Commonwealth

2

“So you’re telling me that you named Albie?” Franny said.

“I didn’t name Albie,” her father said, the two of them following the nurse down a long, bright hall. “If I’d named Albie I wouldn’t have given him such a stupid name. You could trace a lot of that kid’s problems back to his name.”

Franny thought of her stepbrother. “There was probably more to it than that.”

“Did you know I got him out of Juvenile once? Fourteen years old and he tried to set his school on fire.”

“I remember,” Franny said.

“Your mother called and asked me to get him out.” He tapped his chest. “She said it would be a favor to her, like I was so interested in doing her favors. When you think about all the cops Bert knew in L.A. you have to wonder why they were bothering me.”

“You helped Albie,” she said. “He was a kid and you helped him. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“He didn’t even know how to set a decent fire. I drove him over to see your uncle Tom at the fire station once I got him out. Tom was back in L.A. then. I said to Bert’s kid, ‘You want to burn up a school full of children then these are the guys who can teach you how to do it.’ You know what he said to me?”

“I do,” Franny said, not pointing out that there had been no children in the school when Albie had set it on fire, and that he’d done a pretty good job. Say what you will for Albie, he knew how to set things on fire.

“He said he wasn’t interested anymore.” Fix stopped, which made Franny stop, and then the nurse stopped too to wait for them. “People don’t still call him that, do they?” Fix asked.

“Albie? I don’t know. That’s what I’ve always called him.”

“I’m trying not to listen to this,” Jenny said. The nurse’s name was Jenny. She was wearing a name tag but that didn’t matter, they knew her.

“You can listen to anything you want,” Fix said. “But we should be telling better stories.”

“How are you feeling today, Mr. Keating?” Jenny asked. Fix had come to the UCLA Medical Center for chemotherapy so the question wasn’t entirely social. If you didn’t feel well they sent you home and the entire process was pushed even further out into the unknowable future.

“Feeling fine,” he said, his arm hooked through Franny’s. “Feeling like light on the water.”

Jenny laughed and the three of them stopped in a large, open room off the hall where two women wearing head wraps sat with digital thermometers in their mouths. One of them gave the newcomers a tired nod while the other stared ahead. All around them the nurses came and went in their candy-colored scrubs. Fix sat down and Jenny gave him a thermometer and wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his arm. Franny took the empty chair next to her father.

“Just to get back to the original point for a minute, you and Bert talked about what he should name his son before Albie was born?” Franny had heard the story about the fire and the phone call that came after it a hundred times but somehow the one about Albie’s name had never come up before.

Fix took the thermometer out. “It wasn’t like we talked about it later.”

“Hey!” Jenny said, pointing, and Fix put the thermometer back in his mouth.

Franny shook her head. “It’s just hard to believe.”

Fix turned his eyes up to Jenny, who unwrapped the cuff. “What’s hard to believe?” she said for him.

“All of it.” Franny opened her hands. “You and Bert making drinks together, you and Bert speaking, you knowing Bert before Mom did.”

“Ninety-eight on the nose,” Jenny said, and ejected the plastic thermometer sleeve into the trash. Then she pulled a length of bright-pink tourniquet out of her pocket and tied it around Fix’s upper arm.

“Of course I knew Bert,” he said, as if he were being denied the credit he was due. “How do you think your mother met him?”

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t a question she’d ever thought to ask. There was no time in her memory before Bert. “I guess I thought Wallis introduced them. You hated Wallis so much.”

Jenny was kneading the inside of Fix’s elbow with her fingertips, searching for a vein that might still be open for business.

“I’ve known junkies who shot between their toes,” Fix said with something approaching nostalgia.

“One more reason you don’t want a junkie for a nurse.” She tapped another minute on the papery skin and then smiled, holding the vein in place with one finger. “Okay, mister, here we go. A little stick.”

Fix didn’t flinch. Somehow she had managed to slip the needle straight in. “Oh, Jenny,” he said, looking into the part of her hair as she bent over him. “I wish it could always be you.”

“Did you really hate Wallis so much?” Jenny asked. She plugged in a rubber-topped vial and watched it fill up with blood, then she filled another.

“I did.”

“Poor Wallis.” She slipped out the needle and taped a cotton ball in place. “Just hop up on the scale and then I’ll be done with you.”

Fix got on the scale and watched as she tapped the metal weight back with one fingernail. Tap-tap down, another pound, another, until the scale balanced at 133. “You’re drinking your Boost?”

