Day Sixteen

Alfie had no idea what he could do. The thought of Caroline joining them in the after world was such a depressing possibility that he just couldn’t think straight.

“Hello!” called Maurice, waving his trunk. “Something told us you might be in need of our assistance!”

“Elliot!” said Lucy. “Alfie, do you remember?”

For a moment, Alfie was completely lost and worse, he expected Lucy was lost too. Was it all too much for her? And then, he got it.

When Elliot was a young boy, he had a stuffed elephant called, inexplicably, Ricardo. Elliot talked to Ricardo as if he were a real person, brought him to the table as a real person and generally never let him out of his sight. He had gone into meltdown when Lucy had suggested Ricardo might enjoy a short spin in the washing machine. In time, Ricardo was pretty much regarded as a member of the family. They had even taken to addressing Ricardo as if he were a very small, very gray and very stuffed living person.

“Ricardo!” Alfie exclaimed.

Maurice tilted his head as if perplexed.

“Ricardo? Ricardo?” said the emperor penguin.

“Sounds a bit fowl to me,” said the flamingo, once again high fiving the puffin.

“You just quack me up!” screeched the puffin.

Alfie and the others ignored them.

“Maurice,” asked Alfie, “Buy any chance, do you have any physical force points left?”

Reluctantly, Alfie and Lucy left the birds to look after Caroline and brought Ivan and Maurice back to Elliot’s house. Elliot was just getting up and did not look too pleased about the whole process of waking. He looked as if he could have used a few more hours in bed. Briefly, Alfie wondered where his wife was.

“OK,” said Lucy. “The packaging for the pills was left in Caroline’s room where Elliot isn’t likely to notice. So what we need you to do, Maurice, is do your trumpeting thing from her room so Elliot comes to her room, sees the packaging, puts two and two together and calls for help. Got it?”

Maurice nodded his great head. His chest seemed more puffed out with the weight of the responsibility.

Alfie watched his son carefully. He again felt a heavy regret he did not know Elliot the man any more than he understood Elliot, the child. Elliot simply looked like an older, bigger version of the kid that had treated his old man with disdain before moving out of his life completely.

Elliot picked up his phone, pressed a few keys and listened.

“Valerie?” he said. “Oh darling, how good it is to hear your voice.” Elliot relaxed visibly and sat back down on his bed.

From somewhere, deep in the house, there was a low rumbling. Alfie had never heard a sound like it but reckoned he had better things to worry about.

“I can’t!” said Maurice.

“Oh just do it!” answered Lucy.

“I can’t wait to see you again,” Elliot was saying. “I just want you to be in my arms—“

Maurice trumpeted so loudly, Elliot was practically blasted from his bed. Jumping to his feet, he dropped the phone in a complete panic and for several seconds looked as if he were doing an extremely poor rendition of the tail end of a haka dance. In the meantime, Alfie could not recall ever being exposed to such a loud, intense or sustained blast ever in his life. It was like a single power chord, on acid, but magnified.

“JESUS H CHRIIIIIIIIIST!!” Elliot screamed. He ran to Caroline’s room with Alfie not too far behind. As abruptly as it started, it stopped. Maurice was completely spent and had managed to evacuate an impressive amount of elephant faeces with the effort. He wobbled as if about to faint.

Elliot looked about the room wildly. He checked the stereo, the wardrobe and the windows before his eyes settled on the empty pack of medicine not quite obscured by the blankets on Caroline’s bed. Gingerly, he picked up the packet. Alfie could now see the packet was Vicodin.

“Sweet Jesus,” Elliot muttered under his breath when he picked up the package. As Alfie and Lucy had hoped, he rang Caroline’s school and told them they should call an ambulance.

Elliot had grabbed a jacket and was out the door really before Alfie or the others had registered what was going on.

Caroline was conscious and lucid when led to the ambulance but Alfie recognised that there was also a resignation in her eyes, like an acceptance that things were never going to change and life was going to go on as it always had. He knew, that she had only learned how to do things better and more thoroughly the next time.

“We did the best we could! The best we could!” shouted the emperor penguin. The penguin looked into Alfie’s eyes and saw concern and even more worryingly, a belief there was far worse to come.

The flamingo and puffin looked at Alfie with such pity that he would have gladly plucked them.

Brandon was only recently plucked from death but he was completely unsure if wanted life to go as it was going. Recently, he had felt as if life were escaping from him. It used to be so simple.