by Hadley Hury
He talked back to the screen, indirectly to her, muttered to himself. With the remote still in his hand and clicking away, he would walk over and pick up something from the pile of reading materials, look at it, mouth out disparate snatches.
But now it seemed, as the clock inched toward midnight, that he was even worse. He had sunk into an unreachable chasm, sitting in the armchair and scarcely moving, watching a talk-show at low volume on the tilted screen above without giving the slightest indication that he was seeing or hearing it. He didn’t go out into the hall, he didn’t go for juice or crackers, he didn’t look for something new to read, he didn’t respond to her suggestions, he didn’t respond well when she had attempted, twice, to kiss him, to tell him it would be over soon, it would be all right.
She understood his nerves and knew what to do about them. She knew less well what to do about his dangerously imploding fear. It had descended an hour before.
Chaz was in the john and she had control of the remote long enough to stay focused on Angelica Huston’s final scene in The Grifters. It seemed fortuitous that she had happened on this scene of this film, on this night, at this moment. She’d always liked the way the mother’s body dropped into a hopeless hunch over her dead son and the heaving guttural animal sounds of stunned grief. She watched now utterly transfixed.
Chaz came out just as it ended.
And just as Charlie’s eyes suddenly flew wide open.
Sydney saw the sick terror in Chaz’s eyes and turned toward the bed. Charlie was smiling at them and slowly, with obvious effort, was lifting his left hand from its usual resting place at his side.
It was a salute. He nodded his head slightly. Proud that he’d accomplished it. That he reached them.
He drifted off again.
Chaz reached blindly behind himself, flailing for a moment, before his hand closed tightly on the edge of the bathroom door. She got up and went toward him. But she touched nothing. He had ducked, almost falling backward, into the harsh fluorescence. The door slammed in her face.
She whispered. “Chaz!”
The sounds of him being sick went on for two or three minutes that seemed like hours.
Other than a couple of monosyllabic replies to questions she tried to shape as comforts to him, he hadn’t spoken for the past forty-five minutes. Only in the past ten did she seem to be making the crucial contact with him that would let her know she could get him through it. She had taken her chair over beside his and held his hand. She fed him crackers and cold water. After awhile, he rested his head on her shoulder for a minute. When he raised it again, he smiled sheepishly, pale, his eyes gorgeous and dark. “I’m fine.”
“I know you are. I count on you,” she said.
It was going to be fine.
She did something like pray.
For her poor, dear, weak, beautiful husband whom she really did love. He was the only person she had ever met who seemed emptier than herself, and that made her feel things she had never felt. Strong. Useful. Loved. She prayed for herself. She prayed for it to be over, for them to be away. She prayed for a hundred million dollars.
She prayed that she would be strong enough not to look at her watch or the clock every two minutes.
She prayed most of all that Charlie would not waken again to disturb them.
She prayed that less than two hours from now they could know for certain that they would never have to worry about that again.
She passed the remaining time by considering her reactions over and over again, matching specific reactions, or a repertoire of ready possibilities, to specific individuals and groups. When the time came, like any good actor, she had to believe it.
Chaz never looked at Charlie again. He worked a crossword puzzle with unrelenting concentration, his mournful mounting hysteria confined to the circumference of the pencil.
***
They would now have seemed, to anyone who might have seen them, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more or less than what they were—a handsome young couple keeping a late-night vigil by the bed of their loved one.
An expanse of hardware and fixtures and sockets and equipment rose before them, along the wall behind the bed, staring down impersonally on the figure in the bed, a cluttered mass of harsh necessities.
They sat amid the wires and tubes and monitors that blinked or dripped or clicked or whirred, each according to its function. They sat silently amid the seamless, inscrutable, almost submarine, sounds.
They could never have distinguished, among this confused but authoritative welter, three new sets of very small holes in the wall that had not been there before, one pair nearly six feet up from the floor, another a few inches lower to the right, and a single metal-collared aperture set in the bank of control panels and armatures just over the head of the bed.
Chapter 42
Hour by hour, the hall had slowly subsided from its usual daytime demeanor—charged, hurried, clamorous—into the suspended twilight that passes for night in a hospital.
By 12:30, the two nurses had made their rounds and were doing charts at their station, and a young man from housekeeping had swabbed the floor from side to side and moved on with a slow hypnotic rhythm and a faint diffusion of disinfectant.
***
At 1:30, Sydney got up from her chair, laying aside a recent issue of Architectural Digest. She murmured something to Chaz.
The blood left his face, but he nodded slightly.
He went to the door, opened it, and looked up and down the hall. He shook his head, and a few seconds later a med assistant pushed a cart by and gave him a wan, tired smile.
Seconds later he looked at Sydney, who stood near the bed, and nodded.
