by Strnad, Jan
"It's past time."
"Hush."
The day passed as they all did, slowly and painfully. Grandmother listened to the radio, watched the boy's portable TV and slept as much as she could. Then it was night and Evelyn turned off the lights and helped her lay down her head. Grandmother went to sleep, giving Death one more opportunity to make her fondest wish come true.
***
Grandmother woke a few minutes past midnight. The room was dark and quiet around her, and her mind seethed with strange dream memories that swam in her mind and darted here and there, appearing from the dim recesses and vanishing into the murk as mysteriously as they'd come. Each by itself made no sense, but taken together they told an excruciating and unbelievable tale.
She remembered trying to breathe and not being able to draw a breath. Something was pressed against her face, a weight held it down, and she barely had the strength to struggle. Anyone could have placed the pillow over her face and held it there against her pitiful attempts to lift it. It didn't take a man's strength. Evelyn could have done it or even the boy. This memory, the one of being smothered, was clear. It was not part of the dream.
The dream began with Edgar calling to her across a great distance. Then a man interposed himself between them and Edgar flew from the scene, or turned to smoke and was scattered by a cold wind, or maybe Edgar was never there at all. All that was left was the man, whose name she knew was "Seth," and they had a conversation that meant a great deal to Grandmother, but she couldn't remember a word of it.
Enveloped now by the darkness of the boy's room, Grandmother realized that something was missing, something as familiar to her as her own skin. After a moment she knew what it was. It was the pain. The pain was gone, and she knew she had Seth to thank for that.
She lay in the dark and marveled at how good it felt to have a body that was no longer at war with itself. She reflected on the miracle that had sneaked up on her.
Seth had brought her back from the dead. It would have been an unimaginable thing at one time, impossible, but now the notion of resurrection settled around her shoulders like an old shawl. She owed everything to Seth. If only Edgar could have known Seth he would be alive today, and they would be together.
She had traded Edgar for Seth, and the thought of that exchange made her sad. For so many years the dream of rejoining Edgar was all that got Grandmother through the day. Now the dream was postponed, perhaps forever.
The room was all shadows and portent. The hall beyond the doorway was quiet but for the distant hum of the refrigerator. She had never noticed it before. So Seth had fixed her hearing, too, as well as ridding her of the cancer. Her heart hadn't felt so strong in decades. She pressed the backs of her fingers against her cheek, and for the first time in ages her touch did not feel cold.
"I'm sorry, Edgar," she said. "I want to join you, but it isn't my time."
Grandmother lay in the dark and planned her next move. She longed to dress up in real clothes and walk to the kitchen and fix herself a snack, to watch the big TV in the living room, to walk around the block and take a drive out to the countryside, to escape the four walls that held her prisoner for six months. But those things would have to wait. She didn't want to tip her hand too soon. It might be best to play the invalid for a short while yet. She had thinking to do.
First, she had to deduce which member of her loving family had murdered her.
***
And it was a loving family, in its own way. Evelyn, certainly, loved her. Loved her too much, perhaps. How often had Grandmother pleaded with her to end her misery, to reunite her with Edgar, and how often had Evelyn told her, as she had that very day, to hush?
Evelyn was a caregiver. Every bird fallen from its nest and discovered by a neighbor child ended up in Evelyn's hands. Her husband, Doug, was another kind of wounded bird, a dreamer trapped in an ordinary mind, a free spirit doomed by mediocrity to spend its life plodding through the mundane world, digging up paychecks like potatoes to sustain his hungry family. Evelyn nurtured Doug's dreams the way she nurtured the wildflowers that labored their way up through the heavy, clay soil of her back garden.
Evelyn fed the defective birds until they drew their last, labored breaths. She tended the pathetic garden. She supported Doug's decision to fill their garage with Amway products. Any doomed endeavor pulled Evelyn in with the attractive force of a malevolent sun luring a wayward planet into orbit, and it held her there until failure reduced dream, dreamer and Evelyn to cinders.
Did this willingness to sacrifice herself for others remove Evelyn from suspicion, or did it implicate her? Was Grandmother's death a mercy killing? Was it committed at the expense of Evelyn's own incarceration and even, Evelyn might have thought, the damnation of her immortal soul?
It was certainly possible that Evelyn had killed her out of kindness.
And yet, it didn't seem right. Grandmother would have noticed something in her manner, some unsettled quality in her eyes, if she were harboring secret thoughts of murder, however kindly motivated, and Grandmother had noticed nothing. Besides, if that were Evelyn's intention, why wouldn't she have drowned her in the tub? That would have made more sense. Hold her head under the water, leave her to make the tea, come back to find her dead. Surely Evelyn would have thought of that.
Grandmother turned her thoughts to Doug.
Doug, always treading the financial waters, always sputtering like a drowning man. The burden of an old, useless woman dragged at his ankles like concrete boots. Grandmother was one thing too many to deal with, in Doug's words. He couldn't wait for her to die. Just a little breathing room, that's all I need. She could hear his words echoing down the hallway.
