The Marriage of Sticks (19 page)

We walked down the hall to the back door and out to the school parking lot. It smelled of dust and fresh asphalt. It was a hot, still day. The weather would probably change later, because everything felt too thick and heavy. Insects chirred around us. The mid-afternoon sun glinted off a hundred car windshields. James stopped to get his bearings, then started off again. I had questions, but he clearly had a destination in mind, so I held my tongue and followed silently. We wove in and out of the cars and motorcycles. Here and there I recognized one from so long ago. Mel Parker’s beige VW. Al Kaplan’s Pinto with all the bumper stickers on it. One read:
NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY.

James walked to the other side of the lot and only then did I see where he was going. The old green Saab his parents gave him when he got his driver’s license was parked near the exit to the street. How could I forget? He always parked his car there so we could make a quick getaway after school. I saw two people sitting inside.

James was sitting inside. Eighteen-year-old James, and a policeman. Although it was very hot, the car windows were rolled halfway up, but I could hear what they were saying. The policeman was talking. His voice was slow and genuinely sorrowful.

“There were two of you up there at the Swid house last night, James. You and a girl. So don’t keep denying it because then you’re insultin’ my intelligence. People saw you two and wrote down your license plate number. Are you going to tell me who she is? It’ll make it easier on you.”

“I was there alone, really!” James’s voice was respectful, eager to tell the truth.

The cop sighed. “Son, it’s going to be very hard on you this time. We’ve let you get away with a lot of crap over the years, but not this time. You broke into a rich man’s house and people saw you. You’re definitely going to have to do some hard time for it. Maybe if you tell me who the girl was, I can talk to the judge—”

“Honest to God, it was just me. I don’t know why they saw me with anybody.”

Adult James asked me, “You don’t remember this, do you?”

“No.”

“Senior year. Two months before graduation. We went out one night to eat ice cream. I told you I wanted to do this—” He gestured toward the car. “—sneak into the Swids’ house and look around. You were supposed to say yes, Miranda. We were supposed to go in there and end up having sex. That was to have been our first time. The night that would have changed everything. Because the next day I was
supposed
to be arrested. Arrested and sent to prison for breaking and entering.”

“But we didn’t do that, James! What are you saying? What is this?” My voice was shrill and frantic. It knew nothing but still it was denying everything. The sun was in my eyes. Any way I turned, it jabbed me like an accusing finger.

James shook his head, exasperated. “I’m saying everything’s written, Miranda. The biggest secret of life: Fate
is
determined, no matter how much you deny or try to fight against it. But you’ve challenged your fate your whole life. And gotten
away,
with it!

“You and Hugh were not supposed to stay together. He was fated to go back to his wife and have that little boy with her. That’s what the scene on TV was for: to show you how his life was supposed to have happened. You two were supposed to have a quick, red-hot affair. You were supposed to end up writing postcards from exotic places telling him how much you missed him.

“But none of it happened. You were able to change things. You changed fate. Again. Hugh stayed past the time he was supposed to and then he died. No reconciliation with, his wife, no little boy Oakley, mother Charlotte, father Hugh. None of it
happened,
Miranda.”

He stopped abruptly and the racket of summer’s million insects instantly filled the air. Behind it, young James and the policeman continued talking in the car.

“What about the birthday party I saw the first day we went to the house? What about that little boy?”

“Never happened because he was never born. He was supposed to be born, but he wasn’t.”

“But you didn’t go to jail either! That was good!”

“No it wasn’t. That’s where I was supposed to have straightened out. The experience would have terrified and changed me forever. I had always been dancing around the flames, being bad, taking chances. But going to jail would have thrown me into the middle of the fire. It would have been hell. When I got out, I was supposed to get a job I liked and meet a woman who was right for me. And then I was supposed to have died an old man.” He chuckled, but it was a black, bitter sound. He pointed to one side of his nose. “See this mole? The little one? When I was old it went cancerous but I didn’t take care of it and it killed me.” The same chuckle, even more venomous. “Not a hero’s death, but nicer than driving a car into a pylon when I was barely thirty, chasing after a mean bitch with Russian poetry tattooed on her wrist.”

