“I can’t pick it up anymore,” he said. “It’s too heavy. I can’t get it out of the drawer. All the different things you think about, but I never thought about that.”
They would go down to the firing range at the police academy in the summer and shoot paper targets when she and Caroline were girls. It was in all the world the one thing Franny was better at than Caroline. She could shoot a gun. Fix’s friends would come by and marvel at Franny’s target paper when they pulled them in. “Sign that girl up!” the cops would say, and Franny, clear of eye and steady of hand, would beam.
“Don’t worry about that,” Franny said.
“Could you shoot me, do you think?” her father asked.
“Your Lortab is kicking in, Dad. Go to sleep.” She took her father’s hand off the gun, then leaned over and kissed his forehead.
“It is kicking in so you have to listen to me. There’s no time for us to talk anymore, just the two of us. I can’t pick up the gun but no one knows that but you. No one would think of that. Lots of cops shoot themselves in the end, when the end comes to this. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
The gun lay heavy in her lap. “I’m not going to shoot you, Dad.”
He looked at her then, his mouth open, and without his glasses she could see his eyes were fogged with cataracts. Was this the way Cal had looked at Teresa the summer he was seven, the bee crawling over his shirt? Was it the way Cal had looked at her when he died? She couldn’t remember.
“I need your help. Your help, Franny. Marjorie puts the pills away. I don’t know where they are, and if I did know I couldn’t get up to get them. I wouldn’t know which ones to take. She fills up this feeding tube like I’m a car. If I shot myself, no one would mind.”
“Trust me, they would mind. I would mind.”
“Marjorie and Caroline will go to the grocery store tomorrow and you’ll stay here with me. Put on two pairs of those gloves, the disposable ones, one on top of the other. You put my hands on the gun and then hold your hands over my hands.”
Franny put her hands over her father’s hands. She couldn’t write it off to the Lortab or the pain. “Dad.”
“Face the grip out, not to the throat but away from the throat. Do you understand me? I’ll be right here with you. We can go over it step by step. You hold it right under my chin, then tilt it back just a little, maybe twenty degrees. Once you get it set up I want you to lean back. You won’t get hurt.”
Why wasn’t he asking Caroline? That’s what she wanted to know. Caroline was his favorite. She was the one he trusted. But Caroline wouldn’t have listened to him.
“I can’t,” she said.
“When the gun fires you’ll drop it. Leave it however it falls. You pull off the gloves and stick them in your pocket. Go look in the mirror, make sure there’s nothing on your face, then call 911. That’s all you’ve got to do. No one is ever going to think it was you. And it won’t be you, it’s me. It’s you helping me. I wouldn’t put you in a bad spot.” His eyes were closing, down and up then down.
“It would be a bad spot,” she said. There had always been the sensation of letting her father down, living with her mother, living on the other side of the country, living with Bert. How strange it was that even now all of that stayed with her, that she would think, even for an instant, of not shooting her father as failing him again.
“People are scared of the wrong things,” Fix said, his eyes closed. “Cops are scared of the wrong things. We go around thinking that what’s going to get us is waiting on the other side of the door: it’s outside, it’s in the closet, but it isn’t like that. What happened to Lomer, that’s the anomaly. For the vast majority of the people on this planet, the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside. You understand that, don’t you, Franny?”
“I understand,” she said.
He reached out and patted her hand again, her hand and the gun. “I depend on you so much,” he said. His mouth opened as if for one last thought, and then he fell asleep.
Sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, Franny unloaded the revolver. Unloading, cleaning, reloading, that was all part of their childhood education. There were six bullets in the chamber and she put them in the front pocket of her jeans and stuck the gun in the back of the waistband beneath her shirt. Her pants were snug around the waist these days and for once she was glad about it.
When she came back to the den Caroline and Marjorie were watching The Man Who Came to Dinner. Caroline pushed the mute button while Monty Woolley tyrannized the secondary characters from his wheelchair.
“How’s your father?” Marjorie asked.
