“I know, but don’t say anything else like that. I just can’t start crying. I can’t. If I do I won’t stop. Do you know where my sister is?”
“She’ll find you,” Irving said. “Don’t worry.”
MEGHAN SAT BY his bed all day and all night. Evan brought her a stack of books and some magazines, culling the ones that had items about where she was, what her future held, and how Fallujah Levine was doing hosting the show. She never touched any of them. She sat straight in a chair pulled close to the side of the bed. It was a recliner chair in reddish leather, handsome, really, and in the middle of the night she could have leaned back and slept. She never did when I was there. Her eyes went from the heart monitor to Leo’s face and back again.
For perhaps forty-five minutes of every hour, she talked. Her voice was soft and faintly sibilant, as though she was letting diction take a holiday, as though it would penetrate Leo’s muddied unconscious only if it sounded like Mommy, not Meghan Fitzmaurice. The doctors had decided to keep him in a drug-induced coma while they waited to see if the swelling to his spinal cord would go down, but Meghan was convinced he could hear, and so she spoke to him. “I remember that time when you were three and you fell out of the canoe at the house in Connecticut,” she would begin, and even I would be lulled into a state somewhere between meditation and sleep as she went on: the fright, the fish, the warm bath, the hot chocolate. She talked of his first day at Biltmore, of the game at which he got hit in the eye with a lacrosse ball, of the paper he wrote on Greek mythology in which he likened the sirens to the Beatles, of the girl he had dated in eighth grade whose lip had been cut up by Leo’s braces and whose parents had called in high dudgeon. “And I said to Gaby’s mother on the phone, you should consider it a privilege that your daughter was kissed by my son!” That was how that one ended.
Word by word, phrase by phrase, she built a detailed panorama of an idyllic childhood. My sister had wanted to be a writer, not a celebrity, and she was never so eloquent as during those days. When she would finish, stop, take a drink of water, I would feel as though there was one unspoken sentence hanging always in the air: And they lived happily ever after.
“Do you remember the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff?” she said one afternoon as she stopped to drink some tea just outside the doorway. “Mother used to read it to us in her bed. There was a troll, I think.”
I shook my head, and she looked at me. Her eyes were so clear and her skin translucent, the color of amber. She looked years younger than when she’d gone away. It was as though she was searching for something in my own eyes, and finally she said, almost pleading, “You don’t, do you? I’m not sure I do, either.”
“Memory’s a swamp,” I said. “It’s hard to tell the snakes from the shadows.”
She put a hand out to my arm and brushed my belly instead. “That’s a smart thing to say, Bridget Anne,” she said in a half-mocking tone.
“I think it’s a line from a country western song. And don’t sound so surprised. I’ve always been smart.”
“So you got smarter,” Meghan said. “Me, I got tan. And thin. The dream of every New York woman, right? And meanwhile my son almost got killed.”
Once a day Mercedes came with Leo’s favorite foods wrapped in a heat blanket so that when she opened the container the aroma surrounded the bed. Macaroni and cheese, beef stew, sauce Bolognese, peach pie. I don’t know what happened to the food afterward. Meghan and I never ate any of it. A black car took Mercedes back to the apartment. Meghan went there every afternoon to take a shower and change her clothes. She was usually back in an hour.
“Anything?” she would say, and I would shake my head.
Leo had lasted two days in that Bronx hospital. The director was astonished, then truculent when my sister announced that an ambulance would be moving him. A team of neuroscientists from the Manhattan hospital habitually rated best in the nation for everything from heart transplants to mental health supervised the move. Leo was taken directly to what is known in New York as the Four Seasons floor. Not only does it appear to have been decorated by those who decorate the luxury hotels but it states in its brochures that it was. The fabrics are all toile, the furniture mahogany, the bathrooms marble. It was the floor of the hospital to which millionaire hedge fund managers came to have angioplasty or young movie stars to give birth, where socialites whose liposuction had gone terribly wrong lay in comas with a manicurist on call once a week. If not for the respirator, the IV lines, and the monitors, it might have been possible to think that Leo and Meghan had gone on one of those little trips they used to take occasionally, when she had to give a speech and she felt it was time he saw Madrid, or Bangkok, or Prague, usually with an embassy escort.
