Following Polly

by Karen Bergreen

  “I’m all right,” I tell her. “She just has an albatross of a husband. He puts me in a bad mood.”

  “You tell her that,” the nurse says in a very kind tone. “Your mother. She love you very much. She want you to get better and be happy.”

  “Thank you.”

  I’m suddenly very tired. I’m really cold. “Jean. Can I go to sleep?”

  “Of course, honey. But I’m going to stay right here with you.”

  And as I’m falling asleep, I want to ask my best friend for the name of the Good Samaritan: the man who saved my life. I should send him a gift basket or something. But I’m way too sleepy to form any sentences. At least any spoken ones. I drift off.

  “Alice, honey, are you awake? Alice, dear. Are you waking up?” The proximity of the voice is startling and comforting. It moves away a bit. “I think she’s awake.”

  And I wake up. I know something huge has happened.

  Mother is standing over my bed. She’s weeping. And she looks weird to me.

  She looks kind of ugly. I don’t mean like a monster or anything. It’s just that Mother is possibly the comeliest woman in the tristate area, and the way I see her now, no one should see her like this.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her.

  “Oh, Alice dear, I should be asking you that question. We thought we lost you.”

  We! I wish our conversations didn’t always involve Barnes.

  “Didn’t we, Jean?”

  “Where’s Barnes?” I say flatly.

  “He’s at home,” Mother says.

  “Is he sick?” I can’t imagine that Barnes would be mentally healthy enough to allow a mother-daughter visit without his officious presence.

  “No. I instructed him not to come.”

  “Really?” Jean perks up. I must admit, this is getting juicy.

  “Are you two not getting along?” I ask.

  “Nothing like that. You were right, Alice. Barnes and I have been doing a lot of soul searching. He agrees that it’s time you and I have some time without him, while he’s at a backgammon tournament or reading the newspaper.”

  “Wow.” This is bigger than the whole Preston Hayes being a gay murderer revelation. Barnes is letting me have some Mother back.

  “Now, Alice.” She interrupts my thoughts. “I love Barnes. I guess all these years I wanted him to love you and you to love him as—” Mother starts crying again. “—you and your father felt about each other. I kept thinking that if the two of you just gave each other a chance it would happen.”

  While I can’t for the life of me see what any human being would find positive to say about Barnes Newlan, I know that Mother is being honest.

  “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” Here comes the monologue. “For all of the junk I have put you through.” That doesn’t sound like a Mother monologue to me. “From now on, Alice, Barnes will have no say in decisions regarding you. He’s not allowed to give you advice, unless you ask him for it. And he’s been in therapy for two weeks now.”

  Ahh, therapy. I need a seventeen-hour session with my shrink.

  “I keep telling him about your fantastic results with Dr. Moses.”

  “Fantastic results? I was framed for murder and nearly died!”

  “From what I’ve seen, it was after you started therapy that you started to deal with your problems. We call it acting out.”

  We, meaning those who aren’t licensed in mental health.

  But she is right in a way. Maybe the visits with the therapist made me feel safe enough to engage in the psychotic following episodes. Maybe the visits with the therapist made me feel confident enough to stalk Charlie.

  I smile at Mother. “Maybe you’re right.”

  I look over at Jean. She’s bawling. And suddenly I realize I’m crying, too.

  I’ve lost all track of time, but I know that I stay in the hospital for almost a month. I was out of it for the first two and a half weeks. No one is using the word “coma” because they think that will scare me. Funny, though, they have no problem throwing around terms like “hemorrhage” and “bleeding of the brain.” My head seems to be under control now, thanks to my neurosurgeon, Dr. Manuel Reiter. I’ve met him exactly once, but, according to Mother, Jean, and Nurse Jennifer, he was here all the time when I was “out of it.” I stay in the hospital an extra two weeks or so because I have a phantom infection. Or at least I did. And no one could find its source. They’ve finally figured out that it was in my spleen, but the doctor told me yesterday that they were able to save it. I know this is probably not a good time to ask the doctor what the spleen does. He may think I am ungrateful.

  Mother comes to visit me every day. Our conversation is stilted at first. I have forgotten how to talk to her. All those years of adjusting my conversation to accommodate the fact that Barnes was in the room. So I start at the beginning.

  I tell her that for years I missed being with her, just her. I tell her that I sensed that Barnes hoped I would go to prison so that he could have her all to himself.

  “What you understood to be control, Alice, I recognized as protection. Barnes knows that my biggest enemy is free time. He’s afraid that if I’m not working or being attended to constantly, I’ll go back into my depression. To some degree, he feels the same about you. When you got fired, he was terrified that you would go into a very dark place. I admit he’s not so good with the mother-daughter thing. He doesn’t have his own kids and doesn’t understand the complexities of those relationships. What you might see as privacy, he sees as secrecy. And he’s not comfortable with that.”

  To some degree, Barnes was right. I was keeping secrets. Suddenly, I long to tell Mother everything. I start with my following Polly. I tell her how it began. How I detested Polly in college and how easy life seemed for her. I wanted to figure out how she “did her life.” So I could do mine the same way. And then I got caught up in her double, make that her triple life.

