Hide Your Eyes

by Alison Gaylin

  “What’s wrong?” said Patton.

  I pictured Krull, alone in that quiet room, ventilator pulsing in and out. It was so dependable, I figured it could keep her alive forever.

  “I think I’m going to stay here,” I said.

  Gretchen gave me some pillows and blankets, and I set up a bed for myself on one of the couches in the ICU waiting room. She told me I could even order a pizza, so long as I paid for it in the lobby. “Sort of like a slumber party,” she said. “Only . . . um . . . with just one person.”

  There were at least four uniforms patrolling the hallways around me. They’d been there all day, in shifts. I’d assumed they were there for Krull, but apparently I was also part of the deal.

  After Gretchen left, I sat on my makeshift bed for a few minutes, listening to the silence. There was a small TV across the room, but I didn’t feel like turning it on; I was too afraid of catching a news story about Krull, or Elmira, or the murdered children. Or me.

  I looked at the newspapers and magazines on the small coffee table. All the magazines were about parenting or fitness and at least six months old.

  Today’s Times, Post and Daily News were there too—probably left by one of the reporters—with follow-up Ariel stories on all three front pages. When they’d come out this morning, the girl in the footlocker hadn’t even been found. What would the headlines be tomorrow? The next day?

  I picked up the Post, went straight for Liz Smith.

  Liz’s featured photo was a headshot of a young blond woman, lit from behind like a haloed Mary in a Christmas pageant, but dripping with lip gloss and shimmering eye shadow. Her shoulders were bare, and she smiled suggestively at the camera, so she appeared to be wearing nothing more than a long string of pearls, which hung past her prominent collarbones and out of the frame.

  The picture was high drama, even for a headshot in a gossip column, and it took me several seconds to get past gawking and realize I actually knew its subject. Miranda, former supporting player in No Tears for Addie. Shell Clarion’s stalkee.

  Under the photo, the caption read, “Leading Lady for Let Live’s Lucas.”

  I read the column. Not only had Miranda Boothe been cast as Lucas’s long-lost love Carrington, but rumor had it she and Nate Gundersen were involved off camera as well. “At her audition, I couldn’t stop staring at her,” the “scrumptious” Nate told Liz. “She was wearing these outrageous mirrored contact lenses.”

  “Well, fuck me stupid,” I said to no one.

  The strange thing was, I felt nothing. No emotion at all, other than surprise at how quickly some soap operas were cast, and how quickly some actors became “involved.”

  Amazing what a few days could do to one’s outlook on life, if they included sex, murder . . .

  I dialed Yale’s cell. He sounded smooth and dreamy when he picked up; I knew he was still at Peter’s.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Sam!”

  “How’s Peter?”

  “Award worthy.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “More important, how are you? Are you still at Detective Krull’s? Has he caught the killer?”

  Where do I start? “How’d you like to have a slumber party at St. Vincent’s?” I said. It seemed as good a place as any.

  Half an hour later, Yale showed up in the ICU waiting room, wearing the same outfit he’d had on the previous night, carrying a large pepperoni pizza and saying, “Like I said before, screw nutrition.”

  I knew it had been only a day since we’d seen each other, but to me, he seemed like something out of a time capsule.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” he said. The question was so well meaning and simple it made me want to laugh—or cry, I wasn’t sure which. I put my arms around Yale’s neck and hugged him tight, like he had just saved my life.

  Then I sat him down on the couch, put the box of pizza on the coffee table and told him everything that had happened since he’d left the hospital the previous night.

  After I was finished, he watched me without speaking for at least a full minute. Finally, he said, “I thought you were here because of Sal.”

  “No, he’s fine. Hermyn took him home. Or should I say Amy?”

  “My . . . God.”

  I gave him a smile, put a hand on his shoulder. “You leave me alone for just a short time and look at what happens.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is,” I said. “You can get that morose look off your face, you can help me eat this pizza, you can tell me every single detail of your night with Peter and most important . . .” I took out the Post, opened it to Liz’s column. “You can read this, and get ridiculously, irrationally outraged about it.”

  Like any best friend worth the title, Yale did as he was told.

  Early in the morning, I woke up on the waiting room carpet with a rollicking cramp in my neck and Yale snoring into my ear.

  Gingerly, I got up and headed down the hall to ICU. The cramp was just an inch or so above my left collarbone—the exact same place where Krull had been shot—but I tried not to think of it as an omen.

  I picked up the wall phone outside the unit. A nurse answered, her voice flat and businesslike, more or less the opposite of Gretchen’s coconut oil lilt, and sure enough when I asked for Gretchen, the new nurse told me her shift had ended an hour ago.

  “What is John Krull’s condition?”

  “Critical.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “Of course, this is critical care, so everybody’s critical. After we finish transfusing him, we’re gonna attempt weaning again.”

  Krull was still not allowed visitors, but the nurse promised she’d let me know about any change in his condition.

  “By the way,” she said, “did you know he has a heart murmur?”

  “It . . . uh . . . never came up in conversation.”

  “Well, he does. It’s very slight.”

