The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Lynda Leidiger Tell Me from Gettysburg Review

Friday

For her own good, Zandra’s family had been ordered to tell her things, not to ask questions.

Nevertheless, Tom always greeted her with, “Hey, Zee. How’re you doing?”

Today she replied as usual, “Not. . so... bad,” in her clear but halting whisper. The sameness of her answer confirmed that there was nothing in it she pondered, nothing that could frighten or befuddle her. It was a pleasantry, not a true question.

“You look wonderful. Better every day,” he said. Then he squeezed her good hand, the left one, and tried to think of suitable things to tell her.

No one knew how much, if anything, she could see. That was one of the forbidden questions. The CAT scans were inconclusive as to how much the optic nerve had been damaged, but Tom had seen her scrutinizing Christmas and get-well cards inches from her face; several times she’d mentioned “shadows.” He didn’t understand why the doctors hedged. Surely it didn’t take years of medical school or a barrage of sophisticated tests to determine whether a person could see. Furthermore, how could it be something about which a patient and her doctors could disagree? “The memory of sight,” they were theorizing these days. It would be simple to ask her, “What color is my sweater?” but he was afraid. The doctors knew what was best. Her HIV test had come back negative, and that was the most important thing.

“I’ve been growing a beard,” he told her.

“I... know,” she said.

“You do?” he said, too eagerly, and she smiled.

“Scratchy,” she whispered.

He rubbed his chin. “Oh. Right.” He always kissed her hello and good-bye.

“Why...?” She took a deep breath.

“Just for a change, I guess. And to sleep a few minutes later in the morning.”

Zee sighed, or groaned.

Betsy, his latest girlfriend, thought the sprouting beard made him look like Steven Spielberg. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. For the past four months, he’d been a grudging student in her cinematic College of One, dutifully squinting at the subtitles in her Kurosawa DVDs, struggling to see the genius in Wertmuller. If she really wanted to compliment him, she’d say the beard made him look like Welles or Eisenstein. Someone she truly respected.

He and Zandra had both had a few relationships in the four years since the divorce, but he never felt comfortable talking to her about them. He worried that not only would she not be jealous, but that she would see in his failed romances vindication of her own decision to leave him. At the start, women always told him how thoughtful and good he was, how solid. After a time, they began criticizing him for repressing his feelings, for not taking risks. Eventually they accused him of being cold, self-absorbed, and inflexible. Tom let them yell at him, and then he let them go.

If Betsy had hit the anger stage, she was hiding it; some feminine protocol undoubtedly governed how to behave toward a man whose ex-wife has nearly died. With an almost missionary zeal, she continued to cook elaborate foreign dishes to accompany the foreign movies. Last week, before a Satyajit Ray film, she’d made an Indian dinner, roasting and grinding the spices herself. He concentrated so hard on eating slowly and appreciatively and making the appropriate comments that he couldn’t say whether he’d even enjoyed the food.

Zandra was an enthusiastic but ungifted cook whose motto was “Always add something to a recipe to make it your own.” She was prone to dumping soy sauce or cinnamon into her spaghetti, or throwing a handful of sunflower seeds into her brownies. In some ways, it was the most foreign food Tom had ever eaten, but he always found something good to say about it, even the time when she pressed miniature meat loaves into muffin tins and an hour later unmolded hot, crumbly hockey pucks.

After they separated, every month or so she had him over for dinner. In return, he might unstick a window or drill a hole for a coat hook or fix something that required Super Glue, about which she was inexplicably phobic. These were YTB jobs. “You’re The Boy,” she’d elucidated years ago when a mousetrap in their college apartment needed emptying. He found pleasure in being The Boy, and opportunities abounded in her new house. Although, as a real estate agent, she had first crack at the choicest properties, for some reason she had been smitten by a ramshackle cabin just outside of town. She loved the ugly old flowered kitchen linoleum and positively prized the dented zinc countertops. It pained him to see how different a home she’d chosen from the bright, clean split-level where they’d raised Caitlin, whereas he’d moved into a condo that was a downsized version of it, complete with a redwood deck protected by indoor-outdoor carpeting and a rain gauge that he could easily read through the sliding glass door. When she’d explained why she wanted a divorce, she described their marriage as a slow starvation. He made her repeat it twice, irrationally thinking she might have meant to say salvation.

He had tried to make her happy. He never forgot their anniversary (red roses) or her birthday (a gift certificate at a day spa). He always put the toilet seat back down. Little things could be important. When she expressed a like or dislike, he paid attention. There was the time she complained that he never surprised her. A few days later, he secretly filled her car with gas and had it washed. She never noticed.

