Sandman

by Sean Costello

  Richard said, “So you admit you’re at fault.”

  Jenny’s grin widened. “Not likely,” she said, and then just stood there, remembering. He’d had a beard back then, and “hair down to his asshole,” as her father had been fond of complaining. The beard was gone but he still wore his hair on the long side. If it hadn’t been for the dimples Jenny might not have recognized him.

  They got their cars disentangled after that, Jenny pulling hers back into its slot, Richard parking his in an adjacent row. Sitting behind the wheel, Jenny had a brief urge to flee, but she resisted it in favor of another urge, one less well defined but infinitely sweeter. She switched off the engine and joined Richard in the heat.

  “Got time for a coffee?” he said.

  Say yes. “No, sorry. I’ve only got a minute. My daughter will be home from school soon.”

  Richard’s smile faltered. “You have a daughter?”

  Jenny felt the reality of her life tugging her out of this warm fold in the fabric of time and a part of her resisted. In her heart, in this moment, she was just as startled by the fact of her daughter and her marriage and the dissolution of the past sixteen years as Richard seemed to be.

  She said, “Yes. She’s fourteen. Her name is Kim.”

  Richard’s smile was returning, and Jenny wanted so much to hold onto this moment that filled her with memories of young love and shining dreams that she damned herself for what came out of her mouth next.

  “And I’m four months pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.”

  Richard’s smile clung bravely to his face, but Jenny could feel the moment slipping away. It made the gap of years seem suddenly unbridgeable.

  He said, “Hey, Jen, that’s great,” glanced at his car...and the moment was gone. “And look what you’ve done to my baby.”

  Jenny accepted the escape hatch. “What do you care? It’s obviously stolen. Where does a hippy-for-life get the loot for a car like that?”

  Richard drew a plain white card out of his hip pocket and handed it to Jenny, face down. Jenny flipped it over and examined it with widening eyes. It was an embossed invitation to an R. J. Kale gallery opening. She’d read someplace that this world renowned artist planned to open a gallery in the city, but hadn’t thought much of it at the time.

  “Wow,” Jenny said. “Are you working for this guy?”

  “You could say that.” Grinning, Richard reached into another pocket and produced a thin eel skin wallet. He opened it and began fingering through the compartments. “We have to exchange insurance information anyway.”

  “Forget it,” Jenny said, only half joking now. She could feel the heat working on her nerves again. “I’m not...”

  She trailed off. Richard handed her his driver’s license and Jenny examined it in disbelief.

  “You’re R. J. Kale?” Richard affected a spry matador’s bow. “But, why...?”

  “The name change? My agent’s idea. She thought it looked better in lights.”

  “You’ve got a female agent?”

  “Yeah,” Richard said, a blush creeping into his cheeks. “My mother. She always had a better head for business. Kale’s her maiden name.”

  Jenny looked at the invitation again. “Wow. R. J. Kale.”

  * * *

  Jenny agreed to have coffee after all. A quick one. The nagging sense that she had to get away never quite left her, it was only blunted by the shock of Richard’s alter ego.

  While he ordered coffee and biscuits, Jenny reflected that had she been paying more attention the few times she’d seen Kale’s work, she might have recognized Richard’s unique style: the big, apparently careless brush strokes that became living, breathing reality when you stepped just a few paces back; a quality of light that seemed to emanate from the very canvas.

  That was one of the things that had so annoyed her about Richard when they were dating in high school: he had so much talent—the man was truly gifted—but all he wanted to do was lounge on the grass by the canal, smoke pot and talk philosophy. His lack of ambition drove her mad. It was the single, niggling thing that finally sent her searching for someone else. She’d met Jack that same year, her last as a senior, and Jenny had been easy prey. Jack had been all Richard could have been and more. Or so she’d believed at the time.

  As the waitress went off with their orders, Jenny recalled that the only artistic thing Richard had done with any enthusiasm in those days was shoot photos of her. He must’ve taken hundreds, boasting that one day he was going to paint her and the paintings would make him famous. He’d even coaxed Jenny’s mother into giving him a half dozen Kodaks of Jenny as a child so he could have copies made. She wondered what ever became of those pictures.

