Bent Thumbs
He had been sitting at South Street for almost five hours. Time to go home, he thought to himself, but didn't get up. He needed a few more minutes. After a lifetime of weightlifting, John knew that you didn't lift until you were ready, psychically braced, willing the body to go forward. You worked through the fatigue and pain and came to the focus point. He had planned this day for the past two weeks, waiting until Dominic, their son, was on vacation with his family and wouldn't "drop by." He had plotted the best and most painless method, the one that would most resemble an accident, or wouldn't be questioned that closely. It hadn't been an easy decision. Maybe, he thought, it had always been floating around out there, ever since she had gotten sick. But, he reminded himself again, it had been her decision. He had been carrying Margaret from the bathroom to the hospital bed he had set up in the dining room when she looked up at him, lucid like she sometimes was, and said, "I can't do this anymore, Johnny. We can't do this anymore. We need some peace." He knew that she meant peace for herself, and ease for him, but after forty-five years, hadn't they earned the right to become a "we?" At first he was horrified. John wasn't afraid of her dying: he was resigned to that, and though there were nights where he would lie awake and contemplate her decay, waiting for the moment when the collapse of her mind and her body would meet at the moment of passing, and he felt sorrow at the banal tragedy of her death, their life together; but he had never thought of being the agent of ending her life. Two days later, when he was carrying her from the hospital bed to the bathroom, his right arm supporting her back and head, the other holding her legs gently (she bruised so easily), he looked into her familiar and loved face and began to cry as he decided yes, he would. Him and her, John and Margaret, in sickness and health. He shuddered as the breeze picked up and crept inside his pea coat. It was almost full dark, or as dark as the city would ever get. He rubbed his hands together. How he had aged. How they both had aged! His mind, he thought, had not changed much since his twenties— most of his opinions were the same, but his face in the mirror had always surprised him. Sometimes it was too heavy, sometimes too thin, but always aging. John's back had stiffened from sitting and his knees cracked when he stood up. He was tired and exhilarated and frightened, as he had been on his wedding day, as he had been at the birth of all four of their children, as he had been the first time he and Margaret had made love. But, he admitted to himself, mostly he was tired. He adjusted his coat, fixed his cap—his "old man's hat"—as Dominic called it, and took in the Brooklyn skyline for one last time. It was only in the past few hours that John had begun to worry about what his mother had called "his immortal soul." As a bomber in Korea, John tore apart their countryside, and while there may not have been any atheists in foxholes, John still thought that God was an arm's-length deity. Like most architects, He didn't live in the building He designed. If man's destiny was up to man, well, that was up to man. Did God hold him accountable for following orders, or was that only important if they lost the war? He had tried to talk to the base chaplain about it, but the chaplain only wanted to discuss the difference between lost and saved souls. Lying in his bunk he would sometimes offer up a thin prayer for the people who had died on his drop, but John would be damned before he asked for his own forgiveness. Damned was a state of mind, he thought to himself. Now thirty-five years later, he felt his childhood doubts sweeping over him. Was it like the Bible said—that there was a disapproving God who always required a blood sacrifice? Was He only a dissatisfied, intractable deity who saw only the measure of His law? John stopped, looked out over the water and shook off his doubts. God was, and always had been, a carney, forcing you to play His rigged game. People played for prizes, but the only important thing was the game. John began walking. It was a long day for him. He hadn't been away from Margaret this long in years. He rode the train one last time, went to his office in the Empire State Building and ride to the top. He had walked around, looking out over the world, remembering walks he had taken with his kids around the city, trying to remember conversations they must have had. He felt the ghosts of their childhood standing next to him, imploring him, wide-eyed, to think of them, to think again if this was the right thing to do. What if you hadn't wanted us, their memories said. "It wasn't up to me," John had said aloud and startled himself. He went over to the Eastern side of the building and looked to see if he could find his childhood home in the rooftops of