The Black Sheep

by Patricia Ryan

  For several minutes she sat at the table, willing herself not to cry.

  THE RADIO SAID it would be a cloudless day of high, possibly record-breaking, heat and humidity. She liked hot weather, and decided to spend the day weeding and cutting back the perennial borders. She interrupted her work only briefly for a light lunch and a reapplication of sunblock, and then threw herself back into it, grateful to have something physical to do. It was dirty work and she wore comfortable old clothes for it: a chambray shirt, jean shorts belted with a red bandanna, and her grungiest running shoes, plus sunglasses and gardening gloves. And, of course, her good noise-canceling headphones connected to the phone tucked into her pocket, for tunes to work by.

  It was a hot day, brutally hot, but she immersed herself in her work, laboring mechanically and virtually without pause. The effort she had to expend just to muscle through the heat and keep going served to steer her mind from the subject of Tucker Hale, although from time to time his image seemed to waver on a ripple of warm air, then dissolve.

  The sun burned like a blowtorch in the sky; everything she touched felt like it was about to burst into flame. Looking anywhere but at the ground made her feel queasy, so she just bent her head over her work, digging and cutting with an automatic relentlessness. She had never perspired so much, and her clothes were quickly soaked through. Sweat dripped onto the plants she was clipping and ran into her eyes, stinging them. She took the bandanna from the waistband of her shorts and tied it around her forehead, and that helped.

  In the interests of mood management, she chose to listen to her favorite classical playlist, which included everything Beethoven ever composed. The Ninth Symphony was perfect; it made her feel exhilarated and empowered. She made short work of the borders edging the front walk and got started on the driveway. Beethoven’s Seventh, however, was a mistake. She had forgotten about that really soulful part halfway through that always filled her with melancholy. Instead of switching tracks, as she knew she should, she turned the volume up. Then she put down her weeder and sat on the grass next to the blacktop driveway, suddenly very tired.

  Harley checked her phone. It was 2:09 p.m. She had worked almost nonstop for over six hours. Her head throbbed and she felt slightly nauseated. At least she was no longer sweating so hard; that wet, sticky feeling was gone. When she realized that was probably because she had drunk nothing all day but a little mineral water at lunch, she felt like a total asshole. She should have considered her fluids, as she did when she was running. She should have taken some breaks, and she should have worn a hat. She also should have quit hours ago.

  She was so stupid.

  Harley tried to stand, but things shifted and then she felt a sudden jolt of pain and something hard under her head: the driveway. She lay on her back, her body absurdly heavy. The blacktop felt very warm beneath her, almost hotter than she could stand, but not quite. She closed her eyes, took off her sunglasses, and draped an arm over her face. The beautiful, solemn music filled her ears and her mind, and she gave herself up to it, losing herself in its sadness.

  Yes, she was very stupid. She would go through life being stupid and doing stupid things. So much for the theory that Columbia M.B.A. candidates were intelligent people.

  After a while the driveway began to vibrate, as if there were a subtle tremor in the earth. The vibrations stopped, and presently a shadow fell over her.

  She opened her eyes and squinted at the dark form blocking the sun; someone was crouching over her, reaching for her. As she groped on the driveway for her sunglasses, a large pair of hands plucked the headphones from her ears, and silence rushed in to replace the music.

  “I said, are you all right?” came the familiar, rusty voice.

  Tucker? She dropped the sunglasses and just stared. The thought occurred to her that he might be an illusion conjured up by the heat. She reached up with a trembling hand to touch him, but her arm fell like a deadweight across her chest.

  “Harley?” The hands cupped her face. She could see him clearly now. He looked distraught. “God, you’re on fire. Honey, what’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m stupid.” she murmured. Her eyes closed of their own accord. She felt his arms wrap around her. Her head rolled back like a newborn baby’s, and he gripped it firmly with one hand and held it upright. Her eyelids were too heavy to open.

  “Wake up, Harley. I’ve got to get you inside, and I can’t carry you. You’ve got to walk.” Harley struggled to open her eyes, then forgot the point of her struggle and allowed herself to drift off again. “Wake up! Wake up!” he commanded. “You can do it!” Panting with the strain, she forced her eyes open. “Good girl,” Tucker sighed.

