Lightning fc-10

by John Lutz

  5

  The only thing in the hospital cafeteria that looked remotely edible was the salad. Carver used tongs to place some in his plastic bowl, got a cup of coffee from a nearby self-service urn, then paid the cashier. He found a table off by itself near the single row of windows that ran the length of the cafeteria.

  He wasn’t really hungry, but he knew he had to eat, both to keep up his strength in case there wouldn’t be a chance later today, and to pass the time. So he dutifully chewed forkfuls of lettuce and sipped coffee between bites. A group of women were clustered around the table closest to him, apparently employees chatting about hospital gossip on their lunch hour. Beyond them sat two men in white uniforms-nurses, Carver assumed. They were eating quietly. One of them was studiously reading a folded newspaper. Most of the other tables were occupied by one or two people, friends or relatives of patients, reading paperback books or staring pensively at nothing while they ate, wondering and worrying. At the far end of the cafeteria, on the other side of a low railing, sat several doctors in suits and ties. Carver recognized one of them from earlier that day when the man was wearing a surgeon’s green gown.

  As Carver returned his attention to his food, he noticed the gangly young man from the Emergency Department waiting room. He was seated at a table near the wall opposite from where Carver sat. There was no food on the table, only two cans of soda and two white foam cups. Sitting across from the gangly youth was a slim woman with short, curly black hair, a ballerina’s long neck, and dark eyes. She was wearing white shorts and a white blouse, what in other surroundings might have passed for a tennis outfit. She probably hadn’t seen thirty and had a very sweet, oval face of the sort seen in cheap religious paintings. Her expression was one of compassion, and she seemed to be trying to console the young man, leaning toward him and talking earnestly, once even patting his hand.

  The man suddenly seemed to sense Carver staring at him and glared over at him. Carver quickly looked away and concentrated on his salad. It embarrassed him to intrude on someone else’s grief, to the point where it was sometimes even awkward for him to express sympathy. He was a private person and didn’t like his own emotions trespassed upon. “Out of touch with his feelings,” a female friend had once said of him. But he knew it wasn’t that at all; he simply assimilated grief and other powerful emotions gradually as he adjusted to them-perhaps because he was more sensitive than his friend the amateur analyst.

  When he chanced another look at the table where the man and woman had been talking, they were gone.

  After lunch he sat for a while trying to kill time by reading a Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch. But it was too early for any news of the Women’s Light Clinic explosion, and he couldn’t concentrate or remember what he’d read ten seconds after his eyes had passed over it. He gave up on the news, set the paper aside, then went back to emergency and asked the nurse at the desk if Beth had been transferred yet to a regular room. The nurse checked on her computer, then shook her head no and told him it would be a little while yet.

  He wandered outside and went for a walk, but the afternoon was heating up and within a few blocks he became uncomfortably warm. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and though his bald pate was tanned and fairly impervious to being burned, he could feel the sun blazing down on it and figured maybe it had reached its limit. Sweat was streaming down his face, and his legs were weak. There were days when he’d felt better.

  After standing for a while in the shade of a building canopy, leaning against the wall, he felt stronger and realized he was near the entrance to a large discount store. He entered and wrestled a can of Coca-Cola from a vending machine. Enjoying the coolness and quiet, he roamed the aisles, gazing at lotions, loud silk shirts, and a 50-percent-off sale on swimming suits, suntan oil, and beach towels with sunsets and flamingos on them. He thought he might have one of those flamingo towels at home.

  He finished his Coke and he dropped the can into a metal trash receptacle on the way out of the store. Then he walked back to the hospital and entered through the Emergency Department door.

  This time the nurse at the desk didn’t disappoint him as she smiled and checked her computer. “She’s in four-fifteen, Mr. Carver.”

  He thanked her and rode the elevator up.

  After knocking softly, he cautiously pushed the wide door of 415 half open and peered inside.

