Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  A doctor in surgical scrubs walked into the waiting room. “Mrs. Ferguson?” he asked Kelly. He had very tired eyes.

  “That’s me. How is he?”

  “He’ll make it,” the doctor answered, and a great stone of fear tumbled off Kelly’s chest. The doctor went on, “He lost a lot of blood, but we’ve got that stabilized. I’m afraid he will lose some function in his left arm. I don’t know how much yet. Part of it will depend on how he heals. He may need some additional procedures after he recovers from the initial trauma here.”

  More operations. Kelly translated that from doctorspeak into English. More pain. More recovery. She didn’t know what she could do about that, except be there for Colin and take care of him when they happened. For now . . . “Can I see him?”

  The doctor frowned. “He’s still pretty dopey. He’s in the recovery room.” Then he took another look at her face. “Well, for a little while. Come on with me.”

  They gave her scrubs, too, and a mask. Colin lay on his back on an electronic bed. He was alarmingly pale—almost gray. He had an oxygen cannula under his nose and an IV running into the back of his right hand. His left shoulder was a mound of bandages.

  Hesitantly, Kelly went up to him. Even more hesitantly, she said, “Colin? Honey?” When he didn’t respond, she said his name again, louder this time.

  If he’d stayed out, she would have drawn back and waited. But his eyelids fluttered. As if it took a lot of work—and odds were it did—his eyes opened. For a second, she didn’t think anybody was home even so. His lips moved. Not much in the way of noise came out, but she lip-read “Hey, babe.”

  “How are you?” she asked: your basic foolish question.

  He considered. This time, she could hear him when he answered, “I was born to hang.” She yipped startled laughter. Behind her, the doctor snorted. Colin ignored them both. He forced out a question: “Did we catch the guy?”

  “They told me he was dead,” Kelly answered.

  “Okay.” Colin managed a small nod. Then he said, “I don’t feel so real good.”

  “I bet you don’t. But you’ll get better,” Kelly said.

  “That’s about enough.” The doctor touched her arm. “We’ll give him some rest now, and you can see him again when he’s a little more with it.”

  “Thanks for letting me in.” When the doctor guided her out of the recovery room, she shed the scrubs and the mask. Gabe and Chief Williams still stood in the waiting room. She gave her report: “He was sort of awake. He talked and made sense. He asked about the robber, and I told him the guy was dead.”

  “That all sounds good,” Malik Williams said. “He was still doped to the eyebrows, I bet.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Kelly nodded.

  “All right. Do you want that car to take you home?” the chief asked. “I know you’ve got your little girl at the neighbors’.”

  “Yes, please,” Kelly said. “If the power’s back on outside, I have to call his son and his daughter—his ex, too, I guess. If I can’t call, I’ll drive over to Marshall’s and get him to watch Deborah for a bit while I came back here.”

  “That sounds like it ought to work.” Chief Williams spoke with the air of a man who was used to putting plans together on the fly.

  “I’m glad he’s gonna pull through.” Gabe Sanchez hugged Kelly again. “I’m gladder’n I know how to tell you—he owes me fifty bucks.” She poked him in the ribs. They both laughed, more in relief than at the quality of the joke.

  Before Kelly could get back to the police car, she had to run the media gauntlet. The local TV outlets had got word of the shootout. News crews thrust mikes in her face and asked her how Colin was doing, what she was feeling, and about the gun battle (of which she knew as little as they did, maybe less). “I don’t have anything to tell you. Please excuse me,” she said, and she kept saying it till she pushed her way to the car, got inside, and slammed the door. Then—and only then—she added, “Stupid assholes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the cop behind the wheel. “Take you home now? How’s Captain Ferguson doing?”

  “He’s out of surgery. They think he’ll be okay,” Kelly answered. “And yes, take me home, please.”

  “You got it, ma’am. That’s good news.”

