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Carney Hospital, Boston
DANTE SAT ON a bench in the hallway outside Cal’s room and vacantly watched nurses and doctors passing on their rounds. He went to light a cigarette and then realized that there was one already hanging unlit between his lips. He shook his head and slipped the other cigarette between his fingers back into the pack. He lit a match and watched the flame and felt that same sense of guilt all over again. He held the flame, and the tobacco blazed a pulsating ember as he inhaled with small, staggered breaths.
A hand came down upon his shoulder, squeezed gently. He looked up at Lynne, wearing her nurse’s uniform. It was the first time he’d seen her in it, and she looked authoritative in the crisp, well-ironed white, her blue eyes radiant despite the flesh around them appearing swollen, as if she’d gone without sleep.
“You doing better than him, I hope?” She smiled, but it was clear she was tired and the smile disappeared.
“I’m trying my best, Lynne.”
“Well, you should try harder. Haven’t seen you since summer, and you look like you’d barely push one hundred and forty on the scale.”
Dante smiled, sucked on his cigarette. “It’s all part of the jazz diet. Strictly cigarettes and gin.”
“Yeah, and that other stuff.”
Dante turned his eyes away from her and glanced down the corridor.
“I’m a nurse, Dante, and I’ve seen it all. I can tell when somebody is strung out as opposed to hungover.”
I’m not strung out, he wanted to say, but his voice broke, and she sat down beside him on the black bench. An intercom cackled with static, clicked and clicked, but no voice came through. The squealing roll of a wheelchair carried down the connecting corridor.
“Will he be all right?” he asked.
“He’ll be all right,” she said without emotion.
Dante let the cigarette smolder between his fingers, scratched at the stubble on his cheek. The lighted end of the cigarette came dangerously close to his eye. There was silence, and the hospital hallway was suddenly still. The hairs on his neck stood. It was a similar sensation to somebody whispering in his ear, like Margo did so many times when she had woken up before him, beckoning him from sleep with a soft kiss to his cheek, his temple.
Lynne shifted on the bench and sighed. “It’s time I got back to my shift,” she said. “You check in on him one more time for me, and then go get yourself some rest.”
He nodded but couldn’t look her in the eye. If he did, he’d be able to see contempt, or worse. She blamed him for Cal’s beating.
He watched as she walked down the hallway, and when she turned the corner, he noticed the sunlight coming through the high windows and dissolving over the linoleum tiles that had just been waxed this morning, illuminating them to an almost liquid appearance.
His cigarette done, he stood up from the wooden bench and walked into the room where the blinds were drawn and a lone lamp by the bed was turned on, giving that part of the room a comforting glow. He sat in a chair by the bed and watched Cal as he slept, glanced over his still body covered in a wool blanket, and to the bandages that seemed to hold his face together.
He lit another cigarette and spoke through the gray smoke that carried in a stream from his nostrils. “We’re going to get those fuckers. This ain’t the end of it.”
The threat felt empty to him, so he repeated it word for word, but still without true conviction, and the words fell flat and blew away with the smoke billowing in the room. Beyond the drawn blinds there was the sound of ice pelting the glass, and he felt a chill in his bones and a tightening in his throat. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “I promise.”