by Jo Barney
I set my coffee down and watch as Lloyd’s face twists itself into a red mash of wrinkles, slit eyes, lips so tight they almost disappear. His cup crashes against the wall. He stands up. He swerves toward me. I do not move. I cannot move. I stare at him instead.
He reaches my chair, furious flames of disbelief radiating from his body, licking at me. His fingers enclose my wrist. “You cunt. You lying cunt.” He pulls at me. I grip my chair’s arm, wonder whether it will protect me. It doesn’t. I feel myself rise, inches away from Lloyd’s fetid breath. His hand circles my neck. Gray remnants of food rim his gums. I try to stand. My toes brush his shoes. His fingers press into my throat. I hang in his grip.
“Lloyd, let me go,” I gurgle. “I can’t breathe…”
As my vision starts to fade, I hear a voice. “Stop right there. One more move and I’ll shoot. Let her go.”
I am dropped. And when Lloyd steps back, I see Sarah, in her blue uniform, holding a gun out in front of her, like they do on TV, her eyes unblinking, hot.
“What the hell? You have nothing on me. I’m just talking with someone who used to be a friend.” Lloyd’s scabby forehead is wet with sweat.
“You, Lloyd Jensen, are under arrest. Explain all that at the station. And also explain why you have missed your parole dates for the past three months. And why you have been stalking and threatening and now accosting this woman. As a convicted sex offender, you’re in serious trouble.” Sarah lifts the cuffs from her belt, clicks them around Lloyd’s wrists. She recites the Miranda statement I’ve heard only on crime TV shows. She touches my shoulder. “Are you all right, Mrs. Ellison?”
“Just a little bruised, Officer. And I’d like to make a complaint. How do I do that?”
A second officer enters the living room. Hank, hands cuffed at his back, is beside him. “We also found this man outside, in the backyard. He claims he’s your husband.”
“Yes, he is. Please release him.” I reach for him, grasp his elbow above the metal locked on his wrists, as the second officer goes to free him. “Hank? How long have you been out there?”
“For a while. I was listening to you and that guy.” Hank squints at me and shakes his head as if he can’t believe what he’s heard and seen.
A voice calls from the back door. “Are you all right? Can I come in?”
Sarah calls back, “Patsy? Are you the person who called the station?”
Patsy approaches her mother, her demeanor and tone one of a concerned citizen, not a daughter. “Yes, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this guy slinking around here. I’m glad you caught him. I was getting worried.” My friend wraps me in her arms, whispers softly, “So glad it’s over.” Then she sees Hank. “Maybe?”
* * *
The room has cleared. The air is still disturbed, but I know what to do to make a complaint or an accusation—whichever seems the best way to keep Lloyd out of my life. Hank comes out of the kitchen, carrying two glasses. “Cheers,” he says. He’s not smiling.
“We need to talk,” I answer. I said this only an hour ago to another man.
The ice cubes clink. “Me, first.”
We sit, he in his overstuffed chair, which I’ll have to vacuum in the morning; me on the sofa.
“I also kept a couple of things from you.” Hank sets his drink on the end table and clears his throat. “First, I’ve known that I wasn’t Jim’s father, since before he was born. That’s because I’m sterile. From my injury. At first I couldn’t face not having a child of my own, and I didn’t have the courage to tell you. Then it turned out you were pregnant. I believed that I could live with a kid only half ours. I tried not to think about who the baby’s real father was. It didn’t seem to matter. The year I was gone was a lost year for both of us. But Jim did not turn out to be the boy I’d hoped for.”
Hank speaks slowly, almost inaudibly. He looks at the ceiling, takes a breath. “Back in the war, I tossed a grenade without thinking. It landed in a hut. We had been told the village was abandoned. This hut wasn’t.” Hank rattles his ice cubes, sips the drink. I can barely hear his words. “A little boy in a red T-shirt stood in the door looking at me. The grenade was in his hand. I was startled, and I fired a round, and threw myself to the ground. I killed a little kid for no good reason, Eleanor.” Hank has retreated, his eyes closed.
