How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Gillian Roberts

  Just as I got to wondering whether I could stand a life of eternal touring and whether female stars had groupies, the phone rang.

  The man sounded anxious and official. “Miss Pepper?” he asked solemnly.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m calling from the Atlantic City Medical Center to notify you that we’ve admitted Mr. Mackenzie.”

  “Mister Mackenzie?” I pictured someone foreign, a gentleman in a bowler hat, a spy on Masterpiece Theatre.

  Medical Center, he’d said. My pulse escalated and words popped up and down like frightening flashcards. Hospital. Injury. Accident. Emergency. Dead? “But how could he be in the hospital? He isn’t even working!” I said.

  “Am I speaking to the right person? Is this Amanda Pepper?”

  “I…ah, yes.”

  “Because your name was in his wallet as someone to call in case of an emergency. The message on your answering machine in Philadelphia said you could be reached at—”

  “He has my name in his wallet?” I was surprised at how profoundly that affected me. I had my mother’s and sister’s names in those slots, but Mackenzie had mine. I would never have dreamed. Besides, while I fixated on that, I avoided letting the word “emergency” fully register.

  “—this hotel, so I—”

  “Please,” I finally dared. “What…what happened?” Everything slowed down—my breathing, time, the speed of light, and the course of my words, floating listlessly as dandelion fluff. Slowly—more slowly, please—toward the receiver, into the phone wires, down, through—everything slow except my brain, which was snapping and connecting double time and in no particular direction, so that between my question and his reply there was an epoch filled with theories and refutations.

  First theory. Mackenzie’s heart broke. Literally. Heartbroken suitor—with my name in his wallet—requiring hospitalization. Extremely romantic. A reunion at bedside, complete with violin background.

  Second theory. Mackenzie was dead.

  The man from the hospital cleared his throat, hiding in my time warp, afraid to break the news. They must rotate the chore, take turns, punish employees by forcing them to make these calls.

  Food poisoning. Something he bought en route to the hotel. Some sleazy off-boardwalk stall food. My mother was right. You couldn’t trust those food vendors.

  I knew it wasn’t that. Okay, then. What happened was: he gagged on the idea of our Talk with a capital T. Had to go to the hospital to have a Heimlich maneuver to get his heart out of his throat.

  Appendicitis.

  Jackpot. I’d found the acceptable emergency. I could imagine them wheeling him into surgery, no time to phone and cancel our last date.

  “There was an accident, ma’am,” the man said with excessive politeness and patience. “He’s in surgery now.”

  It took me a moment to remember what accident and surgery meant. “A collision?” Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of all the possibilities, the most logical, a car smash hadn’t even crossed my—He had walked back to his hotel, so this must have happened later, while he was driving to see me, and—

  “A gun, ma’am.”

  “A gun? He hit a gun?” An incredibly dumb response, but trust me, as soon as I’d heard this stranger say “Medical Center,” I’d burned off half my IQ, and whatever was left was busy trying hard to not hear, not know, not get it.

  “A gun hit him, ma’am,” he said gravely, precisely, kindly, as if he weren’t talking to an idiot. “Or rather, a bullet from a gun.”

  “You mean…you mean…” I knew what he meant. He’d been as clear and coherent as a person could be. But I couldn’t believe it or accept it until I heard the actual words, one after the other, in an orderly, definitive sentence.

  So he provided that sentence. “Yes’m,” he said softly and gently. “I’m sorry, but your friend, Mr. Mackenzie, has been shot.”

  Thirteen

  “YOU’LL DO ANYTHING, MACKENZIE, won’t you? You’ll even get yourself shot to get out of a capital-T talk.”

  He didn’t seem to be registering what was in front of him, i.e., me. He blinked, proving that he was at least partially alive. Otherwise, no matter what the nurse had said, I’m not sure I’d have believed it. His skin was a close match for the gray sprinkles in his curly hair, his features expressionless, his body inert.

  And then he blinked again, did a double take as comprehension flooded his eyes into such neon-bright intensity, I was surprised the bandages on his head didn’t catch any of their blue light. For once, I knew precisely what it was to be a sight for sore eyes, and I knew how good it felt, too.

