Dragonfire

Three

They let Kerry visit me at five o’clock. Bella fed me soup and Jell-o first and then changed the dressing on my shoulder. I saw the wound; it was ugly and bluish, and they had painted it with some sort of dark red antiseptic, and the stitches stood out stark and white. Red, white, and blue. Looking at it made me even more angry. So did the nurse’s grave pronouncement that there had been no change in Eberhardt’s condition. I was seething inside, but keeping myself tightly wrapped, when Kerry walked into the room.

She came in smiling, but the smile had been pasted on for my benefit; her eyes were solemn and worried, and her face was pale in the auburn frame of her hair. She was wearing an emerald-green dress and a matching coat, as if she had decided bright colors would be more appropriate than mourning gray or black. In one hand she carried a paper sack: present for the patient, a little gesture of her affection for the poor bastard confined to a hospital bed.

The smile faded when she came close enough to take a good look at me. “Hi,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“I’m all right.”

“Do you... does it hurt much? Your shoulder?”

“No.”

She stood there looking at me. She had chameleon eyes, the kind that change color with strong rushes of emotion; they were very dark now, an almost black-green.

“God,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say.”

“I was sick when I heard about it. I came right here to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me see you.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m glad you came.”

She sat down in one of the metal chairs. “I went by your flat this morning,” she said. “I still have the key you gave me and I thought you might want a few things. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No. What did you bring?”

By way of answering, she opened up the paper sack and let me see what it contained. Some toilet articles and half a dozen pulp magazines. She put it all on the nightstand, folded the sack, and tucked it away in her purse. Then she reached out and touched my right hand, let her fingers rest on it. They were cold and slightly damp, her fingers. I did not move my hand under them.

“I feel terrible about Eberhardt,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he.”

I gave her a sharp look. “What makes you say that?”

“I heard two of the nurses talking. They said his chances of regaining consciousness were slim.”

“He’s not going to die.”

“Well... I hope you’re right.”

“He’s not going to die,” I said again.

She was silent for a time. I kept my eyes away from her face because I did not want her to see the anger in them. But she was a perceptive woman; I could feel her watching me.

“You’re different,” she said after a while.

“My best friend got shot and he’s in a coma. I got shot. Yeah, I’m different.”

“That’s not what I mean. I look at you and I’m not sure I know you anymore. You look the same, but I don’t think you are.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Seeing you this way... it scares me.”

“Why should it scare you?”

“I don’t know. But it does.”

“Forget it. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“Yes, it is. I care for you, you know that.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I believe you.”

She took her hand away from mine, brushed the back of it across my cheek. When I looked at her I saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s so damned unfair,” she said. “What’s happened these past few weeks, what people have done to you. What I’ve done to you.”

Same words I had said to Eberhardt on Sunday. But they did not seem to mean much anymore; they were just words. I stared up at the flourescent ceiling lights, not saying anything.

“I’m sorry,” Kerry said. “I really am.”

“All right.”

“I’ll make it up to you. Will you let me do that?”

“How?”

“By being with you. By not running away from you anymore.”

“I don’t want your pity,” I said.

“I don’t pity you. That’s not it.”

“You don’t love me either. Do you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I can.”

“And maybe you can’t.”

“Don’t you want me to try?”

“I’m not sure what I want right now. Except to see the bastard who shot Eb and me behind bars.”

“There’s nothing you can do about that.”

“No,” I said, “I guess there isn’t.”

More silence. She got a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then she said, “Do you want me to go?”

“No.”

“But you don’t seem to want to talk...”

“Not right now. Just sit here with me for a while.”

“Yes. All right.”

So she sat there and we looked at each other from time to time and the silence grew heavy, a little awkward. I tried to dredge up some of the old feelings for her — the tenderness, the warmth, the love. They were still there but they would not come to the surface; anger and bitterness sealed them off like an iron door. I needed her, I wanted to believe what she’d said to me, and yet the needing was not central. Too many things had happened. Too many things.

At least ten minutes passed without either of us saying a word. Finally she got up and leaned over and kissed me gently on the mouth; her lips, like her fingers, were damp and cold. “I think I’d better leave now,” she said.

“Will you come back tomorrow?”

“If you want me to.”

“Yes,” I said, “I want you to.”

“Can I bring you anything else?”

“There’s nothing else I need.”

She tried the smile again; it was a little wobbly but it stayed in place. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ll see.”

“What will?”

“Everything. You, me — Eberhardt.”

“Sure.”

She seemed to want to kiss me again, but she didn’t do it. She said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” and gathered up her purse and went to the door. I got one more look from there, the poignant kind. Then she was gone.

I spent some more time staring up at the ceiling, not thinking about much. But my mind wasn’t blank; I kept getting little blips of memory, scenes from Eberhardt’s living room yesterday. Eb lying bloody and twisted on the floor. The Chinese gunman backlit by the sun. The glistening red smears on my hand when I swiped it across my chest. The way the shadows came into the room and swallowed the sunlight. I felt a sudden pain in my right palm, and when I turned the hand over and looked at it I saw little gouged half-moons where I had dug my nails into the skin.

Pretty soon a nurse came in — not Bella Abzug; a black woman, younger and much more attractive — and announced that I had another visitor. I asked her who it was and she said, “Mrs. Dana Eberhardt. Will you see her?”

“Yes. Send her in.”

