Paulsy
by Gerard J Waggett
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
I didn’t expect to see Walter Grublin at the reunion. He had not come to the fifth. He ordered Dewar’s on the rocks, a heavy drink for a kid who had never touched a beer all through high school. I offered to pay, but he thanked me no.
While he waited for his drink, I told him, “I was sorry to hear about Paul. I thought about going to the funeral, but I didn’t think you or your mother would want me there.”
Walter couldn’t tell me I was wrong.
The two of us stood underneath a basketball hoop. The summer before freshman year, we talked about trying out for the team. Given our heights, we’d been dreaming.
The bartender handed Walter his Dewar’s in a clear plastic cup.
Before he walked away, I needed him to know: “My daughter has cerebral palsy.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” His sympathy sounded genuine.
“What’s really weird… you remember Rick Leonard, right?” It was a stupid question. “I only mention Rick because his son also has c.p. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? That he and I would both have kids with c.p.”
As a man of science, Walter saw a coincidence, nothing more.
As a guy who barely passed chemistry, I couldn’t help but think, “This feels like karma. For the way we treated Paul. Maybe we’re getting what we deserve.”
Walter rolled my hypothesis through his head for half a minute before responding. “That would make Paul punishment for something my mother had done.”
I did not mean to imply that. I considered Mrs. Grublin a living saint, and I would have told Walter that, had he not walked away.
When I returned to my table, I saw that Worm had finally shown up. His hair, which had begun falling out sophomore year, was now completely gone.
Ben Rota, our self-appointed ringleader, was looking for the Rolling Rock I was supposed to be getting him. “Did you not have enough money?” he asked. “If you need money, I have money.”
To prove his point, he pulled out a gold clip filled with hundred-dollar bills. For him, that was part of the ensemble—sort of like the Band-Aid over Rick Leonard’s left eye.
“I have money,” I told Ben. “I just got sidetracked.”
Worm, who’d been watching, asked, “How’s Paulsy doing?”
Ben being Ben needed to correct him. “That was Wallsy. Paulsy died a couple of years ago. He took a header down the front steps of his house.”
Worm stifled a laugh, which was all the respect he was going to pay Paul Grublin’s passing.
I was about to excuse myself when Rick informed me, “Worm was just telling us that his son’s been diagnosed with c.p.”
“That’s really strange,” I said.
Worm, who lived to take offense, told me, “You better not be calling my kid strange.”
I reminded him, “You called Paul Grublin a lot worse.”
“So did you,” he shot back.
“Shut up, the two of you.” Ben Rota didn’t want his pregnant wife coming back to a fight.
An unwritten rule at these reunions: wives and girlfriends were left at home. But no one ever expected Big Bad Ben to follow the rules. To be fair, Gabrielle Rota was not the only wife here tonight, but she was the only one dressed for prom. Her red gown made quite an entrance, especially wrapped around a woman seven months pregnant. And because Ben always had to go you one better, his wife was pregnant with twins.
Ben towered over the poor woman. Like the money clip, he had brought her home from a business trip. He referred to them both as impulse buys.
Gabrielle could tell something was going on. “What did I miss?”
Ben filled her in. “It turns out Worm’s kid is also sick with cerebral palsy.”
“So, all three of you?” Gabrielle’s question came out like an accusation.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” I said.
“It doesn’t sound like one.” And with that, Gabrielle Rota turned and walked away.
Ben excused his wife’s abrupt departure by explaining the effects of pregnancy on the expectant mother’s bladder.
Rick reminded him, “We’ve all been through this.”
“But it’s worse with twins”—because Ben always had to go you one better.
His ringtone was the opening bell from the New York Stock Exchange. Gabrielle was calling from the foyer: They needed to leave right now. Although I couldn’t hear her end of the conversation, I could imagine what she was saying: they needed to get themselves and their babies away from Rick, Worm, me and all our bad karma.
When I got home, I found Lily in bed with a stack of food magazines. I kept telling her that she should write her own column, Cooking on a Budget. In the three years we’d been married, I had packed thirty pounds onto a body that was already carrying a few too many. Before Chloe came along, Lily described my physique as “a dad body in training.” Lucky for me, she found that sexy.
