Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

“How old was he then?” Caroline said. Caroline was standing behind them. They didn’t know she’d come back. Caroline was thinking of her own children. Had they all been stung by bees? She tried to remember.

  Teresa closed her eyes. She was counting her children up, arranging them in her memory according to size. “He must have been seven. Albie was just trying to walk, so the girls would have been three and five. I think that’s right. Cal and Holly were playing in the backyard and I had the little ones inside. Four children on my own, it was really something. Do you girls have children?”

  “Three,” Caroline said. “A boy and two girls.”

  “Two boys,” Franny said.

  “But they aren’t hers,” Fix said.

  “Cal was stung by a bee,” Caroline said, trying to steer the ship.

  “Medications?” the Latin girl asked.

  Franny dug back into Teresa’s purse and pulled the two bottles she’d found on the sink in the bathroom, Lisinopril and Restoril.

  Teresa looked at the orange plastic bottles on the desk and then looked at Franny.

  “I thought they might ask,” Franny said, though maybe collecting medication had been overstepping. She wouldn’t want anyone going through her medicine cabinet.

  “I always taught the girls to be thorough,” Fix said.

  “Next of kin?”

  They looked at each other. “Albie, I guess,” Franny said.

  “Local?” the girl asked, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.

  “Oh, me then. Frances Mehta.” She gave the girl her phone number.

  “Relationship?”

  “Stepdaughter,” Franny said.

  “Wait,” Fix said. He was doing the math in his head, trying to figure out the right word for what Teresa and his daughter actually were to one another.

  “That’s right,” Caroline said to the girl.

  When she was finished with the forms, the girl at reception told them where to wait. “The nurse will come get you.”

  “It needs to be soon,” Caroline said to her in that very direct way she was capable of. “She’s very sick.”

  “I understand that, missus,” the girl said. The weight of her eyelashes was a burden to her. She looked like she was just about to fall asleep.

  Franny wheeled Teresa and Caroline wheeled their father as far away from the television set as was possible. It was still light outside.

  “You should go home now,” Teresa said when they were settled in their corner. “I’m here, they’ll come and get me. You don’t have to worry about me running out.”

  “I’ll take Dad home,” Caroline said. “Then I’ll come back for Franny.”

  “Too much traffic,” Fix said. “It’s better that we stay together, see this through. If I get sick they can always admit me. I like Torrance. Lots of cops used to live out here.”

  “Finish your story,” Franny said to Teresa.

  Fix answered instead. “I worked an accident once, a guy was stopped at a traffic light with his windows down and a bee flew in and stung him. That was that. His foot fell off the brake and the car went out into the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. He was probably already dead at that point. Nobody knew what had happened until the autopsy. I went back to the site a couple of days later, not that I was looking for a bee exactly, but I wanted to take a look around. There was a bottlebrush tree just before that traffic light and it was swarming. I mean half of it was bees.”

  Teresa nodded, as if the story were perfectly relevant. “When Cal came in from the backyard he was dead white. I remember his little face, how terrified he was, and really, I thought it was Holly. They were always going after each other with rakes and brooms and I thought something had happened to her. I said, ‘Cal, where’s Holly?’ And when I started to turn away from him to go out to the yard to find her, he made this horrible high-pitched noise, like he was trying to suck air through a pinhole. He held his arm up to stop me and then he fell straight back. His lips were swelling, his hands. I went to pick him up and there was a bee on his shirt. The bee was right there on him, like someone who commits a murder and then sticks around.”

  “It happens,” Fix said.

  Caroline reached over and took her sister’s hand. No one would have thought a thing about it. They were listening to a terrible story, that was all. Franny wrapped her fingers around Caroline’s fingers.

  “If it hadn’t been for that bee I feel sure he would have died when he was seven, but somehow I understood exactly what had happened. I was up and out the door like lightning. I had him in the car in two seconds. It isn’t far to the hospital, you know that, and in those days there wasn’t half the traffic. I just kept telling him to slow down, slow down and concentrate on breathing.”

  “What did you do with the rest of them?” Caroline said.

  “I left them there. I don’t think I even closed the door. Bert was so mad at me when I told him what had happened. I was scared to death at the time, but really I was proud of myself too. I’d saved Cal’s life! Bert said, you can’t leave children alone like that. You should have put them in the car. But Bert wasn’t there, and he thought I was a terrible mother anyway. If I’d rounded up all those kids and thrown them in the car Cal would have died. The doctor told me so. He told me how serious a bee sting was for Cal, and how the next time it would be even worse. But you can’t keep a boy inside for the rest of his life, at least not a boy like Cal. I was always on him about carrying his pills, and I had a vial of epinephrine and a syringe in the house, but Bert hadn’t brought the epinephrine to his parents’ house, and I doubt they would have known how to give the shot anyway. No one ever checked to make sure Cal had his pills.” Teresa shook her head. “I don’t blame Bert though. I used to but I don’t anymore. The things you really need are never there when you need them. I know that. It could have happened when he was home with me.”

