by Brian Keene
“Oh.” I clutched my stomach and groaned. “Looks like you got me, copper. I'm a dead man.”
“You're going to jail,” T. J. informed me. “Get up, you robber!”
“Don't I get to go to the hospital first?”
“No.” He started to giggle.
“My hero,” Michelle cried and gave him a hug. “Thank you, Officer. Would you like to stay for some cookies and punch?”
“No thank you, ma'am,” T. J. drawled. “I've got to take this bad guy to jail.”
He grabbed me by the arm and I pushed myself to my feet, letting him lead me to the monkey bars prison. I ducked down and slipped between the bars, crouching in the sand.
“When can I get out, Mr. Policeman?”
“Never. Bank robbers have to stay in jail forever.”
“But I have a family, sir. A wife and three kids and a dog.”
T. J. paused, and his face grew serious.
“Daddy?”
“What, buddy?”
“Do bank robbers really have families like that?”
Suddenly, I couldn't breathe again. I struggled for the words, any words, anything.
“Sometimes they do, I guess. Not all bank robbers probably start out as bad guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe they are just poor and don't have any other way to get money. Or maybe they've got a sick little boy at home who needs medicine or a mommy that needs to see a special doctor who's really expensive.”
“So is robbing banks wrong?”
“Yeah, little man,” I fumbled, “it's wrong. It's definitely a bad thing.”
His brow creased in confusion. “Then how can all bank robbers not be bad guys?”
“I'm sure that most of them are, T. J. But some are just regular guys—guys like Uncle John or Uncle Sherm. Guys like me. They just get caught up in something that they can't get out of, no matter how badly they'd like to.”
He thought about this, then asked the question I'd been dreading.
“Daddy—would you ever rob a bank?”
“No, T. J., of course not. I'd never do that.”
“Never ever?”
“Never.”
I'd been lying to Michelle and now I'd just lied to my son. At that moment, I welcomed death from cancer because it was no less than what I deserved.
“Not even if we were sick? Not even if we really needed the money?”
“Nope. Not even then. And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because then I'd have to go to jail and I wouldn't be able to see you and Mommy.”
“That would suck.”
The abruptness of his statement made me laugh and I was grateful, because the laughter kept me from screaming. It kept me sane.
“Yeah, you're right, little man. That would suck. Hey, I've got an idea. How about we play something else now?”
“Okay, Daddy. What do you want to play?”
“How about hide-and-seek? I'll even be it.”
“Sweet.” He scampered away.
“Hey,” I called after him, “can I come out of the jail now?”
“No,” he shouted over his shoulder. “You have to count from there.”
I wrapped my fingers around the bars that separated me from my family, closed my eyes, and began to count.
The chills had almost left me by the time I got to twenty.
Later, after we'd gotten home, I grilled some steaks and made baked potatoes and corn on the cob for dinner, while Michelle gave T. J. a bath. We ate, and when the meal was finished, the three of us curled up together on the sofa with a bowl of microwaved popcorn, and watched The Lion King for the four hundredth time. It was just as good as the first time we'd seen it—except for the part when the father dies. That had always choked me up before, and it really knocked me on my ass now. T. J. fell asleep between us during the last half hour, and when it was over, I lifted him in my arms and carried him to bed. He stirred, mumbled something, then went right back to sleep. I kissed him on the forehead, smoothed his rumpled hair, and shut his door, leaving it open a crack to protect against monsters, just the way he liked it.
Michelle and I finished the popcorn; and then we made love, right there on the couch. She smelled just as good as she had that morning—the vanilla-sugar lingering in the air. When it was over, we snuggled together, still naked, smoking and soaking in the afterglow. We didn't say anything. We didn't need to.
After a while, she fell asleep too. I carried her to bed, pulled the blanket over her, kissed her forehead and smoothed her hair just like I'd done with T. J., and crawled under the sheets next to her.
I didn't sleep.