I sat down on the corner of the bed to take off my shoes. I balled up my socks and tossed them into the laundry hamper. Two for two. Maybe I should have tried out for the basketball team.
“Who’d you see?” she asked.
I told her. “Walter Grublin showed up.”
“Did you talk?” She was hoping that we had.
“We talked briefly. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Which became a theme for the evening.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Ben’s wife dragged him out before nine.”
Lily whacked my shoulder with a rolled-up Bon Appetite. “You told me ‘no wives.’”
“She was the only one,” I lied, “and you wouldn’t’ve liked being around her.”
To be honest, I thought about bringing Lily. I wanted to show off this beautiful blonde angel who had descended into my life. Even sitting there in my t-shirt with her hair pulled back, she outclassed Ben’s wife in her red prom dress. I told Lily “no wives” because I couldn’t risk her hearing the truth about Paul Grublin. As far as she knew, Paul and I went our separate ways because I outgrew the things he liked, comic books and ghost stories. The real story would have killed her.
At St. Brendan’s, Paul had been pitied, so I was praised for being friends with “a boy like that.” In high school, he was ridiculed. To avoid being ridiculed alongside him, I became one of his tormentors.
“Any good gossip?” Lily asked.
“Not gossip,” I told her, “but something really weird came up tonight. Do you remember Rick Leonard?”
Lily remembered his drunken moonwalk at our wedding.
I told her, “His son has cerebral palsy. So does Worm’s.”
Normally, Lily giggled at the mention of Worm’s name. Tonight, she went blank. She sat there staring at the foot of the bed.
She stared until I asked, “Are you okay?”
“The night Chloe was born, I saw something in the delivery room. I thought I did, but I definitely felt it.” Lily was sure about that.
“What did you see?” I asked.
“It looked like a man’s shadow. It was standing at the end of the table, right in front of Dr. Caruso, but I still could see Dr. Caruso. Does that make sense?”
Last night, it wouldn’t have, but tonight, it did.
“At first, I thought it was my father.” Thinking about the man brought a brief smile to her face. “I thought he’d come to witness the birth of his first grandchild. Then, this thing reached its hand inside me, and I went completely cold down there.”
I remembered Lily shouting the word “Cold!” I also remembered her passing out. For a second, I thought she died.
“When I came to,” she said, “the shadow was gone. I figured it was some kind of bad dream. But it wasn’t a dream, was it?”
I couldn’t say for sure, but I had to ask. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before now?”
Lily had spoken to her nurse about the vision. “She started talking about postpartum depression and drugs they’d have to put me on.”
“Have you seen this shadow since that night?” I asked.
“No, but I’ve always suspected that he’s the reason Chloe has cerebral palsy. And now that you tell me about your friends, I’m sure of it. This thing reached its hand inside me and smothered Chloe until it caused brain damage.”
None of the doctors we’d seen had offered any better explanation than that.
I reached over to take Lily’s hand, but she couldn’t take it, not until I answered her question. “Is there some reason why Paul Grublin would do this to Chloe? Is there some reason why he would hate you and your friends?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth, not until I absolutely had to. Instead, I told her, “Paul Grublin was the happiest guy I knew. Even with the cerebral palsy. He was always smiling. And we can make sure Chloe is just like that, always smiling.”
“Danny, I can’t go through that again.” She was now standing beside the bed. “I can’t raise two sick children.”
We had recently worked up the courage to try for another baby. I took her hand and assured her, “We can put those plans on hold.”
“It’s too late.” With tears rolling down her face, she said, “This was supposed to be a happy surprise.”
Unlike Chloe, Paul Grublin had not been smothered by any shadows. The only monster in that delivery room had been an impatient obstetrician and his favorite pair of forceps. Doctors like him had earned Presley-Morgan its nickname, The Pre-Morgue. Paul’s mother sued for ten million dollars, then settled for three point five. The figure had been calculated upon the premise that Paul would live much longer than he did.
Six months ago, Walter Grublin joined Presley-Morgan’s error prevention team. He’d been hired to ensure that what happened to his brother never happened to future children. I was waiting outside his office when he stepped off the elevator. He did not look happy to see me.
I didn’t care. I had banged in sick just to talk to him.
“Five minutes.” That was all he would give me.
