Why They Run the Way They Do (21 page)

He went back into the house, muddied and spattered with his own blood, to find something else to dig with. In the kitchen he seized upon a trio of possibilities from the items he'd won from the marriage: a spatula, a meat fork, and an ice cream scoop.

He returned to the shallow trench. It was cold out, but in minutes he'd worked up a sweat and he peeled his shirt off so that he was wearing only his pajama pants and his slippers, which were quickly becoming caked with dirt. The spatula was useless for anything but scraping, but the combination of the meat fork and the ice cream scoop showed promise. He could loosen the soil by stabbing with the meat fork, then shovel it out with the ice cream scoop. He paused for a minute to wipe sweat from his eyes and saw that the cat had come around the corner of the house and was standing at the edge of the patio watching, looking from person to dog and back again, trying, Simon imagined, to decide if either of them (scoop-handed man, lying-down dog) posed any kind of threat.

He went back to work, digging with both the scoop and his bare hand. He guessed he'd made about enough progress to bury a guinea pig. At this rate it would take him until morning to dig the grave, and the dog was de-frosting by the minute. When the sun came up, things would likely get ugly in a hurry.

A wave of light burst across the yard.

“Everything okay here?”

Simon stood and turned and blinked into the blinding light. He could make out the dim outline of a figure behind it. It was a cop, he thought. Of course, a neighbor had seen him out here, digging like a maniac, blood on his shirt, and called 911. Simon couldn't see much in the glare, but for all he knew there was a gun leveled at him, the safety unlocked, the trigger fingered. For all he knew, one move and he was dead, fallen beside his thawing dog. Fitting, yes, that it would come to this, that Rachel would get another call on her failing phone, this one to inform her that he himself was dead, was lying in a freezer that was not a Frigidaire Elite. But then, as the possibility of this last drama was at its ripest, he imagined Charlie without a father
and
without a dog. The drama deflated before his eyes. There was, finally, a limit to the damage you could inflict on a person all at once.

“It's Ted Oliver, from down the street,” the voice behind the flashlight said. “Lucy's dad. Are you all right?”

“My dog died,” Simon said.

“That's what she told me. I was bringing the trash around and heard you down here. Thought I'd come see what you were up to.”

The beam of light dipped to the ground around his feet, where Charlie's sand toys and the muddy utensils lay.

“You're digging with a fork?” Ted Oliver asked.

“I don't have a shovel,” Simon said. “My ex-wife got it.”

Now Ted clicked off the light and crossed the yard to the tree. He was a thin man with round glasses and a neatly trimmed beard.

“I've got one of those,” he said.

“A shovel?”

“No. Well, yes, that too.” He smiled and adjusted his glasses. “An ex-wife was what I meant. Lucy's mother. Left in the middle of the night when Lucy was three years old. Took the car and the credit card, didn't even leave a note. She was screwed six ways to Sunday but I missed her so much it nearly killed me.” Now he nodded to the dog. “Old age?”

“Cancer,” Simon said.

“Want some help?” Ted asked. “I'll grab that shovel. I suspect we could make quick work of it together.”

Simon considered. “Okay,” he said finally. “I mean, if you want.”

“Nobody
wants
to bury a dog,” Ted said. He knelt down beside her and lay his hand gently on her head. “She seemed like a good one,” he said. “I'd see you walking. She matched you stride for stride.”

Simon looked at the dog. Her fur was wet now, slick like after a bath. She looked like herself again, and he was sorry he'd kept her down there so long, becoming all the things she wasn't—cold and hard, freakish, a memory of another life, a bad joke. She was just a dog, a friendly brown dog, whom he'd untied from a post in the middle of the night and taken in, and loved.

My mother was thrilled to
be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking. She had dodged the bullet of lung cancer after all, she triumphantly announced to me on the phone that summer afternoon. All those years my brothers and I had hassled her, lectured her, begged her, berated her (“Don't you want to see your grandchildren graduate from college?”)—and for what? Her lungs were fine! She'd finally quit two years before, after a bitter and tumultuous relationship with patches and gum and hypnosis and electric cigarettes, but look! There'd been no need! The long-dreaded cancer had found some other place to roost.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her. “Throw a party?” I was trembling from the inside out—my mother was
dying
—and furious at her for reporting her diagnosis so flippantly, as if I, too, would be so thoroughly amused by the irony that the news would just roll right off me. I looked out the kitchen window and saw my children in the backyard, their half-naked bodies slick from the sprinkler, their hair nearly sparkling in the sunlight. It was a suffocating Midwestern Saturday smack in the middle of July. My son was rolling up my daughter in a badminton net.

“I would love a party!” she said. “Just the two of us. Leave Kevin with the kids, and we'll send your father away and
indulge
for a few days. Can you?”

“I don't know if I can think of it as a party,” I said.

“You can,” she said. “For me, you can. I'm like one of those dying children who gets to make a last wish. What are they called?”

“Dying children,” I said.

“See?” she said. “You
are
ready for a party. Can you come?”

I could. I did. I went the next day. Not quite the next day. Arrangements had to be made: work, children, husband—
the full catastrophe
, as Anthony Quinn famously said in my father's famously favorite movie. I went the next weekend. I got off the plane on a Friday morning with four cartons of cigarettes in my carry-on: two Carltons, her old brand, and two Winston Lights, the brand I had appropriated from my oldest brother when I was a sixteen-year-old cripple.

