Maybe that’s what was wrong with Ryan; maybe he was waiting for the neverness of Eddie Coolbaugh to fill him up. Petie and Rose had poured and poured their love into him, but it wasn’t ever enough. His Thanksgiving Pilgrims died, his playground courage failed him. It was as though Ryan had been born with Petie’s empty places built right in. And yet, Ryan had a father who lived with them and always had, while Carissa didn’t remember Pogo at all; and of the two children, it was Ryan who suffered Why was that? Rose’s mother used to say that the Lord moved in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform. Rose didn’t know about the wonders part. Ryan’s yawning needs, Loose’s and Eddie’s troubles learning, Petie’s life—these were not Rose’s ideas of wonders, unless the Lord had a pretty damn peculiar sense of humor. Could He? After good people like her mother spent their lives celebrating His goodness, could He really be nothing but a prankster playing with the unfortunate of His earthly congregation, who made little kids like Ryan with skins too thin and too porous to keep out fears and troubles, just to see how much they could take? Her mother had often said that the Lord never gave his chosen more than they could bear, but Rose thought that was garbage.
She snuggled deeper beside Jim Christie, fitting her curves into his contours like an interlocking puzzle. She had no answers, but tonight, for her, it was enough simply to know that she and all those she loved were safe and warm and under the shelter of some cover, no matter how inadequate.
Chapter 12
RON SCHIFFEN had a bad feeling, and he wasn’t a man generally given to bad feelings. He scraped the end of a bent paper clip across the soles of his boots and listened to Bev on the phone outside his office door. She was talking to someone in the snotty I-know-what-you’re-up-to-missy-so-don’t-think-I-don’t tone she’d begun using lately when Petie called. A moment later, the intercom buzzed. “It’s Petie for you,” she said. “Eddie Coolbaugh’s wife.”
“My God, I hate that woman,” Petie’s furious little voice came to him through the receiver. “Is she awful to everyone, or just to me?”
“Just you.” Schiff admitted.
“She makes you want to take a shower, like she’s dripped slime all over you.”
“Ooh,” said Schiff.
“Oh, screw you—”
“That would be nice.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“No, no! No. Don’t.” Schiff sat up straighter and put both soles flat on the floor. He could hear Bev outside, rattling drawers in the file cabinet nearest his office, her regular listening post.
“I have to cancel lunch,” Petie said.
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do. I’m sorry. Marge had to take Larry to the hospital this morning. I said I’d watch the office.”
“When?”
“Right now. I’m already here. Look, call me when Bev’s at lunch.”
Schiff listened to the familiar sound of Petie hanging up on him. To the dead receiver he said loudly, “I’ll let Eddie know when he gets back. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“Someone we know in Hubbard’s got heart problems,” he said once he’d hung up, for Bev’s sake.
“I’ll bet,” he heard her mutter.
There might come a time when he’d have to fire that woman.
Now he wouldn’t be seeing Petie at lunch, which he’d been looking forward to for days. He could call her when Bev went to lunch—if she went to lunch, which she probably wouldn’t do today just to gall him. He could at least hear Petie’s voice. Or he could make up some Pepsi business in Hubbard, maybe pretend to inquire about an outstanding invoice at the Quik Stop and swing by the motel on the way. Except that everyone knew his rig, and if he parked at the motel, or even at the Quik Stop, there would be talk about why he’d come to Hubbard in the middle of the day, which he never did, and without even letting Carla know. Worse, Carla herself might drive by, see his truck, go into one of her jealous rages and come busting in demanding to know what he was doing at the Sea View Motel with Petie Coolbaugh. And what was he supposed to say? That he was just talking to her, because he liked talking to her better than anything else he could think of, even knowing she would never sleep with him? Who would believe that? Hell, even he wouldn’t believe that. And it would make no difference at all that it was the truth.
So he bided his time until fat Bev finally went to lunch at almost one o’clock, when the other office staff would be coming back. By his reckoning, he had somewhere between five and ten minutes of listener-free time. He dialed the Sea View’s number. Petie answered on the second ring.
“Sea View Motel,” she said.
Schiff put on a cornball voice. “Is this the Sea View Motel?”
“I just said it was.”
“Well, do you have a honeymoon suite with a Jacuzzi?”
“No. Check with the Whaler, or the Spindrift. Do you want their phone numbers?”
“Nah,” Schiff said, dropping the act. “I’d only want one if you were part of the package.”
“Give me a break,” Petie said.
“Does that mean no?”
“Don’t fuck with me today, Schiff. Not today.”
“You’re no fun. How’s Larry?”
“I haven’t heard from Marge yet. He looked awful, though, when I got here. He was all sweaty and gray—you know the look people have when they’re real sick. It shouldn’t happen to them. Larry’s a good man.”
“Bad things happen to good people too, you know,” Schiff said.
“Well, they shouldn’t.”
“I don’t know what world you grew up in,” Schiff said, “but where I come from bad things happened to good people all the time.”
“Then we must come from the same place.”
“You want me to bring you something to eat?”
“Why? Where are you? Are you here?”
