Lucky Leonardo

by Jonathan D. Canter

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  Then it dawned on Leonardo, as the blast of sound went on and on, that this could be his ’Nam flashback, that he was on his belly in the muck at Quang Tri, and not merely on his belly in the muck behind the hedgerow in the center of the driveway to the Main House of Harriford Academy with his eyes closed and his head wedged against the stone feet of the Reverend Lamb. Like he could smell the napalm.

  “Leonardo? Leonardo what’s all the noise?”

  “Doc, they’re zeroing in…”

  “Leonardo…”

  “Doc, did you tell them where I am?”

  “What? Leon…”

  Leonardo fumbled the phone and lost the connection. “Doc? Are you there?”

  ARREEPPP. ARREEPPP. WHOOP. WHOOP. WHOOP.

  The sound repeated and repeated, but Leonardo’s recognizer mechanism was fritzo, brain-damaged, shooting off crazy explanations like sparks in the wind. ’Nam. Dr. Z. Like a kid scared shitless by his nightmare who mistakes the billowing curtains in the dark corner of his room for the stone-cold devil emergent from his dream.

  Leonardo found a place to hide.

  Just for a moment, but long enough to bury it, and leave a gap on his memory tape like when your eyes shut on the interstate until you’re stunned back awake by your head smacking into the steering wheel, hopefully before the bridge abutment, or like a shell-shocked grunt not sure how he got to wherever he was. Joan found him, almost ran him over, as he stumbled out of the hedgerow.

  She was on the home stretch of her own exit strategy, which began when she exited through the back door of the infirmary which had a sign saying that if you open this door an alarm will sound. It was either that or crawl under Harvey’s bed or jump out his window or have her menstrual cramps and the rest of her complicated situation examined by the nurse who was back with the fat boy in the outer office, and moving in her direction less than five seconds away. Four. Three. So who would have guessed it would be such a loud alarm?

  Even more surprising to Joan was Harvey, who wasn’t moving. “Do they have you on pills, Harv?”

  “Yuh, bunch of stuff.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Chill me out. Calm me down. You know…”

  “Don’t you want to get out of here?”

  “I don’t know. I did, but now I’m here, and it isn’t so bad, and my mom said she’d be back in two weeks…”

  “Where’s she?”

  “Some business trip. She called me after they found me walking down the road. She said if I stay good until she gets back she’ll let me out if I still want out. So, you know…”

  “What about your dad?”

  “Mom says don’t talk to him, he’s crazy…”

  “No. He’s great.”

  “Mom said he’s as crazy as you…”

  So Joan, with two seconds left on the clock and no time-outs remaining gave Harvey a good-bye hug even though he wasn’t quite the Harvey she was looking for, looking instead like he had quit the cousin’s club, and pushed her way through the rear door, triggering the alarm. “Oops,” she said as the horns started whooping, and red warning lights started flashing, and all hell otherwise broke loose and accompanied her down the exterior fire escape to the ground, and along the gravel path to the front of the Main House where she ran through a crowd of milling students smack into her drifting uncle.

  “Uncle Lenny,” she said, “we got to get out of here.” She grabbed his arm and gave a tug.

  “I’m not going without Harvey.”

  “Harvey’s not coming.”

  They stood for a frozen frame in front of the building’s flashing red lights, and the WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP of the alarm, and the milling students, like Scarlet and Rhett downstage from burning Atlanta. “Uncle Lenny,” Joan recapitulated, “Harvey’s drugged and he’s not coming, and I’m the one who pulled the alarm, so we got to go.”

  “What alarm?” he asked.

  Which was when Joan realized his eyes were blank, and the rest of his face had turned to clay, like they replaced Uncle Lenny with a zombified look-alike. Like, holy shit, as if the Harvey stuff isn’t bad enough now I’m living with the night of the living dead.

