Practical Jean (4 page)

“Why didn't he call and tell me himself?”

“Oh, that's simple,” said Jean. “I was bringing you my ceramic—do you like it, by the way?” There wasn't much space in Welland's office, but Jean had found a spot for it on top of the standing safe where Welland kept the receipts from charity raffles and other community events the police got themselves involved in.

“Yeah,” said Welland, eyeing it more than a little suspiciously. “It's kind of scary.”

“Well, it's ferns,” said Jean. “They're prehistoric. So, I was bringing this to you and Andrew Jr. said, ‘Since you're there, tell Welland.' And because it's a favor for me, also, it makes sense that I tell you. But he was adamant this was his order.”

“Adamant.”

“Absolutely. He could have had anybody do it, and he said you.”

Outside, in the Tucker's lot, Jean could see one of the Birdy boys—Jeff it was, Ash's oldest son. He had two, Jeff and Gordie, from his marriage to Ruth Donoghue, a girl who had taken mostly technical classes in high school and likely never complained no matter where he put his hands. Jeff had the same jutty chin as his father, and he was out there hosing down his Popsicle orange 1972 Plymouth Barracuda. The whole town knew what that car sounded like—they got an earful of it just about every evening. Jean was a little surprised to see Jeff working so hard, soaping and spraying. Occasionally, a fleck of suds hit Welland's window and began its slow, sliding descent.

“Because this is the kind of work I've been wanting to do,” Welland was saying, still scratching.

“I know. For a long time.”

“When Dad hired me in '87, he never said I'd be stuck here in Community Services. I don't think it was his plan for me. But then Andrew Jr. got on his rocket and just—zoom!”

“Well, now it's your turn.”

Welland stopped scratching and stared in thought toward his window. A soap bubble the size of a walnut clung there on the glass, holding its ground, without popping. “But why this assignment? Why now?” He squinted at Jean. “Maybe it's impossible. Maybe he's setting me up to fail.”

Jean pressed her hands to her eyes. “No, Welland. Listen to me.” More than any man she knew, more so even than Milt, Welland was like a piece of too-wet clay that would not hold its shape. “This is not going to be hard for you. This is like a warm-up. Like when you go golfing? This is your practice swing. Just find Cheryl Nunley for me. And then you can show Andrew Jr. you deserve more real police work.”

Welland rolled his chair away from his desk and eased himself down into it like someone trying out a new lounger at Sears. “Okay,” he said. He patted the edge of the desk in front of him. “Okay, I'll give it a go.”

“Good.”

“There's probably some tracking devices I'll need, or some such. Maybe tie into the computer surveillance networks.” He was staring off, talking mostly to himself. But he turned back to Jean. “Why do you wa
nt to find this woman, anyway?”

“Actually, Welland, I don't know. That's being honest. I just—” Jean looked out to the sky through the soap-flecked window. “I feel some big new understanding of life coming for me. Something that's going to change everything. And I just want to gather around me all the people that I love most in the world.”

Welland nodded. “I understand.”

Jean was reassured and she smiled and took two steps toward the door. As she opened it, she turned and pointed toward the ceramic. “Don't ever try to move that.”

Chapter 4

A
ction had always seemed the proper response to death. It wasn't something Jean went about deliberately; it just happened. Milt had a rather right-wing brother, Albert, who died in November 1989—he had a wonky heart and got much too excited about the Berlin Wall going down—and the next day Jean started a campaign to have pretty, wrought-iron street lamps installed along the busiest section of Main Street. As it turned out, the town had only enough money for one lamp. But up it went, long and black with a handsome ornamental curlicue, at the corner of Calendar and Main.

When her cousin Sarah Fulbright, who was living in the city and married to Dr. Dick Fulbright, steered into a sycamore one night at eighty miles an hour, Jean immediately decided to take swimming lessons. She went every day to the Hern Regional Recreational Center and built up a very nice backstroke until she developed an ear infection from the inadequately treated water.

Having an artistic outlet was often very useful in situations like these, because Jean could dive into her work. And it almost never went haywire, as it had after the death of her father. In the early Nineties, for about six months, there was a run of deaths among her former public and high school teachers, and she amassed quite a collection of shelf-sized pieces dedicated to various sorts of mint.

Where these surges in the wake of death came from Jean couldn't have said. She had never been very troubled by a sense of her own mortality. She didn't consider herself prone to other manias. And what happened that spring day when she was six . . . well, that was such a long time ago.

