Lost (2 page)

When he could speak, their father said, “Where is he?” his voice raspy and tired. One of the women nodded toward the double doors; she said, “The doctor's in with him now.” He glanced at the sharp light outlining the doors, stepped back, and turned. Their mother said, “Don't, Ray. Let them do what they can,” but he paid her no heed. Moving out of her reach, he went to the closed-up room, grasping the handles to draw the doors open, but suddenly he slumped there. Another man from deep in the house—the dining room or the kitchen—called to him, “Ray, is that you?” and hastened to meet him and lead him away. Their mother, comforted by strange hands, let herself be drawn down on the edge of the foyer settee.

As Toddy came down the stairs to sit by Mamie, the nurse slipped from the bright living room. Dodging questions, she hurried outside. Mamie could feel the heat radiating from Toddy's body; when he bumped against her, she cringed from him. Clasping his arms around his shins, he said, “Can I stay down here with you?” He was trembling all over like a rabbit.

She couldn't begin to tell him how awful she felt; her skin seemed to draw tighter and tighter, and the ache of dread and regret sank deeper within her. Without looking around, she said, “Toddy, he was dead, I think. He's really dead. I saw him. I reached down …” She began to sob.

As her voice shriveled, he let out a shuddering sigh. “He can't die, Mamie. He just can't, y'know. He can't die and you can't die and I can't die, because we're all brand-new people. Him and us.”

The weird logic of what he was saying escaped her.

The crowd withdrew and dispersed. A few of them ventured forward to mutter their awkward goodbyes. With his shadowy friend in tow, their father had circled the house and was now on the porch with the last of the departing neighbors, smoking a cigarette. The nurse walked by him when she returned, carrying some metal apparatus and a large canvas bag. The two remaining neighbor women speculated that it was an oxygen tent.

Still perched on the settee, their mother tapped her foot. Then, she stood and paced and sat down again, muttering something to one or the other of the ladies. Suddenly she seemed to realize that she was still holding the oblong box. She lowered it before her and opened the lid with her thumb. It was Sherman's schoolbox, tattered and crudely marked.

“We had such a hard time with him in school,” she said quietly, as if only to pass the time. “I worked with him till I was blue in the face, but nothing helped. He started a year late, you know, because of the stupid birthday law and it just got continually worse. He failed the fifth grade. Always so haphazard and happy-go-lucky. Just couldn't've cared less.” She went on talking calmly about his ups and downs for quite a while. “Then he got in that trouble and it shook him—really upset him—and he seemed to snap out of it. This summer we sent him to remedial class, and for the first time he really started to try. And now this …
this!
” Struggling for breath, she cried again, more easily than before, but when she tried to cover her face, the schoolbox spilled, the gnawed pencils with the erasers bitten off scattering on the floor. The ladies closed around her.

In that way, with unpredictable outbursts and moments of ordinary conversation, they waited. Eventually, Toddy said, “I'm afraid to watch. It makes me too nervous. I'm goin' back upstairs.” And a few moments later, without saying anything more, he was gone from Mamie, who still clung to the railing. It was well after midnight before the doors rumbled apart and the doctor stepped out in the harsh span of light, mopping his face with a handkerchief. Then, with his arms spread, he caught the handles and pulled the doors shut, allowing just a fleeting glimpse of the wicker lounger, the makeshift apparatus beside it, and the shrouded shape under the gauzy tent. He scanned the foyer as he turned.

Their mother came to her feet, dazedly. Her thin face lolled like a mask on a scarecrow. “Where's Ray?” she said.

“He went with them to look for the gun,” the nearest woman told her.

“Tonight?” she said, visibly trembling. “In the dark?” She tried to smooth her hair as she gravitated toward the doctor, hardly able to keep her balance.

Mamie stood when her mother turned, then rushed down the stairs as her mother went forward. But the two neighbor ladies were ahead of her, taking up their positions behind her mother, so that Mamie had to squeeze past their hips, clasping her mother's thigh through her skirt, to hear what the doctor was saying.

