A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [36]
“Where’s that. Thing,” Lou asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to, in his red bathing suit, tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didn’t hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?
The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. “I got old,” he says.
The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.
“What about Rolph?” I ask, my first words since “Hi.”
“Rolph,” Lou says, and blinks.
“Your son? Rolph?”
Rhea shakes her head at me—my voice is too loud. I feel a kind of anger that fills up my head sometimes and rubs out my thoughts like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this pool—his son’s, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.
Lou is trying to speak. We lean close, listening. Habit, I guess.
“Rolph didn’t make it,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.
“What’s the point, Jocelyn?” Rhea asks me, and in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realize that I already knew about Rolph. And Rhea knew—everyone knew. An old tragedy.
“He was. Twenty-eight,” Lou says.
I shut my eyes.
“Long time ago,” he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest. “But.”
Yes, it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.
“Losing a child,” Rhea murmurs. “I can’t imagine it.”
The anger squeezes, it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Lou’s hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. I’m that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Rhea shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and we’re just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When he’s absolutely still, I let him float to the top.
I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Rhea is touching his chest.
It’s a bad day. The sun hurts my head.
“I should kill you,” I say, looking at him straight. “You deserve to die.”
“Enough,” Rhea says, with her sharp mother’s voice.
Suddenly, Lou looks in my eyes. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, that man who said, You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and We’ll see the whole goddamn world, and How come I need you so much? And Looking for a ride, kiddo? Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it on his bright red car. Just tell me where.
He looks scared, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. “Too late,” he says.
Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on a party Lou was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. “Like a baby,” Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.
Every night, my mother ticks off another day I’ve been clean. It’s more than a year, my longest yet. “Jocelyn, you’ve got so much life in front of you,” she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, there’s a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.
Lou is speaking again. Trying to speak.