Sammy took a look both ways down the catwalk, then stepped inside. What do you need to do here. What are you going to do with all this shit.
Leave it. You take everything.
Like I want a can of letters from your wife. Be real. Sammy pried open the tin flap on the cherry can. Wow. She’s got a lot to say.
Will sat down on the cot again and tried to untie his oxfords, but now he was sobbing, like a seizure.
You are a mess. I’ll help you. Sammy squatted down and tugged off each shoe. Okay, you’re all set. I’m just going to take these as a memento. Sammy slipped his hands into the shoes. He clapped the soles together. A cuc-a-racha! Come on. Come on. Come on. It’s over. Sammy tapped Will’s shoulder with a shoe. Come on. Take a deep breath. Isn’t that what they always say. This is the time for all that crap. Sammy leaned over. You hear me in there? Will opened his eyes and nodded. I hear you. Sammy kissed Will, suddenly, on the lips, Will jerked his head away, then Sammy stood up coughing, lifted a shoe to cover his mouth. Will sat way back, Jesus Christ, then he started to laugh. Stupid faggot.
Good. Now get the fuck out of here. And Sammy left, slipped out the open door and away down the catwalk. The sound of his choking pinged off the glass roof.
In the courtyard, Pasteur did a lot of handshaking with Peter as if it were a transfer-of-custody situation. All right now, time to look on the bright side, he said to Will, but did not shake his hand. Don’t let your mind visit here too often, that’s key. Then the rest of you won’t come back either. When the long blue car pulled out under the first twist of razor wire, Pasteur waved once, then went back inside. Will’s loafers felt cold and stiff and thin on his feet. The leather bit into his toes. He asked Peter to turn off the radio because the speakers jabbed his ears. The soft seat felt like sticky wax, and his face burned with a fever he hadn’t felt before. He rubbed his mouth. His hand smelled old. They passed nothing on the road out to the thruway but scrub pine and dirt and weeds. Will didn’t see a single other car or face. Peter said he would drive Will to the hotel, after that he kept quiet.
Sometime late Monday afternoon, Kay came to believe she could go home. She would find a taxi downstairs at the front entrance, easily, and that taxi would take her to the train, from the train she could find another taxi, and then she’d be in Rumson. She’d be inside her own house, step into the laundry, reach into the dryer and pull out the nightgown that had been there for how many weeks now. She’d let Carmen go over a month ago. She wouldn’t eat, or wash, she’d just crawl into her own bed, her side softer than the other, and she’d be there by nightfall. She began to count on that. She held Bo’s toes through the blanket.
Hollis launched herself into the room, carrying two canned sodas. Her face worn with aggravation. Don’t blame me, she said.
How could I blame you? How could I blame you, Hollis? And he’s better now. He’s back. And you’ll be here tonight. Is that for me?
Yes.
It’s freezing. How do you get a can this cold?
I keep them in the lab fridge.
Smart.
Yes.
You are. Everything. Hollis. He’s okay.
Yes, he looks okay. Hollis read all the gauges, then the clipboard. A quick surge and now he’s okay. He just got a fever. And now it’s gone.
Kay nodded. Now it’s gone.
That Clarissa is a pain in the ass, but she did the right thing.
Think so?
Definitely. A night in the ICU whips everyone into shape. We’ll be watching him like the sun rises and sets on him for a few days now.
Kay cracked open her soda. Bo’s eyelids fluttered, then he turned his cheek away from her and sighed in his sleep.
I might go home now.
Sure, why not. He’ll rest until dinner, anyway.
No, I mean home home.
Oh.
You don’t think that’s such a good idea?
I think it’s okay. Hollis was back to examining the label on the IV. She turned away, opened her own soda.
Dr. Bronson’s coming in about ten minutes, and then I think I’ll go home.
Hollis nodded. Okay.
And I’ll come right back tomorrow.
Fine. Good.
Kay watched Hollis’s hand. Fingers to wrist, taking her own pulse, a funny nervous habit.
Sure, she said again, why not.
