“I can’t promise,” said the doctor, “but he’s young, his heart is strong, I don’t think he’s lost too much blood. There’s every reason to think he’ll make a good recovery. As for his shoulder, we won’t know until we see the X-rays.”
Jack was wheeled away to radiology.
“So who shot Mr. Brennan?” she asked, still typing. “And why?”
A word once let out of its cage, Jack used to say, quoting one of his beloved ancients, cannot be whistled back. I longed to answer Dr. Gaitonde, to tell the truth, but I was reeling from what I’d seen outside Mercury’s stall—the incomprehensible spectacle of Viv, my wife, Marcus and Trina’s mother, holding a gun, a gun that she had, only moments before, fired at my friend. Even in my muddled state, I grasped that these words, once released, would fly far and wide.
In the next cubicle a woman’s voice rose. “I told them the exterminator can’t work with a dog in the building.”
I was still gazing at the empty linoleum where Jack’s gurney had stood when Hilary spoke. “We don’t know what happened. After dinner we went to visit my horse at the stables. We were in his stall, and someone shot Jack. We didn’t see who. Mercury, the horse, went berserk. All we were thinking about was getting Jack out of the stall. Getting him here.”
“My heavens.” Dr. Gaitonde’s dark eyebrows arched towards her dark hair. “What were you doing there so late?”
“My wife manages the stables,” I offered. “They’re owned by her best friend.” Two sentences, both true. On the other side of the curtain the woman said that a dog was no different from a baby. And would you leave a baby to the exterminators?
“We’ll notify the police immediately,” said Dr. Gaitonde. Then she held out Jack’s wallet and told Hilary to talk to admissions.
IN RECENT YEARS I have spent many hours at the emergency room with my father, but seldom late on a wintry Saturday night. At least half the people there were, like Hilary and me, waiting for news rather than attention, and more than half were drunk, or stoned, or in some uncertain state. While Hilary dealt with Jack’s admission, I sat at the end of a row of chairs and dialed the number of our house. My own voice, sounding calm and reasonable, asked me to leave a message.
“I’m at the hospital with Hilary,” I said. “They’re calling the police. . . .”
Was Viv standing in our study, listening? Had she driven directly to the police station? Was she even now handing over the gun? At last the machine cut off my silence.
Hilary came back, holding two cans of Diet Coke. She offered me one and said she was worried about Mercury. What if the gunman had injured him too? Under cover of opening the can—that comforting little pftt sound—I said I’d just phoned Viv. She would check on him.
Hilary sank into the chair beside me. “I can’t believe this. One minute we’re in a nice restaurant, eating dinner. The next we’re in the emergency room.”
I repeated the doctor’s reassurances: Jack was young and fit; the bullet hadn’t touched any major organs. “What we have to worry about is his shoulder.”
“And his spirit.” She told me then what I had not known before, namely how frightened Jack had been when he understood he was going blind, how, like my childhood neighbor, he hated never knowing who was in a room, or in the street.
“He always seemed so stoic,” I said.
“Jack’s proud.” Her hair swung back and forth as she described how a few months ago a colleague had failed to meet him for lunch. Jack had eaten alone, but as he was leaving the cafeteria, he heard a familiar voice. “The guy had totally forgotten their meeting,” Hilary said, “and was eating with friends at another table. That’s Jack’s life in a microcosm.”
Listening to her, gazing at the worn chairs, I glimpsed the edges of outrageous grief. If Jack x’d, then I would y. Where x was lost the use of his arm, or ended up in a wheelchair, or died, and y was burn down the stables, or banish Viv to Patagonia, or rend my garments and put out my eyes. Beside me Hilary checked her phone, although the only news either of us wanted would come through the doors at the end of the emergency room. I could feel her fidgeting beside me; I could feel myself doing the same. If there had been treadmills instead of chairs, we would have been running, furiously, side by side.
“So what on earth happened?” she said, giving up on the phone. “Someone else was at the stables? They tried to shoot us?”
