“Thanks for coming,” I said to David.
“Well, a client’s a client, that’s what I like to say,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll need a room to consult,” he told the cops. He looked down at his half-finished Milky Way, then closed the wrapper around it and stowed it in his pocket with an expression of regret.
“You can use this one, but she won’t be allowed in with you,” one of the cops said, nodding at my mother.
“I’m their mother,” she explained, not in the proudest tone I’d ever heard.
The cop shrugged, and without raising his head — or his voice, for that matter — Wylie asked her to go to the hospital and check on Irina and Psyche.
“Those your girlfriends, son?” the cop said. “They mixed up in this too?”
Wylie scowled and didn’t answer.
An officer was summoned to drive my mother to the hospital. David Michaelson kissed her gently on the cheek and looked her straight in the eye. “We’ll be over there in a New York minute,” he said, then winked at me. “Right?”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
After our mother left, David offered us the rest of his candy bar. Sitting across the table from him, Wylie and I shook our heads. I felt about ten years old. With his head deeply bowed, Wylie looked to me like someone about to be hanged.
“So, kids,” David said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened, from the first of it to the last.”
I stared at him blankly. When was the first of it? Was it Wylie’s e-mails, his long-winded manifestos, his disappearance into the dumpsters and mountains? Or was it the second I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque, into its thin desert air, the smell and sun of it, the sweetly irresistible, scab-picking pain of home? It was impossible to answer the question.
“Answer the goddamn question,” David said.
“Wylie, you start,” I said.
He shifted in his seat, never looking up, and muttered, “Fuck off. You called him, you talk to him.”
“Who else did you want me to call? Your buddy Gerald?”
“Who’s Gerald?” David said.
“This is all your fault,” Wylie said.
“How do you figure that?”
“It was your idea to take the car. We could’ve waited to go to the hospital.”
“You stole a car?” David said.
“We couldn’t wait to go to the hospital. You know that. For God’s sake, Wylie, grow the fuck up.”
“You grow up.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
David stood up. “You all don’t seem especially eager to discuss your situation with me,” he said, turning to the door. “In which case, I’ll be going.”
“Wait,” I said, looking at Wylie and then at him. “Please stay.”
In the end I told him the entire story, at least as I saw it, and it took a long time. David reached into his back pocket — I expected another Milky Way — and pulled out a small notebook in which he took careful notes, every once in a while stroking his mustache. Eventually he brought out the leftover candy bar and finished it, sitting there chewing amiably, as though he couldn’t think of any better place to be in the middle of the night than at the police station, listening to his mistress’s children describe a summer’s worth of antics. I thought that he knew I owed him, which irked me very much. But it was also true.
After I was done, Wylie gave his version of events, filling in a few details. If he knew more than I did about Angus and Gerald’s plans — the blueprints in the car, the Shangri-la — he didn’t let on, and I believed him.
After posting our bail, David drove us to the hospital, where our mother was waiting in the lounge along with a new set of deranged, uncomfortable-looking people. She looked at Wylie and me with an expression I couldn’t identify.
“Any news?” David asked her.
She shook her head.
“Can I see them?” Wylie said.
“They said not yet.”
When David asked if she cared for a soda, jiggling the change in his pocket, she looked at him as if he’d just offered her some crack cocaine. “Why don’t you go home, David?”
“I don’t mind staying.”
“You don’t need to,” she said. “It’s late.”
“I don’t mind.”
She pressed her hand against his. “I know you don’t.”
He shrugged and ambled out, his shoulders round and slumped, and seeing this dismissal made me feel sorry for him for the first time.
My mother sat quietly reading a magazine, every once in a while politely covering her mouth during a yawn. I kept waiting for her to explode, but she didn’t. Wylie wandered outside. When I followed him out there, I found him just finishing smoking a joint with one of the blanket-wrapped junkies, who wandered off when I walked up.
“Where do you think Angus is?”
“Is that all you can think about?”
“I have room in my head for more than one person,” I said.
The sky was paling, slowly but surely, its murky black ceding to blue, the city around us still without power. My mother emerged from the hospital and stood next to us, not saying anything. There was a dismal silence. Then Wylie started crying, his shoulders shaking as he just stood there. She had to reach up to put her arm around his shoulder. Across the thoroughfare in front of us, three bulky shapes drifted along, and I realized it was the skinny, blanket-wrapped junkies, reunited, I guessed, with their friend Buster. The three of us watched the three of them, not talking, just waiting together to see what the day would bring. In time the edge of the sky took on a puzzling cast, swollen with color like a bruise, and I was so tired I didn’t realize at first that it was the sun, rising.
Twenty-Two
I woke with a start. I’d fallen asleep on my side, lying across two orange plastic chairs, with an ache down my side corresponding to their contours. My mother and brother were nowhere to be seen. Outside the clear sliding doors of the ER I could see the gentle brilliance of early-morning sun. New nurses were coming on duty, busily chatting about the craziness of the blackout. From what they were saying nobody suspected that the fire, by now extinguished, had been started on purpose; the group’s most successful gesture, I thought, was also the one that everybody took for an accident.
“But did you see all the stars?” a nurse said. “I wish the lights would go out more often.”
“You would,” another nurse said, and they both laughed.
I sat there in the lounge rubbing my face. There was a rattling sound by the doors that made me look up. Behind the glass I saw as in a dream the tousled red hair of Angus Beam.
I stood up and went outside, the city’s apartment buildings and offices and traffic glittering in the morning sun, the slight coolness in the air hinting at fall. August was ending, the summer was ending, everything was ending.
“I thought we should have one last cocktail,” Angus said.
“It’s like seven o’clock in the morning or something.”
“I know,” he said. “But I’m leaving.”
We looked at each other. His freckles seemed to multiply before my eyes. I’d forgotten how blue his eyes were, how white his smile. “Let me guess,” I said. “Bisbee, Arizona.”
“How’d you know?” he said, and grinned.
We walked down the unscenic driveway toward the parking lot, the sun glinting off the fenders of cars. In the distance I could hear traffic and planes, the city awakening.
“I’m leaving too,” I said. “Going back to New York.”
It sounded as if I were saying it just because he was leaving, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t realized that I was going back to face Michael, school, the fortune-teller across the street, but once I said it I knew it was true. I was never going to be the kind of person I’d thought Michael could make me — art-world sophisticate, graduate-school operator, easy, slick sharer in romantic affairs — but that didn’t mean that I could just abandon the city and everything I’d started there.