Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Vince said I should call you. He said, ‘Tell Gene—it wears off. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over. But I can beat it. It’s different for me. They couldn’t.’ Then he hung up. Not a word to me.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  He turned. “Yeah, well, that was Vince, wasn’t it? He always came first with himself.”

  No, I could have said. God came first. And that’s how Bucky beat the J-24 withdrawal. Human bonds, whether forged by living or chemicals, got torn down as much as built up. But you don’t have to live in a three-room apartment with God, fight about money with God, listen to God snore and fart and say things so stupid you can’t believe they’re coming out of the mouth of your beloved, watch God be selfish or petty or cruel. God was bigger than all that, at least in Bucky’s mind, was so big that He filled everything. And this time when God retreated from him, when the J-24 wore off and Bucky could feel the bonding slipping away, Bucky slipped along after it. Deeper into his own mind, where all love exists anyway.

  “The doctor said he might never come out of the catatonia,” Tom said. He was starting to get angry now, the anger of self-preservation. “Or he

  might. Either way, I don’t think I’ll be waiting around for him. He’s treated me too badly.”

  Not a long-term kind of guy, Tommy. I said, “But you never took J-24 yourself.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’m not stupid. I think I’ll go home now. Thanks for coming, Gene. Good to meet you.”

  “You, too,” I said, knowing neither of us meant it.

  “Oh, and Vince said one more thing. He said to tell you it was, too, murder. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said. But not, I hoped, to him.

  After Tom left, I sat in the waiting room and pulled from my jacket the second package. The NYPD evidence sticker had torn when I’d jammed the padded mailer in my pocket.

  It was the original crime scene report for Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca, the one Johnny Fermato must have known about when he sent me the phony one. This report was signed Bruce Campinella. I didn’t know him, but I could probably pick him out of a line-up from the brief tussle in Mulcahy’s: average height, brown hair, undistinguished looks, furious underneath. Your basic competent honest cop, still outraged at what the system had for sale. And for sale at a probably not very high price. Not in New York.

  There were only two photos this time. One I’d already seen: Mrs. Smith’s smashed body on the pavement below the nursing home roof. The other was new. Della Francesca’s body lying on the roof, not in his room, before the cover-up team moved him and took the second set of pictures. The old man lay face up, the knife still in his chest. It was a good photo; the facial expression was very clear. The pain was there, of course, but you could see the fury, too. The incredible rage. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over.

  Had della Francesca pushed Lydia Smith first, after that shattering quarrel that came from losing their special, unearthly union, and then killed himself? Or had she found the strength in her disappointment and outrage to drive the knife in, and then she jumped? Ordinarily, the loss of love doesn’t mean hate. Just how unbearable was it to have had a true, perfect, unhuman end to human isolation—and then lose it? How much rage did that primordial loss release?

  Or maybe Bucky was wrong, and it had been suicide after all. Not the anger uppermost, but the grief. Maybe the rage on della Francesca’s dead face wasn’t at his lost perfect love, but at his own emptiness once it was gone. He’d felt something so wonderful, so sublime, that everything else afterward fell unbearably short, and life itself wasn’t worth the effort. No matter what he did, he’d never ever have its like again.

  I thought of Samuel Fetterolf before he took J-24, writing everyone in his family all the time, trying to stay connected. Of Pete, straining every cell of his damaged brain to protect the memories of the old people who’d been kind to him. Of Jeff Connors, hanging onto Darryl even while he moved into the world of red Mercedes and big deals. Of Jenny Kelly, sacrificing her dates and her sleep and her private life in her frantic effort to connect to the students, who she undoubtedly thought of as “her kids.” Of Bucky.

  The elevator to the fifth floor was out of order. I took the stairs. The shift nurse barely nodded at me. It wasn’t Susan. In Margie’s room the lights had been dimmed and she lay in the gloom like a curved dry husk, covered with a light sheet. I pulled the chair closer to her bed and stared at her.