  I hung up the phone, thinking about all the other things that hadn’t come up in conversation. So many facts left to know about Krull—his birthdate and his favorite food, his political affiliation and his blood type and the strangest place he’d ever made love.

  Back in the waiting room, I found Yale awake, folding blankets and stacking them on the couch. “How’d you like me to take your class this morning?” he said. “I’ve got a few new show tunes I’d like to try out on the kids.”

  “Sure. I’ll okay it with Terry.” My mouth was dry. And between the lingering pain from the gunshot bruise and the brand-new pinch in my neck, my whole body felt pummelled. “John Krull has a heart murmur.”

  “Really? So does Peter.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. I think we were talking about the forms you have to fill out at the dentist’s, and it just . . . Hey, what’s the matter?”

  “Well, let’s see. The first guy I’ve been able to care about since Nate is hooked up to life support. My downstairs neighbor was slaughtered in my apartment with my knife. Oh yeah, and did I mention there’s a fucking serial killer out there who’s either going to murder more kids or me—or most likely both? And I can’t go to my apartment or my job or even a goddamn deli and I haven’t had a fucking shower in two days and . . .”

  “Ssssh. It’s okay.” Yale put his arms around me. He smelled like clean laundry.

  “My life sucks. And . . . and there’s probably not much more of it left.”

  “Please don’t say that.”

  The faint, blond stubble on his chin picked up the light as he spoke. It reminded me of the glitter my class had used to make valentines. “Can you please sing to me?”

  We sat down on the couch, and quietly, Yale started to sing “There’s a Place for Us,” from West Side Story, which, although he had no way of knowing, made me cry as a kid. I used to put the soundtrack on our record player, pretend it was my dad singing to me.

  Yale’s voice reminded me of dark, polished wood, but I
was too tired to tell him that. So I just sat and listened, feeling the soft vibration of it, until I fell asleep in his arms like a baby.

  The next time I awakened, it was around 11 a.m. Yale was long gone, teaching my class (having okayed it with Terry himself, according to the note he’d left.)

  Amanda Patton was sitting on the couch across from mine, reading the Halloween issue of Child magazine. “Good morning,” she said.

  She put the magazine down and handed me a bag with a café chain logo on it. “Brought you coffee and a doughnut, but the coffee’s probably cold by now.”

  It was lukewarm, but the doughnut was chocolate covered, and I loved her for that.

  “So,” she said. “We’re getting closer to Mr. Freak-show.”

  I stopped eating.

  “Remember when Art was talking about the paint on the magazine ad? He said it was called Liquitine, and I asked if it was used by artists?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well it is, but more commonly, it’s used by hobbyists.”

  “Hobbyists?”

  “I don’t know if Krull told you, but the first victim, Graham—”

  “Made intricate model airplanes.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you’re thinking he’s a model builder?”

  She nodded. “They usually find some activity that puts them closer to their victims. Lots of kids like to build models.”

  “But Sarah Flannigan was only three. I seriously doubt she—”

  I was interrupted by a ringing and noticed, for the first time, the wall phone across the room.

  I picked it up. “Um . . . Waiting room?”

  “Hi, honey.” The ICU nurse, her voice flat and unemotional as ever.

  “Yes?”

  “We have consciousness.”

  “Consciousness of what?”

  She laughed a little, and then I knew. Krull had consciousness. Krull was awake.

  Smiling so hard it hurt, I rushed across the room and threw my arms around Patton. “Thank God,” we both kept saying, over and over again. “Oh, thank God.”

  “I can sneak one of you guys in,” warned the nurse through the wall phone outside the ICU. “But it has to be brief as all get-out or his doctors will kill me.”

  Patton insisted it should be me: “You were the one who spent the night in the waiting room.”

  I walked her to the elevator. “Give your baby a big kiss for me,” I said.

  Patton winked. “Right back at ya.”

  “He’s not my baby. I’ve only known him four days,” I said. But the elevator doors had already closed.

  The nurse buzzed me into the ICU, and I started to panic. What if I’d built this relationship up in my mind to be much more than it was? What if he was just a nice guy, a sweetheart like Patton said, and he’d been protecting me because that was his job? What if he’d told me about his dead mother and his furniture-stealing ex-girlfriend and his AC/DC tribute band to get my mind off of Mirror Eyes? What if he’d fucked me for the same reason?

  Before I entered Krull’s room, I nodded at the two guards and took a deep, steadying breath. “You Sam?” said the one on the right, a young guy with a black buzz cut and a marine’s body.

  “Uh . . . Yeah.”

  “Want to hear something funny? My name’s Sam too.”

  Yep, that was hilarious all right.

  “That’s not the funny part. When detective Krull regained consciousness, the first thing he said was, ‘Sam.’ The nurse thought he was asking for me. You should’ve seen the look on his face when I showed up in his room!”

  “He said, ‘Sam’?”

  “You’d better get in there fast before he decides to go unconscious again.”

  I opened the door to find Krull propped up on fluffed pillows, the plastic tube removed from his mouth. Somebody had given him a shave, which made him look younger and a little vulnerable, especially in that thin, pale hospital gown. “Sam.” His voice was croaky from the tube.

