Klecker had stopped the FoxBIte and removed it from Feaver by the time Jim returned to the conference room from the courthouse.
“‘But, Your Honor’?” screamed Robbie as soon as he saw Jim. McManis was too low-key and measured to be vulnerable to ribbing very often and Robbie made the most of the opportunity. “What were you going to do?” Robbie shouted. “Try to talk the judge into changing his mind?”
Caught somewhere between sheepishness and amusement, McManis sat in one of the conference room barrel chairs. His tie was lowered and he appeared drained by the entire experience. It had been such a confusing moment, he finally said. After all the preparation, his instinct was to react like any other loser. McManis’s brief protest in the courtroom actually amounted to good cover, which made it that much easier for Robbie to give him the business. Evon and Klecker hailed several other agents in from the hallway to listen.
“You’re the patsy,” Feaver screamed. “You’re supposed to lose.”
Both Sennett and I had arrived while Robbie was carrying on. Klecker had downloaded the recording magazine to the computer equipment in the cabinet and replayed for us the brief exchange in the courtroom. Listening, McManis shook his head and said he remained utterly lost about what Malatesta had been up to. He couldn’t understand then or now why the judge would schedule a hearing only to announce he’d reached a decision last night. But Sennett, running at warp speed, saw what had happened.
“That’s a snow job for the record,” he answered Jim. “It’s wallpaper for the derriere. This guy is really clever,” he said. “There’s going to be a perfect excuse for everything. The motion’s a close call. So Malatesta staged the hearing to show he had so little interest in who won or who lost that he even forgot he’d already ruled. If anybody ever questions him on the case, today’s transcript will be Exhibit A for the defense. We can’t drop a stitch or Malatesta’ll go right through the opening.”
A second of hushed admiration for Stan’s deft intelligence penetrated the still air of the conference room. For the agents, perhaps, it had never been quite as clear why Sennett was in charge. He held the floor an instant longer, the smallest man there, looking about, impressing his warnings and his discipline on each of them.
11
FOR ALL HIS OVERENTHUSIASTIC OPENNESS about everything else, Robbie was guarded concerning Lorraine. At the start, he said next to nothing to Evon concerning his wife, as if to emphasize that, notwithstanding his deal with the government, in this arena they could not intrude. But after six weeks around him, Evon had absorbed a lot about Rainey and her illness. She’d learned bits from Mort or the staff. And coming and going from Robbie’s office, she’d overheard dozens of his cheerful phone calls with his wife, as well as more sober conversations with the legion of caretakers in Rainey’s life—doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, masseuses, nurses, and the home health care aide whom he employed twenty-four hours a day. By now he’d even ventured isolated observations to Evon about Rainey, but only a sentence or two, rather than his usual extended digressions. Recently, he’d glumly reported on the need to puree everything Lorraine ate. “Puree of steak, can you imagine? Pureed muffin? She can still taste, at least.” His lean face took on the longing, distant look of a man at sea.
It was something of a surprise one day in mid-February when he invited Evon in to meet Lorraine. They had been in the neighborhood, down the block, in fact, meeting a prospective client. Sarah Perlan, a short and portly woman, wanted to sue the local tennis center for the Achilles tendon she’d torn when she’d stumbled on a wayward ball. When they were done at Sarah’s, Robbie had suggested a visit with Lorraine. Evon was reluctant to intrude, but he insisted Rainey wanted to meet his new paralegal.
“I guess I’ve talked a lot about you.” His furry brows crawled up his forehead as if this phenomenon struck him as unaccountable.
From the entry, you could imagine the interior as it had once been. Something of a neat freak, Rainey Feaver had tended to the austere, and had furnished almost exclusively in white. The living room, as Robbie had once observed, was the sort of place where a three-year-old with a chocolate bar could do as much damage as a tornado.
But sickness had a design sense of its own. Outside the house, Robbie referred to it as the Disease Museum, a proving ground and display space for every device, simple or complex, that might somehow improve the life Lorraine had left. Along the handcrafted walnut railing that ran up the turret staircase dominating the foyer, an electric hoist now whirred along a grease-blackened track. Metal hospital rails had been applied to all the walls, and there were a number of electronic doorbells visible that Rainey had once used to summon help.
