The Slab

by Michael R Collings

  Abe couldn’t find any words. Oh he knew well enough what he wanted to say: Why are you here and why are you so old looking and who is that little girl brushing her teeth in my bathroom and why did she slam the door in my face and call me Grandpa.

  He knew what he wanted to say, but he simply couldn’t find the right sounds to say them.

  “Nnnhh,” he began. His voice frightened him. It wasn’t his. The tongue pressing against teeth wasn’t his. The too-old Jay led Abe down the hall to the family room and started to help him settle onto the couch.

  Click.

  Everything slid into focus.

  “Jay?”

  “Dad, are you all right?”

  “I’m…of course I’m all right.” And he was. Now he was, although he vaguely recalled being disoriented only moments before. Or was that part of the dreams? He wasn’t sure. But now he remembered Jay and Ellen coming yesterday, remembered sitting in the rocker and watching his sweet, lovely granddaughters and his fine, handsome young grandsons playing together, thinking how proud Mattie would be of all of them.

  “I’m fine,” he repeated. He glanced around at the room, taking in the clumps of sleeping bags tossed in the corner. His eyes swept across the clock face.

  “Oh no,” he said. “It can’t be that late. I was going to get up early and start cooking…”

  “No you don’t,” Jay said firmly. “You sit right here.”

  Abe melted back into the couch. It felt nice. A woman entered the room. He looked up at her curiously. She seemed familiar. She was… Damn, he had almost had it there for a moment. He looked more closely at her. She was…she was Linda. Of course. Linda. Jay’s wife. Abe shook his head and sighed. It was so hard to remember things anymore. Everything seemed to get all mixed up some days. Other days, he was fine. Those were the days he when he would call Jay and Ellen and the grandkids on the telephone-no use getting them all worried because he was occasionally forgetful.

  “…Not another word about it.” Linda’s voice.

  “Huh,” Abe said. He caught Linda’s expression as she glanced quickly over to Jay.

  “Dad, you’re not cooking anything. You’re just going to relax. We’ll pull the turkey out of the oven after Linda makes reservations for us all at a restaurant this afternoon. That’ll be nice, Thanksgiving dinner without any dishes to do or mess to clear up. Right?”

  Abe was going to answer, was going to insist that he felt fine, that he could cook up a dinner like Jay wouldn’t believe-but just then the front door swung open and Ellen and Mitch and the boys trooped in. Abe thought there was a long moment of cold silence when Ellen’s eyes met Jay’s. Too bad the kids never really learned to get along, he thought. Matty was always disappointed about that.

  Jay crossed over and said something to Ellen, then stood in front of Thad for a long while. Abe could see Jay’s lips moving, could even hear his voice, but the sounds didn’t make any sense. The boy listened intently, his ears and cheeks suddenly flaming. He nodded once, then Jay reached out and gave the boy a hug. At first, the boy seemed horribly stiff, almost frightened, as if terrified of his own uncle. Why? After a moment, though, Thad raised his arms and hugged his uncle in return.

  That’s more like it, Abe thought. A family that really loves each other.

  11

  Jay had hoped for a full reconciliation, but by late morning on Thanksgiving Day, he knew that Ellen wouldn’t let that happen. Mitch was able to repair the television set, so everyone crowded into the family room to watch snatches of parades and football games.

  To an outsider, it might have seemed like a perfectly normal family gathering, but Jay knew better. He felt an undercurrent of hostility that bothered him. He couldn’t quite place it. Ellen talked and laughed and joked enough; she didn’t seem to be any angrier than usual. And Thad, though he studiously avoided even approaching either Elizabeth or Anna, was soon immersed in the intricacies of football, his newly discovered basso rumbling over the rest of the hubbub of noise. Neither seemed particularly upset over the morning’s debacle. Mitch ignored Jay. That was all right by Jay. Dad seemed better as well. His eyes were not as staring, not as wild. And the moments of vagueness that had worried Jay earlier that day had disappeared. Abe sounded normal, his mind clear, his words appropriate and understandable. Maybe it was just waking up that made him sound so…distant, Jay decided.

  No, everyone seemed normal.