the Lower East Side. He walked around the building and traced the lines of traffic heading along the West Side Highway through the Holland, onto the mainland. It eased his mind, this voluminous mass of life. The inconsequentiality of his life was freeing. He had come to terms with the smallness of his own life, had been taught that smallness in Basic Training. It was something that his kids knew nothing about: they were of the mind that somewhere, somehow, their lives were more important than they were. Jennifer, his second child and his first daughter, had wired in and hooked up with all sorts of different fixes in an attempt, as she put it, "to find my transcendent self." It was a generational thing. His generation— a complaining, post-Depression era group— was ridiculed for their "Father Knows Best" lives. Why people didn't see a television show as wishful thinking instead of the truth was something that had always been a mystery to him; his children didn't seem to live their lives as much as view their daily interactions from behind a wall of opaque glass. He worried about his children, worried about them all the time. Jennifer had moved to Seattle, where she had come to terms with her childhood," and was "now in a place of harmony." She hadn't been back east in almost ten years. She used to call about every three months, giving Margaret a quarterly update on her life. Jennifer's exchanges with John only lasted a few minutes: "How are you? Do you need money? How're the kids?" every time. Since Margaret had become ill, Jennifer's calls were even more infrequent. Sometimes she would send cards, colorful cards, with pastel rainbows and sunshine that began, "Mom, if I've ever hurt you, I'm sorry, but I love you…." The cards would go on and on, but they were bright and from a distance, nice to look at, and he taped them low over the hospital bed so Margaret could look at them. Rita, their younger daughter, had died in a plane crash fourteen years ago heading down to Florida on vacation. She and her husband had two children, and each parent had flown with one child. Something broke in the fuselage, or so the official report read, and the plane went down in the swamp. Very few bodies were recovered. They buried two empty caskets at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, where John had purchased a plot, and they went weekly to visit them. James, Rita's husband, had stopped coming to visit after a few uncomfortable outings, and had stopped bringing their first grandchild to see them. John had stopped by James and Rita's home, only to find that James had taken the baby and moved. John had never thought much of James but he had been a good father and a good provider. "Why would he do something like that?" Margaret had asked him when he told her. John couldn't even shrug. He held his wife close, and couldn't answer her. They had been through worse. Rita was a stab wound, breaking through the skin of their life, and knowing that the only grandchild they could see was at the cemetery was an unhealed portion of that wound. John had tracked him down; he saw his granddaughter three years later playing in the park with her new family. The girl, Laurel, was the spitting image of Rita, and it hurt to look at her. He resisted the impulse to reach out, to approach, to reconnect. It would be too painful for all of them, and he couldn't do that to the little girl. To insinuate themselves into her life, by force of the courts: no. He never told Margaret about it. Rita was direct trauma, but Timothy, their youngest had been a slow-spreading, killing disease. In every parent's heart lies the disquieting fact that they have a favorite among their children. Single-child homes may not have this problem: all of the parent's love and affection is leveled onto their one child. But during their grammar school years, parents may realize that their child is not who they hoped he or she would be, that, in fact they don't really like the person their child is turning into. And this will be brushed aside, buried in the bier of memory, leaving the love of the parent as a strong, pained beacon. Such was the case for John with his son Timothy. Of all his children, John loved Timothy the most, saw in him the potential fruition of all a parent's hopes and dreams. Timothy had been a fun, happy child. As a baby he loved being held and tickled. As a boy he was engaged with the world around him, taking it in, processing. His interchange with the world was a beautiful thing. As a young boy, he'd stage little plays that he'd written, with his brothers and sisters acting. Sometimes, he'd draw fantastic buildings and invent cities. When he turned thirteen things changed. John and Margaret had been through it before: Tim's demand for more privacy, the secrecy, the casual contempt for his parents, the anguish at being all and nothing in the world. They had been through it