Deathwatch - Final

by Lisa Mannetti

  I held the glass so she could sip at the straw and drink again.

  “Don’t wait, Stuart. If she gets too strong….I believe it was her plan all along, a way to get—not just out of the grave—but out abroad into the world. Think of it, the girls going out into public for the first time, why, if she gets enough of a hold on em, she’d sail right out the front door with which ever one was carrying her at the moment.” Ruth closed her lids. Looking at the right one was like seeing a paper shade sucked half way through a broken window by a draught of wind: The wrinkled flesh sank, partly, into the empty space.

  “Ruth, Ruth,” I said, lightly squeezing the sensitive hand I took in mine, “but I’m nothing more than a hired man.” I dropped her fingers, raked my hair. “Same as you and Gabriel. Do you think Saunders will listen to me? All he has to do is utter the word ‘expense,’ and I haven’t a defense left in the world. How can I tell a man what he can afford or not?”

  She didn’t answer, but her face took on a hard look. I saw her hand clench at her side into a tight fist as if she’d instantly made up her mind to say something she didn’t really want to—not at all.

  “You know good as me why they should go away to school.”

  She knows about Abby, I thought, feeling my jaw muscles knot.

  “I always thought I’d be here to look after my girls.” She swallowed hard, and I saw what was left of the corded tendons in her throat tense. “Even if I loved Abby and Ellie—and I did—I had to learn to love them in a different way.” She would not look at me, not even so much as to let her good eye wash over my chin. “It was a lesson. They were my penance.” She turned her head, gazed blankly at the far wall. “Now, they’re yours.”

  I felt her hand groping for mine.

  “Lord, Lord,” she whispered and squeezed my knuckles white.

  - 15 -

  I only saw Regina twice that long summer. And I believe now, Ruth—even during the time she was bedridden—held her back in some way. Or perhaps she was subdued by my sudden mood swing away from lust toward innocence. However it was, that summer—with its days of heat and blossoming and freedom—was in so many ways Abby’s first. I saw her pleasure in simple things—catching fireflies, stretching her hand to snatch the highest fat blooming pink rose from the wooden arbor, inveigling me to play statue tag by moonlight—and they brought a delicious tropic heat that stole the agonizing winter from my heart.

  “It’s hot—even for night,” I said. It was August, we were on the porch, a gibbous moon skimmed the treetops.

  “I can do a cartwheel,” Abby announced. She let go of the crank on the ice cream pail she’d been turning. Her face was flushed with exercise; in the glow from the houselamps I saw the beads of perspiration glimmering on her upper lip. She skipped off the porch, batting absently at a mossy hanging pot filled with wilting petunias.

  “You’re supposed to be making ice cream,” I said, pointing at the ‘freezer.’

  “Strawberry.” Her pink tongue skated across the line of her lips. “Yum.”

  “And wasn’t it your idea to have an ice cream supper?”

  She’d read about them in the newspaper, boys and girls sitting at the long trestle tables under the trees at the Methodist Church or in Deer Gate meadow. Wanted to have one—with lemonade, and the best tablecloth, all of us dressed up—sitting in the yard. I couldn’t make her understand it was called a ‘supper,’ but it was really a kind of social where desserts were served; you were supposed to eat something—some kind of dinner at home—first. It was hot, none of us wanted to cook, and ice cream for supper seized her mind. I’d given in, of course.

  “You crank, it’s nearly solid and hard to turn,” Abby said.

  I nodded, adding more sugar, dumping in more of the plump red fruit.

  “You’re not watching my star turn,” she said, putting her hands against the crisp, summer stunned grass and churning her legs over her shoulders. Her dress—white muslin with a blue satin sash—belled upside down over her torso. There was a twinkle of pantalettes, the white toes of her stockings. I turned away to crank the ice cream freezer.

  “Pantalettes are hot,” she said, now sitting cross-legged in the grass. “Can I take off my stockings?” She didn’t wait for my answer, but began tugging at the sweat damp silk.

  “You’re spoiling that child,” Ruth whispered at me from the shadows. She was sitting deep inside the cushions of a heavy wicker chair. Gabriel had carried her outside. She was stick thin, a folding tripod of a woman beneath her wraps.

