I wait until it’s nearly 5:00 a.m., nearly time for the new shift of nurses to come on. Mustering my strength, I rise from bed, gather the cash and find my clothing.
One would think it’s difficult for a bandaged patient with his left arm in a cast to just trundle out of his room, limp past the nurses’ station and down the long hall to the elevators, nod a hello to a doctor, make his way through the hospital’s lobby, pause a moment to ask a security guard where the taxi pick-up is, and then hobble his way out.
Fortunately, it’s not.
Chapter 71
When the Smart car exploded in a shower of glass, screeching metal, and violent spins, I glimpsed the trajectory of my future.
I saw the rough arc of my life.
I’d like to say I saw myself taking the taxi from the hospital to Charm’s.
I’d like to say I walk through the doors, amble to the bar, and position myself on a stool.
The bartender pours a gin on ice, then walks it down to me, the key ring looped on his belt jangling with each steps.
Charm’s Tavern is empty save the two of us.
I place my fingers on the bar where the name MASON is carved. Both he and Ray-Ray wanted something I didn’t have to give.
Whatever it was, it’s brought me a fortune of grief.
The memory of Brighton, the first time I met Mason, flashes to mind. I think of the pipe-smoking old woman on the pier.
One line raced to infinity in both directions, while the other shot only in one direction.
The lines, I now realize, are the same length. Both are immeasurable.
The column of morning light, sharp and blanching, moves slowly across the bar, marking the gaining day. The rotation of the Earth. The progress of life.
I think of Ray-Ray. I think of the woman. I think of the trauma that binds strangers together.
She’s not here. She’s not coming.
I down my gin, then rise to leave. But I am struck by a smell. Lemons and warm cinnamon. It envelops me, cradles my battered body.
The woman.
Sliding onto the barstool next to me, she says, “Can I sit here?”
I sit back down, take her hands in mine. Hers are dripping wet. “They’re still out of paper towels.”
I catch the bartender’s eye; the order is placed without a word. Whatever the woman wants.
She leans to me, her breath charged with loneliness. “Ask me a question,” she says.
The bartender set two gins before us.
“What’s your name?” I say.
“No, I mean a real question. Ask me something real.” She grasps her glass with both hands.
I think. “Have you ever been in love?”
“Yes. What about you?”
I’d like to say I touch her hair, then her face, then her lips. I’d like to say I kiss her and kiss her and kiss her then say, “Yes, I know love.”
I’d like to say this happens.
I can’t.
None of this happens.
Free from the hospital, I climb gingerly into a taxi. I flash the cabbie my wad of cash in Ray-Ray’s money clip, and tell him to drive me to Miami, some three hours away.
I tell him to drive me toward my future.
Chapter 72
After Clement spirited off the bottle of vodka I stole, after my father had confronted me about it and I’d successfully bluffed, after the afternoon had waned toward evening, I went to my room to get ready for our dinner out.
My mother was there, sitting on my bed with my yearbook open. Her eyes were swollen, red. She’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It all goes so fast.” She took my hand in hers. Her voice broke as she spoke. “You’re leaving me. My baby’s leaving.”
“I’m not leaving,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“You’re going to college in the fall,” she sniffled.
“It’s two hours away,” I said. “You make it sound like you’ll never see me again.”
She let go of my hand, flipped through the yearbook. “It seems like just yesterday I took you to your first kindergarten class. And the day before that, I was graduating from high school myself.”
She paused on the page with my graduating class’s photos. “What happens to all the potential, all the dreams?” she asked. “What will happen to these people?” Her fingers lingered over Alan Adams, a goofy kid with a knack for playing the flute.
“I know what happens.”
“Really?”
I nodded, pointed to Alan. “Well, Alan here ends up moving to Mexico and launching his own line of cat shampoos.”
My mother smiled, wiped a stray tear. “Good for him.” She pointed to the next picture. Beverly Anderson. “What about her?”
“Now Bev, she ends up being a toe model.”
“A toe model?”
“For toenail polish,” I said. “Unfortunately, her career is cut short by a terrible case of ringworm.”
My mother laughed.
The game was on.
We worked our way through the class.
“Jasper Carpenter becomes a plumber,” I said.
“In the desert,” my mother added.
We determined that Kathy Eison, a tiny girl who weighed just over a hundred pounds, becomes the first woman to give birth to decatuplets—all ten of them in the back of the pick-up on the way to the hospital.
Randy Gersh grows the world’s longest mustache, only to get it torn off when it gets caught in a rotating door.
Mandi Johnsen, who is dyslexic, becomes the president’s chief financial adviser.
Luke Lickman, an ice cream taster for Breyer’s, has to get a tongue graft after he burns off all his taste buds on a microwaved burrito.
And Janice Mabel is sentenced to seven years in jail for stealing corporate secrets from Victoria’s Secret.
Then my mother’s fingers touched Clement’s photo.
“So what’s Clement become?” I asked.
She studied the photo for some time, her eyes heavy. She said nothing, only shifted her fingers to the next photo.
The photo of me.
“Now this young man—” She broke off, looked away.
“Yes?” I said, trying to keep the game going. Trying to keep the smile on her face. “What’s this handsome brute become?”
Evening came on. Soon it would be night and all that followed.
My mother turned back to me, her eyes brimming with tears. “This young man,” she said, sorrow spilling out, “becomes a stranger.”
END
Where Night Stops Page 23