The Angel of Death

The clock said 3:11, and Vincent was awake to see it.

Seventy-two hours. Give or take. By the second night he wasn't counting anymore, too busy trying to ignore the way the shadows seemed to lean toward him.

Down the hall his father breathed, a wet rattle in, a long whistle out. That was the sound the house ran on now. Nicholas Pierce, seventy-one, lungs full of what the doctors called progression.

The third pot of the night sat cold beside him. Around one, his heart had fluttered, a fish turning under ice. He'd blamed the coffee. Lately he blamed everything on it.

He kept his door cracked two inches, enough to watch the hallway without being watched back. In theory.

Carol didn't make footstep sounds. That was what he kept circling. Forty-something, church-round face, moved through the house like snowfall. There was quiet, and then there was Carol's quiet, which felt rehearsed.

The morphine was what got him counting. A little brown bottle, and her spiral notebook where every dose got logged in handwriting neat as scripture. He'd held the bottle to the kitchen light twice and checked it against the page. Sixteen milliliters gone in two days. The notebook said eleven.

◆◆◆

Past four, he came down. She was in the kitchen, standing at the counter in the dark with the morphine case open, the syringe already loaded.

She didn't jump. He came around the corner in bare feet, and she turned her head slow, as if he'd knocked.

"Can't sleep either, sweetheart?"

"No."

"Your daddy's resting good tonight." She pressed the plunger until a bead stood at the needle's tip. "Nobody ought to hurt more than they have to. You believe that?"

She wasn't looking at the syringe. She was looking at him.

"I guess."

"You guess." A low, warm laugh. "You'll learn." She clicked the morphine case shut. "How long you been back now, sweetheart?"

"Two weeks."

"Mm." She nodded, slow, like the answer went in her book. "He waited longer than that."

When she'd gone, he dumped the pot. The coffee had been tasting wrong all week, a bitterness under the bitterness, like a grapefruit rind dissolved in it. He rinsed everything and started over.

In his room he dug through the old desk for aspirin. Under the cassette tapes sat a rubber-banded bundle of envelopes, every one addressed in his own younger hand, RETURN TO SENDER written across the corner in his father's block letters. Six years of sorry. Refused, every one. Kept, every one. Six years to learn the size of what he'd walked out on: a man who said your name like he'd been waiting all day to.

Down the hall, her voice. Very low, from his father's room. He couldn't catch the words, only the tone: sweet, steady, the way you'd talk to a baby or an old dog. His father's breath rattled on. Her voice went on. Vincent stood in the dark with a fistful of dead letters, listening to something he wasn't meant to hear.

The monitor turned up in the hall closet, under his mother's sewing basket, VINCENT printed on a strip of yellowed masking tape in her round hand. The power light still worked.

The winter he had croup, she'd kept it in her lap all night while his father sat in the hallway in his work boots, calling through the door whenever the coughing stopped. You still with me, Vince? Now it would listen to his father.

Eleven o'clock, night four. He waited at his cracked door, transmitter in his jacket, until the kitchen light came on. He listened to her move through the kitchen, waiting for the refrigerator to seal itself shut.

He crossed the hall on the outsides of his feet.

The room smelled of medicine and sour linen. Nicholas lay with his jaw working at the air. Vincent knelt, wedged the transmitter under the bed frame, and plugged it in behind the concentrator, its cord vanishing among its cousins.

One clouded eye opened. Tracked him.

Vincent didn't breathe. Downstairs, the water ran on.

"Vince," his father said. His first word since March, if it was one. Done, or gone.

"Still here," Vincent whispered.

The eye closed. In the kitchen, the water stopped. He was out before the kettle whistled.

◆◆◆

The receiver sat on his desk, turned low. A hiss like rain on a far roof. Under it, his father's rattle.

Carol brought a thermos at midnight. "Saw your light, sweetheart. Figured you'd be up."

The coffee had that bitterness under the bitterness. He'd decided it was the cheap brand.

He splashed his face at one, pinched his hand at two. His fingertips had gone cold around the cup, and a note had started ringing in his ears, one long tone that wouldn't stop. Ninety hours without sleep could account for nearly anything.

At 2:30, bedsprings creaked in the little speaker. Then her voice, so close it arrived inside his head.

"Hello, Nicholas."

The rattle went on underneath her.

"I know you can hear me. They always can, near the end. The deaf ones, too, I swear it." A rustle of sheets, drawn up and tucked. "I want to tell you something, because you've been so patient."