  And for maybe the first time since her accident, I remembered.

  Roll the window down, Gene.

  It’s fifteen degrees out there, Margie!

  It’s real air. Chilled like good beer. It smells like a goddamn factory in this car.

  Don’t start again. I’m warning you.

  Are you so afraid the job won’t kill you that you want the cigarettes to do it?

  Stop trying to control me.

  Maybe you should do better at controlling yourself.

  The night I’d found Bucky at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I’d been in control. It was Bucky who hadn’t. I’d crawled back in bed and put my arms around Marge and vowed never to see Bucky and his messy stupid dramas of faith ever again. Marge hadn’t been asleep. She’d been crying. I’d had enough hysteria for one night; I didn’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t even let her speak. I stalked out of the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. It was three days before I’d even talk to her so we could work it out and make it good between us again.

  Have a great year! she’d said my first September at Benjamin Franklin. But it hadn’t been a great year. I was trying to learn how to be a teacher, and trying to forget how to be a cop, and I didn’t have much time left over for her. We’d fought about that, and then I’d stayed away from home more and more to get away from the fighting, and by the time I returned she was staying away from home a lot. Over time it got better again, but I don’t know where she was going the night she crossed Lexington with a bag of groceries in front of that ’93 Lincoln. I don’t know who the groceries were for. She never bought porterhouse and champagne for me.

  Maybe we would have worked that out, too. Somehow.

  Weren’t there moments, Gene, Bucky had said, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie? No. I was never Margie. We were close, but not that close. What we’d had was good, but not that good. Not a perfect merging of souls.

  Which was the reason I could survive its loss.

  I stood up slowly, favoring my knee. On the way out of the room, I took the plastic bottle of Camineur out of my pocket and tossed it in the waste basket. Then I left, without looking back.

  Outside, on Ninth Avenue, a patrol car suddenly switched on its lights and took off. Some kids who should have been at home swaggered past, heading downtown. I looked for a pay phone. By now, Jenny Kelly would be done delivering Darryl to his aunt, and Jeff Connors was going to need better than the usual overworked public defender. I knew a guy at Legal Aid, a hotshot, who still owed me a long-overdue favor.

  I found the phone, and the connection went through.

  EVOLUTION

  Beggars and Choosers, which is the author’s most recent novel and a sequel to her highly acclaimed Beggars in Spain, is currently a finalist for the 1995 Hugo award. We hope the disastrous scenario Ms. Kress chillingly evokes in her latest tale does not describe the “Evolution” of our own near future.

  “Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.

  I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Se
an and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothes-basket.

  “Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”

  “Have the police arrested anybody?”

  “Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers, all five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”

  “Was it in the parking lot?” I’m in that parking lot behind the Food Mart every week. It’s unpaved, just hard-packed rocky dirt sloping down to a low concrete wall by the river. I take Jackie’s sheets off the line. Belle, Ariel, and Princess Jasmine all smile through fields of flowers.

  “Yes, in the parking lot,” Ceci says. “Near the dumpsters. There must have been a silencer on the rifle, nobody heard anything. Tom found two .22 250 semiautomatic cartridges.” Ceci knows about guns. Her house is full of them. “Betty, why don’t you put all this wash in your dryer and save yourself the trouble of hanging it all out?”

  “I like the way it smells line-dried. And I can hear Jackie through the window.”

  Instantly Ceci’s face changes. “Jackie’s home from school? Why?”

  “She has a cold.”

  “Are you sure it’s just a cold?”

  “I’m sure.” I take the clothespins off Sean’s T-shirt. The front says SEE DICK DRINK, SEE DICK DRIVE, SEE DICK DIE. “Ceci, Jackie is not on any antibiotics.”

  “Good thing,” Ceci says, and for a moment she studies her fingernails, very casual. “They say Dr. Bennett prescribed endozine again last week. For the youngest Nordstrum boy. Without sending him to the hospital.”