  Beth seemed to be sleeping soundly. There was an IV packet of clear liquid dangling from a vertical metal rod attached to the bed, and a clear tube coiled down from it to the back of her right hand. Carver eased inside and let the door swing shut behind him. The room was cool. It had beige walls that were almost white, beige drapes that stopped at the marble windowsills, beige metal furniture except for the green padded chair at the foot of the bed. Vertical white metal blinds were angled so that the room was softly lighted. There was a medicinal scent in the room, but no smell of Pine-Sol like in the Emergency Department.

  Carver went directly to the bed. Though Beth was resting supine, he could see that the back of her head was bandaged. A cut about an inch long on the side of her neck was stitched and smeared with pink antiseptic. Half a dozen fine cuts were peppered over her face, two of them on her right eyelid, but the doctor had said nothing about her eye being injured. Her lips were dry and her features drawn.

  She opened her eyes to swollen slits and saw him, then gave the faintest of smiles. Her dry lips parted. “Shoulda driven on past that place,” she said in a grating whisper.

  He couldn’t speak, so he nodded and rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. She slipped her hands beneath the white sheet, IV tube and all, and he could see them stirring beneath the thin material. They moved tentatively to the area of her stomach, where new life had existed this morning. He watched her face for a change of expression, but there was none.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Almost certainly a bomb.” Evasive Carver, not ready yet to tell her. But he’d never be ready.

  “A nurse told me I could have been killed. Doctor said I’d be okay, though, after a few days in here. Told me I had a concussion. Am I talking sense, Fred?”

  “Perfect sense.”

  “I don’t have a headache. Aren’t you supposed to have a headache with a concussion?”

  “Been my experience. I guess you’re on medication for the pain.”

  He’d talked enough that she’d picked up something in his voice. She stared up at him. She didn’t blink.

  “There’s something I don’t know,” she said.

  He swallowed loud enough to hear his throat crack. “The baby.”

  “What?” It was as if she’d forgotten she was pregnant and he’d reminded her. But he knew she hadn’t forgotten. Some part of her knew what must have happened and didn’t want to hear it or believe it. Everything would be different once he uttered the words and it had been confirmed, made real.

  “The baby.” He found that he was squeezing her shoulder and loosened his grip. “We lost it.”

  She closed her eyes but still didn’t change expression. Her hands stirred again like frightened thoughts beneath the thin white sheet. She moaned softly.

  He leaned over and kissed her cool forehead. He didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t know what he could do for himself. He felt like sobbing.

  “It isn’t fucking fair!” she said in a flat voice,

  “No,” he agreed, “it isn’t.”

  She opened her eyes again and gazed up at him. Her eyes were moist but she smiled thinly. “You gonna cry, Fred?”

  “No.”

  “Me either. This is rough, though.”

  He said nothing.

  “I’m bad luck for babies, I guess.”

  “Don’t say that. None of it was a matter of chance, any more than the rest of life is chance.”

  “But that’s what it all is, don’t you see, Fred? Nothing means anything … it’s all chance, no matter what we do.”

  It was a notion that scared him because it mi
ght be true and no one could afford to believe it. “You can’t think that. Think about yourself instead. Please!”

  She sniffled. “I guess I have to.”

  “Yes. No choice.”

  “It isn’t gonna break me,” she said.

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  A rhythmic squeaking out in the hall grew louder, stopped, then the door swung open and a plump blond nurse with kind brown eyes and a serious expression walked in on soft-soled shoes that squeaked with each step. She nodded to Carver and smiled at Beth. The serious expression disappeared entirely and her eyes lit up with her smile, as if she really felt the good cheer she projected. “We doing okay?”

  “More or less,” Beth said flatly.

  The nurse bent over her and examined her pupils, then took her temperature and blood pressure. After marking something on the clipboard she was carrying, she went to where the plastic IV packet was slung on the metal rod. She got a hypodermic needle from the drawer of a nearby beige metal cabinet, filled it with clear liquid from a vial she was carrying, then injected the liquid through a plastic connection in the IV tube. “To help you rest,” she said to Beth.

  “Should she sleep with a concussion?” Carver asked.

  “At this point it’s okay. She has other trauma.” Again the smile. “Don’t worry, we’re keeping a close watch on her.”

