I Thought You Were Dead (2 page)

“A guy at the bar said that?”

“Yup.”

“Always a good source for reliable medical information,” she said. “I'm sorry for you.”

“He was shoveling the walk.”

“Your dad or the guy at the bar?”

“My dad. So it's my fault. We should have bought him a snow-blower. I was supposed to do some research and find out the best one to get, but I hadn't gotten around to it. We were worried about him shoveling. There's a family history of strokes and heart attacks.”

Paul scraped a handful of snow off the hood of a car and tried to make a snowball, but the snow wasn't wet enough.

“I'm confused,” Stella said, pausing to sniff at the base of a fence post. “If there's a family history, then how is it your fault?”

“He was exerting himself,” Paul said. “If we'd bought him the snowblower I was supposed to research, he could have taken it easy.”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda.”

“Even though he probably wouldn't have used it. He liked the exercise.”

“There you go, then. You can't live your life second-guessing yourself.”

“Dogs,” Paul said, turning left on Parsons.

“Where to?” Stella asked.

“I need to walk a little bit,” Paul said. He was headed toward the cemetery.

“The sign says no dogs,” Stella reminded him.

“Let's live dangerously,” he said, turning his collar up to keep the snow from falling down his neck. He took a glove off and checked his back pocket to make sure he had plastic Baggies to pick up after his dog. He did. They walked in the street, keeping to the tire tracks. The sound of his feet crunching in the snow reminded him of his teenage years, before he was old enough to drive, the miles and miles he'd walked, in blizzards even, looking for friends, for adventure, for something to do, anything to get out of the house. It pained him now to recall how much he'd once craved being free from his parents. He'd be free of them soon enough, the stones in the cemetery reminded him. Walking among them, it was hard to pretend that wasn't true.

“Beautiful night,” Stella said, trying to make things better. “I love how quiet it is when it snows.”

“Me too.”

“Though it makes it hard to smell things.”

“Why is that?”

“Water doesn't evaporate in the cold the way it does in the heat,” Stella explained patiently. They'd already had this conversation.

“Know why they put this fence around the cemetery?” Paul asked, reading the names on the grave markers. One of the town's celebrities, Sylvester Graham, was buried here. An orator and health-food advocate, he was widely misidentified as the Father of the Graham Cracker, though he'd only invented the flour the cracker was made from. The other regional celebrity was Emily Dickinson, who'd lived across the river in Amherst. He wondered if they'd ever met, as contemporaries or as ghosts.

“Why's that, Paul?” Stella asked, though she'd heard it a dozen times.

“Because people are just dying to get in.”

“That's a good one,” Stella said. “Wasn't the road outside the cemetery where Emily Dickinson got pulled over for recluse driving?”

“I've told you that one before?”

“Once or twice,” Stella said. In fact, he told it every time he told the cemetery-fence joke, and in the same order. He had other jokes he felt obliged to tell in specific circumstances; whenever he saw a kitchen colander, for example, he would advise the cook, “Be careful not to sing through that — you'll strain your voice.” The dog tolerated it. Better than some people, Paul always said.

When they got home, he carried her up the front steps and set her down on the porch. Inside, she took a drink of water in the kitchen, sniffed her food bowl for recent additions, and then went to her bed by the radiator. L.L. Bean, red plaid, down filled, only the finest, she told the other dogs in the neighborhood, though Chester, her boyfriend, swore it was poly fill, but then, he was a golden — in other words, no rocket scientist. She let out a grunt as she lowered her weight to the floor, then appeared satisfied. Paul threw his coat over a chair and sat on the couch.

He took the TV remote control in hand and began at the top, channel 98, surfing down slowly, pausing just long enough at each channel to pass judgment. No, he did not want to invest in real estate, or car polishes, or stain removers, or hair or skin care products endorsed by aging actors and actresses. He could remember back when cable TV was first introduced in the seventies. “People will pay a monthly fee to watch the shows, so there will be no need for commercials — it will be
commercial-free television,
” they'd said.

Paul turned the TV off. And Karen said he had no self-control. She never did like to watch television. He'd known that about her from the start and married her anyway. He had only
himself to blame. It was a mistake he wouldn't make again, assuming he'd ever have the opportunity to repeat it.

He was tired and wanted to go to bed. Flying made him anxious, which meant he was going to have a rough night sleeping. He realized only as he locked the back door that he'd forgotten to check messages on his answering machine. There were two.

The first was from Tamsen, the woman he'd been seeing for the past three months, not exactly a true romance, more a strange but mutually satisfying exchange of courtesies, a benevolent closeness that allowed for physical contact, which it made him slightly tumescent merely to recall. Yet to qualify as a true romance, the relationship would have to hold promise for both the near and the distant future, and as far as Paul could tell, the long-term prognosis was poor.
“Hi, Paul
—
it's me. Just calling because I had a terrible day. It's not looking good at WebVan. Everybody around here is freshening their résumés and stealing office supplies, and here's a bad sign — Derek had his favorite pinball machine taken out for ‘repairs,' or so he said, but I'll bet you anything he's hiding it somewhere so they don't repossess it when the whole thing goes belly-up. So anyway, I just wanted to talk to you because I miss you and I need to hear the sound of your voice. It's eleven now but you can call me and wake me up if you want. Have a good flight tomorrow if I don't hear from you, and call me when you get to your parents' house. I know it's going to be hard for you but you can do it. I know you can do it. Okay? Your dad's going to be okay. So call me.”

She had a sexy voice, slightly smoky and tinged with a Northeast Corridor Boston-Rhode Island-New York accent that made her seem tougher than she really was. It was far too late to return her call.

The second message was from his mother, who always began her messages, “Hi, Paul — it's your mom,” as if he wasn't going to recognize her voice.

