Give Me Your Answer True

by Suanne Laqueur

  Pain in her leg woke her up. She opened her eyes to find David in the chair next to her bed, an ankle perched on one knee, engrossed in The Eyes of the Dragon. He closed the book around a finger and hitched forward, his eyes wide and happy. He touched the tip of her nose and his smile was beautiful.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Still the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. And meant it. “Tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”

  The smile faded as he took her hand. He told her how he and Neil hit the deck behind the Manhattan skyline set when James started shooting. Between a crack in the buildings they watched James jump off the stage and open fire, witnessing the ensuing stampede as people made it out the lobby doors.

  Or didn’t.

  Silence descended on the theater, leaving only James standing alone in the aisle, gun in hand.

  “We were about to make a dash for the wings,” David said. “Then I saw Fish come out.”

  Thoughts of escape were abandoned as Erik came out of the lighting booth into the aisle, crawled a careful distance and then sat on the carpet, up against the seats.

  “I couldn’t hear anything,” David said, his eyes brimming. “But I knew Fish was talking to him. Trying to talk him down. He was holding up his hand. Like he was showing him something. Even with a gun in his face he was in control of the situation. Fucking human valium, that guy.”

  David watched as Erik tried to talk to James. Talk him down, get him to stop. And James stopped by putting the gun under his chin and blowing the back of his head across three rows of seats.

  Daisy swallowed hard. She had never known such weary sadness. A despair that was hollow and decayed like a rotting tree.

  “Why?” she whispered. “David, I don’t understand. What did we ever do to… Why did he do it?”

  David’s gentle fingertips touched the tear tracks on her cheeks.

  “Because we were happy,” he said. “That’s all.”

  She squeezed her face hard, nodding against the crying. Her leg howled. Her heart wailed.

  “It’s all right, Marge,” David said. “Don’t cry, honey, it’s over now.”

  The pain intensified and she broke down. The nurse administered another dose of morphine. David hitched his chair closer, opened The Eyes of the Dragon and read aloud until the drug took hold and she was asleep again.

  AN ORDERLY BROUGHT WILL to Daisy’s room in a wheelchair, parked him close to the bed and left them alone.

  They were desperate to embrace but they could only awkwardly reach around their injuries and rest their heads together, weeping.

  “I’m sorry.” Will’s voice was a tatter of sobs. “I’m sorry, Dais, I’m so sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

  “It was.”

  “No, don’t say that.”

  “He was coming for me. Coming for everything I loved.”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  “Everyone’s wondering why he didn’t go straight for Lucky,” he said. “Don’t they get it, Dais? Don’t they see? He knew what he was doing. He knew what would kill me and he went after it. He fucking went after Fish.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, stroking his head.

  “I don’t know what I would’ve done if he… Jesus Christ, I watched him do it. Watched him put the gun right in Fish’s face and I swear to God, Dais, I—”

  “Will, please,” she said. “Don’t talk about it anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.” Will sat up, sniffing hard and shaking back his hair. When his good hand took Daisy’s, it was with the grip of a partner.

  “You’re gonna get through this,” he said. “You’re strong and you’ll get through this and you’ll dance again. I know you will. And I’m gonna be there with you. All right? We’re gonna make this work. We can do anything. Don’t cry, Dais…”

  ERIK CAME EVERY DAY and every day he seemed thinner and paler. His eyes were circled and his hands shook. He squeezed beside Daisy’s good leg, his head on her shoulder and she picked up the cigarette smoke in his hair and clothes. She only knew him to be an occasional social smoker but what she smelled now was pure, habitual need.

  She couldn’t hold him in her arms, only lace one hand with his and run the other over his head. His jaw snugged in her palm and his tears wet on her fingertips.

  “Everyone’s saying I was brave for leaving the booth,” he said, sounding choked and hoarse. “And it’s bullshit. I left the booth because I thought you were dead. I left the booth because I’m a fucking coward, because I’m afraid to live without you. I went out of there to die. Not to stop James, not to save anyone. I went out of the booth because I can’t breathe without you. That’s the truth.”

