Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  I reached into my pants pocket and checked the phone. No messages. Maybe he had business to conduct, I thought. Yes, he was probably discussing the plans for his return to the set of the movie he was shooting and was intending to call me once he’d dispensed with all the details.

  I hurried down the hall to 613, rehearsing my key talking points one last time and telling myself that everything was going to work out. And then I stopped at Malcolm’s door, breathed deeply, and knocked. “I’m here,” I said and entered.

  He was standing next to the bed with his back to me, not in his hospital gown but in the black leather jacket and jeans he must have worn when he was admitted. His uniform. He was stuffing his things into a Prada knapsack. He didn’t so much as turn his head to greet me.

  “Hey,” I said, walking over to him. “Presto change-o. You’re a movie star this morning.”

  “Am I?” he said, finally wheeling around to face me. His voice was flat, without any of the enthusiasm I’d heard in it over the weekend. Something was wrong.

  Maybe he’s nervous about having to lead a normal life with a defibrillator implanted in his chest, I thought. Patients were often a little anxious about leaving the hospital, where every physical need was met. It could be daunting to go back out into the world.

  I reached out and hugged him. He did not return the hug. “You’re going to be fine,” I reassured him, even as I worried that he wasn’t fine at all, that there was a new distance between us. “Your doctor wouldn’t send you home if he wasn’t convinced of that.”

  In response, he opened his mouth wide. “How about my teeth?” he asked after exposing them all to me. “Do they look fine too?”

  “Your teeth?” I said, wondering why he’d ask me about them.

  “Sure. You’re a dental hygienist,” he said. “Do you see any plaque? Any gum recession? Am I due for a cleaning?”

  Yes, of course, I’d told him that lie, just as he’d told me he was a real estate developer. But why was he bringing it up now in such a snide tone of voice?

  “Malcolm,” I said. “Let’s close the door and spend some private time before you leave. There’s something I need to—”

  “I already know,” he cut me off, his eyes blazing now. “And I’ve got a limo coming in ten minutes, so why don’t you take your little candy striper self and find some other sucker to milk for a story?”

  I staggered back as if I’d been slugged. “What is it you think you know?” I managed, my throat closing up. It was a rhetorical question, obviously. Somehow, he knew.

  “My publicist—” He stopped himself and laughed derisively. “I forgot. You and she are old buddies. Anyhow, Peggy called this morning with some news I wasn’t expecting. An understatement.”

  I stood there motionless, heart thumping.

  “She heard through her sources that Famous is running a cover story on me that goes on sale next week,” he said. “They claim they interviewed me for the story, that the words came directly out of my mouth. But I was here. Right here. Can you believe those parasites?”

  “I—”

  “So I asked Peggy how something like that could have happened, because it was sleazy even for a rag like that, and do you know what she told me?”

  “Yes, because—”

  “She told me that you wrote the story.” He poked me in the chest. “My little candy striper.”

  Thanks again, Peggy, I thought. I’d wanted to be the one to tell Malcolm and I hated that she’d done it instead, but it was my own fault. I’d waited too long to tell him. I couldn’t blame her. Not for this one.

  “Malcolm,” I said. “I did write the story, but I didn’t—”

  “Stop.” He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time, and in a way he was. “You were the chick at the restaurant,” he said. “‘Ann Roth, like Ross, only with a lisp.’” He shook his head at me, as if I were beyond parasitic. “How come I remember that but I didn’t remember you? Lame, huh?”

  “Not at all.” I reached out to touch his arm but he shrank away from me. “What happened that night was in an entirely different context.”

  “Really?” he said, his eyes full of pain and betrayal now. “What’s different about the context? In L.A., you were after me for an interview. In Middletown, you were after me for an interview too. Only in this case, instead of buying me a cheesecake to get what you wanted, you pretended to care about me.”

  The tears came then, because I couldn’t take the hurt in his voice. They sprang out from beneath my lids and rained down my cheeks. I batted them away and kept going. “If you never trust me about anything else, trust this: I didn’t pretend to care. I love you.”

  He shivered. “If lying to people is your way of loving them, you’re a scary, scary lady.”

  “And you love me too, I know you do,” I said, forging ahead in spite of the insult.

  He turned away. I was forced to talk to his back. I delivered my speech just as I’d rehearsed it in the storage room. When I got to the part about his making me do the interview on his plane, about his testing my ability to overcome my fear, he seemed remorseful but defensive too.

  “Yeah, I knew about your flying phobia and yeah, it was wrong for me to play that card,” he conceded, turning around to face me, “but I told you people that I didn’t want to be interviewed and I meant it.”

  You people. That again. “Yes, but anxiety disorder is serious business, Malcolm,” I said. “I tried to get over it myself—oh, did I try—but it wasn’t until I came home and started volunteering and helping others that I discovered a sort of bravery I didn’t know I had. The experience here changed me, made me stronger, made me rearrange my priorities.”

  “Priority number one being me?” he said with a mean smirk. “Getting me on the record while I’m delirious with fever is your idea of changing?”