  Before I could answer, we heard the faint squeak of wheels: Ellie’s chair moving over the threshold, out onto the porch boards. Like her sister, she was wearing white, too.

  “Help me, Stuart,” Abby called, skittering up the steps. “I want to get Ellie onto the lawn.” She began to maneuver the handles on the back of Ellie’s chair. I steered and lifted it down the broad shallow stairs, while Abby yapped and ran around me like a puppy.

  She began pushing her sister in circles on the dry grass. “It’s almost ready,” she announced heading for a circular moonlit table set with big clear goblets, folded napkins, spoons; then: “Is it ready yet, Stuart?”

  “Nearly.”

  “Ice cream. Cartwheels. Best white dresses,” Ruth shook her head. “Even you—in a linen suit.”

  “She’s had so little—I don’t consider this an indulgence at all,” I said, waving my hand over the freezer. The girls were having a race now; Ellie pumping the chair wheels hard, Abby hopping on one foot to make it fair.

  “That child is in love with you,” Ruth said. Her face was swathed in a veil of white gauze. I saw it sway lightly from the puff of air when she spoke.

  I’m looking at a ghost, I thought.

  “What’s the age of consent in the South, Stuart?” Ruth said. I heard one sharp creak of the rockers, the soft pat of her toes.

  “Twelve or thirteen, maybe.” My lips tightened in a narrow line, I kept my eyes on the hand turning the ice cream freezer. I wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t really know, it wasn’t—isn’t—a thing my family held with.”

  “Ever had a girlfriend?” she asked.

  I gasped. “Ruth, please—” I begged.

  I heard the rocker moving against the boards again. I saw her hands lifting the crown of her veil—as though she meant to remind me of her dreadful staring face. “People with nothing are relentless,” she said. “Answer me.”

  “It’s why I drank.” I swallowed uneasily. “Why I started drinking and kept on with it. The first Christmas I came home from college we were both seventeen. We got engaged. It was fine between us all that month. Then I got back to school—it wasn’t other girls—there weren’t any in my class. Well one,” I laughed. “But she had a mustache and could lift a hundred pound sack of grain one-handed over her head.” I felt Ruth’s eyes on me, pushing me deeper inside the old memory. “Livvy—Olivia, that is, who was my fiancée, wrote me every day. You know, the kind of gushing letters….” I suddenly sat on the porch rail, staring at my hands. “Letters about how it was all going to be when we got married. Even,” I breathed, “even what kind of furniture we’d have. Our babies she said—they’d have her thick blonde hair and my blue grey eyes.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “It’s just the kind of thing a girl spins out in her mind. Scared the hell out of you, I bet.” The rocker snapped forward.

  “I felt like there was a chain around my throat.” I laced my fingers together. “The more she wrote, the worse it got, the worse I felt. At the end there—just before I wrote her—she was sending sometimes two letters a day. All that love and good will and sweetness—it pulled on me. The nicer she was the more obligated I felt, and I didn’t want to write her more than once a week maybe, or have her write so much. But she did.” I paused, drawing my cigarettes from the flap of my white linen jacket. “I didn’t answer for a long time. The mail was like a drift of white in my letterbox. My roommate used to joke me about it. ‘Must be a relief to see a b
ill from Klegg’s Department Store or The Blue Angel Cafe,’ he’d laugh handing me the pile.”

  “Finally you wrote and told her,” Ruth prompted.

  “I didn’t want to be engaged anymore—didn’t think I wanted to get married. Not when I finished medical school, maybe not ever.” I lit the cigarette; the air was so still it stayed in a thick cloud around my head, and the thought crossed my mind, that Ruth and I were alike: our faces shrouded by the mix of shadow and white.

  “How’d she do it,” Ruth said.

  “Livvy—she jumped from the Tide Basin bridge. Drowned.”

  “Was your letter in her pocket?”

  I nodded, sucking in the smoke, feeling half-drowned, myself. “Everyone knew,” I whispered. The flush of guilt and shame washed over me all over again. There’s no more terrible feeling in the world, really.

  “You drank to kill the guilt,” Ruth said. “And I guess, like Andrew, you found out pretty quick it doesn’t work.”