If I told her what I had seen, then my life, my family, would not be over—nothing so simple as that—but changed almost out of recognition, like the flimsy Coke can I had unthinkingly, crumpled in my fist. “Maybe someone”—I was groping from one word to the next—“was trying to rob the stables. There’s been a spate of break-ins recently at farms, garages. Lonely places.”
On the nearest TV screen the time flashed, and so I can report that I told my second major, premeditated lie at 12:27 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, March 6, 2011. Perhaps that was my second birthday.
WE WAITED, AND HILARY, despite the magazines scattered around the room, waited mostly by talking. I heard the story of her marriage. Deeper into the night she described Jessie, her secret sister. The exterminator woman left. A young man arrived with a broken wrist and three drunken friends. A woman limped in with two small children, the older sobbing from earache. Hilary, happy for the distraction, walked her baby round and round the waiting room. At last Dr. Gaitonde returned. They were going to operate to remove the bullet; it was the only way to stop the bleeding. The shoulder—she shrugged her own—would be dealt with later by her expert colleagues. As she held out the permission forms, with their dire warnings, she added that the police would be here shortly.
Sometime after the doctor left, Hilary said, “I understood about Michael and women, but I never understood about him and horses. To him one horse was worth a hundred people.”
Was that really any different, I asked, from people who were mad about tennis or music or climbing Everest? Just because we didn’t value the object, that didn’t mean the passion was unworthy.
“What about people who collect garden gnomes?” said Hilary. “For Michael, horses justified everything. I think that’s why I married Franklin. His fanaticism felt familiar.”
Years ago in Edinburgh one of my lecturers pointed out that fan comes from fanatic, an obvious connection I had never noticed and which I now pointed out to Hilary. Desperate to keep the conversation from turning to Viv, I continued to urge counterexamples. People who were trying to cure cancer, or stop the glaciers melting, surely they weren’t fanatics?
“Because they know when to stop,” she said. “The first time Michael talked about Mercury, he said, ‘Hil, I’ve fallen in love.’ But love became something else.”
“I can understand you loving Jack,” I said.
It was then that she told me they wanted to have a child. “I know it’s crazy,” she said. “We’ve only known each other four months.” Her eyelids fluttered, rapid as a moth’s wings.
2
AND WHERE WAS VIV during these hours? As soon as we’d carried Jack out of the barn, she ran to Mercury. He was still wild with fear, kicking, screaming, and the other horses were whinnying and banging, their panic magnifying his. At the stables in Ann Arbor a stallion had killed a man by pinning him to a wall. People said the man was to blame—he’d whipped the horse—but she had always kept her distance. Now she was afraid of Mercury, and he was afraid of her. Perhaps he could smell the gun. She stood at the door of his stall, talking to him—No one’s going to take you away. You’re safe—until at last he lowered his head.
The boy at the shooting range had told her that when the police in his town shot a junkie, the bullet had passed straight through the junkie and hit another man, a teacher, in the throat. “He was a standup guy,” the boy had said. “No justice in that.” So when she took off Mercury’s blanket and saw his dappled coat gleaming, no sign of blood, she gasped with relief. To have shot Jack was unspeakable; to have shot Jack and Mercury was unthinkable. She pu
t his blanket back on, strapping it loosely the way he liked, gave him a handful of oats, locked the door, set the alarm, and then she was in the car, the gun on the seat beside her, not knowing what to do next.
“I kept telling myself,” she told me later, “you wouldn’t let Jack die.”
She sat there, gazing out at the soiled snow. Should she go to the police? If Jack died, she was sure, I would accuse her. If he lived, she could not imagine what I might do. And all her wondering might be beside the point. Perhaps I had already told Hilary. Perhaps she had already lost everything.
At some point she started driving. When she reached the main road she stopped, removed the ammunition from the gun, and threw the magazine as far as she could into the woods. Then, with no conscious plan, only revulsion, she threw the gun. Back in the car, she knew she was not going to the police station that night. She had to see Marcus and Trina. But at the sight of our house, all lit up, she braked. What if I was already there and had barred the door? She pictured herself knocking on doors and windows, calling my name, while I sat on the sofa, my gaze fixed on one of my history books.
