Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  “Lemme up,” Nick said, his words gravelly and slurred as they slowly clambered up through a haze of anesthesia that was dissipating only slowly, like tissue paper in water. “Gotta go, gotta—”

  “You don’t have to do anything, Mr. Fogelsong, except lie back and get better,” the nurse said. He was clean-shaven but the shadow on his jaw was blue-black, a heavy beard held in abeyance, eager to spring. His words were kind but his tone was not; he’d dealt with patients such as Nick Fogelsong before, Bell surmised, and he understood that politeness got you nowhere. His name tag said his name was Bobby Lee Lustig. The room’s bright lights reflected off his shiny shaved head, the way sunlight glints off a chrome fender.

  Nick tried to raise his left arm, the one less laden with bandages, and he gurgled something incomprehensible but most likely profane. Cocooned in thick gauze and IV lines and wires, wires that led to a console of chirping machinery behind him, he looked like a grumpy mummy who’d been awakened and dragged from the tomb about a millennium too soon.

  Bell stood next to Mary Sue. They had been here since their conversation with Dr. Allison some six hours ago. Nick had stirred and shouted in his sleep, and moaned and tried to kick off his blankets, but it was not until now—almost midnight, Bell noted with a quick glance at her wristwatch—that he really seemed to be waking up. To be coming back to them.

  “Nick,” Mary Sue said. “I’m here. Bell’s here, too. Carlene was here for a long time but she had to go pick up her kids.”

  At 5 P.M., Bell had texted Ben Fawcett and asked him to take Goldie over to his house for the night, if his mother agreed; she had realized that she might very well need to be here for a very long time. She kept a change of clothes in her office at the courthouse. If she had to, she could go right from here to the courtroom in the morning.

  Nick gurgled something else, equally incomprehensible but softer this time. Not combative. Lustig checked several of the monitors behind the bed, adjusted the rate of the IV drip, and then looked down at his patient with an expression that mingled authority with pity. Of the two men in this room, one was upright and in command, and the other prone and helpless, weak and needy; you could call what you saw in Lustig’s eyes “concern,” but it was pity. Nick would hate that, Bell knew, but he was in no position right now to tell Lustig where he could shove his damned pity.

  “Okay, Mr. Fogelsong,” Lustig said. “I’m going to let you visit with your family now. But don’t cause any trouble, okay? You need to take it easy. You just had major surgery. Promise me you’ll rest and I’ll let them stay a while. Do we have a deal?”

  Nick blinked, which was good enough for Lustig. He nodded to Mary Sue on his way out. “You all can stay for a little while longer, ma’am,” he said, “but after that he really needs his sleep. He’s still pretty fragile.”

  Bell let Mary Sue go to him first. She wanted to be here, but there was an awkwardness about it, too; she wasn’t family, no matter what the nurse believed. Right before they went in, Bell had murmured her uncertainty to Mary Sue—Technically, I’m not a blood relative, and so maybe I’d better not—but Mary Sue had cut her off: “You sure as hell are. Now, come on.”

  Mary Sue leaned over the rail. “Nick,” she said. “Nick.” She was afraid to touch him, and so she stroked him with her words. “I love you. I love you.”

  He moved his lips. They were glued together with dried phlegm. He’d broken the seal once but now it had re-formed.

  “Did—” Frustrated, he fought to speak, the effort visible on his face. “Did—”

  “Take your time,” Mary Sue said.

  He closed his eyes and frowned. He struggled to make his mouth do what he wanted it to do. “Did—” Again. “Did—” His face was turning slightly reddish purple from the push, the fierce desire to communicate, but Bell knew better than to tell him to take it easy. “Did they—” He clenched his teeth in fury. He was attempting to make a hard “K” sound, but his tongue kept getting in the way. His tongue, the fuzziness in his brain, his goddamned body—which had turned on him, mocking him. His enemy now.

  He tried again. And this time, with tremendous effort, in a rush of mushed-together syllables that perhaps only the people who knew him best would be able to interpret, he finally got it out: “Did they—c-c-catch the b-b-bastard?”