“Asleep.” Franny could feel the cold of the metal pressing into the small of her back. It was ridiculous, walking through the room with a gun and not mentioning it, but she didn’t think the gun was anything Marjorie needed to know about, nor did she need to know about his request. She would tell Caroline in the morning, but there was nothing more that needed to be said tonight, not one more conversation. Franny said she was going to get into bed and read.
That night, after putting the gun in her suitcase and the bullets in a sock, Franny dreamt of Holly. It had been so many years since they had seen each other but there she was, still fourteen, her straight dark hair divided into pigtails, her cropped yellow top knotted halfway up her skinny white torso. She was still a girl, freckles unfaded, braces on her teeth. They were back in Virginia, back at Bert’s parents’ house, and they were walking through the long field that lay between the house and the barn. Holly was talking, talking, the way Holly was always talking, explaining the history of the commonwealth and the Mattaponi Indians who had once lived along the banks of the river. The Mattaponi, she said, had fought the English in the second and third Anglo-Powhatan Wars.
“Right here,” she said, holding out her hands. “There weren’t many of them to begin with, and between the two wars and all the diseases the English brought with them most of the Mattaponi died. Do you remember how Cal would look for arrowheads? Our grandfather had a dish of them on his desk but he’d never give us any. He said he was saving them. What was he saving them for do you think? An uprising?”
Franny looked out over the green slope of grass. There was a shallow pond beyond the barn where the horses liked to wade on hot days, where they themselves had ventured in on some occasions despite the thick, sucking muck at the bottom. She looked at the distant line of trees that rimmed the field to the left and the stand of hay to the far right that the Cousinses leased out. She was trying to take in how beautiful it all was—the grass and the light and the trees, the entire valley. This was where Cal had died, where Holly and Caroline and Jeanette had run through the field once they realized what had happened, back to the house to get Ernestine, Caroline telling her to stay with Cal in case he needed help. Why had Caroline told her to stay?
“You took the gun then, remember?” Holly said. “You brought it back to Caroline later that night.”
Cal’s eyes were shut but his mouth was open like he was still trying to pull in air. His lips were thick and swollen and his tongue was coming out of his mouth. Franny stood over him, looking back in the direction of the house and then looking down. When she remembered the gun she pulled back his pants leg. There it was, stuffed in his sock and tied to his calf with a red bandanna. Franny got it in her head that Ernestine or the Cousinses or whoever was coming out to save her shouldn’t find the gun. They would all get in trouble for that. “I don’t know why I took it,” she said. She really didn’t.
Holly shook her head. “You couldn’t have left it there. We were all so obsessed with the gun. It was all we ever thought about.”
Franny had untied the bandanna and, carefully, pointing the gun away from herself and away from Cal, unloaded it the way her father taught her. She put the bullets in the front pocket of her shorts, holding the open revolver up to the light, spinning the cylinder and looking down the barrel to the sun to make sure it was empty. She tied it up in th
e red cloth but there was really no place to put it. She tried to put it in her waistband but of course it showed. Finally she decided to hide it behind a tree nearby. When everyone was gone she would go back and get it and take it to the house. She would get Jeanette to come with her and they would put the gun in Jeanette’s purse. No one would think that was strange because Jeanette always carried her purse. She remembered being glad to have something else to worry about, something other than Cal.
Franny looked over at the barn. “I always thought I did the wrong thing.”
“What would the right thing have been?” Holly put her arm around Franny’s waist. “We had no idea what was going on. We didn’t even know he’d been stung by a bee.”
“We didn’t?”
“Not until later. We did that night when Dad came back from the hospital, but before that we didn’t have a clue.”
“I loved it here,” Franny said, though she had never known it before.
Holly looked surprised. “Did you? I hated this place.”
Franny looked at her. Holly had been such a pretty girl. Why had she never noticed that? She thought of her as a sister now. “Why did you come back then?”
“To make sure you were going to be okay,” Holly said. “We always stuck together. Don’t you remember that? We were such a fierce little tribe.”
“Listen,” Franny said, looking up. “Do you hear the birds?”
Holly shook her head. “It’s your phone. That’s what I came to tell you. You shouldn’t worry.”
“About the birds?” Franny asked, but then Holly was gone and the room was dark again. She could still hear them.