  She peered over his shoulder. Something large and dark stood on the driveway behind him, swimming on waves of heat. She concentrated, and it took form: a black convertible sports car, very smooth and shiny in the bright sun. She squinted to get it in focus, then shook her head, but that was a mistake; the world spun sickeningly, and she slumped against him. He held her tight and she clung to him, breathing in his now-familiar scent and listening to his heart pound. He felt warm and solid, the only solid thing in a spinning world.

  THIS IS YOUR BED,” she mumbled as he whipped aside the covers with the arm that he wasn’t using to hold her up.

  “Consider it yours.” It was all he could do to get her as far as the maid’s room. No way were they going to make it up those stairs. Her legs gave out again, but he managed to steer her onto the twin bed as she was collapsing. “There you go, that’s right... Everything’s gonna be fine,” he said, more to himself than to Harley, who appeared to be senseless. He straightened her out so she lay on her back, untied her shoelaces, and pulled off her dirt-encrusted running shoes. “Just rest now, hon. No more walking. You did real well.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and wiped his brow with the frayed hem of his T-shirt—damn, it was hot—then untied the damp red bandanna that Harley had been wearing as a sweatband. Whenever he had a fever as a child, his nanny used to gauge it by kissing his forehead, insisting that the mouth was much more sensitive to temperature than the hand. He leaned over Harley and pressed his lips gently to her forehead; it felt like something out of an oven. Without meaning to or thinking about it, he kissed her lightly before drawing away.

  He looked around the room. It did not surprise him that R.H. still hadn’t installed central air-conditioning. The old man had always condemned what he called “frivolous technology.” Of course, “frivolous” was in the eye of the beholder. State-of-the-art gym equipment was apparently not frivolous. Neither were small airplanes, large sailboats, and fast cars, with which he had always surrounded himself. They were his passion—a passion that had rubbed off on Tucker—and owning dozens at a time was not frivolous. Taking measures to make Long Island’s humid subtropical summers a bit more bearable evidently was.

  Tucker remembered having seen a fan in the maid’s closet when he stowed his duffel bag there. Now he set it up and turned it on, aimed at Harley. He removed her ponytail holder and spread her damp hair out on the pillow, a corona of bronze silk. Then he moistened a clean washcloth with cold water and laid it on her forehead, which caused her to grumble something incoherent and shake it off.

  “Easy,” he whispered. He blotted her face gently with the washcloth, noting how pale she was, although color was beginning to rise in her cheeks. Her beautiful lips, which had looked white, were red again. Was that a good sign? He felt helplessly out of his depth, here. He sighed and held her head still, the washcloth pressed to her forehead.

  Phil Zelin would not be out of his depth here. Phil, the cabbie’s son from Brentwood, the friend from the wrong side of the tracks whom R.H. had at one time not even permitted in the house, was a doctor now, some kind of great high Pooh-Bah of internal medicine. Tucker knew this because Phil was the only person from his youth with whom he was still in touch. About once a year, one of them would pick up the phone and call the other, and they would talk for a co
uple of hours, just like old times.

  Tucker tossed the washcloth into the bathroom sink and called the Stony Brook University Medical Center. After about five minutes of being transferred around, he was finally put through to Dr. Philip Zelin.

  “Sounds like heat exhaustion, all right.” Phil agreed. “See if you can get some fluids into her. Mix a teaspoon of salt in a quart of water and make her drink some.” Despite Tucker’s distress, he found his friend’s brusque professionalism amusing. Was this really the same Phil Zelin who had lifted his robe, dropped trou, and mooned all the school administrators at his high-school graduation? “And keep sponging her off. I just finished up my rounds—I can be there in half an hour.”

  Tucker mixed a glass of salt water and set it on the night table. “Come on, honey. You’ve got to drink this. Doctor’s orders.” He sat her up, cradling her against his chest, her head supported by his shoulder. “Come on. Wake up, now. I know you can do it.” Had she gotten hotter? Was that even possible? She was flushed all over now, her skin a deep pink. He patted her cheek, which was no longer clammy, but dry. No response. He put the rim of the glass to her lips. “Come on, Harley, drink. Please.”