  “Look, in the beginning I thought you deserved whatever you got,” I said. “You were as difficult and demanding as you were in L.A., and I was very angry with you. But then you developed the clot and the infection and you realized you were human just like the rest of us, and you changed too. You were so much more open.”

  “Much too open, obviously.” He snickered. “But then I had no idea you were writing down everything I said.”

  “You treated people badly in L.A.,” I said. “You treated me badly. I thought it would serve you right if I wrote the story.”

  “And getting your job back wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Yes. But once we started spending time together—once I fell in love with you—I knew that you meant far more to me than that job or any job.”

  “Bullshit. You wrote the story, sent it to your editor, and sold me out.”

  “My aunt sent the story, Malcolm.”

  He cocked his head at me. “You’re blaming this on your aunt? The one who’s divorced from the body-shop guy?”

  “She wanted me to have my job back,” I said. “She didn’t want me staying in Middletown and ending up as miserable as she is. While I was here with you on Saturday night, she took it upon herself to go into my computer, find the story, and e-mail it to my editor. That’s what she and my mother were fighting about yesterday.”

  He let my words sink in, but not deeply enough, apparently. He glanced at his watch, zipped up his knapsack, and set it on the floor. “Maybe your aunt sent it and maybe she didn’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you never told me you worked for Famous or lived in L.A. or any of it. You misrepresented yourself, just like you did at Spago that night.”

  “You misrepresented yourself too,” I countered. “You ran away to Middletown and told everybody you were Luke Sykes, a real estate developer from Miami. Was my lie that much worse?”

  “You bet,” he said. “I wasn’t masquerading as someone else to hurt anybody or take advantage of anybody or—here’s the big one—advance my career. Can you say the same?”

  No. I couldn’t. It killed me to admit it, but he was absolutely right about the
comparison. It didn’t line up. Mine was the greater sin.

  He shook his head again, as if he still didn’t believe what I’d done. “I don’t even know who you are.”

  As the tears flooded my face now, making it one big soaking eyesore, I shrugged, feeling like nothing, and said, “I don’t know who I am either.”

  He waved me off. “The irony of all this is that you could have gotten the interview the old-fashioned way—by asking,” he said. “As I told you the other day, my experience in the hospital made me reevaluate everything, including my attitude toward the media. I still hate those tabloid dirt bags who’d follow me into the bathroom if I let them, but I plan to make myself more accessible to the mainstream media now. I just had that conversation with Peggy. So if you’d only been the honest person I thought you were, it could have worked out perfectly. You would have had your story, your job, and me. A trifecta.”

  “And you?” I said, wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Would it have worked out perfectly for you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I fell for you, Ann. We could have been great together.”

  “We still can be,” I protested, searching his face for even a hint of hope and not finding any. “I love you. You love me. We’ve been through a challenging situation, but we can—”

  At that moment, Rolanda appeared with a wheelchair. “Time to go, Mr. Sykes,” she said, motioning for him to lower himself into the chair. “You’re a free man.”

  He nodded at her, lifted himself and his knapsack into the wheelchair, and sat. “Free as a bird who can’t wait to fly away,” he said with emphasis, in case I didn’t get his drift.

  Rolanda looked at me with puzzlement, then grabbed the handlebars of the chair. When she started to steer him out of the room, I moved toward the door, essentially blocking it.

  “Could I just have another word with him?” I asked her.

  She looked down at Malcolm, even more puzzled. “You wanna stay or go, Mr. Sykes?”

  He hesitated before answering, but only for a second. And even then, his answer was directed at her, not at me, to show me just how insignificant I was to him now. “Go,” he said. “I’m more than finished here.”

  And off they went. No good-byes. No we’ll-talk-about-this-when-I’ve had-a-chance-to-settle-downs. No overtures of any kind. Just an exit.

  I did not cause a scene and run after them. There wouldn’t have been any point.

  Chapter Thirty

  I had another phone conversation with Harvey later that day. I pleaded with him to pull the story and he pleaded with me to come back to work. Well, he didn’t plead, exactly, but he did remind me of the hefty raise I’d be getting to reward me for a job well done. “You gotta earn a living,” he said. “Might as well earn it here, huh?”

  Tuscany said the same thing. Her take on the situation was that what was done was done; that I may have lost Malcolm but I had gained a new shot at my career; that I should seize the moment and pick up where I left off at the magazine; and that I should spend my raise on a fancier apartment than the one I’d been renting. Oh, and a new car too.

  As for my family, they were also pushing me to return to L.A.—all three of them. I couldn’t remember a time when they’d agreed on something so unanimously, but they were really rooting for me to reconcile with Malcolm and figured I stood the best chance of doing that if he and I lived in the same city.

  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing if you ran into each other at some swanky party and kissed and made up,” said my mother, who was very excited about the possibility of boasting to everyone in town that her daughter was dating a movie star.

  “Besides, that story you wrote is very flattering to him,” said my aunt, who knew firsthand. “Once he gets over his snit, he just might thank you for it.”

  “I doubt that,” I said, recalling all too vividly that “snit” didn’t begin to describe Malcolm’s reaction to my undercover caper.

  “You’ll never find out unless you hustle yourself out there,” said my grandmother.

