Crazy for Cornelia (37 page)

“Do you think we’re using people like Creamcheese and Richard, getting them in trouble?” he asked.

“Not on my wing. We’re their Designated Couple.”

On the upstairs landing, Kevin slammed his elbow against a window frame at the top of the stairs and it sprung open easily.
He helped her through the opening.

They settled down on a five-foot slab outside the window, hidden from the view of guards patrolling the grounds. She pulled
the hobo bag apart, taking out bread and two types of cheese and spreading it neatly on their slab.

“We’re like bandits,” she said, “hiding in the rooftops of Notre Dame.”

She watched him break off a piece of yellow cheese for her, then stop. “No. You like the white one, don’t you?” he said.

She felt gratitude swelling up through her whole body, just because he knew those tiniest factoids about her. He fed her a
gooey morsel of Camembert.

“You see everything.” She kissed him, a tear on her cheek.

He smiled, not quite understanding, but put his arm around her and squeezed.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “How are we ever going to get ourselves out of the hospital?”

“You mean go AWOL?” He looked worried.

“Our checkout time seems up in the air, Kevin.”

“You could do it the old-fashioned way. Just show everybody you’re okay.” He looked serious. “I’ve been thinking about your
family business thing. How old is Tucker Fisk?”

“Twenty-eight.” She moved to tickle him.

He held her fingers back. “Is he going to make thirty million dollars as soon as he saves your father’s company?”

She sounded surprised. “How could he? He doesn’t even make a million dollars a year, I know that much.”

“How about if your father gave him a bonus.”

“A
bonus?
” she picked up and nibbled another bit of Camembert to keep from giggling. “Kevin, I wouldn’t call my father miserly by any
means, but he wouldn’t give Tucker a thirty-million-dollar bonus. And WASP families don’t believe in big dowries, even for
crazy daughters.”

Kevin had a thought.

“What about the people behind this hostile takeover…”

“Han Koi and his son.”

“Yeah. Would they give Tucker thirty million dollars if he, uh, ‘delivered you’?”

She almost choked on her Camembert. He pounded lightly on her back while she coughed and her face turned red.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Who gave you that idea?”

“Your driver.”

“Mike?” She recovered, breathing hard.

“I saw him here.” She tensed. “But he won’t say anything to your father. He says Tucker was talking on the phone to ‘the Chinese
guy.’ I think he was asking for thirty million, but I don’t have any proof.”

“Neither do I,” she said, coughing again. She sat stiffly. “Kevin, we have to tell my father, but he won’t believe me.”

“You’ll make him believe you.”

“How?”

“Well, I’ve been doing an electrical count.”

“A what?”

“I counted how many times you’ve mentioned electrical stuff to me the past three days,” he said, putting his cheese down.
“Zero. You used to be two people. You and—”

“I called her the Electric Girl.”

Called
. She spoke slowly and carefully, like the thought had to crawl up from somewhere. She wanted to be certain she heard no warnings,
none of the Electric Girl’s signals to protect her.

“You’re okay, Corny. Call your father. Tell him to come up without Tucker.”

“Why would he listen?”

She watched him brush the breadcrumbs off his hands.

“Because,” he told her, “you’re all Cornelia now. He’ll see that. What are you grinning about?”

“Because I can’t see people’s coronas anymore,” she told him. “But I can still see yours.”

In a stroke of ego, Tucker Fisk had taken out a whopping mortgage for one of the apartments on the top floors of Koi Tower.

He bought it sight unseen, bragging that he was too busy to take the elevator upstairs and look at it himself. Now it mocked
him, his little glass and steel one-bedroom squirrel hole that cost him $2 million and change. He had learned, too late, that
it was the cheapest apartment in the building because it had been designed as a fancy servants quarters for the $15 million
three-story palace next to it. Before the sheik who was supposed to buy it reneged.

Now he hated his dark quarters. He had expected to lord over the skyline of Midtown Manhattan from an eagle’s nest. Instead,
his floor-to-ceiling windows commanded a total loser’s view of the office building right across the street. All he could see
was its reflective mirrored glass. To prevent the workers across Madison Avenue from spying, he was forced to leave blackout
shades down day and night. They gave his living room, crammed with his oversized leather and steel furniture, the feeling
of a luxury coal mine.