Dr. Bronson looked a bit like a piglet to Kay. He wore a pink shirt, had pink skin and black wires of hair on the backs of his hands that pressed like trapped insects against his rubber gloves. He took the plastic drape in the doorway and looped it over a chair as if he needed some fresh air. Seven doctors followed him into the room silently, all dressed as if for surgery. They lined up against the windows. Dr. Bronson stepped to the bed and gently lifted each of Bo’s eyelids, he unbuttoned the pajama top and felt all around Bo’s neck and chest, then he covered him up with a blanket and went back to wrestle again with the drape. Bo never woke up. Dr. Bronson nodded to the assembled doctors, All right. And they all left shaking his hand as they went. Now he leaned in the doorway, patted his round stomach, he was ready for her.
Kay followed Dr. Bronson down the hall. He motioned her into the play-nurse’s cubicle, swept a pair of trolls off the desk to the floor. Drive me batty, those things. I can’t stand to look at them.
Kay took a seat. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the fallen trolls.
So, said Dr. Bronson. We’re making history.
Kay stared at him. He’s barely been conscious for two days now.
I see a very minor setback, completely well handled, by the way. Out of ICU fast. That’s good. We’ve already got some positive test results. His blood looks very good. I think if all continues to go well—the doctor flexed his small articulate hands twice—I think we’re going to see a remission.
Do you really think so?
I do.
Kay bent forward and picked up the trolls. Straightened their hair, dropped them in her lap.
Dr. Bronson frowned at her. You look tired.
I am tired.
Go get some rest. This is a big change for the better. From here on, it’s just cheering him in to home plate.
And what about later?
We’ll keep him feeling well.
Dr. Bronson shifted his weight in the social worker’s bucket chair. Maybe you don’t understand what’s happened here? This is unprecedented. Really unheard of. You know that, don’t you.
Kay nodded, handed him the trolls. Dr. Bronson laid them on the desk. Is there something you wanted to ask?
One of the new nurses stuck her head around the corner. They’re all waiting for you, Doctor.
Be right there. Mrs. Clemens?
She shook her head. No. I believe you.
You’re just tired. Who wouldn’t be? Dr. Bronson stood, led her by the arm out of the cubicle. You know what? I’m going to call you in the morning, okay? We’ll talk more, he said, then signaled to the waiting nurse to show him the way to the conference room.
Kay walked back to Bo’s room, remasking. She held his ankles through the white cotton blanket. She rubbed her hand along his shins. He almost always slept on his back now, to accommodate all the monitors, the Hickman, and the tubes. She gave Hollis a quick smile, then headed out to grab the elevator, untying the lab smock, stuffing her mask and gloves into her pocketbook as she went.
Right away she found a cab, but as soon as she was settled into the back and the cabbie was careening down York Avenue, looking for a cross street not choked with traffic at five o’clock, she changed her mind. She couldn’t make the trip after all, it was too far and too long to go home. The St. Regis, please, she said. The cabbie gunned his engine at the red light, as if now they were in business. It meant another day before she saw Lou-Lou. She’d call Gert as soon as she got into her room.
It was after six by the time they crawled the twenty steaming blocks downtown, and inside the lobby of the St. Regis, it looked like Mardi Gras. A
hundred people, at least, in black tie and ball gowns. Wasn’t it early for this? Kay flipped open her purse and plucked out her sunglasses, the ones that covered half her face. She hadn’t touched a lipstick in a day and a half, and she’d slept in her dress all weekend. She wriggled through the crowd.
The elevators were all at the penthouse. She pushed all the buttons, not one would budge from the top. The women in their crinkling gowns and the men with too much cologne and their cigars waving pressed into her, they wanted the elevators too. She took the stairs. By the eighth floor, sixteenth landing, she was sticky with sweat and needed to cry. And so angry she felt she would knock over the next person who got in her way. Kay pushed through the fire door onto her corridor which, empty, smelled of new paint. Maybe they were renovating this floor, maybe that’s how Roy cut the deal. Her doorknob still had the sign on it. Don’t trespass, don’t come near me. It had been a week, at least, since she’d let the maid service clean up her room. She treated almost everyone now as if they were carriers of a deadly virus. When did that happen, when did she start becoming so hateful. All the partygoers looked like ghouls to her. She remembered Gert in a strapless gown once, with so many freckles on her shoulders it looked like a translucent lace shawl. And Kay had loved that, the strangeness of it. What had happened to her.