On the first step of the staircase, he turned to Evon. “Sure you can handle this?”
He might have thought of that before, but it was too late to turn around. The truth was that she was not good with illness. Maw-Maw, her grandmother, paralyzed after disk surgery went bad, had moved in with her parents when Evon was fifteen. Her entire existence by then was founded on physical well-being, and she was often frightened in the presence of the old woman, even sickened when a sheet or hem slipped away and she caught sight of her grandmother’s legs wasted to the width of a hockey stick. She kept what distance she could. ‘You know, it isn’t catching,’ her mother finally told her one afternoon in her customarily brutal fashion.
This encounter would be worse. Maw-Maw’s decline had been long but natural. Rainey Feaver was thirty-eight years old and dying. There was really no hope. Some—a distinct minority of ALS patients—lived twenty years with the disease as it smoldered through their bodies. Stephen Hawking was by far the most famous of these slow-progressing cases. But Lorraine was ‘normal’—walking one day, falling down the next, and in a wheelchair within eighteen months. Her hands had weakened to the point that she could no longer hold a pencil or lift her arms above her head. And now, two and a half years after diagnosis, she could not feed herself or swallow well. She needed assistance even to remain upright on the toilet. She could not control her salivary glands, and shortly before Evon had arrived on the scene, they had been irradiated to keep Rainey from drowning in her own spit.
There were no prizewinners for the worst disease, Robbie had told Evon. He knew this from his practice. The body could fall apart in gruesome ways not even envisioned in nightmares. But this one, ‘this rotten motherfucker of a disease,’ as he repeatedly called it, was perhaps the most insidious. Your body deserted you. The voluntary muscles weakened, spasmed painfully, and then stopped working at all. Even the minutest volitional reflexes eventually disappeared, blinking usually being the last to go, rendering a patient entirely inert. In the meantime, intellectual functions remained unimpaired. Rainey thought. She saw. And worst of all, Robbie said, she felt. Inside and out. Movement ended with ALS. But not pain. She suffered intensely and could not writhe or lift her hand far enough to massage the muscles knotted in misery.
The Feavers had tried every potential remedy—herbalists and homeopaths and acupuncture. They’d volunteered for experimental drugs and had been accepted for one trial, a medicine that after ninety days left Rainey on the same steady downward slide. They had even gone to see a woman with a ridiculous machine made up of old vacuum tubes and a long flashing neon wand that she waved over Rainey’s torso while making a ‘woo-woo’ noise with her mouth. The scene, Robbie said, would have been worth a laugh, had they not been so humiliated faced with the unreasoning depths of their desperation.
The Feavers’ bedroom, where Robbie still slept, was full of contraptions. Evon crept to the threshold, but went no farther inasmuch as Rainey was in the bathroom. In her absence, Robbie toured the room, pointing out various machines he’d previously described. There was something called a Hoyer lift that brought Lorraine, when she had the energy, from the large hospital bed to her wheelchair. An adjustable tray table held a speakerphone, the Easy Writer—an appliance to hold a pencil—a mechanical page turner for reading
, and two remote controls for the huge theater-style TV. A glowing computer monitor sat beside the bed, along with an alphabet board on which Rainey pointed out letters when she became frustrated by her efforts to speak.
All of this, of course, had cost—monumentally. Including the caregivers’ fees, the figure she’d heard Robbie repeat was more than $2 million. He would soon blow through the lifetime cap on his insurance and already had a suit pending against the company for several hundred thousand dollars in covered expenses they’d refused to pay. But in a situation with few blessings, money was one. He had money, buckets of money, a hundred times the resources of most families, whom this disease routinely brought to the verge of bankruptcy. In their case, Mort had told Evon once, Rainey simply would not live long enough for Robbie to spend everything.
The process of retrieving Lorraine from the bathroom was under way. Evon retreated while Robbie assisted the aide, a tiny Filipina named Elba. Down the hall, Evon heard them encouraging Rainey as she was restored to the chair and wheeled back.
