Hospital. Nashua. Next afternoon. No one saying the word “coma,” but each of them thinking it. Wood. Pet. Anita. Nils. Grace and Pimletz, off to the side, wanting to be let in. It’s out there and obvious and foremost in their heads, but what comes out is how lucky he was, Norman, the way his car looked, the way the truck driver gave his report of what happened. People talking just to hear themselves, to avoid dwelling on how things are. The swing sets were mostly fine, the talking goes, except for a stretch of snapped rungs on one of the ladders and a bent plastic slide, but the Buick apparently spun and hit in such a way that it seemed to want to swallow the truck. It collapsed in on itself, around the truck nose, making room.
Pet went out to the scene with Nils on the way to the hospital to see for herself. She came away astonished there was even any air left in the Buick after the impact, forget poor Norman’s smushed body, but the rest were able to get the same impression from the pictures—that is, all but Anita, who couldn’t bring herself to look.
It was Nils noticed the broken glass from Norman’s flavored vodka bottles, and, when he pointed it out to Pet, she turned on him. “Say anything and I’ll kill you,” she threatened. “I mean it.”
“What?” he said, knowing what, and that she probably could.
“I mean it, Nils. This gets cleaned up. That’s what you do, right?” She looked at him, her eyes mad. “You’re in the clean-up business. Clean it the fuck up.” She knew she was being stupid, crazyridiculous, that the police already had been to inspect the crash, that the fact of Norman’s drinking was already a matter of record, but she wanted to give Anita a chance at some perspective. She wanted her friend to deal with whatever she had to deal with before dealing with everything else. There should be at least that.
Nils stepped back to his van and took out a vacuum and a loose duster. He knew not to mess with one of these Woodwomen when they got going with one of their ideas. They want what they want.
What’s also out there and obvious and not being talked about is Wood resurfacing in this way after so long. A tragic accident, a chance encounter, a misdirected phone call, and he is sucked back into how he was, alongside the same subset of people who drove him to what he did or, at least, didn’t keep him from it.
Funny, the way things happen. Ironic, funny, one of those. The doctor says there’s a good prospect Norman will come out of this okay, the next twenty-four hours will be the tell, so Wood thinks in terms of his own circumstance. He’ll have time to get his mind around what happened and, for now, supposes he’s been looking for a way back in, a reconnect with his kid, a chance to undo some of the pieces of the new life he’d made and remake pieces of the old. If he’s honest with himself (and this seems a good place to start), he can see that lately he’d been thinking it was too sudden, his checking out the way he did. Too extreme. The deeper he got into it, the further removed, the harder it was to reach back out to Norman, to reclaim the parts of his old life worth having. He’s never placed his thinking in just these terms, but here it is. It wasn’t like the old Wood to squelch an impulse, so he can’t exactly fault himself for making his sudden and not entirely thought-out exit, but he can at least listen to the new impulses finding him in this room. He can remain open to his own remaking. After all, they remake pictures all the time out there in L.A., so the notion is essentially innate to his species; it’s what you do, when there’s nothing else. The Tall Blonde Man with One Red Shoe. Cape Fear. The Absent-Minded Professor. Even The Sons of Simon Pettigrew—one of his, a western, updated as a vehicle for Angela Basset, Whoopi Goldberg, and Halle Berry, with Cicely Tyson in his gender-bowed title role. Even the ones opened to not very much business are up for remaking.
It’s like a do-over, he thinks, a second serve, and he wonders if this isn’t where Norman has taken them all right here. Another chance to get it right. An editor’s mark—STET—on an unfinished manuscript: this whole section right here . . . take it out . . . no, wait, never mind, leave it the fuck in . . . what the fuck was I thinking? It’s out and then it’s in, right and then not right, and then (somehow!) right again. It can’t make up its mind.
