Perfume River (9 page)

He pauses so he’s sure they get it. They get it. They’re still quaking.

As it was, the blast threw me about twenty feet and I ended up bruised and scuffed and my head was spinning for an hour. I was alive. Barely. It was that close, boys. You know what else that means. You two were that close to never being born. Never even existing. Think of that.

Jimmy is weeping. Robert is still shaky in the legs but he’s making sure he stands up straight before his father. Jimmy
begins to tremble and the weeping turns to sobs. Pops is looking off down the street, toward the river. Robert puts his arm around his brother.

A horn honks.

And again.

On Thomasville Road, north of I-10, at the traffic signal before Walmart, the light has turned green.

Robert shakes off the past.

He thinks:
All of that is done with. He will die now.

On the cusp between the tumbledown houses of Thomasville’s poor and the bespoke dwellings of Thomasville’s moneyed, along an avenue of attendant health care enterprises—for pain, for feet, for teeth and hearts and vascular systems, for flu shots and for lab work—Archbold looms large in a six-storied complex of cream stucco walls and red-tiled roofs. Robert parks in the landscaped lot before the hospital’s main entrance. As he steps from the car, his cellphone rings. He reads the screen.
Home.
Darla is back from running. He closes the car door, leans against it, and answers.

“You got my note,” he says.

“I’m so sorry,” Darla says. “How is he?”

“I just arrived. I’m still in the parking lot.”

Darla is standing, sweating, in the foyer, just returned. It occurred to her to shower first. But she carries a memory, not
so much in her mind as in her body. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom in their first house in Tallahassee, a rental near Lake Ella, and there was only darkness before her. She’d just spoken to her brother Frank on the phone downstairs.
Dead.
His voice.
Both of them.
And she’d said
Oh.
She stood in the doorway and she realized that this single word might not have been the right one. Perhaps she’d said more. But she could not remember any further words with her brother, nor any details of her passage from the phone downstairs to this doorway. She thought:
We need an extension up here.
She stood there waiting for something, but she could not imagine what. And then he emerged from the darkness. Robert. She blinked hard at him. She thought:
I haven’t been seeing him very clearly lately.
And Robert knew to say nothing, he knew instead to step very close. He smelled of Ivory soap and flannel and coffee on his breath.
He should brush better.
And his arms came around her, one at her waist, his hand coming to rest in the small of her back; the other under her arm and angling across her shoulder blades, that hand landing on her shoulder, cupping her there, and his hand on her back rose and moved farther around her and he drew her against him, and as soon as he did, she could remember what had happened, and she fell into him, fell a long way into him. Their first death. The first close death that comes to a man and a woman who are sharing a life. The first death brings all the future deaths with it. Brings all the deaths in all the world. And he held her close.

She does not remember this consciously now, as an event. Her body remembers, in the muscles, on the skin, simply as
something it owes. Darla knows what the broken hip in Thomasville likely will mean for Robert, who has gone deep into his life without a close death of his own, and so she has not showered before making this call. She says, “Shall I come?”

“Thank you,” he says. “But no. Not yet. He’s probably … I don’t know. It’s going to be all about Mom. It’ll be about her. You don’t need to come. Please just do what you need to do today.”

She says, “Perhaps I need to be
there.
Not for her. For you.”

“Weren’t you doing something? A field trip?”

“Did I say?”

“Last week. Something.”

She thinks. Then, “Ah. Monticello.”

“You want to meditate there, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Go. Be a Southern belle.”

“Not quite.”

“Whatever you need.”

She doesn’t answer for a moment. From the prompting of her body, she tries to think if she should ignore what he’s saying. If she should go to him anyway. But her body also feels a sharp-scrabbling chill. He keeps the thermostat too low overnight. Always. She should turn it up before she runs, but she never seems to remember. She doesn’t want to go to Thomasville. “All right,” she says.

“I’ll see you later,” he says.

“Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sure.”

They fall silent. But they do not immediately hang up. They aren’t good at ending phone calls. They both hate phones, in fact. They can’t read each other’s body or face, which is crucial to them, to inflect their silences.

