To the Power of Three

by Laura Lippman

  Simone furrowed her brow. “Like Fitzcarraldo.”

  “Oh, stop being so fucking pretentious, Simone,” Colin said. “Fitzcarraldo is the opposite of watchable. It would have a score of, like, negative one. Which isn’t a knock—Schindler’s List and Raging Bull are low, too, on this scale. Great movies, but not watchable. You want to go with a classic that’s watchable, then—Citizen Kane.”

  “The Godfather,” Simone tried.

  “Yeah,” Peter mused, “but you always feel a little cheated if you miss the wedding scene. It’s like a movie unto itself.”

  “Scarface!” Colin yelled, exchanging a high five with Peter, and they proceeded to chant in unison, “ ‘Say hel-lo to my leetle friend!’”

  The three friends almost fell apart laughing over that. It was funnier still if you knew Peter was half Cuban. But then they were finding everything hilarious these days.

  Peter Lasko, Colin Boyd, and Simone Simpkins—recent graduates of NYU’s Tisch School, joined at the hip since sophomore year—were sharing what they kept billing as their last night together, starting with the two-for-one happy hour at their favorite downtown bar, a neighborhood joint where the workaday regulars grimly tolerated the high-spirited theater majors who kept discovering it year after year. This celebration was the last of many last nights over the past two weeks, a veritable Ramadan of leave-takings in which the three friends had toasted themselves and their futures over and over again, relived the triumphs of their college days, and pretended, ever so modestly, that they did not expect the world to continue to heap prizes at their feet. Simone was going to Yale—her parents were loaded, so she could afford it, but she still had to get in, and she had, which was no small thing. Colin had landed the part of Mark, the second lead, in a national touring company of Rent.

  And Peter…well, Peter still couldn’t quite believe what waited for him in a mere four weeks, the bit of last-minute luck that had transformed him from the underachiever of the three into the undisputed shooting star.

  “Did you know there’s another Peter Lasko in SAG?” he asked now, hoping it sounded casual, even a little put-upon. “My agent says I have to change my name.”

  “Peter Pringle,” Simone suggested.

  “Peter Piper Picked a Pickled Pepper,” Colin said, his diction theater-school perfect.

  “Peter Paul,” Simone said. “Tell everyone you invented the Mounds Bar.”

  “I was thinking”—Peter paused, not so much because he was shy about his real choice but because he wanted to make sure they understood he was no longer joking—“of Peter Lennox.”

  “Like the china?” Simone wrinkled her nose.

  “It was my father’s mother’s maiden name. I’d use my mom’s, but it would throw people off. I mean, you know, Sandoval. I wouldn’t get calls for anything but gangbangers and gardeners. So…Peter Lennox?”

  Colin and Simone nodded judiciously, although Colin had to add, “It will look great on the cover of Vanity Fair.”

  This was Colin’s way of saying that he knew Peter entertained such fantasies. Well, Colin probably did, too.

  The difference was that magazine covers weren’t quite so theoretical in Peter’s case, not anymore. He was going to play Guy Pearce’s younger brother in a period piece, a film that was being described as L.A. Confidential meets Memento, and not just because Pearce had appeared in both of those movies. “Oh, the other Australian,” Colin had said, and it was true that Pearce was not the star that Russell Crowe was. But Peter would take Pearce’s career any day—and Colin would, too.

  Ah, well, he could afford to be magnanimous. Rent may have seemed cutting edge a decade ago, but now it was about as daring as those shows you saw at places like Hershey Park. Ladies and gentle men, welcome the Lower East Side Singers! Perky, perky, perky, Pulitzer Prize or no. A boy-band singer had played the same part that was now Colin’s.

  Simone squeezed Peter’s knee under the table, her way of saying she was happy to sleep with him tonight, another last-last time. Simone’s favorite film, or so she always said, was Jules and Jim; Colin and Peter had been accommodating her Truffaut-inspired fantasy for two years now, a setup that all three had found practical, as it left their emotions relatively free. But since Peter had landed the role of the self-destructive Chick Webster in Susquehanna Falls—younger brother of Guy Pearce! totally Best Supporting Actor material!—Simone had seemed to be focusing exclusively on him, trying to get something more traditional going. Peter was having none of it, and not just because he didn’t want Colin to feel shitty. This was not the time to have a girlfriend. So when Simone squeezed, Peter didn’t squeeze back.

