NINE

“Please do call me,” said Rhonda.

She was looking at my mother, but she was talking to me, not a trace of Texas in her voice.

“If there’s any news,” my mother said, and if you didn’t know her, you would think she had not a single negative feeling in the world toward Rhonda Newport, watching as she clip-clopped toward the elevator.

Half an hour later my mom got tired of pacing, running her fingers through her tumble of red hair, and got on the phone. It was a pay phone down the hall, and I could not hear what she was saying but I could hear her voice, a lot of talk over a period of some twenty minutes. She flicked her address book like a fan, looking up at the ceiling, white tiles with tiny holes.

She marched back into the waiting room to report, “We can move him if we’re not happy,” she said. “Stanford, anyplace, if we aren’t satisfied with the medical treatment here. There’s someplace he’s going to track down for me, where they grow nerves in a petri dish, somewhere in L.A.”

This was vintage Mom, one of the things my dad couldn’t stand—when in doubt do something, something smart, something stupid, it didn’t matter.

She didn’t look at me. “I called Billy Brookhurst. I had to track him down, he was all over the place.” Billy Brookhurst was a white-haired lawyer, wrinkled and blind in one eye, a handicap that made him seem more shrewd than any of us. He looked at reality through an unusual pair of glasses, one lens blank white.

“It’s up to Dad and Sofia,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

An hour later my mother came back to report, “Sofia is in intensive care with him. She’s tripping over tubes.” She generally called Sofia something disparaging, even crude.

I expected some change in the light, in the color of the walls, at this news, but the floor and the ceiling stayed as they were, bright, fluorescent light off every surface.

“I want to see him,” I said.

My mother had new, fine lines round her eyes. The waiting room was empty except for the two of us, the old magazines, the potted serpent plant—an imitation living room. She said, “One visitor at a time,” giving the words a spin, invisible quotation marks.

“Where is Intensive Care?” I asked, unable to control my voice.

She shook her head.

I couldn’t talk.

“Zachary,” said my mother, putting her lips close to my ear and speaking in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Zachary,” she began again. She liked my name, loved saying it.

She held my head to her shoulder, a fine, feminine tweed, heather brown, something wintry she had thrown on against the cool of San Francisco summer. “I hate hospitals, too,” she said.

“The surgery was successful,” said the doctor. “The initial trauma is repaired as far as possible for now, and I think we can all breathe a temporary sigh of relief at this point.”

“You extracted the bullet,” said my mother.

“This was a through-and-through wound,” said the surgeon, without stopping to choose the words, ready for the next question.

He looked like he could have been my dad’s brother, a little younger than my father, but with the same high forehead, one of those people so intelligent they look handsome even when they are bone tired. My mother is not tall, and when she is insistent, she stands right in front of a person and looks up.

“Of course, I have to caution you,” he said, trying to buy time with a little extra conversation, avoiding questions about sutures and disinfectant.

I could tell what my mother was thinking: Why of course?

The doctor said, “He is not, for example, breathing on his own.”

For example.

“When you have major damage like this we have to be willing to give everything a little time,” said the doctor. “He’s not conscious yet,” he added.

“Where, exactly, was he shot?” I heard myself ask in a kind voice, gentle, being nice to this man. I felt that I had to be especially sweet-tempered toward this surgeon and avoid hurting his feelings in any way, as though I had some power over him.

“In the neck,” said Dr. Monrovia, shaking his head a little as he said it, hating having to report such a thing. He touched his forefinger to a place below his ear, just above his collar.

“The perpetrator,” said my mother, gathering her strength to say this, “put a gun up to him at an intersection. And—” She couldn’t say shot him.

I had a bad taste in my mouth, like after I’ve run to catch a bus and missed it, and kept running, all the way to the next stop—an attempt that almost never works. As slow as they look, buses are faster than people.

“The bullet shattered one of the cervical vertebrae—one of the bones of the neck,” he said.

We waited, but it wasn’t like any of the pauses in normal life, while a video starts or a movie begins, or while a lecturer finds the right place in the notes.

He put his hand to the back of his head, rubbing his skull, perhaps without being aware of what he was doing. “The transverse process, the spinous process—parts of the vertebra—are badly fragmented.”

The scientific-sounding words would have been a comfort to my dad, but to me at that moment they sounded shocking, obscene. At the same time, they meant that he was in the hands of science, like hearing that a traveler is delayed in a foreign city, a famous, faraway place.

We could both tell that Dr. Monrovia was working up to something without being sure how to go on. I had the feeling that with most families he would simply talk, stop talking, and leave.

“The spinal cord is involved,” he said.

A nurse padded across the tile floor, wearing white shoes with white soles, a tanned woman as tall as Dr. Monrovia. He turned his head and listened to her whisper, and gave a nod.

“You can go in and see him now,” he said. “Both of you.”

This sounded like good news, but the way he said it made me pause. Something had changed. My father’s condition was not the same as it had been. We could all go see him because it didn’t matter if there was one visitor or three.