When Sweeney didn’t respond, Alice said, “I’m sorry. Does it bother you?”
“Not at all,” he said. “It’s a nice change.”
She looked back to Danny, reached down, and ran a hand over the side of his skull.
“His hair’s like silk. I love it at this age.”
“He’s got his mother’s hair,” Sweeney said.
Alice nodded, took a last look at the boy, then motioned toward the hall with her head and said, “Be careful there. It still isn’t dry.”
Sweeney followed her outside. She looked up and down the corridor before she spoke.
“In the next week,” she said, “we’ll want to schedule a meeting with you.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine,” Alice said. “This is standard procedure at the Clinic. It’ll be my entire assessment team, Dr. Gögüs and Dr. Tannenbaum, maybe a therapist or an attending nurse. And possibly my father.”
“I’ve met Dr. Tannenbaum,” Sweeney said.
Alice bobbed her head and said, “He’s terrific, isn’t he? We’re thrilled to have him here.”
“What happens at the meeting?”
“It’s actually the first in a series of meetings. But in some ways it’s the most crucial. We’ll track through Danny’s condition from every possible angle. We look at full medical history. We study prior diagnosis and prognosis. We look at and evaluate all previous therapies. And we revisit the incident itself.”
“The accident,” Sweeney said.
“I tell you this,” Alice said, “to prepare you. For most families it’s a pretty grueling session. It’s tedious and it’s technical and some highly emotional material is presented in a pretty clinical fashion.”
“I might not like what I hear.”
“You might not like what you hear,” Alice said, “both in terms of the recounting and the final assessment.”
“You took Danny,” Sweeney said, “because you thought his case was promising. That’s what Dr. Lawton told me.”
“And that hasn’t changed,” Alice said. “But what we do here at the Peck is start from the beginning. And it can be painful going backwards. It’s been a year since Danny’s incident, right? You’d already found a routine at the St. Joseph. And you might find things changing here.”
“And that would be a bad thing?”
Alice smiled at him and regrouped.
“This is what I’d like to do,” she said. “At some point, before the meeting, I’d like to talk to you one-on-one. Outside a clinical setting.”
Sweeney stared at her again and went mute.
“Away from the Peck,” she said. “I want to sit down, in a relaxed atmosphere, and talk to you. About Danny. And about you and Danny.”
“Anytime you want to talk about Danny,” he said, “I’m available.”
“I’ll call you,” Alice said and walked away before Sweeney could tell her that he didn’t have a telephone yet. He watched her turn a corner and, in the same instant that she disappeared, the janitor, Romeo, turned onto the hall, pushing a wash bucket on casters with a long-handled mop. He swayed toward Sweeney with a relaxed, almost swaggering gait, water slopping over the lip of the bucket as he moved. He didn’t stop to talk, but brushed by and said, “How we doin’ today, friend?” The voice was low and it was still locked in street jive.
“You’re making a mess,” Sweeney said to his back and Romeo lifted a hand, waved it in the air, and kept moving.
Sweeney went back into 103, stood at the end of the first bed, and looked at his son. Then he walked across the room and looked at Irene Moore, Danny’s roommate. She was still in the same position she’d occupied yesterday. He moved to the side of the bed, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. Then he immediately walked back to Danny.
He climbed in next to his son. He brought his head level with Danny’s and got comfortable, rolled to his side and brought his lips to the boy’s left ear.
“Dad’s back, Danny,” he whispered.
He took a few breaths. He reached down, took his son’s wrist, and timed the pulse.
“Do you remember,” he asked, “where we left off?”
He stared for too long at his son’s face, waiting for anything that he could tell himself was a response. Then he opened the drawer of the nightstand, reached inside, and pulled out several issues of Limbo.
13
At some point, Sweeney dozed off and dreamed that Kerry and he were with Danny at Put-in-Bay. They were sailing a boat through a series of narrow canals. Danny’s hair was long and summer blond. Kerry was wearing the teal bikini. He noticed a tattoo of the sun on her belly. And then it was a different boat, something larger with a tall mast and Sweeney was having trouble with the rudder. Kerry was down below getting lunch and he kept calling to her but she wouldn’t answer. Danny had climbed up the mast and grabbed onto a line and was swinging out over the water. With each swing the boat tilted on its side. The waves were hitting Sweeney. His eyes were stinging. He was furious, screaming for Danny to climb down and Kerry to come up topside. Then a flock of birds blocked the sun and the lightning began.
He yelled out when the second-shift nurse woke him.
“You were having a nightmare,” she said.
He swung his legs off the side of the bed, rubbed his eyes, and looked at his watch.
“What’s that?” he asked as the nurse began to hang a new bag on the IV pole.
“Just his meds,” she said without looking at him.
She checked the drip and moved on to attend Irene Moore. He wiped at his eyes again, pulled a peppermint from his pocket, and put it in his mouth. He leaned over the bed and kissed Danny, then went back down to the apartment.
HE EMPTIED HIS purchases from the Mart, hung his lab coats in the bedroom closet, and made up his bed with the new sheets. He changed into T-shirt and gym trunks, then assembled the percolator and made some coffee. No one used percolators anymore, he thought. And this was a shame because they made such a wonderful sound, gave off such a rich smell.
He started his routine of sit-ups but before he reached his quota the idea hit him. He sat up with the first notion, then went into the bedroom, got the Big Chief scratch pad and the felt markers, and brought them to the couch. But he found, immediately, that the ink bled through the paper, so he took the pencil from the logic puzzle book and began his notes on the second page of the scratch pad. When he’d filled a page, he felt confident enough to get up and pour himself the first of what would be many cups of coffee.
He wrote in outline form. One-line sentences. Nothing fancy. At this stage, he was unconcerned about language or style. He wanted only to get the facts down, the series of sequential events necessary to build a plausible bridge from point A to point B.
It would have been easier to make a new starting point, to lessen the desperateness of the freaks’ situation. But that would have been a cheat. Danny knew the story by heart, so there was no choice but to play the cards that had been dealt.
SWEENEY WENT UP to the cafeteria and found it empty. He got a ham and Swiss sandwich from the vending machine but it smelled suspicious and he threw it in the trash. He bought several packs of peanut butter crackers and a can of cream soda and ate at a clean table at the far end of the room.
When he was done, he went to the pharmacy and found Ernesto Luga seething.
“What the fuck,” Ernesto said. “I offer you my friendship and you rat me out?”
“I didn’t rat you out,” Sweeney said. “What’s the problem here?”
He was still standing in the doorway of the vault. Ernesto threw a bag of Jevity at him and he caught it like a football.