The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  “You should hire me because I’m very good at what I do,” said Shenk, keeping his face solemn, thrusting out his chin. “And because when you hire me you get me, not some associate, twenty years old, still learning how to write a brief. Me. You need me, I’m available. You call me, I call back.”

  Shenk moved his gaze back and forth between Rich and Beth, who was now placing a powdered doughnut on a paper plate in front of her husband, setting down the coffees.

  “Number two is, you’ll pardon the expression, I don’t fuck around. I work hard, I move fast, and I win. Once I have the details I need from you folks, we can have our notice to file in on the hospital by the end of the week. Not next week. This week.”

  That was enough for starters. Shenk left it there.

  He spared them, for now, all the gory details of a multiparty medical malpractice lawsuit. How they would be suing to recover three different forms of damages: for pain and suffering, for medical costs, and for future medical care. How the suit would target not just the hospital, but the neurosurgeon who performed the surgery to relieve Wesley’s subdural hematoma, a big shot named Dr. Thomas Angelo Catanzaro, as well as anyone else from the hospital staff who was implicated as discovery got underway, potentially including surgical nurses, ER staff, radiologists, and so on. How ultimately, when an appropriate settlement was reached, they would be recovering damages not from the doctors and nurses nor even from the hospital, but from the insurance company that stood behind them.

  There would be plenty of time to explain everything, Shenk figured. If they got that far.

  Rich was looking sourly at Jay. “Honestly, man?” he said. “That’s all well and good. But it’s a question of trust. Why should we trust you?”

  “Fuck’s sake. Rich. Come on.” Beth reached over and flicked him with the side of her hand, an irritated swat on his hairy forearm. “Eat your doughnut.” Then, to Jay, she said, “I’m sorry. My husband is not in a great place.”

  “Of course not,” said Shenk. “Of course. Although. Having said that…it’s a fair question. Why should you trust me?”

  This, Shenk understood, was the question of the day. This was not a meeting about legal tactics or money or medical details. Beth Keener he’d had from go, from the moment they laid eyes on each other in the lobby of Valley Village, two souls thrown together by fate. Beth was his. But Rich’s trust would have to be earned. Rich the set builder, the union carpenter: this was a man of materials, of wood and metal and beams, a man accustomed to relying only on things he made with his own hands.

  “How can you know who to trust, or what to do, in this awful situation?” Shenk said. “What I’m wondering, Mr. Keener, is if you can suspend that decision for the moment. Accept me, for today, for this hour, as your—your—” What was the word he was seeking? What was the word Rich would respond to? “Your champion. OK? Let me walk you through my process; let me tell you about some of my other cases. Let me tell you about my firm, my family. I think you met my son on the way in?”

  “Yeah.” Beth smiled. “Nice-looking kid.”

  But Rich was shaking his head. He was standing up. “Yeah, no. You know what? I’ve heard enough.”

  “Rich,” said Beth.

  “Thanks anyway, man.”

  “Rich. Sit.”

  With the woolly beard and the thick neck and wide shoulders, Rich had an imposing, bearlike quality, but he looked down at his wife with a touching helplessness.

  “Baby, come on.” His voice had that gruff-and-tough thing, but he wasn’t telling her, he wasn’t insisting. He was making a case. “You said I had to come and meet the new guy. I did it. I met him.” He bent down a little, swept his keys, phone, and wallet off the table and dumped them in his jacket pocket. “So now let’s go.”

  But Beth didn’t get up. She looked at Jay, shaking her head and exhaling in a controlled fashion, like the mother of a toddler, working to stay patient. “Nobody ever taught him to express his emotions, so when he’s sad he acts like a freakin’ gorilla.” Shenk flicked a glance up at Rich, fearful of his reaction…and saw, by how he was gazing at his wife, his mouth set tight but his eyes lit with tenderness, that Beth could say anything she wanted about him, anything in the world.