  “Have you told your folks yet?” she asked, removing her hand.

  “I’m going to surprise them, take the train home Sunday, crash there for a little while. The apartment is sublet as of next week anyway, and I can let my mom feed me.” He patted his nonexistent belly. “Although I have to be careful. They hired me for my lean and hungry look.”

  “And for your resemblance to Pearce,” Colin said. “That was what clinched it, right?”

  “Yep,” Peter said. “Luckiest accident of genetics ever, my Jewish dad and my Cuban mom.”

  Not to mention the growth spurt that had come so late that he had almost despaired of ever cresting six feet, only to zoom up six inches his first year at NYU, when girls like Simone were going with seniors or sneaking around with professors. Peter had come into NYU cute—cuddly cute, with a big personality to compensate for his lack of literal stature. But now he was six foot one and super lean, with his father’s dark hair and pale skin, his mother’s green eyes and sharp cheekbones. Yet he still had a short boy’s personality, charming and eager to please. It was, Peter had discovered, a good combination.

  Their glasses, the second beers in their first twofer happy-hour round, were almost empty, and they had to decide whether to stay for another round or go someplace else. Colin and Simone were restless, in need of novelty. But Peter was content with the familiar, and they were deferring to Peter more and more these days. He signaled the waitress for refills.

  “Another school shooting,” Simone said, glancing at the television over the bar, which was always tuned to CNN or the Yankees network.

  “There was almost a shooting at my junior high,” Colin said. “But the kid showed the gun to someone who ratted him out before he had a chance to do anything. Too bad—we could have used a little drama.”

  “Where’s this one?” Peter asked.

  Simone squinted, which was funny because she was wearing glasses. But they were plastic, just for show, picked up from one of the sidewalk vendors in SoHo.

  “Glendale…”

  “Glendale, Maryland?” Peter looked up. “That’s where I’m from.”

  “I thought you grew up in Baltimore,” Simone said.

  “Glendale is just outside the city limits.” At that exact moment, a chroma-key map popped up on the screen, showing Glendale in relationship to Baltimore. More exacting eyes might have noticed it was far from just outside, but neither Simone nor Colin was petty enough to call him on that discrepancy, not when Peter was watching a video of students standing around his former high school. The school was the only thing he recognized, of course. He had graduated four years ago, so the students were unknown to him, although he thought he saw his old drama teacher, Ted Gifford, hovering on the edges.

  The text superimposed on the screen said ONE DEAD, TWO INJURED.

  “That’s not so bad,” Colin said. “Relatively. Barely national news.”

  “I wonder why they don’t give the names,” Peter said, more to himself than his friends. “Everyone I know has graduated, but a lot of my friends have brothers and sisters there.”

  “The names aren’t going to mean anything to most people,” Colin said. “Besides, they’re probably minors, or their families might not have been notified yet. Don’t be a drama king, dude. We leave that kind of narcissism to Simone.”

  “Hey.”
She mock-punched Colin with her tiny beringed fist.

  “Right,” Peter said. “Yeah.”

  And just as he was availing himself of that very reasonable assurance, the video jumped to a shot of Dale Hartigan, rushing from what looked like Deerfield Middle, his arm around a woman whose only visible feature was the part in her blond hair. That would be Mrs. Hartigan, whom Peter knew better, the Hartigans having already separated when Peter and Kat were dating. Peter had often wondered that summer how things might have gone otherwise if Mr. Hartigan were still in the house. Peter probably never would have gotten started with Kat if Mr. Hartigan had anything to say about it.

  But it was hard for Mr. Hartigan to put his foot down about a fifteen-year-old girl dating a nineteen-year-old boy when he was shacking up with a woman sixteen years younger than himself. “You don’t exactly have any moral authority on this subject, Dale,” Peter had overheard Mrs. Hartigan say on the phone one night, when he was waiting for Kat to get ready. Yeah, Mr. Hartigan had been out to get rid of him from the start.

