Falling in Place

Twenty-One

“ITHINK I’ve spent a lot of time talking to most everybody but to you. How do you feel?”

“Like hell,” Mary said.

He nodded. It was going to form a scar — puffy and ugly, the doctor had told him the day before — but there could be a second operation, later, to graft skin over the scar. The doctor thought that a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn’t have such a reminder of what had happened. He told Mary that when the plastic surgery was done, she could wear a two-piece bathing suit and no one would know. They would take skin from another part of her body — the inside of her thigh — and graft it. Mary nodded. She closed her eyes often, even when the doctors were there talking, and imagined other diseases, other things gone wrong, that might have put her in the hospital. It could have been mono. Appendicitis. Something simple. Two psychiatrists came to visit her every day, to tell her that this was not simple. It had been simple, though. She remembered saying goodbye to Angela. She thought Angela was going to trail her home, insisting that she go to another party at Lloyd Bergman’s, but Angela had given up on her. “If you don’t want to, you don’t want to,” Angela had said. Then she had walked through the field, being careful to avoid the poison ivy. Once Angela gave up, the idea of the party seemed more interesting. Walking through the field, she thought about changing her mind. She was still wondering whether she should go to the party or not — the last one hadn’t been as bad as she thought — when she knew that something was wrong. It was just a peculiar feeling she had, that something was going to happen. She looked back, suspecting that Angela was following. She saw a bug alight on her jeans and flicked it off. Before she had turned fully around again, and before she thought to look up in the tree, she felt a terrible explosion in her side, and that was all she remembered. One psychiatrist wanted to know what she had thought when she heard the sound, and she told him there was no sound — just pain that knocked her over, and then she didn’t remember anything. The psychiatrist told her that there was no such thing as a totally silent firing of a gun, even with a silencer. He asked her to try to remember the sound. She smiled at him. She couldn’t. After only three meetings with him, she had figured out that anything she couldn’t remember or didn’t want to talk about could be taken care of with a smile. When she smiled, he smiled. It also worked with the woman. Then, if she didn’t speak, after a while they went on and talked about something else.

She was amazed that John Joel had shot her, of course, but she was also amazed that now she hated him less. In fact, she didn’t hate him at all. She was embarrassed to have been shot. She told the psychiatrist that, and he asked whether she was saying that she somehow deserved to be shot, whether she felt it was something she had asked for. “But this was a real gun. It was shot with the intent to kill you.”

She realized that it was real. That didn’t matter. It mattered that she hurt, but she couldn’t believe that she might have died. Now her father was in the room, and he was smiling at her. She did what the psychiatrist did when she smiled: smiled back and didn’t say anything. Finally he was the one who spoke. He whispered, “Do you hate me?”

She shook her head no.

“That was a selfish question, I guess. Coming to stand by your bed and be absolved of guilt.”

“What did you do?” she said.

“I went to live in Rye,” he said. “Among other things that I’ve done.”

“Rye seems like a pretty nice place to me,” she said. It was a joke. Only in this context did it seem reasonable. It wasn’t reasonable. John Joel knew that, and she thought that it was part of the reason why he had shot her. Although their mother liked John Joel better than she liked her. Rye. If he wanted to live in Rye, let him live in Rye. She did not think it reflected on her. But she thought it explained why her brother had done it, in part. The psychiatrists wanted her to think about all the reasons why her brother had shot her, and then they wanted to hear what she thought about those reasons: why she did or didn’t think she deserved to be shot. One of them gave her a legal pad. She made criss-crosses on the page, doodled flowers and moths and birds, wrote her name and inked over it and over it until the letters were tall and wide. She would just tell the psychiatrist again why he had done it. That it was because they didn’t like each other. That she taunted him. That her brother wasn’t happy. That he probably wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, for some reason. No — she didn’t think John Joel was sick. She thought that he had shot her maybe without even deciding to do it, and that now it was over. Things were going to change. The psychiatrist asked her how.

She tested her father: “Are things going to be different?”

“You’re going to get well,” he said. He looked huge, standing by the window. Everything in the room was low: the tray that came over the bed so she could eat, the little night table. He was playing with the cord to the Venetian blinds.

“Be different,” he sighed. “Yes. Things certainly seem to have changed, don’t they?” His little joke. She had made a little joke that it would be better to be in Rye with her grandmother than to be in Connecticut with her family, where she had been shot; he had made a little joke that being shot was a change.

Mary had been shot, and John was standing in her hospital room, playing with the cord to the blinds. The private nurse usually went out when someone came into the room, but he noticed that when he was there alone, she stayed. She feigned interest in the book she was reading, but from time to time she would look up. She disapproved of his fiddling with the cord.

