“Coffee shop, first floor.” He was sifting through an enormous stack of charts as if the one he really wanted was the one he couldn’t find.
“That’s good to know,” Sullivan said. “But I don’t want to go down to the first floor. I don’t want to leave this floor.”
The young man put his thumb in the pile and glanced up.
“She’s on her way to surgery,” Sullivan said.
The man nodded and separated the stack into two piles. “Sorry. Black?”
“Milk actually.”
The nurse brought back the coffee and a glazed doughnut resting on a napkin. Sullivan thanked him for the kindness.
And then there was the Irish girl coming down the hall towards him like an old friend. “I shouldn’t have run you off. Turns out they’re not taking her down for another hour at least.” She didn’t have a bad face. It wasn’t the kind of face that Sullivan liked, and she was fat, but he gave her credit where credit was due. People must have said it to her all her life, such a pretty face.
“Really?” He took a bite out of the doughnut.
“It’s the snow. Everybody’s running late. Dr. Zhang isn’t even here yet. It’s one big parking lot out there.”
“So you’re not leaving?” He gave up half a smile. There was no reason not to. For an instant she reddened and then faded back to chalk.
“Just as soon as someone comes to take my place.”
“Well, I’ll be here too. My brother walked off with my wallet.”
“That kid was your brother?”
“Long story.”
“He stole it?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Nothing like that. There was just a little mix-up in the coat closet. My fault, really.”
“So she’s your—”
“Aunt,” he said. “By marriage.”
“Sally,” said the Asian nurse, bearer of doughnuts, and pointed to the phone. “Anesthesia.”
Sally waved Sullivan on like a doorman at a club. She seemed to take enormous pleasure in her own largesse. “Go back and sit with her. She seems pretty out of it, your aunt.”
Sullivan nodded and took a long sip of coffee. “She was hit by a car,” he said by way of explanation, and he headed down the hall.
The electrical light that had burned over the bed was off now but the sun was pulling up over Boston and the walls and the floors were washed over in strips of gold that fell through the tilted Venetian blinds. It was a hospital room, and nothing could soften the seafoam walls or the gray tile floors. A hospital room could only be made beautiful by light, but the opportunities for light to come into 315 were rare and fleeting. Tennessee Moser was folded into stiff white sheets, her arms down straight by her sides. Her eyes were closed. The bed next to hers was empty and it looked like an oasis of rest and peace the likes of which Sullivan had never known. He could fall into that bed and sleep until June. He should have told the nurse that he was her husband, since husbands, unlike nephews, could probably lie down in the empty beds and not be made to move. But the Irish girl wouldn’t have gone for that. It was one thing to have a black aunt or a black brother, those were matters beyond your control. A black wife was something else entirely.
Sullivan finished off the coffee and doughnut and washed his hands in the little sink.
He kept his eye on the woman sleeping in the bed. Her face was swollen, sliced and stitched, undone and reassembled. There were bits of gauze tape holding her together and flecks of blood clinging to the roots of her hair. It hurt him to look at her but Sullivan did not turn his eyes away. He saw her as a box of clues. He tried to assemble the faces of his brothers and the face of the little girl they’d brought home from the features she provided. Doyle could deny it all day long but there they were: Tip’s forehead, Teddy’s mouth. Most of all he tried to remember her in the landscape, to scan the faces on every street he had walked down as a child to see if she was there, but there was really no remembering something like that. Besides, he imagined the woman he saw in this bed only bore a faint resemblance to the woman who was hit last night by a car. The question was, what did she look like smiling? What did this woman with blood in her hair look like when she was standing up? What if it was springtime and a breeze stirred the branches of flowering apple trees over her head? That was how he wanted to see her, in the brilliant light of late April, standing in a rain of apple blossoms, but it was too large of a gap to cross. In this bed she looked tired in a way that was greater even than last night’s violence could account for. It was clear that she had been tired for years before she ever saw the lights of the car. Sullivan understood this because he was tired himself. He wanted to lie down in the bed beside her as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He wanted to sleep for both of them.