When they were finished with what were called the preliminaries, they went farther down the same hall, past the nurses’ station, where doctors stood reading reports on computer screens or their phones. They went into the large, sunny room where the patients lay tilted back in recliners, tethered to trickling streams of chemicals. Someone had turned the volume off on all the televisions, which meant they were freed from commercials but left with the discordant beeping of monitors. Jenny led Franny and Fix to two chairs in the corner. It was a gift, considering how busy the chemo room was. Everyone with the energy for preference preferred the corner chairs.

“I hope you have a good day once this is over,” Jenny said. Jenny didn’t administer chemo. It was only her job to get the chart ready for the nurse who would take over his case from there.

Fix thanked her and then settled in, using both hands to push himself into the recliner. When his head tilted back and his feet levered up he gave the small sigh of a cop in his chair at the end of a long day on the beat. He closed his eyes. For five full minutes he stayed so still that Franny thought he’d gone to sleep before the line was even started. She wished she’d thought to bring a magazine with her from the waiting room and was just starting to look around the treatment room, because sometimes magazines got left in there, when her father went back to his story.

“Wallis was a bad influence,” he said, eyes still closed. “She was always sitting in our kitchen going on about liberation and free love. What you have to remember about your mother is that she didn’t have her own character. She turned into whoever she was sitting next to. When she was sitting next to Miss Free Love then free love sounded like a great idea.”

“It was the sixties,” Franny said, glad he was awake. “You can’t pin the whole thing on Wallis.”

“I’ll pin anything I want on Wallis.”

It probably wasn’t a bad idea. Wallis had died ten years before of colon cancer, and for all her talk of free love and liberation, she had stuck it out with Larry, who she had married when she was a junior in college. Larry saw her out of her life as patiently as he had seen her through it — giving her bed baths, counting her pills, changing her colostomy bag. Larry and Wallis had moved to Oregon after Larry sold his optometry practice. They grew blueberries and paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their dogs because their children and grandchildren so rarely had the time to visit. Wallis and Beverly had been maintaining their friendship from opposite sides of the country since they were twenty-nine years old, since Beverly left for Virginia to marry Bert Cousins, so Wallis’s late-life move hadn’t affected them at all. Los Angeles, Oregon, what difference did it make when you lived in Virginia? If anything, they were closer after the move because Wallis had no one but Larry and the dogs to talk to. Beverly and Wallis had e-mail and free long distance now. They talked for hours. They sent birthday presents to one another, funny cards. When Beverly married her third husband, Jack Dine, Wallis flew from Oregon to Arlington to be the matron of honor, as she had been the maid of honor at Beverly’s wedding to Fix, but not in Beverly’s wedding to Bert, which had been conducted privately and without friends at Bert’s parents’ house outside Charlottesville. Later, when Wallis got sick, Beverly flew to Oregon and they sat up in the bed together and read Jane Kenyon’s poetry aloud. They talked about the things in life that had mystified them — mostly their children and their husbands. Wallis hadn’t liked Fix Keating any more than he liked her, and she never minded that he assigned to her full responsibility for things that could not possibly have been her fault. If she could shoulder the burden of his blame while she was alive, it was hard to imagine she’d be bothered by it now.

“Are you cold?” Franny asked her father. “I can get you a blanket.”

Fix shook his head. “I don’t get cold now. I get cold later. They’ll bring me a blanket when I need one.”

Franny looked around the room for the nurse without letting her eyes linger on any of the patients — the woman asleep with her mouth open, hairless as a newborn mouse, the teenaged boy tapping on his iPad, the woman whose six-year-old sat quietly in the chair next to hers and colored in a book. How had chemo gone for Wallis? Did Larry drop her off or did he sit with her? Did their sons come up from L.A.? She would have to remember to ask her mother.

“They’re slow getting started today,” Franny said, not that it mattered. The soup and the bread that Fix wouldn’t eat were ready at the house. Marjorie would be waiting for them. They would watch Jeopardy! Franny would sleep in the guest room upstairs.

“Never be in a rush to have someone poison you. That’s my motto. I can sit here all day.”

“When did you get to be so patient?”

“The patient patient,” he said, pleased with himself. “So do you and Albie keep in touch?”

Franny shrugged. “I hear from him.” Franny had talked about Albie too much in her life, and now, as if she could make up for it, she made a point of not talking about him at all.

“And what about old Bert? How’s he doing?”

“He seems okay.”

“Do you talk to him very often?” Fix asked, the soul of innocence.

“Not nearly as often as I talk to you.”

“It isn’t a contest.”

“No, it’s not.”

“And he’s married now?”

Franny shook her head. “Single.”

“But there was a third one.”

“Didn’t work out.”

“Wasn’t there a fiancée though? Somebody after the third one?” Fix knew full well that Bert had had a third divorce but he never tired of hearing about it.

“There was for a while.”

“And the fiancée didn’t work out either?”

