Commonwealth (29 page)

“Did you find the checkbook?” Franny asked.

“I did, but you could have texted me back six hours ago when I asked you.”

“Really, I couldn't have.” She yawned. “If you'd been here today you'd be overwhelmed with sympathy for me right now. Did the boys make it home from soccer practice okay?”

“I haven't seen them,” Kumar said.

“Don't give me a hard time. I'm not up for it.”

“Ravi's in the shower. Amit is pretending to do his homework
on the computer but he switches over to some horrible video game whenever I stop watching him.”

“Are you watching him now?” Franny asked.

“I am,” her husband said.

Marjorie tapped on the kitchen window and waved her inside.

“I have to go now,” Franny said.

“You're still coming back?”

“That's one thing you don't have to worry about,” she said, and hung up the phone.

“Your father wants you to come in and say goodnight,” Marjorie said, looking tired. “I can't believe he's still awake.”

“Is Caroline in there?”

Marjorie shook her head. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

Franny promised not to keep him up.

Marjorie had pushed their two single beds together and covered them with a king-sized blanket and bedspread to make it look like it was still one bed, even though Fix's side was a hospital bed. Sitting halfway up helped with the pain in his chest and made it easier for him to swallow his own saliva so he slept that way. That was how Franny found him, in his light-blue pajamas, staring at the ceiling.

“Close the door,” Fix said, and patted the space in the bed beside him. “This is private.”

She went and sat down next to her father. “I'm sorry I dragged you out to Torrance,” Franny said. “I was thinking about Albie and Teresa when I should have been thinking about you.”

“Don't listen to Marjorie,” Fix said.

“Marjorie's looking out for you. That's why we had to go to Teresa's in the first place, because she doesn't have someone like Marjorie to take care of her.”

“Forget about all of that for two minutes. We need to have a serious talk. Can you listen to me?” Fix in his bed seemed particularly hollow and small, her father's husk.

“Bring the bed up a little more,” he said, and when Franny did he said, “Good. There. Now open the bedside table drawer.”

It was a big drawer, deep and long and full of crossword puzzle books and envelopes, a paperback guide to the great hiking trails of California, a book of Kipling's poems, a pair of exercise grips to strengthen the hands, loose change, Vicks VapoRub, a rosary. The rosary surprised her. “What am I looking for?”

“It's in the back.”

Franny pulled the drawer out farther and shifted the papers around. There she found the gun. She didn't have to ask. She took it out and held it in her lap. “Okay,” she said.

Fix reached over and touched her hand, then he put his hand on the gun and smiled. “Marjorie made me promise that I'd turn everything in when I retired. She said no more guns once we move to the beach, so I didn't tell her.”

“Okay.” Franny put her hand on top of her father's hand. She felt the delicate structure of his skeleton beneath his paper skin. She imagined it was like touching a bat's wing.

“Thirty-eight Smith and Wesson. This was my gun for a long, long time.”

“I remember,” she said.

“I never left the house without that gun.”

“Do you want me to take care of it for you?” Franny wasn't exactly sure how she would do that. She couldn't put it in her luggage. She couldn't take it on the plane or bring it into her house in Chicago with Kumar and the boys. She didn't want the gun but was sure she could figure something out.

“I can't pick it up anymore,” he said. “It's too heavy. I can't get it out of the drawer. All the different things you think about, but I never thought about that.”

They would go down to the firing range at the police academy in the summer and shoot paper targets when she and Caroline were girls. It was in all the world the one thing Franny was better at than Caroline. She could shoot a gun. Fix's friends would come by and marvel at Franny's target paper when they pulled them in. “Sign that girl up!” the cops would say, and Franny, clear of eye and steady of hand, would beam.

“Don't worry about that,” Franny said.

“Could you shoot me, do you think?” her father asked.

“Your Lortab is kicking in, Dad. Go to sleep.” She took her father's hand off the gun, then leaned over and kissed his forehead.

“It is kicking in so you have to listen to me. There's no time for us to talk anymore, just the two of us. I can't pick up the gun but no one knows that but you. No one would think of that. Lots of cops shoot themselves in the end, when the end comes to this. There's nothing wrong with it.”

The gun lay heavy in her lap. “I'm not going to shoot you, Dad.”

He looked at her then, his mouth open, and without his glasses she could see his eyes were fogged with cataracts. Was this the way Cal had looked at Teresa the summer he was seven, the bee crawling over his shirt? Was it the way Cal had looked at her when he died? She couldn't remember.

“I need your help.
Your
help, Franny. Marjorie puts the pills away. I don't know where they are, and if I did know I couldn't get up to get them. I wouldn't know which ones to take. She fills up this feeding tube like I'm a car. If I shot myself, no one would mind.”

“Trust me, they would mind. I would mind.”

“Marjorie and Caroline will go to the grocery store tomorrow
and you'll stay here with me. Put on two pairs of those gloves, the disposable ones, one on top of the other. You put my hands on the gun and then hold your hands over my hands.”

Franny put her hands over her father's hands. She couldn't write it off to the Lortab or the pain. “Dad.”

“Face the grip out, not to the throat but away from the throat. Do you understand me? I'll be right here with you. We can go over it step by step. You hold it right under my chin, then tilt it back just a little, maybe twenty degrees. Once you get it set up I want you to lean back. You won't get hurt.”

Why wasn't he asking Caroline? That's what she wanted to know. Caroline was his favorite. She was the one he trusted. But Caroline wouldn't have listened to him.

“I can't,” she said.

“When the gun fires you'll drop it. Leave it however it falls. You pull off the gloves and stick them in your pocket. Go look in the mirror, make sure there's nothing on your face, then call 911. That's all you've got to do. No one is ever going to think it was you. And it won't be you, it's me. It's you helping me. I wouldn't put you in a bad spot.” His eyes were closing, down and up then down.

