Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 52

“The kids all want to see you,” gushes Mariah, sitting next to my hospital bed. “It’s like you’re some kind of hero to them.”

I smile reassuringly from deep inside my undignified tangle of bandages and sensors and sutures and tubes. My doctors have assured me happily that I lost so much blood in the Burial Ground that I nearly died. I have had sufficient pain since awakening that I have wondered once or twice whether I might have been better off had the paramedics taken a little longer to find me. Not all the pain has been physical. Yesterday afternoon, I opened my eyes to find Kimmer dozing in the armchair, a thick legal memo on her lap, then opened them again to find her gone. I decided I might have dreamed her presence. When the nurse dropped in to see whether I was dead yet, or at least whether there might be a reason to call in a code and have everybody come running, I asked if my wife had been in to visit. My voice did not come out right, but the nurse was very patient and, eventually, we managed to make contact. Yes, I was told, your wife was here for a while, but she had to go to a meeting. Which is when the pain settled in as a permanent companion. Same old Kimmer. Dutiful enough to visit me despite our estrangement, but not at the risk of losing billable hours.

I asked the nurse if I could have something for the pain. She flipped coolly through my chart, then fiddled with my IV for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes again it was night and I had two detectives as company.

Dr. Serra, my surgeon, bustled in and told them I was too weak to talk.

Lots of flowers, but nobody from the law school on the first day, because I was not allowed visitors other than my wife. One of the critical care nurses, a robust black woman named White, turned the television on and surfed through the channels for me, but I paid little attention to the programs. She finally settled on a movie, something involving Jean-Claude Van Damme and lots and lots of guns. I turned my face to the pale green ceiling, remembered those last moments in the cemetery, and wondered when I could see my son.

I slept some more.

At some point I asked Dr. Serra how it was that I came to be in a private room, but he only shrugged, his palms turning upward as his shoulders sashayed, suggesting through this ornate Mediterranean gesture that his concern was the state of my health, not the state of my finances. I asked for a phone and was refused. A hospital can be like a prison. I wanted to make this point to Dr. Serra, but he rushed off to see his other almost-dead patients. Then Nurse White was back, explaining to me that, because of my guarded condition, I could have only a few visitors, which I had to list for her; once she told me that children were barred from Intensive Care, I lost interest in the exercise.

Five names, she told me, plus family.

I quickly listed Dana Worth and Rob Saltpeter. I listed John Brown. After a moment’s desperate thought, I listed my next-door neighbor Don Felsenfeld. And I asked Nurse White, as a favor to me, to call the Reverend Morris Young, the fifth name on my list. She smiled, impressed. As Nurse White left, I noticed a man in dark blue serge sitting outside the door, and I wondered before falling asleep again whether I was under guard or under arrest.

When I next awakened, there was a Bible on the table next to the bed, a large-print King James Version, along with a note from Dr. Young in an old man’s shaky hand. Call me anytime, he had written. Another nurse came in, and I asked her if she would read to me from Genesis 9.

She was too busy.

The police came back, with Dr. Serra’s grudging permission, and one of them was my old friend Chrebet. I told them what I remembered, but they had talked to the FBI and Dana Worth and Uncle Mal and Sergeant Ames, and seemed to know an awful lot already. They asked me only one question that really seemed to matter: whether I had seen my assailant. That was the word they used, assailant. A word from the newspapers and the movies. I found I liked it. Despite pain and muzziness, the semiotician awakened, wondering why officialdom would choose so impressive-sounding a term to describe a brutal criminal. Perhaps because it made their job seem to lie higher on the social scale than it really did. They were not catching petty hoods, the uneducated and desperate detritus who had been, in the lovely coinage of Marx and Engels, “precipitated” into the Lumpenproletariat, they were chasing down assailants. Well, I had been assailed, all right. I had been struck by an assail of gunfire. Croaking out the words, I explained to the two patient officers that Colin Scott, the man who had done the assailing, was dead. They looked at each other and then shook their heads and told me that the three bullets that struck my abdomen, my thigh, and my neck were recovered, and only two of them were fired from the gun of the late Mr. Scott. Meaning that I was also shot by a fourth person in the cemetery that night.

The person Dana tried to catch. Now I knew why. Because, certainly, there was no need to recover the stolen box.

“We’re not sure yet whether it was an accident,” one of the detectives said. It was that third bullet, they added, that did most of the damage, catching me low in the chest. In the movies, they told me, people shoot for the heart, not a bad idea, but the heart has ribs around it; in real life, you often do more damage aiming for the belly, hoping to smash a kidney or, better still, the liver. And even if you miss those organs, they went on, you cause so much bleeding that there is a good chance that the victim will die long before help arrives.

