They drank in silence until John spoke again.
“How did you handle seeing all those dead bodies over the years?”
“You get used to it,” Will said. “Or you get another job. You try to think about doing your job, finding the bad guy.”
“I gotta go.” John stood up. “I’ll put the bottle downstairs. Want another one?”
“No, I’ll fall asleep. Can’t drink like I once could.”
In a minute, he watched John walk to his car and drive away.
As the quiet returned to the street, Will wondered why John had visited him, had chosen tonight, and had waited for him outside. Why had he put a piece of metal through his penis and felt the need to show it? Will was a man whose training and experience had made him a skeptic, even with his own family, perhaps especially with his own family. But John was no longer a boy and had long ago slipped the influence of his parents. Maybe John merely wanted to see how his stepfather was holding up.
“How are you?” John had asked. That commonplace greeting was always given in the expectation of a simple return: “fine.” The person asking it didn’t really want to know how you were. Will had done the same thing a hundred thousand times in his life before his surgery. Now he dutifully said, “fine,” even if inside he thought, “how much time do you have to hear my answer?”
How was he? His latest MRI scan had shown the area inside his spinal cord where the tumor had chosen to do its damage to be “stable,” the doctor said. That was good news. It meant no new tumor. But the neutrality of the word carried incredible weight. How was he? He couldn’t really feel touch on his belly or trunk below the tumor zone. The same numbness appeared in unpredictable patches on down his legs and feet. Thank god he could feel his right foot to drive a car.
He was usually constipated. His right leg was as strong as before. His left leg could barely make a step; he used the swing of his hip to compensate as he walked. That, and the inside muscles of both legs, which he had developed thanks to time with a kinesio-therapist, endlessly raising and lowing himself, knees pointed inward, with his back held straight against a concrete post. He walked with a cane and some days were better than others. After the activity of today, there would be hell to pay tomorrow. That’s how it went. Every. Step. Is. Hard.
How he was: it very much involved the spasms that ruled both legs now. Impulses to and from the brain and legs were scrambled by the damage inside the spinal cord. The result in the right leg centered on his quads. Quadriceps femoris-he had even learned the Latin name. As a normal man, it would have been the strongest muscle in his body. Now, the confusion between brain and muscles, and the fact that the right leg did most of the work walking, left it constantly clenching. The left quads were not so ambitious, simply jumping and thumping as it became tired. He took the maximum dose of Baclofen and Neurontin to make it bearable. Right at the moment, his right quads felt as if they wanted to tear themselves free from the bone, rip the confines of his skin, and fly out into the night like a wild creature.
How did you explain this to anyone?
This was how he was. He hadn’t been shot or otherwise injured in the line of duty. He hadn’t ended up in neurosurgery because of a crackup on a Harley he had foolishly bought to fend off middle age. Will Borders had bad DNA. Instead of a helix, it was the shape of a bull’s eye. Now he qualified for a handicapped placard. People asked him if his leg was getting better. What could you say? He had seen the MRI scans showing the inside of his spinal cord after the surgery: where once the cord had run thick and true, he now literally had threads.
And for all this, John was right: He was mellower, strangely so. It was more than the anti-spasticity drugs. His wife had left him, his body had, well, stabbed him in the back. But, most of the time, he was strangely at peace. He couldn’t understand it. Had he been the victim of an on-the-job injury, he probably would have spent many hours discussing this with a police shrink. As it was, he had the Christian Moerlein, nearly drained, the city skyline, slightly diminished as banks of lights in the towers were turned off. It would have been enough if he didn’t have a murder to solve.
He looked out on his city, wondered who had been on that boat with Kristen Gruber. He wished he knew who had tried the door to her condo. The doorman had been downstairs. They interviewed the neighbors on the floor: Two old ladies. One other condo was empty, on the market. He felt not a little pressure from the chief’s benevolent encouragement earlier that day. If he were really suspicious, Dodds-like suspicious, for Dodds had spent time in police-union politics, he would have worried he was being set up to fail. But that qualm didn’t find purchase in his mind or his maniac quads.
Maybe part of it was the “wow” view. He couldn’t keep his eyes from roaming to the left, into the little jewels of lights on Mount Adams, to Theresa, to her needless death. They had become accidental lovers, yet he wasn’t there to protect her when she needed him most. The weights on his heart that were never gone pulled painfully. Somehow, he let himself think again of Cheryl Beth, without anxiety and regret, and as he did, he fell asleep.
As his legs started quivering, he found himself with his father. They were both in uniform, their shirts incandescently white against the darkness of the narrow alley. Dirty brick walls of tenements hemmed them in. The only light besides their uniform shirts was a yellow streetlight half a block away: it backlit a shadow that approached slowly. Will reached for his service weapon but his holster was empty. He shouted to warn his father, “get down!” “take cover!” but his mouth seemed sewn shut. The words would not come out, instead being half-born primal sounds trapped inside him. The shots came as long fingers of flame from the shadow’s hand. Then the shadow was gone and his father was gone and only John was left standing in the alley, watching him.
When Will’s eyes came open and he was still sitting on the balcony, chilled from the post-midnight air, staring at the skyline, it still took him a full minute to know for certain he was awake.
Tuesday
Chapter Twelve
At a quarter past six that morning, Cheryl Beth stepped off the elevator at The Christ Hospital to begin her clinical day with the nursing students. Fortunately, this was only a few blocks from home. It was probably the best hospital in Cincinnati and it actively recruited her when Memorial Hospital closed. She might still come here permanently, on staff. She was impressed with the people and the facilities, and it always felt good to be back in her soft scrubs with her white lab coat. The rhythms of the hospital morning were in high gear. She was in her element.
The usual routine began: checking the patient census for new patients, surgical schedule, tests scheduled, and discharges. She also did a quick look at the in-service classes scheduled that the students could benefit by attending. Then she had a conversation with the charge nurse, asking a couple of questions to clarify the situation of one patient. The overnight shift was eager to get home. As the clinical instructor, Cheryl Beth reviewed the nurses coming on duty and which students would be working with them. She walked down the hall to find two new patients, introduced herself, and asked if they would be comfortable being treated by student nurses. Some patients would refuse to have a student care for them, not realizing that they would get even better care and more attention from the student considering how stretched the regular R.N. staff could be. Especially if they were treated by her students.
Classes had resumed at Miami, so she expected all her students at the hospital for their clinical. And by 6:45, all were there. Cheryl Beth met them at the nurses’ bay. She was proud of her group, having watched them grow in skills and confidence over the semester. Each one was now good enough to care for as many as three patients at once.