Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [212]
Mallard had stopped massaging his wife’s feet, and both he and his wife were staring at Krumholtz, their attention fixed on him. Mallard lightly dropped his wife’s legs on the floor, rose, and took Krumholtz’s glass, refilling it, and then returned it to him. Krumholtz could not stop himself. Where had this story come from? It wasn’t untrue, exactly, even though it hadn’t happened.
“And Michael seemed to be all right for a while, and he thrived, and by the time he reached his fifth birthday, we thought we were out of the woods. But then, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if it weren’t the end of the day and I weren’t tired out—”
“Go right ahead,” Ellie Mallard said. “Disunburden yourself.”
“Thank you. He … he became sick. It began with coughing, and he lost his appetite, and he was pale, and he never had any energy, which you’re not expecting in a child that age, they’re animals really, or they should be, running and shouting all the time, that’s what nature intended, I mean, but instead he, I mean Michael, would sit in a chair morning until night, listlessly, you know, and usually television was all he could do, and we at least gave thanks for that.… Well, we couldn’t get a diagnosis from the pediatrician, and of course, it was understandable. Who knows how to look? Or where? We did one blood test after another, I mean, they did, they did one blood test after another, beyond what our insurance could pay for, those ghouls, though I suppose I shouldn’t say that, they mean well, those medical professionals, and each time, each time we went in, Michael would start crying before they had even taken the blood, which tore at my heart. He’d just see the exterior office door, which was painted this bright terrible frightening red, not comforting at all, and he’d start howling. How can you get used to the suffering of a child? I mean, you can’t. You can’t get used to it. Or you shouldn’t. There’s nothing there in that situation you should ever accept. And he was bleeding from the nose all the time, and sometimes from his mouth, for no reasons that we knew, and then finally we got a diagnosis.”
“What was it?” Ellie Mallard asked in a whisper.
“Chronic thrombocytopenic purpura,” Krumholtz said. He had once written an article about the disease and knew something about it. “And there’s no cure for it and no treatment and invariably it’s fatal. So … well, we had a certain amount of time. There was this question we were facing. What should we do? What should we do with the time we had left with our little boy? It’s such a terrible decision. I mean, no one can make a decision like that. Of course we asked Michael what he wanted to do, we had to ask him, what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. He didn’t want to go to any of those destination places. He said he wanted to sit by the window.”
Krumholtz took another swig of the scotch.
“Michael sat by the window, and he would narrate what he saw, almost as if he could imagine what his adulthood might have been like. People going to work in the morning, people coming home in the evening, laboring at their jobs. And the sun, traveling across the sky. And the street. And the birds. And squirrels. There was one particular bird, a sparrow that came by for the bread crumbs that Michael put out on his windowsill. And then, when Michael died, the sparrow came by waiting for him, for the food he had put out there. The bird would hop out on the sill and chirp. Then one night we heard a terrible thump against Michael’s window. The next morning we found the sparrow on the lawn. It seemed to have flung itself against his window. When I bent down to pick it up, I discovered that its heart had stopped.”
Well, he had his triumph: the winner and his wife were in tears. The damn tears: against the riches of the world, they changed almost nothing. But now Krumholtz felt a power surging through him. No one would dare to move him from his comfortable