by Julia Keller
Ellie had set it all up. “Knew you’d handle things,” Henry had said, grinning, when she told him about the move. She had hired a medical ambulance to take him from Columbus back to Charleston. At first he’d hated the idea of that. He knew what a medical ambulance must cost, he told her, and he didn’t want to be a bother.
“Stop it,” Ellie had said, tears in her eyes. “It’s no bother and you know it. Besides, Brett and I can afford it. Believe me.”
The ambulance driver and his assistant had just arrived. They were moving him from his hospital bed onto the gurney. They were very gentle with him and it was that—their gentleness, the concern of strangers—that had made Ellie cry. Not so much the fact that Henry was going home to die. She had come to terms with that reality a few weeks ago; what moved her now were the little mercies. The driver was a big, burly man and yet he handled her brother with great delicacy, as if Henry was someone beloved by him, too, and not just a client.
Once the gurney cleared the hospital room Ellie had stayed behind for a few minutes, gathering up his belongings: slacks, sweatshirt, wristwatch, dentures, a Civil War magazine that Brett had brought him on one of his brief, infrequent visits. Henry’s precipitous downturn had come during the bank’s busy season, and Brett had not been able to make the drive to Columbus as often as he would’ve liked. “Don’t worry about it,” Henry had said to him. “Ellie’s taking real good care of me. Appreciate you letting her stay.” Henry was an old-fashioned man. To his mind, a wife didn’t go anywhere—and certainly didn’t stay there for weeks on end—without her husband’s approval.
Ellie followed the ambulance to Charleston in her own car.
Henry’s apartment was on the second floor of an older building, three stories of drab, sand-colored brick with an unaccountably fancy entranceway, an arched threshold with THE LANCER ARMS chiseled in the concrete. The driver had stopped his long vehicle right there, blocking the lane. He flipped on his flashers. It was a busy street, with no legal way to park in front of the building, but this seemed like the best way to get Henry inside. A few drivers honked and gunned their engines, annoyed at getting stuck and having to wait their turn to swerve around the ambulance. To hell with you, Ellie thought as she heard the honks. She had stopped right behind the ambulance, daring the bastards to hit her car. You go straight to hell. I don’t care what you think.
She already had the living room set up for Henry. Brett’s secretary had researched places in Charleston that supplied home medical equipment; she had texted the list to Ellie, and Ellie made her selections. Everything had been delivered and assembled before they got there: hospital bed, bedside commode, adjustable tray table.
The next few days passed in a slow, sepia-colored blur. Henry slept. He had lost control of his bowels and his bladder just before he left the hospital, and so a great deal of Ellie’s time was spent cleaning him. He no longer had the capacity to be embarrassed about having his sister see those parts of him. It did not matter to either of them.
The hospice people came and went, bringing what needed to be brought, making sure that he wasn’t in pain. Ellie kept the blinds closed, because the sunlight had seemed to bother him.
“I don’t want this to happen,” she said.
She was sitting by his bed, watching him breathe. Sometimes he rallied and they were able to have brief conversations.
“Well, now, little sister—it’s nothing that anybody can do anything about.” Henry chuckled. He gave her a tired smile that was half apology, half encouragement, as if Ellie were a child who’d asked for a pony and he wasn’t able to oblige this year, but maybe next.
“I’m scared, Henry.”
She had not been this blunt with him before now, naming things, identifying the fate that rushed at him, but it was time. She sensed it.
“I know,” he said.
“Are you scared?”
That was what she really wanted to know. Her confession about her own fear had been strategic; maybe it would make him come clean, too.
“I don’t know,” he said.
You don’t know? The words bumped around in her head while she tried to make sense of them. You don’t know? How can you not know?
“Well,” she said.
Silence pooled around the little island comprised of all the words they’d already spoken. As the silence grew, the island seemed to become smaller and smaller, shrinking back into a small, hard nugget. Soon Ellie could barely remember anything they’d said, even just minutes ago.