  Even in their anger and irritation with each other, as they navigated this unaccountable nightmare world of doctors and lawyers they had been pitched into, their love for each other was vividly present in the room.

  “I’m not a gorilla,” muttered Rich.

  “I didn’t say you were a gorilla, babe. I said you were acting like one.”

  Then she turned back to Shenk, still shaking her head, marveling at her husband’s obdurateness. “He thinks, well, this is just what happened, that’s all, and we have to just go along and it is what it is.”

  “That’s not what I think.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Elizabeth,” said Rich. “I have to get back to work.”

  “He doesn’t understand that sometimes you have to fight for what you deserve.”

  “This guy,” said Rich, very suddenly, and very loud, pointing a thick finger at Shenk, “doesn’t give a shit about what we deserve.” He smacked his hand down on the table, knocking over all three coffee cups at once. “Guy like this cares about money. That’s what he cares about.”

  He stood there unspeaking, heaving breath, and Jay understood that he had about a half a second here to answer this charge in a way that would keep Richard from storming out, with or without his wife. Jay had speeches he could deliver about truth and justice and decency; speeches about his dear dead wife and her last days in the hospital; he could conjure something quickly comparing the dignity of his work to that of Rich’s own, how there was nothing so different about building sets for TV shows and building legal arguments.

  But there was an old line Shenk liked—was it David Mamet?—always tell the truth, because it’s the easiest thing to remember.

  “Of course it’s about the money,” Jay pronounced. “Of course it is.” He gave the table a little smack of his own, and one of the fallen coffee cups rolled off the table onto the carpet.

  “And I do it for you. For my clients. It’s both things. Both reasons. It has to be.”

  And this sounded sincere because it was sincere. It sounded like he meant it because he did mean it, and this was the great secret of Shenk’s heart: he loved the money and he loved the people and his loves were in alignment.

  Richard squinted and furrowed his brow, and for that moment he did look like a gorilla, just a little bit. Beth looked down at her hands and smiled, very slightly, and then Richard sighed and said, “Am I allowed to smoke in here?”

  “Alas,” said Jay, “Los Angeles County says no. But…you know what…”

  He ducked beneath the table to recover the cup that had fallen, thinking I did it, and then passed the cup over to Rich and Beth’s end of the table. Richard dug himself out a cigarette and used the coffee cup to ash in while Shenk—very slowly, very carefully, like an anthropologist tiptoeing through a forest—took out a legal pad and set it down. Took out a pen. Took out his mini recorder and set that down, too.

  “Now,” he said. “Mrs. Keener. Let’s start at the beginning.”

  Beth told the whole story, an expanded version of what she had told Jay in the parking lot on the day of the accident. Everything to which she had borne witness in the hospital, the scraps and pieces of information she’d gotten from the doctors during and after the surgery, supplemented by what she’d since heard from Wes’s friends who had been there when the accident happened—when he fell, when he was briefly unconscious, when he had been loaded onto the stretcher and taken away.

  Rich said nothing, just sat smoking. When he was done with his first cigarette he lit another. Shenk took notes in his eccentric shorthand, getting down as much as he could, trusting the mini recorder to capture the rest. And of course all of these details—the accident and the ambulance ride, the triage room and the ER floor, the ra
diology room and the surgery—would be repeated a hundred times, repeated and recorded and transcribed.

  Sometimes, though, he did put in a small question, not so much for the answer but to gently jostle Beth out of the agitated silence into which she occasionally lapsed.

  “Do you happen to know,” said Shenk at one such moment, “how long the ride to the hospital lasted?”

  “In the ambulance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Um—I don’t know.” She winced, picked at a thumbnail, agitated. “Can we find that out?”

  “Of course,” offered Shenk, “absolutely. When we file suit, those records will come in through the discovery process.”

  Beth nodded earnestly, taking this small piece of procedural information as a tonic. So it was that Shenk—slowly, ever so slowly, as careful as a lover—began to ease the Keeners into the zone where this was already a done deal, where he was already their guy—slipping the word we midway into the sentence—when we file suit—quietly and unofficially yoking their interests to his ability.