He looks over at Grace, not knowing what to do with herself, surprised to be included in this unfolding. He marvels at the places he’s made for her in the middle of his uncertainty. He works to understand his feelings. No, she’s nothing like the women he’d been with before, and it’s not just the way she looks that sets her apart. It’s not her delightful lack of education. (In the past, if he went with someone who’d never gone to college, it was because she hadn’t yet finished high school.) It’s where she comes from, what she’s done, how she manages. She works fourteen-hour days, mostly on her feet, makes just enough to keep going, send a little bit down to Florida for her father. He wonders what her dreams were when she was young, what she wanted, if she’s even come close. He wonders why they’ve never talked about this, why he could never share with her the truth about himself, and, underneath the wondering, he recognizes the thing between them was mostly about comfort. Was, is, whatever. There was an easiness to how they were together, once it got going.
And then she went and shocked the shit out of him when the news of what happened to Norman began to filter through the coffee shop last night. He all but dropped this Axel Pimletz’s phone. He let out a low, almost guttural moan and scrambled to Grace’s rabbit-eared black-and-white, desperate for confirmation. When it found him a few minutes later from the mouth of Tom Brokaw on NBC, there she was, and now everything between them is subject to change.
“A sad footnote tonight to the legacy of actor Terence Wood,” Brokaw began, and by the time they popped a years-ago photo of father and son onto the small screen, Grace was at Wood’s side, her arms around him in a slanted bear hug, his nose thick with the grease and sweat and trouble of her working. Man, it threw him to have to hear about his kid like that, and, at that point, they didn’t have this doctor’s good prospect to hold onto. They didn’t know shit, and, on top of that, to have to process that the charade of the past months had been revealed, and somewhere in the middle to have to take in the up-close dew of perspiration on Grace’s upper lip and not bite it off and have it be a part of him. It was a condemnation of the life he’d quit and the one he’d replaced it with, and an anchor holding him to the new place he’d made, all at once and mixed together. He couldn’t think where to put his regretting.
“So, what?” he said, turning up from Grace’s compassion, leaving her lips alone. “Everyone knows?”
“No,” she said, brushing back his hair, dabbing at the slather of quickly gathered nose run from his moustache. She covered his brow with downy-wet kisses. “Just me.”
He thought about this and considered it a good thing not to have to make a serious scene in front of Gracie’s regulars; it was enough of a scene to be crying like this, collecting the softsweet kisses of his great bear of a woman. The rest of it would come, he realized, but he didn’t want to have to explain his crying just yet, his behavior since he pitched into town. He wanted to keep it to himself. And to dear Grace, bless her big-bottomed, bear-hugging soul.
Then, it followed, there was the matter of how his estranged and nearly widowed wife came to find him on a left-behind cellular phone, and Wood didn’t leave it to Pet to explain. He was too flustered to think of it straightaway, and it didn’t occur to him in any kind of focus until after he’d pressed the End button on the device, scrambled over to the television, and started wondering if these latest turns weren’t being taken by some other group of luckless people, if maybe there wasn’t some other plane of existence he might tap into where the choices of the past months had not been made. It was a long processing of information, the inverse of how it was last fall. Then, in the first weeks after his checking out, he had to remind himself each morning of his new circumstance until, finally, the things he had going with Grace and Maine and Larry Lobster and his being out from under had taken hold. When he heard Pet at the other end, it wasn’t enough to erase his new situation. It opened a door, but it didn’t pull him through.
Pimletz, emerging from the bathroom after just these few moments, picked up that something was happening. His nose for news began to flare, the way it did when he walked in on someone else’s breaking story in the newsroom. It wasn’t quite a sixth sense, but it was a fifth and change. “Hey,” he said, returning to his table, trying to guess at how the attention of the room had shifted, “what gives?” He said this to no one in particular, not really knowing anyone in particular, and not fully realizing it had been about a decade since people said things like “what gives?”
Wood slipped from Grace’s comforting and stepped to the table. “Your phone,” he said, holding it out to Pimletz. “It rang.”
“Really?” He’d forgotten about the phone. It didn’t explain the attention of the room, but it was something to think about.
“Look at me,” Wood insisted, pulling close, the juice of his various lives by now coursing through him like never before. “You know who I am, or you fucking with me?” His voice had turned since Pimletz first came through the front door. It was hard, flat.
“Harlan Trask,” Pimletz said quietly. He paused to see how this registered on the face up against his. “Did I get it right?”
