“Cake will be fine, sweetie,” he said, and kissed her on the cheek. Irma threw her arms around him and, just for a second, wanted desperately to absorb him into her, the way those vampire-type creatures did on that Outer Limits episode, but the moment passed and she relaxed her hold.
“Hey, careful there,” Boz said with a grin. “Don’t you know I’m a sick man?”
“You’ve always been a sick man,” Phil chided, “and it hasn’t done you any harm far as I can make out.”
They all laughed, though perhaps a little dutifully—just three normal people making polite banter—and then Boz said, “Come on into the den.” Turning to Irma, he said, “I’ll come get the coffee and cake, sweetie. I’ll just get Phil settled in.”
Jiminy, Irma thought to herself in the kitchen, it sounds like he’s about to send him into orbit.
The following day, Boz came into the kitchen and turned on the Mister Coffee. “You got any more of that cake left?” he asked as he rummaged in different cupboards. “Phil just can’t get enough of it.”
“He coming around again?”
Boz shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “I think he’s bored. Since he retired, I mean.”
“Well, he could at least bring Jackie along. Be nice to have someone to talk to while you two are in the den.”
She opened the one cupboard that Phil seemed to have missed and produced the plate containing the cake, wrapped in tinfoil.
“What is it that you talk about in there anyways?”
“Oh, this and that,” Boz said. “This and that.”
When Phil came around, the entire process was repeated: the slightly awkward look on his face as he shuffled the briefcase around, the somewhat contrived pleasantries, the ushering of the guest by her husband into the den, and the profuse declaration that Boz would save her the trouble of bringing in cake and coffee by taking it himself.
On this occasion, however, Irma noticed that Boz’s hands were shaking a little. She watched the hands intently as he loaded cake onto the top plate and straightened the mugs so that the handles were accessible. She thought about how those hands had travelled her body and her face over the years, pleasuring her and making her feel safe, and she wondered, just for a few seconds, where those years had gone and how they had gone away so quickly.
When the hands stopped shaking and stayed exactly where they were, Irma looked up and saw Boz watching her. There was a profound sadness in his eyes, a sadness borne of love and a long relationship that could now be measured in weeks . . . possibly even days, though neither Boz nor Irma would acknowledge that possibility. But that very morning, it had taken Irma some time to get Boz out of bed and into the shower. In fact, she had been considering asking Chris Hendricks, the family odd-job man these past twenty years or more, to come around and investigate putting up a handrail—she just didn’t trust Boz’s balance anymore.
“I’m okay,” Boz said, “before you ask.”
“I know, honey,” she said, lifting a hand and tracing a line with a fingernail along the back of Boz’s left wrist. “I do so love you,” she said.
Boz nodded. And as pale and exhausted as he looked—even a little jaundiced around the eyes—there was a twinkle of mischief in those eyes that made Irma frown and narrow her own eyes.
“You up to something, Boswell Mendholsson?”
“Just taking some cake and coffee through is all, sweetie,” he said. And with that, he backed out of the kitchen and into the den, closing the door firmly behind him.
And so it went on for several weeks, almost daily visits from Phil Defantino with each stay restricted to the den, usually for between one and two hours. The visits were in the mornings mostly, which was also when the children called around whenever they could—children! what a ridiculous thing to call them, Irma thought to herself on more than one occasion: they were both in their thirties now but, of course, they would always be a little boy and a little girl. And they did so love their father. When they left—they rarely brought their other halves or the grandchildren—they would hug Irma tightly, asking if she was okay and managing to keep things under control. Each time she would tell them emphatically that she was fine. And she was.
Irma believed you got an almost spiritual strength from someplace in these situations. She had heard of that before. And while she did not dare to consider what life would be without her husband, she managed to cope with his steadily deteriorating condition with determination, patience, and even good humor.
Boz himself seemed to wind down around lunchtime or early afternoon, retiring to the couch where he would watch game shows or, occasionally, the Cartoon Network. Sometimes he would simply call it a day and go straight to bed. Irma would take him a sandwich and a bag of potato chips around five or six o’clock and then Boz would drift in and out of sleep until Irma came to bed herself at around ten thirty.
As the November winds buffeted the house and Thanksgiving approached, there were increasingly clear signs that Boz’s downhill slide was gaining acceleration. It was just the little things that they both noticed—the swollen ankles from the steroids, the drowsiness from the painkillers, the sickness from the tumor itself—any of which by itself could maybe have slipped beneath the radar. But taken all together, things were starting to look a little bleak. And now Boz was starting to wheeze like an old steam train. “It’s got into his lungs,” Jack Fredricks told Irma one late afternoon as he was leaving the house, the setting sun framing him there on the porch as he buttoned up his overcoat.
Then, one day, Boz cried out in pain as Irma was trying to get him out of his bed. “It’s no good, sweetie,” he said, his words coming out like knife stabs, in breathless staccato. “Let me be . . . just let me be.” And with that, he slumped down onto the pillow and fell immediately back to sleep, his mouth wide open, stealing as much air from the room as it could manage.
“Hey, Irma,” Phil Defantino said when Irma opened the door. They looked at each other in silence, neither one of them making a move, and then Phil said, “Boz not so good?”
