“Thirty-eight Smith and Wesson. This was my gun for a long, long time.”
“I remember,” she said.
“I never left the house without that gun.”
“Do you want me to take care of it for you?” Franny wasn’t exactly sure how she would do that. She couldn’t put it in her luggage. She couldn’t take it on the plane or bring it into her house in Chicago with Kumar and the boys. She didn’t want the gun but was sure she could figure something out.
“I can’t pick it up anymore,” he said. “It’s too heavy. I can’t get it out of the drawer. All the different things you think about, but I never thought about that.”
They would go down to the firing range at the police academy in the summer and shoot paper targets when she and Caroline were girls. It was in all the world the one thing Franny was better at than Caroline. She could shoot a gun. Fix’s friends would come by and marvel at Franny’s target paper when they pulled them in. “Sign that girl up!” the cops would say, and Franny, clear of eye and steady of hand, would beam.
“Don’t worry about that,” Franny said.
“Could you shoot me, do you think?” her father asked.
“Your Lortab is kicking in, Dad. Go to sleep.” She took her father’s hand off the gun, then leaned over and kissed his forehead.
“It is kicking in so you have to listen to me. There’s no time for us to talk anymore, just the two of us. I can’t pick up the gun but no one knows that but you. No one would think of that. Lots of cops shoot themselves in the end, when the end comes to this. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
The gun lay heavy in her lap. “I’m not going to shoot you, Dad.”
He looked at her then, his mouth open, and without his glasses she could see his eyes were fogged with cataracts. Was this the way Cal had looked at Teresa the summer he was seven, the bee crawling over his shirt? Was it the way Cal had looked at her when he died? She couldn’t remember.
“I need your help. Your help, Franny. Marjorie puts the pills away. I don’t know where they are, and if I did know I couldn’t get up to get them. I wouldn’t know which ones to take. She fills up this feeding tube like I’m a car. If I shot myself, no one would mind.”
“Trust me, they would mind. I would mind.”
“Marjorie and Caroline will go to the grocery store tomorrow and you’ll stay here with me. Put on two pairs of those gloves, the disposable ones, one on top of the other. You put my hands on the gun and then hold your hands over my hands.”
Franny put her hands over her father’s hands. She couldn’t write it off to the Lortab or the pain. “Dad.”
“Face the grip out, not to the throat but away from the throat. Do you understand me? I’ll be right here with you. We can go over it step by step. You hold it right under my chin, then tilt it back just a little, maybe twenty degrees. Once you get it set up I want you to lean back. You won’t get hurt.”
Why wasn’t he asking Caroline? That’s what she wanted to know. Caroline was his favorite. She was the one he trusted. But Caroline wouldn’t have listened to him.
“I can’t,” she said.
“When the gun fires you’ll drop it. Leave it however it falls. You pull off the gloves and stick them in your pocket. Go look in the mirror, make sure there’s nothing on your face, then call 911. That’s all you’ve got to do. No one is ever going to think it was you. And it won’t be you, it’s me. It’s you helping me. I wouldn’t put you in a bad spot.” His eyes were closing, down and up then down.
“It would be a bad spot,” she said. There had always been the sensation of letting her father down, living with her mother, living on the other side of the country, living with Bert. How strange it was that even now all of that stayed with her, that she would think, even for an instant, of not shooting her father as failing him again.
“People are scared of the wrong things,” Fix said, his eyes closed. “Cops are scared of the wrong things. We go around thinking that what’s going to get us is waiting on the other side of the door: it’s outside, it’s in the closet, but it isn’t like that. What happened to Lomer, that’s the anomaly. For the vast majority of the people on this planet, the thing that’s going to kill them is already on the inside. You understand that, don’t you, Franny?”
“I understand,” she said.
He reached out and patted her hand again, her hand and the gun. “I depend on you so much,” he said. His mouth opened as if for one last thought, and then he fell asleep.
Sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, Franny unloaded the revolver. Unloading, cleaning, reloading, that was all part of their childhood education. There were six bullets in the chamber and she put them in the front pocket of her jeans and stuck the gun in the back of the waistband beneath her shirt. Her pants were snug around the waist these days and for once she was glad about it.
When she came back to the den Caroline and Marjorie were watching The Man Who Came to Dinner. Caroline pushed the mute button while Monty Woolley tyrannized the secondary characters from his wheelchair.
“How’s your father?” Marjorie asked.
“Asleep.” Franny could feel the cold of the metal pressing into the small of her back. It was ridiculous, walking through the room with a gun and not mentioning it, but she didn’t think the gun was anything Marjorie needed to know about, nor did she need to know about his request. She would tell Caroline in the morning, but there was nothing more that needed to be said tonight, not one more conversation. Franny said she was going to get into bed and read.
That night, after putting the gun in her suitcase and the bullets in a sock, Franny dreamt of Holly. It had been so many years since they had seen each other but there she was, still fourteen, her straight dark hair divided into pigtails, her cropped yellow top knotted halfway up her skinny white torso. She was still a girl, freckles unfaded, braces on her teeth. They were back in Virginia, back at Bert’s parents’ house, and they were walking through the long field that lay between the house and the barn. Holly was talking, talking, the way Holly was always talking, explaining the history of the commonwealth and the Mattaponi Indians who had once lived along the banks of the river. The Mattaponi, she said, had fought the English in the second and third Anglo-Powhatan Wars.
“Right here,” she said, holding out her hands. “There weren’t many of them to begin with, and between the two wars and all the diseases the English brought with them most of the Mattaponi died. Do you remember how Cal would look for arrowheads? Our grandfather had a dish of them on his desk but he’d never give us any. He said he was saving them. What was he saving them for do you think? An uprising?”
Franny looked out over the green slope of grass. There was a shallow pond beyond the barn where the horses liked to wade on hot days, where they themselves had ventured in on some occasions despite the thick, sucking muck at the bottom. She looked at the distant line of trees that rimmed the field to the left and the stand of hay to the far right that the Cousinses leased out. She was trying to take in how beautiful it all was — the grass and the light and the trees, the entire valley. This was where Cal had died, where Holly and Caroline and Jeanette had run through the field once they realized what had happened, back to the house to get Ernestine, Caroline telling her to stay with Cal in case he needed help. Why had Caroline told her to stay?
“You took the gun then, remember?” Holly said. “You brought it back to Caroline later that night.”
Cal’s eyes were shut but his mouth was open like he was still trying to pull in air. His lips were thick and swollen and his tongue was coming out of his mouth. Franny stood over him, looking back in the direction of the house and then looking down. When she remembered the gun she pulled back his pants leg. There it was, stuffed in his sock and tied to his calf with a red bandanna. Franny got it in her head that Ernestine or the Cousinses or whoever was coming out to save her shouldn’t find the gun. They would all get in trouble for that. “I don’t know why I took it,” she said. She really didn’t.