• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 990 0

unprompted by Sheppard, announced at dinner with his parents and his brothers and their wives that she was pregnant. It was still a little early, the beginning of June, before she was even through her first trimester, but she wanted to tell them when they were all together. And while her pregnancy with Chip had been fraught with anxiety, haunted by her mother and brother’s death, and came afterward to symbolize their marriage’s turn for the worse, the beginning of his sustained absence, her own loss of freedom, and the end of their sex, now she seemed eager to embrace this new child. And at the dinner table, while her sisters-in-law gathered round to congratulate her, Sheppard was stabbed with regret and pained for Chip, fearful his son might have inherited some of these doubts he and Marilyn had conjured up, their collective angst passing from their souls to him via the womb.

I have to be a better father, he thought, walking with Chip over to the Aherns’ house. I’ve failed him in so many ways. Was it possible that the boy had registered his absence all along? Was a child’s sense of love and its lack that refined? Were the things Chip took so long to learn, like tie his shoes or cut his food, his attempt to call out to him, confirming with each little assisted task that his father was there? He and Chip looked a great deal alike and both could sleep through an artillery barrage, yet the similarities ended with that. In fact, the boy had the worst of both of them. He lacked Sheppard’s athleticism and the confidence that came with it, but had Marilyn’s emotionalism and sulkiness, her moods, in spades. He was so utterly remote, Sheppard concluded, that it must have been caused by what had transpired. You could be saved, he thought, but never fully. He and Marilyn had been saved, but for Chip there’d been a cost.

He came up behind the boy and lifted him into his arms. “Your father loves you very much,” he whispered.

But Chip squirmed loose without looking at him and ran ahead.

Bless Don Ahern. The man could make a drink. A martini was simple enough, but his just tasted different, and far better. They stood on the back lawn watching the boats gather for the fireworks show, families starting to congregate on the beach. Ahern’s son and daughter had included Chip in a game of Keep Away and Nancy was walking toward Marilyn, meeting her midway between their houses, a whiskey sour for her in hand. “I’ll bet you’ve had a day,” Nancy said.

“A day and a half,” Marilyn answered—and gave Sheppard a look.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ahern muttered. “That lady of yours still has the figure of a girl.”

They watched their wives take each other by the arm and clink glasses, Marilyn catching Sheppard’s eye once more. Was it possible, he wondered, that he could still be aroused? He felt so physically spent right now that no matter what reserves he tried to tap he knew this was going to be a short night. Yet he felt like taking her now, all over again, excusing themselves for the evening, to sound the depths of this joy.

“Work any miracles today, Doc? Save any lives?”

“Actually,” Sheppard said, “I lost a boy.”

He ran through the story again, finally able to talk about it without seeing it all in his mind. It had become a story, encapsulated, having a beginning, middle, and end, and in the version he told Don, the father became a bit player, not the central figure who’d forced Sheppard to flee the hospital in a near panic because earlier he’d felt guilty as charged. He was a killer, not of the boy, but the murderer of his and Marilyn’s days together. And even worse, he still needed these angels to come into his life and wake him up to facets of his character at once pathetic and sad, chiefly his own rapacious nature. If that boy hadn’t died and his father hadn’t berated him, Sheppard might have forgotten his sorry actions, might yet be unappreciative of Marilyn, might still be that unknown to himself. My first instinct will never be to put other people before me, he thought.

“Well,” Don said, “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“Yes,