  * * *

  He had come very, very close to dying. So close that when Dr. Allison had tried to describe to them the distance between a dead Nick Fogelsong and a living one, and she lifted her thumb and her forefinger to do so, the visual was less than clarifying; Bell couldn’t make out any space between the digits. It looked as if she were pinching her fingers shut.

  That close. The line was no line at all.

  The .22-caliber bullet had penetrated the upper chamber of Nick’s heart, storming into the left atrium. The ER doctor, the surgeon explained, had wedged a finger in the wound in the heart to stymie the bleeding while the trauma team prepped him for the long and complicated surgery that ensued. Yes, it sounded so amateurish, so makeshift, Dr. Allison acknowledged, seeing their faces, like a desperate strategy that might have been used on a Civil War battlefield—but it worked. Bell could imagine Nick’s reaction to the description of how he’d been saved: Hell. Why didn’t they just patch up my heart with duct tape, while they were at it?

  “Fair to say,” Dr. Allison had added, looking at Mary Sue, “that your husband is a lucky man.”

  Luck. The thing you couldn’t believe in—until it went your way, Bell thought, and after that it was the most powerful force in the universe.

  And then the doctor told them what Nick faced. Her voice was matter-of-fact, not cheerful or reassuring. It wasn’t her job to be reassuring. Nick was fifty-five years old. His wound had very nearly been lethal. He faced long months of rehabilitation, hard labor, the likes of which he’d never known before. He would develop an intimate relationship with pain, and exasperation, and the suffocating despair that always comes in the wake of serious injury: Everything was different now. The extent of his recovery would depend upon his appetite for work, and his attitude. And his patience.

  “Patience,” Mary Sue had repeated back to the surgeon.

  “Yes. He won’t be able to do the things that he used to do—and for some people, that’s hard to accept.”

  “If you knew Nick Fogelsong,” Mary Sue said, “then you’d know that a better word would be ‘impossible.’”

  * * *

  Nick was in pain. He didn’t complain about it, he didn’t moan or flinch, but Bell could tell, and she was sure Mary Sue could tell, too. The anesthesia was almost gone now. It was like a sheet whisked off a piece of Victorian furniture, revealing the ornate monstrosity that waited under the white cover. The pain had been there all along, but medication kept it hidden, kept its twisted menace out of sight. A tug on the sheet—and here it was. The nurse came in and out at regular intervals, offering painkillers; Nick, though, would fib about his level of distress and grunt no. The moment Lustig left, Nick tightened his jaw and closed his eyes. Sweat slickened his brow. As the anesthesia inched away, polite and courtly in its retreat, the pain came roaring forward, crazy and despotic. Nick dozed, jerked awake, and then dozed again.

  It was almost 3 A.M. No windows in the ICU, which gave the place a sealed-off feel, a sense of being suspended above the fuss and jumble of the world, a snug little island. Here, everything was slow and deliberate and purposeful. Nothing extraneous, nothing but what was needed.

  If she looked too long at Nick, Bell felt that she could almost hear the blood hurtling through his veins, valiantly trying to replenish itself after this confusing interruption, and she also felt she could hear the hectic effort of his heart, appalled at this turn of events. Her daughter—thank goodness—had never been seriously ill, but when she was twelve years old she had tumbled out of the big silver maple in their backyard. The surgery to repair her broken arm was complex, which meant a night in the hospital, and Bell had had the same strange
feeling back then: Looking at her sleeping child in the middle of the night, she was sure she could see right through the cast and the skin and then on into the interior of the body itself, a body shocked by its wound but now recovering, and she imagined that she could actually watch the delicate infrastructure taking care of itself, sending out fresh new green shoots, branching out, healing the breaches.

  Mary Sue dozed in a chair on one side of the bed, her head tucked sideways, her hands loose on her lap. Bell, wide awake, was in a chair on the other side. She watched Mary Sue for a while, struck by the vulnerability of a sleeping person. Mouth slack, consciousness in shards, shields down. How much we have to trust the world, Bell reflected, to get any rest at all. If you thought about it too long, you’d never go to sleep again.

  Nick stirred, moaned. Mary Sue’s eyes opened.