“Really?” she says.

Just enough silence has ticked by between them that it takes a moment for Robert to place the
really
into its proper context.

While he tries to, she interprets the few beats of his silence to mean he’s not really sure.

“I’ll come,” she says.

“No,” he says, figuring it out. “I’m really sure. Thank you.”

And he hangs up.

I do that too
, she says to herself about the abruptness of his ringing off. She won’t worry anymore about him for now.

She touches the off button on the phone and places it in its cradle.

Robert finds his mother sitting on an upholstered couch beneath the skylight halfway down the entrance corridor. Peggy Quinlan rises at his approach and comes to him and they hug in the way they’ve hugged for decades, leaning to each other at the waist, cheek to cheek, patting each other behind the shoulders, as if always consoling each other. The patting is firmer this morning.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” she says. “They’re preparing him for surgery. The doctor is coming down to talk to us.”

They let go of each other. She takes his hand and leads him to the couch. “I need to sit,” she says.

They do.

Robert turns mostly sideways to face her.

“Are you okay?” Robert says.

“A little shaky. I didn’t eat.”

“Ma,” he says. “You have to eat.”

“After the doctor.”

“How’s Pops doing?”

She smiles faintly at Robert.

He sees it. “What?”

“‘Pops,’” she says. “It’s just good to hear you call him that again.”

He was unaware. He’s not sure it’s good. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s pissed,” she says. Then she quickly adds, “I put it that way because it’s how he says it.”

Robert wags his head at her. “You can say ‘pissed’ for yourself.” And he regrets niggling. Why make a point of this now? But he knows the answer. The artifice of her. This is not the time for her to be working on her image.

As she often does, Peggy quickly co-opts Robert’s irritation with her by claiming it for her own, criticizing herself. “Of course,” she says. “What a silly time to hear the whisper of the priest. Piss piss piss. There. I’m pissed too.”

Though part of him recognizes her self-deprecation, antically adorned, as just another strategy of image-making, Robert gives her credit for it. “Good girl,” he says.

“But he’s more than pissed,” she says. “He’s scared, darling.”

“He’s a tough guy.”

“You don’t see him like I do. He’s not so tough.”

This is hardly the first time she’s claimed this. Robert has always doubted that it’s so. He has understood her assertions about the inner life of William Quinlan simply as her taking the opportunity to project
herself
onto the blank screen of her husband.

“He’s faced death before,” Robert says.

“It’s not about the dying,” she says. “It’s about leaving other things unresolved.”

“Jimmy.”

“That,” she says. “And more.”

Robert nods at this. But he does not even try to think what those other things would be. They could be legion.

Peggy waits.

Robert stays silent.

She says, “I called Jimmy.”

“What?”

“I called him.”

“How?”

“Your grandson.”

She waits again, and Robert can only do likewise in response. He refuses to drag the story out of her. She is prone to this sort of drama.

She says, “I asked Jake if there was a website. He found one. It’s like the white pages for Canada.”

“Didn’t you already try to find his phone number?”

“Years ago. But this time, there he was. Not in Toronto anymore. A town called MacTier. It was his voice. I recognized his voice on the answering machine.”

“So you didn’t talk to him directly?”

“No.”

“When did you call him?”

“This morning, though I’ve had the number for a little while. I knew how losing Jimmy continued to hurt your father. Even if he wasn’t talking about it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I don’t expect him to call me back. At the end I was too much on your father’s side. How could I not be? But it wasn’t so bad between the two of you, was it?”

“Bad enough.”

“Still.” Peggy picks up her purse from beside her and opens it and draws out an index card. She offers it to Robert.

He lets it hang there between them.

“Please,” she says. “His number. He may listen to you.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing, even if Dad wants it.”

“For me then.” The throb in her voice sounds genuine.

Still Robert doesn’t take the card.

A figure appears in Robert’s periphery.

