Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty

There were still COVID protocols in place at the Utica Community Health Center, so Holly Hall met me outside. She’d been in the ambulance with her husband. I’d driven over, planning to drive home from there and not spend the night.

“He’s regained consciousness,” she said.

She didn’t just look tired now. But much older. My mother once said that as women aged, daylight became the devil.

“Good news,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “He has shut down completely now, as if he’s retreated more inside himself than ever. It seems to have been triggered by seeing you, whomever he thinks you are.”

“Who did he think I am?” I said.

I looked more closely at her as she stared past me and across the street, perhaps taking a clearer look at how the reality for her and for her husband had somehow become even bleaker over the past twenty-four hours. I was quite sure that only other caregivers truly understood. I knew I didn’t, and hoped never to find out.

“Who knows,” she said. “Maybe he thought you were a younger version of me, and remembered the girl I was and the book he told me that I had in me.”

“Did you?” I said.

“Oh, I started it,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody? He helped me quite a lot, actually, with the structure and the voice of the main character. We talked about it endlessly. But no, I never became the writer Charles wanted me to be.”

She smiled.

“But one he very much wanted to sleep with,” she said. “Of course, it hardly made me unique.”

“I’m certain this is likely an unknowable thing for you,” I said. “But if he didn’t think I was you, who might he have thought I was?”

She turned back to me.

“Any of them,” she said.

I told her I would check back in, perhaps in a few days, to see if there had been any improvement with him. She said that was quite decent of me, but didn’t expect there to be any improvement.

“In a way,” she said, “maybe you did us a favor by showing up.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said, because I didn’t.

“By sending him all the way off into his own world for good,” she said. “And into a place where he can get the care he needs from someone other than me. So that whatever life I have left doesn’t still organize itself around the living dead.”

She offered me her saddest smile yet.

“Like I said about when we were first together,” Holly Hall said. “I didn’t do the math.”

Then she said, “I’m sorry you didn’t find the answers you were looking for.”

“I thought he might have them,” I said.

“I’m quite sure he does,” she said. “Not that it will do you much good.”

She said she had to get back inside. It was fine with me. There was nothing else to be said. He had been at least twenty years older when they’d started up together, roughly the same age difference there had been between him and Melanie Joan when she had fallen under his spell, as creepy as the whole idea was to me.

Dr. Charles Hall had perhaps thought I was one of his girls, one who’d maybe written the book he’d told Holly she had in her. Who might have been the best he ever had.

As a writer, not another sexual conquest.

But which girl?

And had that girl written a book that ended up being published under Melanie Joan’s name?

Or was what was going on something other than a literary revenge tour?

I was passing one of the Albany exits on the thruway, singing along with Adam Levine, when Richie called.

“You interrupted me rocking out with Maroon 5,” I said.

“Where are you?” he said.

I told him.

“Before I tell you what I’m about to tell you,” Richie said, “I just want you to know that he’s fine.”

“Who’s fine?”

“Your dad.”

“What happened to my dad?”

“He was shot,” Richie said.

I felt the air come out of me.

“You said he’s fine,” I managed.

“He was shot in the upper arm,” Richie said. “A through-and-through, like when I got shot that time.”

I felt myself gripping the steering wheel as if it were some kind of life preserver.

“It was Joe Doyle, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Actually,” Richie said, “he got hit saving Doyle’s life.”