“I’m getting new carpeting,” he told her now. “Wall-to-wall. The floor won’t feel so drafty, and it’ll keep the wood like new.” He thought she gave him a look. “It’s sort of grayish brown with flecks. The clerk said it won’t show the dirt.” Betsy called it “pre-soiled.”

Zee was staring at him. “Why...?” she exhaled. She seemed exhausted.

“Because I’m such a slob. A regular ape-man.” He thumped his chest like a cartoon gorilla. “Remember that song?”

She didn’t respond.

In college, she used to sing to herself, “Come on and love me, be my ape-man girl.” The lyrics went on about being happy in an ape-man world: living in a tree, eating with your hands, that sort of thing. One of these days he should surprise her with a CD. Some music store clerk into the oldies — it was an oldie already by the time they were in college — might recognize it from the few lyrics he could remember. Zee probably had the original record stashed somewhere in her cabin, but he wasn’t about to go looking for it.

He hadn’t been back there. No one had. When she needed clothing, someone went shopping. She seemed to have given up asking about the new clothes, as she had about her head injury and what everyone was instructed to call “the accident.” Before long, arrangements would need to be made to box up her things. The place would have to be cleaned and put back on the market, although Tom was certain that no one who knew its history would want to live there. Zee could never move back there, even if she recovered. It was no longer safe. That was one more thing that had been taken from her. Tom had begun investigating the cost of renting a hospital bed and hiring a nurse to come in during the day. It wouldn’t be hard to convert his study. He could buy a bigger TV, hang a bird feeder or two in the window for the flashes of color, put a little CD player on the nightstand so she could listen to audio books. Zee had always loved mysteries. He hadn’t said anything to her yet, of course. Or to Betsy.

As he paced, Zee’s eyes tracked him — following the sound of him, the doctors would say. She was waiting for him to tell her something else.

“It’s snowing,” he told her. “It’s terribly cold. You’re lucky to be someplace warm. The weatherman said it’s already one of the ten coldest winters on record.”

She was still waiting.

“Hey, Mom. Looking good,” Caitlin sang out as she breezed into the hospital room. Around her mother, she’d developed this new tendency to breeze, bustle, chatter, flutter, babble, and generally behave like some crazed perpetual-motion machine.

“Thank... you,” her mother whispered.

She did look good these days, relatively. With that horrible shunt removed from her skull, her hair was growing back. It was coming in gray, either because of the trauma or because she’d secretly been dyeing all these years. At least she was wearing fun purple sweats, instead of a hospital gown, now that she was off the tubes. Caitlin used to worry that if she herself went blind, people would dress her in clashing stripes and plaids, maybe even T-shirts with moronic slogans, and laugh at her behind her back. Now she worried that if someone tried to kill her, she might not die.

She shrugged off her parka and snatched up yesterday’s mail from the bedside table, in the process sending the telephone crashing to the floor. “Sorry. Enter the ox,” she said, stooping to slap the jangly thing back together. Who in their right mind would call someone in her mother’s condition anyway? Telemarketers, most likely. Invasive cretins. She prayed for one — just one! — to call while she was there. She stood and rifled through the cards. “Oooh, Aunt Eileen’s in Africa again.”

“Ethi. . opia,” her mother said.

“Right!” Caitlin cheered, as if her mother were a clever contestant on some TV game show. She had forgotten how to talk like a normal person. Now she was bright and brisk, frantically awkward. Strutting and fretting. Life’s but a walking elbow. In her own way, she felt as inappropriate as her aunt, who was jetting blithely around the world — even if it was her job — and dashing off chirpy little notes on embossed hotel stationery. As if anyone cared what the weather was like in Addis Ababa! Aunt Eileen, who was five years younger, had been born old, Mom claimed. “Don’t feel bad about being an only child,” she’d advised Caitlin more than once. “Someday, when you’re least expecting it, you’ll find your true sister, like I did with Peg.” Their meeting in a Laundromat as college freshmen was a family legend. “I thought this chain-smoking blonde was stealing my clothes out of the dryer. But she happened to have a Bullwinkle sweatshirt exactly like mine. Wottsamatta U!” It still made her laugh.

Caitlin imagined that her father had fallen in love with Aunt Eileen all those years ago, which would have been much more sensible of him. Her mother would have been her aunt! No, I wouldn’t have been born, she reminded herself. I wouldn’t be me, anyway.

“Dad...” her mother began.

