Commonwealth

7

“So Bert Cousins’s kid was the one who broke you and the old Jew up?” Fix said. They were on their way to Santa Monica, the car windows down. They were going to the movies. Caroline was driving. Franny was in the back, leaning forward between the two seats.

“How have I never heard that part of the story?” Caroline asked.

“Would you please not call him ‘the old Jew’?” Franny said to her father.

“Sorry.” Fix covered his heart with his hand. “The old drunk. May God rest his soul in Zion. Hats off to the kid is my point. He’s finally earned my respect.”

Franny imagined calling Albie with that bit of news. “It wasn’t like I left the house that night and never went back. We stayed in Amagansett all summer.” There was still Ariel and her intolerable Dutch boyfriend and sad little Button to deal with, the entire long, horrible summer of houseguests to endure. The end of Leo and Franny’s relationship played to a full house. It was more than twenty years ago and still the complete misery of that time was fully accessible to her.

“But essentially that was that, right?” Fix said. “The kid put the nail in the tire.”

Caroline shook her head. “Albie identified the fact that the tire had a nail in it,” she said, and Franny, surprised by the accuracy of her sister’s assessment, laughed.

“I should have stayed in law school,” Franny said. “Then I’d have been as smart as you.”

Caroline shook her head. “Not possible.”

“Get over a lane,” Fix said, pointing. “You’re taking a left at the light.” Fix had his Thomas Brothers street guide in his lap. He refused to let Franny put the theater’s address into her phone.

“Do you have any idea how it could have taken this long to make the movie?” Caroline glanced in the rearview mirror then accelerated deftly to get the better of an oncoming Porsche. As with so many other things in life, Caroline was the superior driver.

“It happens. Leo wouldn’t sell the film rights so nothing could have started until after he died. I can’t imagine his wife was easy to work with.” Natalie Posen. They were, miraculously, still married when Leo died fifteen years ago, still battling it out. All those years his wife and now his widow. Franny saw her just that one time at the funeral, so much smaller than she would have imagined, sitting in the front row of the synagogue flanked by two sons who looked like Leo — one from the nose up and the other from the nose down — as if each had inherited half his father’s head. Ariel was on the other side of the synagogue with a very grown-up Button and her own mother, the first Mrs. Leon Posen. Eric was listed in the program as an honorary pall bearer, too old himself to lift one sixth of the casket’s weight by that point. He’d been the one to call Franny with the news of Leo’s death, thoughtful considering all the time that had passed. She asked about the next book, the one of the long-ago advance that he was always supposed to be writing. Eric said no, sadly, it wasn’t there.

They were all there, time having run them down: Eric and Marisol, Astrid, the Hollingers, a dozen more — all the summer guests come to claim him along with the rest of the world. Franny stayed at the back, standing against the wall in the peanut gallery of former students and devoted fans and old girlfriends. Natalie Posen had chosen to bury her husband in Los Angeles, giving her spite the air of the eternal.

“The wife,” Fix said. “As long as we’re thinking of things to feel good about, let’s thank the wife.”

“Leo’s wife?”

Fix nodded. “She’s the unsung hero in all this.”

“How do you figure?” It was Fix’s birthday, eighty-three, with metastases to the brain. Franny was making her best effort.

“If she hadn’t hung in there like a pit bull to get more money, Leo Posen would have been a free man.”

“Ah.” Caroline nodded. She colored her hair the warm reddish shade of brown it had been when they were children, she went to Pilates three times a week. She had followed their mother’s example, kept herself up. Caroline had become the younger sister.

“I’m not seeing your point,” Franny said.

Fix smiled. Caroline, as far as he was concerned, had never missed a trick.

“If Leo had ever gotten a divorce,” her sister explained, “he would have married you.”

“Franny girl,” their father said, turning with difficulty to look at her, “that may have been the only bullet you ever dodged.”

Franny and Caroline had long agreed it was a waste of resources for them to visit either parent at the same time. With divorced parents on opposite sides of the country, and husbands whose parents also required a certain number of family holidays, Franny and Caroline divided their burden in order to conquer it. There were only so many vacation days, personal leave days, plane tickets, missed school plays, and unexcused absences between them. Whatever affection the two sisters had found for each other later in life would not be manifesting itself in visits. Los Angeles was as close as Franny ever got to the Bay Area, though she meant to go. Albie lived there now, two hours away from Caroline. Caroline’s oldest son, Nick, was a senior at Northwestern, so at least when Caroline and Wharton came out for parents’ weekend Franny could drive up to Evanston to see the three of them. Caroline’s other two children, the girls, Franny had missed out on entirely, much the same way Caroline had missed out on Franny’s two boys. But Ravi and Amit, no matter how long she’d had them, were not actually Franny’s. They had come with the marriage, and Caroline, try as she might to feel otherwise, could never grant full citizenship to stepchildren.

All of which was to say that under normal circumstances neither Franny nor Caroline would necessarily have traveled to Los Angeles to celebrate Fix’s birthday, but since Fix had already exceeded the outer limits of his oncologist’s predictions, they both stepped up their game. This birthday was going to be his last, a quick glance over to the passenger seat confirmed this, and in honor of the occasion the two sisters broke their own arrangement and met in California.

“So what are we going to do for the big day?” Caroline had asked the night before. “Sky’s the limit.”

They were sitting in the den, the four of them, in the house in Santa Monica that Fix and Marjorie had moved to when they finally left Downey after retirement. It was something of a miracle, that house, in no way splendid except that it was two blocks from the beach. It was forty years ago that Fix had known a cop who played poker with a bankruptcy judge. He had a tip the place was coming up at auction. That was when Fix finally told Marjorie he’d marry her. They would use her recent inheritance from her aunt in Ohio as the down payment. They would buy it, rent it out for twenty years or so, and by the time they were ready to retire they’d practically own it.

“That’s your proposal?” Marjorie had said, but she took the offer.

“But what was Dad’s part in all of it?” Franny had asked her years later when she finally heard the full story. Fix and Marjorie had driven the girls by the Santa Monica house every time they came to visit. They would point it out from the car, saying they owned it, saying one day they were going to live there. “If you were the one with the money then why did you have to marry him? You could have just bought the place yourself and rented it.”

“Your father wanted a house at the beach, and I wanted to marry your father.” Marjorie laughed when she heard how that sounded. She tried again. “He wanted to marry me. He was just slower to figure it out. I like to think that in the end everybody won.”

Marjorie had just finished pushing the nutritional supplement into Fix’s PEG tube. She was a young seventy-five to his old eighty-three, but it seemed that Marjorie had stopped eating about the same time her husband did. Her shoulder blades pushed out like a wire rack beneath her sweater.

“Let’s go to the show,” Fix said. “We’ll see a matinee of Franny’s movie.”

“Fix,” Marjorie said, her voice tired. “We talked about this.”

“My movie?” Franny asked, but of course she knew what he was talking about. He’d called it her book.

“The one your boyfriend wrote about us. I figure I’ve got one chance to see a movie about my life.” Fix appeared wonderfully satisfied by the thought. “I never read the book, you know. I wasn’t going to give the son of a bitch my money. But now that he’s dead and the money will go to his wife, it’s fine by me. Plus I read the review in the paper that said the woman who plays your mother wasn’t any good. I’m thinking that must really burn her up.”