Wood inched closer still. “Look again,” he said.
Pimletz looked again, but he had no idea what he was looking for. The other man’s face was wet, perhaps from crying. It wasn’t raining outside that Pimletz could remember. He looked up, inexplicably, to see if the sprinkler system had been activated, if they even had one in a place like this. He couldn’t think what he’d missed.
“You’ve never seen me?” Wood tried. “You don’t know who I am?”
Pimletz shook his head.
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“And now you’ve seen me it’s not a face you can place?”
He looked again, making certain. “No. Never seen you before.” For a beat, Pimletz thought this Harlan Trask was getting ready to do a card trick with the flowery show he was making of the fact they’d never met.
Just then, Wood made the connection himself. It knitted itself together and came clear. If he had to wait on Pimletz it would never have happened, and he led the asshole his publisher hired to finish his book (it was in the papers!) to a back table to sort through the mess of these last hours. It took a while explaining, and when he was finally out with it Wood felt a tremendous weight lifting from him. First there was the weight that had lifted when he disappeared six months ago, and now there was this new weight in its place, and alongside his thoughts of Norman, he kept thinking, okay, it’s done. I’ve said it. Now I can breathe.
Pimletz, as the situation gradually emerged, couldn’t move off thinking what this meant for his book. That was the first thing on his mind. First, last, only. He wanted to flip ahead, see how it would all turn out, where it would leave him. He wanted to summon Hamlin on the cell phone, get the fucker’s help in figuring the puzzle. He wanted to call Volpe, tell him to hold the first edition, he had a scoop he wouldn’t believe. (But then he thought, well, maybe this isn’t one for the paper just yet; maybe we can make more of a splash with the book if we time it to coincide with publication; he was thinking like a business man, as if he had a real piece of the back end, when really all he cared about was being counted in.) He wanted to ask Terence Wood how it happened that he was not, in fact, dead, and what his plans were regarding his autobiography. He wanted to ask about Norman, how he was, what his chances were. In all, he wanted to say the right things, but his skills in this area were never much to begin with, and here they were further eroded by concern for his stalled book project. He didn’t have it in him to think what it all might mean for the man who suddenly appeared before him as alive as he had ever been on screen, the man who’s left-behind life Pimletz had all but taken up. He couldn’t think what it meant for Norman, laid up in a hospital down in Nashua, or Pet, waiting on Pimletz back at the cabin. No, all that floated to the surface was what this meant for Axel Pimletz, his going-nowhere career, the twenty-five thousand dollars that had been waiting for him at the other end, and the thought that, probably, with Wood back in the picture, he wouldn’t be getting any more of whatever it was he’d been getting from the man’s wife.
Pet, on the other side of the cut cell transmission, was left to draw her own take on the same situation. First, there was Norman to consider, but, on top of that, now there was Wood. What the fuck was that? Him picking up Axel’s phone? Him not being dead? What? She wondered, is this some end-around, him wanting to get out of a picture? Or not paying alimony? It made no sense, it wasn’t like him, but it was all she could think.
She’d gotten used to Wood’s being dead, the memory of what they had, the way his star had lifted to where it was. First, it was waking up every day and having to remind herself what had happened. Then it was processing what had happened, and then it was a part of her. One morning, she woke up and it just was, and it colored the memory of everything that had come before. Just as the motion picture industry had found a way to set aside the shit work Wood had been doing at the end of his career and celebrate the good work he did at the front, Pet had found a place to put his shitty treatment of her and not have it infect the rest. There was that time, early on, when he brought back some kind of venereal disease from his sleeping around, and Wood slinked into bed, thinking Pet was asleep, and applied some topical antibiotic to her pussy beneath the covers. He was too chickenshit to come clean about it, and she was too much of another kind of coward to confront him, and they moved about in this kind of mutual deceit until they could no longer look away from it. It wasn’t just this one thing. It was all fine on the surface, but there were layers and layers of betrayal underneath, to where the surface finally fell through. But now, with Wood gone, Pet had at last been able to shore up those betrayals and return the surface to the top, where everything between them was fine once more. Now, at last, she could look back on his under-the-covers deception and think it was just Wood, you know. It was just how he was.
