I was present on the evening the Dobbs sat down to eat dinner together, as a family, for the last time. I wouldn’t have been there, had any of us known that.
I used to want to be a priest. I honestly believed that was my calling. When I was a child I attended mass regularly, and I was a fixture at church retreats, youth meetings, and community events organized by the church in my neighborhood.
I didn’t stop wanting to be a priest because I lost my faith, let’s get that up front. Actually, I never consciously made the decision not to become a priest. I never reneged on my religion; I still go to church on Sundays.
What happened was I discovered life. I never had many friends growing up, but then I found a few and discovered that life could be fun. Girls had something to do with it, too, to be honest. Never before my teenage years had I considered what I would be giving up if I packed and went to the seminary. A priest’s life looked different when considered from the point of view of a child and from the point of view of a horny teenager.
Still, I don’t want you to get the idea sex was the reason why I didn’t become a priest. Let me put it like this, it just didn’t happen. Long after I would have had to make the decision to enter the seminary, I found myself enrolled in high-school.
Some kids I knew wanted to become doctors when they grew older, or airline pilots, or professional soccer players. One of them wanted to become a nature photographer. I wanted to be a priest. As far as I know, all of us entered different fields from those we had envisioned, and nobody calls those guys “Pilot”, “Player,” or “Photographer.” Yet, everyone who knew me when I was a kid calls me “Priest.” Go figure.
I could say my first real friend was Jesus, but I would only be perpetuating a joke I find tiresome already. So, my first real friend was Trenton Dobbs. We met in the seventh grade. While not a fixture at church, he did participate in some events organized by our parish. So we had seen each other on ocassion, before we got into a real conversation and became friends.
Whereas I was quite by nature, he seemed only comfortable when talking about every little thing that sprang to his mind and, let me tell you, his mind must have been filled to capacity with loaded springs, because he couldn’t seem to shut up. We slept in the same room many times throughout our friendship, and I speak with authority when I say he even talked when asleep.
So, we complemented each other. We must have, to become such good friends. We were always together from then on, and got to know each other’s families quite well.
I was welcome with love by his family from the very first day. On the other hand, my parents always resented him a little. They never quite got over the idea that he was the main force behind my abandoning the priest idea. Who knows? Maybe he was. He certainly introduced me to a few things that my parents frowned upon.
They may have blamed him a little, but I never did. If I started smoking after we became friends, it was my own fault. It’s also true I never had a drink before I met him, and we got caught a few miles down the road from drunk together, on more than one ocasssion, but it was my own decision if I took those drinks, not his. You see where I’m going? He was not a corrupting influence in my life. He did those things and he looked cool, so I did those things and I felt cool. Looking back we both agreed we felt cool but must have looked like a couple of morons playing with fire. Uncool.
As far as I know, I was never judged by his family, although his mom did feel understandably pissed off the night we decided to see how many shots of tequila we could drink before calling ourselves offically drunk, and I ended up puking on her rose garden.
When you’re embraced by your friend’s family, they become your family, in a way. They take you in and they feed you, they let you in on their jokes, their suffering, their little idiosyncracies. As the years go by, you almost become a part of the family, and you love them as much as you love your own.
You understand, then, that when he gave me the news that his dad was diagnosed with prostrate cancer, I embraced him and we wept together.
He called me on the phone and told me he needed some company but didn’t want to leave the house. I climbed on my rattler, that’s not a snake, by the way, nor is it something as cliché as a motorcycle. No. It was my old beetle volkswagen, whose muffler was as noisy as a drummer on speed practicing in the shower. Anyway, I got on my car and drove to his house. When I got there he was waiting for me on the sidewalk, finishing a cigarrete. He gave me one as I walked up to him, took out a new one for himself, and we lit up.
“What’s up, dude?” I asked.
“It’s bad, Priest,” he said.
“Your old man?” I asked. I knew his dad had gone to the doctor that morning, and since that had been the main concern of the family since the day he had made the appointment, I knew why he had gone.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s the C?” I asked already knowing.
“The fucking C,” he confirmed.
“Oh, Squig…” I started to say. I called him “Squig” because he used to want to learn to scubadive. He said he wanted to see a live octopus, up close. That night, when we got officially wasted with tequila, I meant to call him squid, but what came up was “squig”, and it had seemed so immensely hilarious to both of us, it just stuck.
His eyes got all watery then. We’d been friends long enough that we could hug on the street without fearing anyone would feel compelled to look away, in case we decided to make out in public. Not long ago, many of those neighbors had watched in trepidation as their daughters evaded our raging hormones. They wouldn’t think us queer.
The trash you think at times like those.
“Step back, Priest,” he tried to joke, “don’t get all mushy on me.”
“Tell me, pal,” I said. “What did the doctors say?”
“It’s his prostrate,” he explained. “Advanced, but not completely without hope. They’re talking about an operation.”
“Thank God.” I whispered. “The C blows, man, but there’s things y’all can do, then?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It hasn’t spread, so the docs think they can cut and root the thing out.”
I looked at him as I inhaled cigarrete smoke, feeling the rush of mindless death enter my lungs at huge speeds, and said “Squig, there’s hope. What about chemotheraphy?”
“He’s not young,” he explained. “His heart might not stand for that.”
“But the doctor said he might do well after an operation, right?”
“It’s what he said.”
“So there’s hope,” I repeated.
“Ain’t gonna lose that,” he said.
“Can’t do that,” I said.
“Ain’t no mountain high enough…” he sang.
I followed his lead, “Ain’t no valley low enough…”
“Ain’t no one as full of shit as you, Priest,” he finished.
“Sure hope not,” I played along. “You know me, gotta be number one at something.”
We usually did this when things got too intense. Young boys can’t take too much reality without resorting to jackass comments sooner or later, even in the company of real friends.
We went inside his house. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome today of all days, a thought which had never before occurred to me, but I would have understood. His mom, though, greeted me as always. She’d been crying discreetly in the kitchen, and she didn’t try to conceal it from us, but she didn’t comment on it either. She simply offered her cheek so I would greet her as I’ve always done, and then we climbed the stairs to the second floor. His dad’s bedroom door was ajar, and Trenton led the way into his room and closed the door quietly, so we wouldn’t disturb his father.
That house was never in silence, and it was weird playing old black vynils at such low volume, not hearing the usual, loud TV in his dad’s room and some other noise in Ginny’s bedroom.
Ginny was Trenton’s kid sister. Both Trenton and I were seventeen at the time his father was diagnosed with the C, or cancer if you prefer, and Ginny was fifteen.
As it’s often the case with best friends and beautiful sisters, Ginny was my first love. I should say, my first platonic love; I’ve had a few. I also had one or two that were not platonic, but you get the idea, I hope. Ginny was off limits.
“I won’t have that best-friend-loves-my-sister shit with you,” Trenton had half-jokingly said one day back in the eight grade, after I allowed as to how I found his sister truly beautiful. “C’mon priest, that’s too weird. There’s all sorts of things you’d have to tell me about your girl, us being best friends, and I couldn’t help but think that those slinky, dirty, juicy tidbits of information you lay on me, were performed on my sister! Uh uh. Nope, no way.”
He had a point.
I’m not sure whether Ginny would have been interested in me or not. I never tried, so I never knew. She was beautiful, though, and sometimes during meals my friend’s family shared with me, I’d find my eyes straying towards where Ginny was sitting, and then down to my soup an instant before she caught me looking. On those nights when I stayed overnight at his house, I would think that I was sleeping in the same house as Ginny… Okay, I’ll stop. You don’t want to know, and I don’t want to tell you.
Besides, if I go into every possible detail of our friendship, I’ll never finish telling you this story.
This horrible story.
Damn. Wait. I’m crying again.

I’m sorry. I realize I could have omitted that last part, but I don’t want to edit too much what comes out once I’ve written it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do justice to the things that happened. I want to be as honest as I can, but I don’t know if it is in me to describe the horror of what happened at my friend’s house, to tell of the pain, the desecration...
I’m getting ahead of myself and that won’t do any good, either.