  Abby’s high laughter bounced toward us from the garden. I heard the thin scratch of gravel: the wheel chair on the paths, her footsteps. We could hear the girls moving toward us.

  Ruth leaned forward now, quickening her speech, lowering her soft voice even more. I had to strain to hear her. “Did you know that when Regina was pregnant with the girls, she had bad trouble with her heart—the beats, too fast.”

  “Palpitations,” I said.

  “Just so. Andrew gave her some kind of drug—not once, but every day to slow it—”

  “Barbiturates,” I guessed.

  “When the girls were born like they were, they blamed each other. This house was hell a long, long time.”

  “Of course it’s ready,” Abby’s voice came to us from the side yard. She stopped pushing her sister’s chair briefly, and we could hear her take a long deep breath. “Phew, hard work, I think you’ve gotten fatter, Ellie,” she laughed.

  “You want to watch out Stuart,” Ruth whispered. “Your guilt helps conjure Regina. Needing her to take the sting out of being with a child.”

  “No more, Ruth,” I warned. They were maybe forty feet away—the length of the porch. I could see the white shapes of their dresses just beyond the shrubbery.

  “She loves you, too.” Ruth ignored me, bearing down on the too.

  “Regina?” my voice was a strangled caw.

  “Ellie,” she answered. “Don’t let the same lesson get by you again.” She tugged my sleeve, forcing me to look at the matte of veiling. “Some people—the ones that are weak and too wounded—they aren’t strong enough to live with love that’s not returned.”

  Abby bounded up the steps. “Let’s just eat it right here.” She waved a set of spoons she’d snatched from the table. “Right out of the freezer, Stuart.”

  I went to get Ellie, heard Ruth telling Abby to hold on and wait for her sister. “Go call your father, Ab,” Ruth said.

  Andrew staggered drunkenly onto the porch, moving haphazardly through the long shadows; he was collarless, in his shirt sleeves.

  There was a metallic thump.

  We all jumped at the noise.

  “Shitspells,” he cried. The ice cream freezer clunked and rattled, rolling onto its side under his feet. He skidded unsteadily in a puddle of water.

  I heard Abby’s sharp intake of breath.

  “It’s just ice cream,” he announced soddenly. “For Christ’s sake, shut up.”

  I thought he might kick at the freezer, but he turned and went back inside, weaving away from us, the wooden screen door banging shut.

  I moved quickly in the silence, righting the can, moving it out of the wet, rapidly turning the crank handle a few times, saying nonsense things like, “It’s okay, we’ll have it now, it’s done for sure.”

  Then, we were in a small cluster—me and the girls—Ellie leaning over the edge of the chair. “Readysetgo,” Abby said, the enthusiasm gone from her voice.

  Three long handled spoons dove into the round tin, salty water sloshed at the edge.

  “The pail leaked, the pail leaked when he kicked it,” Abby wailed.

  Ellie’s spoon fell from her hand at the taste, a red stain bloomed, ran from her dress front to her lap. She began to cry. “Aren’t we ever going to have good times like other girls?”

  Salt bitter; I spat over the side of the porch, trying to clear the taste from my own mouth, thinking it was no worse than the taste of Ruth’s words.

  “Ruined,” Abby mourned, “every time I plan something, it ends up ruined.” She hurled the spoon, it clattered across the porch.

  “Plans are like that sometimes, honey,” Ruth said.

  Abby ran to me, her head burrowing against my chest. I knew she wanted no more than a moment’s comfort. I held her close.

  I watched Ruth reach out to dab Ellie’s soiled dress gently with a handkerchief. She folded the cloth in a pad and touched the clean part to Ellie’s cheeks, blotting tears.

  Ellie’s sad eyes followed me. I read in them the thought that she loved me but it didn’t matter, saw the knowledge she was not chosen, never would be.

  I couldn’t look at her. I soothed Abby, shushed her, knowing Ellie was aware the tears silvering my own eyes, stinging my throat were all for the summer night gone sour and her twin.

  Shortly after that, Regina came among us.

  - 16 -

  “I could send you to New York, Ruth. There’s good surgeons there,” I said. It was just past lunch and we were sitting side by side in the library; on the low table in front of us was a half empty coffee pot, the crusts from two sandwiches, an open surgical text. The photographs were obscure and cloudy, but the illustrations were crystal clear.