And now this. Out of nowhere, he was back, and she didn’t know what to think. She simply told him her news about Norman as if it was the most natural thing in the world, his answering the phone. Oh, it’s you. Wood. Hey. Long time. Her thoughts were all over the place, her head a collage of how things were—early on, late, just last week—and how they were just then, and how they’d be the week after next. It was all bundled together, but all that came out was about Norman. She delivered her news, and Wood was gone, leaving Pet to wonder if Wood was so much a part of what she was feeling about Norman that she couldn’t separate the two. She had no instincts for a transformation like this, no place to look for help. She wanted to call Anita, see if she couldn’t get her to look at things more clearly, but she stopped herself before dialing because, ultimately, you know, this whole revelation flowed from what happened to Norman. As confused and alone and spooked as Pet was, she still couldn’t tell Anita about her son over the telephone. She’d have to drive down, tell her in person, but then she realized—shit!—Anita’d likely bump into the news on the television or hear it from someone else, and she couldn’t think which was worse, to have to hear it from her on the telephone laced with the news of the born-again Wood, or to have to hear it from a stranger.
As it happened, it was Nils who brought the news home to Anita, and he did so lovingly and with great care. At least he meant to. He didn’t know the part about Wood, so he just went with the straight accident account, which he collected from the portable radio in the carport, where he’d been organizing his tools and equipment. He went about it systematically, the way he would a major carpet job after a flood. He wrote out a little script in his head and hoped he could follow it. Then he went back into the house through the kitchen, where he found Anita tidying up from dinner, making sandwiches for tomorrow’s lunch.
“Sweets,” he said tenderly, “there’s some news about Norman, just over the radio.”
Anita turned away to steel herself against what she might hear.
“He’s been in an accident,” Nils continued, like he planned. “He’s okay, they said. In the hospital in Nashua.” He threw in the part about his being okay. They said no such thing, just that he was taken to the hospital. If he was dead, they would have said he was dead.
“When?” Anita said. “Where? What?” Her head filled with knowing and with images of Norman as a little boy, crushed inside his Big Wheels plastic riding toy. It wasn’t her full-grown Norman being pulled from some full-blown wreckage, it was her baby being pulled from a heap of primary-colored plastic. Then she tried to think what Norman was doing in Nashua without telling her, thought maybe Nils had heard it wrong. She didn’t question the part about Norman, just Nashua, as if it mattered whether he was hit by a flatbed truck in New Hampshire or someplace else. Either way, it was like she always feared. Since she gave birth, she walked about expecting some great tragedy. She didn’t know how other people sent their children off into the world when she was so consumed by worry. Even now, with Norman living on his own in New York, it hasn’t gotten any better. She noticed, in among her racing thoughts, that she was thinking still in the present tense, as if nothing had happened. He’s living on his own in New York. He’s got his own place. He’s fine.
“We can call,” Nils said, his hand on her shoulder from behind.
“Yes,” Anita said, still turned away, looking down at the sandwiches.
And they did.
Cut to Norman’s bed in the critical care unit, all of them not saying anything, making room for what’s changed.
Wood, finally: “So, like, what the fuck am I doing here, right?”
His wives flash him looks that, between them, could mean a hundred things, but there is no good place to begin.
Nils moves to fill the silence. “Frankly, yes,” he says, “now that you mention it.”
“And, frankly, who the fuck is she?” Pet says acidly, indicating Grace in the corner of the room. “Your personal trainer?”
Wood’s not about to let Pet crack about Grace’s weight or the fact of her being here, but he’s stripped himself of any authority he might have had over the situation. He’s up for grabs, and so is Grace. “How ’bout we just leave Gracie out of it,” he announces, as firmly as his position will allow.
“Say goodnight, Gracie,” Pet straightlines.