“He was here? Good,” Caitlin said. He came every afternoon at 4:30, after her mother’s last therapy session. Visitors were allowed in only one at a time, so, without discussing it, the regulars had settled into time slots, putting in predictable, orderly twenty-minute shifts, occasionally conferring with one another if they happened to meet in between. “I think Dad’s going through a midlife crisis. His beard?” She restacked her mother’s get-well cards, rapping them sharply on the tabletop like a blackjack dealer straightening his deck. Her mother seemed to wince. “I thought only bald guys felt they had to grow beards when they hit fifty. Although he hardly ever takes off that baseball cap, so who can tell what his scalp is up to.”

“Scratchy,” her mother whispered.

“Definitely,” Caitlin agreed.

She wondered if her mother regretted the divorce. How important could all those “bored-and-suffocating” complaints — the confidences Caitlin had loathed hearing — seem to her now? Both of her parents would be happier together, even like this. Mr. In-Sickness-and-In-Health would have dutifully taken care of Mom for the rest of his life and been grateful, because for once he would have known exactly what to do. Unlike his present role. As a devoted ex-husband, he was doing his best, but with the apologetic sheepishness of an actor who wasn’t yet off-book. Caitlin had been considering majoring in theater before Everything Happened, as the family referred to it. Now she might as well become a professional bowler, get paid for knocking things down and making a racket, though it was probably harder than it looked. That would be something to tell her mother: “I’m thinking of dropping out of college. I can’t see the point in anything.”

When the doctors said, “Tell her things,” they didn’t mean: “Tell her the boy who broke in and pressed a pillow to the back of her head, then a .22 against the pillow, was younger than her daughter. Tell her that after he zipped up his jeans and left her for dead, he went out for a Big Mac. Tell her that when the police caught him a couple of hours later, he explained that he had been bored.”

“Tell me if this hurts.” Caitlin leaned over the metal guardrail and rubbed her mother’s new claw, gently bending the curved fingers outward. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She rooted in her backpack for a little plastic bottle. “Grandma thought you might like this. It’s got coconut oil and aloe?” She squirted out a dollop of lotion and warmed it in her palms. “She swears by it. You know she still creams her hands and wears cotton gloves to bed every night? She’s incredible.”

Grandma, unlike Dad, was rising to the occasion. If she had any hesitation about how an ex-mother-in-law should conduct herself, you couldn’t tell. She greeted disaster with a sort of satisfaction, as if now that the worst had happened, she could finally stop worrying about it.

With the dorms closed, Caitlin was thankful to be spending the semester break with her, tucked up in the sewing room hide-a-bed and awakening to the odor of cigarette smoke and coffee. It smelled better than fresh-baked Christmas cookies. There was no question of going back to the cabin, and no need. (Thank god her mother wasn’t the type for a cat or houseplants.) She would have sprung for a motel before staying with her father. His latest virtually lived there, a middle-aged, semi-anorexic pseudo-waif who never stopped talking. Or cooking. At the sad little Christmas Eve dinner the five of them had gathered for at Grandma’s, old Heavens-to-Betsy, as Grandma secretly called her, unveiled a plate of brownies that she bragged were from Katharine Hepburn’s family recipe. Caitlin and her father exchanged glances. He had to be remembering the time her mother had made what was supposedly George Washington’s eggnog but was closer to latex enamel, the kind that covered in one coat. Kate’s famous brownies, big surprise, were chocolate caulk. In a way, Caitlin felt sorry for earnest, bony Heavens-to-Betsy in the way she felt sorry for all optimists, all myopic dogs barking up a lifetime of wrong trees, but it was too much trouble to try to set her straight. She wished, utterly without hope, that her father would ask her mother to get back together again, and that her mother would say yes.

“Poor Mommy,” she crooned to her mother, the way she had once comforted her baby dolls. “Poor, poor Mommy.” She massaged her mother’s hands until the beachy scent of the lotion rose from the bed.

Her mother’s nose wrinkled.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Caitlin sniffed her own hands. “You know, I hear this is the original recipe for Marie Antoinette’s very own piña coladas?”

Her mother made the peculiar noisy grin that was her new way of laughing.