Marjorie raised a slender hand. “I’m out. You and the girls make a day of it. I’ll be here with cupcakes when you get back.” A few free hours were worth a month of pension checks.

“Oh, Dad,” Caroline said. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to stay home and pull our toenails out with pliers?”

Franny had her share of guilt and dread when Commonwealth was published, but still, she would never deny that those were glorious days: the publisher’s luncheon at La Grenouille, the award ceremony in which Leo was called to the stage, the never-ending book tour where night after night he read to the spellbound crowds and then waited while the crowds formed a line at a table, supplicants come to tell him how his work had changed their lives. He was famous again, back in the light of the world, and every night in a different hotel room he gave her full credit, cradling her head in his hands while they made love. He could not look away from her. He loved her and thanked her and needed her, Leo Posen did. So for all the many costs she had been rewarded.

But seeing the movie now would bring back more than just her betrayal of her family. The movie also spoke to the failure of her long-ago relationship and the lonely death of the man she had loved, as sold by his second wife.

Franny hadn’t understood what it would be like to live with Commonwealth when Leo was writing the book, and once she’d read the book it was too late to do anything about it. The movie, however, was another matter. The movie had yet to be made. Franny begged Leo to keep the rights. She understood that such a promise would constitute a significant financial loss, and still, with the manuscript in her hands, she begged him.

Leo gave them to her on a three-by-five card, because Franny was the sun, the moon, and every last glittering star.

To Frances Xavier Keating,

on the occasion of her twenty-seventh birthday,

I give you the film rights to Commonwealth,

for now and forever,

as a token of my enduring love and gratitude.

LEON ARIEL POSEN

He honored it, even later when they rarely spoke and she suspected he needed the money. She didn’t mention his promise to anyone after he died. Who would she have told? His wife? She knew an index card didn’t stand a chance against the flotilla of lawyers. Irrationally, she had gotten it in her head that they might try and take the card away from her.

“No,” Franny said. No, it wasn’t a movie she wanted to see, especially not with her father and sister and a hundred strangers packed into the Santa Monica AMC 3, eating popcorn.

Fix laughed and smacked his hands flat against the arms of his recliner. “Boy, did you two turn out to be a couple of little girls. There’s nothing in that movie that’s going to hurt you. You should be able to see how a dying man stuck in this rattrap frame might want to see himself portrayed by a handsome movie star. And anyway, this story is ancient history. You’ve got until tomorrow to pull yourselves together. It’s my birthday and we’re going to the show.”

Caroline parked and Franny got the wheelchair out of the trunk. Fix had long since stopped driving but he wouldn’t sell the car. There was always the chance that fate could reverse itself, that a cure could be found in the latter part of the eleventh hour and the parts of himself that had been devoured by cancer could be restored. Hope, Fix said, was the blood of life, and the car could never be replaced. It was a Crown Victoria, a former unmarked police car he’d bought from the department. Franny called it the Batmobile for its ability to go a hundred and forty miles per hour if need be. Not that he’d ever driven it at a hundred and forty, but he liked to say he felt better just knowing what was possible.

Franny opened the car door and picked up her father’s feet from the floorboard, swinging them gently out and then taking his arm. “Count of three,” she said, and together they counted while he rocked back and forth to gain momentum. The car that could catch a stolen Ferrari could not help him up. Franny pulled him out and Caroline caught him in the chair the moment he stood. Even a month ago Fix had fought this. A month ago he wouldn’t use the walker, insisting instead on holding on to Marjorie, even after the falls. But that was behind them now. Now he let Franny put his feet on the paddles. He said thank you.

The actress who owned the house in Amagansett had wanted to play Julia in the movie, which was to say she wanted to play Franny’s mother. She didn’t know, of course, that Franny was a real person who would be sleeping in her bed on her Egyptian cotton sheets. Leo had blamed Albie for the end of their affair. He believed that had Albie never found them they would have gone on happily together. But Caroline was right: Albie didn’t put the nail in the tire, the nail was already there. Still, as long as Leo got to blame their personal problems on an innocent party, Franny would like the chance to blame the actress and her ridiculous goddamn house. No one should have so much money that they could own a house like that and then not even bother to live in it. The swimming pool was long and deep and looked nothing like a swimming pool at all. It looked like the foundation of a shotgun house that had been built in the 1800s and then blown away in a storm. The swimming pool was fed by a spring. No one knew exactly where it came from, not the spring, not the pool, both having been there longer than the actress’s house. And that was just the beginning: there were climbing roses that covered the east wall and then sprawled in a giant tangle over the sloping roof, a miraculous profusion of blooms. It was a storm of roses, white and red, a half a dozen shades of pink, that piled over themselves all summer long, one breed dying out just as another was peaking. A carpet of blown petals covered the lawn throughout the summer. And there was a Klimt in her bedroom, small but unarguably real, a painting of a woman who bore an almost ancestral resemblance to the actress. Who kept the Klimt in their summer house? It was the house, Franny believed, that had done them in. No one could stay away from it except the actress herself. Leo had called Franny one night long after their relationship was over to tell her the actress had invited him back to Amagansett for dinner. She said she wanted to talk about the movie, even though he told her there wasn’t any movie.

“Come anyway,” she’d said.

“You remember all that champagne in the refrigerator?” Leo said to Franny on the phone.

Franny remembered the champagne.

“Well, we drank it.” From his apartment in Cambridge, Leo sighed. “Nothing happened. That’s what I wanted to tell you. In the end I couldn’t go upstairs with her. It was still our bedroom, Franny. I wasn’t going to do it.”

By the standards of the film industry, both the actress and her attempts to land a part by any means possible were now ancient history. She had long ago ceased to be the romantic interest in films. She had stopped playing the mother roles. At sixty, she was even too old to play fairytale witches. She was left with a handful of dowager parts, the occasional senior senator, a ruthless CEO in a well-reviewed cable series. That was what Franny had to content herself with as the lights in the movie theater in Santa Monica went down: somewhere the beautiful actress was going to see the movie of Commonwealth and remember how hard she’d tried to be Julia.

But that turned out to be no comfort whatsoever.

Franny and Caroline, sitting with their father, were joined in the darkness by a single improbable thought: Would it have been worse to see a film of their actual childhood? There was the summer that Bert had the Super 8 and stalked them like Antonioni as they ran through the sprinklers and weaved their bikes in and out of the frame. Holly swirled a hula hoop around the straight pole of her hips. Albie jumped in front of her, pulling off his shirt. The sound of Bert’s voice came from the other side of the camera, barking at them to do something interesting, but they were being children, and so, in retrospect, they were fascinating. Maybe that film still existed in a box in her mother’s attic or somewhere in the bottom of a file cabinet in Bert’s garage. Franny could try to find it the next time she was in Virginia and thread the tape into a projector. That way they could see the real Cal running again and erase the memory of this sullen boy who played him. A film of life would definitely be better than this, even if there had been a camera behind them every minute recording the entire disaster of childhood, all the worst moments preserved, it would still have been better than having to watch these strangers making some half-assed attempt to replicate their lives. Holly and Jeanette had been collapsed into a single girl who was neither Holly nor Jeanette but some horrible changeling who stamped her foot and slammed the door when she argued. When had Holly or Jeanette ever done anything like that? But of course the child actors weren’t trying to play real children. They wouldn’t have known that the book had anything to do with real people, and anyway, they wouldn’t have read the book. So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every now and then there was a flash of familiarity in the minute cruelties the two families exchanged.

