33

Whenever I opened my eyes, Rick was there, his hands clasped, his face taking on a smile when he knew that I was looking. But I always saw the look that had preceded the smile.

Above me was a white, dead expanse—acoustical tile, with the holes in rows. I did not have to ask where I was. The familiar walls surrounded me, with that thick, glossy paint, paint so shiny passing people cast not only shadows but dim reflections. I recognized this place. I was in the Medical Center, a few floors from Nona’s children, and from her office.

“You’re looking good,” Rick would say, and my eyes would roll back to him.

There was one thought that returned again and again, amidst my morphine-coddled sleep: not dead.

Nona can’t be dead.

I felt the insistence, the denial, working against what my rational mind knew had to be true. Remember, I told myself: the sloppy crunch of the blows.

The sickening, ugly sound of the bats.

It’s better not to know. It’s always better. That way you can pretend that everything is the way you want it to be.

Whatever you do: Don’t ask the question.

I couldn’t wait any longer.

I braced myself, and stared up at the ceiling. “How is Nona?” I asked.

But my words had been soundless, airy nothings. I tried again as Rick knelt close. This time my words were audible.

“They won’t tell me,” he said.

I tried to sit up.

“They won’t say anything about her,” he said. “When I ask they just give me that look—that doctor look.”

The opiate was too strong, the pleasant lucidity lifting me, and yet pulling me from what I had to know, needed to know.

“But I’m sure everything will be okay,” said Rick.

Meaning: He wasn’t sure at all.

I was alone.

I grasped for the call button and missed. I took a moment to catch my breath, and this time I closed my hand around it and depressed the button.

The male nurse who fussed over me said, “Don’t worry about her. You’re looking fine.” He was a big man, overweight, panting as he tucked in the sheets.

Fine, I repeated to myself. The word was a steel blade, the sound of meat sliced. Fine. It was the sour echo of the word lie. I had suffered a serious concussion, and such patients need peace. You might even lie to a person like myself to keep that patient calm.

“How is Nona Lyle?” I asked.

The television was on to a news program, a handsome, silent woman giving voice to some information about Europe, I gathered, as the map of that continent spread into focus behind her.

The nurse gave me a smile. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I need to see Nona.”

He pinned me to the bed as I struggled.

My own family had been furtive when it came to injury and sickness. If one of us had ever been shot we would have stumbled home, and in answer to an inquiry about our health would have respond, “I’m fine, thanks.” There had always been that formality about our home, a calm that was both benign and maddening.

I made an interesting discovery as I let myself relax, pretending to surrender the effort: I was not critically hurt. My arm was weak, badly bruised. I was stiff and ached all over. But I was not a wreck.

As soon as the nurse reached the door, I worked my way to the edge of the bed. I sat up, posed dizzily, and stood.

I was attached to various apparatus, tangled in transparent cords that reached into every limb, into one nostril and down my throat. When I lifted an arm a bag of saline solution swayed and a pole threatened to fall.

As a tennis player, Barry Montague was gifted with a brilliant serve. His weakness had always been the quick strategy of the game. I had usually found him easy to work out of position, a victim of the well-timed counterstroke.

Just as I began tearing adhesive tape off my arms so I could free myself, Barry was there. It was good to see him. I needed to hear the truth, and I knew that Barry could not lie to me if I had him by the hand and looked him in the eye.

Barry helped me lie down again. The room swayed slowly one way and then another. He adjusted the blanket over me, and then our eyes locked. He was hoarse. “Her condition is very serious.”

“Is she still alive?”

Why did he hesitate before answering? “I would tell you if she wasn’t, Stratton.”

I choked on the words. I tried to sit up. “I don’t believe you. She’s gone.”

“She’s not gone,” said Barry gently. “She’s still with us.”

Tears flooded my vision. I turned my head so they could spill from my eyes.

He gave a tired smile. “But she still has a long way to come.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that her recovery is slow. You’ve been here three days. You’re doing well.” He hesitated. “Nona is struggling.”

“Struggling,” I echoed.

“She’s strong. She’s a fighter.”

I searched his words, echoing them in my mind. It was like translating Caesar in my student days, easy sentences, interesting stories, but at the same time oblique and hard to tease into sense.

To swallow my saliva took an effort. The plastic tube felt like the shaft of a pencil caught, maddeningly, in my throat. I said, at last, “You’re hiding something from me.”

“I’m trying to,” he said with a rueful smile.

“What’s wrong?”

There was a long pause. “She’s not responding.”

“What does that mean? ‘Responding.’ Talk to me like a human being, Barry.” I flung off my blanket. “I want to see her.”