Kay stuck the key in the lock, turned it, stepped inside the tiny foyer and out of her sling-backs. In the sitting room, her eggs from three days ago still sat a yellow mess just where she’d left them. She felt a sick relief to be here, out of anyone’s sight or hearing, and then immediately a smack of fear. The bedroom door was closed. She never closed it. She thought to call the manager, someone, but it was a free-for-all in the lobby, who knew how long they’d take. She could see her hands were shaking. But inside she went still, still and angry.
She wrapped a cold trembling hand around the crystal doorknob, turned and pushed. It was dark in the bedroom. Almost like the sun had set rapidly from one room to the next. The curtains were drawn closed across the window that overlooked the air shaft. She pulled aside the fabric. Through the window, sooty drafts carried the scent of hors d’oeuvres. In her bed, in her dirty sheets, was her husband, dead asleep. A streak of gray across his shoulder, his head covered in stubble patches and a long red scar. She looked at him, face turned into her pillow, hands tucked around his neck, fingers cradling one cheek.
Kay felt an odd stricken calm, but her hands still shook and she went to shut out the smell, the nasty smell of hors d’oeuvres, and spotted the back of a woman in a gown, ready to go, in the window opposite. She pulled the window shut, dragged the curtains together, drowning out most of the light. She could still see her husband’s face sunk into the pillow, and the rise and fall, very slight, of his breath in his back. I miss you, she thought, looking right at him. That seemed true now. She could not move. She sat at last in one of the low boudoir chairs, wide-bottomed, low-slung, good for putting on difficult shoes. She sucked on the remains of a warm, flat soda in a bottle. She unclasped the stranglehold of her dirty stockings and she unzipped her dress, untangled the straps of her bra and slid it off her chest. Felt the heat of the airless room and felt the weariness of her husband like a radio broadcast to her bones. And her own weariness and her own anger, and she slid off her panties and felt the slick satin of the chair, and how dirty her own body was, sweaty, smelling of the hospital and the cab and all the cigarettes she’d smoked in disinfected toilets, and how her breasts pulled down heavy like a sickness, and she took this body and went across the room to her husband and lay down, she curled into his back and put her mouth to the base of his neck, her breasts touched his skin where the strange gray ash streaked beneath his shoulder blades, she dropped her left hand to the base of his spine. She would lie there just this way, her body against his cool cool skin, until she could breathe and think and feel anything that made sense again.
August 1
Lou-Lou glanced sideways at Timmy Mooney, the demoted pool boy, in the light shimmering off the Atlantic Ocean. Sparkles like stars flashed from the water to his face. His calves were drenched by low foamy swells. He was watching and waiting.
Lou-Lou had been avoiding Timmy, hiding out. She’d never gone back to New York to get her bones tapped, as she had said she would. She knew he would think she was a liar. Maybe she was a liar. All the rest of July, Gert sent her to the beach club only twice, and each time Lou-Lou stayed far away from the umbrella hut. When she saw Timmy sticking umbrellas in the sand, she froze until he finished and moved away. She felt so sad when he left, but she couldn’t do anything differently.
Now Lou-Lou listened closely in case Timmy spoke. They stood this way, side by side, near the jetty, at the end of the half-mile strip of beach that was the private property of the Monmouth Beach Bath and Tennis Club. The water was rough today, with huge breakers. Timmy was going to give her some tips on bodysurfing.
That morning Lou-Lou got creamed over and over. She crashed, then wobbled upright, clumps of sand stuck in the bottom of her bathing suit. The lifeguard finally beached her, blew his whistle and ordered her to sit for an interval in the shadow of his big white chair. After digging in some encampments, Timmy strolled over and said, Look, it’s just not that hard.
They were waiting for the perfect curl. Timmy squinted out to the horizon line, and there a small bump began to form. All right, here we go, Timmy said. Now just watch. He began corkscrew running, swiveling his body to cut through the water, fists at chest level, elbows straight out from his shoulders, until he was thigh-deep, then he took a dive. The water crept higher and higher, gathering a thick green bottom and a thin top like frosted glass. The foam around her feet was sucked away suddenly with a hush. Timmy reversed direction and let his body be pulled up into the top, up higher until he was part of the crumbling lip, he put his hands out in the air as if grabbing on to something, to keep climbing for the last full reach, and then, swimming like crazy, Timmy’s body slipped down into the crash of white bubbling water, swallowed up in it, fingertips heading right to her.