  But still there was a persistent feeling, a heaviness in his mind like a headache about to descend and ravage him, that made it impossible for him to enjoy the day.

  Thanksgiving dinner passed without any incidents. The combined families took up three tables in a Baker’s Square seven miles down the freeway. The food was hot and good, the service excellent, the wait for available tables marginal (thanks to Linda’s foresight in making reservations). Abe presided over one table, quietly and rather distractedly, to Jay’s way of thinking. The kids sat at the other one, and for once Jay heard no squabbling at all from them. Once or twice, in fact, Thad or Josh said something and both of his girls would hide their faces in their hands and giggle. They were having fun together. Every element of the day was as it should have been, more subdued than usual perhaps, but nothing to suggest that anything was wrong.

  Still, as Jay dressed for bed that night beneath the watchful eyes of the stuffed specimens on the walls, he felt oddly tense. His head swam, his heart raced, and for a time he was so short of breath that he had to sit on the mattress and force himself to relax. Linda came in a few moments later and rubbed his shoulders. Even that helped only marginally. His sleep that night was even more ragged, more disrupted than before.

  12

  “Aw, do we have to?”

  Thad’s voice edged into a whine. Ellen’s harsh soprano all but drowned out the boy’s complaints.

  “Yes, you do. We all do. It’s the least we can do for Grandpa Abe.” She looked around the gathered family members as if daring anyone to contradict her. She’s in her element, Jay thought with a flood of realization that startled him. She’s the matriarch, now that Mom’s gone. She’s taken full charge, telling everyone what to do and when to do it and where to go. Even Dad.

  He glanced over to a patio glider that squawked thinly as Abe’s weight shifted. The old man sat silently in the shadows, his eyes downcast. Jay wondered if his father saw any of them, or whether the old man was really aware of where he was. Since the episode on Thanksgiving, Jay had been watching his father closely, not at all pleased with what he was seeing. At regular intervals, Abe seemed to phase out-almost, Jay thought, as if he were drugged. Jay had toyed with the idea of checking to see if his father’s medications were interacting but decided to wait a bit before mentioning his concerns. After all, no one else seemed to have noticed anything untoward.

  That morning had started well enough, with everyone sleeping in until eight or nine. Then, right after breakfast, Ellen had hustled everyone into the back yard-including Abe, bundled in three layers of sweaters and jackets in case the crisp November air should be too much for him.

  “He needs the fresh air,” Ellen insisted. “And besides, you know how much he loved to garden.”

  Loved. Ellen had that one right. She herded the kids like a general marshalling troops, handing out rakes and hoes and shovels, directing her boys to one part of the overgrown yard, Jay and his girls to another. Linda had opted to stay inside and clean up in the kitchen. Mitch was out front, puttering around with his engine.

  Apparently, Jay thought, it’s all right for my wife to work to straighten up her father-in-law’s place, but Mitch is somehow immune to the same obligation. He was surprised at the anger that realization kindled in him.

  He turned to the job at hand-hacking down brambles of dead and dying plants that clotted the foundation line of the house. He showed Elizabeth and Anna how to grab the stiff, blackened passion-plant vines and twist them into small bundles and stuff them into thick brown lawn-and-leaf bags. He actually didn’t
mind them working in the yard with him; in fact, he enjoyed it more than he would have cared to admit. It reminded him of his own childhood, when his was the small hand struggling to control a recalcitrant branch, and Abe’s the larger reaching over and with a single deft touch putting things to right.

  If only Ellen weren’t acting like the Her Untouchable Highness, the Queen of the May.

  They broke at noon, and after lunch-superbly cooked and served up by Linda, who had managed to make second-day turkey taste like a rare treat-the kids stayed inside. Ellen’s three began arguing almost immediately about the PlayStation. Anna and Elizabeth settled themselves onto the couch and began leafing through old picture albums Grandma Mattie had accumulated over fifty or sixty years. Jay could remember thumbing through them himself on rainy days when he was a child. The adults returned outside. This time Mitch deigned to join.

  “Still a lot to do,” Mitch said judiciously, as he surveyed the line of fifteen or so brown bags, stuffed to the top, secured with metal twist-ties, and set waiting to be hauled out for the garbage on Monday. They had already arranged for a neighbor boy to take care of the bags, since neither Mitch nor Jay could stay beyond Saturday evening.

