Authors: Jacqueline Carey
CHAPTER
11
P
at had read very little about LinkAge. Once Frank was arrested, she felt much more at home with stories like “Man Drowns in Jell-O” and “You Are What You Watch: Your Personality Revealed by Your Choice of Talk Show.” Occasionally when Pat turned on the TV, revealing further insights into her personality, she’d see a clip of a perky newscaster looking straight and hard into the camera and rattling off a few vague sentences about one of the many companies that had been plagued with accounting irregularities recently. These stories would often be anchored with an incomprehensible statistic or two about the loss to shareholders. When Pat came upon the article that mentioned Lemuel Samuel’s condemnation of LinkAge, she printed it out and then looked for others. In an interview with a local independent paper upstate, Lemuel referred to former CEO Riley Gibbs as “another unindicted scumbag struggling by on hundreds of millions of dollars a year.” A blog also quoted from him: “No one is saying that Gibbs and Culp didn’t pocket millions from their company. What’s bizarre is that we have to go to trial to prove that it was wrong.” Pat read articles online until late into the night.
At six she sat down to breakfast—coffee and a slice of cantaloupe. This followed her no-carbs-before-dinner rule, although she’d got so little sleep that maybe it still counted as after dinner. Ruby wasn’t up yet, because it was Saturday, but Pat had set the table with ceremony. In the center was a fire orchid in a funky old cracker tin lined with sphagnum moss. A blue beaker held a soy substitute for cream. Her Wedgwood plate showed a blue lover strumming a blue mandolin at his mistress’s blue feet.
Back at the computer off the kitchen, she did an address search for Lemuel, who fortunately had an extremely rare name. For the first time the leaps in perspectives offered by MapQuest made sense. To find a man like Lemuel Samuel you would of course start with the whole of North America and of course you’d eventually zero in on a single, mysteriously bending road amid a lot of blank space that could have been anything at all. What was hard to believe was that he lived less than an hour from the house in Lenox.
The phone rang, and when she answered, the prison announcement whirred to life with its usual
You are receiving a call from the United States federal prison system blah blah blah,
and then Frank’s voice emerged as if from a tube, sounding even more agitated than during her last visit.
“I miss you so much. I hope you miss me, too. You couldn’t possibly miss me as much as I miss you. I think about you all the time. I picture what you’re doing. The hardest part of being here is being separated from you and the kids. Sometimes I think I can’t go on, and then I think of you. I think of that great house I bought you. You forget how wonderful it is when you’re in it. I can’t believe I fell for the FBI’s line of bullshit. Why did I trust anything they said? I turned myself in and out, and it made no difference at all. If only I’d been smarter. You don’t see Neil in jail, unable to enjoy the wife he just bought and paid for. Do you think the kids miss me? I keep remembering that first time I saw you at the train station. You were so beautiful. Your hair was kind of fluffy from the heat. I can’t get it out of my mind. It hurts to think about, but I don’t want to stop. My roommate can’t believe I have such a beautiful wife. I’m such an ordinary guy. Yeah. An ordinary guy caught in another dimension. There are some guys in here that you don’t want to mess with, but mostly you’d never know these people were criminals. I don’t think anyone will be able to tell when I get out. I try not to think about that, but it won’t be too long before I can be with you again. Oh, how I love you.”
Pat interjected remarks now and then, but this was Frank’s call, and she was happy to go along for the ride. He never would have expressed such sentiments if he’d been home. The situation was heartbreaking, and as romantic as the Wedgwood, if you looked at it the right way. The forced separation, the unjust incarceration, the lovelorn cries. It was unfortunate that Frank’s avowals sounded like so much whining and complaining. Pat decided it was time to go to the country.
Guests expected elaborate plantings up there, but Pat considered it the one place where she did not have to put on a show. She constantly moved single plants around to compare various combinations; there was never any sense of a harmonious whole. No matter what she did, though, Frank said it looked pretty. He really was a good person, even if he’d become more overbearing in the last few years. His job had made him believe that he could—in fact, that he should—throw his weight around. Certainly it was better than hanging back. Still, Pat did not miss the way he always seemed to smash the back door shut rather than simply close it.