“How would you like things to change?” he said.

“Am I going to flunk summer school? Or will she feel sorry enough for me to pass me? If she passes me, I never want to read another book as long as I live.”

“Summer school,” he said. “Summer school. Shell pass you, I’m sure. If you have to make up work, you can make up work.”

“But I don’t have to go back?”

“It’s almost over. You won’t be out of the hospital, I don’t think.”

“I mean ever.”

“To school?”

“Yeah. To school.”

He looked uncomfortable. He didn’t answer. He had made a knot in the cord that was too tight. It was going to be a problem to untie it. He ran his thumb over the knot. He thought about it-how to untangle the knot. Then he realized that it was there before he had started fooling with it. The other cord also had a knot. They were made that way. He hadn’t done it. He smiled, holding the cord.

“I’d be embarrassed to go back,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “It wasn’t anything you did.”

“Yes it was.”

“No it wasn’t. What do you mean?”

The private nurse turned the page. She was reading a copy of Life. Life was back. Gone, then back. He wondered how Life was doing.

She would have shrugged, but it hurt to move her body that way. She looked at her hands. Angela had painted her nails before it happened. They were an orangey-red, a color she didn’t much like. She had already picked the polish off two of the fingers. It felt like a match had just been lit in her side.

“What can I do for you?” he said. “What would you like? Is there something I can bring you here, or something I can promise you?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said.

“But you want things to change. You want things to change-how? By my being in Connecticut?”

“Be where you want to be,” she said.

“I don’t blame you for taking it out on me.”

“I’m not,” she said. “Be where you want to be.”

The night before, Louise had said to him: “Maybe you flatter yourself. Maybe all of this doesn’t have much to do with you.”

The private nurse coughed. “If they keep making movies like this, the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. She looked at John. “Please excuse me while I get a drink of water,” she said. She looked at Mary. “Is there anything I can get for you?” she said. “A Coke?”

“No, thank you,” Mary said.

It was the same private nurse his mother had had when she had a tonsillectomy five years ago. Then, he remembered, the nurse had been reading Robert Frost. Now she was reading Life. She had also dyed her hair the color of a tangerine, and she wore necklaces that you could hang ornaments on. There were several chains around her neck, but whatever dangled from them was hidden under her white uniform. She wore white clogs and white stockings and a white uniform with a pleated top and a wide skirt. He had no idea whether Mary liked her. Her name was Mrs. Patterson. He had no idea what her first name was. His mother paid the nurse. His mother had arranged for the nurse, and she was picking up the bill. Louise and his mother had worked it out and he didn’t know anything about her being there until he walked into the hospital room and she was there. Louise said that she had more things on her mind than to tell him about the nurse — did he mind that there was a nurse? Did he suddenly want to be consulted about decisions made in the family?

Mrs. Patterson came back. “They had a perfectly fine movie, a good movie, and they had to do it: They had to show Sally Field’s breasts. Norma Rae couldn’t just be a winner — she had to be a sexy winner. It disgusts me that a good movie like that existed, and they had to stoop to a — pardon me — a boobies shot.” She coughed into her hand. “Pardon me,” she said again.

“I thought we might go to Nantucket,” he said. “Your grandmother said she’d look after John Joel for a while. He’s seeing a doctor. You knew that?”

She nodded yes. He had sniped her, from up in a tree, when she didn’t know he was there. It was the first time he had ever gotten the best of her. It was hard to hate him for winning just once. She decided not to tell anyone that she didn’t hate him anymore, though. If she ever started to hate him again, she did not want to have to explain it.

“Mary?” John said.

“What?”

“What do you think about the idea of going to Nantucket?”

“If you want to,” she said.

“When you get out,” he said.

“If you want to,” she said. She began to chip the polish off another nail. It was sour on her tongue.

“Your mother and I would like to do something you’d like to do. Is there somewhere you’d like to go?”

“The beach is fine.”

“You don’t want to go,” he said.

“It’s okay. We can go.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’m just guessing about what you might like. What can I do, send for Peter Frampton?”

“He wouldn’t come.”

“I was just kidding,” he said. “But is there anything I could do? Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

“You know what she probably wants,” Mary said. “You could get her another German shepherd.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. That’s what she’d like. Another dog. I’ll bet you.”

“I think she just liked that particular dog. If she wanted another one, I think she would have gotten it.”

“Maybe not,” Mary said. “Maybe she just never got around to it.”

“Would you like to have a dog around the house?”

“She would. She talks to Tiffy all the time about the dog.”

“She talks to Tiffy all the time about you, too, you know.”

“She liked the dog better. You know she did. Face it.”

“Of course she didn’t like the dog better than she likes you.”

