Right to Life

BRAVE GIRL

“Police operator 321. Where’s your emergency?”

“It’s my mommy.”

The voice on the other end was so small that even its sex was indeterminate. The usual questions were not going to apply.

“What happened to your mommy?”

“She fell.”

“Where did she fall?”

“In the bathroom. In the tub.”

“Is she awake?”

“Unh-unh.”

“Is there water in the tub?”

“I made it go away.”

“You drained the tub?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good. Okay. My name is Officer Price. What’s yours?”

“Suzy.”

“Is there anybody else in the house, Suzy?”

“Unh-unh.”

“Okay, Suzy. I want you to stay on the line, okay? Don’t hang up. I’m going to transfer you to Emergency Services and they’re going to help you and your mommy, all right? Don’t hang up now, okay?”

“Okay.”

He punched in EMS.

“Dana, it’s Tom. I’ve got a little girl, can’t be more than four or five. Name’s Suzy. She says her mother’s unconscious. Fell in the bathroom.”

“Got it.”

It was barely ten o’clock and shaping up to be a busy summer day. Electrical fire at Knott’s Hardware over on Elm and Main just under an hour ago. Earlier, a three-car pile-up on route 6 — somebody hurrying to get to work through a deceptive sudden pocket of Maine fog. A heart-attack at Bel Haven Rest Home only minutes after that. The little girl’s address was up on the computer screen. 415 Whiting Road. Listing under the name L. Jackson.

“Suzy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“This is Officer Keeley, Suzy. I want you to stand by a moment, all right? I’m not going to put you on hold. Just stay on the phone. Sam? You with me?”

“Yup.”

“Okay, Suzy. Your mommy fell, right? In the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“And she’s unconscious?”

“Huh?”

“She’s not awake?”

“Unh-uhn.”

“Can you tell if she’s breathing?”

“I… I think.”

“We’re on it,” said Sam.

“Is your front door unlocked, Suzy?”

“The door?”

“Your front door.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know how to lock and unlock the front door, Suzy?”

“Yes. Mommy showed me.”

“Okay. I want you to put the phone down somewhere — don’t hang up but just put it down somewhere, okay? and go see if the door’s unlocked. And if it isn’t unlocked, I want you to unlock it so that we can come in and help mommy, okay? But don’t hang up the phone, all right? Promise?”

“Promise.”

She heard a rattling sound. Telephone against wood. Excellent.

In a moment she heard the girl pick up again.

“Hi.”

“Did you unlock the door, Suzy?”

“Uh-huh. It was locked.”

“But you unlocked it.”

“Uh-huh.”

I love this kid, she thought. This kid is terrific.

“Great, Suzy. You’re doing absolutely great. We’ll be over there in a couple of minutes, okay? Just a few minutes now. Did you see what happened to your mommy? Did you see her fall?”

“I was in my bedroom. I heard a big thump.”

“So you don’t know why she fell?

“Unh-unh. She just did.”

“Did she ever fall before, Suzy?”

“Unh-unh.”

“Does mommy take any medicine?”

“Huh?”

“Does mommy take any medicine? Has she been sick at all?”

“She takes aspirin sometimes.”

“Just aspirin?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How old are you, Suzy?”

“Four.”

“Four? Wow, that’s pretty old!”

Giggles. “Is not.”

“Listen, mommy’s going to be just fine. We’re on our way and we’re going to take good care of her. You’re not scared or anything, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Good girl. ’Cause you don’t need to be. Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any relatives who live nearby, Suzy? Maybe an aunt or an uncle? Somebody we can call to come and stay with you for a while, while we take care of mommy?”

“Grandma. Grandma stays with me.”

“Okay, who’s grandma? Can you give me her name?”

Giggles again. “Grandma, silly.”

She heard sirens in the background. Good response time, she thought. Not bad at all.

“Okay, Suzy. In a few minutes the police are going to come to your door…”

“I can see them through the window!”

She had to smile at the excitement in the voice. “Good. And they’re going to ask you a lot of the same questions I just asked you. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“You tell them just what you told me.”

“Okay.”

“And then there are going to be other people, they’ll be dressed all in white, and they’re going to come to the door in a few minutes. They’ll bring mommy to the hospital so that a doctor can see her and make sure she’s all better. All right?”

“Yes.”

She heard voices, footfalls, a door closing. A feminine voice asking the little girl for the phone.

” ’Bye.”

