THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE (40 page)

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. The house settled, as houses will do, otherwise it was silent. After Rena had sipped from her tea, she said, “Henry was by again today.”

Dojcsak said, “I see; with a revised prognostication on when Luba will finally die?”

“Actually,” his wife replied, “he came to see about you.”

“I’m sorry,” Dojcsak said. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re always sorry for something, Ed” she replied. Dojcsak had yet to taste his beer. Rena sipped more tea and said, “Funny, but you’re never inspired to do much about it.”

Dojcsak caught himself before saying again,
Sorry
. “What is Henry’s interest in me?” he asked instead.

“Your health. He’s concerned for it. Frankly, Ed, so am I.”

“It’s the investigation, Rena.”

“It’s more than that, Ed. Our daughter is going to die—soon—and we don’t even talk about it. We haven’t planned for the funeral or for life after she’s gone. It seems to me you’ve already made up your mind that there
is
no life after she’s gone. If you have, decided that, you owe it to me to say. I won’t bother investing the effort to see this thing through.”

“What does your
Swami
have to say about it?” Dojcsak asked, immediately regretting the remark.

He avoided her gaze by focusing on the television, where a new show was playing. A man stepped from a room—a bathroom or a closet, Dojcsak couldn’t tell—covered head to toe with shaving cream, while others—two men and a woman, his family Dojcsak presumed—looked on. Dojcsak failed to see the humor, though with the sound low he assumed he had missed something in the visual translation. Through the shave cream Dojcsak detected one button visible on the man’s suit jacket, though he reasoned there must be more, otherwise the jacket would fall open at the knap. The woman wore a short skirt; if there were buttons, Dojcsak couldn’t see.

Rena finished her tea. She looked at her husband staring blankly at the television screen. He hadn’t touched his beer. Rena wanted to scream, to claw at his eyes with her fingers and to scratch his already painful looking skin with her nails, to dig and discover if there remained beneath the surface a deeper layer of emotion. During the years Luba had been dying, Ed was so self-indulgent and self-possessed as to resentfully and resignedly believe the illness was more about him, than it was about her.

“My
Swami
says I have two great burdens in my life, Ed. Though it’s painful to bear, she says in time one will pass. The other will be more difficult to overcome, still more difficult to comprehend. Which are you, Ed?” Insufficiently motivated to discuss what Dr. Henry Bauer had described as her husband’s precarious condition, Rena lifted herself from the sofa. “I’m going to bed.”

In the kitchen, she rinsed her cup. Shortly thereafter, she climbed the stairs to bed.

Dojcsak waited until she finished in the bathroom. He listened to Rena as she rinsed her mouth after brushing her teeth, flushed the toilet and washed her hands. He listened to the door of his bedroom as it was quietly pushed shut.

Without finishing his beer, Dojcsak eventually mounted the stairs himself. Jenny was out. Dojcsak didn’t soon expect her. In the bathroom, he shaved using a dull blade. A sharp edge, he reasoned, might initiate a blood flow he would be unable to staunch.

Unenthused and foregoing his usual routine, Dojcsak counted only fifty-seven strokes; two fewer on each cheek and on either side of his jaw and finally, one less over the upper lip. As usual, Dojcsak wrapped his blade carefully, discarding it carelessly and in doing so missing the trashcan altogether. Bending to retrieve the cartridge, he faltered, the weight of his torso threatening to act as a cantilever and topple him to the floor. At the last moment, Dojcsak gripped the pedestal sink, lowered his bulk cautiously into a sitting position on the cool tiles, and propped his back against the wall.

It had been Rena’s idea to install the black and white two-inch by two-inch checkerboard ceramic pattern. All four thousand three hundred twenty, less seventy-seven to account for the toilet and the base of the pedestal sink; a total of four thousand two hundred forty-three tiles in all. Seventy-two rows of sixty, or sixty rows of seventy-two (less seventy-seven); from corner to corner diagonally, one hundred thirty-two on all four points of the compass. From the center along the
length
, thirty-six either way (not counting the center tile, lest it be counted twice) for a total of seventy-three; from the center along the
width
, twenty-nine either way (not counting the center tile, lest it be counted
twice
) for a total of fifty-nine. Dojcsak sat for a moment and struggled to pull himself upright from the floor, careful to avoid eye contact with the black and white two inch by two inch squares lest he be compelled to spend the night reconfirming his previous count of the tiles it had been Rena’s decision to install in the first place.