Franny shook her head.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Fix said, sounding as if he meant it, and maybe he did, but he had asked her the same questions a month before and he would ask her again a month from now, pretending that he was old and sick and didn’t remember their last conversation. Fix was old and sick, but he remembered everything. Keep examining the witness — that’s what he had told her over the phone when she was a kid and her ID bracelet had gone missing from her locker. She had called him from Virginia at five o’clock, the minute the rates went down, two o’clock California time. She called him at work. She had never called him at work before but she had his business card. He was a detective by then, and he was her father, so she figured he’d know how to find the bracelet.

“Ask around,” her father had told her. “Find out who was changing classes and where they were going. You don’t need to make a big deal about it, don’t let anyone think you’re accusing them, but you talk to every kid who walked down that hall and then talk to them again because either there’s something they’re keeping from you or there’s something they haven’t remembered yet themselves. You have to be willing to put in the time if you’re serious about finding it.”

Patsy was his nurse today, a child-sized Vietnamese woman who swam in her XXS lavender scrubs. She waved at him from across the crowded room as if it were a party and she had finally caught his eye. “You’re here!” she said.

“I’m here,” he said.

She came to him, her black hair braided and the braid caught up in a doubled loop like a rope to be used in the case of true emergency. “You’re looking good, Mr. Keating,” she said.

“The three stages of life: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking good, Mr. Keating.’”

“It all depends on where I see you. I see you at the beach lying on a towel in your swim trunks, I don’t think you look so good. But here”—Patsy dropped her voice and looked around the room. She leaned in close. “Here you look good.”

Fix unbuttoned the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, offering her the port in his chest. “Did you meet my daughter Franny?”

“I know Franny,” Patsy said, and gave Franny the smallest raise of the eyebrow, universal shorthand for The old man is forgetting. She pushed a large syringe of saline to clear the port. “Tell me your full name.”

“Francis Xavier Keating.”

“Date of birth.”

“April 20, 1931.”

“That’s the winning ticket,” she said, and pulled three clear plastic pouches from the pockets of her scrub top. “Oxaliplatin, 5FU, and this little one is just an antiemetic.”

“Good,” Fix said, nodding. “Plug ’em in.”

From outside the seventh-story window the bright Los Angeles morning came slanting in across the linoleum floor. Patsy skated off to the nurses’ station to input the details of treatment while Fix stared up at the silent advertisement playing on the television that hung from the ceiling. A woman walking through a rainstorm was drenched and dripping, lightning shooting down around her. Then a handsome stranger handed her his umbrella and as soon as he did the rain stopped. The street was now some British gardener’s idea of the afterlife, all sunshine and roses. The woman’s hair was dry and billowing, and her dress trailed behind her like butterfly wings. The words “Ask Your Doctor” parked across the top of the screen, as if the advertisers had anticipated everyone turning off the sound. Franny wondered if the drug was for depression, an overactive bladder, thinning hair.

“You know who I always think about when I’m here?” Fix asked Franny.

“Bert.”

He made a face. “If I ask you a question about Bert or his pyromaniac son, that’s called making conversation, being polite. I don’t think about them.”

“Dad,” Franny said. “Who’ve you been thinking about lately?”

“Lomer,” he said. “You didn’t know Lomer, did you?”

“I didn’t,” she said, but she knew that story too, or some version of the story. Her mother had told her a long time ago.

Fix shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t remember Lomer. You were sitting in his lap the last time he came over. He was carrying you around everywhere with him. He didn’t even put you down when he ate his dinner. It was just a couple months after your christening party, I remember now. You were a pretty baby, Franny, and you were sweet. Everyone made such a fuss over you and it drove your sister crazy. Before you came along, Lomer paid all his attention to Caroline, which was how she liked it. I remember Lomer saying to her, ‘Caroline, come up here, there’s plenty of room,’ but she wasn’t having it. She couldn’t stand to see the two of you together.”

“Well, there you go,” Franny said. To the best of Franny’s memory, the only lap Caroline had ever wanted to sit in was their father’s, even after they had moved to the other side of the country.

Fix nodded. “Kids loved Lomer, all of them. He was always letting them get in the car, turn on the siren, play with the handcuffs. Can you imagine the lawsuits people would file if someone did that now, handcuffing a little kid to the rearview mirror for fun? They had to stand up on the front seat, they loved it. Lomer gave cops a good name. I remember when he left our house that night after dinner, your mother and I talked about how sad it was the guy didn’t have any kids of his own. We thought he was so old and he was what then, twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”

“Was he married?”