“Answer your phone,” Caroline said from the other bed.
The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.
“Mrs. Mehta?” a voice said, a woman’s voice.
“Yes?”
“This is Dr. Wilkinson. I’m calling from Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Mrs. Mehta, I’m sorry to tell you that your stepmother has passed away.”
“Marjorie’s dead?” Franny sat straight up, the news pulling her awake. How was that possible? When had she gone to the hospital? Caroline got out of her bed and turned on the light on the table between them. There was only one person who was going to die and that was their father.
“What?” Caroline said.
“Mrs. Cousins,” the doctor said. “Her heart monitor alerted the nurse a little after four o’clock this morning. We attempted resuscitation but it was unsuccessful.”
“Mrs. Cousins?”
“Teresa died?” Caroline said.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said again. “She was very sick.”
“Wait a minute,” Franny said. “I don’t think I’m understanding what you’re saying. Could you say this to my sister?”
Franny gave the phone to Caroline. Caroline would know what questions to ask. The digital clock on the bedside table said it was 4:47 in the morning. She wondered if Albie would be awake by now, if he had set his alarm. He was taking an early flight to Los Angeles to see his mother.
8
Six months in advance of her retirement, Teresa bought herself a ticket to Switzerland to visit Holly at the Zen center. She did it so she’d have something to look forward to. She wasn’t sure about retiring so much as she feared becoming a doddering presence in the job she had loved for so long. Over time she’d seen everyone come and go, rise and fall and pack the contents of his or her desk into a box. Sooner or later she’d have to do the same, and wouldn’t it be better to do it before they started nudging her towards the door? At seventy-two she might well have the time to figure out another life, not that she was sure what that meant exactly. She thought she might take a bridge class or do a better job with her yard. She’d thought that she could go to Switzerland.
Two weeks after her retirement party, a pretty gold watch on her wrist and a ticket in her purse, she called a taxi for the airport.
Holly didn’t come home anymore. When she first went to Switzerland twenty-five years ago, she had planned to be gone for a month. She came back after six months, and then it was only to apply for a permanent visa. She officially quit her job at Sumitomo Bank, which they had held for her. Holly had been an economics major at Berkeley and even though she was young she’d been valued at her job. She gave up the lease on her apartment which had been sitting empty all this time. She sold her furniture.
“Are you in love?” her mother asked. She didn’t actually think that Holly was in love, even though she exhibited all the classic signs: distraction and dewiness, a loss of appetite. Holly had cut her dark hair close to her head. Her face was scrubbed, and for the first time in years Teresa could see that a smattering of freckles still remained. Teresa was afraid her oldest daughter had been kidnapped even though they were sitting together at the kitchen table drinking coffee, that her brain had been taken over by a cult that had allowed her body to come home long enough to sort out her possessions, throwing everyone off the trail. But asking Holly if she’d been taken over by a cult was a harder question.
“Not in love,” Holly said, picking up her mother’s hand and squeezing it. “Not exactly.”
It used to be that Holly came home from time to time, first once a year, then every two or three. Teresa suspected that Bert bought the tickets but she never asked. After a while the small trickle of occasional visits dried up. Holly said she didn’t want to come back to the States anymore, making it sound like it was her country she was letting go of rather than her family. She said she was happier in Switzerland.
While Teresa ardently wished for her children’s happiness, she didn’t understand why they couldn’t have found it closer to Torrance. With one of them gone, the other three might have chosen to circle the wagons, but it seemed just the opposite had happened, that Cal’s death had flung each of them to their own far corner. She missed them all but mostly she missed Holly. Holly was the least mysterious of her children, the only one who on occasion would crawl into her bed at night, saying she wanted to talk.
You could always come see me, Holly would write whenever her mother complained, first in slow Aérogramme letters and then, blessedly, in e-mails once the Zen center, called Zen-Dojo Tozan, got its own computer. Teresa never could remember the actual name of the place so it helped to see it printed out.
What would I do in Switzerland? her mother wrote back.
Sit with me, Holly wrote.
