“I have a friend who might be on this ward. Her name’s Ruth?”
“Came in in a coma?”
The past tense stopped him.
“She woke up,” the nurse told him. “She’s going to make it.”
“How far is her room?”
She pointed to the end of the corridor. “Can you make it that far?”
“Let’s go.”
—
SITTING IN THE CHAIR at Ruth’s bedside, he woke up with her gaze on him and rain pattering against the window behind him. The wall clock said four-thirty, so he’d dozed there for half an hour. She’d been asleep when they arrived, but Sully talked the nurses into letting him wait there for a while. He must’ve nodded off as soon as they left.
If anything, Ruth looked worse than she did yesterday. The swelling in her lower face had spread right up to her hairline, the bruising more vivid. But the eye that seemed glued shut the day before had partially opened. Most important, unlike Vera earlier that evening, Ruth was really there, present in her badly damaged body, actually in the room with him. He’d promised the nurse that he wouldn’t try to get to his feet without help, but now he did so without too much effort. Though there was discomfort in his chest where they’d inserted the internal defibrillator, it was nothing like the agony of the last few days. Leaning on the raised railing of the bed with one hand, he took Ruth’s with the other.
“Okay, you win,” he said. “We’ll go to Aruba.”
She started to smile, but he could see the pain in her eyes. No more jokes, then.
“How about us two going down for the count at the same time, huh?”
She blinked once, slow and deliberate. Yeah, how about that?
“Janey and Tina were here all day. Zack, too.”
Another long blink.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so…,” he began, then stopped. “I’m sorry I made you worry about me. They wanted to do this down at the VA weeks ago,” he said, laying a hand on his chest.
Yes.
“You’re out of the woods, too. You know that, right?”
Yes. She knew.
“Maybe while we’re here they’ll fix everything. Make us young again.”
Her head moved to the side ever so slightly.
“You don’t want to be young again? Me neither. Make do with being alive, I guess.”
Yes.
He wanted to, he realized. Live, that is. For a while longer, anyway. For the last month or so he’d been wondering if maybe he’d lost his taste for it, but apparently not. Rub would have to muck out the basement of the old mill by himself, but he’d manage. So would Carl, at least until Sully could get back on his feet.
“Well,” said a voice behind him. “Look who’s up and disobeying orders.”
The older nurse was standing in the doorway. “Uh-oh,” he told Ruth. “The gig is up. This one’s going to throw me under the bus for sure.”
Small pressure from Ruth’s hand. Small, but not imaginary. Then they both let go.
A middle-aged man was leaning against the door to Sully’s room when the two nurses escorted him there, and it took Sully a moment to recognize his son. “You’re back,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you until Tuesday.”
“Keep moving,” the older nurse prodded, “before you fall over.” She looked at Peter. “Is he always like this?”
“Stubborn, you mean? Ornery? Cantankerous? Impossible?”
When the nurses had Sully tucked back into bed and they were alone, Peter said, “I can’t leave you alone for two minutes, can I.”
Sully ignored this. “I’ve got a job for you. I’d do it myself, but it could be a couple days before they let me go back to work.”
Peter was grinning at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You know where Rub lives?”
“Did he move?”
“Pick him up at seven. You know how to operate a backhoe?”
“Better than you.”
“Yeah?”
“In my sleep.”
“What?” Sully asked, because Peter was still grinning at him.
“I missed you, too,” he said.
“Good,” Sully told him, pleased to hear it. “I wasn’t sure you would.” He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. The oxygen, bless it, ran right through him. “How’d you know where I was?” it occurred to him to wonder, opening his eyes again when Peter didn’t respond.
The room was dark. Apparently he’d slept. Had he imagined the conversation with his son? No, he decided, it had been real. There was a hint of gray in the eastern sky. Another day, he thought. Sunday, in fact, and him around to see it. Imagine that.
—
IT HAD BEGUN to rain. Not violently, like the night before, but steadily, another drenching. Unless Raymer missed his guess, more of Hill would slalom into Dale by morning, Bath’s dead slip-sliding, in clear violation of their unspoken covenant, into the terrain of the living.
He parked behind the station and let himself in the back door. He would be inside just long enough to lock his gun and badge and SUV keys in the large bottom drawer of his desk so he wouldn’t have to come in tomorrow. He was turning the bolt when he heard a sound, and there, standing in the doorway, was Charice, her eyes swollen from crying. Tears for Jerome, of course, Raymer thought bitterly.
“There’s some things I need to say before you sneak off,” she told him, tossing his gym bag, which he’d left in her car the night before, onto the sofa.
Sneak off, he thought, hearing in that phrase a judgment. Well, he was sneaking off, wasn’t he, so maybe he deserved it. He motioned to a chair. “There’s no need to apologize—”
“Good,” she said, sitting down, “because I’m not.”
Raymer sat across from her, his desk and so much more between them. Charice, who was seldom at a loss for words, was silent so long that he began to wonder if she’d changed her mind and decided she had nothing to tell him after all.
“The first thing you have to understand,” she said at long last, “is that from the time we were little I’ve kept Jerome’s secrets. After our parents died, it was him and me against the world, you know? He was my protector. I was an adult before it finally occurred to me that I was protecting him more than he was me.”
“When did you learn? About him and Becka?” In other words, for how many days, weeks and months had she sided with her brother when she might’ve sided with him?
“I knew from the start,” she told him, with unmistakable defiance. “He couldn’t wait to tell me. Like I said, him and me against the world. That’s the next thing you need to understand. Jerome? For him, this was no fling. It was love.”
Raymer didn’t doubt it, since his words were still ringing in his ears. We were so in love…You have no idea…Do you even know what it’s like to love somebody…I mean really love somebody…Do you even know what love is? And of course that single word on the florist’s card: Always. This had been seared into his brain much like the staple had been into his palm.
“He’d had a lot of girlfriends,” she continued, “but love was a completely new experience — and it was complicated by this crazy idea he had.”
“Which was?”
“He believed she’d cured him.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything. Of being Jerome. All his obsessions and anxieties? Gone. He didn’t need to perform his rituals anymore. The counting, touching, reciting, sanitizing. He might not act like it, but — deep down? — Jerome’s the most anxious, insecure man you’ve ever met.”
No, Raymer thought. I am. By far.
“You probably think he wanted me to move here so he could look after me, right? Not true. Whenever he has one of his panic attacks, I’m the only one who can help. Before I packed it in down home, I had a life. I was engaged to be married.”