May We Be Forgiven Part 6

"Okay, so where do you want to go?" I ask.

"Amus.e.m.e.nt park."

"You're kidding, right?"

Apparently not.

At Nate's insistence I phone the amus.e.m.e.nt park and find that due to the odd and unseasonably warm winter, they haven't closed for the season. "The owner thought it was better to keep folks employed and have a snow day if needed-which so far hasn't happened," the guy says. Nate goes on ride after ride, roller coaster, Zipper, Bungee Rocket, Tower of Terror, Gravitron, which spins so fast he's plastered to the side with an expression on his face like he's been whipped through a wind tunnel.

"Do you think it's weird?" he asks as we walk to the next ride.

"Who am I to judge?"

"I carry a diagnosis," he says.

"Like what?"

"Like supposedly there's something wrong with me."

"What's your point?"

"Do you think it's true?" he asks.

"Do you?" I ask.

He shrugs.

"Do you want to go on a ride?" I ask Ashley, who at eleven is holding my hand and seeming more like six. She shakes her head no. "Are you sure? I'll go with you." She shrugs.

"I miss the snow," she says, shaking her head sadly. "When I was young it used to snow in the winter."

"It will snow again," I say.

"When?" she asks.

"When you least expect it," I say.

We leave Nate at the roller coaster. He seems relieved by the spinning, by hurling through the air again and again. Ashley picks out something called the Wave Swinger; it seems innocent enough.

Like the mall, the amus.e.m.e.nt park is empty. Nate and Ashley both have their own attendants, ride operators who are like mechanical tour guides. They walk with us from ride to ride, turning each one on and giving it a test spin before letting the kids board.

"Isn't it hard to spend your days in an empty amus.e.m.e.nt park?" I ask one of the operators.

"Beats sitting home with my wife," the guy says, shrugging like I'm the idiot.

"My mother's in the hospital," Ashley tells the operator as he's turning on the chair swing. "We were sent home from school. Our father hit her in the head."

"Rough," the operator says, and it vaguely sounds like he's saying "Ruff," as in barking more than talking.

The Wave Swinger lifts gently off the ground. I am in the chair ahead of Ashley, suspended by twenty feet of galvanized chain. It makes a couple of graceful spins in a wide circle, rising higher each time, and then it takes off, spinning faster and faster. The chair swings out wide, it tilts, now we're flying up high and then swooping down low. I am dizzy, nauseous, trying to find one thing to fix on, one thing that is not moving. I stare at the empty chairs in front of me, the blue sky overhead. I am losing my sense of balance; I fear I will pa.s.s out and somehow slip out of the chair and fall to the ground.

Nate is waiting for us when we land. I stumble getting off the ride and knock my head into the chains.

We head for the Haunted House, all hopping into our own cars, and the train bangs through the double doors and into the darkness. It's warm inside and smells like sweat socks. Overhead there are howls and ear-piercing screeches from the dead, timbers crack, and ghosts fall from the sky, stopping inches short of our faces before being s.n.a.t.c.hed away again. The mechanical soundtrack is punctuated by a frightful choking sound.

"What is that?" I ask.

"It's Ashley," Nate says.

"Are you choking?" I ask, unfastening my seat belt and trying to turn and look at her.

"She's crying," Nate says. "That's the way she cries."

As lightning is crashing around me and we're climbing a hill into a dark castle, I'm turning and trying to crawl out of my car and into hers. Suddenly strobe lights are flashing and, as in some slow-motion Marx Brothers movie, I'm on my hands and knees on top of the train car. The train is heading straight for the closed door of the castle, and right before it hits, the train turns sharply and I am thrown overboard, banging into a wall, reaching out and grabbing at anything for balance, worried about landing on the third rail-if there is such a thing in a haunted house. And then it all stops. It's pitch-dark. "Don't move," we hear a voice overhead. Ashley is still crying, sobbing in the dark. A minute later, the Haunted House is flooded with bright fluorescent light; every secret of the night is revealed-the lousy papier-mache walls, the cheaply strung-together skeletons suspended on wire hangers, the yellow and purple glow-in-the-dark paint on everything.

"What the f.u.c.k," the ride operator says, coming down the tracks.

"Sorry," I say.

"Sorry, shmorry," he says to me.

"The little girl was crying."

"Are you all right, sweetheart?" the operator asks Ashley, genuinely concerned. "Is anybody injured?"

We all shake our heads. "We're all right."

The operator grabs a tow rope at the front of the train and pulls us all down the tracks, bending his head at the front doors, and we bang out into the daylight.

"You sure you're all okay?"

"As okay as we can be, given the circ.u.mstances," I say. I hand the guy twenty bucks. I'm not exactly sure why, but it feels necessary.

"Let's go home," I say to the children, herding them to the parking lot.

"It was all good until we got to the Haunted House," Nate says.

"It was good," I say.

For dinner we have Jane's spaghetti sauce from the freezer.

"I love Mom's spaghetti," Ashley says.

"Great," I say, worried that there are only two more containers in the freezer and they're going to have to last a lifetime. I'm wondering if spaghetti sauce can be cloned. If we save a sample or take a swab of Jane's sauce, can someone make more?

Spaghetti and frozen broccoli and cream soda and Sara Lee pound cake. You would almost think things are under control.

The cat walks by, flicking her tail at my ankles under the table. Ashley gets up and shows me the cabinet where forty cans of cat food are stacked in neat order.

"She likes the salmon the best," Ashley says.

After dinner I take the children back to the hospital. Everything is slightly more hushed; the ICU has a dimmed glow-in-the-dark quality. The large s.p.a.ce is divided into eight gla.s.s-walled rooms, of which six are occupied.