I wish that I could tell you it was a good day, but it wasn't. Except for the panic and guilt attack during the game of cops and robbers, and my battle with nausea earlier that morning, it should have been the perfect day. Sounds like it was, doesn't it? Well you weren't there. You weren't inside my head. I should have been grateful—should have loved every minute of it, every second. Except I didn't. How could I? How the fuck was I supposed to? My wife and son had enjoyed a beautiful spring day as a family, and in their hearts they thought that there would be thousands more of those days to come.
But I knew better. I knew that this would be the last. And that knowledge was a fucked-up thing. It ate at me in ways the cancer never could. It devoured me from the inside. If I shared that knowledge, it would destroy them. And by not sharing it, I destroyed what we had.
I lay there in the darkness, listening to my wife breathing next to me, and my son snoring softly down the hall. Anger suddenly overwhelmed me. Silently, I cursed God and the Devil and the tobacco companies and the doctor and my vanishing father and bitch of a mother and the owners of the foundry and everybody else I could think of. Most of all, I cursed myself.
The thought occurred to me that maybe I should just commit suicide. Sign up for a life insurance policy with a big payout and take one of the pistols and blow my brains out the back of my head. But that would never work. Most insurance companies would want some kind of physical, and they'd find out about the cancer right away. Besides that, I didn't think they paid out if you killed yourself.
Still, it would be an easy way out, a way to stop the lies and the pain and the sickness, a way to stop the dread I constantly felt in my gut, the dread that was consuming me, gnawing at me like a worm.
I tossed and turned. The sheets stuck to me. After a while, I got up and tiptoed to the front door. I opened it quietly, knowing that if Michelle woke up now, I'd have no choice but to come clean. Slipping outside, I made it to the truck, opened the door, killed the dome light, and reached under the seat. For one terrifying moment, I couldn't find the box, and all kinds of things went through my head. Michelle had found it or a neighbor had stolen the guns or maybe the cops knew about the buy. But then my fingers brushed against it, and I pulled it out, relieved.
I lifted the lid and the pistols stared back at me in the moonlight, whispering of a means to an end. Robbery. Suicide. Peace. Whatever I wanted, they were more than happy to provide it. They were shiny, happy things, full of promise and release.
Still considering my options, I put the lid back on the box and carried it over to my toolshed. I popped the combination lock and stepped inside, shutting the wooden door behind me. I flicked on the overhead light and a terrified mouse scampered in one of the dark corners. One of my mom's boyfriends had once given me an Old Milwaukee barroom mirror, and I still had it, hanging on the wall next to my tool bench. I opened the box, pulled out one of the .357s, and lifted it up, staring at my reflection in the mirror.
I placed the cold barrel to my temple. The gun looked big—bigger than on TV. Then I opened my mouth and put it inside, pressing it against the back of my throat, tasting the metallic tang of oil. I gagged. No. There was no way I could do that. No way I could ever pull the trigger and do myself.
Still watching my reflection, I pulled the gun back out and pointed it at
the mirror.
“This is a stickup, motherfucker! Put the money in the goddamned bag and nobody gets hurt!”
I smiled. That was a lot easier and a lot better.
I repeated the words again. And again. They became a mantra and I practiced till they were perfect.
Still smiling, I locked up the shed and put the guns back under the seat in the truck. There were a few more things I had to do—just to make sure this was the road I wanted to take. But the words in the mirror stayed in my head. I slipped into the trailer, and lay down next to Michelle.
I had no trouble sleeping after that.
The next morning was Sunday. On Sunday, God may have rested, but I was still dying, and trust me, that was a very fucked-up thing to remember upon waking. I lay there in the bed, disoriented, aware of nothing but the sound of my cells turning bad and ganging up on me. I imagined that I could hear them, scurrying like ants through my body. At least I wasn't puking—yet. I fumbled on the nightstand for my cigarettes, lit one up, and tried to force the thought from my mind.