  Of course, Kat’s parents could be on the video just because they were prominent local residents. Mr. Hartigan’s dad practically invented Glendale, as Peter understood it. Or Kat might be among the injured. Don’t be a drama king, Lasko, which was how he always addressed himself in his head. He wondered if that would change over the years, as he grew into the skin of this new person called Peter Lennox. Don’t be a drama king, Lennox. No, it didn’t have the same ring.

  He could call home, ask his folks, but that would take some of the steam out of his surprise visit Sunday. Besides, he had no regular minutes. All he had left were night and weekend minutes, and it wasn’t either yet, not according to his wireless contract.

  Peter glanced around the bar. There was a guy at a booth, working on a laptop, maybe grabbing a little of the wireless bleed from the Starbucks next door. Asking someone in a public place to use his Internet connection was an almost unthinkable gaucherie; you might as well ask to slip your hands down some guy’s pants and cup his ass cheeks in order to warm yourself. For Peter—who had sung in this bar, and danced, and made himself ridiculous and obnoxious in probably ten thousand ways—going up to a stranger and asking if he could use his laptop was the most self-conscious thing he could imagine.

  “It’s a matter of life or death,” Peter said as the man waffled. “Honestly.”

  And perhaps because the request was so outside the realm of accepted behavior, the guy slid his laptop toward Peter, saying only, “I’ve got Google open.”

  Peter’s first Google search was unwieldy, returning dozens of versions of the same stories, with no more detail than what he had glimpsed on CNN. Then he finally thought to go to the home page of the local newspaper, the Beacon-Light. Yes, there it was—a story that claimed to have been updated within the past hour, along with the promises of streaming video from the paper’s “television partner, WMDS, channel 7.” Peter clicked on the link. The guy’s computer was slow to load, and it blinked ominously at one point, as if it were going to lose the connection. But the story surfaced at last.

  “Baltimore County police have released the names of the victims in today’s shooting at Glendale High School but are withholding the identity of the girl who is expected to be charged, although she is 18 and will be treated as an adult.

  “The victims are Katarina Hartigan, 18, who was killed by a single gunshot to the chest, and Josie Patel, also 18, who is being treated at Greater Baltimore Medical Center for a gunshot wound to her foot.”

  Peter quickly closed the page, as if it were something he would have been embarrassed to be caught reading, like really sleazy porn.

  “You okay, man?” asked the stranger.

  “Sure,” he said automatically, wanting to retreat into the world of normal manners and customs. But when Colin repeated the same question moments later, he couldn’t sustain the lie.

  “No. I’m a long way from okay.”

  “Hey, that’s from Pulp Fiction,” Colin said. Then: “I’m sorry. Fuck.”

  “Did you actually know…” Simone’s voice trailed off.

  “Oh, yeah.” He was tempted to add in the biblical sense, as if making a joke could help him regain his balance. The only thing was, it wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t say such a thing about Kat even if it were. There was a reason that Peter Lasko hadn’t been cast to play the tough guy but the sensitive younger brother to the tough guy, the one who was going to die in the leading actor’s arms, coughing up fake blood.

  And if there were a part of his mind that whispered to him to remember this feeling, to use it later as he had been trained in his acting classes, it was only a faint voice at the back of his head, one he immediately silenced before getting blind-heaving-hurling-blackout drunk.

  6

  When Josie woke at 2:00 A.M., she had no confusion about where she was, not even for a second. Hospital, her brain supplied instantly, GBMC. Greater Baltimore Medical Center was the same hospital where she had been born, in the middle of a blizzard. At the school today, the paramedics had wanted to take her to Sinai, but Josie had wailed and screamed, determined to come here, and they had obeyed her, much to her surprise. GBMC was safe, familiar. GBMC was a place of happy endings.

  Josie’s birth was a famous story in the Patel family, one that Josie had asked her parents to tell over and over again when she was small. Then, about the time she turned thirteen, she decided it was all too embarrassing, that the problem with a story about one’s birth is that it kept pointing back to the fact that one’s parents actually had sex, which was simply too gross to contemplate. Besides, she had decided that it wasn’t really about her after all. She may have been the title character, but it was her parents’ adventure. Josie was little more than a series of contractions causing her mother to squeal, which made her father push harder on the accelerator, so the car skidded off the road. “You were so determined to be born,” her father would say, “that you almost killed us all.”