  She retrieved Deborah from Wes and Ida Jones, who made horrified noises when she told them Colin had been shot. Ida said she would pray for him. Kelly didn’t know a lot of people who took their religion seriously. She knew even fewer who took it seriously and were still nice. Ida qualified on both counts.

  “Daddy got hurt?” Deborah asked.

  “Daddy . . . got hurt,” Kelly agreed. “But he’s going to get better. He’ll be in the hospital for a while, and then he’ll finish getting better at home. He’ll be home all the time till he’s well enough to go back to work.”

  They went across the street. The power was still out. Kelly was as sure as made no difference that her ancient Honda wouldn’t start. Keeping two cars alive these days felt like insane ostentation. She had to look up Marshall’s new address before she stuck Deborah in the Taurus’ car seat and drove over there.

  When she knocked on the door, Marshall looked amazed. “What are you doing here? You and the artichoke?”

  “I’m not an artichoke!” Deborah said, laughing—it was a game they played.

  “Your dad got shot,” Kelly said baldly.

  “Oh, shit.” He sounded less surprised at that than he did at finding Kelly and Deborah on his doorstep. A cop’s kid knew it was possible even if it wasn’t likely. “What happened?”

  She told him what she knew, finishing, “Will you come back with me and babysit while I go to the hospital again? That’d help a lot.”

  “Sure. Lemme write a note for Janine—she’s over at her folks’. And I’ll throw my bike in the car so you don’t have to drive me back here. Do Vanessa and my mom know?”

  “Not unless they’re listening to a radio with batteries. Power’s been out all day. I’ll call ’em as soon as I can.”

  “Gotcha. Yeah, the power’s down, all right—I’ve been pounding on the tripewriter all day. Be right back.”

  Kelly took him and Deborah to the house where he’d grown up. Then she drove to San Atanasio Memorial again. She was almost there when she realized her license had been expired for a couple of years—one more thing she hadn’t worried about. Back in the day, the DMV had renewed it pretty much automatically as long as your record stayed good. It stopped bothering after the eruption. She wasn’t likely to hit another car. She did have to be careful not to take out anyone on two or three wheels.

  She had to get through the TV crews on her way in this time. She said “Please excuse me” over and over, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but Get the fuck out of my way.

  They’d moved Colin to a regular room by then. He looked pinker than he had when he first came out of surgery. He looked more alert, too. “Some hero you married, huh?” he said.

  “I married the guy I love,” Kelly said. “How do you feel?”

  “Like an angry alligator found me at the snack bar,” he answered. “But you told me the other guy is talking with his mortician, didn’t you?”

  “Uh-huh. I wasn’t sure you remembered.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Now Colin could nod better. “What did they say about the arm?”

  “That you may have some damage.” Since he was able to remember, Kelly wouldn’t lie to him. “They don’t know how much yet. That’ll depend on how it heals.”

  He nodded again. “All right. But I’m still here, and I guess I’m gonna stick around and annoy you a while longer.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “You’d better, Buster. Or else!”

  • • •

  When Vanessa’s phone rang after dinner, the number the screen showed wasn’t one she recognized. She said “Hello?” anyway. She was so glad to have bars again, she might even have talked to a political pollster. He wouldn’t have liked what she had to say, but she would have
talked.

  But it wasn’t a pollster. “Vanessa? This is Kelly. Have you seen the news or anything tonight?”

  “No. Why?” Next to talking with her stepmother, a pollster’s bull seemed downright cheery conversation.

  Then Kelly said, “Okay—you don’t know. Your father got shot this afternoon.”

  “Oh, Jesus! What happened? How bad is it?”

  “An armed robber with an AK was holed up in a house and started shooting. Colin got hit in the shoulder. He’s at San Atanasio Memorial—he had surgery. He’ll make it. That’s the main thing. They don’t know how good his left arm will be afterwards, but he will make it.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” Vanessa said. “What happened to the robber?”

  “Deceased.” Kelly packed a lot of sour satisfaction into the word.

  Vanessa understood that down to the ground. “Good!” she exclaimed.

