After you left—
“I don’t talk about that,” I said. Not ever.
He seemed to struggle with his breath, and then: “You went to your mama’s people.”
“No.”
“She said that’s where you’d go.”
“We were estranged from her family.” There’s a precise word. Yes, estranged. “I was here and then I went to college.”
“Your mama must’ve been proud.”
“Would’ve been, I imagine.”
The room got very quiet except for the beep of his heart monitor and the whoosh of the compressor that fed his oxygen mask and the murmur of the television behind the curtain.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Your grandpa didn’t come for you?”
“I told you. I don’t talk about those years.” The lost years. When you lose a thing, you let it go.
“But a child can’t live alone.”
“A family took me in.” As you’d take in a dirty, scruffy stray. “A foster family. We don’t need to talk about it. Everything was fine. They were a good Christian family.” Into their good deeds. I was their good deed—until I wasn’t.
“You were happy?”
“Sure.”
“You still talk to them?”
“No.”
He was plucking at his sheet again. “You’re not going to be able to forgive me.”
The ladder-shadow on the wall had thickened so that it barely resembled a ladder anymore but had taken on the shape of a door closing swiftly.
“You’re getting yourself all worked up,” I said. “Should I get a nurse for you?”
“Stay.”
“This isn’t any good for you. I didn’t come here for this.”
“Why then?” he said, and when I couldn’t answer: “Curious?”
“My motivation wasn’t heroic.” My hand sifted nervously through my hair. “I treated someone I care about badly, my friend, a man. I don’t know how to deal with him or with what he says he wants, and part of me thinks that’s your fault. You know, all that Freudian crap about absent fathers? So I came all this way to kick your ass.”
“It’s already kicked.”
“I’m not going to feel sorry for you.” But I could feel myself being lulled by the rhythmic beep of his heart monitor, the whoosh of the oxygen compressor, up and down, making my harsh breaths match his ragged breaths, my heart beat to his.
“Okay.”
“You can’t make me.”
“You said that when you were six.”
“You expect me to believe you remember that long ago?”
“Blink of an eye,” he said. “I remember your mama like that, too.”
I brushed angry tears from my eyes. “I have to go.” When I got to the door, he said something about negotiating. I spun around. “What did you say?”
“Can we negotiate?” he repeated.
“No, I do that.”
“What?”
“I negotiate.”
“It’s a good tactic.”
“No. Not for you, it isn’t. It’s a good tactic for me. It’s mine.” I exhaled a bitter laugh. “When I feel small and someone’s got leverage over me. When there’s something I have to get but I can’t get it. It’s my tactic. It cannot be your tactic.”
“Apples don’t fall far—”
“I fell!” I shouted. “Far. After you dropped me.”
A nurse peeked into the room, asked if everything was all right. I nodded without speaking, and she went away. I took a deep breath and relaxed my fists and ran my hand over the bed railing, which was shockingly cool. I pulled my hand away.
“I shouldn’t holler at you when you’re unwell.” My voice was calmer now. “It’s only that I’m not you. Nothing personal. I just wanted to be something else entirely; maybe all children do, and that’s all I meant, not to upset you.”
“You have the leverage here.”
“Hardly.” I snorted, and then: “I’m not in shape for this and you’re definitely not.”
“This is as good as I get.”
“And if I stay much longer I’m going to say something that’ll rattle around my brain for years and I don’t need that. I want to be better. I’m really going to try.”
His hand moved across the blanket, restlessly. “I was afraid—”
“I don’t—want—to hear it,” I said through clenched teeth.
From the other side of the curtain, the television’s volume was turned up suddenly, and sports talk blared. The man in the other bed was trying to give us privacy, and he was sick, too. It was wrong of me to bring my anger here. I picked up my satchel from the floor and slipped it over my shoulder.
“Wait,” he said, and after a deep breath, “How about I give you something you need?”
“Christ, you sound like I do.” I put my head down and rubbed my temples. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have anything I need. Not to be cruel, but I never needed anyone.”
“I could tell you about your mother.”
I lifted my head and stared. His face was thin, his lips dry, but his eyes were full of purpose. He did not blink.
“You probably don’t remember her when she was well.”
It was true, even the old photographs were gone, the last stolen a decade ago when my bag got lifted from a club downtown, and all that remained, was a wavering memory of a blank-slate face. I thought of that other blank face—the first picture of Evelyn Carney, the one with the white spots for eyes—and then the pictures were moving around in my mind, one sliding across the other, suggesting disturbing similarities I couldn’t name and that made no logical sense.
“I have this stupid photographic memory,” I said in a slow, thick voice, “except for her. I can’t see my mother’s face. I don’t know why that is.”
“Ah,” he said. “Her beautiful face. Let me tell you.”
My hand gripped the rail of the bed again. The band of my watch skimmed noisily across the cool metal as I made my way toward him. In the chair next to the bed, I sat elbows on knees, my head lowered.