When she went on, you could hear the pride in it.

"I've walked thirty-two of you through that door, Nicholas. Thirty-two, and every one went out gentle, like a candle pinched between wet fingers. Mrs. Hunt held my hand the whole way. Such a dear."

His father's breath caught, caught, caught.

Then the pop of a syringe cap between her teeth.

"Thirty-three," Carol said. "Time to be free."

The mug went over between thirty-three and time to be free. Coffee crossed the desk and soaked into the bundle of letters, six years of sorry going dark at the edges, and the RETURN TO SENDER stamps began to bleed blue.

He didn't have a second to care.

The room tilted a degree. Ninety hours, he told himself, that's all this is, same as before. Static still coming off the receiver. Then Carol's voice, gone tender. "There now. Almost through."

The flashlight lived on the dresser. Four D-cells in steel, a gift from a father who believed a man should own tools. It fit his fist like it had been waiting years for this exact job.

The hallway ran twelve feet. He'd walked it since he was in footed pajamas, never once thinking about it. Now each step arrived late, like a phone call routed through some far city.

His breathing had changed without asking him. Sips. Small ones that did nothing at all. He didn't want more anyway.

The fish was back under his ribs, turning, turning, and the ice above it thinning.

Halfway down, his knees stopped reporting in.

"Dad," he said, and it came out the size of a coin.

The doorframe arrived on its own schedule. He caught it with one hand. Through the gap: Carol's back, bent close, a syringe drinking the light.

He got the flashlight up. That was the whole plan, and his arm held it out like a covenant. The doorframe held him for four more heartbeats. Then it let him go.

The flashlight rolled away, dragging its beam across the ceiling, around and around. He lay with his cheek on the boards. The wood was cold and honest, and he understood, in a distant way, that he was going to stay on it.

The hall light clicked on, warm and yellow.

Slippers entered his sightline. Pink chenille, heels scuffed gray. Two weeks of seeing them every night, and he had never once wondered why a nurse wore slippers on shift.

Somewhere behind his ribs, his heart was trying to leave without him.

Carol crouched down. The syringe was gone from her hands, or he'd lost track of it, he couldn't say which. Her face came into view from above, upside down, framed in the doorway light, wearing the expression of a woman leaning over a cake she'd just pulled from the oven.

She settled onto her knees beside him, comfortable as a woman weeding a garden.

"Oh, sweetheart," she said. "Look at you."

"Your daddy doesn't need me," she said. "Lungs like his, the good Lord's already driving that bus. I never hurry the ones who are already on their way. That would be vanity."

He reached for the flashlight. His hand declined the errand. The effort cost him a breath he didn't have to spare.

"It was the coffee, sweetheart." She said it the way you'd tell a child about a dead pet. "The bottle's been lighter every night than my little book says. And you've been so helpful. Three pots a night. I barely had to lift a finger."

The bitterness under the bitterness. Not the cheap brand. He'd even blamed the cheap brand.

"You dumped the pot once," she said, scolding now. "The thermos fixed that. You take your comfort where it's offered, and you were offered plenty."

Then she got up to work.

She came back from his room with the letters, coffee-dark and fanned open, and laid them by his hand. Six years of sorry, staged. She pressed the empty brown bottle into his palm and folded his fingers over it, one at a time, like fitting a mitten on a kid going out in the snow.

"Here's what the police will find," she said. "A son who came home after six years and couldn't sleep. Lord, the cups in that sink. He ended his daddy's suffering, and then he couldn't live with what he'd done." She clicked her tongue. "Nobody wonders twice about a man's coffee."

His chest was making sounds now. Small bellows with holes in them.

She stood over him a moment, head tilted.

"Told you you'd learn."

On the bed, his father's eye opened. Clouded, but aimed. His jaw worked once.

"Vince."

Not done. Not gone. Just him. Just the name a father gives.

His father turned his face toward the sound of him and lay listening for his boy's breathing. He'd had practice.

Carol turned down the lamp and tucked the blanket to Nicholas's chin, humming something with a walking rhythm to it. Down the hall, the receiver on Vincent's desk went on hissing. Under the bed, past her ankles, the little red light burned, sending it all out to an empty room.

Vincent's world went gray at the edges, and then the edges went too. The last thing he had was his father's breath, rattling in and whistling out, and her slippers, pink as dawn, going off to the kitchen to make her tea.