  “Welcome back.” I was proud of my composure and lack of sentimentality. Here I was in a hospital room, the perfect setting for a schmaltz-intensive scene, and I was having none of it. I spoke in an upbeat bedside voice. “Do you know you’re in a hospital with a Frank Sinatra wing? And that you’re a stone’s throw away from Bally’s Grand and Caesar’s Palace?”

  “Hey,” he whispered. He looked like a fair-skinned Sikh in his gauze turban. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

  And that was it for stoicism and ironic detachment. I burst into tears. Flying Chagall characters did a freefall through the room, their violin bows going a mile a minute. So much for aplomb.

  Hours had gone by. Hours that took days to pass. Hours during his surgery and post op, during which I grappled with War and Peace until I realized that I had read a sentence about Prince Nikolay Andreivitch Bolkonsky’s need for a regular schedule for seventeen minutes straight. Or perhaps it was seventeen hours straight. After that, I switched to a Vegetarian Times magazine that was sitting on a nearby table. After a few more decades, I retained only a headache and an impression that the rigid Prince Bolkonsky had eaten, at a set and specific moment each day, Easy Tofu Whip. And that the wait had been interminable.

  The kindly woman whose function was, at least metaphorically, to hold relatives’ and friends’ hands, told me as much as she could find out about the shooting. It appeared that Mackenzie had attempted to stop an ordinary, garden-variety mugging. The woman’s purse and person were saved and the would-be thief arrested, but C.K.’s right leg had been taken hostage. As a result, he was going to go through the rest of his life setting off metal detectors at airports, given the number of pins now holding a significant portion of his skeleton together. He had also fallen sideways from the force of the blast and done a minor number on his skull, which obviously wasn’t nearly as thick as I’d assumed.

  I couldn’t stop blubbering. I wanted to be angry with him.

  Who did Mackenzie think he was, Superman saving Metropolis? But it was too much of a stretch, because I knew if I were being robbed by a street thug, I’d want a Mackenzie of my own. That particular thought sent me into further spasms.

  “For our hero.” In walked a pair of feet topped by a gigantic vase of red roses. “From Mrs. Weinstein and her children and grandchildren.” The nurse put the bouquet on his nightstand. The vase occupied so much space, there was no longer room enough for a pill bottle.

  “So embarrassin’.” Mackenzie spoke dreamily, as if the anesthesia hadn’t completely worn off. “Didn’t see the gun until… Feel like a fool. Wait till they hear about it. What was wrong with me? Where was I?”

  I appropriated one of his tissues and blew my nose. “You know,” I said, “they just stitched you up, so self-laceration seems pretty ungrateful.” My voice wobbled and I sniffled some more.

  “Huh?” He was still lost in the fog zone.

  “Stop beating yourself up.” I sat down beside the bed, blew my nose again and took three deep breaths. “You saved that woman. You’re a hero, and not only to Mrs. Weinstein.”

  “Shoulda seen her. Littlest lady I ever saw. Like in a fairy tale. Four-foot-something. Square little body. Old. And poor-lookin’. Old coat, old kerchief on her head. What kind of kid sees that and—” He winced and gasped. He had attempted to shake his head for emphasis.

  He wasn’
t as thoroughly hardened as I sometimes made myself believe he was. He was still amazed and disgusted by what people did to one another. However, he was going to have to hold off on the body language for a while.

  “You’re a really good human being.” I barely got the words out before I was sucked into another emotional wind tunnel.

  He waited through my siege of snuffling, either through gallantry or druggy oblivion, I wouldn’t know. “So,” he finally said, very softly, “here I am. Captive audience. Don’ want you thinkin’ I forgot our capital-T talk. Shoot. Or is that a poor choice of expressions today?”

  “Now? You want to talk now?”

  “Don’ ever want to have that kind of talk, so why not?”

  “Did they check for brain injuries, C.K.?”

  He grinned. “Lots of time for once. It’s a good bet I’m not goin’ to rush off for a sudden emergency.”