Back under control.
Trenton’s was a small family – Mr. Jackson Dobbs, paterfamilias, Mrs. Marion Dobbs, loving mother and force behind the moving parts of that particular machinery, Ginny, and Trenton – but, Lord, they were a noisy bunch! There was always some noise in their house. Trenton’s dad liked to watch baseball games on the TV, and he cranked the volume up because he said it was the closest he could get to being at the ball park. Besides, having married Mrs. Dobbs a few years after the death of his first wife in an accident, he’d been over forty years old when Mrs. Dobbs got pregnant with Trenton, so he wasn’t all that young now, and I suspected his hearing wasn’t what it used to be. Trenton’s mom wasn’t all too partial to the ball game, so she’d go into the living room or the kitchen and, if she wasn’t cooking or something, she’d sit down at the kitchen table and read, sew, write letters, whatever, but always with the radio on. Of course, her husband’s TV could be heard in the kitchen, so she’d also turn up the volume on her radio.
Whenever Trenton and I were at his house on a given evening, we’d close the door to his room and put some music on ourselves. And, you guessed it. We didn’t turn it up because his parents didn’t let us hear the music, they didn’t, but we played it loud because we liked it loud.
Ginny? She played the violin. Have you ever attended a concert by a philharmonic orchestra? Think of those few minutes before they start playing, when every musician is fine-tuning a different instrument in that confined space, at the same time, and you’ll get an idea what Trenton’s house was like in the evenings.
I loved it.
He said it drove him crazy, but I never believed him.
There’s another reason why there could be noise in Trenton’s house, one which has a bearing on what I have to tell you.
The Dobbs could get angry as fast as an alpha gorilla when somebody’s poked his butt with a fork. A red-hot fork. And just as viciously.
The first time I witnessed this transformation in my friend’s family, I was as bewildered as that old man at the end of the movie about nuclear war, The Day After, do you remember the one? Yes, I was as frightened as he was, as well.
Just about anything could spark a fight among members of the family, and then barroom fights jumped to mind and you felt like ducking and taking cover.
They loved each other, I’ll swear to that, and they could be as tight as any family you’ve known, and as fun as any child growing up could wish. It’s just that they all had the same quick fuses and strong personalities, that made them want to dominate everyone else. Think of Hitler, Mussolini, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Indirah Gandhi living as roommates for a few years, and picture each of them telling the others what the arrangement of the furniture is going to be, what they’ll watch on TV, what they’ll eat, which room is whose. Not that my friend’s family were evil as those I mentioned, you understand, but, at times, they certainly seemed as fierce.
The last full-scale fight I ever witnessed chez Dobbs, happened on a weekend.
We’d just finished lunch. Trenton’s mom and dad had lit cigarettes. This was back in the days when people felt free to smoke without the guilt produced by a meddlesome society censoring their habits. As they enjoyed their cig, they were considering sending Trenton and me to the nearest Starbuck’s for a couple of alto lattes. We didn’t mind. These requests usually came accompanied by a chance to drive Mr. Dobb’s car, which was sweet, especially considering our only set of wheel was my old beetle, not precisely a babe magnet, you understand, and babes was what Starbuck’s was all about back in those days. Too old for us, you say? Sure, but we’re talking ogling here. We were teenagers, and the days of the C were fast approaching behind the horizon.
Then Ginny said, “I’ll get your coffee, dad, it’s Trenton’s turn to do the dishes.”
My bubble burst. Not for long, though. If I wanted to see babes, I just had to come over to my friend’s house, remember?
However, Trenton was disappointed.
“Bitch,” he said, not quite in a whisper.
“Mind your mouth, boy,” his father said, just as Ginny yelled, “What? Mom!” in that inimitable teenage girl style.
Silently, I willed Trenton to say he was sorry. I knew how fast tempers flew around here.
“Apologize to your sister,” Mrs. Dobbs demanded.
“Why? She’s a bitch.”
Ginny flew at him so fast, she seemed to have beamed herself from one corner of the kitchen to the other. One moment she was standing by the fridge with her jaw hanging open, looking like a seventeenth century duelist’s fiancée whose honor has been called into question, five feet away from my friend, the next she was slapping Trenton’s face. Hard.
I flinched when I saw/heard the slap. She was fiery. I’m ashamed to say I found her delicious just then, with her tight jeans poised at an angle my eyes just couldn’t resist being drawn to, as she bent slightly forward getting in Trenton’s face.
“Call me a bitch once more, asshole!” she screamed.
As many fights as I witnessed between brother and sister, I never saw him hit her, I’ll tell you that. He cut her, deeply and painfully, with his sarcasm, squeezing metaphorical lemon on the open wounds of her adolescent lack of self-confidence. With well chosen slights, belittling comments, and knowing full well what buttons to press, with the right amount of scorn and a cruel streak inside him, my friend could pour venom as deadly as that cooked up by Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis.
She, on the other hand, hit him often enough that, had he received all the blows she gave him in the years I knew them, one after the other in a single night, he would have found himself beaten to a pulp, unrecognizable, drooling, brain-damaged, and toothless.
“Stop, both of you!” Mrs. Dobbs yelled.
“I’ll call you a bitch,” threatened Trenton through clenched teeth, ignoring his mother. “What you’re gonna do?”
All five of us were now standing, and the spacious kitchen seemed to have inexplicably shrunk. I stood, helpless behind my chair, as if I planned to clear the table and wash the dishes so the row would be solved; Mrs. Dobbs stood almost between her son and daughter, clearly intending to intervene any second now; Mr. Dobbs stood between his chair and the table, and watched in sullen silence, clearly disgusted by what he saw.
Ginny couldn’t find an answer to her brother’s challenge that would be offensive enough, so she resorted to the kind of thing that made him see red. “Master swine,” she called him lowering her voice. Experience had taught her that when she insulted her brother, a low voice yielded better results; also, she could be utterly creative.
“Oh, here comes the wit of a fourth grader again!” he mocked in return.
“You’re a boil on a maggot’s ass!” Ginny said.
Do maggots have asses? I wondered incongruously.
She went on before her brother could reply, “Your birth certificate is an apology from the condom factory.
“You’re the slime in a hooker’s toilet.”
Oh, I liked that one.
“Stop it!” their mother hollered.
“If you were twice as smart, you’d still be stupid,” she paused for breath.
“Damn it, Jackson, do something!” Mrs. Dobbs charged her husband. “Don’t just stand there!”
“Oh, you stupid girl,” Trenton now spat at his sister, “you never know when to stop.” He took a step towards her, which forced her to take a step back towards the wall, as their faces were already inches from each other, making me fear this might be the first time I was going to see him hit her. “Name calling is the best you can do,” Trenton said, forgetting he had started this whole thing with name calling. “I ought to punch your mouth and be done with it!”
“Don’t you dare, Trenton!” his father finally yelled at the same time his mother cried, “Shut up! Shut up, now!”
“Do it!” Ginny challenged her brother, “put your hands behind that big cesspool you call mouth, and do it!”
Mrs. Dobbs slapped Ginny. As hard as she had slapped her brother, now her mother returned the favor. Caught off guard, Ginny’s head turned with the blow, and her body followed, almost losing its balance. Trenton honked in surprised and pleasure at his mother’s intervention, but, returning her arm to its usual position, she backslapped Trenton’s face, as well.
“I am sick of your fights!” Mrs. Dobbs shouted at them. “Why the hell do you have to use that language in my house?” She was panting, she had really put everything behind those two blows. Her face was red, strands of hair were on her face. For a moment I feared she might have a stroke or something.
“Get out of here!” she screamed. “Get the hell out of my kitchen! Get the hell out of my house!”
“Marion,” Mr. Dobbs said to his wife, “you punish violence with violence, where does that leave us?”
“Shut up!” Both Mr. Dobbs and I flinched. True, the timing of his comment was misguided, but I had never seen her talk to him like that. “If you can’t act like their father when you’re needed, then shut up! You don’t like the way I handle it, the next time do something about it!” She stormed out of the kitchen.
Mr. Dobbs looked sadly at his children, “Thanks a lot,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen, too.
Ginny was holding her face and shooting mortal darts through her eyes at Trenton. I touched his shoulder and pushed him towards the door, “Go man,” I said to him, “have a smoke in your room, I’ll be right over.”
Amazingly, he did. He looked at his sister one final time, lowered his eyes, and walked out of the kitchen.
I turned to Ginny but, before I could speak, she said “Can it, priest. I don’t need your sympathy.”
“Actually, I was gonna say you’re really something.”
“Something, yeah” she said. “Road kill, the way I pissed off my mom.”
“You were great,” I insisted. “I wish I could say the things you say when I’m angry, but I just stutter and look pathetic. I can never think of a single thing to say.”
She smiled. I got that at least; she had a lovely smile.
“The slime in a hooker’s toilet?” I quoted, and we started giggling.
“Sshhh!” she put a finger to her lips. “They hear us laughing you’ll get it, too!” But of course that got us laughing even harder, albeit silently.
If ever I had a chance to get something going with Ginny, that was it, but I got cold feet. I mumbled something about seeing how Trenton was and fled the kitchen. I never forgot the way she looked right then, though, all disheveled and flustered, flushed by anger, with the red, angry mark of her mom’s hand on her face.
Talk about lost opportunities and its consequences.