The night before, a Sunday, Robbie had gone to a wedding. Rainey had been too fatigued to go, but having promised to take his mother, Robbie attended, ferrying the old woman back and forth from the nursing home where she lived. Rainey slept in snatches between bouts of muscle cramps and had apparently missed his return last night as well as his departure this morning. Robbie described the evening’s doings now.
“Mother of all Jewish weddings. Right down to the sculpted chopped liver. Great food, bad wine. And even so, my Uncle Harry was drunk like always and got so sick he didn’t notice that he’d flushed his false teeth down the john.”
Much more softly, Rainey answered. Her faint mumbling speech, a wobbly ghoulish drone with a glottal hiccup at the end of every word, was growing worse every day. For this, too, Robbie envisioned mechanical aid, a computer-controlled voice simulator that could be operated so long as Rainey had any voluntary movement remaining, even flexing her brow. Evon had heard Robbie’s discussions with his wife’s former colleagues in the computer industry who were helping. The hardware had been purchased and stored somewhere in the house, but the Feavers held out against each of these changes as long as possible, since no matter how convenient they were, there was no way to avoid the emotional impact of the lengthening shadow of decline.
“To the nines,” he answered now. “Everybody. Inez bought a three-thousand-dollar dress—where she gets three thousand for a dress is beyond me—and as soon as she walks in, there’s Susan Schultz in the same thing. Then my Aunt Myrna shows up in this tight white number, a lady of what? Sixty? And through the fabric and her panty hose you can see the outline of the tattoo on her fanny. You don’t pick your family, right? I took my ma out on the dance floor in her wheelchair and whirled her around a few times. She got a real bang out of it.”
Evon heard Rainey’s voice again.
“I wish you’d been there, too,” he said more somberly.
He refused to linger on the downbeat. Whatever his private moods, with Lorraine, Robbie was determined to be the spirit of brave optimism. On the phone, Evon had often heard him counterpoint his wife’s reports of deterioration by reminding her of some other physical element that seemed to be withstanding the physicians’ dire predictions. Frequently, he’d turned to the computer in his office to tap out a message to her, especially when he’d heard a good joke. “E-mail,” he explained to Evon, an innovation to which Lorraine had introduced him. Now his tone ascended cheerily as he announced Evon. She girded herself.
A blast of air freshener could not fully conceal the many odors that shrank the large room—excretory smells, liniments and lotions, cramped body scents, the greasy effluvium of machines. As Evon entered, Robbie was massaging Rainey’s arm to alleviate a spasm. She was in her wheelchair, the HiRider, a huge impressive motor-driven affair, with elaborate padding and smaller wheels. Robbie had described the chair. It not only moved smoothly in every direction from a joystick control but rose to a standing position, so that once she was strapped in, Lorraine could even greet guests at the door. Tonight she simply sat, held upright by two belts across her waist and chest. She wore a high-fashion running suit, on which the zippers had been replaced with Velcro. From the corner of her mouth a crooked tube protruded, attached to a bottle of distilled water on an IV standard, which provided a steady drip to replace her saliva.
Even behind this obstruction, Rainey Feaver’s beauty had not fully deserted her, although she looked decades older than the woman in the photo behind Robbie’s desk. The muscle waste had emaciated her, and left her head canted slightly to the left, but she apparently asked her attendant for makeup every day and her dark hair retained its luster. Somewhat caved in, her face was still striking. The remarkable violet eyes of the photograph remained vivid and fully focused on Evon as she approached.
Hopelessly ill at ease, Evon did her best: She’d heard so much about Rainey. Robbie was proud of her courage.
Lorraine considered that and slowly worked her mouth around several words. Her lips had lost most of their elasticity and barely responded. Rough to be you? It made no sense, and Evon had to turn to Robbie for help.
“Lovely to meet you,” Robbie translated. He explained that certain letters had grown impossible—‘I’s especially. He smiled at his wife and touched her hand. “She always called herself a JAP.”