“Maybe you’d get me that water now,” she said, and he startled. He was leaning over her, his face too close to hers.
“I’ll ask again. They’re running late.”
“Where’s Teddy?”
“He had to go home.”
Tennessee stopped talking. She had not opened her eyes. There was no way to be sure if she was actually awake, but Sullivan made his way down the hall to see about getting her something to drink. Everything was quiet there. The patients were still sleeping and the visitors had been kept away by snow. The nurses clustered together at their station, complaining idly about a certain doctor who never returned his pages. “Just like the boys I used to date in high school,” one woman said, leaning a hip against the counter, and the tall Ethiopian woman replied, “He wants you to beg.” Sullivan motioned for his friend Sally, and when she came to him, standing a half a step too close, he pressed her for the favor. She relented easily this time, coming back with a few chips of ice in the bottom of a cup. She was tired after working all night and what difference was it going to make, really? The surgery was looking later all the time. She handed it over with all the gravity of a first visit to a methadone program. “Give it to her slowly. Don’t let her have it all at once.”
He assured her that he understood.
“I looked at her chart,” Sally said. “We don’t have any insurance information. We need to get her cards.”
“If I don’t have my own wallet I certainly don’t have hers,” he said.
Sally gave him a stern look. “Well, call someone, okay? I need to get this in the computer.”
Sullivan nodded and went back to the room. He held a piece of ice against Tennessee’s lips. “Don’t go crazy on this stuff because I don’t think we’re getting any more. It looks like you’re not covered for ice.”
“You didn’t go,” she said.
“I stayed with you.”
She kept her eyes straight up, fixed on the acoustical tiles of the ceiling. “I don’t understand.”
“Let’s just say you’re interesting to me.” Sullivan pulled up a chair beside the bed. “You’re like the spy who came in from the cold.”
Tennessee tried to open her mouth a little wider but her jaw was sore and her lips were swollen. She felt like somebody had beaten her with a fender and asphalt and a thick sheet of glass. She tried again and Sullivan took his finger and pushed the bit of ice inside. He knew about these things. He had sat with the sick before. To look at the expression on her face a person would think that nothing in her life had felt as kind or tasted as sweet as that sliver of ice on her tongue. She took a moment to savor the melting before she answered him. “I’m not a spy.”
“Of course you are,” Sullivan said. “You’ve been following us around all our lives. What else do you call it?”
Tennessee thought for a minute. She tried to get the right words because words were so hard to come by. “Wanting to make sure your boys are okay.”
He shook his head. “You knew they were okay. If anything had happened to the sons of the former mayor of Boston it would have wound up in the paper. Our entire life winds up in the paper.”
She sighed then and closed her eyes. She said what every woman
said. “You don’t understand.”
Sullivan considered the assessment and found it to be fair. “I probably don’t. I probably couldn’t understand why you were spying, but at least I know that you were. And believe me, you have my complete admiration. You’ve been at this for a long time and none of us knew you were there. I don’t think you ever would have slipped up if that car hadn’t caught you.”
Tennessee stayed quiet and Sullivan shook his head. “People like you never open up. You just get used to not telling anything. Spies always have a lot more information than they let on to. There are lots of spies in Africa, you know. You don’t see them for a long time but they’re always there: contractors, tour guides, kids with backpacks. They blend in like those moths whose wings look like dried out leaves. It was all a sort of game for me, learning how to spot them. The good ones were just like you, very low profile, very discreet. You won’t find one getting drunk in a bar and going on about Dubai. You just get a sense about them. Spooks, they’re called. As soon as you notice one they’re gone.”
“What were they spying on?” It was better to talk about spying in general rather than the specific ways it might apply to her.