“The operation’s tomorrow,” Trenton told me two weeks later on the phone, “at nine. You think…”
“I’ll be there,” I said, guessing he wanted me there, but didn’t feel good about asking. “I’m not sure I can make it at nine, but I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, man,” my friend said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but...”
“I love him, too, Squig,” I said. “You know that.”
I hung up the phone and stared at it for a few seconds. This is where I’m supposed to tell you that I knew something was wrong. I’m supposed to say that I had this feeling that something would go wrong. But I didn’t. I stared at the phone because I was concerned for Mr. Dobbs, just like anyone else, and I wished it were already tomorrow, after the operation, with him recuperating in his hospital room, so I could go in and tell stupid jokes to Ginny and his mom, trying to lighten up the moment.
I didn’t get any bad feelings or presentiments of impending doom mostly because I’m not psychic, but also because there was no problem with the operation; it was successful.
The doctor gave us all assurances that he had succeeded in removing the tumor and that it had not visibly metastasized. Personally, I didn’t like that adverb, visibly, but what did I know? I made no comment. I didn’t like the way he prattled on about his new instruments, either; about the marvelous, new laser technology he had employed in the operation. Here’s a word of advice for you, if your doctor seems extravagantly enthusiastic about new instruments, equipment, or techniques he’d like to try on you or your loved ones, run as far as you can, as fast as you can. We should have known that any doctor whose eyes shine when describing a procedure, hasn’t actually performed it many times before. Otherwise, it would have lost its glitter already and become routine for him.
Ginny hugged his mother and I hugged Trenton, then we switched partners and I hugged his mother while he hugged his sister. Sadly, the partner-switching-hugging routine ended, so I didn’t get a chance to hug Ginny. I found it strange, though, that Trenton didn’t try to comfort his mother, or share her relief.
Mr. Dobbs was released from the hospital two days later. That new laser technology did have an advantage– since there were no major incisions cut into Mr. Dobbs, he would be up and, well, maybe not running, but shuffling along, in a few days. In the course of two to three weeks, he would be walking normally without worrying if the piping down there would seize up and start smoking in a delayed reaction to having been submitted to a laser burn.
The day Mr. Dobbs arrived home I didn’t come to visit. I felt they’d like to enjoy those first moments of the rest of their lives post-C by themselves.

Father Tim McDougal was an Irish bear of a man who ran our small community’s church with an iron hand and a compassionate heart. He seemed to me the prototype of what a Catholic priest should look like. I wouldn’t have been surprised to look up “priest” in an illustrated encyclopedia and find his photo there, next to the definition.
He had eidetic memory, too, when it came to who had not attended mass last Sunday, and who had promised some service to the church or the community and had welshed so far. He never forgot your telephone number if he was in need of a couple of hands for a youth retreat. However, he never forgot the birthday dates of his parishioners, their anniversaries, the names of their children and relatives, and so on, so I’m sure his good memory was not self-serving.
He called me on what I thought of as my first Saturday of Freedom; the day after I finished exams and was liberated from that commonly accepted death camp society has renamed “higher education” (how did he always know when you were on a break from school?). The heat of July was already overwhelming and I had been holed up in my room, going through my school books, notebooks, graded essays, and what have you, for the better part of the morning, relishing every second I spent shredding all the junk I thought I would never need again, and was therefore sweating as a logger in flannel shirt attire, chopping down trees somewhere in a swamp in Louisiana. As soon as I picked up the phone, Father Tim’s rumbling voice asked me if I would like to help him help Jesus lead other youths like me into the right path and away from speed and crack and booze and premarital sex. That’s exactly how he put it, I swear. I could never string all those words together in a sentence all by myself. He told me he needed me for three days, and three days only, as he knew I would like to “take advantage of the well-deserved rest and restoration I had earned through my good work at school.”
Three days was the length of a youth camping trip, sure, but he had planned five camping trips in a row- one for little children, eight years and under, boys and girls; one for older children, twelve years and under, boys only; a third for girls, twelve years and under; a fourth for boys and a fifth for girls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Once he had me out in the middle of nowhere, away from a phone, a TV, and tap water, he told me some of the young men and women who usually helped him were unable to make it, so he was shorthanded, and would I please stay? The last two camping groups were made up of people my age, sure, but with my experience my help would surely prove invaluable, and I’d be able to meet new friends and have fun. He had already cleared everything with my folks.
I loved him, I tell you, but he could be devious and instill violent thoughts in your mind, on occasion.
I had fun. I loved being around Father Tim, and I found those little boys and girls exhilarating to work with, even if they did have a tendency to let their excitement run wild, long past the time I would have subjected my body to the dubious comforts of rocks, loose branches, and rugged ground under my sleeping bag.
When it was time to go home, Father Tim told me he had recommended me to a friend of his who ran a summer camp facility nearby. His friend offered to take me as a summer camp hand for a full eight week stint, if I was interested. I was.