  “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”

  “I can’t breathe without you,” he said, his voice dissolving now.

  “I can’t either. Hold onto me, honey. It’s all right.”

  He dug the heel of his hand into his streaming eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be doing this, it’s not fair to you.”

  “Listen to me,” she said against his hair. “I don’t remember anything. People are telling me what happened and it’s like they’re talking about a movie. I don’t remember any of it. I woke up and nothing was fair, nothing made sense until you walked in the room. Don’t ever be sorry for needing me. If I’m your air then you’re my…”

  The sentence trailed away. She was weary and grieving and her leg hurt. She picked up his hand and ran fingertips over the tattooed daisy.

  “This,” she said. “I’m in your skin now. You keep me alive.”

  A shiver swept over him. “I thought you were dead,” he said.

  “Shh, honey. You’re so tired. Close your eyes.”

  “I love you.”

  “I’m right here,” she said. “I’m in your skin and I won’t disappear, I promise. Close your eyes now.”

  He nestled into her shoulder. His hand in hers twitched a few times, then he was still, breathing soft and slow.

  Her eyes were dry and alert as he slept. They looked daggers at her flayed leg, staring down the ugly red flesh and the blood-caked edges.

  If I can’t dance then all I have left is him.

  She inhaled hard at the smoke smell in his clothes, desperate for a cigarette. Her nail worried at the calluses on the pads of his fingers. A nervous twist in her stomach. A feeling this was the price she paid for something.

  But she couldn’t remember what.

  “IT WAS ALL PEOPLE TALKED ABOUT,” Daisy said. “How Erik went out of the booth. Crawled through broken glass and went out into the aisle where James was with a gun.”

  “It was an incredibly brave thing to do,” Rita said.

  “They said he was a hero,” Daisy said. “But he never believed it himself. Not even when my father gave him a medal. He gave Erik the purple heart he earned in Vietnam.”

  “What a beautiful gesture.”

  “Erik tried to talk to James. James trusted him once. But he was too far gone, I guess. And he shot himself.”

  She looked up at Rita. “I don’t think Erik ever got over it.”

  “Nobody would.”

  “It changed everything. And everybody.”

  “Of course it did. It’s a life-altering experience. And from what you tell me, neither you nor Erik, nor many of your friends, sought out counseling afterward.”

  “No. We didn’t.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  Her shoulders circled vaguely and settled again. “We wanted to forget. Put it behind us. The worst was over. Right?”

  Rita said nothing.

  “Erik said the day of the shooting was nothing compared to the week after. When he and David went to all the funerals, four funerals in three days. It’s what finally broke him down. The last service was Taylor’s and then he cracked. His mother came to see me in the hospital. She sat on the bed and took my hands and said she
needed to talk to me as a mother. I think she meant woman-to-woman. And I felt like an equal in the conversation, like we were conferring as the two women who loved him most. Erik was sick. He wasn’t sleeping. He was losing weight and Christine was worried about what to do. And I said, ‘Take him home. He needs to go home and collapse.’ I knew him so well. I knew he’d go if she asked. Or rather if she told. He needed directions. He was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. And I was right: he cried when we said goodbye but he wasn’t fighting either of us. He was so tired.”

  “And you?”

  Daisy leaned to scratch her ankle. “What about me?”

  “How long were you in the hospital?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “In bed the whole time?”

  “For the first week. Ten days, maybe. Then I started in-house physical therapy. Nothing for my left leg, I couldn’t put weight on it yet. But stretching everything else, getting some movement and range of motion going. Little things.”

  Rita shifted in her chair. “What was that like?”

  For a minute Daisy barely understood what she meant. The question knocked on a door long closed, the hinges and latch cobwebbed and rusty. The nameplate missing from the mailbox. “It was fine” formed on her tongue and she nearly said it. But the door cracked. She looked within and it wasn’t fine.