The stories took the rest of the afternoon. He spoke slowly, whistling his words, and he had to stop often to catch his breath. Sometimes he’d ask me to put the mask over his face and he’d rest, his watery eyes blinking slowly and I figured painfully, until his hand would pluck at the rubber band cutting indents in gaunt cheeks. I took the mask off, careful not to snap the band against his waxed paper skin. Sometimes he’d ask for a cup of water, which I’d lift, pointing the straw between his parched lips, careful not to push too far, and I’d wait. I would’ve waited hours, days. I felt I’d waited my whole life for this. He was a gifted storyteller, and he made my mother come alive. Not the beautiful woman who’d held a little girl in awe, nor the dying woman whose strange prayers for deliverance terrified me, but the living, breathing, hot-blooded, soft-talking, happy, clumsy—if you could believe it, he laughed, clumsy—proud woman I’d have liked to have known.
They were good stories, his gift to me.
————
After visiting hours were over, I made my way to the hotel a block from the hospital and asked if they had a room, thinking if they had one, I’d stay the night, I was so tired, but if not, fine, I’d hop the train home. They had a room. It was small and dark with blackout curtains covering the view of the highway and beyond the highway, the interstate back to DC. On one of the double beds, I sat with my back to the headboard and wrote everything I could remember of what he’d told me. When room service came, I was still writing. For the first time in a long time, I took off my watch and laid it facedown and wrote well into the night and maybe morning, I don’t know.
I wrote about the day my father had left. Fairness dictated a report not through the eyes of a girl who was being deserted but through those of an impartial judge, the eyes of a god who flings his wealth and suffering widely but without bias, I could now see. I wrote about Gone with the Wind on the lap of the girl hiding in her mother’s chair and
about the sound of arguing in the parents’ bedroom upstairs, of duffel bags dropping and the engine roar as he drove away. I rewound the memory to the bags.
Thump, thump. Two bags—tell the truth—one for him and one for her, the girl had wished that day. Because the girl was afraid of sickness, too. Because it wasn’t until the girl was betrayed that she learned not to betray, she would have left had she been given the choice. Thank the father she hadn’t been given that choice.
I stared down through tears at the black marks trembling on the white page, breathing hard, scarcely able to believe I’d finally admitted it. There it was. The girl would’ve abandoned her mother. She would’ve left her for dead. And there, that girl was me.
————
The next morning I returned to the hospital. The nurse warned me my father was having a bad day. When I went into his room, he was asleep. The dividing curtain had been drawn back and the bed next to him was empty. The morning light poured through the window and made his skin appear more taut and gray than it had the day before. One of the snaps on the shoulder of his gown had come undone and his collarbone protruded. He wore his mask, his breathing labored even in sleep.
I touched his hand, avoiding the needle and the tape over the needle and the bruising all around the tape. He opened his eyes and lifted two fingers, which meant he wanted his mask off. I tugged the band carefully, resting the mask beneath his jaw. I told him I was leaving now. I had to get back to the District. I had a job there, and they wouldn’t tolerate my ditching work. He was whispering, so I huddled closer. He said he’d made a mistake when he was afraid and he’d never known how to fix it. It kept growing until it wasn’t fixable.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I get afraid, too. Right now, in fact.”
“I was young. I wanted to live. I tried to run but it got me anyway.”
“It?”
He picked at his blanket, restlessly, the onyx ring turning on his thumb.
“I should never have run,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
I put the mask back over his face and he breathed easier. I did, too. I told him I forgave him and the lost years were finally gone now and I’d remember only the great gift he’d given me, which I’d carry back to DC and wherever else I roamed.
He pulled the mask down himself.
“You’re a good girl, Ginny.” He smiled a weary, toothless smile. “I’ll tell your mama when I see her.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CABS IDLED BESIDE the main entrance to the hospital. On the far side of the driveway, a familiar gray pickup truck was parked. A tall man got out of the truck and came toward me, his jacket flapping open, the long, unhurried sauntering gait I knew so well. An apparition, too good to be true, but no, it really was Ben.
“Need a ride?” he said.
Christ, he looked good. He wore aviator sunglasses that changed him somehow, made him look older, the strong contours of his cheeks and nose and jaw more pronounced.
“How did you know where I was?” I said.
“Isaiah forwarded me your travel info. I wish—Well, it doesn’t matter what I wish, as long as somebody tells me what’s going on, I guess. Let’s go.”
His palm cupped my elbow and I leaned into him for a moment, the hardness of his arm against mine, and something in me relaxed. He led me to the truck and opened my door. When he settled into the driver’s seat, he shoved his keys into the ignition without turning the engine over. “Your dad will be all right?” he said.
“No.”
He swung his dark glasses on me. “Ah, Virginia, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not like I know him or anything.”
“I know it,” he said. “That’s why I’m sorry.”
We drove in silence for a bit. The interior of the truck was cramped, intimate. I turned the radio on low. News radio competed with engine hum. I pressed my face to the passenger window and burrowed deeper into the leather seat. Outside, the broken white road lines became solid with speed, and it seemed we were traveling through time and space, sailing south, making our way home. My eyes became heavy and I slept.