“It isn’t you,” Leo had said when she finished reading the book. “It isn’t any of you.” He was sitting in the second bedroom he used as an office in their apartment in Chicago, the little apartment they had before there was money. He held her in his lap and stroked her hair while she cried. She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but a day all the way back in Iowa when Leo, brushing his teeth while Franny was in the shower, had spit out his toothpaste, pulled back the curtain just a bit, and said, “I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about your stepbrother.”

What she had thought at that moment, naked in the water, the shampoo running down her neck, was that Leo Posen had listened to her, that he had found Cal’s death worthy of his further reflection. He reached into the water, ran his finger in a circle around her small soapy breast.

What she hadn’t thought of in the shower was that one day she would be fifty-two and have to watch the outcome of her smiling acquiescence play out on a screen. Cal’s character wasn’t dead yet, that was waiting up ahead. Albie’s character had been drugged a couple of times by the other children, the character who was Caroline had slapped and pinched the character who was Franny every time the camera panned in their direction, and the movie wasn’t even about the children. It was about the mother of one family and the father of the other and how they looked at each other at night from across the driveway. The character who was Franny’s mother pushed her hand repeatedly through her long blond hair while staring off into the distance, proof that she struggled with the weight of her infidelity. She wore blue surgical scrubs that seemed to have been tailored to her pretty figure. The mother in the movie was pulled in so many directions: the hospital, her children, her neighbor who was her lover, his wife who was her friend. Only her hapless husband seemed to ask nothing of her. He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. She was being called away again.

“Enough,” Fix howled. He pushed himself halfway up to standing, as if he meant to walk out of the theater on his own, but his feet were still on the paddles. Caroline shot from her seat, catching him just as he pitched forward into the wide open space in front of handicapped seating, breaking his fall with her body. They were clambering around in the darkness, each with a knee and both hands on the sticky floor. Franny had her arms around her father’s chest but he was thrashing, fighting her off.

“I can get up!” he said.

The collective eyes of the movie theater fell upon them. No one hushed them. Up on the screen the scene had changed. Now Cal’s character was running down the street past the neighbors’ houses in the middle of the day, his brother running behind him, trying to catch up. There was for that moment enough light that the patrons could see the noise was coming from an old man in a wheelchair. There were two women trying to help him up. No one knew that they were the movie.

“Get out of here,” Fix said, his voice keening. “Get out!” They had him back in his seat but his legs were still twisted. He kicked at Franny but she got his feet back on the paddles. Caroline got behind the chair and Franny grabbed their purses. They were not exactly running with their father but they were going as fast as they could. Franny raced ahead and held open the door to the long, carpeted hallway, and then they were through the lobby, past the crazy neon rainbow pulsing above the popcorn stand, past the teenaged ticket-takers in their brown polyester vests. Bang! They burst through the glass double doors and out into the unbearable flood of sunlight.

“Fuck that!” Fix screamed at the parking lot. A mother with two children was crossing towards them but then stopped, reconsidered, and went the other way. Franny laughed and then buried her face in her hands. Caroline bent from the waist, putting her head on the curve of her father’s shoulder.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said. She gave him a small kiss on the neck.

“Fuck that,” Fix said again, this time discouraged.

“Yeah,” Franny said, and rubbed his other shoulder. “Fuck that.”

After the movie they went to the beach. Franny and Fix were against it. They said they were tired and wanted to go home, but Caroline was the one who was driving the car.

“I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday,” she said, tapping at the accelerator to remind them what the car was capable of, what she was capable of. “I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean.”

“Turn on Altamont,” he said. His voice half-vanished, as if the roar of his invective to the movie theater parking lot was all he had left.

“Do you think we might kill him, going to the beach now?” Franny said to Caroline.

Fix smiled. “That’s how I want to go. I want to die at the beach with my girls. We could call Joe Mike to come out and give me last rites.”

“Joe Mike’s not a priest anymore,” Caroline said.

“He’d do it for me.”

It was harder getting their father out of the car the second time. He wasn’t as able to help them, but Franny and Caroline managed. Caroline had, of course, been right about the beach. Almost all of the days in Santa Monica were beautiful, and this one, by virtue of the fact that it was no longer playing out in a movie theater, was more beautiful than most. Fix had a permanent handicapped placard for the Crown Victoria and they got a magnificent parking space when no parking spaces were available.

“Writing out a two-hundred-dollar ticket to some able-bodied asshole in a handicapped spot.” Fix shook his head. “That is a pleasure you’ll never know.”

Franny pushed the chair down the sidewalk blown over with sand. They took it all in: the gulls and the waves, the bikini-clad girls, the boys in board shorts, the lifeguard in his wooden tower watching over them like a god. Young people so beautiful they should have been making commercials for tanning lotion or ever-lasting youth played volleyball with no one watching. People ran with their dogs or ate sno-cones or stretched out on brightly patterned towels the size of bed sheets and baked.

“Don’t you wonder who all these people are?” Caroline marveled. “It’s Thursday. Doesn’t anyone have a job?”

“They’re celebrating my birthday,” Fix said. “I gave them all the day off.”

“Why aren’t those kids in school?” Caroline looked at a half dozen children with buckets beavering away on the rearrangement of sand.

“Do you remember when I used to bring you girls to the beach?” Fix said.

“Every year,” Franny said.

Fix looked out at the waves, at the tiny figures of men skating the water on bright-yellow boards. “I don’t see any girls out there,” Fix said.

“The girls are lying on their towels,” Franny said.

Fix shook his head. “That isn’t right. I would have taught you to surf. If you had lived out here with me I would have taught you to surf.”

Caroline reached out and combed back her father’s hair with her fingers. All she had ever wanted when she was young was to live with her father and no one would let her. “You didn’t know how to surf.”

Fix nodded slowly to the waves, taking it all into account. “I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said.

They watched a boy with a pink-and-red dragon kite that raced straight up, spun in wild circles, and then plummeted down. They watched two girls in bikinis roller-blade past them, their long legs nearly brushing Fix’s knees.

“Your mother wasn’t like that,” Fix said, his eyes still on the surfers.

Franny didn’t know what he was talking about, the roller-blading girls? but Caroline picked it up. “Mom wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon?”

“Your mother was better than that, that’s all. I’m not one to go sticking up for your mother but I want you to know, she wasn’t the way that woman played her in the movie.”

The two sisters looked at each other over the wheelchair. Caroline gave her head a sideways tilt.

“Dad,” Franny said. “None of those people were us.”

‘That’s right,” Fix said and patted her hand as if to say he was glad she’d understood.

When they got back in the car Caroline and Franny both checked their phones. They’d turned them off for the movie and in the aftermath had forgotten to turn them on again.

“I wish I had a phone,” Fix said. “I could be a part of the club.”

“Check your Thomas Brothers guide,” Caroline said, her thumb rolling down an endless stream of texts from work.

Franny had two texts, one from Kumar wanting to know where the checkbook was, and one from Albie that said “CALL ME!!”

“One second,” Franny said, and got back out of the car.

He picked up on the first ring. “Are you still in L.A.?”

They had e-mailed a week or two ago. She had told him she was coming out for her father’s birthday. “I’m standing in front of the ocean right now.”

“I need a huge favor, which you owe me for not telling me that fucking movie was coming out this week.”