” ’Bye, Suzy. You did really, really good.”

“Thanks.”

And she had.

“Minty, badge 457. We’re on the scene.”

She told Minty about the grandmother and when it was over Officer Dana Keeley took a very deep breath and smiled. This was one to remember. A four-year-old kid who very likely just saved her mother from drowning. She’d check in with the hospital later to see about the condition of one L. Jackson but she felt morally certain they were in pretty good shape here. In the meantime she couldn’t wait to tell Chuck. She knew her husband was going to be proud of her. Hell, she was proud of her. She thought she’d set just the right tone with the little girl — friendly and easy — plus she’d got the job done down to the last detail.

The girl hadn’t even seemed terribly frightened.

That was the way it was supposed to go of course, she was there to keep things calm among other things but still it struck her as pretty amazing.

Four years old. Little Suzy, she thought, was quite a child. She hoped that when the time came for her and Chuck they’d have the parenting skills and the sheer good luck to have kids who turned out as well as she did.

She wondered if the story’d make the evening news.

She thought it deserved a mention.

“Incredible,” Minty said. “Little girl’s all of four years old. She knows enough to dial 911, gives the dispatcher everything she needs, has the good sense to turn off the tap and hit the drain lever so her mother doesn’t drown, knows exactly where her mother’s address book is so we can locate Mrs. Jackson over there, shows us up to the bathroom where mom’s lying naked, with blood all over the place for godsakes…”

“I know,” said Crocker. “I wanna be just like her when I grow up.”

Minty laughed but it might easily have been no laughing matter. Apparently Liza Jackson had begun to draw her morning bath and when she stepped into the still-flowing water, slipped and fell, because when they found her she had one dry leg draped over the ledge of the tub and the other buckled under her. She’d hit the ceramic soap dish with sufficient force to splatter blood from her head-wound all the way up to the shower rod.

Hell of a thing for a little kid to see.

Odd that she hadn’t mentioned all that blood to the dispatcher. Head-wounds — even ones like Liza Jackson’s which didn’t seem terribly serious — bled like crazy. For a four-year-old she’d imagine it would be pretty scary. But then she hadn’t had a problem watching the EMS crew wheel her barely-conscious mother out into the ambulance either. This was one tough-minded little girl.

“What did you get from the grandmother?”

“She didn’t want to say a whole lot in front of the girl but I gather the divorce wasn’t pretty. He’s moved all the way out to California, sends child support when he gets around to it. Liza Jackson’s living on inherited money from the grandfather and a part-time salary at, uh, let’s see…”

He flipped through his pad, checked his notes.

“… a place called It’s the Berries…”

“I know it. Country store kind of affair, caters to the tourist trade. Does most of its business during summer and leaf-season. Dried flower arrangements, potpourri, soaps and candles, jams and honey. That kind of thing.”

“She’s got no brothers or sisters. But Mrs. Jackson has no problem with taking care of Suzy for the duration.”

“Fine.”

She glanced at them over on the sofa. Mrs. Jackson was smiling slightly, brushing out the girl’s long straight honey-brown hair. A hospital’s no place for a little girl, she’d said. We’ll wait for word here. The EMS crew had assured them that while, yes, there was the possibility of concussion and concussions could be tricky, she’d come around very quickly, so that they doubted the head-wound was serious, her major problem at this point being loss of blood — and Mrs. Jackson was apparently willing take them at their word. Minty wouldn’t have, had it been her daughter. But then Minty wasn’t a Maine-iac born and bred and tough as a rail spike. Suzy had her back to the woman, her expression unreadable — a pretty, serious-looking little girl in a short blue-and-white checkered dress that was not quite a party dress but not quite the thing for pre-school either.

When they’d arrived she’d still been in her pyjamas. She guessed the dress was grandma’s idea.

The press would like it. There was a local TV crew waiting outside — waiting patiently for a change. The grandmother had already okayed the interview.

They were pretty much squared away here.

She walked over to the couch.

“Do you need us to stay, Mrs. Jackson? Until the interview’s through I mean.”

“That’s not necessary, Officer. We can handle this ourselves, I’m sure.”

She stood and extended her hand. Minty took it. The woman’s grip was firm and dry.

“I want to thank you for your efforts on my daughter’s behalf,” she said. “And for arriving as promptly as you did.”

“Thank you, ma’am. But the one we’ve all got to thank, really, is your granddaughter. Suzy? You take good care now, okay?”

“I will.”