Mrs. Patterson looked up from the magazine, pretending to be shaking a curl that had fallen on her forehead out of the way. She pushed the curl back in place and bent over the magazine again.

“Mary,” he said, “I don’t want to upset you, but I can’t let you say something like that. You don’t believe that.”

“I was just kidding.”

“No you weren’t. Do you believe that?”

“No,” she said.

“Good,” he said. He thought that she was lying to him and that she had meant it. He was trying to think of what to say next, when a man carrying a lunch tray came in. He took the top off the tray, clattered it onto the shelf underneath his pushcart and said, “There you go,” setting the tray on the tray table. Mrs. Patterson jumped up. There were carrots on the plate. Mashed potatoes. Gray meat.

“Doesn’t this look delicious,” Mrs. Patterson said.

He went to the waiting room while she ate. He said that he had to make a phone call and would be right back, but it was a lie. He couldn’t stand to see her eat that food. He couldn’t stand to think that his daughter thought Louise had liked her German shepherd more than she liked her. There was some truth in it, of course. The dog wasn’t distant. It wasn’t self-absorbed. But didn’t adolescents always draw away from their parents? Didn’t they all have a period when they felt superior, when they were critical or distant, just wanting to block their parents out? Mary had blocked them out. They had also blocked her out. His son had shot his daughter. He was not entirely sure who his daughter was. John Joel was much more understandable, even though he still couldn’t believe that he had fired a gun, that he had shot not caring if he killed Mary. He was understandable because … He got up and went into the phone booth. His son wasn’t understandable, and his daughter wasn’t understandable, except now, when she was hurting and punishing her parents for what had happened. Louise was understandable, up to a point. He had thought that he had understood her a while back, when he had been standing at the bedroom window watching shooting stars dart and fade in the sky, and something they had been talking about, whatever it was — somehow she had told him, point-blank, that she didn’t want to know everything. That meant that she knew, and didn’t want confirmation. Didn’t want details. Yet if she knew, and if she didn’t have much feeling for him or even care if he was there, why would she plan a vacation to Nantucket? And if she did, why wouldn’t Tiffy have talked her out of it? Louise had told him that Tiffy said her greatest problem was that she had to develop a sense of pride. He could tell by the way Tiffy looked at him that she hated him.

He called Nick. It was Saturday, and Nick would be home. He dialed his apartment, and a woman answered.

“He went out for groceries,” the woman said. “Who’s this?”

“It’s John. It’s not important. Tell him I’ll call back.”

“Want me to have him call you?”

“I’m not home. I’m at a phone booth. I’ll call him tonight.”

“You don’t sound good,” the woman said.

“What?” he said. “Who’s this?”

“Carolyn Ross,” she said.

He had never heard of Carolyn Ross.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Fine. I’ll call back later.”

“Sure,” she said. “He should be back in an hour.”

It wasn’t until he put the phone back that he realized that he was seeing yellow shimmering around the edges of things. But he never fainted. He couldn’t be about to faint after doing nothing but standing in his daughter’s room and going out into the corridor to make a phone call. He looked at his hands, and they looked as though small yellow sparks were coming off them. He got out of the phone booth and went to a sofa and sat down. The yellow paled, shimmered, gradually disappeared. He sat there, trying to breathe normally. What would he do with them in Nantucket? Go to the beach. Sail. Watch clouds change shape. Buy fudge. Post cards.

He couldn’t. He could do it for a week, two weeks, but he couldn’t do it for the rest of his life. He thought of Metcalf, and how he took his lover with him for the family’s annual East Hampton vacation. He told his wife she was there to help with the children, and the woman came along. Year after year she came along. He paid her on Fridays, and she took the checks. She lived on Park Avenue, in an apartment Metcalf rented for her. It galled Metcalf that she actually cashed the checks, when he gave her almost twenty thousand dollars a year, plus an apartment on Park Avenue. They did it for five summers, and then Metcalf’s wife informed him at the last minute that her sister was taking the children for July, and that the vacation could be for just the two of them. Proud of thinking quickly, Metcalf had said that he felt duty-bound to have the au pair anyway, because she had been counting on the money, and that she could come and take care of the house. When he told Jenny, his mistress, what he had worked out, she just stared at him silently. He had no idea, Metcalf said, that asking her to clean house had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. When he left, Jenny called his wife and told her what was going on. Bad enough that she had to put up with two bratty kids every summer — she was not going to clean somebody’s house, she told Metcalf’s wife. Metcalf showed up in the office the first of August, when everybody thought he would be gone, because his wife and Jenny were in the East Hampton house, and they wanted two weeks to work it out and become pals before he went there. Metcalf kept threatening to get in his car and put a stop to it, but he never did. He spent the last two weeks of August there and said that although he’d lost respect for Jenny, he had still never been kissed the way she kissed him, and he was going to go on supporting her. “For a kiss,” Metcalf said. “Not a lay, a kiss. The way she kisses.” Metcalf had come back and slammed tennis balls against the wall in the corridor outside his office, letting his phone ring, getting violently angry if anyone objected to the noise or asked him a question. “A kiss,” Metcalf kept saying over and over. “A good kiss should be everybody’s birthright.”