  “Looks like everything he planted died.”

  It was a simple statement, but it took Jay by surprise. Thus far, in spite of his initial impressions as he had arrived the other day, he had been working on the assumption that they were essentially cleaning up old growth. But Mitch’s words forced Jay to look again, more closely.

  Mitch was an arrogant, self-centered, conceited blowhard most of the time, but this time he was right. Abe’s place was a graveyard of unburied plants. Everything Jay saw was dead or dying. The branches of a two-or three-year dwarf peach standing forlornly in one corner were brittle and shattered when he bent them to test for sap. Roses, wisteria, pyracantha, even two palms set out at the far corners of the patio-everything was dead. Along the foundation, not even the hardiest weeds survived. Jay knelt and pulled up handfuls of dry, flaking Bermuda grass. The roots-usually almost impossible to remove from the soil-ripped up in brown, rotting masses.

  Without saying anything more to either Ellen or Mitch, Jay made a circuit of the place, front yard as well as back. He wasn’t a professional gardener or horticulturist or anything-at home, he barely touched his own place, relying on the twice monthly services of a Japanese gardener who worked diligently and competently and could speak no English and write little more than the date and amount due in the appropriate spaces on the bill he slipped once a month into Jay’s screen door. But even with his narrow expertise, Jay knew enough from his childhood to know that something was wrong.

  Nothing seemed alive.

  He wondered worriedly what the house must have looked like during the spring and summer, when every other house on the street would have been a riot of Southern California colors-the vibrant scarlets and oranges and purples of bougainvillea, the delicate lavenders of wisteria and jacaranda and blue hibiscus, the fluorescent pinks and violets of geraniums. But here, at the house on the top of the hill, there would only have been brown and grey and the dingy black of dead and dying vegetation. Even the elm overhanging the corner of the yard looked diseased and rotted, its trunk seamed and twisted.

  “What’s going on here?” Jay asked himself as he crumbled dry leaves between his fingers. It looked like more than just neglect contingent upon failing health. It looked as if Abe had deliberately poisoned every plant in the place.

  Jay started for the garage, intending to pull out a shovel and test the hard-pack soil in the front yard when a shriek from inside the house drove any such ideas from his mind.

  Elizabeth!

  He recognized her voice, recognized her cry as one of pain and fear, not just the petulance of a ten year old. He slammed through the front door. Elizabeth stood in the center of the family room. One hand cupped her chin, from which blood was flowing in a steady stream.

  “She’s dying, she’s dying,” Anna whimpered from her corner on the couch. Jay took in the scene at once. Thad was not in the room. Thirteen-year-old Josh stood defiantly with his back to the television screen, on which an electronic Mario whistled and burbled unnoticed. A heavy glass ashtray was clenched in his fist. One edge was starred and stained with deep red.

  “Shit!” Jay said, “Now what.” Even as spoke he was lifting Elizabeth and rushing her down the hall to the front bathroom. He heard the back door slam as he disappeared around the corner-that would be Linda and Ellen and Mitch. They could take care of the kids in the family room.

  He set Elizabeth on the toilet seat and gently pried her fingers away from her chin. The skin was sliced, shallowly and neatly, for perhaps an inch just to the right of her mouth. Jay dabbed at it with a hand cloth from the rack next to the sink. It was bleeding heavily, but it looked like the blood was more superficial than serious.

  A hand touched his shoulder. It was Linda.

  “How is she?” Linda did not try to keep the fear from her voice.

  “All right, I think,” he answered. He held a clean hand cloth to the cut and pressed. Elizabeth winced but didn’t say anything. Her eyes were still clouded with tears, but she was no longer screaming.

  “More frightened than anything.”

  “Let me see,” Linda said. Jay gently released the pressure on the cut. He pulled the cloth away. The wound was now a thin red line, oozing lightly but no longer flowing.

  “Where are the band-aids?” Linda asked.

