The Book of Blood and Shadow (12 page)

“I
told
you,” Max said, with a flash of anger, “it’s missing, all of it.”

“What?” I asked.

“The letters. The translations of the Book. The whole archive—everything. Gone.”

Now I squeezed his hand.

The cop shook his head. “We’ll bring you down to the station to give a statement, and put together a list of everything that’s missing, but I don’t think you need to worry, not about this, at least. There was no sign of violence at the scene, no sign of a break-in.” He flipped his notebook shut and slipped it into his pocket. “My guess? Your prof got a little confused, stuck your papers somewhere, then passed out. I can see why you got spooked, but this is a case for the doctors, not the cops.”

“So what do you really think happened?” I asked Max when the cop was gone.

He swallowed hard. “I thought he was dead. When I walked in and saw him like that …”

I grabbed him and kissed him, hard. If someone had broken into the office and attacked the Hoff, if Max had gotten there a little earlier—I stopped myself. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

“The letters are gone,” he said, still holding on to me. “Someone got into the safe. It’s all gone.”

“You’re not.” I kissed him again, then buried my face in his shoulder.

“I should go,” Adriane said. “I don’t belong here, right?”

“Adriane—” I started, but she cut me off.

“It’s fine.”

It clearly wasn’t.

“Well, when you find Chris, will you tell him I say—” I paused, because how to phrase the message
For five seconds I thought those sirens were for you, and now I need to hear your voice. I need proof that you’re real
? “Just tell him to call me.” But when I looked up, she was already gone.

26

I don’t do hospitals. It’s not the smell, that suffocating stench of cleaning fluid with a hint of the decay it was intended to disguise. It’s not the waiting rooms, with their faded, broken furniture and huddled groups of weeping or wailing families alongside dead-eyed survivors with no need to stay and no will to go home. It’s not Andy, who never made it that far.

It’s the doors. Open doors along dingy white corridors that reveal everything you’re not supposed to see. Patients crying, patients moaning, patients vomiting; patients awkwardly mounting bedpans or shuffling barefoot, IV in tow, toward an industrial toilet; bloated patients lying still with tubes running in and out, monitors beeping, machines wheezing and pumping and performing all the functions their bodies have given up.

I didn’t have to go alone, but bringing someone with me would have meant admitting I couldn’t do it myself.

Also, the Hoff had only asked for me.

The nursing station in the intensive care unit was empty, but eventually a heavy woman in an orderly’s uniform noticed me. She was carrying a vial of something that looked suspiciously like urine. “I’m looking for Professor—I mean, Anton Hoffpauer?” I said.

“You Nora?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, he’s been asking for you.”

“They told me. But … are you sure?”

“Took us a while to figure out exactly what he wanted, and how to find you, but yeah, I’m sure.”

“I just don’t see why he would want—”

“Room seven, honey,” she said. “You can go right in.”

“How is he?” I asked, stalling.

“In and out. You never know with a stroke. People come back from the damnedest things.”

“So he’ll be okay?”

She pursed her lips. “Go see him, honey. He’ll like that. If you stick around for a while, the doc might come by, and he’ll have more answers for you.”

But the non-answer was answer enough.

The narrow patient rooms were encased behind thick glass walls, with white curtains draped across for privacy. The door of number seven was open. I desperately didn’t want to go inside.

The door creaked when I shut it behind me. Deep breath, I thought, forcing myself to turn around and face him. In and out.

He was pale, with yellowed encrustations around his watery eyes, like a kid who’d cried himself to sleep. The liver spots at his
thinning hairline stood out like splotches of ink on a too-white canvas. IV needles threaded into bulging veins. One side of his face drooped noticeably, and when he opened his eyes, only one of them focused on me. It widened.

Why me?
I wanted to ask. Why not Max, or Chris, or better yet, a son or granddaughter, someone to take his gnarled hand or stroke his sweaty forehead, to sit beside him and force a smile and not recoil when a rivulet of drool trickled from the corner of his blistered lips.

I lowered myself into the narrow metal chair beside the bed. He was muttering. Nonsense syllables, mostly, the right side of his mouth lagging behind the left.

