He instinctively turned away, and the chair hit him across the back. Hard. Harry Pearce stumbled forward, his foot landing on one of the cubes of ice.
In a Three Stooges episode it might have been comical.
Harry’s foot went out from under him and he pitched forward, right through the open doorway to the basement. Made a hell of a noise going down. But when he reached the bottom, there was total silence.
Phyllis screamed.
“Dad!” Richard cried, throwing aside the chair.
The two of them ran down the steps, finding Harry in a twisted heap, eyes closed, not moving.
“Oh my God, he’s dead,” Phyllis said.
Richard knelt, laid his head sideways on his father’s chest. “No, he’s not. He’s breathing. His heart’s going.”
Phyllis dropped to her knees, put her head to his chest as well, needing to confirm it for herself. “Yes, I hear it. I hear it. Harry? Harry, can you hear me?”
Harry, who had adopted the shape of a pretzel, did not respond.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” Richard said, getting up. He went up the stairs two at a time and as he was disappearing into the kitchen his mother called up to him.
“Wait,” she said.
His head reappeared, framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the kitchen lights. “What?”
“Don’t... I mean, just... wait.”
“Mom, every second counts.”
“He’ll be okay,” Phyllis said. “He just needs a minute. Help me straighten him out.”
“We shouldn’t move him,” her son said.
“We’ll be really careful. I’ve got that old rollaway bed in the back room. I’ll bring it out and we can put him down on that.”
“Mom...” Richard came back down the stairs halfway.
“Richard, listen to me,” she said. “If you call the ambulance, they’re going to call the police, too.”
“I’m the police,” Richard said.
“I know. But others will come. And when Harry wakes up, and tells them what you did...”
“I... I didn’t mean to do it. He just made me so angry. I thought he was going to hit you.”
“I know, love, I know. I totally understand. But the police, they won’t. They won’t understand. You’re just starting out. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be fair for them to hold this against you.”
“I... I don’t know...”
“Get the bed set up. Set it up right here. I’ll straighten him out.”
Richard brought in the rollaway, the rusty wheels squeaking in protest. He opened it and flattened it, patted the mattress to smooth it out.
“Help me lift him,” Phyllis said.
Together, they got him onto the bed. “He’s still breathing,” she said. “He seems to be breathing just fine.”
“I couldn’t stand what he was doing,” Richard said. “He just wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t let it go, he—”
“It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll look after him. He’ll probably be fine in a few hours. He’ll have a bad headache is all. You wait and see. It doesn’t make any sense to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is.”
“If that’s what you think, Mom,” Richard said. She always seemed to know the right thing to do.
But was this right? It had seemed so at the time. But Harry was not fine in a few hours. He didn’t regain consciousness for two days. When he did, he wasn’t the same. He was simpler, somehow.
When Richard and Phyllis tried to coax him out of bed, they discovered he could not move his legs.
“We should call a doctor,” Richard said. “He probably needs an X-ray or something.”
“We’ll give it a few more days,” Phyllis insisted. “Maybe — maybe whatever broke that keeps his legs from working will fix itself.”
Neither one of them really believed that, but they were willing to give it a go.
At Patchett’s, people asked where Harry was.
“He’s got that nasty flu bug that’s been going around,” Phyllis told them. “Last thing I want is him coming in here and sneezing on the chicken wings.”
After a week had gone by, Phyllis and Richard knew they had a real problem on their hands.
They’d waited too long to call for help. How were they going to explain their actions? Letting a man fall down a full flight of stairs and not calling for help? It was a bit late to start claiming self-defense. If what Richard had done had been to save his mother’s life, they could have called the police that night. After all, as a spanking-new police officer, Richard would have a pretty good idea what constituted self-defense.
But they didn’t.
And while Harry Pearce was a little groggier than he used to be, every time Richard descended those stairs to see how his father was coming along, the man would raise one arm weakly, point at him, and say, “You. You son of a bitch.”
Meaning that pretty damn literally.
Getting him medical attention now posed a considerable risk to Phyllis and her son, but particularly to him.
And at work, people continued to ask, “How’s Harry? Where the hell is he? When’s he coming back?”
“What are we going to do?” Richard asked one night as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, listening to Harry snoring downstairs.
“I don’t know,” his mother said.
“People are going to keep asking and asking where Dad is,” he said.
“We have to stop them from asking,” she said. “This needs to end, somehow.”
Richard leaned back in his chair. “What are you saying? You’re not thinking we should—”
“No, no, of course not. But everyone needs to think something has happened, something permanent, so they won’t be asking where he is anymore.”
“Like, maybe he went to see his cousin,” Richard said. “In Calgary.”
Phyllis shook her head. “People would keep asking when he was coming back. No, we need to tell a story that will stop people from asking questions once and for all.” Her mouth tightened. “I went to the library today. I found out something interesting. I found that over the years, quite a few people who’ve fallen into the river accidentally and gone over the falls — some of them were never found.”
“Wait,” Richard said. “I thought you just said you weren’t saying we’d do anything like that. We’re not going to send him over the falls. We can’t... I mean, he’s my father. Okay, not my real father, but that’s what he’s been to me for a hell of a long time.”
She reached out and held his hand. “I know that. But I was thinking, if we could make people think he went over the falls, then we can just keep looking after him. Right here.”
“For how long?”
“As long as we have to.”