  “There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

  “Bert swore he was going to cut down the orange trees in the back. They’re always covered in bees when they’re in bloom. He was in a rage about those trees, like they had done this to his son, but after a couple of days he forgot all about them. We all did.”

  She stopped and looked around the place they were now. “The emergency room was in the back of the hospital in those days. It’s a lot nicer now. All of this is new.”

  After the CAT scan and an examination, the doctor came out to talk to them. “Mr. Cousins?” he said to Fix.

  “Nope,” Fix said.

  This didn’t seem to trouble the doctor a bit. He was there to relay the news and so he went ahead. “It looks like Mrs. Cousins has a diverticular abscess in her sigmoid colon. We’re going to cool things down with antibiotics, give her something to keep her comfortable. We’ll watch her white blood count and fever through the night. Keep her NPO, then we’ll reexamine her in the morning and see how she’s doing. Has she been sick very long?”

  Caroline looked at Franny. “Maybe three days?” Franny said.

  The doctor nodded. He made a note in the file he carried, told them she had been transferred to a room, and then excused himself. They imagined him imagining their neglect. Why hadn’t they brought such a sick old woman to him sooner? There was no point in explaining themselves.

  “Not cancer,” Teresa said to the Keatings when they came to tell her goodbye. “But it still looks like I’m going to have to spend the night.” She had a heart monitor now, an IV dripping into the back of her hand.

  “Lucky you,” Fix said. He was happy for her.

  “Oh,” Teresa said, touching her untethered hand to her forehead. “Cancer. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. They’re giving me morphine now. I’m loopy.”

  Fix gave a little wave to say it meant nothing.

  “I’ll come back later tonight and check on you,” Franny said.

  Teresa to
ld her not to. “I talked to Albie. He’ll be here first thing in the morning. I’m going to sleep straight through until then. To tell you the truth I’m very tired. And anyway, you’ve come out here to be with your father, not me. I’ve eaten up half your day.”

  “I just wish you could have had all of it,” Caroline said. “The second half was definitely better than the first.”

  “We can wait here until you go to sleep,” Fix said, feeling both chivalrous and uncertain. He’d been in the wheelchair too long. He needed to get home and into his recliner. It had felt good to take someone else to the hospital for a change, to think of Teresa’s condition rather than his own. But pain was only going to be ignored for so long. It had come back on him with a baseball bat.

  “I’m closing my eyes now. By the time you get to the door I’ll be asleep.” She smiled at Fix in his wheelchair and then, true to her word, closed her eyes. She should have married Fix Keating, that’s what she was thinking when sleep wrapped her up in its soft arms. Fix Keating was a good man. But he was sick now, and she was sick. How was she going to be able to take care of him?

  Caroline and Franny wheeled Fix down to the elevator. They were in a different part of the hospital now, having come in through the emergency room and then traveled to the other side of the world to get to the patient rooms. When they came outside they were someplace they’d never seen before and it took Caroline a while to find the car. By the time they got the wheelchair in the trunk and found the exit to the parking lot, Fix was asleep in the front seat, leaving Franny to put the address to the Santa Monica house into her phone.

  Neither Caroline nor Franny said anything for a long time. Maybe they were each waiting to be sure their father wasn’t going to hear them, but why? What had they done? Fix’s head fell back against the headrest. His mouth was open. If he hadn’t been snoring very lightly they might have wondered if he was dead.

  “When she said that about Cal turning white, and then making a noise,” Caroline said.

  Franny nodded. Kumar’s oldest son, Ravi, had asthma. There had been the summer at the lake in Wisconsin when she was clawing through his backpack trying to find the inhaler. The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing.

  “It’s so hard to remember what I was thinking,” Caroline said. “Cal was already dead but I still felt like I could do something about it. I could make sure no one knew we’d given Albie the Benadryl. I could get the gun back to the car. Why did Cal have that goddamn gun?” Caroline said, turning to look at her. “Who leaves a gun in the car and never knows their teenaged son has it tied to his leg? And why did I care? Cal was dead and the gun didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up leaves so no one would notice what had happened.”

  “We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.”

  “I made it worse,” Caroline said.

  Franny shook her head. “You couldn’t have made it worse. There isn’t anything worse.” She laid her forehead on the seat in front of her.

  “Maybe I should have told her.”

  “Told her what?”

  “I don’t know, that Cal wasn’t alone, that we were all there with him when he died.”

  “Holly and Jeanette were there too and they never told her. Or who knows, maybe they did. We have no idea what Teresa knows about what happened in Virginia.”

  “Unless she goes to the movies this weekend.”

  “Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”

  Caroline and Franny lost their father’s eighty-third birthday. The traffic, which had been manageable driving over to Teresa’s, was at a standstill going out to the beach from Torrance, and so they got home well after dark. The consequence of their kindness was that Fix had been too long in his wheelchair and too long in the car. His pain radiated out to his feet and hands and into the bones of his face, though it was nothing like the pain that concentrated into the white-hot center of himself.

