Chapter Sixty-two

Francesca has come in with lunch, but Rick can see that she’s preoccupied. Three and a half sandwiches. For once, she doesn’t come in smiling and full of chat for the sake of filling up the silence in that room. She talks, but her heart isn’t in it. “Do you want another half? Do you want tea or coffee?” She doesn’t realize just how well he knows her. Keller’s absence is the gorilla in the room. Rick wonders if maybe they had a fight.

She’ll just keep pretending that everything is hunky-dory. It is so wearing. Sometimes he thinks that Francesca is holding up his world on her back, and it plagues him that she won’t admit that she’s tired. On her most aggressively cheerful days, he thinks that he’d give his other arm for her to be honest with him, to rage against the shitty end of the stick she’s holding. He’s survived another bladder infection, but that only serves to pump up her shortsighted optimism that he’s going to improve, that these things are just temporary setbacks. Get back in the game! She’s like a fan who never gives up hope. A real fan overlooks bad games and cheers for the team no matter what. Francesca really needs to accept defeat.

But this time, Rick can see that Francesca’s preoccupation isn’t about him, and it’s like he’s being cheated. Why should she be so concerned about their aide’s wanting a little break? So what if Keller didn’t want to eat his lunch. Why should she even be thinking about it? He goes back to thinking that Keller and Francesca have had a disagreement. But when a man and a woman have a fight, there has to be a certain kind of intimacy to fuel it.

Rick bites a chunk out of his sandwich; doesn’t answer Francesca’s benign question about beverage. He hears only the high note of tension in her voice, as if she’s being garroted with an unspoken question.

“He took Pax with him?” The grease from the sandwich coats his fingers.

“I guess so. Yes.” Francesca hands him a napkin. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

“He shouldn’t be taking Pax if he’s going out for any length of time. I need him.”

“So does he.” Francesca drops her unfinished sandwich on the plate. “Did he seem upset to you?”

“No. Just a man needing an afternoon off to clear his head.” Really, why is she so concerned? Like a teenage girl worrying about the disposition of her crush. Rick shoves the rest of his sandwich into his mouth to stop it up before he says something he will regret.

“Are you done?”

It takes a second for Rick to realize she means done with lunch. “Yeah.”

She removes the plate with the uneaten halves and leaves him as he is, sitting in that chair, facing the door, through which he seldom goes, the grease from his sandwich still on his fingers. Pax should be here to lick them off. Rick manages to turn his chair around so that he is facing the interior of his room. What sky he can see through the open blinds is opaque in the thin daylight, and the first sting of wet snow hits the pane.

It seems like hours pass before Rick finally hears the front door open. He closes his eyes with relief. Pax is back. Keller has brought him back. The big dog bounds into the room, his fur cold and sprinkled with hard balls of sleet. He shakes and sprays Rick with moisture, then commences licking Rick’s fingers one by one, like a mother dog licks the ins and outs of her puppy. Careful, considered, and devoted. Done, the dog’s tongue unfurls to lick his dewlaps and he settles his head in Rick’s lap for an ear rub. Rick strokes deep into the ear, sliding his fingers up the length of it, moving the cilia. In the pearly winter light, a darker skin emerges within Pax’s ear—his tattoo. The mark that designates him as a war dog, a dog who saw service. Who, like him, was wounded in action. Keller’s loyal partner on the battlefield.

Not one of the men with whom he served in that doomed squad survived. Removed from the battlefield, Rick was also removed from his platoon. Languishing for months in the hospital, first in England and then here, Rick lost contact with anyone he served with. Some guys, he knows, cling to those associations, reluctant to give up the camaraderie, the mythical brotherhood of battle, but he doesn’t. Nor is he willing to seek out any connection. Not after what happened, and the fact that he survived. “Survivor’s guilt.”—that’s what the shrink called it the one time he met with one. Don’t beat yourself up. You tried. Wasn’t your fault. Oh my, how many platitudes have been lobbed at him by all and sundry. Doctors, nurses, the shrink, Francesca. But not Keller. Keller listened to his story, but he didn’t attempt to absolve him.

Rick can’t read the numbers written on the inside of his dog’s ear. The thick cilia obscure four of the digits; he’d have to shave the inside of the ear to read them. Pax whines a little; Rick is holding that ear too tightly. He lets go, pushes the dog off his lap.

*   *   *

The sound of sleet hitting the window. The room is a little cold and Rick shrugs more blanket up over his shoulder. As he does most every night, he has awakened suddenly and without a known disturbance. He hears the click of the dog’s toenails coming down the stairs, Pax alert, as always, for his awakening. Usually, the dog is there before his eyes open, sensitive to Rick’s coming awake even from a distance. But lately, Rick has awakened alone in this room, comforted only by the quick sound of those nails on hardwood.

The dog comes in and touches him with a cold nose, as if he’s been outside. He wags his tail and does the doggy equivalent of tucking Rick in, resting his head in the crook between Rick’s shoulder and chin. Rick knows that as soon as he drifts off, the dog will go away. Go back up to the bedroom Keller uses now that he’s been invited into the house, a narrow landing width away from Francesca and the room she occupies alone, sleeping in their marriage bed, a room he’s never seen but pictures exactly as the one they had in their first apartment.

Sometimes in the quiet of the deep night, when the street traffic is done and the furnace is satisfied with the temperature and shuts off, Rick thinks he can hear them. The creak of a floorboard. The sound of a bedspring complaining. Like someone has gotten up and moved to another bed. It’s just house noises, he tells himself. But tonight he hears murmuring. In the middle of the night, they are close enough to whisper to each other.

Last night they were alone in this house.

Rick presses his ear against his pillow, covers his other ear with the stump of his pitching arm. But he still hears them. Whispers carry farther than the natural voice. He uncovers his ears and strains to listen for distinct words. There is only the rising and falling of tone, and a slight crescendo/decrescendo, as if the conversation were scored with musical notation.

Is it the wind singing through the naked pear tree in the backyard, or the water gurgling in the radiators? It must be the sound of windshield wipers on a lone car on the next block. The train whistle, a foghorn. The sound of his own blood squeezed through his heart? But no. It’s voices above him. Whispering to each other. He’s sure of it.