“Mrs. Quinlan.” A baritone, but not as warm as you’d expect from the pitch. A scalpel-edged voice. Robert turns to it. A man in blue scrubs, young-seeming somehow but with
his managed scruff turning gray and with wrinkling at brow and eyes.

Robert and Peggy rise.

She uses the moment to thrust the index card into Robert’s hand.

He pockets it.

“Dr. Tyler,” Peggy says, “this is my son, Robert.”

He shakes the man’s hand. It feels faintly oily.

“Please sit,” the doctor says.

They do, and Tyler perches on the front edge of a chair set at a right angle to Peggy’s end of the couch.

Robert sees now that Tyler holds a plastic ziplock bag of almonds in the palm of his left hand. The man dips in and takes a few and chews them as he speaks. He lifts the bag a little, to draw attention to it. “Forgive me,” he says. “These are part of my prep. Good protein and good magnesium. To be at my best for Mr. Quinlan.”

Peggy gives him a nod of permission, not that he was asking. “Go right ahead.”

“I have to tell you honestly,” he says, drawing the sentence out slightly so he can look both Robert and his mother in the eyes as he speaks it. He pauses briefly, chewing his almonds, swallowing his almonds, though presumably the intent of the pause is to let these two family members have a moment to prepare themselves for the implied bad news.

It has another effect on Robert, a little to his surprise: He wants to slap the almonds from the man’s hand
—eat them in the goddamn elevator on your way to the operating room if you
must
—and to grab him by the front of his scrubs and shout,
Out with it.

Tyler says, “The statistics are not good. Of those who break a hip after the age of eighty, one in two will not live more than six months. And Mr. Quinlan has two complicating factors beyond the hip. His heart issues, of course. And unfortunately, the fall has broken his right wrist. This will make rehab very difficult. We can put the bones back together. But having a man his age on his back for an extended time can lead to fluid buildup, which can lead to complications, most commonly pneumonia or congestive heart failure. We will be vigilant. But you need to know the special risks.”

He is done. He takes more almonds. Robert and Peggy understand that he’s waiting for questions. Does he want them to ask the obvious one?
So will he die now?

The doctor will evade.

But he has just said it.

Even Peggy knows this. Her question is simply, “When will we be able to see him?”

“It depends on how things progress this morning,” he says. “But understand he’ll be on morphine at least through tonight. He won’t be fully aware. You can go home and rest. Call us mid-afternoon.”

As if simultaneously hearing the same cue, they all rise.

They shake hands, and Doctor Tyler is gone.

Robert and Peggy do not move, do not speak. They struggle to absorb the official version of a prognosis they both
already knew well enough, from common knowledge. Now it’s personal, however.

Finally Peggy says, “I came in a cab. Can you take me home?”

“Of course.”

Her eyes are full of tears and she steps to Robert and now the two of them hug with no bend at the waist, with quiet hands upon each other’s back, with no artifice or mulled memories or sense of family failures. They hold each other quietly, mother and son, and though Robert is a man capable of them, he finds he has no tears to shed.

At their kitchen table, Jimmy sits facing the window, the afternoon shadows bluing the snow. Behind him Linda is making chamomile tea. He stares at the darkening bluff of white pine. He’s also standing in the center of his parents’ kitchen in New Orleans. Robert is nearby, in his uniform, ready to go fight in an unholy war to please the man Jimmy’s been furiously arguing with about the issues of the United States’ bloody interference in Vietnam. An argument that has kept Robert in the room, their mother having fled, after taking care to turn off all the pots on the stove. Robert did not flee but he hasn’t said a word. He’s just standing there. If he’s ready to go kill for their father’s disastrously distorted patriotism, he should at
least be ready to argue the justifications. He may have found some semblance of physical courage to decide to go—likely to vanish when the reality of the carnage is upon him—but he is an intellectual coward.

But no. That’s present-day thinking. At the time, Jimmy has some crazy little hope. He and his brother talked about these very issues a couple of hours ago. Just the two of them. In the midst now of the old man’s fury, Jimmy has a fragmentary hope about Robert’s silence, that their own discussion—civilized compared with this present one—had opened his brother’s mind.