She shook her head and wiped at her eyes. She knew that Phil could see she had been crying.
Phil nodded. “Well,” he said, drawing the word out and hunching his shoulders against the wind, “maybe it would be better if I called around another time.”
“Yes,” Irma said, trying to keep from glancing down at Phil’s briefcase, “maybe it would at that. I’ll get him to give you a call when he’s feeling a little better.”
When Phil said, “Sure,” his voice sounded hoarse and broken. He nodded once and turned around, head hanging down, and made for the street along the path through the Mendholssons’ front yard. He never looked back. And he never saw Boz alive again.
Irma spoke in whispers to Nicola on the telephone.
“Hey, honey,” she said.
“Hey, Mom. Everything okay? Is it Dad?”
She glanced around to make sure the bedroom door was still closed. “He’s not too good, honey.”
“Not too good?”
“No, not too good at all. Dr. Fredricks says . . . he says . . .”
“Mom?”
“He says your daddy will be leaving us soon.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“I know, honey, I know.” A single tear dropped from Irma’s cheek onto the telephone cradle and she wiped it away with one finger, rubbing the spot back and forth until there was no trace of it at all. “I called your brother. He’s coming home tomorrow. Catching the red-eye out of Boston—should be here by midmorning.”
“Will that . . . will that be—”
“Oh, I hope so, honey. I surely do hope so, but he’s not so good.”
“I’ll be there.”
Irma replaced the telephone and listened to the resulting silence, absolute at first and then, slowly, giving way to house sounds—boards settling, the wind outside, the occasional clank of the heating system. It was all familiar and yet, with the absence of her husband’s movements around the place, it
was completely alien.
She went back down the hallway and gently eased open the door to the bedroom she had shared with Boz these past thirty-six years or so. He was still there—where would he have gone for goodness’ sakes?—but only just, a mere shape beneath the bedclothes, made eerie by the dim nightlight on the bedside table, his chest rising and falling very slowly and with apparent difficulty. She moved silently across the room and sat down on the bed beside him, took one of Boz’s thin hands between hers, and watched his face.
“Irma?” he croaked without opening his eyes.
“I’m here, honey. I’m right here.”
“Irma . . . I feel pretty rough.”
“I know, honey. You must rest, save your energy.”
Boz opened his eyes and looked straight ahead, past Irma, at the covered shelving and rails that contained all their sweaters and coats, pants and shirts, a lifetime of clothing and shoes. Half of that will have to go, Irma thought, following Boz’s line of vision. Oh, dear Lord, give me the stren—
He turned toward her and, when she saw his milky, watery eyes, Irma let out a small gasp.
“Irma . . .”
“I’m here, dear,” she said.
“Irma, you have . . . you have to be strong.”
“I know, honey. I will be. You be strong, too.”
Was that a laugh he gave or just a cough? Irma couldn’t tell anymore.
“Irma, I’m going to be going soon and—”
“Hush, please hush, saying those—”
Boz shook his head. “Shhh. Let me finish. I always wanted to go traveling,” he said, his voice soft like unfurling parchment, “and now I’m going to get the chance. After all these years . . .” He coughed again and Irma wiped his mouth with a paper tissue.
“After all these years I’m going to visit all those places we wanted to visit together. Think of me there,” he said.
“I will,” Irma promised. “I’ll think of you.”
“Just pret—” He closed his eyes and gave another little shake of his head. “Just think,” he continued, “that I’m away from home, seeing wonderful sights and . . . and missing you.” He turned to her. “I will miss you, sweetie,” he said.
“And I’ll miss you, too,” she said.
He nodded and closed his eyes. After one long, wheezy breath, Boz’s chest was still.
“Honey?” Irma said, even though she knew, deep down, that her husband was now too far away to hear her. Even so, she said it again. And then once more. After a while, she just sat with him, holding his hand, reminding him of all their times together and telling him how much she loved him.
The funeral was held on a rainy Wednesday in November.
James held tightly onto his mother’s arm all through the service, with Nicola standing on her other side, watching Irma carefully throughout the hymns and the sermon. At the end, to the strains of a Glenn Miller tune, they trooped out into the graveyard for the internment.
Irma hadn’t realized how well-thought-of her husband truly was. They had kept themselves pretty much to themselves all through their married life and yet here were lots of people—people Irma wasn’t entirely sure she had ever met—standing out in the driving drizzle to celebrate her husband’s life and to mourn, with her, his passing.
“Who are all these folks, Mom?” Nicola whispered.
Irma shook her head, her eyes locked onto just one figure standing almost directly across from her, above the open grave beneath Boz’s coffin: Phil Defantino. She had not mentioned Phil’s stream of visits to either of the children and now, seeing him acknowledge her with the faintest nod of his head, she wondered why.
James’s hand grasped her arm and she turned her head just as the coffin began lowering.
On the way back to the car, Irma stopped and talked to many of the mourners. Everyone said pretty much the same thing, which wasn’t much at all. But what could you say? He was gone and that was it. Phil Defantino was different, though. Phil took Irma in his arms and hugged her close to him. “Anything you ever want, Irma, no matter what it is, you only have to call me. Okay?”