Fix shook his head. “He didn’t have a girlfriend, at least not when he died. He got his nose broken in the Navy and his nose was a mess but he was still a good-looking guy. Everybody used to say he looked like Steve McQueen, which was an overstatement because of the nose. Your mother was always wanting to set him up with Bonnie and I said no because I thought Bonnie was an idiot. Too bad I got my way on that one. It would have saved the world a priest.”

“Maybe he was gay,” Franny said.

Fix turned his head, a shadow of such bewilderment crossing over him that it was clear he thought there had been a misunderstanding. “Joe Mike wasn’t gay.”

“I meant Lomer.”

And with that Fix closed his eyes again and kept them closed. “I don’t know why you have to do that.”

“There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it,” Franny said, but she was already sorry. Once upon a time in the city of Los Angeles there was a smart heterosexual cop who loved kids and looked like Steve McQueen and didn’t have a girlfriend; whether she thought such a thing was possible didn’t matter. Gay or straight, Lomer was just shy of fifty years dead. The chemo bag had just gone up and they had another hour and a half to sit in this room and either talk or not talk. “I’m sorry,” she said, and when he didn’t answer her she gave his arm a small poke. “I said I was sorry. Tell me about Lomer.”

Fix waited for a minute, deciding whether to nurse the grudge or let it go. Truth be told, Franny irritated him, the way she looked like Beverly but without Beverly’s sense of knowing what to do with her looks — her hair in a ponytail, the drawstring pants, not so much as ChapStick on her face. He knew people here, sometimes his doctor came by during treatment. She could have made an effort.

And she didn’t know the first thing about Lomer either. Sitting in his lap when she was a year old was as close as Franny ever got to a man of Lomer’s caliber. That old guy she’d been so crazy about when she was young, the one who’d robbed her blind, and even her husband, who may be nice enough but had clearly married her because he needed a babysitter for his children — Franny had no taste in men. Fix had hoped that someday his girls would meet a man like Lomer but no luck there. The picture in his mind — his partner at the dinner table holding Franny, Beverly in the kitchen dressed like she was going out to dinner instead of making dinner — that was enough to make the decision to keep his eyes closed, but then he felt a single, electric jolt run through his esophagus, as if the poison coursing through him had suddenly washed against the side of the tumor, and Fix remembered again what he was constantly forgetting: this was going to kill him.

“Dad?” Franny said, and touched her hand very lightly to his sternum in exactly that place.

Fix shook his head. “Get me another pillow.”

When she brought the pillow and arranged it behind his back, he started. Franny had come all the way from Chicago to see him. She’d left her husband and the boys for this.

“What you need to know about Lomer is that he was a funny son of a bitch,” Fix said. “There was nothing better than going on a stakeout with him.” He found his own voice to be small and cleared his throat to start again. “I looked forward to sitting in some piece-of-crap car until four o’clock in the morning in South Central because Lomer was there telling jokes. I’d laugh until I was sick, until finally I had to tell him to cut it out or we were going to blow the whole night’s work.”

Franny’s father looked brittle and small. The cancer was in his liver now.

There were spots in his pelvis and one in his spine, while Lomer was handsome and still twenty-nine.

That’s what Lomer would have to say about it.

“So tell me a joke,” Franny said.

Fix smiled at the ceiling, at Lomer sitting beside him in the car. He lay like that for several minutes, the silvered droplets of chemo sliding down the plastic tubing and into the hole in his chest, then he shook his head. “I don’t know them anymore.”

Which wasn’t true exactly. He remembered one.

“So this woman is home when a cop knocks on the door,” Lomer said. For the first second Fix didn’t know he was starting in on a joke. That was the thing about Lomer, you never knew. “The cop has a dog with him, something like a beagle, maybe a little bigger than a beagle, and the dog looks guilty as hell. The beagle tries to look up at the woman and he can’t do it, he can’t meet her eye, so he’s looking down at the grass like maybe he’s dropped a quarter in there somewhere.”

A joke. Fix was driving and the windows were down. The radio was squawking directives in numeric code and Fix dialed back the volume until the words and the numbers were nothing more than a slight crackling of static. Lomer and Fix weren’t headed anywhere in particular. They were on patrol. They were looking.

“The cop,” Lomer said, “he’s trying. This is tough duty. ‘Ma’am,’ he says, ‘is this your dog?’ And she tells him it is. ‘Well, I’m sorry to inform you there’s been an accident. Your husband’s been killed.’ So you know what happens, she’s shocked, she’s crying, all of it. The dog still won’t look at her. ‘But ma’am,’ the cop says, and he does not want to say this, ‘there’s something else I have to tell you.’ He’s just going to rip off the Band-Aid. ‘Your husband’s body, when we found him at the site, he was naked.’ And the wife repeats the word, ‘Naked?’ And the cop nods, then he clears his throat. ‘There’s something else, ma’am. There was a woman in the car with him, and the woman didn’t make it either.’ The wife makes some sort of sound, a little gasp, or maybe she says, Ooh. And then the cop finishes it off. He doesn’t have any choice. ‘Your dog here was in the car with them. It looks like he was the only survivor.’ And the dog just stares at his front paws like he really wishes they’d all been killed together.”

