He finished floundering. “…to say how sorry I am. But that’s not why I’m calling.” Long pause. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.
Very important.”
Pause. “It’s not about Father Healey again, or any of that old…something else entirely.” Pause.
“Very important, Gene.
I can’t…it isn’t…you won’t…” Pause. Then his voice changed, b
e
came stronger. “I can’t do this alone, Gene.”
Bucky had never been able to do anything alone. Not when we were six, not when we were eleven, not when we were seventeen, not when he was twenty-three and it wasn’t any longer me but Father Healey who decided what
he did. Not when he was twenty-seven and it was me again deciding for him,
more unhappy
about that than I’d ever been about anything in my life until Margie’s accident.
Bucky recited his phone number, but he didn’t hang up. I could hear him breathing. Suddenly I could almost see him, somewhere out there, sitting with the receiver pressed so close to his mouth that it would look like he was trying to swallow it.
Hoping against hope that I might pick up the phone after all.
Worrying the depths of his skinny frantic soul for what words he could say to make me do this.
“Gene…it’s about…I shouldn’t say this, but after all you’re a…were a…it’s about those elderly deaths.” Pause. “I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals now.”
And then the click.
What the hell could anybody make of any of that?
I limped to the elevator and caught a cab to St. Clare’s Hospital.
Margie
was
worse, although the only way I could tell was that there was one more tube hooked to her than there’d been last night. She lay in bed in the same position she’d lain in for eighteen months and seven days: curled head to knees, splinter-thin arms bent at the elbows. She weighed ninety-nine pounds. Gastrostomy and catheter tubes ran into her, and now an IV drip on a pole as well. Her beautiful brown hair, worn away a bit at the back of her head from constant contact with the pillow, was dull. Its sheen, like her life, had faded deep inside its brittle shafts, unrecoverable.
“Hello, Margie. I’m back.”
I eased myself into the
chair,
leg straight out in front of me.
“Libby hasn’t called yet. First week of classes, schedule to straighten out, old friends to see—you know how it is.” Margie always had. I could see her and Libby shopping the week before Libby’s freshman year, laughing over the Gap bags, quarreling over the price of something I’d buy either of them now, no matter what it cost.
Anything.
“It’s pretty cool out for September, sweetheart. But the leaves haven’t changed yet. I walked across the Park just yesterday—all still green.
Composing myself for today.
Which wasn’t too bad.
It’s going to be a good school year, I think.”
Have a great year!
Margie always said to me on the first day of school, as if the whole year would be compressed in that first six hours and twenty minutes. For three years she’d said it, the three years since I’d been retired from the Force and limped into a career as a junior-high teacher. I remembered her standing at the door, half-dressed for her secretarial job at Time-Warner, her silk blouse stretched across those generous breasts, the slip showing underneath.
Have a great day! Have a great five minutes!
“Last-period 7H looks like a zoo, Margie. But when doesn’t last period look like a zoo? They’re revved up like Ferraris by then. But both algebra classes look good, and there’s a girl in 7A whose transcript is incredible. I mean, we’re talking future Westinghouse Talent winner here.”
Talk to her
, the doctor had said.
We don’t know what coma patients can and cannot hear.
That had been a year and a half ago. Nobody ever said it to me now. But I
couldn’t stop.
“There’s a new sacrificial lamb in the room next to mine, eighth-grade English. She had a cat fight in there today. But I don’t know
,
she might have more grit than she looks. And guess who called.
Bucky Romano.
After all this time.
Thirteen years. He wants me to give him a call. I’m not sure yet.”
Her teeth gapped and stuck out. The anti-seizure me
d
ication in her gastrostomy bag made the gum tissue grow too much. It displaced her teeth.
“I finally bought curtains for the kitchen. Like Libby nagged me to. Although they’ll probably have to wait until she comes home at Thanksgiving to get hung. Yellow. You’d like them.”
Margie had never seen this kitchen. I could see her in the dining room of the house I’d sold, up on a chair hanging drapes, rubbing at a dirty spot on the window.…
“Gene?”
“Hi, Susan.”
The shift nurse looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. “What’s this new tube in Margie?”
“Antibiotics.
She was having a little trouble breathing, and an X-ray showed a slight pneumonia. It’ll clear right up on medication. Gene, you have a phone call.”
Something clutched in my chest.
Libby
. Ever since that ’93 Lincoln had torn through a light on Lexington while Margie crossed with a bag of groceries, any phone call in an unexpected place does that to me. I limped to the nurses’ station.
“Gene? This is Vince. Romano.
Bucky.”
“Bucky.”
“I’m sorry to bother you at…I was so sorry to hear about Margie, I left a message on your machine but maybe you haven’t been home to…listen, I need to see you, Gene. It’s important. Please.”
“It’s late, Bucky. I have to teach tomorrow. I teach now, at—”
“
Please
. You’ll know why when I see you. I have to see you.”
I closed my eyes. “Look, I’m pretty tired.
Maybe a
n
other time.”
“
Please
, Gene. Just for a few minutes. I can be at your place in fifteen minutes!”
Bucky had never minded begging. I remembered that, now. Suddenly I didn’t want him to see where I lived, how I lived, without Margie. What I really wanted was to tell him “no.”
But I couldn’t. I never had, not our whole lives, and I couldn’t now—why not? I didn’t know.
“All right, Bucky.
A few minutes.
I’ll meet you in the lobby here at St. Clare’s.”