Trying to scare me. Worked pretty well, too.

Then they told me the rest. Colin Scott was also hit three times. But only the final shot, the one that killed him, was from the same mysterious gun that pinpointed my abdomen from the darkness. The first two bullets to strike him were fired from yet another weapon. Two slugs dug out of headstones near the site of our confrontation also matched this gun. One possibility, the detectives said, is that the secret shooter out there in the mist ran out of bullets and pulled a second gun. Another is that there were not four but five people in the cemetery that night: Dana, myself, Scott, and two unknowns.

Stunned, I told them part of the truth: that I saw nothing except the muzzle flash, that I never knew I had been shot until I collapsed.

They shrugged and went away, never asking me the right question. I dozed, worrying about accident versus intention.

The next time I awakened, Mariah was at my bedside, and I gaze at her now, pert and mature and decidedly rich in designer jeans and ski sweater, a breath of royalty come to call on the commoners’ wing. Crying for me, and telling me that her children think I am a hero.

“What are you doing here?” I manage to croak.

“Your dean tracked me down.”

“No, I mean… I mean, you’re a new mommy.”

“And I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” she sobs, but laughing at the same time. “I go into labor and you go and get yourself shot.”

“How’s the baby?”

“The baby is beautiful. The baby is perfect.”

“And, what? Two days old?”

“Four. She’s fine, Tal. She’s perfect. She’s downstairs in the van with Szusza. Matter of fact, Mommy has to go feed her in a few minutes.” Mariah is smiling as she weeps. “But look at you,” she whispers, twisting her hands in her lap. “Just look at you.”

“I’m fine. You should have stayed home. Really.” I stifle a cough, because coughing hurts. A lot. “I mean, I’m glad you’re here, kiddo, but… well, you really didn’t have to leave the baby for this.” I do not want her to know how touched I am. Nor could I form the words if I wanted to. I may be in Intensive Care, but I am still a Garland.

“Well, no, maybe if they just shot you once. Or even twice. For that I would have stayed in Darien. But, Tal, you’ve always been an overachiever. You have to go and get yourself shot three times!”

I manage a smile, more for Mariah’s sake than mine. I remember, when my mother was dying, how she seemed to think it her role to offer some word of comfort to every tongue-tied visitor who dropped by Vinerd Howse to pay next-to-last respects. I spend a moment’s thought on my brother, wondering why only Mariah is here, but he never came to the Judge’s confirmation hearings either: Addison only likes happy endings.

“I guess you have enough to do,” says Mariah, pointing. My pocket chess set and my laptop computer are lined up neatly next to the bed. I smile like a kid on Christmas. Resting my voice, I gesture. My sister opens my laptop for me on the little table arm that swivels over the bed and turns it on.

Thank you, I mouth as Windows toots its cheery hello.

Kimberly brought them, says Mariah. “She thought you might want them.”

Kind of her, but infuriating too.

“Kimmer’s leaving me,” I tell my sister in a flat tone, but I have to say it three times before my words are clear.

Mariah has the good grace to look embarrassed by her answer. “I think everybody on the East Coast knows that,” she says gently. She turns chipper. “But you’re better off without her. You know what Mom used to tell me when some guy broke my heart? There are many fish in the sea.”

I close my eyes for a moment. If a hospital is a prison, this is my sentence: listening to my sister telling me that I am better off living without the mother of my child.

“I love her,” I say, but so softly that I doubt Mariah hears. “It hurts,” I add, but far beneath the range of sound detectable by the human ear.

“I never liked her,” my sister continues, too distracted to heed any voice but her own. “She wasn’t good for you, Tal.”

We are, for a moment, alone together, for my family has no real emotional tools to support those in need, at least if those in need are relatives. Then I open my eyes and glance up at my sister. She is looking down at her lap, where her fingers are picking nervously at each other.

There is something else on her mind.

“What is it, kiddo?” I whisper, because whispers are the only tune my voice will sing just now.

“Maybe this isn’t a good time…”

“Mariah, what is it?” My swiftly rising fear puts some energy into my voice. “You can’t just come in here and not tell me. What?”

“Addison is gone.”

“Gone?” Panic. Memories of gunshots. And a spike, no doubt, in the blue machine that monitors my heart. I would probably sit up were I not half dead and strapped down besides. “What do you mean, gone? You don’t mean… he isn’t…”

“No, Tal, no. Nothing like that. They say he fled the country. He’s down in Latin America somewhere. They were going to arrest him, Tal.”

“Arrest him? Arrest him for what?” But I am exhausted again, my voice is faint and dry, and I have to repeat this several times, with Mariah leaning close, before she knows what I am asking.

