The Astral, or, Till the Day I Die. V. J. Banis
over the booths, almost never directly at Peter.
He was thinking, what a horrible thing it must have been for her. If only he could have been there to comfort her. He couldn’t, of course. She didn’t love him. He could have borne that, if she had only let him love her; but she was married to another man, had married him within weeks of the day he had left Los Angeles, so whatever love she felt for Walter must have been there all along—all the time that she was with him.
Since he had arrived back in the city, he had been to nearly all the places they used to haunt. Yesterday he had lunch at The Apple Pan: a hickory burger with cheese, and apple pie à la mode. The day before, he had been to the pier at Santa Monica, where he had resisted the urge to ride the merry-go-round. A couple in love could do that and get nothing more than amused glances from passers-by. A single man could only engender suspicion.
He had been to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, Angel’s Flight and The Bradbury Building, the Farmers’ Market, The Witch’s House that the tourists never discovered, and The Original Pantry in the seedy part of downtown, where he’d eaten a French Dip in honor of its invention there. A one-man tourist trail, and all of it empty of pleasure, all of it spoiled for him by the absence of the one with whom he had shared it in the past, with whom he could never share it again.
Sitting across from him, as he talked, Peter watched all these emotions flit across his friend’s face. Should I have said anything, he wondered? Or kept my trap shut? He would have learned of it sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? For such a big city, Los Angeles could be a small town in that regard.
He finished his story and waited for Jack to respond. The silence grew uncomfortably long. He was about to speak up himself when at last Jack looked directly at him for the first time in many minutes.
“Let’s talk about that job you mentioned,” he said.
* * * *
It was nearly a month before she could go home. Brain damage, they explained, in terms too technical for her to grasp: stroke danger, seizures, black-outs. A whole litany of dire consequences, none of which mattered to her in the least. If she couldn’t die, couldn’t trade places with her daughter, what did it matter how she lived?
She never saw the woman doctor again, the one who had spoken to her of traveling. No one seemed to know who she was. Even Nurse Millie was unhelpful.
“There are so many doctors here,” she said when Catherine questioned her. “It’s hard to keep track of them all.” Millie was different now. She still took pains with her ministrations, but the easy intimacy that had existed between them before had vanished. She was wary with Catherine. Sometimes it seemed as if she were uncomfortable in Catherine’s presence.
“Who could blame her?” Catherine asked herself. “I am uncomfortable in my presence.”
* * * *
Walter brought her home, his air one of gentle solicitude. She had managed to give him at least some of the forgiveness she knew he sorely needed.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she assured him, this on the day before she left the hospital. “You are not to blame for their evil. How could you have known—how could any sane person expect that?”
He was grateful, of course, but it seemed to her as if her forgiveness embarrassed him in some way. They both knew it was not over, that perhaps the guilt would never go away. Perhaps she could never altogether stop blaming him, but it was a start, at least.
They had to try, if they were to save their marriage. If they were to save themselves. To linger in that hell of self-torture could only lead to insanity. She had felt since the moment she regained consciousness in that hospital bed that she was teetering at all times on the edge of that abyss. Sometimes she thought it might be easier to plunge into it.
Her mother was at the house when they got there. “I won’t be in the way,” Sandra Dodd promised, wary, because up till now, when she had visited at the hospital, her daughter had been distant and uncommunicative. “I’ll just finish getting dinner ready and then I’ll go home. Unless,” she added, and could not keep a hopeful note from her voice, “you want me to stay.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” Catherine assured her, making the effort to smile gratefully. “I can manage.”
“Maybe she should stay for a night or two,” Walter said. “I’ll have to go to work. I’ve been away from the restaurant so much, and you know what happens when the cat’s away. People are getting sloppy.”
“I’ll be all right,” Catherine said, and, more emphatically when they both looked uncertain, “Really.”
She glanced around at the living room that should have been familiar, and looked utterly foreign to her. She focused on a vase filled with yellow roses that sat atop the piano. “Thank you for the flowers, Mom,” she said, to soften the stubbornness that she knew left mother and husband uneasy.
“Oh, they’re not....” Sandra hesitated. Part of her wanted to let the mistake stand, but she found that she couldn’t. “They aren’t from me.” Catherine raised a questioning eyebrow. “They’re from Jack. Jack McKenzie.” She didn’t add that they had been coming every week for nearly a month.
“McKenzie?” Walter said. “I didn’t even know he was back in town, did you?” The look he gave Catherine was accusing.
“I’ve rather been out of circulation.” She took the note from the roses and read it.
“What the hell does he want?”
She handed him the note. It was simple to the point of austerity: “My sincere sympathy. Jack McKenzie.”
Jack McKenzie. As if he needed to add his last name. As if she might have forgotten who he was. She suddenly remembered hearing his voice in that dying moment. That was why she had kept the memory of that incident so resolutely locked away inside her mind, why she had mentioned it to no one. To remember that eerie moment was to remember Jack, and she didn’t want to think of Jack; wouldn’t think of him. That, surely, was the feather that would tip her over the edge into the bottomless pit if anything would.
Walter took the card, read it for a long moment as though the message it contained was a lengthy one. “Have you seen him?” he asked finally.
She sighed. “I haven’t spoken to Jack since he left thirteen years ago.”
He was on the verge of saying something further, and thought better of it. Instead, he crumpled up the card and threw it violently into the wastebasket by the desk.
“Did I hear a baaing sound?” Sandra asked. “I do believe there’s a lamb stew calling for my attention.”
She left the room to give them tactful space for anything that needed saying. There was, she thought, quite a bit of that, none of which she needed to hear.
Whatever that might have been, however, remained unsaid in a silence that eddied around husband and wife. Catherine went to the bay window and stared out at the back garden. The flowers were wilted, the grass brown from lack of water, the leaves of the maple tree hung down dispiritedly. She supposed it was a measure of her healing that she could even notice such things, though she hadn’t yet reached the point of caring much.
“I’d better get to the restaurant,” Walter said to her back. “If you have any...if you need anything, call me on my cell.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said again. Relenting, if only slightly, she came to give him a perfunctory kiss.
When he had gone, when she heard the car door slam, heard the Buick pull out of the driveway and move off down the street; when she was sure he wasn’t coming back but was truly on his way to the restaurant he owned in Santa Monica, she went to the wastebasket and retrieved the card, smoothing it out. She too studied it for a long while, as if seeking some coded message invisible to the undiscerning eye.
They had been rivals, Walter and Jack, if unequal ones. It had always been Jack who had ruled