  “What is it?” Mary Sue asked him, leaning forward, touching the rail.

  “Just thinking,” he said. His voice was marginally clearer now, but the effort to speak still was arduous. Every word cost him. Yet they knew better than to ask him to stop. “Thirty years as sheriff and not so much as a hangnail,” he muttered. “Coupla months at the Highway Haven and I’m shot like a dog.”

  There was nothing to say to that, not really, no words of consolation that would mitigate the perverse accuracy of his observation.

  Bell held the water glass up for him to see. Did he want any? He blinked, his mouth a tight line. No, he didn’t. But he wanted to say something to her, and so he kept his bleary gaze aimed in her direction.

  “Belfa,” he said. “You need to get the hell out of here.”

  For a moment she thought he meant Acker’s Gap. She thought he was telling her to return to D.C., to leave this place with all of its sorrows and its contradictions and its endless bad luck. But then she realized—just in time, just before she upbraided him for meddling in her life, a sin from which not even the fact the he’d almost died could excuse him—that he meant the hospital. He meant she needed to go home. To get ready for Day Two of Royce Dillard’s trial, which would begin again in—she’d just checked her watch—less than six hours. After what he’d been through, though, how the hell did he remember the fact that there was a trial going on? It was, Bell supposed, part of the mystery of Nick Fogelsong. And tied up somehow with his affection for this place.

  “Town’s pretty wrought up,” he mumbled. “Biggest trial around here in ages. You gotta be sharp. Gotta get to the bottom of things.”

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I’ll leave in a minute. Can’t believe they haven’t thrown me out already.”

  She thought he had drifted off to sleep again but he hadn’t; he had just closed his eyes to regather his strength. Now he opened them.

  “Pam told you, didn’t she?”

  “Told me what?”

  Nick frowned. She wasn’t really confused about his meaning, and they both knew it. Her coyness was a disappointment to him. But she had her reasons. My God, Nick, Bell thought, do you really want to talk about this now? In a hospital room in the middle of the night, with him groggy and gurgling and wrapped up like something you’d find under the Christmas tree—minus the bow—and her so weary that she could barely keep from oozing out of her chair and landing in a heap on the floor?

  Yes, his eyes said. He did.

  “Okay,” Bell said. “Yeah, she told me. About you wanting to come back.” She looked over at Mary Sue, to see if Nick’s wife wanted to be part of the conversation.

  Mary Sue was silent. This is between you and Nick right now. That was how Bell interpreted her expression.

  “Hell of it is,” he said, “doesn’t matter anymore. By the time I’m back on my feet from this—they tell me it’s going to be a long, long road, and the way I feel right now, I sure believe it—I’ll be too damned old. Too broken-down. Can’t ever be sheriff again. Not even a goddamned deputy.”

  Bell didn’t argue. Because he was right.

  The silence went on for a while. It was not real silence. The mechanical voices—the beeps and the rhythmic swishes, the ones that sounded like a lonely person sweeping a sidewalk at dusk, going back and forth, back and forth—never ceased. Only the human voices had taken a respite.

  Bell was startled when Nick spoke. Once again she thought he had dropped off to sleep, and her plan was to slip out in a minute or two, with a nod to Mary Sue.

  “Don’t wait too long to do what you want to do, Belfa,” he said. His voice was dark. A sadness seemed to move around inside it, like something caught in a box, and that something was still feeling the walls, getting a sense of the size of the prison. He had to take a break between sentences, recover his breath, but he was able to finish his thought. “If you want to do something, for God’s sake—do it. Don’t hold off. Do it now. You never know what dirty tricks are coming down the road. Ready to trip you up.”

  Dirty tricks. That was Nick Fogelsong’s name for fate. Yes, there were fancier names. More sophisticated ways to refer to destiny. Still, she’d stick with Nick’s phrase: dirty tricks. The little twists and kinks and false bottoms. The ironies and double crosses.