Fix turned the car down Alvarado. It was August 2, 1964, and even though it was nearly nine o’clock at night it still wasn’t fully dark. Los Angeles smelled like lemons and asphalt and the muted exhaust of a million cars. There were kids on the sidewalk shoving each other and running away, one big game, but the night crawlers were coming out too: the gang-bangers, the working girls, the junkies with their insatiable needs, and together they created a market of exchange. For everyone there was something to sell or buy or steal. The night was just getting warmed up. The night was still very young.

“So do you make these things up?” Fix asked. “Have you been riding around for the last three hours making this up in your head or do you read jokes in joke magazines and save them for the right time?”

“This isn’t a joke,” Lomer said, taking off his sunglasses now that the sun was nearly finished. “I’m telling you what happened.”

“To you,” Fix said.

“To someone I know. The cousin of someone I know.”

“Fuck you. Seriously.”

“Just be quiet and listen for a change. So the cop offers his condolences and hands the woman the leash and he’s out of there. The dog has to go inside. The whole time the dog is looking over his shoulder at the cop, who’s getting in his car. When the woman closes the door she starts in on the dog right away. ‘He was naked? He was in the car and he was naked?’” Lomer’s voice wasn’t that of a grieving widow but a furious wife. “And the dog looks back at the door, just desperate to be anyplace else in the world, you know?” Lomer looked out the passenger window of the car for a minute, at a kid with a basketball parked under one arm walking home from the courts, at a guy standing on the corner, drunk or high, his head thrown back and his mouth open, waiting for rain. When he looked back at Fix he was the beagle, the saddest, guiltiest beagle in the history of beagles, and the beagle that was Lomer nodded his head.

“‘And the woman?’” Lomer said in the wife’s voice. “‘She was naked too?’”

And just that quickly he was a beagle again, just barely able to look up at Fix. He nodded.

“‘Well, what were they doing?’”

This question was almost too much for Lomer as the beagle, so painful was the moment to recall, but he touched his thumb to the fingers of one hand to make a circle, and then took the index finger of his other hand and jabbed it through. Fix flipped on his turn indicator and pulled the black-and-white to the curb. He was no longer watching the street.

“‘They were having sex?’ the wife asks.”

Lomer nodded sadly.

“‘In the car?’”

The beagle closed his eyes and very slowly nodded again.

“‘Where?’”

Lomer lifted his chin just a quarter inch to indicate the backseat. A sadder beagle was never born.

“‘And what were you doing?’”

Fix was laughing before the punch line came, as Lomer put his hands on an imaginary steering wheel and looked nervously, nervously but with real interest, into the rearview mirror in order to see the backseat of the car, where Lomer the beagle watched his master screw another woman.

“Where do you get these things?” Fix asked and for a second touched his forehead to the steering wheel. Lomer never told him but he could remember the feeling of laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. Then from underneath the laughing and the sound of the cars rushing past and the high Latin music that was coming from someplace neither of them could see, a series of numbers separated them from the steady barrage of numbers the radio spat out — their numbers. Lomer and Fix both heard them with the volume nearly off, and they were glad, though there was no need to say this. The night had been too quiet so far and the quiet had given them an itch. They never believed there was nothing going on in Los Angeles, only that it hadn’t come to them yet. Now the lights were on and the siren was screaming out its loop. Lomer gave directions and Fix raced the car down the suddenly empty middle lane of the wide street. Pedestrians held to the curb, all eyes on the black-and-white. The two officers felt that kick inside which never failed to ignite them. The call was for a domestic disturbance, which could mean a screaming match that was annoying the neighbors or a husband beating his wife with a belt or some kids standing on the roof popping off rats in the palm trees with a BB gun. It wasn’t armed robbery and it wasn’t a murder. Most of the time the people were just embarrassed and whoever called the cops got all the blame. Though sometimes not.

They took Alvarado to Olympic and slid down into the warren of side streets. Night was full on them and Fix killed the siren but left on the lights so that house by house the curtains parted an inch or two and the occupants peered out, wondering who was in trouble and wondering who was thoughtless enough to bring the cops down on their quiet neighborhood where everyone had at least one thing to hide. The house they were going to was dark. When the residents of the house know you’re coming for them, the residents of the house trouble themselves to get up and turn off the lights. Standard operating procedure.

