Lessons in Chemistry(32)

CRACK!

From the darkness came a hideous popping sound. It was like a firecracker—sharp, loud, mean. Six-Thirty bucked in fright—What was that? He bolted, or tried to, but he was yanked back by the leash that connected him to Calvin. Calvin, too, reacted—Were those gunshots?—and bolted in exactly the opposite direction. POW, POW, POW! The explosions stuttered like a machine gun. In response, Calvin lifted his foot and lurched forward, yanking Six-Thirty this way, while Six-Thirty, wild-eyed, lifted his front paws and yanked back as if to say, No, this way! And the leash, taut like a tightrope, left no room for compromise. Calvin brought his foot down in a slick of motor oil, slipping forward like a clumsy ice skater, the pavement coming up fast like an old friend who couldn’t wait to say hello.

BAM.

As a thin trail of red created a dark halo around Calvin’s head, Six-Thirty turned to help, but something bore down upon them— a huge ship of a thing that moved with such force, it snapped the leash in two, flinging him off to the side.

He managed to lift his head just in time to see the wheels of a patrol car bump up over Calvin’s body.



* * *



—

“Jesus, what was that?” the patrolman said to his partner. They were accustomed to their cars’ constant backfires, but this was something else. They jumped out, startled to see a tall man lying on the ground, his gray eyes wide open, his head wound quickly soaking the sidewalk. He blinked twice at the policeman standing over him.

“Oh my god, did we hit him? Oh my god. Sir—can you hear me? Sir? Jimmy, call an ambulance.”

Calvin lay there, his skull fractured, his arm snapped in two by the force of the police car. Around his wrist dangled the remnant of the leash.

“Six-Thirty?” he whispered.

“What was that? What did he say, Jimmy? Oh my god.”

“Six-Thirty?” Calvin whispered again.

“No sir,” the policeman said bending down beside him. “It’s almost six but not quite. Actually, it’s about five fifty. That’s five five oh. Now we’re going to get you out of here—we’re going to get you fixed up, don’t you worry, sir, there’s nothing to worry about.”

Behind him, police poured out of the building. In the distance, an ambulance screamed its intent of getting there soon.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” one of them said as air pressed out of Calvin’s lungs. “Isn’t that the guy everyone always calls about—the guy who runs?”

From ten feet away, Six-Thirty, his shoulder wrenched from its socket, the other half of the leash dangling from his whiplashed neck, watched. He wanted more than anything to go to Calvin’s side, to dip his face close to his nostrils, to lick his wounds, to stop everything from going any further than it already had. But he knew. Even from ten feet, he knew. Calvin’s eyes drifted shut. His chest stopped moving.

He watched as they loaded Calvin in the ambulance, a sheet over his body, his right hand hanging off the side of the gurney, the snapped leash still wrapped tight around his wrist. Six-Thirty turned away, sick with sorrow. With his head down, he turned and went to give Elizabeth the bad news.





Chapter 12



Calvin’s Parting Gift

When Elizabeth was eight, her brother, John, dared her to jump off a cliff and she’d done it. There was an aquamarine water-filled quarry below; she’d hit it like a missile. Her toes touched bottom and she pushed up, surprised when she broke through the surface that her brother was already there. He’d jumped in right after her. What the hell were you thinking, Elizabeth? he shouted, his voice full of anguish as he dragged her to the side. I was only kidding! You could’ve been killed!

Now, sitting rigidly on her stool in the lab, she could hear a policeman talking about someone who’d died and someone else insisting she take his handkerchief and still another saying something about a vet, but all she could think about was that moment long ago when her toes had touched bottom, the soft, silky mud inviting her to stay. Knowing what she knew now, she could only think one thing: I should have.



* * *



—

It was her fault. This was what she tried to explain to the policeman. The leash. She’d bought it. But no matter how often she said it, he didn’t seem to understand, and because of it, she thought there was a chance she’d imagined the whole thing. Calvin wasn’t dead. He was rowing. He was on a trip. He was five floors up, writing in his notebook.

Someone said go home.

For the next few days, she and Six-Thirty lay on her unmade bed, sleep impossible, food out of the question, the ceiling their only vista, waiting for him to walk back through the door. The only thing that disturbed them was a ringing phone. Every time it was the same whiney voice— a mortician of all people—demanding that “decisions must be made!” A suit was needed for someone’s coffin. “Whose coffin?” she said. “Who is this?” After too many of these calls, Six-Thirty, seemingly exhausted by her confusion, nudged her toward the closet and pawed open the door. And that’s when she saw it: his shirts swaying like long-dead corpses at a hanging. And that’s when she knew: Calvin was gone.



* * *



—

Just like after her brother’s suicide and Meyers’s attack, she could not cry. An army of tears lay just behind her eyes, but they refused to decamp. It was as if the wind had been knocked out of her: no matter how many deep breaths she took her lungs refused to fill. When she was a kid, she’d remembered overhearing a one-legged man tell the librarian someone was boiling water somewhere in the stacks. It was dangerous, he explained; she should do something. The librarian tried to assure him no one was boiling any water—it was a one-room library, she could see everyone—but he was insistent and shouted at her, and because of it two men had to remove him, one of them explaining that the poor guy was still suffering from shell shock. He’d probably never recover.