  I don’t answer. The back of Sean’s t-shirt says DON’T BE A DICK. Irritated by my silence, Ceci says, “I don’t see how you can let your son wear that obscene clothing!”

  “It’s his choice. Besides, Ceci, it’s a health message. About not drinking and driving. Aren’t you the one that thinks strong health messages are a good thing?”

  Our eyes lock. The silence lengthens. Finally Ceci says, “Well, haven’t we gotten serious all of a sudden.”

  I say, “Murder is serious.”

  “Yes. I’m sure the cops will catch whoever did it. Probably one of those scum that hang around the Rainbow Bar.”

  “Dr. Bennett wasn’t the type to hang around with scum.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean he knew them. Some lowlife probably killed him for his wallet.” She looks straight into my eyes. “I can’t think of any other motive. Can you?”

  I look east, toward the river. On the other side, just visible over the tops of houses on its little hill, rise the three stories of Emerton Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital. The bridge over the river was blown up three weeks ago. No injuries, no suspects. Now anybody who wants to go to the hospital has to drive ten miles up West River Road and cross at the Interstate. Jack told me that the Department of Transportation says two years to get a new bridge built.

  I say, “Dr. Bennett was a good doctor. And a good man.”

  “Well, did anybody say he wasn’t? Really, Betty, you should use your dryer and save yourself all that bending and stooping. Bad for the back. We’re not getting any younger. Ta-ta.” She waves her right hand, just a waggle of fingers, and walks off. Her nails, I notice, are painted the delicate fragile pinky-white of freshly unscabbed skin.

  “You have no proof,” Jack says “Just some wild suspicions.” He has his stubborn face on. He sits with his Michelob at the kitchen table, dog-tired from his factory shift plus three hours overtime, and he doesn’t want to hear this. I don’t blame him. I don’t want to be saying it. In the living room Jackie plays Nintendo frantically, trying to cram in as many electronic explosions as she can before her father claims the TV for Monday Night Football. Sean has already gone out with his friends, before his stepfather got home.

  I sit down across from Jack, a fresh mug of coffee cradled between my palms. For warmth. “I know I don’t have any proof, Jack. I’m not some detective.”

  “So let the cops handle it. It’s their business, not ours. You stay out of it.”

  “I am out of it. You know that.” Jack nods. We don’t mix with cops, don’t serve on any town committees, don’t even listen to the news much. We don’t get involved with what doesn’t concern us. Jack never did. I add, “I’m just telling you what I think. I can do that, can’t I?” and hear my voice stuck someplace between pleading and anger.

  Jack hears it, too. He scowls, stands with his beer, puts his hand gently on my shoulder. “Sure, Bets. You can say whatever you want to me. But nobody else, you hear? I don’t want no trouble, especially to you and the kids. This ain’t our problem. Just be grateful we’re all healthy, knock on wood.”

  He smiles and goes into the living room. Jackie switches off the Nintendo without being yelled at; she’s good that way. I look out the kitchen window, but it’s too dark to see anything but my own reflection, and anyway the window faces north, not east.

  I haven’t crossed the river since Jackie was born at Emerton Memorial, seven years ago. And then I was in the hospital less than twenty-four hours before I made Jack take me home. Not because of the infections, of course—that hadn’t all started yet. But it has now, and what if next time instead of the youngest Nordstrum boy, it’s Jackie who needs endozine? Or Sean?

  Once you’ve been to Emerton Memorial, nobody but your family will go near you. And sometimes not even them. When Mrs. Weimer came home from surgery, her daughter-in-law put her in that back upstairs room and left her food on disposable trays in the doorway and put in a chemical toilet. Didn’t even help the old lady crawl out of bed to use it. For a whole month it went on like that—surgical masks, gloves, paper gowns—until Rosie Weimer was positive Mrs. Weimer hadn’t picked up any mutated drug-resistant bacteria in Emerton Memorial. And Hal Weimer didn’t say a word against his wife.