“Looks like we’re too late,” Lomer said. “They’ve already gone to bed.”

“Let’s wake them up,” Fix said.

Were they ever afraid? Fix would wonder about this later. In the years that followed there was not a single thing Fix Keating didn’t know about fear, even though he would eventually learn to set his face in such a way so as not to show it. But in the years he spent with Lomer, he walked through every door certain he would walk back out again.

It was a small box of a house with a small, square yard. It was like every other house on the street except for a cascading hedge of bougainvillea covered over in flowers the burning pink of antihistamine tablets. “How did this even get here?” Lomer said, running his hand across the leaves. Fix knocked on the door, first with his knuckles and then with his flashlight. In the flashing blue light from the car he could see he was making small dings in the wood. He called out, “Police!” but whoever was inside knew that already.

“I’ll check around back,” Lomer said and walked off whistling through the narrow side yard, shining his flashlight in the windows while Fix waited. There were no stars above Los Angeles, or they were there but the city threw out too much light to see them. Fix had his eye on the slim quarter moon when he saw a bright light coming through the dark house. Lomer switched on the porch light and opened the front door. “The back was open,” he said.

“The back door was open,” Fix said.

“What?” Franny asked. She put down her magazine and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. He’d been right about the blanket. Patsy had brought him one.

“I was asleep.”

“It’s the Benadryl. It keeps you from itching later on.”

He was trying to put it all together — this room, this day, his daughter, Los Angeles, the house just off Olympic. “The back door was open and the front door was locked. You would’ve stopped to think about that, wouldn’t you?”

“Dad, tell me what house we’re talking about? Your house now? The Santa Monica house?”

Fix shook his head. “The house we went to the night Lomer was shot.”

“I thought he got shot at a service station,” she said. That’s what her mother had told them, and if it was forty years ago, more than that, she still remembered it. Her mother had been fighting with Caroline. Whenever Caroline stayed out past curfew or said something really horrible to Bert or gave Franny enough of a slap to make her nose bleed, she took the opportunity to remind their mother that had Beverly been a decent wife and stayed with their father then none of this would have happened. If Beverly had stayed married to Fix then Caroline would have been a model citizen; her good behavior had been entirely within their mother’s grasp and she’d blown it by choosing to run off with Bert Cousins, so no one should be blaming Caroline for how her life was turning out. It was old news. By the point at which they’d come to this particular fight they’d been living in Virginia for longer than either girl had lived in Los Angeles, but the story of her alternative existence was Caroline’s trump card and she brought it out for every occasion. Franny remembered the time the three of them were in the car coming home from school, she and Caroline both in the plaid uniform skirts and white perma-press blouses of Sacred Heart. She couldn’t remember what Caroline had done that had started the fight, or why this fight seemed more serious than the others. But something that was said had made their mother tell them about Lomer.

“That’s right,” her father said to her. “He was shot at the Gulf station on Olympic.”

Franny leaned over in her chair and put her hand on her father’s forehead. His hair, which had been gray for as long as she could remember, had grown back a luminous white brush after the last round of chemo. Everyone talked about her father’s hair. She swept it back with her palm. “I really want to know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice low even though no one was listening. No one in that room was thinking about them at all.

Fix, who had never been big on sharing, suddenly wanted to explain it to her. He wanted Franny to understand. “The house was so small we knew it wasn’t going to take any time to find them. There were three doors off the hall — two bedrooms, one bathroom. These places were all put together the same way. They were in the first bedroom. It was a father, a mother, four kids. They were on the bed together in the dark. We flicked on the overhead lights and there they were, all sitting up straight, even the littlest one. It was the father who’d been beaten. That’s not one you see a lot. Usually it’s the woman who’s taken the hit but this guy looked like someone had just scraped him up off the freeway, his lip had sliced open on his teeth, one of his eyes was already shut, his nose was everywhere. I can see his face as clear as I see you. It’s crazy how much of that house and those people I remember — their feet were bare, and all of them had their feet up on the bed. We started asking them questions and we got nothing, no response at all. The father was looking at me with his one eye and I was wondering how he was even upright. There was blood on his neck that was coming out of both of his ears. I would have thought the beating had popped his eardrums if it weren’t for the fact that no one on that bed seemed like they heard us. Lomer radioed in for an ambulance and backup. I kept talking to them and finally the oldest girl, maybe she was ten, tells me they don’t speak English. The mother and father don’t speak English but the kids do. There were three girls and a boy. The boy was maybe seven or eight. I said, ‘The person who did this, where did he go?’ And then they all turned mute again, the girl was staring straight ahead just like her parents until the little one, who was five or something like that, not so much bigger than Caroline was then, looked at the closet plain as day. She didn’t turn her head but she was very clear. The guy was in the closet. The older girl grabbed her wrist and squeezed the hell out of it but Lomer and I turned around and Lomer opened the closet door, and there he was, smashed into the clothes. It was a small closet, the kind people used to have, and everything they’ve got in the world was in there, including this guy. He understood the situation. He wasn’t going to make it past us. He had blood on his shirt and his hand was cracked up from beating the poor son of a bitch on the bed. I don’t think he spoke any more English than the one he’d come over to bust up. He’d stuck his gun in the pocket of a dress in the closet. Maybe he figured nobody would find it and he could come back and pick it up later. Right about that time the backup came in and then the ambulance. There were no Miranda rights back then, no calling in a guy who spoke Spanish. The family on the bed, they’re all shaking now and the kids were crying, like it was fine when he was in the closet and they didn’t have to look at him but now that he’s standing in the bedroom again they were all stirred up. His name was Mercado. We found that out later. He had a regular job beating Mexicans who’d borrowed money to be smuggled into the country and hadn’t made enough yet to pay off the debt. Nobody who had any money or any way to get their hands on money screwed these guys over. They beat people in front of their families, in front of their neighbors. That was the wake-up call, and if the money still didn’t come a week or two later they’d swing by and shoot you in the head. Everybody knew it.”