Sometimes, especially at night, I felt as though I was underwater, or underground. When you are from New York and you meet people from other parts of the country—or even the suburbs of New Jersey—they will express surprise that you manage to live where you do. None of them seems to understand how rude this is. How surprised they would be if you said, Gosh, it’s hard to understand how you manage to survive in the stifling upper-class confines of Sterling Silver, Connecticut, or Gee, don’t you get kind of tired of the sheer boredom of life in Little Town, Iowa? But those same people feel not the slightest hesitation in saying, I don’t know how you manage to live here, while standing in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or in the middle of Central Park. Sometimes they try to turn the insult on its head by congratulating you on mastering the pace, or the press of people. But mainly they mention the noise.
What they don’t understand is that there’s no noise to New York if you’re rich enough. There is a hermetically sealed office, the backseat of a car with darkened windows, an apartment with triple-glazed windows. The New York apartment of a certain size is so utterly soundproofed that I remember once leaving a dinner table to go to the bathroom—a ploy that I perfected to get through polite conversation with some of the big-money blowhards with whom I had been partnered—and standing at the window astonished as a fierce thunderstorm barreled across Manhattan. Grabby fingers of lightning arced from charcoal gray clouds into the blowing branches of trees in Central Park. Rain fell so hard that it was almost impossible to see the traffic on the street eleven stories below other than as a series of ruddy smears of brake lights. Faintly I could feel a vibration that I suspected was the kettledrum of thunder. But I couldn’t hear a thing.
I remember that the man on my right had been talking about a massive lawsuit some years before that had involved the very cooperative building in which we were now eating swordfish and orzo. “Don’t worry, Stephen, it was before you bought the place,” he brayed when our host had looked wary. It turned out that the residents had been able to hear a faint whir in their back pantries when the elevator passed their floor. “Did any of the residents actually go into their back pantries?” I asked. “Aha!” said the man, using his fork for emphasis. “That’s why it took so long for them to get on it. One of the housekeepers finally made a fuss.”
The elevator had been rendered utterly soundless. And when we left the dinner party, the storm had blown through as though it had never happened at all, with nothing left but wet sidewalks and a string of black-car drivers who had placed striped golf umbrellas in the front seats, close at hand.
The Four Seasons floor of the hospital was soundless in precisely that way, or at least to the extent that a hospital can ever be soundless. Below it was a busy Manhattan avenue, on which the trucks blew horns, the cars came to a grinding halt, the pedestrians shouted at cabs, and the bicyclists shouted at the pedestrians. It was all a dumb show out the windows of the Four Seasons floor, a mime city. I lived completely and utterly in two bodies, in my own, which seemed to have taken on a life of its own—or two lives, I suppose, since my own participation often seemed negligible—and in Leo’s. A machine breathed for him, with a sound a bit like an obscene phone caller with asthma. I often found myself unconsciously breathing in
tandem with him, and occasionally I became dizzy because of it.
Edward Prevaricator was on the hospital board. He had also sent the private plane, and provided the car that hovered at a side entrance all day and all night, for Mercedes, for Meghan, for me. He was an unobtrusive presence, coming in once a day for a few minutes just to ask Meghan how she was and to offer her the use of the plane to bring in that specialist from Miami, this one from Geneva. “He’s stinking rich,” Meghan said wearily one day after he left. “Machine parts or something. Plants all over the Midwest. It’s kind of refreshing actually, to meet someone who made his money by actually making something as opposed to just making more money.”
Evan was there every day, too, but the more time passed the less he put his arm around Meghan’s shoulder or took her hand. It was hard to blame him. Meghan was as thin and hard as a bamboo pole, her eyes glowing with a slightly maniacal shine. I waited and waited for her to weep. Perhaps, like me, she did it in the car or in the shower.