  “I said the same thing when they told me,” Kelly said. “I guess I’m not as civilized as I’d like to be.”

  “Screw civilized,” Vanessa answered. “Civilized people don’t shoot cops with assault rifles.” For once in their touchy relationship, they were on the same page.

  “I would’ve called you sooner, but I’ve been waiting to get a working line,” Kelly said.

  “Yeah, it’s been down all over,” Vanessa said. “I had to go in today to edit some stuff. Double time on Saturday—yeah! But people at work were playing with manual typewriters. An old engineer brought out a slide rule, if you can believe it.”

  “I’ve used one a few times when the power just wouldn’t come back on,” Kelly said. “Feels medieval, but it works.”

  “If you say so.” Vanessa wasn’t on the same page as Kelly any more.

  Her stepmom must have realized as much. “Listen, I’ll let you go,” she said. “I guess I need to call your mother next.”

  “Have you ever talked to her before?” Vanessa asked, honestly curious.

  “No, but it needs doing, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, probably.” Vanessa might not have been sorry to hear some of her exes had stopped a bullet. If Bronislav stopped one, she’d give three cheers. But her mom didn’t despise her dad the way she despised men she no longer loved. Maybe raising kids together had something to do with it. Or maybe her mom was just more sentimental than she was.

  “Then I’d better do it,” Kelly said.

  Realizing she was about to hang up, Vanessa quickly asked, “Can Dad have visitors? I should get over there.”

  “They let me in to see him. You’re family. They should let you in, too.” Kelly paused. “I guess I’d better tell them to let your mother in, too, if she wants to come. They’re liable to raise a stink unless I say it’s okay.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Vanessa said. “Maybe I’ll see you at the hospital.”

  “Yeah. ’Bye.” This time, Kelly did hang up.

  “Fuck!” Vanessa said as she set down her phone. You hoped you never got a call like that. Getting it from someone you disliked made it worse, but the Holy Ghost couldn’t have given her that kind of news without rocking her. She went into the kitchen and pulled the bottle of slivovitz off a high cupboard shelf. It tasted like plum-flavored napalm and burned as if it were on the way down. Worse, it was left over from her time with the Serbian freedom fighter, chef, and thief.

  At the moment, she didn’t care. She filled a shotglass full and chugged it. It was just as venomous as she remembered. Bronislav could drink it like that without even coughing, but he must have had his gullet copper-plated or something. Vanessa coughed plenty after it went down. She didn’t do this often enough to get used to it, assuming a human body could get used to it.

  In a little while, though, the plum brandy put up an invisible shield between her and the bad news. Just as well she didn’t do this very often; she might get to like it too much if she did. Her father had done a lot of drinking after her mother walked out of their marriage. He did seem to have eased off since. Maybe Kelly was good for something, hard to believe as that might be.

  You were never further from real misery than one bad break or a few inches. If the dumb shithead with the AK had missed, Dad would have a story to tell for the rest of his life. A few inches the other way and he’d be dead. He got the story this way, but he earned it with his pain.

  Vanessa filled the shotglass again. The slivovitz scorched less going down this time. Her nerve endings still had to be stunned, or something. And it definitely did numb her up. That suited her just fine. The less she had to think about the gruesome orgy they always made of the funeral for a cop killed in the line of duty, the happier she was.

  • • •

  “If you’d told me sooner you wanted to go over there,” Jared Watt said to Louise on Monday afternoon, “I would have brought the car and driven you. It wouldn’t have bothered me. I know you were married to him for a long time.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll take the bus,” Louise said. Driving her to see her ex in the hospital might not have bothered Jared, but it would have bothered her. Life was crazy enough even when you didn’t try to fit together pieces that weren’t supposed to mix.

  Instead of crossing Van Slyke to wait for the bus, she stayed on Reynoso Drive. The bus that stopped at this bench took her east, not south. She went past Hesperus, past the Carrows and the post office and the B of A, past Sword Beach. This part of town felt achingly familiar. She’d come to these places all the time while she lived with Colin. She’d shopped at the Vons past Sword Beach as long as she could afford to drive. Now she went to a smaller market much closer to the condo.