She nodded. “Thanks, Phil.” They stood looking at each other for a few seconds before James helped his mother into the waiting car. She kept her eyes closed all the way home, praying to her heart to stop beating. But it didn’t. Nothing was that easy.
Having made arrangements for Angie and Jim to look after their respective children, James and Nicola had decided to stay on at the house, though the first day after the funeral, Thanksgiving, was a baptism of fire. “If I can make it through today,” Irma said when Nicola brought her a cup of Earl Gray tea in bed, her voice tired and her eyes bagged from crying all night, “then I can make it through any day.”
Nicola made a wonderful turkey dinner with all the trimmings and the three of them spent the day looking through old photo albums, listening to music, and crying like babies. When Irma finally made it into bed, she was so completely exhausted that she even refused one of the sleeping tablets prescribed by Jack Fredricks.
As soon as she closed her eyes, she dreamed of Boz, and when she woke up the following morning, with shafts of watery sunlight angling through the gap between the curtains, it was like losing him all over again.
“Okay,” James announced as he plopped onto the side of his mother’s bed, “we need to have a plan.”
“James always had to plan things, Mom,” Nicola observed from where she was standing, leaning against the door frame. “He won’t be happy unless he has a list so you might just as well let him get on with it.”
Irma forced a brave smile and nodded.
“So, first, Dad’s clothes,” James said, writing clothes in his notebook.
“I don’t think I can—” Irma began before being startled by a thud out in the hallway. She looked up and, just for a moment, there was a girlish excitement in her eyes. But the excitement evaporated just as quickly as it had appeared when she realized it was the mailman.
“I’ll get it,” Nicola said, and she backed out of the room.
“Okay, Mom, I know how you must feel, but—”
“James, you truly have absolutely no idea at all how I feel. Those are your father’s clothes . . . his shirts, his pants, his favorite shoes, his—”
She stopped when Nicola reappeared at the door clutching a bundle of envelopes. Her eyes were wide and her mouth seemed to have been chiselled into an O shape.
“Nick? What is it?”
Irma frowned at her daughter. “Nicola?”
Nicola walked across the room and lifted one of the letters from the small bundle, handed it across. Irma accepted it and saw that it was not a letter at all: It was a postcard. From Venice. The picture showed the Bridge of Sighs and a gondolier guiding his craft between high stone buildings, backdropped by a sun that appeared to be sinking into the canal behind him.
Her heart beating, Irma turned the card over and gasped: The message was written by Boz—she knew his handwriting anywhere.
Dearest Irma,
it began.
“Mom?” James said, hardly daring to move.
Well, here I am in Venice. The trip was less traumatic than I expected. I wish you could see this place—I’ll have to bring you when we meet up again. The sound of the gondoliers calling to each other—and singing! My, but they have wonderful voices. The smell is a little strong—kind of fishy—in places but the canals and the buildings—such wonderful buildings—more than make up for it. Anyway, must go. We’re on a tight schedule. I’ll write again soon.
All my love as always,
Boz
“Mom, you okay? What is it?”
“It’s a postcard,” Irma said, her voice reverently hushed.
“A postcard?” Nicola moved over alongside Irma, but only managed, “Who’s it—” before she saw the handwriting. “That’s from Dad!”
“A postcard from Dad?” James was half tempted to add something along the lines of it must have needed one hell of a stamp
, but decided against it.
“From Venice,” Irma added, checking the front of the card again before turning it over and re-reading the words.
“I don’t understand,” Nicola said.
“It’s some kind of sick joke,” James said as he reached for the card.
Irma shook her head. “No, it’s not a joke. It’s a very clever ruse on your dad’s part to make me feel better. ”
And she went on to tell Nicola and James about the daily visits from Phil Defantino, mentioning the mystical briefcase, the secluded sessions in Boz’s den, the fact that Phil had spent his entire life traveling to distant countries so he must have built up quite a database of contacts . . . people who, as a favor to Phil—and for such a good reason—would probably not be averse to sending a prewritten card from their home city to Irma here in the United States.
After studying it for a while, Irma said, “I’ll bet this is the way it works:
“Phil organizes the card from Venice, gets it across here and brings it around for your dad to write. Then Phil takes it away and sends it back to Venice, and that same person then sticks a stamp on it and pops it into a box.”
“But the timing is so perfect,” Nicola said.
“Well, maybe Phil held onto the card until—” She paused and shrugged. “Then he sends the card and tells whoever that it’s fine to send it right back.”
“ ‘I’ll write again soon’? What’s that mean?”
“Exactly what it says, I guess, James,” Irma said.
“You mean . . . you mean there’ll be other cards?”
Irma smiled at Nicola and nodded. “I guess so. I don’t know just how many, but . . . they were in there a long time every time Phil came around. And Phil came around pretty much every day until your dad got too weak.”
James watched his mother turn back to the card and read it again. “How do you feel about it, Mom?”
“I think it’s pretty weird,” said Nicola, and she gave a little shudder. “It’s like Dad speaking from beyond the grave.”
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 11
