by Jessie Haas
“We know what to do,” Margaret said. “Don’t we?”
Dr. Rossi’s eyes were stretched wide to hold back tears, but it wasn’t entirely working. “Yes,” she said, turning away for the needle.
“I knew when I came in, really. Oh, Thor—yes, what a good dog!” The Lab was panting in discomfort, but he still seemed cheerful and gave a wag at the sound of his name.
“Phillip, will you hold him?”
“I will,” said Margaret quickly. She knelt and hugged the dog, pressed her cheek against his head, and whispered a few words. He wagged his tail slowly from side to side.
“All right,” Margaret said. There were tears where her cheek had rested on his head, but she held him calmly, and calmly his body slackened. He was heavy, and he fell out of her arms and sprawled on the floor.
She stood up, with tears streaming down her face, and suddenly there was a small clatter as Dr. Rossi angrily threw down the syringe. She pulled Margaret into her arms, and Phillip, who had stayed only because Dr. Rossi seemed determined to need him, looked for an exit.
But he was in a corner, between a supply shelf and the table, and they were blocking the way. He made some slight move anyway, out of embarrassment, and fear at the prickling of his own eyes.
Without looking up, without a word, Dr. Rossi reached out and drew him in.
Into darkness and softness, sniffles and shaking breath, the smell of perfume and the smell of tears. His own tears started, but it was dark. No one could see. He put an arm around each of them, Margaret and Dr. Rossi, and they stood that way.
At last there came a cautious tap at the surgery door. “Dr. Rossi?” Sharon called. “Three-thirty.”
Dr. Rossi stood back from the embrace with a loud sniff. “Five minutes, Sharon.” Phillip turned away from them as they blew their noses and wiped their eyes. He rubbed his face on the sleeve of his jacket.
“Phillip, can you help Margaret carry him to her car? Use the side door.”
“I’ll do it,” he said, stepping in Margaret’s way before she could bend down. He gathered up the heavy dog and carried him outside. The wind was even sharper, the air full of snow.
Margaret opened the car door for him. He put the dog on the backseat, and pulled the old dog-smelling car blanket over him.
“Thank you,” Margaret said.
Phillip looked away, feeling the cold wind acutely on his still-damp face. “Sorry,” he said.
“I know.” Margaret squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and then got in the car and drove away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Brr!” In the back room Dr. Franklin stamped snow off his boots. “It’s damned cold out! Starting to add up, too.”
Phillip looked past him out the door. The afternoon was darkening rapidly, but the parking lot was bright with snow.
“It’s not supposed to keep on like this, is it?”
Dr. Franklin shrugged. “Doesn’t look like stopping to me. About an inch out there now.”
If there was an inch here, on warm pavement in the valley, how much more was there at the gray house?
Sharon poked her head through the door. “Phillip, phone for you. You want to take it out here? Press the flashing button.”
“Hello?”
“Phillip? Hi.” His mother. “It’s so awful out—don’t start home. I’ll come pick you up as soon as my pie gets out of the oven.”
“I was gonna call you,” Phillip said. “I’m going to … Dave’s house tonight.” Out ahead of his words was a void. In fascination he listened to himself bridge it. “He asked me to … help him with some homework and have supper. I thought I’d stay overnight, so you wouldn’t have to come get me.”
Thin. It sounded thin to him and should have sounded thin to her. But lately her instincts were blunted. “Well … all right,” she said, expressing only generic parental caution.
“See you tomorrow,” Phillip said, and hung up the phone. He glanced at Dr. Franklin, who was busy resupplying his black bag. But from Dr. Franklin’s perspective the conversation must have seemed perfectly innocent. When he did look up at Phillip, it was with this encouraging thought.
“Maybe it’ll snow so much they’ll cancel school.”
“Maybe,” Phillip said.
“Give you a ride home, Phillip?” The last two people had canceled their appointments, and Dr. Rossi was in the hall, putting on her coat.
“No, that’s okay.”