I thought about anything else I could, anything that didn't involve dying. The time Michelle and I played hooky from school and went down to the Baltimore-Washington airport to watch the planes from the observatory. How beautiful she looked on our wedding day. When we moved into the trailer and Michelle and Sherm got into an argument because Sherm scratched the dining room table while he was unloading it, and how John and I laughed when she shut him down with just a look. The day she came home from the doctor and told me that he'd confirmed the home test, and she was indeed pregnant. T. J. being born, and when I first saw him, I thought there was something horribly wrong because his head was cone-shaped. The relief I felt when the doctor explained that it was normal. The first Christmas that T. J. actually opened his own presents, and got excited over them. When John and Sherm and I took him fishing off the dam at Three Mile Island, and how we hadn't caught any fish but T. J. came home with a stringer full of new curse words. T. J.'s first day at day care, and how he clung and cried and screamed not to go—and how happy and smiling he was when the day was over and he told us how much fun he had.
The first time he said, “I love you, Daddy.” That one, that memory, kept the thoughts of dying out of my head the longest. But it also brought them crashing back in the hardest.
I rolled over onto Michelle's pillow and breathed in the aroma that she'd left behind. I could still smell her, but not as strongly as I would have been able to a few months before. That realization brought it all back again and soon, her pillow was wet, as was my face.
Eventually, the sounds of cartoons drifted in from the living room, and I heard the hiss of bacon sizzling in the frying pan. I couldn't smell it no matter how hard I tried. I blew my nose, clearing out the bloody snot, and tried again, but I still couldn't smell it. I stayed in bed, smoking the cigarette down to the filter and feeling depressed.
At the moment, the best thing in the world I could imagine was to pull the sheets and comforter up over my head, curl into the fetal position, and just lie there, drifting in and out of consciousness until the cancer finally did me in—hopefully while I was sound asleep. I was never one of these people that believed in that chronic depression bullshit, never bought into the psychobabble and self-help books and feel-good pop psychology of people like Dr. Phil and Oprah. Michelle thought that Dr. Phil and Oprah both walked on water and shit gold bricks. I thought they were both assholes. I mean, if the two of them were so goddamn good at dispensing advice on how to control your life, then why couldn't the fat fucks control their calorie intake? They were phonies—rich people who made their money telling others how to fix their lives, while their own lives were a fucking mess. I'd never taken Prozac, Paxil, or any of the other antidepressants that, according to the disclaimer on the commercials, had common side effects like bleeding from the eyes, fatal nose warts, and spontaneous human combustion. It was all bullshit; just mass-produced medication for phony diseases that existed simply to make the drug companies richer, and I wasn't buying into it.
Listen up. Are you or a loved one depressed? Well, now there's good news. Here's Tommy O'Brien's plan to cure yourself: Shut the fuck up. That's all. Shut the fuck up and get on with it. Life's a bitch, then you die. It's that simple. Depressed? Shut up and get the fuck over it. Move to fucking Calcutta or Baghdad or Compton, then come back and tell me how bad you have it.
But I was depressed. Depressed and angry. It wasn't fair. Why should I have to die now? Why did it have to be me? I was too frigging young for this to be happening. But it was, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. Part of me wanted to lie there in bed and another part of me wanted to run through the streets, screaming “Fuck you!” to God and the tobacco companies and the foundry and my parents and the government and our president and the rich and this fucking town and everybody in it. I wanted to rage, to let my anger spill out of me. I wanted to smash things, break stuff—just destroy everything in sight and burn it all to the fucking ground and laugh amidst the ashes.
But I didn't do any of that. I didn't run into the street. Instead, as the nausea hit, I made the now-familiar morning run from the bed to the bathroom, and I puked. Then I flicked on the exhaust fan so Michelle wouldn't hear me, puked some more, showered, and puked again. I brushed my teeth and winced. My gums were tender and they started to bleed. The mouthwash burned them too, and I squinted my eyes shut and rode out the pain. After rinsing my mouth and getting dressed, I lit up another smoke and walked down the hall to join my family.