Doug, desperate for air of his own, could have smothered her. Maybe it was part of a larger plan, to hide the body and continue to collect Grandmother's government checks. Just until we can get a little bit ahead, he would have said, if only to himself. Among his many, pedestrian schemes, could Doug harbor any so grand as murder?
It wasn't likely. Despite his failings, the standard model of "Doug" came equipped with an irrepressible sense of duty, the legacy of a demanding mother. Ultimately, it was duty that would keep Doug on the straight and narrow path, discontent and complaining and miserable, but surefooted as a Mohican.
It took more imagination than Doug could muster to kill Grandmother. Besides, killing her required fearlessness, that or an unsophisticated sense of consequences. Selfishness, too, to put the killer's earthly needs against the life of another person, however feeble and willing to pass on she might be.
Fearless, little sense of consequence, selfish. My God, Grandmother realized, it sounds just like a nine-year-old boy. A boy who wants his room back.
Events replayed themselves in Grandmother's head. The boy's sullen glances, the resentful whining that went on behind her back. She thought of the grimacing figures on the boy's shelves, mirrors into the adolescent soul. How would any of those muscle bound oafs deal with an interloper like Grandmother? Violently, of course. They were action figures; they would take action. And these were the boy's heroes.
Then she remembered one more thing. The boy loved his candy. He was never without it, chewing and sucking and slurping. His hands were always sticky—he could have followed Spider-Man up a wall.
Grandmother picked up her pillow and drew it to her face. She inhaled deeply, taking in the scent. It smelled like her. She turned it over and smelled the other side, the side that would have been in contact with her killer's hands. She lowered the pillow, smiling.
It smelled of licorice.
***
The boy (it occurred to her, maybe because her memory had been sharpened by resurrection) was named "Jeffrey."
Grandmother lay awake trying to figure out what to do with little Jeffrey. Selfish, murderous little Jeffrey. By three a.m., she had formulated a plan.
The plan required the sacrifice of two innocents, but thanks to Seth and his blessing, their sacrifice would not be for
long. A day and a night of death was all, then both would be restored.
Grandmother began with her daughter because Doug was such a sound sleeper. A tree could fall on the house and not wake Doug, whereas Evelyn was awake even before she felt Grandmother's knife in her throat. Awakened by a creaking floorboard, she saw Grandmother standing over her, naked, in all her saggy, baggy glory. She registered the hunting knife in Grandmother's hands and for a moment thought she was dreaming.
"Mother?" she said.
Grandmother drove the knife home again and again. She would never have had the strength if it weren't for the blessing of Seth. As she plunged the knife into Evelyn's throat and felt the flesh give way so effortlessly, she wondered what Seth would fix about Evelyn when he brought her back. Aside from the stab wounds, that is. Her bunions, maybe, or that premature streak of gray in her hair.
Even before Evelyn fell still, Grandmother crossed to the side of the bed where Doug, true to form, still slept, mouth open, making a gurgling sound in his throat that was half snore and half garbage disposal. He woke when the knife bit his throat and tried to fend off Grandmother's second and third strokes, but soon he, too, collapsed into a dead and bloody heap.
Grandmother bathed the knife in Doug's blood and let it trickle as she left the bedroom. Blood pattered onto the hardwood floor of the hallway. Droplets stained the carpet in the family room where Jeffrey lay asleep on the convertible sofa, tangled in the sheets, arm jacked out over the edge.
She tilted the knife to drip blood on the boy's pajamas. She wrapped his fingers around the handle and folded his arm back over his bloody chest. She backed away slowly, making sure that he had not awoken, and tiptoed to the bathroom. She washed away the blood from her hands and body. She pulled on her old night dress and returned to her bed.
Within minutes she was asleep. She dreamed of Edgar. They were sitting on an asteroid that hurtled through a milky way of stars, and they were having a picnic.
***
The next morning, amid the hysteria surrounding the discovery of Evelyn and Doug's bodies, the boy was taken away and placed in a lock-down ward at Greenhaven Convalescent Center, the state mental asylum, in Junction City. He protested his innocence, but there was the knife and the blood, and the only other person in the house was Grandmother and she was obviously too ill to have committed such a strenuous crime. Neighbors verified that Grandmother didn't even have the strength to walk to the bathroom unaided, let alone all the way to Evelyn and Doug's bedroom, and what motive could she have to murder her own caregivers? Grandmother was taken to the hospital where she was at midnight when Evelyn and Doug returned from the dead, with Seth's blessing.
Thanks to the miracle resurrections, no charges were filed against the boy, but he would remain at Greenhaven for another few weeks under observation, as Grandmother had anticipated. Evelyn and Doug petitioned immediately for his release, but the system is like a well, easy to fall into, hard to climb out.
Grandmother had no need to feign illness with Evelyn and Doug. They knew what she had done and they understood, though it puzzled them why she had killed the two of them outright but hadn't taken out Jeffrey at the same time.
By the time they figured it out, she had the posters down and the plastic figures in boxes. A cut glass vase of flowers sat on the chest of drawers and her own knick-knacks decorated the shelves. For the next several weeks, until little Jeffrey was released, she would have a room of her own.
On the table beside her bed, she placed her favorite photograph of Edgar.
