Commonwealth(78)

“The first time he was stung we came here.”

“I guess I didn’t know he’d been stung another time,” Franny said. Bert had brought all of the children together in the living room in the house in Virginia on the morning of Cal’s funeral. He told them a bee sting was something Cal could not have survived. He’d said it to be comforting, so they wouldn’t think there was something they could have done to save him. Although, of course, they could have saved him. They could have stopped insisting that Cal feed all his Benadryl tablets to Albie whenever they wanted Albie to shut up, and they could have encouraged Cal to stop giving Albie the pills himself when none of them were around, just so he would have had a few left when he needed them. They could have gone to him when he fell instead of ignoring him for half an hour, thinking he was doing it for show.

“That’s how we knew he was allergic,” Teresa said. “It was that first time.”

“How old was he then?” Caroline said. Caroline was standing behind them. They didn’t know she’d come back. Caroline was thinking of her own children. Had they all been stung by bees? She tried to remember.

Teresa closed her eyes. She was counting her children up, arranging them in her memory according to size. “He must have been seven. Albie was just trying to walk, so the girls would have been three and five. I think that’s right. Cal and Holly were playing in the backyard and I had the little ones inside. Four children on my own, it was really something. Do you girls have children?”

“Three,” Caroline said. “A boy and two girls.”

“Two boys,” Franny said.

“But they aren’t hers,” Fix said.

“Cal was stung by a bee,” Caroline said, trying to steer the ship.

“Medications?” the Latin girl asked.

Franny dug back into Teresa’s purse and pulled the two bottles she’d found on the sink in the bathroom, Lisinopril and Restoril.

Teresa looked at the orange plastic bottles on the desk and then looked at Franny.

“I thought they might ask,” Franny said, though maybe collecting medication had been overstepping. She wouldn’t want anyone going through her medicine cabinet.

“I always taught the girls to be thorough,” Fix said.

“Next of kin?”

They looked at each other. “Albie, I guess,” Franny said.

“Local?” the girl asked, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.

“Oh, me then. Frances Mehta.” She gave the girl her phone number.

“Relationship?”

“Stepdaughter,” Franny said.

“Wait,” Fix said. He was doing the math in his head, trying to figure out the right word for what Teresa and his daughter actually were to one another.

“That’s right,” Caroline said to the girl.

When she was finished with the forms, the girl at reception told them where to wait. “The nurse will come get you.”

“It needs to be soon,” Caroline said to her in that very direct way she was capable of. “She’s very sick.”

“I understand that, missus,” the girl said. The weight of her eyelashes was a burden to her. She looked like she was just about to fall asleep.

Franny wheeled Teresa and Caroline wheeled their father as far away from the television set as was possible. It was still light outside.

“You should go home now,” Teresa said when they were settled in their corner. “I’m here, they’ll come and get me. You don’t have to worry about me running out.”

“I’ll take Dad home,” Caroline said. “Then I’ll come back for Franny.”

“Too much traffic,” Fix said. “It’s better that we stay together, see this through. If I get sick they can always admit me. I like Torrance. Lots of cops used to live out here.”

“Finish your story,” Franny said to Teresa.

Fix answered instead. “I worked an accident once, a guy was stopped at a traffic light with his windows down and a bee flew in and stung him. That was that. His foot fell off the brake and the car went out into the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. He was probably already dead at that point. Nobody knew what had happened until the autopsy. I went back to the site a couple of days later, not that I was looking for a bee exactly, but I wanted to take a look around. There was a bottlebrush tree just before that traffic light and it was swarming. I mean half of it was bees.”

Teresa nodded, as if the story were perfectly relevant. “When Cal came in from the backyard he was dead white. I remember his little face, how terrified he was, and really, I thought it was Holly. They were always going after each other with rakes and brooms and I thought something had happened to her. I said, ‘Cal, where’s Holly?’ And when I started to turn away from him to go out to the yard to find her, he made this horrible high-pitched noise, like he was trying to suck air through a pinhole. He held his arm up to stop me and then he fell straight back. His lips were swelling, his hands. I went to pick him up and there was a bee on his shirt. The bee was right there on him, like someone who commits a murder and then sticks around.”

“It happens,” Fix said.

Caroline reached over and took her sister’s hand. No one would have thought a thing about it. They were listening to a terrible story, that was all. Franny wrapped her fingers around Caroline’s fingers.