American Savior (3 page)

“And you’re sure you weren’t feeling better before he came by?”

“I’ve never felt this better. It’s like I have another body or something. They’re coming back in a few minutes to do some PFTs.”

“Which stands for what? Pretty fine tomatoes?”

“Pulmonary function test.”

“How do you know these things? I mean, ‘vitals,’ ‘pulmonary function?’”

“Long story, Russ,” she said.

At that point, Alba made her presence known to me. She was standing in the corridor holding up one finger. I nodded.

“Last question, Amelia,” I said. “What did he say to you, this nice man?”

“That’s a secret.”

“Even for the TV guy?”

The look she gave me then seemed to have something in it …
pity
is the word I’d use, I guess, though it doesn’t make me happy to admit that. I’ve never forgotten that look, or the sense that this nine-year-old saw through me and down into something I kept telling myself was not there. “He asked me to keep it a secret until he tells everybody, and I will,” she said with conviction.

“All right,” I told her cheerfully. “They’re taking me away now. I’m sorry to have made you tell the story again, and I’m happy you’re feeling better, really I am.”

I hoped she might ask for my autograph or something, but she’d met a lot of celebrities in her life, I guess. She just nodded and looked out the window again, as if my visit didn’t mean that much to her either way.

I tried, of course, to get Amelia and her parents on camera, but it was no sale. They were nice people, shy people actually, who gave millions to various inner city and environmental causes. You could see that they were hoping against hope their daughter wouldn’t slip back into the iron grasp of her illness, and that they were not into having their faces on the TV for any reason. Nonetheless, I cobbled together a nice piece about the Good Visitor (Wales’s idea, nobody else liked the name), trying to sound neutral, maybe slightly skeptical but definitely not cynical. Maybe like I thought it might be partly true, and even if it wasn’t, it was a feel-good tale that balanced off the usual nightly misery.

FOUR

After my visit to Mercy Hospital I started making notes about the Good Visitor story. I had been a compulsive diary-keeper my whole life (growing up in an odd family will do that to you), so it was more or less natural to jot down the news of the day. The first entry looks like this:

June 3

W. River yesterday. Mercy. Alba S and the miracle girl. Parents say no to camera. Is there a chance all this is not b.s.? Later. Date with Z. Stewardess. Closet. Talk.

The last part of it means that, on the night of my visit to Wells River, I had a “date” with Zelda. Date is what we called it when I went over to her place for the night or she came over to mine. When we went to a restaurant or a movie, it was “going out,” but we didn’t do that very often because we would inevitably attract the attention of some guy with a belly the size of three watermelons, and he’d come up and slap me on the shoulder like we were former shipmates, tell me I was looking good, and then remind me I’d made a slip of the tongue a few nights earlier, saying something like “Channel 23 Nude” instead of “Channel 23 News.” A guy like that can take the shine off a night out pretty fast.

A night at Zelda’s carried no such risks. Her idea of a date was, for example, just what happened that evening: she met me at the door of her
condo dressed up like a flight attendant: the tight skirt, the tied-back hair, the wings pinned to her white blouse (she spent a lot of time in vintage clothing stores). She had a martini in hand, and made me sit in the armchair and served me, then came back every few minutes as I sipped, and asked, in a certain tone of voice, if there was anything else she could do for me. And so on. You get the idea. Great imagination, that woman, and a pretty fair actress, too. We ended up in the closet, pretending it was the lavatory and we were thirty thousand feet above Arizona, ripping off each other’s clothes. Stewardess one night, policewoman another, dental hygienist, call girl, librarian. And then, a few times a month, just a pretty woman memorializing the missionaries. She had a constantly expanding repertoire of roles and enjoyed it as much as I did, which was a great deal. Plus, there were other sides of her I liked, and other sides of me she seemed to like, amazing as that may be.

Afterward, I’d want to sleep and she’d want to talk. My listening to her talking was part of the deal, as it were, and that seemed fair enough to me, though after a day at the station or on the streets, I preferred quiet. After a day of listening to clients, she, naturally enough, wanted to talk. That night, after our exhausting flight across the country, we lay in bed, and just as I was sinking down into that heaven of postcoital rest, Zelda said, “Why didn’t you show pictures of that little girl on the report tonight?”

