The Night Remembers

41

Six Days Later

Faith was in the recovery room for half an hour. Afterward, they brought her down to her room in the elevator. They let me and her parents ride along.

In her room, the nurse fluffed the pillows and began arranging the various vases of flowers Faith had received, and made sure Faith was carefully set into bed. Only occasionally would she speak, and rarely was it more than a moan or some broken meaningless word, the voodoo effects of the anesthesia.

In the window the day was harsh gray, winter.

On either side of her bed stood her parents, her mother holding one of Faith’s hands, her father the other. I caught myself thinking how old they looked, and then I remembered that I was older than them.

Not even by noon was she speaking coherently. Her father said, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?”

It was the first time in four meetings he’d ever said a single word to me. I felt like a seventeen-year-old who’d lucked into something pretty big.

In the cafeteria, her father lit a Camel. When he brought it away from his mouth with a farm-tanned, liver-spotted hand, he said, “I don’t know what you got in mind for my daughter.”

“Neither do I, to be honest.”

“She sure seems to like you.”

“I like her.” I paused. I tried to say I loved her. I couldn’t quite. Not to him.

“She seems to trust you, too. You’d think a girl with her looks would’ve had better luck with men than she has.”

For a time he didn’t say anything at all. I watched nurses and interns carry sensible lunches on bright plastic trays to small Formica tables.

He said, “That doctor said he thinks they got it all.”

“They got it early. That’s the important thing.”

He said, “You be all right watchin’ Hoyt for a few days? Otherwise, we’ll be glad to take him.”

“I’ll be fine.”

He had another cigarette and said, “You wanna go back up? I told the missus she could come down and have lunch when we got back.”

“Why don’t you go on ahead? I need to make a phone call.”

I walked him to the elevators and then walked over to the phone booth.

“How’s she doing?” I asked George Pennyfeather a few minutes later.

“Better. Not great but better.”

“How’s her mother doing?”

“Lisa’s a very strong person. Look how she held the family together when I was in prison.”

Yesterday Carolyn had had what the family doctor called “a breakdown.” She had been heavily sedated since David’s funeral two days earlier. Even with the drugs, she’d slumped into a deeper depression.

“We should have known,” George Pennyfeather said. “We should have guessed. What Paul did to him, I mean.”

It was something he would be saying for the rest of his life.

Around five-thirty, just as Dan Rather came on the set mounted high on the wall across from Faith’s bed, her parents said they were going downstairs to the cafeteria for dinner. I said fine, I’d stay here. We’d spent the afternoon sitting in chairs around the bed, snapping to attention each time she so much as moved. They were not yet what you’d call friendly, but they were no longer hostile, either.

When they were gone, I stood up and went to her. I picked up her hand. Her eyes didn’t open. I held her hand all the time I said my shabby little prayer. It wasn’t just for her, my prayer, it was for that more abstract unit called “us,” Hoyt and her and me, and what lay ahead.

It was dark then, and you could see the street lights burning faintly in the fog of an early December evening.

I turned back to the bed. Her eyes, open now, stared at the ceiling as if she did not quite comprehend where she was. I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead.

“Why don’t you see if you can get Hoyt on the phone?” she said. “Marcia can hold the receiver to his mouth and he can babble or something.”

So I got Hoyt on the phone and he did babble. And at the end, Marcia said, “So how’s she doing?”

“She’s doing fine,” I said, and hung up.

In the darkness, in the silence, the TV set having been turned off, she said, “It’s not going to be easy for me. Even if I’m all right physically, psychologically it’s going to be tough.”

“I know.”

“I keep wanting to — touch myself up there — but I... I’m afraid.”

“I love you, Faith.”

I was afraid I was going to start crying. She must have sensed this because she saved me just then. “How’s it going with my parents?”

“Pretty good.”

“You look like you’re about fifteen when you’re around them. Tripping all over yourself.”

“I’ve got evil designs on their innocent young daughter.”

She reached out through the rails of her hospital bed and squeezed my hand. “I don’t want to start crying and I don’t want you to start crying, you understand?”

“I understand perfectly,” I said but then of course that’s exactly what we did, both of us, started crying.

“I thought you were tougher than that,” she said as she pulled me closer for a kiss.

“Oh, no,” I said, barely able to speak, “I’m not tougher than that at all.”