A young man in his early twenties, at the other end of the sofa, was watching John out of the corner of his eye. John was trying to look normal, to convince his body that it could function normally. It would be humiliating to fall over in the waiting room. He tried to breathe normally. To blink. It was difficult not to blink hard and often when you thought about blinking. It was hopeless the way it was hopeless to be aware of your tongue and not have it feel too big for your mouth. The man was holding something out to him, with a little corona of light around it. The light faded as John stared at the pack of gum with one piece slid out, finally realizing what it was. “No thanks,” he said. He tried to remember the last time he had chewed gum. With Brandt, about a year ago, to show him how to chew without making faces. Pilar, his mother’s cook, had introduced him to chewing gum. She also let him eat raw cookie dough, which was bad for him. However, as his mother always said when she finished a list of grievances against Pilar, she never skimped on lime in the gin and tonics, and never once had they run out of ice. Her stews were very good, although she would make them all summer long unless she was stopped. His mother had recently given Pilar some cookbooks with recipes for cold summer meals. Diced cucumber and cold salmon loaf. Argentine eggs with pasta. He had just been offered a stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, and his mouth was watering as much as it would if he had taken the stick and chewed it. He could smell the gum. He looked at the young man. The man was looking at him.

“It’s a bitch,” the man said.

He nodded. “You know somebody who’s a patient here?”

“My wife. She was cutting the lawn, and she fell over. I thought she was dead. What a bitch. Mower kept going and crashed into the house. I wouldn’t have known. Had the television on. What a bitch.” He snapped his gum three times. “How about you?” he said.

“You probably read it in the papers,” John said. “My son shot my daughter.”

“I haven’t seen a paper in two weeks. My wife and I were in Ashland, Oregon. Come home and unpack, and the next day, whammo! She’s on her back in the yard. I thought she was kidding. They think it’s her heart, but nothing shows.” He had stopped chewing. “I don’t know what to say about what you said. I heard you, but I don’t know what to say. They young kids, fooling around, or what?”

“Ten and fifteen. My son is ten.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “An accident, huh? How’d he get a gun?”

“Apparently it was around his friend’s house, in a box. The kid’s father didn’t have any idea his son knew the gun was there. How the gun got out of the box and into my son’s hands is still up in the air.”

“Holy shit,” the man said. “Ten and fifteen. She all right?”

“Yes. She’s going to be all right.”

“Holy holy,” the man said. “Lucky she wasn’t blown away. If you can say anybody’s lucky who’s been shot. I didn’t read about it in the papers. What’s it like, having a story about you in the paper? Never mind. That isn’t any of my business. You don’t chew gum? There’s a Coke machine hidden behind that door.”

The man pointed. He had a turquoise and silver ring on his index finger. His nails were a little long, and dirty.

“Thanks. I might get one later.”

“I wonder how many people are sitting around here, or lying in bed here, wondering what they did wrong? I left the room because the lady my wife shares it with was being examined. Not examined, butchered. A bone marrow extract. My God. One day in Ashland, the next day here.” The man lit a cigarette, offering one to John. John shook his head no. “Not exactly the next day. I barrel-assed back from Ashland, but it still took five days, you know? Not the next day really, but so to speak. Holy shit. I can’t believe I’m sitting here. Her sister’s coming, and it’s just as well if I can have a word with her before she goes in to see my wife. Her sister’s a nun, and my wife is an agnostic, and I want to try to get her to keep religion out of it. Just seeing her sister in her penguin get-up sets her off as it is. Some orders wear normal clothes now, but not her sister’s order. They voted no. Imagine. Jesus.”

“I thought I was going to faint a few minutes ago,” John said.

“You looked like it,” the man said. “I was all set to slide down the sofa and push your head between your knees. That works, you know.”

“I should go back to her room now,” John said. “They were having lunch.”

“My wife blew lunch yesterday,” the man said. “Cottage cheese and custard. Maybe not exactly cottage cheese, but something like it. I wonder how many people are sitting around this hospital right at this minute, trying to figure things out. This place is probably sending out more vibes than the Rand Corporation.”

