by Ben English
“Yes, hello. This is Jack Flynn, I’m an acquaintance of Miss Adams. I know she’s going into surgery now, but is there any way I could speak to her first? You know, offer encouragement.”
The woman on the other end paused. This sounds so pathetic, Jack wailed inside. There’s no way they’ll—
“Why yes. I think that might be a good idea, Mr. Flynn. She could use a friendly voice. Just a moment.”
They withdrew the needle and eased Mercedes down and back onto some kind of pillow. Jack watched, nearly unable to breathe, as the attendant handed the phone to Mercedes.
“Hello?”
“Hi. I just wanted to wish you luck.”
He wished the angle gave him a better idea of exactly what emotion passed over Mercedes’ face. Maybe it was the shot, maybe.
“You’re calling me from the plane? How’d you know I’d be here, Jack? You weren’t supposed to know--” and she gasped, a short cry of honest pain that nearly drove Jack to his knees. “You weren’t supposed to know about any of this. I didn’t say anything.” Jack dared a look across the hall. She was gritting her teeth, or trying to smile. “Who told you? Can’t you just leave me alone?”
“I will, I wanted to help. I--” This wasn’t going right, not at all. What was he doing? Jack was only peripherally aware of the other figures in the “make ready” room. It would take so little for him to be at her side. Just put down the phone and cross the hall. His temple and jaw hurt, and he realized he was pressing the phone against his face.
Her voice was beginning to soften, and Jack knew her attention was shifting inward, her body preparing for the invasion of the laser and surgical tools. “Look, if you know what I’ve got, I mean why I’m in here –” She hesitated again, and Jack watched pain work lines across her face and neck. “Jack, I probably can’t have any, I mean, I can’t be your—or if you ever want to have kids,” her eyes were closed, and Jack watched as one of the attendants moved to take away the phone.
The curtain behind the window jerked. Almost, but not quite shut. He could still see her face.
“I don’t care about any of that. Just you, okay? I know there’s no time. There’s too many words to tell you.”
She frowned, twisting the phone away from the nurse. “I don’t want to hear any of it right now! I’m not what you want!” The frown deepened into a scowl, then quickly into a rictus of pain. She breathed in little, gasping gulps. The nurse got a solid grip on the phone cord.
“Let go,” whispered the nurse, working at the phone.
“You have to let me go,” echoed the girl.
Jack had time for one breath, one slip of a message to whisper through to her. He knew panic. It was impossible. It was a knife fight in a phone booth.
Is this what a man is, thought Jack. Reduced to the simplest equation, is this the sum of a man? He nearly hung up the phone. “Mercedes, I love you. I love you.”
*
Mercedes sobbed, feeling her face tie itself in knots as the nurse tried to take the phone. “I’m sorry; I thought that young man was one of your friends.” Mercedes hung onto the phone as long as she could, tried to respond to Jack, but it was hard to work her brain, her mouth, and the phone at the same time. The nurse was a kung fu blackbelt or something and eventually managed to take away the phone. Gently, she placed Mercedes’ arm and wrist into a restraining leash, to keep her from moving about during surgery. She battled the nurse, but she was SuperNurse or something. Had the strength of ten mortal nurses.
The other attendant tsked and finished prepping the area around Mercedes’ navel, which was quite numb. “We really should have better call screening down at the operator. How’s the shot doing, dear? Can you still feel it?”
Cold tears escaped her then and tracked down either side of her face, back toward her ears. The universe was reduced to a simple truth. Jagged pain. Waves and waves of it. Whatever it was inside of her knew that doctors were coming for it today, and was trying to kill her while it still had the chance.
One other thing remained solid. Even under the constant, uneven stab of pain and the softening effect of the drugs, Mercedes felt her heart shine, almost dance with glee. A hot, purple haziness swooped up at her. The phone fell, and Mercedes grinned fiercely. He loves me, he loves me! The world bubbled into a whiteout of pain. Oh, Jack-- oh God, it hurts . . .
*
Scott Culligan hated medical school virgins. Two semesters now he’d been Dr. Pellish’s aid, and Pellish still stuck him with the ob-gyn geeks. Scott knew his real talent was in admin, not procedure, but oh well. Pellish had tenure, and a letter of recommendation at graduation was worth any amount of hell. Scott adjusted his surgical cap and checked the clipboard. One more semester of schlepping second years through the hospital, and he deserved tenure.
“Settle in, everybody. The resident has asked for as much silence as possible today; you’re in for a special treat. The patient has advanced stage 4 endometriosis, the most extensive growth of tissue anyone on staff has ever seen.” The newbies would really see how it was done.
They were dawdling. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he said to the last of them. “The procedure is about to start, and the real doctors are all down below. Now, you’ve all been in an operating theater before, so you know the rules.”
Someone piped up from the back of the line, “No throwing popcorn,” and someone else said, “Don’t heckle the performance.”
Scott smiled despite himself and waved them all in. “First stage is a laparoscopy, so there’s not much to see. No open-body at all, so just watch the screen.”