all. Usually, by age eighteen, things would start to improve, but not with Timothy. He receded further from them. It was stupid and simple and keeping with the times but John and Margaret began to suspect that was using drugs, and they were right. They searched his room, finding more than the ubiquitous joint; they found vials of pills, little bags of cocaine. Standing in Timothy's dusty closet-air room, John beca me angry. For John, drugs and users indicated a character flaw; all of his hopes for his boy emptied out the window leaving a cold disdain behind. That night, he and Margaret confronted him, and the boy broke down, saying that he hadn't even been going to college (a private college, a yearly $40,000 with no tuition reimbursement.) Timothy ran away from treatment and was arrested for buying drugs from an undercover officer. John and Margaret put up Timothy's bail, but Timothy fled. They took on a second mortgage on their home to cover Timothy's bond. Three years passed before Timothy called them from San Francisco. He loved them, he said, and he was sorry. Could Dad come and get him? John flew out of LaGuardia on a red eye. He met his favorite, fallen son, a straggly mess of cuts and junkie bruises. They went back to the flophouse where Timothy had a room, dank and stinking of people. Timothy packed his few things and returned to John's hotel, where fresh clothes were waiting. They went to dinner and John listened to Timothy's story of life on the streets between bolted mouthfuls of food. Things will be alright, John said in his best Dad voice. Come home. We'll figure things out. Timothy cried and John watched him. Timothy excused himself to the restroom, and John waited—first at the table, then in the lobby, then up in his room. He didn't want to, but the following morning, with no Timothy in sight, he went back to the flophouse and waited in his son's awful room. He sat on the edge of the broken mattress, replaying his son's tale of drug use and prostitution, and sleeping on the streets and begging for change. A half-hour turned into four hours, and then the knock came. John opened the door and the police informed him that they were sorry, but his son had jumped off of the Golden Gate. He had used the bridge phone to let them know how miserable he was and could they pleaseinform his father. He called Dominic, told him the news and asked him to go over to the house to be with Margaret when he called. Margaret broke down, finally, tears and pain let loose long-distance. There was relief in those tears as well, guilt and relief that he shared with her. He identified Timothy's corpse, flew it back to New York, and buried his youngest son. Two years later, he would bury his oldest girl. He and Margaret would visit their graves; it was the only time that Margaret would let her grief overtake her. John learned to live with it. In the Army there was a game—more like a contest—which was called Thumbs. Each soldier would have to do ten pushups resting only on the pads of their thumbs. If you were able to do ten (which only a few could), then weight would be added for each new set of ten, more and more until you couldn't do anymore. It was used as an introductory ritual for new recruits; inevitably the rest of the camp would join in, cheering and hollering. The trick of it, John had learned, was not to let your thumbs bend backward. If they did, then they might break or become disjointed, which would mean a trip to the infirmary as well as the ridicule of the battalion. Although John wasn't a strong player in the game, he had a deep respect for the philosophy of Thumbs. It was axiomatic and simple, and whenever things would go wrong, he would ask himself, "Can I take on any more weight? Can I bear any more?" He had buried one child and that had been a hard, horrible experience; t hen he buried another. Harder still, he was now going to end his wife's life for whom, despite the damage of the years, he held a schoolboy's love. It was never going to get easier: that was the moral of Thumbs. It was difficult to start, and only got worse.
John looked around. Walking on autopilot, he had gotten himself up Vietnam Veterans’ memorial. He walked down to the train station, jingling the pocketful of tokens. He always braced himself for the first assault of the subway smell. Whenever he went into a bar, he was always reminded of subways; the worn-in, locked-in, dank urban smells which became a permanent stain on the souls of New Yorkers. Cancerous, rotten smells. John found a seat toward the front, sat and waited for the train to start. There were only a few other people in the car. The train would pick up more bodies at West Fourth—late commuters heading home. It would take about forty minutes to get to Kew Gardens station, and then another ten to walk to the house. An hour after that, if he did things right, they would both be dead. After making