He was speaking low. He said the bleeding had stopped and that Sherman was in a coma. So softly she could hardly be heard, her mother said, “Then maybe we should move him to a hospital, after all.” The doctor studied what she had said at length, his dire thoughts apparent in his long hesitation. Presently he said, “No, I don't think so. At least not right now. His condition is very … extremely delicate just now, very critical. It's too dangerous. The risk … If he hemorrhages again, Mrs. Abbott, death would be instantaneous.” He was an elderly gentleman with baggy eyes and he had a small trimmed mustache that looked painted on.

The woman nearest Mamie stooped down and drew her aside. “Mamie, you should go to bed,” she said. “It's way past your bedtime. We'll take care of your mama. Really, it's okay now. Go on and go to sleep.” But Mamie shrugged away from her and went around to her mother's other side.

“… centrifugal force,” the doctor was saying as he massaged the base of his skull behind his right ear. “It's lodged roughly here,” he said, holding his fingers stiff to that place. “It's possible the bullet was deflected somehow and moved inside his head for several seconds like—like—”

“Like a bee, in a bonnet,” her mother said distractedly.

“Yes, I suppose,” he said, and nodded. “Something on that order. But try to remember, Mrs. Abbott, even if he should live through this—even if he does, the extent of the damage won't be known for a very long time. He could be an invalid … or seriously impaired.” He cleared his throat. “Even with the most sophisticated equipment, we couldn't know this soon.”

“But he will live, then—won't he?” her mother asked. She leaned toward him, anxious for his confirmation.

The doctor's face did not change. For a moment, he stared at her intently. His eyes drifted aside, then refocused on her. He opened his mouth but said nothing.

She began to fold where she stood, and the women swept toward her. She staggered, caught herself, motioning them off. “Then I have to see him. Please, I have to go in to him.”

Attentive, but without any further talk, the doctor accompanied her to the doors and slid them apart for her to enter. Too late, Mamie ran around the four legs blocking her path, but from inside the room her mother called out, “No, Mamie, not now. Not this time. Maybe tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow, maybe,” and she instructed the women to put the children to bed. She was nearly transparent with light.

Mamie heard her father cross the hall; under the rug the floorboards snapped. He went to Toddy first. Drifting in and out of sleep, she heard the gruff rumble of his voice. A drawer squealed open, then shut.

Through the open window came the distant funnel-like shouts of children playing in the yards below. Despite the residue of her distress and the mood of strife that had descended on the house the night before, the cheerful noises beckoned her like slow, enticing music. Her eyelids wobbled; she dozed. Immediately it seemed, although it could have been longer, an angry uproar erupted in the gray distance—the neighbor's dog lashed out, growling and barking. Mamie thought, Those boys're tormenting him again. In her imagination, she could see them sneaking along the right-of-way behind their house to throw rocks into the dog pen. All hackles and teeth, the dog would lunge at them, his snapping chain flipping him crosswise in the air. He was a crazy-mean dog with scary eyes, and the bet was to see if they could goad him into breaking his chain. Once in a while he did break it, his teeth slashing at the fence wire.

“Oh, Chinaman,” she muttered. Mamie wanted to get up, poke her head out the window, and yell at them to stop it. She reached for the bedpost to pull herself up, but in the air her fingers bumped across a scratchy face. Her entire body flinched. She lurched crablike on the bed to escape it. The room was too full of sunshine to see clearly. With her pulse pounding, she rubbed her eyes and squinted. “Oh, Daddy,” she gasped. “You scared the daylights out of me.” He was seated on the small chair by her bed.

“Mamie,” he said, so softly, and his face turned pale like a foggy image of himself. “I want you to tell me some things.” Again she wiped her fists across her closed eyes, and when she looked once more, he struck three matches from a little pasteboard box—the first two broke to pieces in his fingers. Smoke curled on his lip. He was unshaven, the drag of the comb still showing in his neat, wet hair.

She scooted up from the pillow, but stammered, said nothing.

Flattening his hands on his knees, with the cigarette glowing between his fingers, he asked where the gun had come from; did she know where Sherman got it?

He's dead, Mamie thought and, slipping out from the twisted quilts, remembered in detail the night before.

“He had no business with that gun,” her father said. “Somebody's just as responsible for this as he is. I mean to find out who that is.”

This time he's dead, Mamie thought, and they won't tell me. And the sickening ache that had stayed with her through the night spread vividly along her nerves.