“Don’t see it,” Franny said. The kid still had the dragon kite up. There was just enough wind.

“My mother’s sick. She’s been really sick for three days and she won’t go to the hospital. She tells me she’s fine and she tells me she’s sick all at the same time, and I don’t think she’s fine. I can get down there by tonight but I’m worried she needs to go to the hospital now. I can’t get her neighbors on the phone, her best friend’s out of town. Mom was never exactly what you’d call social, or if she was social she didn’t tell me about it, so I don’t have a lot to work with. I don’t want to send an ambulance and scare her to death when maybe there really isn’t anything wrong with her.” Albie stopped for a minute, breathed in. “What I want to know is if you’d go over there and check on her. Jeanette’s in New York, Holly’s in fucking Switzerland. I can call Mom and tell her you’re coming. She’ll be mad but at least that way she’ll open the door.”

Franny looked back at the Crown Victoria, knowing the car could fly there. She looked at her father and sister in the front seat, staring at her through the window like two people who were late for an appointment. “Sure,” she said. “Give me the address. Then I’ll call you and tell you whether or not you should come.”

There was a pause on the line and Franny wondered if her phone had gone dead. She wasn’t great about remembering to plug it in. Then Albie’s voice came back. “Oh, Franny,” he said.

“Your mom doesn’t know about the movie, does she?”

“My mom doesn’t know about the book,” he said. “It turns out a novel isn’t the worst place to hide things.”

It was more than twenty years since Albie had taken the train to Amagansett. He had finished reading the book before he left and had given it to Jeanette. He had walked the three miles to the actress’s house from the station and knocked on the door to find out how his life had fallen into someone else’s hands.

Later, after the argument with Leo, she and Albie had gone out the back door without ever seeing Ariel or Button. They were only going as far as the cabin at the back of the property, and they passed John Hollinger in the backyard on their way. He was wearing a perfectly crumpled summer suit and was smoking a cigarette. He was taking in the beauty of the night. “Isn’t this place something,” he said to them in wonder.

Franny and Albie kept the lights in the cabin off and drank the gin, passing the bottle back and forth between them. No one thought to look for them there, but then there was a good chance that no one had thought to look for them at all. Instead, Leo and his guests would be sitting on the screened-in porch on the other side of the lawn, smoking and drinking the gin the Hollingers had brought. Leo would be railing about Franny’s crazy ex-stepbrother who had shown up out of nowhere in a rage, but he wouldn’t mention what the stepbrother might have been mad about.

“Did you tell Jeanette you were coming?” Franny asked him.

“No, no.” Albie shook his head in the dark. “Jeanette would have wanted to come with me, and Jeanette really would have killed him.”

“Not him,” Franny said. The burn of the gin was pleasant and familiar. She realized now she’d been saving this drink for the necessary occasion. “It was my fault.”

“Yeah,” Albie said. “But I wouldn’t let Jeanette kill you.”

“Quick errand of mercy,” Franny said when she got back in the car. She explained the situation to Caroline and their father. “Let me drop the two of you off at the house and I’ll go check on her. It shouldn’t take long.”

“That was Albie on the phone just now?” Fix said.

“That was him.”

“That’s crazy!” Caroline said. “What are the chances?” Even Caroline was impressed.

The chances were unremarkable. Franny and Albie were friends. She and Kumar had gone to his wedding. She had a picture of his daughter Charlotte on her refrigerator. Most years they remembered each other’s birthdays.

“Well, I can’t speak for your sister but you aren’t dropping me off at the house,” Fix said. “I haven’t seen Teresa Cousins in a dog’s age.”

“Since when do you know Teresa Cousins?” Caroline asked. The four girls used to talk about it in their bunk beds at night when they were all together for the summer, how perfect it would be if Caroline and Franny’s father could marry Holly and Jeanette’s mother. Then everything would be settled.

“When Albie burned down the school. Haven’t I ever told you that story? Your mother called and asked me to get him out of Juvenile as a favor to her, like I was in the business of doing your mother favors.”

“We know this part,” Caroline said. “Get to the Teresa part.”

Fix shook his head. “It’s amazing when you think about it, those guys in Juvenile releasing him to me. They didn’t know me from Adam. I just showed them my badge and said I was there to pick up Albert Cousins. Two minutes later I’m signing for the kid and they’re handing him over. I would bet they don’t do it like that now, at least not with a juvenile. There were two or three other boys in his gang if I remember, a couple of blacks and a Mexican. The desk sergeant asked me if I wanted them too.”

“What did you do with them?” Franny said. How could she have heard a story so many times and just now realize that all of the interesting parts had been left out?

“I left them there. I didn’t want the one kid, I sure as hell wasn’t going to take all four of them. I remember he’d gone to the hospital first. He had a burn on his back from where his T-shirt caught fire. They gave him a scrub top to wear but he still stank of smoke. I made him keep the windows down in the car.”

“You’ve got a cold heart, Pops,” Caroline said.

“Cold heart my ass. I saved that kid. I was the one who got him out. I took him over to the fire station to see your uncle Tom. He was working Westchester then, all the way out by LAX. I was stuck in that airport traffic with Bert Cousins’s kid who smelled like a charcoal pit. He and Uncle Tom had their heart-to-heart about arson. You know your uncle was a childhood arsonist, used to burn things up all the time. Not schools, mind you, just empty lots and little things no one cared about. Lots of firemen got their start setting fires. They learn to set them, then they learn to put them out. Tom explained all that to Albie and then I drove him back to Torrance. It was a whole goddamn day in the car.”

“And that’s when you met Teresa Cousins,” Caroline said.

“And that’s when I met Teresa Cousins. Nice woman, I remember that. She’d really been through it but she kept her head up. That kid of hers, though, he was a wolf.”

“He improved,” Franny said.

“I’ll say he’s improved. First I find out he broke up your engagement to the Jew—” Fix held up his hand. “Wait, I did it again, sorry, the drunk, and now he’s worried about his mother.”

“We weren’t engaged,” Franny said.

“Franny,” Caroline said. “Let Albie have his due.”

“Same house out in Torrance?” Fix asked.

Franny read him the address.

He nodded. “Same house. I’ll tell you how to get there. We can do the whole thing on surface streets.”

All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.

In Virginia, the six children had shared two bedrooms and a single cat, picked food from one another’s plates and indiscriminately used the same bath towels, but in California everything was separate. Holly and Cal and Albie and Jeanette had never been invited to Fix Keating’s house, just as Caroline and Franny had never seen where Teresa Cousins lived. Bert and Teresa bought the house in Torrance in the sixties when Bert took the job in the Los Angeles D.A.’s office: it wasn’t too far from downtown or too far from the beach. There were three bedrooms, one for Bert and Teresa, one for Cal, and one for Holly. When Jeanette and Albie came along everybody shared. It was the starter house, the port from which they planned to embark on their grand life. In the end, everyone left but Teresa, first Bert then Cal then Albie then Holly and finally Jeanette. Jeanette started talking that last year before college when she and Teresa lived alone together. They had a good time, made each other laugh, which surprised them both.

