“Are you awake?” Heather whispers.
“I am,” Jimmy says.
“What are you thinking?”
Only in his wish to answer her does he realize: “How it was I came to Canada.”
Heather tightens her arm around his chest. “I can’t hold you close enough,” she says.
The next morning Heather and Jimmy rise late, her daughter having spent the night with the grandmother, who is accustomed to sending the girl off to school. They have to rush to get ready to open the shop on time, tussling for first use of the bathroom basin, pausing to laugh at feeling like a couple already. Robert and Darla rise in their usual manner, having gone to sleep in their usual manner, Robert distracted, this time by his intention to speak to his father, and Darla sublimating with Bach. She is to go for her run and drive to the hospital on her own in the late morning. Robert will head up earlier, though after Darla has left the house he lingers for another bean-grinding and brewing and a second slow sipping of Ethiopian coffee, in his reading chair facing his oak. Peggy sleeps late in her one-bedroom assisted-living apartment at Longleaf Village, exhausted by her husband’s pain, sorry the twin bed next to her is empty, dreading when it will not be. Bob is up early from his bunk bed at the Mercy Mild Shelter. He’s happy that North Florida is behaving in the way it often suddenly can, throwing off the cold, warming the morning. He makes his way to the woods near Munson Slough, where he will spend a couple of hours dry-firing his Glock, getting back his trigger control.
And a physical therapist at Archbold Memorial named Tammy, a former softball star at the University of Georgia, uncovers William with encouraging chatter about how tough he looks and how he’s going to muscle through this little episode. She unwraps his compression leggings and she straps a thick cloth belt around him, and she starts to get him up, get him vertical, get him on his feet with her help, just for a little bit, to prime his body to heal, to engage him in staying alive, to get him used to the cost. This is her specialty. She is a champ at this.
William is grumpy but compliant. He might think this is a good time in history to die, given what the world has come to, but he’s too pissed about it to succumb. So he is vertical now. And he feels something begin in the middle of the calf of his right leg. A pulling loose. Like an adhesive bandage that’s been on for too long being stripped off, beginning there in his calf and running now upward, behind his knee, and then curving to the inside of his thigh. It’s a good feeling. A letting go. But the rushing changes, as if the bandage finishes breaking away and something emerges from beneath it, a goddamn night crawler burrowing its way past his broken hip and up his spine, and William thinks, What the hell is that doing inside me? but it moves too fast for a worm way too fast and the blood clot hits his heart and the engine seizes in Papa’s Ford Runabout pickup, which is as old as me, and maybe this is when it finally dies, on this dirt road along Bayou Bernard and Papa has stripped off his shirt and has the hood up and he’s cussing like Mama won’t stand for, and now we’re sitting beside the bayou letting the Ford cool off and Papa cool off, and I’m a little behind him and sneaking peeks as usual at the slash of a scar below his left shoulder blade, and I been warned by Mama since I was toddling not to ask him, since the scar was from the Big War and full of bad memories, but today I do ask and he turns on me and his hands come up but he doesn’t hit me, he just gets quiet and he gets sad and he takes me by the shirt and pushes me over backward, but not hard not to hurt me just to tell me to shut up, and he’s weeping like a baby with me at the train station and I’m in my uniform and there’s another Big War, and as I put my duffel over my shoulder it hits me like a rifle shot in the brain what it is that he’s been carrying around all this time, the fact that his battle scar is in his back, it’s in his goddamn back, he turned his back, and so I turn my back on him, I turn my own goddamn back and I run away from this man and I’m going up the stairs in a house in Mainz, and it’s just mop-up, we haven’t yet found a living soul on this whole block, it’s only us Patton boys tidying up with the Third Army that’s about to cross the Rhine, and I’m checking the second floor, just for procedure’s sake, and I’m at the top of the stairs and there’s a doorway to my left and I step into it and across the room the window is bright behind him and he’s sitting tall there and I can’t see his face, I can’t read his face for the shadow but his Schmeisser is crosswise in his lap and his hands are down but I don’t check where they are I just know they’re down but I don’t check if his shooting hand is near the grip and it’s all fast and my M1 is up and I’m squeezing and squeezing and the Kraut’s chest blows open and he flies back and he’s dead, and then I notice some little thing, no I don’t, not then, I just see it but I don’t really notice it, not then while I’m rushing inside over killing the enemy, rushing sweetly at that moment, sweetly like happens in a war, and it’s only years later, when my sons are about ten, about the age I was myself in the dying Ford, and it’s hot summer in the Ninth Ward and the afternoon thunderstorm has just passed and my boys take off their shoes to run barefoot in the wet grass, it’s then that I really notice the German soldier’s boots, which are sitting there beside him, the two boots straightened up side by side and his socks draped over them, his feet hurt, this guy, his feet hurt and he took off his shoes and socks so whatever is going to happen to him on this day at least his feet won’t hurt him so bad, and I turn away from my sons so there’s no chance they’ll glance back at me and see my eyes filling with tears, and not a week goes by for the rest of my years that I don’t think about that man and I squeeze the trigger and I squeeze and there is no rushing in me, no fucking sweet thing, my own chest cracks open and my heart seizes, and I come up the stairs and I step into the doorway and I see him sitting there and I notice his boots, and I take my hand off the trigger, I don’t squeeze the trigger, and the light behind him gets brighter but the shadow on his face fades away, and we look each other in the eyes, and it’s just two fellas in a sunny room
And William Quinlan is dead.
When the phone rings in the foyer, Robert is still sitting in his reading chair, his coffee mug empty for a while now. He’s not actively dreading his father. He’s not wavering in his intention to tell him. He’s just inert. Intending to overcome that. The dread driven deep. The wavering converted to dozy distraction: wondering if this lot of coffee beans is depleted yet at the roaster; watching the flash of cardinals beyond the veranda; thinking the room too warm and suspecting the weather has changed overnight. It takes a second ring of the phone to make him rise, and still there is no urgency in him, no sense of dread. Just the phone ringing.
Doctor Tyler himself. Very sorry. A saddle embolism is not uncommon in spite of doing everything possible. Death certificate signed. In the hospital mortuary awaiting instructions. Have you done this before? Do you have a funeral home?
“No,” Robert is finally saying, “I’ll have to see about one.”
“Not a problem. Call here and tell us when you decide. The home will take care of everything from this point on.”
“All right,” Robert says.
“I’m very sorry,” Doctor Tyler says.