Alison and Tequila would arrive most days after work, and we would come out to the common room to meet them. The common room on the Four Seasons floor was a three-story skylit atrium with Oriental rugs, living room furniture groupings, and a grand piano. The pianist came at four and left at seven every day, so we sat and talked to the plaintive strains of “Für Elise” or, if he was in a jauntier mood, “Send in the Clowns.”
“The cops are all over the projects,” Tequila said somberly when Meghan had drifted back to the room to check on Leo. “They saying it was those boys that Armand was hanging with. Armand’s over to his aunt in Queens. I told the officers, I said they can talk to him whenever but I want him out of the house while this happening.”
“You need to get a lawyer,” I said.
“We don’t need no lawyer. It wasn’t him. I know that boy. He’s got his troubles, but he didn’t do this. He wasn’t with them. He was over to the college signing up for his summer courses, and he had to wait and wait for the adviser to sign, and I told him, That professor, he saved your butt, boy. He says they didn’t say nothing to him about doing this. They knew, those boys, that he wouldn’t go along, or maybe it just happened, you know, just sudden and careless. He told the officers all he knows. They can’t find the other boys. That tells you something, right there. All four gone missing, all at once. Huh.”
“Is Margaret all right?”
“She wants to come here, I say no. I don’t want her seeing him like that. She thinks she started all the trouble, says those boys were hassling her about her white boyfriend. She says, Mommy, he wasn’t my boyfriend, he was just my friend. I don’t want her coming here.”
“Tequila, would you like some roses?” Meghan said, emerging from the nurses’ station with a vase of white long-stemmed flowers. The arrangements had come in an unceasing cavalcade once the story had gotten out that the young man shot in the projects in what was assumed to be a drug deal gone wrong was Meghan Fitzmaurice’s son, a volunteer at a charity for homeless women.
The president of the network, Meghan’s agent, the managing partner in Evan’s firm, the head of the Biltmore School, dozens of people who had sat at their dinner table and gossiped about them after: they all sent enormous bouquets. Delphiniums, peonies, orchids, of course. They were all summarily sent down to the oncology floor after Mercedes collected the cards to make a list for thank-you notes. The Borowses sent chocolate chip cookies, the ones Kate makes herself. They were the only thing I ever saw Meghan eat during those days.
At the end of the week, Alison and Tequila came with a folder of drawings the kids had made. “Dude, Get Well Soon, Darren,” said one with a stick figure of a man standing over what appeared to be a chessboard. “I am so sad that you are sik,” said another from one little girl, construction paper cut into the shape of a lopsided heart. In all there were eleven cards and letters, including one from Annette, Delon’s mother, a Hallmark card that said on the front “May God Bless You and Hold You in His Hand.”
Irving would appear at odd times, two in the morning, two in the afternoon, his suit spotted, his tie loosened at the throat. The ICU had a family-only policy, but his deputy commissioner’s badge trumped that. He sometimes appeared to be the only person Meghan was interested in talking to, and she would walk around and around the atrium with him, her flip-flops slapping the marble at the margins of the rug. Her face would be set and her eyes down, but her mouth would work whether she was speaking or he was. Occasionally he would stop and bend his head to speak to her with the fierce and dark intensity that I had seen only from time to time, and only on television.
“I’m thanking God your sister doesn’t have a carry permit,” he said when he made me sit down in the small parlor where afternoon tea was served to the visitors to the Four Seasons floor. There was chamomile, mint, and Earl Grey tea, and cucumber and smoked salmon tea sandwiches. Watching Irving eat tea sandwiches is like watching a bear eat berries.
“She’ll be better when you catch the guy,” I said.
“Yeah, people always think that. It’s bull. I mean, we’ll get this guy, but he’ll just turn out to be some mook showing off for his homeboys. There won’t be anything biblical about it, which is what people always want. They want it to be big, epic, to mean something. None of it means something. Eat a sandwich. You have to keep up your strength.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask this, but do you guys think Tequila’s son is involved?”
