There are stars.
There is a moon.
There are late August wishes and early June dreams that slip out of time and float into the cold that turns dew to frost and hardens the pavement, gives echoes blade edges and makes children’s laughter seem too close to screams.
In the evening; never morning.
When the year begins to die.
The hospital on King Street faces south toward the woods that flank the Station solidly no matter how many streets are made. It is three stories high, tinted windows and brick; a double row of evergreens reaches above the roof, keeping a year-round screen between the hospital and all its neighbors. All the patients’ rooms are ranged along the outside walls, to give them views of green; all the floors except the basement are divided left to right by a long central corridor that, like the others, is tiled and painted in the warmest earth tones, to keep voices and anxieties down and to give visitors the impression the building is much larger than it looks from the curb.
It is seldom full.
It is always fully staffed.
But in spite of the equipment more advanced than most cities, and in spite of the residents, who usually smiled and were usually relaxed and were usually better trained than their counterparts on the outside, Michael suspected that dungeons and medieval prisons were a lot like this: a window you could see through, but too far away to reach even with mighty efforts—a deliberate reminder that freedom was out there and you were still in here, even if your doctor was a genius and your nurse a beauty queen; something to lie on, uncomfortable and hard—a thinly padded rack sadistically designed to put crooks in your back and scabs on your heels and a giggling mad desire to throw yourself on the floor where at least you could sleep without waking slick with sweat; the food in small portions less than fit for human consumption; and the captain of the guards out patrolling the halls, left free by the king to torture the inmates.
No wonder the Bastille had been stormed during the best of the revolution; no wonder they screamed when someone mentioned the Bloody Tower.
On the other hand, he could be dead.
With a sigh for the dubious blessings of mortality, he clasped his hands behind his head, wriggled his buttocks vigorously in a reminder not to get bedsores, and stared glumly at his left leg, invisible in a great white cast putting a dent in the bed. And at his right leg, tucked under the sheet but swollen twice its size from the bandages wrapped around his calf. He twitched the muscles to be sure they still worked, then shifted his gaze to the ceiling.
Brother, he thought glumly.
Softly tan, like the walls; restful perhaps, but without the game-playing flaws he could turn into twisted faces and monsters. Boring. Soporific. As bad as the small television on the wall across the room. The remote-control unit was on the bedtable, but he seldom used it anymore. He hated the game shows. He didn’t understand the soap operas. And it seemed that every time someone ran a large piece of equipment somewhere in the building, the picture broke up into colorful, painful static.
Another look at his leg, and he glared at the toes poking through the end of the cast. He wiggled them. He wished someone would come in and tickle them. He wished someone would come in and tickle his side, or under his arms. He wished someone would come in and put a bullet through his head.
One week in this bed and, according to his doctor, probably another week more.
“This,” he said aloud, “is boring!”
The varnished pine door to the hallway was propped open, and a nurse stepped in the moment he opened his mouth. She grinned and shook her head in mock despair, and wheeled a small cart to his side, picked up his left hand, and curled her fingers around his wrist.
“You really don’t have the right attitude, Mr. Kolle,” she scolded lightly with a glance at the gold-framed watch pinned to her chest.
“My attitude,” he said, “is rotten because I am bored, Janey. I am bored out of my mind and I want to go home.”
She dropped the wrist, picked up an electronic thermometer unit from the cart, and gestured to him. He opened his mouth, and they waited until the unit beeped.
“You dip that in garlic, right?” he said, licking his lips and grimacing.
“Just for you, Mike, just for you.”
His next sigh was world-weary as she checked the cast and thumped it with a knuckle, then moved to his right, flipped over the sheet and checked the bandages for loosening. He guessed her to be a good decade younger than he, her hair blonde, her face round, with a height that couldn’t have been much above five feet. She worked with a minimum of excess motion and not another word, long fingers deft and delicate, and he could have wept with joy when, as she walked around the foot of the bed, she tickled his toes.
At the cart she checked for medication, found none was required and started out. At the threshold she paused, snapping her fingers. “I forgot. You’ll be happy to know you won’t be so horribly bored from now on. You’re going to have company.”
He looked to the empty bed by the window. “Nuts.”
“I thought you’d be pleased. Someone to talk to.”
“Probably an old man who’s just had his gallbladder ripped out, or his kidneys reprocessed.”
“No,” she said, and seemed to think twice before finishing. “As a matter of fact, it’s a kid.”
“A what?”
“A kid. From the upstairs ward. There’s been …” She smiled and shrugged. “He’ll be down later. I’ll be back to see how you guys get along.”
“Thanks,” he said sourly. “I know one lousy fairy tale, I don’t like sports, and I haven’t the slightest idea who has the number one record, country or rock. Wonderful.”
“Sports?” she said. “You don’t like sports?”
He looked mournfully at his leg, cleanly broken in two places, the other one with calf muscles nearly torn to shreds. “Not anymore.”
She laughed, and surprised him by blowing him a kiss. He tried to lean forward to watch her progress down the hall, but she was gone in an eye’s blink, and he lay back, smiling.