“It’s no trouble, Phillip,” she said, a trifle sternly. A man was waiting for her, and Phillip was glad, though jealous. After a day like this she should have someone to go home with.
“No, it’s all right.”
Her beautiful eyes focused on him severely. “You are a very stubborn boy,” she said, and swept by, brushing him with her perfume. Now he had made her angry. For some reason that pleased him slightly.
He put on his own coat and stepped outside. The snow swirled beneath the streetlights. There was enough to scuff through, enough to make tracks in. He started across the parking lot.
“Hey, Phil, didn’t your ride show up?” Dr. Franklin, at the wheel of his station wagon, pulled alongside and stopped, slewing sideways a couple of inches.
Shit! Phillip thought, but that was a waste of mental energy. He found himself with nothing to say and stood there, all too obviously groping for a lie.
“Oh,” said Dr. Franklin. “So that was all a fabrication?” His eyes were bright and watchful. Snowflakes drifted through the open window and caught in his beard. Phillip decided to remain silent.
“Well … none of my business,” said Dr. Franklin, unconvincingly. “But … need help?”
Jesus! Phillip thought. All of a sudden he was surrounded by people wanting to help him. Insistent on helping him. He started to shake his head and saw Dr. Franklin frown.
“Actually, yeah,” he said. “Could you lend me five dollars, just till payday?”
Dr. Franklin wasn’t giving up. He sat there looking up at Phillip with a kind of formidable openness. If not given a true answer, if turned from and run away from, he looked ready to leap from the car and tackle. Christ! thought Phillip. What had he done to make so many people notice him?
“I’ve got those kittens hidden out,” he said. “I gotta go take care of them.”
Dr. Franklin hissed his breath across his teeth, glancing at his snowy windshield and lashing wipers. “They have any shelter?”
“They’re in an old house,” Phillip said. “But I should get up there. Build a fire.”
“Any chance I could drive you and take them home with me?”
They’re all right! Phillip felt like shouting. I take care of them! He had never expected to feel guilty about saving the kittens’ lives.
“There’s no road,” he said. “You couldn’t get there.”
Dr. Franklin’s eyebrows and the end of his beard drew toward each other in a deep, worried frown. “Does anyone know about this? Does anyone know where—”
“Someone knows,” said Phillip, with a rush of thankfulness to Kris.
Reluctantly Dr. Franklin relaxed.
“Is five dollars going to do it? Make it ten—and here, take my car blanket. You’re planning to stay out there, I understand? You should have a hat. Here. Your head is just like a wick, you know. Think of yourself as a candle: Your head is the flame, burning off all your body heat.” The hat came from the backseat, like the blanket, and carried a strong scent of cow manure. “Are you all set?”
Phillip nodded.
“Good! You’re in for a goddamned uncomfortable night, Johnson!” Dr. Franklin thrust his mittened hand out the window and shook Phillip’s hand. “Good luck—Christ, kid, don’t you have any mittens?”
“No.” Phillip thrust his hands in his pockets and backed away.
Dr. Franklin shook his head. “All right, but I meant it. I’ll take ’em if I have to.” He rolled up his window and, spinning slightly, drove away.
Phillip went across the road i
nto the grocery store and bought cheese and a chocolate bar and a very small flashlight. The store was packed with people, stocking up as if for a major blizzard and complaining excitedly.
When he went outside again, the weather seemed to have grown even more miserable. The snow in the air was magnified by headlights and streetlights, slushed and splashed by cars. As Phillip trudged up the road, wearing the blanket over his shoulders, he thought with unusual affection of his home. Pie, his mother had mentioned …
“Need a ride?” Three people stopped to ask tonight. The first storm of the season made a solitary walker with a blanket on his shoulders look especially pathetic. Phillip said no each time. It was good to walk. The wind, the blurred lights, the steady rhythm of his own feet seemed to smooth everything out in his head. Weather he could handle.
Beyond the rim of the suburbanized world the sky was dark and full of snowflakes. The road was white, his own tracks black and wobbly behind him.