All in all, I had been away from home for a little over eight weeks, staying in touch with my folks and Trenton on the phone, though maybe not as often as they would have liked me to, especially my mom.
Almost as soon as I came back to the world to rediscover the pleasures of a comfortable toilet, I was greeted by two painful discoveries. The first I learned through my mom; she told me Mr. Dobbs was taking a long leave of absence from his work because the cancer had come back; although everyone wished him well and encouraged him to get back on his feet and back to his office as soon as possible, nobody expected him to return. He’d been home, in bed for all she knew, for the last two weeks.
My second surprise came from Ginny herself. It was the Sunday before the start of classes and I still hadn’t seen Trenton, so I went to look for him. Armed with the news about his father, I didn’t go directly to his house. Instead, I climbed the hill behind the Dobbs’s house, hoping he’d be there, reading a novel or working on one of his fabulous drawings, as he frequently did when nothing much was going on.
As I reached the top of the hill, I didn’t find Trenton, but Ginny was there. She looked gorgeous, sitting on the ground, her back against an old oak tree all three of us had climbed a million times when we were kids. She was fingering the strings on her fiddle, the bow cast beside her on the ground, for the moment. The sound was idle; she wasn’t playing a real tune or anything like that, she was just plucking notes, willing the evening away.
“Hey, Gin,” I said as I reached her.
“Hey yourself, Priest,” she said looking up. She rearranged her skirt, securing it between her knees and the grass, which I took as an invitation to sit down.
“Ready to go back to school?” I asked just to say something.
“Dreading to go back to school,” she replied.
I laughed, “Oh, it’ll be fun,” I said, “The end of Middle school is supposed to be fun, you know?”
“Not for me, it won’t,” she said with finality. I was suddenly curious.
“Why not?”
“Did you hear about my dad?” she asked, evading my question, looking down and idly plucking a blade of grass from the ground, holding it between two fingers for a moment, before casting it away.
“My mom told me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“Is this like before?” I didn’t know how to ask how bad it was, without sounding too brutal, as I would have done with Trenton, perhaps.
“Worse,” was all she said.
As much as I liked Ginny, I didn’t have much experience talking to her alone, and I was finding it difficult to move through our conversation. “Ginny, where’s Trenton?” I asked.
“You’re a sweet person, Priest,” she said. The look on my face must have been a study in mental deficiency, because she laughed out loud and said, “Close your mouth before you swallow a mosquito.”
“You’re also a good friend,” she went on. “I used to have a crush on you, you know?”
Huh?
“When?” I asked, providing material for those in charge of the mental deficiency study.
“Couple of years back,” she said sounding as if it wasn’t news as big as an extraterrestrial invasion. “I got over it.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, encouraging my brain cells to go back up to speed.
“I guess I’m saying I’m sorry,” she said compounding my idiocy with bafflement.
“Sorry for what?” Of course I asked.
“For what you’re going to find out,” she said, starting to get up. She was almost sixteen and she was grace personified as far as I was concerned. She had always been agile, graceful, frisky. Yet, it seemed getting up from the ground took some effort for her, as if her old nimbleness had deserted her. I figured she’d been sitting here too long, and her legs had grown numb.
I had no idea what she was talking about and I said so.
“Daniel…” my name on her lips sounded so engaging; she’d used it so little across the years. “I’m pregnant.”
Once, Trenton and I had been cruising around on his dad’s car at night, one of those rare occasions when he’d allowed us to drive it to a party. The party had been a bust, so we’d decided to take a ride and check out the action around the town. Looking out the car’s window, as we cruised in front of a dilapidated wall covered by mostly incompetent graffiti, I’d gotten a glimpse of a fantastic rendition of a multitude of elongated, iridescent bubbles flying over a mountain, under the legend “Yog Sothoth rules Cthulhu.”
The feeling of dread that stroke my spine as I saw that thing and turned on my seat to get a better look at the receding artwork, is hard to explain even now. And those words were as unintelligible to me as the ones Ginny had just spoken.
I looked at her for a moment longer, still sitting on the grass, as she picked up her violin and bow and started to walk away. She seemed to have gained a few pounds since I last saw her. The total absence of fat around her waist had always been one of the things I found so appealing in her. She turned around one final time. “I don’t know where Trenton is, he’s not at the house but, when you find him, don’t believe everything he says about me.”
With that last caustic incantation, she left.

Trenton didn’t come to school the following day, so as soon as I got home, I dropped my bag in my room, grabbed a coke from the fridge, pecked my mom’s cheek, and told her I was off to look for Trenton at this house. I made some inane comment when she asked if everything was alright, and walked to my car.
He opened the door a full minute after I rang the bell, just as my finger came up poised to ring again.
God, look at you! was the first thing I thought as soon as I saw him. His hair was dirty, it sat on his head as a mop you use to clean something sticky you spilt on the floor, and never bother to rinse it afterwards. His face was covered with a stubble that must have been growing unattended for two or three days, at least. He smelled, too. He took half a step into his house and motioned me inside with his hand, quietly closing the door behind me.
“Squig,” I began to say.
He turned and started walking towards the stairs. “Don’t make noise, my old man is sleeping,” he said.
We walked up the stairs to his room. Just as it had been on the day this whole thing started, the door to his parents’ bedroom was ajar. Trenton closed the door to his room as soon as I came in after him.
“Long time no see, Priest,” he said.
“Too long,” I said.
“Thought you’d forgotten about your friends,” he said, and somehow I felt he wasn’t joking.
I chose not to go that way. I didn’t mind telling him what I’d been doing, but I found myself not wanting to. Once friends see getting together as an obligation, things start rolling downhill, and explaining my activities of the summer felt too much like justifying not having fulfilled an obligation. Instead I said, “What’s going on, pal?”
“Lit seminars with Mr. Jablownski,” he said. Mr. Jablownski had been our literature teacher three years in a row. He had worshipped “the Bard of Avon” until leukemia sent him to recite “Macbeth” to an incorporeal audience.
“What about them,” I asked.
“All our yesterdays have lighted fools, the way to dusty death,” he quoted, perfectly remembering that well-drilled drama from our sophomore year.
“It is a tale told by an idiot,” I said, skipping a few lines from the original quote, so we wouldn’t do the whole thing just now.
“…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We finished together.
Then we fell silent.
“Your dad’s dying?” I asked in a way I would never dare ask Ginny. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“I’m so sorry, man,” I walked up to him, meaning to embrace him, but he turned and walked to the window.
“Yeah,” he said again.
I didn’t take offense at his rejection. I was always the touchy-feely one, not him. I sat on the edge of his bed. It was unmade and his room didn’t smell like a garbage dump only because the overhead fan was on at full speed and the window was open. I could see unfinished bits of food on plates that seemed to have been lying there longer than since last night, clothes strewn haphazardly all around me, and his ashtray was overflowing, which was surprising, since his parents knew we smoked and we occasionally did at their house, but never so openly and never carelessly leaving the evidence for his mother to find.
“We’re not taking it well, my friend,” he finally said. “And I don’t think I’ve handled things very well lately.”
“How so?” I asked matching his quiet tone of voice. By now I was dying to get some answers to all this mystery, but I didn’t think coming right out and saying so would be such a good idea.
“I’ve gone and done one stupid thing after another since the day Ginny and I fought in the kitchen, remember?”
How could I forget, I wondered. Instead, I said, “Yeah, I remember,” and then my personality set in and I said, “Slime in a hooker’s toilet,” and laughed. I soon wished I had stapled my lips together, or that I had suddenly swollen my tongue, anything so I hadn’t caused such a sad look on his face.
“Yeah, that” he said, and turned around to face me, “Guess who the hooker turned out to be?”
He and Ginny had decidedly taken a liking to speaking in riddles, recently. “Huh?” I more or less asked, already knowing what was coming, of course.
“She’s pregnant, you know?” he said. “The silly bitch.”
I remained silent. What could I say? I didn’t want to speak ill of Ginny. Even if I thought that, on this day and age, a girl with Ginny’s education, supportive family, and intellect would be hard pressed to make such a mistake, unless stupidly careless, but I wasn’t going to say things I would later regret
She doesn’t even have a boyfriend, I thought stupidly. I felt as if I had been swallowed down the fabled rabbit hole. How had things gone so wrong, so fast for my friends?
“I know, but I don’t understand how that could happen!” I blurted out.
“Dude,” he said, for a minute reverting to his old self. “I know your experience is limited, but surely you know how.”
“Asshole,” I said. “When? Where? You know what I mean.”
“Well,” he explained. “She’s already two months along, but where and other details, uh, uh, she’s not talking.”
“Did she say who the father is?”
“No,” he replied. “But my money is on this guy from twelfth grade who’s been hanging around her group of friends. Why would an older guy hang around a group her age, if not because she’s got a girl in his sights? I guess that girl was Ginny.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That makes sense. How are your folks taking it?”
“Man, let me put it to you like this: my old man doesn’t sleep, because he’s in pain half the night; my mom doesn’t sleep because she’s discovered that she’s going to be a grandmother right about the time she’s going to… lose her husband,” his voice broke down on that last sentence, but he went on, “and I don’t sleep because I’m paralyzed with dread over what’s going to happen to us, about not being able to make it to college -how could I leave my folks like this?- and, even though she wouldn’t believe this, because I love my sister, and I feel for her.”
“I know, man,” I said. “I know.”
“She stayed out really late one night, around the time you came back from your trip with Father Tim to pick up your stuff for summer camp,” Trenton explained. “She said she was going out with some friends and would be back in a couple of hours. She didn’t return home until 2 A.M. My mom was ready to call the police, I tell you.”
Surprised, I said, “Man, that’s not Ginny. What the hell was she thinking with your dad sick and all?”
“We’ve done a good job of not being judgmental, Priest,” he reproached me, “but I hear you. Who knows, man? Everything that’s been happening… maybe she was just looking for some comfort, to forget about stuff…”
“You said you had done a bad job adjusting, Squig,” I told him, “but you sound mature about this, man. You’re scaring me.”
“Nah, it’s just old me,” he said. “Truth is, man, I’ve had time to think things through and am telling you the short version. There was some shouting going on in this house, you better believe that.”
“I wouldn’t believe it if you said different,” I said, meaning to joke a little, but realizing it was the truth.
Ginny had refused to offer an explanation to her parents about arriving home so late, other than to say she had stayed with one of her friends, and they had spent the night talking on the porch, outside his house. Her parents had been furious when she got home that night, but Ginny had never been wild, so they’d had no reason to doubt her honesty, even though they seriously questioned her judgment.
So far as Trenton could tell, either Ginny was lying, or talking the night away on the porch could get you pregnant, because eight weeks later, while I was away teaching pottery to ten-year-olds, Ginny had confronted her mother with the news that she had missed two periods in a row, and had reason to believe she might be pregnant.
To her credit, Mrs. Dobbs didn’t slap her that time. Instead she maintained her composure as her daughter refused to offer details, then she had serenely picked up the phone and arranged for a consultation with her gynecologist. She instructed Ginny to buy a pregnancy test at the pharmacy, and gave her money to do so. On the day of the consultation with her doctor, Mrs. Dobbs already knew she was going to be a grandmother, right around the time when the doctors predicted she would become a widow.
Mr. Dobbs’s condition had deteriorated in just a few weeks. The pain in his legs became increasingly unbearable, while pain killers became increasingly useless for him. He started taking his meals in the TV room upstairs as the pain in his legs grew worse. Mrs. Dobbs on her part, started looking as harried as a one-armed waitress in a bustling diner on a Saturday night.