In truth, the story didn’t turn out to be such a bad one. While Teresa went to work day after day and year after year at the D.A.’s office, Torrance improved. The neighborhood, which had once been a place to leave as soon as there was money, became up-and-coming, and then fully arrived. Teresa planted a succulent garden in a rock bed with plans she took from a magazine. She added a deck. She turned the boys’ room into a den. Real estate agents left handwritten notes in her mailbox asking her if she was interested in selling and she put the notes in the recycle bin. Teresa liked her job as a paralegal and she was good at it. The lawyers were always telling her to go to law school — she was smarter than most of them — but she wanted none of it. She stayed with the county until she was seventy-two, leaving with one of those plush California pensions that would eventually drive the state into bankruptcy. Lawyers who had long since moved on to other jobs came back to raise a glass to Teresa at her retirement party. They chipped in together and bought her a watch.

Once a year she went to New York to see Jeanette and Fodé and the children. She loved them but New York overwhelmed her. Californians were used to their own houses and cars and lawns. She missed the sprawl. She saved up her money and bought a ticket to Switzerland to see Holly at the Zen center. For ten days she sat beside her oldest living child on a cushion and did nothing but breathe. Teresa liked the breathing up to a point but then the silence overwhelmed her. She considered the life of her daughters in terms of Goldilocks coming into the cottage of the three bears: too hot and too cold, too hard and too soft. She kept her opinions to herself, wanting most of all to not be seen as critical. Albie came back to Torrance two or three times a year. She would make up a list of the things that needed taking care of and he would tick them off, putting a new motor in the garage door and flushing out the hot water heater. After a life of scraping by in odd jobs, Albie had, by necessity, become a person who could do absolutely anything. These days he worked for a company up in Walnut Creek that made bicycles. He liked that. At Christmas he sent his mother a plane ticket so that she could come and sit around a tree with him and his daughter and his wife. Sometimes the popcorn and the fireplace and the endless hands of Go Fish would overwhelm her and she would have to excuse herself and go to the bathroom just to stand beside the sink for a minute and cry. Afterwards she’d rinse her face and dry it off again, coming back to the living room good as new. It was what she had hoped for but never for a minute what she’d expected.

Teresa dated a few lawyers after Bert left, a couple of cops, none of them married. That was her rule and she never broke it, not even for a drink after work, which, as they were quick to remind her, was all they were asking for. Around the time Jeanette left for college Teresa fell in love with Jim Chen, a public defender of all things, and they had ten good years before he had a heart attack in the parking lot outside the county courthouse. There were people all over the place, people who saw him fall and called 911. A secretary who had taken a life-saving course when her children were small did CPR until the ambulance came, but sometimes all the right things are as useless as nothing at all. Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.

Now there was this thing in her stomach that was doubling her over, enough pain to make her shake, and then it would pull back and let her breathe. If she’d had the sense to go to her doctor three days ago when it started she could have driven herself over, but after three days of not eating she was too weak to drive anywhere. She could call Fodé and ask him what to do, Fodé was a doctor, but she was perfectly capable of having that conversation in her head without bothering him on the other side of the country: he would tell her she should call a friend and go to the hospital, or, short of that, call an ambulance. She didn’t want to do either of those things. She was so tired she felt lucky to make it to the bathroom, to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then back to bed again. She was eighty-two years old. She imagined her children might use this particular stomach pain to answer their questions about whether or not she could continue to live alone in her house or whether she’d have to move to a facility up north someplace near Albie. She couldn’t go to Jeanette, people moved to Brooklyn to fall in love and write novels and have children, not to get old, and she couldn’t go to Holly, though she imagined dying in the Zen center might come with spiritual advantages.

Then on the second day it occurred to her that maybe this pain, whatever it was, could answer the question of her future in a larger way: maybe this pain that felt like it was killing her would actually kill her. Her appendix was still in there somewhere, and while appendicitis seemed like the kind of thing schoolchildren died of on camping trips, it was possible that hers had hung around all these years in order to detonate late in the game. That wouldn’t be the worst thing, would it? Peritonitis? Not as quick as dear Jim Chen going out in a parking lot, but still. When she was having a better moment she found the key to the lockbox, the title to her car, her will. Only a person in deep denial about the future would work her entire life in the legal profession without having a good will. Everything she had was divided three ways. The house, long since paid for, had ticked steadily up in value, and there were savings. Once the kids were out of school she never spent what came in. She laid everything out on the kitchen table and sat down to write a note. She didn’t want it to seem like a suicide note because she was most definitely not committing suicide, but she thought whoever came to the house eventually should find more than the car keys and her body. She looked at the pad of paper she used to make grocery lists. The top was lined with cheerful daisies dancing in their pots above a series of chaotic pink letters that spelled out Things To Do. She had never stopped to think about how stupid it was to buy a pad of paper that said Things To Do but she didn’t have the energy to go look for a plain white sheet. The pain was ramping up again and she wanted to go back to bed.

Not feeling great.

Just in case.

Love, Mom

That was good enough.

Albie was the single distraction from what, on the third day, she had rather hazily decided was a very intelligent plan. He had called too many times to check on her, and how she explained the situation to him had everything to do with where the phone call fell in the cycle of pain. A few times she simply hadn’t answered. The idea of picking up the phone had overwhelmed her. But then she did answer, and he told her to get up and open the front door. He said that Franny Keating was coming over to see her.

“Franny Keating?”

“She’s in town visiting her father. I asked her to come over and check on you.”

“I know people who can check on me,” Teresa said, sounding pathetic even to herself. She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.

“I’m sure you do but I was tired of waiting for you to call them. Go open your door. She’s going to be there in a minute.”

Teresa hung up the phone and looked down at herself in her zip-front cotton robe, what her mother had called a model’s coat back in Virginia. She’d been wearing it for three days and it had been crushed by restless sleep and perspiration. She hadn’t taken a bath or brushed her teeth or looked in a mirror since this all began. Franny Keating coming to the house was not the same as Beverly Keating coming to the house, but at this moment Teresa was having a hard time distinguishing the two of them in her mind. Beverly Keating, who was Beverly Cousins, who was now Beverly-something-else, Teresa couldn’t remember what Jeanette had told her other than she’d married again after Bert. Beverly-Something-Else was so bone-crushingly beautiful that even now, fifty years later, it hurt to think of it. Beverly was always in the pictures the children brought back from summer, as if Catherine Deneuve happened to wander by while they were playing in the pool or swinging in swings and stepped accidentally into the frame as the shutter snapped. She did not want to die thinking of Beverly Keating’s beauty. Beverly was younger than Teresa too, not by a lot but it mattered. Beverly wouldn’t even be eighty yet.

A wave of pain broke over her and she had to cling to the back of the recliner to remain upright. It was deep in her pelvis, top to bottom, hip to hip. Uterine cancer? Bone cancer? Could it come on this fast? If she didn’t answer the door the Keating girl would call her father. Albie said she was visiting her father. He would be old himself by now but he would call some cop friend over to break down her door. That’s the way cops work: straight from thought to battering ram. She could feel the sweat breaking out over her scalp. Her short gray hair would be soaked through in a minute. She let go of the recliner and made it over to the front door. Every step made her swear in her head, sonofabitch, sonofabitch. She used it as a mantra, a focal point to calm her breathing, the way Holly had taught her. She opened the front door wide and unlatched the screen, then, having no speed to work with, shuffled back to change her clothes and splash some water on her face. She was hoping there was mouthwash. She didn’t think she had the energy to brush her teeth.

It wasn’t five minutes before she heard a voice, “Mrs. Cousins?” and then five seconds later, the voice was more familiar, “Teresa?” She heard the screen door open.

