Just as I began tearing adhesive tape off my arms so I could free myself, Barry was there. It was good to see him. I needed to hear the truth, and I knew that Barry could not lie to me if I had him by the hand and looked him in the eye.
Barry helped me lie down again. The room swayed slowly one way and then another. He adjusted the blanket over me, and then our eyes locked. He was hoarse. “Her condition is very serious.”
“Is she still alive?”
Why did he hesitate before answering? “I would tell you if she wasn’t, Stratton.”
I choked on the words. I tried to sit up. “I don’t believe you. She’s gone.”
“She’s not gone,” said Barry gently. “She’s still with us.”
Tears flooded my vision. I turned my head so they could spill from my eyes.
He gave a tired smile. “But she still has a long way to come.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that her recovery is slow. You’ve been here three days. You’re doing well.” He hesitated. “Nona is struggling.”
“Struggling,” I echoed.
“She’s strong. She’s a fighter.”
I searched his words, echoing them in my mind. It was like translating Caesar in my student days, easy sentences, interesting stories, but at the same time oblique and hard to tease into sense.
To swallow my saliva took an effort. The plastic tube felt like the shaft of a pencil caught, maddeningly, in my throat. I said, at last, “You’re hiding something from me.”
“I’m trying to,” he said with a rueful smile.
“What’s wrong?”
There was a long pause. “She’s not responding.”
“What does that mean? ‘Responding.’ Talk to me like a human being, Barry.” I flung off my blanket. “I want to see her.”
“It might not be good for her. She’s too badly injured, Stratton.” He adjusted my pillow, giving it a little punch from the side. “Everyone is very optimistic about you.”
My lips formed the words: about me?
“Well, for both of you. The telephone has been driving the receptionists mad. There’s a mailbag of cards in the mailroom. You’ve been beat up. Not one-tenth as bad as Nona, but you took some tough hits.”
I weighed his sports-announcer diction against the way I felt about him, and decided not to be too critical. “I want to see her now. Help me out of this bed. Christ, it’s not a bed—it’s a web. Jesus, I have a—my penis is hooked up to something, for God’s sake.”
He said my name with that sharp, clear tone I remembered from the classroom, and from visiting people with disobedient dogs.
I was still, but I gave him a very hard look and he dropped his eyes for a moment. “As soon as possible,” he said.
I waited.
“First thing tomorrow,” he said.
I clenched my teeth, and found my tongue to be raw. I was aware of myself as I might be aware of another person. I was furious, and even in my damaged state I was stronger than my old tennis partner.
I was connected to poles, sacks of fluid. I was out of bed, and wires and cables clung to me. Urine spilled from a sack beside the bed, and flowed across the floor. I disconnected the catheter, with a yank that made me gasp as the long, hot wire pulled all the way down the shaft of my penis and fell to the floor.
I whipped the IV out of my arm. Barry called to someone just outside, in the corridor, and looked on as two large male nurses shouldered into the room. I gave them a move, a stutter step, a feint, but I was still too weak to dodge them. They stabbed a needle into my hip.
The two men wrestled me into the bed. I could feel the drug dissolving my strength. “If she dies, Barry, I’ll never forgive you.”
The drug had me. Pain, anguish, even love, was nothing. I tried to fight the sedative, but I couldn’t.
Barry looked back from the doorway. His eyes were friendly, and I knew that he was a man I could trust. I took in the array of plants at the far end of the room, under the television. This greenery was a violation, I supposed, of hospital rule, but was the evidence of the handiwork of some of the City’s more expensive florists and also the respect that the hospital owed my family.
“The first thing tomorrow,” he repeated, and I lifted a finger in agreement, and in command.
I woke. Childress stood over me. I tried to sit up. The drug held me, sapped me. “You let this happen! You knew what they would try to do.”
He sat down, said nothing.
“Don’t even pretend,” I said.
He looked tired. “We’re looking for suspects.”
I no longer had a tube in my throat, but even so my voice was rough. “You don’t expect to find any.” I recalled Fern’s body lying in the street, and grief made it impossible to continue.
Childress picked at a callus on his palm. “Tell me what you remember.”
“They wore masks.”
“License-plate numbers. The makes of the cars.”
I did not respond.
Childress blinked and rubbed a hand over his mouth, either uncomfortable or all-too sympathetic. “If you could give us any kind of description at all—”
But I wasn’t really listening. It took a moment for me to realize that Childress had spoken. I was caught up in a violent reverie, a fantasy of revenge that surprised me, and I had to stir myself, shifting my head on the thin hospital pillow.
“These are violent times,” he said, as though he couldn’t bear the silence.
“Do you know anything about Nona’s condition?”
“The doctors don’t talk to me,” he said. “Any kind of description. Size, age. Any impression of what race—”
I closed my eyes.
Childress’s voice was easy, intelligent. He wanted so much to be liked by me, but his dislike for police work was too plain. “This is common when there’s a violent crime. There’s a selective amnesia.”
