Page 160 - Some Dance to Remember

130 Jack Fritscher

Annie Laurie, her hand fingering her mother-of-pearl rosary beads,
was her brave, independent self. She was so calm that Ryan wondered if, at
home alone at night, kneeling up in their bed, she screamed at the crucifix
hanging over the headboard and fell, crying, face down pounding her fists
into the pillows. She gave no hints. She was what she was. Her children
had come home to her and their father, and she was strong for them. She
knew it was not easy for them to be together. She prayed to God to know
why they really didn’t much like each other.
Twice a day each one entered the ICU alone to stand watch over
Charley-Pop for the twenty minutes allowed. Between visits, Thom sat
chain-smoking Marlboros in the waiting room. Kweenie tried to reach
old high school friends by phone and met them in the hospital cafeteria,
hoping to get laid if they hadn’t turned born-again or gay. Ryan had left
Peoria for Misericordia when he was fourteen. He had lost track of his
parochial school friends. He feigned interest when Annie Laurie told him
that Kenny Baker had finally married Donna Hanratty after she had car-
ried not one, but three of his children. He spent his hours writing in his
Journal. Once a day he called Kick back home alone in the Victorian. The
family hung in a limbo of waiting.
They had hope. Charley-Pop had frightened them before, weakening,
falling into coma, vital signs failing, hands cold as ice, then finally rally-
ing, coming back, going home for another six months.
His episodes terrified Ryan. “If I were my dad, I would have killed
myself,” he wrote in his Journal, “at the first onset of this illness, and if
not then, at the second stage, when I saw how horrible it was going to be.”
Did Charley-Pop know something? Had he chosen to suffer to submit
to God’s reckless will? Or was Death so fearsome that he chose instead of
rational suicide, this endless, mindless suffering?
Thom, after nearly a week of flipping through hospital magazines and
biting his fingernails to the quick, announced he had to leave. “I’m flying
back to Bar Nada,” he said. “I talked to Sandy. She’s got me a lead on a
job working construction.”
“You’re such a bastard,” Kweenie said, “to believe that lying bitch.
Who’d tell her about a job? She just wants you back. She doesn’t trust you.
She thinks you’re sleeping with someone.”
“She thinks,” Thom said, “I’m sleeping with you.” Annie Laurie was
at the hospital. Her three children were home alone. The house seemed
smaller to them than it had when they were kids. They sat in separate
chairs on the summer porch of the big white house on Saint Louis Street.
“It’s the same old story,” Ryan said. “You’re always the last to arrive

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