The farther he went, the smarter people seemed. They had gotten home already or not gone out in the first place. Phillip passed houses where the light shone yellow and hospitable out the windows, where families could be seen at supper, where the snow had stopped melting off the car hoods and was beginning to mount up. He passed mailboxes with little caps of snow and horses in roadside pastures, surprised-looking, wearing snow blankets.
He walked slowly. His work boots had little tread left, and he slid backward with every step. For so long he had been light on his feet, his sneakers pushing the frozen ground back behind him easily. Now winter dragged on him like ankle weights. It was a long, cold, uphill walk.
At the farm the barn was dark, with a deep blanket of snow shouldering the sky. A wide river of tracks, human and dog, led toward the yellow house. Its lights seemed kind and homey, but far away, like a Victorian Christmas card. They’d left the cows in, safe from the storm. Phillip could hear hay rustling and an occasional soft moo. The bulk-tank motor droned in the milk house.
Out across the white expanse of cornfield, the wind swirled in all directions, as if uncertain what to do next. Soon, Phillip thought, the snow would stop. Then it would get even colder.
Tonight the locust trees seemed very black and wild, and the gray house looked cozy, wearing a coverlet of snow. Phillip trudged down through the weeds, stumbling a little as his feet missed the familiar path. He looked back at his own tracks, like the wallowings of a moose. Now no one who passed could imagine this place deserted.
Inside he knelt at the fireplace, standing the little flash light on its end to illuminate the widest possible area. He would light a fire first and then look for the kittens.
But as he dragged the first stick out of the kindling pile, something moved in the back of the fireplace. Phillip’s heart thumped. He grabbed the flashlight and pointed it, and the kittens blinked at him. They were curled in a tight ball, behind the heap of ashes against the back wall. Perhaps they remembered the earlier fire and were trying to find its warmth.
He picked them up. They were reluctant to move or break apart from each other, like someone in bed on a cold morning, not wanting to stir the covers.
“Just a minute, guys,” he muttered, settling them in their box. At the loosening of his clenched jaw, his teeth began to chatter.
Quickly he broke the sticks, laid a fire, and touched a match to the dry kindling in several places. It seemed to take forever for the separate points of flame to catch and grow and unite into a single bright young blaze. Then it took another forever for the blaze to deepen and begin to give back some heat.
Phillip set a pan of water on the flames and crouched close. The kittens huddled beside him. Occasionally one gave a convulsive shiver.
Phillip didn’t take them on his lap. His jeans were soaked. The knees, only inches from the fire, steamed and scalded him. The wet fringe of Dr. Franklin’s car blanket began to smolder. He pressed his foot on the smoking place.
Now the water was close to boiling. He made his cocoa, stirred it with a twig, wrapped his hands around it. Just so his father had wrapped his hands around a coffee mug, in the corner of the couch Saturday morning.
One kitten yawned and stretched, spreading its toes at the fire. The other trilled and curled on its back, exposing its belly to the heat. Phillip wanted to touch the fluffy tummy, but when he started to reach, he found his hands didn’t really want to move. He sat staring at them. Big red hands. His father’s hands.
“You look so much like your father.” People like aunts and cousins, people who didn’t know him well enough to think he looked like Phillip, used to say that to him.
Someday soon all he would have left of his father was what he could see in a mirror.
The tears flowed easily. He felt no inner convulsing, no difficulty. For a few moments he was interested by this. He imagined firelight glinting on the water that trickled down his face.
Then he heard a small drip. Startled, he looked down and saw that his tears had reached the floor. Suddenly it wasn’t easy anymore. He remembered what he was doing: crying for his father, who was going to die.
He loved his father.
He had to put the cocoa down because the difficult, harsh crying was making it slop on the hearth. Now he could press his palms against his eyes and bow his head down to his knees. He could smother his sobs against his wet jeans, hug himself, curl himself as small as possible. His face was hot, salty, stinging. He didn’t know what would ever make him stop.
