More Stories from the Twilight Zone (15 page)

 

“Honey, Phil's coming around.”

“Oh, fine. Did he call? I didn't hear the—”

“No, I called him a few days ago—last week, if I recall. I just remembered about a half hour ago.” Boz stretched to his full height in the kitchen doorway and breathed in the smell of baking. “Smells good.”

“Jackie coming, too?”

“No, just Phil.”

“Any particular reason?”

Boz shook his head. “Just fancied shooting the breeze. Now that they're back in town I figured I'd spend as much—” He paused and re-phrased. “Spend a little more time with him. You know.”

“I know, honey. I'll set out the table in the front room and—”

“That's okay, sweetie, we'll have coffee in the den.”

“But it's so cramped in there, honey.”

He walked over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. Then he licked a finger and rubbed at a patch of flour on her forehead. His heart ached when she allowed her eyes to close and moved her head against his hand like a cat wanting to be stroked. “Don't worry about me, okay? I'm fine.”

The truth, however, was that Boz was actually far from fine. He was now starting to feel weak and the pills designed to keep his prostate growth down to a minimum seemed to be less successful than they'd been at first. But he kept this information to himself.

“Nicola said she'd maybe call you.”

“Well, if she does, just tell her I'll call her back. I don't really want to be interrupted when Phil's here.”

Irma looked at him, a slight frown on her face, but it passed quickly, like a cloud across the moon, when Boz smiled at her. “I'm sure looking forward to cake,” he said. “And the coffee'll help me pee.”

She shook her head and waved him away. “Oh, you,” she said.

The doorbell rang and Boz said, “That'll be Phil,” as he disappeared out into the hall. Irma heard their voices and she stepped out to say hey.

“Hey, Irma,” Phil said, his voice wreathed in smiles and consolations. “How're things?”

Irma did a little jig with her head, side to side, and then nodded. “We're doing okay, I think. Aren't we, honey?”

“We're doing fine,” Boz agreed. Then, to Phil, “Well, come on into the den. Irma's been cooking all morning so I think fresh cake is heading our way.”

Irma smiled bravely at Phil and saw him give her the slightest of nods that would have been all but imperceptible to a casual
onlooker. When she dropped her gaze from his eyes, Irma noticed that Phil Defantino was holding a briefcase in his hand. When she looked up at Phil again, about to ask why he'd brought a briefcase, Phil shuffled the case into his other hand and said to Boz, “Okay, show me to a chair—I'm pooped.” And the two of them turned around and moved down the hallway to Boz's den.

“You go on in and make yourself comfortable,” Boz said as he ushered Phil over the threshold to his book collection. “I'll get the coffee.”

“I can bring it in for you, honey,” Irma said.

But Boz was already making his way back to the kitchen. “I don't want you waiting on me, sweetie,” he said. “And anyway,” he added, “I want to have a nice long talk with Phil without any interruptions. It's not you, baby,” Boz said when Irma frowned at being labeled as an interrupter, “but you know how Phil can gabble on.”

Irma watched Boz open cupboard doors and place mugs on the breakfast conuter. She watched the whole process of her husband preparing a tray—milk from the refrigerator, sugar bowl, two plates, two pieces of cake—and all the while she tried to think back to a time when Phil Defantino had gabbled on. For the life of her, she couldn't come up with a single one.

Phil stayed with Boz in the den for over two hours, the pair of them speaking in hushed tones in there. It wasn't that Irma was eavesdropping, but just that whenever she went past the den door, all she could hear was a dim and distant drone of voices. When Phil emerged, Boz hurried him out of the door while he explained loudly that Irma would be preparing lunch. She took that as a hint and went straight back into the kitchen to make them a couple of omelettes. As she switched on the Mister Coffee, she heard Boz shout, “Okay, same time tomorrow,” and then close the door.

“He's coming back tomorrow?” Irma asked when Boz appeared at the kitchen door.

“Yeah,” he said. “He sure is a sucker for punishment.”

“What was in the case?”