He tried Nick again. This time nobody answered the phone. He let it ring six times, then hung up and took his dime back. He wondered if Metcalf could be right: Would Nick really be so childish as to subscribe Metcalf to magazines? It was absurd the way Nick always got riled up about Metcalf: He had a picture of Metcalf (taken at a picnic several years ago) enlarged to eight by ten, and hung it on the bathroom wall, in his apartment, to decondition himself. Nick thought that if he could look at Metcalf’s face without going wild, he could handle him better in person. But the picture just drove him crazy. One night when he was drunk, he got spooked about going into the bathroom, even though he knew where the picture was and wouldn’t have to look in that direction; he went into the kitchen instead and peed into an empty wine bottle. That absurdity, and the absurdity of Metcalf’s scheme to keep his lover around. The absurdity of being out of your mind, showing up at six in the morning, seven in the morning, whatever it was, at your lover’s apartment and finding a man there, even if nothing was going on. The craziness of going there. The craziness of finding happiness when you couldn’t have it; or of planning to have it, only to have this happen. It had happened. And Mary was in the room, waiting for him. He walked down the corridor and into her room. Her face was white, and her hospital gown and the sheets; and the sun had shifted so that the blinds looked bright white, strongly illuminated from behind. The nurse was taking Mary’s temperature. When he was a child, his mother had gone around in the evening with a thermometer in her mouth, because she had read somewhere that it would firm up the jawline. For a while his mother had cared about wrinkles. He could remember his father suggesting a straw instead, because a thermometer was depressing. His mother said that a straw would not be the same. You had to know the mercury was in there. You had to be steady and careful. You could not bite down. The thermometer they had at the hospital stood in a white plastic stand when it was not in use.

“Your mother’s in with John Joel,” he said. “Did I tell you that? She told me that she’s coming to see you at two or three. And Angela called this morning, and I told her it would be all right to visit. Was that all right to tell her?”

“She’s going to think I look gross,” Mary said.

“We’re all glad you’re all right. That’s all,” John said.

“That’s not all Angela thinks. I talked to her on the phone yesterday, and all she wanted to hear about was how big a bandage it was. She thinks it’s better that this happened than that I lost my tits like Marge Pendergast, or something. She wanted to know if they bathed me in bed every day. She thinks it’s a resort. She’s pretty stupid sometimes.”

“Should I have told her not to come?”

“Sure,” Mary said. “She’s only my best friend.”

“Your temperature’s normal. I’m not supposed to give any of that information, but it is, and why should I hold out on you about good news?” the nurse said.

“She doesn’t have circles under her eyes today,” John said.

“When she did, nobody said anything, and that was the right thing to do,” the nurse said. “It’s discouraging to patients to be told they look bad. I’ve been in rooms where people walked in and clamped their hands over their mouths.”

He pulled the small chair up to her bed. “Was lunch good?” he said.

“Suck-o,” Mary said.

“I was down in the sitting room, and I thought over what you said. Do you think it would be nice for all of us if there was a dog? We could get a dog when we come back from the vacation.”

“You’re moving back?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. Her eyes glazed when he said it, like a sick person’s. “In any case, we’re taking a vacation, and I think that you’re right — your mother might like a dog, and you might like it, too. What do you say?”

“You forgot him,” Mary said. “He’s coming back too, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Sure. After a little while. He’s talking to some doctors now, and he’s going to be staying with Grandma for a while.”

“She must think the sky is falling.”

“I imagine she does. She doesn’t cover up very well. When she’s upset she cries and raves. She knocked over one of her vases. You would have liked to have seen it. Pilar ran into the room and dealt with it. Pilar can deal with anything. I once saw Pilar swatting a fly with one hand while she was using a whisk to beat an egg with the other, and she never missed a beat.”

“Unhygienic,” the nurse said. “This is your mother’s cook? I like your mother, though. She’s a fine lady. I’m sure this cook is the right person for the job if your mother thinks so.”

He took Mary’s hand. It was small and tender. He moved his hand over hers, stroking, wondering how her hand could be so warm in such a cool room if she had no fever. He remembered Nina’s hand on his head, and the way she had asked, “Are you in shock?” In fact, he had been — or out of his mind, at least. To prove that he was sane, he had tried to re-create for Nina his trip into New York, but he had gotten bogged down trying to remember whether he said goodbye to Louise or not. He thought he had been in the house and then left, but maybe he had been in the house only when Tiffy was there, before he knew what had happened, when he came home and saw the police car blocking his driveway. He had once joked to Nina that there were pillars, and she had believed it. He could imagine pillars, rising up, 2001 music playing as they went higher and higher. He could not imagine living in that house again, and he wondered if Mary could, either. He was holding her hand, and it was still as warm, as clammy. He bent over and kissed her hand, and she drew it away. There was a Band-Aid in the crook of her arm, from the intravenous. A bruise spread out beneath the Band-Aid. The nurse had put it there, because, she said, looking at needle marks and bruises was upsetting. “Everyone isn’t like me. Other people aren’t accustomed to things that are physically ugly, and it’s easy to forget that. I always try to remember that the patient is the patient, and I am me.