  She started to answer, but then realized he’d fallen asleep for real this time.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  When Bell was thirteen years old, she sneaked in the back of a courtroom while a trial was in session. Her foster mother had come to the Raythune County Courthouse on business and Bell accompanied her, even though it was a school day; the woman, whose name was Georgette Slattery, never really cared if Bell went to school or not. She never really cared, frankly, what Bell did or didn’t do, at any time. Slattery went off to find the office she needed and Bell roamed the long, echoing hallways. She came across a thick set of double doors and paused to tug casually on one of the big brass knobs, with every expectation that it would be locked up tight as tick, when—Holy crap!—it actually opened, and she pulled it back slowly, slowly, so that it wouldn’t creak or squeak, and then she slipped in. She felt like a dirty piece of paper sliding into a fancy white envelope.

  The courtroom was big and cold and ornate. Around the top of the walls ran a thin strip of wood with intricate repeated carving; it was the loveliest thing Bell had ever seen. Arranged in symmetrical lines across the wooden floor were six rows of wooden benches, divided in half, with a long aisle in the middle, just like in a church. The floor was dark, thick wood, like the wood you’d expect to find on the deck of a ship.

  She crept into the very back row on the right-hand side. No one had seen her come in. She was sure of it. There weren’t many spectators, anyway, just two old ladies, one old man, and a younger lady. No kids. The windows along the wall were stacked squares of cold sunlight. Below the windows, two radiators hissed and coughed. Up front was a high wooden stand, and behind it was visible the top half a very old, very bald man. The black robe in which his shoulders were swaddled made the shiny white knob of his head look definitely odd, like a pus-filled boil that had erupted from the moist pleated interior of that robe. Two men in dark suits stood in front of the judge. She couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  Bell had then felt a hard hand clamp her upper arm. A frowning, pink-faced sheriff’s deputy stood over her. Brown shirt, brown trousers, black boots. Little pink ball of a chin. His eyebrows dove together, indicating an excessive amount of displeasure in discovering her there. He jerked his head. She correctly interpreted the head-jerk to be his preferred shorthand: Come with me. She stood up. Allowed him to haul her roughly back out the big double doors. Once they were in the hall, he said, Get lost, kid. You got no business here. She obliged him. Not because she feared authority—in fact, her experiences in foster homes had made her realize that most of the people in the world invested with authority are frauds and liars and hypocrites, including, but not limited to, the people who wanted her to call them “Mommy” and “Daddy”—but because it was probably time to meet Georgette Slattery in the lobby. She couldn’t be late. Not if she knew what was good for her
. Bell turned back only once as she walked away. The deputy was watching her to make sure she didn’t sneak into another room. She had to ask him a question. He’d seen that magnificent space, too, with the carved strip around the ceiling and the high windows. Hey, mister, she said. Isn’t it beautiful?

  She still remembered the moment, all these years later, especially when she argued a case in the very same courtroom, as she was doing this morning. It was the beginning of the second week of the murder trial of Royce Dillard.

  Beautiful?

  Well, no. It was well shy of beautiful. But the thing that had impressed her then—how like a church it was, with old wooden pews and a center aisle and a raised pulpit and a kind of gathered reverence for words—impressed her still.

  Bell stood behind the table designated for the prosecution. Stacked and handy on that table were the yellow legal pads containing her notes for the day. Rhonda Lovejoy sat in the second chair. She wore a white wool pantsuit and white heels.

  “State your full name for the record, sir,” Bell said.

  “Rusty Blevins.” The old man added a So there head-bobble at the end. He gripped the front of the witness box with his gnarled hands, hands that were now paying the price for a bricklaying career that had lasted more than half a century. He was stooped, and his bony shoulders jutted up so high they could’ve doubled as earmuffs. Pink tufts of hair sprouted up here and there across his pale crusty scalp. The pink had once been red, hence the nickname he’d borne since toddlerhood.

  “Your full name, please,” Bell said.

  “What’re you getting at?” he rasped back at her, pulling himself even farther forward in the wooden box, suspecting a ruse.

  “The name on your birth certificate,” she clarified.

  “Oh. Gotcha. Okay, well, it’s William Barnard Blevins Junior.” The head-bobble again. “Always been just ‘Rusty,’ though.” He scooted back in his chair, but still gripped the front of the box, twisted fingers hanging over the edge.