“Huh?”

“The briefcase. Phil had a briefcase with him?”

“Oh, yeah,” Boz said as he leaned over the frying pan and sniffed in the smell of eggs cooking. “He wanted to show me some stuff he'd picked up on his travels. Books and stuff.”

“More books!” Irma said, smiling, and she shook her head. She wondered how she was going to get rid of all those books when the day came, but just as quickly as the thought presented itself to her, she dispelled it. And so the moment passed, and as it passed she never gave a thought to the fact that Phil's briefcase looked just as full as it had been when he had arrived.

 

“More books?” Irma said when she answered the door the following day and saw Phil standing there in the rain, his arms wrapped around his briefcase.

“Excuse me?” Phil said, stepping past Irma into the house.

“It's okay, Phil. I told her.”

Irma turned around to see her husband walking along the hallway, a big
aw shucks
smile etched on his face.

“You told her?” Phil said, smiling, glancing from one to the other.

“Yeah,” said Boz, taking Phil's coat from him. Phil moved the case from one hand to the other during the process. “She knows you're smuggling books into the house.” He shrugged. “I think maybe she's worried I'm going to spread to the other rooms.”

Irma smiled, cocking her head on one side as she watched Boz. Was it her imagination or did he seem to be losing a little weight? Maybe she needed to fatten him up a little. “Coffee and cake?” she asked Phil.

“Irma, you are a beacon of sustenance in a wasteland of famine.”

“I'll take that as a yes. Honey? Would you like cake or maybe a sandwich to set you on until lunch?”

“Cake will be fine, sweetie,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. Irma threw her arms around him and, just for a second, wanted desperately to absorb him into her, the way those vampire-type creatures did on that
Outer Limits
episode, but the moment passed and she relaxed her hold.

“Hey, careful there,” Boz said with a grin. “Don't you know I'm a sick man?”

“You've always been a sick man,” Phil chided, “and it hasn't done you any harm far as I can make out.”

They all laughed, though perhaps a little dutifully—just three normal people making polite banter—and then Boz said, “Come on into the den.” Turning to Irma, he said, “I'll come get the coffee and cake, sweetie. I'll just get Phil settled in.”

Jiminy,
Irma thought to herself in the kitchen,
it sounds like he's about to send him into orbit
.

 

The following day, Boz came into the kitchen and turned on the Mister Coffee. “You got any more of that cake left?” he asked as he rummaged in different cupboards. “Phil just can't get enough of it.”

“He coming around
again
?”

Boz shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “I think he's bored. Since he retired, I mean.”

“Well, he could at least bring Jackie along. Be nice to have someone to talk to while you two are in the den.”

She opened the one cupboard that Phil seemed to have missed and produced the plate containing the cake, wrapped in tinfoil.

“What is it that you talk about in there anyways?”

“Oh, this and that,” Boz said. “This and that.”

When Phil came around, the entire process was repeated: the slightly awkward look on his face as he shuffled the briefcase around, the somewhat contrived pleasantries, the ushering of the guest by her husband into the den, and the profuse declaration
that Boz would save her the trouble of bringing in cake and coffee by taking it himself.

On this occasion, however, Irma noticed that Boz's hands were shaking a little. She watched the hands intently as he loaded cake onto the top plate and straightened the mugs so that the handles were accessible. She thought about how those hands had travelled her body and her face over the years, pleasuring her and making her feel safe, and she wondered, just for a few seconds, where those years had gone and how they had gone away so quickly.

When the hands stopped shaking and stayed exactly where they were, Irma looked up and saw Boz watching her. There was a profound sadness in his eyes, a sadness borne of love and a long relationship that could now be measured in weeks . . . possibly even days, though neither Boz nor Irma would acknowledge that possibility. But that very morning, it had taken Irma some time to get Boz out of bed and into the shower. In fact, she had been considering asking Chris Hendricks, the family odd-job man these past twenty years or more, to come around and investigate putting up a handrail—she just didn't trust Boz's balance anymore.

