Sweet Jesus (14 page)

Connie saw the school principal’s daughter come out of the church in a red hoodie and wave sheepishly at someone in the parking lot. Then Connie watched Harlan saunter over to talk to her. The girl twisted her foot on the ground, in a coy and bashful way, and for the second time that day, Connie heard the words
spit in your eye
, only this time they took on a different tone.

Then Mary-Beth came out of the church, pushing her son down the handicap ramp in his wheelchair. Connie waved and called out, Hi, Jay!

The boy swung his head around as if it was connected by a loose spring and spoke out the side of his mouth, Hi, Connie. Looking good!

Thanks, Jay. You too.

I’ll call you later, Mary-Beth mouthed while holding her hand to her head like a phone.

Come on, Connie said to Simon and turned to locate Emma, who was pulling Theo around by his collar. Emma! she called out. Over here! It’s time to go home!

They got into the car and Harlan was already waiting for them behind the wheel. He drove without speaking. What was that all about? Connie said.

What was
what
all about?

Shell Lunetta, the principal’s daughter?

Who?

That girl you were talking to.

I didn’t know her father was the principal.

Well, how do you know her then?

She goes to our church, doesn’t she? How do
you
know her?

Connie just shook her head. When they reached home, Emma and Si got out. She extracted Theo from his car seat and held him on her hip. Harlan hadn’t moved. Aren’t you coming in the house?

No.

Why not?

Because I’ve banished myself.

Oh, snap out of it, Connie said, for Pete’s sake.

But Harlan wouldn’t budge.

Don’t you think, Connie said, before you banish yourself, that there might be a few things you should come into the house and sort out? Or can’t you get past punishing yourself enough to think about the effect this might be having on the people around you?

I need to be selfish right now, Harlan said.

Oh, I hate you right now, Connie said and slammed the door. She watched his Jeep reverse out the drive, and then she wanted him back. I’m sorry, she whispered into Theo’s neck. Please come back, Harlan, please. I don’t care about the money. I forgive you. Just don’t leave me here alone. Not with the kids. I can’t do this on my own.

Z
eus stood near his open locker, disinfecting his props. He was thinking about what he could do for Fenton. They needed to get a juicer. They should go on a raw food diet. He’d go to the Thai place and bring home some spicy noodle soup. Or maybe the spices wouldn’t be good for his liver. He’d ask one of the nurses. Then he caught sight of the little country house on wheels, sitting patiently in the corner, unused. He laid his forehead against the cool metal of the locker and relaxed his face.

Zeus had a rubber stethoscope that played ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and this is what he resorted to now. For Lalia, Zeus had to wipe down his toolbox and all his props with isopropyl swabs and, in addition to his face mask and gloves, wear a pale blue surgical gown and cap. It was because of her immune system, which was weak, though her spirit was so strong.

Standing outside her room, he put the stethoscope into his ears and pretended to listen to his own heart. He could hear people talking on the other side of the door and wondered whether he should come back later. He knocked and Mrs. Deluca
answered and immediately broke out, with frantic delight, Oh look, Lalia, it’s
Signore Zeus
!

Lalia loved Zeus so much. It almost shocked him how firm she could be in her demands for him. Today, she didn’t want him to leave. Even as the doctors talked to her parents in hushed tones, she insisted that he stay. Zeus pulled a joke syringe out of his gown and squirted a murderous red ribbon at the doctor, for Lalia’s sake, and she had giggled right through his speech, while her parents wept quietly into their hands. Zeus caught her father’s eye and it was like the eye of an animal in the jaws of a trap – fearful, uncomprehending. It was at moments like this that Fenton’s father would appear to him, smacking the foot of the hospital bed the way he’d pound the dinner table, and bellow his rousing encouragement, A gag is a gag is a gag! Don’t fuck with the joke, Zeus! Sometimes it’s all you’ve got!

The previous time he saw her, Lalia had patted him gently on the back of the hand, in a maternal way, as if she knew he needed reassurance. The kids could always tell. They know everything, a nurse had told him once. Astonishing in their wisdom and thoughtfulness, giving encouragement when
they
were the ones who were suffering.