“It would be a bad spot,” she said. There had always been the sensation of letting her father down, living with her mother, living on the other side of the country, living with Bert. How strange it was that even now all of that stayed with her, that she would think, even for an instant, of not shooting her father as failing him again.

“People are scared of the wrong things,” Fix said, his eyes closed. “Cops are scared of the wrong things. We go around thinking that what's going to get us is waiting on the other side of the door: it's outside, it's in the closet, but it isn't like that. What happened to Lomer, that's the anomaly. For the vast majority of the people on
this planet, the thing that's going to kill them is already on the inside. You understand that, don't you, Franny?”

“I understand,” she said.

He reached out and patted her hand again, her hand and the gun. “I depend on you so much,” he said. His mouth opened as if for one last thought, and then he fell asleep.

Sitting on the edge of her father's bed, Franny unloaded the revolver. Unloading, cleaning, reloading, that was all part of their childhood education. There were six bullets in the chamber and she put them in the front pocket of her jeans and stuck the gun in the back of the waistband beneath her shirt. Her pants were snug around the waist these days and for once she was glad about it.

When she came back to the den Caroline and Marjorie were watching
The Man Who Came to Dinner
. Caroline pushed the mute button while Monty Woolley tyrannized the secondary characters from his wheelchair.

“How's your father?” Marjorie asked.

“Asleep.” Franny could feel the cold of the metal pressing into the small of her back. It was ridiculous, walking through the room with a gun and not mentioning it, but she didn't think the gun was anything Marjorie needed to know about, nor did she need to know about his request. She would tell Caroline in the morning, but there was nothing more that needed to be said tonight, not one more conversation. Franny said she was going to get into bed and read.

That night, after putting the gun in her suitcase and the bullets in a sock, Franny dreamt of Holly. It had been so many years since they had seen each other but there she was, still fourteen, her straight dark hair divided into pigtails, her cropped yellow top knotted halfway up her skinny white torso. She was still a girl, freckles unfaded, braces on her teeth. They were back in Virginia,
back at Bert's parents' house, and they were walking through the long field that lay between the house and the barn. Holly was talking, talking, the way Holly was always talking, explaining the history of the commonwealth and the Mattaponi Indians who had once lived along the banks of the river. The Mattaponi, she said, had fought the English in the second and third Anglo-Powhatan Wars.

“Right here,” she said, holding out her hands. “There weren't many of them to begin with, and between the two wars and all the diseases the English brought with them most of the Mattaponi died. Do you remember how Cal would look for arrowheads? Our grandfather had a dish of them on his desk but he'd never give us any. He said he was saving them. What was he saving them for do you think? An uprising?”

Franny looked out over the green slope of grass. There was a shallow pond beyond the barn where the horses liked to wade on hot days, where they themselves had ventured in on some occasions despite the thick, sucking muck at the bottom. She looked at the distant line of trees that rimmed the field to the left and the stand of hay to the far right that the Cousinses leased out. She was trying to take in how beautiful it all was—the grass and the light and the trees, the entire valley. This was where Cal had died, where Holly and Caroline and Jeanette had run through the field once they realized what had happened, back to the house to get Ernestine, Caroline telling her to stay with Cal in case he needed help. Why had Caroline told her to stay?

“You took the gun then, remember?” Holly said. “You brought it back to Caroline later that night.”

Cal's eyes were shut but his mouth was open like he was still trying to pull in air. His lips were thick and swollen and his tongue was coming out of his mouth. Franny stood over him, looking back
in the direction of the house and then looking down. When she remembered the gun she pulled back his pants leg. There it was, stuffed in his sock and tied to his calf with a red bandanna. Franny got it in her head that Ernestine or the Cousinses or whoever was coming out to save her shouldn't find the gun. They would all get in trouble for that. “I don't know why I took it,” she said. She really didn't.

Holly shook her head. “You couldn't have left it there. We were all so obsessed with the gun. It was all we ever thought about.”

Franny had untied the bandanna and, carefully, pointing the gun away from herself and away from Cal, unloaded it the way her father taught her. She put the bullets in the front pocket of her shorts, holding the open revolver up to the light, spinning the cylinder and looking down the barrel to the sun to make sure it was empty. She tied it up in the red cloth but there was really no place to put it. She tried to put it in her waistband but of course it showed. Finally she decided to hide it behind a tree nearby. When everyone was gone she would go back and get it and take it to the house. She would get Jeanette to come with her and they would put the gun in Jeanette's purse. No one would think that was strange because Jeanette always carried her purse. She remembered being glad to have something else to worry about, something other than Cal.

Franny looked over at the barn. “I always thought I did the wrong thing.”

“What would the right thing have been?” Holly put her arm around Franny's waist. “We had no idea what was going on. We didn't even know he'd been stung by a bee.”

“We didn't?”

“Not until later. We did that night when Dad came back from the hospital, but before that we didn't have a clue.”

“I loved it here,” Franny said, though she had never known it before.

Holly looked surprised. “Did you? I hated this place.”

Franny looked at her. Holly had been such a pretty girl. Why had she never noticed that? She thought of her as a sister now. “Why did you come back then?”

“To make sure you were going to be okay,” Holly said. “We always stuck together. Don't you remember that? We were such a fierce little tribe.”

“Listen,” Franny said, looking up. “Do you hear the birds?”

Holly shook her head. “It's your phone. That's what I came to tell you. You shouldn't worry.”

“About the birds?” Franny asked, but then Holly was gone and the room was dark again. She could still hear them.

“Answer your phone,” Caroline said from the other bed.

The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.

“Mrs. Mehta?” a voice said, a woman's voice.

“Yes?”