  Richard said, “So do you think you can make it?”

  “Hm?”

  “The opening. Think you can make it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenny said. “I’d have to check with my husband.” They had tickets for the Russian ballet this Friday night.

  “Why don’t you bring him along?” Richard said. He pointed at the invitation. “There’s plenty more where that came from. There’ll be a big wine and cheese. And all kinds of big cheeses brown-nosing for a discount on an R. J. Kale.” He smiled. “What do you say?”

  Jenny returned his smile. “I’ll see. No promises.” But she didn’t ask for another invitation.

  The coffee came with a tray of biscuits. Jenny drank her coffee, but left the biscuits untouched. And although they should have had plenty to talk about, once the discussion of invitations trailed off a vacuum of silence enveloped them, one so restricting even Richard’s gift for the gab failed to make a dent in it. And suddenly, Jenny wanted out.

  She stood, discouraging Richard when he tried to join her. “I have to go, Richard. I’m sorry to run out on you like this, but I’ve got things to do.” She offered her hand to be shaken. Richard accepted it, holding it lightly.

  “Please come,” he said. “It would mean a great deal to me.”

  “I’ll try,” Jenny said, and hurried away.

  * * *

  Kim said, “Tracy, I can’t. If my dad ever found out he’d kill me.” The school day was over and they were halfway home, crossing the Bank Street bridge.

  Tracy said, “Fuck, man,” almost screaming the words. “Why do I waste my time on a wimpguts like you? Look, we’ve got a chance to party with two of the most popular guys in the whole school. Don’t you see what that means? These guys are going to be major someday.” She pinched Kim’s arm and smiled. “We could be, like, groupies to the gods.”

  Kim managed a half smile.

  “Your parents go out every Friday night, right?” Kim nodded. “So, we party-hardy, smoke their dope—” she winked lecherously “—maybe even see what they’re packin’, then we kick ’em out by, like, ten-thirty, max.” Tracy began to slam dance against Kim, driving her into the guardrail, almost sending her tote bag into the canal. She sang at the top of her lungs: “You got to live, for yourself, yourself and nobody else. You got to—”

  “All right,” Kim said, “you win. But ten-thirty, Trace. No later.”

  Tracy adjusted her headphones and resumed walking. “No problem,” she said. She didn’t speak again until they parted company on Echo Drive.

  * * *

  Richard sat in the busy restaurant and tried to make sense of what he was feeling. One moment he’d been buzzing around making last minute arrangements for his opening, and in the next he was thrust into this weird emotional time warp which, even now, refused to relinquish its hold on him.

  He could still smell Jenny’s perfume.

  Part of it, perhaps, was his seemingly impetuous return to the city of his birth after so many years in France. He’d come to believe Paris would be his permanent home. But after his marriage failed and the divorce was finalized, old yens awoke in him, slow-burning desires rising half-formed from the confusion of his life. And all of them pointed in the same direction. Home.

  The odd thing
was, he hadn’t even thought about Jenny. Not in any concrete way. He’d remembered the old mansion near Carp that would soon be his private home and had wondered if it was still there. He’d spotted it while motorcycling one summer in his late teens and had thought what a marvelous and unattainable place it seemed. He’d returned to it often, sitting on a hill in an adjoining field and sketching it, fantasizing about one day having the means to possess it. That memory led to the sudden and inexplicably urgent notion that a holiday back home might be nice, and he’d booked a flight that very day. Once back, one thing had led to another...

  But Jenny hadn’t figured into it. He might have wondered about her a time or two, when he drove by some of their old haunts: the canal-side campus at Lisgar Collegiate, their old alma mater; the droopy old willow at Brown’s Inlet in the shade of which they had sometimes picnicked on a patchwork quilt; the Britannia drive-in theatre, where they’d shared their first kiss and Jenny had told him he slobbered. Little more than that.