Paul’s picture hung on the wall directly across from Walter’s desk. Looking at the picture and then at Walter, you would never guess they were twins. Paul’s face was rounder, and his hair untamable. With Walter’s hair, every strand knew its place. Paul also loved to smile while Walter’s lips had practically disappeared from lack of use.
Because he looked after Paul, everyone assumed that Walter was the older brother. In actuality, Paul had been born three minutes before Walter. If Walter had come out first, he would have been the one with cerebral palsy.
Conscious of my time frame, I cut right to the bone. “The other night, I told you that my daughter and Rick Leonard’s son have cerebral palsy. It turns out, Worm also has a kid with c.p.”
“Worm has reproduced?” That fact alone disturbed Walter.
I saw no need to tell him about the two new Rotas coming into the world.
“Three cases of cerebral palsy among friends… that has to be more than a coincidence. It has to be,” I insisted.
“Not scientifically,” Walter replied.
For the moment, I needed him to think unscientifically. “When Lily—that’s my wife—when she was giving birth, she saw this thing in the delivery room. She described it like a moving shadow.”
Walter said, “There are lots of lights in the delivery room. Lights cast shadows.”
“I know that. I was in the room with her. But this wasn’t a shadow,” I said. “He just looked like one. And Lily didn’t just see him. She felt him. When he reached inside her, she said she turned cold.”
Once again, Walter had a scientific explanation. “Hormone levels go a little haywire during labor. They can affect a woman’s body temperature.”
“You don’t want to believe me.”
Walter reminded me of the nights I stayed over at their house. “You used to make up some really wild stories. Ghosts and werewolves and alligator men living in the sewer.”
Paul loved my stories, the gorier the better.
Walter remembered that. He also remembered, “You used to claim that every story really happened.”
“This is Lily’s story, and she’s not the type to make things up.” I held my rising anger in check.
Giving my story the benefit of the doubt even for one minute was not easy for Walter’s scientific brain. “So how do we get from your wife seeing a ghost to your daughter having cerebral palsy?”
“According to Lily,” I said, “this ghost smothered Chloe until he induced brain damage. Loss of oxygen during birth can cause cerebral palsy.”
Walter knew that. He knew all the risk factors. He knew the list better than some of the doctors on staff.
“She’s terrified he’s gonna do it again.” Lily and I had decided not to tell anyone about the pregnancy, but she would forgive this one exception. “She is so terrified, she’s considering abortion. You gotta talk to him, Walter. You gotta make him stop.”
“Talk to who?” Walter asked.
“Paul.”
Walter looked at his brother’s picture. “You think Paul is doing this?”
In seventh grade, Paul was obsessed with fantasy games, board games not video because of the palsy. Whenever we played, his character was always a demon or an evil wizard. And he loved the word vanquish. “I will vanquish you,” he’d say. When he got really angry, he’d say, “I will vanquish you and your children for generations to come.”
Walter reminded me, “That was a game.”
“Have you seen Paul since he died? Be honest,” I said.
Walter had dreamed about him, but that was all.
“What about your mother?” I asked.
Walter paused before he answered. “She still talks to him.”
“So, she believes he’s around.”
“She believes he’s in Heaven.”
“I don’t think he’s in Heaven.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew how Walter would twist them around.
“Why are you turning him into some kind of monster?” he asked. “To erase your own guilt?”
“I’m just trying to make sense of what happened to my daughter.”
“But you’re not making sense,” Walter said. “If you’re looking for a common denominator, start with all the drugs the four of you did.”
That possibility had crossed my mind. We smoked a lot of weed, and we snorted a lot of coke. Worm, named for his underground connections, did not always hook us up with the best quality stuff. But none of those drugs explained what Lily saw in the delivery room.
“Can you please talk to your brother?” If necessary, I was willing to beg on my hands and knees.
Walter said, “I would love nothing more than to talk to my brother, but he’s dead. And Paul would never hurt children.”
“Not even to hurt us?” I asked.
“Not even then.” But Walter didn’t sound quite so sure about that.
I had one last shot here. “Even if you don’t believe in ghosts, can you just say the words? Can you please just say, ‘Paul, you need to leave them alone.’ He’ll listen to you.”
Walter took a breath. “Danny, you need to leave me alone. And you need to leave right now.”