She leaned in over the edge of the bed, both her hands rising quickly toward Charlie’s face. Simultaneously and without hesitation she gripped his nostrils shut with one hand and clamped her hand over his mouth.
***
At the same moment Chaz let out an odd, strangled “No!” and her hands jerked to her sides.
A large man in a uniform was twisting him around and jamming his arms into his back.
A uniformed woman had hurtled past them and crossed four yards in three time-lapsed lunges and now gripped her own arms.
***
As they were escorted quickly down the hall, Sydney saw, incongruously, Hudson DeForest standing off to one side.
She didn’t look at him.
She was trying to silence Chaz with a look.
She was trying to think, but she could not.
She had never given a bad performance.
She always made everyone believe because she only played what she believed. But she found herself unprepared for failure. She had no script, no lines. No motivation.
Where was the truth?
She was aware of the stares and could only listen, passively, to the people around her talking. Remote external details.
***
When they emerged from the cool gray unreality and were taken through the harsh sodium vapor lights to a waiting police car, she suddenly recoiled. She heard, from somewhere far away, what sounded like gunfire.
“They always have to start early,” chuckled the big man to the woman and another officer who sat behind the wheel.
It was one week before the Fourth of July.
The window between the front and the back seats was like a cage. The woman’s sharply creased uniform smelled faintly of starch.
September
He had only three days, not enough time to use sixteen hours of it driving.
Camilla and Libby were to meet his plane. He looked through the glass panel of the long walkway that steered the Labor Day weekend passengers from the gangway into the small waiting area.
He saw neither of them. Perhaps they were late.
He came to the end of the glassed walkway and stood to one side. As he resituated his shoulder bag and searched the atrium crowded with holiday travelers, he heard through the clutter a soft voice from som
ewhere behind him.
“Hudson.”
It was Charlie, sitting on a short bench. He had put on a few more pounds in the past month. His color had continued to improve and the smile was almost back at full tilt. But he still looked frail, shrunken.
“Well, what are you doing here?” said Hudson. He gripped the outstretched hand and leaned down for the only sort of hug the recent wound could tolerate. “Did Nurse Ratched give her permission?”
“Nurse Ratched and Camilla are waiting for us out front.” As they slowly negotiated the swarm he said, “I just wanted to meet you myself, under my own sail. To prove I could.” He grinned. “That’s what I do these days, you know. Eat fatty foods four times a day and try to prove things to myself.”
***
The three of them, together, had told Charlie what had happened to him.
They’d had to get it over with only days after he regained consciousness. They delayed as long as they could, fearful of a relapse, but finally they’d had to group themselves around his bed and tell him. They trusted Rogers and Fields to keep their final questions to a minimum and to be as gentle as possible, but there was no gentle way to tell Charlie that his only living relative and his bride had conspired with one of his employees to encourage an unbalanced fanatic to kill him.
***
Libby had insisted on being the day nurse since Charlie had come home after three weeks.
“He’s not going back into that house alone or with just a hired nurse,” she said. “We can’t have him getting depressed.”
They had moved Charlie into the downstairs bedroom. Before Hudson had to leave for Memphis in early August, to get back for a week of settling in before school, he and Brad had taken turns spelling her for a few hours every day, and Camilla came when she could. Fentry and Victor checked in regularly, and a night nurse, carefully vetted against Libby’s burgeoning set of criteria, came on from eight to six.
They also took charge of the new, seven-week-old chocolate Lab puppy—whom Charlie dubbed Ruth and who slept nightly on his bed without once interfering with his bandages—exhorting Charlie, as they dealt with the rigors of housebreaking and tripped over chew toys on a regular basis, to hurry up and get strong enough to assume more of his appropriate paternal functions.
Libby became infuriated, as no one had ever seen her, to find, one morning, a crudely scrawled note about getting rid of faggots on the front walk. The police were later able to reassure them that, ironically, it was the wholly unconnected, fairly generic work of a Seagrove boy who’d been up to other similar mischief in the neighborhood for a couple of months, including a particularly obscene bit of graffiti mailed to a nearby Methodist minister’s wife. The reminder that such virulent hatred could have been bred and was already seething in an eleven-year-old was an especially bleak sort of reassurance.
They kept Charlie engaged with reading and television and movies and music, with trying to eat, with the physical therapist’s first assignments. And to keep his disbelief and sorrow from swallowing him back into a mute darkness, they talked with him about it.
A little here, a little there, letting him take the lead but trying not to let him brood hopelessly on the nightmare he had wakened to. They kept him on task. Getting stronger. Getting well. They were all they could be to him. The people who had always been there. The ones who loved him and wanted him back.
They themselves had learned, in grisly pieces, the full scope of the outrage soon after that night in the hospital, and they took encouragement from the mercifully quick closure. Cold solace that it was, at least it was something, and they hoped they might somehow pass that solace on, a positive current of energy, to Charlie.