Far down the beach, the lifeguard’s whistle tooted shrill and fast. Lou-Lou turned to see the guard waving at her. Whistling and waving. And now Gert was running along the wet sand in a shocking-pink muumuu. Gert had promised she wouldn’t pick Lou-Lou up until dinnertime, now she was ruining everything. Lou-Lou looked down at Timmy, just about to glide in beside her. Lou-Lou! Gert shouted out, and Timmy scrambled upright, water pearling all over his shoulders. He laughed, breathless. Easy, totally easy, he said. And Lou-Lou smiled at him, as if she still saw the whole thing in his eyes.
Lou-Lou! Gert was panting. Didn’t you hear the loudspeaker? Come on. Let’s go. We have to hurry. Gert took her by the hand, and together they raced back up to the boardwalk.
What’s the matter?
Nothing’s the matter, your mother called and she wants you in the city, pronto. She’s sending down Uncle Roy’s car. Peter will be here any second. So let’s go.
But why?
You need a why? Your mother wants you. Gert unlocked the door to Mrs. Murphy’s cabana. No time for a shower, here are your shorts. She tossed Lou-Lou her Danskins.
Is it for my bones?
Your bones? Gert poured Mrs. Murphy’s baby powder into her hand. She puffed it onto Lou-Lou’s damp chest. Honey, your bones are just perfect.
The green stripe of the awning made an odd chartreuse shadow on Gert’s face. She held Lou-Lou’s hand tight. The long blue limousine pulled slowly through the clubhouse gates. This is good, said Gert, this is what we’ve all been praying for.
Lou-Lou didn’t remember Gert praying. Did Gert want a limousine?
Now, don’t get too excited. Just take it slow. Lou-Lou wanted to ask about these instructions, but now Gert was waving to Peter, flagging him down. Here we are! Peter pulled the car to a stop and hopped out.
Mrs. Maguire, Miss Lou-Lou. Peter removed his stiff cap and opened the back door. A block of cold air rushed out. Newspapers cov
ered the carpet. Huddled under the leather puff of the seat, a miniature silver poodle whimpered and scratched. For you and your brother, Miss Lou-Lou. A gift from Miss Kinder.
Oh. Kay’s going to be thrilled.
He’s crying.
Just scared, Miss Lou-Lou.
Now, get going, you two, said Gert. When Lou-Lou was settled in the backseat, the little dog turned his nose to the corner. Gert leaned in and patted Lou-Lou’s cheek. Be good, angel, no matter what. Then she backed out of the car. Angel. Now Lou-Lou was worried. Maybe she wouldn’t see Gert for a while.
Peter poured her a small ginger ale on ice from the bar, then closed the door. Gert rubbed at her nose and watched from under the awning as Peter made the slow wide turn out of the club. He drove the ocean road to the highway. The tiny dog ignored Lou-Lou and his little silver bowl of food, ate the newspaper, and threw up on the back of the blue jumper seat.
By the time they reached the end of the Lincoln Tunnel, the puppy had rested his nose on Lou-Lou’s flip-flop once. Peter cruised up the West Side Highway and down the spiral ramp to the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin. At the bottom he slid to a smooth stop. Peter reached through the open divide with a silver leash. Here you go, Miss Lou-Lou. You might want to put this on. He’s never seen the water before.
The Wavemaker II was docked at the end of the first pier, engines running. The tarp on the Boston Whaler rescue boat was peeled back. Captain Peeko fiddled on the bridge. Lou-Lou put the dog on the ground, and he ran in uneven arcs back and forth in front of her as she walked along the path holding Peter’s hand.
Uncle Roy came running down the gangplank. What took so long? Sweetheart! What do you think of our friend? But Uncle Roy already had the poodle up in his arms. The dog gave a yowl, jaw trembling, teeth exposed. Uncle Roy tapped his nose and the dog stopped crying, panted instead. I thought you’d never get here. He sent her up the gangplank first. Hold that rail!
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