He felt scalded by the indignity, and saw it as a sign to push even harder. He had plenty to do, keeping Lord & Company storming
ahead at 25 percent annual growth, while having to shoulder all of Chester’s family burdens besides. He performed these marvels
as a salary serf, not even a partner in the company he had led to greatness in spite of Chester Lord—the only CEO in America
who refused to lead or follow or get out of the way.

But he wouldn’t waste time feeling sorry for himself. He practically had the Cornelia problem solved. Assuming that his butt
boy Loblitz—of course, the arrogant young doctor wouldn’t like to think of himself that way—had done his job at the hospital
staff conference.

Tucker tore open the manila envelope that had just arrived by messenger. Concealed in bubble wrap was the tie clip microphone
he had given Loblitz—a marvel of Koi microengineering. Recorder and mike were both built into the little tie bar, a miniature
of the 1939 World’s Fair Trylon and Perisphere. Now he would find out for sure how Loblitz performed under pressure, and how
useful the young doctor would prove to be as offensive end during the last moments of Tucker’s game.

His muted lights reflected off the shiny tie bar. He took the little eavesdropper to the blinking sound system built into
his wall and attached the recorder to its adaptor. The recording, made on an ultrathin wire, would now play through his twelve
Bang & Olufsen speakers.

He kicked off his sleek black loafers, sprawled into his ergonomic egg-shaped listening chair, and flicked his remote.

The novelty of it tickled him, listening to what psychiatrists would say about Cornelia, now that Chester couldn’t hear them.

He first recognized Dr. Burns’s measured voice.
“Next, Cornelia Lord… Dr. Loblitz? Where are we?”

“Stalled.”
Loblitz’s voice sounded a decibel too high.
“She came to us hearing voices and believing that a dead inventor named Tesla is some kind of romantic hero. If we accelerate
to ECT now, we can get her back home in two weeks.”

Then a woman doctor’s voice.
“What’s the rush?”

Tucker scowled at his sound system, blinking red and green in the near-dark.

“Not to put too fine a point on the family’s interest, ”
Dr. Loblitz said,
“but they want her out for a wedding date in February.”

“Are wedding planners writing our treatment procedures now, Doctor
?”
The woman doctor again. Tucker’s chest heated up with acid. Who was she to question his plans?

“That has nothing to do with it,”
Loblitz sounded wobbly, obviously not expecting this counterattack.
“She’s resistant to therapy, she had a hell of a tolerance for chlorpromazine, and her defense mechanisms are hardening.”

“Maybe they should just postpone her wedding date.”
The stupid woman again.

Dr. Loblitz took a needling tone.
“This isn’t some feminist thing, Joanne.”

Then Burns.
“All right, start ECT next week, we’ll see what happens. Let’s move on. Joanne, what about Kevin Doyle?”

Tucker smiled broadly. His finger moved to switch off the button, but hesitated at the mention of that name, Kevin who?

“Doyle’s showing all the cues of a spontaneous recovery, ”
the woman said.
“He manages to control his Sebastian delusion around other patients. I’d say he’s even been a positive influence on Cornelia
Lord.”

Tucker jumped out of his chair and stood facing his audio player.

“All right,”
Burns told her,
“but don’t be in too much of a hurry to rush him out…”

“… out the door.” The words bubbled from Tucker’s lips. He saw the doorman Kevin Doyle, the runty mutt with sullen eyes giving
him backtalk. No. It was cunning that had lurked under the black visor.

So, Kevin Doyle, doorman of Slack City, had executed a clever end run around Tucker. How had he pulled it off? Absently, Tucker
destroyed the little tie-pin recorder with his fingers, ripping it apart to calm himself down.

Well, it didn’t matter. He’d seen that kind of play before, and knew how to stop it.

In the Abraham Maslow room that night, the Designated Couple managed to slink out the locked door behind an aide.

They ran as fast as Cornelia could, and she yelped with the fun of it, holding hands as they raced into the wind with her
hair flying.

“Five minutes,” he breathed in her ear. “I just have to show you something and we go straight back.”

They hugged the double line of trees along the circular driveway, checking for guards. Then they broke into a run again.
They rushed toward the tall, barren clump of trees at the end of the property, scuttled around the spiky, leafless woodland,
poking their way carefully until the outline of the electrical fence loomed ahead.