  “I’m not going to be pushed around by my god-damn ex-wife any more,” Uncle Lenny said. “I want my Harvey back right now. I need to find the person in charge…” He spun around like he was looking for the person in charge, around and around.

  “Uncle Lenny,” Joan said, “you’re lost. You’re missing what’s going on. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Hell no. I won’t go…”

  She was a bulky teenager, getting more frantic with each passing second. She pushed into him sumo style, and crowded him off the circular driveway with big bangs from her belly and chest, and once she built his momentum she grabbed an arm and ran with it, assuming the rest of him would follow. The rest of him, not including the pieces of his mind which were beyond her grasp.

  The minivan loomed straight ahead. All by its lonesome in the admission office parking lot. “I need the keys, Uncle Lenny.”

  “Are we going to the person in charge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a driver’s license?”

  “Don’t worry. I can drive.”

  But even still, Joan had to fish the keys out of her uncle’s coat pocket, losing more time, thinking this was one of those movie break-out scenes where the bad king orders the gates closed to seal the good intruders in, and it’s so very close as to whether the getaway car or horse or prop jet can slip out ahead of the iron jaws clamping shut. “Oh, baby, let’s keep this moving,” she said as she stuffed her uncle into the passenger side and ran around to the driver’s side, and pulled him back in as he tried to jump out, and ignited her engine, and drove down the hill toward the gate house thinking she might have to risk violence to get through.

  Chapter 43

  The gate house was unmanned as Joan roared toward it because the guard had run to the Main House when the alarms started ringing, giving Joan the chance to off-road around the closed gate without getting her tires shot out or her getaway radioed to the state police, and with only minimal damage to the shrubbery. She hightailed it home from Maine at the land-speed record for a maroon minivan despite ice patches and the distraction of an uncle curled in the fetal position, and the fact that she didn’t have a driver’s license. She dropped him off in front of his house.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, but didn’t hang around for his answer because she knew he wasn’t and didn’t know what to do about it anyway and was too tired to do anything even if she knew what to do, and just wanted to get away from him and his mess and get back to her own room in her own house and have a drink, and forget the day. And have another drink.

  He stood on the sidewalk and watched her red rear lights disappear. Like, good-bye little red lights. Then he spotted his nose, and watched it as it led him around the side of his house and into his backyard, to Helen’s space at the apple tree. He leaned his butt against the trunk of the tree and aimed his eyes at his bedroom window, and waited, like a tourist waiting for the historical society to reenact scenes of historical significance, but more like the night waiting for the relief of day, or the potted plant waiting for rain. Like he dimly perceived he was on the wrong side of the window, but had no particular interest in moving. Like, so what?

  He waited, with indifference as the temperature dropped to the teens and the wind began to cut sharply, still gloveless and hatless, and soaking in sweat. He was exposed. The authorities could have found him in the morning dead, like any street bum who decides not to care any more and has used up his winter mulligans. An unexpected and sorry conclusion to a life of promise, like “my son, the dead doctor…” Like a plane crash, or emergency room fuck up, or a hiker lost in the woods, or some other avoidable event
which, due to the freakish alignment of the stars, didn’t get avoided. Like God says he’s sorry it happened this way. It wasn’t supposed to…

  But lucky for Leonardo, just as some tested and approved safety nets rip apart on contact, some others, which you never in your wildest dreams expect to be there, jump out of the fantasy lane in the nick of time to break your fall, like Eugene Binh catching his foot on the window washer cords. This is, of course, one of the great lessons of craps, and is arguably the basis of all successful religions, that it is worth praying because every once in a while, and not necessarily by coincidence, your prayers get answered.

  So it was that Helen, after fooling around with Leonardo’s private things for the better part of her afternoon work shift, thought she heard scuffling in the front part of his house as she was about to velcro it up for the day and go home. Could have been the plumbing. Could have been the wind. She darted into the bedroom closet to wait and see.