  “And do you remember how long he spent in the ER, before being moved to surgery?”

  “Um, no,” Beth said. “A while. I think.”

  “A long while?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Beth’s chin trembled for a startling instant, and Shenk saw the flash in her eyes he recognized as anger: not at him. At herself.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. Rich passed her a bright-pink Gloria’s Glorious napkin and she furiously blew her nose. “Motherfucker.”

  “It’s OK, Mrs. Keener,” Jay said, murmuring, reassuring. “There is no rush. We have all the time in the world.”

  He smiled at her, and then at Rich, who did not smile back.

  “Once Wesley was examined,” Shenk continued, “did the doctors tell you they had to operate immediately?”

  “Yeah,” said Beth. “Yes.”

  “And did they say exactly what they were going to do?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I didn’t really—they said they had taken these scans—”

  “Scan, singular, or scans?”

  “I don’t—”

  “A CT scan?”

  “I think so.”

  “OK. Go on, I’m sorry. What else did they say?”

  “They said it appeared there was a buildup of blood in his brain—”

  “They used that word?”

  “Which?”

  “Appeared. They said it appeared there was a brain bleed, or that there was one?”

  “I…” She held up her hands. Her nails were bitten nearly down to the flesh. It looked like it hurt.

  “It’s OK if you don’t remember.”

  “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Mrs. Keener, did you consent to the operation?”

  “Um—yes. Yeah.” She bit her lip. “Shit. I did.”

  “Consented just by saying so? Orally? Or were you presented with papers to sign?”

  “Yeah. I mean—not orally. I signed something. They gave me a copy…”

  She opened her pocketbook, realized this wasn’t the bag she’d been holding, and snapped it closed. “Damn it.”

  “It’s OK. Mrs. Keener, listen. This is OK. This is all just for my information. How much time did they give you to sign those papers?”

  “What?”

  “Was it like”—Shenk mimed a big rush, turning his hands in windmill circles: Here, here, sign this, fast, please—“time is of the essence?”

  “Yes,” Richard said.

  Shenk jerked his head, stunned, toward the husband, who had arrived in the conversation like a bowling ball dropped from a height—bang—answering for his wife in a single firm syllable. He rubbed his jaw and went on:

  “She told me that. That they rushed her.” He pantomimed a sniveling egghead doctor, face grotesquely contorted. “Sign it. Sign it. Come on.”

  “Thank you,” said Shenk.

  Rich held his gaze for a moment and then nodded curtly, you’re welcome, and Shenk nodded back.

  “Assholes,” Rich added, his voice still holding weight. “These doctors. They’re a bunch of assholes.”

  Rich’s hands were clenched, the knuckles white, and Shenk saw how right Beth had been about her husband’s mental state, how unmoored he was by this slowly unfolding catastrophe. His neck had strong muscles in it that tightened when he pursed his lips, as he pursed them now, his jaw set in perplexed fury. Beth was sad and afraid and frantic, scrambling to find solutions to a thousand different problems; her husband was a fist that did not yet know what to smash into.

  “Well, they sure can be assholes,” said Shenk. “They sure can be. But we are not suing them for being assholes.” The word again: we. We, we, we. “We’re suing them because they screwed up.”

  Slightly later, as Shenk with great delicacy took out the two-page contingency agreement that Darla had prepared, he made a solemn pronouncement, a version of what he always said at this moment in the process:

  “Now, look, you signing this paper, this isn’t like you’re hiring a plumber or something, OK? This isn’t just a contract. You sign this, and I’m your guy. I’m your man. A lawyer is a promise.”

  “What?” said Beth. “What does that mean?”

  “It means once I am your lawyer, I am your lawyer forever.”

  Shenk bent slightly forward, emphasizing his point, palms flat on the table and fingers extended. Beth gripped the pen tightly while she signed, Richard standing beside her with another pen that Shenk had handed to him, his expression elusive and ungiving. That moment got frozen there. Just as if a flashbulb went off. Like someone clicked a button.