“Lay da chee,” he said, then repeated it, louder. “Lay da chee!”

He curled his left hand into a fist and pounded the bed.

“Shh.” I patted the blanket, awkwardly, a few inches from the lump that was his right leg. “It’s okay.”

His mouth twisted, and he forced out a slurred but understandable word. “Safe!” he shouted. “Not safe!”

“You are,” I assured him. And then I took his hand. I had to. “Don’t worry.”

He pulled away with surprising strength, and jabbed a finger at me. “You.”

“Me what?”

“Yortheeun.”

I leaned closer, hating myself for noticing the smell, cloyingly sweet and ripe. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“You’re. The. One.” He punctuated each word with a fist against the blanket. “Your blood.” And then those nonsense words again that seemed to mean so much. “Lay da chee!”

“Yes,” I said, because what else was there? “I know.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He closed his eyes. I sat there,
listening to his breath rattle in his chest and the monitors play their discordant song, wondering how long I was supposed to stay—and how I could leave him there alone.

The door creaked open. “So how are we doing today, Mr. Hoffpauer?” A young doctor stood in the doorway, his black hair gelled into tiny spikes and a minuscule silver stud in his right ear. The look would have gained a thumbs-up—and likely some gratuitous yoga stretches—from Adriane, but it didn’t exactly scream professional competence.

“I think he’s sleeping,” I said when the Hoff didn’t react to his arrival.

“You a relative?”

I shook my head. “I’m his student, I guess. They said he was asking for me.”

The doctor brightened. “Oh, you must be Nora? Yes, he was pretty adamant.”

“He didn’t really seem … I mean, he was kind of babbling, like he didn’t really know what he was saying.”

“That’s normal with a neurological event of this severity.” The doctor lifted a clipboard from the edge of the bed and began flipping through it, nodding at whatever he saw. “Did he know who you were?”

I nodded. Then, since he was still buried in his clipboard, said yes.

“He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand it. I think I upset him.”

“He got angry, right?” the doctor said. “Don’t worry, that’s normal, too. You can expect some irrational emotional outbursts.”

I wanted to point out there was nothing irrational about getting angry when you were stuck in a hospital bed with a ruined body and defective brain. But I also wanted answers. And I suspected
I wouldn’t get many if I treated him to an irrational emotional outburst of my own.

“So it was definitely a stroke?” I asked.

“Oh, there’s no question of that.”

“And is it possible … I mean, is that the kind of thing someone could
cause
? Like, on purpose?”

He didn’t seem surprised by the question. “Certainly excessive stress on the body or nervous system wouldn’t help matters. And certain medications can induce—” He frowned, like he’d said more than he’d intended. “We’re waiting on the scans, but I suspect he’s been having transient ischemic attacks—think of them as mini strokes—for some time now. Has he been acting oddly at all? Doing things, saying things that don’t make sense?”

“I really don’t know him that well,” I admitted, and thought of the open safe, the missing archive. Was it possible that the police were right and he’d hidden the papers somewhere himself?

“It’s good of you to sit with him, then,” the doctor said. “He’s going to need all the support he can get. Does he have any family?”

Again, I had to admit I didn’t know. “How serious is this?” I said. “Is he going to get better?”

The doctor finally met my eye. “The stroke affected his speech center. There are mobility issues, especially on his right side, and we don’t know yet whether his speaking problems are connected to that, or to a cognitive deficit. There are signs of aphasia, disorganized cognition.… It’s just too soon to tell.”

“You mean you don’t know whether he can’t talk or can’t think.”

“We’re monitoring the situation. Rehabilitation after a stroke is difficult, but people accomplish amazing things. That said, you should prepare yourself. He might never be the man he was before. You said he was a teacher?”

“Professor,” I said, then realized the Hoff’s eyes were open, and pinned on me. “He’s a very respected professor. Brilliant. World-renowned.”

The doctor tugged at his stupid earring. “Well. It’s nice to be able to leave a legacy behind, isn’t it?”

“He’s not dead,” I said sharply.