Time flew by unnoticed as Mr. Dobbs’s condition grew steadily worse. Ginny gained weight and started looking like a blotted beauty. I’d expected that once she lost her fabulous figure forever, she would look less desirable, but I found her even more fetching in her new colorful maternity wardrobe, hip but loose. She and Trenton helped their father as much as they could, but certain things only his wife could do for him. So Mrs. Dobbs started aging prematurely, I sadly noticed one evening I went to visit with my friend’s father, and read to him those Alistair Mclean novels he liked so much for a little while. Life has a twisted sense of irony, and the novel I read to him that evening was the author’s acclaimed “The Way to Dusty Death.” Getting up to carry himself over to the bathroom, aided by a light-weight aluminum walker, became all but impossible for him. So from then on, he was subjected to new indignities, like the use of a commode. Naturally, he soon stopped coming downstairs altogether.
Still, before that happened, as I said in the beginning, I was present on the evening the Dobbs sat down to eat dinner together, as a family, for the last time, and as I also said, I wouldn’t have been there, had any of us known that but, although everyone was coming to terms, in their own way, with the fact that the end of Mr. Dobbs’s life loomed close, acceptance and resignation were denied to Mrs. Dobbs, and she kept insisting Mr. Dobbs try to walk slowly downstairs to share a meal as a family. She probably thought this would cheer him up. She probably believed that mere motivation would somehow provide his failing body with renewed resources with which to fight off the invading malignant cells now roaming his body. She probably just wanted to enjoy another meal sitting at their kitchen table, as they had done so many times before, trying to recapture even a little of that domestic routine that strings the moments of a group of people and makes them a family, whereas blood merely makes them kin.
Mrs. Dobbs insisted I stayed for dinner. Maybe she thought I was such a familiar fixture at their home that I would provide ambience for her desired semblance of normality. Whatever the case, I was there. I loved them all. We all have our defects, our personality quirks, and theirs was, perhaps, a flaming temper and a readiness to argue and let arguments escalate, but otherwise they were as normal as your family, or mine. Tell me the perfection of your family isn’t marred with a few peculiarities and I will call you a liar to your face.
It wasn’t a happy evening. Mr. Dobbs was in pain, and to the discomfiture of everyone present, he tried to be game and have a little food, but he couldn’t keep anything down. Sitting at the head of the dining room table, minutes into the dinner, not being able to keep his food down, and not being able to move from his chair, he threw up on himself. Then, mortified, he began to weep silently.
Alarmed, Mrs. Dobbs stood up fast, so fast her left foot got caught with the table’s leg and she fell on her face, between her chair and her husband’s, just as Trenton sprang from his chair and ran to the bathroom to get paper towels from the kitchen, but then stopped and started to bend down to help his mother.
“Go,” I said to him, already on my feet. “I’ll help your mother.”
“Marion!” Mr. Dobbs exclaimed, and heaved some more food onto his lap.
“Mom!” cried Ginny at the same time, “are you alright?” She had managed to get up from her chair after disentangling her legs, since she sat in the same posture as her mother, left leg under her right; apparently not the most recommendable position if you need to stand up in a hurry.
“Let me help you, ma’am,” I said, taking her arm and bringing her up from a half kneeling position.
“Thank you, Daniel,” she never called me Priest. Turning to her husband, she said, “I’ll help you clean up, Jackson. Forgive me, I shouldn’t have insisted that you try the food.”
Looking green and miserable, Mr. Dobbs said, “Nothing to forgive,” and there wasn’t really. We strive for normalcy even in our darkest times, stubbornly denying fate a chance to assert itself, but it does, and we can’t beat it, no matter how hard or how assiduously we try.
Trenton came back with a roll of paper towels, cut a few pieces and was about to clean his father’s chin with them, when his mother said, “I’ll do it. Ginny, please bring a mop, perhaps Daniel will help you carry a bucket full of water?”
“Right away, Mrs. Dobbs,” I said, and left the dining room with Ginny leading the way.
“Trenton,” Mrs. Dobbs said, “fetch a clean pajamas for your father, please.” She was back in control and everyone was calming down, as people usually did under her directions, normally issued with an unperturbed air of dignity, even in the toughest of crises.
Some time later, after Mrs. Dobbs had helped Mr. Dobbs into a fresh pajama top, both Trenton and I assisted Mr. Dobbs up the stairs, and we soon understood the sacrifice he’d made for his wife and family, climbing down those thirty-something stair steps. Even bringing his legs up to get them to the next step made him tremble. Both of us hooking an arm under him, we could feel his body racked with tremors due to the pain standing on his legs caused him. His brow was covered with sweat, and I feared he would soon lose consciousness.
“We got to carry him,” I said to Trenton.
“I’ll do it,” he said, “hold him while I lift him.” Speaking to his father, he said, “Dad, I’m going to carry you upstairs, okay? Just a little longer and we’ll reach your room.”
Mr. Dobbs couldn’t answer, every muscle in his body was a string in an archer’s bow. His mouth was open, as if in a silent scream. The veins in his neck and forehead stood out as if that archer bow’s string was wound tight around his throat. Trenton lifted him up, and then the scream did come. I’d never heard anyone scream like that outside the movies. His scream filled me with dread and compassion. That a bull of a man as strong as he had always been, so solid, so resilient, should be reduced to such racking expressions of pain in front of his family, was unnerving, and an unnecessary reminder of our own human frailty.
For an instant, I was afraid Trenton would drop him, surprised by his father’s screams, but he held on to him, daintily carrying him upstairs. I admired his courage and determination. It mustn’t have been easy, disregarding his father’s plaintiff pleas to be put down, and not lose his step up the stairs, knowing that his father’s best chances of relief were in his reaching his father’s bed as quickly as possible.
As Trenton carefully laid his father on his bed and arranged his pillow, Mr. Dobbs spoke out loud, in a clear voice, full of misery and anger, “When am I going to die? When will I be rid of this pain?”
I stepped out of the room and went downstairs, leaving father and son alone.
Mrs. Dobbs was sitting at the kitchen table, elbows on the table, covering her face with her hands, crying in silence. She made no noise. I only knew she was crying because of the movement of her shoulders. Ginny was standing behind her, silently crying as well, running her hand down her mother’s head, attempting to soothe her. When she heard me enter the kitchen, she looked up. “How is he?” she asked me.
“I think he will sleep, now,” I said.
“What am I going to do without him, Daniel?” The fact that she was asking me told me all I needed to know about her desperation and feelings of helplessness. I took her hand in mine and kept silent.
“We’ve tried everything there was to try,” she said mostly to herself. “After the operation, as soon as we saw the result hadn’t been as positive as that incompetent doctor had promised, we tried radiotherapy, acupuncture, even Reiki healing, for Christ’s sakes!” I didn’t know that, but I wasn’t surprised. Just another shot at beating fate that went sour.
“Now, I don’t know if I want him to hang on,” she went on sobbing harder than before, “or if it’s better for him to just stop suffering and… go!” Then she broke down completely. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought this might be the first time she had done more than mourn quietly, discreetly, in the solitude of her kitchen.
I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Mr. Dobbs. I went to his room before I left his house. Standing by his bed, I promised I would come to visit in a few days, as I didn’t want to intrude any more than I already had. I can’t know if he heard me, but I urged him to hang on, to have faith.
I embraced Mrs. Dobbs and I couldn’t say anything, so I just hugged her and stepped back. She wished me a good night.
Following an impulse, not aware I meant to do it, I kissed Ginny’s lips, and miraculously, she kissed me back. We said nothing.
Trenton walked me to the car and we said goodbye. I promised I’d call the following morning to check on them. I asked him to call if… there was news. He said he would. I left.
The last time I saw my friend alive was through the rearview mirror; he was standing on the sidewalk watching me drive away. Marion and Ginny Dobbs were standing outside their door waving goodbye, while Mr. Dobbs fought to escape death, or strove to embrace it. Who knows for sure?