Irving’s mouth was full. He shook his head and swallowed. “Nah, he’s clear. All these guys we’re hearing about are his friends, though. The thing is, most of them aren’t real players. A couple of them don’t even have juvie problems, they’re pretty clean. I think one of them had a thing for the daughter. Maybe it was just something that got out of hand. We don’t know yet but it won’t be long. We’ll pop somebody for something else, drugs or an assault, and they’ll say, Yo, you guys want to trade some jail time for information? And there we’ll be. We’ll get the guy. And we’ll nail him.”
“Did you tell Meghan all this?”
“Sure. Like I said, it’s not going to make her feel any better. And you know that kid, it’s not going to make him feel any better. He’s a champ, that kid. It’s gonna be tough, but he’s a champ and he’ll get by. Oh, hell, don’t cry.”
“I just want him to wake up,” I said, wrapping some of the salmon sandwiches in a napkin. “Oh, madam, I’ll take care of that,” said the young woman who served the tea. She brought out a fancy white box full of the sandwiches and an assortment of scones, and I took them back to the room, back to Meghan. The next morning I threw them away, untouched.
That was the morning the doctor told Meghan and Evan that he and his colleagues suspected Leo’s spinal cord might be irreparably damaged. When Meghan left for the apartment that afternoon, her back looked bowed, as though her own spine had been damaged, as though it was too slender a thing to hold her up any longer.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the taps full blast and sobbed, sitting on the toilet seat, my belly heavy on my thighs. Perhaps she was right; perhaps he could hear. I wouldn’t want him to hear the horrible retching sounds that were coming from inside me. Finally I splashed water on my flaming face and sat down in the chair that was still slightly warm from Meghan’s weight.
“Do you remember that day I went on the field trip to the Bronx Zoo with your class?” I whispered. “You got into that big argument with Andrew, I think that was his name, Andrew Backus, about whether an opossum was a marsupial. I think he was Australian, or he’d just been to Australia, and he was so full of himself, one of those fat kids with a loud voice, and he kept saying, No, no, only Australia had marsupials. Your voice was so high then, and you were very polite, you waited until he was done with all his spitting and screaming, and then you said in this very dignified way, ‘The opossum is the only American marsupial.’ And one of the zoo guys heard you and said, ‘That’s right. Most people don’t know that.’ Man, the wind just went out
of his sails. I remember afterwards I said to your dad, I think that kid lost ten pounds of bullshit. You went to school and repeated that and got in trouble. I got you in trouble.”
His heartbeat on the machine continued to count out a monotonous even pattern. Kerthunk, kerthunk. “Wake up, kidlet,” I said after each anecdote. Kerthunk, kerthunk. It was oddly soothing, the minutiae of memory, the details dragged up from the undifferentiated tedium of the past. Who cared what was true and what was a trick of the mind, which was the snake and which the shadow? I went on to the story about the doorman coming up to complain that Leo and his friends were mooning double-decker tourist buses from the library windows, and the time we went to the San Gennaro festival and Leo threw up calzone on Irving’s shoes after chugging a Coke.
“Wake up,” I was murmuring, and then I pushed the recliner back and fell asleep. Hormones, I thought dismissively to myself. Once I blinked and a nurse was there, changing an IV bag, humming under her breath. Later I shifted positions and saw Evan in the straight chair on the other side of the bed. “Shhh, it’s okay, Bridge,” he said quietly, and I slid down the slope of sleep again.
THE DAYS WENT by slowly and almost soundlessly, neither day nor night. I slept often, listening to Meghan tell stories, watching the lines around Evan’s mouth deepen, hearing the doctors murmur in the halls. There was a nightmarish shape to each day: the updates from Irving, the conferences with the doctors, the constant dozes from which I always woke momentarily unsure of where I was and, for just a blessed instant, ignorant of all that had happened. Maybe that was why Meghan never napped, because if she did she would smell the sweet equatorial air, hear the white pebbles rolling up and down the beach, and imagine herself swimming to shore, chasing the rays from their hiding spaces in the sand. And then she would wake to this.