  “Awful,” she said. “Scary. Frustrating. Painful.” The words felt inept. Labels with the wrong name on mailboxes. Unopened deliveries.

  A fragile silence. More fragile than the edges of skin around the perimeter of her fasciotomies. One hand stroked the line of scar tissue through her jeans.

  “They never give you a straight answer,” she said. “It’s all might and maybe and possibly. Probably not. But a chance. We’re cautiously optimistic. After a while I stopped asking if I would dance again. And I stopped listening to all the hypothetical, cover-our-ass bullshit. I thought who’s going to win? Me, or James? You dance or else he’s got the last word. Fuck that. Fuck him. It’s gonna be hard? Fine. It’s gonna be painful? Bring it. It’s gonna break my heart? I’ll break it my way. I hardened down. Erik would say I went into my war room. I could almost feel it…like a coat of shellac over my heart. No more crying, it’s time for work.”

  She put her hand into the bowl of dried lavender and lemon verbena and let the soft, dusty leaves and tiny buds sift through her fingers. Then she held them to her nose, inhaling. Smelling her mother.

  “I went home after three weeks. Finally home in my own bed. Mamou filled a big vase with lavender and put it on my night table. I remember sitting on the front porch, breathing in the sun and the flowers.”

  “And Erik was home then?”

  “Yes, in Rochester. He was going to start an internship at Lancaster in June. Rebuilding the theater. So we had all of May to get through before we’d see each other. It was hard. We talked on the phone every night but… It was the longest we’d been apart.”

  She could remember the spring nights curled up to the telephone. Remember Erik’s voice and the keen, frustrated longing that laced their conversations. But none of the words.

  “I started physical therapy. Cardio training at first: wheelchair workouts, building my endurance back up. Three of us were under the same trainer: one guy who was a double amputee and another who was paralyzed from the waist down. And me. All working with Stef.”

  “Stef?”

  Daisy nodded. “A former drill sergeant roughly the size of a redwood. Funny as hell. Pure take-no-prisoners motivation. The only one who said to me ‘Yes’ when I asked if I’d dance again. Actually the answer was ‘Fuck yeah.’ But oh my God, he was tough. Brutal. I thought I’d survived being shot only to die at the hands of a sadist. I got so mad at him once, I said ‘First thing I’m gonna do when I get strength back in this leg is kick you in the nuts.’ And he gave me a shit-eating grin and said, ‘I look forward to it. I’ll even hold still.’”

  “Did you?” Rita said, smiling.

  “No. By the end of the summer, I loved him too much.”

  Looking back was like flipping through a scrapbook underwater, a blurred collection of mementos stretching from May to August. Washed-out sepia tones. Pages stuck together, melding days into weeks. Weeks into months. She worked and trained and recovered. Fell down and dragged herself up again. Took faltering steps to the shouted approval of her war mates, neither of whom would ever walk again. She cried to the impervious ears of Stef, who waited with beefy arms crossed until the crying was over. Then threw her back into the battle.

  The pool. The exercises. The weights. The steps. Ice therapy. Ultrasound therapy. Heat therapy. Massage therapy. Life revolved around her body. Her body’s feats measured in millimeters. Then inches. Then steps. Ounces turned to pounds. She could put weight on her left leg for seconds which gradually became minutes. Her gait smoothed out. The limp began to fade. One joyful morning in August she put her feet into first position and did a plié and a rise onto the balls of her feet, both knees straight and true. Stef had wagered she wouldn’t reach this important goal until September. Both a good sport and a man of his word, he wore a tutu and tiara to work the next day.

  “At the time I thought it was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life,” Daisy said. She turned ironic eyes around Rita’s office, shaking her head the tiniest bit. “Little did I know…”

  “Don’t dismiss it,” Rita said quietly. “It was an amazing and heroic accomplishment. None of what’s happening here invalidates how hard you worked. This is simply different work.”

  Daisy smiled, tasting it. “It was a long summer.”

  “It must have been.”

  “I went back to Philly one weekend. And David met up with me.”