  “Will the New York specialists fix me up so that people will look me face on?” She stared at me, and I caught the wet glimmer of her good eye under her veil.

  “No,” I shook my head. “But they can contour the shape of your jaw….” There was no real cosmetic skin repair in those days; we just grafted what we could from healthy tissue to cover injuries and wounds. “Give you areas of scar-free flesh….”

  “So, instead of looking like the rusty broken-through bottom of a blackened skillet—”

  “Ruth!” She was right, but it didn’t stop my shock.

  “I’ll be like something the tinker left too long on the fire and then tried to mend. Lots of copper-red seams and lumps.”

  “They have more experience with this kind of thing than Andrew—”

  One of her hands had contracted, and she laid its shrunken monkey foot shape on my arm. “I don’t want Andrew to do it—I want you to.” She paused. “You say the infection’s not healing the way it ought, that taking good skin,” she touched her left buttock briefly, “will stop the endless oozing and weeping and dressings with picric acid.” Her lips stretched in a grimace I knew was a grin. “Stuart,” she leaned in confidentially patting my knee, “you can’t make me look any worse.”

  She was wrong of course; and we both knew it. But I thought it brave of her to say so.

  ***

  It was while Ruth was under the anesthesia—the first time for skin graft, the second to remove the mortified flesh from the failed surgery—that Regina appeared.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning, and I’d just excised the first of the long rectangular strips I planned to use to cover Ruth’s seared face and throat with healthy tissue. Andrew was working with me—I understood she wanted me to do the surgery—but I needed assistance.

  “I keep hearing the word flay banging away inside my head,” he said, looking at me over the brim of his mask. His hands were unsteady, he looked hungover, but I thought he was sober.

  “Yes, it’s like that,” I sighed looking at the bloody furrow I’d just carved in Ruth’s buttocks. I lifted the skin strip with the point of my surgical knife, and Andrew laid it onto a shallow metal tray filled with saline solution. I started cutting the next section, my mind focused on the details of the delicate operation; Andrew hissed, and I lo
oked up, squinting into the comparative shadows of the room. Regina stood just inside the threshold, the door flapping wide behind her.

  “Here! What are you doing!” Andrew shouted.

  I’d stopped, the scalpel hung in mid-air, a rill of unchecked blood welled up in the pit of the wound then spilled over the white slope of Ruth’s left hip.

  Was he seeing her? Shouting at me?

  “Doing here,” I echoed in a strangled voice.

  “Taking care of unfinished business—same as you,” Regina said.

  I felt my heart clench in a painful spasm, the blood ringing in my ears.

  “By the way, Andrew doesn’t see me. I won’t let him—not yet, anyway,” she said. She moved towards the table, hands gripping the padded edge, peering down. “He’s only reminded of me—a fleeting thought, a psychic whiff of….violets….”

  She trailed off, but I thought she might be about to say which one of the girls she was manipulating.

  “Ruth,” she tsked under her breath. “Such an ugly state to be in.” Her index finger rode the ruined mound of flesh, and she sucked at the reddened tip.

  “Stuart, she’s bleeding!” Andrew shrieked at me.

  I started working fast, but my fingers were slipping in the gore. Nerve, keep your nerve, I shouted at myself inwardly, forcing the hemostat against the spurting vein. Acrid yellow sweat dripped from my temples, stung my eyes.

  “Clamp it, Andrew! Clamp it, I can’t see!” I turned away from the table, quickly mopping my brow with a sterile swab.

  “How much did you drink last night?” she asked, coming close and sniffing the air around me. “Your eyes are bloodshot. You’re not more than a binge away from becoming Andrew,” she said, grinning up at me.

  “I won’t let you destroy me,” I hissed under my breath.

  “I won’t have to,” she said. “It’s inside you, you’ll do it to yourself.” She laughed lightly, then turned shimmying toward the hallway, beige high heeled boots clicking on the bare floor, a tuft of frilled petticoat bubbling from the olive line of her hem like white froth foaming on the sea. She turned, and I was suddenly aware of her pale arms, the swell of her breasts at the wide neckline.