It was a made-to-order Christmas miracle for the media. Shot in the head the day before Thanksgiving, popping out of her coma bright and early Christmas Day, smiling and squeezing hands by New Year’s Eve. It was so damned miraculous that Marian couldn’t explain why she was having such a hard time feeling lucky. Lucky was how everyone was supposed to feel, what the reporters wanted to hear, so they could write:

It was a hell of a lot more heartwarming than what she had actually said when Channel 6 showed up on her doorstep this morning, which was, “Lucky? Do we feel lucky because some worthless punk turned a bright, wonderful, hard-working woman into an invalid for the rest of her life, robbed a daughter of her mother, and for punishment he’ll be lying on his can watching TV for a few years, courtesy of my taxes?” The young reporter holding the microphone cringed, and for a moment Marian pitied her: a paid jackal in a poorly cut plaid coat that would add twenty pounds on camera. “There was someone like Alexandra on Oprah the other day,” Marian told her, “and when she said she forgave the drug-crazed hoodlum who tried to murder her for three dollars and a bus pass, the audience applauded. And cried, of course.” Channel 6 bobbed her head and smiled hopefully. “But I’m telling you,” Marian went on, “that we have entirely too much forgiveness nowadays. Forgiveness for cruelty, stupidity, intolerance. Forgiveness for selfishness and cowardice. We have lost our capacity for outrage. That is not what Jesus meant by turning the other cheek.”

The reporter sputtered an apology and left with her cameraman. Channel 6 would never air the segment. Oprah was on a different network.

It was from studying Buddhism that Marian, an unwavering lifelong Christian, had accepted rage as her savior. In a stress-management seminar that Marian’s company had sponsored several years before her retirement, the instructor had led the participants in a Buddhist meditation: “Breathing in, I know I have anger in me; breathing out, I know I am the anger.” It had taken only three exhalations to reduce Marian to helpless sobs, cross-legged on her green plastic mat, in front of everyone. She understood that her anger had been protecting her all along from a vast, unsuspected cavern of sadness — she refused to call it despair — and decided then and there to love it, to hang on to it for dear life.

When the elevator doors opened, she walked down the long white hall, lugging her usual tote bag full of surprises for Alexandra. As she had once focused on stimulating her son, and later her granddaughter, when they were small, she now searched out things that would engage those of Alexandra’s senses that weren’t in question, items that might remind her of who she used to be. Give us this day our daily bundle. In this case: mail and a comic strip to be read aloud, a manicure kit so she could polish Alexandra’s nails, a pine needle-filled sachet to tuck under the pillow, and a new pair of soft, nubby socks.

In the hall, a candy striper wobbled on a stepladder as she took down the shiny red and green ornaments that hung from the ceiling. In a few weeks there’d be hearts, then shamrocks, Easter eggs... Marian saw herself plodding through all those days, clutching her tote bag with one hand, her stalwart friend, Rage, with the other. She gnawed the inside of her cheek.

Alexandra was propped up in bed, facing the window. Who knew what she saw?

“Hi, darling.” Marian kissed her. “It’s colder out there than a Republican’s heart.”

With an effort, Alexandra whispered, “Com... mie.”

Marian burst out laughing. “Bless your heart.” She was thrilled whenever Alexandra made any sort of joke, or responded to one. Humor, after all, was one of the higher brain functions. “Even in the cold, everything’s gorgeous with all that new snow. Like an exquisite pen-and-ink drawing,” she went on as she took off her coat. “I love the bare trees. The way you see tiny little twigs you can’t even imagine in the summer when the leaves are so full?” She sniffed. “Do I smell coconut?” she said.

“Cait. . lin.”

“Oh, good, she did your hands. Because I’ve brought a little treat.” She took out the manicure kit and helped Alexandra feel the files, the cuticle stick, the buffer. “This shade might be too orangey for you, but I adore the name. Coral Shores. It makes you think of the ocean and warm sunshine, doesn’t it? A gorgeous white sand beach, and at the edge of it, palm trees with those immense green fringy tops, like a hat Carol Channing would wear.”

Alexandra said nothing — concentrating, perhaps, on the word-picture Marian worked so hard to paint. Or wondering who on earth Carol Channing was. Marian envisioned the blindness as a membrane between Alexandra’s eyes and brain, a membrane that will and imagination could break. She prattled on while she did Alexandra’s hands; occasionally she was rewarded with a smile or a sound that was close to a laugh. Marian knew she’d pay for it tonight, bending over the guardrail like this until her back stiffened. She didn’t care. If Channel 6 had asked her why she cared so much about the woman who had broken her son’s heart, how would she have answered?

She had to release Alexandra’s hand to get a tissue. To her mortification, her absurd imaginary press conference had left tears in her eyes.

“You won’t believe what I had at the feeder today,” she said, searching Alexandra’s face for a sign of interest but going on anyway. “A tufted titmouse! A pair of them. Titmice. Tom still can’t hear that word — much less say it! — with a straight face. Why are men such adolescents? Of course, those despicable starlings scared them away. The big, speckled pigs practically bathe in the feeder and knock the seeds everywhere. The man at the bird store says the starlings are just like poor relations who show up and eat you out of house and home. You can’t starve your family just to get rid of them, so what choice do you have?”

