Authors: Anna Quindlen
At the end of the week, Alison and Tequila came with a folder of drawings the kids had made. “Dude, Get Well Soon, Darren,” said one with a stick figure of a man standing over what appeared to be a chessboard. “I am so sad that you are sik,” said another from one little girl, construction paper cut into the shape of a lopsided heart. In all there were eleven cards and letters, including one from Annette, Delon’s mother, a Hallmark card that said on the front “May God Bless You and Hold You in His Hand.”
Irving would appear at odd times, two in the morning, two in the afternoon, his suit spotted, his tie loosened at the throat. The ICU had a family-only policy, but his deputy commissioner’s badge trumped that. He sometimes appeared to be the only person Meghan was interested in talking to, and she would walk around and around the atrium with him, her flip-flops slapping the marble at the margins of the rug. Her face would be set and her eyes down, but her mouth would work whether she was speaking or he was. Occasionally he would stop and bend his head to speak to her with the fierce and dark intensity that I had seen only from time to time, and only on television.
“I’m thanking God your sister doesn’t have a carry permit,” he said when he made me sit down in the small parlor where afternoon tea was served to the visitors to the Four Seasons floor. There was chamomile, mint, and Earl Grey tea, and cucumber and smoked salmon tea sandwiches. Watching Irving eat tea sandwiches is like watching a bear eat berries.
“She’ll be better when you catch the guy,” I said.
“Yeah, people always think that. It’s bull. I mean, we’ll get this guy, but he’ll just turn out to be some mook showing off for his homeboys. There won’t be anything biblical about it, which is what people always want. They want it to be big, epic, to mean something. None of it means something. Eat a sandwich. You have to keep up your strength.”
“I probably shouldn’t ask this, but do you guys think Tequila’s son is involved?”
Irving’s mouth was full. He shook his head and swallowed. “Nah, he’s clear. All these guys we’re hearing about are his friends, though. The thing is, most of them aren’t real players. A couple of them don’t even have juvie problems, they’re pretty clean. I think one of them had a thing for the daughter. Maybe it was just something that got out of hand. We don’t know yet but it won’t be long. We’ll pop somebody for something else, drugs or an assault, and they’ll say, Yo, you guys want to trade some jail time for information? And there we’ll be. We’ll get the guy. And we’ll nail him.”
“Did you tell Meghan all this?”
“Sure. Like I said, it’s not going to make her feel any better. And you know that kid, it’s not going to make him feel any better. He’s a champ, that kid. It’s gonna be tough, but he’s a champ and he’ll get by. Oh, hell, don’t cry.”
“I just want him to wake up,” I said, wrapping some of the salmon sandwiches in a napkin. “Oh, madam, I’ll take care of that,” said the young woman who served the tea. She brought out a fancy white box full of the sandwiches and an assortment of scones, and I took them back to the room, back to Meghan. The next morning I threw them away, untouched.
That was the morning the doctor told Meghan and Evan that he and his colleagues suspected Leo’s spinal cord might be irreparably damaged. When Meghan left for the apartment that afternoon, her back looked bowed, as though her own spine had been damaged, as though it was too slender a thing to hold her up any longer.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the taps full blast and sobbed, sitting on the toilet seat, my belly heavy on my thighs. Perhaps she was right; perhaps he could hear. I wouldn’t want him to hear the horrible retching sounds that were coming from inside me. Finally I splashed water on my flaming face and sat down in the chair that was still slightly warm from Meghan’s weight.
“Do you remember that day I went on the field trip to the Bronx Zoo with your class?” I whispered. “You got into that big argument with Andrew, I think that was his name, Andrew Backus, about whether an opossum was a marsupial. I think he was Australian, or he’d just been to Australia, and he was so full of himself, one of those fat kids with a loud voice, and he kept saying, No, no, only Australia had marsupials. Your voice was so high then, and you were very polite, you waited until he was done with all his spitting and screaming, and then you said in this very dignified way, ‘The opossum is the only American marsupial.’ And one of the zoo guys heard you and said, ‘That’s right. Most people don’t know that.’ Man, the wind just went out of his sails. I remember afterwards I said to your dad, I think that kid lost ten pounds of bullshit. You went to school and repeated that and got in trouble. I got you in trouble.”