More tests were required and Lalia was transferred to a gurney with a clear plastic tent. Before she was wheeled out of her room, Zeus took out his pocket watch with the terrycloth dog and wound it up and snapped it open and read in her eyes hope, heartbreaking courage, and a little plea to save her. He waved goodbye and one of the wheels on her gurney spun wildly as they pushed her down the hall.

He went to Sam’s room, but Sam wasn’t there, so he flapped over to the nurse’s station in his big shoes and was told the boy had been taken to
ICU
the night before.

Zeus laid his hands on the counter to steady himself. He
considered taking off his costume and laying it neatly at the nurse’s station. He could walk out of the hospital in his underwear and never come back. He went into the staff lounge and lay down on a cold vinyl cot.

He must have fallen asleep because it was nearly midnight when he woke up with a start. He took off his surgical gown, put on his morning jacket, and flippered conspicuously out of the ward. In a faint-hearted attempt at dignity, he took off his long, flat brown shoes and tucked them under his arm like two folded newspapers.

The suspended glass walkway that joined the upper levels of the north and south sections of the hospital was one of his favourite places. He liked how it hissed with the unseen circulation of air, as if it had lungs in a perpetual state of exhalation. The walkway was a bright glass vein of bluish light. The glass itself glowed, who knows where the fluorescence was hidden. Zeus padded silently into the tunnel, eleven floors of thin air beneath his feet, and stopped at the halfway point. Between his socks, cars nosed along the street below – and one tiny pedestrian, who seemed engaged in conversation with a mailbox. He looked out over the cityscape. Office towers shining like stainless steel appliances in the moonlight. The moon was so full and bright it seemed to surpass the potential of mere reflection. Zeus raised his thumb like a painter and covered it. The moon was the size of his thumbnail.

It wasn’t hard to make a thing disappear. And when it was gone, you sometimes wondered whether or not it had ever existed. Would it be that way with Fenton? The thought made him feel as if he was coming apart, like aspirin in water.

Hey, Zeus! This was from a young doctor rushing through the glass corridor, lab coat open, holding a can of Diet Coke. You’ve got to have your shoes on, it’s regulation.

Zeus waited until the alarming disruption of her sudden appearance had subsided, then he bent forward to place his shoes soundlessly on the floor and slip them back on.

At the
ICU
they weren’t allowing visitors, but he went and stood outside the room Sam was in. Behind the door, he could hear a woman’s voice, elevated, urgent. She began to shout, This is completely unacceptable! Where’s the goddamn doctor! I want my son moved to another department –
now!
Her voice sounded disembodied, unnatural, like the voice of someone being electrocuted, or possessed. There was a low murmur, in a man’s voice. Quiet male anguish. Zeus wanted to burst in and do a silly routine, make Sam laugh. That’s what he should’ve done, to hell with the rules. Make him laugh again when, all around him, people were choking on their grief. But he couldn’t do it. Zeus no longer had the heart, or the stomach, for this kind of thing anymore. Not for
anything
anymore. He took a few steps down the hall, then went back to the room. He pried off his feathery orange wig. He hung it from the door handle – a ritual of defeat – and walked away.

In the morning, Fenton was having trouble breathing. Zeus was crying and Fenton said, I think it’s time to go. Zeus packed him a bag and accompanied him to the hospital, where a doctor they’d both met before was on duty. She did a quick assessment and told them Fenton had pneumonia. He was admitted and given a bed in a shared room. He looked so thin and sickly, Zeus wondered how he’d failed to notice the extent of it. It was only now, against the white sheets, that he realized how yellow Fenton’s skin had become. His hair was dark and matted against his forehead. He had an oxygen tube taped under his nose and an
IV
inserted into the back of his hand. Even his hands, on top of the sheets, looked strange, like they didn’t
belong to him. Zeus touched one of them. It was surprisingly hot and dry. Oh Fenton, he said. I don’t know what to say.

What’s there to say? Everything’s obvious now. And what isn’t, no longer matters. Fenton coughed and put a great effort into adjusting himself and sank back into the same position.

You’re my best friend, Zeus said and pulled the curtain around the bed and carefully got in beside him. What am I going to do without you?