  “Is this a play for sympathy? You, wounded and lying there, looking like—”

  “No?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Good, then. Ah gave it my best shot. Why do we have so many gun images in our speech, do you think? Anyway, give me points for tryin’.” He smiled crookedly and put out his hand. I took it in both of mine. “Feel like a fool, though. A laughingstock. A cop who didn’t see a kid’s gun. Barely saw the kid—or Mrs. Weinstein. I was lost in my head, a million miles away.”

  “I understand. It was that kind of time. I was thinking, too.” We were having that capital-T talk after all.

  “Walkin’ back, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been payin’ real attention. Just goin’ along the same old way, in the same old patterns.”

  “I’m also responsible,” I murmured, meeting him halfway. They say compromise is the basis of good relationships, after all. “I didn’t make myself clear enough.” I squeezed his hand-gently—to show how touched I was with this new Mackenzie. Why had I thought he was one-track, unable to change? “When they called me and said you were hurt—” I hesitated, then decided to be completely honest, the way he was being. “I—”

  “So there I was,” he said, continuing his monologue, “walkin’, tryin’ to figure my way out of my rut, to really listen, I mean really hear, and—”

  “—realized how much you mattered to me even if there are problems,” I said. “Tonight’s been a hard lesson in how much I care about—”

  “—even if she’s cracked—”

  “She?” The word reverberated in my brain. She? She?

  “Mandy? You okay?”

  I shook my head, nodded, felt my chin dangle, my cheeks burn with humiliation. What had we been talking about? Not a tender, if cryptic, lovers’ reconciliation, that was for sure. Mackenzie had been off in hyperspace, talking about somebody else—a female somebody else.

  “Say somethin’. You sick? What is it?”

  I wasn’t uttering another word until I had some sense of the topic. Instead, in a mean-spirited urge for revenge, I turned his hand palm up. At least I’d find out one of his secrets—his first name.

  The plastic hospital wristband said only, Mackenzie, C.K. It didn’t say Gotcha! but it might as well have.

  “Livin’ on the beach doesn’t mean she doesn’t know somethin’.” Mackenzie continued on in his parallel dimension. “She did mention Jesse Reese by name, after all.”

  “Georgette?” It emerged a squeak.

  He made a throaty noise of assent. “Georgette. I was tryin’ to remember her name an’ exactly what she said when Mrs. Weinstein and the kid came out of nowhere.”

  “Georgette?” There it was. And there Mackenzie was, still and always putting murder first. Except…my name had been in his wallet. I knew that now, and he knew that I knew it, too.

  I gave up. There was simply too much feeling—good and bad, loving and infuriated, pro and con—to be ignored at this stage. We had flubbed breaking up. Done it wrong, thwarted our mutual escapes, thanks to fate in the squatty shape of Mrs. Weinstein.

  “So do you think she knows somethin’? Could Reese maybe have robbed old women the way she said?”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that she also said Prince Charles was a good singer and had a lot of pep.”

  “He may.”

  “She said he was blind.” I realized I was trying to discount Georgette, because Mackenzie had been thinking about her when he should have been thinking about me.

  “Why Reese?” Mackenzie said in a slightly dreamy voice. His mind was fighting through the drugs and making it halfway. “She said J. Edgar Hoover, Prince Charles—”

  “She meant Ray Charles.”

  “Donald Trump, George Bush, an’ Jesse Reese. That’s like one of those lists on a test—which one doesn’t belong.”

  I wouldn’t think he could have carried the woman’s monologue through a trauma, but I seem to consistently underrate him.

  “Hate things that don’ make sense,” he said softly. “Makes me mad to be stuck here, not knowin’.” He closed his eyes, breathed deeply. “An’ I… I think I need a little…”

  “Sleep? Bedpan? Food? Quiet?”

  He inhaled sharply. “Oh, boy,” he said in an exhale.

  “Painkiller?”

  He tried to nod, winced again and grunted. It was almost a relief to know he really, truly wasn’t Superman.

  I rang for the nurse and kissed him very lightly on the forehead. “So this is how it feels to know exactly where you are,” I said. “And where you’ll be. I thought it’d be more fun than this. See you tomorrow. Heal.”