His heartbeat on the machine continued to count out a monotonous even pattern. Kerthunk, kerthunk. “Wake up, kidlet,” I said after each anecdote. Kerthunk, kerthunk. It was oddly soothing, the minutiae of memory, the details dragged up from the undifferentiated tedium of the past. Who cared what was true and what was a trick of the mind, which was the snake and which the shadow? I went on to the story about the doorman coming up to complain that Leo and his friends were mooning double-decker tourist buses from the library windows, and the time we went to the San Gennaro festival and Leo threw up calzone on Irving’s shoes after chugging a Coke.
“Wake up,” I was murmuring, and then I pushed the recliner back and fell asleep. Hormones, I thought dismissively to myself. Once I blinked and a nurse was there, changing an IV bag, humming under her breath. Later I shifted positions and saw Evan in the straight chair on the other side of the bed. “Shhh, it’s okay, Bridge,” he said quietly, and I slid down the slope of sleep again.
T
HE DAYS WENT
by slowly and almost soundlessly, neither day nor night. I slept often, listening to Meghan tell stories, watching the lines around Evan’s mouth deepen, hearing the doctors murmur in the halls. There was a nightmarish shape to each day: the updates from Irving, the conferences with the doctors, the constant dozes from which I always woke momentarily unsure of where I was and, for just a blessed instant, ignorant of all that had happened. Maybe that was why Meghan never napped, because if she did she would smell the sweet equatorial air, hear the white pebbles rolling up and down the beach, and imagine herself swimming to shore, chasing the rays from their hiding spaces in the sand. And then she would wake to this.
“I’m having those contractions,” I said to Evan one day as we sat on either side of the bed, during one of those rare times when Meghan had left the hospital.
“You are? Are you sure? Should I call the nurse?”
“Not the real contractions, the fake kind.” A nurse came in to adjust the IV and smiled reflexively at us both. “They’re some sort of practice contractions. They have a strange name. Like Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound contractions.”
“Ezra Pound?”
“Braxton Hicks,” murmured the nurse.
“That’s it. I’m having Braxton Hicks contractions.”
“Absolutely normal at this stage,” said the nurse. “And that’s from someone who spent eleven years in labor and delivery.” She patted my shoulder on her way out.
“Ezra Pound,” Evan said. “Bridge, I miss the wackiness you brought into my life.”
“Yeah? I miss stuff, too, Ev.”
“Like what? Or should I even ask?”
“I don’t know. I miss my illusions, mainly. It turns out I had a lot of them. Which is strange when you think about it. I mean, of all of us I probably have the most real-world job. Well, maybe not as much as Irving, but close. You’d think I’d be more realistic than the rest of you put together.”
“That’s false logic. If you were really realistic, you’d be a partner at some law firm with two kids in private school and hot-and-cold running nannies.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” And we both laughed a little. I hoped Leo could hear us; it was the kind of interchange that he loved, the kind of remark he so often made. Maybe I was trying to speak for him as well as to him. I noticed the light playing on the sheen of coppery stubble on his head. I remembered how terrified I had been of the soft spot on his skull when he was an infant. “Can’t he wear a helmet?” I’d asked once.
“You seeing somebody, Ev?” I said in a quiet companionable sort of voice.
He stared down at his hands, then nodded without looking at me. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know where it will wind up. I don’t know.” His eyes slewed sideways to Leo, and for a moment his mouth twisted.
“I saw you,” I said. “I saw you at dinner. At Française.”
“I know. I saw you, too. There was a mirror on the wall and I could see you and Irving.” Both of us smiled.
“Like an O. Henry story,” I said. “I saw you and you saw me and neither of us said anything to one another.”
“I thought about it, but you and Irving looked like you were fighting.”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“Oh, that explains it.”
I laughed again. “I miss you, too, Ev. Maybe someday…” I shrugged as my voice trailed off. I was having another contraction. Braxton Hicks.
“Maybe.”
I slept, and then I dreamed. Leo and I were skydiving. He was young, perhaps seven or eight. We were both nervous and happy, unconcerned with the fact that Meghan had been kept in the dark about our plans. We leapt, and our chutes didn’t open, and the spires of the city rose to meet us, and I woke to the sound of a sharp click as Evan turned the television on.