“It might not be good for her. She’s too badly injured, Stratton.” He adjusted my pillow, giving it a little punch from the side. “Everyone is very optimistic about you.”

My lips formed the words: about me?

“Well, for both of you. The telephone has been driving the receptionists mad. There’s a mailbag of cards in the mailroom. You’ve been beat up. Not one-tenth as bad as Nona, but you took some tough hits.”

I weighed his sports-announcer diction against the way I felt about him, and decided not to be too critical. “I want to see her now. Help me out of this bed. Christ, it’s not a bed—it’s a web. Jesus, I have a—my penis is hooked up to something, for God’s sake.”

He said my name with that sharp, clear tone I remembered from the classroom, and from visiting people with disobedient dogs.

I was still, but I gave him a very hard look and he dropped his eyes for a moment. “As soon as possible,” he said.

I waited.

“First thing tomorrow,” he said.

I clenched my teeth, and found my tongue to be raw. I was aware of myself as I might be aware of another person. I was furious, and even in my damaged state I was stronger than my old tennis partner.

I was connected to poles, sacks of fluid. I was out of bed, and wires and cables clung to me. Urine spilled from a sack beside the bed, and flowed across the floor. I disconnected the catheter, with a yank that made me gasp as the long, hot wire pulled all the way down the shaft of my penis and fell to the floor.

I whipped the IV out of my arm. Barry called to someone just outside, in the corridor, and looked on as two large male nurses shouldered into the room. I gave them a move, a stutter step, a feint, but I was still too weak to dodge them. They stabbed a needle into my hip.

The two men wrestled me into the bed. I could feel the drug dissolving my strength. “If she dies, Barry, I’ll never forgive you.”

The drug had me. Pain, anguish, even love, was nothing. I tried to fight the sedative, but I couldn’t.

Barry looked back from the doorway. His eyes were friendly, and I knew that he was a man I could trust. I took in the array of plants at the far end of the room, under the television. This greenery was a violation, I supposed, of hospital rule, but was the evidence of the handiwork of some of the City’s more expensive florists and also the respect that the hospital owed my family.

“The first thing tomorrow,” he repeated, and I lifted a finger in agreement, and in command.

I woke. Childress stood over me. I tried to sit up. The drug held me, sapped me. “You let this happen! You knew what they would try to do.”

He sat down, said nothing.

“Don’t even pretend,” I said.

He looked tired. “We’re looking for suspects.”

I no longer had a tube in my throat, but even so my voice was rough. “You don’t expect to find any.” I recalled Fern’s body lying in the street, and grief made it impossible to continue.

Childress picked at a callus on his palm. “Tell me what you remember.”

“They wore masks.”

“License-plate numbers. The makes of the cars.”

I did not respond.

Childress blinked and rubbed a hand over his mouth, either uncomfortable or all-too sympathetic. “If you could give us any kind of description at all—”

But I wasn’t really listening. It took a moment for me to realize that Childress had spoken. I was caught up in a violent reverie, a fantasy of revenge that surprised me, and I had to stir myself, shifting my head on the thin hospital pillow.

“These are violent times,” he said, as though he couldn’t bear the silence.

“Do you know anything about Nona’s condition?”

“The doctors don’t talk to me,” he said. “Any kind of description. Size, age. Any impression of what race—”

I closed my eyes.

Childress’s voice was easy, intelligent. He wanted so much to be liked by me, but his dislike for police work was too plain. “This is common when there’s a violent crime. There’s a selective amnesia.”

“The light was peculiar,” I offered, feeling the need to apologize, and to be kind to this man who wanted to be everything at once: cop, fellow citizen, sympathetic visitor. “Not bad, so much as shifting, all glare and shadow.”

“That’s very unfortunate.”

We gave each other a long look.

“Can I tell you a secret?” said the policeman.

He wandered to the window of the room, an opening in the wall that disclosed virtually no view except for the sight of an angle of wall, concrete painted adobe yellow. I found myself once again liking this difficult cop.

I encouraged him to share his secret.

“If DeVere or Renman paid money for this, there’s a limit to what we can do.”

Once again, I missed Fern. He had thought of danger as so much rubbish to be removed by expert hands. A threat had brought a test pilot’s glint into his eye.

“I’m going to post a guard in the corridor,” said Childress. “Just to be safe.”

“They didn’t want to kill me, did they?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“You know what I want to do.”

“Understandable,” he began.

“If I find one of them. Just one.”

All that night I kept waking and thinking: Nona.

What are they hiding from me?