The aroma of oranges made her mouth water. While Margaret held the glass, Jennifer drank through a straw. Her mouth didn’t work quite right. Occasionally she had minor difficulty swallowing, but the juice was cold and delicious.
When she emptied the glass, she let the nurse blot her mouth with a paper napkin.
She listened to the soothing fall of the rain, hoping that it would settle her nerves. It did not.
“Should I turn the radio on?” Margaret asked.
“No, thank you.”
“I could read to you if you’d like. Poetry. You always enjoy listening to poetry.”
“That would be nice.”
Margaret drew a chair to the side of the bed and sat in it. As she sought a certain passage in a book, the turning of the pages was a crisp and pleasant sound.
“Margaret?” Jennifer said before the woman could begin to read.
“Yes?”
“When he comes to visit…”
“What is it, dear?”
“You’ll stay in the room with us, won’t you?”
“If that’s what you want, of course.”
“Good.”
“Now, how about a little Emily Dickinson?”
“Margaret?”
“Hmmmmm?”
“When he comes to visit and I’m… lost inside myself… you never let me alone with him, do you?”
Margaret was silent, and Jennifer could almost see the woman’s disapproving frown.
“Do you?” she insisted.
“No, dear. I never do.”
Jennifer knew the nurse was lying.
“Please, Margaret. You seem like a kind person. Please.”
“Dear, really, he loves you. He comes so faithfully because he loves you. You’re in no danger from your Bryan, none at all.”
She shivered at the mention of the name. “I know you think I’m mentally disturbed… confused….”
“A little Emily Dickinson will help.”
“I am confused about a lot of things,” Jennifer said, dismayed to hear her voice growing rapidly weaker, “but not about this. I’m not the least bit confused about this.”
In a voice too full of artifice to convey the powerful, hidden sinewiness of Dickinson, the nurse began to read: “That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love….”
3
Half of the large table in Ricky Estefan’s spacious kitchen was covered with a dropcloth on which were arranged the small-scale power tools he used to craft silver jewelry: a hand-held drill, engraving instrument, emery wheel, buffer, and less easily identifiable equipment. Bottles of fluids and cans of mysterious compounds were neatly arranged to one side, as were small paintbrushes, white cotton cloths, and steel-wool pads.
He had been at work on two pieces when Harry interrupted: a strikingly detailed scarab brooch and a massive belt buckle covered with Indian symbols, maybe Navajo or Hopi. His second career.
His forge and mold-making equipment were in the garage. But when he worked on the finishing details of his jewelry, he sometimes liked to sit by the kitchen window, where he could enjoy a view of his rose garden.
Outside, even in the dreary gray deluge, the plentiful blooms were radiant — yellow and red and coral, some as big as grapefruits.
Harry sat at the uncluttered part of the table with his coffee, while Ricky shuffled to the other side and put his cup and saucer down among the cans, bottles, and tools. He lowered himself into his chair as stiffly as an octogenarian with severe arthritis.
Three years ago, Ricky Estefan had been a cop, one of the best, Harry’s partner. He’d been a good-looking guy, too, with a full head of hair, not yellow-white as it was now, but thick and black.
His life had changed when he had unwittingly walked into the middle of a robbery at a convenience store. The strung-out gunman had a crack habit for which he needed financing, and maybe he smelled cop the moment Ricky stepped through the door or maybe he was in the mood to waste anyone who even inadvertently delayed the transfer of the money from the cash register to his pockets. Whichever the case, he fired four times at Ricky, missing him once, hitting him once in the left thigh and twice in the abdomen.
“How’s the jewelry business?” Harry asked.
“Pretty good. I sell everything I make, get more orders for custom belt buckles than I can fill.”
Ricky sipped his coffee and savored it before swallowing. Coffee was not on his approved diet. If he drank much, it played hell with his stomach — or what was left of his stomach.
Getting gutshot is easy; surviving is a bitch. He was lucky that the perp’s weapon was only a.22 pistol, unlucky that it was fired at close range. For beginners, Ricky lost his spleen, part of his liver, and a small section of his large intestine. Although his surgeons took every precaution to keep the abdominal cavity clean, the slugs spread fecal matter, and Ricky quickly developed acute, diffuse, traumatic peritonitis. Barely survived it. Gas gangrene set in, antibiotics wouldn’t stop it, and he underwent additional surgery in which he lost his gallbladder and a portion of his stomach. Then a blood infection. Temperature somewhere near that on the sunward surface of Mercury. Peritonitis again, too, and the removal of another piece of the colon. Through it all he had maintained an amazingly upbeat mood and, in the end, felt blessed that he had retained enough of his gastrointestinal system to be spared the indignity of having to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.
He had been off-duty when he’d walked into that store, armed but expecting no trouble. He had promised Anita, his wife, to pick up a quart of milk and tub of soft margarine on his way home from work.
The gunman had never come to trial. The distraction provided by Ricky had allowed the store owner — Mr. Wo Tai Han — to pick up a shotgun which he kept behind the counter. He’d taken off the back of the perp’s head with a blast from that 12-gauge.
Of course, this being the last decade of the millennium, that had not been the end of it. The mother and father of the gunman sued Mr. Han for depriving them of the affection, companionship, and financial support of their deceased son, and never mind that a crack addict was incapable of providing any of those things.
Harry drank some coffee. It was good and strong. “You hear from Mr. Han lately?”
“Yeah. He’s real confident about winning on appeal.”
Harry shook his head. “Never can tell what a jury will do these days.”
Ricky smiled tightly. “Yeah. I figure I’m lucky I didn’t get sued, too.”
He hadn’t been lucky in much else. At the time of the shooting, he and Anita had been married only eight months. She stayed with him another year, until he was on his feet, but when she realized he was going to be an old man for the rest of his days, she called it quits. She was twenty-six. She had a life to live. Besides, these days, the clause of the matrimony vows that mentioned “in sickness and in health, till death do us part” was widely regarded as not binding until the end of a lengthy trial period of, say, a decade, sort of like not being vested in a pension plan until you had worked with the company for five years. For the past two years, Ricky had been alone.
It must be Kenny G Day. Another of his tunes was on the radio. This one was less melodic than the first. It made Harry edgy. Maybe any song would have made him edgy just then.
“What’s wrong?” Ricky asked.
“How’d you know something’s wrong?”
“You’d never in a million years go visiting friends for no reason during work hours. You always give the taxpayer his money’s worth.”
“Am I really that rigid?”
“Do you really need to ask?”
“I must’ve been a pain in the ass to work with.”