“People die in that house,” the old woman called after him from the shadows. He realized with an odd pang that had never seen her face clearly. Her cracked, warbling voice was eerily strained, as if she simultaneously wanted to yell out a warning and was afraid to raise her voice above a raspy whisper.
“They die.”
He glanced over his shoulder once more, just in time to catch a muted shimmer of yellow polyester pants as she disappeared around the corner of her garage.
At the car, he turned to face the realtor—a pretty young thing named Rebecca Cantwell, who was pretty enough and young enough that she should have been at home caring for her man and her little ones, not strutting around showing houses to old farts like himself. Not for the first time, Abraham Morris admitted to himself that he was indeed getting old. Everything he believed in and valued and knew to be inviolable and unalterable was shifting like sands beneath his feet. And lately the tide had been going out faster and faster. The reality of mortality struck him at that moment, as it had so often and so unexpectedly in the four years since Matty had died—struck him full in the face and for a moment he was blinded and made breathless by its power.
“Mr. Morris?” Rebecca asked, “are you all right? Do you want to sit down?”
“No, I’m fine.” He paused for a second to catch his breath. “Is it true?”
“Is what true, Mr. Morris?”
He was mildly amused to notice that she was lying to him...well, to be generous, not precisely lying, since she hadn’t exactly answered him, but she sure as hell didn’t want to talk about something.
Toying with him was perhaps closer. As if he wouldn’t notice when she turned the snow-job machine on full tilt.
“What that old woman was talking about,” he said patiently. Old indeed. Who knew, he might even have a decade or two on her. He couldn’t really tell, not with her hidden in the shadows like that.
“About this being a ‘death-house.’”
There was a long silence as Rebecca Cantwell rummaged through her purse for her car keys. Abe thought the movement curiously stereotyped, verging on deliberate. She’s stalling, he thought. Why?
The young realtor glanced up and saw him staring at her. She flushed embarrassedly and jerked the key ring out of the depths of her large bag.
“Uh...well,” she said, slipping the key into the door lock, “Uh, to be frank, Mr. Morris....”
Uh-oh, Abe thought. Here it comes. Beware realtors when they decide to “be frank.” He waited, not giving the woman any clues as to how she should proceed to save a once-sure sale that might suddenly be in jeopardy.
“There was...uh...some...unpleasantness here a couple of months ago.”
He opened his car door and slid in. He waited patiently while Rebecca fumbled with ignition and finally started the car. His glance was firm and his face unexpressive.
“The previous owner...a businessman here in the valley, respected, really an exceptional man. Uh, his stepson went...well, Mr. Morris, to be blunt, the kid flipped out completely.”
Behind the unmoving muscles of his face, Abe grinned at Cantwell’s lapse into slang.
Lost his marbles, his generation might have said, or wigged out, blew his gaskets. But the result would be the same, whatever you called it.
“The boy killed his stepfather?” he asked gently. “In the house?”
Cantwell looked momentarily surprised. “Yes, in the master bedroom. And his mother afterward. With a knife.”
Abe winced. That was a bit more than he had anticipated. “How old was he?”
“Fourteen or fifteen, I don’t remember exactly.” Her face was now pale, as if she were the senior citizen who needed to sit down and catch her breath before she fainted.
“What happened to him?”
“He’s dead, too.”
Abraham raised one eye brow quizzically.
“Not here,” the woman rushed to add. “Not in the house. He tried to get away in his stepfather’s car. It went off the road a couple of miles from here. There was…an explosion.”
Abe nodded. Then he turned slightly away from where the woman leaned against the door of her powder-blue Cadillac Eldorado, and he studied the house again. Not that the deaths made any difference, of course, not to him at least. It was a shame that things like that happened. The boy was probably on drugs or drunk and just couldn’t handle life. He had heard of such things before, although never quite this tragically. Three people dead. He shifted his position.
The house.
In spite of what might have happened inside a couple of months ago, the house was still a good buy. The inside had been completely renovated: new carpeting in every room; new hardwood doors hung in each room; new paint throughout.
He squinted against the bright sunlight. The mildly angled roof sloped down from each side of a central gable, giving the house a deceptive profile. It looked smaller, closer to the ground than it really was; the fourteen-foot, open-beam cathedral ceiling in the living room had surprised him, as had the fact there were five bedrooms. The place just didn’t look that large. From where he sat, he could see the crisp lines of white-rocked shingles. The roof was in good shape, he decided, and the exterior had recently been repainted as well.
The plants close to the house itself were all young—obviously newly planted. They weren’t doing all that well, but a spot of good fertilizer would fix that. Most of them would probably come out, anyway, since Abraham Morris had very definite ideas as to what was appropriate and not appropriate for front yards and flower beds. Roses, irises, gladiolus, geraniums—that sort of thing. Old fashioned cut flowers like Mattie so much enjoyed. He glanced disapprovingly at the straggling junipers and juvenile jade plants that promised nothing but unending, unchanging, year-round green.
Boring.
He noted with somewhat greater pleasure that the lawn had been re-sodded as well. Vaguely, Abraham wondered what the house must have looked like at the time of the...incident. From all he could see, everything replaceable had been replaced.