How do I respond to my husband’s confession? I reach out for his hand, feel tremors under his cold skin. “I am so sorry. About the grenade. About you trying to make sense of a war that left so many people injured and gone, like that little boy. I’m sorry mostly that I had no idea what you had gone through, and what your nightmares must have returned you to over and over again.” I go to my most painful regret. “I’m so sorry for allowing an unimportant man to change our entire life together.” I stop talking. There is nothing more to say.
Hank has opened his eyes, is back again, looking at me. “Your hand is warm.” He sighs. “Yes, I’m sorry too, Eleanor, but not about that unimportant man. That was long ago. I’ve told Jim that I am sorry about being an unloving father. Now I’m telling you. I am sorry. About everything.”
We are silent. We may never talk about these secrets again. But it will be difficult for me to forget these twenty years. I suppose the word is forgive, not forget.
I’ll try. I think Hank has already begun.
44
Patsy feels energetic this morning, ready to meet with Ray and her mother to talk about Izzy. Ray seems ready too, but her mother, strong woman that she is, is hesitant. “Isn’t it too early?” she asks, and Patsy says, “No, the time is just right.” They invite him to come by for coffee.
Ray looks good, healthy in a way that reminds her of his younger self before he went to Vietnam, handsome and tall, a catch, she had once thought. So had her mother, who was more impressed with his degree in business than his looks. And the way his voice went soft when he talked about Patsy. She told Patsy she was envious first, then grateful that her daughter was on a road very different from hers. “You have a real man,” she said, and Patsy agreed.
Then the war happened, and he came back a broken person.
They sit at the dinette table. Patsy can see that he has been put back together in most ways. His voice is soft again, as he speaks to her; his eyes are clear. “I promised I’d be here for Izzy, Patsy. I’ll be finished with my program soon, and I wonder whether you want me to move back into this house, or are too many bad memories floating around these rooms? Should I find another place?”
Sarah answers for her daughter. “Izzy is used to this house. Any bad memories here are not hers.” She glances at Patsy. “Are you okay with life going on as it used to?”
Patsy shakes her head. “It won’t go on as it used to, Mom. I won’t be here in a month or two. The question is, how do you two want the raising of Izzy to go?”
They talk for an hour, and Sarah seems to finally understand that Patsy’s death will be real, coming when it decides to come. Patsy will stay in her home, with Ray, if he wishes, until that time, and the three of them will work out a schedule that covers Patsy’s needs as her health lessens, Izzy’s needs as she begins attending a special nursery school, Ray’s needs as a working man, and Sarah’s needs as a grandmother and policewoman.
They make lists, compare schedules, try to deal with a tentative timeline that will need to be modified several times. By early afternoon, they have their lists in front of them, and Patsy offers more coffee and cinnamon rolls.
“I made them,” she brags because she has been eating frozen dinners lately.
“Eat up and let’s schedule the next week at least.” They do. Ray will move back in a week or two, Sarah will begin her designated chore of cooking dinner each evening, and Patsy will ask Eleanor—although she wasn’t at this meeting, but should have been—whether she would make breakfast each morning and make sure Izzy gets to her school.
“Whew! We did it, I think,” Patsy says as she hugs them goodbye at the door. She really needs a drink.
Maybe she doesn’t need it, only wants it, in the company of a good friend. She calls Eleanor. She has a plan for just Eleanor and herself. Maybe she’ll need to include Hank. She’ll see.
Eleanor brings crackers and liver pâté, with the vague hope that the pâté will somehow connect with Patsy’s sick liver. She explains this to Patsy, and Patsy holds up her glass and says, “Pâté balanced by bourbon. A fair exchange.”
She spreads pâté on a saltine and goes over the Izzy-care schedule of the morning with Eleanor, who agrees to get breakfast for Izzy and Ray, when the time comes, and to bring Izzy to her school. She says she will also spend some time cleaning up and doing the wash at Patsy’s house since she is very experienced in these arts. And, if he wants to, Hank can volunteer to pick up Izzy if changing Sarah’s schedule gets difficult.