the decision, John had gone about the process of making everything easy for everyone. He liquidated their annuities, and just this morning he had deposited a large sum of money into the joint account Dominic had contended was necessary "just in case." Out of one of the policies, the largest one, he had gotten a cashier's check, had gotten the cash out from the check and into a small sturdy box, and had mailed it to Dominic. He had written a note: "Dominic, you may not fully understand why this happened—chances are you'll be more upset that I didn't tell you, or I didn't let you 'help.' This isn't guilt or a payoff…think of it more as reciprocity, my way of saying thank you for sticking around. If there were times that you felt unappreciated, I'm sorry…. Know that both your mother and I love you. I'm sorry for any difficulty this might bring you and Josie, and for that, I'm sorry. We both are. We love you, son. –Dad." But in the end he tore that up and wrote "I hope you will understand. Spend it in small amounts.We love you. Dad." There wasn't anything more that John could or wanted to offer. Dominic would misconstrue a letter, read it for hidden messages. It was the flavor of this age: reduction, deconstruction, miscomprehension. It was a simple, painful case as far as he understood it: his dying wife wanted to die sooner rather than later. He loved her and didn't want to be in the world alone, so they would both depart this life with some integrity. John could hear the teaser on the ten o'clock news: "A local man kills himself and his wife in their Queens home. We'll tell you why, later." Only two more stops to go. John cursed himself for being away so long, for being away all day. Dominic might have called, which might spell trouble. When John had retired and began caring for Margaret, Dominic had begun a campaign to usurp his parents' lives. John had read somewhere that as children grew older they began to live their lives in one of two ways: either rejecting their upbringing or embracing it. It was a theory he had dismissed when he heard it, but looking at his own children as the years went on, it had begun to feel like a truism, what with Jennifer, who sought to "reconcile herself with her upbringing," and Dominic who seemed to want to be his parents. Dominic had, in John's opinion, assumed the worst aspects of his and Margaret's personalities. Margaret's fretting, his brusqueness. Margaret's provincialisms, his reserve. Dominic had started with calling once a day, then morning and night, which neither Margaret nor John saw as a problem, just a bit excessive. And Dominic had started visiting, which John thought was very good for Margaret. But then Dominic had started to become more and more obtrusive, bringing over pamphlets he had picked up from one doctor friend or another, complaining about the state of the house and how it was getting to be too much for them, and how they should look for a place closer to him, so he could help out more. Sometimes, he would bring his wife and kids along. "Don't you want to spend more time with your grandma and grandpa?" he would ask his children with such petulant ferocity that a "no" would be a betrayal to their Dominic. "Well, who's saying we want to spend all our time with them?" John asked on one overly long, uninvited "drop-in." He had caught a glare from Margaret and a small smile from Carmela, Dominic's wife. Dominic simply went red. "I don't know why you're so hard on the idea, Dad," Dominic had said. "You always have to cut me down." The children and Carmela sat looking at their plates, and Margaret stood up as if she were going to follow him. "Oh, sit down Mags," John said. "Give him a minute. He's always been…" John looked at his grandkids staring wide-eyed back at him, struggling for an polite insight into their father. "…a private person." John finished lamely. "Drama-queen" had been what he almost said. On another occasion, while taking Margaret to the doctor, John had picked up a pamphlet that claimed to have the insight into "Middle-Child Syndrome" and he gave it Dominic. "The part on control as a method of acknowledgement I found interesting," John had told him. "Did we not acknowledge you enough as a child, son?" Dominic laid low for a while after that, but it was when John found Dominic going through his desk that John had to set his boy straight. "Despite what you may think about how things are going around here—yes there are dishes in the sink, and yes I could do the wash more frequently, and yes, you're right—the house should be painted. But none of that is your concern. I understand your concern. I appreciate it. So does your mom. But I'm not feeble, not yet. I'm tired more, I'll give you that, but this is my house. Let me say it again: This is MY house. If you want to help, ask. Don't rifle my desk, or check the amount of your mother's pills. You're my son, but you're here