Desperate Measures

11

Pittman stood across from the hospital for quite a while. The building was soot gray. The mid-April day had been warm, but as the sun descended behind skyscrapers, cool shadows made Pittman cross his arms and hug himself.

This was the same hospital where Jeremy had died. Pittman had come to the corner across from the Emergency entrance, the same corner where he had often stood late at night after visiting Jeremy. From this corner, he had been able to see the window of Jeremy’s room on the tenth floor. Gazing up through the darkness for several hours, he had prayed that Jeremy wouldn’t be wakened by the need to vomit because of his chemotherapy.

Amid the din of traffic, Pittman now heard a siren. An ambulance veered from the busy street and rushed to a stop beneath the portal at the Emergency entrance. Attendants leapt out and urgently removed a patient on a gurney. Pedestrians glanced toward the commotion but kept walking swiftly onward.

Pittman swallowed, squinted up toward what he still thought of as Jeremy’s window, and turned away. Jonathan Millgate was in that hospital, in the adult intensive-care ward that was just down the sixth-floor hallway from the children’s intensive-care ward, where Jeremy had died. Pittman shook his head. He couldn’t tolerate going into the hospital, couldn’t make himself go up to that floor, couldn’t bear exposing himself to the torment on the faces of people waiting to hear about their loved ones. It would be all he could do not to imagine that he was one of them, not to sit down with them and wait as if for news of Jeremy.

It would be far too much.

So he went home. Rather than take a taxi, he walked. He needed to fill the time. As dusk increasingly chilled him, he stopped for several drinks-to fill the time. The elevator to his third-floor apartment creaked and wheezed. He locked himself in his apartment, heard laughter from a television show vibrate through thin walls from the apartment next to him, and had another drink.

To fill the time.

He sat in darkness. He imagined what it would have been like if Jeremy had lived. With basketball playoffs approaching, he would have spent the coming Saturday afternoon playing one-on-one with Jeremy. Afterward they’d have gone for pizza and a movie, or maybe to Tower Records-whatever they wanted to do. The future would have been theirs.

Pittman wept.

He turned on the kitchen light, opened the drawer where he’d put the.45, and took out the pistol.

Vaguely conscious that the time was 8:00 P.M., because the sitcom next door had ended and another was starting, he continued to stare at the.45. His eyes became like the lenses of a microscope, focusing intensely on the gleaming blue metal, magnifying the trigger, the hammer, the opening in the barrel from which the bullet would…

The next thing he was aware of, a new sound disturbed him, the smooth deep voice of a man who spoke in formal cadences. The voice came from the apartment next door. The voice was…

A television news announcer? Frowning, Pittman turned his gaze from the.45 and fixed it on the stove’s mechanical clock. Its numbers whirred, 10:03 becoming 10:04. Pittman frowned harder. He had so absorbed himself in the gun that he hadn’t been conscious of so much time passing. Hand trembling, he set down the.45. The news announcer on the television next door had said something about Jonathan Millgate.