Marjorie had been away for almost two weeks, helping to take care of her own mother, Jean's Grana, after she had snapped her tailbone on a flight of polished stairs. Her mother had taken Andrew Jr. and the baby, Welland, with her, but Jean had had to stay for school. While Marjorie was gone, their German shepherd, Mona, which was really Drew's dog, delivered a litter of five gray-and-brown puppies. Marjorie had known this was going to happen, and she had not seemed very happy about it. But Jean was delighted, of course. She watched, entranced, as Mona licked and nudged the whelps in the box, situated in the far corner of the garage under a halo of coiled hose.

The puppies were odd in some way that Jean didn't understand. She knew it only by the way half of her father's face went squinty when he looked at them the first time and muttered, “I guess your mother was right.” But whether or not they were odd didn't matter to Jean. Within days she had named them after storybook characters—Flossie, Alice, Sam-I-Am, Rapunzel, and Horton. She'd cleaned out the puppy mess with a plastic beach shovel, and she had surrounded the box with “friends,” which were her collection of stuffed animals. The friends, of which there were eight, in various sizes and fur types, were meant to protect the puppies from anything that might threaten or hurt them, and also keep them company in the sullen loneliness of the garage when Jean could not be there.

Every day when Jean came home from school she filled Mona's water bowl and carefully petted each puppy with seven long strokes. Because she loved them all equally and wanted no puppy to get more or less affection than the others. And she gave each of the friends time in the box so they could become closer to the puppies, especially Sam-I-Am, who wasn't moving very well, or much at all, except for his little gray rib cage. And every day, Jean made another attempt at pleading to keep the puppies, bopping her father's knee with her fist as he sat watching Walter Cronkite. But Drew made no promises about the puppies. He said only that he wouldn't be giving them away at the station like he'd planned, that was for damn sure. As far as he was concerned, he told Jean, it was her mother's decision.

That spring day when Jean was six, she arrived home from school wearing the yellow cotton dress she had picked out that morning to find her mother had returned. Jean knew it as soon as she opened the front door, even though the boys were nowhere to be found, because the air in the house felt thinner somehow, pulled taut as if the air were a string. She ran to the garage and found Mona whimpering and scratching at the base of the door that led to the backyard. She saw her stuffed animals in a circle on the floor, surrounding an empty space where the puppy box had been.

Jean's heart began to bump in her chest. She gripped the sides of her dress by her legs. “Mommy?” she called through the door.

“Don't let the dog out,” came her mother's voice from the yard.

She dashed back into the house. There was another door to the backyard at the top of the basement stairs and she ran toward it. She ran as fast as she could because now she could hear Mona scrambling over the kitchen linoleum after her. She jumped down the short flight of stairs to the landing, her dress flying up to her waist, and she managed to get herself mostly through before Mona arrived and tried to squeeze and squirm past. It took all of Jean's six-year-old strength to keep Mona inside, pushing on her furry, twisting head and scrabbling paws so she could close the door.

Outside, under the sprouting elms of the backyard, Jean found Marjorie, her auburn hair pinned back, hauling a bucket of water across the patio to the picnic table. On top of the table sat the puppy box. Jean could hear the faint squeals of the puppies inside.

“Mommy,” said Jean. She tried to breathe more slowly so she could speak. “What are you doing?”

Marjorie sighed. “Dealing with this situation your father left for me.”

Jean approached the table with care.

“I told him this litter would be bad,” said Marjorie, “but he wouldn't listen.”

Jean wanted to ask her mother if she could keep the puppies, the way she had planned to, but when she opened her mouth to ask, her lips began to shiver, and asking seemed the most impossible thing. So she watched as her mother lifted one of the puppies out of the box. It was Sam-I-Am, the smallest of the litter, about the size of Marjorie's hand. At the back door Mona scratched furiously and her whines reached a higher pitch. Jean watched her mother put Sam-I-Am in the bucket and she had to speak, she had to speak, even though her lips were buzzing.

“Mommy, are you washing him?”

Marjorie looked up from the bucket at Jean, her mouth pressed flat.

“Are you washing him, Mommy?”

“No, Jeanie, I'm not.”

“What are you doing?”

Her mother looked down in the bucket again. “I'm putting him—”

“Are you drowning him, Mommy?” Jean's lips were bubbling so much she could barely complete the words. Her vision began to sparkle with tears.

“Yes.” After a few seconds more Marjorie lifted Sam-I-Am out of the water and set him, limp and dripping, on the picnic table. She used her wet fingers to smooth a bit of hair behind her ear, and took another puppy from the box.