And so she reached into the past. If the present was a vanishing island, the past was the sky—vast, permanent, always accessible.
“That doll,” she said.
“Mmmm?” He’d been dozing. He did that now; he fell asleep all the time, sometimes in the middle of his own sentences. Weariness engulfed him.
“That doll,” Ellie repeated. “Do you remember?”
He murmured something.
“You got it for me,” she said. “I was five years old. I’d never had a doll before. Lillian was so jealous. She tried to grab it away from me. But you told her to stop that. You said, ‘This is for Ellie.’ That was it. You didn’t give any reason. You just said, ‘This is for Ellie.’ And that satisfied her. She walked away. She didn’t even argue. Can you imagine that? Lillian loved to argue. You remember. If somebody said the sky was blue, Lillian would say, ‘No, it’s pink,’ just to get an argument going.” Ellie’s head was suddenly filled with images of her sister. Lillian was never pretty, the way Ellie was pretty, and she let that fact define her life. She was heavyset, with lank brown hair that tended to be oily looking even right after she’d washed it. She had died eight years ago of a stroke. Alone in a trailer.
Henry’s eyes fluttered open. He didn’t move his head—he seemed too tired for that—but his pupils slid over in Ellie’s direction.
“The doll,” he murmured. “I think I remember it now.”
She didn’t know if he was telling the truth or if he was just being polite. Chances were, he probably didn’t remember the doll: a small plastic one, obviously secondhand, that didn’t even have hair. The butterscotch-colored hair was painted on and the paint had already rubbed off in several places by the time Ellie held it to her heart that day, loving it at first sight.
No, he surely didn’t remember it. One small gift to his little sister, a gift for no reason, amid a lifetime of events—it wasn’t that important. She had lost the doll somewhere along the way, anyway. It was one of the reasons she loved Henry as much as she did, but it wasn’t important, not the thing itself. All that mattered was the fact of the giving.
“If I still had that doll I sure know where I’d keep it,” she said, talking softly. “Our house in Acker’s Gap has a doll room. In the attic. Tyler couldn’t wait to show it to you, remember? When you visited us? It was Thanksgiving. Ten years ago. Tyler was just a little boy. The dolls weren’t there anymore but I still called it the doll room. You thought that was funny. A doll room with no dolls.”
Henry had closed his eyes again, drifting off. She didn’t know if he could hear her anymore, but she didn’t care. Tyler’s troubles had recently started—the principal had called two days ago, her son was being expelled for selling pot to his classmates—and Ellie was tempted to tell Henry about it, seek his sympathy. And then she thought: no. The things of this world were receding from Henry Combs now, sliding back, falling away from him. One by one the little threads tethering him here were disengaging. Thread by thread, memory by memory.
“I go up there and I sit,” she said. “I can remember things better in that room. So many things. Sometimes I think if I could just stay there—stay in that room forever—I’d be fine. I’d never be sad or scared again. I’d have my memories and that would be enough. Briney Hollow and all the fun we had—do you remember, Henry? How much fun it was? All of us together?”
His eyes suddenly opened. It startled her. She reached for his hand. Something was happening.
“Ellie,�
� he said.
His hand felt small in hers, the skin papery and dry, the bones infinitely fragile.
“Ellie,” he said, and then he was gone.
* * *
Each time Shirley took a breath, her body seemed to register it as a separate and distinct event, as if each breath was being counted. Breathing was an ordeal now.
The hospital staff had moved Shirley into a larger room. A private one this time. Apparently that was what they did when the end was near. Bell only figured that out later. At first she was just grateful for more space, and for the absence of chatter from a TV set. Every roommate her sister had had so far was a dedicated, indiscriminate TV watcher. The set was always on. Bell tried to block it out, but that proved to be impossible.
