The Red Hunter(9)

“We’re not going to talk about this,” I said.

“We are,” he said, tapping his finger, one hard knock, on the page. “This is wrong.”

“Is it?” A lash of anger caused me to rise. Then I sat again, leaned into him. “How? How is it wrong? In what just universe is it wrong?”

“When we hurt other people, we hurt ourselves, Zoey. You must know that by now.”

He bowed his head and struggled to breathe. I put my hand on his. I slowed my breathing, hoping it would signal him to slow his. It did.

“What do you want me to make for your dinner?” I asked. “I’m working tonight, so I’ll make it now and Betsy can heat it up when you’re hungry.”

He didn’t answer me. So I moved over to the cabinets and removed those cans of tomatoes. “I was thinking I’d make a marinara with meatballs and sausage. I’ll make a lot so we can freeze it.”

“Zoey.”

Out his kitchen window, I could see right into the dining room of the loft apartment across the alley. It’s one of those newer buildings, everything espresso and white, clean lines and glittering backsplash. Cold and modern the way people seem to like things these days. My uncle’s kitchen by contrast is all Formica and peeling wallpaper, things so old and stained from use that they’ll never really be cleaned no matter how hard I scrub.

The rest of the apartment is similarly old-school New York. No central air in this building. There’s an air-conditioning unit in the window of his bedroom. I sleep on the pullout couch when I stay here, now—which I sometimes do when I don’t like his breathing. When I moved in here with him at fourteen years old, he let me have the bedroom, and he slept on the couch until I left for the dorms at NYU. Four years he slept on a pullout couch.

“I’ll put it in a Tupperware, and Betsy can just heat it up and make some pasta tonight. And a salad.”

Betsy was the nurse who came in every day to check on his meds, help him with things he wouldn’t let me do, make sure he ate when I couldn’t come by.

“Please,” he rasped.

“It’s done.”

“It’ll never be done, kid,” he said. “Not like this.”

Even though I already suspected that he might be right about that, was already aware of a kind of hollow opening inside me that might never be filled, there was really nothing I could do. There are certain dark doorways in this life, and when you open one and step inside, you can’t come back out. The door locks behind you and you have to stay. No one ever tells you that. Or if they do, you don’t listen. You never really understand until it’s too late.

I poured the olive oil in the bottom of the heavy-bottomed pot that belonged to my mother. I minced the garlic by hand and slid it from the cutting board into the oil, then put the heat on low. I opened the cans of tomatoes and sniffed the air. Only the nose can tell when the garlic is ready, right before it turns brown and has to be thrown out.

When it was time, I dumped the crushed tomatoes (my mother would have picked them from our garden, but I’m less ambitious about things like that—and I don’t have a garden) into the oil and listened to the sizzle. I tore up leaves of fresh basil and watched them flutter into the red. Salt. Pepper. A tiny bit of sugar to cut the bitterness. And let it simmer. Like all good recipes, there’s almost nothing to it, just quality ingredients, a little attention, and time.

When I turned back to my uncle, he had his head in his hand, the rasping growing worse.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

He shook his head, didn’t seem able to talk. So I helped him into the bedroom. The air conditioning was on in there, the shades drawn, so it was cool and dark. I tried not to notice that he looked thinner, that his arm felt smaller in my grip. I could hear the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street, faintly over the hum of the window unit.

“Do you want the oxygen?” There was a green and silver tank by the bed. He nodded and sat heavily on the mattress. I lifted his legs onto the bed and helped him get the oxygen on. He used to lift me up over his head and spin me around in my parents’ backyard. I used to ride on his back, or make him drag me in stocking feet across the hardwood floors in our great room in a game we called Airplane.

You’re too big for that, Zoey! My mother would chide. Uncle Paul has a bad back. But he would just smile and shake his head, and I knew it was okay.

I didn’t know anything about emphysema until my uncle got it. It had seemed to my ignorant mind innocuous, a little trouble breathing. I didn’t know that it slowly destroyed your lung function, that it wasted you. The lungs eventually lose so much function that they can no longer support the metabolic processes of the body and supply oxygen. I think it’s one of those ugly things that no one ever talks about. It’s such a quiet, nasty way to slowly die.

I covered him with the blanket resting over the chair in the corner. He pointed over to the television, and I switched it on, handing him the remote. I checked the inhalers on his bedside table—Advair, Combivent, Flovent. He took Accolate twice a day and has prednisone for flare-ups. He was at less than 50 percent lung function, and it was only going to get worse.

There was a picture in a cheap plastic frame by the bed of my parents and me, next to his retired shield and his department ring. Other than that, there was just the bed, his reading chair, two bedside tables, and shelves and shelves of books, kiltered every which way, in checkered, colored stacks—history, biographies, detective fiction, science. My uncle never stopped reading. He had a stack of three by his bed: the new Lee Child, a book about birds, and a biography of Alexander Hamilton.