The lightning that had struck the house in Lenox the year before had given it a piquancy it otherwise might have lacked. Every successful country house has a raffish air; that is its point. Cooking utensils are haphazard and largely impractical. Linens disappear. Random aesthetic impulses rule in the bookcases: A long forgotten bestseller about terror on the high seas molders beside a collection of funny stories about dogs.
Pat could feel herself happily unravel as soon as she pulled into the dirt driveway, tires crunching on all the little stones. “What are we going to do here?” said Ruby, and Pat said, “I’m going to see an old friend, and then you and I are going to do something fun tonight.”
“Hooray,” said Ruby lifelessly.
Rose had called Pat the other day and said that Ruby had IM’ed her to ask why no one had ever told her what a rotten place the world was. Pat had been very interested, of course, but she was not about to tell Ruby that Rose had betrayed her confidence. Rose had always been a bit of a tattletale, anyway.
“Oh, honey,” said Pat. “We’ll be all right. It’s not like your father is a real criminal.”
“Then why is he in jail?” asked Ruby.
“It’s complicated,” said Pat.
Pat was wearing her skinny sunglasses, jeans, a black cashmere sweater, and a brown barn jacket. Her landscaping work had kept her fit, if not exactly youthful. She pivoted out of the car, flexing her calves and thighs as if to prove this to herself. Her legs were strong, her shoulders square, her upper arms firm. At least Lemuel would recognize her. Once she’d left Ruby in the company of her laptop and she was on the road again, Pat felt free to imagine Lemuel Samuel’s house but got nowhere. She did better with his yard, which would be neglected. She could take him out to lunch. She could meet him for a drink. They could see what happened.
The county road was pleasantly familiar. There was a gas station bordered with white painted stones, icy in the sharp air. The sign for the KwickCuts hairdresser had a scissors-shaped K. A garden store desperately offered half off blow-up Santas. But it was hard to find Lemuel’s street, which was supposed to go off to the left after Elm and before Bridge. Once she’d driven back and forth a couple of times, she figured out the only road it could be, although it appeared to be a continuation of another one with a different name.
All of this difficulty seemed fitting as Pat had never seen Lemuel in any domestic setting. When they had known each other they’d met at her place or in bars. She was at an apartment of his only once, maybe twenty-five years ago, on Jane Street. It was a mess—every single dish was dirty—but no one worried about stuff like that back then, certainly not a rolling stone like Lemuel. He never entered a restaurant, unless you counted a pizzeria or a falafel stand. He bought all his clothes at an Army Navy store, even his underwear. He complained about “fern” bars, although he had probably never seen a fern in his life (and certainly never the fabulous staghorn fern).
His house was a small green ranch, with a couple of neglected thuja in the front, branches breaking under the weight of the snow, and some scrappy-looking pines invading from the woods beyond. The bottom branches were dead, which was supposed to happen because no light reached them, but here the trees were all by themselves out in the lawn, there was plenty of light, and the bottom branches were still dead. Almost any kind of landscaping would be an improvement.
A man in a red checked hunting jacket was shaving off the top layer of snow on the driveway with a shovel, evidently trying to prepare it for the more formidable snowblower splayed out in the road. He straightened up when Pat stopped and leaned his stacked hands, icon-like, against the squared-off handle of the shovel. His clean pink face looked open and guileless because it was wider than it was high. His hair sprang up from his forehead and then fell down on either side with a regularity that suggested either luck or a natural fastidiousness.
“I’m looking for Lemuel Samuel,” called Pat from her car, window rolled down, letting in the heavenly smell of smoke from woodstoves. She
always
spoke to gardeners, no matter how foreign, and this one was cute.
He didn’t answer right away, which was no surprise to Pat. She chattered on: “I’m a very old friend. I haven’t seen him in ages. But we were very close. I wanted to talk to him about LinkAge, you know, the company that went bankrupt? I understand he was pretty angry.”
“Are you from television?” he asked.
“Why, no,” said Pat.
“I’m a neighbor,” he said. “I live over there.” He nodded at what could have been any of three or four more ranch houses farther along down the road.
“How convenient.”
