Risen (52 page)

"He mustn't get the idea that he's been shoved aside. This is only temporary, after all, until we get the addition built."

There was no addition, of course. No contractor. No architect. Not even a folder of pictures from magazines. The addition was a fable meant to disguise the fact that Grandmother's time in the house was expected to be brief. She was there to die.

As if one little picture of Edgar on the nightstand would turn the kid into a serial killer,
Grandmother thought. As far as Grandmother was concerned, the cancer that had invaded her bones couldn't take her away soon enough. She just wanted to be with Edgar.

She hoped death would happen quietly in the night, while she dreamed of Edgar, but she would welcome it whenever it took her. She thought of the joke she heard on the radio: "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, and not screaming in terror like his passengers." Edgar would have liked that one. She couldn't wait to tell it to him when she reached the other side.

Dead these five years, Edgar was still with her in spirit, in memory, in longing. How often these days did she start a sentence with "When Edgar was alive...?" Everything she had to say seemed to begin and end with Edgar.

Outside, in the hallway, she heard Evelyn and her husband, Doug, arguing. Did they imagine that she couldn't hear them? Or did they just not care? She recognized familiar phrases.

It's such a damned nuisance....

Only a matter of time....

Could hang on for years....

I don't know what's wrong with putting her in a home....

As if we could afford....

So now it's about my inadequacies....

The boy gave a perfunctory knock at the door and walked in without waiting for Grandmother to beckon. It was his room, after all, and he had to get dressed for school.

"Good morning," Grandmother said. She wished she could remember the boy's name. She was always getting it wrong. All of these Joshes and Jonahs and Justins, her conglomerated grandsons, merged in her mind. By the time she remembered which one she was speaking to, they had usually fled from her like ghosts.

"Hi," the boy said. He threw the word at her like a spit wad. He gathered his school clothes and marched into the bathroom where he had to dress these days. He emerged after a few minutes. "Bye," he said as he marched back through.

"Bye," Grandmother said, though by the time she'd gotten up the wind, the boy was long gone.

***

After the boy was off to school, Evelyn helped Grandmother to the bathroom. Grandmother was too weak to walk on her own. She had to be supported every step of the way.

"Today's bath day," Evelyn said. She helped Grandmother into the tub, lifting one leg over the edge and then the other, then cradling her as she lowered her into the tepid water.

Grandmother knew she smelled ripe. Getting her in and out of the tub was a chore, as was the bath itself, so it had become an every-third-day affair or more often as needed, as when Grandmother soiled herself.

Evelyn toweled her off and dressed her in a fresh nightgown and escorted her back to bed. She drew up the
Star Wars
sheet over Grandmother's legs.

"I'll be back after I get Doug off to work," she said. "It's his late day."

More arguing came to Grandmother's ears from beyond the bedroom.

Well, we could afford a nursing home if Edgar hadn't let the long-term care lapse….

You'll be old one day….

I just hope I don't overstay
my
welcome….

Grandmother knew that she'd overstayed. She had been with Evelyn and Doug longer than with any other relatives. Six months. It was a long time to intrude on a family's life, but Evelyn was a registered nurse, working part time, and she was the best caregiver available for no money. Grandmother's time was running out, but the sand drained so slowly from the hourglass that it was hard to foresee the end. It was cruel to everyone, to draw death out this way.

"Edgar always chided me for straggling," she told Evelyn when she brought Grandmother's toast and tea.  "He would stand by the front door checking his watch while I attended to one thing after another. Now look at me. Edgar's five years gone and I'm still straggling behind."

"That's no way to talk, Mother," Evelyn said.

"Why not? It's the truth. If there was any God in this world, He'd have taken me five years ago."

"Hush. Do you want help with your tea?" Grandmother's hands shook as she raised the cup to her lips. Grandmother shook her head "no."

"I wish you'd just smother me in my sleep," Grandmother said. "It'd be a blessing."

"Hush."

"I just want to be with Edgar."

"You will, Mother. When it's time."

"It's past time."

"Hush."

The day passed as they all did, slowly and painfully. Grandmother listened to the radio, watched the boy's portable TV and slept as much as she could. Then it was night and Evelyn turned off the lights and helped her lay down her head. Grandmother went to sleep, giving Death one more opportunity to make her fondest wish come true.

***

Grandmother woke a few minutes past midnight. The room was dark and quiet around her, and her mind seethed with strange dream memories that swam in her mind and darted here and there, appearing from the dim recesses and vanishing into the murk as mysteriously as they'd come. Each by itself made no sense, but taken together they told an excruciating and unbelievable tale.

She remembered trying to breathe and not being able to draw a breath. Something was pressed against her face, a weight held it down, and she barely had the strength to struggle. Anyone could have placed the pillow over her face and held it there against her pitiful attempts to lift it. It didn't take a man's strength. Evelyn could have done it or even the boy. This memory, the one of being smothered, was clear. It was not part of the dream.

The dream began with Edgar calling to her across a great distance. Then a man interposed himself between them and Edgar flew from the scene, or turned to smoke and was scattered by a cold wind, or maybe Edgar was never there at all. All that was left was the man, whose name she knew was "Seth," and they had a conversation that meant a great deal to Grandmother, but she couldn't remember a word of it.

Enveloped now by the darkness of the boy's room, Grandmother realized that something was missing, something as familiar to her as her own skin. After a moment she knew what it was. It was the pain. The pain was gone, and she knew she had Seth to thank for that.

She lay in the dark and marveled at how good it felt to have a body that was no longer at war with itself. She reflected on the miracle that had sneaked up on her.

