“Cut the bullshit, Claire.”
“Do you think I’d want anyone to know about this? Jesus, Michael.” All along she had harbored a fantasy—Michael’s fantasy—that they would get through this privately, that no one else would ever have to know what she’d done. She felt nauseous, as she looked at the bouquet she’d brought home from her “friend.”
“Yeah. Jesus.” Michael’s words stung with a fury and sarcasm that seemed to be flourishing in him by the day.
She sank back into the cushions and closed her eyes, imagining her husband’s angry face. “What did you say to Robert?” she asked in a barely audible voice.
“It doesn’t matter what I said.”
CHAPTER 10
Claire tried to focus on the road as she headed to the hospital, but the vision of Jeannie and her camouflage bouquet flashed in her head, imprinted in her mind’s eye like the final image on a television screen the moment someone switches it off. When she batted at her calfskin bag on the passenger seat searching for a tissue, it tipped forward, spilling its contents onto the floor of the Mercedes. She swerved into the next lane trying to reach it. Carolyn and Robert heard a ridiculous story. Word leaks, the other shoe drops. And knowing that her darkest regret and God knows what other embellishments were now “Can you believe it?” lunchtime fodder, that knowledge seared. She had reduced her family to a story.
Cars were rapidly approaching in her rearview mirror, and Claire gripped the steering wheel tighter, locking her arms out in front of her. A pedestrian jumped back onto the curb as she hauled through a yellow light. From under the passenger seat, she heard her cell phone ring. She fished for it over the center console but decided not to make any more unwise moves. Not while she was navigating thousands of pounds of German steel through downtown. The ringing stopped.
As she continued east, she noticed a faded pickup truck in front of her, which, according to its bumper sticker, was powered by Jesus. She scoffed, thinking how confident and prepared that driver must be for the randomness life might hurl at him. She slowed for a red light, and a muffled shout suddenly filled the car. Claire looked at the silent radio and clock displays, puzzled, imagining her own dashboard Jesus calling her out for her sins.
Another muted shout emanated from the floor. She followed the angry voice to the base of the passenger seat and was able to grab her cell phone. “Hello?”
“Finally. I’ve been shouting for you for the last two minutes. What’s going on, Claire?” the voice asked frantically.
“Mother?”
“Of course it’s me. I’m calling you back. And why did you leave me hanging like that?”
“What? I didn’t call. The speed dial must have—”
“That’s not important. What is going on there for God’s sake? I called Michael’s phone by mistake before I called you, and he was very unpleasant and told me I should talk to you about the latest developments? Did Nicky take a turn for the worse?”
Claire exhaled loudly as the light turned green, and she pulled nervously into the intersection. “No, Mother. Nothing’s changed with Nicky.” She weighed the dreadfulness of admitting an infidelity to a spouse versus a parent. Either way it was a shitty proposition, but she didn’t have much choice, considering it would all be out there soon enough. “I, um . . . you don’t have the entire story, the reason Nicholas is in the coma.”
“What? You said it was an insulin reaction.”
“I know what we said, but there was more to it than that. The truth is—” The dreadfulness stabbed at her. “The truth is that he overdosed. On some cocaine.”
“Cocaine? What kind of people is Nicholas around?” Cora’s voice was frenetic, just like a blade on glass. “At Andover of all places.”
“Mother, the drugs weren’t Nicky’s. They belonged to a man who came to the house. He left it behind accidentally.”
“What kind of man? What are you talking about, Claire?”
“I’m just going to say this because people have found out certain things. I had something with him, a fling or whatever you want to call it, and—”
“You had a . . . a fling with some kind of drug fiend?”
“Mother, he isn’t a drug fiend. He was just a person I thought I—” Claire heard honking horns and noticed a crush of traffic behind her in the mirror, and the wide-open space ahead. She gunned the gas. “I don’t know. It was a colossal mistake and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. But it happened, and Nicky found the cocaine.” As the frayed scenery of apartment buildings gave way to the traffic of Colorado Boulevard, she slowed to thirty-five. “It was a fluke that he had the reaction he did.”
“Oh, good lord. And everyone knows about this now?”
Claire felt her sense of dread congeal like refrigerated pan drippings.
Pulling into the hospital parking lot, Claire wondered how they would get through this already untenable situation under a public magnifying glass. To think clearly about anything seemed so tricky, like trying to unzip a heavy fog. She rested her hand on Nicholas’s book and imagined sitting down with him and reading in smooth, reassuring tones. And she imagined Nick coming back to her. Slowly opening his eyes, squeezing her fingers, waking with no memory of what had taken him away.
When she arrived at Nick’s room, it was empty, his bed gone. And with her last nerve shattered, Claire heard herself cry out. A passing nurse rushed in to assist her.
“Mrs. Montgomery, Dr. Sheldon wanted to run another CAT scan. He saw some increased eye movement and responses during his rounds and thought it was worth a check. I thought your husband would be waiting here to tell you.”
Adrenaline pumped through Claire’s body. “He’s coming out of it? Isn’t he?”
“They should be bringing Nicholas back in twenty minutes or so, and Dr. Sheldon should be in to see you.”
She asked to go to him, but the nurse indicated Claire’s regular chair in the corner of Nicholas’s suddenly cavernous-looking room. Instead she walked over to the window and placed the book on the ledge. Beyond the glass, life was in motion—birds, people, cars. Clouds made their animal shapes for those who stopped to notice. But from where she stood, time seemed suspended.
She opened The Phantom Tollbooth to a dog-eared page and began to read aloud.
“Dig in,” said the king, poking Milo with his elbow and looking disapprovingly at his plate. “I can’t say that I think much of your choice.”
“I didn’t know that I was going to have to eat my words,” objected Milo.
“Of course, of course, everyone here does,” the king grunted. “You should have made a tastier speech.”
“Here, try some somersault,” suggested the duke. “It improves the flavor.”
“Have a rigmarole,” offered the count, passing the breadbasket.
“Or a ragamuffin,” seconded the minister.
“Perhaps you’d care for a synonym bun,” suggested the duke.
“Why not wait for your just desserts?” mumbled the earl indistinctly, his mouth full of food.
The page morphed into a dancing jumble of words, and Nicholas’s profile appeared to Claire in the black-and-white print, a lost boy in a surreal world, just like Milo. If he just knew how she would gladly swallow a thousand half-baked ideas and climb The Mountains of Ignorance to take back that night and have him whole again.
Pressing the book to her chest, Claire paced and sat, repeating her silent prayers of hope. She looked out at the gunmetal horizon. It seemed impossible to her that the sun had risen and set six times since Nicholas was last able to speak to her. And like the predictable but still surprising pop of an overblown balloon, it hit her just then—the date and time—and the fact that the art museum benefit would be starting in just a couple of hours. Earlier in the week in what seemed like an hallucinatory phone call, she’d given everything over to Peggy, her co-chair for the event, to handle, and had promptly hit the delete button in her mind.
How strange and awful it seemed, peoples’
lives proceeding as usual. While the mere act of changing her shirt in the morning had become a distraction for Claire, women all over town were, at that very moment, having their hair done, removing their gowns from garment bags, trying to decide between the black or the red, the Oscar or the Valentino. She put down the book and checked her cell phone. No new calls. But her voice-mail box was already full of messages about auction items, centerpieces, and a hundred other last-minute details, in addition to all of the Nicholas calls. The act of ignoring them had, for those long days, fueled her delusion that her friends’ declarations of concern and sympathy were premature and unnecessary.
Claire stared at the whiteboard near the door with its foreign language of medical abbreviations and dosages, at the hanging plastic bags and IV tubes, and she wished for normal life in color again. She shouldn’t be waiting for Nicholas to be wheeled back to the ICU. She should be tying his bowtie, checking to see that he had a full set of studs and cufflinks for his tux, and that Michael would be home early from his meetings. Longingly she imagined standing with both of them in the ballroom, holding them tightly, her two handsome men. She imagined Michael smiling proudly, and Nick nudging them with an eye roll to the center of the dance floor.
Claire drummed her fingers on the windowsill, hoping for a miracle, knowing that something good had to be happening in that scan room. She tried distracting herself with the chaos she envisioned for the night ahead inside the museum doors. She could hear Peggy extending apologies for her absence during her welcome speech. “As many of you are aware,” she’d say, “our friend Claire Montgomery and her husband Michael are by the side of their son tonight, and our thoughts and prayers are with them.” Claire also could hear more than a few guests whispering to their spouses that the Montgomerys were certainly not together at the hospital, given the latest turn of events.
She could see the scene playing out against the backdrop of breathtaking floral displays and ice carvings that she had ordered, the butler-passed hors d’oeuvres and champagne. How ironic, she thought, that it would probably serve as the backdrop of her family’s public undoing. The daisy chain of rumor and innuendo began to unfold in Claire’s mind as she imagined the women comparing couture designs, and deconstructing and magnifying one of the sadder bits of scandal in Denver since the former Miss America went public about her abusive childhood. Only this time, she’d be the one under the glass. A few friends would be vocal in her defense—Peggy certainly, and of course Carolyn. And Gail Harrold, if she were even in town. But on a night fueled by champagne and gossip, the air would be thick with conjecture. And she’d overheard enough games of telephone to know that the end message was generally far worse than the truth.
From the corridor came the sound of an approaching gurney. Claire ran out to greet her son, poised for the miracle. Grabbing on to the bed rail, she raced along as an orderly wheeled Nicholas back to his room. She held her breath and looked into his face, but his eyes remained closed. From down the hallway, Michael and Dr. Sheldon approached. She placed the book near Nicholas’s hand. “I brought The Phantom Tollbooth, Nicky.”
With everyone gathered, Dr. Sheldon explained that Nicholas had been showing increasing awareness of external stimuli all afternoon, and that the scan had shown improvement in his brain-wave activity. He walked over to the bed and motioned Claire and Michael in closer. He pinched Nicholas just below his collarbone, and Nicholas reached toward the doctor’s hand with his own. Claire gasped, transfixed as Nick’s skin reddened then slowly faded back to pale. Michael remained standing with his arms folded. Dr. Sheldon then walked away from the bed and clapped his hands together loudly. Though his eyes remained closed, Nicholas turned his head toward the sound.
“Oh my God.” Claire squeezed his hand softly, waiting for him to respond.
“Scratch his chin,” Dr. Sheldon suggested.
Nicholas swiped at the spot Claire scratched, and she immediately began to cry with relief.
“Why don’t we step outside and talk for a moment,” Dr. Sheldon said.
He explained that there were many levels of coma, and that Nicholas seemed to be emerging from one of the lowest levels of generalized response to that of localized, if inconsistent responses. Claire beamed at Michael.
“Now I can’t say with certainty that Nicholas is going to be fine, or that he isn’t going to be fine.” Dr. Sheldon chose his words carefully. “But I’m optimistic that we’ll be seeing some changes for the better.” He recommended that Claire and Michael look into getting a spot for Nick at a rehabilitation facility. It was entirely feasible that he could be moved in a week or two. The doctor asked one of the nurses to give them information on Craig Hospital.
“I’ve got some already.” Claire pulled a packet labeled “Craig” from the file folder in her bag and handed it to Michael.
Michael reminded her that Nicholas still had not opened his eyes or spoken.
CHAPTER 11
Two days later, as if in defiance of his father’s reminder, Nicholas began to flutter his eyelids rapidly. The following morning he opened them. Although he was still unable to recognize anyone or understand what was going on around him, Claire remained positive. There was life and movement behind his intense expression, she was certain. Her quiet prayers were being answered, their boy was fighting to come back to them.
Amid Nicholas’s progress, Michael tried to make inroads at Craig Hospital, just a few miles from their home. But despite calls from hospital board members, even offers of financial donations, he was unable to move Nicholas through the crowded wait list. There were simply too many patients and too few beds, no matter who was asking.
“This is bullshit,” he said as they stood facing each other in the visitors’ lounge—the familiar scene for the brief exchanges that punctuated their overlapping visits. “There are no strings I can pull, not a fucking thing I can do to get him in there.”
“A little patience, Michael.” Claire knew he had none when it came to situations out of his control—business or otherwise. His perceived opponents always morphed into the great fuckers of the western world, Asia, or the planet. This, from a man otherwise known for his Murrow-esque eloquence and elegance. But it was always better to try and check his frustration early on than let it run. “A spot will open up eventually,” she offered, as much for her own mollification as his. “People get better and move on.”
Michael studied her mouth as if trying to lip-read a madwoman. “We can’t keep him here for three months, Claire. He needs to start recovering in a rehab hospital. And no spot is going to magically open up in time if it hasn’t already, with what I’ve been through.”
“Have you talked to Teddy?”
“Yeah, I’ve talked to Teddy. He and practically every other doctor on staff at Cedars Sinai have called on our behalf. And nothing. It’s ridiculous the way they run these places.” He looked out the door toward Nick’s room.
Claire reached her hand out across the two or so feet that always seemed to divide them, and rested it lightly on his forearm. Not an extravagant gesture, just the merest insinuation of what had been.
“How can I help him if no one will let me?” he asked.
“I know.” Claire kept the space between them, but gripped his wrist, connecting them in the only way she could anymore. “I feel helpless, too. Every day.”
They stood side-by-side and rigid like paper dolls, gazing in the direction of their truest connection. “Nick’s the kid who always gets picked first,” Michael whispered. “For every team.” His voice dripped with pain and he closed his eyes. “He needs to know that I’m trying everything.”
Claire slid her hand from his wrist and laced their fingers, hoping if they could hold each other up like this, they wouldn’t both drown in their sorrow.
After a moment Michael’s posture stiffened and he pulled his hand free. As he appeared to refocus, he fixed his attention on the magazine table and stepped away from her, the tenderness of the moment recalibrating in a
n instant. “You know, I’ve had it,” he said, wiping his eyes, “dealing with all of the rumors and questions.”
“What?” She still felt the warm weight of his fingers against hers.
Michael picked up The Post from the table and slapped it into her hand. The paper was already folded over to the Society column with its snapshots of the Art Museum Gala. Claire eyed him nervously. He was a looming building again, casting his long shadows. She skimmed through the account of the evening. Most elegant soirée in recent memory . . . enormous success . . . fabulously attended. All the bold-faced names. The compliments abounded, but Claire held her breath as she read on, her anxiety beginning to inch up her throat as she reached the third paragraph. Gala co-chairwoman Claire Montgomery did not attend because of the family crisis involving her son’s tragic hospitalization. Many of the patrons in attendance expressed their best wishes to the Montgomerys as they persevere through this difficult time. On the surface, it was adequately benign. But for those with keen enough vision to read between the lines, it dangled volumes.
“Damn it,” Claire said, knowing Michael was dead-on in his assessment that the mere mention would only spawn further gossip.
“She might not have alluded to your pal in this tragic mess, but other people are. And I’m tired of the heads-up phone calls and the veiled sympathy from your friends’ husbands. This whole thing, it’s such an unmitigated, fucking, tragic—” He’d begun pacing, the muscles of his neck tensed, his hands fidgeting anxiously with some invisible object.
Claire flung the paper at his feet, the boundary between her hope and anger blurring. “Michael, I’m sorrier than I’ll ever be able to express that I did this. And sorry the whole world apparently knows about it now, too. But I don’t know what to do other than to just try and get through this together.” She looked into his eyes. “Can’t we please try to do that?”
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