by Ann Patchett
“You’re awake!” Patsy said, making Franny jump. Patsy took down the smallest bag, the antiemetic, which was already empty. The others still had a way to go. “Did you get some rest?”
“I got some rest,” Fix said, but he looked exhausted, whether from the chemo or the story or both. Franny wondered if Patsy didn’t see it but then maybe he didn’t look so different from anyone else in the room.
Patsy yawned at the mention of sleep, covered her mouth with a small gloved hand. “One day I’m just gonna stretch out in one of those chairs. I’m gonna pull the blanket up over my head and go to sleep. People do that, you know, the light bothers their eyes. Who’ll know that it’s me under a blanket?”
“I wouldn’t tell,” Fix said and shut his eyes.
“Are you thirsty?” Patsy patted the blanket on top of his knee. “I could get you some water, or there’s soda if you want it. Do you want a Coke?”
Franny was just about to tell her they were fine but Fix nodded. “Water. Water would be good.”
Patsy looked at her. “You?”
Franny shook her head.
Patsy went off to get his water and Fix waited, opening his eyes so that he could watch her go.
“So then what happened?” Franny said. This was the deal of taking her father to chemo when none of the doctors spoke in terms of a cure: this was the time she had, these were all the stories she was going to get. It was why she and Caroline took turns flying out to Los Angeles, because they’d never been with him for very long. It was to give Marjorie a break because it was Marjorie who did all the work, but more than anything it was to have a chance at the stories he was going to take with him. She would call Caroline tonight after their father had gone to sleep and tell her about Lomer.
“The house filled up with people—cops, the ambulance guys working. Lomer found an envelope in the trash and he drew some mice on the back for the littlest girl. It was clear she was in serious trouble with her parents and Lomer felt bad for her. The father went to the hospital in the ambulance, the mother and the kids, my God, we probably left them in the house for somebody else to finish off, I don’t even know. It must have been two years before I thought about them again. We took the guy Mercado back to the station and booked him. When we were done it was nearly one in the morning and all we wanted was coffee. The coffee at the station was unfit. That was Lomer’s word—‘unfit.’ I used to find myself thinking that if they’d troubled themselves to get decent coffee then Lomer would have had a cup at the station, but those are the kind of thoughts that make you crazy. We went to a gas station over on Olympic. Not close but close enough. The guy who owned the place spent real money on his coffee and he taught all the kids who worked for him the importance of dumping it out and making a fresh pot. People would drive an extra couple of blocks to buy their gas from a guy who had good coffee. It wasn’t like it is today where there’s nobody to fill up your tank but you can get a goddamn cappuccino. A coffee pot in a gas station, especially if the coffee was good, that was full-on innovation. The guy made the coffee and the cops came around and sat in the parking lot drinking the coffee, and then more people would come because they felt safer because of the cops. It was a little ecosystem based on coffee, so that’s where we went. I was driving. The guy who drives drives all night, and the guy who isn’t driving gets the coffee, so Lomer went in. I have to think he didn’t see what was going on. He was eight, ten feet in the door before he was shot. And I didn’t see what was going on because I was writing in the log. I heard the shot and I looked up and Lomer was gone. What I saw was the kid behind the cash register raising up his hands, palms out, and then this guy Mercado turned around and shot him too.”
“Wait,” Franny said. “Mercado? The guy from the house?”
Fix nodded. “That’s what I saw. The gas station was just like all gas stations were back then—like a fish tank with a bright light on top—so I got a very clear look: Latino, twenty-five, five seven, white shirt, blue pants, some blood on the shirt. I’d been looking at this guy for the past two hours. He’d been sitting at my desk. I knew him, he knew me. He looked out the window and saw me there. He fired one more shot but he must have been rattled because the bullet didn’t even hit the car. All it did was punch out the glass in the front of the station. Mercado ran out the door and went around the back. I heard a car but I didn’t see it. I went in the station and Lomer was on the floor.” Fix stopped there, thought for a minute. “Well,” he said finally.
“What?”
Fix shook his head. “He was dead.”
“What about the other guy, the service-station guy?”
“He made it maybe an hour, long enough to get him into surgery. He died in surgery. He was a high school kid, summer job. All he had to do was make the coffee and keep the gas station open.”
Patsy came back with two Styrofoam cups of water, each with a bent-neck straw. “You never think you want any until you see it. That’s the way it goes around here.”
Franny thanked her and took the cups. Patsy was right, she wanted the water.
“But that’s crazy,” Franny said to her father, though she remembered that this was part of the story her mother had told them in the car, that her father had gone crazy after his partner was shot, that he hadn’t been able to identify the man who killed Lomer. “How did Mercado get out of the police station? How did he know where you were?”