At last something stung his leg: a kitten, sharpening its claws. It met his eyes with a warm, chummy look, pleased with itself and sure of pleasing, swarmed up onto his knee, and butted its head against his nose. A few more tears fell on its soft fur. It curled in the crook of his arm, blinking up at him and purring.
He put another stick on the fire and watched the flames, watched the breath of the kitten slow to sleep. The same thoughts that had sent a hot gush of tears down his face and tied a knot in his breath a few moments ago, now presented themselves simply for him to look at.
He loved his father.
It was possible that he’d never thought this before. There had been no need. It would have been like saying he loved air or his metabolism. And lately whatever had been on his frozen mind, it wasn’t love.
Now image after image came: his father condemning the duck pillows; standing in the garage door with the oxygen cord trailing down the steps; facing Aunt Mil, that smile at the corner of his mouth; holding up a bottle of beer and saying softly, “Well, I’ll be!”
His father had become visible again, changed, full of a weary, beaten grace. He was resigned and angry, sad and full of humor. Phillip realized how much he had been missing his father. How much he would miss him.
“Shit.” He was crying again, so helplessly it was like bleeding. Once he had feared cutting himself, alone up here, or being shot. This was the real hemorrhage. Really—as real as the hearth, as real as the fire, as real as the storm outside—his father would die.
Everyone will die.
His father would die too soon. He was sick now and soon would die.
But he’s doing better! His attitude—
He would die anyway. His attitude could not change that.
It was like a rock wall in Phillip’s mind that every straying, hopeful thought ran up against. It had been there a long time, but he’d kept turning his back on it. Now he was helpless—almost worse than helpless, almost running into it on purpose, turning back to it whenever he strayed off a little and found relief. He will die. Die. Die.
Never see him again. Never get to ask him things. Never get to show him, with your life, what you learned from him, where the two of you differ.
Hemorrhage.
But it couldn’t last forever. Phillip began to feel dehydrated, and his tears dried up. He couldn’t stop shivering.
After a while he thought of the hot cocoa, reached down for it.
It was stone cold.
Knowing how long he must have been crying fo
rced a few more tears—concentrated, stinging and itching on his cheeks. He got up and went outside.
The snow had stopped. He was surprised to see only a couple of inches on the ground and bright stars tangled in the locust branches. For a long time he leaned against the door frame, weak and drained. Very slowly, the clean, bright beauty of the night made its impression on him, striking deeper and deeper until it seemed to be everything. He didn’t move. He hardly turned his eyes; but he felt them widen and widen, and each long breath seemed to draw the smell of the snow to the very center of his chest. He felt clean and blank and open, as if the black wind of the universe roared without impediment through his heart.
He was getting very cold.
Finally he was too cold. He bent and scooped up two handfuls of snow from beside the step and pressed them to his hot eyes and cheeks. Then, with snow water trickling down his face, he went back inside, stoked the fire, and made more cocoa.
Eventually, as the windows were beginning to show gray with the dawn, he ran out of wood. The fire sank and died, and the stone chimney began to cool.
Slowly the room became visible. The woodpile was gone. The kittens’ box was empty. The ax, the hatchet, the jar of matches, the cat food pans and the blackened saucepan he’d heated his water in, elements that had made this a primitive home, seemed only lonely, separate articles in the gray light. He and the kittens, huddled at the cooling hearth, were no longer residents, but only waiting to leave.
Stiffly Phillip stood up and began to festoon himself with possessions: ax, hatchet, cup and blackened pan, strung on his belt; Dr. Franklin’s huge flannel shirt over his jacket; the blanket on his shoulders. Finally he turned to the kittens.
“All right, little dudes.” It was the first he’d spoken in hours, and he had to clear his throat. “Time to go.”
Clanking slightly, he stooped to pick them up and tucked them inside his jacket, buttoning it around them. He walked to the door, paused with his hand on the latch, and looked back.
His meager domestic arrangements were swept away, and with them, the sense of being at home. Phillip felt his original excitement rise again at the bareness and loneliness of the place.