  Not unlike Leonardo trying to figure out when it was safe to cross the street, she waited a long time in the closet, crunched behind a rack of tweed jackets which smelled like she was sleeping with a pack of wet dogs, reminiscent of parties in high school she thought she had forgotten. A long time spent listening, worrying, hearing things, not hearing things, remembering things, twiddling with her velcro. When she couldn’t stand it any longer she decided it was safe enough, and crept out of the closet.

  “You again,” Mary Ellen, the little tree-climbing crapshooter herself, said to Helen from above Helen’s head. Mary Ellen was armed with a flashlight in one hand and a heavy stainless-steel frying pan in the other which she was dropping on Helen like the blade of a guillotine, but managed to check swing when she recognized the perky cat ears in the flickering beam.

  “Huh?” Helen said.

  When Leonardo lost consciousness, he fell on his funny bone and yelped sharply. By then the girls on the other side of his bedroom window were exchanging explanations, or at least versions, in the dark, on the bed.

  “I’m the doctor’s new housekeeper,” Mary Ellen said.

  “Oh. I didn’t know a position was open,” Helen replied.

  “Just opened up.”

  “Live in?”

  “I think.”

  “Pay?”

  “We haven’t worked out the details.”

  “Do you have a key?”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m a close personal friend.”

  “Oh.”

  They danced around the subject matter, that they should have so much in common starting with the same tree at the same time on the night Harvey was missing, and the same object of consuming interest—lucky Leonardo. Like what are the odds of that? A lot longer than a meeting arranged by a dating service. A lot longer than two people bumping into each other on a ski slope. “Like,” Helen whispered to Mary Ellen in the darkness of Leonardo’s bedroom, “do you think our meeting was arranged?”

  Leonardo’s yelp prompted the girls to jump off the bed like latter-day Chrissies at the second coming of Roger LaFlamme, and rush to the bedroom window and push it open. But they saw and heard nothing in the dark.

  “Should we call the police?” Helen asked cautiously.

  That didn’t seem to be a great idea under the circumstances. Instead they stealthed to the backyard armed with heavy pots and pans, and tripped over Leonardo as he lay in a heap beneath the apple tree, and saved him, like a four-handed, two-headed, safety net contraption poking and prodding him back to consciousness, or maybe like that giant mother turtle we sometimes hear about who scooped up a drowning boy as he sank into the depths of the ocean and carried him on her shell to dry land.

  ———

  The girls dragged Leonardo in from the cold, and warmed him to room temperature employing a variety of ministrations; the hot shower, the group hug, the heating pad that Helen located earlier in the afternoon in the bottom cabinet of the master bath when she was snooping through Leonardo’s drug and hygiene supplies. They kept an ice pack on his forehead because in the excitement of the rescue it got cracked by a frying pan, and had swollen up like it had been implanted with a purple golf ball.

  Leonardo didn’t resist, but didn’t participate either. He looked unhealthy by any measure. Vacant eyes. Grayish complexion. Like he was on a return flight from the dead, encountering turbulence, might have to turn back.

  The phone rang. Helen picked up. It was Chrissie. “Who’s this?” Chrissie asked.

  “Helen.” Helen said, which provoked a moment of silence and reflection from Chrissie.

  “Oh?” Chrissie said after the pause.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re at Leonardo’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s with you?”

  “We’re together, Chrissie, but he can’t come to the phone. Can I take a message?”

  “What’s he…umm…What’re you…umm…OK. Fine. Would you tell him I can’t get back tonight with the car. I’ll call tomorrow.”

  Helen and Mary Ellen sat on the bed, on either side of Leonardo, observing him and each other, and how one thing leads to another. “I planned on working at Starbucks this afternoon,” Helen said.

  The phone rang again. It was Dr. Ziggamon. Mary Ellen took the call.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “I’m the housekeeper,” she answered. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Dr. Cook’s doctor. Is he back from Maine?”

  “Partly,” she answered.