Jean began to jiggle her hands at her sides. There was no air in her lungs. “But not Alice, Mommy,” she said. “Not Alice, Mommy.” The back of her throat stung. She grabbed and pulled handfuls of her dress. Her tears fell into her mouth. “Sam-I-Am was sick but not Alice, okay, Mommy? Okay, Mommy?”

Marjorie held Alice squirming in her hand. “These puppies aren't right, Jeanie. They won't live. They shouldn't even have been born. But your father refused to have that dog spayed.”

Jean watched as her mother drowned Alice. In the house, Mona cried and raced between the door at the top of the basement steps and the green door to the garage. Jean stood and stared, her body shuddering with hiccups, as Flossie, and Rapunzel, and finally Horton went squirming into the bucket and came out sleek and limp as livers. At some point Mona stopped running and from behind the green garage door let out a sound that made Jean put her hands over her ears.

And why, Jean wanted to know between hiccups, didn't her mother use the needle to put the puppies to sleep? Don't be silly, Marjorie told her. That drug was expensive and no one was paying her to do this. Drowning was the most practical solution.

Two hours later, after her mother had showered and gone back to Grana's to get the boys, but before her father had come home from the station, Jean went to the garage. Mona lay in the corner, quiet and motionless in the dim light, and Jean put an oatmeal cookie on the concrete floor within a few feet of her. “I'm sorry, Mona,” she said. After a moment, she went to the spot under the coiled hose where the puppy box had been. She sat there on the floor, surrounded by her stuffed animals. There were three brown teddy bears. There was a panda, one Snoopy, a plush lion, a floppy beanbag kitten, and a tall, hard-packed giraffe. They were named simply, for their attributes—Bear, Big Bear, Floppy Kitten, and so on—because Jean had been given them when she was much younger, when words themselves were novelties. Now she read stories, she knew about life and death, and she believed in things she couldn't see, such as ghosts, and fairies, and princesses, and Heaven. She was much more grown up, and she could undertake difficult tasks.

As she sat on the floor of the garage, Jean wasn't angry at her stuffies for failing to protect the puppies. Not under the circumstances. But she was worried because now the puppies were alone in Heaven, which she was told was nice but was certainly huge and probably frightening for puppies who “weren't right” and had been sent there so young.

She had to do something. Some action was required, to make sure the puppies weren't scared and alone. Jean had thought up what she was going to do as soon as her mother was gone. But she spent a moment on the floor of the garage, petting Giraffe and Panda and Lion, trying to decide whether to make it a surprise.

Yes, she decided, a surprise was best. It gave less room for worry and fright. She gathered up some of her stuffies, as many as she could carry, set them outside the green garage door, and went back for the rest. Once she had all of her friends out of the garage, she closed the door to keep Mona inside. She took her stuffed animals to the picnic table, set them in a careful row on the bench seat so they could watch the sun sinking in the sky, and at the tap she filled the bucket her mother had used.

Once full of water the bucket was too heavy for Jean to lift, so she dragged it slopping over the patio stones and got it as near to the table as she could. From the picnic table she brought down Giraffe, because he was the youngest and most easily scared. Giraffe was from Africa and ate the leaves of acacia trees. She kissed him on the side of his long neck. Said, “Good Giraffe.” And plunged him headfirst into the water. She held him under for a minute or two, her hands turning numb from the cold. When she was sure the air bubbles had stopped, she put his sopping body aside on the patio and took the next in line, which was Lion. Lion who roared, but always obeyed when Jean told him to be quiet because she needed to sleep.

“Thank you, Lion,” Jean said. “I liked you very much.” And she pushed him to the bottom of the bucket.

One by one, and without tears, Jean drowned seven of her stuffed animals so they could be with the puppies. By the eighth, which was Bear, the sun had fallen to the top of the fence that separated the Horemarsh backyard from the Peltiers' next door, and Jean had had to fill up the bucket twice, because the animals swallowed so much of the water.

Bear was the hardest to drown, because Jean had known him the longest. He was not very pretty, because some of his stuffing had leaked from a foot before Grana could mend him, and his left ear was quite a bit chewed. But he had always slept with her, from the first day she could remember, and she knew she would miss the cushion of him against her body, and his curly brown fur against her cheek. That was being selfish, though. So after she had hugged him close for a long, long while, Jean pushed him under the water and drowned him, watching the bubbles rise.

When she was done, Jean took the soggy animals out to the side of the house, by the eaves spout, and dropped them into the same tin garbage can in which her mother had disposed of the puppies.

She had needed to do something. She had done what she could.