  But Carver was worried.

  “You don’t have to stay, Fred,” Beth told him.

  “I want to stay,” he said.

  “It isn’t necessary,” the nurse assured him.

  “I’m not going to let this fuck me up,” Beth said softly, and closed her eyes.

  Carver and the nurse watched her as her breathing deepened and evened out.

  “She’ll sleep for several hours,” the nurse said. “Maybe longer. You’re welcome to stay here if you want, but you don’t have to. Why don’t you leave a message at the nurses’ station where you can be reached if she wakes up and wants you or needs something?”

  Carver didn’t like the idea of leaving Beth, even though she obviously didn’t need him for anything at the moment. He hesitated, then nodded and left the room with the nurse.

  He dropped off both his office number and the beach cottage’s phone number at the nurses’ station down the hall from Beth’s room, then limped to the nearby elevators and pressed the down button.

  It took awhile for the elevator to arrive. Carver’s mind kept circling what had happened, playing on the screen of his memory the images of Beth flying backward out of the clinic in a shower of fragmented glass, falling back, her head bouncing off the concrete walk. People throwing aside placards and diving for cover. Figures running in the edges of his vision. Something there he couldn’t quite grasp. Maybe something important. Now Beth was in a hospital room, and the baby … their baby …

  He felt shaky as he entered the elevator, and tears brimmed in his eyes. He drew a deep breath and held it.

  As the elevator dropped toward the lobby, he fumbled in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses and put them on, then leaned against the hip-high metal rail along the back wall. Casual Carver.

  The elevator lurched to a stop at the second floor, and a large man with a stomach paunch and a loud tropical print shirt stepped in and unnecessarily punched the glowing button for the lobby. Carver allowed himself to breathe.

  When they reached lobby level, Carver and the paunchy man waited patiently for the elevator doors to slide open. Through his dark glasses, Carver saw that the tropical shirt was festooned with a pattern of brightly colored parrots flitting among brilliant flowers. The man stared directly at him, even raising himself slightly on his toes as if he could peer over the rims of the sunglasses and see what Carver might be concealing.

  “You okay, buddy?” he asked.

  “I’m fine!” Carver snarled at him as the doors slid open on the lobby.

  The paunchy man stood and stared at him as he hurried past him out of the elevator.

  “Hey, buddy,” the man said behind him in a loud, annoyed voice, “don’t take it personal.”

  But Carver didn’t answer or look back. He tightened his grip on the crook of his cane and limped quickly toward the exit and the cauterizing sun.

  6

  Beth slept most of that day. At six that evening she was examined and was awake for another hour, during which she and Carver were never alone. Within minutes after the doctors and nurses had left, she was asleep again. Carver stayed with her in the room until eleven o’clock, then left and drove back to the beach cottage.

  He lay awake in the dark for a long time, listening to the ocean and wondering. The evening news had revealed that the explosion at the clinic definitely had been caused by a bomb. The somber and handsome newscaster quoted police as saying they had leads and expected an arrest to be made soon. Then there was an interview with Operation Alive members who’d been picketing at the clinic that day. All of them denounced violence and professed to know nothing about the bombing. Carver stared into the shadows and thought about the irony of the bomb injuring a woman who had gone to the clinic to cancel her appointment for an abortion. What would Operation Alive think about that?

  Probably that it was too late for her to be exculpated after the sin of making the appointment in the first place.

  From up on the highway came the sound of a truck accelerating along the curve that paralleled the coast, a faraway whine of tires on still-warm concrete, then gradations of engine noise as the driver shifted through the gears.

  It was the last thing Carver heard in the sultry night before falling asleep.

  In the morning, when he returned to the hospital to visit Beth, he was pleased to see that she was sitting up in bed. She had her head wrapped in a pale yellow scarf wound like a turban. The IV needle had been removed from the back of her hand, leaving a black-and-purple bruise tinged yellow with antiseptic. She looked much better, more clear-eyed and alert.

