* * *
—
And I know now what was happening:
She’d beg him for help every morning.
The worst was each moment we left.
“Six months,” she’d say. “Michael—Michael. Six months. I’ve been dying a hundred years. Help me, please help me.”
Also, it was rare now—it hadn’t happened for weeks—that Rory, Henry, and Clay would skip school and come home to visit. Or at least we were fools to believe it—because one of them often did come back, but was good at remaining unseen. He’d leave at varying time slots, and watch from an edge of window frame—until once he could no longer see her. He’d left school as soon as he’d got there.
Back home he walked the lawn.
He moved to their bedroom window.
The bed was unmade and empty.
* * *
—
Without thinking he took a step backwards.
He felt the blood and the hurry—
Something was wrong.
Something’s wrong.
He knew he had to go in there; he should walk straight into the house, and when he did, he was hit by the light; it came right through the hallway. It belted him in the eyes.
But still he carried on walking—out the open back door.
On the porch, he stopped when he saw them.
From the left he could hear the car—a single but tuneless note—and he knew in his heart the truth of it: that car wasn’t leaving the garage.
He saw his father standing, in the blinding light of the yard, and the woman was in his arms: the woman of long-lost piano, who was dying but couldn’t die, or worse, living but couldn’t live. She lay in his arms like an archway, and our father had dropped to his knees.
“I can’t do it,” said Michael Dunbar, and he laid her down gently to the ground. He looked at the garage side door, then spoke to the woman beneath him, his palms on her chest and a forearm. “I’ve tried so Goddamn hard, Penny, but I can’t, I just can’t.”
The man kneeling, lightly shaking.
The woman in the grass was dissolving.
* * *
—
And he stood and he cried, the fourth Dunbar boy.
He remembered, for some reason, one story:
He saw her back in Warsaw.
The girl in the watery wilderness.