Mary in her gingerbread-man bathing suit. Mary in her white bag of a hospital gown. Mary herself. He had been so surprised to have a baby, and then two, and then three. Different-sized children. Mary the first of them. It made him sentimental in a way he couldn’t remember being sentimental before. If she could be born again, it would be in low light, with music playing, and he would be there, humming along with the music. That would certainly make him pass out, if just being in the hospital made him queasy. Mary’s birth. The time before Mary. The time before Louise. If you could only go backward, however awkwardly, like running backward without looking, depending on memory so that you didn’t crash into something, hoping some sixth sense would protect you. Going backward that way as an adult would be like a small child’s going forward — your footing unsure, trusting a hand to be outstretched at the crucial moment, for a table to be sturdy and not light. To be able to walk, to balance, to progress. He remembered Mary toddling, Louise luring her with some toy, shaking an elephant or a lion, calling to her, “Come on, Mary. That’s right.” Mary hanging back, gripping his thumb, wanting to go but afraid of all that space between hands, the gap between what was behind her and the lion. Then she had half-run forward, awkwardly, and grabbed the prize. Someone had told him (Tiffy? One of the policemen? Somebody, anyway) that she had just fallen, and there had been no scream that Louise or Tiffy had heard. (That’s right, Tiffy had told him.) They had just gone out into the backyard and there they all were, four of them standing and one on the ground, as silent as actors about to begin a pantomime. But then Louise had started screaming. Her screaming had made Parker cry, and John Joel. And then Parker ran across the field, shouting back that the gun wasn’t his, that John Joel had done it, and John Joel had waited in the house, upstairs in his room. He had been sent to his room, like a bad boy, until the ambulance got there. Louise kept trying to move Mary, to shake her, tug at her. Tiffy had had a hard time convincing her to let her be still. His daughter, lying still on the ground. Still in a hospital bed. Her stillness had made him move erratically, frantically. Suddenly he was not at the hospital, not at the house in Connecticut, but in New York, in the familiar garage, talking to a taxi driver, getting out at Columbus Avenue, opening the door and going up the stairs. It hadn’t been until then that the tiredness had hit him — the tiredness and the shock. It was like trying to wish yourself awake from a bad dream, steps and more steps, like layers upon layers, and he couldn’t make a sound. There had been a little noise on the street, but inside the building, nothing. It was quiet, like the floor of the ocean, and he was trying to reach the top. He could feel the sweat running down his face, and from somewhere far-off — not from any place he could identify — he was watching himself move forward, step after step, moving in slow motion to reach the landing. Moving deliberately in slow motion, perhaps, because what could he say? And if he said it, what could she do? What did he want her to do? What had John Joel wanted from Mary? He had wanted to be rid of her. He had wondered if telling Nina would frighten her, make her go. He didn’t want that. He wanted her, he wanted not to be swimming, to bound up the stairs, minus bouquet and top hat but still charming, ready for… She did not open the door, of course, in a long gown, and he did not take her in his arms for a dance. There was no graceful movement at all. He was exhausted from the climb, and the man-he had stood and gaped at the man as surprised as if the man were naked. And then Nina had said the man’s name, and that she had not slept with him, no matter what he was thinking. He was thinking: I’m alive. Even Mary is alive. My son shot my daughter. But it was impossible to talk about it. Everything went on, in slow motion. His following her into the kitchen, his legs so heavy that he could not believe that they were not ballooning. She had been cutting fruit. Simply fixing breakfast, cutting fruit. He had walked into ordinary life, and the little accidents of ordinary life — Nina’s cut finger. While she was gone he had continued to peel and chop the orange. The juice ran down his hands and wrists. He was holding the peeled orange, baseball-sized but soft, soft and juicy, it must have been like something the doctors had seen inside Mary’s body. Didn’t medical students practice cutting oranges because oranges were like certain tissues in the body? Oranges punctured with needles, as they learned to give injections? He held the peeled orange and stared at it. Then he put it on the chopping board and chopped it, sprinkled the wet pieces over her bowl of cereal. He waited for her to come back. He went to the bathroom door and saw her, washing her sleeve, bandaging the finger. He had wanted to tell her all of it, in detail, but he hadn’t been there, he would have to make the details up. He could describe the field, the day, but the blood — he hadn’t been there to see the blood, or Tiffy in the field, then Louise, Parker streaking past them, screaming that he had not done it. And what happened from there? How did John Joel go to his bedroom? How had he driven into New York? He was in Nina’s apartment and she was right — he loved it, small as a womb. He was comfortable with the small movements he could make. And how had he gotten from the bathroom door into Nina’s bedroom? In time. Floating. The dead-man’s float. Lying face down on her mattress, arms outstretched. He had wanted to tell her, before any more time passed, before she left the bathroom; but she had pushed past him, and he had said nothing, only that he had peeled the orange. Chopped the orange. He wanted to say: Am I crazy? But she would have thought he was talking about his peeling the orange when he knew she was angry with him. When he realized that it was right not to have spoken, he also realized that then he wasn’t crazy. If he wasn’t crazy, then he would just be a normal person, telling a story about a crazy person. The crazy person was his son. Born of his genes. Seeds of the orange.