“You’re awake!” Patsy said, making Franny jump. Patsy took down the smallest bag, the antiemetic, which was already empty. The others still had a way to go. “Did you get some rest?”

“I got some rest,” Fix said, but he looked exhausted, whether from the chemo or the story or both. Franny wondered if Patsy didn’t see it but then maybe he didn’t look so different from anyone else in the room.

Patsy yawned at the mention of sleep, covered her mouth with a small gloved hand. “One day I’m just gonna stretch out in one of those chairs. I’m gonna pull the blanket up over my head and go to sleep. People do that, you know, the light bothers their eyes. Who’ll know that it’s me under a blanket?”

“I wouldn’t tell,” Fix said and shut his eyes.

“Are you thirsty?” Patsy patted the blanket on top of his knee. “I could get you some water, or there’s soda if you want it. Do you want a Coke?”

Franny was just about to tell her they were fine but Fix nodded. “Water. Water would be good.”

Patsy looked at her. “You?”

Franny shook her head.

Patsy went off to get his water and Fix waited, opening his eyes so that he could watch her go.

“So then what happened?” Franny said. This was the deal of taking her father to chemo when none of the doctors spoke in terms of a cure: this was the time she had, these were all the stories she was going to get. It was why she and Caroline took turns flying out to Los Angeles, because they’d never been with him for very long. It was to give Marjorie a break because it was Marjorie who did all the work, but more than anything it was to have a chance at the stories he was going to take with him. She would call Caroline tonight after their father had gone to sleep and tell her about Lomer.

“The house filled up with people — cops, the ambulance guys working. Lomer found an envelope in the trash and he drew some mice on the back for the littlest girl. It was clear she was in serious trouble with her parents and Lomer felt bad for her. The father went to the hospital in the ambulance, the mother and the kids, my God, we probably left them in the house for somebody else to finish off, I don’t even know. It must have been two years before I thought about them again. We took the guy Mercado back to the station and booked him. When we were done it was nearly one in the morning and all we wanted was coffee. The coffee at the station was unfit. That was Lomer’s word—‘unfit.’ I used to find myself thinking that if they’d troubled themselves to get decent coffee then Lomer would have had a cup at the station, but those are the kind of thoughts that make you crazy. We went to a gas station over on Olympic. Not close but close enough. The guy who owned the place spent real money on his coffee and he taught all the kids who worked for him the importance of dumping it out and making a fresh pot. People would drive an extra couple of blocks to buy their gas from a guy who had good coffee. It wasn’t like it is today where there’s nobody to fill up your tank but you can get a goddamn cappuccino. A coffee pot in a gas station, especially if the coffee was good, that was full-on innovation. The guy made the coffee and the cops came around and sat in the parking lot drinking the coffee, and then more people would come because they felt safer because of the cops. It was a little ecosystem based on coffee, so that’s where we went. I was driving. The guy who drives drives all night, and the guy who isn’t driving gets the coffee, so Lomer went in. I have to think he didn’t see what was going on. He was eight, ten feet in the door before he was shot. And I didn’t see what was going on because I was writing in the log. I heard the shot and I looked up and Lomer was gone. What I saw was the kid behind the cash register raising up his hands, palms out, and then this guy Mercado turned around and shot him too.”