“Oh, honey,” she said breathlessly, when I opened my carry-on to reveal the precious cargo. “Oh, honey. Really?” She had to set her hand on a chair back to steady herself, and she wasn't being funny or dramatic. The last time she'd looked at me that way was the first time she saw me pregnant.

“The cigarettes are innocent,” I said. “We must celebrate the cigarettes.”

My father knew when he wasn't wanted. He hugged me in the driveway and went to visit my nearest brother for the weekend. My father had never been a smoker. He had no dog in this race. He was just a regular guy, a skinny engineer who could kick your ass at Ping-Pong and whose wife was dying of brain cancer. Six to eight months, the oncologist had told them, time enough for her to have a few days alone with her only daughter.

“You look great,” I said, after I'd dumped my stuff in my old bedroom and come out to the living room. I wasn't lying; she didn't look like a person
suffering
from anything. She was a tallish woman with still exquisite posture. Her black hair had never grayed and now never would. She wore solid-colored cardigan sweaters nearly every day, even in the summer, because air-conditioning always made the hair on her arms stand up. She looked essentially the same as she had the last time I'd seen her, when they'd come west at Christmastime and shared my son's bunk bed, my father on the top bunk because my mother “didn't like heights.” (“It's not really a
height
, Nana,” my son had told her, and they'd laughed about it all week.)

“I feel fine,” she said. “If they hadn't told me I was dying, I'd never know it.”

She'd already broken into a carton of Carltons, in exactly the way a dog would break into a package of bacon thoughtlessly left on a coffee table. Pieces of the box were strewn across the room. Now she flicked the lighter and took a drag so deep that I thought the smoke might seep from the tips of her shoes. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god, Christine, thank you.”

I sat down on the couch and opened my own carton, removed a pack. I remembered once, on a Christmas Eve many years before, my father had left the festivities to buy my mother two cartons of cigarettes, and when he got home he commented on the irony that the cigarettes were more expensive than any of the Christmas presents he'd gotten her.
And more beloved,
we'd all thought, though no one said it.

“Are you in pain?” I asked her.

“Very little,” she said. She ashed her cigarette. Ashtrays had already sprung up all over the living room; apparently when they'd been removed, they hadn't gone far. “Even less right now.”

I smacked my pack of cigarettes on my open hand until my palm stung, then undressed the cellophane and—with a quick strike to the index finger—knocked the first cigarette loose. I withdrew it gently from the pack and slowly ran it under my nose. It had been a dozen years since I'd had a cigarette—I'd smoked through grad school, simultaneously earning a master's in architecture and a thin, musical wheeze—and twenty years since that wonderful winter and spring I'd spent chain smoking with my mother. The tobacco was sweet and made my nostrils tingle.

“First this,” my mother said, sitting down across from me and pushing a stack of papers across the coffee table.

“What is it?”

“For pulling the plug,” she said. “I don't think your father has the stomach for it. And your wishy-washy brothers won't—”

“I just got here,” I said. “I haven't even taken my shoes off.”

“I'm getting my affairs in order,” she said. “Haven't you seen any movies about people dying? The plot demands it.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “But only because the plot demands it.” I signed the paper as the
X
instructed. It occurred to me after I set the pen down that I should have actually read the document. It could have demanded anything. I could have just agreed to give her my own brain. I could have agreed to sprinkle her ashes on my cereal. But I was anxious to get to my cigarette.

“No extreme measures,” she said. “When you think I'm gone,
pfffft
”—the cigarette like a blade across her neck—“I'm gone.”

I rubbed my thumb on the lighter before igniting it. “If you just drift off on the couch—?”

“When you think I'm gone,” she said, “I'm gone.”

I touched the quivering flame to my cigarette, she turned on the television, and we settled in. After a moment she let out a long, satisfied sigh.

“What?” I said.

“You're just what the doctor ordered,” she said, not turning from the TV. She ground out her first cigarette and reached for another.

A week after my sixteenth birthday, I was hit by a car and fractured my spine in three places. An old man veered off the road and struck me while I walked to the bus stop on a bone-chilling Tuesday morning. I never saw it coming. One minute I was reciting French verb tenses, and then I was in the air, twisting, twisted, flying on the edges of a joyful memory of my father flinging me into a swimming pool. I landed with a jolt that went from my toes to my teeth. The concrete sidewalk was bitter cold, and I was alone, and I looked into the bright blue sky and believed I was dead, until the old man was beside me in a panic, shouting at me to stand up, and when he took my arm and pulled, I felt things inside me fall apart, bones ripped from muscle torn from skin, and I lost consciousness.

For a time, a very short time, only a couple of days really, there was some terror about whether I'd walk again, but the surgery to repair my spine went off without a hitch, and after two weeks in the hospital, I was sent home to recuperate, which meant sleeping in long after my father and brothers had left the house, glancing at the schoolwork that had been packaged up for me, shuffling to the car, sweating through a couple of hours of grueling physical therapy, shuffling back to the car, and then returning to the cocoon of my living room, my mother, and my pain medication.