Alexandra appeared to be sleeping. Clever, exciting Marian had stimulated her right into a doze, with two nails still to be done. She dabbed them with the little brush, then held Alexandra’s hands and blew lightly on the wet polish. “Here’s the ocean breeze blowing across the coral shores,” she whispered. When she thought the nails were dry, she changed Alexandra’s socks. Her daughter-in-law’s feet were cool and waxy-looking. Recently, the right one had started to droop and stiffen in an odd position. Marian tugged the thick new sock over it, then gently worked to straighten the foot, as the therapist no doubt had just done half an hour earlier. Alexandra grunted, and Marian let go. She dropped the old socks into her bag, to be washed at home. The hospital had a service, but you couldn’t trust them not to lose things, and she didn’t like the idea of someone who didn’t know Alexandra handling her clothing. Marian straightened slowly. Her spine made a sound like cookies being crushed with a rolling pin for a crumb crust. The sachet would keep for another time, she decided; the pine was one smell too many.

As she struggled back into her coat, it nagged at her that she hadn’t read Alexandra her mail, which she should have done first thing instead of launching into one of her bird-nerd monologues, as Caitlin called them. One envelope looked like a card from the office. The other agents were decent people, but once it became obvious that Alexandra’s career there was over — you can’t show houses you can’t see — they didn’t know how to behave toward her. The one with the Minneapolis postmark had to be from Peggy, Alexandra’s college friend. Peggy had a good heart, which Marian admitted was the sort of thing you said about irresponsible, lost women whose hair was a different color every time you saw them, but who never did anything that was downright immoral.

Alexandra opened her eyes. She bumped her hands clumsily together, trying to raise them to her face.

“Here, sweetheart.” Marian bent again and clasped Alexandra’s hands, lifting them to eye level. Alexandra rolled her head from side to side, as if studying first her healthy, moving hand, then the weak one that curled in on itself like a hatchling. All they had in common were ten perfect ovals, gleaming coral.

Saturday

Peg almost didn’t come when she suspected that she was getting a cold. She deliberated about checking with the doctors, but it wasn’t as if the problem was Zee’s immune system. A million things worse than a cold were no doubt being pumped through the hospital’s ventilation ducts every second. These days, you could go in for a hysterectomy and die of Legionnaires’ disease — provided some incompetent anesthesiologist didn’t do you in first. Besides, the Zee she knew and loved wouldn’t fight her way out of a coma to die of the sniffles. Peg was haunted by her vision of Zee not fighting, of forcing herself to be still and submit until it was finally over. Only it wasn’t over, not quite. Afterward, lying there bruised and half-naked in her torn clothes, but alive, she must have thought she was finally safe. What had she felt when that asshole kicked her over onto her stomach, when the hard piece of metal nuzzled at her skull through the pillow he pressed to the back of her head? Did she plead, promise anything? Was she angry, scornful, utterly cool? Or numb, the way you get when time stops?

Peg found herself taking deep breaths in the elevator. Hospitals had always terrified her; sick people made her want to run. Zee wasn’t really sick, she was recuperating. And she was still herself — Marian had stressed that — only tired and weak and aphasic. “A bit slow to find the words,” Marian elaborated, as if Peg herself were a bit slow. When the elevator slid open on all those in-your-face cheery handmade Christmas decorations, Peg thought first of an elementary school, then a nursing home. Suddenly she was afraid to take deep breaths.

It didn’t matter that it was just the rehab ward, no diapered screamers strapped into wheelchairs here. Her automatic mouth breathing kicked in to shut out the acid tang of urine, antiseptics, and boiled food. She couldn’t separate the smell from the memory of smell. Which was even more ridiculous considering that she’d been sneezing for a day and a half and felt like a cork was stuffed up each nostril.

She was angry with herself for being such a baby, for not coming sooner, for letting acres of acoustic tile and white linoleum induce a low-grade panic attack, for making lists of what might be acceptable things to say, safe topics. To Peg, “Discretion is the better part of valor” had always meant: “It’s tough to keep your mouth shut.” She knew Zee was going to be different. She also knew it was vitally important to act as if everything was the same. She’d never been good at acting. Whatever the opposite of a poker face was, she had it. A domino face? One wrong move, and everything collapses. Marian had prepared her for the fact that Zee might be blind, but Peg knew that whatever was on her face would be in her voice too. She and Zee had never been able to bullshit each other. Face it, they were probably seriously flattering themselves if they thought they’d ever bullshit anyone. They’d always been a matched pair of heart-on-sleeve buffoons. It was that “always” she had to get beyond. Forget the past and the person Zee had been. Be ready to appreciate the current Zee. Be here now. Another philosophy that wasn’t exactly second nature to Peg.

