to the back door. She paused there, exhausted, her hand on the knob, praying for guidance, for strength. She prayed for knowledge, to understand what was happening, and to be shown the right thing to do.
She opened the door and walked down the steps to the shed. The shed from which she had dragged the dogs’ corpses to the corner of the yard, not knowing what else to do. Luckily, there had been an old shovel underneath the front porch, so she didn’t have to go back into the shed. She buried them in shallow soil and wept over their graves. Wept for them and for her children and for herself.
She stepped to the side of the shed, where orange and yellow mums were planted in a box beneath a small, four-pane window. She hesitated before looking inside, shading her eyes from the sunlight. Yard tools hung from pegboard walls inside, other tools stacked on shelves, and a small workbench. The sunlight through the window formed a perfect rectangle on the dirt floor, Ann-Marie’s shadow falling over a metal stake driven into the ground. A chain like the one on the door was attached to the stake, the end of which was obscured by her angle of vision. The floor showed signs of digging.
She went back to the front, stopping before the chained doors. Listening.
“Ansel?”
No more than a whisper on her part. She listened again, and, hearing nothing, put her mouth right up to the half inch of space between the rain-warped doors.
“Ansel?”
A rustling. The vaguely animalistic sound terrified her … and yet reassured her at the same time.
He was still inside. Still with her.
“Ansel … I don’t know what to do … please … tell me what to do … I can’t do this without you. I need you, dearest. Please answer me. What will I do?”
More rustling, like dirt being shaken off. A guttural noise, as from a clogged pipe.
If she could just see him. His reassuring face.
Ann-Marie reached inside the front of her blouse, drawing out the stubby key that hung on a shoelace there. She reached for the lock that secured the chain through the door handles and inserted the key, turning it until it clicked, the curved top disengaging from the thick steel base. She unwound the chain and pulled it through the metal handles, letting it fall to the grass.
The doors parted, swinging out a few inches on their own. The sun was straight overhead now, the shed dark inside but for residual light from the small window. She stood before the opening, trying to see inside.
“Ansel?”
She saw a shadow stirring.
“Ansel … you have to keep quieter, at night … Mr. Otish from across the street called the police, thinking it was the dogs … the dogs …”
She grew teary, everything threatening to spill out of her.
“I … I almost told him about you. I don’t know what to do, Ansel. What is the right thing? I am so lost here. Please … I need you …”
She was reaching for the doors when a moanlike cry shocked her. He drove at the shed doors—at her—attacking from within. Only the staked chain jerked him back, strangling an animal roar in his throat. But as the doors burst open, she saw—before her own scream, before she slammed the doors on him like shutters on a ferocious hurricane—her husband crouched in the dirt, naked but for the dog collar tight around his straining neck, his mouth black and open. He had torn away most of his hair just as he had torn off his clothes, his pale, blue-veined body filthy from sleeping—hiding—beneath the dirt like a dead thing that had burrowed into its own grave. He bared his bloodstained teeth, eyes rolling back inside his head, recoiling from the sun. A demon. She wound the chain back through the handles with wildly fluttering hands and fastened the lock, then turned and fled back into her house.
Vestry Street, Tribeca
THE LIMOUSINE took Gabriel Bolivar straight to his personal physician’s office in a building with an underground garage. Dr. Ronald Box was the primary physician for many New York-based celebrities of film, television, and music. He was not a Rock Doc, or a Dr. Feelgood, a pure prescription-writing machine—although he was liberal with his electronic pen. He was a trained internist, and well versed in drug-rehabilitation centers, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C, and other fame-related maladies.
Bolivar went up the elevator in a wheelchair, clad only in a black robe, sunk into himself like an old man. His long, silken black hair had gone dry and was falling out in patches. He covered his face with thin, arthritic-like hands so that none would recognize him. His throat was so swollen and raw that he could barely speak.
Dr. Box saw him right away. He was looking through images transferred electronically from the clinic. The images came with a note of apology from the head clinician, who saw only the results and not the patient, promising to repair their machines and suggesting another round of tests in a day or two. But, looking at Bolivar, Dr. Box didn’t think it was their equipment that was corrupt. He went over Bolivar with his stethoscope, listening to his heart, asking him to breathe. He tried to look into Bolivar’s throat, but the patient declined, wordlessly, his black-red eyes glaring in pain.
“How long have you had those contact lenses in?” asked Dr. Box.
Bolivar’s mouth curled into a jagged snarl and he shook his head.
Dr. Box looked at the linebacker standing by the door, wearing a driver’s uniform. Bolivar’s bodyguard, Elijah—six foot six, two hundred and sixty pounds—looked very nervous, and Dr. Box was becoming frightened. He examined the rock star’s hands, which appeared aged and sore yet not at all fragile. He tried to check the lymph nodes under his jaw, but the pain was too great. The temperature reading from the clinic had read 123° F, a human impossibility, and yet, standing near enough to feel the heat coming off Bolivar, Dr. Box believed it.
Dr. Box stood back.
“I don’t really know how to tell you this, Gabriel. Your body, it seems, is riddled with malignant neoplasms. That’s cancer. I’m seeing carcinoma, sarcoma, and lymphoma, and all of it is wildly metastasized. There is no medical precedent for this that I am aware of, although I will insist on involving some experts in the field.”
Bolivar just sat there, listening, a baleful look in his discolored eyes.
“I don’t know what it is, but something has you in its grip. I do mean that literally. As far as I can tell, your heart has ceased beating on its own. It appears that the cancer is … manipulating the organ now. Beating it for you. Your lungs, the same. They are being invaded and … almost absorbed, transformed. As though …” Dr. Box was just realizing this now. “As though you are in the midst of a metamorphosis. Clinically, you could be considered deceased. It appears that the cancer is keeping you alive. I don’t know what else to say to you. Your organs are all failing, but your cancer … well, your cancer is doing great.”
Bolivar sat staring into the middle distance with those frightful eyes. His neck bucked slightly, as though he were trying to formulate speech but could not get his voice past an obstruction.
Dr. Box said, “I want to check you in to Sloan-Kettering right away. We can do so under an assumed name with a dummy social security number. It’s the top cancer hospital in the country. I want Mr. Elijah to drive you there now—”
Bolivar emitted a rumbling chest groan that was an unmistakable no. He placed his hands on the armrests of the wheelchair and Elijah came forward to brace the rear handles as Bolivar rose to his feet. He took a moment regaining his balance, then picked at the belt of his robe with his sore hands, the knot falling open.
Revealed beneath his robe was his limp penis, blackened and shriveled, ready to drop from his groin like a diseased fig from a dying tree.
Bronxville
NEEVA, THE LUSSES’ NANNY, still very much rattled by the