  Yet seeing her today, and under such fluky circumstances, Richard found his equilibrium completely undone. When her car crashed into his he’d thought, Great, R.J., just what you need. Haste had always gotten him in trouble. He hadn’t even recognized her at first. She was older and she was mad and the tinted windows had disguised her a little. But when recognition finally locked their eyes, the strangest feeling had come over him, a sort of inner replenishment, as if a hole he’d long since stopped noticing had been filled with a living organ. It was weird and it was unsettling. More than sixteen years had passed since he let Jenny walk out of his life. In that time he’d become a millionaire several times over and done works of art that hung in galleries all over the world.

  So why did he feel like a mixed up teenager?

  Why did he feel so alone?

  * * *

  The phone rang as Kim came in from school. Ignoring it, she dropped her tote bag on the vestibule floor and hurried upstairs to get ready for her evening with her dad. Jenny heard her daughter’s footfalls as she scooted in from the backyard to pick up the call. She peeled off a gardening glove and grabbed the receiver in the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “Jenny, it’s me.”

  “Oh, hi, Jack.”

  “Listen, I’m taking Will’s call tonight. I had to let him go home. He’s a wreck. I probably won’t be done until late.”

  “Aw, Jack, no. What about your date with Kim?”

  “This is a little more important, don’t you think? I can do the other anytime.”

  Do the other. You prick. “Do you want to tell her or shall I?”

  “You look after it, okay?”

  That almost tore it. She almost told him how she really felt...but what would be the point? She knew without even trying that no matter what she said, he’d leave her feeling trivial and out of line. She could feel herself slipping into her accustomed role, the way an old work horse slips into its traces.

  She said, “Okay. I’ll tell her.”

  “Did you see Craig today?”

  “Yes. He says everything’s fine.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  Jenny tugged at an errant strand of hair. “Well, he’s cut me off. Says he doesn’t want to see me again until July.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Okay. Don’t work too hard.”

  Jenny replaced the handset, considered going upstairs to tell Kim, then decided to wait until supper. Kim’s reaction to her at breakfast this morning had been cool—Jenny was convinced that Kim sometimes listened in when she and Jack were having sex—and from past experience Jenny knew it was best to wait until Kim came to her when something was on her mind. If you pushed Kim, even a little, she simply clammed up.

  Jenny went back outside. She had a lot on her mind, and grubbing around in her small vegetable garden sometimes helped her to sort things through. But when she got back to the mounds she’d been heaping for her cucumber seedlings, her thoughts returned to where they’d been for most of this hot afternoon.

  To Richard. To R. J. Kale.

  * * *

  At five o’clock, as Jack was inducing a patient with a bleeding ulcer, the head nurse came in to tell him about some other emergency cases.

  “Dr. Robinson’s got a hip fracture and Dr. Smith’s got a hot gallbladder. After that the slate looks pretty clean.”

  “All right,” Jack said. “We’ll do the hip next, then the gallbladder.”

  But there was a delay with the surgery on the hip. Something about the consent. To pass the time Jack went to the cafeteria for a bowl of soup. On his way back, he stopped by the main switchboard to pick up the on-call beeper but the girl at the console couldn’t find it.

  “Do you have any idea where it might be?” Jack said.

  The receptionist shrugged.

  “Well, who was on call last night?”

  The girl huffed, leafed through the call book and said, “Doctor Yao. Maybe he forgot it at home.”

  Jack said, “Wonderful,” and started away.

  “Oh, wait,” the girl said. “It says here Doctor Armstrong picked it up this morning.”

  Annoyed, Jack called Will from the OR lounge.

  “Jack. What’s up?”

  Jack heard the bright chatter of ice cubes against heavy crystal. He said, “I can’t find the beeper.”

  “Shit, sorry Jack, it’s in my locker. Got a pen? I’ll give you the combination.”

  Will recited the numbers and Jack committed them to memory. He started to say goodbye when Will cut in, saying, “Listen, about today...”

  “Forget it,” Jack said. “Just think about what I said.”

  “Believe me, I have been. I’ll work it out, I promise.”

  “Okay. I’ve got to go.”

  As Jack hung up, they paged him for the OR.

  * * *

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, hon?”