“It was a quirk of the brain, or at least that’s how they explained it to me later. Too much had happened and somehow I mixed up the slides, exchanged one suspect for another. But to this day I’ll tell you: I saw what I saw. This was my partner dead. I didn’t know how it happened but the guy was standing under a light maybe fifteen feet in front of me. We looked straight at one another, just like you’re looking at me. When the cops came to the scene I described him to the letter. Hell, I gave them his name. But Jorge Mercado was in a holding cell in Rampart. He’d been there all night.”
“And the guy who killed Lomer?” Franny said.
“Turns out I never saw him.”
“So they never found the person who did it?”
Fix bent down the neck of the straw and drank. It was hard for him to drink because of the strictures in his esophagus. The water went down in quarter teaspoons. “No,” he said finally, “they found him. They put it together.”
“But you identified another man.”
“I identified another man to the police. I didn’t identify another man to a jury. They found someone who’d seen a car driving crazy near the gas station. They made it a point to find the driver and then they made it a point to find the gun he’d thrown out the window of the car. You shoot a kid in a gas station and the police department will make a sincere effort to find you. You shoot a cop in a gas station, that’s a different story.”
“But they didn’t have a witness,” Franny said.
“I was the witness.”
“But you just said you didn’t see the guy.”
Fix held up a single finger between them. “To this day I haven’t seen him. Even when I was sitting across from him in court. It never straightened out. The psychiatrist said when I saw the guy I’d remember him, and when I didn’t remember him the psychiatrist said it might come back over time, that I might just wake up one day and it would all be there.” He shrugged. “That didn’t happen.”
“So how were you a witness?”
“They told me who the guy was and I said yes, that’s him.” Fix gave his daughter a tired smile. “Don’t worry about it. He was the right guy. What you’ve got to remember is that he saw me too. He looked out of the fish tank just before he tried to shoot me. He knew who I was. He killed Lomer and he killed the kid and he knew I was the guy who saw him do it.” Fix shook his head. “I wish I could remember that kid’s name. At the funeral home his mother told me he was a serious swimmer. ‘Very promising’ is what she said. Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”
>
Beverly had stayed for another two years after Lomer died, even though she’d already made a promise to Bert that she was leaving. She stayed because Fix needed her. She’d pulled the car over to the side of the road on that day of the bad fight after school in Virginia and told Caroline and Franny to stop thinking she had just walked out on their father because she hadn’t. She had stayed.
“I managed to get Lomer out of my head eventually,” Fix said. “I carried him around for years, but one day, I don’t know, I put him down. I didn’t dream about him anymore. I didn’t think what he’d want for lunch every time I got lunch, I didn’t look at the guy riding next to me in the car and think about who he wasn’t. I felt guilty about that but I have to tell you, it was a relief.”
“But now you’re thinking about him again?”
“Well, sure,” Fix said, “all of this.” He raised his hand to the plastic tubing that tied him down to life. He smiled. “He’ll never have to do this. He’ll never get old and sick. I’m sure he would have wanted to get old and sick if anyone had asked him. I’m sure that we both would have said yes, please, give me the cancer when I’m eighty. But now . . .” Fix shrugged. “I can see it both ways.”
Franny shook her head. “You got the better deal.”
“Wait and see,” her father said. “You’re young.”
3
On the day before Bert and his soon-to-be second wife, Beverly, were to drive from California to Virginia, Bert came by the house in Torrance and suggested to his first wife, Teresa, that she should think about moving with them.
“Not with us, of course,” Bert said. “You’d have to pack, sell the house. I know it would take some time, but when you think about it why shouldn’t you come back to Virginia?”
Teresa had once thought her husband to be the handsomest man in the world, when in fact he looked like one of those gargoyles perched on a high corner of Notre Dame that’s meant to scare the devil away. She didn’t say this but it was clear by his change of tone that the thought was written on her face.
“Look,” Bert said, “you never wanted to move to Los Angeles anyway. You only did it for me, and not, if I may remind you, without a great deal of bitching. Why would you want to stay here now? Take the kids back to your parents’ place, get them started in school, and then when the time is right I can help you find a house.”
Teresa stood in the kitchen they had so recently shared and tightened the belt of her bathrobe. Cal was in second grade and Holly had started kindergarten, but Jeanette and Albie were still home. The children were hanging on Bert’s legs, squealing like he was a ride at Disneyland, Daddeee! Daddeee! He patted their heads like drums. He patted them with a beat.
“Why do you want me in Virginia?” she asked. She knew why but she wanted to hear him say it.
“It would be better,” he said, and shot his eyes down to those dear tousled heads, one beneath each hand.
“Better for the children if both of their parents lived near each other? Better for the children to not grow up without a father?”
“Christ, Teresa, you’re from Virginia. It’s not like I’m suggesting you move to Hawaii. Your entire family is there. You’d be happier there.”
“I’m touched to hear you’re thinking about my happiness.”