  “Just let me go to sleep,” he said to Marjorie when they got him in the house. She had to bend over to hear him he had so little voice left. “I can’t stand this,” he said. He was tugging at his shirt, trying to get it off.

  Marjorie helped him with the buttons. During the course of his illness, Fix had lost his reserves. He had no buffer to carry him through the unexpected. They had stayed out too long and now he was bone on bone.

  “You were with Teresa Cousins?” Marjorie said to Franny, in the same way she might have said, You took him to South Central to smoke crack?

  “Her son called right after we got out of the movie. She had to go to the hospital,” Franny said.

  All she had to do was bring him home first. They were practically at the house when Albie called, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she was the one to make that decision, not Fix. “We didn’t know it was going to take this long.”

  Caroline put a Lortab in a tiny spoonful of applesauce and gave it to her father. The pills were easier to swallow that way.

  “Doesn’t she have her own family?” Marjorie had always been so patient with the girls, right from the beginning when Fix used to bring them over to her mother’s house to take them swimming. But dragging their dying father along on an errand of mercy for someone they didn’t know was tantamount to trying to kill him.

  “She does,” Franny said. “But none of them live in town. Dad said he wanted to see her.”

  “He didn’t know her. Why would he want to see her?” Marjorie ran her hands across the shoulders of his rumpled undershirt. “I’ll get you to bed,” she told him.

  Franny looked at her sister, the two of them still standing in the den once Marjorie had rolled Fix away. “If there’s anything else I can fuck up today you let me know.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Caroline said, and rubbed her face. Neither of them had eaten and neither of them would. “You didn’t know. And anyway, we had to go, all three of us. We owed her that. I understand that it makes no sense to Marjorie, but even if it was a mistake, we owed it to Teresa.”

  Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?”

  “We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.

  Caroline went up to the bedroom they shared to call Wharton and say goodnight. Franny went into the backyard to call Kumar.

  “Did you find the checkbook?” Franny asked.

  “I did, but you could have texted me back six hours ago when I asked you.”

  “Really, I couldn’t have.” She yawned. “If you’d been here today you’d be overwhelmed with sympathy for me right now. Did the boys make it home from soccer practice okay?”

  “I haven’t seen them,” Kumar said.

  “Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not up for it.”

  “Ravi’s in the shower. Amit is pretending to do his homework on the computer but he switches over to some horrible video game whenever I stop watching him.”

  “Are you watching him now?” Franny asked.

  “I am,” her husband said.

  Marjorie tapped on the kitchen window and waved her inside.

  “I have to go now,” Franny said.

  “You’re still coming back?”

  “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” she said, and hung up the phone.

  “Your father wants you to come in and say goodnight,” Marjorie said, looking tired. “I can’t believe he’s still awake.”

  “Is Caroline in there?”

  Marjorie shook her head. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

  Franny promised not to keep him up.

  Marjorie had pushed their two single beds together and covered them with a king-sized blanket and bedspread to make it look like it was still one bed, even though Fix’s side was a hospital
bed. Sitting halfway up helped with the pain in his chest and made it easier for him to swallow his own saliva so he slept that way. That was how Franny found him, in his light-blue pajamas, staring at the ceiling.

  “Close the door,” Fix said, and patted the space in the bed beside him. “This is private.”

  She went and sat down next to her father. “I’m sorry I dragged you out to Torrance,” Franny said. “I was thinking about Albie and Teresa when I should have been thinking about you.”

  “Don’t listen to Marjorie,” Fix said.

  “Marjorie’s looking out for you. That’s why we had to go to Teresa’s in the first place, because she doesn’t have someone like Marjorie to take care of her.”

  “Forget about all of that for two minutes. We need to have a serious talk. Can you listen to me?” Fix in his bed seemed particularly hollow and small, her father’s husk.

  “Bring the bed up a little more,” he said, and when Franny did he said, “Good. There. Now open the bedside table drawer.”

  It was a big drawer, deep and long and full of crossword puzzle books and envelopes, a paperback guide to the great hiking trails of California, a book of Kipling’s poems, a pair of exercise grips to strengthen the hands, loose change, Vicks VapoRub, a rosary. The rosary surprised her. “What am I looking for?”

  “It’s in the back.”

  Franny pulled the drawer out farther and shifted the papers around. There she found the gun. She didn’t have to ask. She took it out and held it in her lap. “Okay,” she said.

  Fix reached over and touched her hand, then he put his hand on the gun and smiled. “Marjorie made me promise that I’d turn everything in when I retired. She said no more guns once we move to the beach, so I didn’t tell her.”

  “Okay.” Franny put her hand on top of her father’s hand. She felt the delicate structure of his skeleton beneath his paper skin. She imagined it was like touching a bat’s wing.

  “Thirty-eight Smith and Wesson. This was my gun for a long, long time.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “I never left the house without that gun.”

  “Do you want me to take care of it for you?” Franny wasn’t exactly sure how she would do that. She couldn’t put it in her luggage. She couldn’t take it on the plane or bring it into her house in Chicago with Kumar and the boys. She didn’t want the gun but was sure she could figure something out.