A loud, humming noise jarred me awake. I rubbed my eyes to the yellow light of the harbor tunnel outside of Baltimore. The earthiness of being awakened while submerged and the hum in the tunnel and the yellow lights casting Ben’s skin darker—all of it made the truck interior electric. I watched him while pretending not to. His long-fingered, knuckle-scarred hands gripped the wheel, and I imagined those hands on my body. When he glanced over, we were out of the tunnel.
“We should probably talk about the other night,” I said softly.
“Not today.”
“To clear the air, so we can work—”
“Leave it alone.” When he glanced up in the rearview mirror, I noticed the heat on his skin, his lips in a stubborn line. He appeared as hard and remote as the place from which he’d come and to where I’d figured he’d one day return, and I couldn’t understand how I’d known him all these years without really seeing him. Maybe I’d been looking too long through the lens of the camera that made him pretty, almost boyish; the camera that lied.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I get it.”
“You do?”
“Sure, I can be patient.”
He cut me a sideways look of disbelief. “You—patient?”
“Uh-huh, right now we’re both off-kilter. You, because you want to do what you’d typically do for a friend who needs you. But you’re not sure what we are—friends, coworkers, something else—and you dislike that kind of confusion. And I imagine, although I’m not entirely certain of this, you also feel bad because you idolize your father and can’t imagine a world without him, and you’re projecting that feeling onto me.”
His mouth dropped open.
“So it’s okay,” I said. “We’ll work it out later. See? Patient.”
————
By early Monday morning I was back to work. I hated Mondays. My desk was always buried under a weekend’s worth of paperwork, newspapers, press releases, and sticky-note messages of missed calls. This particular morning I felt about as tired as I’d ever been, my mood still low from the visit with my father, and the pile on my desk seemed insurmountable. I ignored everything except the Post, which I scanned for weekend developments on the Evelyn Carney investigation. The print guys had nothing.
Evelyn had been missing for over a week. During that time, I’d been making the same calls to her family, leaving messages for her parents in upstate New York, neither of whom had returned one damn call, and to her husband, Peter, from whom I expected no return call. Next, I called Paige Linden and left a message. Despite her busy schedule, she let me check in with her each day, even if she had nothing new to tell, nor I to tell her. But the relationship had been established, and I liked her.
As I hung up, my cell phone rang. “I’m hungry,” Michael Ledger said without identifying himself. “Come out for breakfast.”
“I don’t recognize this number.”
He laughed. “Meet me at our coffee shop?”
He was so arrogant I nearly laughed, too. “We don’t have a coffee shop.”
“Sure we do,” he said. “You remember.”
“Don’t play games. If there’s something new in the investigation that I can report, tell me now, so I can rush it on air.”
“The way sources are treated these days. Can’t even get a cup of coffee.” There was a loud, dramatic exhalation on his end of the line. “I’m sure I can get better treatment from your colleagues at the Post,” he mused. “They’ve got coffee, though it hasn’t gotten any better since you were there. Or maybe I’ll go to Channel 5. They’re always quick to feed a fellow.”
I sighed. “Give me a few minutes to get there.”
————
Michael was already at the register, pulling his money clip from his pocket, running his hand over the bills as one might caress a lover, before he slid the clip back into his pocket. He carried two mugs of coff
ee to the table and went back to retrieve a scone for me and two glazed donuts for himself.
“Have to keep up the stereotype,” he said, shoving a donut into his mouth.
Michael Ledger was no stereotype. He wore a bulky fisherman’s sweater that no fisherman could afford. It bulked up his slim frame nicely. He had color in his pale face, and his gray eyes flashed with humor. He looked good the way an actor looks good. I could appreciate it, but it no longer hurt me.
“I talked to Ian Chase the other night,” I said. “He was awfully skittish. You think he was in a relationship with Evelyn Carney?”
“Of course he was. We’re talking about me first.”
“You knew. Goddamn it, Michael. I specifically asked you.”
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I find myself all jammed up in this situation,” he said, elongating each syllable: sit-you-ay-tion. “I figured you could help me work the angles. You’re pretty clever. It involves this news exec I like.”
My back tensed. “Let me hear it.”
“Top-of-the-line newsperson, well known for her fair dealings and all that. She comes to me for sensitive information—sensitive being the understatement here—and trustful fellow that I am, I give her the goods, thinking I like her, she likes me, we’ll watch each other’s backs. A good deal in a case that could go bad in a hurry. And did I mention? This news exec and I, we’ve got history, so all the better. You still with me here? You look bored. I’m not putting you to sleep with my situation?”
“Too much caffeine pumping through my system.” I lifted my cup. “Get on with it.”
“So I trust this fair and honest newsperson and give her access to info as well as a copy of my victim’s journal—which, by the way, I see in that overgrown handbag of yours.”
I dropped the satchel to the floor and kicked it under my chair.
“Flaunting what you learned from that journal is pretty ballsy,” he told me, “given you have not watched out for me. I haven’t received one call. Imagine my surprise when I turned on my TV and that prick Ben Pearce was reporting romantic intrigue involving my case.”
“Ben was never a great fan of yours, either.”
The Cutaway Page 11