Minty believed her.

Carole Belliver had rarely done an interview that went so smoothly. The little girl had no timidity whatsoever in front of the camera — she didn’t fidget, she didn’t stutter, she didn’t weave back and forth or shift out of frame — all of which was typical behavior for adults on camera. She answered Carole’s questions clearly and without hesitation. Plus she was pretty as all hell. The camera loved her.

There was only one moment of unusable tape because of something the girl had done as opposed to their usual false stops and starts and that was when she dropped the little blonde doll she was holding and stooped to pick it up and the dress she was wearing was so short you could see her white panties which Carole glimpsed briefly and promptly glanced away from, and then wondered why. Was it that the little girl acted and sounded so much like a miniature adult that Carole was embarrassed for her, as you would be for an adult?

It was possible. She’d done and thought sillier things in her life.

The piece was fluff of course but it was good fluff. Not some flower-show or county fair but a real human interest story for a change. Unusual and touching. With a charming kid as its heroine. She could be proud of this one. This one wasn’t going to make her cringe when it was broadcast.

It occurred to her that they could all be proud of this one, everybody involved really, from the dispatchers god knows to the police and EMS team to the grandmother who’d no doubt helped raise this little wonder and finally, extending even to her and her crew. Everybody got to do their job, fulfill their responsibilities efficiently and well. And the one who had made all of this happen for them was a four-year-old.

Quite a day.

They had down all the reactions shots. All they needed now was her tag line.

“This is Carole Bellaver — reporting to you on a brave, exceptional little girl — from Knottsville, Maine.”

“Got it,” Bernie said.

“You want to cover it?”

“Why? I said I got it.”

“Okay. Jeez, fine.”

What the hell was that about? Bernie had just snapped at her. Bernie was the nicest, most easygoing cameraman she’d ever worked with. She couldn’t believe it. It was totally out of character. He and Harold, her soundman, were packing their gear into the van as if they were in some big hurry to get out of there. And she realized now that they’d both been unusually silent ever since the interview. Normally when the camera stopped rolling you couldn’t shut them up.

But the interview had gone well. Hadn’t it?

Was it something she’d said or done?

By now the print media had arrived, some of them all the way from Bangor and Portland and they were talking to Suzy and her grandmother on the front steps where she’d taped them earlier. Flashbulbs popped. Suzy smiled.

Bernie and Harold looked grim.

“Uh, guys. You want to let me into the loop? I thought everything went fine here.”

“It did,” Bernie said.

“So? So what’s the problem?”

“You didn’t see? You were standing right there. I thought you must have — then went on anyway. Sorry.”

“See what?”

“When she dropped the doll.”

“Right, I saw her drop the doll.”

“And she bent down to pick it up.”

“Yeah?”

He sighed. “I’ve got it all on tape. We can take a look over at the studio. I want to know it wasn’t just my imagination.”

“It wasn’t.” Harold said. “I saw it too.”

“I don’t get it. What are you talking about?”

She glanced over at Suzy on the steps. The girl was looking directly at her, ignoring the reporters, frowning — and for a moment held her gaze. She’s sick of this, Carole thought. That’s the reason for the frown. She smiled. Suzy didn’t.

And she had no idea what all the mystery was about until they rolled the tape at the studio and she watched the little girl drop the doll and stoop and Bernie said there and stopped the tape so that she saw what she hadn’t noticed at the time because she’d looked away so abruptly, strangely embarrassed for this little girl so mature and adult for her age so that they’d simply not registered for her — the long wide angry welts along the back of both thighs just below the pantyline which told her that this was not only a smart, brave little girl but perhaps a sad and foolish one too who had drained the tub dry and dialed 911 to save her mother’s life.

Which may not have been worth saving.

Nobody had noticed this. Not the cops, not EMS. Nobody.

She rolled the tape again. Jesus.

She wondered about the grandmother. She had to know. How could she not know?

“What do you want to do?” Bernie said.

She felt a kind of hardness, an access to stone will. Not unlike the little girl’s perhaps. She remembered that last look from the steps.

“I want to phone the reporters who were out there with us, kill the story. Dupe the tapes. Phone the police and child welfare and get copies to them. I want us to do what her daughter evidently couldn’t bring herself to do. I want us to do our best to drown the bitch.”

They both seemed fine with that.

RETURNS

“I’m here.”

“You’re what?”

“I said I’m here.”

“Aw, don’t start with me. Don’t get started.”