“Hi, Paul — it's your mom,”
she said.
“It's about eleven o'clock here, and I'm at Mercy Hospital. Your father is still resting comfortably and your sister is here and I'm going back just as soon as I get some coffee. Pastor Rolander was here visiting but he's left too. I think Bits will meet you at the airport, and she has your flight number and all that, so don't worry. I'm looking forward to seeing my little boy. Love you lots. Bye.”

It was nice to think there was at least one person left on earth who thought of him as a little boy.

Paul filled a glass with ice and poured himself a scotch, adding an extra splash for good measure, because it had been an extradifficult night, and tomorrow was likely to be worse. He took the drink to bed with him, where he read another paragraph of
Anna Karenina
. He'd been reading the book about one paragraph a night for the past three years. He heard toenails clicking against the floor. Stella had risen from her dog bed all on her own and had come to join him.

“You want up?” he asked her.

“Sure.”

“Promise not to whimper in the middle of the night to be let down?” he asked. “I need my sleep. Chester's owners are going to come get you and take you to their house while I'm gone.”

“No whimpering, I promise,” she said.

He lifted the dog up onto the bed, where she made a nest for herself at his feet. He tried to read. Levin was convinced that Kitty thought he was an asshole. Paul was inclined to agree with her. He put the book down. He wondered if his father knew the difference anymore between being asleep and being awake, or if he had no words in his head at all and felt trapped, bound and gagged. Maybe the opposite was true and he was engaged in some kind of unbroken prayer and felt entirely at peace. Strokes could occur in any part of the brain, couldn't they? Each stroke was probably unique, immeasurable or unpredictable to some
extent. His mother said that before it happened, Paul's father had complained of a headache and his speech had seemed a little slurred, though she hadn't made anything of it at the time. “I saw him shoveling, and then when I didn't see him anymore, I thought he'd gone down the block,” Paul's mother had told him on the phone. “Then when I went to look for him, I saw him lying on the sidewalk and I thought at first that he'd slipped on the ice.”

When he didn't get up, she'd dialed 911, fearing he'd had a heart attack. The operator told her not to move him because jostling could cause a second heart attack. Paul's mother had covered her husband with blankets where he lay and stayed by his side. They took him in an ambulance to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed a stroke. There they gave him a drug to dissolve the clot, but it would only work, they said, if it was administered in time, before too much damage had been done to the tissues in the brain that were being deprived of blood and therefore oxygen. Maybe the old man simply thought he was dreaming and couldn't wake up. Maybe it was a good dream. Maybe it wasn't.

“What?” Stella asked. “You sighed.”

“Just thinking,” Paul said. “If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?”

“Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?”

“There's been some debate. Why would you be a tomato?”

“To get next to all those hamburgers,” the dog said.

“But if you were a tomato, you wouldn't want to eat hamburger.”

“Of course I would. Why would I change, just because I'm a tomato?”

“You'd want tomato food. This has got to be the stupidest conversation we've ever had,” Paul said.

“Actually, this is fairly typical,” the dog said.

“You think my dad is going to be okay?” Paul asked.

“Sure. He's a tough old bird, right?”

“He used to go to the park and play pickup hockey with the high school rink rats until he was, like, sixty-five years old.”

“The only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”

“That's right,” Paul said. “The only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”

“Your dad's not a quitter.”

“That's got to be in his favor.”

“On the other hand,” Stella said, “everybody gets old and dies. You know that, don't you?”

“Of course I know that.”

“It's supposed to work that way. If it didn't, the whole planet would fill up with decrepit, useless old wrecks everybody else would have to take care of. And that wouldn't be good, would it?”

“No, that wouldn't be good.”

“If you ask me, you humans have already artificially extended your life spans to the point where you're seriously screwing up the environment for the rest of us. You're supposed to die at forty or forty-five, tops. You're not supposed to gum up the works by hanging around for an extra thirty or forty years.”

“
That's
a bit insensitive.”

“Nothing personal.”

“Look who's talking,” Paul said. “How old are you? Fifteen? What's that in dog years?”

“Fifteen and a half,” she said proudly. “And it's all relative. In tortoise years, that's nothing. In butterfly years, it's forever. I want your dad to be okay, but if he's not okay, that's no less desirable, in the grand scheme of things. That's all I'm saying. If he goes, it means more food for you.”

“It's not a question of food,”

Paul said. “Paul,” Stella said, “
everything
is a question of food. Everything except where you lie down. And even that has to be somewhere
near food. If you had a choice between sleeping somewhere that was soft and warm but a thousand miles from food, and sleeping in a place that was totally uncomfortable but right next to the kitchen, you'd sleep where there was food.”

“I'm just a bowl of Iams to you, aren't I? That's all I am.”

“You're more than a bowl of food, Paul. You're a dish of water too. You even pick up my shit.” Sometimes she'd crap in the middle of the sidewalk downtown and turn and say, “Be a dear and get that, would you, Paul?”

“All I'm saying,” she continued, “is that there's a line. And above the line, life is good, so keep on living, because you're healthy and alert and everything is okay. But below the line, life isn't good. Below the line, you're in pain, or you're hurting others, or you don't enjoy seeing your loved ones anymore, or you're embarrassed all the time because you're incontinent and you're pissing on yourself. Below that line, pulling the plug is better than not pulling the plug. Just play it by ear when you get there.”

“I'll take it under advisement,” he said.

She nestled in, resting her head on his leg.

“If he dies,” she asked a moment later, “will that make you the alpha dog in your family?”

He'd once explained to her how wolves organized themselves as social animals, referencing research he'd done for the book he was working on, tentatively titled
Nature for Morons
.

“No,” Paul told her. “That would be my brother, Carl.”

“Oh,” Stella said. “So you're not even going to try?”