“Not allowed.”

“By who?”

“Head nurse. Girl’s parents. The nurse probably shouldn’t have even let me in the girl’s room but the parents were away and she did.”

“How old is this nurse?”

“Twice as old as you and a tenth as nice. Did you think the story was kind of flat without the visuals?”

“As flat as the front of the hospital,” Zelda said. One of the things I liked about her was that she could be perfectly frank without giving offense or trying to flatter. She was lying next to me, on her back, very close, and she took my hand and squeezed my fingers. “Don’t fall asleep yet, Russ.”

“Okay.”

“I think there’s something special about this story.”

“Lots of people do. You should see the calls we—”

“No. I mean it. It gave me a feeling tonight.”

“That was me. In the closet. I gave you that feeling.”

“Stop joking.”

“Okay.”

“It was as if I knew this would happen, or something. I was watching you and listening, and it was as if I’d seen the broadcast before.”

“
Danger view,
is what the French call it.”

“Stronger than that.”

“Danger view with no ice. Straight up.”

“You can be an ass.”

“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately, in varying forms.”

“You wouldn’t know a great thing if it sat in your lap.… Plus, if you get a better job in some other city, what’s supposed to happen to me, to us?”

This was, it seemed to me in my exhausted state, the actual heart of the discussion. I wanted to tell Zelda that there were days I knew I couldn’t live without her, but the dust storm of my past hadn’t settled enough for me to see my life clear yet, and I wasn’t ready for another marriage. She was one of those women who had happiness written all over her future, and deservedly so. It’s just that I was one of those men who had sadness written all over my past, and I was thirty then, ambitious as hell, and not ready. So I told a tiny lie. I said, “If a job someplace else comes through I have a plan, okay? Let’s not talk about it until then, so we don’t jinx anything.”

From years of listening to troubled souls, Zelda had an instinct for the convenient untruth. She didn’t answer. I heard the whisper of the sheets as she rolled away from me, and I felt the nice warmth disappear. And then I was alone with the person I’d turned out to be.

FIVE

You would think that the occurrence of two apparent miracles in the same neck of the woods would make a splash in the media world. But it didn’t. The Wells River/Mercy Hospital/Good Visitor story evaporated from the collective consciousness like moisture off a sidewalk in a blast of summer sun. In the first place, most educated people don’t believe in miracles. And in the second place, very few stories have a lifespan of more than a day or two. The American news-watching public is promiscuous and impatient in its appetites, a fact well understood by the media conglomerates.

In spite of that, for a couple of weeks I made calls to the hospital—without telling anybody, as a private project—and checked in with Nurse Seunier to see how things stood. (I kept notes about it in my journal, too. I had a weird intuition that it would turn into something big.) I was pleased to learn that Amelia Simmelton was doing well, and then continuing to do well, and then going home she was doing so well. From the sound of Nurse Seunier’s voice, I could tell the story had not evaporated from her consciousness. “This is so unusual in my experience that you should come up and talk to me about it again at some point,” she suggested, in our last conversation. “You people should do another story on it.” I thought her invitation was nice, but I had so many other things going then that I never went back to see the nurse. Wales didn’t mention the story again either, so there was, as we say, no professional impetus.

But then, one ordinary night after we’d finished the six o’clock report,
and I’d gone across the street to Patsanzakis’s for my usual steak-and-cheese, a beer, and two pieces of baklava (I work out like a maniac to keep the weight off; the health club membership is tax deductible), and had come back to the office and was kind of lounging around, checking to see what I might have on the docket for the next day, my private line rang. I picked up, hoping it would be Zelda pretending to be Beyoncé and wanting to party after the late broadcast, but it wasn’t. The voice, masculine and unfamiliar, pronounced my name with a certain authority. “Russell Thomas?”

“Speaking.”

“Meet me at Pete’s Cafe in Wells River at 2:25 tomorrow.”

“Sure, happy to. Who’s this supposed to be?”