“I'll find out,” he said, “one way or the other. So you'd better tell me. Mamie, do you know where he got that gun?”

She shook her head. She wanted to tell him without lying that Sherman lied all the time, that he'd told her different made-up stories about how and where he got the gun, but she shook her head. “Let me hear you say it.” And she muttered, “Dunno,” and asked was he dead. Her father glanced toward the elm twig scratching the windowpane. “Maybe he will be,” he said. For a moment, his eyes glazed. “Probably.” He's lying to me, Mamie thought. Sherman's already dead. Her father cleared his throat. “Mamie, do you know anything about this?”

Matching the cadence of his words, she again shook her head, five, six times. He put the cigarette to his lips but his fingers trembled; a long stub of ash splashed down his shirt. He kept his dark head tilted toward the window. “Why'd he shoot himself, Mamie?” He frowned, studying his cigarette. He wiped his eyes. “Something's been wrong here a long time for this to happen. I just didn't see it. Why would he do such a thing? You were around him all the time. If anybody knows about this, you do. You're the one. You have to.”

“I really liked him,” Mamie said and nodded, without looking up.

His cigarette had gone out. He held it pointed up in a pinch of his thumb and fingernails. “We found the gun last night,” he said. “I've never seen it before.… Well, I'll find out whose it was and how he got it if I have to go from door to door of every house in Graylie.” As he talked, never once loud or hateful, he pulled from his pants pocket a small green plastic water gun. “Here,” he said, and thrust it at her. “Show me, Mamie.” His voice became firmer. “Show me what you saw … how he did it.”

She cowered from it. “No, Daddy, don't make me. I don't want to. Please, please don't make me.” But regardless of how much she begged, he insisted. Reluctantly she cupped her palm around the handle and placed her forefinger through the slot until it rested on the tension of the plastic trigger. She looked at him to see if he would tell her not to, but he said, “Go ahead.” Drawing her arm up crooked, she held the water gun to her head.

He wiped his face and ran his hands through his hair. “All right,” he said. “Give it here.” She handed it back to him. “Mamie, if you know anything else about this—anything at all—you have to tell me now. And tell the truth, because I don't want to find out you're in on this. I'll be watching you, every move you make.” Like God does, she thought.

“But I dunno,” she said, crossing her feet off the edge of the bed, one on top of the other, then reversing them. “I already told you.” His hand came down close to hers, but she got up and went to the dresser. When she glanced back, the door was ajar; smoke hung in the doorway.

All that day the double doors to the living room didn't open except to allow their neighbor Mrs. Jackson to enter and leave at suppertime with a tray covered by an embroidered cloth. Toddy stayed in bed, taking his medicine, and their father roamed the house, smoking his cigarettes. Some of the bouquets of flowers that had come were left on the table in the dark vestibule. Again the next day, except for brief necessities, the doors remained shut. Twice the nurse left and came back; the doctor arrived shortly after two o'clock and stayed in the room for most of an hour; otherwise the room was closed. Her father went in and out a few times, taking a glass of water or a wet washcloth, but Mamie did not once glimpse her mother. The room must be full of flowers by now, Mamie thought.

As she changed into her pajamas, she tried to question her father. Where would Mama sleep? She had to go to sleep sometime, because she had never stayed in the living room so long. But her father shrugged off her questions. “Your mama sleeps on the couch when she's tired,” he said.

Mamie had made a place to play on the landing where the stairs turned, bringing down shoe boxes from the closets to build an imaginary room and dragging out all her paper dolls, but she played with them distractedly, watching the tall doors below through the bannister spindles. Late in the afternoon of the third day, their father helped Toddy pack his tin suitcase to go stay with the Connerlys down the block, where Jeff Connerly, a friend in his grade at school, lived. Watching from the bedroom doorway, Mamie saw her father do the things usually left to her mother. His large hands looked so strange folding and packing the small clothes while Toddy tracked behind him from the bureau to the side of the bed and back, asking how bad was Sherman, how long would he be sick? “I don't know,” her father said. “We don't know for sure.” That evening, for Mamie, he made peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for the fifth time in a row. She couldn't eat more than a few bites. “When's Toddy comin' home?” she asked him, but he didn't seem to hear.