Mary’s eyes were closed. Mrs. Patterson, seeing that they were, allowed herself to look directly at John. She moved her head, telling him silently that he should go away from the bed. He moved back, cocked his head. She was lying there, suddenly asleep. People got heavier when they were unconscious. He remembered carrying her, when she was a child, taking her along with them when they had dinner with friends, putting her down to rest in the friend’s bed, then picking her up again and taking her home, dead weight pressed against him. The awkwardness of it, the way all her weight seemed to be concentrated in the middle of her body: Her arms and legs were so light they dangled and flapped. Inadvertently she would kick. As she got larger, her foot hit against him, kicking him in the balls. He knew she would not kick in her sleep, but still he would hunch forward, warding off the pain, and as he hunched she would slip down farther and farther. He had been awkward in a lot of ways. He had been awkward about leaving, coming back the way a drunken guest returns, apologizing, for a sweater, and then for a wallet, everyone knowing the person is drunk, the person wanting to appear only forgetful. He had wanted to appear sensible, and they had all known that what he was doing did not make sense. There had been the excuse of his mother’s illness, but when that passed it was so awkward that he did not go back. He could not go back, because for a long time, for years, he had felt like a guest, like someone who could only go so far, and then have to stop: feet on the footstool, but not tucked under you on the chair; a long soak in the bathtub, but then you had to scrub the ring away; a plant to be admired, but how could you know how much water it needed? Everything was being taken care of. He was visiting. He even had the manners to bring flowers, occasionally. A bottle of wine. He knew the things they liked, and they knew what he liked. It could have gone on. If it had, things might even have changed. It could have gone on like a reel of movie film spinning, but he started to get dizzy, to lose his breath. He started to edge away, delicately, as delicately as he could. Like shaving with a safety razor — you could only do it so delicately. You could know the strokes, the feel of the blade on the skin, just how much lather to put on; but still the skin would pull an unexpected way, a microscopic imperfection of the blade would result in a nick. He had told Louise, shaving, that the move was going to be permanent for a while. That was the way he had said it — awkwardly, like some bumbling child. An adolescent, cutting himself shaving. Lies: because he couldn’t stand the commute; because his mother needed him, even if she wasn’t dying. A trickle of blood had come up through the lather — a little cut he hadn’t even felt. “Do you want me to feel sorry for you?” she had said. She had not moved off the side of the tub, where she sat. She had watched him continue shaving, watched him hold the styptic stick to his cheek, cursing that it wasn’t working and he was in a hurry. He suddenly remembered what she had said to him: She had come up behind him, put her arms around him, and said, with her head buried in his back, “You hate blood, don’t you?” She was right. She knew him very well. And she was clever, too. Because she had not been talking about blood.

He had not rinsed the washcloth well enough. The razor wasn’t put carefully on the back of the sink, but dropped on the small table among her make-up. He was a bad guest. The guest who brings flowers, then gets drunk and chews off the heads. When he left, and didn’t come back for two weeks, he had been such a coward that he had sent tulips. Then guilt caught up, and he began the weekend visits. Then his son shot his daughter. In between, there was life with his mother and Brandt, life with Nina, working with Nick, dealing with Metcalf. And then his son had shot his daughter.

Leaving Mary’s room, he went to the phone booth. He was about to call Nick, when he realized that he couldn’t remember what he wanted to talk to him about. He was standing there, dime in hand, trying to think, when Mrs. Patterson came toward him, carrying his raincoat.

“Thanks,” he said. “I knew I’d forgotten something.”

When she turned to go back to Mary’s room, he continued to stand by the phone, holding the raincoat. The weather. People called other people and talked about the weather. He would call Nick and talk about the weather, the thunder outside the hospital, and it would come to him why he had tried to reach him before.