"Anything?" I ask the nurse.

She shakes her head. "Nothing."

The children visit with their mother. Nathaniel has brought a paper he wrote for school. He reads it aloud to her and then asks if she thinks it needs something more. He waits for an answer. The ventilator breathes its mechanical breath. After he reads the paper, he tells her about the amus.e.m.e.nt park, he tells her about a boy at school that apparently she already knows a lot about, he tells her that he's calculated that by the time he's ready to start college it will cost about seventy-five thousand dollars a year and that by the time Ashley is ready to start it will be more than eighty. He tells her he loves her.

Ashley rubs her mother's feet. "Does that feel good?" she asks, smoothing cream over her toes and up her ankles. "Maybe tomorrow I can bring polish from home and do your nails."

Later, I walk through the house, turning out lights. It's nearly midnight. Ashley is in her room, playing with her old toys; all the dolls from her shelves are down on the floor, and she's in the middle.

"Time for bed," I say.

"In a minute," she says.

Nate is down the hall, in his parents' room, splayed out on their bed asleep and fully clothed. Tessie is with him, her head on the pillow, filling in for Jane.

In the morning, a van pulls up outside. A man gets out, unloads six boxes. From inside I watch him carry them one by one to the front door. At first I'm thinking it's a box bomb delivered by the surviving relatives of the family George killed. But there's something so methodical, so painstaking about the way this guy works that clearly he's a professional of another sort. The last thing out of the van is the enormous plant. He's got everything all lined up before he rings the bell.

Tessie barks.

I open the door carefully.

"Delivery," he says. "Can you sign for these?"

"Sure. What is it?"

"Your property."

"My property?"

"Office supplies," the guy says, turning to leave. "How the f.u.c.k would I know? I'm just the messenger. Eight o'clock in the morning and people are already asking questions. When is enough enough?" He walks back to the van, yelling the whole way.

I drag the boxes into the house. It's the contents of George's office.

"Did you order something?" Ashley asks.

"It's for your dad," I say, and the three of us drag it all into his office and close the door.

"Can I have the plant?" Nate asks.

The decision is made to take Jane off life support, to donate her organs. "I didn't sleep all night," her mother says. "I made up my mind and then I changed my mind and then I made up my mind and I changed my mind."

"Who will tell the children?" someone asks.

"You should," Jane's father says, stabbing his finger towards me. "It's all on you."

Nate and Ashley are taken to a conference room; they ask me to come with them. We sit, waiting and waiting, and then, finally, the doctor comes in. He's got scans, charts, and graphs.

"Your mom is very sick," he says.

The children nod.

"The damage to her brain can't be fixed. So we're going to let her body help other people whose bodies can get better. Her heart can help someone whose heart isn't working. Does that make sense?"

"Daddy killed Mommy," Ashley says.

There isn't much more to say.

"When are you going to pull the plug?" Nate asks.

The doctor braces. "We'll take her to the operating room and remove the parts that can be transplanted."

"When?" Nate wants to know.

"Tomorrow," the doctor says. "Today all the people who are going to be helped by your mom will get phone calls, and they'll go to the hospitals near where they live, and their doctors will start to get ready."

"Can we see her?" Ashley asks.

"Yes," the doctor says. "You can see her today, and again in the morning."

Somehow the police are notified and a cop shows up with a photographer, and they ask us all to leave the room, and they pull the curtains around her bed and start taking pictures. The white flash explodes again and again behind the curtain, lighting up the silhouettes of the cop and the photographer. I can't help but wonder: Are they taking close-ups, are they pulling back the blankets? Are they photographing her nude? The flashes of light attract attention; the other families look at us strangely but silently. Stroke, heart attack, burn-MURDER-we are known to each other by ailment and not by name.

When the cops finish, we go back in. I look at the blanket. If they pulled it back, what did they see? What does a brain-dead woman look like? I fear I know the answer: like a dead woman.

Rutkowsky the lawyer and I meet in the hospital parking lot and go in together to talk to George. "He's never asked how she is," I tell the lawyer.

"Let's a.s.sume he's out of his mind," the lawyer says.

"George," Rutkowsky and I say simultaneously, as the nurse pulls the curtain back. George is in a bed, curled into a ball.

"Your wife, Jane, has been declared brain-dead; she'll be taken off life support, and the charges against you will be raised to murder, or manslaughter, or whatever we can get them to agree to," the lawyer says. "The point being, once this happens, wheels will be put into motion and your options become more limited. I am negotiating to have you sent someplace, to a facility I have worked with in the past. When you arrive, there will be a period of detoxification and then, hopefully, they'll be able to address your underlying psychosis. Do you see what I'm saying, do you hear the direction I'm going in?" The lawyer pauses.

"She was sucking my brother's c.o.c.k," George says.

And nothing more is said for a few minutes.

"What will she look like?" George asks, and I'm not sure exactly what the question means. "Well, no matter, I'm sure they can make a nice hat for her."

The nurse tells us she needs a moment alone with George. We take the cue and leave.

"Have you got a minute?" the lawyer asks me.

In the lobby of the hospital, the lawyer asks me to take a seat. He places his enormous bag on the small table next to me and proceeds to unpack a series of doc.u.ments. "Due to the physical and mental conditions of both Jane and George, you are now the legal guardian of the two minor children, Ashley and Nathaniel. Further, you are temporary guardian and the medical proxy for George. With these roles comes a responsibility that is both fiduciary and moral. Do you feel able to accept that responsibility?" He looks at me-waiting.

"I do."