The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  We are, for a moment, alone together, for my family has no real emotional tools to support those in need, at least if those in need are relatives. Then I open my eyes and glance up at my sister. She is looking down at her lap, where her fingers are picking nervously at each other.

  There is something else on her mind.

  “What is it, kiddo?” I whisper, because whispers are the only tune my voice will sing just now.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good time . . .”

  “Mariah, what is it?” My swiftly rising fear puts some energy into my voice. “You can’t just come in here and not tell me. What?”

  “Addison is gone.”

  “Gone?” Panic. Memories of gunshots. And a spike, no doubt, in the blue machine that monitors my heart. I would probably sit up were I not half dead and strapped down besides. “What do you mean, gone? You don’t mean . . . he isn’t . . .”

  “No, Tal, no. Nothing like that. They say he fled the country. He’s down in Latin America somewhere. They were going to arrest him, Tal.”

  “Arrest him? Arrest him for what?” But I am exhausted again, my voice is faint and dry, and I have to repeat this several times, with Mariah leaning close, before she knows what I am asking.

  “Fraud. Taxes. I’m not actually sure. A whole lot of money was involved. I don’t know the details. But Uncle Mal says that, whatever it was, they only found out about it from doing the background check.”

  “Background check?”

  “You know, Tal. On Kimberly.”

  Biting the name off, suggesting through her tone that, had my wife not pressed so hard in her quest for a judicial appointment, Addison’s financial shenanigans, whatever they are, would never have been found out. It is my wife’s fault that Addison was ruined, just as it was Greg Haramoto’s fault that the Judge was ruined. Neither man was brought down by his own demons. In today’s America, and certainly in the Garland family, nothing is the fault of the person who does it. Everything is the fault of the person who blows the whistle.

  “Oh, Addison,” I whisper. At least I know now why he was looking at property in Argentina. And what was scaring him.

  “Just Alma says he has a girlfriend down there. Only, the way Alma says it, I think maybe she’s his wife.”

  Perhaps it is the medication, but I have to chuckle at that one. Poor Beth Olin! Poor Sally! Poor whoever-it-was-last-week! Then I realize it may be years before I see my brother again, and my face sags. Oh, what wreckage the Judge left behind him.

  “Are you okay, Tal? Want me to call the nurse?”

  I shake my head, but I do let her give me some water. Then: “Has anybody heard . . . from him? From Addison?”

  “No,” says Mariah, but the manner in which she cuts her eyes away from me conveys the opposite message.

  Then, suddenly cheery, she changes the subject: “Oh, hey, guess what? We got the most incredible offer on the house.”

  “The house?”

  “On Shepard Street.”

  I am fading fast, which might explain my confusion. “I . . . I didn’t know it was, um, on the market.”

  “Oh, it isn’t, but you know how these brokers are. They hear somebody died, and they’re lining up buyers before the will has even been read.” Mariah misunderstands the concern she reads in my face. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I turned it down. I still have lots and lots of papers to go through.”

  I signal her to lean close. “Who . . . who made the offer?” I manage.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Brokers never tell. You know how it is.”

  Although too weak to say so, I view this development more ominously than Mariah does. “Have to find out who,” I whisper, too softly for my sister to understand.

  Mariah begins to talk about Sally, who is now in rehab at the fancy place in Delaware, but I cannot connect the dots. My mind wants some rest. The nurse comes in unapologetically to add some pain medication to the IV line. After that, things are hazy for a while.

  The next time I awaken, Mariah is gone, but Dear Dana Worth is there, my first sight of her since—when was the cemetery? Three nights ago? Four? Hospitals, like prisons, erase the body’s natural sense of time’s steady passage. She is wearing a dress, which she rarely does, and looks rather cross. Perhaps it is Sunday, and she has stopped in on her way from that conservative church she so adores. She is wearing a white cardigan over her dress, and white shoes: she looks terribly small-town Southern. Her right arm is in a sling: a bone, she explains, was chipped by the ricochet of a bullet. “How many law schools have two faculty members who were shot on the same night?” she teases.