  There was so much I wanted to say, to do. Run across the room and jump on top of him, for one thing, but I figured that would probably upset the IV. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “You’re glad I’m okay?”

  “The last I saw, you were . . . shooting my gun at that . . . God, you’re beautiful.”

  “That has to be the morphine talking.” I moved closer, took his hand in mine. It was warmer now, and so soft. “Your pupils are huge.”

  “Thank you.” He gave me a half smile.

  “I didn’t get him, by the way.”

  “It was a good try—” He grimaced. “Please don’t ever get shot in the neck, because it hurts.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be talking so much.”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “Pretty crappy.”

  “These drugs . . . My head feels like it’s full of cotton candy.”

  I could hear voices outside the room, the handle on the door turning. Do they want me out of here already?

  I wished there was something I could say to him, some meaningful words or a piece of good news to cut through the drugs and make him strong again. But there was no time for words, and I didn’t have any good news.

  So I kissed him on the mouth. It was like breaking the surface of deep water after a long time under. “That was from Amanda Patton,” I said.

  “Her husband’s going to kill me.”

  “Sorry, honey.” I looked up and saw the ICU nurse, heavyset and thin lipped, as serious as her voice.

  “That was fast.”

  “I’ll let you back in soon, when he’s a little stronger. In the meantime, you’ve got two visitors in the waiting room.”

  It wasn’t until I’d left his room that I began to wonder who those visitors might be.

  As I headed toward the waiting room, an image flashed into my mind: Mirror Eyes and his girlfriend, sitting side by side on the waiting room couch, next to the stacked-up blankets and pillows from the previous night, staring at the door.

  I almost bypassed the waiting room altogether and headed for the lobby to dial 911. In fact, I would have done it if two cops hadn’t been standing in front of the elevator, if the waiting room door hadn’t swung open, and if Yale hadn’t flown out of it and nearly knocked me over. “Fabulous news about Detective Krull. Now get in here immediately.”

  He grabbed my arm, pulled me into the room, which was empty save Veronica Bliss, who sat on the couch, looking at me like she expected to get socked in the face.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Ask your friend.”

  “Sam, have you ever dated anyone named Intargio?”

  “Intaglio,” Veronica said. “Evan Intaglio.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so,” said Yale.

  I looked at Veronica. Her cheeks burned the same pink as the embroidered strawberries on her navy Shetland sweater. “Are you sure?”

  “Who is Evan Intaglio?” I said.

  “Someone . . . who . . . was looking for you.”

  Yale nodded at me and narrowed his eyes and I began to understand. “You’ve been talking to—”

  “I thought you knew him. He said he was your ex-boyfriend, and you have so many ex-boyfriends—”

  “How did he—”

  “He called school on Monday and said, ‘Is Samantha Leiffer there?’ I guess he’d called that theater where you work, and they gave him our number.”

  “Probably Hermyn,” Yale said. “She’s not used to talking on the phone.”

  “It was early, and nobody was there but Anthony and me. So I took the call.”

  “Veronica, how could—”

  “Evan said he’d met you in Chicago.”

  “I’ve never been to Chicago!”

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  The hairs pricked up on the back of my neck. I gritted my teeth to stop the sensation.

  “
He sounded so . . . sweet . . . And he said he missed you.”

  I remembered the way Veronica had looked at me on Monday, with that glint of perplexing envy. How could anybody be jealous of a hangover, I’d thought. But it wasn’t the hangover. It was him. Evan Intaglio. Mirror Eyes. “All he wanted was your home phone number.”

  “You gave him my home phone number?”

  “And then we started talking, and we found out we had a lot in common.”

  Like what, Veronica? Wanting to see me dead?

  “We talked about God, and doing good works and, frankly, I couldn’t see what he saw in you. You didn’t seem to share any of his interests.”

  I stared at her. The fact that she could still find a way to make snide comments when she’d just admitted to putting a serial killer on my trail was so astronomically bitchy I almost admired her for it.

  “It gets worse,” Yale said, and my mind went straight to the magazine ad in my desk.

  “Did you let him into the school, Veronica?” I was trying to stay calm, but my voice cracked, like a teenaged boy’s. “On . . . Tuesday morning?”

  She picked at a cuticle. “I didn’t,” she said. “But Anthony may have.”

  “What do you mean, he may have?”

  Her voice was barely audible. “Evan . . . got in somehow.”

  “Tell her how you know that,” said Yale, making no effort to stay calm.

  “He . . .”

  “He left a dozen red roses on Veronica’s desk.”

  I stared at him, let the scene play through my mind. A man shows up at Sunny Side before school hours, well dressed, with a dozen roses. He’s wearing sunglasses. Anthony sees him at the gate. A nice-looking guy in sunglasses with roses for Veronica. Poor Veronica, who never gets roses. The man tells him his name. Evan Intaglio. Anthony’s last name is Ciriglio. Intaglio /Ciriglio. They could be cousins . . .

  “I never met him in person,” said Veronica.

  “No,” Yale said. “But you chatted online with him that night.”

  “Did you give him my e-mail address at the Space?”