as a guest. Remember that." This was a wolf-pack challenge, and John won that round. But if he didn't act soon, John knew, Dominic was going to take over his house and home, and start making decisions that weren't right. Last stop, John thought, and got off the train. My last stop. He watched the train recede down the wormhole, heading east toward Jamaica. There, people would board and the train would ride back to the city. Over and again, as it had gone for years and would continue now without him. John always found the train as an uncomfortable, familial experience, like Thanksgiving. You had to go to work, and for most people work was in Manhattan. He would read the New York Post on the train (most of the brokers he knew read The Post—for the sports) and when he stopped for his coffee at Timothy's, he would check the bond prices, catch some gossip with some of the other bondsmen, then up to the office for nine hours. Then home again. It wasn't a bad life. Work was work. When he was a younger man he had dreamed about moving west, moving to Montana. He wasn't sure what he would do once he was there, maybe work on a ranch, or own a restaurant. Maybe an inn. Maybe he would write. Something other than New York. Somet hing other than these islands. He had talked about it a lot with Margaret when they had met, and they had even gone on vacation and looked at land. For almost five years after they were married, even after Rita was born, John still would talk to Margaret about it, trying to convince her, trying to convince himself. "But what would we do?" she would always ask at the end of every conversation. "We wouldn't know anybody there. We'd be all alone." We would have one another, he though to himself, but he knew it would hurt her if he said it aloud, make it seem as if she were indifferent. When Jennifer was two, he was still thinking about it, trying to figure out the logistics of a feasible plan, trying now to convince himself. A passion cannot sustain its own flame. He had a wife who hesitated, even in the best conditions, and two small children. What would he do to earn money? Could he ever earn what he could earn here? And what about the children? What about schooling? One day on the way to work, he had caught his shadow reflection in the subway window and at first, didn't recognize the stiff, thin man looking back at him over his newspaper. He had a hard time not staring at his reflection for the rest of the way into the city, toying with the realization that this was indeed his life. There would be no herding cattle, no moving west, no charm of the open sky or being interdependent with your community. This work thing that he did, this going to and fro and the selling of bonds was not a preoccupation, but occupation. This was his life, here, and though he was sad, there was peace, a sense of relief at letting it go. It was in a talk with Jennifer years later that he actually felt regret about giving up. He had told her, as part of one of her therapies, about his Montana dream, and about his discovery. "But it was you, Dad," she cut into his story. "It was you. Mom would've gone. She was probably just waiting for you to make up your mind." "There's a time for dreams to die, hon," he said to her. "And that's really what you wanted. You were too scared to commit. You killed your own desire."
John stood in front of his home, a solid row house in a decent neighborhood, marked however, by the indifference shown when Kitty Genovese died. Thank God he had enough money to put his kids through private school, he thought, although Jennifer was the only one to go to college. Her first holiday home from the University of Michigan and she was ripe with the smarmy condescension unique to college students and octogenarians, the outrage that the world was the way it was. "You would be shocked Dad, shocked, if you took the time to notice how things really are in the world," she had said to him. Why couldn't she have just been a generic liberal arts major, he thought. Sociology. Anthropology. Good God. Even English majors get to learn some history and some of the workings of the world. Jennifer had become a P.R. executive. She probably blamed Margaret and him for that, too. It was too late to be thinking this way. So little time, so many thoughts and nothing is ever resolved. He climbed the front steps to his house and unlocked the door. "Margaret?” he called softly from the foyer. It was better to rouse her from a distance, let her get herself together a bit rather than stand in front of her and startle her. He listened for the rustle of sheets. Nothing. He had left the living room light on. It was an old half-hearted attempt at security: leave a light on and no one would break in. Same light, same position for close to twenty years. The living room light cast a weak glow into the dining room, which allowed John to look at Margaret without disturbing