The Chinese Beverly Hills
Page 25
“What it is?” Paula asked.
It took a few moments for Gloria to shake herself free from some train of thought. “How’s Jack?” she snapped.
Paula let Maeve explain what she knew, and Gloria nodded at several points, a little more heartily than she should have. Paula chased away a nurse who looked in to try to shoo them.
“Glor, don’t keep us in suspense,” Maeve said. “You had it out with that woman.”
Gloria’s eyes were burning and confused. “She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said evenly.
An even more insistent nurse looked in. “I’m sorry, but you all really have to leave.”
“Tell us,” Maeve said to Gloria.
Gloria’s eyes settled into their accustomed fierceness. “I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse neither.”
*
Jack Liffey lay with the world’s heaviest brick on his chest, afraid to move at all lest he stir the pain in his chest into something worse. He heard voices nearby, but his eyelids were far too heavy to open. The voices were comforting nonetheless. He’d taken in that he’d had serious heart surgery—serious enough so he really should have been walking down that glowing tunnel to meet a beloved uncle, but none of that had showed up.
He wondered what had become of the lost young man he’d given the John Berger book to. Zook. Bad companions, as everybody’s mom used to say.
Hate the other, the outsider; hate non-whites, hate gays, hate people from the next neighborhood over. These days it seemed to be your range of hatreds that defined who you were.
And it was so often the comfortable who hated. People who had plenty to eat, warm shelter every night, all the toys. He wondered if there was some toxic gas venting from deep in the American psyche.
*
“Hold on, girl!” Gloria yelped into her cell phone. “An eye’s opened up!”
She was hovering over Jack Liffey in an instant. It was an ugly room in a nursing home now.
“Jack, are you with us?”
He winked.
“I’ll get back to you, Paula. Can you speak, Jack?” She rested her hand on his forehead. Both eyes were open now, squinting. “Make me a sign.”
The eyes blinked twice. Then she suggested one blink for yes and two for no and found out that he was genuinely present.
“You been away, my love. It’s six weeks you been in a coma.” She didn’t tell him he’d had a stroke after the heart surgery. And she didn’t say she’d refused the Vietnamese woman’s entreaty to fly him to Zurich for some super-duper neurologists. She knew absolutely that Jack Liffey wouldn’t have wanted anything that an ordinary man couldn’t have.
“Maeve’s been coming to talk to you all the time, Jack, and a fireman named Roski, and a Chinese girl named Ellen, too. A whole lot of grown-up bad boys from the hood that say you helped them out years ago.”
One blink. Maybe an acknowledgment.
“What do you need, my love? Want me to suggest things?”
He closed his eyes and stayed that way for another week.
Maeve was at his bedside when he surfaced again, and she squealed to see his eyes. He coughed to clear his throat.
“Give me eat,” Jack Liffey said.