  Which provoked Dr. Ziggamon to make a late-night house call, his first in recent memory. “I thought you’d have a stethoscope and a black bag,” Mary Ellen said as she opened the door.

  “I don’t think he’s that kind of doctor,” Helen said.

  “How do we know he’s a doctor at all?” Mary Ellen added.

  “How do I know you’re the housekeeper?” Dr. Z asked.

  Leonardo’s moaning broke up the threshold deadlock. The caregivers hurried to the bedroom where Leonardo gave a moan of recognition to Dr. Z, who greeted him with professional courtesy and personal dismay at how he looked, and felt his forehead, took his pulse, looked into his eyes, listened to him breathe, and asked simple questions to which Leonardo moaned.

  “The good news,” Dr. Z diagnosed to Leonardo, recoiling his stethoscope as it were, “is that I think you’re still alive…”

  Leonardo moaned.

  “The bad news is that I think you’re sick as a dog. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have pneumonia, on top of the shock. I’m calling an ambulance.”

  ———

  By the end of his second day in the hospital Leonardo was walking and talking, but not exactly good as new. Like who keeps ringing those bells? He remained under intensive antibiotic and anti-depressive medical regimes.

  “You’re doing better,” Dr. Z said during his bedside visit.

  “I think so,” Leonardo replied. “I want to go home.”

  “Soon.”

  “And I want to go back to work.”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid.”

  “Really, doc, the lawsuit constipated me, but I’ve had a good bowel movement. The shit is out…”

  “Leonardo, it’s closer to say that the lawsuit acted as an opportunistic virus. It took advantage of your systemic weaknesses, but didn’t invent them. You were a sitting duck before, and still are. You need wing repair. And flying lessons.”

  “I want to go back to work.”

  “First heal yourself.”

  “I need the money.”

  “I’m sure we can find an acceptable temporary alternative to help you through your convalescence. Like you’ve always been interested in the funeral business…”

  “I like being a psychiatrist.”

  “I don’t think you have a choice.”

  “I have a cho
ice.”

  In fact, he didn’t have much of a choice. Abigail entered his hospital room bearing papers soon after Dr. Z’s exit. You may remember cartoonesque Jeff with the big nose, who played double boiler in Mary Ellen’s pots and pans street band on the morning after Harvey was found in Joan’s suburban basement digs alive and well except for his green tint and grown-up hang-over, superseding Helen’s culpability confession to the contrary, and whom big-breasted Michelle originally suspected of being her suspicious betrothed? The Jeff who escaped Mary Ellen’s little fists by driving away in reverse, and whom Abigail tried but failed to restrain in his alleged capacity as the dirt-digging agent of Eugene Binh and/or DeltaTek, both of whom denied complicity while arguing in the alternative that there would have been nothing wrong with complicity had they chosen to be complicitous?

  Jeff, whose real name was Felix Smith, was employed by the state medical board as an investigator. They assigned him to investigate Leonardo in response to a complaint filed with the board by DeltaTek, at the behest of Attorney Greene. DeltaTek claimed it received negligent psychiatric care from Leonardo on or about last October 4, and suffered severe corporate distress as a result thereof, seeking as a remedy that Leonardo’s medical license be reviewed and/or disposed of as the board might deem just and proper so as to protect the public at large, including without limitation other corporate patients which might be at risk emotionally or otherwise.

  In other words, the usual ploy to apply pressure in civil litigation by opening up a second front, which led to the letter which Abigail brought with her to Leonardo’s hospital bed wherein the board ordered Leonardo to appear and show cause why the relief sought by DeltaTek should not be allowed.

  “Would you read that again?” Leonardo asked.

  Chapter 44

  Meanwhile Harriford Academy called Hal Eisenberg a couple days after Joan’s escape, to ask him how he liked his tour of the school and did he or his daughter have any questions. “Hubbada, hubbada, hubbada,” said Hal, as he bought time for his brain to pour a cup of coffee.

  “Would you like us to send you an application package?”