“Some dude,” I said. “He grabbed me from behind and started whalin’ on me. I couldn’t really see his face.”
“Did you hear him saying anything?” Jude asked. “Did you know his voice?”
“No.”
“Move aside,” Perry Mendelson said to my dead husband’s friend.
Jude looked up in anger and defiance. Even in my fractured state of mind I was surprised by his strength and courage in the face of the police.
Finally, after a full five-second stare-down, Jude rose and moved to a sheepskin chair across from the couch.
“Same question, Mrs. Pinkney,” Perry said. “Did you recognize anything about your attacker?”
I pretended to think before shaking my head.
“No.”
“How about that Richard Ness?”
“He wasn’t that big.”
“Can you tell us anything at all?”
“What happened?” I asked. “How did you get here?”
“Your neighbor, Miss Alison, called nine-one-one after hearing a scream. When we got here we found Mr. Lyon kneeling over you. He told us that he’d come up and found you on the ground, that he’d already called for help, but we thought that he might have been your attacker.”
“I came over to visit, Deb,” Jude said, once again in the guise of his mild demeanor. “I was just worried that you might be sad.”
“We’d like to take you to the hospital,” a paramedic said. “It would be best if a doctor took a look at you, maybe take some X-rays.”
“I have my own doctor,” I told the sandy-haired, blue-eyed young man.
“I don’t know,” he said, doubting my decision.
“I’ll make sure she gets there,” Jude told him.
“I’ll need to know where you are,” Perry said.
The conversation felt unwieldy, like a juggling act with one too many balls in the air.
“Okay,” I said.
“You’ll have to sign a release if we don’t take you to the hospital,” the paramedic said.
“Anything,” I told him. “Just stop talking to me.”
It took a good forty-five minutes to get the police and ambulance attendants out of my house. Perry asked four times if I wanted Jude to stay.
“Yes,” I said for the last time. “He’s a family friend.”
When they were finally gone I asked Jude to go get me a glass of water while I called Neelo Brown’s private line. Neelo asked me if I could get down to his offices and I told him that Jude would take me.
After that things happened in a kind of jumble. I took the pistol out of my purse and told Jude that we’d walk out to his car together. He didn’t seem bothered by the gun or the possibility of meeting my attacker again. This brought to mind Theon calling him dangerous.
Jude drove a dark blue Cadillac.
I was sitting next to him drifting in and out of awareness. While driving Jude asked me questions.
“You sure you don’t know who attacked you, Deb?” he asked at one point.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Because you know you don’t have to be afraid.”
“No? Why not? I mean, the police wouldn’t be able to protect me day and night.”
“I’d take care of you.”
“You? Come on, Jude. That guy wasn’t as big as Richard Ness but he was a foot taller than you.”
“Don’t let my size fool you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
I fell asleep for a period there. When I woke up we were close to the clinic.
“Did you love Theon?” I remember Jude asking the question when my eyes were closed.
“Sometimes. Did you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. Very much.”
When I opened my eyes again I was in a bed in a private room at Neelo’s clinic. The pudgy young doctor was shining a small flashlight into my right eye.
“How you feeling, Aunt Deb?” he asked when I looked directly at him.
“Like somebody dropped a ton of bricks on me and then jumped up and down on them.”
“I think you have a concussion but it’s mild. You’re going to have to rest for a day or two. Do you want me to call anyone?”
“Lana Leer,” I said. “Her number’s in my red phone. Maybe she could come talk to me later on.”
The ocean was a big part of my imagined experience after the beating. I was drifting across the surface a thousand miles from land in a field of seaweed as large as a continent. The floating vegetation kept me buoyant, breathing. The sun was hot and unrelenting. Now and again the air-conditioning came on in the room. The cool breeze made me feel as if I were dunking my head in the water below.
There was a deep concussive sound coming up out of the water. It vibrated through my body, making me laugh and shudder.
The sun wouldn’t stop beating down and the waters undulated. I tried to remember why I was there but there was no memory, nothing before the forever ocean and nothing beyond it either.
“Deb? Deb?”
It didn’t sound like my name. It wasn’t real. It was made up on the spur of the moment and stuck.
“Deb, are you awake?”
I felt flattened and dead, like a fish washed up on the shore then dried out by the sun.
I opened my dry fish eyes and saw Lana sitting on a chair beside the hospital bed. She was wearing a peach-colored dress and a cream fabric hat that flared around the edges like something out of the Roaring Twenties.
“Hi.”
“Hey, Deb. How are you, hon?”
“I feel it all the way down between my toes.”
“You look pretty good. The swelling went down.”
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Tuesday afternoon. You been sleepin’ a day and a half.”
I tried to rise and failed. My head spun and my intestines felt loose and watery.
“Help me sit up, Lana.”
She did this. I managed to get my back against the bars at the head of the bed, feeling that if I leaned to the side I’d fall over and tumble to the floor.
“Neel called me and told me you were here,” Lana said. “I called that creepy guy Dardanelle and told him to keep on doin’ what he was doin’ while you rested.”
“What’d he say?”
“He asked who was gonna give the eulogy and I told him you.”
I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. My thoughts kept flitting off in tangents about Coco Manetti and my brother — Cornell.
“Deb?”
“Call me Sandy, will ya, Lana? Sandy’s my name. She’s the woman I want to be.” These words invigorated me.
“Okay... Sandy.”
“You remember the name of that wardrobe and makeup woman?” I asked, then, “The one who used to be in the life but went to work for that movie studio?”
“Bertha. Bertha Renoir.”
“Yeah. Could you figure out how to get in touch with her and tell her that I need to talk? You can give her the red phone number.”
“You bet.”
Lana told me how they replaced my character in Linda Love’s film with this girl out of Georgia — named Georgia Peaches — who was four inches shorter and three shades lighter than I. She also had a thick accent even when she was moaning during sex.
Lana left after we had a good laugh and I almost felt strong enough to stand.
I was wanting a book to read when the door opened and a nurse came in. She was short and Korean, stern faced but still pretty in her light blue uniform.
“There’s a policeman here to see you, Mrs. Pinkney,” she said. “Dr. Brown asked me to ask you if you wanted to see him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Lieutenant Mendelson.”
“Perry,” I said to myself, imagining a road in front of me that broke off into so many pathways that it seemed like a fan.
“Mrs. Pinkney?” the nurse said.