Only one breed of pain is easy to bear, and that is pain born by others.
The International Association for the Study of Pain, IASP, defines pain as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.
They got that right. Pain is an experience, and it is certainly unpleasant.
Anesthesiologists who course graduate studies in algology are usually in charge of terminal patients stricken by diseases inherently accompanied by acute or chronic pain. They are commonly referred to as pain specialists, even if this evokes images of a minute Chinese beauty, skimpily dressed in leather, whipping a bound man wearing nothing but his socks. Not precisely the most appropriate scenario should your loved one lay prostrate in bed whimpering because of severe pain. Fortunately, however, pain specialists are affable looking men and women, usually attired in white lab coats and carrying a typical black doctor’s case, which may or may not be made of leather, containing miraculous concoctions designed to bring urgently needed relief.
Yet, just as physical pain is suffered by the victims of disease, and temporarily abated through the use of drugs, emotional and psychological pain afflicts family members without remission, whose only solace is found when their loved one’s pain is assuaged.
The Dobbs went with little food, almost no rest, and certainly without consolation for three days and their long, long nights, checking on their father and husband around the clock, running to his side, usually with a syringe full of morphine, whenever he cried in pain. Wishing for a miracle, in full denial mode, they hoped for the best, not knowing what the best was any longer.
Then, on his last evening on Earth, Mr. Dobbs asked for food. He felt no pain, assisted by the powerful drug in his system, and he felt he could take a little soup.

“I love you, Marion,” he said to his wife, “and my only regret is in leaving you.”
“I love you, too,” she said to her husband, leaning closer to kiss his lips. “But, you’re not leaving any time soon. Look at yourself, you’re feeling better!”
“Don’t lie to yourself, woman,” he said to her. “Not now.”
“I’ll stand on my hope,” she said, “until the end.”
Mr. Dobbs smiled, “What would my life have been like without your hard head?”
“You know it,” Mrs. Dobbs bravely played along.
“You have to stand up for your mother,” he said addressing Trenton. “You have to learn to live with your sister.”
“I will, dad,” said Trenton.
“Princess,” he said to Ginny, who smiled as she heard that endearment she hadn’t heard from him in at least five years, “whether it was your choice or not, you’re responsible for a life, now, one that will take my place in the family.” Ginny started to cry. “I don’t blame you and I never judged you,” he told her, “rely on your mother, she’ll never lead you wrong.”
“I know, dad,” Ginny said. “I will.”
“We had some good times,” he finished. “I won’t ask you not to cry, but I’d like to think you’ll find a way to cherish those moments. That’s what remains. That’s what counts.”
I wasn’t there, but I knew my friend’s family as well as I know my own. I’m sure those were not his exact words, but I’m also sure his message ran along those lines.
Then came the night.

“I’ll go up to see if your father wants a little more soup,” Marion Dobbs told her children, standing up from the chair where she’d been sitting in the kitchen, waiting with Trenton and Ginny for whatever came next. “He may be hungry, and now that his stomach has managed to keep some food down, he may feel like eating a little more, gain back some strength.”
“Okay, mom,” Ginny said, standing to heat up some of the chicken broth his mother had served him before.
“You shouldn’t encourage her,” Trenton told his sister as he heard his mother start to climb the stairs.
“Encourage her how?” Ginny asked. The warmth in her voice always dropped a few degrees whenever she needed to address her brother.
“Give her false hope,” Trenton said.
“How do you know it is false hope, m’lord?” Ginny mocked her brother.
“Get real, Ginny,” he said forcefully, “father’s dying.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she asked in the same tone her brother had used.
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m heating up soup!” she said. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You know what I mean!” he said, raising his voice and quickly turning to look at the kitchen door. Lowering his voice once more, he said, “Mom’s got this false idea that dad will recover. He won’t!”
“I’m not stupid,” Ginny said. “I know the odds as well as you do, but stranger things have happened. If mom wants to hold on to a little hope, to believe… what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s wrong!”
“Why?” Ginny turned to look at her brother.
“Because she’ll be hurt!”
“Oh, and you think she won’t be hurt, anyway?”
“It’s not the same,” Trenton said standing up and walking to her sister.
Ginny turned around to check on the broth, asking, “How is it different, Trenton? Explain to me because I’m failing to see what you, in your infinite wisdom, must already know.”
“Oh, shut up!” Trenton spat out. “Why do you always have to trot out the same shit?”
“Why do you always have to put everyone down?” asked his sister. “Why do you always have to be the one who owns the truth? Huh? The one to point it out to us, mental cripples, as if we couldn’t see what’s happening, just like you? Better than you!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Trenton finally raised his voice.
“What the fuck are you talking about? False hope,” Ginny raised her voice in turn, “why false? What do you know?”
“You always do the same shit,” he said taking a step towards his sister, “what’s next? Your moronic insults? Huh?”
“Get away,” Ginny said, “leave me alone. You act like a moron and then you demand that people follow your orders. Who do you think you are?”
Maybe it was the revulsion in her voice ordering him away as if he were the carrier of a deadly infection. Maybe all that pent up rage after months of struggling with so much misery just swelled up inside him and had to come out. For whatever reason, Trenton went in for the kill, “I act like a moron?” he shouted. “That’s rich, little slut!”
Ginny’s hands found themselves wrapped around the handle of the pot heating the soup, and although her eyes marked the white knuckles in her hands, her brain didn’t make sense of what the hands it commanded were doing.
“That’s just rich!” Trenton continued, not knowing he had less than thirty seconds to live. “I wasn’t the one who put out like a whore!”
Ginny’s hands lifted the pot from the stove. It was hot and it was heavy, but even though nervous endings on her fingers and palms cried out to her spinal cord, which rerouted the message to her brain in a millionth of a second, even though her brain responded to that alarm by ordering her hands to put the scolding pot back down before her hands were heavily damaged, even though this also happened in a millionth of a second, Ginny’s arms failed to respond.
“I didn’t spread my legs for some moron with a car! Not when my father was dying and he didn’t need shit like th..”
Ginny turned around, using the turn to build momentum, and the hot pot of soup in her disobedient hands connected with Trenton’s head with a sickening thud, just as he was turning his back to Ginny, still spewing invective at his sister.
With the back of his head caved in, he was dead before his body hit the ground.