Dana entered the room a couple of minutes after the nurse went away. She was three years younger than Eb and me, just turned fifty, but she didn’t look her age; she looked no older than forty. Still slender, except for heavy breasts and wide hips. New hairdo: cut short and curled. There had been gray in the brown hair the last time I’d seen her; she had dyed it away. She looked sleek and fit, despite the gravity of her expression and the dark smudges under her eyes. Life in Palo Alto with a Stanford law professor must be agreeing with her.

“Hello, mug,” she said.

Mug. Her pet name for me in the days when she had tried to play matchmaker and marry me off to a variety of eligible women. “You’re a mug,” she used to say. “You don’t know what’s good for you. Marriage is a wonderful thing.” And now she was living with a law professor, and Eberhardt was lying in a coma with his insides and maybe his head scrambled by a pair of bullets.

I think I hated her a little in that moment.

She came over and stood near the foot of the bed, as if she were afraid to move any closer. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me,” she said.

“It’s always nice to see old friends.”

I made no effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but she took it without flinching. One of her characteristic gestures was to pick at her chin with thumb and forefinger; she did that. Then she made a throat-clearing sound and wet her lips. They were painted a glossy rust-red color, like drying blood. I had never seen her wear that shade of lipstick before.

“Don’t condemn me,” she said.

“Why should I condemn you?”

“I still care for Eb. I never wanted to hurt him.”

“Then why did you?”

“I couldn’t live my life for him any longer. I needed a change, a new direction; I needed to be me.”

“So now you are.”

“Yes. I’ve been happy these past few months, mug—”

“Don’t call me mug.”

“All right. I didn’t think you minded the name.”

“Well, I do mind it.”

“All right.”

“Listen, Dana, why’re you here? What do you want from me?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” she said. She sounded hurt. “I just wanted to see you—”

“Give me a little sympathy, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Or maybe you’re looking for forgiveness, somebody to tell you you’re not a bad woman and none of this is your fault. Well, I’m not that person. Try a rabbi, if that’s what you’re after.”

This time it got to her and she winced. “That’s not fair,” she said.

“No? Is it fair what happened to Eb?”

She half-turned away from me. But her eyes were clear; she never cried. Maybe that was a significant thing about her, maybe that explained a lot: she never cried.

“Don’t you think I feel badly enough as it is?” she said.

“I don’t know how you feel. Neither does Eb.”

“He must have said terrible things about me. That’s why you’re acting this way.”

“He never said much of anything about you. Except that he thought you were a whore.”

“I’m not a whore.”

“Maybe not. But you still walked out on him for somebody else.”

“It was over between us. He knew that as well as I did.”

“The hell he did. You blew him right out of the water, Dana. You tore him up inside.”

She put her eyes on me again and I watched anger flash in them. “You weren’t married to him. You don’t know how he could be.”

“I’ve known him as long as you have.”

“But you didn’t live with him. You think it’s easy, being a cop’s wife? Waiting for something like this to happen, some crazy with a gun to show up on your doorstep?”

“You put up with it for twenty-eight years.”

“Yes,” Dana said, “and I got tired of putting up with it. I got tired of his long hours and his moods and his silences. We never talked anymore. We never went anywhere. We weren’t going anywhere, can’t you understand that? It was over. It had been for a long time.”

The rage was thick and hot inside me, tightening my muscles, making the wound in my shoulder throb painfully. But it was not really directed at Dana; she was just a handy object. It was blind, all-encompassing. I was angry at everybody and everything and I wanted to lash out, to hurt someone else.

“Leave me alone, will you,” I said. “Go carry on your deathwatch somewhere else. Go back to your goddamn law professor, let him tell you what a poor, misunderstood woman you are.”

She pinched her chin again with tremulous fingers. “Damn you,” she said. “I came in here feeling sorry for you. I thought we were still friends; I thought you’d understand; I thought we could give each other some comfort. But I was wrong. God, how wrong I was.”

“You’ve been wrong before,” I said. “You were wrong three months ago when you moved out of Eb’s life.”

She pivoted from the bed and went to the door in hard, thumping steps. With the knob in her hand, she looked back at me. “I don’t care what you think,” she said. “David is a good man, a kind man, and I love him and he loves me. I’m not ashamed of what I did.”

“David can go to hell,” I said. “So can you.”

That stung her too; I saw the pain register in her face before she twisted her head around. She pulled the door open, went through it. When she shut it behind her there was a click like the hammer of a gun being cocked.

It took me a while to calm down, to get myself tightly wrapped again. Then I thought: You were too hard on her, she’s suffering too. But I could not seem to feel sorry for her. Eberhardt, yes, but I had no compassion left for anyone else. Least of all myself.

My back hurt from lying in one position; I shifted around on the bed until I was resting on my right hip. But the movement aggravated the pain in my shoulder. A yell formed in my throat and I had to clamp my teeth together to keep it from coming out.

There was one of those hospital buzzers attached to the top of the bed. I grabbed hold of it and jabbed my thumb down on the button. Two minutes later, the young black nurse poked her head inside the door.

“I could use some coffee,” I said.

“No coffee. I can bring you some tea.”

“Okay. Some tea, then.” She started to withdraw, but I stopped her by asking, “Is there any change in Lieutenant Eberhardt’s condition?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“He won’t die,” I said. “He’ll pull through.”

She just looked at me.

“He’ll pull through, you hear?”

“I’ll bring your tea,” she said, and when she closed the door it made the clicking sound again — the sound of a .357 Magnum being cocked.