It was a cliché, he supposed, that patients fall in love with either their doctors or their nurses, and once the hospital stay is over, they drift apart, shadows swallowed by the night; but in this case he had a feeling he was putting the lie to the saw. He didn’t love Janey, he adored her; he waited impatiently for each visit on her rounds—for the beginning of each shift when she came to kiss him good morning, for the end of the shift when she kissed him goodnight. He fantasized how they might make love with him trussed and cast; he fantasized taking her home when he was better and showing her how he could make her a hell of a lot happier than she was right now.
Especially since, behind that smile, behind the wide blue eyes, he could see the apprehension.
They were all that way these past few days. The halls were less filled with chatter; the rattle and clatter of supply carts muffled and less hurried. Even the announcements over the PA system seemed more subdued.
He hadn’t noticed it at first. He had been too busy fighting through the drugs in his system, struggling out of postoperative recovery to feel the dull and constant throbbing in his newly set leg, the knife jabs that made him pray for a cast on the right one as well.
He was no hero, never wanted to be one; stoics were people who needed very long vacations. So he took every drop of medicine they prescribed for him, and the sleeping pills that seldom worked because he couldn’t lie on his back, and he had to. For the first time in years he wept—at the pain, and the helplessness he couldn’t relieve. The fall, and the snap of his bones, had terrified him, but only when he had realized what had happened; then he was furious at himself for being so stupid. For walking up to the Jasper house as if he were the police and had every right. The butler had opened the door, saw him on the porch and glared. Michael introduced himself. The butler turned away and a new man took his place. A large man. A very large man with hate in his eyes and damned strong hands that had p
icked him up and tossed him over the railing.
There were shrubs, but he’d missed them, pin-wheeling in midair and landing just wrong.
He winced at the memory—of the flight and the fall.
It was stupid, incredibly stupid, and he should have known those people would be touchy about reporters, but here in the hospital, listening to the quiet nightsounds, the whispers, smelling the antiseptic and hearing footfalls without seeing who was coming to his door …
It was only a broken leg, but it made him think of dying.
On the third day he felt fine, except for a little discomfort under the cast; over the fourth and fifth days he managed to find the right position to sleep in, the right way to sit so he could read the morning paper, the proper way to behave when they gave him the bedpans. And once he had established a routine, and knew approximately when he was going to leave, the boredom set in. Had he been buried in work from the office, or had family in to see him every day, the tension among the staff might have swept right past him.
But he had been bored. So he listened, eavesdropped, and knew why Janey had stopped herself before telling him there was trouble with the children.
As far as he could make out, one was dead, and one was missing, and she wouldn’t tell him why.
Now he was going to get one of them in here with him. Just what he needed—an hysterical brat to keep calm while he was losing his mind.
Five minutes later the doctor walked in, looked at him from the foot of the bed, clucked at his sour expression, and walked to his side to plant a kiss on his cheek.
“You’ll scare the little bugger to death looking like that,” she said, pushing long black hair away from her eyes. “Can’t you at least smile?”
He did, stiffly, and she slapped his shoulder playfully, took his chart from the footboard and flipped it open. As he watched, he felt himself calming, thinking that a man who could be in love with two women at the same time can’t be all that close to the lip of the grave. He might, he admitted when she pulled back his sheet and examined his right leg, be a little crazy and asking for trouble, but how could he not fall for a woman like this? Tall and slender, her profile sharp and soft at the same time, her hands so gentle, and her manner as well. He didn’t think Janey would be jealous; she was the understanding type, and he doubted she would mind if some of his affection were shared.
“Well?”
“Hurts, right?”
“Carolyn, for god’s sake.”
“But not as bad as last week.”
Grudgingly, he nodded.
“Good. Tomorrow you’ll go upstairs and get a walking cast and be up on crutches for a little while. Practice for when you go home.”
“Thank god for that,” he said, and looked earnestly at the narrow door to the television’s left. “No more bedpans, just lovely cold porcelain.”
She laughed, patted his arm, and told him she’d be back to see him before she left for home. He couldn’t persuade her to visit for a while longer, and sighed loudly when she left him, clasped his hands on his chest, and looked back at the ceiling.
Michael, he thought, you are a goddamned fool.
Which wouldn’t be the first time, he reminded himself as he turned his head toward the window. Being a fool was what had cost him his last job, and he had been determined not to ruin his chances here, in Oxrun Station. He was not going to let an old friend down, especially when that old friend had thrown him a lifeline.
“All you have to do,” Marc Clayton had told him, “is go out to the Jasper place on the Pike. I haven’t heard anything from the police, but maybe you can convince the old man that we can help him. At least find out if there’s been a ransom note, or a call. Just be cool, Mike, be cool. This isn’t Boston; this is the Station. It wouldn’t hurt to be low-key.”
He never had the chance, and now Marc was calling him once a day or so, half laughing at the episode, half reminding him he was still on salary and whatever had happened to the Jasper family wouldn’t go away just because he was resting.
