Mr. Engel’s refrigerator is shaped like a giant tombstone. There is no freezer door, from what I can see. When I open the fridge, the handle rotating on a hinge to release the latch, I see that the freezer door is inside the compartment. Inside it, I find a metal tray with cubes. I free a couple and return to Mr. Engel.
He swallows reflexively when the cold hits his lips. He squinches his face—maybe the ice stings him. Then his tongue chases the cube when I pull it away. I lay it across his lips again.
Behind me, the phone begins to squawk.
Mr. Engel’s eye follows me as I jump up and return it to the cradle.
I dial again.
It rings and rings and doesn’t connect. I hang up and try again.
“I can’t get them to answer,” I tell Mr. Engel. When I look down, I’m startled to see that he has turned his head so he can watch me at the phone. I put the phone back and return to his side. With the towel in one hand and ice in the other, I dab and soothe.
“They said they’re on their way,” I said.
He blinks.
His eye assesses me.
“I’m your neighbor,” I say, in case that’s what he’s wondering. “Walt’s nephew? My uncle left me his house.”
He makes a sound through his parted lips.
“Sorry to barge in on you,” I say. “I came by to make sure you were okay in the heat and your door was open. I thought I heard you calling for help.”
He makes a low moan and I nod.
I pull the ice away.
“Are you… Are you trying to say something?”
His teeth come together and he makes a tiny hissing sound.
“Ice?” I ask.
It’s a good guess. He nods a fraction of a fraction of an inch.
I put the ice back to his lips.
(He was on the floor.)
He was on the floor.
I have to assume that he fell. Given that, I have to assume that he might be injured. Given that, I’m not sure I should move him. I want to take him outside, where there might be a chance of air moving around. I’m sweating so much that my own lips are beginning to feel dry. It almost hurts to blink.
Mr. Engel isn’t sweating at all. When I lean over to listen to his breathing again, he almost smells like a towel, fresh from the dryer. If all old people smelled like that, people would probably take better care of them. When Kimberly was in her second trimester, her friend Bethany gave birth. I practically had to drag Kimberly away from that child. All she wanted to do was smell that baby’s head.
I wonder why nature didn’t engineer a similar smell for dying people. It’s probably because wasting effort on old people isn’t an advantage for the species. I understand why nature is heartless, I suppose, but it seems especially cruel that it gave us empathy so that we can understand the depths of the heartlessness.
“I don’t know how long it will take for them to get here,” I tell him. His eye seems to widen a tiny bit. I hastily revise. “But I’m certain it will be any second. All you have to do is hold on for a few more seconds and they’re going to take good care of you.”
When I stop talking, I can hear him breathing.
There’s a tiny pause after each exhale before he starts pulling in air again. I don’t like it. My heart stops each time and it feels like the gap is growing.
“You need to stay with me, Mr. Engel,” I say.
I don’t tell him what I’m thinking about. In the delivery room, everyone tried to make me think that I had an important role in the process.
They would say things like, “Come on, Dad, you have to help her breathe.”
Like that’s a thing.
Then, with no notice at all, the demeanor of the doctors and nurses changed. They all saw something that Kimberly and I were completely unaware of. She was breathing and pushing, just like she was supposed to, and then chaos took over. Suddenly, I was pushed out of the way and the medical professionals descended. More masked people appeared. Kimberly faded as she descended into herself. The pain and effort disappeared from her face and the doctors fought hard to drag her back to the surface.
“When I was a kid,” I say, “I used to come up here a couple of times a year. My uncle bought his house right out of college, so it seemed like he had been there forever. Every corner of his house is distinctly him, you know? I think you were already living here when he moved in, right?”
He blinks and I take that as a yes.
“It was a magical place for me—nothing like the suburbs at all. The first time I came up here alone, to stay with my uncle for the whole summer, I was thrilled during the day and terrified at night.”
I smile at the memory.
“The sound that the train makes when it’s going across Bartlett Road. The way they always blow the whistle before they round the corner? It’s such a haunting sound.”
Mr. Engel’s lips part to a smile.
“I would always imagine that they blew the whistle to clear the vampires off the tracks, you know?”
I’ve never admitted this to anyone. It’s such an absurd, little kid thing to think.
He is still smiling and he nods again. Maybe he’s just reacting to the pleasure of the ice on his lips. A little moisture is rolling down from the ice cube, into his mouth. When Kimberly went into surgery, they told me that it was a good thing that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink
