Startled, she said, “Sorry?”
“Warned you. Night I proposed. I’ve always been…a little bit of a fuck-up.”
The laugh that escaped her was perilously close to a sob. She leaned so hard against the bed railing that it pressed painfully into her midriff, but she managed to kiss his cheek, his pale and feverish cheek, and then the corner of his gray lips. “Yeah, but you’re my fuck-up,” she said.
“Thirsty,” he said.
“Sure, okay, I’ll get a nurse, see what you’re allowed to have.”
Maria Alicante hurried through the door, alerted to Jack’s change of condition by telemetry data on the cardiac monitor at the central desk.
“He’s awake, alert, he says he’s thirsty,” Heather reported, running her words together in quiet jubilation.
“A man has a right to be a little thirsty after a hard day, doesn’t he?” Maria said to Jack, rounding the bed to the nightstand, on which stood an insulated carafe of ice water.
“Beer,” Jack said.
Tapping the IV bag, Maria said, “What do you think we’ve been dripping into your veins all day?”
“Not Heineken.”
“Oh, you like Heineken, huh? Well, we have to control medical costs, you know. Can’t use that imported stuff.” She poured a third of a glass of water from the carafe. “From us you get Budweiser intravenously, take it or leave it.”
“Take it.”
Opening a nightstand drawer and plucking out a flexible plastic straw, Maria said to Heather, “Dr. Procnow’s back in the hospital, making his evening rounds, and Dr. Delaney just got here too. As soon as I saw the change on Jack’s EEG, I had them paged.”
Walter Delaney was their family doctor. Though Procnow was nice and obviously competent, Heather felt better just knowing there was about to be a familiar face on the medical team dealing with Jack.
“Jack,” Maria said, “I can’t put the bed up because you have to keep lying flat. And I don’t want you to try to raise your head by yourself, all right? Let me lift your head for you.”
Maria put one hand behind his neck and raised his head a few inches off the thin pillow. With her other hand, she held the glass. Heather reached across the railing and put the straw to Jack’s lips.
“Small sips,” Maria warned him. “You don’t want to choke.”
After six or seven sips, with a pause to breathe between each, he’d had enough.
Heather was delighted out of all proportion to her husband’s modest accomplishment. However, his ability to swallow a thin liquid without choking probably meant there was no paralysis of his throat muscles, not even minimal. She realized how profoundly their lives had changed when such a mundane act as drinking water without choking was a triumph, but that grim awareness did not diminish her delight.
As long as Jack was alive, there was a road back to the life they had known. A long road. One step at a time. Small, small steps. But there was a road, and nothing else mattered right now.
While Emil Procnow and Walter Delaney examined Jack, Heather used the phone at the nurse’s station to call home. She talked to Mae Hong first, then Toby, and told them that Jack was going to be all right. She knew she was putting a rose tint on reality, but a little positive thinking was good for all of them.
“Can I see him?” Toby asked.
“In a few days, honey.”
“I’m much better. Got better all day. I’m not sick any more.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Anyway, your dad needs a few days to get his strength back.”
“I’ll bring peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream. That’s his favorite. They won’t have that in a hospital, will they?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Tell Dad I’m gonna bring him some.”
“All right,” she said.
“I want to buy it myself. I have money, from my allowance.”
“You’re a good boy, Toby. You know that?”
His voice became soft and shy. “When you coming home?”
“I don’t know, honey. I’ll be here awhile. Probably after you’re in bed.”
“Will you bring me something from Dad’s room?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something from his room. Anything. Just something was in his room, so I can have it and know there’s a room where he is.”
The chasm of insecurity and fear revealed by the boy’s request was almost more than Heather could bear without losing the emotional control she had thus far maintained with such iron-willed success. Her chest tightened, and she had to swallow hard before she dared to speak. “Sure, okay, I’ll bring you something.”
“If I’m asleep, wake me.”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, peanut. Now I gotta go. You be good for Mae.”
“We’re playing five hundred rummy.”
“You’re not betting, are you?”
“Just pretzel sticks.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to see you bankrupt a good friend like Mae,” Heather said, and the boy’s giggle was sweet music.
To be sure she didn’t interfere with the nurses, Heather leaned against the wall beside the door that led out of the ICU. She could see Jack’s cubicle from there. His door was closed, privacy curtains drawn at the big observation windows.
The air in the ICU smelled of various antiseptics. She ought to have been used to those astringent and metallic odors by now. Instead, they became increasingly noxious and left a bitter taste as well.
When at last the doctors stepped out of Jack’s cubicle and walked toward her, they were smiling, but she had the disquieting feeling they had bad news. Their smiles ended at the corners of their mouths; in their eyes was something worse than sorrow—perhaps pity.
Dr. Walter Delaney was in his fifties and would have been perfect as the wise father in a television sitcom in the early sixties. Brown hair going to gray at the temples. A handsome if soft-featured face. He radiated quiet authority, yet was as relaxed and mellow as Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young.
“You okay, Heather?” Delaney asked.
