“Are there specific words you prefer not to say? Do you know about autism, Jeffrey, or Asperger’s syndrome? Has your ward of the state told you about those?”
“Nonsense,” Mama said through tight-gritted teeth. “Darlings, wheel me home this instant.”
At home Mama smashed dishes. RAGING against the “rat-shit jack-bastard.” The “hateful brute and lush.” Were Cappy present he would have exclaimed: “She’s on the warpath!”
“A rotten trickster,” Mama told me. “As doctors are. Warp your body, warp your mind. You have a black spot on your brain because your amoral mother smoked drugs. That’s why… that’s why… everything!”
In the kitchen that night Mama crushed shards of bone china with a rolling pin.
“Pull that ground chuck out of the icebox, Jeffrey. Sloppy joes another night.”
Mama crunched the china to sparkling powder. Knuckled sweaty hair out of her eyes. She rolled the raw chuck through glass.
“All I ever want is to help. But people so seldom take the cure.” Pinpricks of blood on her hands. “They spit the bit. You believe me, darling, don’t you?”
I cannot tell what other choice I ever had. Under a gibbous moon I threw the raw meatball into Doctor Saberhagen’s backyard.
Before dying, Gadzooks! chewed through my telephone cord. I have to go to Mama’s house to call. “Is this Patience?”
“… it is.”
“I call on behalf of James Paris. Who is dead.”
“James Paris?… oh! Dead. Christ. How?”
“Police are stumped. His pitbull, Matilda, is with me. Old Family Red Nose. White coat. Brindle pattern over left eye. High stiffles. Clipped ears. A proud bitch.”
“I knew him only one night. We met at the Legion in Fenlon Falls.”
“Otherwise she must go to the Humane Society. For gassing.”
“Gassing?”
“He wanted you to have the dog. Otherwise—”
“Gassing, gassing. My life may not tolerate a dog.”
But she agrees to meet. I hang up. Mama is off at the Lucky Bingo. My elbow brushes the computer mouse. The monitor brightens.
A MySpace page. A girl in pigtails.
We meet at Montebello Park. Patience is Patience Nanavatti. She is wearing a floppy sunhat. Big sunglasses accord her face the aspect of a dragonfly. She is also pushing a pram.
“Jeffrey?” Chin tucked to her neck. SUSPICION. “From Sarah Court?”
I mimic her chin-tuck. “Patience Nanavatti?”
Matilda licks the baby’s foot. The baby’s name: Celeste. She grabs the air in front of her face. Patience Nanavatti takes Celeste’s hand. She pins it gently to her belly.
“She is very scrawny,” I say. “Have you seen a pediatrician?”
“She… no, she eats. Why won’t you take Matilda?”
“This dog was not offered to me.”
“She’s yours.”
Celeste emits hitching, painful sobs. Her eyes swivel so far back in their sockets it is as though she wishes to examine the inside of her own skull.
“Celeste is the toilet baby. I read of you both in the newspaper.”
“Please.” Is she soliciting help or begging me not to tell? “Jeffrey, please.”
Patience Nanavatti tells me how she stole her. Then she fled up north but, finding nothing at all, she returned to the city. The police may be monitoring her home. I ask how long Celeste was in the toilet.
“Four minutes, maybe?”
Onset of advanced cellular decay: two minutes.
“Something is the matter with her brain.”
“You don’t know that.”
I do not know what else to say. I say this:
“I will take the dog.”
“Can’t stand to see her gassed?”
“I will take the dog.”
My employer is entombed in a wheelchair. Bandages clad his head, eyes, to the midpoint of his nose. Hands encased in gauze. He appears to have shrunk several sizes. His body is like an alpaca sweater sent through the wash. There is a large depression in the side of his head. A wet, red, glistening hole like a medical photograph of someone’s wrecked vocal cords. Tonight he will be visited by Nicholas Saberhagen. My presence a precautionary measure. The dreadlocked kid, Parkhurst, who my employer says is a biographer of some sort, is curled up in a corner. I saw this person, Parkhurst, not too long ago. In the company of Colin and Wesley Hill.
When Nicholas Saberhagen arrives, I observe unnoticed from the top of the stairs. Nicholas asks permission to photograph the box. There is some commotion in the viewing chamber. Nicholas brought his son with him, you see. Somehow the fat vampire boy got into the viewing area with the box. Next Nicholas is bundling his son into the car. I follow them in my minivan. They pull into the Motor Motel. I park in a washout. The dark fluttering of wings in the trees. Time goes by. Nicholas exits his room in a towel. He retreats inside.
Next: bracing animalistic screams.
I get out of the car, walk across the road. The boy is lying on the motel carpet. Rope burns ring his neck. Nicholas Saberhagen pushes at his chest. He spies me. As if to spy a demon. I kneel beside them. There is a visible dent in the boy’s throat.
“Your boy’s trachea is crushed.”
In my pockets: a notebook, a pen, a penknife. I chew off the pen’s cap. I pry out its ink wand.
“The fleshy tube running down the boy’s neck. You must cut below the obstruction.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” says Nicholas.
“The veins run here”—I trail a finger down the boy’s neck—“and here. I know to avoid them. I know the trachea’s consistency is that of a garden hose. I know about how hard to push.”
I kneel patiently. The towel has fallen away from Nicholas’s body. There is a dark stain on the tip of his penis. The boy’s skin is presently the blue of a picture-book sea.
“Okay, Jeffrey. Go. Go.”
I straddle the boy’s waist. Set the knifetip horizontally across his windpipe below the Adam’s apple. Drive the knifepoint in, then squeeze either side of the wound. Still too small. Insert my pinkie finger. The boy’s tendons constrict around my fingertip. His slit trachea feels like a calamari ring. I thread the pen barrel in. Nicholas wraps the towel round his boy’s throat. I find the carotid snaking past the boy’s collarbone. Pressure stems the blood flow.
A man enters. He has the look of a SAD cowboy. His consort: a half-naked woman with a harelip.
“We called the medics.”
A medical evacuation helicopter touches down in the gravel lot. I stand in the rotor wash as it lifts off. The helicopter ascends until it is nothing but a blinking red dot.
I return to the motel room. The closet door smashed. Contents of the boy’s knapsack spilled over the carpet. Electronic equipment in Ziploc baggies. On the cover of his math booklet is a girl’s name. Encircled by a lopsided heart. I know that name.
General hospital. Lea side of Valleyview Road past the ambulance bays. Midnight. Patience Nanavatti sits in the passenger seat of my Vend-O-Mat Dodge Sprinter. On my lap is a box of cellulose packing peanuts.
“It is sensible.”
“You keep saying that. How will she breathe?”
“I will punch holes in the boxtop.”
“She’s not a turtle.”
I stack cases of soda onto a dolly. Patience sets Celeste gently into the bed of packing material. She moans when I close the flaps.
“I’m a bad mother, I guess.”
“But she is not your child. She never was.”
I have made Patience Nanavatti SAD. I cannot understand why she should react so. I merely outlined the truth of the matter.
The elevator takes me to the fifth floor. As I am pushing the dolly round a blind corner, I nearly collide with a nurse. The nurse’s patient is Abigail Burger.