her. The dim light softened the abuse of the disease. The crime here, John thought, is time. It's hard enough to have to live, passing through the great hall of life, like a bird: in one quick moment and gone the next. But to have that passage marked by mistreatment and neglect by one's host…well, that was unforgivable. "I don't forgive you," he said to a mass card with an image of the Sacred Heart on it. "I don't and I never will. You've washed your hands of the lot of us. Why should we give a damn? There's no amount of allegiance that can make up for this." He took a few breaths, pushing down the anger and the accompanying tears. He looked down and Margaret was looking up at him. "It's okay, John," she said, "He'll forgive us." Right before the illness had crippled her body, Margaret returned to church. She went daily. It aggravated John, infuriated him and left him feeling guilty. When she would get ready to leave, he would go and sit out in the yard if it was warm, or go to the basement and lift weights. When she became too ill, a lay minister (never a priest) would come by and give a quick reading and the Host. John would let the man or woman in, and then go wait in the kitchen. He couldn't be in the same room. Two dead children and a dying wife. There was no solace for him in a wafer. "You just have to make the leap, John," Margaret had told him after she had been diagnosed, "the proverbial leap of faith." "But there's nothing on the other side," John had said. When the doctor told them that she was terminal, neither one of them had cried. Margaret could have God. For John, it was Thumbs all over again. He reached down and stroked her hair. It had once been black, coal black, and little by little, with age and time and finally, medication, it had gone gray, then white, and now was nothing more than a thin web. It's a good thing we're subjective creatures, John thought. In a lifetime of miseries, each one unique and painful to their prey, objectivity was the cleanest, straightest path to madness. Whenever he touched Margaret's hair, he got a pain below his heart, like a kidney stone, sharp and violent: love and sorrow wrestling. Margaret's eyes closed. She must be hungry, John thought, and felt reflexively guilty. It was necessary. He hadn't eaten anything himself today, and had only had two laxatives yesterday with a glass of water. He didn't want Dominic to find them covered in their own filth. "I'll be back down in a minute, hon," he said, and kissed her temple. She shifted back into whatever world the dementia had brought her. He went upstairs and walked down the dark hallway to their bedroom. He slept on the couch in the living room now, so he could hear her if she needed him in the night, but he still kept his clothes upstairs. Even when he did the wash, he sorted and folded everything upstairs, and put it in its proper place. Two days ago he had spent the better part of the morning cleaning their bedroom, oiling the bedposts, chasing dust bunnies out from under the bed. He had changed the sheets, dusted the dressers and mopped the floor. The last thing he did was to clean the frames and photos that decorated their room. Here they were on their wedding day, Margaret already a month pregnant with Rita; here was Timothy at two on a sled, being pulled by an already chubby Dominic; here was Margaret and Jennifer at Jennifer's graduation; here was Rita, posed and photographed with her children; here was John clowning in the Army; here was Dominic and his wife. All moments sliced out of their small personal history: the true intersection of the timeless and time, John thought. He handled each photo carefully, staring into each one, sparked by the image into memory, and recalled as best he could the events surrounding the photos and the lives lived therein. He had thought of bringing these down to Margaret, but knew they wouldn't mean that much to her— not anymore. John checked his watch, almost ten o'clock. There was still enough time. He stripped down to his boxers and looked at himself in the mirror. He'd always been fit, always worked out, and even in that he wasn't able to escape time's hand. His stomach was still flat but the skin had sagged down slightly. His shoulders pitched in a bit, giving him a stooped appearance he hadn't had two years ago, and the skin on his buttocks and legs was also falling with gravity. He counted himself lucky that that was the full extent of the damage done to him by the human condition. He put on one of his suits. Where he had once had a closet full, now there were only two. He wore them for funerals or weddings. One was dark gray and the other was blue. They were two-year-old suits: after he left work, he had lost a lot of weight. He put on the charcoal suit: it was double-breasted and a much better fit. John buttoned up his shirt and put on his tie, giving himself a Windsor knot. He had gone