15

I had always been able to charm Clara Newcomb, the night shift head nurse. A long-running routine had evolved in our working relationship. I maintained that Clara, who was the mother of three teenagers and happily married, was a wild, pot-smoking hedonist who lived to party. She maintained that I was feeble-minded, that a rich uncle had bribed the hospital’s director. How else would I have obtained the cushy job of orderly, a job so obviously beyond my mental abilities? I tried to charm her that night with the old jokes, the old routines, but she wasn’t buying it.

“You don’t walk into an emergency room with a gunshot wound and walk out again without it being reported,” she told me. “I’m sorry, but that’s the law.”

“Clara, I’m okay. I’m pretty sure I’m okay, anyway. I tell you what. I’ll make a deal. If you’ll page Gill, and if he’ll come down here and take a look at me in an unofficial capacity, and if he says I’m okay, then we’ll forget I even walked in the door.”

Clara shook her head sadly. She wore silver-rimmed glasses and wore her hair pulled back so tightly it sucked her cheeks in, made her eyes bulge. This was all in a vain attempt to wrest authority from an impossibly benign, maternal countenance. “No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

“Yes you can. This was an accident. But Anna’s not well, and the last thing she needs is a lot of police milling around. They’ve got her over at Romner Psychiatric right now. Diane rang up a doctor she knows over there, and he admitted her. I just think she doesn’t need a lot of noise over nothing. I think.” I stopped talking; the words just came to an end somehow.

I didn’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t able to talk about Anna yet, that was clear. Clara said, “Okay. I’ll get Gill down here.”

I assured her that I would be fine. I had made my own cursory examination of the wound. A bathroom mirror revealed a two-inch-long furrow racing up my right shoulder, an inch to the right of my collarbone. I had been in the act of sitting up when Anna fired, and if she had moved her hand slightly to the right, the bullet would, just as smoothly, have entered under my chin and skidded unceremoniously into my brain, causing all manner of confusion. As things stood, the bullet must have gone on to smack against the wall behind me.

That was my diagnosis, anyway, and Dr. Gill Andrews confirmed it as he stitched me up. “Yeah, she didn’t draw a good bead on you.” Gill had listened to my story of an accident, the classic didn’t-know-the-gun-was-loaded story, and his matter-of-fact acceptance, a series of thoughtful nods, turned the tide with Clara. The police went unnotified, my visit unlogged. Gill was a young resident, five or six years older than I was, a lanky, longhaired guy who didn’t take himself too seriously. We were good friends, having discovered a number of shared enthusiasms (like P.G. Wodehouse and Bob Dylan) in late-night conversations in the E.R.. I’d had him over to the Villa a couple of times. He had briefly met Anna, although his sole comment had been raised eyebrows and the exclamation, “My God, what a beautiful girl.” I didn’t like the lifted eyebrows; they seemed to suggest that he had pictured me with someone less stunning. But then, I was always defensive about me and Anna together, always expecting some dissenting voice to shriek, “This union must be sundered. It is against Nature and all the gods!”

Gill sewed me up and then asked me what I intended to do. I realized, quickly enough, that he hadn’t bought my story.

“You are looking rotten,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Gill leaned forward. He had a long face with a large, beaked nose, a handy countenance for interrogations. “You look rotten,” he repeated. “All your freckles are faded out, and you have a general swampy, underground look to you.”

“Swampy? Is that a medical term?”

Gill nodded. “Worse than that. It’s the truth.” I laughed.

“You want to talk about this stuff?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t, and he nodded his head. “Yeah, well, you aren’t dead. Maybe I should get Vaughan to lock you up while your luck is holding.”

“Thank you.” I said. “I appreciate your concern. I’ve had a rough night, no doubt about it. But I’m okay now, honest.”

Gill said, “If they release your girlfriend tomorrow, what are you going to do? If some underpaid and overworked social worker says, ‘Take three Librium a day and see us on alternate Tuesdays at six’ what are you going to do? Look. I’m asking because I’m your friend, remember? I don’t think that gun went off by accident, at least not the way you describe it, and I don’t think your friends dropped her at Romner Psychiatric just because the trauma of almost killing you temporarily unhinged her. I would just like to know what you intend to do. You don’t look too swift, and I’m really not at all sure that you should be walking the streets.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said. I watched Gill’s mouth clamp shut in recognition of my unreasonableness. He shrugged his shoulders and stood up.

“Okay,” he said. “If you feel like talking later, give me a ring.”

I thanked him again and left.

When I returned to the Villa, Diane was up waiting for me. She told me that Anna had been admitted without incident, that everyone at Romner had been kind and efficient. Dr. Richard Parrish himself was going to interview her in the morning, and right now she was sedated.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She’s okay,” Diane said. I stared at her. “I don’t know how she is, really. Just because I work at Romner doesn’t mean I know what’s wrong with Anna. I’m vocational rehab, you know. I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“Did she say anything?” I asked. “When you were driving her over there, did she say anything?”

“No. Yes. She was in shock. She wasn’t making any sense, ranting all that mystical bullshit.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

Diane looked weary. Those quick, grey eyes had dulled, and the lateness of the hour brought me a vision of her ten years hence, still pretty but braver, more determined.

Apparently she hadn’t heard me. I repeated. “Did she say anything about me?” Diane looked up, clearly exasperated.

“Jesus, David. Jesus.”

“Well?”

Diane shook her head sadly. “As a matter of fact, she did. She said, ‘Tell David I love him.’”

I smiled. I hadn’t intended to, but I could feel an idiot smile stretch across my face. I don’t know what that smile looked like, but Diane’s eyes widened. “Goddam it, David!” she screamed, and before I could say anything she had jumped off the sofa and raced up the stairs.

I went upstairs to my own room. I could smell the fiery smell of the gun’s discharge, and I began to feel faint. I walked downstairs, knees trembling, and drank two beers, sitting in the soupy yellow kitchen light.

I felt better after the beers, and I lay on the mattress and thought of Anna’s words. “Tell David I love him.” Maybe everything will be all right, I thought. Why not? Well, why not?