She nodded. “I’m holding up.”
“How’s Toby?”
“Kids are resilient. He’ll be all right as long as he can see his dad in a couple of days.”
Delaney sighed and wiped one hand down his face. “Jesus, I hate this world we’ve made.” Heather had never before seen him angry. “When I was a kid, people didn’t shoot each other on the street every day. We had respect for police, we knew they stood between us and the barbarians. When did it all change?”
Neither Heather nor Procnow had an answer to that.
Delaney said, “Seems like I just turned around, and I’m living in a sewer, a madhouse. The world’s crawling with people who don’t respect anyone or anything, but we’re supposed to respect them, have compassion for the killers because they’ve been so poorly treated by life.” He sighed again and shook his head. “Sorry. This is the day I donate time to the children’s hospital, and we have two little kids in there who were caught in the middle of gang shootings—one of them three years old, the other six. Babies, for God’s sake. Now Jack.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard the latest news,” Emil Procnow said, “but the man who shot up the service station this morning was carrying cocaine and PCP in his pockets. If he was using both drugs simultaneously…well, that’s psycho soup for sure.”
“Like nuking your own brain, for God’s sake,” Delaney said disgustedly.
Heather knew they were genuinely frustrated and angry, but she also suspected they were delaying the bad news. To the surgeon, she said, “He came through without brain damage. You were worried about that, but he came through.”
“He’s not aphasic,” Procnow said. “He can speak, read, spell, do basic math in his head. Mental faculties appear intact.”
“Which means there’s not likely to be any brain-related physical incapacity, either,” Walter Delaney said, ?
??but it’ll be at least a day or two before we can be sure of that.”
Emil Procnow ran one slender hand through his curly black hair. “He’s coming through this really well, Mrs. McGarvey. He really is.”
“But?” she said.
The physicians glanced at each other.
“Right now,” Delaney said, “there’s paralysis in both legs.”
“From the waist down,” Procnow said.
“Upper body?” she asked.
“That’s fine,” Delaney assured her. “Full function.”
“In the morning,” Procnow said, “we’ll look again for a spinal fracture. If we find it, then we make up a plaster bed, line it with felt, immobilize Jack from below the neck all the way past the filum terminale, below the buttocks, and put his legs in traction.”
“But he’ll walk again?”
“Almost certainly.”
She looked from Procnow to Delaney to Procnow again, waiting for the rest of it, and then she said, “That’s all?”
The doctors exchanged a glance again.
Delaney said, “Heather, I’m not sure you understand what lies ahead for Jack and for you.”
“Tell me.”
“He’ll be in a body cast between three and four months. By the time the cast comes off, he’ll have severe muscle atrophy from the waist down. He won’t have the strength to walk. In fact, his body will have forgotten how to walk, so he’ll undergo weeks of physical therapy in a rehab hospital. It’s going to be more frustrating and painful than anything most of us will ever have to face.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
Procnow said, “That’s more than enough.”
“But it could have been so much worse,” she reminded them.
Alone with Jack again, she put down the side railing on the bed and smoothed his damp hair back from his forehead.
“You look beautiful,” he said, his voice still weak and soft.
“Liar.”
“Beautiful.”
“I look like shit.”
He smiled. “Just before I blacked out, I wondered if I’d ever see you again.”
“Can’t get rid of me that easy.”
“Have to actually die, huh?”
“Even that wouldn’t work. I’d find you wherever you went.”
“I love you, Heather.”
“I love you,” she said, “more than life.”
Heat rose in her eyes, but she was determined not to cry in front of him. Positive thinking. Keep the spirits up.
His eyelids fluttered, and he said, “I’m so tired.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
He smiled again. “Hard day at work.”
“Yeah? I thought you cops didn’t do anything all day except sit around in doughnut shops, chowing down, and collect protection money from drug dealers.”
“Sometimes we beat up innocent citizens.”
“Well, yeah, that can be tiring.”
His eyes had closed.
She kept smoothing his hair. His hands were still concealed by the sleeves of the restraining jacket, and she wanted desperately to keep touching him.
Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he said, “Luther’s dead?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“I thought so, but…I hoped…”
“You saved the woman, Mrs. Arkadian.”
“That’s something.”
His eyelids fluttered again, drooped heavily, and she said, “You better rest, babe.”
“You seen Alma?”
That was Alma Bryson, Luther’s wife.
“Not yet, babe. I’ve been sort of tied up here, you know.”
“Go see her,” he whispered.
“I will.”
“Now. I’m okay. She’s the one…needs you.”
“All right.”
“So tired,” he said, and slipped into sleep again.
The support group in the ICU lounge numbered three when Heather left Jack for the evening—two uniformed officers whose names she didn’t know and Gina Tendero, the wife of another officer. They were elated when she reported that Jack had come around, and she knew they would put the word on the department grapevine. Unlike the doctors, they understood when she refused to focus gloomily on the paralysis and the treatment required to overcome it.
“I need someone to take me home,” Heather said, “so I can get my car. I want to go see Alma Bryson.”