A loud bell clanged inside the school. Within seconds, doors slammed open and hundreds of kids flooded out. Almost instantaneously the parking lot was filled. Cars started, horns honked goodbye, kids shouted and talked, hurrying toward the street and freedom. The necessary part of their day was over, and after hours in class, all were eager to get to the good part.

James and I watched them leave. It didn’t take long. I remembered that from the old days. You were out of the school building and somewhere else as fast as you could move.

Minutes later a few stragglers still stood around the back door chatting with my old chemistry teacher, Mr. Rolfe. A bunch played basketball at the other end of the lot. Several cars remained, including the green Saab. The policeman and young James continued talking. It was supposed to be the first day of the rest of his life.

But it never happened. Because of me.

FEVER GLASS

M
CCABE AND I LOOKED
at each other, waiting to see who would go first. The nurse at the reception desk had given us directions to the room, but once we’d stepped out of the elevator, we stood still, each hoping the other would make the next move.

“Go ahead.”

“That’s okay. You first.”

“What was the room number again?”

“Ten sixty-three.”

Unlike other hospitals or rest homes I’d visited, this one smelled altogether different. It was unnerving. None of the blunt, spiritless odor usually so prevalent in those places—disinfectant, medicine, and sickness mixed together so that it reeked of nothing good, nothing that gave comfort. Unable to stop myself, I raised my head and sniffed the air like a hound trying to recognize a scent.

McCabe saw me and spoke without hesitation. “Turkey. Smells like a turkey dinner in here. I noticed it first thing when we came in. Come on, let’s find Frances.” He started down the hall looking left and right for room 1063.

I had awoken in bed in the Crane’s View house fully dressed, a quilt over me, head on a pillow, arms at my sides. Normally it took time for my mind to clear, but not
that
morning. Instantly I remembered what had happened the night before with Hugh and his family on the kitchen television, and then going with James to visit our old high school.

All my life people joked that I looked dead while sleeping because of the position in which I lay. Once settled and asleep, I usually never moved. This morning I lay wondering how I had managed even to reach the bed. Then the telephone rang. Picking it up, I didn’t recognize McCabe’s voice until he identified himself and said Frances Hatch was in the hospital. She had called him from there and asked that both of us come to see her as soon as possible.

His voice was edgy and irritated. “What I don’t understand is why she’s not in Manhattan. She’s up in a place near Bronxville called Fever Glass or something. Strange name like that, but I’ve got it all written down. She gave me directions. Can you be ready in an hour? I’d like to get going.”

The building was one of those expensive, ludicrous copies of a Tudor mansion only rock stars and other momentary millionaires buy or build these days. First we passed through high, scrupulously trimmed hedges that hid the grounds from the street. Then, at the top of a long curving driveway, Fieberglas Sanatorium sat on a small rise amid acres of beautifully tended land that must have cost a fortune to maintain. Looking around, you got the feeling it could have been a golf course, an expensive research facility, or a cemetery. Or maybe all three in one.

McCabe pulled into one of the many empty parking spaces in front of the main building and turned off the motor. He had been playing a Kool & the Gang CD and the abrupt silence was unsettling. It emphasized, Here we are and now we have to do something.

He looked in the rearview mirror and ran his hands through his hair. “Pip-pip. Tut-tut. This place is all English wannabe. They
wish
they were
Brideshead Revisited.
Wouldn’t wanna be sick here. I’m sure they’re big believers in high colonics.”

I looked out the window. “You’re sure she’s here? It doesn’t look like a very Frances place.”

“True, but this is it.”

We got out and walked across immaculate white gravel to the front door. McCabe opened it and motioned for me to enter. Inside, I was surprised to see large numbers of people milling about the entrance hall. Some were in robes and slippers, others were fully dressed. We went to the reception desk and asked for Frances. Checking a computer, the nurse apathetically tapped a few keys. I glanced at McCabe. He was a handsome man, no doubt about it. I wasn’t crazy for the gelled hair, but in his double-breasted suit, white shirt, and black silk tie he looked very dashing.

“I’m sorry, but she’s not allowed visitors right now.”