Jill’s lying on the stained expensive sofa with the TV on in front of her tuned to some game show, a bottle of Jim Beam on the floor and a glass in her hand. She doesn’t see me but Zoey does. Zoey’s curled up on the opposite side of the couch waiting for her morning feeding and the sun’s been up for hours now, it’s ten o’clock and she’s used to her Friskies at eight.

I always had a feeling cats saw things that people didn’t. Now I know.

She’s looking at me with a kind of imploring interest. Eyes wide, black nose twitching. I know she expects something of me. I’m trying to give it to her.

“You’re supposed to feed her for godsakes. The litter box needs changing.”

“What? Who?”

“The cat. Zoey. Food. Water. The litter box. Remember?”

She fills the glass again. Jill’s been doing this all night and all morning, with occasional short naps. It was bad while I was alive but since the cab cut me down four days ago on 72nd and Broadway it’s gotten immeasurably worse. Maybe in her way she misses me. I only just returned last night from god knows where knowing there was something I had to do or try to do and maybe this is it. Snap her out of it.

“Jesus! Lemme the hell alone. You’re in my goddamn head. Get outa my goddamn head!”

She shouts this loud enough for the neighbors to hear. The neighbors are at work. She isn’t. So nobody pounds the walls. Zoey just looks at her, then back at me. I’m standing at the entrance to the kitchen. I know that’s where I am but I can’t see myself at all. I gesture with my hands but no hands appear in front of me. I look in the hall mirror and there’s nobody there. It seems that only my seven-year-old cat can see me.

When I arrived she was in the bedroom asleep on the bed. She jumped off and trotted over with her black-and-white tail raised, the white tip curled at the end. You can always tell a cat’s happy by the tail-language. She was purring. She tried to nuzzle me with the side of her jaw where the scent-glands are, trying to mark me as her own, to confirm me in the way cats do, the way she’s done thousands of times before but something wasn’t right. She looked up at me puzzled. I leaned down to scratch her ears but of course I couldn’t and that seemed to puzzle her more. She tried marking me with her haunches. No go.

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. My chest felt full of lead.

“Come on, Jill. Get up! You need to feed her. Shower. Make a pot of coffee. Whatever it takes.”

“This is fuckin’ crazy,” she says.

She gets up though. Looks at the clock on the mantle. Stalks off on wobbly legs toward the bathroom. And then I can hear the water running for the shower. I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to watch her. I don’t want to see her naked anymore and haven’t for a long while. She was an actress once. Summer stock and the occasional commercial. Nothing major. But god, she was beautiful. Then we married and soon social drinking turned to solo drinking and then drinking all day long and her body slid fast into too much weight here, too little there. Pockets of self-abuse. I don’t know why I stayed. I’d lost my first wife to cancer. Maybe I just couldn’t bear to lose another.

Maybe I’m just loyal.

I don’t know.

I hear the water turn off and a while later she walks back into the living room in her white terry robe, her hair wrapped in a pink towel. She glances at the clock. Reaches down to the table for a cigarette. Lights it and pulls on it furiously. She’s still wobbly but less so. She’s scowling. Zoey’s watching her carefully. When she gets like this, halfdrunk and half-straight, she’s dangerous. I know.

“You still here?”

“Yes.”

She laughs. It’s not a nice laugh.

“Sure you are.”

“I am.”

“Bullshit. You fuckin’ drove me crazy while you were alive. Fuckin’ driving me crazy now you’re dead.”

“I’m here to help you, Jill. You and Zoey.”

She looks around the room like finally she believes that maybe, maybe I really am here and not some voice in her head. Like she’s trying to locate me, pin down the source of me. All she has to do, really, is to look at Zoey, who’s staring straight at me.

But she’s squinting in a way I’ve seen before. A way I don’t like.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about Zoey,” she says.

I’m about to ask her what she means by that when the doorbell rings. She stubs out the cigarette, walks over to the door and opens it. There’s a man in the hall I’ve never seen before. A small man, shy and sensitive looking, mid-thirties and balding, in a dark blue windbreaker. His posture says he’s uncomfortable.

“Mrs. Hunt?”

“Un-huh. Come on in,” she says. “She’s right over there.”

The man stoops and picks up something off the floor and I see what it is.

A cat-carrier. Plastic with a grated metal front. Just like ours. The man steps inside.

“Jill, what are you doing? What the hell are you doing, Jill?”