“I’ll take you there and then home,” Gina said. “I want to see Alma myself.”
Gina Tendero was the most colorful spouse in the division and perhaps in the entire Los Angeles Police Department. She was twenty-three years old but looked fourteen. Tonight she was wearing five-inch heels, tight black leather pants, red sweater, black leather jacket, an enormous silver medallion with a brightly colored enamel portrait of Elvis in the center, and large multiple-hoop earrings so complex they might have been variations of those puzzles that were supposed to relax harried businessmen if they concentrated totally on disassembling them. Her fingernails were painted neon purple, a shade reflected slightly more subtly in her eye shadow. Her jet-black hair was a mass of curls that spilled over her shoulders; it looked as much like a wig as any Dolly Parton had ever worn, but it Was all her own.
Though she was only five three without shoes and weighed maybe a hundred and five pounds dripping wet, Gina always seemed bigger than anyone around her. As she walked along the hospital corridors with Heather, her footsteps were louder than those of a man twice her size, and nurses turned to frown disapprovingly at the tock-tock-tock of her high heels on the tile floors.
“You okay, Heth?” Gina asked as they headed for the four-story parking garage attached to the hospital.
“Yeah.”
“I mean really.”
“I’ll make it.”
At the end of a corridor they went through a green metal door into the parking garage. It was bare gray concrete, chilly, with low ceilings. A third of the fluorescent lights were broken in spite of the wire cages that protected them, and the shadows among the cars offered countless places of concealment.
Gina fished a small aerosol can from her purse, holding it with her index finger on the trigger, and Heather said, “What’s that?”
“Red-pepper Mace. You don’t carry?”
“No.”
“Where you think you’re living, girl—Disneyland?”
As they walked up a concrete ramp with cars parked on both sides, Heather said, “Maybe I should buy some.”
“Can’t. The bastard politicians made it illegal. Wouldn’t want to give some poor misguided rapist a skin rash, would you? Ask Jack or one of the guys—they can still get it for you.”
Gina was driving an inexpensive blue Ford compact, but it had an alarm system, which she disengaged from a distance with a remote-control device on her key ring. The headlights flashed, the alarm beeped once, and the doors unlocked.
Looking around at the shadows, they got in and immediately locked up again.
After starting the car, Gina hesitated before putting it in gear. “You know, Heth, you want to cry on my shoulder, my clothes are all drip-dry.”
“I’m all right. I really am.”
“Sure you’re not into denial?”
“He’s alive, Gina. I can handle anything else.”
“Forty years, Jack in a wheelchair?”
“Doesn’t matter if it comes to that, as long as I have him to talk to, hold him at night.”
Gina stared hard at her for long seconds. Then: “You mean it. You know what it’s gonna be like, but you still mean it. Good. I always figured you for one, but it’s good to know I was right.”
“One what?”
Popping the hand brake and shifting the Ford into reverse, Gina said, “One tough damned bitch.”
Heather laughed. “I guess that’s a compliment.”
“Fuckin’ A, it’s a compliment.”
When Gina paid the parking fee at the exit booth and pulled out of t
he garage, a glorious gold-and-orange sunset gilded the patchy clouds to the west. However, as they crossed the metropolis through lengthening shadows and a twilight that gradually filled with blood red light, the familiar streets and buildings were as alien as any on a distant planet. She had lived her entire adult life in Los Angeles, but Heather McGarvey felt like a stranger in a strange land.
The Brysons’ two-story Spanish house was in the Valley, on the edge of Burbank, lucky number 777 on a street lined with sycamores. The leafless limbs of the big trees made spiky arachnid patterns against the muddy yellow-black night sky, which was filled with too much ambient light from the urban sprawl ever to be perfectly inky. Cars were clustered in the driveway and street in front of 777, including one black-and-white.
The house was filled with relatives and friends of the Brysons. A few of the former and most of the latter were cops in uniforms or civilian clothes. Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, and Asians had come together in companionship and mutual support in a way they seldom seemed capable of associating in the larger community any more.
Heather felt at home the moment she crossed the threshold, so much safer than she had felt in the world outside. As she made her way through the living room and dining room, seeking Alma, she paused to speak briefly with old friends—and discovered that word of Jack’s improved condition was already on the grapevine.
More acutely than ever, she was aware of how completely she had come to think of herself as part of the police family rather than as an Angeleno or a Californian. It hadn’t always been that way. But it was difficult to maintain a spiritual allegiance to a city swimming in drugs and pornography, shattered by gang violence, steeped in Hollywood-style cynicism, and controlled by politicians as venal and demagogic as they were incompetent. Destructive social forces were fracturing the city—and the country—into clans, and even as she took comfort in her police family, she recognized the danger of descending into an us-against-them view of life.
Alma was in the kitchen with her sister, Faye, and two other women, all of whom were busy at culinary tasks. Chopping vegetables, peeling fruit, grating cheese. Alma was rolling out pie dough on a marble slab, working at it vigorously. The kitchen was filled with the delicious aromas of cakes baking.