  This was when her parents still lived in the city, in South Baltimore. GBMC was ten miles up Charles Street from the rowhouse the Patels were restoring in a then iffy neighborhood. There were closer hospitals, but her mother’s ob/gyn preferred to deliver at the suburban hospital, which no one expected to be a problem. And even with the snow, her father was making good time until he came to that final curve.

  It was then that the car—an ordinary Honda Civic, her father always pointed out, not an SUV or a minivan, for her parents were still young and giddy then, just beginning to be parents—had fish-tailed and swerved off the road, hitting the gatehouse at Sheppard Pratt, the psychiatric hospital next to GBMC. This was when the road to Sheppard Pratt led through a stone gatehouse, which everyone just assumed was a charming relic. Josie’s parents had never known that someone actually lived in this quaint structure, famous as it was, but on the night their car plunged off the side of Charles Street and into the side of the gatehouse, a caretaker had emerged, a parka thrown over his pajamas. He was angry at first, sputtering about what fools they were to take the curve so fast. But when he saw Josie’s mother in her down jacket, which wouldn’t zip over her belly, he stopped yelling and put her in his pickup truck, leaving Josie’s father behind to wait for a ride in the tow truck.

  (Her father always said here, “And for all that, your mother was another eleven hours in labor, so what was the rush? She could have walked to the hospital, and I could have gotten the ride in the pickup truck. I was the one who had hit my head on the steering wheel and cut my forehead. I was the one who had a cracked rib, although we didn’t know it at the time.” Of course, he could say these things, because everyone in the Patel family knew that Vikram Patel could have been dying in a ditch and he would have insisted that the gatehouse keeper take care of his wife first.)

  Many years later the road to Sheppard Pratt was redone, at great expense, so instead of going through the gatehouse, the road now swept to the side. It was an article of faith in the Patel family tha
t Josie’s birth had led, at least indirectly, to that bit of reconstruction. My road, Josie always thought when she passed it. Eight years later, then ten years later, her younger brothers had been born at GBMC, but far less dramatically.

  Meanwhile Josie had been in GBMC several times since then—she was something of a regular in the ER because of her physical fearlessness—but this was her first overnight stay. Her parents had explained that the doctor wanted to keep her here for observation, but Josie hadn’t felt observed so much as guarded. She had been given a sedative, but she vaguely remembered someone coming to the door and being turned away, on the grounds that she just couldn’t speak right now. Part of her had wanted to call out, groggy as she was, and part of her had been glad to fall back into the dreamless sleep afforded by the pill.

  Now here she was, at 2:00 A.M., wide awake. What were the rules? Was she allowed to ring for water? Turn on the television, or even the light, or was there someone on the other side of the curtain? Would they bring her a bedpan if she had to pee? Oh, God, she would rather hold it all night than pee in some basin, a nurse standing by. She had been allowed to limp to the bathroom throughout the afternoon, a nurse or parent supporting her. How bad was her foot anyway? It felt funny—throbbing and fiery, with a pins-and-needles sensation.

  And then she realized her father was sitting in a chair in the corner, his chin resting on his chest, his bald spot staring at her. A few strands of hair, so much darker and glossier than her own, clung to his skin, but most of it had fallen back to the side from which it had been coaxed so painstakingly. Her father’s comb-over was a source of great embarrassment to Josie, but her mother had forbidden her to tease him about it. “You can say all the hateful things you want about my appearance,” her mother had said, “but don’t you dare pick on your father. He works so hard.”

  He works so hard. Her mother was always saying that, as if it should have some special significance to Josie. He works so hard. Translation: You and your brothers need too much. You can’t imagine how hard it is to commute. Translation: We moved out here just for you. The strange thing was, Josie’s mom worked hard, too, with virtually the same commute, but she sought no sympathy for herself. Josie was left with the sense that her mother was happy to make the sacrifices that children required, but her father had surrendered something infinitely more precious.