“No, of course not.” But we both knew what he meant. The brilliant, world-renowned phase of things was likely over. This is how it happens, I thought as the doctor slid the clipboard back into its holster and escaped. You don’t even realize you’re living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after. I smiled down at the Hoff, and the left side of his mouth smiled back. Did he understand what was happening? I suspected he did. But did he understand that this was
it
, that things would never go back to the way they were? That, I doubted. There was a chasm between knowing and believing, and if the Hoff had jumped it, he wouldn’t be smiling.

“Don’t go,” the Hoff croaked, though I hadn’t moved.

“I won’t,” I said. “And when I do, I’ll come back. I’ll visit.”

He lurched upright and grabbed my wrist. His hand was a claw.

“They’ll lie,” he slurred. “But don’t go!”

“Okay,” I said, because it had worked the last time. “Okay, I won’t go.”

“Promise.”
Pwomiss
, it came out. Like a little kid.

“I promise.”

He let go and sank back into the pillows, a wide, lopsided smile spreading across his face. Such a small thing, to make him so happy. But his whole life had gotten small, I realized. These tubes. These walls. This bed. No more manuscripts to decipher, no more mysteries to penetrate, no more ancient grudges to prosecute. And the only secret language he had to decode was his own.

27

“Please come,” I said into the phone, and he did, no questions asked, showed up at the house I’d never let anyone visit, took one look and folded me into a hug that felt like it could last forever if I needed it to.

“Horrible?” Chris asked, still holding on.

“Horrible.”

He squeezed tighter. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gone.”

“I had to.”

“At least it’s over now.”

It didn’t feel over.

“I hate hospitals.” I pressed my face to his shoulder. It was the only way to wipe away the tears without letting go.

“Because of …?”

“No.” It was the closest we’d gotten to mentioning my brother in two years. “This isn’t about him.”

But maybe it was, as much as anything was. And maybe that was why I’d called Chris, without thinking, without any conscious desire to choose him over Adriane, over Max, because I didn’t have to explain myself to him.

“Okay,” he said. Then, “Not that my arms are getting tired or anything, but … how much longer is the hugging phase going to last?”

“A little longer.”

“Okay.”

He held on until I was ready to let go.

28

“So this is the inner sanctum.” Chris grabbed my desk chair, straddling it backward. I took the bed, my knees pulled up to my chest. It was weird having him here, in my bedroom, playing with the elephant paperweight I’d gotten from a fourth-grade trip to the zoo. “I can see why you’ve kept it secret all these years.”

“Shut up.”

“No, truly, it’s shocking. Is that”—his eyes widened and his mouth formed a perfect O—“a desk calendar? And a piggy bank? What kind of crazy operation are you running here?”

“Asshole.”

He grinned. “You know how compliments embarrass me.”

There was nothing shocking, or even memorable, about the bedroom, which hadn’t been redecorated in years and so still featured the pink walls and turquoise floor I’d chosen at age nine. The only thing hanging from the cheap cardboard paneling was a Red Sox pennant that I’d confiscated from Andy’s room before my parents had a chance to purge it, and a dolphin painting my mother had bought for my sixteenth birthday, because the last time she’d checked, I was a big fan. (The last time she’d checked, I had been eleven.) The furniture was a shiny wood laminate and had been constructed, piece by piece, by my hapless parents a decade before, which meant the bed wobbled, the desk drawers didn’t quite close, and both were chipped and scuffed in spots where my mother’s hammer—or her frustration—had gone astray. The crawl space beneath the desk, where Chris had dumped his backpack, was the perfect size for a twelve-year-old to curl up in and hide out. I was too big for it now.

I wasn’t embarrassed by the small, bare room, or the rest of the house, which could have fit into the east wing of the Moores’
mansion. It was the collision of worlds I’d hoped to avoid. Nothing here was untainted with memories of Andy, with guilt and death and grief, with empty spaces no one wanted to fill. And maybe that was another reason it was Chris I’d called, because with Chris the collision had already happened. The danger had passed.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not really.”

A pause, not an awkward one, but heading in that direction. I realized it had been a long time since Chris and I had hung out alone together. There was a space between us that hadn’t been there before, and part of me knew this was Max, and it was as it should be, but most of me was sorry.