through Margaret's closet yesterday and had found a nice, simple dress that didn't have a lot of buttons. It was a distinguished-looking dress—ivory and lace. He brought the dress downstairs with him. "Margaret?" He called into the room. For almost two months, Margaret stayed curled in the fetal position. John tried to exercise her everyday, alternating between upper and lower body, but it didn't have any effect. "Margaret?" he called again, softly. She didn't stir. He laid a hand on her head, caressed her cheek. Let her rest. He still had to make the cocktails. The kitchen wasn't overly clean, he knew. It wasn't filthy, but it never looked as good as when Margaret went through and cleaned it. It was man-clean, and that was enough for John. The mortar and pestle had been a wedding gift and had never been used, but it had stood in a prominent place in the kitchen as a reminder of "the old days." John opened the cupboard that held Margaret's pills and took out the Darvon. He emptied a few pills into the mortar and ground them down. He took the champagne and the orange juice out of the fridge, and poured an equal amount of each into two water tumblers. The pills amounted to a teaspoon in each glass. He kept straws on the counter in an old-fashioned holder that he bought at a retro store in a mall on Long Island. Margaret always needed a straw. He brought the drinks upstairs and put them on Margaret's nightstand. He picked up his wingback chair and brought it as close as he could to her side of the bed. Then he went back downstairs to dress Margaret. He picked her up out of the bed. How light she had become, he always marveled. John was careful not to hold or squeeze her too tight "Work with me Margaret," he whispered to her. He worked her gown up with one hand, holding her with the other. When it was off, he put the dress over her head, working in one arm, then the other. The arms were always the hardest; sometimes they were too tight and forced her arm painfully up while the material dug into her arm. He lowered the rest of the dress, and pressed her against his chest as he zipped up the back, standing like two dancers, two young lovers unwilling to say goodbye. Margaret had always loved to dance, and when they were first married and child-free, they would go into Manhattan, spend the night dancing away, departing from their parents' staid idea of marriage. Margaret danced with the children when they were little, putting on her albums. When they were teens and running out with their friends, Margaret and John would occasionally spend a quiet evening dancing in the living room. The Lindy, the Two-Step, the Fox-Trot and the Waltz. Margaret especially loved waltzing, loved moving slowly around the room, listening and losing herself to the music. "The most natural of dances," she had called it. John began to sing softly to her, holding her up and swaying back and forth. "The Shepherd will tend his sheep/And the meadow will bloom again,/And Jimmy will go to sleep/In his own little room again." "Is it time yet, John?" Margaret asked. "If you want it to be. If you don't, then we don't have to," John said. How he loved her! Most people would say that having children was the greatest thing they had ever done: for John, it was meeting and marrying Margaret. There was never a time that seeing her couldn't lift his spirits, that she couldn't somehow make things right for him. She was his love and his hope in the face of a world he saw as never-ending and ugly. She set things right. "We don't have to," he said again. She shook her head. "No, it's time." "It's time," he repeated. John carried her upstairs and laid her on the bed. "Keep singing," she said, "I always like it when you sing." He sang a little bit more, then picked up her glass, and humming, held the straw to her lips. She drank it all, looking at him with beautiful, trusting eyes. He put the glass on the nightstand and held her hand. "I love you, John," Margaret said. Her head lay on her pillow and smiled at him, "No pain, my love." "No pain." He felt the tears welling in his chest and his eyes. She was his light, his heart, and she was going. He felt her pulse slowing between his fingers. He pulled his chair closer to her. John took his glass and drank down the contents in one shot. He held her hand in the silence. "Tell Jennifer and Dominic I love them." Margaret murmured. "Keep singing" He held Margaret's hands tightly in his own, and though he wept, his voice didn't break. He sang their wedding song over and over, long after her pulse had stopped, he sang and faded into his own unconsciousness, feeling his mind tumbling backward into the bottomless gulch: "There will be joy and laughter and love ever after, /Someday, just you wait and see/There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover/ Someday, when the world is free."
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