Nick answered.

“It’s raining like hell here,” he said. He waited. He tried to think. He thought: I would have walked out into the rain and never remembered bringing my raincoat. Maybe I would have remembered. Gone back. He had tested himself a lot of times, and as little as he thought he could stand it, he was always able to walk into Mary’s room. Over and over.

“Do people die from guilt?” he said to Nick.

“No,” Nick said. “They die from being interrupted when they’re screwing, because some nut calls to talk about the weather. Call me back in half an hour.”

From his car in the parking lot, he looked back at the hospital. The thunder had stopped, and it was raining lightly. He counted fourteen windows up, and looked across to the window he thought might be Mary’s. It was just a dark square, high up.

Metcalf had heard about what happened somehow, and he had come into his office and sat down without saying anything, picked up the Nantucket picture from the desktop and studied it.

“What can I say?” Metcalf had said. “The truth is, everything shocks me. I couldn’t believe what happened between my wife and Jenny last summer. This summer, I can’t believe what’s happened to you. A man in the elevator this morning that I didn’t even know told me a joke about an eggman delivering eggs to a convent that shocked the hell out of me. What if I had been a Catholic? There are still Catholics, aren’t there?”

“What was the joke?” he said.

“Never mind what the joke was. It was filthy. You wouldn’t laugh at it. You probably need a laugh, though. I was going to come in and tell you some other joke, but I don’t have a joke in my head today.” He put the picture back in place. “I came in to offer to do anything, if there’s anything I can do. How’s your daughter?”

“She’s going to be all right.”

“Good.” Metcalf pushed himself up straight in the chair. “Anything I can do?”

“No. Thank you, though.”

“What could I do, huh? I could do something, but it wouldn’t have much to do with your daughter or her being—” Metcalf bent over, pulled up his pants leg, tugged his black sock higher. “Her being shot,” he said. He pulled down his pants leg. “I’m giving you a raise,” he said.

“You are? What kind of a raise?”

“Whatever raise you want,” Metcalf said, and got up and went out. “Be reasonable about it,” Metcalf called back, going down the hallway. He said something else that John didn’t catch.

Nina had made that crack about his not supporting her, about having to go to work because she didn’t have somebody to take care of her. What would she think, now, about the way he had taken care of Louise and his family? Did she still think that he would be a good father?

Louise had parked her car far down in the lot, and didn’t see him. He watched as Louise and Tiffy walked through the lot and across the one-lane road that separated the parking lot from the hospital. Tiffy was always with her, never even an arm’s-length away. They walked at the same pace, step for step. He watched their backs disappear through the tall glass doors, into the lobby of the hospital.

Driving away, he wondered what he would do with it if he were granted just one wish. He thought that the wish should be a selfish one, not a wish to change things for other people, but a wish for self-salvation, a wish that dared whatever force governed wishes to come through: that his family all disappear in a puff of smoke, and that he could start over again with Nina. That was two wishes, not one. Either the disappearance, or the starting over with Nina. As he drove, though, it came to him that he was now thinking about wish number three. What had numbers one and number two been? One and two and then a million more: for enough money not to have to work, for a perfect kiss, for rain to change to sun, sun to change to rain, a bee sting to stop itching, a photograph not to show the lines on his forehead, a ball to fly into his glove, to tag the runner in time, to find pesto in a New York restaurant in the winter, for his headache to go away, for the shell of the robin’s egg never to break. He had used up his wishes. So if it happened, it would just have to happen. There was no way he could wish for it

He wished for it. And that the car radio wouldn’t be full of static so he could hear music instead of his thoughts. And that the police not catch him for speeding. That he miss the frog hopping across the road. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the frog, still hopping. Mary was alive. He was alive. The doctor was wrong: It wasn’t John Joel he identified with, but Mary. He was the victim, not the one who pulled the trigger. He certainly did not think that he had charge of his own life. As the doctor would have put it, he had the sense of reacting instead of acting.

“Would you like to go out for a drink and forget all this bullshit?” he had asked the woman doctor.

“If I thought this was bullshit,” the doctor said, “I wouldn’t be doing it. The question that interests me is why you kept going, if you felt you had no control.”

“Cruise control,” he said.

“Do you have cruise control on your car?” she said, writing.

“No,” he said. “And no pillars at the end of my driveway, either.”

“What is the connection?” she said.

“No connection. A non sequitur.”

“No it wasn’t,” she said. “Let me in on the joke.”

“The joke is that my lover overestimates how rich I am. I told her I had pillars at the end of my driveway, and she believed me.”

She said, writing, “You have a lover?”