As I was heading out the door, I noticed Paul’s picture frame. While I’d been sitting here, the glass had spider-webbed—but only around the eyes. It made Paul look like he was wearing broken glasses.
By the time Walter came out of the little boys’ room, Paul had been shoved into one of the supply closets. His glasses were being passed around. Ben was offering twenty bucks for the best Paulsy impersonation.
“Give them back.” Walter trumpeted his voice like he was issuing a decree from Caesar.
Unfortunately for him, Ben Rota hadn’t taken Latin, and he didn’t take orders. But he did make deals. “We’re in the middle of a contest. If I give you these glasses, you gotta give us your best Paulsy imitation.”
Walter said, “I can do that.”
Ben held out the glasses. Then, right as Walter was reaching for them, Ben pulled them away.
“First,” he said, “I wanna hear you do it without the glasses.”
Worm and Rick pulled out their phones.
Like Paul, Walter had long ago stopped looking in my direction for help.
“Come on, Wallsy. We’re waiting.” For inspiration, Ben dangled the glasses just over Walter’s head.
Walter took a step back and rushed Ben. Ben, who outweighed him by a hundred pounds, knocked Walter to the ground with one push.
The glasses cracked when they hit the floor. But that wasn’t enough damage to satisfy Big Bad Ben. Walter Grublin needed to be punished for his attempted trickery. Because of the rain, Ben was wearing his Timberlands that afternoon. After he stomped the glasses, Rick and Worm took their turns. I didn’t want to join in, but it was raining. I needed a ride home.
Lily could not listen to any more stories like that. She just wanted me to answer one question. “Why did the four of you do something so cruel? Was it just the cerebral palsy?”
“That was part of it,” I had to admit. “But what really triggered Ben was Paul’s smile.”
“His smile?” Lily couldn’t fathom how a smile could tick someone off.
“Ever since we were kids, Paul smiled a lot. I used to think it was part of his condition, but it was just his way. Ben would see him walking down the hallway or eating lunch in the cafeteria, and he’d ask me, ‘What the hell does someone like that have to smile about?’”
“He meant someone with cerebral palsy?”
I nodded my head. “Thanks to Ben, Paul’s smile started to drive all of us crazy. One day, Ben came up with the name Paulsy. He thought it was brilliant. We’d yell ‘Paulsy!’ every time we saw Paul smiling. Maybe if he’d just taken the hint, things wouldn’t have escalated.”
Lily warned me, “Don’t you dare pin any of this on him.”
In my mind, all the blame lay with Big Bad Ben. “After he broke Paul’s glasses, Paul didn’t walk around school smiling anymore. Eventually he stopped coming altogether.”
“Is that what it’s going to be like for Chloe?”
I’d been asking myself that same question. School was three years away, but I was already agonizing over her first day.
“Are you going to walk her to school that day? Or any day? Are you going to show up at any of her dance recitals? Or will that be too embarrassing?”
It killed me that Lily needed to ask these questions.
Mrs. Grublin greeted me with the words, “You are not welcome here.”
The woman’s house no longer smelled like fresh baked cookies. Every day after school, they would be coming out of the oven just as dinner was going in. And I was always invited to stay. Until the day I married Lily, I never ate as well as I did in this house.
I couldn’t get over how much Mrs. Grublin had aged. She had given birth to Paul and Walter somewhere in her forties, but she could pass for much younger back then. Now she looked eighty, in part because of the weight loss. Surprisingly for someone as thin as she’d gotten, the cold porch didn’t seem to bother her. But she wasn’t going to stand here all day.
So, I cut right to the bone. “Walter tells me that you still speak to Paul.”
“You need to stop bothering him.”
“I wasn’t trying to bother him,” I said. “Did he tell you about my daughter?”
Mrs. Grublin knew all about Chloe’s cerebral palsy as well as Lily’s impending abortion. “I also know about Rick Leonard’s son, the Worm baby, and those poor motherless twins.”
“What do you mean ‘motherless?’”
Mrs. Grublin responded to my question by shutting the door.
The word “motherless” followed me down the driveway. I would have been mulling it over the entire ride home if not for the headlight. At some point while I was talking to Mrs. Grublin, my right headlight had shattered. It had shattered into ten thousand little pieces—and two larger ones, each shaped like an eyeglass lens.