Marion Dobbs had woken her husband up when she put her hand to his forehead, as if looking for a fever.
“Mmhh?” he moaned.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I thought you were awake.”
“ ’s okay,” he managed to say.
“Do you want a little more soup?” she asked. “You seemed a little better this evening when you ate.”
“No.”
Mrs. Dobbs heard shouts in the kitchen, then. “What now?” she asked aloud. “Let me see what’s going on and I’ll come back with some soup, honey. Okay?”
“Sleep,” Mr. Dobbs begged.
“Are you sure?” she asked, disappointed. “It’s no trouble, really….”
“No” Mr. Dobbs said, “...soup. Pain.”
“Honey,” Mrs. Dobbs looked at the alarm clock on her night table. “I can’t give you another shot for an hour yet. I’m sorry.”
“Why…” Mr. Dobbs sighed, “…wake me?”
“I’m… sorry…” she said, finally realizing her insistence had brought him back to the ceaseless pain from whatever place it was he went to blanket it. “Oh, Jackson, I’m so sorry,” said Mrs. Dobbs as she heard something fall in the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” she turned around and made for the door.
Mr. Dobbs now aware that something was going on downstairs said to his wife, “Go… check.”
It was Ginny she was thinking of as she climbed down the stairs. Ginny falling on the kitchen floor. Maybe she had slipped, that floor could be slippery and treacherous. But Trenton would have called out! Why isn’t Trenton calling out? He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t want to wake his father. He wouldn’t want to scare her, either. He must be taking care of the situation. He must be helping her up. That’s when she heard another thud and Ginny cried out. “I’m coming, baby!” Mrs. Dobbs called out. “I’m coming!”

“Oh, my God,” cried Ginny, “no, God! No! What did I do!”
The kitchen floor had been covered in linoleum when she and Trenton were children, but her mother had always complained about how hard it was to sweep and mop, how it always seemed to have an oily feeling after so many hours of exposure to cooking. The truth was her mother simply hadn’t liked linoleum. She had worn Mr. Dobbs’s resistance down and had eventually succeeded in talking him into removing it, and modernizing their kitchen floor to an appealing tiled finish in an off-white color.
As her mother well knew, it could get slippery. Especially when covered in blood.
Ginny ran to her fallen brother but she never made it. Her legs slipped from under her and she fell flat on her back, hitting the floor with the back of her head almost as hard as she had hit her brother’s head with the scalding pot. Her back on fire, she instantly felt a terrible cramp taking hold of her distended belly, already showing signs of a pregnancy. She had an instant to understand why people said they saw stars at times like this. They weren’t stars. They were a sort of fading lights, not unlike that special effect used in the old Star Wars movies in the instant when a space ship goes into hyper drive and accelerates to the speed of light. Then she thought, “My Baby!” and she tried to sit up.
At first she thought she must have gotten wet with the broth spilt all over the kitchen. A second later she feared her bladder had let go in her fall, and she had wet herself. When she looked down she saw that she was bleeding, and understood how terribly wrong things had gone in seconds.
As terrible pain spread throughout her head, her vision dimmed. She had enough presence of mind left to understand she had really hurt herself in the fall, and not just by endangering the life of her baby.
She was crying as she managed to half-sit on the floor with her legs splayed out in a V. Her dead brother lied face down between her feet with a hole on his head the size of an orange. Then her mother came into the kitchen, took in the scene that awaited her beyond the kitchen door, and fell against it, her mouth open, a look of horror on her face.
“What…?” she started to say, then clutching her left arm, she bent forward.
“Mom!” Ginny shrieked and she tried to get up. She failed and fell back on her butt again, her legs unable to sustain her weight. “Mom! What’s wrong!”
“Heart…” her mother groaned, as she took a step forward and managed to rest her forehead on the table, her hand beginning to massage her chest.
Ginny started dragging herself towards her mother, then, awash in unreality. She was supposed to heat up the chicken broth. She had to get to her mother, help her on a chair and then heat up the chicken broth for her father. Her legs found no purchase on that slippery, but modern, tiled floor. She was leaving streaks of blood behind her every time her foot tried to push the rest of her body forward. She was in horrible pain herself, now, and she felt her consciousness ebbing, her head swooning, her eyesight fading in and out of focus. She felt pain everywhere now. I’ll have to get one of dad’s injections for myself she thought crazily. She succeeded in wedging one foot against the table and push herself forward a little, while pushing the table back, away from her.
“Mom?”
Mrs. Dobbs was now lying on the floor, on her side, with her eyes closed, her right arm massaging her chest. Her lips were moving, making no sound. The house was completely still, as dead as… “My brother,” she said out loud. Only her labored breathing breaking the ominous silence.
At the words, her mother moaned.
Ginny worked her legs under her and crawled towards her mother. It was harder this time, now that she didn’t have the table to push forward on. Painstakingly moving one knee forward, balancing, then shifting her weight to push the other, she had advanced perhaps three feet when she looked up again. Her mother wasn’t moving. Her mother’s eyes were closed. She stopped, focusing her eyes, perilously weak and sleepy, she fought the dizziness that had crept up on her and threatened to take her into a void of darkness.
Darkness beckoned and she thought it was peaceful there. She just had to reach her mother, make sure she was alright before she could give in to it. Hello darkness, my old friend.
She thought her mother wasn’t breathing.
“Mom!”
Ginny reached her mother and climbed on her elbows until her head was resting against her chest.
No movement. No sound.
Ginny knew no more.

