Chapter 2 - The Next Four Minutes
The next four minutes ran on their own, without anybody choosing anything.
Marcus got down on his knees in the opening. The shaft smelled. That was the first fact, and it was the one he would not describe to anyone, ever, not to the investigator and not to the lawyers and certainly not to his son: it smelled like a room where a person had been kept.
The tape across his father’s mouth was silver duct tape, doubled, and it had been put on badly, folded over on one edge. Marcus got a fingernail under the fold.
“This is going to hurt,” he said. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
It hurt. Arthur made a sound through his nose and then his mouth was free and he did not say anything at all for about six seconds. His lips were cracked white at the corners. He worked his jaw twice.
Then he said, “What day is it.”
Not help me. Not his son’s name.
“It’s Thursday,” Marcus said.
“The tenth. September tenth.”
Arthur closed his eyes. His head went back against the metal wall with a soft knock, and Marcus heard himself make a noise he did not recognize, because that was the sound. Two quick, one slow, was what Eli had said. This was one, and it was the same sound.
“Then it isn’t done yet,” Arthur said.
Marcus’s hands were not working properly. The zip ties on his father’s wrists were the wide white kind, pulled tight enough that the skin had gone shiny and bunched over them, and there was no give at all. He put his thumbs under them and pulled anyway, stupidly, twice, before he stopped.
“Eli. Kitchen drawer by the stove. Scissors.”
Eli went. He went fast, and Marcus registered somewhere behind everything else that his son had not made one sound since the doors opened.
Susan had not moved from where she was standing.
“He fell,” she said.
Marcus turned his head.
“On the thirtieth. He came down the back stairs at night and went into the sideboard. He cut his head.” She said it evenly, in order, like someone reading off a chart, and her hands were folded in front of her. “He was confused after that. He kept going outside. He went down the drive twice in the middle of the night, Marcus. Twice. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t leave the house.”
“I know how it looks.”
“He’s tied up, Susan.”
“I know how it looks,” she said again.
Vincent had moved to the table. Not far — three steps — but he was standing at the table with one hand flat on the top folder, and when Marcus looked at him he was looking at the blue signature tab as if it might still matter.
Eli came back with the scissors. Marcus cut the zip ties. Arthur’s hands came free and he rubbed the deep red grooves with his thumbs, slowly, the way you do when the blood is starting to move again.
Marcus helped his father sit up more fully against the wall of the shaft. Arthur’s legs were stiff. He had been in one position a long time.
Outside the house, somewhere on the long gravel drive, a car door closed. Then another. Marcus heard the sound of boots on the stone steps.
Susan’s face changed. Not panic — calculation, then acceptance, then something closer to resignation.
“You called them,” she said to Marcus. It was not a question.
“I called when Eli opened the doors.”
Arthur looked at his daughter. His voice was still rough, but clearer now.
“You were going to wait until after he signed.”
Susan did not answer.
Arthur turned his head toward Marcus.
“The power of attorney. The company papers. They need ninety percent. They have seventy-eight. That is the only reason the tape and the ties were new.”
His sister had put those on him tonight, after she got the call that Marcus was two hours out, and not before.
“Sir. Step back from the opening, please.”
The trooper’s name tape said DEROSIER. He was young and he was very calm and he asked Marcus to sit down in a chair in the front hall, which Marcus did, and then he asked Eli to sit in the kitchen with a second trooper, which Eli did without being asked twice.
Marcus watched the paramedics work in the mouth of the shaft. They put a line in his father’s arm. Arthur answered their questions in a voice that kept losing its bottom and coming back. Name. Arthur Carrow. Date of birth. He gave it. Do you know where you are. He said, “My house.”
Do you know what year it is.
Arthur said the year, and then he said, “Ask me the harder ones.”
The paramedic, a woman of about thirty with her hair scraped back, said, “Okay. Who’s the president.”
“No,” Arthur said. “Ask me who has power of attorney.”
She looked up at the trooper. The trooper wrote something down.
Arthur turned his head on the backboard and found Marcus in the hall doorway.
“Did you sign anything,” he said. “Tonight. Did you sign anything.”
Marcus shook his head.
“They needed you,” Arthur said. “That’s the only reason there was a reason.” His eyes went past Marcus, down the hall, to where Susan was standing with her arms crossed under the light, talking quietly and steadily to a second trooper who was writing everything down. “They have seventy-eight percent and they need ninety. That’s why I’m alive, Marcus. Don’t ever be confused about that part.”
May you like
Then they lifted him and carried him out through the front door of the house he had been born in, and the last thing he did before the doors of the ambulance closed was look back at the torn portrait on the floor, the four generations of them on the steps, face-up on the rug with a footprint across it.