They were down to days now. That was an obvious, if still unspoken, reality. Shirley lapsed into periods of silence; sometimes she didn’t react anymore when Bell came into the room. Her head was arranged in the very center of the pillow. Her arms were at her sides. The thin white blanket had been pulled up to her chest by somebody else. She wouldn’t have had the energy to pull it up herself, Bell knew.
“Hey, Shirley,” Bell said. That was what she said each time she came back into the room.
Sometimes she thought she saw a response from Shirley. A flicker of an eyelash, a tremor of a finger. And even those minute motions might not have been volitional. Just the body going through its inevitable progressions as it slowly, methodically, shut down.
Bell had watched people die. There was, for instance, her ex-husband’s grandfather, Chester Elkins, back when she and Sam had just gotten married. The old man had lasted a day and a half after a brain aneurysm, with various family members shuttling in and out of the hospital room, and Bell and Sam were the unlucky ones; it was during their brief visit that Chester had decided he’d had enough of this world and would take his leave of it.
Bell remembered the particulars: the low, guttural groan; a noise like heavy-duty farting; a gush of foul-smelling black liquid from the old man’s sagging mouth. Later, as a prosecutor, she’d twice found herself at the bedside of a dying witness, taking a statement.
And a few months ago Charlie Mathers, a retired Raythune County deputy and a good friend, had died in her arms after being shot during a drug raid.
But those moments, as harrowing as they might have been, were nothing compared to this.
Because this was Shirley.
“Hey, Shirley,” Bell said. She’d gone for coffee in the hospital cafeteria and was back now. The coffee had been a bad idea; it glowered and snarled in Bell’s gut like a liquid grudge, seeping into the crawl spaces in the lower half of her body.
Bell sat down in the chair next to the bed. She had kept on talking to Shirley, every day, even after it was hard to tell if her sister could hear her. “Got a call from Carla. She’s going to drive over again tomorrow.” Carla had just started a new job in Charleston but came as often as she could.
Sam, too, had visited three days ago, when it had become clear that things were drawing to a close. He flew into Columbus from Reagan National. Rented a car, drove to the Ohio State campus, sat with Bell in Shirley’s room for an hour, and then did the whole thing again in reverse. It was more than Bell would ever have expected. She had been divorced from the man for well over a decade, yet he came.
A few hours later, Shirley revived a bit. It started when she licked her lips. Then she opened her eyes. Bell was standing up now, hands on the bed rail, looking down at her sister.
“Hey,” Bell said.
“Hey.” Shirley’s voice was a soft rasp. The doctors had explained to Bell that the tumor had grown so large now that it was impinging on her vocal cords.
“Something to drink?”
Shirley’s head rustled slightly on the pillow. Bell took it as a nod. She picked up the plastic cup on the bedside table, angled the bendy straw between her sister’s cracked lips. When Shirley was finished, Bell sat back down again.
She had promised herself that she would keep on talking to Shirley. The silence seemed too momentous, too much a foretaste of what was waiting around the corner for her sister. Bell could not have put that thought into words but it was there, anyway, with or without words.
“Comer Creek,” Bell said. “Remember that? I know you do. I was—what? Four years old? Five? I’d play in that mud and get it all over me. You’d be hopping mad. Because you had to clean me up.”
Shirley murmured something. Bell leaned closer.
“What?”
“I never. Wanted.” She had to rest between words. “To. Hurt. You.”
“We don’t need to talk about this. Not now.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, okay.” Bell touched her sister’s shoulder. “I know you didn’t. I know that, Shirley.”
“Telling. You. I didn’t mean…” She came to a full stop. Her shoulders vibrated with deep, lung-scraping breaths. The effort exhausted her. But she wanted to try again. “I didn’t want you. To resign. Your job. Job you love.”
“Not your call.”
Shirley’s eyes opened wider. This had happened sometimes over the past few days; she would be in a deep drowse and then suddenly rise up out of it, capable of complete sentences, of arguing back.
“Makes no sense,” Shirley said. “You do good things. And now—”
“Now I’ll do other things. Different.”