  “I love it,” is all Mother can say. “I hope you kept a journal.”

  “It’s all in here,” I say as I point to my head, “or at least what’s left of it.” I suspect my memory is intact, since I’d spent at least an hour the night before remembering almost every word of Daphne Feller’s little sister’s graduation speech.

  And then I tell Mother about Charlie. I begin with Professor Flatineau’s History of Paris class. I tell her about how I loved Charlie from the moment I met him.

  “Like your father and me.” I notice that Mother is crying. I try to cheer her up.

  “I gave him beads,” I say.

  “That’s big,” she replies somberly.

  I tell her how I dreamed of Charlie during my involvement with other men. I tell her that I dreamed of him when I was running from the police, and that when I finally found him, I was truly happy, despite my impending prison time or death.

  “You must really love him,” she says.

  “I do, but I did a terrible thing.” I recount how I was afraid to tell Charlie what I thought to be the truth about his father because I thought he would hate me or lose faith in me or both. “It was weak and selfish,” I say.

  “Alice, you were in love.”

  “I hope he’ll forgive me.”

  “He will if he’s the man you say he is.” Mother is more serious now than I have ever seen her.

  Mother thinks I should be a private investigator. She thinks that following people is my calling. I’m just happy she hasn’t asked me to create a watercolor of all of the scenes I had witnessed these last months.

  “I can help you,” she says. “I know people.”

  I’m going to look into this.

  Mother has a good idea. I could continue to intrude, but with a purpose. I wouldn’t feel as morally bankrupt if my spying could help someone and was income producing.

  The phone rings.

  “Why don’t you answer that?” Mother says.

  I pick it up. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Alice.” It’s Barnes.

&nbs
p; “Hi, Barnes.”

  “I trust you’re feeling better,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well then. I have a question for you. I will be attending a French decorative arts auction this evening, and I was wondering if you could remind me of Napoleon the Third’s chief architect.”

  “Baron Haussmann,” I say suspiciously. The man has Internet access.

  “Thank you, Alice. I really appreciate that,” he says. “Well, good-bye, then.”

  “Good-bye.” I turn to Mother. “He really appreciates me.”

  “He’s trying,” she says.

  Dr. Moses has stopped by a couple of times. She was there when things were really bad, according to Jean. I am a little embarrassed to see her.

  “Are you mad at me?” I ask her.

  “No, I’m relieved. We have a lot to talk about when you start back in therapy.”

  “Just so you know, I really did think we were making progress. I have my lifelong dream.” I’m still not ready to say Charlie’s name yet. “Or at least I had a lifelong dream, but maybe we can come up with another one.”

  “Let’s work on this one first,” Dr. Moses says, smiling.

  I could swear she’s wearing hemp.

  I think I have everything. At least I hope I do. I’m in the lobby of the hospital. I’ve said good-bye to the doctors. We never developed much of a relationship. Apparently my case was fairly unremarkable from a medical standpoint. But I have a hard time leaving Jennifer. I wish I could take her home with me, so she could take care of me until I figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

  “Oh. You all say that. Then a week goes by, and you say, ‘Jennifer who?’” Jennifer has wheeled me down to the lobby exit of the hospital and is now hugging me. “You be good to your mother, now. She needs you. And you need her.”

  And so I leave the hospital. Just like that. Jean took my stuff back to my apartment last night. She and Mother both wanted to take me home, but I told them I would rather take them up on their kindness later in the day. I haven’t been in my apartment for almost three months. Mother paid all my back rent and helped convince the landlord to let me stay in the building. She told him that he’d be helping a New York hero, and then she slipped him five grand. “It costs more to move,” she assured me.

  Jennifer had instructed me to get into a taxi the minute I leave the building, but the March weather is so enticing, I decide to take my chances and walk a bit. The sky seems especially low today. The clouds move quickly and change their formation every minute or so. It’s like watching a movie in the sky. It’s cold, but a lot warmer than I remember. Spring is imminent.

  Spring: my new start.

  I shiver.

  Someone is following me.

  Who?

  Preston Hayes is in custody. I must be imagining it. I must have a little post-traumatic stress disorder coming to me.

  I cross the street to Sixty-fifth and York. If I keep walking west, I’ll walk into Charlie’s house—my former, albeit temporary, residence. And the home of the only man I’ve ever loved.

  Charlie may never speak to me again, even if he no longer resents me for withholding the information about his father. After all, our quandaries have come to their respective resolutions. Now we have nothing that binds us.

  I don’t know if I’ll recover from this loss. I don’t recover from relationships as quickly as Jean. In case you were wondering, she has been seeing my neurosurgeon, although she is reluctant to use words like “love” and “obsess” and has taken a shine to the phrase “we’ll see.”

  I’m on First Avenue now, and I am certain I’m being followed. Despite my discomfort, I take pride in the knowledge that whoever is following me lacks my stealth. This one is too close to me—too desperate.

  I have no choice. We are on a very busy, very public street. No one can kill me here.