Back in high school, Ben Rota appointed Rick Leonard our designated driver. Rick still drank as much as Ben, Worm and me, but he drove drunk more soberly than any of us could pull off. Rick didn’t mind the responsibility. He loved Ben’s Escalade. He loved cars. He loved driving them, racing them, and fixing them. Since graduation, he had been working in his father-in-law’s garage.
I pulled in there on the way home. Before I could show Rick the shattered headlight, he asked if I heard the news about Gabrielle Rota. “She’s lying in a coma, pretty much brain dead.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“According to Worm, Gabrielle was getting ready to take a bath when her water broke.”
“Isn’t she—?”
“It was early even for twins,” Rick said. “But what’s really weird, there was ice in whatever you call that water.”
“Ice?” I wanted to make sure I heard that right.
“Not ice cubes,” he said, “but crystals. Ben saw them on the bathroom floor.”
“Is that humanly possible?” I asked.
“Keep in mind,” Rick said, “I’m getting this story from Worm, who’d been smoking. Anyway, they get to the hospital, the doctors rush her up to maternity, Ben’s doing the breathing with her, and she just stops.”
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“This morning. At least, the doctors managed to get them both out.” Rick was talking about the twins. “They’re in the preemie unit.”
“Gabrielle was worried about something bad happening.” I reminded Rick about her abrupt departure at the reunion.
Rick was blaming The Pre-Morgue. “That’s why I’m putting together a lawsuit. You want in?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Mrs. Grublin’s been living pretty nice off her settlement.”
“Her life hasn’t been nice,” I said. “We were horrible to Paul. All because Big Bad Ben hated his smile.”
Rick saw no reason to bring that up while Ben’s family was struggling for their lives.
I had to ask Rick, “You ever think, maybe this is his revenge?”
“Whose revenge?” Rick asked. “Wallsy? Wallsy doesn’t have the ballsy.”
“I’m not talking about Walter. I’m talking about Paul.” I debated for a moment before I told Rick, “Lily saw Paul’s ghost in the delivery room the night Chloe was born. If you ask your wife, I’m betting she saw him, too. I’m betting she felt something cold inside her.”
Laughter was not the reaction I was expecting.
“What part of this is funny?” I asked.
“I’m picturing Ghost Paulsy with really thick glasses walking into walls instead of through them.” Rick couldn’t believe that I didn’t find that image hysterical, but he knew someone who would.
While Rick texted Worm, I noticed the light strip directly over his head. Three of the rods had begun to flicker. I then felt a draft coming down from them, a very cold draft.
Suddenly, my shattered headlight could wait until morning.
The second my car pulled out of the garage, all four rods in the light strip exploded. Right before they did, they began blinking. They blinked and blinked and blinked until Rick finally looked up.
In my rearview mirror, I saw Rick on his knees with his hands pressed against his eyes.
I found Lily in the nursery. She was sitting in her grandmother’s rocking chair, knitting something I couldn’t yet identify. Chloe lay in her crib, sleeping off her six o’clock bottle. She looked angelic when she slept. You couldn’t tell anything was wrong with her. I stroked my thumb along her cheek, careful not to disturb her quiet perfection.
Our little girl needed a brother or a sister, someone who would take care of her the way Walter looked after Paul. Lily also wanted to give her that. “But can we take the chance?” She’d been asking me that over and over since Friday night.
For the first time, I could tell her, “I think we’ll be okay.”
“Did you get through to Mrs. Grublin?” she asked.
“No. The woman will always hate me. And rightfully so,” I admitted.
“Then how can you be so sure?” Lily couldn’t risk having this baby unless we were sure.
I considered telling her about the light strip in Rick’s garage. Those rods could have exploded into my eyes, but they didn’t. Paul let me drive away with nothing worse than a broken headlight. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell Lily what happened without confessing that I’d driven away from a friend who’d been seriously injured.
What I could share was Gabrielle’s coma and the poor motherless twins. Being premature put them both at a higher risk for cerebral palsy.
I pulled Lily into a hug and told her, “That’s gotta satisfy Paul’s need for revenge.”
Lily wanted to believe that too — “But it’s a horrible thing to wish upon those two babies.”
I wasn’t wishing anything bad on either of those boys. I was wishing it on their father.