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"Yes, I think Tom said what he had to say," I told Charles. "He wanted me to keep an eye on Peter."
"Yes, well--good luck with that. I'm guessing that'll be up to Peter!" Charles said. (I'd not been entirely wrong to mistake him for a bouncer at the Mineshaft; Charles had some of the same cavalier qualities.)
"No, no, no!" we could hear young Peter crying all the way from the kitchen. The girl, Emily, had stopped screaming; so had her mom.
Charles was unseasonably dressed for December in New Jersey, the tight black T-shirt showing off his muscles and his tattoos.
"It didn't seem that the oxygen was working," I said to Charles.
"It was working only a little. The problem with PCP is that it's diffuse, it affects both lungs, and it affects your ability to get oxygen into your blood vessels--hence into your body," the nurse explained.
"Tom's hands were so cold," Elaine said.
"Tommy didn't want the ventilator," Charles continued; he appeared to be done with the Hickman catheter. The nurse was washing the crusted Candida from the area of Atkins's mouth. "I want to clean him up before Sue and the kids see him," Charles said.
"And Mrs. Atkins--her cough," I said. "It's just going to get worse, right?"
"It's a dry cough--sometimes it's no cough. People make too much of the cough. It's the shortness of breath that gets worse," the nurse told me. "Tommy just ran out of breath," Charles said.
"Charles--we want to see him!" Mrs. Atkins was calling.
"No, no, no," Peter kept crying.
"I hate you, Charles!" Emily shouted from the kitchen.
"I know you do, honey!" Charles called back. "Just give me a second--all of you!"
I bent over Atkins and kissed his clammy forehead. "I underestimated him," I said to Elaine.
"Don't cry now, Billy," Elaine told me.
I tensed up suddenly, because I thought Charles was going to hug me or kiss me--or perhaps only push me away from the raised bed--but he was merely trying to give me his business card. "Call me, William Abbott--let me know how Peter can contact you, if he wants to."
"If he wants to," I repeated, taking the nurse's card.
Usually, when anyone addressed me as "William Abbott," I could tell the person was a reader--or that he (or she) at least knew I was "the writer." But beyond my certainty that Charles was gay, I couldn't tell about the reader part.
"Charles!" Sue Atkins was calling breathlessly.
Elaine and I, and Charles, were all staring at poor Tom. I can't say that Tom Atkins looked "peaceful," but he was at rest from his terrible exertions to breathe.
"No, no, no," his darling boy was crying--softer now.
Elaine and I saw Charles glance up suddenly at the open doorway. "Oh, it's you, Jacques," the nurse said. "It's okay--you can come in. Come on."
Elaine and I saw each other flinch. There was no concealing which Jacques we thought had come to say good-bye to Tom Atkins. But in the doorway was not the Zhak Elaine and I had been expecting. Was it possible that, for twenty years, Elaine and I were anticipating we might see Kittredge again?
In the doorway, the old dog stood--uncertain of his next arthritic step.
"Come on, boy," Charles said, and Jacques limped forward into his former master's former study. Charles lifted one of Tom's cold hands off the side of the bed, and the old Labrador put his cold nose against it.
There were other presences in the doorway--soon to be in the small room with us--and Elaine and I retreated from poor Tom's bedside. Sue Atkins gave me a wan smile. "How nice to have met you, finally," the dying woman said. "Do stay in touch." Like Tom's father, twenty years ago, she didn't shake my hand.
The boy, Peter, didn't once look at me; he ran to his father and hugged the diminished body. The girl, Emily, glanced (albeit quickly) at Elaine; then she looked at Charles and screamed. The old dog just sat there, as he'd sat--expecting nothing--in the kitchen.
All the long way down that hall, through the vestibule (where I only now noticed an undecorated Christmas tree), and out of that afflicted house, Elaine kept repeating something I couldn't quite hear. In the driveway was the taxi driver from the train station, whom we'd asked to wait. (To my surprise, we'd been inside the Atkins house only for forty-five minutes or an hour; it had felt, to Elaine and me, as if we'd been there half our lives.)
"I can't hear what you're saying," I said to Elaine, when we were in the taxi.