“One minute.” She pulled up her track pants and pushed her feet into sneakers, ran a towel over her head. It hurt. Her hair was so short but who did she have to impress? Jeanette said she looked like she was coming back from chemo. Holly said she looked like a Buddhist nun. Albie never mentioned her hair.

“It’s Franny,” the voice said.

“I know, Franny. He told me.” Teresa closed her eyes, waited, inhaled sonofabitch, exhaled sonofabitch. It helped a little.

When she came into the living room there were two of them there, a blonde and a brunette. The blonde was aggressively natural, gray in her ponytail, no makeup, a cotton top that tied at the neck with a string. The brunette had more polish but the truth was you wouldn’t look at either one of them twice. Neither was as pretty as Holly or Jeanette. Teresa pushed her mouth into a smile by the sheer force of will.

“This is my sister, Caroline,” the blonde said. “I hope you don’t mind us coming over. Albie was worried about you.”

“He turned out to be a worrier,” Teresa said. She was trying not to pant. “It’s strange, when you think about all the worry he caused us, that he would turn around and worry.”

“I guess it happens,” Caroline said.

Teresa looked at them for a long time. She had seen so many pictures, heard so many stories. Caroline was the aggressive one, Franny placating. They both made good grades in Catholic school but Caroline was smarter. Franny was kinder. “I know this sounds crazy but have I ever met you girls before?” One of them finished law school and one of them dropped out. She couldn’t say she remembered which was which but she could sure tell by looking at them.

“Cal’s funeral,” Franny said. “I think that was the only time.”

Teresa nodded. “I wouldn’t remember it then.”

“How are you feeling?” Caroline asked. Straight down to business. She had authority. Teresa had the feeling that if she lied about anything Caroline would walk over and poke her in the stomach.

“I’ve been sick,” she said, putting her hand on the chair. “But I’m getting better. I’m up now. It’s hard when you get to be my age. Little things knock you out.”

“Wouldn’t you like to see a doctor?” Franny asked.

Had I liked to see a doctor, Teresa thought, I would have seen one. But she wouldn’t be nasty. There was nothing wrong with these girls. Albie had asked them to come. It wasn’t their fault. “No,” she said.

The smarter one squinted slightly. “We’re here. We can drive you over to the hospital. If you have to call an ambulance at eleven o’clock at night it’s going to be a lot harder. I’m sorry to say this but you don’t look great.” Miss Rational Argument. She’d probably already made partner.

“I’m eighty-two,” Teresa said. She could feel the sweat on her face. “I haven’t looked great in a long time.”

“So you’re not going?” Caroline asked. Let the record state the defendant declined the offer for transportation to the hospital despite the advice of counsel.

“I’m sorry my son made you come all the way over here for nothing. If he’d asked me first I would have told him not to call.” They would leave in just a minute and she could sit down. She could fall down. She wouldn’t make it back to bed but the living room couch was all she could ever want.

“Okay,” Franny said, “but my father’s in the car and he wants to say hello to you. Come say hello to my father and we’ll leave you alone.”

“Fix is in the car?”

Franny nodded. “Today’s his birthday. He’s eighty-three. That’s why we’re out here.” Franny waited for a minute but Teresa didn’t make any offers. She decided to up the pot. “Dad has esophageal cancer. He’s very sick.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Teresa liked Fix Keating. She’d only met him that one time on the terrible day of the fire, but she remembered him as being a very nice man. Albie, radiant in his silent fourteen-year-old rage, had gone to his bedroom and slammed the door while she and Fix sat in the kitchen and had a drink together. There was fresh orange juice in the refrigerator and she made them each a screwdriver. When he tapped his glass to hers he looked her straight in the eye and said, Solidarity. She thought that was just the classiest thing in the world.

“Ask him to come in,” Teresa said, wondering how much time this was going to take and if she’d have to offer anyone a drink. That would not be possible.

Caroline shook her head. “We’ve been out all afternoon. We could never get him up the stairs.”

There were three short steps to the front door, a decorative wrought-iron handrail on either side that Albie had put in for her last year. If Teresa made it down the stairs she wouldn’t make it back up. “Tell him I said hello,” she said.

“Dad’s dying,” Franny said.

So am I, Teresa wanted to say. She looked from one girl to the other. Suddenly she could see they were tag-teaming her: good-cop daughter, bad-cop daughter. They weren’t going anywhere. Another wave of pain crested up from below her navel. She’d been standing there too long being nice. She closed her eyes and tried breathing through her mouth, her fingers digging deep into the back of the chair.

“I’ll get your purse and lock up,” Franny said. “Is your purse in the kitchen? Are all your insurance cards in your purse?”

Teresa moved her head a quarter inch in confirmation while the other one came and put her arms around her. She was gentle but she was undeniably holding her up.

“Are you ready to walk?” Caroline asked.

She had been up and down those steps countless thousands of times, and now she felt like Eva Marie Saint looking over the edge of Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. A Keating girl stood on either side and lifted her up. She had never been a big woman, never tall like her children, even before she’d started shrinking. She didn’t feel like a burden to them. They were strong girls, obviously. They were her kidnappers, sailing her across the lawn and into the backseat of the car, lifting up her feet while pivoting her around in a way that was disturbingly professional, as if stealing old people was what they did. They clicked the seat belt to lock her into place and when she cried out briefly in pain because nothing should touch her stomach, they took it off again.

“Teresa Cousins,” Fix said from the front. “We meet again.”

“Dad,” Caroline said. “Tell me where I’m going.”

Teresa heard the urgency in Caroline’s voice. It wasn’t enough just to take her to the hospital, they had to get there immediately.

Fix gave her directions to Torrance Memorial Medical Center. He didn’t even pick up the Thomas Brothers guide. Every page was muscle memory.

The pain subsided a bit and Teresa took in the view. She sighed to be in the backseat of the car, to be moving away from her plan. Maybe dying hadn’t been her best idea. Look at this day, another beautiful Southern California day. “Happy birthday,” she said to Fix. “I’m sorry to hear about your health.”

“Cancer,” he said. “What about you?”

Franny was on her cell phone. “We’ve got your mother in the car. We’re going to the hospital now.”

“No idea,” Teresa said. “Ruptured appendix maybe?”

Caroline pressed the accelerator and the Crown Victoria sprung forward like a racehorse.

“Is that Albie on the phone?” Fix said. “Let me talk to him.”

“Dad,” Franny said. Her father was holding out his hand to the backseat. Teresa put her hand in Fix’s hand and squeezed very lightly.

“Albie, Dad wants to talk to you.”

“Your dad?” he asked.

Franny handed her father the phone.

“Son?” Fix said, somewhere he’d found some boom to add to his voice. “We’ve got your mother here with us. We’re going to get her taken care of so don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” Albie said. “You’ve saved me twice now.”

“We’ll stay with her until they get to the bottom of this thing. I don’t want you to think we’d just drop her off at the door.”

“That’s nice,” Teresa said, looking out the window as her neighbors’ houses flew by.

“Should I come down now?” Albie asked.

Fix looked at Teresa there in the backseat, like one of those little featherless birds that’s dropped out of the nest and onto the sidewalk, still breathing but completely translucent, everything at the wrong angle. “Why don’t we say we’ll see you in the morning, how’s that? We’ll call you again. How do I hang this thing up?” He said this last bit to all of them and then hit the red button.

