Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

make it simple and quick. The house had been severely remodeled and was a single-family dwelling these days—a young developer and his PR woman wife, both chums of Governor Schwarzenegger. I knew they wouldn’t cotton to the notion of a foreign substance being sprinkled in their garden.
    “I hope we’ll see you,” said Irwin.
    “I hope so, too,” I replied.

    Shortly after ten that morning, Jake and Selina showed up to relieve the watch. Brian and Shawna headed off in their separate directions, and Ben and I went home. Anna’s condition had remained unchanged, and I was grateful, frankly, to get the smell of the hospital out of my head. I was beginning to feel a familiar tightening in my chest—a function of my meds, probably, or anxiety, or a combination of the two. It happens sometimes, I don’t know why. I was ready to breathe some clean morning air and take a shower and stretch out on the bed for a few hours. Ben was, too.
    It felt odd hauling our luggage back into the house. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since we’d packed those bags. After showering, we unpacked just enough to brush our teeth, then crawled under clean sheets together.
    “What would I do if you weren’t here?”
    “You’d manage,” Ben said, smiling. He was straddling my leg like a koala climbing a tree. He’s only an inch shorter than me but he feels much smaller in bed. The weight difference has something to do with that (I’m not in denial here), but it’s also about the sense of purpose I feel when we’re together. I feel like his protector.
    “My daddy,” he said with a sigh. “My man.” (He often adds the man part to the daddy part, for fear, I guess, that I’ll find him too hung up on roles. He needn’t worry. I love being his daddy—it seems to be the role I was born for.) “You’ve been so patient,” I told him.
    “About what?”
    “All this death and dying shit. You didn’t sign on for that.”
    “I didn’t sign on at all. I was drafted. And she made you do it, thank God.”
    He meant Anna, of course—the way she’d brought us together at the Caffe Sport.
    I smiled. “We owe her one, don’t we?”
    “More than one, I’d say.”
    We lay quiet for a while. A light drizzle was shellacking the leaves in the garden. I felt the warm rise and fall of Ben’s chest against my side.
    This is my harbor, I thought. This is where I’ve been heading all along.
    He stroked my arm deliberately, as if about to say something, but changed his mind.
    “What, sweetie?”
    “I was just wondering…say, assuming she doesn’t come out of the coma…”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what we’d do.”
    “Do you know what she’d want?”
    I swallowed hard. “Probably…yes.”
    “Same as your mother?”
    I couldn’t answer that directly. “The doctor said it sometimes takes three or four days for them to come out of it.”
    “Sure.” He patted my stomach as if to say that he’d leave that alone for now. “Let’s get some sleep.”

    I slept solidly for a little over four hours. I was awakened by my cell phone—an unidentified caller.
    “Hello.” My voice was still froggy with sleep.
    “I’m sorry,” said the caller. “I’m not sure who I am calling. This is Mary Ann Caruthers from Darien, Connecticut.”
    I noticed, perversely, that she pronounced the town’s name the way I’ve been told the locals do: Dairy Ann. Mary Ann from Dairy Ann. Singleton no more.
    “Hey,” I said evenly. “It’s Michael.”
    “Oh…Michael…hi.”
    “Hi.”
    Pleasant but stiff, both of us. Like the day we’d met back in 1976. She’d just found the man of her dreams at the Marina Safeway only to discover that he was there with the man of his dreams—me. What else could we be but pleasant and stiff?
    “One of the posties just called me at Pilates.”
    “I’m sorry…What?”
    “The Explorer Post. The place you called?”
    “Right. Of course.”
    “She dates my stepson, Robbie, so…” She caught her breath, stopped herself. “It was something about Mrs. Madrigal?”
    She sounded so young at that moment, framing the difficult as a hopeful question. Those of us who’d grown old with Anna had dropped the “Mrs.” years ago. Mary Ann had to summon a younger version of herself to function in this moment.
    “She had a heart attack,” I said. “She’s in a coma.”
    “Fuck.” She spoke the word softly, like an Episcopal prayer.
    “We couldn’t not tell