She reiterated what the sign said. “I’m sure you’re very concerned about Mr. Jones, we all are, but it’s family only.”
“Is there anyone with him right now?”
“I believe his sister’s in there. She flew in from Denver.”
“I’ll wait for her.”
I peered in through the window of the door to the ICU. There looked to be about a half dozen beds in there, and at one of the two far beds, which were up against the window that looked out onto the parking lot, a black woman was sitting in a chair. A curtain pulled partway around the bed kept me from seeing who was in it. All I could make out, under the pale blue hospital bedding, was the shape of legs and feet.
She was an attractive woman, in her late thirties I guessed, with gleaming black hair and a tailored blue suit, and every few seconds she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. She reached out and held the patient’s hand, leaned in a bit, cocked her head slightly to one side, as if she was trying to hear something the patient was saying. She tilted forward out of her chair, and now I couldn’t see her head as she disappeared behind the curtain.
I took a chair by the door and waited. About fifteen minutes later, the ICU door opened and she stepped out, walking slowly, her head hanging like she had a bag of rocks tied around her neck.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Ms. Jones?”
“No,” she said. “My name is Letitia McBride.”
“I’m sorry. But was your name Jones? Are you Lawrence’s sister?”
She nodded, hesitantly. McBride was, I surmised, a married name.
I got up and introduced myself. “Lawrence is a friend of mine. I came by to see him, but they won’t let me in, not being a relative and all. I understand you flew in from Denver? The nurse told me.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Do you mind my asking you how you know my brother?”
Maybe, when your brother is gay, and a man you don’t know approaches you and says he’s his friend, you need a bit more information to understand the nature of the relationship. I obliged, telling her I was with The Metropolitan and had been doing a story on Lawrence, but that in the short time we’d hung out, we’d become friends. And that I had been the one who found him and called 911.
“Thank you,” she said, and reached out and touched my arm. “The doctors said if he’d been found any later, he would have lost too much blood.”
“How is he?”
Letitia McBride’s lips pursed out, she breathed in deeply through her nose, and her eyes moistened. “He’s hurt real bad,” she said. “They say the next day is critical. He’s a fighter, you know? And he’s fighting now, more than he ever has before.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “My baby brother.”
I tried to smile.
“Our mother, she drove a bus for the city, worked all kinds of shifts, some right through the night, and our dad, he wasn’t home much because he was working two, three jobs, trying to make enough to support us. They loved us, we never doubted that, but we were on our own a lot, and I always looked out for him, making him dinner, making sure he got to bed on time. One day, this big dump truck smashes into our mother’s bus, back end came right through the window, and we lost her. After that, Dad, he had to work even harder to support us, and I was looking after Lawrence all the time.”
“Is your father still alive?”
She shook her head. “He passed on, oh, ten years ago now. Lawrence was never able to tell him.”
“Tell him?”
“About being different,” she said, looking at me cautiously.
“About his being gay.”
She nodded. “Maybe, if it was now, attitudes are different, you know?”
I nodded.
“But even now, our dad probably wouldn’t have understood. And you know what? Lawrence would never have held that against him. ’Cause he knew our father was such a good man, with a good heart. It wouldn’t have been in our father to understand something like that. Lawrence would have accepted that, wouldn’t even have bothered his father with it. Lawrence doesn’t need anybody’s acceptance. He’s who he is.”
“I know,” I said.
She shook her head again, then appeared thoughtful for a moment, like she was trying to remember something. “Mr. Walker, what did you say your first name was?”
“Zack.”
“Oh my.”
“What?” I said.
“Lawrence, he’s been kind of in and out, you know. They’ve got him on painkillers. But he’s been asking for you. He’s been saying your name.”
“Asking for me?”
“He keeps saying ‘Zack.’ And things that don’t make sense.”
“Like what?”
“You should see him. You should come in.”
“I don’t think they’re going to believe I’m family,” I said.
She smiled at that, and it was a beautiful smile. Letitia glanced over at the nurses’ station, didn’t see anyone looking our way, and led me through the door into the ICU.
We slipped quietly past the other patients, who were in varying stages of disrepair, and when we got to the far side of the room, I could see around the curtain.
He looked bad.
There were tubes running in and out of him, monitors beside and above him, and I didn’t understand what any of it meant. But you didn’t have that much hardware hooked up to you unless it was pretty damn serious.
“Hey, man,” I said.
His eyes were closed, his head back on the pillow. Letitia moved in close to him. “Larry,” she whispered. “He’s here. The man you were asking for. Zack. Zack is here.”
One eye half fluttered open, went closed again.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We should just let him rest.”
“No,” Letitia said to me. “It sounded important, what he wanted to tell you.”
Now I leaned in a bit closer. “Lawrence, it’s Zack. Your sister says you wanted to give me some sort of a message. So, like, I’m here. But you take your time.”
The one eye fluttered open again, landed on me, tried to focus. Now the other eye struggled to open.
“Ohhhhh,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, you must be hurtin’,” I said.
He grimaced, rolled his head back and forth on the pillow. “Zack,” he said, barely more than a whisper.
“Yeah, I’m here. You kind of made a mess of my feature, you know? Getting yourself hurt this way, it kind of changed the angle. You shouldn’t have gone and done that on me.”
“Watch,” he said.
“Huh? What did you say, Lawrence?”
“He said ‘watch,’ ” Letitia said.
“Watch?” I shrugged. “What do you mean, Lawrence? What watch? Somebody’s watch?”
“Out,” he said, his eyes closing for a second.
“Watch out?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say? Watch out?” I glanced at Letitia.
Lawrence tried to swallow. Letitia held a straw that led down into a glass of water up to his mouth. A sip of water went down and he took a couple of breaths.
“After,” he said, looking at me now. “You.”
“What are you saying, Lawrence?
He closed his eyes again, exhausted.
“I think what he’s saying,” Letitia said, “is watch out, they’re after you, too.”
That was kind of the way I’d read it, too.
22
“MY BEST GUESS,” said Otto, “is the battery cells.”
I’d grabbed another cab from the hospital back to the auto repair shop and was standing with Otto out in the parking lot next to the Virtue, which had spent quite a bit of time inside the shop during the day, but was now back outside.
“I tried and tried to get it to do what you said it did,” Otto said. “There was only one time it wouldn’t start, wouldn’t do a damn thing. So I checked all the wiring to the cells, saw one I thought looked like it was loose, and fixed it. Couldn’t get it to act up after that, so that may have done the trick, but shit, you should probably take this thing to a Virtue dealer where they got a better handle on this car than I got.”