She walked slowly, reading the room numbers. A few feet from Zee’s door, she stopped to compose herself and run through her mental list of cheerful comments. She felt like a fraud and an idiot. But it didn’t take a clairvoyant to read the invisible writing over the door of every hospital: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. For god’s sake, with all that Zee was going through, Peg could certainly find the guts to be upbeat, couldn’t she?

You look fantastic!

(For a person who’s supposed to be dead!)

I hear you’re improving like crazy!

(The doctors are withdrawing your nomination for Most Likely to Be a Turnip Forever!)

I’m sure you’ll be out of here and back to normal in no time!

(Do you think the bullet in your brain will set off airport metal detectors?)

Things could be worse!

(Think of that diabetic man in Florida whose surgeon amputated the wrong leg!)

The drive down from Minneapolis was gorgeous!

My motel room is a hoot!

If a coward dies a thousand deaths, isn’t that practically as good as having nine lives?

All of this, of course, was about herself and not about Zee at all. Peg gave herself a brief shake, like a wet dog — an onlooker might have mistaken it for a shudder — and went in to see her friend.

Zee’s bed faced away from the door, toward a big, frost-etched window with a sun catcher hanging in the middle. Some kind of yellow bird. Marian and her animals!

It was the hand Peg saw first, resting on the metal guardrail and looking normal enough except for the freshly painted nails in an unsettling shade of salmon. Then she realized Zee wasn’t alone.

A scruffy-looking older man rose from his chair in the corner. “Peg?”

“My god. Tom?” She reached out to shake hands as he lurched forward to embrace her. Awkwardly, she patted his rib cage for a moment before they disentangled themselves. She knew from his face that he was smelling every Marlboro Light she’d smoked in the car.

“I can come back,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I wrote. A few days ago. I should have called.” But if she didn’t call, no one could tell her not to come.

“No problem. I’ll get some coffee and see you in twenty minutes.” He gathered his coat and gloves from the chair. Something in her expression must have prompted him to explain, “Doctor’s orders. To keep her from getting too tired.” Less brusquely, he said, “Evidently Mother didn’t fill you in on the routine.”

“We haven’t talked much,” Peg said.

“Is that. . Peg?” A whisper from the bed.

“Nobody knew she was coming, Zee,” Tom said. “Her letter... went astray or something. I’ll come back in a while and we can finish our visit, okay?” He turned to Peg. “She doesn’t talk much, but she understands everything. And she hears perfectly. You don’t have to shout.”

“Shouting never crossed my mind,” Peg said, and he reddened. “I’m generally quite well behaved in hospitals.” Caitlin had been only a toddler when Zee unexpectedly said one day, “I married my father. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Peg?” Zee whispered again.

“Sorry. I’ll get out of your way,” Tom said. “I’m gone.”

Peg, plucking off her gloves, watched him hustle out of the room.

“Well, that was certainly weird,” she said to Zee, who only smiled and smiled.

Zee’s surgical buzz cut, her new gray stubble, gave her a reduced, severe appearance, like a retired general. Yet it took mere seconds to stop seeing the lack of her former hair: shoulder length, whiskey-colored, sixties straight. Peg had never been religious, but something about Zee’s... immutability... awed her, even frightened her a little.

She hunched over the guardrail for a clumsy hug and kiss. Zee’s left arm hugged her back.

Peg dug a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose twice. “Damn cold,” she said. “I didn’t take anything because I was afraid I’d fall asleep while operating heavy machinery.”

“Me... too,” Zee said. She pressed a button that raised her torso several inches. “Your... trip?”

“Oh, you know,” Peg said, shucking her coat. “I spent the whole drive rehearsing what to say. Important stuff, you know? Nothing about the weather or hospital food or, god forbid, current events. I had an appendectomy a few years back, and everyone who visited just wanted to talk about Libya. Or was it Liberia? It was awful.” Zee was smiling. “So I had this idea that we’d talk, really talk, like we used to. But now that I’m here, all I can think is that being together is enough.” She hid her face, her shameful domino face, in her hands. “Oh god, I’m sorry. I’m going all cosmic on you.”

“They... all... talk,” Zee said. “No one... tells... me... things.”