“I'm okay,” Boz said, “before you ask.”

“I know, honey,” she said, lifting a hand and tracing a line with a fingernail along the back of Boz's left wrist. “I do so love you,” she said.

Boz nodded. And as pale and exhausted as he looked—even a little jaundiced around the eyes—there was a twinkle of mischief in those eyes that made Irma frown and narrow her own eyes.

“You up to something, Boswell Mendholsson?”

“Just taking some cake and coffee through is all, sweetie,” he said. And with that, he backed out of the kitchen and into the den, closing the door firmly behind him.

And so it went on for several weeks, almost daily visits from Phil Defantino with each stay restricted to the den, usually for between one and two hours. The visits were in the mornings
mostly, which was also when the children called around whenever they could—children! what a ridiculous thing to call them, Irma thought to herself on more than one occasion: they were both in their thirties now but, of course, they would always be a little boy and a little girl. And they did so love their father. When they left—they rarely brought their other halves or the grandchildren—they would hug Irma tightly, asking if she was okay and managing to keep things under control. Each time she would tell them emphatically that she was fine. And she was.

Irma believed you got an almost spiritual strength from someplace in these situations. She had heard of that before. And while she did not dare to consider what life would be without her husband, she managed to cope with his steadily deteriorating condition with determination, patience, and even good humor.

Boz himself seemed to wind down around lunchtime or early afternoon, retiring to the couch where he would watch game shows or, occasionally, the Cartoon Network. Sometimes he would simply call it a day and go straight to bed. Irma would take him a sandwich and a bag of potato chips around five or six o'clock and then Boz would drift in and out of sleep until Irma came to bed herself at around ten thirty.

As the November winds buffeted the house and Thanksgiving approached, there were increasingly clear signs that Boz's downhill slide was gaining acceleration. It was just the little things that they both noticed—the swollen ankles from the steroids, the drowsiness from the painkillers, the sickness from the tumor itself—any of which by itself could maybe have slipped beneath the radar. But taken all together, things were starting to look a little bleak. And now Boz was starting to wheeze like an old steam train. “It's got into his lungs,” Jack Fredricks told Irma one late afternoon as he was leaving the house, the setting sun framing him there on the porch as he buttoned up his overcoat.

Then, one day, Boz cried out in pain as Irma was trying to get
him out of his bed. “It's no good, sweetie,” he said, his words coming out like knife stabs, in breathless staccato. “Let me be . . . just let me be.” And with that, he slumped down onto the pillow and fell immediately back to sleep, his mouth wide open, stealing as much air from the room as it could manage.

“Hey, Irma,” Phil Defantino said when Irma opened the door. They looked at each other in silence, neither one of them making a move, and then Phil said, “Boz not so good?”

She shook her head and wiped at her eyes. She knew that Phil could see she had been crying.

Phil nodded. “Well,” he said, drawing the word out and hunching his shoulders against the wind, “maybe it would be better if I called around another time.”

“Yes,” Irma said, trying to keep from glancing down at Phil's briefcase, “maybe it would at that. I'll get him to give you a call when he's feeling a little better.”

When Phil said, “Sure,” his voice sounded hoarse and broken. He nodded once and turned around, head hanging down, and made for the street along the path through the Mendholssons' front yard. He never looked back. And he never saw Boz alive again.

 

Irma spoke in whispers to Nicola on the telephone.

“Hey, honey,” she said.

“Hey, Mom. Everything okay? Is it Dad?”

She glanced around to make sure the bedroom door was still closed. “He's not too good, honey.”

“Not too good?”

“No, not too good at all. Dr. Fredricks says . . . he says . . .”

“Mom?”

“He says your daddy will be leaving us soon.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“I know, honey, I know.” A single tear dropped from Irma's cheek onto the telephone cradle and she wiped it away with one
finger, rubbing the spot back and forth until there was no trace of it at all. “I called your brother. He's coming home tomorrow. Catching the red-eye out of Boston—should be here by midmorning.”

“Will that . . . will that be—”