  I struggle to smile back.

  “I never caught up with him,” Dear Dana says, her tiny fists clenched. I realize that it is herself at whom she is angry. “I’m sorry, Misha.”

  “It’s okay,” I mutter, but my voice is even weaker than before, and I wonder whether Dana even hears me.

  “Then I came back to see how you were doing, and there was all this blood—”

  I wave this away. I do not want to hear about her heroic rush down through the very drainage pipe I was looking for, or how she commandeered a telephone at a convenience store—maybe the same one!—and waited for the paramedics and the police and Samuel, to open the gate, and led them back into the cemetery, quieting their doubts and questions as the parade twisted and turned along the dark paths, or how they worked frantically to save me, carrying me out of the Burial Ground more dead than alive. I do not want to hear it in part because I have heard pieces of it already—from Mariah, from Dr. Serra—and in part because I cannot bear to think of Dana’s heroism, when it has become important to deceive her.

  And Dana, with her swift empathy, understands my reluctance at once, and so veers off on another path.

  “Everybody at the law school is rooting for you,” she insists, squeezing my fingers in the way that people do when they want you to know they are sincerely sad. Maybe the word is out that Professor Garland is not going to make it. “The students all want to know what they can do. Give blood, whatever. And the Dean wants to visit.”

  Just what I need. I shake my head wearily. “What about . . . about the deadline?” I manage.

  “Are you kidding? They won’t dare fire you now. We’re famous, Misha, we’ve been in all the papers.” She smiles, but it is forced. I gesture at her arm, whisper that I’m sorry.

  “It’s okay.” She pats my hand. “My life is never this exciting.”

  “You shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t have . . .”

  “Forget it, Misha.”

  “I . . . did they . . . did they . . .”

  I can manage no more, but Dana gets the message. She glances toward the door before hazarding an answer. “Yes, Msha, it worked. As far as I know, they bought the story. And it’s a good thing.” She wags a tiny finger at me. “You owe me big-time, mister, and when you’re out of here . . .” She trails off. She smiles. The truth is, Dear Dana is complete. She has nearly everything she wants. There is nothing she can think to demand of me, even in jest. Whatever she lacks, she goes to her little Methodist church to find, and providing it is God’s problem, not mine. Dana sighs and shrugs. “Anyway, Misha, it worked.”

  I mouth the words Thank you, and I try to add, though I am fading, I hope you’re right.

  Dana is embarrassed now, or maybe she is sick of trying to cheer me up. For whatever reason, she is on her feet, brushing her lips against my forehead, pressing my hand, shrugging into her coat. At the door, she turns to look at me once more. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch him,” she repeats into my fading consciousness.

  I try to tell Dana, although I doubt that I actually form the words, that I am pretty sure that the him she keeps apologizing for not catching, the person who fired the third bullet into me, was actually a her. I do not know her real name, but the first time I saw her, she was wearing Rollerblades.

  (II)

  “YOU’RE LOOKING A LOT BETTER TODAY, honey,” burbles my wife of nine years, even t
hough she no longer thinks of me as her husband.

  “Must be all the push-ups,” I manage through parched lips. But I am sitting up and can even drink liquids through a straw. My aching jaw is wired shut. Dr. Serra says I fractured it, but I do not remember when.

  Kimmer smiles one of her slow, warming, secret smiles. She pours me some water from a carafe and snaps the plastic top onto the cup. Then she leans over and puts the straw to my mouth so that I can sip. It hurts to watch her move. The sharp professional cut of her inky-black suit and ecru blouse do nothing to disguise her lazy sensuality. Since shutting me out of her life a week ago, Kimmer seems to have blossomed. She is, at this moment, a remarkably happy woman. And why not? She is free.

  “Had enough?” asks my wife, sitting down again. I nod. She smiles. “The doctor says they’ll have you up and walking soon.”

  “Great.”