“Fraud. Taxes. I’m not actually sure. A whole lot of money was involved. I don’t know the details. But Uncle Mal says that, whatever it was, they only found out about it from doing the background check.”

“Background check?”

“You know, Tal. On Kimberly.”

Biting the name off, suggesting through her tone that, had my wife not pressed so hard in her quest for a judicial appointment, Addison’s financial shenanigans, whatever they are, would never have been found out. It is my wife’s fault that Addison was ruined, just as it was Greg Haramoto’s fault that the Judge was ruined. Neither man was brought down by his own demons. In today’s America, and certainly in the Garland family, nothing is the fault of the person who does it. Everything is the fault of the person who blows the whistle.

“Oh, Addison,” I whisper. At least I know now why he was looking at property in Argentina. And what was scaring him.

“Just Alma says he has a girlfriend down there. Only, the way Alma says it, I think maybe she’s his wife.”

Perhaps it is the medication, but I have to chuckle at that one. Poor Beth Olin! Poor Sally! Poor whoever-it-was-last-week! Then I realize it may be years before I see my brother again, and my face sags. Oh, what wreckage the Judge left behind him.

“Are you okay, Tal? Want me to call the nurse?”

I shake my head, but I do let her give me some water. Then: “Has anybody heard… from him? From Addison?”

“No,” says Mariah, but the manner in which she cuts her eyes away from me conveys the opposite message.

Then, suddenly cheery, she changes the subject: “Oh, hey, guess what? We got the most incredible offer on the house.”

“The house?”

“On Shepard Street.”

I am fading fast, which might explain my confusion. “I… I didn’t know it was, um, on the market.”

“Oh, it isn’t, but you know how these brokers are. They hear somebody died, and they’re lining up buyers before the will has even been read.” Mariah misunderstands the concern she reads in my face. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I turned it down. I still have lots and lots of papers to go through.”

I signal her to lean close. “Who… who made the offer?” I manage.

“Oh, I don’t know. Brokers never tell. You know how it is.”

Although too weak to say so, I view this development more ominously than Mariah does. “Have to find out who,” I whisper, too softly for my sister to understand.

Mariah begins to talk about Sally, who is now in rehab at the fancy place in Delaware, but I cannot connect the dots. My mind wants some rest. The nurse comes in unapologetically to add some pain medication to the IV line. After that, things are hazy for a while.

The next time I awaken, Mariah is gone, but Dear Dana Worth is there, my first sight of her since-when was the cemetery? Three nights ago? Four? Hospitals, like prisons, erase the body’s natural sense of time’s steady passage. She is wearing a dress, which she rarely does, and looks rather cross. Perhaps it is Sunday, and she has stopped in on her way from that conservative church she so adores. She is wearing a white cardigan over her dress, and white shoes: she looks terribly small-town Southern. Her right arm is in a sling: a bone, she explains, was chipped by the ricochet of a bullet. “How many law schools have two faculty members who were shot on the same night?” she teases.

I struggle to smile back.

“I never caught up with him,” Dear Dana says, her tiny fists clenched. I realize that it is herself at whom she is angry. “I’m sorry, Misha.”

“It’s okay,” I mutter, but my voice is even weaker than before, and I wonder whether Dana even hears me.

“Then I came back to see how you were doing, and there was all this blood-”

I wave this away. I do not want to hear about her heroic rush down through the very drainage pipe I was looking for, or how she commandeered a telephone at a convenience store-maybe the same one!-and waited for the paramedics and the police and Samuel, to open the gate, and led them back into the cemetery, quieting their doubts and questions as the parade twisted and turned along the dark paths, or how they worked frantically to save me, carrying me out of the Burial Ground more dead than alive. I do not want to hear it in part because I have heard pieces of it already-from Mariah, from Dr. Serra-and in part because I cannot bear to think of Dana’s heroism, when it has become important to deceive her.

And Dana, with her swift empathy, understands my reluctance at once, and so veers off on another path.

“Everybody at the law school is rooting for you,” she insists, squeezing my fingers in the way that people do when they want you to know they are sincerely sad. Maybe the word is out that Professor Garland is not going to make it. “The students all want to know what they can do. Give blood, whatever. And the Dean wants to visit.”

Just what I need. I shake my head wearily. “What about… about the deadline?” I manage.

“Are you kidding? They won’t dare fire you now. We’re famous, Misha, we’ve been in all the papers.” She smiles, but it is forced. I gesture at her arm, whisper that I’m sorry.

“It’s okay.” She pats my hand. “My life is never this exciting.”

“You shouldn’t… shouldn’t have…”

“Forget it, Misha.”

