The Long Fall

38

Standing in the doorway of the kidney-shaped den was a very skinny and tall young man with wiry red hair that stood up here and there. His eyes were bluish and his expression one of indignation that teetered upon madness.

This, I knew, was Fritz, Hannah’s slightly older brother. There seemed to me something natural about this wild intrusion, like the comic relief in a bloody slasher film.

Fritz wore a dark-green jacket, brown trousers, a buff-colored shirt, and a red-and-black bow tie. He wasn’t wearing glasses but should have been—to make the geek image complete.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked again, a little louder this time.

“You don’t have to shout, Fritzie,” Hannah said. “This is Mr. McGill. He’s looking for Daddy.”

“Why is he in my house?”

“It’s my house, too,” the princess said to the nerd.

“What are you doing with my sister?” Fritz asked me.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit exposed, a masher in the sudden light of a passing car.

“What are you doing to my sister?” he said again, this time looking at Hannah.

“He’s not doing anything. He was just telling me about why he’s here.”

“He might be stealing from us,” Fritz said. His agitation was definitely escalating.

“I’ve been with him the whole time,” Hannah argued. “How can he steal anything when we’re sitting down, looking at each other?”

“He has pockets,” the boy pointed out as if having discovered a new continent in the distant ocean. “I have to search him. He could have taken something when you weren’t looking.”

I began to think that Bryant Hull’s endowment of the Sunset Sanatorium might have been a wise long-term investment.

“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I said to Fritz in a detached, objective tone.

“I sure the hell do.”

“No you don’t.”

“Why not?” he screamed.

“Because I’m a trained fighter and if you touch me I’ll knock you unconscious. And when you’re out cold, imagine how much I could steal before you came to.”

“Why did you let him in here?” Fritz yelled, turning on his sister.

The girl’s response was to look at me. She didn’t want me to do anything. Hannah just asked me silently, with her eyes, to bear witness to something she lived through every day, or maybe every other day, making the span in between one of dread.

I thought, Of course she wants me to stay. And of course she couldn’t ask. I understood the impulse in an instant. I wanted to protect her but didn’t know how.

So I turned my attention to Fritz, worried that in his agitation he might try something foolish.

The boy was standing in place, shivering—no, shaking. The tremors were increasing. His eyes lost their focus. Pretty soon his balance was affected. As he fell, I stepped forward and caught him. His was an awkward weight because he’d gone rigid. I lowered him to the couch as his sister fled the room.

I wanted to run myself but there were flecks of foam coming from the boy’s mouth. He was shuddering. I looked around the room searching for a wedge that I could put between his teeth to keep him from biting his tongue. His blue eyes were wide, staring right at me, indicting me as a dead man accuses his murderer.

For a brief moment I felt the urge to kill him, to wrap my hands around his throat the way Willie Sanderson had done to me.

I squelched the impulse before Hannah scurried back into the room. She was carrying an alligator case that she unzippered while running to her brother’s side. She took out a disposable syringe that was already filled with an amber fluid.

“Help me!”

“What?” I asked.

“Pull off his jacket.”

It wasn’t easy but I turned the boy on his side, yanking against his jacket collar, pressing down on his rigid arms. When I got it down to the middle of his forearms Hannah moved in between us. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and so she easily found the vein just below the biceps and then expertly injected the medicine.

Maybe twelve seconds later Fritz relaxed and fell into a deep sleep.

Hannah sat down on the floor and sighed.

It was the family photograph that would never be taken: a sister who had just saved her brother, exhausted by the lifelong task of having to be there when the emergency arose. Why didn’t he have a nurse? Why wasn’t he on a regular regimen of drugs? Because Hannah was there to save him and to bear the brunt of his imbalance and frenzy.

She stood up and began pulling on her brother’s arm.

“Help me take him upstairs,” she said.

“Shouldn’t you call a doctor?”

“No. This happens all the time. He’ll be fine.”

“Don’t you have any servants that can help?”

“They’d tell my parents and then Fritzie would be hospitalized. He can’t stand that. He’ll kill himself if they commit him again.”

I bent down and lifted the skinny boy in my arms.

“Where?”

She led me further down the hall, away from the front of the house. After a little way we came to a staircase leading up. I carried the kid to the second floor and, under Hannah’s direction, brought him to a small room filled with various kinds of science tools: a microscope and telescope, a rock collection and butterfly pinboard. There were no posters, not even any music players. Here was a young man born to one of the wealthiest families in America and he didn’t even have a TV set.

I put him down on the single bed and stood back while Hannah undressed him. She took off all of his clothes and threw a sheet over him. Then she folded his shirt and pants, placing them on a walnut table in the corner.

Fritz looked very different in his sleep: older and defeated. I watched him for a while before Hannah touched my arm and we walked out into the hall.

I hadn’t registered the surroundings before as I was straining under Fritz’s deadweight. The white carpets were of thick virgin wool and the paintings on the hall walls were originals by Chagall, Picasso, and the like.

“Thank you,” Hannah said, attempting to express some deeper feeling.

I remembered the young woman who had made love to me in her small apartment. A little tingle in my chest was the hope that I could actually make up for some of the wrong that I’d done.

“It was nothing,” I said.

“You didn’t have to stay and help,” she said. “You don’t even know us.”

“It’s okay,” I replied, placing two fingers on the crook of her elbow.

It wasn’t anything sexual or suggestive. She folded her arm, hugging my fingers in that fashion to show how much the little I’d done had meant. And I understood. Unconscious, casual kindness is sometimes felt most deeply.

“I like you,” she said, and my heart, despite all intentions, quailed.

“I have to go.”

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