  “When they let you out, you can come home if you want,” she tells me, smiling, but even in the midst of my drug-induced torpor I recognize the trap. Kimmer is not proposing that we try to rebuild our marriage; she is simply suggesting a place for me to recuperate, her house, by her sufferance, placing me in her debt. “I could nurse you back to health, like in the movies.”

  She is trying hard, I must grant her that, but the offer is hardly one I can accept, as she well knows. So I merely stare, and eventually my wife loses her smile and drops her eyes and searches for a less controversial topic.

  “You wouldn’t recognize Bentley. He’s getting so tall. And talking so much.” As though I have been away for months or years, rather than hospitalized for four or five days.

  “Mmmm,” I acknowledge.

  “Nellie hasn’t been around the house,” she adds softly, instinct telling her where my fears lie. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Misha. Or to our son.”

  I wonder whether any particular word of this is true. Kimmer is a fine lawyer: how, I ask myself cleverly, is she defining around?

  “I’m so sorry about how things worked out,” Kimmer says a little later, her eyes teary as she holds my hand in both of hers. I pat her fingers.

  “Me, too,” I assure her.

  “You don’t understand.” She seems ready to resume the argument she has already won, although I cannot imagine why.

  “Not now,” I plead, closing my eyes. All I can see is Bentley’s glowing face.

  “It’s not that I don’t love you, Misha,” she continues unhappily, shoving my heart closer and closer to the precipice. “I do. I really do. I just . . . I can’t . . . I don’t know.”

  “Kimmer, please. Don’t do this, okay?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s just so complicated!” she bursts out, as though my life is the simpler of the two. But maybe poor Sally was right all along. Maybe it is. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me!”

  “It’s okay, Kimmer,” I whisper, to no apparent purpose. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay! I tried, Misha, I really tried!” Pointing a slender finger at me. “I wanted to do it right, Misha, I really did. For you, for my folks, for our son—for everybody. I tried to be what you wanted, Misha, but you got too crazy on me. Or I got too crazy. Either way, I couldn’t be that person any more. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her for the third time, or the thirtieth.

  She nods. The silence stretches out.

  The nurse comes in to do some of those invasive but necessary things that nurses do and asks my soon-to-be-ex-wife to wait outside. Kimmer dries her tears and stands up and says she has to be going anyway. She kisses me gently on the corner of my mouth and walks proudly to the door, where she turns and offers a half-smile and a quarter-wave, all the while looking tall and strong and incredibly desirable and not at all mine.

  “You’re a lucky man,” says the nurse.

  The odd thing is that, from the depths of my several pains, I agree.

  CHAPTER 53

  ANOTHER OLD FRIEND ARRIVES

  (I)

  ON THE FIFTH DAY FOLLOWING MY SURGERY, I am able to stand and walk around for a few minutes a day. Three days later, I trade in the assistance of the nurses for the support of two metal crutches. Then the harridans of physical therapy have their turn at adding to my medical torture, laughing and cajoling as I suffer and half die all over again. After nine days of their ungentle tutelage, the doctors reluctantly concede that I am about ready to go home.

  This is the part I have dreaded. How can I tell my doctors that I have no place to go home to? I have no intention of setting foot in the house on Hobby Hill, trying to live under the same roof, even temporarily, with a wife who has not only thrown me out but who had, and may still be having, an affair with one of my students. Dana has offered to put me up for as long as necessary, but I can tell from the way she says it that Alison is opposed. Rob Saltpeter invites me to stay with his family, and I am tempted by the simple stability of his household, but I do not want to burden Rob and his extraordinary wife, Sara. Don and Nina Felsenfeld, still practicing the art of chesed, offer me their guest room, but living next door to the wife who no longer wants me would be slow torture. Uncle Mal leaves word that I am welcome at his house down in Vienna, Virginia, but I do not return the call. Dean Lynda does not offer me a place to stay, but she does suggest by phone that I take the rest of the semester off. And this time she says it nicely.