  “What for?” Rita asked.

  “I needed him.”

  SHE’D NEVER ASKED DAVID for a favor before. But she called him now. “Will you do something for me?”

  “Anything,” he said. “It’s done.”

  He drove her downtown to the tattoo parlor Will frequented and where Erik got his daisy. The shop was next door to a West Indian grocery. They appeared to be co-owned, or at least on friendly business terms. The adjoining wall within had been opened up and the smell of spice drifted around the artists’ stations along with the hypnotic offbeat of Reggae.

  A gorgeous black couple lounged by the front desk, the woman sitting on the man’s lap. His hair was in dreadlocks. Hers was barely fuzz along her perfectly-shaped skull. She wore not a shred of makeup or jewelry, except for a single, delicate silver ring in her nose. As the bell rang on the door jamb, she looked first at David then at Daisy, who was on her crutches today, letting her leg rest.

  The black woman smiled. “Hello, sister.”

  With her eyes Daisy asked David to hang back and he did, taking a seat on one of the chairs by the front window. Daisy crutched smoothly to the desk and asked if she could see Omar.

  “I am Omar,” the man said, reaching past his lapmate’s body to offer a large hand.

  “My name’s Daisy,” she said, shaking it. “You know my friend Will—”

  Omar put up his palm, silencing her. The woman slid from his lap and he came around the desk and set both his hands on Daisy’s shoulders. His eyes swept from the crown of her head down to her feet.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “I inked your boy. William sent him to me after the shooting.”

  “Yes.”

  “He described your eyes.” His hands still on Daisy’s shoulders, Omar turned to his friend. “She was at Lancaster. She and her boy and William. Do you remember the daisy? This is she.” His voice broke and he cleared his throat.

  “I remember,” the woman said. “How are you, sister?”

  “Let’s sit down,” Omar said. “Tell me what I can do.”

  “Do you want me to come back later, Dais?” David called from his chair.

  Daisy reached her hand to him, beckoning. “No, stay with me,” she said. “This is David. Erik’s frien
d.” She squeezed the fingers that had crept into hers. “And mine.”

  The woman, introduced as Camille, brought David a cup of strong coffee and Daisy a cup of chai tea, an anise star floating on its creamy top. From her bag, Daisy drew out the sheet of paper she’d been doodling on for the better part of a week. “Don’t laugh,” she said to Omar.

  “I never laugh at someone’s vision,” he said. “Bad for business.”

  She smoothed it out on his desk. “Erik’s last name means fisherman in Swedish. Everyone calls him Fish. So…” She had attempted to make a fish shape from the letters spelling Svensk Fisk. Omar and Camille bent their heads over it, exchanging glances and nods.

  “Oh yes, I see,” Omar said. “I see it.” He took a fresh sheet of paper from his desk drawer and clicked the end of a mechanical pencil. “Camille, love, get me that book. The one with the Norse runes.”

  Camille made a face but went over to the bookshelf. “I don’t know, I think runes will be too angular and harsh. The fish won’t ripple.”

  “It will,” Omar said, drawing. “Think I’m going to ink something on a dancer that doesn’t move?”

  Camille’s upper lip curled as she mocked him. Setting the book down on the desk, she inhaled by Daisy’s head. “Goodness, you smell like black cake.”

  “Like what?”

  “Jamaican rum cake. It’s made with burnt sugar essence.”

  “Everyone thinks she smells like sugar,” David said. He was walking up and down the panels of designs, arms crossed tight, looking both curious and fearful.

  “Are you getting anything today, my friend?” Omar said, looking up from his sketching.

  “Me?” David’s head turned back. “No. No. She’s the brave one. I’m just the chauffeur.”

  Camille, having slipped away, came back from the grocery side of the building with a small brown bottle with a yellow label. She unscrewed the cap and waved it first under Daisy’s nose, then David’s. A thick, singed smell wafted.

  “Oh yeah,” David said, closing his eyes as he inhaled. “You make cake with that and rum?”