Seth had brought her back from the dead. It would have been an unimaginable thing at one time, impossible, but now the notion of resurrection settled around her shoulders like an old shawl. She owed everything to Seth. If only Edgar could have known Seth he would be alive today, and they would be together.

She had traded Edgar for Seth, and the thought of that exchange made her sad. For so many years the dream of rejoining Edgar was all that got Grandmother through the day. Now the dream was postponed, perhaps forever.

The room was all shadows and portent. The hall beyond the doorway was quiet but for the distant hum of the refrigerator. She had never noticed it before. So Seth had fixed her hearing, too, as well as ridding her of the cancer. Her heart hadn't felt so strong in decades. She pressed the backs of her fingers against her cheek, and for the first time in ages her touch did not feel cold.

"I'm sorry, Edgar," she said. "I want to join you, but it isn't my time."

Grandmother lay in the dark and planned her next move. She longed to dress up in real clothes and walk to the kitchen and fix herself a snack, to watch the big TV in the living room, to walk around the block and take a drive out to the countryside, to escape the four walls that held her prisoner for six months. But those things would have to wait. She didn't want to tip her hand too soon. It might be best to play the invalid for a short while yet. She had thinking to do.

First, she had to deduce which member of her loving family had murdered her.

***

And it
was
a loving family, in its own way. Evelyn, certainly, loved her. Loved her too much, perhaps. How often had Grandmother pleaded with her to end her misery, to reunite her with Edgar, and how often had Evelyn told her, as she had that very day, to hush?

Evelyn was a caregiver. Every bird fallen from its nest and discovered by a neighbor child ended up in Evelyn's hands. Her husband, Doug, was another kind of wounded bird, a dreamer trapped in an ordinary mind, a free spirit doomed by mediocrity to spend its life plodding through the mundane world, digging up paychecks like potatoes to sustain his hungry family. Evelyn nurtured Doug's dreams the way she nurtured the wildflowers that labored their way up through the heavy, clay soil of her back garden.

Evelyn fed the defective birds until they drew their last, labored breaths. She tended the pathetic garden. She supported Doug's decision to fill their garage with Amway products. Any doomed endeavor pulled Evelyn in with the attractive force of a malevolent sun luring a wayward planet into orbit, and it held her there until failure reduced dream, dreamer and Evelyn to cinders.

Did this willingness to sacrifice herself for others remove Evelyn from suspicion, or did it implicate her? Was Grandmother's death a mercy killing? Was it committed at the expense of Evelyn's own incarceration and even, Evelyn might have thought, the damnation of her immortal soul?

It was certainly possible that Evelyn had killed her out of kindness.

And yet, it didn't seem right. Grandmother would have noticed something in her manner, some unsettled quality in her eyes, if she were harboring secret thoughts of murder, however kindly motivated, and Grandmother had noticed nothing. Besides, if that were Evelyn's intention, why wouldn't she have drowned her in the tub? That would have made more sense. Hold her head under the water, leave her to make the tea, come back to find her dead. Surely Evelyn would have thought of that.

Grandmother turned her thoughts to Doug.

Doug, always treading the financial waters, always sputtering like a drowning man. The burden of an old, useless woman dragged at his ankles like concrete boots. Grandmother was
one thing too many to deal with
, in Doug's words. He couldn't wait for her to die.
Just a little breathing room, that's all I need.
She could hear his words echoing down the hallway.

Doug, desperate for air of his own, could have smothered her. Maybe it was part of a larger plan, to hide the body and continue to collect Grandmother's government checks.
Just until we can get a little bit ahead,
he would have said, if only to himself. Among his many, pedestrian schemes, could Doug harbor any so grand as murder?

It wasn't likely. Despite his failings, the standard model of "Doug" came equipped with an irrepressible sense of duty, the legacy of a demanding mother. Ultimately, it was duty that would keep Doug on the straight and narrow path, discontent and complaining and miserable, but surefooted as a Mohican.

It took more imagination than Doug could muster to kill Grandmother. Besides, killing her required fearlessness, that or an unsophisticated sense of consequences. Selfishness, too, to put the killer's earthly needs against the life of another person, however feeble and willing to pass on she might be.

Fearless, little sense of consequence, selfish.
My God,
Grandmother realized,
it sounds just like a nine-year-old boy. A boy who wants his room back.

Events replayed themselves in Grandmother's head. The boy's sullen glances, the resentful whining that went on behind her back. She thought of the grimacing figures on the boy's shelves, mirrors into the adolescent soul. How would any of those muscle bound oafs deal with an interloper like Grandmother? Violently, of course. They were action figures; they would take action. And these were the boy's heroes.

Then she remembered one more thing. The boy loved his candy. He was never without it, chewing and sucking and slurping. His hands were always sticky—he could have followed Spider-Man up a wall.

Grandmother picked up her pillow and drew it to her face. She inhaled deeply, taking in the scent. It smelled like her. She turned it over and smelled the other side, the side that would have been in contact with her killer's hands. She lowered the pillow, smiling.

It smelled of licorice.

***

The boy (it occurred to her, maybe because her memory had been sharpened by resurrection) was named "Jeffrey."

Grandmother lay awake trying to figure out what to do with little Jeffrey. Selfish, murderous little Jeffrey. By three a.m., she had formulated a plan.

The plan required the sacrifice of two innocents, but thanks to Seth and his blessing, their sacrifice would not be for long. A day and a night of death was all, then both would be restored.

Grandmother began with her daughter because Doug was such a sound sleeper. A tree could fall on the house and not wake Doug, whereas Evelyn was awake even before she felt Grandmother's knife in her throat. Awakened by a creaking floorboard, she saw Grandmother standing over her, naked, in all her saggy, baggy glory. She registered the hunting knife in Grandmother's hands and for a moment thought she was dreaming.