“The Good Visitor.”

“Right. You and sixty-five other people who’ve called the station in the past few weeks. How did you get this number, anyway?”

“I touched Amelia Simmelton on her left knee,” the guy said, and then hung up.

This fell outside even the usual bizarre territory of my anonymous phone messages. And that’s saying something, because those messages ran the gamut from weird to pathological. Once, when I’d been on the job only a few years and was still green, I had a call from someone claiming to have inside information on a professional football drug scandal that was much in the news at the time. I thought it might be my ticket to a bigger market, because this was a big-market story. So, ambitious, young, pumping iron, feeling brave, I agreed to meet this someone on a not-very-nice street in a not-very-reputable section of the city at an unwise hour. The intrepid reporter. Also, the intrepid reporter who wasn’t smart enough to tell anyone where he was going.

And there on that disreputable street, I stood on a dark sidewalk in front of a bar and waited. At last, a Cadillac drove up, the passenger window slid down, I was motioned in. And in I went. I was driven a few blocks to the unlit parking lot of an out-of-business candy factory and “rolled” as we used to say; that is, I was banged over the head from behind by a friend of my “source,” then roughed up and pushed out of
the car after being relieved of my wallet and other assorted valuables—a nice watch, a dependable cell phone, tickets to the Bob Dylan concert in Wells River the following week. I woke up in a puddle with a bloody, broken nose, a very sore head and neck, and scratches on my face, hands, and knees.

For a while, Wales and I thought about doing it as a story: brave reporter mugged by unscrupulous thugs. But, in the end, we decided against it on the grounds that it might give a disturbed segment of our viewing audience the idea that roving reporters existed to fulfill the darker aspects of their fantasy lives. I took two weeks off with pay. The police went to the Dylan concert and found the two geniuses sitting in my seats; they did eighteen months in Winford State Prison and have not been in contact with me since. After the initial emergency room visit in West Zenith, I went up to Wells River to have my nose straightened and my head X-rayed again, at Mercy, where they have a facial reconstruction specialist and a brain guy. (Nurse Seunier remembered me from that short stay, not my finest hour.)

It ended up working out well, though, because it was during that week, after my hospital visit, that I met Zelda. It was at Pete’s, in fact, a cute vegetarian cafe/coffee shop a block off Wells River’s main street. Zelda, I might have neglected to mention, is a therapist. At the time, in addition to her thriving private practice, she was teaching a course in counseling at the expensive women’s college in Wells River, and was reading some student papers over a mochaccino with a shot of vanilla syrup and buttered wheat toast.

“There’s something
jai no say qua
about a woman who eats buttered wheat toast,” I offered, a terrible line, I admit, but I blame it on the pain medication. Plus, I had momentarily forgotten that my face was all scratched up, the nose bandaged, and one eye still black. So I was not looking my best.

Without even lifting her eyes she said, “Yes, and there’s something
je ne sais quoi
about jerks like you.”

I didn’t respond but kept looking at her. And that made her glance up. And when she glanced up, she took in the awful spectacle of my battered
visage. I thought, for a second, that she’d either apologize out of pity or run screaming from the place. But she didn’t do either. She just appraised me, taking in the raw scratches, the dark purple swatch under my left eye, and the bandage/splint type of thing they were using to hold my nose in place.

“A sight for sore eyes, aren’t I?” I said, trying again.

“The hair looks good at least.”

I thanked her. We laughed. The conversation sputtered and backfired for a while before we stumbled onto one of my passions—the American political scene, which, in those years, was fitting material for a comedy show. It turned out that, in the most recent election, we’d both voted for a candidate for senator who claimed to have a secret invention, not yet patented, that would fuel cars with vanilla extract. He was from East Zenith. I’d done a story on him. Zelda hadn’t seen the story (she watched our competitors) but had voted for the guy because the incumbent senator, who we both liked, had no chance of losing, and because she had a soft spot for offbeat, harmless types. Which somehow led to her giving me her “contact information,” as she called it. To wit, an e-mail address. I fired off an amusing note that afternoon. She answered it two weeks later. The rest is history.