The Body Human by Nancy Kress Read Free Book Online Page A

bad.
    This wasn’t one of my nights to go to the hospital. But I flicked off the TV, limped to the trash to throw away my dinner tray, and picked up the cane I use when my leg has been under too much physical stress. The phone rang. I paused to listen to the answering machine, just in case it was Libby calling from Cornell to tell me about her first week of classes.
    “Gene, this is Vince Romano.” Pause. “Bucky.” Pause. “I know it’s been a long time.”
    I sat down slowly on the hassock.
    “Listen, I was sorry to hear about Margie. I was going to…you were… it wasn’t.…” Despite myself, I had to grin. People didn’t change. Bucky Romano never could locate a complete verb.
    He finished floundering. “…to say how sorry I am. But that’s not why I’m calling.” Long pause. “I need to talk to you. It’s important. Very important.” Pause. “It’s not about Father Healey again, or any of that old…something else entirely.” Pause. “Very important, Gene. I can’t…it isn’t…you won’t…” Pause. Then his voice changed, b e came stronger. “I can’t do this alone, Gene.”
    Bucky had never been able to do anything alone. Not when we were six, not when we were eleven, not when we were seventeen, not when he was twenty-three and it wasn’t any longer me but Father Healey who decided what he did. Not when he was twenty-seven and it was me again deciding for him, more unhappy about that than I’d ever been about anything in my life until Margie’s accident.
    Bucky recited his phone number, but he didn’t hang up. I could hear him breathing. Suddenly I could almost see him, somewhere out there, sitting with the receiver pressed so close to his mouth that it would look like he was trying to swallow it. Hoping against hope that I might pick up the phone after all. Worrying the depths of his skinny frantic soul for what words he could say to make me do this.
    “Gene…it’s about…I shouldn’t say this, but after all you’re a…were a…it’s about those elderly deaths.” Pause. “I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals now.” And then the click.
    What the hell could anybody make of any of that?
    I limped to the elevator and caught a cab to St. Clare’s Hospital.
     
    Margie was worse, although the only way I could tell was that there was one more tube hooked to her than there’d been last night. She lay in bed in the same position she’d lain in for eighteen months and seven days: curled head to knees, splinter-thin arms bent at the elbows. She weighed ninety-nine pounds. Gastrostomy and catheter tubes ran into her, and now an IV drip on a pole as well. Her beautiful brown hair, worn away a bit at the back of her head from constant contact with the pillow, was dull. Its sheen, like her life, had faded deep inside its brittle shafts, unrecoverable.
    “Hello, Margie. I’m back.”
    I eased myself into the chair, leg straight out in front of me.
    “Libby hasn’t called yet. First week of classes, schedule to straighten out, old friends to see—you know how it is.” Margie always had. I could see her and Libby shopping the week before Libby’s freshman year, laughing over the Gap bags, quarreling over the price of something I’d buy either of them now, no matter what it cost. Anything.
    “It’s pretty cool out for September, sweetheart. But the leaves haven’t changed yet. I walked across the Park just yesterday—all still green. Composing myself for today. Which wasn’t too bad. It’s going to be a good school year, I think.”
    Have a great year! Margie always said to me on the first day of school, as if the whole year would be compressed in that first six hours and twenty minutes. For three years she’d said it, the three years since I’d been retired from the Force and limped into a career as a junior-high teacher. I remembered her standing at the door, half-dressed for her secretarial job at Time-Warner, her silk blouse stretched across those generous breasts, the