McCabe took out his police badge and held it up for the woman to see. When he spoke, his voice was low and kind but there was no mistaking the authority it carried. “Just tell us the room number. And the name of her doctor.”

The woman twitched uncomfortably in her chair. But there wasn’t much she could do. “Ten sixty-three. Dr. Zabalino.”

“Zabalino. That’s great. Thanks very much.” He took my arm and neither of us spoke until we’d reached the elevator across the hall. He pressed the orange button and stared at his feet.

“What if she really
is
too sick for visitors?”

The doors slid opened. The car was empty. We stepped in and they shut quickly. I pressed three.

“Miranda, how long have you known Frances?” He stood too close to me but I didn’t mind because it wasn’t male-female or sexy in any way. McCabe was in close on all accounts; he touched, he poked, he patted people on the shoulder. Most of the time I don’t think he even knew he did it. He also spoke in a tone of voice that said he knew you intimately; you could tell him anything and it would be okay. He made contact in all ways, and even if you had done something wrong his touch or voice held you in place. It was nice.

“Not that long. A few months. Why?”

“I’ve known her twenty-five years. She’s the world’s most independent person. But when she does ask for something, do it and don’t let anything stop you. She calls up and says she wants to see us here? We
run,
Miranda.”

Several doors were open as we walked down the hall. In one room a very old man lay in bed with his eyes closed. Seated next to him on a wooden chair was a small girl. She wore a large red watch on her wrist and stared at it, eyebrows raised. She spoke to the old man and I realized she was counting seconds for him. Although his eyes remained closed, he was smiling.

Two doors down I was startled to see a small black dog sitting alone in the middle of a perfectly made bed. There appeared to be no one else in the room. I couldn’t resist touching McCabe’s sleeve and pointing. When he saw it he did a double take and stopped.

“What the hell?”

The dog saw us and yawned. McCabe stepped to the door and peered at the small shield giving the patient’s name. “Frederick Duffek. Is a Duffek a breed of dog?” He took a step to the right so he stood in the center of the doorway. “Frederick? Where’s your master?”

“Yes?” A gigantic middle-aged man appeared from behind the door a foot from McCabe. His bald head shone like it was oiled and he wore pajamas the color of old ivory. McCabe wasn’t fazed. “Hey! I saw your dog there on the bed and was wondering—”

The man put a hand on McCabe’s chest, pushed him back out into the hall, and shut the door in his face. Frannie looked at me, delighted. “What a fucking nutty place, huh? That guy looked like Divine. Maybe the dog’s part of his therapy.”

“Maybe we should find ten sixty-three.”

But there was one more snapshot before we reached Frances’s room, and that one stayed in my mind. All the other doors on the hall were closed except the one next to 1063. It was wide open.

Inside was a young woman. On first sight, her back was to us. She wore a baggy black sweat suit and her legs were spread wide. She looked like an inverted
Y.
On the floor in front of her was a very large blue-gray stone shaped like a rough egg. It would have been a strange sight anywhere. In that quiet, forbidding place, it was outrageous.

She panted hard three times—hoosh hoosh hoosh—bent down, and like a seasoned weightlifter hoisted the stone up to her stomach. Then she blew out the same three short pants and lowered it to the floor. Pause, then three pants and up again. McCabe hissed, “Jesus!”

The stone was almost to the floor. Letting it thud down, she spun around. She was remarkably beautiful.

“Dr. Zabalino?” She had a marvelous smile. When she saw us, it fell noticeably. “Oh, hello. I thought you were my doctor.”

McCabe stepped into the room and looked quickly behind the door to check if anyone else was there. “Why are you lifting a rock? In your hospital room? Is that good for you?”

“It’s part of my meditation.”

“
Meditation?
Who’s your guru, Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ooh!” He smiled lewdly and reached into a pocket. “My telephone’s ringing. I love vibrating phones. I could let it ring all day.” He took out a small gray one. It sprang open in his hand. “Hello? Well, hi, Frances. Where are we? Not far. We could be there in, oh, eight seconds. Yeah, we’re here. Next door to you, with the woman who picks up the rock? Uh-huh. No problem.” He closed the phone and looked at me. “Frances says she’d like to talk to you first. I’ll wait outside.”