Chapter Nine

Joe Anderson dreamed he was on a small rowboat, with a rabbit. The rabbit didn’t do or say anything, it just looked at Joe, watching him row the boat. Moments later the boat ran aground, and the rabbit was actually a teddy bear full of lead shot. It weighed a lot for its size, and Joe struggled to carry it. He needed to deliver the rabbit, but he wasn’t exactly sure where to take it. There was a small building about two hundred yards ahead of him, so Joe decided he would take the lead-filled teddy in there. All he had to do was be careful not to touch any of the carnivorous plants lining the sidewalk.

He made it into the building, though he’d lost one of his shoes in the effort.

In Joe Anderson’s dream, he was in high school again, and late for a final exam he had forgotten about. He had forgotten about the entire class, actually. He ran to the classroom, but his legs didn’t work quite right, and the classroom was so far away. The bell began to ring, and Joe knew he needed to be in his seat before the bell stopped ringing or he would fail and have to repeat a year. The bell seemed unusually loud, and Joe started to panic. The teddy bear didn’t like loud noises.

He woke up, in the dark.

The phone next to Joe Anderson’s head rang again. He jerked up in bed and grabbed the handset.

“Yes? Hello? What?” Joe said. His tongue felt thick and clumsy. The rest of him felt thick and clumsy as well, he’d nearly fallen out of bed reaching for the phone.

“Joe?” asked the voice on the phone. “Joe, I don’t know what to do.”

Joe fumbled around in the dark for a moment or two before he found the switch for the lamp next to his bed. He turned on the light, and grabbed his alarm clock. It was three forty-seven in the morning.

“Sorry, who am I talking to? And you don’t know what to do about what?” Joe asked. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, wondering who could possibly be calling him at this hour with problems.

“Joe, it’s Judy. I think Thomas is dead,” said the voice on the phone.

“What? Why did? Nevermind, did you call an ambulance?” Joe asked. He struggled to sit upright.

“No, not yet,” Judy said. Her voice sounded panicky and Joe suspected she was very close to tears.

“OK Judy. Everything is going to be fine. You call the ambulance, and I’ll come over to your house as soon as I can,” Joe said. “Be sure to unlock your front door so the EMTs can get in.”

He hung up the phone, and spent a moment staring at the wall wondering if all this had really happened. Why would Judy have called him? He was pretty sure she and Thomas had kids. Of course, they’d never mentioned their kids outright. Still, he was just a friendly neighbor of theirs.

Joe got up, used the toilet, went back to his room and dressed himself as well as he could in a rush at four in the morning. That is to say, he stumbled out of his room wearing slippers, mismatched socks, a pair of black slacks, a t-shirt he’d gotten at the state fair three years ago and a green and yellow flannel shirt.

He grabbed his wallet and house keys from the shelf next to his front door, and stepped outside. Half-awake, he locked the door behind him, and walked down his sidewalk to the street, where he turned to walk to Judy and Thomas’s house. The air was surprisingly chilly, and damp. Ridiculous as he looked, he was glad for the flannel shirt.

After a few moments, an ambulance rushed past him on the street, lights flashing. The siren was not on, but the ambulance did honk it’s horn at him twice, quickly, in case he’d missed the bright pulsing lights in the middle of the night.

Joe walked faster.

He reached Thomas and Judy’s house, and he could see Judy standing just inside the front door with her back to the street, watching as the EMTs stomped through the house. Joe walked up the sidewalk and stairs and said, “Hi Judy.”

Judy turned to Joe and said “Hi” in a small voice, then “Come in.”

Joe could hear the EMTs in the back of the house, talking to each other. They came back out into the room, looked briefly at Joe, then told Judy they were sorry, and that they had called the coroner, who would arrive shortly.

They left.

“Oh Joe, what am I going to do?” Judy asked, and reached to hug Joe. Joe hugged her back and tried to comfort her as she cried.

“Don’t worry, he’s in a better place now,” Joe said. He hated the cliché, but couldn’t come up with anything better to say. “Everything is going to be ok,” he said.

“The only family I’ve got left now is my sister down in Texas,” Judy said after a long time. “And she’s not in very good health either.”

Joe didn’t know what to say to that, so he tried to wing it. “Yeah, but you have plenty of friends here, and, uh, the people you volunteer with…” He stopped there. After weekly dinners with Thomas and Judy for several years, he would have expected to be able to come up with something more comforting than Judy’s volunteer work.

Joe spent the rest of the night at Judy’s house. They waited for the coroner, then waited for sleep to come again.

It was a long night.

In the morning, Joe had a cup of coffee with Judy, then walked back to his own house to shower and change into something that looked slightly less insane. By then, Judy had gotten in touch with some of her other friends, friends who had been through this before, who rushed over to help her with all the arrangements that needed to be made.

Joe had breakfast, and went for a ride to clear his head.