“No.”
“So what if I said yes?”
“I’d bring you something to eat.”
“Really?”
“Yep,” Schiff said, realizing it was true.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day,” Petie said.
“Must not be a very good day.”
“No, not very.”
A car door slammed in the Pepsi distributorship parking lot. “Sorry, princess,” Schiff said. “Gotta go.”
“Okay.”
“Be good.” he said.
“What’s the point?”
“Ooh,” he said, but only after he was sure Petie had hung up.
· · ·
SHE STOOD by the plate-glass window in the motel office for a long time, watching the squalls stalk across the bay. The last time she’d been alone in this office was when Ryan was an infant lying in a bin beneath the counter. Nothing had changed since then except the year on the Craftsman tool wall calendar. Like a time machine, the toothpick cup and cut-glass candy dish, the green sculpted carpeting and wood-look paneling hurtled her backwards at the speed of thought. If it were possible would she choose to hear Ryan’s baby wail one more time? Maybe so, maybe just for a few minutes. She had loved the smell of his skin, the feeble flailing of arms and legs as frail as chicken wings. He had been—still was—a difficult child, but secretly dearer to her by far than big-headed Loose who, let’s face it, looked too damn much like Old Man. Ryan was everything lost and afraid that Petie had ever felt but fought, as though her troubles had come back to fall, redoubled, on Ryan’s fragile head.
And what of fear, really? Had she ever been more afraid of anything than she was of the all-seeing eyes of that baby, whose booties were smaller than oysters, whose dependence on her goodness was absolute? Her abiding terror for years was of fucking up, of boiling the boy, of pushing him into oncoming traffic, of hurting him in any of a hundred other ways. It was her legacy, her inheritance, her hand-me-down junk from generations of Old Man’s people, and Paula’s, too. Even now she marveled that so many years had gone by and for all his fragility Ryan had come to no harm at her hand.
There in the lobby of the Sea View Motel, the ghosts of Paula Tyler, of Petie’s terrible grandfather, of Old Man himself swarmed overhead with the beating of soiled wings.
AFTER THEIR eviction Petie and Old Man lived in the little humpbacked trailer in the woods off and on for four years. The Adult and Family Services people had contacted Old Man once, a couple of years after Paula died, about a report that he was providing substandard living conditions for Petie. Old Man had sidestepped it all somehow, which was okay with Petie. She was on her own most of the time by then, anyway, bringing herself up with Rose’s help. Old Man had a job sometimes as a night security guard down at the docks, and even though everyone knew he was nothing but a drunk, they gave him a flashlight and a jacket and told him to keep an eye on the boats and call if he saw something suspicious—which of course he never did, since he was the most suspicious person for miles around. Petie always knew when he came in, reeking of beer or whiskey, in the early morning. She’d pretend to be asleep while he peed out the trailer door, stumbled into his rickety cot and passed out cold.
Then came a night when he was less drunk than usual, but more addled. He shook her by the shoulder. She hit him hard in the solar plexus with her elbow, lit the Coleman lantern and sat up, shivering. He was crouching on the trailer floor holding his head in his hands and making peculiar noises, not quite human. His mouth hung slack on one side, and he kept saying something she couldn’t understand. Then, with prodigious effort, he managed the last coherent word Petie would hear him utter for five months. Scared. It was probably the only thing that saved him.
Petie put a blanket over his shoulders and told him to stay where he was until she brought help. He kept his eyes on her face like a lifeline. She could hear him keening as she got into his truck. It was the awful sound of a bad man reckoning with his own wrongdoing and coming smack up against the knowledge that he could rightfully claim no slack and no mercy, not from God and certainly not from her.
Petie had been driving down to the docks and the Wayside for years to haul Old Man home. She took the wheel now with a deadly calm, pulling into the Coast Guard station at the mouth of the bay.
“My father is sick,” she told the duty officer. “We need help.”
“Did you call 911?”
“We don’t have a phone.”
“I can call for you.”
“We don’t live in a house.”
The duty officer slung on his coat. “Where is he now?”
Petie led the officer back to the trailer. Old Man was lying on the floor, uncovered and unconscious, lying in a small pool of vomit. The Coast Guard officer called for an ambulance and monitored Old Man’s breathing and pulse while they waited. Petie rode with the team to the hospital over in Sawyer. Her talk with the emergency room people was blunt.
“He’s a drunk,” she told them. “He’s always been a drunk. I don’t know what you’ll be doing to him, but you’re going to have to dry him out first.”
She saw the nurses look at each other. One of them, a tired man with a gentle face, said, “We were told about the, ah, conditions your father was found in. Do just the two of you live there?”
“Yes.”
“What about your mother, where is she?”
“Dunno. She’s dead, though.”
Four eyebrows went up; two mouths turned down.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
The male nurse noticed two linear wounds on Old Man’s arm and shoulder, each a couple of inches long, still healing, apparently deep but very clean, almost surgical.
“What’s this?” he asked Petie.
“He must have cut himself,” she said blandly.
“Oh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sweetie, let’s be honest,” the nurse said. “Those aren’t ordinary cuts, and they weren’t self-inflicted.”