It wasn’t so much to ask. Certainly she’d sat with Jeanette and Fodé and the boys in Brooklyn. She’d sat with Albie in any number of places including her own living room. Over the long years, Teresa had gotten past her suspicion of Buddhism and meditation. Holly, the times she’d seen her, had still been Holly. And while there had been plenty of good reasons not to go when she was working, without work all she could tell herself was that she was too old, the trip too long, the tickets too expensive, and the connections too intimidating. None of those were reason enough to miss seeing her own daughter.
The flight from Los Angeles to Paris was twelve hours. Teresa accepted the free wine whenever the cart rolled down the narrow aisle, slept fitfully against the window, and tried to read The English Patient. By the time the plane landed at Charles de Gaulle she had aged twenty years. Prosecutors should insist the trials of murderers and drug lords be held in economy class on crowded transatlantic flights, where any suspect would confess to any crime in exchange for the promise of a soft bed in a dark, quiet room. Off the plane, stiff and slow, she shuffled into the river of life: the roll-aboard suitcases trailing behind the cell-phone-talkers like obedient dogs, everyone walking with such assurance that it never occurred to her not to follow them. She was too muddled to think for herself, yet when she finally did, snapped back to reality by the sight of an information desk, she was told that her departure gate was in another terminal that could be accessed by shuttle
bus, and that the flight to Lucerne was three hours delayed.
Teresa accepted a highlighted map of the airport from the startlingly handsome informational Frenchman and started making her way back in the direction from whence she came. Her feet had swollen on the flight and were now a full size larger than the shoes she was wearing. It wasn’t that she expected someone was going to show up and escort her to her gate, but she couldn’t help but remember the way things had gone the last time she was in this airport fifty years ago: she was a different person under considerably different circumstances.
Bert had taken Teresa to Paris for their honeymoon. It was all a surprise. He made the hotel reservations, ordered francs from the bank, asked Teresa’s mother to pack her daughter’s suitcase. His parents drove them to Dulles the morning after the wedding to catch their flight and she still didn’t know where they were going. She had majored in French literature at the University of Virginia and had never left the country. She had never spoken French outside of class.
She stopped at a little café on the concourse, collapsed into the white molded-plastic chair, and ordered a café au lait and a croissant, that was easy enough. She had nothing but time. She eased her heels out of the backs of her shoes even though she knew it was a mistake. Her feet would expand like bread dough and she would never be able to cram them back in. For the first time since she was in her twenties she thought about what a beautiful boy Bert Cousins had been, tall and sandy blond, with such dark blue eyes they startled her every morning when he opened them. His family was rich as Croesus, her grandmother liked to say. His parents had given him a little green Fiat when he graduated from college.
When they met he was in his second year of law school at UVA, the top of his class, and she was in her senior year of college. She slipped on a patch of ice one snowy January morning hurrying to class and had gone down hard, books and papers fanning out around her, the icy air knocked from her lungs. She was lying on her back, too stunned for the moment to do anything but watch the flakes of snow wafting towards her, when Bert Cousins leaned into her view and asked if she would allow him to help her. Yes, she would. He picked her up, a stranger, picked her up in his arms and carried her all the way to the infirmary, missing his next class to wait while they wrapped her ankle. A year later, when he asked her to marry him, he told her that he wanted them to move to California after he finished law school. He would take the California bar and they would start a whole new life together where nobody knew them. He wasn’t going to spend his days drawing up contracts for real estate sales, he was going to practice real law. And he wanted children, he said, lots and lots of children. As an only child he had wished for nothing but brothers and sisters. Teresa looked back and forth between Bert and the pretty ring on her hand and thought she must be emitting light from her entire body she loved him so much. It was unnerving to remember that now, at seventy-two, spreading strawberry jam on the tip of her croissant, how much she had loved him. She could barely hold the thought in her mind. She had loved Bert Cousins, and then grown used to him, then was disappointed in him, and then later, after he left her with four small children, she had hated him with the full force of her life. But in the Charles de Gaulle airport when she was twenty-two, her love for him had precluded all thoughts of ever not loving him. They held hands on the way to baggage claim, and while they waited beside the shining silver luggage chute he kissed her, full and deep, not giving a thought to who might be watching, because they were married, they were in Paris.