I Thought You Were Dead Read Free Page A

Bye.”
    It was nice to think there was at least one person left on earth who thought of him as a little boy.
    Paul filled a glass with ice and poured himself a scotch, adding an extra splash for good measure, because it had been an extradifficult night, and tomorrow was likely to be worse. He took the drink to bed with him, where he read another paragraph of
Anna Karenina
. He’d been reading the book about one paragraph a night for the past three years. He heard toenails clicking against the floor. Stella had risen from her dog bed all on her own and had come to join him.
    â€œYou want up?” he asked her.
    â€œSure.”
    â€œPromise not to whimper in the middle of the night to be let down?” he asked. “I need my sleep. Chester’s owners are going to come get you and take you to their house while I’m gone.”
    â€œNo whimpering, I promise,” she said.
    He lifted the dog up onto the bed, where she made a nest for herself at his feet. He tried to read. Levin was convinced that Kitty thought he was an asshole. Paul was inclined to agree with her. He put the book down. He wondered if his father knew the difference anymore between being asleep and being awake, or if he had no words in his head at all and felt trapped, bound and gagged. Maybe the opposite was true and he was engaged in some kind of unbroken prayer and felt entirely at peace. Strokes could occur in any part of the brain, couldn’t they? Each stroke was probably unique, immeasurable or unpredictable to someextent. His mother said that before it happened, Paul’s father had complained of a headache and his speech had seemed a little slurred, though she hadn’t made anything of it at the time. “I saw him shoveling, and then when I didn’t see him anymore, I thought he’d gone down the block,” Paul’s mother had told him on the phone. “Then when I went to look for him, I saw him lying on the sidewalk and I thought at first that he’d slipped on the ice.”
    When he didn’t get up, she’d dialed 911, fearing he’d had a heart attack. The operator told her not to move him because jostling could cause a second heart attack. Paul’s mother had covered her husband with blankets where he lay and stayed by his side. They took him in an ambulance to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed a stroke. There they gave him a drug to dissolve the clot, but it would only work, they said, if it was administered in time, before too much damage had been done to the tissues in the brain that were being deprived of blood and therefore oxygen. Maybe the old man simply thought he was dreaming and couldn’t wake up. Maybe it was a good dream. Maybe it wasn’t.
    â€œWhat?” Stella asked. “You sighed.”
    â€œJust thinking,” Paul said. “If you could be a vegetable, what vegetable would you be?”
    â€œIs a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?”
    â€œThere’s been some debate. Why would you be a tomato?”
    â€œTo get next to all those hamburgers,” the dog said.
    â€œBut if you were a tomato, you wouldn’t want to eat hamburger.”
    â€œOf course I would. Why would I change, just because I’m a tomato?”
    â€œYou’d want tomato food. This has got to be the stupidest conversation we’ve ever had,” Paul said.
    â€œActually, this is fairly typical,” the dog said.
    â€œYou think my dad is going to be okay?” Paul asked.
    â€œSure. He’s a tough old bird, right?”
    â€œHe used to go to the park and play pickup hockey with the high school rink rats until he was, like, sixty-five years old.”
    â€œThe only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Paul said. “The only guy alive who thinks Gordie Howe was a quitter.”
    â€œYour dad’s not a quitter.”
    â€œThat’s got to be in his favor.”
    â€œOn the other