Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  The older cop stared at Charlie, narrowing his eyes as if he were trying to figure something out about him, something hidden or suspicious, almost as if Charlie were suspect. “The car’s pretty totaled,” the cop said. “Anything in it burned.”

  “What?” Charlie looked at the cop, who was studying his shoes.

  The cops glanced at each other. “You know where they were headed?” one asked.

  Charlie felt a cold clutch about his ribs. “They were headed home.”

  The cop shook his head. “According to the Connecticut cops, it doesn’t appear to have been the driver’s fault,” he said.

  Charlie tried to stop whatever was banging against his skull. “Which driver?”

  “No alcohol. Fog, but no speeding. Crystal-clean record.”

  “My wife’s a great driver,” he said. “She’s never had a traffic ticket.”

  The cop leaned forward as if he were going to tell Charlie a secret. “Your wife’s car was in the middle of the road with no lights. No flares or signals. It was facing the wrong way. Your wife was in the center of the road and the boy ran into the woods. There was a 911 call, an asthma attack.”

  “My son has asthma. Is he all right? What does my wife say happened?”

  The younger cop hesitated. “We don’t know,” he said, finally.

  Charlie grabbed the handles of the railing.

  “You okay?” the cop said, leaning forward, and Charlie’s air pipe squeezed shut even more. He thumped himself on the chest, and for a moment he wondered if he were having one of Sam’s asthma attacks. “Fine,” he said, and then he grabbed for his car keys and one of the cops took his hand. “Can you have someone drive you? You don’t look in any condition to drive three hours.”

  “It’s three hours,” Charlie repeated. Just hearing the number hurt.

  “We have time,” the cop said abruptly. “We’ll wait with you until you can get someone to drive you.”

  He called a few friends, but no one was home. Then he called his foreman, Ed, who came right over, got Charlie in the car, and then drove as fast as he could. Neither one of them spoke and there was only the roar of the highway.

  The car didn’t seem to be going fast enough for Charlie. The motor knocked, and he clamped his hands together and then un-clamped them. The streets were crowded with people, but they all were moving in slow motion. A young woman stretched sluggishly up on tiptoes to reach for a magazine at a newsstand. An old man splashed a bottle of water onto the street, laughing, “Ya ya ya.”

  Everything’s all right, Charlie told himself. People got things wrong all the time. Ask three witnesses about a crime and you’d get three different answers.

  Finally, they reached Hartford Hospital. Solid and red brick. An ambulance whined past him and Charlie felt suddenly nauseous. He dug his fingers into his palms, hunching over, sweating. It was a mistake. That was what it was, a mistake. He’d get to the hospital, see his wife and son. They would all go home and this would all be an amazing story they’d laugh about later.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS BRIGHT and noisy. Ed walked with him, close by. In the elevator, the woman next to him clutched a bunch of oddly yellow daisies, sighed repeatedly, then backed away from Charlie, as close to the wall of the elevator as she could get. Charlie looked closer at the flowers. Dyed, he thought in wonder. The flowers were dyed. He leaned across the woman and punched the floor button and she sighed again. The dyed petals fluttered with her breath.

  When the doors opened, he nearly stumbled. “I’ll wait for you here,” Ed said, nodding toward a waiting room. He sat in one of the orange chairs and put his head in his hands.

  Charlie tried to snag a nurse, a doctor, to ask, Where are they? Where are they? But every time he approached a nurse, she glided past him like quicksilver, shoes as whispery as cat paws. Every time he cried, “Doctor,” the doctor glanced at him and then was pulled away. Charlie headed for the main desk; a flurry of people were around it. A nurse looked up at him. “April Nash. Sam Nash,” he said breathlessly.

  The nurse blinked at him. “Oh, Mr. Nash—”

  “Where can I find my son? Where’s my wife?”

  She touched his arm, making his heart skitter. It was never a good sign when they touched you. He had seen far too many television hospital dramas to imagine what was going to come next: the lowered voice, the steady gaze, the bad news. He jerked his arm away. “Let me get the doctor for you,” she said.

  “No, no, you tell me.” he said, but she started walking and he followed her, and then there, at the end of the corridor, sitting up on a gurney, swimming in an oversized blue hospital gown, was a boy. Charlie strained his eyes, trying to make out a face, but he was too far away to tell who it was. There was a nurse beside the boy, banding a cuff about his arm.

  The floor was black, with blue and green and red lines to follow to different departments, and Charlie’s shoes skidded on it, but he still ran as fast as he could. The boy was getting bigger, more detailed, and then suddenly, Charlie saw the pale skin, the dark brown spill of hair, all the elements that added up to Sam. He started to cry as he ran toward his son. “Sam!” he called, thinking, Look at me, look at me, as if his son’s seeing him would make Sam real. “Sam!”

  Sam didn’t move. And then Charlie saw his arm, held out stiff, stitched from the wrist to the elbow in neat black crosses that made Charlie’s head reel. “Daddy,” Sam said. “I got stitches.” Sam winced when Charlie touched his cheek. “Daddy,” he said. “It hurt.”

  “He had quite a gash,” the nurse said. She took off the blood pressure cuff and patted his shoulder. “You’ll have a scar. Like a little souvenir,” she told him. “Something to make you special.”

  Sam stared down at his arm.

  “We gave him a nebulizer for his asthma,” the nurse said.

  Charlie hugged Sam tight against him. He could feel his small chest rising and falling, the rapid birdlike beat of his heart. He could smell his sour breath. “Daddy,” Sam whispered. His voice sounded funny. Charlie pushed back his son’s hair to check his face, shoved up the sleeves to check the bones, the skin purpled here and there, each bruise like a punch to Charlie’s gut. “You’re okay,” Charlie said, in wonder. He hugged Sam again as tightly as he could, but Sam felt cold and clammy, and Charlie noticed his lips were a little blue. He looked up at the nurse.

  “He’s going to be fine. This is one strong boy, I’ll tell you that fact.” The nurse’s voice was loud and strong, but then she tapped Charlie and drew him away, where Sam couldn’t hear. “He’s in shock,” she said quietly. “He might feel and act stunned for a while. Just give him lots of love and he’ll be fine.”

  Charlie turned back to Sam, hugging him close.

  Sam struggled free. His eyes were enormous, the pupils dark and glassy, but distant, too, as though he wasn’t seeing Charlie even though he was looking right at him. “I ran,” Sam blurted. “I ran from the car.”

  “That’s all right. That’s good. I’m glad you ran, otherwise you might have gotten hurt in the car.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do!”

  “You ran and you’re all right.” Charlie swallowed. “What were you doing in the car, kiddo? Where were you and Mommy going?”

  “They won’t let me see Mommy,” Sam said.

  “My wife—” he said to the nurse. Another stretcher, pushed by a man, wheeled past.

  “You’ll have to find a doctor,” the nurse said. “Lots of people here tonight.”

  “You sit tight,” Charlie said to Sam. “Stay with the nurse and I’ll find Mommy.” He couldn’t wait to see her. They’d hug and cry, and in the light of this, their morning argument would be no more than a piece of lint they’d brush away and forget.

  Everything was fine. Sam was okay. April was probably bruised or bandaged, too scary for a little boy to see, and of course, Sam would need preparation for a thing like that, explanation and reassurance.

  He was only a quarter of the way down the hall wh
en a voice called, “Mr. Nash!”

  Charlie turned. A doctor, bookended by two cops in uniform resembling Canadian Mounties, was coming toward him. All their faces were drawn, like coin purses. “Mr. Nash.”

  The doctor was in green scrubs, a mask slung about his neck. “Where’s my wife?” Charlie asked the doctor.

  “Mr. Nash.”

  Charlie looked around. “Is she on another floor?”

  He noticed, suddenly, a faint splotch of mustard on the doctor’s sleeve.

  “I’m so sorry,” the doctor said.

  LATER, THIS IS what he remembered. The cops asking him the same unanswerable questions the Massachusetts cops had asked him. The cops asking his permission to talk to Sam, and Sam refusing to say anything, even with Charlie standing there beside him, holding his hand. A nurse handing him a small plastic bag of April’s belongings. Her wallet, her comb and a handkerchief, everything so familiar. Two doctors asking him about the donor card they had found in her wallet, wanting him to sign papers so her organs could go to someone else. Someone else would touch April’s skin. Someone else would see through her eyes. They asked him about signing papers for an autopsy, and then about a funeral home. He stood there, staring. “We can refer you to someone in Oakrose,” the social worker said gently, and he nodded. He remembered going into the room to see her. An ordinary empty room with a long table and his wife lying on it, casually, as if she were just resting, her face relaxed, her skin as pale as stationery, a faint smile on her lips as if, even with her eyes closed, she knew he was there and she was happy to see him. He touched the hem of her dress, one he had never seen before. For a moment, he thought, Maybe it’s not April. There was a triangle of skin on her cheek that was gray. He cupped her face, stroked her arms, her legs. “Breathe,” he said.

  He got up on the table and lay beside her, wrapping one arm about her. He shut his eyes and then he heard the door open, steps coming toward him. “Mr. Nash,” a voice said, and he opened his eyes and saw the damned social worker again, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his legs work. She touched his arm again and this time he stiffened.

  “Is there someone I can call for you?” she said.

  “Call April, my wife.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Is there someone else?”

  He shook his head.

  “I know how hard this is. I know how you must feel, but you can’t stay here,” she said.

  He thought of Ed, sitting in the waiting room, his head in his hands. “How do you know how I feel?”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “My daughter died when she was ten. She choked on a piece of bubble gum.”

  He shut his eyes. If he kept still, she might go away.

  “I’m going to call a funeral home for you. They can make arrangements to transport your wife home. Is that all right?”

  He felt a card touching his hand and he opened his eyes. She had printed on it Roland Brothers’ Funeral Home. “She wanted to be cremated,” he said, and she nodded.

  “I’ll tell them,” she said. “But you need to take your son home.”

  Slowly, he lifted himself up off the table. He followed her down the corridor, along the red line and then the blue, and then to a small room and there was Sam, fully dressed, a bandage along one arm, chatting away with one of the nurses. Sam took one look at Charlie’s face and went silent. “Come on, we’re going home,” he said quietly, and Sam slid off the hospital bed and took Charlie’s hand, holding it tight.

  The police were waiting, their hands awkward in their pockets. “You have a way to get home?” one cop asked.

  Charlie nodded. Then he went to find Ed and as soon as Ed saw Charlie’s face, Ed stood up and did something he had never done before. He wrapped both arms about Charlie and squeezed. “Come on,” Ed said. “I’ll take you both home.”

  IT WAS LATE. The neighborhood was dark, curtains were drawn. Down the block, the Gallaghers’ yellow tabby was yowling in heat. “Are you going to be all right?” Ed asked, and Charlie thought of Ed’s wife, a lean, pretty woman with red curly hair, who must be up worrying about him. Charlie rubbed Ed’s shoulder. “You’ve done more than I can ever thank you for. Go home,” he said.

  Sam staggered a few steps on the sidewalk. Charlie picked him up, a bundle of warm, sleepy boy with a jagged cut all along one arm. It would leave a scar, he thought. Charlie took Sam into his room, gently laying him on the bed. As soon as Sam’s head rested on the pillow, he was asleep.

  Charlie sat down on the bed beside Sam. He couldn’t go into his own bedroom. He couldn’t move about in his own house. The phone rang and he let it.

  The bed was narrow, but Charlie gently lay down beside Sam and threw one arm about him, drawing him close, watching his son’s chest rise and fall. He bent and kissed his cheek.

  I ran, Sam had told him. Ran where? Ran to what? What was Sam even doing outside the car? What was April doing on that road three hours away? Where were they going and why hadn’t he known anything about it? He’s in shock, the nurse had said.

  Charlie lay awake, staring into the dark, listening to the creaking of the house. Then he got up and went to get the plastic bag of April’s belongings that he’d left on the front table. He upended it on the living room floor. Her wallet, a spray of change, and some makeup. Everything was tinged black, edged in smoke. He felt as if he had been sucker punched. He sank to the floor, feeling sick.

  He used to laugh at those movies where men would lift their wives’ clothes and inhale. Now Charlie held April’s blue handkerchief to his face, but it smelled only of smoke. He let it drop.

  Charlie’s hands began to shake. He shoved the bag to the far corner of the floor. Why didn’t she tell him she was going someplace with Sam? Was she still angry about the argument? Was this her way of cooling off, go someplace and come back before he even knew she was gone? He strode to the bedroom and opened her drawers, flinging out the brochures she kept for places and sites she wanted to visit. The Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water House in Pennsylvania. The Whetstone Park of Roses in Ohio. Was that where they were headed?

  She hadn’t left him a note. She hadn’t told him anything was wrong. Everything was still here, but dear fucking Jesus, she had stood in the middle of a road with the car turned around the wrong way, and she had taken Sam.

  Love you. The night before she left, when they first got into bed, before they had argued, she had said that to him, whispering it against his neck. Love you. Most mornings there was a quick kiss because they were both rushing off, because Sam was going to be late for camp or school. He had touched the tip of her nose, smiling at her. “Say it back to me,” she always said, and he always said, “Don’t you know by now?” Every morning, like a dear, familiar routine.

  But they had fought that morning. He had said terrible things he hadn’t meant. She hadn’t given him a chance to fix it.

  When he stood up, his head reeled. Everything looked different to him now, as if the colors were all a shade off. The air had a strange metallic taste and he was suddenly shivering. Charlie yanked open the bedroom closet. There were the dresses she never wore, the jackets of his that she lived in. He grabbed up handfuls and threw them to the floor. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, what he thought he’d find, but he looked through her pockets. Nothing, nothing. There was nothing but this huge pile of her clothes and the only thing wrong was that she wasn’t in any of them.

  The closet was just about empty when he saw the suitcases.

  They had bought four of them just last year, a matched set of red leather because April thought no one else might have red. “A snap to find in the airport,” she told him.

  There were only three suitcases in the closet. The biggest one was gone.

  THREE

  THE FIRST TIME Charlie saw April, she had a black eye.

  He was at the Leaning Tower of Pizza. The place was a big, cavernous barn, with wood tables covered in red oilcloth that the waitresses were always wiping down. Re
d nets were slung across the ceiling, and the blackboard listed thirty-five kinds of pizza.

  Of course, he knew it was a tourist trap, but they had great pizza, they were open twenty-four hours a day, and Charlie knew all the waitresses. Charlie liked sitting at the communal tables, making conversation with the summer people. He liked feeling like a native who could tell people the best places to go for crabs, the best movie theater, and why aloe was a natural healer for the sunburns they almost always had. And sometimes, too, he liked bringing dates here, though lately, he’d been coming alone more and more.

  Tonight, the place was packed and it was all he could do to find a tiny table wedged in the corner. The waitresses in red-checked aprons speed-walked past him, and Charlie lifted his hand, trying to get their attention.

  He was about to go to the counter and get his order to go when he heard a tray crash. People catcalled and stamped their feet. He looked over and saw a shimmering diamond field of broken glass and ice chunks, and right in the center was a waitress he had never seen before, tall and pale, with vanilla-colored hair cut short and as shaggy as a boy’s. She was crouched over the plates, her back a curve. Usually, the waitresses got upset when such a thing happened, but this woman seemed completely unconcerned about the chaos. She didn’t seem to hear the uproar around her. He couldn’t stop looking at her graceful neck, the spiky points of her hair. He wanted to stroke her back, and he got up and walked over to help her. It wasn’t until she looked up, turning her face to his, that he saw her black eye. Startled, without thinking, he plucked up some ice from one of the spilled drinks and brought it to her eye, and when he did, to his shock, he felt heat radiating from her skin, melting the cube so it dripped along his hand. She gazed at him calmly, and he dropped the ice cube.

  “Butterfingers,” the waitress said. Her voice was low and had a hint of a drawl. The corners of her mouth curved up. She turned and went into the back, cinching her apron tighter about her.

  Charlie felt as if he had been struck. Black eye or not, he had never seen a more beautiful woman. He forgot the pizza he had wanted. The whole world seemed to have narrowed down to her: all pale and black and blue.