“You saved his life.”
I wondered if Ben felt very grateful to me for that right now. Aloud I said, “I have to see him.”
“He’s sleeping. He probably won’t be allowed to have visitors before tomorrow.”
I lay back against the pillows, miserable. Frank started talking to me about Cody and the dogs and everyday things, and I calmed down. Exhaustion began to conquer me again. “Don’t leave me alone in here,” I said sleepily.
He turned out the overhead light, stretched out on the other bed, and continued to talk to me for about another minute and a half before he fell asleep — too far away from me, but I didn’t begrudge him the rest.
Over the next two hours, I drifted back and forth across the borders of sleep. I was dreaming of marching bloody boots when the phone rang. Frank awakened, and was up on his feet and at my bedside before I had turned the light on and found the right end of the receiver.
“Irene? It’s Gillian.”
“Hello, Gillian,” I said, around a hard knot in my throat.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No, no, it’s okay.” And for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what to say next.
“I wondered if I could talk to you — not tonight, but maybe tomorrow? Will you still be there?”
“No, I won’t be here. I’m going home in a little while,” I said, suddenly knowing that I wouldn’t be able to spend the night in that hospital bed, that I needed familiar surroundings. “But I’ll be going into the office tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to meet me there?”
“Sure. What time?”
“About four?”
“Okay.”
A silence stretched, and I said, “I’m sorry, Gillian.”
“It’s all right,” she said, although she didn’t sound as if that were true. “Thanks for going up there. I — I heard about what happened on the news. Is the man — Ben Sheridan, is that his name?”
“Yes.” The knot froze solid.
“Is he going to be okay?”
No, he’s not. But I thought of her four-year wait ending as it had, and said, “Yes, he’ll be okay.”
After another silence, she said, “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I had signed all the papers for my release and was changing into some clean clothes that Travis had thoughtfully brought by, when I remembered something. I got my maps out and showed Frank where the too-clean cave was located. “It might be nothing,” I said, but somehow the act of giving him this information soothed me a little.
He thanked me, then said, “I talked to a nurse while you were filling out paperwork. It didn’t seem likely to me that you’d be able to leave here without looking in on Ben. He’s asleep, but she said if you kept it brief and promised not to disturb him, it would be okay.”
I looked up at him, wondering how it was that he so often seemed to anticipate what my needs might be.
“You didn’t abandon him in the mountains,” he said. “We won’t abandon him now.”
“Thank you,” I said. When I was fairly sure I could speak again without crying, I added, “Where would you like to celebrate our one-hundredth anniversary?”
My first shock came when, expecting a flat place under the blanket, I saw what appeared to be two feet at the end of Ben’s bed. “A temporary prosthesis,” the nurse whispered, reading my look.
I discovered that the only things that mattered to me at that moment were that he was still alive, that he was sleeping peacefully, that his face was not drawn tight with pain, that he was safe and in more capable hands than my own — but mainly, that he was still real in a world that seemed less and less so. I thanked the nurse and left quietly. I asked Frank to take me home, where, despite all the commotion above and around us, I slept dreamlessly in his arms.
30
SATURDAY MORNING, MAY 20
Newsroom of the Las Piernas News Express
Our ill-fated expedition into the mountains supplied most of the material for Saturday’s A section, which read largely like a giant obit page.
Most Saturday mornings, the newsroom would be fairly quiet, but when I came in at nine-thirty, there was more activity than usual. By then, members of the public who owned televisions or radios, or who purchased newspapers, knew that despite an extensive search effort, Nick Parrish was still at large and that no one could find Phil Newly. The public knew that after recovering Julia Sayre’s remains, unauthorized (a word used often by people who had been safely at home) efforts to recover another set of remains led to a trap set by Parrish and tragically resulted in the deaths of six members of the Las Piernas Police Department and an instructor of anthropology at Las Piernas College.
Oh, David.
An associate professor of anthropology was in critical condition at St. Anne’s Hospital. A reporter for the Express had sustained minor injuries. Others with the group, including a search dog, were unharmed.
I thought of Bingle — staying with us until other arrangements could be made — lying listlessly near David’s sweater. I thought of the look I had seen on J.C.’s face. I hadn’t seen Andy yet, but I was fairly sure he wasn’t doing much better. “Unharmed.”
Frank was sitting a few feet away from me, reading a paperback. He’d look up every so often, I’d smile at him, and look back at the blank computer screen. Or down at my fingers. My hands kept shaking, but I kept my fingers on the keyboard, hoping for a miracle.
John hadn’t been happy about allowing Frank to hang out in the newsroom, but with Parrish on the loose and my nerves shot to hell, I wasn’t quite ready to go anywhere without Frank yet. Besides, we were currently down to one car, so if he wanted me to come in, Frank was going to bring me anyway.
Lydia was there, giving up her Saturday plans with her boyfriend, but you would think sitting in the newsroom for the sixth day in a row — spending time with an uncommunicative friend — was just about as good as it could get for her. When I complained that she shouldn’t have let John bully her, she told me he hadn’t, and I couldn’t bully her, either.
By eleven o’clock, I had been sitting at my keyboard for over an hour. I had come in early because, I told Frank, I wanted to get this part over with. But I wasn’t getting anything over with at all — ninety minutes and all I had to show for it was a blinking cursor on an empty screen.
Lydia walked over to me. Frank watched, then went back to his book.
She made a gesture, moving her hand back and forth, indicating me, then herself. Lydia’s parents were Italian immigrants. I’ve seen her mother make the same gesture. There’s no need for pretense between us, the gesture says.
“We’ve known each other since third grade, right?” Lydia said.
“Right. But you only say that to me if you’re about to be brutally honest.”
She laughed, I didn’t.
“I can’t take any brutality right now, Lydia. Even in the name of honesty.”
“Okay, I’ll try to be gentle.”
That time, I did laugh. Frank was watching us now.
“You were in this situation,” she said, “in which everything went out of control.”
I heard a soft rattling sound, looked down at my trembling hands, and lifted my fingers from the keyboard.
“You did everything you could,” Lydia went on, “and things still went bad.”
“Straight to hell,” I agreed.
“If you don’t want to write about what happened,” she said, “I’ll stick up for you with John. We’ll both walk out of here, if that’s what it takes.”
“Because newspaper jobs are in such plentiful supply right now,” I said.
“Because nothing is worth that much.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“You don’t want to write about it, because you think Nick Parrish was seeking attention all along.”