  They were doing the evening dishes, Jenny rinsing, Kim loading the dishwasher. Jenny had finally summoned the nerve during supper to tell her about her dad. Kim had come down from her room wearing her best spring dress. She’d even put on some make-up. When Jenny told her they wouldn’t be going out, Kim had bravely bitten back her disappointment. “That’s okay, Mom. He’s a doctor. I understand.” But Jenny could almost hear her daughter’s heart breaking.

  She looked at Kim now and was unsurprised to see her eyes full of tears. The poor kid had held out as long as she could.

  “Do you think Daddy loves me?”

  Jenny wrapped her arms around Kim’s shoulders, splotching her blouse with suds.

  “Of course he does, sweetheart. You’re his little girl.”

  “Then why doesn’t he show it?”

  “I guess he’s just not very good at it, hon. Some people are like that. They have trouble expressing their feelings.” She felt Kim stiffen.

  “He shows it to you. I hear him.”

  So there it was, her suspicion confirmed.

  “That’s different. We’ve talked about this before.”

  And they had, a monologue about the birds and the bees that left Jenny feeling she might as well have been describing the fine art of spoke tightening. Kim listened patiently, but regarded Jenny afterward as if she’d wasted her time, as if all this were information she’d never need. It took two to tango, her eyes seemed to say, and if she couldn’t win her father’s love, what chance did she stand with a stranger?

  “It’s not different,” Kim said, swallowing her sobs. “He doesn’t love me and you know it. We both know it.” She broke from Jenny’s embrace and headed for her room. Jenny started after her, but Kim turned on her in the staircase, her face beet red. “No, Mom. Just leave me alone.”

  She tramped upstairs and slammed her bedroom door.

  Jenny wanted to follow, fix things somehow, but she had no idea what to say. Instead she returned to the dishes, scouring them through a mist of tears.

  * * *

  Around mi
dnight, as Jack was changing into his street clothes, he got an urgent call to the ER. Dr. Emily Quinn, a cheerful freckled redhead, hailed him to a corner cubicle. Her gloved hands were blood-streaked, her face very pale. Jack followed her into the cubicle.

  On a stretcher lay a young man of about twenty who looked as if he’d stepped on a land mine. Incredibly, despite the extent of his injuries, he was still conscious. Jack appraised the situation while Quinn filled him in.

  The kid had been struck by a bus while crossing a busy downtown thoroughfare, Quinn told him, dragged fifty yards before the driver could stop the vehicle. That he was alive at all was some kind of brutal miracle. Below the knees his jeaned legs resembled freshly ground hamburger. His left hand was missing, the stump wrapped in a dripping pressure bandage, and the fractured bones of his right forearm jutted through the flesh. His abdomen had been laid open by something under the bus, and his face and chest were one big weeping road burn.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s get this kid upstairs.”

  “There goes your beauty sleep,” Quinn said.

  Nodding, Jack rolled the stretcher out of the cubicle.

  7

  DR. NILES McRAE AWOKE ON the morning of Tuesday, June 10 disoriented and afraid. He’d been dreaming that his day-to-day role as a physician had undergone an ironic reversal and suddenly he was the patient. Not only that, he’d been about to undergo a delicate surgical intervention that could prove fatal: coronary artery bypass grafting. It was nonsense, of course. He was twenty-eight years old, fresh out of med school and about to marry the girl he’d been dating since the ninth grade...

  Then the fog of sedated sleep burned away and with dawning horror Niles realized he was fifty-eight years of age, sedentary, overweight—and he really was about to go under the knife. Hell, Niles thought, why not be honest: they’re going to split me open with a bonesaw. All those starchy, on-the-fly lunches and deep-fried cafeteria dinners drowned in gravy, not to mention the two or three evening martinis he always managed to convince himself he’d earned, all of that had finally caught up with him. Eighty percent blockage of three vessels, the fourth totally gridlocked with plaque. The pain had caught him on the throne of all places, during an especially nasty tug of war with constipation. Without warning, a fifty-pound sledge had slammed into his chest, closing off his windpipe and sending a searing aftershock down his arm. Niles had uttered a startled grunt, toppled off the john with a foot of Delsey Extra Soft wadded into his fist and writhed in agony until the lights went out.