  He gave up and bathed her face and arms with the cool washcloth until the doorbell rang.

  Phil greeted him with a warm hug and a slap on the back. “Trade you my house for that Jag.”

  Even after twenty-one years, Tucker would have known him anywhere. His lanky frame and dark, perpetually amused eyes hadn’t changed, although now those eyes were surrounded by a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. The main difference between the teenage Phil and the thirty-something Phil was the scattering of gray in his wiry black hair, now much shorter than the shoulder length he’d worn it in high school. And, of course, his natty attire—pleated linen trousers with suspenders, a striped shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a loosened polka-dot tie—was a far cry from the grunge band shirt and ripped denim of his youth.

  Dodging further time-consuming conversation, Tucker quickly turned and led Phil to the maid’s room.

  “Your face has more character.” Phil said as he followed behind. ‘‘And that leg of yours has a lot more character. What happened?”

  “I got hurt.” Tucker said.

  “That part I already figured out, tough guy. It’s hot as fuck in here. Your lunatic old man still doesn’t believe in air conditioning?”

  Tucker sighed and shook his head. “She’s in here,” he said, standing aside at the door.

  Phil walked straight to Harley and thumped his black bag on the night table. He sat on the edge of the bed, took her head in his hands, and pried her eyes open. “She been comatose long?”

  Comatose. The word snapped a memory into focus: a young doctor’s moon face and the words, Mr. Hale, you’ve been comatose for nearly a week. He had thought, comatose, as in coma? Phil was looking at him, waiting for an answer. “Uh, in and out for a while. Completely out for the better part of an hour. Is she okay? Is she gonna be okay?”

  “How long she been flushed like this?” He took her pulse.

  “Not long. Since I spoke to you.”

  Phil withdrew a stethoscope and blood-pressure kit from his bag, wrapped the cuff around her arm, and pumped the bulb. “You get any fluids into her?”

  “No. That was hopeless.” He bit off the impulse to ask again if she was going to be okay. If the answer had been an unequivocal yes, Phil would have given it. He hunched his shoulder to wipe his brow on his shirtsleeve, thinking, Please let her be okay. Please.

  “Blood pressure’s a little high,” Phil said. “That’s good, that’s what we want.” He opened the top two buttons of her shirt and listened to her chest with the stethoscope, then rolled her onto her side away from him, pulled out her shirttail, and slid the stethoscope under it. “Lungs are clear.” He sheathed a thermometer and inserted it in her ear. “Her clothes are damp, but she’s dry, meaning she perspired heavily for a while and then stopped. Her body’s cooling mechanism shut down and she overheated, just like a car.” The thermometer beeped and he checked it.

  Tucker looked over his shoulder at the digital readout. “Is that right?” he asked. “Her temperature’s 104.8?”

  Phil put away the instrument. “That’s her temperature.”

  “So it’s heat exhaustion?”

  Phil glanced up at him. “No, she’s graduated to heatstroke.” He stood.

  Stroke? Heatstroke? “Does she have to go to the hospital?”

  “Not if we can get her cooled down. Let’s try a cold bath with the fan on.” He quickly finished unbuttoning her shirt, opened it, then unclasped her white bra and stripped her of both garments, leaving her naked her from the waist up.

  She had a beautiful body, her breasts taut and perfect, but Tucker had known that; what Lycra had not revealed, his imagination had filled in. It tugged at his heart for her to be exposed this way. She was a private person, with a highly developed sense of dignity. She would not knowingly have him see her like this.

  When Phil unzipped her shorts, Tucker turned away. “I’ll run a bath,” Tucker said.

  “Great.”

  In the little bathroom, he stoppered the claw-footed tub and turned the cold water on all the way, contemplating the discomfort he had felt when Phil undressed Harley. It wasn’t just her vulnerability that had gotten to him. He was jealous of Phil for having the right, as a doctor, to touch Harley, to take her clothes off, to see her naked. Phil, of course, was merely doing his job. The problem, if there was one, was Tucker’s.

  The tub filled quickly, and Tucker turned the water off. Phil brought the fan in and handed it to him, then left again. While Tucker was crouched under the sink plugging it in, he heard Phil’s footsteps again, heavier this time, and the sound of water being displaced. He wrestled himself to his feet, turned the fan on, and carefully aimed it toward the tub and Harley.