But, taken all in all, the place was obviously a good buy. It was perhaps a bit larger than he had originally intended, but that would mean all the more room for the two most important things in his life now that Mattie was gone: his grandchildren, and his collections—definitely in that order. And there was a lot of room for gardening, both in the front and in the deep back yard.
All in all, he repeated, a good buy.
Sold, he said to himself.
He turned to face the realtor, catching the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes—uncertainty coupled with a hungry eagerness to make a sale that he couldn’t miss.
“Well let’s get going,” he said brusquely. “Don’t you have anything else,” he added, knowing full well that any further showings would serve primarily to give him leverage when it came time to bargain for the house on Oleander.
The engine roared as the car backed out of the driveway and negotiated the turn. As they pulled away Abe glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a final glimpse of the house, his house, as he had already started to think of it.
Now for the fun part, he mused silently. Just how hard will this realtor lady bargain to get rid of a death house?
It was going to be entertaining finding out. And then his new life would begin. A new life in a new place, with a new house. He figured he had ten or fifteen good years in front of him.
Even though escrow on the house closed a little over a month and a half later and he moved in two weeks after that, he never saw the woman in yellow again.
2.
Abraham Morris had developed diabetes just after his forty-ninth birthday.
“A mild case,” Dr. Sideko said as unconcernedly as if he had been diagnosing a hangnail or an ingrown body hair. “Should be no trouble at all controlling it.”
For the next eighteen years, Abe Morris religiously followed the prescription for Diabinese. And for eighteen years, the medication did in fact control the disease.
>
When Abe turned sixty-seven, however, the new doctor in California recommended that he change medication.
“The diabetes has worsened slightly,” he said, his youthful face twisted into what he no doubt considered an appropriate expression of concern for the health of his old-timer patient. Abe snorted to himself and caught himself thinking whippersnapper, a word his grandfather had always applied to wet-behind-the-ears doctors that thought they knew everything. “We could go to insulin,” the kid continued.
We, Abraham thought contemptuously. Yeah, right. You and me shooting up together, sliding needles into our thighs on cue. Junkies in tandem. Junkies on parade. We. Right.
“But I think this will work just as well.” The kid-disguised-as-a-doctor handed Abe a prescription for a different drug, Glucotrol, that would take care of everything. He promised.
3.
Abe knew that blood disease ran in his family. His father and grandfather had died in their early sixties from heart attacks. He hadn’t really figured on being immune to it, but when his first attack came in the spring of 2003, it was more of a shock than he cared to admit.
It was a relatively mild attack. Within six months, the doctor assured him, he would be right back to normal. With care—proper diet, moderate exercise—no one would even know he had suffered the attack.
But still, Abe knew.
4.
The Parkinson’s Disease developed gradually and unobtrusively at first, then finally afflicted his every movement.
The still-a-kid-disguised-as-a-doctor sent him to a neurologist, who prescribed Artane.
“No problem,” Abe said. “Just what the doctor ordered.” He simpered at his own feeble joke.
5.
As the years slowly rumbled past, the house became more of a burden than Abe had anticipated. He never quite got around to many of the surface repairs he had promised himself he would take care of when he first saw the house. Ruefully, he acknowledged to himself early in 2005 that he was probably going to have to sell the place. He just couldn’t take care of everything himself.
6.
“It’s Grandpa,” Elizabeth Morris called, cupping her hand over the telephone as she yelled the message across the family room to where her father was immersed in a 2,000-piece Big Ben puzzle he and Mom had been working on now for weeks with little overt signs of progress. The thing still looked like the jagged skeleton of a picture. So far they had only managed to fit the edges together, with random bits of connected pieces scattered through the center.
“Just a minute,” Jay said, beginning the complex process of extricating himself from behind the wobbly card table without disturbing any of the pieces so carefully laid out around the promised-but-not-yet-emerging representation of a crumbling European castle surrounded by unbelievable emerald forests and plastic turquoise skies.
“Hi, Grandpa,” Elizabeth said, removing her hand and speaking directly into the phone. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, sugar-plum. And how is everything there?”
“Fine. I won the spelling-bee in school today. I spelled cantankerous.” She giggled.
“That’s just great.”
For an instant, Elizabeth caught an undercurrent in Grandpa’s voice that worried her. She was about to ask again how he was feeling, when Jay finally made it across the room to the telephone. He took it from her, ruffled her hair (which he knew she hated), and spoke to his father.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Jay, how’s everything.”
“Just great. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“You’re sure. No problems?”
“Just the usual,” Abraham said, his voice coming heavily through the telephone. “I’m falling apart and no one can do a damn thing about it but other than that everything’s fine. How’s Linda and the girls?”
They continued in this vein for a few minutes, Abe catching up on events in his son’s household, then sharing the most recent news of Jay’s sister Ellen, her husband Sam, and their three kids. Pretending that Jay actually cared. Finally, though, he came to the meat of the conversation.
“Jay, how about you and the ladies coming out here for Thanksgiving this year?”