“I… did they… did they…”

I can manage no more, but Dana gets the message. She glances toward the door before hazarding an answer. “Yes, Msha, it worked. As far as I know, they bought the story. And it’s a good thing.” She wags a tiny finger at me. “You owe me big-time, mister, and when you’re out of here…” She trails off. She smiles. The truth is, Dear Dana is complete. She has nearly everything she wants. There is nothing she can think to demand of me, even in jest. Whatever she lacks, she goes to her little Methodist church to find, and providing it is God’s problem, not mine. Dana sighs and shrugs. “Anyway, Misha, it worked.”

I mouth the words Thank you, and I try to add, though I am fading, I hope you’re right.

Dana is embarrassed now, or maybe she is sick of trying to cheer me up. For whatever reason, she is on her feet, brushing her lips against my forehead, pressing my hand, shrugging into her coat. At the door, she turns to look at me once more. “I’m sorry I didn’t catch him,” she repeats into my fading consciousness.

I try to tell Dana, although I doubt that I actually form the words, that I am pretty sure that the him she keeps apologizing for not catching, the person who fired the third bullet into me, was actually a her. I do not know her real name, but the first time I saw her, she was wearing Rollerblades.

“You’re looking a lot better today, honey,” burbles my wife of nine years, even though she no longer thinks of me as her husband.

“Must be all the push-ups,” I manage through parched lips. But I am sitting up and can even drink liquids through a straw. My aching jaw is wired shut. Dr. Serra says I fractured it, but I do not remember when.

Kimmer smiles one of her slow, warming, secret smiles. She pours me some water from a carafe and snaps the plastic top onto the cup. Then she leans over and puts the straw to my mouth so that I can sip. It hurts to watch her move. The sharp professional cut of her inky-black suit and ecru blouse do nothing to disguise her lazy sensuality. Since shutting me out of her life a week ago, Kimmer seems to have blossomed. She is, at this moment, a remarkably happy woman. And why not? She is free.

“Had enough?” asks my wife, sitting down again. I nod. She smiles. “The doctor says they’ll have you up and walking soon.”

“Great.”

“When they let you out, you can come home if you want,” she tells me, smiling, but even in the midst of my drug-induced torpor I recognize the trap. Kimmer is not proposing that we try to rebuild our marriage; she is simply suggesting a place for me to recuperate, her house, by her sufferance, placing me in her debt. “I could nurse you back to health, like in the movies.”

She is trying hard, I must grant her that, but the offer is hardly one I can accept, as she well knows. So I merely stare, and eventually my wife loses her smile and drops her eyes and searches for a less controversial topic.

“You wouldn’t recognize Bentley. He’s getting so tall. And talking so much.” As though I have been away for months or years, rather than hospitalized for four or five days.

“Mmmm,” I acknowledge.

“Nellie hasn’t been around the house,” she adds softly, instinct telling her where my fears lie. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Misha. Or to our son.”

I wonder whether any particular word of this is true. Kimmer is a fine lawyer: how, I ask myself cleverly, is she defining around?

“I’m so sorry about how things worked out,” Kimmer says a little later, her eyes teary as she holds my hand in both of hers. I pat her fingers.

“Me, too,” I assure her.

“You don’t understand.” She seems ready to resume the argument she has already won, although I cannot imagine why.

“Not now,” I plead, closing my eyes. All I can see is Bentley’s glowing face.

“It’s not that I don’t love you, Misha,” she continues unhappily, shoving my heart closer and closer to the precipice. “I do. I really do. I just… I can’t… I don’t know.”

“Kimmer, please. Don’t do this, okay?”

She shakes her head. “It’s just so complicated!” she bursts out, as though my life is the simpler of the two. But maybe poor Sally was right all along. Maybe it is. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me!”

“It’s okay, Kimmer,” I whisper, to no apparent purpose. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay! I tried, Misha, I really tried!” Pointing a slender finger at me. “I wanted to do it right, Misha, I really did. For you, for my folks, for our son-for everybody. I tried to be what you wanted, Misha, but you got too crazy on me. Or I got too crazy. Either way, I couldn’t be that person any more. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her for the third time, or the thirtieth.

She nods. The silence stretches out.

The nurse comes in to do some of those invasive but necessary things that nurses do and asks my soon-to-be-ex-wife to wait outside. Kimmer dries her tears and stands up and says she has to be going anyway. She kisses me gently on the corner of my mouth and walks proudly to the door, where she turns and offers a half-smile and a quarter-wave, all the while looking tall and strong and incredibly desirable and not at all mine.

“You’re a lucky man,” says the nurse.

The odd thing is that, from the depths of my several pains, I agree.