“Rame joke,” Rainey said with protracted effort. Evon laughed with Elba and Robbie, but despite all warnings, Lorraine’s acuity was jolting, a dismal register of the vast inventory of thoughts and feelings even now going unvoiced. The laughter, which had rippled through Rainey like a light current, led to a spell of coughing. This reflex, too, was weakened, and in order to clear Lorraine’s air passages, little Elba bolstered Rainey and applied a cupped hand repeatedly against her back, speaking sweetly in her sharply accented voice.
When Lorraine recovered, she resumed where she had left off. The interruption was unnoted. Life was what could be grasped in the intervals. She asked Evon about work. How long? Where from? She mustered only two-word questions. Robbie hovered over the chair and mediated. Even this woman in extremis Evon answered in her undercover identity. Robbie, who had shared nothing of his own situation with Rainey, would have wanted nothing else.
“Whah rif?” asked Rainey. “N’by?” She was asking if Evon lived nearby, apparently curious about why Evon was here in the dwindling hours of the afternoon. Robbie explained their meeting with Sarah Perlan and said that he was going to have to drive Evon back to her place. Something struck him as he spoke, a wayward implication in the detail, and Rainey responded at once to his apparent anxiety. In the faltering moment in which Robbie vamped to cover, explaining that Evon was new to town and still without a car, a different air came into the room. Rainey Feaver had heard her share of tales from her husband, especially regarding other women, and she clearly knew she was hearing one now. Her narrow, long-jawed face could show little in the way of expression, but even at that, her eyelids fluttered in a labored way and her lovely eyes grew darker.
“Co’ heah,” she told Evon. Evon pitched a look at Robbie, but his doting manner with his wife apparently comprehended no way to deny her. He let Evon take his place beside the chair. She bent closer because she could not hear when Rainey first spoke.
“He rise.” It took a moment. Great, Evon thought when she understood. Perfect for the government witness. A testimonial to his dishonesty from the person who knew him best. Rainey, after a moment of recovery, had more.
“He rise a-bow everfing,” she said. “Rememb’.”
Evon suddenly understood that she was receiving a warning, vengeful in part, but also perhaps shared in a sisterly spirit. Robbie was not to be believed. If he said he cared, pay no attention. If he said he’d marry her when Lorraine was gone, it was only another lie. Rainey’s eyes bore in as her message fired home. Robbie intervened to save Evon.
“She already knows that, sweetie. Everybody who hangs around me for a w
hile knows that.” Back beside the chair, Robbie was alone in smiling at his joke. “It’ll just take her a few years to see my good side.”
“Yes,” said Rainey. Years, she meant and went on deliberately in her watery monotone. “Then I be dea’. And you be happy.”
Robbie took quite a while with that. His tongue was laid inside his cheek. He gave her a look, a dignified request: Don’t talk that way. But he said nothing. He bent to adjust Rainey’s legs on pieces of foam cut to cushion them, and, still without a word, turned to take Evon back to the city.
In the car, after some time, he said, “They say things. PALS? People with ALS. It’s part of the disease. Because of the neurons that get affected in the brain stem. They lose impulse control. It’s actually funny in a way. You know, ironic. Lorraine was always one of these people who couldn’t say anything. It just built up. She burned holes in my suits. She threw my Cubans down the toilet. She once put cayenne pepper in my jockstrap. You can imagine what that was about.” A brief smile flickered up in admiration of his wife’s spunk. “But she couldn’t say what was on her mind. Now? Criminy. God, what I’ve heard.”
Facing him, Evon had no idea what to say. Her sense of the size of what was bearing down on Rainey and Robbie was still gathering. The whole episode had left her heart feeling as if it wanted to scurry around her chest.
The car slid to the curb beside the brown awning extending from her building. Pedestrians rushed beneath it along the refurbished brick walks in their hats and heavy coats, eager to reach the warmth of their homes. She still knew none of her neighbors. There was an insular mood to the area. Despite extensive renovation and renewal, bums and addicts could often be found in the mornings, asleep in the sandblasted doorways or beside the struggling saplings in their fancy wooden planter boxes. Local residents were in the habit of moving on with their business without greeting anyone.