“You’ve got to watch closely,” he told her. “I can only do this once, or the guards might see.”

“Okay,” she promised, taking deep breaths.

“Ready? Watch the fence right there.”

Then he stepped back and threw a small object, as though skimming a stone across a pond.

The buzz of the fence made a hiss. She felt the electrical surge through the ground from fifteen feet away.

The curved lines and squiggles of tube were attached to the electrical wires. They lit up a brilliant red as light scampered
through the shape of Kevin’s heart.

“Kevin, your
Open Heart
. You finished it. How did you
do
that?” she cried, happy and bewildered.

“In Artistic Expression class. I got the teacher to order some plastic for me, nothing sharp or breakable, you know? Then
I snuck out and attached it.”

She bit her lip. “Weren’t you afraid of bringing the Electric Girl back?”

They held each other like close dancers.

“I don’t think we’re going to see that Electric Girl around here anymore.” He slipped both arms around her and pressed the
small of her back.

They kissed almost violently until the glare of a flashlight found them.

“I’m fine, really,” Cornelia explained. “Kevin helped me tremendously. I’m ready to leave the hospital now, and so is Kevin.”

Dr. Burns and Dr. Loblitz had left her alone with Chester. Her father sat in a large chair, uncomfortably. He crossed his
leg and played with a sock, pulling it up so it wouldn’t expose a white flash of his leg. She’d never seen Chester undone
by his executive-length socks before.

“Dr. Loblitz doesn’t agree,” Chester finally said, not happy about
it. “They’ll need to change treatment now to repair whatever damage this Kevin Doyle has done to you.”

“Damage?” Her eyes exploded. “If you’ll recall, Chester, what Kevin did involved pulling me from under the wheel of your car.
I just want to get to know him better on the outside. I realize that he’s not exactly at your social level—”

Her father waved with his hand, frustrated.

“It’s not that he’s a doorman,” he told her. “If it made sense otherwise, I could learn to live with the social difference.
I could even help him if he had the right material.”

“He has more material in his little finger than Tucker Fisk—”

“Cornelia,” he told her, “I didn’t just take Tucker’s word for it. I checked his background myself and made every effort to
find some redeeming value. All Kevin Doyle has ever achieved is to talk his way into this hospital. Why would he do that?”

“To be with me where you couldn’t blow him off as a nobody. And Tucker couldn’t manipulate him.”

“I don’t think so, Cornelia,” her father said with a mulelike shake of his head. “In the worst case, he’s a fortune hunter.
But even if he’s not, I couldn’t bear to see you marry a man whom you ultimately won’t respect.”

“Because he wants me? You think that someone would only be interested in me for my money?”

Her father put his chin in his hand and looked down at the floor.

“You don’t even know me, Chester, and it breaks my heart.”

Kevin found him in the visitors lounge, toying with a shiny computer the size of a thin-crust pizza slice on his lap.

“Have a seat, Kevin.” Tucker didn’t get up. “Or is it Sebastian today?”

“No, thanks,” Kevin told him, standing. “I sit all day.”

“Suit yourself.” Tucker shrugged. “I just wanted to show you something.”

He angled his laptop around so Kevin could see the screen clearly. It was a page from some encyclopedia. The title of the
page read, “Saint Sebastian.” The dense type under it was illustrated by the lost Giotto painting of Sebastian in a corner
of the screen.

“The funny thing is,” Tucker told him buddy-to-buddy, “Sebastian didn’t die from the arrows like everybody thinks. A woman
nursed his wounds and he lived. But, you know what? It didn’t matter. The emperor found out and sent the soldiers back to
beat him to death. The poor guy couldn’t win. Not after he took on the emperor.”

Tucker smiled sadly and waited for Kevin to speak. Kevin let him wait.

“I just wanted to share that with you,” Tucker went on. “The difference in your case, Kevin, is that I haven’t forgotten you
saved my fiancée’s life.”

“And you’re thinking, quid pro quo.”

“I don’t speak Latin.” Tucker shrugged. “I’m just telling you, there’s an upside to this. I found out something that might
interest you. There’s a program at the Benito College of Art in Rome for young artists.”