We had a leisurely breakfast late the following morning and exchanged greetings with Bob West, informal in his Sunday morning attire of bathing suit, T-shirt, and sandals. “We live in a place up in the hills,” he explained. “On Sundays I just drop by to make sure everyone’s come to work. If we lived at the hotel, the staff would be bothering us every time they had to change a bar of soap. That’s the trouble with this country: no one ever wants to make a decision on his own.”
Hinano diverted him from his litany of woes by extracting a vague account of his visit to Mareta in the hospital. As expected, it was indeed Mareta Atatia that I’d picked up on the road. She was in a semi-private room and fairly presentable. With a cheery “Take care, gang,” he strolled off and left us to our second pot of coffee.
“Maybe we could go visit her,” suggested Hinano.
“You can’t think of anything better to do than that?”
“What? Again? You’re an old man, Alain. You have to think of your heart.”
“I am,” I said truthfully. “I hate getting involved with victims. I’ve seen too many of them, and they take too much out of you.”
“You’re not a cop anymore,” she said cuttingly. “You’re supposed to be a human being. When are you going to start thinking and feeling like one?”
I hadn’t expected this from a girl I’d picked up in Tahiti. I examined the contents of my coffee cup, abashed. “Are there any flower shops open on Sunday?” I said at last. “No? Well, go pick some in the grounds around here and let me finish my coffee. Then we’ll start on Project Redemption: Alain LaRoche.”
* * * *
Sunday visiting hours at the Hôpital de Mamao seemed to be as relaxed as the general administration. Children ran up and down the corridors hooting and screaming, radios and cassettes blared, guitars plinked, visitors snoozed on the floor beside their invalid relatives, bottles of beer and red wine were passed around, and in the indigent wards there were even a couple of meals being cooked on primus stoves. Over everything rang the high-pitched Tahitian voice raised in laughter and song. It was the jolliest hospital I’d ever been in, with the specters of pain, anguish, and death seemingly banished. I found my spirits lifting.
They were immediately dashed.
Bob West had said Mareta was presentable. I wondered what he would have meant by saying someone was in bad shape—probably that the vultures were already nibbling at his liver.
We found her in a large sunny room she shared with a Tahitian lady who spent most of her time in a wheelchair out on the balcony that ran the length of the building and that permitted exciting wheelchair races among the patients. So for all practical purposes she had a room to herself.
She looked as if she could have used a private ward in a somewhat less lively environment than the Hôpital de Mamao, the Mayo Clinic perhaps, one where a little less emphasis was placed on glorifying the human face of medicine and little more on its scientific aspects. But who could say? Perhaps the doctors at Mamao were actually highly skilled, supremely conscientious practitioners who disdained to let themselves be sidetracked by flashy but non-essential gimcrackery such as soap and water. At least her ribs seemed to be held tightly together in a mass of tape that circled her body, there was a plaster cast on her leg, and bandages around her shoulders.
There was also dried blood on the pillows and sheets, on her face and arms, and thick clots of it in her hair. Her long black tresses were a tangled rat’s nest of blood, leaves, twigs, and whatever else had been on the hillside two nights before. One eye was swollen shut, there was an enormous bump on her forehead, and whatever portions of her skin weren’t black with dried blood were red with mercurochrome. She looked like the Bride of Dracula after a seven-course banquet.
Hinano gasped, and even I was a little taken aback. Recovering, Hinano pecked her unenthusiastically on both cheeks, while I limited myself to lifting her lifeless-seeming hand and giving it a faint squeeze of encouragement. She was still heavily drugged, and our conversation was halting at best. She recognized Hinano, but had difficulty fitting me into her scheme of things.
“Why did he do it?” asked Hinano bluntly after a while. Tears welled in Mareta’s eyes and slowly rolled down her cheeks as she shook her head feebly. Hinano dabbed at the tears with a soiled towel, then at her own eyes. She balled up the towel and threw it to the floor in disgust. “We’ll be back,” she whispered to Mareta, leaning over to kiss her. “You just go to sleep for a moment, and when you wake up I’ll be right her to clean you up.” She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me from the room.
“Oooh, that Susan!” she hissed, as she clattered down the stairs. “How can she possibly run a hotel? She saw her like that yesterday and didn’t do a thing?” She stalked angrily to my Fiat in the parking lot. “You’ll just have to take me.…”
Her voice trailed off. Susan West straightened up from the open trunk of the car parked beside mine. We stared at each other in mutual surprise. Her arms were laden with pillows, towels, and nightgowns. There was a large carton in the trunk. While she and Hinano exchanged the customary kisses I peered inside. Kleenex, soap, rubbing alcohol, glasses, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, mineral water, hairbrush, combs, fruit, books, magazines, slippers, and a dozen other items of feminine interest. She’d had a busy morning.
“I was just cursing you out,” said Hinano sheepishly.
“I don’t wonder,” said Susan. “She was like that yesterday noon and the head nurse told me everything would be fixed within a couple of hours. When I came by early this morning she was just the same, so I went yelling and screaming around the hospital, but everyone says it’s not their fault. They just shrug and say, ‘What do you expect on a weekend?’ It’s disgusting.”
Her eyes glittered with purposeful anger and her jaw was set with determination. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a mere doctor or nurse trying to get in her way. She no longer seemed slightly simple, or spaced out. I apologized to her mentally for ever thinking she was.
“I was on my way home to get some of this stuff,” said Hinano. “Let’s see what you have.” She inventoried it and decided it was lacking only in eau de cologne and toilet paper. “I’ll bring that later. In the meantime, our gallant rescuer here of stranded damsels can wait in the parking lot while we go and start making her feel like a human being again. Here, amuse yourself. She handed me a magazine grabbed at random from the carton and stumped off grimly. Susan West flashed me a quick smile and followed hastily.
I opened the car and rolled down the windows. The temperature was about 145 degrees. I got out. The sun beat down. The ice-cream shop across the street was closed. I picked up the magazine. It was in French, and told you how to make your own dresses.
It wasn’t going to be easy, being remade into a human being.