Her hands flutter to her ears as though she’s trying to bat away a fly or a mosquito and she blinks rapidly but the man doesn’t see that at all. The man is focused on my cat who remains focused on me, when she should be watching the man, when she should be seeing the cat-carrier, she knows damn well what they mean for godsakes, she’s going somewhere, somewhere she won’t like.

“Zoey! Go! Get out of here! Run!”

I clap my hands. They make no sound. But she hears the alarm in my voice and sees the expression I must be wearing and at the last instant turns toward the man just as he reaches for her, reaches down to the couch and snatches her up and shoves her head-first inside the carrier. Closes it. Engages the double-latches.

He’s fast. He’s efficient.

My cat is trapped inside.

The man smiles. He doesn’t quite pull it off.

“That wasn’t too bad,” he says.

“No. You’re lucky. She bites. She’ll put up a hell of a fight sometimes.”

“You lying bitch,” I tell her.

I’ve moved up directly behind her by now. I’m saying this into her ear. I can feel her heart pumping with adrenalin and I don’t know if it’s me who’s scaring her or what she’s just done or allowed to happen that’s scaring her but she’s all actress now, she won’t acknowledge me at all. I’ve never felt so angry or useless in my life.

“You sure you want to do this, ma’am?” he says. “We could put her up for adoption for a while. We don’t have to euthenize her. ’Course, she’s not a kitten anymore. But you never know. Some family…”

“I told you,” my wife of six years says. “She bites.”

And now she’s calm and cold as ice.

Zoey has begun meowing. My heart’s begun to break. Dying was easy compared to this.

Our eyes meet. There’s a saying that the soul of a cat is seen through its eyes and I believe it. I reach inside the carrier. My hand passes through the carrier. I can’t see my hand but she can. She moves her head up to nuzzle it. And the puzzled expression isn’t there anymore. It’s as though this time she can actually feel me, feel my hand and my touch. I wish I could feel her too. I petted her just this way when she was only a kitten, a street-waif, scared of every horn and siren. And I was all alone. She begins to purr. I find something out. Ghosts can cry.

The man leaves with my cat and I’m here with my wife.

I can’t follow. Somehow I know that.

You can’t begin to understand how that makes me feel. I’d give anything in the world to follow.

My wife continues to drink and for the next three hours or so I do nothing but scream at her, tear at her. Oh, she can hear me, all right. I’m putting her through every torment as I can muster, reminding her of every evil she’s ever done to me or anybody, reminding her over and over of what she’s done today and I think, so this is my purpose, this is why I’m back, the reason I’m here is to get this bitch to end herself, end her miserable fucking life and I think of my cat and how Jill never really cared for her, cared for her wine-stained furniture more than my cat and I urge her toward the scissors, I urge her toward the window and the seven-story drop, toward the knives in the kitchen and she’s crying, she’s screaming, too bad the neighbors are all at work, they’d at least have her arrested. And she’s hardly able to walk or even stand and I think, heart attack maybe, maybe stroke and I stalk my wile and urge her to die, die until it’s almost one o’clock and something begins to happen.

She’s calmer.

Like she’s not hearing me as clearly.

I’m losing something.

Some power drifting slowly away like a battery running down.

I begin to panic. I don’t understand. I’m not done yet.

Then I feel it. I feel it reach out to me from blocks and blocks away far across the city. I feel the breathing slow. I feel the heart stopping. I feel the quiet end of her. I feel it more clearly than I felt my own end.

I feel it grab my own heart and squeeze.

I look at my wife, pacing, drinking. And I realize something. And suddenly it’s not so bad anymore. It still hurts, but in a different way.

I haven’t come back to torment Jill. Not to tear her apart or to shame her for what she’s done. She’s tearing herself apart. She doesn’t need me for that. She’d have done this terrible thing anyway, with or without my being here. She’d planned it. It was in motion. My being here didn’t stop her. My being here afterwards didn’t change things. Zoey was mine. And given who and what Jill was what she’d done was inevitable.

And I think, to hell with Jill. Jill doesn’t matter a bit. Not one bit. Jill is zero.

It was Zoey I was here for. Zoey all along. That awful moment.

I was here for my cat.

That last touch of comfort inside the cage. The nuzzle and purr. Reminding us both of all those nights she’d comforted me and I her. The fragile brush of souls.

That was what it was about.

That was what we needed.

The last and the best of me’s gone now.

And I begin to fade.