Ever since the start of the pregnancy, I had found it difficult to move from sleep to consciousness. Sometimes I thought a part of my mind was deep inside with the pair of them, lulled by the motion, listening to the heartbeats, dreaming the dreams of those poised between two worlds. So it took me a minute or two to realize that I was looking at a shot on the TV screen of the front door of a building in the Tubman projects, police officers in flak jackets on either side. The camera pulled back and showed the broad quadrangle of dirt at its center; it was empty of everything except police and police cars.
“What?” I said.
Evan turned up the sound. A local reporter was stumbling over her words, caught in midsentence “…will be exiting the building in just a few minutes, we’re told. It’s unclear whether this was a hostage situation or a surrender. What we do know is that for at least an hour a resident of the projects has been inside one of the apartments there with a young woman and another person who has been identified by police as Meghan Fitzmaurice.” The local reporter seemed flustered, working live without a script, but she was smart enough to know that she didn’t have to identify Meghan further.
One of the nurses stood in the doorway, too, as Evan switched from channel to channel, finally settling on the network for which Meghan had so famously been the public face. They interviewed a woman with a toddler in her arms, who said the police refused to let her back into her apartment. “This baby is getting hungry, too,” she said peevishly, and as if on cue her little girl keened, “I wanna sandwich.” They interviewed a young man, who said it wasn’t fair that a clutch of cops showed up for “some TV lady” and paid scant attention when items were taken from people’s apartments, which had apparently happened to his girlfriend recently.
They interviewed Charisse as a group of kids jumped up and down behind her, until she turned and waved them off with her fierce bottom lip thrust out over her chin. “Meghan’s boy, he got shot here and she’s upstairs talking to the person who did it, and she’s going to bring him out before there’s any more trouble,” she said. “He showed up here, he’s sorry, he came to apologize to a girl here who is a friend of Meghan’s boy, and things got a little out of hand and the girl’s mother called Meghan and told her to come over. You can’t get the cops to come right over here and have things stay calm, you know what I mean? You don’t know what would happen with that boy in there if the cops come, breaking down the door. So she called Meghan and she came in and she’s talking to him now. She’ll take care of business with this boy. You know she will.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“What the hell is she talking about?” Evan said.
“She’s taking a terrible chance,” said the nurse.
“Oh, come on. That’s a preposterous story,” Evan said.
“No, it’s not,” I said.
Evan didn’t have the advantage of knowing Tequila, of knowing how strategy forms in a mind sharpened by years of mistreatment at the hands of mindless authority. If she found a criminal in her home with Princess Margaret, even a remorseful criminal, she would ask herself how best to turn him over to the authorities without getting her children hurt, or her daughter’s name sullied, or the child welfare bureaucracy interested in her family again. How lucky she was, to have on her desk pad the number of a person so well-known that instead she herself would become the center of attention, a person so powerful that she would surely be able to make things right.
We sat and watched for what seemed like a long time, although when I looked at the grandfather clock out in the hallway I saw that only fifteen minutes had passed. The local stations were all afraid to cut away, and even CNN had gone live to a shot of the doors of the Tubman projects. The traffic helicopters hovered overhead, and I wondered what it sounded like in Tequila’s apartment, where the windows would have been open. The soundless New York exists only for the wealthy. For the poor there is always sound: the cars whooshing past on the highway on their way to someplace else, the subway clanking along the elevated line, the screaming fights in the courtyard, the sound of gunshots at night. Their lives are so noisy that maybe the guy who had shot Leo didn’t even notice the sound of rotors. Maybe he slept in every morning, stayed out every night drinking a forty-ounce and blowing a bone with the boys, so that he thought the freckled woman sitting on Tequila’s velour couch was just some white lady Princess Margaret had gotten to know at that fancy school she went to.
Meghan Meghan Meghan, all the reporters said, as though she had never gone away. There’s never much happening in a hostage story until the very end, so most channels took the opportunity to reprise the Ben Greenstreet episode, and one of the cable shows, the right-wing one, even reran the footage with the obligatory dead air over the offending words. But Meghan’s own network did not. I thought that it was self-protection, but afterward I wondered whether even then the big guys could see what was coming and were hedging their bets.