“Not for a while. You told them to send you to prison.”
“Who told you that? Who?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Who told you?”
“Nobody. I read it in the paper. Connie Boyd brought me a copy.” Connie was Shirley’s friend. They had worked together at an auto parts store until Shirley grew too sick to work.
The judge had given Bell a month to put her affairs in order. She had four more days of freedom left.
“Never wanted that,” Shirley said. “Wanted you to know the truth. Didn’t want to wreck your life.”
“You didn’t wreck my life. I did that. All by myself.”
Shirley closed her eyes. She was, Bell knew, trying to summon more strength so that she could make her next point. Her chest rose and fell.
“Belfa,” Shirley said.
“I’m right here.”
“You’ve got to tell me why.”
“No. I don’t.”
“You do. I told you the truth—so you owe me the same. Why didn’t you keep it to yourself? Why did you tell the world—and then make them punish you?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” Shirley’s cough was long and phlegmy. “Why, Bell? You didn’t know what you’d done. For God’s sake—you were a child. I made you think it was me who’d killed Daddy. So why did you…”
Bell leaned closer. She felt a frantic, rushing sound in her ears, like a million winged insects taking flight simultaneously. Her heartbeat had taken over her entire body.
They were the only two people in the world right now.
Maybe her sister was right.
Maybe she should tell her.
Maybe it would be a gift, not a burden.
“Shirley,” Bell said.
Shirley’s eyes looked bigger now, Bell thought, because she was listening so intently. Shirley’s fragile body—stippled with cancer, the organs peppered with it, her lungs riddled with it, her bones thinned and frayed by it—was strained with this waiting, this listening.
“Shirley,” Bell repeated.
Shirley licked her lips. She tried to swallow, but she was too weak; she made a small strangling sound in the back of her throat. Foamy saliva trickled over her lips.
“You didn’t know,” Shirley murmured. “You’re not to blame. You didn’t know.”
It’s time, Bell thought. I have to. Before she goes. While I still have the chance.
“Shirley,” she said, “I did know. I knew from the beginning. I knew what I’d done. I knew that I was the one who’d
killed Daddy. I just pretended I didn’t know. Because I wanted a life.”
Shirley’s face looked startled, and then confused. “You—”
“I knew. I knew all along. That’s why—now, all these years later—I did what I did. Confessing. Serving time. When you got sick, I realized that I—I had to be punished. I had to.”
There was doing a wrong thing because you didn’t know that what you were doing was wrong.
And then there was doing a wrong thing and knowing full well that it was wrong—and not admitting that you knew. Until you were forced to.
Very different sins. One was forgivable. The other—maybe not.
Later, when Bell read about Utley Pharmaceuticals, the realization would strike her: They knew. They knew—and they did nothing. They pretended they hadn’t known.
Just as she’d pretended that she hadn’t known.
* * *
A day and a half later, Shirley died.
It happened when Bell was sleeping, slumped over in the chair beside the bed. She had not left Shirley’s side after she told her the truth, except for bathroom breaks. Occasionally, though, she did fall asleep.
This time, when Bell awoke, she lay with her head back against the seat, eyes still closed, and asked her sister if she’d like a drink of water. There was no answer.
Bell sat up. She looked at Shirley’s face.
Her eyes were open. Her struggle was over.
Bell’s was just beginning.
PART THREE
Chapter Thirty-four
“Coffee tastes the same,” Nick said.
“No wonder. Same pot we were working our way through when you left off being sheriff.”
“That was over five years ago, Bell.”
“Like I said—same pot.”
He smiled. He took another drink and then set down the white china mug. He took a look out the big front window of JPs. The morning was overcast, with the remnants of an earlier fog.
“I’ll give you credit—you sure know how to spoil the mood at a wedding,” Bell said. “After your bombshell, Rhonda got out of there so fast I thought she was going to knock over a few bridesmaids.”