T. J. was sprawled out on the floor again, still wearing his pajamas and picking at a half-soggy bowl of Cheerios with blueberries floating in milk. His eyes never left the screen. It looked like he'd gotten some sun during our visit to the park the day before. Michelle did too. She cracked two eggs and dropped them into the pan. They'd gotten some sun, but I was still as pale as the egg whites.
“Morning, babe.” She pecked my cheek as I leaned into her from behind, smelling her hair and giving her a squeeze.
“Good morning.” I did my best to sound happy and awake. “How'd you sleep?”
“Like a rock,” she purred. “Especially after—well, you know. How about you?”
“Okay, I guess.” I poured myself a mug of coffee. “You guys are up early.”
“Yeah, I promised my mom that we'd go to church with her. She's been bitching that T. J. and I haven't been there with her in a few weeks. I think she just likes to show us off to her friends. You want to go along with us?”
I shook my head. “I don't think so, hon. Church gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“You sure it's not just that you don't want to spend time with your mother-in-law?”
“Well yeah, now that you mention it. Your mom gives me the heebie-jeebies too.”
“Tommy!”
Laughing, she smacked my ass with the greasy spatula. I yelped in surprise.
“You take that back, Mr. O'Brien.”
“What are the heebie-jeebies?” T. J. piped up.
“It's a present your grandma gave me,” I told him, and Michelle turned away, snickering. “What ya' watching, little man?”
“Justice League Adventures. It's my new favorite cartoon on Sundays.”
“And who's that big green guy? The Hulk?”
“No, Daddy, that's Jonn Jonzz, the Martian Manhunter. He's getting ready to fight Vandal Savage but . . .”
I'd known that, of course. I'd been raised on Marvel and DC. Successfully getting him off the subject of his grandmother's effect on me, I tuned him out, nodding in the appropriate places and expressing dismay over the character's plight when required. All the while, I searched for the aspirin. I found them, washed four down with my coffee, and resurfaced for air just as T. J. was finishing up.
“. . . can outrace Superman because Flash is the fastest man on Earth!”
“Cool!” I responded.
Michelle was staring at me. The bacon was draining on a paper-towel-covere
d plate. The eggs looked just about done.
“What?” I asked.
“How many aspirin did you just take?”
I shrugged.
“I don't know. Why?”
“How many?”
“Four.”
“Will you please get that prescription filled today? I mean it, Tommy. This is getting ridiculous.”
“It's Sunday, Michelle. The pharmacy ain't open on Sunday.”
“Yes it is, and you know it is too. You look like shit, Tommy. Maybe you need to get a second opinion while you're at it. Whatever you've got, it sure as hell isn't getting any better.”
That's because it's growing, I thought. Growing at an alarming rate. In fact, Michelle babe, I'm afraid it's terminal. And soon, it will be later my niggaz and peace out!
“Okay, okay.” I held up my hands in defeated surrender. “I'll go get the prescription filled today. This morning in fact.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good.” She kissed me on the cheek, gave my hand a squeeze, and flipped the eggs onto a plate. “Now come eat.”
I looked at the eggs and bacon and wanted to puke again. I felt the bile rise in my throat, burning me, but I fought the urge down and smiled.
“Looks great.” I licked my lips and sat down at the table.
I almost told her the truth then. The words were on the tip of my tongue. I swallowed them down again, and the taste was bitter.
“We've got to get ready for church,” Michelle said. “Come on, T. J., turn that thing off and go get dressed.”
“Five more minutes,” he negotiated. “It's almost over.”
“Now,” Michelle countered, “or no ice cream after church. Besides, you've seen this one already.”
“I never get to do anything . . .”
Begrudgingly, he stomped down the hall to his bedroom. Michelle followed along behind him, arguing. As soon as they were gone, I got up, dumped the food into the garbage can, covered it up with paper towels, then changed bags. By the time they were finished, I was washing the dishes and Michelle was none the wiser.