Before retiring, Dojcsak entered his youngest daughter’s bedroom. Luba didn’t respond to his presence, but Dojcsak suspected she listened. Listened in the unconditional and non-judgmental way he needed, but from those close to him, he had never received.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

LIKE ED DOJCSAK,
Eugene Bitson returned home that evening before ten. He discovered Maggie in the kitchen, surrounded by food. On the stovetop, each of four burners was occupied with a simmering pot. The aroma of cooked beans, tomato, curry and something unpleasant—which Eugene could not immediately identify—wafted toward the kitchen ceiling in a combined puff of steam. Without lids, the contents of each bubbling container overflowed like lava from an erupting volcano, running down the sides onto the electric elements, creating, Eugene now realized, the unidentifiable and unsavory odor.

On the kitchen counter there was jug milk, fruit juice, bottled water and soda. Soda in screw top glass bottles, soda in pop-top cans, soda in plastic, recyclable containers. Everywhere on the floor meat, chicken and fish thawed, leaving greasy, bloody puddles. Fresh fruit and vegetables were scattered over the linoleum, some still in their clear plastic grocery wrap, others, those that could—like apples, oranges, plums, nectarines—rolling across the tile like hand grenades at a convention of terrorists. Careful to avoid them, Eugene approached his wife.

Both Cassie and his daughter had cautioned him on what to expect. Eugene had been forewarned at the bank, by the status of his depleted checking account. The grocer, even, had advised him Maggie was behaving oddly, though under the circumstances they were careful to not say strange. Eugene had been cautioned, forewarned and advised, but he had been offered no recommendations and no advice on what to do about it.

“Maggie?” he said in a nervous voice. His wife had lost weight, just how much he could see now by the way her blouse fell from her shoulders, and the slacks from her protruding hips; Maggie resembled a coat hanger. Canker sores erupted from her lips. Her skin was stretched tight as a lampshade.

“You’re home,” she replied, without turning.

“Thought I’d leave early,” he said. “Things have picked up at the store. I’ve hired new staff. Won’t be working as many hours as I have been, unless somebody quits,” he lied. “I’ll be home more often.”

Maggie did not respond.

“That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” he ventured.

Maggie surveyed the room, oblivious to the bottles on the countertop, the food on the floor, and the pots bubbling on the stove. “Hungry?” she asked, turning to face him. “It’s not much, but I’m sure I could throw something together.”

Throughout the course of their marriage, Eugene had either adored his wife or, alternately, he had despised her. More often than once, he had experienced these conflicting emotions concurrently. When Evelyn arrived, their firstborn—
Maggie’s
firstborn—Eugene had wept, at first with joy then with rage upon realizing the child could not possibly be his. He’d been sick to his stomach in the men’s room, returning later to Maggie’s bedside, compelled both to caress her and to smash her face with his fist, unsure of how he would react until finally at the last moment, he moved to embrace her. He was, after all, a mere boy and in too deep to do otherwise.

Eugene loved Evelyn as if she was his own, but was unable to compensate adequately for Maggie’s contempt toward the child. Life was difficult, becoming intolerable for Evelyn after the arrival first of Mandy, and following her, Missy. Eugene both sympathized and resented Maggie’s attitude toward her daughter, even if it was beyond his capacity to understand. Even now, Eugene was unsure if he should feel pity for his wife or cast blame. Eugene believed instinctively that in the manner of their daughter’s passing, it could happen only to a child of hers.

Unable to face her any longer, he said, “I’m going to bed.” Eugene turned from the kitchen, taking the steps to his bedroom two at a time.

Later, after Maggie had straightened the kitchen and long after Eugene had fallen into a deep sleep, she herself was ready for bed. She did not take the stairs two at a time like her husband. Maggie attacked them slowly, methodically, as if each were a burden.

In the bedroom, she spoke to the sleeping Eugene as if he were awake.

“I know you blame me,” she said. “I understand. I should have done more, for your sake if not hers.” Eugene turned from his stomach to his back, but did not wake. Satisfied that he was listening, Maggie continued. “I’m a terrible mother, Eugene, God knows, I’m unfit. It’s not as if I had someone to take after, is it? Instead, I suppose, I defined myself by him,
against
him, like a mirror.”

Slowly, Maggie undressed, discarding her blouse and her slacks in a heap on the floor. She hadn’t bathed in over a week and her underclothes were soiled. “Don’t you see? Without
Daddy
, who was
I?
As his reflection, if I shut him out, wouldn’t I myself simply disappear, cease to exist?”

She looked to Eugene as if for an answer. When he didn’t respond, she said, “I’m really no better than who I
was
, Eugene, like one of Daddy’s horses. I wish I could, but I can’t rise above my bloodlines. Please understand; please understand and please forgive me. I know I shouldn’t ask; I have no right, but you’re a good man, Eugene, you’re a
good
,
good
man. I don’t care anymore if God forgives me; he abandoned me long ago. Still, I’ll pray to him anyway, that you will, forgive me.”

Maggie pulled back the cover on her side of the bed, slipped between the sheets, pecked Eugene on the cheek, and made herself comfortable in the outstretched arm of her husband.