“That part was never completely clear, though in the end I guess some of them were spying on me.” There were two black men who were too often together, too often in the places Sullivan went. For a time he thought they were looking to buy, but then he noticed their clothes weren’t right. They were shabby enough but they changed all the time. Two poor men and every day they had on different filthy shirts.
“What did you do?” It was an effort for her to make the words and so he patted his hand lightly against her wrist. Sullivan told her she should rest while she could, that he would leave so that she could get some sleep. “I won’t tell anyone about this. It will be our secret.”
“What did you do?”
Finally he held up an ice chip and when she looked at him he put it in his own mouth. “I stole.”
Tennessee blinked as if this had managed to surprise her.
“I thought you knew everything about us already.”
“No.”
“Well, that isn’t fair. You couldn’t have known that. Nobody knows that. If you knew what I was doing in Africa I would spend the rest of my life trying to secure your position as the head of the NSA.”
“What did you steal?” she said.
He did not like the question, even though he had made the declaration himself. To announce a theft seemed cavalier, but to be asked about it felt like an accusation. Now he wanted to reword his statement. It wasn’t stealing exactly. It was skimming. He simply took a little bit off the top of everything he had to make more for someone else. He could turn twenty vials into twenty-one. Then he could turn ten into eleven. Then five into six. It was a kind of mathematical genius. In a country where the demand exceeded the supply by hundreds of thousands of vials he was saving lives and making money hand over fist, and then spending it fist over hand, pumping the fruits of his labor directly back into that fruitless economy. In that light it wasn’t even wrong. It was an expansive redistribution. “Retrovir,” he said, but there was no reason she would have heard of Retrovir unless she was HIV-positive herself. “Anti-retrovirals.”
He waited for her shock and reproach but she just kept staring at the ceiling. One of her eyes was full of blood where a vessel had broken the night before. He wondered if she was unable turn her head and then he wondered if she knew what the word meant. Anti-retro-viral. He was ready to tell her. He had been ready to tell somebody since he saw those two men in the street outside his apartment two nights ago. All along he had been waiting for someone to ask him, at the airport, on the plane. The woman sitting next to him put on her headphones and an eye mask and turned her chin towards the window. The flight attendants made their soulless trek up and down the aisles like members of the living dead. Someone should have turned to him and asked what had happened. Why was he leaving so quickly, what had he done? Had the balance of the scales tipped over from the living to the dead? Had he, without ever knowing exactly when it happened, started taking too much medicine out and putting too much purified water in? He had made up so many stories, fashioned credible lies out of pieces of absolute truth, but in the end no one had questioned him about anything. He had bought a one-way ticket, after all, and thanks to his hurried departure he had only the small bag. At every checkpoint they let him pass. In Logan, the customs officer stamped his passport and said, “Welcome home.” No one took a firm hold on his upper arm. No one asked him to step aside. He had steeled himself for the barrage of questions from his father, from his brothers who would certainly pull him off into the kitchen and whisper to him when they were alone, but then there was that scene that blew in through the front door with the snow, Tip in his boot, Teddy and Doyle so shaken. There was that doe of a girl who remained the focus of everyone’s attention. No one was asking him anything. He wondered if this was the way it felt to the spies. They wanted to tell what they knew but they were doing too good a job and so nobody ever asked. Criminals lingered near their crimes like narcissistic teenage girls who longed to unburden their souls with talk. But he wasn’t a criminal, nor was he like them. The drugs were his to begin with, or at least they were in his control. It wasn’t hard. He delivered to the hospitals, to the doctors. Tip was not the only one who had a grasp of basic science in this family. It wasn’t all fish. Measure out what you need and what you have and it becomes perfectly clear that they allow for a certain amount of waste in the dosage. All you have to do is take the waste off the top.
“Is there any more ice?”
Sullivan slid out a piece and gave it to her. It was small. “You should take what’s left. It’s melting.”
“I don’t feel well,” she confessed.
“Should I go get the nurse?”
“Have you been in Africa all this time?”
