“Allie,” he said, “if you want to handle this case, you know it’s yours.”
“Thank you, Poppa,” Alice said. “It’s just that the boy, Danny. . Have you taken a good look at him?”
Peck didn’t say anything but he took his hand away.
“He looks,” Alice said, “a lot like Alvin did at that age.”
And the hand came back up and Peck slapped his daughter across the face.
The action was as controlled and neat as the voice that followed it.
“We don’t mention that name,” Peck said.
Alice kept herself from touching the cheek, she nodded and tried to breathe, but the claustrophobic feeling was flooding through her now.
“Enough shop talk,” Peck said, putting both hands on his daughter’s shoulders and positioning her away from him on the window seat, so that he could come up against her back and wrap his arms around her. He let his chin rest on her shoulder, brought his nose into her neck, and took in her scent.
“Look at how beautiful the woods are tonight,” he said. “It’s like we’re the only people left in the world.”
7
Sweeney hooked his feet under the bureau and did sit-ups. This was his preferred method for avoiding sleep. He had been getting by on three to four hours a night for months now. What sleep he did get was fitful and, because of the dreams, sometimes more debilitating than restorative. The therapist out in Shaker Heights had promised they’d stop eventually. So far, she was wrong.
The dreams didn’t always center on Danny. Occasionally, they would feature people and places from Sweeney’s childhood. Sometimes the setting was the pharmacy. Sometimes an enormous shopping mall or a hot and confining bus or a stretch of off-season beach. But in every dream, whatever the locale, he was searching for something he had lost — money, keys, jewelry he’d bought for Kerry, the deed to his father’s house. In his dreams he had searched for his Honda, a beagle puppy, his college diploma, his driver’s license, his uncle’s toolbox, and an overdue library book titled Roots of the French Revolution. The therapist had suggested he keep a notebook by his bed and write the items down.
She had also suggested he attend the coma families support group that met once a month at the Holiday Inn on Royalton. His first meeting was also his last. He was horrified to find that members new to the group had not only to introduce themselves but to explain their loved one’s condition and the coma’s proximate cause. On impulse, he’d made up a story about a swimming pool accident. But when the group broke for coffee, a woman approached and called him on the lie. She had someone at the St. Joseph. She knew all about Danny, she said. Mrs. Heller had told her about Kerry and she knew “the whole truth.”
He ran from the Holiday Inn and almost hit a taxi on his way out of the parking lot.
But one good thing had come from the meeting. He learned that the dreams weren’t uncommon. The wife of a man who had been shot in the head told about a recurring nightmare in which she exited a car but closed its door on her raincoat. She ended up being dragged down the block as the car began to accelerate. At that, the woman next to Sweeney had leaned into him and whispered, “In mine, I’m at the zoo and all the animals are getting loose.”
Now he avoided sleep as much as possible, drinking coffee all day, keeping the lights and the radio on whenever he was at home. He’d been tempted to try some chemical solution to the problem. To either dose himself with amphetamine or narcotize his brain into his own, controlled coma. But like most of his colleagues, he’d been conditioned at school against self-medicating.
What he did in lieu of sleep was exercise. He couldn’t bear the sociability at the gym but he loved the old-fashioned regime of solitary calisthenics. In the privacy of his bedroom, by the glow of the muted TV, he jumped rope, pulled on a chin-up bar he’d mounted in the doorway, and ran through sequences of push-ups and sit-ups. As a result, he was college weight again and his arms and legs and abdomen had become toned and taut. And if his brain still, sometimes, screamed for sleep, he was learning to ignore its demands. What he found more difficult to ignore was the irony his new habits had produced. His muscles had grown hard as his son’s had atrophied. And Danny had achieved perpetual sleep while his father had made himself into an insomniac.
He hit three hundred, unhooked his feet and lay down on his back. The ceiling was cracked and water-stained. His room sat directly below 103 and he tried to picture where, exactly, Danny’s bed was located.
The admission and assessment team had spent two hours with the boy. Sweeney liked the idea that they were starting fresh instead of relying on the St. Joseph files. Alice — she insisted he call her by her first name — had explained that the doctors would meet in the afternoon, compare notes, and work up a prognosis and a schedule of therapies and medications. She told him that at the beginning they’d be reassessing almost constantly. Then she had dismissed the team and bought him dinner in the cafeteria.
The place was even seedier at night. They ate a runny stroganoff and Jell-O and, as he knew she would, she asked about the circumstances of Danny’s accident. He didn’t want a replay of the morning’s episode with Nora, so he said, “It’s all in his records,” and Alice didn’t push for anything more.
He stripped off his trunks and his T-shirt, threw them in the sink, and stepped in the shower. The water was hot and the pressure was high. He sat down at the far end of the tub and let the spray blast his body.
Kerry and he had often showered and bathed together before Danny came along. She’d reach up to wash his hair and he’d run the soap over her belly and between her legs. Afterward, he liked drying her off, wrapping her in a towel, and pulling her backward into his arms.
Now he placed a hand on his cock, then just as quickly took it away. He thought he heard a phone ring, got up on his feet, and turned off the water. The bathroom was entirely fogged. He climbed out of the tub and ran, dripping, into the living room. An old black rotary phone sat on the floor next to the sofa, but it wasn’t ringing. He squatted and picked up the receiver, put it to his ear, and heard nothing. Tomorrow he’d have to call from the pharmacy and have it turned on.
THE CLINIC PHARMACY was a cave. It was located in what had been a walk-in bank vault built, by the original Peck, in the recesses of the family manse.
Ernesto Luga, the second-shift pharmacist, asked more questions than he answered. He was leaving the Clinic in a week. He had scored an opening at the new Wonder Drug out at the new Wonder Drug Plaza in Flanders. According to Ernesto, he’d be making double his current salary by the end of his first year.
“An’ you actually get to work with people,” he said, “instead of, you know. .” trailing off because he knew about Danny.
“What’s his story, anyway?” Ernesto asked.
Sweeney was doing Ernesto’s inventory. Ten minutes into his inaugural shift, Sweeney knew there was nothing he needed to learn.
“He’s in a coma,” Sweeney said and began to count the bags of saline again.
“Everybody in here’s in a coma,” Ernesto said. “I meant, you know, how’d it happen?”
Sweeney braced the clipboard and jotted numbers, then looked up. Ernesto was sitting on a countertop, eating a tuna sandwich.
“You really need to know?” Sweeney asked.
Ernesto chewed with his mouth open and nodded.
“We were at an Indians home game. They were playing the Tigers. We’d been given box seats by a drug company rep I know.”
“What company?”