  I was at the door when he said, in an almost inaudible murmur, “Tonight made me realize how much I care, too.”

  I was going to have to really get it that no matter how slow and out of it he might seem, even when drugged, Mackenzie heard and remembered. His brain had parallel tracks, and he could monitor them all, and make you think he was daydreaming the whole time. I was going to have to stop underestimating the man.

  Although, of course, he hadn’t said just what it was he so much cared about. Or even who. Or even whom.

  * * *

  The next day dawned sunny and calm, very close to beach weather. Good thing I had no hopes of enjoying it, or I’d have been more upset when I swung my feet off the bed and my lower back clenched like a fist.

  Hysterical ailment, I told myself. Jealous of the attention Mackenzie is getting. Garden-variety back pain, the first herald of middle age.

  I walked around like a crone, trying, perhaps, to look like Mrs. Weinstein so that Mackenzie would come rescue me, too.

  Then I forced myself to stand straight. Later I would arrange for a massage in the health club. Until then I didn’t want to think about it.

  The USA Today shoved under my door didn’t mention anything as mundane as a local murder. But downstairs the Atlantic City newspaper on the rack outside the coffee shop still featured the story. NO FURTHER CLUES IN BRUTAL SLAYING, the headline said. SUSPECT IN CUSTODY. And then it rehashed Sasha’s long-ago association with the dead mobster. I read on with incredulous amazement.

  “It’s not that much of a surprise. Sasha Berg always played with fire,” former high school classmate and current A.C. resident Candace Winter, was quoted as saying.

  Candace Winter? My former high school classmate as well, then, but the name… Then I realized who it had to be. Smarmy Candy Conroy, whose boyfriend had dropped her because of an infatuation with Sasha, who, for once, had done nothing to provoke trouble. Candy had screamed, “I’ll never forgive you for this!” at Sasha—and at me, too, for remaining Sasha’s friend. Who could have dreamed that she meant it?

  But, incredibly, thirteen years later, Candy, married, settled down, was still angry enough to call the papers and have her revenge. People were perpetually amazing.

  I took the paper to a table and settled in, marveling at Candy’s ability to hate. For one happily crazed moment I decided that Candy Conroy Winter had murdered Jesse Reese and framed Sasha as final payment for the shame of l
osing Elliot “Rocky” Feinstock.

  I’d thought that having breakfast in the coffee shop would be quicker than room service, and I expected it to be a quiet and meditative kickoff to the day’s work. I was wrong on both counts because I hadn’t factored in yet another encounter with Lala.

  The woman was certainly making the most of her fiancé’s largesse. She’d come to Atlantic City as a day-tripper, yet she never left, and furthermore, each time I’d seen her, she’d been in different ensembles.

  This morning’s was nautical. Her sailor collar was trimmed in gold braid, as were the cuffs of her slacks. She looked like an admiral in the AARP’s navy.

  “May I?” she asked even as she pulled out the chair across from me. I guess I could have said no, grabbed the chair, held her under the arms to stop her from sitting, but that required too much energy. “I had no idea Tommy was such a slugabed!” She shook her head, but the lacquer kept her buttercup curls immobile. “He’d like to sleep till noon and be up all night. What am I going to do?”

  What she was going to do was have serious marital problems. Or perhaps no problems at all, because they’d never see each other.

  “It’s like I was telling my cousin Belle,” Lala said. “Who, by the way, is down here. Arrived last night. You’ll just love her, sweetheart. I told her all about you—well not exactly about how we met, if you know what I mean. But I was saying to her that I’m a morning person. And Belle said—oh look, there she is now. Would you mind awfully if she joined us? She’s dying to meet you.”

  Something about Lala’s delivery convinced me that there were no random situations in her life because she scripted each encounter. The only reason I didn’t react to her manipulations with more anger was that I also suspected that fear prompted her careful planning and avoidance of chance.

  Lala was peroxide and morning-bright, and Belle was inky darkness—black hair streaked with gray, and a still darker expression in her deep brown eyes. The yin and yang of cousinhood.

  “Meet Belle, honey,” Lala said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Belle said. “What’s Honey short for? Honora?”