Jackson Dobbs returned from a realm where pain was a background constant, to a realm where pain stood tall, right smack in center stage, as soon as his wife left the room. Pain was everything. Pain was everywhere. Every drop of sweat on his fevered body contained a symphony of pain, as it ran down his forehead, onto his nose, sliding down, festering on his dry, broken lips, spreading the taste of pain into his mouth. Pain is a hungry beast; it is never bested, and it always feeds. Awakened from its slumber, the beast immediately gripped his legs in its claws and sank its murderous fangs on Jackson’s calves, it took a chunk of flesh from his thighs, it gnawed at the bones of his knees, it drooled its acidic spittle, burning his groin. With his body fully under its unforgiving control, pain clutched Jackson’s brain and shook it and squeezed; pain stroke his inner organs; pain tore his throat to ribbons; pain throbbed in his ears. Pain was the master of the universe, and he was a broken heap of bones and flesh sacrificed to the ravenous emperor to bite and lick and savor at its will.
But he could hear the commotion downstairs.
His fogged brain retained just enough rationality to comprehend that something of import was taking place in the kitchen, his eternal soul ached at not being able to do anything about it.
Pain was unbearable.
The doctors said this amount of pain was the result of his organism having become dependent on morphine by now. After multiple regular doses of morphine, his system shouldn’t be able to decode these sensations as pain, anymore. It was the nervous terminals yearning for their fix that now sent desperate signals shooting through his nervous system, demanding the only substance they now cared about.
In Jackson Dobbs’s humble opinion, it made no difference whether his nervous system was a fucked up shambles of neurochemistry misfires, or if a band of demons had taken up residence inside his body and were just now performing increasingly complex foxtrot steps on his nerve endings. Pain was god. No, pain was God.
And he needed his morphine.
Ah, what a word.
Morphine.
Just its melodious name rang an evocative bell of tranquility and relief in his body. Jackson knew morphine was a colorless liquid, yet in his mind it shone golden. Rivulets of ambrosia. Pure water from a virgin spring high in the Himalayas. Nectar droplets of Nirvana. Wine of Xanadu.
Transfigured by the pain prompted by such an exertion, Jackson raised the sheets covering his body and threw them aside. He lay back on his bed panting, gasping for air, drenched in sweat. If the effort of turning his body face up, and sliding his prone body upwards to the headrest, and his head onto his pillow, took so much out of him, how would he be able to reach that luscious syringe on the vanity table?
With the willpower that only a mother in distress and a desperate junkie can resort to, he pushed his torso up and wedged his arms behind him on the mattress. This is the hard part, now, he thought. His right leg moved an inch towards the right edge of the bed. His groin complained, affronted, and Jackson Dobbs ignored it as best he could. He moved his leg another inch, the muscles in his legs taut, wretched tears streaming down his cheeks. He paused. He had to bring his left leg next to the right. If he separated his legs any further, his groin would scream bloody murder. Should he pass out from the pain, his body would be temporarily alleviated, but he knew the price he’d pay when he woke up even after a few minutes of unconsciousness in this position. He slid his left leg a fraction of an inch and his body convulsed in a paroxysm of agony as the wrinkled sheet scratched at the open sores on his thigh. His arms trembled for the effort of sustaining his torso, but he held on in what was perhaps the last grand stand of his life.
“Mom!” he heard Ginny scream in the kitchen.
“Marion!” he cried out himself wondering why he was doing all this when Marion would be up any second now to give him his shot. Yet, deep down inside he had understood from the moment Marion had left the room that she would be busy for a while, sorting out whatever stupidity his quarrelsome offspring had cooked up this time. He couldn’t wait. Minutes for them meant consecutive life sentences for him. He looked down to see that for all his exertions, he had only managed to slide both his legs perhaps five inches towards the edge of the bed, and he had already been on the verge of losing his consciousness and falling back on the bed to a position from which he might just be unable to make it up again.
“God,” he rasped, “remember me? It’s Jackson.” He gasped for breath, trying to bring his treacherous heart, that one which might give up for good any day now, to a normal rhythm. “I know it may seem blasphemous to ask for this, but surely you remember what it felt like to take this much punishment? What did I do to deserve this, God? So. I’m not complaining. I haven’t so far, have I?”
His right arm stopped trembling and started shaking, it was losing the fight. It would lose its lock at the joint any second now, and he would fall on his side. He could see that if his arm gave out, he might just stumble out of bed onto the floor, and what new visions of pain would that evoke?
“I might tell you I need some strength to stand and drink some water, God,” he continued, “but you know everything and, anyway, you’ll see I won’t go for the water, right? I’ll go for the stuff.”
His brain commanded his arm to stop being such a sissy and stop shaking, but either his arm didn’t give a rat’s tail what the brain said anymore or, most likely, it couldn’t comply.
“So, how ‘bout it, God,” he finished his prayer, “cut me some slack, okay?”
His arm gave out. Immediately, Jackson Dobbs fell on his right side and found new evidence that he had not yet reached perigee in his reeling wheel of pain. As he had feared, momentum carried him onwards, and as his powerless hands clutched at the sheets, he fell to the floor on his face, breaking his nose.
Fortunately, for the sake of his immortal soul, he had no time to contemplate what this said about God.
He passed out.

I rang the bell for the third time, letting my finger linger on the button for a few seconds longer than I normally would. I could visualize Mrs. Dobbs and Ginny leaving the house and walking to church. Even if they didn’t usually attend mass on a week day, these were less than normal circumstances, for sure. Talk about an understatement. I might even explain the car parked in the garage. They might have decided to walk those four blocks. Getting away for a while, taking a walk in the morning, sounded like a good idea, particularly for Ginny, who would need some exercise, and especially in this mild weather.
What I couldn’t account for was Trenton not hearing the bell. I knew the Dobbs slept lightly these days, poised to rise as exhausted zombies the second they heard a sound coming from their father’s bedroom. It seemed that a blaring doorbell would be at least a little more alerting than a groan or a moan.
Yet the door remained shut.
No way they left the old man alone, I thought and walked to the back of the house. The Dobbs were not the trusting type. They would never leave the kitchen door unlocked, but I had seen Trenton retrieve a spare key from the space over the doorframe often enough. If I was challenged by a recently awakened Ginny on her pajamas, as I entered the kitchen, I would feel embarrassed, but I would also feel relieved.
Walking the hallways in my friend’s house, just to discover that the whole family was enjoying a well-deserved sleep after so many sleepless night, I would tiptoe back out and pray to God nobody had heard me.
What I found instead has marked every waking moment of my life since, and has haunted my every moment of sleep, too.
The smell hit me first, a pungent, coppery odor I now know is the smell of blood, and something else, a whiff of something gone bad, which forensic specialists later ascertained was chicken broth.
Only the well-loved kitchen table was as it should be. Although it had been pushed to one side, it was the last thing standing.
A house is defined by its kitchen. More than that, its inhabitants tend to bond in the kitchen. Sitting around lovingly prepared food, a carefully decorated table, families spend some of their best times in the kitchen, not in the dining room, not in the living room, not in their bedrooms, but in the kitchen.
This was no longer a kitchen; this was the tenth circle of hell, so gruesome even Alighieri hadn’t dared describe it.
A cold, viscous substance coated the floor, the fridge, kitchen cabinets, chairs, and walls. Bits of chicken, even some noodles, stuck to the ceiling. There was blood everywhere. Long smears of blood crisscrossed the floor from the stove to the table, and from there they painted a half moon that went around to the far side of the table. Blood smears clearly made by a sneaker. A pool of blood at the foot of the stove displayed two white irregular circles in its center, where someone had sat, preventing the blood from spreading completely, leaving the testimony of a fall.
Trenton’s head lay broken just inches from that pool of blood, his body partially lying under the kitchen table, its arm over a fallen chair he had dragged on his fall, as if he were claiming it as his possession so he might have a place to sit on in his long wait in eternity.
An iron pot stood immutable near the place where my friend had fallen, stricken in an inexplicable fit of fury, a silent witness with a dash of blond hair stuck onto its metallic surface, along with something else I didn’t dare contemplate.
Ginny looked like she was sleeping on her mother’s chest, an endearing tableau of daughterly affection, if not for the fact that she seemed to be the source of all that blood. Her jeans were covered with dark brown stains that ran from her crotch down to her white socks. The soles of her sneakers, her hands, her face, hid behind the abundant, ghastly red make up.
Marion Dobbs’s hands belayed her motherly affections as one was clutching at her chest, the other clawing at the floor; none embraced her sleep-like daughter. The expression on her face was one of silent desperation, if not fear, though it seemed to me not completely devoid of a measure of resignation.
I knew I shouldn’t enter. I would be seriously put down by the police for this, I was sure, but I couldn’t think of anything else than Mr. Dobbs. An awful certainty had taken residence around my heart, and wouldn’t leave me, no matter what sorts of recommendations my conscious, more conservative mind, was issuing.
I couldn’t heed the warning to step outside and call the police, any more than I could postpone taking my next breath of air. I had to go upstairs. I had to see Mr. Dobbs. I couldn’t quite convince myself that he must already be dead. What if he wasn’t? He certainly hadn’t participated in these appalling festivities, so he might even now be desperate for a drink of water, a commode… a shot of morphine.

I no longer stay awake until dawn trying to understand. I mourn, and I don’t forget. I ache, but I am spared pain. I regret, but I don’t assign blame.
The coroner said none of my friends took a long time dying. Wisely, he didn’t say they didn’t suffer much. For a broken nose, there wasn’t enough blood that led to the assumption that Mr. Dobbs had lived for more than a few minutes after his fall. The dead don’t bleed. So, the absence of whole pints of blood indicates the end came quickly after that.
They bleed plenty while dying, though.
As for suffering?
They leave that to us.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 03.04.2010

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