The neighbor blinked but recovered. “They put me on French TV once,” he said.
“Really? About Lemuel?” She turned off the engine.
“They came to the house for more than an hour. I had to clear a space so they could set up their cameras. They had me move the cane chair under the deer head. They asked me a million questions. What sort of man is he? What sort of neighbor? What sort of town is this? And then all they showed was me saying that I hadn’t read his book. They got a whole lot of people to say it and then showed us saying it one after another. Like we were a joke.” As he made this statement, his expression did not change. He was still good-natured, matter-of-fact, ready to tell the story on himself, but unsure how to do so. “They got the mayor, too. They showed him sitting at his desk under his seal of office.”
“That’s awful!” cried Pat. “What did Lemuel do?”
The man shrugged. “He said they were trying to make us look like real Americans, only they didn’t know how. He didn’t care if I hadn’t read his book. And then I did! I was going to tell him, but I didn’t get the chance before his son found him.”
Dread pricked the back of Pat’s neck. “Found him?”
“I thought you were here because of that.”
Pat shook her head.
“He fell down the basement stairs.”
“Oh, no!” Pat’s voice slid up and down the scale. “What happened? Is he okay?”
“He’s in the hospital. He’s been there a while. I figured I’d better clear the driveway just in case.”
“You don’t know what’s wrong with him?”
“Not really,” said the neighbor. “He just didn’t wake up.”
“Does his son live here with him?”
“Recently. But mainly he lives alone.”
Her drive to the hospital was oddly like her trip to visit Frank when he’d broken his leg: empty roads, brittle surfaces, eerie light. This time Pat was at the wheel. You’d think that she’d have more of a sense of control, but she did not. She had a similar feeling of being suspended between two times. She realized now that it had been building for months. Would the new era begin today? Tomorrow? The next day? It was coming soon.
When Pat was directed to a room at the ICU, she thought at first that the nurse must have made a mistake. In the bed was a strange lump of wrecked flesh; you wouldn’t even see someone so unhealthy begging for change on the streets. But as she was turning to go back to the nurses’ station, she started to recognize traces of the earlier face: Lemuel’s half smile was gone, of course, but the full lips were there, and the darkness around the eyes was the same, and a line on his cheek indicated where the crease had been. Pat sat heavily in the hospital chair near the bed.
The noise was incredible—whirring, beeping, buzzing, hissing. It couldn’t all be normal. Through the glass window separating her from the rest of the ICU, she could see several people milling about, watching a wall of monitors, pushing at a huge stainless-steel machine on wheels, bending over to pick up ripped plastic bags. Two technicians conferred in urgently muffled tones. A sense of impending disaster was everywhere.
Pat peeked again at “Lemuel.” Two tubes snaking out of his mouth were taped onto his bloated cheek. Another tube stuck out of his neck. Three wires sprang from pads on his chest. Two IVs were secured to a wrist board; the wrist was lashed to the stainless-steel piping that constituted the side of the bed. A final tube dropped from under the white woven hospital blanket to a heavy frosted-plastic sack in front of her. His urine.
The man was the size of two of the old Lemuels. He was as big and white and tightly encased as an overstuffed laundry bag. His belly swelled under the blanket. You could tell he had no clothes on, but his ankles and legs, all huge, were tubed in stretchy black. A multitude of machines peered down at him.
In strode a young doctor writing on a clipboard. She was followed by a young man in an oversize pea coat.
“Doctor, please,” said Pat. “Why is he making that sound?”
“What sound?” The doctor did not stop writing.
“That!” Pat pounced, then tried to imitate it.
“It’s just moisture in the breathing tube. It’s bound to happen when you’ve retained as much fluid as he has.” The doctor turned over a few pages on her clipboard so forcibly they made a slashing noise.
Pat looked dubious. “What exactly is wrong with him?”
“Are you a family member?” More noisy ruffling as another page went over the bulging clip.
“I don’t know,” said Pat mournfully.
“I see,” said the doctor, making long cutting marks across the paper. “Well, I hope you have some influence over him. He has congestive heart failure. And if he ever gets out of here, he’s going to have to stop drinking.”