“Really,” Peg said. “Really? Well, forget Libya. And Liberia. I’m out of the loop. I can’t help you there.” She heard herself with the horror of someone who was spending her last minutes on the Titanic organizing her sock drawer. “Jesus. I hate being so damned nervous.”

“You’re... part of my...” Zee trailed off, distressed.

“Yes?” Peg said. “What? Your... life?”

Zee shook her head. “My...” She tapped her chest.

“Your heart?” Peg said. “Zee, you know I always sucked at charades.”

Zee squeezed her eyes shut.

Peg groaned. “I’m sorry I’m so—”

“My... self,” Zee whispered, radiant with relief that the word had surfaced.

“Oh, Zee.” Peg’s throat closed.

Zee slowly reached up and fumbled for Peg’s hair. “What color...?”

Peg laughed. “My new hair person calls it ‘champagne caramel.’ An hour of being wrapped in tin foil, for this?” She held up an end. “Split all to hell. You probably can’t see it, but—” She stopped. She was conscious of Zee working a piece of hair between her fingers as if she could learn something from the texture. “You can’t see me?”

Zee took some time formulating her answer. “I can... picture you.”

“But you don’t look blind,” Peg said, as if it was something she could talk Zee out of.

“I look...?”

“Well, normal. Like you’re actually focusing on me.”

“Not. . scary?” Zee whispered. “No... bullshit.”

“Hey. Tammy Faye Bakker was scary. Did anyone tell you she died? She would have liked these fingernails. I take it you didn’t pick the color?” Peg paused and took her friend’s hand. “Zee, tell me. Can you see anything at all? I mean, when your eyes are open or closed, is there a difference?”

Abruptly, Zee’s hand clenched. Her perfect new nails stabbed Peg’s skin.

“What is it?” Peg said. “Are you all right?”

Zee’s head rolled from side to side in a kind of frenzy. She no longer seemed to focus on anything.

“Sha... dows...” There was fear in her voice, and anguish. “Shapes.”

“That’s something, at least. Maybe the rest will come back. What do the doctors say?”

Zee labored to raise her head. She strained her mouth open as wide as possible. “NOTHING!” she whispered. Her head flopped back onto the pillow, and she started to cry.

“Shh. Shh.” Peg stroked Zee’s cheek. With her other hand, she lifted Zee’s palm to rest against her own wet face so they could feel each other’s tears. “Blood sisters.”

Snow blew past the window. It was like being inside a glass paperweight that a giant, unseen hand kept shaking and shaking. Peg wanted to scream at it to stop. Instead, she said softly, “Tell me about the shadows and I’ll tell you everything I know. Anything. I promise.”

Monday

Tom believed it was all for the best, and the doctors concurred. So had Marian and, reluctantly, Caitlin.

Peg meant well, certainly. And, to be fair, she hadn’t been warned. Honesty was an overrated virtue; it wasn’t the sort of thing you brandished right and left without considering the consequences. Peg couldn’t have known how wild Zee would be, how distraught. Tom was thankful he’d returned to her room promptly. He’d considered giving the old friends a little extra time together, after Peg had driven for hours through all that snow. As it turned out, twenty minutes had been more than enough.

After the sedative wore off, Zee remained calm. She simply refused therapy. And food. It grieved Tom to see her intubated again. The doctors speculated that forcing her to confront the incident had caused shock and depression. With time, and the proper medication, it would pass. Surely she would even resume speaking to him. If anyone deserved her coldness and anger, it was Peg, not he. It was Peg, as Zee said, who took away the shadows.

No one prevented Peg from going to Zee’s room — her former room — the next day. She was simply informed that Mrs. Sladek had been moved to a ward where the only visitors permitted were family members. Unfortunately, the room number could not be given out; the phone had been temporarily disconnected to give the patient some rest. Predictably, Peg had left Tom a voice mail ranting about kidnapping and false imprisonment. She threatened to go to the police. He called her back at the motel today just to be sure she had checked out and was on her way home. He prayed that she wouldn’t involve the reporters.

The only one who hadn’t agreed with his regrettable but necessary action was Betsy. In her opinion, Zandra should have been exposed to little bits of the truth all along, to lessen the shock. Tom had betrayed her trust. He kept everything to himself because he was a control freak. Knowledge is power. Peg was a heroine; why, Betsy wouldn’t be surprised if she slipped past the nurses by pretending to be Zandra’s long-lost sister, just in from Africa.

When Tom proposed that she had seen too many movies, Betsy called him a pious oaf and said that his beard made him look Amish, nothing against the Amish.

“Remember Sunset Boulevard? That’s who you remind me of, you and Zandra. You’re playing Max to her Norma Desmond.” She shook her head. More quietly, she said, “Everyone in that movie was so alone.”