“Resting? You call this resting, you—”
“Just keep in touch, pal. You haven’t broken your dialing finger yet.”
He shifted, froze when he expected his legs to protest, then relaxed and watched the pine trees through the window. There was a wind, and their tops swayed, whipping in the gusts and settling again. It was hypnotic, and he started to doze, shook out of it with a grunt when he sensed someone standing in the doorway.
It was a young woman.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Cora. Mr. Clayton sent me, to help you out if I can.”
Then she moved into the room hastily with a muttered apology left behind her, and Michael saw the wheelchair, Janey, and eventually, the boy.
There was a great deal of confusion as the nurse and Cora did a dance to avoid collision, and Carolyn marched through with orders for moving in. Michael watched it all with amusement, deciding on the spot it wouldn’t hurt to love three women, not if they were realistic about a man crippled in his bed and his emotions in turmoil. He almost forgot about the boy until he heard the bed squeaking on the other side of the curtain Janey had pulled along its ceiling track. Shadows swayed, swelled, and shrank, and he looked away from it with a shudder; it was too much like the nightmares he’d had when he was little—things that prowled, things that stalked, things that came to him in shadows on his nursery wall.
It was silly. It was the remnants of the drugs. It was all he could do to put a smile on his face when the curtain was drawn back, and the three women were ranged around the young boy’s bed. Nine, perhaps ten, with red hair and freckles and a large padded bandage that covered his left ear. He wasn’t smiling, and finally Carolyn ushered the others out, returned, and stood between the two beds.
“Mr. Kolle,” she said with a nod to Michael, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Rory Castle. Mr. Castle has had his appendix out. He will also probably talk your ear off.
She blew a kiss to both of them, left with white coat flapping, and Michael cleared his throat.
“I didn’t know you had to stay in so long for something like mat.”
Rory sat up, pushed away the sheets, and crossed his legs. “I had …” He touched the bandaged ear. “I don’t know. They told my mom all about it, but they didn’t tell me.”
“Complications?”
The boy nodded. “Yeah, that’s it! Something happened, and they had to fix my ear, too.”
“Is Miss Player your doctor?”
“Yep. Neat, ain’t she?”
Yeah, he thought; neat is right.
“Wow!” Rory moved closer to the edge of his bed. “How’d you do that?”
“Fell off a porch.”
“Wow. Wow, that’s neat.”
“You think so, huh?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “It looks better than this stupid thing on my head.”
They talked for the next hour, Rory’s eyes widening when he learned Michael was a reporter, shifting away when he was asked if other kids had been moved. They were, but he wouldn’t talk about them, and Michael decided not to push it just yet. It occurred to him that he had been handed a byline on a silver platter, and all he had to do was make friends with Freckles.
And that, he soon realized, wouldn’t be hard.
Carolyn was right—the boy talked as if he’d been locked away for most of his life. He talked about his schoolmates, his teachers, his pets, his house, and when all that was done, he began to tell stories. All kinds of stories. About cowboys, and cops and robbers, and spaceships, and sports, not once finishing one, something he’d said reminding him of something else and sending him off on an entirely new tale. Michael listened, and nodded, and laughed when he was supposed to, and didn’t feel at all guilty when he finally shouted, “Enough, boy, for god’s sake. Have pity on an old man.”
“But you’re not old,” Rory said.
“I will be if you keep it up. Old before my time and collecting my pension.”
Rory wanted to know what a pension was.
He told him they were both too young, and maybe it would be a good idea if they both rested a while.
Rory laughed, and started a story about his grandfather that made Michael groan; and it wasn’t until dinner that he remembered the girl, Cora, and realized it was too late to call Marc and find out what was going on. He didn’t object to the help, but he would have thought Clayton would have given him some warning. For a moment he wondered if the woman’s appearance was a comment on his abilities, and once the moment had passed, he knew he was being childish. Feeling sorry for himself again, when he ought to be thinking of ways to use her as his eyes, as well as his legs.
He grunted, swore, and blinked when the boy giggled. He’d forgotten all about Freckles and would have to get used to keeping his comments to himself.
He ate then and traded acid reviews of the meal with Rory and the orderly who took the trays away. The boy, he noticed, had eaten very little, and when the television was turned on, Mike spent as much time watching him as he did the small screen. Rory had grown silent, nervous, his hands clutching the sheets into clumps, smoothing them out, clutching them again. He looked to the door several times, to the window, which reflected nothing but the room.
And the only thing he said before the lights were turned out was, “Mr. Kolle, do you ever have nightmares?”
At night. All night. The hospital whispering to itself in faint footsteps along the hall, the wind testing the windows, every so often a low moan from another room, a muffled chime, a hiss-and-delayed thud as elevator doors opened and shut and no one came out, no one went in.
All night. Bedsprings and sheets and the scratch of a pencil, the burr of a telephone, somewhere down around the corner a toilet flushing and the scuff of worn slippers and the flaplike wings of a nightgown on thin legs.
All night.
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