  “Up there,” Jay said, motioning with his head toward the medicine cabinet. Linda opened the mirrored door and rummaged for a few seconds in the depths. She took out a box of band-aids and small pair of scissors. With the deftness honed by years of motherhood and family crises she snipped at the band-aid until it was butterfly shaped.

  “Move a minute.”

  Jay shifted away from Elizabeth. Linda carefully positioned the butterfly band-aid on the cut, then lifted Elizabeth and sat down on the toilet seat, her daughter securely on her lap.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Linda murmured. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  Jay reached out and touched his daughter’s forehead. As he moved, he noticed that Abe was standing in the hallway, watching the proceedings intently.

  “She’s fine, Dad,” Jay said in an attempt to reassure the old man. “Just an accident.”

  “Huh-uh,” Elizabeth said. “Josh hit me.”

  “What!” Jay swung his attention back to the small, pale face pressed against his wife’s shoulder.

  “Josh hit me.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to play. With the video game. He didn’t want me to, and he grabbed that glass thing and hit me.”

  Jay surged to his feet. Linda grabbed his arm and held him tightly.

  “Jay, please, try to stay calm and find out what happened.”

  “Calm! Stay calm! That little bastard nearly kills your daughter and you tell me to stay calm.”

  Linda blanched at the anger in his voice, then her face flushed red and hot.

  Jay was out the door in an instant. He shouldered past his father, not noticing the distanced, glazed expression in the old man’s eyes, not noticing that as he passed his father Jay almost knocked him off balance. The old man slumped against the wall. Already Jay was in the family room yelling. But Mitch was there also, running interference, hunched aggressively between his son and Jay.

  Jay accused. Mitch defended. Josh burst into tears and threw the glass ashtray. It spun in the bright winter light, catching sunlight and refracting it in rainbow spirals as it shattered the family room window and disappeared into the dead yard.

  The crash of glass startled both Mitch and Jay, enough at any rate for the nearly crazed fathers to catch their breaths. They stared at each other, realizing with a unanimity that was itself breathtaking how close they had come to blows. Mitch’s fists were clenched at his sides. Jay’s breath was ragged and shallow, and his voice shook as he spoke.<
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  “Anna, come here.” She came. Without a word, she slipped across the room and stood behind her father. Jay took her by the hand and led her down the hall. As he passed the bathroom, he looked in at Linda and Elizabeth.

  “We’re leaving. Now,” he announced. “Anna, pack your things and Elizabeth’s.”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She disappeared into the bedroom the girls had shared.

  “You stay here with Elizabeth,” Jay said to his stunned wife. He rushed down the hallway and threw his and Linda’s things into their still-open suitcases, hammered the Samsonites shut, and yanked them up. Without speaking to anyone, he stalked through the hall and out the front door. He thrust the unoffending cases into the trunk of the car, slamming the lid hard enough to jostle his key ring loose. The keys dropped to the pavement with a harsh, raucous clatter. Blood throbbed in his temples as he leaned over to retrieve them.

  He re-entered the house, carefully avoiding any words with Ellen, who now fluttered protectively around her boys. Thad was in the family room as well, Jay noted, his long frame slouched in Mattie’s favorite chair, his feet hooked over the arm. The boy’s shoes were filthy.

  He helped Anna close her bag and Elizabeth’s, then took them outside as well and, moving like an automaton in spite of his mounting fury, went inside for a final time. By then Linda and Elizabeth were on their feet, standing together in the bathroom doorway.

  “Jay,” Linda began. “Don’t you think…”

  “Think, nothing. I’m leaving. Now.”

  He swept Elizabeth into his arms and carried her outside. Anna followed, her eyes dark with unwept tears. Jay sat Elizabeth on the back seat, then held the door open for Anna and waited until both girls were securely seatbelted in. He looked up. Linda was on the door-step. He could see Abe’s silver hair glistening in the darkness behind his wife.

  For a moment, Jay faltered. This is absurd, he heard himself argue. You haven’t even talked to the boy; you don’t know what really happened. Elizabeth is fine; she probably won’t even have a scar in a couple of weeks-shallow cuts like that bleed like hell but don’t really do much damage. Why are you acting like this, like Attila the Hun with raging hemorrhoids, setting out to rape and ravage and slaughter.