“The light was peculiar,” I offered, feeling the need to apologize, and to be kind to this man who wanted to be everything at once: cop, fellow citizen, sympathetic visitor. “Not bad, so much as shifting, all glare and shadow.”
“That’s very unfortunate.”
We gave each other a long look.
“Can I tell you a secret?” said the policeman.
He wandered to the window of the room, an opening in the wall that disclosed virtually no view except for the sight of an angle of wall, concrete painted adobe yellow. I found myself once again liking this difficult cop.
I encouraged him to share his secret.
“If DeVere or Renman paid money for this, there’s a limit to what we can do.”
Once again, I missed Fern. He had thought of danger as so much rubbish to be removed by expert hands. A threat had brought a test pilot’s glint into his eye.
“I’m going to post a guard in the corridor,” said Childress. “Just to be safe.”
“They didn’t want to kill me, did they?”
“I guess not,” he said.
“You know what I want to do.”
“Understandable,” he began.
“If I find one of them. Just one.”
All that night I kept waking and thinking: Nona.
What are they hiding from me?
34
“I have to tell you something,” he said. Barry blocked the doorway with his body. “I want to warn you,” he said. He did not add anything further. He expected me to understand what he was trying to say.
“Get out of the way,” I said.
“You’ll see why I thought it was a bad idea.”
My first impression was that Barry had taken me to the wrong room. There was a stranger in the bed, someone I did not recognize.
I took an uncertain step and stood mystified. My hand hesitated, then reached forth, and I touched her.
The white wristband read: Nona Patricia Lyle.
Nona was a mummy, blue, tube-festooned. She lay contorted, her hands bunched into fists.
; I leaned over her. “Nona?” I said, speaking into the greenish cloth that swathed her skull.
I said her name again, and then Barry said, “It’s best to let her be still.”
I met his eyes.
“You’ve seen her,” he said. “She’s alive.”
Her eyelids were blue bruises. Her lips glistened with glycerin or petroleum jelly.
“She can hear us now,” I said.
“There’s not a whole lot of reason to expect much in the way of cognitive function.”
“She can hear us,” I said. “That’s one of the things Nona discovered. That people critically hurt, even dying, can hear us.” This was a rebuke, and a reminder to Barry to remain upbeat. But it was also a message to myself, in wonder: She was still with us.
I kissed her.
“You will be well,” I promised her. “Whatever it takes.”
I leaned against the wall in the corridor. Barry leaned beside me. Neither of us wanted to talk.
“The prognosis,” he said, “is anyone’s guess.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“We expected subdural trauma. After all, she was hit on the head pretty hard.”
It impressed me once again that Barry was not articulate. “And?”
“She should be in better shape than she is.”
“Her condition baffles you.”
“That’s right.”
“She’ll be all right.”
Barry folded his arms. “I think you should be prepared,” he said.
“She’s not going to die, Barry. Somehow or other, you’ll find some way to bring her back.”
“We don’t even know what’s wrong with her.”
“That can mean good news. If you don’t know what’s wrong with her—”
“Don’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? Please don’t make me spell it out.”
35
“It’s your mood,” said Barry.
It was an effort to tie my shoe, but I managed.
“What’s wrong with my mood?” I asked.
“It’s inappropriate.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ve made up my mind about something.” I knotted my tie. Rick was in the corridor, talking to the policeman on duty, waiting for me. I stuffed my shaving kit into the overnight bag.
Barry adopted his most brisk tone. “I want you to stay here for another day or two. We can have you work with one of the staff psychiatrists.”
“You always said that, except for Nona, they were a bunch of bores.”
“Well,” he said, regretfully, “they are. But they might be better than nothing.”
“Barry, look at me.”
“You suffered a deep concussion. They can be unpredictable.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of what you might do.”
“Revenge?”
Barry did not answer.
“I have something else in mind,” I said.
I knew how to win Nona from the place which had claimed her. I was beginning to understand that life was a series of bargains. Effort is expended for reward, money is exchanged for pleasure. I knew what Nona’s life would cost me, and I would pay.
Rick had ordered the flowers, and the type of floral arrangement that dominated was a lush confusion of heather. They did not look like the usual flower for this sort of event, and I think that is what Rick intended, hoping to remind all of us of the more lively sort of garden, the one that is not the well-kept haven for the permanently asleep, but the sort for children and painters, and lovers.
Many people had known Fern, and liked him. It rained. It didn’t matter. Black umbrellas were everywhere, sweating dark domes under the fine rain. The people who don’t go out in the rain, my mother said, are “people made of sugar.” By this she meant that these people were soft and without drive, and she was, I think, trying to prevent me from becoming a decorative male, like so many of the tall, well-tailored men who lounged in and out of my parent’s parties, all good looks and money and, one sensed, without any strength unless it was the ability to drink until five in the morning.
It was not a downpour. The sun broke through, only to dazzle us like a trophy, far above anything we could attain, and then it resolved itself again into a tablet of calcium, a trace, and then nothing but the flowing, sun-bleached clouds.