“Wait,” Franny said. “Mercado? The guy from the house?”

Fix nodded. “That’s what I saw. The gas station was just like all gas stations were back then — like a fish tank with a bright light on top — so I got a very clear look: Latino, twenty-five, five seven, white shirt, blue pants, some blood on the shirt. I’d been looking at this guy for the past two hours. He’d been sitting at my desk. I knew him, he knew me. He looked out the window and saw me there. He fired one more shot but he must have been rattled because the bullet didn’t even hit the car. All it did was punch out the glass in the front of the station. Mercado ran out the door and went around the back. I heard a car but I didn’t see it. I went in the station and Lomer was on the floor.” Fix stopped there, thought for a minute. “Well,” he said finally.

“What?”

Fix shook his head. “He was dead.”

“What about the other guy, the service-station guy?”

“He made it maybe an hour, long enough to get him into surgery. He died in surgery. He was a high school kid, summer job. All he had to do was make the coffee and keep the gas station open.”

Patsy came back with two Styrofoam cups of water, each with a bent-neck straw. “You never think you want any until you see it. That’s the way it goes around here.”

Franny thanked her and took the cups. Patsy was right, she wanted the water.

“But that’s crazy,” Franny said to her father, though she remembered that this was part of the story her mother had told them in the car, that her father had gone crazy after his partner was shot, that he hadn’t been able to identify the man who killed Lomer. “How did Mercado get out of the police station? How did he know where you were?”

“It was a quirk of the brain, or at least that’s how they explained it to me later. Too much had happened and somehow I mixed up the slides, exchanged one suspect for another. But to this day I’ll tell you: I saw what I saw. This was my partner dead. I didn’t know how it happened but the guy was standing under a light maybe fifteen feet in front of me. We looked straight at one another, just like you’re looking at me. When the cops came to the scene I described him to the letter. Hell, I gave them his name. But Jorge Mercado was in a holding cell in Rampart. He’d been there all night.”

“And the guy who killed Lomer?” Franny said.

“Turns out I never saw him.”

“So they never found the person who did it?”

Fix bent down the neck of the straw and drank. It was hard for him to drink because of the strictures in his esophagus. The water went down in quarter teaspoons. “No,” he said finally, “they found him. They put it together.”

“But you identified another man.”

“I identified another man to the police. I didn’t identify another man to a jury. They found someone who’d seen a car driving crazy near the gas station. They made it a point to find the driver and then they made it a point to find the gun he’d thrown out the window of the car. You shoot a kid in a gas station and the police department will make a sincere effort to find you. You shoot a cop in a gas station, that’s a different story.”

“But they didn’t have a witness,” Franny said.

“I was the witness.”

“But you just said you didn’t see the guy.”

Fix held up a single finger between them. “To this day I haven’t seen him. Even when I was sitting across from him in court. It never straightened out. The psychiatrist said when I saw the guy I’d remember him, and when I didn’t remember him the psychiatrist said it might come back over time, that I might just wake up one day and it would all be there.” He shrugged. “That didn’t happen.”

“So how were you a witness?”

“They told me who the guy was and I said yes, that’s him.” Fix gave his daughter a tired smile. “Don’t worry about it. He was the right guy. What you’ve got to remember is that he saw me too. He looked out of the fish tank just before he tried to shoot me. He knew who I was. He killed Lomer and he killed the kid and he knew I was the guy who saw him do it.” Fix shook his head. “I wish I could remember that kid’s name. At the funeral home his mother told me he was a serious swimmer. ‘Very promising’ is what she said. Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”

Beverly had stayed for another two years after Lomer died, even though she’d already made a promise to Bert that she was leaving. She stayed because Fix needed her. She’d pulled the car over to the side of the road on that day of the bad fight after school in Virginia and told Caroline and Franny to stop thinking she had just walked out on their father because she hadn’t. She had stayed.

“I managed to get Lomer out of my head eventually,” Fix said. “I carried him around for years, but one day, I don’t know, I put him down. I didn’t dream about him anymore. I didn’t think what he’d want for lunch every time I got lunch, I didn’t look at the guy riding next to me in the car and think about who he wasn’t. I felt guilty about that but I have to tell you, it was a relief.”

“But now you’re thinking about him again?”

“Well, sure,” Fix said, “all of this.” He raised his hand to the plastic tubing that tied him down to life. He smiled. “He’ll never have to do this. He’ll never get old and sick. I’m sure he would have wanted to get old and sick if anyone had asked him. I’m sure that we both would have said yes, please, give me the cancer when I’m eighty. But now…” Fix shrugged. “I can see it both ways.”

Franny shook her head. “You got the better deal.”

“Wait and see,” her father said. “You’re young.”