“It’s like we’re a family. Haven’t really had one before.” Eleanor finishes her drink and sees Patsy yawning. “I’m going to let you rest now. You’ve done a lot of work today.”
“No, I have one more project. For you and me, the blood sisters, and maybe with Hank’s help.” Patsy points to the ragged hole in the hedge. “We have to do something about that.”
“Your mom said it would grow back.”
“No, just the opposite. That is the conduit between our houses, but it’s not so good for a little girl or her big father, not to speak of others who will want to wander between us, like a dog, maybe.”
“Or chickens. What’s your idea?”
“A gate, a lovely wooden gate with latches on both sides and no keys.”
“Besides someone to clip back the hole more, we’ll need someone with a saw and a few carpenter’s skills to set the gate. And, of course, a gate. Which I’ve already found. It’s a gorgeous carved teak one from Thailand. At the Import Store, forty dollars. A steal.” Patsy grins. “I’ve put it in layaway.” She doesn’t explain that she saw it on her way to her doctor and risked missing the appointment entirely as she negotiated with the owner of the store. She’s discovered she still can do a few things, like making cinnamon rolls and bartering, if she sets her mind to them. Some things. She isn’t much good at going up stairs now. Lucky their master bedroom is on the main floor. Would Ray mind sleeping in Izzy’s room upstairs when she needs the whole bed? She’ll ask him.
“Tomorrow we start clipping.” Eleanor laughs. “Hank needs a project. I’ll ask him to handle the lumber and sawing. The hedge has been on his mind since you and I climbed through it that first day, and it’s time for him to make friends with it.”
45
The gate, leaning against the hedge, is gray with age and very appropriate for the old bushes it will join. I wonder what kind of building it was a part of. I hope it’s not from a home with people still living in it, maybe someone who still needed the protection. “Do you think this was stolen out of someone’s house?” I ask Patsy, who, rag in hand, stops dusting the surface.
“Nah. It looks pretty new. Old enough to need dusting.”
“How do you know though?”
“I don’t. But I can’t stand feeling guilty about anything anymore. No time to waste on useless guilt.”
“Sounds like you’re ready for me,” Hank says, with a shovel, bag of cement, two six-foot posts, and a belt of tools in the wheelbarrow rolling in front of him. I send my quizzical-eyebrow look at him; he raises his chin, says, “Useful stuff. Cleaned the garage this morning. Found the wheelbarrow under a tarp and a gathering of spiders. Killed ’em.” He laughs at my gasp. “Except for one that I put under your pillow.”
Hank hasn’t joked like this since…forever. I don’t say a word, afraid I’ll break the spell his laugh has cast over the hole in the hedge.
He wheels his barrow close to the big opening we had cut an hour before, sawing limbs and clipping branches. “Now we can really see into each other’s yards.” Hank nods at Patsy. “Good job, worker. It’ll be a joy to hang that gate.” He picks up his bucket and bag of cement, ambles to the outdoor faucet, and starts mixing.
“He’s on a pill, isn’t he?”
“Thank God for pills.”
“And a good therapist like Amy.”
“Like coming out of a twenty-year-long dark tunnel. I think we may be near the light at the end of it.”
“So why do you look worried?”
“I’m going to have to change, too, aren’t I?”
“You’re already changing. Keep going, friend.”
I am not sure that Patsy’s right. Changes? Maybe. I caught myself paging through a community college catalogue at the library the other day. A little different than my last visit at that place. I can imagine taking a class or two, maybe in art or writing. But not right now. No changes for a while, except maybe the way I’m looking at Hank these days. Like a husband. Maybe like a lover. “Let’s clean up the mess we’ve made and sit and watch Hank work.”
“Got to wait for the concrete to dry,” Hank calls as he heads into the house. “Anyone for a drink?”
“We should wait to celebrate until our project is done,” I suggest.
Patsy nods. “Water, though, would be great.”