But the door opened easily, and inside everything was as she had left it, weirdly quiet. Even Nabokov was asleep. In all the years we had lived in the house, she had never been there alone at night before.
“I saw myself in the bathroom mirror,” she told me later, as we sat drinking Scotch at the kitchen table, “and I looked just the same. Like Dinos.”
For a moment I couldn’t place the name. Then I remembered. When I still lived on Linnaean Street, Dinos had owned the shop where I bought my coffee. A handsome man, always ready for a chat, he had married his pretty manager. The year after Marcus was born, a photograph had appeared by the cash register: “It’s a girl.” Beaming, Dinos told me that Natalie was named for his grandmother in Thessalonika. She liked the smell of apples, and slept for six hours a night. We no longer lived near the shop, and several months passed before I returned to buy coffee. When I asked if Dinos was around, the boy behind the counter lowered his voice. Natalie had died ten days before; Dinos had been charged with shaking her to death.
I had been shocked to think that someone I knew, someone so genial, could have done such a thing, but in the ongoing emergency of my own life, I had gradually forgotten Dinos. Then last autumn, searching for a birthday present for Viv, I had gone into another shop near Linnaean Street. The saleswoman was flirting with a dark-haired man in a leather jacket. As I studied a row of blouses, she complained that she needed to lose weight.
“Honey,” said the man, “you look great, and I’m not just saying that because I haven’t seen a woman in nine years.”
At once I recognized Dinos, and he, catching my glance, recognized me. Before I could move, he had crossed the small shop and embraced me. He asked after Viv and Marcus; I said he was looking well. He left the shop, and the saleswoman helped me choose a gift.
At home I had described the encounter to Viv. “Here was this person,” I said, “who killed his daughter, and he looked just the same.”
“But he served his sentence,” Viv said. “Shouldn’t he be forgiven?” Her hair was still long, and it was easy to picture her as Portia, the role she had played in her high school production of The Merchant of Venice.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I kept feeling it was too easy.”
“Nine years in prison isn’t my idea of easy.”
“Even nine days, but all the time we were talking, I was thinking that if Natalie were alive, she’d be a year older than Trina, old enough to pick apples. Perhaps that’s what bothers me: I’d forgotten her, and he seemed to have too. I don’t think forgiveness should involve forgetting. But if I remember Natalie, then I’m not sure I can forgive him.”
Viv’s gaze had sharpened. “Dinos isn’t a criminal,” she’d argued. “Just a person who made a terrible mistake, and who has to live with that day after day, knowing he can never ever go back and undo it.”
Which was, she told me, staring sorrowfully across the kitchen table, how she now thought of herself.
3
ONE OF THE THINGS Viv and I share—used to share—was a belief in the rational. We both believed in facts and figures, chemical reactions and reasoned argument. But that night the shock of what she’d done, the awfulness of her mistake, the excruciating slowness with which the hours passed, made her afraid she would lose her wits as easily as a set of keys. Thoughts were running wildly through her brain, like when she had the flu, only much worse. She could see, as I had years before when I tried to juggle child care, my hospital duties, and my father’s illness, the possibility of them running away altogether. Not knowing what else to do, she began to clean the empty house. Scrubbing, dusting, washing, vacuuming, made her feel a little calmer.
Meanwhile in the emergency room the Saturday-night revelers dwindled. An elderly woman was brought in. The man at the admissions desk asked after her cat. During my stint in ER we had had several regulars, old people living alone, who came in two or three times a month, convinced they were at death’s door and, once they were settled in a cubicle, fell happily asleep.
A nurse called, “Ms. Blake.” We jumped up, thinking there was news. Two policemen were waiting in the hall. Each wore a wedding ring, and one had a faint scratch on his cheek, the sort of injury a small child might inflict. They asked me to sit down again while they spoke to Hilary. I remember staring at my clasped hands, my own thoughts running wildly: Viv had confessed, the children, Jack’s shoulder, my father. For a moment I was back in Edinburgh, my ruddy-faced Sunday-school teacher towering over me. Children, he boomed, when you tell a lie you are hidden from God.
