“The what?”
Brooks took a breath and she heard him trying to choke back another laugh. She slapped him playfully in the chest.
“Tell me.”
“Oh, man.” He sighed. “So, like, women have this piece of skin. Or maybe it’s cartilage. Tucked in there, like.” He paused.
“And…”
“Think of it like a magic button.”
She fell back beside him and he tapped the front of her damp underwear. A streak of pleasure shot through her.
“Oh, yes. Mrs. Whitehead didn’t teach us about the”—she paused, enunciating every syllable—“clit-or-is in ninth-grade sex ed.”
It was only then that she felt the tickle of the caterpillars on her arm, on her thigh. Marching through her hair. They were making their slow, methodical journey across Brooks’s body too, one sluicing through the milky fluid on his hip.
“There are caterpillars on us,” she said.
“I know,” he said dreamily.
29.
Veronica
She sat on the peach linen chaise longue in their bedroom, smoking cigarettes and watching Bob mumble in his sleep. He seemed agitated, even crying out once.
Champ lay on the carpet at the foot of the bed. His ears twitched each time his master stirred. Poor dumb dog, she thought. His loyalty was sure to kill him.
She thought of Champ’s sister, Princess. Thirteen years ago, she and Bob had driven across two states to a farm known for their world-class German shepherds. Bob had insisted, claiming the dogs were sired by a stud whose great-great-great grandfather had searched for bodies in the rubble of London’s bombed buildings during the war. The breeders, when hearing Bob was the head of Grudder Aviation, let them walk into the fenced-off puppy area and Veronica had been knocked on her behind when she leaned down to pet the mass of floppy-eared pups, and then they were climbing over her, licking her face with their sandpaper tongues. It had been delightful. She hadn’t surrendered her body like that since Ginny was a toddler, and it made her feel like a mother. It made her laugh. When the breeders called the dogs off, she’d been sad but didn’t know how to explain that she wanted the pups to paw at her, to cover her body with theirs.
They had picked out two roly-poly pups, the only bitch in the litter and one of her brothers. Princess and Champion. Princess had died of cancer two years ago. When the vet had sliced open their silver-and-black beauty for what they had hoped would be a lifesaving operation, the tumors were everywhere. Veronica had been the one to sign the euthanasia and disposal papers. Bob had been so distraught he had nearly hyperventilated in the waiting room. The receptionist had brought her a brown paper bag that smelled like luncheon meat and showed Bob how to breathe in and out, the paper bag inflating and deflating like a bellows.
The change in Bob was born in that moment, she thought now as she watched him kick away the ivory satin bedsheets—he was still murmuring in his sleep but more softly. It had taken him weeks to recover from the loss of Champ’s sister. And now Champ was old, and what would happen, Veronica thought, when Champ died? His back legs were going fast, buckling when he took the long flight of stairs up to the master bedroom each night. He was almost fourteen. Why shouldn’t there be euthanasia for people, she thought, lighting another cigarette off the butt of the last. Why should the sick and old have to suffer? Why should the young and healthy have to watch their onetime heroes decay?
“The show must go on,” she said to the dark room, and Bob stirred, turning over, clutching his pillow like a child dreaming.
She remembered the little box. The gift Dominic—it must be him, the scribbling on the note was all boy—had left at the back door last week. For the pain.
Like the glass box in Wonderland that appears, magically, out of thin air, Veronica had thought as soon as she’d opened the dusty velvet box big enough for a bracelet or a brooch. But instead of a cake iced with the words EAT ME there was the note and a hand-rolled cigarette. When she lifted it to her nose and sniffed, she knew it wasn’t any ordinary cigarette. She’d hid the box on the top shelf of the butler’s pantry near the extra Metamucil and cans of Ensure she’d had forced Bob to drink after Princess’s death when he was on his mourning fast.
Now she slipped on her quilted pink housecoat and her once plush pink slippers, now torn and stained from the walk through the woods to the Castle bell tower, and went to the pantry.
The box was still there. She had to stand on her toes to reach it and a wave of vertigo washed over her and she imagined how they’d find her. Dead in the pantry with a Mary Jane cigarette. She laughed at the image, and then laughed harder when she imagined Peggy Brell and Binnie Mueller at the club gossiping about it over drinks.
Outside on the patio overlooking the green sea of lawn, she was grateful for the cool breeze blowing west toward the factory instead of away. The night air was clear of the oily residue from the smoke that pumped out of Plants 2 and 3 day and night. As constant as the sun and the moon.
She reread her grandson’s note: For the pain. For what pain? Wasn’t there an infinite variety, she thought. Physical. Emotional. Existential. The pain of youth when it seems as if time slogs ahead like a snail stuck in the sunshine after a rainstorm. The pain of middle age when time slips through one’s fingers. And the pain of old age. Well, that was one helluva list. He couldn’t know—about her cancer. Could he?