Sloane Michaels’s secretary told Georgia that her boss often went to New York Hospital on Friday afternoons to visit his wife. But when Georgia got to Amelia’s room at the hospital, the door was wide open, and neither of them were there.
“She’s getting bathed,” a nurse explained. “They should be back any moment.”
Georgia idly scanned a wall of photographs opposite Amelia’s bed while she waited. The pictures showed a tiny, dark-haired sprig of a woman in running shorts and tank tops with numbers pinned to her back. In some, she was in full stride, her jaw set firmly against the pain, sweat pouring off her sinewy body. In others, she was collapsing over the finish lines, a look of relief mingling with something sad around her eyes.
There were medals, too—big, garish gold discs strung with ribbons that had faded from their once-brilliant hues. And newspaper articles that had yellowed with age. On a bedside table, a hardcover book lay open along a cracked spine: a biography of the runner Prefontaine. Michaels had been reading to her.
Georgia turned at the sound of rubber wheels on polished linoleum. Two nurses were wheeling Amelia into the room. Sloane Michaels walked behind them. His suit jacket was off and his shirt sleeves rolled up. His brown eyes registered shock and a certain wariness at Georgia’s presence.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Georgia stammered. “I just needed to speak to you for a few minutes. This was the only place I could track you down.”
She glanced over at Amelia lying on the steel gurney, her body twisted and emaciated, her freshly shampooed hair matted to her head, threads of gray sprouting like weeds among the black strands. “Would you rather I call you later?”
Michaels folded his arms across his chest. The smile that had beamed back at her from countless television interviews and newspaper articles was gone. He was reserved, protective. He leaned over and told Amelia who Georgia was. The woman’s dark eyes focused clearly. She parted her lips to say something, but the words were garbled.
“I suppose you might as well stay.” Michaels sighed, tenderly stroking his wife’s hand. “Amelia loves company.”
The nurses settled the woman back into her bed, then left.
“Amelia can’t talk much anymore,” Michaels explained. “But she understands everything.”
Georgia, accustomed to death but not to the process of dying, had no idea how to respond. Embarrassed, she nodded and smiled, then leaned on the edge of the bed, nearly toppling a monitor. Michaels pulled up a chair and Georgia sat stiffly on it, fidgety and nervous in the sour, stuffy room. She’d thought herself so tough, so superior in life experience to Sloane Michaels the other night. But watching the kindness and patience he showed with his wife, she wondered which of them was really the more cocooned.
“Amelia wanted to be a firefighter, too,” said Michaels. “Right after she got out of grad school. But that was before they let women on the job.” He took his wife’s limp hand between his. “Amelia’s quite an athlete.”
The present tense took Georgia aback. For a man so shrewd in business, he seemed willfully boyish and naive in his wife’s presence. Georgia sensed it wasn’t an act. Sloane Michaels was used to controlling every aspect of his life. Yet his wife was dying before his very eyes. Georgia suspected that, on some level, he couldn’t accept what he couldn’t control.
Michaels’s cell phone rang. He cleared his throat and took the call—sounding, to the world, like a man in charge. He dispatched the caller quickly, then explained that he was due back for a meeting at three P.M. “If we walk out together, will that give you the time you need?” he asked Georgia.
“That’s fine,” she said.
Michaels leaned over and murmured something to his wife, then gently pressed his lips against hers. In the hallway, his pace quickened until he was nearly at a gallop. He seemed to need the physical release. His way of decompressing, perhaps. Georgia wouldn’t speak until he was ready.
“She loves people,” Michaels murmured when they reached the lobby. “God, she was a talker. Talked to everybody…I worry that if something were to happen to me…” His voice trailed off and he seemed suddenly embarrassed. Georgia rescued him.
“I shouldn’t have intruded upon your time with her today. It was bad judgment.”
“No harm done.” He unrolled his sleeves, slipped back into his gold cuff links, then wiped a hand down his face. He reminded Georgia of an actor getting ready to go onstage. “What did you want to see me about?”
“Your brother, Fred. I understand you sent him to Atlantic City last Sunday?”
“I have property down there. I asked him to pick up some rental receipts.”
“When was he supposed to return?”
Michaels shrugged. “I don’t think I gave him a timetable. I may have told him to take a couple of days down there and enjoy himself.”
“Didn’t you specifically tell him not to come back until Tuesday?”
“Ms. Skeehan, you couldn’t tell my brother anything. He always did what he wanted.”
“Were you aware he’d returned Monday?”
“Not until they pulled his body from the wreckage.”
“You never told me he lived in the building.”
“Because you’re a fire marshal and it was an illegal occupancy. Look, I let my brother have a small room in the basement. Otherwise, he’d have been homeless. He was too messed up most of the time to pay rent. If I’d put him in any of my residential buildings, the other tenants would’ve complained. Spring Street was funky, the building commercial. He didn’t cause any harm down there—”
“Except probably deal drugs.”
Michaels sighed. “He may have. I’m sorry if he did.”
He barreled through the revolving doors. His limo was waiting at the curb. “I know that to you, Ms. Skeehan, my brother was a lowlife. But sober, he was a good guy, and I loved him. Just because he came back early from some errand doesn’t mean he set any fires.”
The chauffeur got out and opened the rear passenger door. Michaels offered to drop Georgia someplace. She declined.
“He talked a lot about burning the building, you know,” she told him as he got into his car. “He wanted to hurt you.”
“He hurt me, all right—he died. I buried him yesterday.” Michaels looked up at the hospital and shook his head. “People get sick. People die. All the money in the world, and you can’t do a damn thing about it. That’s the biggest hurt of all.”