  “And if I were you, I’d hustle myself out there before the story goes on sale next week and the shit really hits the fan,” said my aunt, whose language prompted a sharp rebuke from my mother, whose criticism prompted a snide remark from my aunt, which provoked another round of bickering. Some things never changed.

  “You go get your man,” said Grandma Raysa while her two daughters traded insults. “I’ll hold down the fort here.”

  So it was all decided: I would pack my stuff and head back out west as soon as possible. But there was one more piece of business to clean up before I headed anywhere.

  I DROVE TO the hospital on Tuesday morning and met with Shelley. She was as happy to see me as always—until it registered that I was not wearing my uniform.

  “I came to give you this,” I said somberly, laying my photo ID on her desk. We were sitting in her tiny cubicle of an office, just as we had on my fateful first day at Heartland General when I’d appeared for my interview. Back then it was winter, and the dry heat blowing out of the ceiling vents had nearly suffocated me. Now it was early spring, and the air-conditioning blowing out of those same vents was turning my lips blue.

  “What’s going on?” she said with surprise and concern, her long upper torso leaning toward me. “I was so sure things were going well for you here, that you enjoyed being a volunteer.”

  “I loved it,” I said, heaving a sigh of regret. “I didn’t expect to, didn’t think I’d last more than a day, didn’t know what an uplifting experience it would be. But I’m leaving, Shelley. Before I do any more damage.”

  “Damage? What are you talking about? The patients adore you.”

  “I’ve done something I shouldn’t have,” I said, forcing myself to meet her eyes. “I didn’t break any laws, but I committed a major lapse in judgment. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  I told her about Malcolm, about writing the story, about falling in love with him, about his discharge from the hospital. She was stunned.

  “First of all, I had no idea we had a celebrity in our midst,” she said with a shake of her snowy white head. “Which means that some people around here actually follow the rules.”

  I nodded and waited with dread for her to beat me up about the rest. I respected her and valued her friendship, and I was kicking myself for betraying her trust right along with Malcolm’s.

  “As for what you did,” she said, her expression sorrowful, almost as if she was disappointed in me rather than angry with me, “I would have had to dismiss you if you hadn’t quit first. You crossed the line, Ann. We can’t have our volunteers selling a patient’s story to a national magazine, whether that patient is a movie star or a farmer. The only reason you won’t be disciplined further is that you weren’t the one who sent the infamous e-mail.” Another shake of her head. “Your aunt is lucky Mr. Goddard hasn’t pressed charges or she could have been looking at jail time.”

  Again, I just nodded, humbled by my guilt and by my desire not to screw up any more than I already had. I also thought it was ironic that Aunt Toni and Claire Honeycutt might have had prison stripes in common in addition to Uncle Mike.

  “If only you’d come and talked to me,” she said. “I told you my door was always open to my volunteers. You could have confided in me that you recognized Mr. Goddard, that you were tempted to write about him to get your old job back, that you were developing romantic feelings toward him. I could have been there for you, offered my advice, maybe even prevented all this.”

  “I know,” I acknowledged. “I wish I’d taken you up on that offer, believe me. I just want to say that this hospital has been wonderful to me and I shouldn’t have even contemplated doing anything that might put its reputation at risk.” I cleared my throat as my emotions threatened to overwhelm me. “I may have become a volunteer under false pretenses, but working here has given me back myself, my belief in myself, my belief that we can and should donate our time in the service of others. A
flowery speech, I know, but I mean every word. I owe you so much, Shelley. I feel like slitting my wrists for letting you down.”

  She relaxed into a smile. “This is hardly worth killing yourself over,” she said. “When you come through a serious illness the way I have, you learn that nothing is so god-awful important except your health. Did you make a whopper of a mistake? Yes. Should you stop with all the self flagellation? Yes.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said, touched yet again by her kindness and compassion. “Thank you for everything. You’ve been an inspiration to me. Truly.”

  We continued to talk for a few minutes about the hospital and the other volunteer programs she was trying to implement.

  “While we’re on the subject of making this place better,” I said, “I also want to share a suspicion I have about Richard Grossman.”

  “Tight Ass?” She scowled. “What’s he done?”

  “I’m not accusing him of anything,” I said. “Well, not directly.”

  “Come on, Ann. Let’s have it.”

  I told her about Isabelle and the class-action suit and how unconcerned Richard had seemed. “Whether he’s in denial about the situation or he’s deliberately turning a blind eye to these surgeries, I couldn’t begin to say. He doesn’t strike me as a criminal, but my reporter’s instinct suggests that somebody needs to take a closer look.”

  “Consider it done,” she said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  When it was time for me to go, we hugged each other warmly.

  “You did good work here. Never forget that,” she said in parting. “When you’re out there in la-la land, try to hang on to whatever it was that made you whole again.”

  “I will, I promise,” I said, and bid her a poignant good-bye.

  BEFORE LEAVING THE hospital, I went to pediatrics. I had to see Bree Wiley again, if only for one final time. Jeanette was working her shift that day, so I was able to see her too.

  I gave my friend the Cliffs Notes version of why I was leaving and ended the story by expressing how much I wanted her and her husband, with whom she had recently gotten back together, to fly out and visit me.