  3.

  The waiting room at Shenk & Partners wasn’t really a room. It was a windowless alcove, crammed tightly with two brown armchairs, off the short hallway that ran from the door past Darla’s desk and the photocopier/fax machine to Jay’s office. Ruben sat in the larger of the armchairs, his hands resting on its upholstered arms, smiling politely at Wesley Keener’s little sister.

  She sat on her hands, staring back at him.

  Her skin was so white it was almost translucent. She wore a jean skirt and a sleeveless T-shirt with a picture of a unicorn on it. Her hair was straight and brown, with a single barrette set precisely above each ear and the bangs trimmed neatly across the front. Every time Ruben made eye contact with her she made a twisty little half smile, and sometimes she bugged her eyes out, like she was still learning how to make facial expressions.

  “Your name is Evelyn?” Ruben asked, when it seemed like he ought to say something. She nodded. She squirmed a little, rocking back and forth on her hands.

  Ruben made a mental note to tell his father they ought to keep some magazines out here. National Geographic Kids, something like that. There was one called Cobblestone they’d had at his elementary school, about history.

  He was desperately curious, of course, about how things were proceeding inside his father’s office, but Ruben was determined in the meantime to fulfill his mandate as best he could. The problem was, although the assignment made a certain logical sense, since they were both kids, he really had no idea what to say to this girl. Ruben was the kind of child who was for the most part uncomfortable in the company of other children.

  “Hey, do you want some water?” he asked Evelyn.

  “No,” she said quickly, and made a face.

  Did she not like water? Do kids think water is stupid? He thought about the other students at Morningstar, in the cafeteria, and tried to remember if they drank water.

  “I could also get you a soda. Are you allowed to drink soda?”

  The girl shrugged. Did that mean yes or no? She probably wasn’t allowed to drink soda. Ruben shifted in the big chair, trying to sit up straight.

  “Would you like to have a doughnut?” he asked, and she shrugged again.

  “We have blueberry crumb, maple frosted, chocolate…a lot of different kinds.”

  “Strawberry
? Are there strawberry doughnuts?”

  “I think so, actually. Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  “So—should I get you one?”

  “Actually—no. No. That’s OK.”

  “You sure?”

  She shrugged a third time, and then it was quiet. Ruben wondered if maybe she was thinking that accepting the doughnut would have been like taking candy from a stranger. Then he felt bad for having put her in an awkward position.

  Ruben glanced at the closed door of the inner office and hoped his father was handling the conversation carefully. He knew his dad had a tendency to overdo it. Push too hard. He hoped he’d play it cool this time, if he could. Ruben wished he was in there.

  The girl spoke suddenly.

  “So are you Chinese?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry.” She shifted her butt, freeing one hand, and twisted her hair. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “That was so rude.”

  “It’s totally OK. Actually, I’m Vietnamese.”

  “Oh. Huh.”

  Ruben smiled. In general this was not a favorite subject. His sixth-grade English teacher, Ms. Klein, had assigned them all to give a presentation about their cultural heritage, and Ruben had literally been so anxious at the prospect that on the day of the presentations he vomited in the hallway outside the classroom. But he was glad to have something to talk about with Evelyn Keener.

  “I mean, I was born in the country of Vietnam? But I came to America when my parents adopted me, and I was still really little. I’m basically just American. And I’m Jewish. Like my dad.”

  “Oh.” Her smile broadened a little with interest, transforming her face. “Huh.”

  “And actually, Judaism is not just a religion,” Ruben went on. “It’s like a—a people? It is a religion, but it’s also a web of cultural feeling.” This was a direct quote, something his dad said often. Evelyn looked back at him curiously.

  “So I’m Asian in appearance, but, you know—” He didn’t like to say I’m not really Asian, because he was, obviously, and it would probably seem crazy to claim otherwise. “We’re Jewish.”