“But Dad, that would be too much trouble for you. All that work. Having us all descend on you like that. We couldn’t.”
“Now you listen to me, young man. I’m old and retired, but I can still whip up a turkey dinner like you wouldn’t believe—I had the world’s best teacher, remember? And besides”—here his voice took an edge of seriousness—“besides, you’ve had me out there so many times that I’m beginning to feel guilty. I’d really like to have my children home for the holiday this year. All my children.”
Jay thought for a moment. Dad was right, he realized suddenly. It had been, what...almost two years since Jay and his family had made the four-hour trip from Palm Springs to Tamarind Valley. It hadn’t been that long since they’d seen Abe, of course. He came out for a weekend or so at least three or four times a year. But for the last while, instead of them visiting him on holidays, they’d paid his round-trip bus fare, convincing themselves that the ride in an air conditioned bus would be more comfortable for the old man than having the four of them descending like marauding locusts. Besides, to be honest, there wasn’t really that much to do at Dad’s place.
Jay sighed, thinking of how bored his girls had been the last time they had been there—almost a week at Christmas, 2003, and both Elizabeth and Anna had nearly gone out of their minds with not having anything to do. No friends, no toys, no nothing except walking up and down the street and watching TV. Dad had been recovering from his attack, so even short sight-seeing trips had been out.
No, Jay decided, no matter what, that house would never mean as much to his kids as Jay’s own grandparents’ farmhouse had meant to him when he was that age. There they had dogs and cows and horses and pigs and chickens to watch and feed and play with, attics to explore, creepy dark corners of the cellar to dare, alfalfa fields full of was-that-a-snake! remnants of dried hay to wander. There had even been a swaying, single-board bridge over a rippling creek that threatened to spill him into the water each time he crossed. That had been a real Grandpa-house.
Grandpa Abe’s was just another tract house in an older part of a typical southern California suburban complex.
Still....
“Let me check with Linda, Dad,” Jay said. “I’ll get back to you later tonight or tomorrow. Okay?”
“Sure, but Jay...,” Abe’s voice crackled into a surge of static that startled Jay.
“What? I didn’t get that. We must have a bad connection.”
“I just said,” Abe repeated, his voice enunciating every sound carefully, “that I really want you folks to come out. It’s real important to me. Okay?”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Fine. Now let me talk to that other princess you got out there.”
“Here, Anna,” Jay said, handing the receiver down to his younger daughter. “Grandpa wants to talk to you.”
She began a murmured chatter that Jay hoped would carry across the bad connection.
He looked at his wife and mouthed his question, “What about it?”
She shrugged, her eyebrows tugging up in concern—for his father, Jay knew, not for herself. “If it means that much to him,” she whispered, “Okay.”
Jay nodded. As soon as Anna finished telling Grandpa Abe about her new goldfish, he would get back on the line and tell the old man it was a Go for Thanksgiving.
He remembered how frail his father had looked when he came out for the Fourth of July weekend. His eyes had been persistently slightly bloodshot, the lids wider open than usual. At times Abe had a faintly frantic, faintly crazed expression. He had occasional trouble speaking as well. His words sometimes slurred, and more frequently than usual his voice cracked upward into treble like an adolescent suffering through puberty in reverse. The Parkinson’s was visibly worse. His fingers and hands sho
ok so hard that at dinner the first night, he could barely feed himself. Jay noticed how translucent his father’s fingers and lips had become. The flesh seemed almost bloodless.
That weekend had seemed to help. By the time Abe caught the bus into Los Angeles on Wednesday, he looked and sounded much more like the old Abraham Morris. Jay remembered wishing that they lived closer to him, but Abe had reassured his son that he was doing fine, that everything was going well. Jay had believed him.
But now, listening to his father’s voice over the telephone, he wasn’t so sure. There was something in the sound that bothered him. He shook his head.
Quit borrowing trouble. Dad wasn’t one of those parents who waited until after they were dead to let their kids know that they had a problem. He’d kept Jay and Ellen posted on every change in his health. He’d called at least once a week. He wrote as often as he could, although the Parkinson’s did make that more difficult recently.
Jay shrugged. Nothing he could do about his father right now, anyway. He’d wait until Thanksgiving, only four weeks away. Then he’d see.
7.
Ellen Cameron, her husband Mitch, and her three children—Thad, Josh, and Colin—were already at Abe’s place when Jay and his family arrived just after noon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Their brass-toned Ford van squatted dead center in the two-car driveway, forcing Jay to angle alongside the curb.
“Look’s like it’s going to be a family reunion, after all,” Jay said to Linda in what he hoped would come across as a light, optimistic tone. Linda and Ellen did not get along that well. Linda and Mitch in one house were even worse. And those three kids of Ellen’s—it would help if someone had bothered to teach them discipline and self-control somewhere along the way. Most of the time they behaved like what Linda referred to as a bunch of wild-eyed, foul-mouthed hooligans. Jackanapes, would have been Abe’s word, Jay thought, although Dad would never have applied it to his grandsons. Still, Jay had no trouble agreeing with Linda on the point. He sighed. He already wondered if agreeing to get together as a family had been a big mistake.
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