One last student brushed in, adjusting his scrubs as he slid into the front row. This one had his scrub top on backwards—Lord, how did these idiots manage high school, let alone get admitted to Stanford? Scott started to check his list of students—these printouts were always out-of-date—but the video feed began. By the time Scott closed the door the newcomer was nearly invisible, ignoring the other medical students around him. He was motionless, ignoring the video feed, strangely intent on the patient as the procedure began. Almost, Scott noticed, as though he were looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.
*
Regular visiting hours were long past, but he didn’t care. They’d found a bed for Mercedes in the quietest, least-occupied section of the hospital—in this case near the rooms reserved for women in the early stages of labor. Twice in the hall Jack went through his nervous young father routine, and the nurses passed by. It wasn’t much of an act. During the surgery his insides knotted and writhed. They hadn’t stopped.
He looked at her for a long moment through the large plate of glass, then entered the room. She wasn’t attached to any of the machines; the room was quiet aside from her breathing.
The surgery had progressed pretty much the way the textbooks described; the surgeon lazed and removed so much black, viscous material Jack wondered if there were anything else left inside her. He looked hard at her face, trying to see something different, and failing. The procedure had taken a long time but wasn’t terribly invasive; they’d gone in through a tiny incision in her belly button. He supposed she’d wake up in a few hours and be taken home, and someone else would watch over her. The benefit of a family.
An ache like hunger lay solidly in Jack’s stomach, a feeling for which he had no name. He looked around the sparse room, knowing that there was no space for him, still wanting to stay.
There wasn’t even an empty chair.
You must leave her, Jack. She already told him so.
He’d given her the future and the present in the form of a crystal ball, and made his promise. She was not his. He had her address and could write letters, that was all.
She could choose.
Before he left, he took a small, bright disk from his pocket and placed it in her palm. “I won.” His voice broke, and he started again. “I won the race.”
A murmur, a soft noise from down the hall made Jack glance at the window, and he blinked in surpri
se. “Mr. Adams,” Jack started to say, but the man smiled and placed a finger to his lips, nodding at his daughter. He looked good, Jack saw, healthy as life, wearing a red 49ers jersey and a baseball cap. Adams rested his elbows on the windowsill and looked down at his daughter, and Jack’s breath caught in his throat at the unmistakable tenderness and strength in the man’s face. It was a father’s expression, a look which unambiguously read, You are safe, no matter what.
Adams looked up again at Jack and nodded, as if the two of them had spoken aloud. Jack freed his hand from Mercedes’, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and looked at her a final time. There were nurses coming down the hall, so Jack kissed her again, quickly, and walked out.
Her father had already gone, slipped away somehow before the two women in white saw him and hustled him back to his room. Jack was surprised he’d even made the trip to see his daughter, he’d looked so weak earlier.
Jack ignored the nurses, took the elevator downstairs, and walked straight out of the hospital, moving quickly and with utility. The last of Alonzo’s cash bought him an anonymous taxi to the airport. His thoughts wheeled around Mercedes the entire time, and he passed through the concourse almost in a trance, focused completely inward, and why not?
He moved through the crowds completely unknown, blended indistinguishably with the elementary mass of people about him. There was no one he knew, not a single person he’d—
“I remember you,” someone said. Jack looked up with a start at the speaker, and locked eyes with a lean, fair-haired man just in the act of attaching a bright ladybug clip to a little girl’s hair. The father and daughter from that morning. She stuck out her tongue.
“Honey, this is the young man from the trolley,” he said to the woman sitting next to Jack. She had the straightest auburn hair he’d ever seen.
Obviously his wife. She smiled generously. “You were really in the right place at the right time. If Clark,” her eyes went to her husband, “wasn’t so busy trying to make a cowboy out of our daughter, I wouldn’t worry as much.”
Jack shifted in his seat, momentarily unsure. The family looked at him with something oddly like recognition in their eyes. They were talking to him as though they’d know each other ten years or more. Inwardly, he sighed. Small talk with strangers suddenly seemed the most exhausting thing imaginable. He gathered himself nontheless, and smiled. “My name is Jack.”
“Jack. Nice to meet you,” the man said. He disentangled himself from his daughter’s hair long enough to shake hands. “Clark Seaman. This is my wife, Daylyn, and you and Katie already know each other.” The little girl was whispering ferociously to her Barbie. “I’m really a much better dad than that. Not like I leave the baby on the roof of the car, or anything.”
“Are you going home?”
“We’re headed back home to Utah, just here visiting friends from college. And you’re from around here?”
“No, Idaho. I came to visit . . . a friend in the hospital.”
“I hope your friend is doing alright,” said the woman.
“You might want to think about staying around here,” Seaman said, offhand. “San Francisco has a lot of work right now.”
Jack was confused.
“At least three new pilots being shot,” he continued, “Principal casting is done, of course, but there are still plenty of solid roles—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Jack. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Seaman blinked, then refocused on him. “Aren’t you in the Guild?”
Jack was surprised at the question. No one had ever asked him that before. “I’m still in high school,” he said.
They were both surprised. The woman said, “I would’ve said you were at least a junior—in college, I mean.”
