“It’s so hard to remember what I was thinking,” Caroline said. “Cal was already dead but I still felt like I could do something about it. I could make sure no one knew we’d given Albie the Benadryl. I could get the gun back to the car. Why did Cal have that goddamn gun?” Caroline said, turning to look at her. “Who leaves a gun in the car and never knows their teenaged son has it tied to his leg? And why did I care? Cal was dead and the gun didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s like this enormous tree had just crashed through the house and I was picking up leaves so no one would notice what had happened.”
“We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.”
“I made it worse,” Caroline said.
Franny shook her head. “You couldn’t have made it worse. There isn’t anything worse.” She laid her forehead on the seat in front of her.
“Maybe I should have told her.”
“Told her what?”
“I don’t know, that Cal wasn’t alone, that we were all there with him when he died.”
“Holly and Jeanette were there too and they never told her. Or who knows, maybe they did. We have no idea what Teresa knows about what happened in Virginia.”
“Unless she goes to the movies this weekend.”
“Your guilt’s got nothing on my guilt,” Franny said. “Your guilt isn’t even in the ballpark.”
Caroline and Franny lost their father’s eighty-third birthday. The traffic, which had been manageable driving over to Teresa’s, was at a standstill going out to the beach from Torrance, and so they got home well after dark. The consequence of their kindness was that Fix had been too long in his wheelchair and too long in the car. His pain radiated out to his feet and hands and into the bones of his face, though it was nothing like the pain that concentrated into the white-hot center of himself.
“Just let me go to sleep,” he said to Marjorie when they got him in the house. She had to bend over to hear him he had so little voice left. “I can’t stand this,” he said. He was tugging at his shirt, trying to get it off.
Marjorie helped him with the buttons. During the course of his illness, Fix had lost his reserves. He had no buffer to carry him through the unexpected. They had stayed out too long and now he was bone on bone.
“You were with Teresa Cousins?” Marjorie said to Franny, in the same way she might have said, You took him to South Central to smoke crack?
“Her son called right after we got out of the movie. She had to go to the hospital,” Franny said.
All she had to do was bring him home first. They were practically at the house when Albie called, but it hadn’t occurred to her that she was the one to make that decision, not Fix. “We didn’t know it was going to take this long.”
Caroline put a Lortab in a tiny spoonful of applesauce and gave it to her father. The pills were easier to swallow that way.
“Doesn’t she have her own family?” Marjorie had always been so patient with the girls, right from the beginning when Fix used to bring them over to her mother’s house to take them swimming. But dragging their dying father along on an errand of mercy for someone they didn’t know was tantamount to trying to kill him.
“She does,” Franny said. “But none of them live in town. Dad said he wanted to see her.”
“He didn’t know her. Why would he want to see her?” Marjorie ran her hands across the shoulders of his rumpled undershirt. “I’ll get you to bed,” she told him.
Franny looked at her sister, the two of them still standing in the den once Marjorie had rolled Fix away. “If there’s anything else I can fuck up today you let me know.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Caroline said, and rubbed her face. Neither of them had eaten and neither of them would. “You didn’t know. And anyway, we had to go, all three of us. We owed her that. I understand that it makes no sense to Marjorie, but even if it was a mistake, we owed it to Teresa.”
Franny gave her sister a tired smile. “Oh, my love,” she said. “What do the only children do?”
“We’ll never have to know,” Caroline said.
Caroline went up to the bedroom they shared to call Wharton and say goodnight. Franny went into the backyard to call Kumar.
“Did you find the checkbook?” Franny asked.
“I did, but you could have texted me back six hours ago when I asked you.”
“Really, I couldn’t have.” She yawned. “If you’d been here today you’d be overwhelmed with sympathy for me right now. Did the boys make it home from soccer practice okay?”
“I haven’t seen them,” Kumar said.
“Don’t give me a hard time. I’m not up for it.”
“Ravi’s in the shower. Amit is pretending to do his homework on the computer but he switches over to some horrible video game whenever I stop watching him.”
“Are you watching him now?” Franny asked.
“I am,” her husband said.
Marjorie tapped on the kitchen window and waved her inside.
“I have to go now,” Franny said.
“You’re still coming back?”
“That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about,” she said, and hung up the phone.
“Your father wants you to come in and say goodnight,” Marjorie said, looking tired. “I can’t believe he’s still awake.”
“Is Caroline in there?”
Marjorie shook her head. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”
Franny promised not to keep him up.
Marjorie had pushed their two single beds together and covered them with a king-sized blanket and bedspread to make it look like it was still one bed, even though Fix’s side was a hospital bed. Sitting halfway up helped with the pain in his chest and made it easier for him to swallow his own saliva so he slept that way. That was how Franny found him, in his light-blue pajamas, staring at the ceiling.
“Close the door,” Fix said, and patted the space in the bed beside him. “This is private.”
She went and sat down next to her father. “I’m sorry I dragged you out to Torrance,” Franny said. “I was thinking about Albie and Teresa when I should have been thinking about you.”
“Don’t listen to Marjorie,” Fix said.
“Marjorie’s looking out for you. That’s why we had to go to Teresa’s in the first place, because she doesn’t have someone like Marjorie to take care of her.”
“Forget about all of that for two minutes. We need to have a serious talk. Can you listen to me?” Fix in his bed seemed particularly hollow and small, her father’s husk.
“Bring the bed up a little more,” he said, and when Franny did he said, “Good. There. Now open the bedside table drawer.”
It was a big drawer, deep and long and full of crossword puzzle books and envelopes, a paperback guide to the great hiking trails of California, a book of Kipling’s poems, a pair of exercise grips to strengthen the hands, loose change, Vicks VapoRub, a rosary. The rosary surprised her. “What am I looking for?”
“It’s in the back.”
Franny pulled the drawer out farther and shifted the papers around. There she found the gun. She didn’t have to ask. She took it out and held it in her lap. “Okay,” she said.
Fix reached over and touched her hand, then he put his hand on the gun and smiled. “Marjorie made me promise that I’d turn everything in when I retired. She said no more guns once we move to the beach, so I didn’t tell her.”
“Okay.” Franny put her hand on top of her father’s hand. She felt the delicate structure of his skeleton beneath his paper skin. She imagined it was like touching a bat’s wing.