“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.