  She hadn’t been to San Atanasio Memorial since James Henry was born not long after the eruption. It only seemed a million years ago and in another country, one where almost everything still worked all the time. Inside the hospital, things still did. But you paid a stiff price for that, not only in money but also in health and pain.

  She cross the street. An electric eye opened the sliding glass door for her. A young Hispanic woman at the reception desk raised a polite eyebrow when she came up. “I’m Louise Ferguson,” she said. “Which room is Colin Ferguson in, please?”

  “He’s in 476,” the receptionist answered. “Please use the stairs. We save the elevators for emergencies.” She pointed. Maybe they were trying to save power. Or maybe not quite everything was sure to work all the time, even here.

  Louise dutifully went up the stairs. My exercise for the day, she thought. She found her way to room 476. There was Colin, looking like somebody in a hospital bed. And there, in a chair by the bed, sat a rather wide-shouldered woman whose short, dark-blond hair had some gray streaks in it. That had to be Kelly. Absurdly, Louise was miffed. Her picture of her visit to her ex hadn’t included his current wife.

  Kelly’s picture might not have included Louise, either. But no—she wouldn’t have said to come if it hadn’t. Louise stepped into the room. She introduced herself to Kelly, who wouldn’t have been in much doubt about who she was. They cautiously shook hands: life’s little, or not so little, awkwardnesses. Then Louise turned to Colin. “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m drugged,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I’m still pretty sore. I’m due for another shot before too long.”

  “All those years without ever needing a gun . . .” Louise said.

  “Yeah.” He let out the dry chuckle she remembered so well. “Watch that first step. It’s a doozy, I tell you.”

  “I guess!” Louise said. “You weren’t the one who got him, then?”

  “Oh, heck, no. I was out of it by then. I fired three rounds that didn’t do any good, and then he nailed me.”

  “How long will they keep you here?”

  “If everything goes okay, a few more days. They want to make sure I don’t have an infection in there. Then I have to heal up and see how the arm is. I can wiggle my fingers some. They say that’s good.”

  “Has, uh, Deborah seen you since you got hur
t?” Louise asked.

  “I brought her for a few minutes this morning,” Kelly said. “She said this was a weird place and it smelled funny. But she was glad to see her daddy even so.”

  “That’s good.” Louise nodded. “And this is a weird place, and it does smell funny.”

  “Thanks for coming,” Colin told her. “Nice to know I’m still irresistible.”

  “Oh, right. At least,” Kelly said before Louise could decide whether to laugh or get mad. Only the pitch of her voice differed from Colin’s; the inflection was his to a T. If that meant anything, odds were it meant they’d made a good match. While Louise had put up with what Colin called his sense of humor, she hadn’t tried to imitate it much.

  A nurse came in and shooed Louise and Kelly out into the hall. Sweeping the curtain around the bed closed, she said, “One minute, ladies. I have to give him an injection.”

  “I hope that’s his pain shot. I think it is,” Kelly said. “He’s hurting more than he lets on.”

  “That sounds like him,” Louise replied.

  The current and former Mrs. Ferguson eyed each other, looking for something to say. Kelly spoke first: “I do appreciate that you came. And so does Colin. You still mean something to him—I know that.”

  “He means something to me, too,” Louise said. “We were together a long time. And it wasn’t a horrible divorce. I tried not to make it one, anyhow. I just . . . had to go in a different direction, that’s all.”

  “I’ve got the car here,” Kelly said. “For this, I’ve been using it. When you go, do you want me to drive you to your place?”

  “Thanks, but that’s okay,” Louise answered. Kelly didn’t try to insist. Now Louise had met her, but making friends or even owing her anything pushed it further than she wanted to go. She’d made her choices before the supervolcano erupted, and she’d stick with them.