When Hank finishes the newspaper, he decides it’s time to hang the gate. It’s heavy, and I help him prop it up, hold it while he measures holes for the hinges. Things go awry when we try to set it in place. The gate, sturdy with lots of wood, is unwieldy when not leaning against the hedge. Patsy volunteers to help, but we two gate-hangers say she would be more helpful if she tended to Izzy, who had begun to cry a few minutes before.
“I can’t believe I didn’t hear her.” Patsy steps through the hole and turns toward her house. She stops, turns back, sobbing. “I left her somewhere. Where is she?”
“Izzy’s okay. You forgot you left her at my house, to try out the little bed I got for her.” I hug Patsy, and we walk together toward the wails.
“What is happening to me? I forgot Izzy!” She picks up her daughter, sniffs several times, and lays her on the bed. Izzy begins to cry again as Patsy, her tears dropping down on a fat wiggling body, changes a diaper, dabs at her eyes with a wet wipe, and lies down beside her child, quiet now. “I’m a terrible mother.”
“You’re on medications that may be affecting you, your memory, depressing you. This is not your fault. It may never happen again. But—” A thought occurs to me. “—when will Ray be able to come home for good?”
“I’m not sure if I trust him with her yet.”
“You might have to. Let’s give him a call.”
“Eleanor, you will have to help him. At first. And Mom.”
The screen door slams. “The gate is finished. It works! We did it.” Hank stands at the bedroom door. “Sorry, looks like a bad time. We can celebrate another day.”
He closes the door softly, and I answer Patsy. “You know Izzy will be in good hands and a sea of love always. You are not to spend any energy worrying about her any longer.”
Izzy squirms, pushes herself into a crooked sit. “Up, up, Ma.”
Patsy kisses her child. “Up is right, dear one. We are going to celebrate a new gate. Right now.” On our way out, I gather a towel for a bib and a gingersnap to go with it, and point to the glasses and the water jug. Hank carries them out, along with the rest of the gingersnaps, and we compliment ourselves on a good day’s work.
46
“You wouldn’t have died, you know.”
Patsy has invited me in for a drink; hers is water; mine, Chablis. I sit by her bed where she is spending more and more time these days. The table next to her holds pill bottles, liquids of some several colors and warnings, and its drawer is filled with devices that the hospice people have left behind for the nurse who drops in every morning.
My friend is a shell of the woman she once was, her frame thin, her skin dusty, her eyes yellowed by rampaging bile and a liver that refuses to deal with it. She has allowed her mother to trim her Afro, and she wears a flowered scarf over her defiantly curly hair. One piece of her hasn’t changed
: her white smile, which she is aiming at me from the pillow she’s leaning against.
“What?”
“I did some research. That first time I looked through the hedge, when I saw you and Jim tearing the plastic bag from your head? I’ve never forgotten that scene. Probably because I was in a bad place, myself, but I had Mom and a little girl to help fill my emptiness.
“Later, when the doctors confirmed my diagnosis, and I knew I would die, I thought of your plastic bag. I could leave when I wanted to, avoid the lingering on, the pain and meds, shorten the painful anticipation for us all. If, of course, I could arrange a few things first. Ray, Izzy, legal things. My list.
“Then I went to the library, looked in the medical journals, and in the microfilm collection found an article: ‘Plastic Bags and Suicide.’ Plastic bags have become popular in grocery stores lately, I’ve discovered. And people are beginning to reuse them in a variety of ways.”
I am working on breathing. “I didn’t think of looking in medical journals. The helpful lady didn’t think of that either. So what did you find out?”
“Something way too complicated for either you or me. That one needs a bag big enough to hold an hour’s worth of air and gas until the gas or pills you’ve taken bring unconsciousness.” Even when she is dying, she is precise. “A suffocating person will automatically begin to attempt to tear off whatever is cutting off the oxygen supply.” Patsy smiles. “Jim did that for you. And I am so glad he did. We’ve had a good few months, haven’t we?”