Sydney had apparently been prepared to fight despite the damning videotape and eyewitnesses, but she gave up after Chaz shakily emitted a lengthy, detailed confession and Terry Main was intercepted at the Puerto Vallarta airport carrying a fake ID and twenty-eight thousand in cash.
***
By the time Hudson had to go, there was some abatement in Charlie’s physical pain. And, characteristically, as the only gift of gratitude he could offer them, he was working hard at doing what he could about his emotional pain.
On the day Hudson left for Memphis he had come by just as Libby was helping Charlie negotiate his fork over a mashed-up baked potato. Still ashen and wraith thin, he was propped in the winged armchair near his bed.
Suddenly he noticed his reflection in the full-length mirror inside the closet door which Libby must have left open. He gestured feebly with his fork, and when he was sure they were looking, he smiled.
“Guess she was wrong,” he rasped.
“Who was wrong?” Hudson asked.
“Duchess of Windsor. You can be too rich and too thin.”
***
Charlie proved something else that night. With Hudson on one side, Libby on the other, and Brad just behind, he walked very slowly but steadily not only into the 26-A but up the stairs, even more slowly, one at a time, to his regular table overlooking the main room.
Camilla finished up a few things and then joined them, carrying a bouquet of native hawthorn and early chrysanthemums that had just arrived with a note from Susie, now on staff with a magazine in New Orleans. They had two bottles of Chateau de Mareuil sur Ay. Victor served the meal. The soup was of chilled pumpkin, shallots and nutmeg, followed by a salad of romaine hearts in a light vinaigrette with kalamata olives, mint, tomatoes, and feta, followed by a terrine of fresh corn, peas, crab, and peppers in tarragon aspic, followed by Gulf red snapper grilled with a tapenade of garlic chutney, and apple tart with cream for dessert.
They were well aware that he rankled under having been the center of attention for too long. He was back in his element now, deflecting that attention, enlivened by his connection to others, to the world. He listened with a kind of boyish elation to Hudson’s first anecdotes of the school year, and asked about the book, and Brad’s golf game, and Camilla’s son who had been with her for two weeks before going back to school.
They talked and laughed and ate and made toasts and drank. They watched the diners below. They repeatedly told Charlie not to tire himself but were elated at seeing him very nearly back to being Charlie.
He proposed the final toast. He looked very deliberately around the table at each of them in turn and lifted his glass.
“Thank you.”
In all the sum total of their years of knowing him, and through all the unimaginable horrors of the past ten weeks, they had never seen Charlie cry. For a moment they thought their mutual history was about to transform itself once more.
But he swallowed hard, smiled, and tried again, testing each word like a man on a high wire.
“You are the finest family I could ever have imagined. Or ever been blessed to have.”
***
On Sunday afternoon, Hudson and Camilla walked the beach to Seaside and back. They had told him the night before that August had gone out like a roaring furnace, but this day had dawned in a cool drizzle.
There was no particular destination, no particular reason for going to Seaside. They walked barefoot, along the surf, with lightweight ponchos over their shorts and shirts, enjoying the wet freshness and the light whipping wind.
In the village, they passed some indeterminate period of time browsing through books at the Sundog, had a salad at Bud & Alley’s, sat for awhile with hot chocolate on the wide steps of the market, and drifted aimlessly through the shops and galleries.
“I thought you weren’t a shopper,” she said as he scrutinized an awful piece of pottery.
“I’m not,” Hudson said. “Loathe it. This isn’t shopping. This is wandering. It’s good for the soul, I hear. Particularly the souls of teachers for whom the year has just begun like a huge boulder rolling down a steep hill.”
“Do you remember what we talked about that night in the cottage, the night just before…”
“The part about ‘keeping a place cleared’?”
&n
bsp; “That part.”
“Yes,” he said.
***
When they headed back, the skies had cleared for an unimaginably spectacular sunset. They tried just to let it happen, managing silence for minutes at a time, but it was too much to bear. Like children, they burst with exclamations, they oohed and aahed and pointed, so overpowered as they walked toward the west that they occasionally wheeled in little circles or fell into a silly skip.
By the time they approached Laurel they had forgotten themselves.
The summer.
Time.
They moved silently now, slowly, a part of the land and the seascape, as the saturated colors glowed, then vibrated, and finally muted to a jagged wash of infinite pastels seeping into the Gulf.
They waded through the shallow breach of the lagoon where it meandered across the beach and suddenly felt the wind from the northwest pick up against their faces.
They stopped for a moment and turned to look through the gathering twilight for the roof of Charlie’s house, for the end of the upper porch, discernible from only one particular perspective over the high dunes and the tangle of scrub oaks.
They reached out for one another’s hands.
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