  Carver walked to her and kissed her on the lips, then placed the valise with the clothes and cosmetics she’d requested on the chair next to the bed.

  He was suddenly aware of an odor in the room that didn’t belong. It had about it the cloying sweetness of something rotting in the sun.

  “Just who I wanna fucking see,” said a voice he recognized.

  He turned around to see Del Moray police lieutenant William McGregor, and he realized the familiar odor was the cheap deodorant McGregor used as a substitute for bathing. The lieutenant was nobody’s favorite cop. He was corrupt and ambitious and blatantly reveled in his evil. He hated Carver. Carver hated him.

  “I’ve been talking to your dusky friend here,” McGregor said. He was a skinny but strong man, six and a half feet tall, wearing his usual rumpled brown suit and stained shirt, his boat-size brown wingtip shoes. He had a lean face, lank blond hair that flopped down over his forehead like Hitler’s, and a wide space between his front teeth through which the pink tip of his tongue habitually peeked like a serpent. He didn’t approve of interracial love affairs, said his mean little blue eyes, and he didn’t feel at all sorry for Beth. If Carver had asked him, he probably would have said as much.

  Carver looked at Beth. “Do you feel well enough to talk to the police?”

  She nodded. “Might as well get it over with. It can’t take long, because I don’t have much to tell. All I know is that I walked inside the clinic, then got blown back out through the door.”

  “Wages of sin,” McGregor said with a wicked grin, pulling a small, leather-covered note pad and a pencil from his pocket. The movement made his suit coat open wider and revealed the checked butt of his shoulder-holstered nine millimeter. Also fanned the stench and failure of his deodorant across the room.

  “What sin?” Carver asked.

  “Yours and hers, dumbfuck. You knocked her up and she let you do it, or she wouldn’t have been anywhere near that explosion.”

  Beth knew how McGregor fed on other people’s misery and tried not to show she
was upset. “I thought you were going to tell us you were pro-life or pro-choice, but that would mean you believed in something other than yourself.”

  McGregor looked over at Carver and grinned, poking his tongue through the space between his teeth at the same time. It made him look incredibly lewd. “Hey, she’s still feisty, even after getting her ass blown through some glass doors.”

  “Still thinking clearly, too,” Carver said. “She’s got you figured out.”

  McGregor shrugged. “Pro-life, pro-choice, who gives a flying fuck? I’m pro-me and I’m not ashamed to admit it.” He poked at his concave chest with a long forefinger. “Pro-me, just like everybody else is, when push comes to shove.”

  “You sound proud of it, though,” Beth said. Despite Carver’s warnings, she was always surprised anew by the totality of McGregor’s evil. He wished she’d be quiet; inspiring others’ loathing was McGregor’s crude way of communicating with people. It would have been pathetic if it weren’t so … well, loathsome.

  “Damned right I’m proud,” McGregor boasted. “Charles Darwin would be proud of me, too. He and I both understand nature, including human. I accept my nature, which is just like yours. Only you don’t accept what you are. Don’t even admit it to yourselves. Hell, I admit it and like it. Tell you, Carver, I feel good about myself, just like all the psychology assholes advise.”

  Carver tried to imagine McGregor reading psychological self-help books but couldn’t. Maybe I’m Despicable, You’re Despicable.

  “You’re as repugnant as anyone I’ve ever met,” Beth told McGregor.

  He smiled at her, happy to have roused her ire. “Thanks. And you should be a good judge, considering you’ve slept with repugnant characters. Even married one. Way it goes, you lie down with shit, and you can’t help but get up with it all over you.”

  Carver felt his anger surge and took a step toward McGregor. He wanted to grab him by his wrinkled brown lapels and knock out some of his oversize yellow teeth.

  He almost raised his cane to swing it at McGregor’s head. Then he stopped. McGregor was staring at him, still smiling. This was what he wanted. Anything he’d said that was out of line could be denied, and McGregor could lie like a corrupt choirboy. And a scuffle would bring people, leave evidence. The kind McGregor wanted in order to nail Carver with the law he sometimes wielded like a hammer.