  I whip around. “Stop it.”

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I’m looking at Charlie.

  “Hi,” I say shyly. “Sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

  “Just how many people make pursuit a hobby?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “You look good,” Charlie says.

  “So do you.” Of course he does; he looks like Charlie. He’s wearing his blue down jacket and jeans and hasn’t combed his hair since yesterday.

  “You feeling okay?” he asks.

  “I just got out. I thought I’d walk a bit.”

  “Be careful. There are a lot of nutcases around.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “You want an escort? After all, you’ve been in the hospital for a month.”

  He knows.

  “You know,” I say.

  “I do.”

  “So you know everything?”

  “I do.”

  “I’m sorry the way things turned out,” I tell him.

  “Not everything, I hope.”

  “No—I’m okay with the fact that I’m not dead.”

  “Yeah. It was touch-and-go there for a while.”

  How does Charlie know that? He probably called Kovitz for an update.

  “I guess I was out of it for that part,” I say, referring to my coma.

  We stop at the red light.

  “We were all pretty worried. I can tell you now because you’re walking around, but I was sure that you were dead.”

  When exactly was that?

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, when I disconnected you from Preston. I couldn’t tell if you were breathing or not. There was a lot of blood.”

  I’m obviously way less interested in the volume of blood in this memory than I am in Charlie’s presence there.

  “You were the Good Samaritan.”

  “I was the person who, from his window, saw his houseguest getting clobbered.”

  The light turns green again, but we’re just standing there.

  “But Kovitz didn’t identify you. He just said that a Good Samaritan found me.”

  “Oh. That’s because I didn’t want my identity to become public—you know, with the reporters. I could see them pursuing a human interest story. Frankly, there have been enough Red-wins in the public eye.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “He’s doing great. He’s relieved the whole thing is over, though he wishes that the celebrity treatment will end. I assure him that it will. A big movie star will have triplets or a cabdriver will return someone’s wallet. Kelt offered him his job back.”

  “Did he take it?”

  “No, he says he’s done with that chapter. He’s at a smaller company that is working on anti-cancer drugs.”

  “He’s a really wonderful man. I’m glad for him.”

  “Me too.”

  “Walter, I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  “I think I know that. If I didn’t know my father so damn well, I would have jumped to the same conclusion.”

  “He is kind of a perfect person.”

  “No, if he were truly perfect, he would have convinced LaDonna to clear him before he lost his job,” Charlie says, chuckling. “But in my own hiatus from work, I’ve had a lot of time to think. More than enough. In fact, I realized that I acted very badly toward you. You did nothing wrong. I was just really angry. Angry that my mother died and that my father couldn’t have handled it more nobly. You happened to be there during the worst of my rage storm.”

  “This is not nec—” I interject.

  “Let me finish. While I was thinking about how I was going to apologize to you, I saw you there with Preston. There you were in mid-pummel, covered in blood. It was too much. The anger about what had been done to my father, to me, and to you. I don’t know where I got the energy; I ran downstairs, out the door, and I punched him in the neck and knocked him out.”

  “And you called Kovitz.”

  “Yup. And Kovitz called his buddies from the nineteenth precinct. As soon as they grabbed Hayes,
one of the guys took me in his squad car to New York Hospital. We didn’t even wait for an ambulance.”

  “So you came with me to the hospital?”

  “I did. My father had some connections over there and we got you the best neurosurgeon.”

  “Dr. Reiter. Not much of a bedside manner.”

  “No, but that’s not his job. Besides, you got all the bedside manner you needed from Jennifer.”

  Jennifer? How did he know Jennifer?

  “You knew my nurse?”

  “Yeah. She was pretty strict, though. She had all sorts of rules. Stay two feet from the bed except for your mother. She was allowed to touch you. Jean and I had to stay back.”

  Wait, he was there with Mother and Jean?

  “Yeah, and we couldn’t say anything that was not positive. ‘I don’t want no gloom and doom.’”

  “So you met Mother?”

  “I did.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “I asked her not to. And Jean as well.”

  The two largest mouths in New York failed to utter any of this to me.

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Why weren’t you in the hospital when I woke up?”

  “I was on the way, and then I heard you had an infection. I was afraid my presence would compromise your immune system.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you would never forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? You saved my life.”

  “For kicking you out in the first place. For putting you at risk. I should have predicted that someone might go after you. After all, you were framed. I wanted to be able to ask for your forgiveness when you were strong enough to grant it. And if you aren’t strong enough today, then I don’t want you to have to make a decision.”

  As Charlie is saying this, I realize that I’m exhausted.

  “I’m a little tired.” I say to him. We’re on Sixty-fifth and Lexington, just yards from his house.

  “Well, don’t say anything.”

  “Oh. I’m not too tired to forgive you. I love you. I just happen to be tired.”

  There it is. It just slipped out. For the second time. The first time I told him, I was angry. Today it just came out so matter-of-factly. Naturally. As if Charlie and I had been saying “I love you” to each other for years, and we just completed a squabble over dry cleaning. I can’t un-say it.