“Pet,” Pimletz interjects, surprising himself with his attempt at forcefulness. The others look at him as if he’s just brushed his teeth with dog vomit, and he slinks back to his place on the wall. He doesn’t know how he fits into this scene, if he fits at all, and he tries to look at his situation objectively. Here he is in the raw middle of these movie people, people he reads about in magazines, and they’re all about as fucked up and fucked over as any group of people he’s ever met. He’s connected in only the most tenuous way, and yet, when he thinks about it, he realizes he is more deeply rooted to what’s going on than anyone else in the room will likely acknowledge. They may not be larger than life, these people, but they are life itself—Pimletz’s life, at last!—and he sets this out in his head as if it makes sense.
Also, he’s back onto The Wizard of Oz, the one movie he knows well enough to reference. He’s trying to think like these people, connecting his life experience with a scene from a movie. What he comes up with is everyone hovering around Dorothy’s bed, waiting in black and white for her to wake from her dream, only here it’s not a dream, and he’s no Auntie Em or Uncle Henry or whoever the hell else they had crammed into the shot. About the best he can do for himself is the guy who eventually turned out to be the wizard, the carnival humbug on a breeze through town who, for some reason, stops by to check on the little girl hit her head in the storm. He’s like the farm hands, too—no ability to feel each moment, to think for himself, to stand up for his convictions—but, mostly, he’s like the guy who doesn’t belong. He doesn’t even get to come in the room, he has to lean in through the window. That’s the parallel. He’s got no role beyond circumstantial, and he leans himself more firmly against the back wall of the small room, waiting for the others to realize he’s got no reason to be here and start asking him to leave. It’s only a matter of time.
Grace, too, is wondering how she fits and waiting for it to come up in strained conversation. She doesn’t want to press too close to Wood, waits for him to come to her, if that’s what he wants. Whatever he wants if fine. Let him play it how it works because, eventually, she knows it’ll be just the two of them back in her apartment above the coffee shop or maybe someplace else. His son will be okay, she’s sure of it, and his wives will crawl back into the lives he left behind, and it will be just them, back up in Maine, somewhere. She believes this deeply, and, in the places where believing doesn’t reach, she prays for it.
“How ’bout I get us something to eat?” she suggests, wanting to get out of the small room, leave these people to themselves.
“I hear you’re good at that,” Pet stings. “That’s why he hired you.”
No one moves in Grace’s defense, not even Wood, but he does turn and ask if she wants company. She shakes her head no, but he goes anyway. It’s like she’s got her own gravitational field, this hold she has on him. He hadn’t realized it until now, out in the real world, and now that it’s hit him, he gives himself over to it.
Yielding, he flashes back to a time in Cannes, a side trip to Monaco, whooping it up with some of the drivers there, and then getting back to his hotel and turning on CNN and hearing one of his new drunken, fearless friends had wrapped his car around a light pole and suffered massive head and spinal injuries. He had a press breakfast the next morning to blow smoke up the ass of whatever picture he was there to promote, but, after that, he hired a car and driver to take him to a hospital in Nice, where his drunken, fearless friend had been taken. In his boarding school French, he managed to determine that the guy was on the reanimation unit. It was the same setup they’ve got here in critical care for Norman—same basic machinery, but over there it was called reanimation. He considers the difference in outlook. It didn’t even strike him, then, but now, in contrast, it seems such a pleasant, joyful outlook on what it is. Reanimation. He says it in his head in a French accent so that it sounds like something he might order off a menu, and, in saying it over and over, he loses what’s happened to Norman and fixes on himself. As he steps outside the unit with Grace, he notices for the first time the stares of the nursing staff. They know who he is. They know there are reporters camped in the parking lot waiting on word of Norman. They’ve made sense of the whispering on Wood’s arrival. It’s the first time in months he’s been on the receiving end of these stares, and he doesn’t know whether to relish in them or look away. He’s been unmasked, revealed.
Reanimated.
He leans back in to Norman’s room and catches Pimletz’s attention. The man is wallpapered to the corner. “You coming?” he says.
Pimletz lets his eyes answer for him: Me? Where? Now? You mean right now?
“My Boswell,” Wood declares, holding the heavy hospital door for the man who might as well help him sort through what’s happened, set a few thoughts down on paper, long as he’s here. “What, they picked you out of a hat? That how you got the job?”
Pimletz doesn’t get the reference or the joke. “Fuck if I know,” he says.