“We have good children,” Teresa said to Fix. “After all the trouble they gave us they turned out okay.” She was shocked by how bad he looked. Cancer really was the devil’s handshake.

Caroline pulled the car into the emergency entrance. Franny went inside to get a wheelchair for Teresa while Caroline got the wheelchair out of the trunk for their father. Caroline and Franny worked together to get the two of them out of the car. Teresa was easier. She squinched up her eyes and pressed her lips together but she didn’t say anything. She was very light. Fix was in a good bit of pain now, his limbs so stiff it was hard to wedge him out. It had been a longer day than anyone had anticipated, and they hadn’t brought the Lortab. He was resting a hand on either rib the way he did when he was tired, like he was trying to hold himself together. Franny wondered if it would be possible to score a single pill from the emergency room so they could get him back to Santa Monica. Probably not. Caroline and Franny rolled Teresa and Fix up to the registration desk where a young Latin girl with heavy eyeliner and a low-cut T-shirt looked from one wheelchair to the other and then back again. The bottom of a gold crucifix dipped into the top of her extravagant cleavage.

“Both?” she asked.

“Her,” Franny said.

Caroline went out to park the car. “I’ll call Marjorie and tell her to put the cupcakes in the refrigerator.”

“Your birthday,” Teresa cried, remembering his wife. “I’ve ruined it.”

Fix laughed, a real laugh that none of them had heard in a while. “You’ve ruined my eighty-third birthday? Seriously, you can have it.”

“Insurance cards?”

Franny had Teresa’s purse, and she asked if it would be okay to go through her wallet. She dug past the balled-up Kleenex, the house keys, a roll of mints. In her wallet she found the Medicare card, supplemental Blue Cross Blue Shield, and her driver’s license. Did she still drive?

“Name?” the girl began, reading from the questions on her computer screen, having committed none of them to memory.

“I used to come here all the time when the kids were growing up,” Teresa said, looking around as if she was just that minute waking up from a dream. “Stitches, tonsils, earaches. But after the kids were gone I never came here anymore. No kids, no emergencies. I’d come to the hospital to have a mammogram or see a sick friend but I don’t think I’ve been to the emergency room even once.”

“It’s all on the cards,” Franny said to the girl.

“I brought Cal here when he was stung by a bee,” Teresa said.

“He was stung by a bee in Virginia,” Fix said, trying to be helpful.

“We’re supposed to ask the patient,” the girl said. “It helps us assess.”

Franny looked at her, then looked pointedly over to Teresa. The girl sighed and started typing.

“The first time he was stung we came here.”

“I guess I didn’t know he’d been stung another time,” Franny said. Bert had brought all of the children together in the living room in the house in Virginia on the morning of Cal’s funeral. He told them a bee sting was something Cal could not have survived. He’d said it to be comforting, so they wouldn’t think there was something they could have done to save him. Although, of course, they could have saved him. They could have stopped insisting that Cal feed all his Benadryl tablets to Albie whenever they wanted Albie to shut up, and they could have encouraged Cal to stop giving Albie the pills himself when none of them were around, just so he would have had a few left when he needed them. They could have gone to him when he fell instead of ignoring him for half an hour, thinking he was doing it for show.

“That’s how we knew he was allergic,” Teresa said. “It was that first time.”

“How old was he then?” Caroline said. Caroline was standing behind them. They didn’t know she’d come back. Caroline was thinking of her own children. Had they all been stung by bees? She tried to remember.

Teresa closed her eyes. She was counting her children up, arranging them in her memory according to size. “He must have been seven. Albie was just trying to walk, so the girls would have been three and five. I think that’s right. Cal and Holly were playing in the backyard and I had the little ones inside. Four children on my own, it was really something. Do you girls have children?”

“Three,” Caroline said. “A boy and two girls.”

“Two boys,” Franny said.

“But they aren’t hers,” Fix said.

“Cal was stung by a bee,” Caroline said, trying to steer the ship.

“Medications?” the Latin girl asked.

Franny dug back into Teresa’s purse and pulled the two bottles she’d found on the sink in the bathroom, Lisinopril and Restoril.

Teresa looked at the orange plastic bottles on the desk and then looked at Franny.

“I thought they might ask,” Franny said, though maybe collecting medication had been overstepping. She wouldn’t want anyone going through her medicine cabinet.

“I always taught the girls to be thorough,” Fix said.

“Next of kin?”

They looked at each other. “Albie, I guess,” Franny said.

“Local?” the girl asked, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.

“Oh, me then. Frances Mehta.” She gave the girl her phone number.

“Relationship?”

“Stepdaughter,” Franny said.

“Wait,” Fix said. He was doing the math in his head, trying to figure out the right word for what Teresa and his daughter actually were to one another.

“That’s right,” Caroline said to the girl.

When she was finished with the forms, the girl at reception told them where to wait. “The nurse will come get you.”

“It needs to be soon,” Caroline said to her in that very direct way she was capable of. “She’s very sick.”

“I understand that, missus,” the girl said. The weight of her eyelashes was a burden to her. She looked like she was just about to fall asleep.

Franny wheeled Teresa and Caroline wheeled their father as far away from the television set as was possible. It was still light outside.

“You should go home now,” Teresa said when they were settled in their corner. “I’m here, they’ll come and get me. You don’t have to worry about me running out.”

“I’ll take Dad home,” Caroline said. “Then I’ll come back for Franny.”

“Too much traffic,” Fix said. “It’s better that we stay together, see this through. If I get sick they can always admit me. I like Torrance. Lots of cops used to live out here.”

“Finish your story,” Franny said to Teresa.

Fix answered instead. “I worked an accident once, a guy was stopped at a traffic light with his windows down and a bee flew in and stung him. That was that. His foot fell off the brake and the car went out into the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. He was probably already dead at that point. Nobody knew what had happened until the autopsy. I went back to the site a couple of days later, not that I was looking for a bee exactly, but I wanted to take a look around. There was a bottlebrush tree just before that traffic light and it was swarming. I mean half of it was bees.”

Teresa nodded, as if the story were perfectly relevant. “When Cal came in from the backyard he was dead white. I remember his little face, how terrified he was, and really, I thought it was Holly. They were always going after each other with rakes and brooms and I thought something had happened to her. I said, ‘Cal, where’s Holly?’ And when I started to turn away from him to go out to the yard to find her, he made this horrible high-pitched noise, like he was trying to suck air through a pinhole. He held his arm up to stop me and then he fell straight back. His lips were swelling, his hands. I went to pick him up and there was a bee on his shirt. The bee was right there on him, like someone who commits a murder and then sticks around.”

“It happens,” Fix said.

Caroline reached over and took her sister’s hand. No one would have thought a thing about it. They were listening to a terrible story, that was all. Franny wrapped her fingers around Caroline’s fingers.

“If it hadn’t been for that bee I feel sure he would have died when he was seven, but somehow I understood exactly what had happened. I was up and out the door like lightning. I had him in the car in two seconds. It isn’t far to the hospital, you know that, and in those days there wasn’t half the traffic. I just kept telling him to slow down, slow down and concentrate on breathing.”

“What did you do with the rest of them?” Caroline said.