That night, Maggie Bitson, nee McMaster, slept peacefully, the first time she had done so since the night before the day she turned eight years of age, a birthday on which her father had promised to do what he must to make it a happy day.

…

Christopher Burke could see the river from his back porch. In winter—after the leaves fell completely from the trees—it was just visible from here as a thin, blue-green thread. In summer, it was obscured completely, which was fine with Chris as he was neither able to hear it or to see it; Burke preferred to partake of the Hudson from a distance.

Twice in the time they had worked together, Ed Dojcsak had invited Burke on a trip to Lake George, to accompany him on the water in his sixteen-foot aluminum powerboat. Ostensibly to fish, but more likely, the younger man assumed, to bond. Both times, Burke had declined. (Too
Deliverance
for him.) Dojcsak had never asked again, preferring, Burke imagined, his own company instead: to Burke, Dojcsak’s heart hadn’t seemed much into the invitation anyway.

It was after midnight. At the insistence of his wife, Burke agreed to remain home this evening, to entertain his mother-in-law. In truth, Burke would not miss the damp second floor of the fire-come-police station bunkhouse. He’d been sleeping there with greater frequency lately, on the pullout sofa. The springs punched through the cushions, digging into the muscle of his back like small metal fists, leaving welts the following morning. Burke had told this to Sheila, though he wasn’t at all convinced she had ever accepted his explanation.

The Pasta Pomodoro he had brought home for dinner had been a hit with both Sheila and her mother. After dinner, they sat in the small living room, the women together on the couch, Sheila with her legs elevated while Tina Marinos massaged her daughter’s swollen feet. It was something Burke had never done, or even thought to do.

“Are you ready for this?” she had asked him after dinner, her hand flat on her daughter’s belly. “It isn’t a pet you know.”

Burke suspected Sheila complained to her mother about his behavior. He hoped it was not too much.

“I know,” Burke replied. “Not like a dog or a cat. It needs more attention, maybe like a tropical fish.”

Tina smiled; Sheila did not. To Tina, Christopher had looks, charm and career prospects. Her daughter could do worse, much worse, and privately Sheila’s mother hoped her daughter wasn’t giving her husband too hard a time, as expectant mothers were wont to do.

“It’s okay to raise a child here,” his mother-in-law said, her eyes surveying the room. “But if you want to raise a
family
, it’s too small.”

“Church Falls is nice ma’,” Sheila said. “It’s clean, it’s safe.”

Tina Marinos scoffed. “Safe?” she said. “Safer than what? This place has an aura, Sheila. I don’t like it.”

Burke laughed. “Bangor Maine,” he said.

His mother-in-law smiled. “
Stephen King
.”

“Stop it, you two,” Sheila said, “You’re both being ridiculous.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not, and maybe it’s time for a change, for you to move back to Syracuse, to be closer to me and your Dad,” she said to her daughter, fixing Burke with a sidelong glance. “The baby will mean more work you know, for both of you. If you return to work even part-time,” she said to Sheila, “it will be more work for Chris. Besides, no offense Chris, but I don’t see you playing Barney Fife to Dojcsak’s Andy Taylor. There must be openings with the State Police.”

Chris said, “Your mother has a point, Sheila.”

Shortly afterward, the ladies went to bed, leaving him alone to smoke outside on the back porch.

The wind had risen and though the sky was clear, the weather forecast was predicting snow. Today the temperature had reached into the mid-fifties but this far north, Burke knew, if the conditions were right by tomorrow they might wake up to six inches. This early in the spring it was not unheard of for a cranky Nor’easter to wander in off the Atlantic and collide with a temperamental Canadian cold front, dropping enough of the white stuff to extend the ski season until early May. If the warm weather held, the small lakes would quickly thaw, keeping the more adventurous off the water; if not, authorities would be pulling the bodies of careless snowmobilers from the water until June.

Burke flicked his cigarette butt from between his thumb and forefinger onto the lawn. He pulled a small, flattened square of aluminum tin foil from a rear pocket of his jeans. He unwrapped, extracting a joint. Inserting it between his lips, he ignited, drawing heavily on the musky fume, filling his lungs.
Enjoy
, he said to himself, not knowing how long the small quantity he had remaining would last. No more Jordy, no more dope.

“
Jordy, Jordy, Jordy,
” Burke said quietly, smiling. “You little
scumbag
. Even I can’t save you now.”

Inside the house, he retrieved a manila envelope. Earlier, he had concealed it beneath the dining room hutch. He pulled on a heavy jacket, one that was too warm for the temperature but not for the wind, he decided. He locked the front door behind him, leaving the house for the short walk to the river. It would do neither for his marriage nor his career to be found in possession of the photographs of Missy Bitson impaled on the shaft of her adoring cousin. Best consign them to the deep, where for him they could do no harm.