  “People are scared, but they’ll do the right thing,” Jack said, the only other time I tried to talk to him about it. Jack isn’t much for talking. And so I don’t. I owe him that.

  But in the city—in all the cities—they’re not just scared. They’re terrified. Even without listening to the news I hear about the riots and the special government police and half the population sick with the new germs that only endozine cures—sometimes. I don’t see how they’re going to have much energy for one murdered small-town doctor. And I don’t share Jack’s conviction that people in Emerton will automatically do the right thing. I remember all too well that sometimes they don’t. How come Jack doesn’t remember, too?

  But he’s right about one thing: I don’t owe this town anything.

  I stack the supper dishes in the sink and get Jackie started on her homework.

  The next day, I drive down to the Food Mart parking lot.

  There isn’t much to see. It rained last night. Next to the dumpster lie a wadded-up surgical glove and a piece of yellow tape like the police use around a crime scene. Also some of those little black cardboard boxes from the stuff that gets used up by the new holographic TV cameras. That’s it.

  “You heard what happened to Dr. Bennett?” I say to Sean at dinner. Jack’s working again. Jackie sits playing with the Barbie doll she doesn’t know I know she has on her lap.

  Sean looks at me sideways, under the heavy fringe of his dark bangs, and I can’t read his expression. “He was killed for giving out too many antibiotics.”

  Jackie looks up. “Who killed the doctor?”

  “The bastards that think they run this town,” Sean says. He flicks the hair out of his eyes. His face is ashy gray. “Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.”

  “That’s enough, Sean,” I say.

  Jackie’s lip trembles. “Who’ll get us all? Mommy . . .”

  “Nobody’s getting anybody,” I say. “Sean, stop it. You’re scaring her.”

  “Well, she should be scared,” Sean says, but he shuts up and stares bleakly at his plate. Sixteen now, I’v
e had him for sixteen years. Watching him, his thick dark hair and sulky mouth, I think that it’s a sin to have a favorite child. And that I can’t help it, and that I would, God forgive me, sacrifice both Jackie and Jack for this boy.

  “I want you to clean the garage tonight, Sean. You promised Jack three days ago now.”

  “Tomorrow. Tonight I have to go out.”

  Jackie says, “Why should I be scared?”

  “Tonight,” I say.

  Sean looks at me with teenage desperation. His eyes are very blue. “Not tonight, I have to go out.”

  Jackie says, “Why should I—”

  I say, “You’re staying home and cleaning the garage.”

  “No.” He glares at me, and then breaks. He has his father’s looks, but he’s not really like his father. There are even tears in the corners of his eyes. “I’ll do it tomorrow, Mom, I promise. Right after school. But tonight I have to go out.”

  “Where?”

  “Just out.”

  Jackie says, “Why should I be scared? Scared of what? Mommy!”

  Sean turns to her. “You shouldn’t be scared, Jack-o-lantern. Everything’s going to be all right. One way or another.”

  I listen to the tone of his voice and suddenly fear shoots through me, piercing as childbirth. I say, “Jackie, you can play Nintendo now. I’ll clear the table.”

  Her face brightens. She skips into the living room and I look at my son. “What does that mean? ‘One way or another’ ? Sean, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he says, and then despite his ashy color he looks me straight in the eyes, and smiles tenderly, and for the first time—the very first time—I see his resemblance to his father. He can lie to me with tenderness.

  Two days later, just after I return from the Food Mart, they contact me.

  The murder was on the news for two nights, and then disappeared. Over the parking lot is scattered more TV-camera litter. There’s also a wine bottle buried halfway into the hard ground, with a bouquet of yellow roses in it. Nearby is an empty basket, the kind that comes filled with expensive dried flowers at Blossoms by Bonnie, weighted down with stones. Staring at it, I remember that Bonnie Widelstein went out of business a few months ago. A drug-resistant abscess, and after she got out of Emerton Memorial, nobody on this side of the river would buy flowers from her.