Bert sighed. She was wasting his time. She’d never had any respect for his time. “Everyone else is moving forward except for you. You’re the one who’s determined to stay stuck.”
Teresa poured herself a cup of coffee from the percolator. She offered one to Bert, who waved her away. “Are you asking Beverly’s husband to come with you too? So he could see more of his girls? It would be better for them that way.” Teresa had been told by a mutual friend that the reason Bert and the soon-to-be second Mrs. Cousins were moving back to Virginia was that Bert was afraid the new wife’s first husband would try to have him killed, that he would find a way to make it look like an accident and so never be caught. The first husband was a cop. Cops, some of them anyway, were good at things like that.
It was a brief conversation which ended in Bert’s being demonstrably irritated with her in the way he was always irritated with her, but that was all it took for Teresa Cousins to spend the rest of her life in Los Angeles.
Teresa had gotten a job in the secretarial pool at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. She put the two little ones into day care and the two older ones into an after-school program. The lawyers in the DA’s office had a small, collective sense of guilt about having covered for Bert during his long affair. They thought they owed Teresa a break now that he was gone and so they offered her the job. But it wasn’t too long before they were talking to her about going to night school and becoming a paralegal. Teresa Cousins was exhausted, angry, and misused, but they had come to find out she was no dummy.
Bert Cousins had made very little money as a deputy district attorney, and so he had been obliged to pay only a modest alimony and child support. His parents’ wealth was not his wealth and therefore did not figure into the settlement. He petitioned for custody of his children for the entire summer, from school’s end to school’s start, and his petition was granted. Teresa Cousins had fought hard to give him only two weeks, but Bert was a lawyer and his friends were lawyers who were friends with the judge, and his parents sent him enough money on the side to keep the case in court for all eternity if that was what the situation required.
When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation. She loved her children, there was no doubt about that, but she could see that one season out of four spent without having to deal with every sore throat and fistfight, the begging for ballet classes she couldn’t afford and didn’t have the time to drive to, the constant excuses made at work for being late and leaving early when she was just hanging on by a fingernail anyway, one season every year without her children, though she would never admit it, might be manageable. The thought of a Saturday morning without Albie jumping over her in the bed, back and forth and back and forth like he was skiing some imaginary slalom course, was not unappealing. The thought of him jumping over Bert’s second wife, who no doubt slept in a cream silk negligee trimmed in black lace, a nightgown that had to be dry-cleaned, the thought of Albie actually jumping on her, well, that would be just fine.
For the first few years the children were too young to travel alone and so arrangements were made for their supervision. One year Beverly’s mother flew them out, the next year it was Beverly’s sister. Bonnie was anguished and apologetic in front of Teresa, never exactly able to meet her gaze. Bonnie had married a priest and was capable of experiencing guilt about all sorts of things over which she had no control. Another year it was Beverly’s friend Wallis who played chaperone. Wallis had a loud voice and a big smile for all of them. She wore a bright-green cotton dress. Wallis liked children.
“Oh, kiddos,” she’d said to the four little Cousinses. “We’re going to eat every peanut on the plane.” Wallis acted like she just happened to be flying to Virginia herself that day, and wouldn’t it be fun if she and the children could all sit together? Wallis had made it so easy that Teresa didn’t even think to cry until she returned to the house alone.
It was one of Teresa’s people who accompanied the children on the return flight: one year her mother, another year her favorite cousin. Bert would buy a ticket for anyone willing to brave six hours on a plane with his children.
But in 1971 it was decided that the children were old enough to go it alone, or that Cal at twelve and Holly at ten were old enough to wrangle Jeanette, who at eight needed absolutely nothing, and Albie, who at six needed everything in the world. At the airport, Teresa handed over the tickets Bert had sent and put her children on the plane to Virginia without suitcases, a bold maneuver she would never have attempted when Bonnie or Wallis was on duty. Let Bert hit the ground running, she thought. T
hey needed everything: he could start with toothbrushes and pajamas and work his way up. She gave a letter to Holly to give to her father. All four of the children needed to have their teeth cleaned. Jeanette, she knew, had cavities. She sent copies of their immunization records, putting a check mark beside all the boosters that were due. She couldn’t keep taking off work to run to doctor’s appointments. The doctors were always late, and sometimes it was hours before she made it back to the office. The second Mrs. Bert Cousins didn’t have a job. There would be plenty of time for her to take the children shopping, to take them to doctors. Holly fainted whenever she had a shot. Albie bit the nurse. Cal refused to get out of the car. She had wrestled with him but he had braced a foot against either side of the car door and wouldn’t get out and so they missed his last booster. She wasn’t sure if Jeanette had had her shots or not because she couldn’t find Jeanette’s immunization records. She made note of all of this in the letter. Beverly Cousins wanted her family? Have at it.