Hilary returned. The policeman with the scratch led me to an alcove off the hall. The two men asked their questions, and my thoughts stopped running. I pictured Trina waving to the whales; I pictured Marcus carefully cutting up a stalk of broccoli for Nabokov.
“My wife, Viv Turner, manages the stables,” I said. “I have a key. We wanted to visit Ms. Blake’s horse.”
The policemen took notes; Ms. Blake had said the same thing. They would check out the stables and return in the morning to speak to Mr. Brennan. Back in the waiting room, I asked Hilary if she would like something else from the vending machines: Coffee? Chocolate? Peanuts?
She shook her head. “What’s happening?” she said. “Why is everything taking so long?”
“Shoulders are complicated. The surgeon has to be careful of the muscles and tendons.”
“In that case, I hope they take as long as possible. Do you know a girl who works at Windy Hill, Charlie something? She came by my office yesterday.”
“Charlie? What did she want?”
Hilary was saying she didn’t know, she’d been out, when a nurse, an older man, appeared, calling her name. Once again we jumped up, jostling our chairs. Please, I thought. In a soft Irish accent the man said Mr. Brennan was in recovery. We could see him soon, just for a few minutes.
“Thank you,” Hilary kept saying. “Thank you so much.”
My vision narrowed. I was afraid I would fall to the floor. The nurse guided me into a chair and told me to put my head down. Someone brought me a glass of water. “Sorry,” I said when I could speak again. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“You love Jack.” Hilary’s hand was warm on my arm. “This has been one of the worst nights of my life.” It was then that she told me about her sister, and the grief of losing that first pregnancy.
Half an hour later the nurse returned to lead us along a series of corridors, past darkened rooms, into and out of an elevator, and then at last into a dimly lit room.
“Just three minutes,” he said. “Don’t expect anything.”
Jack. One small word: an entire being.
He lay propped up in the hospital bed, surrounded by the panoply of drips and monitors, his face still pale but no longer waxen, his lips no longer taut with pain. It was he who had told me that the word panoply came from the Greek phr
ase meaning the full armor of the Hoplites. I took his living hand in mine.
Hilary bent to kiss his cheek. “I love you,” she said. “Your only job is to get better. Sleep and get better. I’ll be back soon.”
The nurse ushered us out, promising to phone if anything changed. Then we were standing in the frigid parking lot with no sign of my car. After several minutes of searching near the entrance, Hilary remembered that at some point in the night, I had moved it. We found it in a distant corner, slewed across two spaces. I turned on the engine and scraped the windows. Hilary waited in the passenger seat, eyes closed. Neither of us spoke on the way to Il Giardino, but at the sight of the dark-green awning, I was dismayed. Don’t go, I wanted to say. Let me come home with you. Perhaps Hilary felt the same. Awkwardly, across the gearshift, she clung to me. We agreed to talk in the morning. I waited until her car started and she was safely on her way.
I managed three blocks before I pulled over. Once, driving back from the nursing home after seeing my father, I was so overwhelmed that I parked at the 7-Eleven, the one where Viv encountered the young men, and walked the rest of the way home, every step a protest against the atrocious, unbelievable fact: my father was going to die. Now I could scarcely begin to name the feelings that roiled inside me, but one emerged with absolute clarity: I did not want to see Viv. Had she confessed? Was she already in prison? Or was she at the house? I could not deal with one more thing. We had waited. Let her wait. I did a U-turn and drove to the office. Inside I turned up the heat, took off my shoes, wrapped myself in the blanket we kept for emergencies, and, on the small sofa in the waiting room, fell abruptly asleep.
4
PERHAPS IN SOME OTHER language there is a word for that state of mind one discovers upon first waking after a terrible event. For barely a fraction of a second everything seems the same. Then there it is, the awful “it,” and the world is utterly altered. Or so I felt the morning after my parents announced we were not going back to Edinburgh; the day after I learned of my father’s illness. I felt it again that Sunday morning, waking on the office sofa, my cheek against the stubbled cushion. Reaching for my glasses, I hoped for evidence that last night’s happenings were a vaporous dream, but everything, from the ficus by Nabokov’s table to my own presence, confirmed their reality.
Mercury Page 18