“You’ve got one of those faces,” the man continued, matter-of-fact. “You can change how old you appear, things like that.”
A beat. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, sorry,” the man grinned sheepishly. “I’m a casting director. I work with actors in film and television. I thought you were one for a minute there. You’ve certainly got the look.”
If he hadn’t been so tired, Jack would have laughed at the thought. Then his thoughts whipped back to Mercedes, and he felt his heart drop again.
The lurch must have registered on his face. “Are you all right,” asked the woman. “did we –?”
“It’s not you,” said Jack, quickly. This family sure was nice. “My friend is pretty sick. She has a problem that nobody seems to know the cause of, or the cure. I wanted to help, but it’s really hard when someone hurts so much and there’s nothing you can do.”
The two adults were silent for a moment, and Jack was sure he’d made them uncomfortable. Then the woman placed her hand on his shoulder, and her husband said, simply, “Maybe you can help the next one.”
Maybe. Jack’s eyes fell to his own hands. In their last moment together, with her father at the window, Mercedes hand had closed around his. He might have imagined it. Maybe.
He looked up at the other man. “Could you tell me about your job? What is it like to work with actors?”
Little Black Dress
Orange County, California
None of the cousins would pay for a taxi when another cousin was within one hundred miles. It was one of their deals with each other. Besides, who can you call to pick you up in the middle of the day besides the girl looking for any excuse to get out of the office? The girl who owns the office, naturally.
Mercedes couldn’t help but whistle as she pulled into a parking stall at John Wayne International. The forecast said rain, but the sky over the airport was a brilliant, almost liquid blue. Decent morning light for making pictures.
A healthy chunk of her mood bubbled up from her latest batch of pictures, the ones she’d made in Cuba. The country was a photographer’s mine, a silver mine. The magazine editors couldn’t get enough. Americans loved the cars, the buildings, even pictures of the food. Several photos of the reconstructed classic Cuban architecture sold immediately to a New Orleans design firm working on the rebuild. It turned out the hotel where she stayed in Havana hadn’t gotten around to taking any shots of the flower market at its threshold on the Malecón, and she sold them the rights to nearly a dozen good shots. The shots of Espinosa’s inauguration went for the highest price, and the editors in Spokane had been most impressed with the spec shots she’d made during her morning run. Would she mind terribly going back?
She kept this up and she’d have to delegate all the work with the celebrity wedding and bar mitzvah circuit. Before that calendar filled up completely, Mercedes just had to get to Cuba again. Her press pass was usable through the run of the Goodwill Games, and would even get her into the opening night reception. She wondered if she should take a dress or buy one when she landed in Havana. Maybe her flight would lay over in Miami. Would definitely be good to develop some more professional contacts there; at least someone who liked to shop.
And everyone needed a little black dress.
She and Irene had agreed to meet at the baggage carousel; neither one was sure about procedures for disembarking from a private jet. Mercedes couldn’t wait to hear how that came about. Even if the government flew her cousin somewhere hush-hush for a little crime scene work, she should still be able to weasel out details about flying on a private aircraft.
Mercedes waited near the information desk, idly looking over a rack of brochures and pamphlets advertising the area’s attractions. She’d heard there was a great chowder restaurant at the end of Balboa pier. And there was a black-and-white film revival at the Lido, a Laurel and Hardy showcase. That made her heart warm. Classics deserved to displace blockbusters every once in awhile. She still hadn’t gotten around to seeing Caesar Whispered; the idea of Jack Flynn stalking the trenches of WWI France in a long scarf and peaked cap threatened to send her into paroxysms of laughter. He looked decent enough in the trailer, but absolutely ridiculous on
the posters and billboards all over town. According to the kids on staff at her studio, the still production photography was the weakest part of the movie.
Jack needed a good photographer.
Not that he got his hands dirty with that part of the business. And that’s all a movie was, a business, temporary at that, propped up to make the greatest amount of money for the least investment. Jack’s usual producers—a Hollywood power couple—were notorious, but the fact of the matter was that Gardner and Alicia Watt had backed the last three of Jack’s movies, and the market was just right for a Douglas MacArthur biopic. The stars were aligned. Must be nice to be that lucky.
Irene appeared at the top of the stairs, wobbling underneath a rucksack full of duty free bags. Mercedes waved and went to meet her. She determined not to mention tomorrow’s return trip to Cuba, even though the place wasn’t half as dangerous as Irene thought. Her cousin really needed to get out of the lab.
And she really needed a new outfit for the opening reception. It would have to be amazing if she was going to mingle and make pictures with that crowd.
“Irene! Want to help me pick out my next tax deduction?”
Legend
Havana
Two hours.
Jack grimaced as he slid down the dark tunnel toward the growing circle of light. This must be what a bullet feels like, he thought, pressing his feet and palms into the sides of the shaft to slow his descent. The conference room below was empty.
The aluminum air duct popped and squeaked under Jack’s weight as he swung down onto the table. Using a powered screwdriver, he reattached the vent cover, then affixed a small, bright swatch of adhesive security tape to the crease where the vent met the ceiling.