Fenton rolled over slowly and did what they’d done for many years – he spooned Zeus. It made Zeus feel protected, cared for. It gave his body such a warm deep pleasure, almost childlike, to be cradled this way. He realized how tired he was. He didn’t want to go anywhere ever again. He could feel himself falling asleep.

Remember when we were in the truck, Fenton whispered, and I told you I was in the army? His voice was so close to Zeus’s ear, it woke him up.

There’s more to it, he said. Something I never really got over but didn’t understand until a year ago. I think it’s why I got sick.

What do you mean? Zeus said.

We were sent to Lebanon, Fenton said. There’d been these massacres in the refugee camps there. The Israelis were blamed, but it was the Lebanese Christians fighting the Lebanese Muslims. Fenton’s lungs began to whistle and he rolled onto his back and gave a sudden, ripping cough.

Zeus got a glass of water from the bedside table and lifted Fenton’s head so he could take a sip through a white straw bent sideways at its accordion hinge. He lowered him back onto the pillow and lay down beside him again. Zeus told him maybe it was better he didn’t talk so much, but Fenton said he needed to tell him.

We got there at the end of the war, Fenton said, but it was still awful. We saw a lot of bodies. I remember there was this baby on the ground. She wasn’t crying. Just lying there with these huge, wide eyes. Right where she’d been dropped. Tiny hands trembling in the air from shock. Nobody was picking her up.

For a moment, Fenton stopped talking and the room filled up with all the familiar hospital noises – a blowing air vent, a beeping monitor.

There was a boy there too, he said. Somehow he became my responsibility. He was bawling his guts out, just hysterical, and I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t get him to stop. He was six or seven years old. We carried chocolate bars for the kids. I mean, they were given to us by the army, to win them over, pacify them. I gave him a chocolate bar so he’d stop crying. I must’ve given him about ten of them because I didn’t want to hear him cry again. Your parents have been murdered. Here, kid, have another Hershey’s bar. What the hell else was I supposed to do?

But you were just a kid yourself, Zeus said.

So there I am, a year ago, Fenton said. I’m sitting in this cab and the driver says, I know you. I say, no you don’t. He says, yes I do. You were in Lebanon. No, I wasn’t. It was such a long time ago. I hadn’t thought about it in years. I’d put it out of my mind. You gave me chocolate when my family was killed, he said. Nobody knows I was there. How could this guy know? I didn’t know what to say. I started to cry, right there in the cab. I apologized – he said it was okay. When we got to my door, he wouldn’t take my money. I thought, why is this guy being so nice? What had his life been like? He’s a cab driver now in Chicago, and I’m a clown, working with kids, still trying to pacify them with little gifts of sweetness, right in the face of death.

Fenton made a gasping noise, like he couldn’t get enough air. His lungs were an abandoned barn, something cavernous, with rafters. Zeus could hear pigeons in there, flapping their wings in the dust. But that story’s a good sign, he said. It’s
optimistic
. It shows how things we give away can sometimes come back to us, that the things we do, whether we know it or not, can have a good effect.

You don’t understand, Fenton said. I was in the army. I was trained to kill people. I was involved in that killing, and it was after meeting that man again that my body started to break down. I thought, why? Why did I meet him? Was it to take me back to that moment in Lebanon? Or to a moment just before that, when my father sent me to the army in the first place and I didn’t refuse? Because what enemies did I have? Talk about Jewish duty. It was my duty to refuse. It’s
everybody’s
duty.

Fenton had to stop and rest.

That’s what I’m guilty of, he said, in the smallest voice. That’s why I’m dying. It’s why we’ll all die.

No, it’s not, Zeus said.

I wanted to do the baby swap with you, Fenton said. I wanted to see Lalia and Sam. How can God live with himself? Why does he always take the best children?

N
orm flicked back and forth between election coverage and the baseball game – one moment a
CNN
anchor talking to a holographic image of a correspondent in Dallas, and the next, Cheeter making a dive for the ball and hanging for a second parallel to the ground before catching, in his tan glove, that little white snowball with such quick and unnatural precision it was as if a plug had been pulled in the earth and the first two things to get sucked down were Cheeter and that baseball.