There were many police. Childress was between two marble monuments in the distance, talking to a uniformed cop.
In the background, along a ridge, was a picket line of photographers aiming their cameras, some of which were on tripods. The cameras made a faraway squeal and whine whenever the figures of the mourners parted, giving the photographers a clear view of myself gazing at the cherrywood casket under the canopy, or looking down into the grave.
They were drawn to me. My story was still on the front page, after four days. There were diagrams of the street, estimates of the number of “club-wielding assailants.” My fight with them was described as “heroic.”
I was the center of the target, even now.
I had come straight from the hospital, dressed in a suit Rick had picked out from my closet. My left arm was in a sling, but I had stamina, and a sense of purpose.
People kept their distance as I made my way through the crowd. Snipers have been known to miss their targets.
Anna Wick wore bright red lipstick. She was now the sole captain of the DeVere empire. I was surprised to see her there, and then I realized that she must have come to catch my eye.
The earth from the grave was a small hill disguised by bright green artificial turf. I did not listen to the prayers, to the eulogy, finding the drone of the clerical voice irritating, forcing me to the back of the crowd.
I greeted Collie and her sister, a square-jawed woman with strong-looking arms who spoke in a whisper.
Only Rick stayed near me during the service, and afterward he kept close, as Fern might have. I told him that the flowers were beautiful.
“This isn’t what I had in mind. I thought just a quiet service, graveside, intimate, was the best idea,” said Rick. “It’s hard to feel intimate with the media around, though.”
“It’s a beautiful afternoon,” I said, awakened to the scent of grass by my stay in the hospital.
“It’s terrible about Nona.”
“I don’t think there’s any reason to be worried, Rick. She’ll be all right.”
“You’re so sure of that.”
“It’s just one of those strange things that happen,” I said, perhaps too airily.
“That’s the difference between us,” said Rick. He looked drawn, tired.
“Why do you suppose Anna Wick bothered to come?” I mused.
“She needs your help,” he said, putting his hands into his pockets.
“Her people killed Fern.”
“That’s not what happened. She runs the DeVere empire, but most of the Renman people see her as expendable. She wants your help to consolidate.”
“You’re smart,” I said, remembering in that instant the conversation I had enjoyed with Stuart. One could use craft, or strength, rarely both. “I wonder if I’m as cynical as you are.”
“I would keep away from Anna,” he said.
The photographers had packed their gear. They trailed away toward an assembly of subcompacts and vans, looking like hunters mildly satisfied with the day’s kill.
Rick waited for me to enter the car, but I held back. I told Rick that I wanted a private moment beside the grave, and Rick sounded almost relieved to say that he understood. This was the Stratton he could understand, serious, thoughtful, loving.
Anna Wick had beckoned to me.
We walked together under a row of cedars, my leather soles squeaking on the wet grass. “I know the people who did this,” she said.
“Why tell me?”
“They’ll try again,” she said. “And this time they’ll kill you.”
“I think I’ll survive,” I said.
“The cops won’t help, Stratton. They don’t even want to.”
Rick was watching from a distance. Even from here I could sense his disapproval.
“She’s just trying to set you up,” said Rick. “You better have a talk with Childress.”
We were in the back of a limousine, the day screened by the tinted glass. “I’m not that worried about it.”
Rick made an incredulous laugh. Then he grew somber. “If the doctors can’t do anything to help Nona. If they can’t help her.” He was thinking something he could not bring himself to say.
“Are you saying that Nona might as well be dead?”
Rick opened his hands and let them fall. “It’s a thought that occurs, isn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said sharply. “Not to me.”
He gave me a satisfied look, as though I had passed a test. “Let’s have dinner together. I’m putting together a security team, and we can sit right there in Trader Vic’s like presidential candidates and nobody will lay a finger on us.”
I told him that I couldn’t.
I had plans.
36
The night was clear and it was warm.
The warmth came out of the ground, radiating upward. I walked the streets to the Great Highway, and, swept by the beams of the occasional pair of headlights, I hurried along the shoulder of the road for awhile. Then I ran across the lanes of the highway to the beach.
The beach there was broad and flat. There were a few iceplants, straggling succulents, like barbed wire gone green and slack. The plants were planted to keep the sand from blowing into dunes across the highway.
There were stars. The sand was white, littered in places with aluminum cans and scraps of charred driftwood. I made my way to the edge of the water, to the spindrift, the lowly fleece, all that is left of the surf when it has died on the shore.
There was no sign of any gift from the surf. Nothing glowed on the glistening wet sand. No voice called to me. There was only that buffeting near-deafness of the surf.
When I saw one at last I did not stoop to seize it. I waited, wondering if it was the one I sought.
It was the feather of a gull, upright in the sand right at the line where the wet sand and the dry meet. It did not glow, it did not possess a flush of color. But it was the only one, the only plume along the beach.
The Horses of the Night Page 18