“Fifteen minutes.
God, thanks, Gene.
Thanks so much, I really appreciate it, I need to—”
“
Okay
.”
“See you soon.”
He didn’t mind begging, and he made people help him. Even Father Healey had found out that. Coming in to Bucky’s life, and going out.
The lobby of St. Clare’s never changed. Same scuffed green floor, slashed gray vinyl couches mended with wide
tape, information-desk attendant who looked like he could have been a bouncer at Madison Square Garden. Maybe he had. Tired people yelled and whispered in Spanish, Greek, Korean,
Chinese
. Statues of the Madonna and St. Clare and the crucified Christ beamed a serenity as alien here as money.
Bucky and I grew up in next-door apartments in a neighborhood like this one, a few blocks from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. That’s how we defined our location: “two doors down from the crying
Broad
.” We made our First Communion together, and our
Confirmation,
and Bucky was best man when I married Marge. But by that time he’d entered the seminary, and any irreverence about Our Lady had disappeared, along with all other traces of humor, humility, or humanity. Or so I thought then. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Even though he always made straight A’s in class, Bucky-as-priest-in-training was the same as Bucky-as-shortstop or Bucky-as-third-clarinet or Bucky-as-altar-boy: intense, committed,
short
-sightedly
wrong.
He’d catch a high pop and drop it. He’d know “Claire de Lune” perfectly, and be half a beat behind. Teeth sticking out, skinny face furrowed in concentration, he’d bend over the altar rail and become so enraptured by whatever he saw there that he’d forget to make the response. We boys would nudge each other and grin, and later howl at him in the parking lot.
But his decision to leave the priesthood wasn’t a howler. It wasn’t even a real decision. He vacillated for months, growing thinner and
more
stuttery
, and finally he’d taken a
bottle of pills and a half pint of vodka. Father Healey and I found him, and had his stomach pumped, and Father He
a
ley tried to talk him back into the seminary and the saving grace of God. From his hospital bed Bucky had called me, stuttering in his panic, to come get him and take him home. He was terrified. Not of the hospital—of Father Healey.
And I had, coming straight from duty, secure in my shield and gun and Margie’s love and my beautiful young daughter and my contempt for the weakling who needed a lapsed-Catholic cop to help him face an old priest in a worn-out religion. God, I’d been smug.
“Gene?” Bucky said. “Gene
Shaunessy
?”
I looked up at the faded lobby of St. Clare’s.
“Hello, Bucky.”
“God, you look…I can’t…you haven’t changed a bit!”
Then he started to cry.
I got him to a Greek place around the corner on Ninth. The dinner trade was mostly over and we sat at a table in the shadows, next to a dirty side window with a view of a brick alley, Bucky with his back to the door. Not that he cared if anybody saw him crying. I cared. I ordered two beers.
“Okay, what is it?”
He blew his nose and nodded gratefully.
“Same old Gene.
You always just…never any…”
“Bucky. What the fuck is wrong?”
He said, unexpectedly, “You hate this.”
Over his shoulder, I eyed the door. Starting eighteen months ago, I’d had enough tears and drama to last me the
rest of my life, although I wasn’t going to tell Bucky that.
If he didn’t get it over with.…
“I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals,” Bucky said, su
d
denly calmer. “After I left the seminary, after Father He
a
ley…you remember…”
“Go on,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. Father Healey and I had screamed at each other outside Bucky’s door at St. Vincent’s, while Bucky’s stomach was being pumped. I’d said things I didn’t want to remember.
“I went back to school.
Took a B.S. in chemistry.
Then a Ph.D.
You and I, about that time of…I wanted to call you after you were shot but…I could have tried harder to find you earlier, I know…anyway. I went to work for Kelvin, in the research department.
Liked it.
I met Tommy. We live together.”
He’d never said. But, then, he’d never had to. And there hadn’t been very much saying anyway, not back then, and certainly not at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.
“I liked the work at Kelvin. Like it.
Liked it.”
He took a deep breath. “I worked on
Camineur
. You take it, don’t you, Gene?”
I almost jumped out of my skin. “How’d you know that?”
He grinned. “Not by any medical record hacking. Calm down, it isn’t…people can’t tell. I just guessed, from the profile.”
He meant
my
profile.
Camineur
is something called a neurotransmitter uptake-regulator. Unlike Prozac and the other antidepressants that were its ancestors, it fiddles not just with serotonin levels but also with norepinephrine and
dopamine and a half dozen other brain chemicals. It was prescribed for me after Marge’s accident.
Non-addictive, no bad side effects, no dulling of the mind.
Without it, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat,
couldn’t
concentrate. Couldn’t stop wanting to kill somebody every time I walked into St. Clare’s.
I had found myself in a gun shop on Avenue D, tri
g
ger-testing a nine-millimeter, which felt so light in my hand it floated. When I looked at the thoughts in my head, I went to see Margie’s doctor.
Bucky said, quietly for once, “
Camineur
was designed to prevent violent ideation in people with strong but no
r
mally controlled violent impulses, whose control has br
o
ken down under severe life stress. It’s often prescribed for cops.
Also military careerists and doctors.
Types with compensated paranoia restrained by strong moral stri
c
tures.
Nobody told you that the
Camineur
generation of mood inhibitors was that specific?”
If they did, I hadn’t been listening. I hadn’t been li
s
tening
to
much in those months. But I heard Bucky now. His hesitations disappeared when he talked about his work.