He wondered if she had heard anything he’d said to her. She must be at least as tired as he was. She had been hit by a car and was pumped full of what he imagined to be a complicated cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics. It was even possible that her hearing had been damaged in the fall. They probably hadn’t understood a single word the other one had said. “I’m going to let you get some sleep.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I told you.”
“Boston,” she said.
“Why did I leave Boston?”
“It’s your home.”
It had been a long, long time since anyone had asked him that. Leaving Boston for Sullivan was just a given. What amazed people was that he ever came back at all. It was the weather, he wanted to say to her. I couldn’t stand the way they pile the snow up in walls between the sidewalks and the streets so that you spend half the winter wandering around like a goddamn rat in a maze. And the business of having to always move your car to the opposite side of the street when there never was a spot for it, I hated that. I hated all the colleges and their sweatshirts, the self-righteous liberalism that made all the children feel so good about themselves while their parents coughed up $45,000 a year in fees to keep them safe. There was also the construction. It would never be finished in my lifetime. I left because my father gave up on me as soon as there were those other boys for him to bank on, and I hated those other boys, your sons, because they took his attention and his love without any effort at all. Besides, everything reminds me of my mother. That was reason enough to go. Every day I am in Boston I think of how she died and I will tell you that the Christ to whom you pray knew nothing of suffering compared to what she endured at the end. Outside of Boston I do not see her face on a daily basis. He could come up with a list that was longer than the phone book and every bit of it was true, but she was a spy and the only answer she’d settle for was the answer she already knew, and so he told her: he left because of the accident.
“Tell me.”
“What am I supposed to tell you? If you know where we eat dinner then you cer
tainly know I was in a car accident. People who don’t even know my name know I was in a car accident.” Sullivan stopped and rested his forearms against her bed. There was always that sound of the lights in a hospital. He could hear them from the hallways and for a second it made him think of Africa, that relentless buzzing just off in the distance and how in Africa it was another thing entirely.
“How long ago?”
He closed his eyes. Certain things exist outside of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother’s death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different intervals but always there. It happened in the past and it was always happening. It happened every single minute of the day. “I was twenty-three. I’ll be thirty-four in June.”
“You were hurt.”
“You know this.”
“I read some things.”
“Oh,” Sullivan said. “But you want to know what happened because you never believed that story anyway? No one believed that story.”
She stayed quiet then and she waited. Sullivan admired her tactics. He thought of the snow outside. The sky was bright blue now and the wind coming straight down from Toronto would be bitterly cold, but he could have walked it. Sally the nurse could have given him the fare to get home. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought to ask her in the first place. He could have promised her something, a phone call later on. The promise of a phone call was worth a dollar and a quarter to a fat girl. “Natalie always wanted to spend the weekend in Boston, but I liked to come up to Amherst. I had talked her out of spending her junior year abroad. Her three best friends had all gone to Paris and I managed to talk her into staying even though I had graduated. I wasn’t even there and I made her stay.” Sullivan tilted back the Styrofoam cup and took the little bit of water and the last shards of ice down the back of his throat. Tennessee Moser was right about that ice. It was brilliant. “It’s funny, but when I think about Natalie and everything that happened, the thing I feel worst about in some strange way is that I cheated her out of a year in France. I never came right out and said she had to stay, but everything I did made it clear: my mother left me and everybody leaves me and now you’re leaving me, too. She was twenty years old and she was so bright, A’s in everything, but she wasn’t smart enough to see through such a simple bit of bullshit. The truth is I would have been fine if she’d gone. I would have sulked around and slept with other girls and she would have memorized every painting in the Musée D’Orsay and spoken French like Simone de Beauvoir and we both would have had a great time. But I missed being in college. I liked going back on the weekends and sleeping in her little twin bed in the dorm room. I liked the idea of a girl giving up something as big as a year in another country for me. That was the kind of proof I needed in those days. That was love.”