She looked in his eyes for so long that he thought she might kiss him good-bye. Instead, she simply turned and walked out, grabbing her Rashomon DVD but leaving him the sushi, although she knew perfectly well how he felt about seaweed. She and Zee, he thought wistfully, would have liked each other.

Zee’s new room looked out on a parking lot. Ironically, now that she could see — at any rate, that was how he interpreted her remark about the shadows — she didn’t have much of a view. Nor did she seem to care. She had turned her face to the wall, literally and figuratively. Somehow it was easier to talk to her, now that he knew she wouldn’t answer. It was a good time to finally tell her what was on his mind. If her usual nurse was on duty, he could ask if she knew anyone who might be interested in the sort of situation he was envisioning. She had never been overly friendly to him, but she was tender with Zee.

He groped in his pocket for the CD and the reassuring hard edges of its smooth plastic case. He expected Caitlin to be amused when he related how he went into a music store and repeated “be my ape-man girl” until the tattooed and perforated clerk coaxed the title out of the computer and pointed him to the section where he’d find the Kinks. Instead, Caitlin rolled her eyes and snorted. “Why didn’t you just Google?” She couldn’t believe that he’d bought some embarrassing clock-radio-CD player instead of an iPod. But he and Zee could listen together to the CD player, and it was small enough to leave room on the nightstand at home for one of those wireless indoor-outdoor thermometers. Zee would be able to see at a glance when it was extremely hot or cold and feel grateful that she never had to go out for anything.

You could set your clock by 814’s ex. Right on schedule, he was marching down the hall, today with what Nurse Paltz hoped was only a radio but feared might be one of those karaoke contraptions. It had gotten worse ever since Oliver Sacks went on 60 Minutes with that elderly woman, a stroke victim who couldn’t talk. He got her to sing “Daisy” — only every seventh word or so, and not half so well as Hal the computer in that old outer-space movie when the astronaut was disabling him, but it started a wave of hopeful people trundling in with everything from guitars to electronic keyboards and worse, desperate to break through to their loved ones. Most went away heartbroken. It would be better all around if the hospital set some rules.

In general, Paltz neither approved nor disapproved of what went on in these eases: the heaps of childish gifts, the gabble of onesided conversations. She admired that energy, that optimism. People were entitled to whatever gave them comfort, including the illusion of giving comfort to someone else. Or the illusion that you could cure someone with love. As if only the alone and friendless died! Day after day, the visitors came with their gadgets and good intentions. They reminded her of children snatching at the string of a balloon that kept on drifting farther and farther away.

Of course, 814 was different. She had come out of one coma already. The family had had their miracle. This time around, although the muteness was clearly self-imposed, everyone went on behaving as if she were still a helpless victim instead of an angry woman who was asserting virtually the only power she had left. Paltz had seen it before. Sometimes it was the patient’s recovery, not the initial trauma, that tore a family apart. Especially when the person who was returned to them was not the person they had lost. Face it: people had different definitions for recovery.

If the ex had asked Paltz’s advice, she would have counseled him to skip the music and simply talk. Say he was sorry. Try to explain why he had behaved like an idiot and banished the friend, or even confess that he couldn’t explain. But no, there was the music. It was too faint to identify. No one was singing along. Yet.

How many times a week did that poor old woman grope her way through “Daisy” for the sake of her family or a roomful of med students? Still, perhaps it gave her life focus; perhaps it brought her more visitors. Paltz no longer cried easily, but the other day that space movie had been on TV again, all chopped up with commercials for minivans and acid-reflux remedies, and when Hal started to lose his mind and sing slower and slower, she broke down and sobbed like a fool. Her grandchildren laughed at her. She didn’t blame them.

She had just given 810 his meds when the crash came from 814. The music stopped. It took her a moment. Then she got the picture. In the silence that followed, she waited for the ex to come dashing down the hall, apologetic and panicky. Let him beg for a sedative: she intended to stand her ground. She would tell him that anger was often part of the healing process; it was usually an encouraging sign when they started to fight back. Of course, it was entirely possible that he wouldn’t consider it good news. It might not fit with his plans. Paltz chided herself for being uncharitable. The ex generally had a smug look, but, to be fair, it was often hard to tell what was on a bearded man’s mind.

When no one came looking for her, she collected a broom and dustpan and started down the hall, uncertain whether she was motivated by duty or raw, unprofessional curiosity. Where on earth had that woman found the strength? Paltz was careful to compose her expression; there was a mess to be cleaned up, and it wouldn’t do to appear pleased.