  With Nurse White’s occasional assistance, I finally turn to the get-well-soon cards stacked on the windowsill. Many of them are from the usual suspects—faculty and students and bits of family—but there are also a few surprises, including a couple from college friends I have not seen in years who must have heard about the shooting on the news, because it was reported everywhere. There are flowers from Mallory Corcoran and the law school, and cards from Wallace Wainwright and even Sergeant Bonnie Ames. And another card, postmarked at Miami International Airport, probably while its sender was on the way out of the country, brings me up short, for it is signed at the bottom, in a strong but feminine script, Sorry, Misha. A job is a job. Glad you’re OK. Love, M. Somehow I doubt it is from Meadows. I gaze out the window and try to reconcile two images, a gentle evening stroll on the Vineyard, and a third bullet that almost killed me in the Old Town Burial Ground.

  Morris Young stops by several times to see me, talking to me about God’s providence and what the Bible has to say about how marriages end. God prefers that marriages last until death, he says, but also forgives us, if we are repentant, when we fail in the quest to do as he would like.

  His message does not reduce my pain.

  Three days before I am to be released, somebody from Accounting comes down with a thick sheaf of papers for me to sign. At last I have the opportunity to find out how it is that I came to spend my entire stay in a private room. She shows me the intake form: Howard and Mariah Denton are paying for it. I suppose I should have known. I am about to call Howard with my grudging thanks when Mariah bustles in again, telling me I look ready to travel and informing me that the Navigator will be downstairs when the “big day” comes, plenty of room for me to stretch out on the trip to Darien.

  I consider. A private guest house, space to walk on their seven wooded acres, a housekeeper to wait on me, probably a private-duty nurse and an occupational therapist to get me going again. And Mariah to listen to, all day long, and five—no, six now—children to stumble over. And so many miles away from my boy.

  “Thank you,” I tell my sister, bewildered at the way my options have managed so swiftly to shrink.

  The next afternoon, Special Agent Nunzio comes by, and I know they are about to shrink further.

  (11)

  “I CAN’T TELL YOU EVERYTHING,” he says sadly, as though he wishes he could.

  “Can you tell me anything?”

  “That depends on what you want to know.”

  “Start with all the lying,” I suggest.

  Nunzio runs a rugged hand through shiny black hair. When he speaks, his face is turned partly away. He
does not want to be here. Mallory Corcoran must have pulled the string of all strings to get the Bureau to send an agent up from Washington to brief me. But, then, Uncle Mal owes me, several times over. Oh, does he owe me!

  “Nobody lied to you exactly, Professor Garland,” Nunzio begins. We are on formal terms once more.

  “Oh, no? Well, you did, for one.”

  “I did?”

  I nod. I am sitting in my chair by the window again, the sun warming the back of my neck. “It wasn’t coincidence that you were the one who came to interview me about the fake FBI agents who came to Shepard Street. If I hadn’t been so busy worrying about everything else, I would have figured that out for myself. The Bureau moved awfully fast, didn’t it? But it wasn’t because of the impersonation. It was because you already suspected that one of the fake agents was Colin Scott. You had lost track of him, hadn’t you? And you needed me to help you find him again.”

  Nunzio gazes at the various medical devices lined up next to my bed. “Perhaps it was something like that.”

  “No, it was exactly like that. I must be some kind of idiot to have missed it. You never even tried to discourage me. You never said I was nuts. You never told me to go away. I would call you with the wildest theories, and you would take them seriously. Because you wanted me to keep looking. You wanted me to find Scott for you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s why Bonnie Ames asked me all those questions about the arrangements. They were your questions, not hers, but you didn’t want to interview me formally about my father’s arrangements because I might get suspicious. So you let her do it.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly. Right. All that because you wanted me to flush out Colin Scott. A murderer.”

  “You were never in any danger,” he sighs, finally conceding the main point.

  “That’s what everybody keeps telling me. But look at this.” I lift my hospital gown to show him the bandages all over my abdomen. He does not flinch. He has seen worse.