“Really?”
“Really. So you don’t know anything about them?”
Petie waited a beat, looking the nurse straight in the eye. “Sometimes he spends time with the wrong people.”
“Ah. Well, they appear to be healing,” said the nurse, still frowning at Petie. “Do you have any older brothers or sisters, an aunt or an uncle maybe, someone you can stay with?”
“No.”
“How old are you, honey?” the second nurse, a woman, asked her.
“I just turned fourteen.”
More side glances all around. Finally the male nurse said, “I think the hospital is obligated to contact Adult and Family Services about you. You can’t go back there alone.”
Petie was surprised. “Why? It’ll be better than living there with him.”
“How long have the two of you been living there? The ambulance people made it sound very, ah, primitive.”
“Four years, two months, three weeks and a day. Except once for two months and once for three, when he fooled somebody into renting us some piece-of-shit house.”
More frowns. An administrator was called in, a whispered consultation held behind a curtain, and the woman finally approached Petie. She cleared her throat and said, “Patricia, I understand that you have no friends or family in the area whom we can call for you. And we can’t let you go back to your—well, back. From what the doctor has told me, your father has had a rather serious stroke. He will have to stay here for at least several days while we stabilize and evaluate him, and then he’ll have to go through some sort of rehabilitation. There’s no way of telling right now how long that might take, but it could be months.”
Petie nodded.
“Look, I’ll be frank,” said the administrator. “We have a bit of a dilemma here. Legally we can’t let you leave without knowing you’re in the care of a responsible adult. If you don’t have any friends or family members you can stay with, we’ll have to call Adult and Family Services to request a foster home for you.”
“I’m not going to a foster home.”
The male nurse shook his head. “Then give them an alternative, kiddo. They can’t just let you go. You know that.”
“Give me a few minutes,” she asked the administrator, who frowned but agreed.
“I’m trusting you not to leave here, Patricia, without our permission. If you run, we can’t help you.”
Petie thought hard. Rose’s mother wouldn’t take her in, she knew, and if she called anyway she’d only get Rose in trouble. But there was no way in hell she was going to some snake-pit foster home. She approached the administrator. “Do you have a phone book?”
“A local one?”
Petie nodded.
“Of course,” the hospital administrator said, leading Petie down a short hall to her office and taking a phone book from a shelf above her desk.
Petie drew a deep breath. “Look in the C’s,” she said. “Look for Coolbaugh. Eula Coolbaugh.”
WITH AN effort Petie tore herself away from the window and the quicksand of her memory. She dialed the Pepsi distributorship. When Bev put her through, she said, “Schiff, look. I need you to do something for me.”
“Shoot.”
“My skin is crawling. Will you call the hospital and ask about Larry? I have a bad feeling.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve had one all day.”
Petie hung up and then reconnected, this time calling Rose. She explained the situation and asked Rose to pick up Ryan and Loose and take them home with her. The minute she hung up the phone rang again.
“Hi,” Schiff said. “He’s not doing well. He had a torn aorta. They were afraid he wouldn’t make it to Portland, so they operated on him here. He came out an hour ago.”
“Did you talk to Marge?”
“Yeah, for just a minute.” Schiff cleared his throat. “Look, princess, there’s a good chance he won’t make it. He probably had a stroke on the table, and now he’s going into renal failure. His system’s just not up to this.”
The line was silent.
“Petie?” Schiff said.
“Yeah. I should call their ki
ds.”
“Already done. They’ll get here as soon as they can.”
“You called them?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Marge couldn’t. Look, it’s the middle of winter, no one’s going to check in. Switch on the NO VACANCY sign and get out of there.”
“Yeah. I’ll come over and sit with Marge until her kids get here. Will you let Eddie know what’s going on? Rose is going to pick up the boys and keep them until he gets home.”
“No problem.” Schiff could hear in her voice that she was a million miles away. “Hey, Petie,” he said.
“What?”
“Drive carefully.”
PETIE CLICKED on the NO VACANCY sign, jumped in her car and headed for Sawyer Samaritan Hospital. Larry and Marge. There was never just Larry or just Marge; like salt and pepper shakers, or egg white and yolk, they were a matched pair, a nested set, a unit indivisible. Petie couldn’t imagine one of them without the other. They had brought up three kids, gone to church every Sunday for forty-five years, lain in bed side by side through head colds and stomach flu and pregnancy. They had chosen sheets and shopped for groceries and buried parents and decorated Christmas trees together. They were aging and dumpy and jug-eared and failing in a dozen small ways and they still looked at each other like they were all by themselves in a fairy tale. When walking any distance, they always held hands. Maybe Jim Christie held Rose’s hand sometimes. Eddie Coolbaugh and Petie never did, never had. But then, they hadn’t started that way. Petie couldn’t even remember when it had occurred to her that she was in love with Eddie.
She pulled into the hospital parking lot. To her surprise, Schiff’s truck was also just pulling in. “I gave Eddie the rest of the day off,” Schiff said in greeting. “Did you pass him on the headland?”
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