The Fall of Never(84)

“What is that?”

“Sleepwalking,” he said. “I don’t do that.”

“Lots of almost-fathers have a difficult time sleeping in the months before the baby’s due. I read an article about it in a magazine. I saved it for you.”

“Thoughtful.”

“What’s my surprise?”

“Soon, soon,” he said. “This afternoon.”

Sometime later, standing outside the door to Nellie Worthridge’s apartment, Marie tugged on her husband’s coat sleeve and smiled.

“What?” he said.

“What is this? Now I’m making house calls with you?”

“I said it was a surprise.” He knocked twice against the door. “This is a friend I met at the hospital, a sick old woman who happens to have a special gift.”

“So this woman has my real surprise?”

“This woman is the surprise. She blesses the unborn. She’s going to give Julian grace.”

Marie’s eyes softened. She brought her head down to one side, let it rest briefly on Carlos’s shoulder. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Carlito. This is the sweetest.”

“How many babies get their own personal blessing?”

“And you know so strongly that it is a boy,” she said.

“Why?”

“You called him Julian.”

He hadn’t even noticed.

The door opened and Josh stood on the other side. The weariness in his features shocked Carlos. The young man’s face was pale and unshaven. Deep grooves clung to either side of his mouth like parentheses. His eyes were dark, cavernous pits. Though Marie had never before met Joshua Cavey, Carlos felt his wife tense the moment he opened the door, similarly taken aback.

“Doctor,” Josh said, and nodded at Marie.

“This is Marie, my wife.”

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello. Come in. Nellie’s in bed.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“It won’t get any better, I don’t think. Please, come in.”

They entered the apartment. Nellie’s Ellington record was turning in quiet revolutions toward the back of the sitting room. The entire place reeked of citron. All the curtains had been pulled shut, blocking out the daylight.

“Is she still asleep?” Carlos asked.

“Not asleep,” Josh said. “She’s sick. Bad sick. Too weak to get out of bed.”

Marie looked at her husband, suddenly concerned and still very confused.

“Has she been to her physician?” Carlos asked.

“There’s nothing anyone can do. And she’s a stubborn old bird. She won’t let me do anything for her.”

“We should leave,” Marie whispered.

“No,” Josh said, “please. She knew you two were coming, it’s fine. She just feels bad that you have to see her this way.”

Marie only nodded. She was staring about the room, her small hands pressed together and resting atop the swell of her belly. Her winter coat was buttoned to the neckline and she wore a knitted beret pushed to one side. She looked incredibly young, Carlos thought, just as young as she had before they’d been married. Pregnancy—the dominance of perpetuation—had kept her beautiful and untouched. Again, he thought about all the lying he had done recently, thought about the long nights away from the house, afraid to go home where his thoughts (and Nellie’s words) only felt stronger and truer. Unfair—but he’d done it all for her, all of it, every second away from the house, every waking hour of his life these past few weeks. Was he a coward for refusing to instill in his wife the same unfounded fears he’d been carrying since Nellie had spoken those words? Was he a coward or a hero? No—he couldn’t see himself as a hero. Yet not a coward, either.

I’m a child, he thought. A frightened and confused child.

The bedroom was quiet and dark, the drapes pulled across the window here as well. A pungent medicinal smell hung like vapor in the air. Josh led them in but seemed reluctant to step too close to the old woman’s bed. Instead, he remained by the doorway and simply motioned for Carlos and his wife to enter.

Nellie was difficult to see in the darkness. As they approached, Carlos could see that she was indeed awake and propped into a sitting position beneath a bundle of heavy bedclothes. And as he got even closer, he could see that she was trying to smile. But there was a strong, sickly smell about her, and her aura was just as weak as Josh’s. Worse. Nellie appeared as the disease that had somehow found its way to Josh. She was the carrier, the host, the architect of both their deterioration. The presentation of her body conveyed images of soiled canvases; of downed telephone poles after a storm; of a discarded flat tire on the side of an interstate; of everything that seemed ruined and unhealthy in this world.

“Welcome,” Nellie said. Her voice sounded dry and abrasive.

“Carlito,” Marie whispered. Her discomfort was mounting. Another two minutes and she would insist they leave.

“Beautiful girl,” Nellie said.

“This is my wife, Marie.”

“Marie Mendes,” Nellie said. Not just dry and abrasive: her voice was troubled—wracked with something other than the inhibitions of her stroke and the weariness of her apparent state of being. And despite Carlos’s professional intimacy with such a realization, he was delayed in diagnosing Nellie’s condition: simply, the woman was dying.