“I left them there. I don’t think I even closed the door. Bert was so mad at me when I told him what had happened. I was scared to death at the time, but really I was proud of myself too. I’d saved Cal’s life! Bert said, you can’t leave children alone like that. You should have put them in the car. But Bert wasn’t there, and he thought I was a terrible mother anyway. If I’d rounded up all those kids and thrown them in the car Cal would have died. The doctor told me so. He told me how serious a bee sting was for Cal, and how the next time it would be even worse. But you can’t keep a boy inside for the rest of his life, at least not a boy like Cal. I was always on him about carrying his pills, and I had a vial of epinephrine and a syringe in the house, but Bert hadn’t brought the epinephrine to his parents’ house, and I doubt they would have known how to give the shot anyway. No one ever checked to make sure Cal had his pills.” Teresa shook her head. “I don’t blame Bert though. I used to but I don’t anymore. The things you really need are never there when you need them. I know that. It could have happened when he was home with me.”

“There’s no protecting anyone,” Fix said, and reached over from his wheelchair to put his hand on hers. “Keeping people safe is a story we tell ourselves.”

“Bert swore he was going to cut down the orange trees in the back. They’re always covered in bees when they’re in bloom. He was in a rage about those trees, like they had done this to his son, but after a couple of days he forgot all about them. We all did.”

She stopped and looked around the place they were now. “The emergency room was in the back of the hospital in those days. It’s a lot nicer now. All of this is new.”

After the CAT scan and an examination, the doctor came out to talk to them. “Mr. Cousins?” he said to Fix.

“Nope,” Fix said.

This didn’t seem to trouble the doctor a bit. He was there to relay the news and so he went ahead. “It looks like Mrs. Cousins has a diverticular abscess in her sigmoid colon. We’re going to cool things down with antibiotics, give her something to keep her comfortable. We’ll watch her white blood count and fever through the night. Keep her NPO, then we’ll reexamine her in the morning and see how she’s doing. Has she been sick very long?”

Caroline looked at Franny. “Maybe three days?” Franny said.

The doctor nodded. He made a note in the file he carried, told them she had been transferred to a room, and then excused himself. They imagined him imagining their neglect. Why hadn’t they brought such a sick old woman to him sooner? There was no point in explaining themselves.

“Not cancer,” Teresa said to the Keatings when they came to tell her goodbye. “But it still looks like I’m going to have to spend the night.” She had a heart monitor now, an IV dripping into the back of her hand.

“Lucky you,” Fix said. He was happy for her.

“Oh,” Teresa said, touching her untethered hand to her forehead. “Cancer. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. They’re giving me morphine now. I’m loopy.”

Fix gave a little wave to say it meant nothing.

“I’ll come back later tonight and check on you,” Franny said.

Teresa told her not to. “I talked to Albie. He’ll be here first thing in the morning. I’m going to sleep straight through until then. To tell you the truth I’m very tired. And anyway, you’ve come out here to be with your father, not me. I’ve eaten up half your day.”

“I just wish you could have had all of it,” Caroline said. “The second half was definitely better than the first.”

“We can wait here until you go to sleep,” Fix said, feeling both chivalrous and uncertain. He’d been in the wheelchair too long. He needed to get home and into his recliner. It had felt good to take someone else to the hospital for a change, to think of Teresa’s condition rather than his own. But pain was only going to be ignored for so long. It had come back on him with a baseball bat.

“I’m closing my eyes now. By the time you get to the door I’ll be asleep.” She smiled at Fix in his wheelchair and then, true to her word, closed her eyes. She should have married Fix Keating, that’s what she was thinking when sleep wrapped her up in its soft arms. Fix Keating was a good man. But he was sick now, and she was sick. How was she going to be able to take care of him?

Caroline and Franny wheeled Fix down to the elevator. They were in a different part of the hospital now, having come in through the emergency room and then traveled to the other side of the world to get to the patient rooms. When they came outside they were someplace they’d never seen before and it took Caroline a while to find the car. By the time they got the wheelchair in the trunk and found the exit to the parking lot, Fix was asleep in the front seat, leaving Franny to put the address to the Santa Monica house into her phone.

Neither Caroline nor Franny said anything for a long time. Maybe they were each waiting to be sure their father wasn’t going to hear them, but why? What had they done? Fix’s head fell back against the headrest. His mouth was open. If he hadn’t been snoring very lightly they might have wondered if he was dead.

“When she said that about Cal turning white, and then making a noise,” Caroline said.

Franny nodded. Kumar’s oldest son, Ravi, had asthma. There had been the summer at the lake in Wisconsin when she was clawing through his backpack trying to find the inhaler. The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing.

“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.

“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.

Holly shook her head. “You couldn’t have left it there. We were all so obsessed with the gun. It was all we ever thought about.”

Franny had untied the bandanna and, carefully, pointing the gun away from herself and away from Cal, unloaded it the way her father taught her. She put the bullets in the front pocket of her shorts, holding the open revolver up to the light, spinning the cylinder and looking down the barrel to the sun to make sure it was empty. She tied it up in the red cloth but there was really no place to put it. She tried to put it in her waistband but of course it showed. Finally she decided to hide it behind a tree nearby. When everyone was gone she would go back and get it and take it to the house. She would get Jeanette to come with her and they would put the gun in Jeanette’s purse. No one would think that was strange because Jeanette always carried her purse. She remembered being glad to have something else to worry about, something other than Cal.

Franny looked over at the barn. “I always thought I did the wrong thing.”

“What would the right thing have been?” Holly put her arm around Franny’s waist. “We had no idea what was going on. We didn’t even know he’d been stung by a bee.”

“We didn’t?”

“Not until later. We did that night when Dad came back from the hospital, but before that we didn’t have a clue.”

“I loved it here,” Franny said, though she had never known it before.

Holly looked surprised. “Did you? I hated this place.”

Franny looked at her. Holly had been such a pretty girl. Why had she never noticed that? She thought of her as a sister now. “Why did you come back then?”

“To make sure you were going to be okay,” Holly said. “We always stuck together. Don’t you remember that? We were such a fierce little tribe.”

“Listen,” Franny said, looking up. “Do you hear the birds?”

Holly shook her head. “It’s your phone. That’s what I came to tell you. You shouldn’t worry.”

“About the birds?” Franny asked, but then Holly was gone and the room was dark again. She could still hear them.

“Answer your phone,” Caroline said from the other bed.

The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.

“Mrs. Mehta?” a voice said, a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“This is Dr. Wilkinson. I’m calling from Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Mrs. Mehta, I’m sorry to tell you that your stepmother has passed away.”

“Marjorie’s dead?” Franny sat straight up, the news pulling her awake. How was that possible? When had she gone to the hospital? Caroline got out of her bed and turned on the light on the table between them. There was only one person who was going to die and that was their father.

“What?” Caroline said.

“Mrs. Cousins,” the doctor said. “Her heart monitor alerted the nurse a little after four o’clock this morning. We attempted resuscitation but it was unsuccessful.”

“Mrs. Cousins?”

“Teresa died?” Caroline said.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said again. “She was very sick.”

“Wait a minute,” Franny said. “I don’t think I’m understanding what you’re saying. Could you say this to my sister?”

Franny gave the phone to Caroline. Caroline would know what questions to ask. The digital clock on the bedside table said it was 4:47 in the morning. She wondered if Albie would be awake by now, if he had set his alarm. He was taking an early flight to Los Angeles to see his mother.