  It astounded him that she could remain completely unconscious through all of this. Immersion in cold water should jolt anyone awake, but there she was, as peacefully unaware of her situation as if she were asleep.

  She had settled into an artlessly graceful pose, head back against the curved lip of the tub, arms crossed at the waist, lower body curled modestly toward the wall. She looked so lithe and fragile.

  “The point of all this.” Phil said as he knelt beside the tub and dipped a washcloth into the water, “is to lower her body temperature, and fast. If it keeps rising, she’ll go into circulatory collapse.” He looked up at Tucker to underline the seriousness of his words. “Shock.”

  “Shock,” Tucker repeated dumbly. He lowered the lid of the toilet and sat, rubbing the back of his neck. “How will you know if she’s—”

  “You see how pink her skin is? Flushed?” Phil ran the wet washcloth over Harley’s shoulders and upper chest, which were not immersed. “The blood is on the surface. If her circulation gives out and she goes into shock, she’ll go gray, pallid—we’ve got to watch for that. Her blood pressure will plummet.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “We find out how fast that Jag of yours can make it to the medical center.”

  Tucker mulled that over. “What’s the worst that could happen?” Phil hesitated, as if weighing his words. “Don’t be coy, Zelin. Just answer the question.”

  “I’m not being coy, Tucker, I’m just being careful. I’ve had years of experience explaining to people what’s happening with their loved ones. It’s not always an easy call. People tell you they want the unvarnished truth, but they really—”

  “Relax. We’re not talking about a loved one here—she’s the house sitter.” Not the whole story, perhaps, but Tucker wasn’t in the mood to split hairs. He wanted answers.

  “House sitter.” Phil looked at Harley and then at Tucker. “I thought she was your—”

  “Well, she’s not. She’s the house sitter, so tell me.”

  “All right, then.” He wiped her face with the washcloth. “She could die. It’s been known to h
appen.”

  Tucker lapsed into a stunned silence. Finally he swallowed and asked, “What’s the likelihood of that?”

  Phil felt her forehead. “Not as likely as brain damage.” Tucker felt something slowly whirl inside him. He put a hand on the edge of the tub to steady himself as Phil continued, oblivious: “Which, in turn, is less likely than heart, liver, or kidney damage.” Phil nodded to himself. “Which, in turn, is less likely than no permanent damage at all, in this particular case. In my opinion.”

  “No permanent damage,” Tucker said. “That’s the likeliest?” Phil nodded.

  Tucker patted the pocket of his T-shirt, felt his sunglasses and nothing else, and sighed. Phil, recognizing the gesture for what it was, pulled a pack of Newports from his own shirt pocket and offered them to Tucker.

  “You smoke?” said Tucker. “Still? You’re a doctor. You should have quit by now.”

  “Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. You want one or not?” Tucker shook his head, and Phil lit one for himself with a monogrammed gold lighter.

  “Uh, Phil...” Tucker hesitated. This was weird. Why was he doing this? “You mind taking that outside? You’re not supposed to... She doesn’t like... I’d rather you didn’t smoke in the house.”

  Phil stared at Tucker, cigarette in one hand, dripping washcloth in the other. “You’d rather? You’re a smoker—what do you care?” Before Tucker could formulate an answer, Phil nodded toward Harley. “And she’s out cold, so she could care less. And the old man’s in parts unknown, so he’ll never find out. Besides which, it serves him right for hating me for no reason whatsoever way back when. I’ll smoke in his fucking house and give him a fucking reason to hate me. He’ll never know, but it’ll make me feel better. I hate it when people hate me for no reason. Better I should have done something wrong.” He nodded, happy in his logic, all of this making perfect sense to him.

  Tucker looked at Harley, naked and unaware, remembering how she had snatched the cigarette from his lips and doused it in the pool that first night. She was powerless now, her authority gone. He didn’t want to order his friend outside, yet it struck him as profoundly wrong to ignore Harley’s will simply because she was incapable of exercising it at the moment. It was like taking advantage of her while she was at her weakest, and he found that impossible to do.