Jacob sat up and stared at the black screen of the television. The tubes were gone now and the burns had mostly healed, though portions of his body still received twice-daily applications of silvadene ointment. He was taking multiple courses of antibiotics, and the worst was over, according to Dr. Masutu. But the doctor was an optimist. The worst had only just begun.
Jacob looked at the tray on the table beside him. A fly landed on the scrambled eggs and tracked across the rubbery yellow surface. As a toddler, Mattie had called them “home flies,” a cute corruption of the phrase “house flies.” He watched the fly reach the tar pit of pancake syrup. It struggled, broke free, cut a lazy circle in the air, then lit again in the same sticky spot.
Renee entered the room. “Knock, knock.”
Jacob closed his eyes and sank against the pillows. The darkness behind his eyelids was far too inviting.
“I hear you’ll be going home in a few days,” she said.
“Home,” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
“The wonderful Dr. Masutu explained the formula to me. One week of hospitalization for every ten percent of body burn.”
“Then you should have been released last week.”
“The burns feel better,” he lied. “They’re trying to fix the stuff that’s broken on the inside.”
“I took an apartment. The insurance company gave me some money until they sort things out. Donald set me up with one. I tried to pay but he said M & W would absorb it, since you own half of it.”
“Which apartments?”
“Ivy Terrace.”
“Nice. We only opened them last year.”
“I didn’t know you built them.”
“Didn’t build them, really. I got a commission on the land sale, subdivided a few lots, went in as a silent partner. M & W just collects the rent.”
“I got a two-bedroom unit,” she said, as relieved as he to avoid conversation. She opened a National Geographic.
Jacob let his gaze crawl back to the window. He’d trusted his partner, Donald Meekins, to take care of her until he got out. Donald had phoned his hospital room but Jacob had refused to talk to him. He was afraid of what he might say. The cash flow would be tight for a couple of months, but at least they had insurance.
He counted the houses on the hillside opposite the hospital. There were at least two good-sized tracts that were prime spots for development. With Kingsboro Hospital opening a new cancer wing and cardiac care facility, more wealthy seniors would be moving from Florida and New York to the North Carolina mountains. Those seniors needed homes, preferably close to health care services. M & W had built a country club outside of town, complete with an eighteen-hole golf course, but those homes had all been sold. New homes were needed for all the future cancer victims. Abnormal growth was a growth industry.
“It’s too quiet in here,” Renee said.
He heard a click and the television came on. One of those stupid morning shows, Early NBC or ABC Sunrise or whatever. He opened his eyes. At least he could focus on the screen instead of Renee. A man in a blue suit was interviewing a woman who kept pulling at the hem of her short skirt, wanting to show off her legs while still projecting wholesomeness and modesty. Cut.
“I really like this commercial,” he said. On the screen, a lizard spoke in an Australian accent, trying to entice the viewer into buying a particular brand of car insurance.
“About the insurance,” she said, as if the commercial had triggered an opportunity to bring up the subject. “I didn’t want to do too much without you. But I needed a roof over my head.”
“She was worth a lot, wasn’t she?”
“You bastard. Don’t start that again. We’re going to have to deal with some things, and we may as well be civil about it.”
“The money, you mean.”
“Shut up. All I’m asking is that you sign the papers and let’s get on with our lives. Whatever we can salvage, that is.”
“We probably saved a ton on the cremation, since the job was half-done when you turned the body over to the aftercare vultures.”
“I had to make arrangements. I couldn’t wait—”
“—for me to attend my own daughter’s funeral?”
Renee jabbed at the television remote and muted the sound. Jacob watched the silent interview guest fighting her hem line. The woman’s knees were a little too knobby for his taste. Back when he had taste, that was. He turned his attention to the fly in the syrup.
Wasn’t there a saying about the fly in the ointment? Dr. Masutu’s tranquilizer worked miracles, freed his mind to explore the foolish. Jacob had stopped fighting, and the injections had been replaced with twice-daily pills. Diazepam. The quicker-picker-upper.
Or the easier-to-forgetter.
Or the don’t-give-a-damner.
“Jake, we’re going to have to talk about it.”
“There’s nothing left to talk about.”
“There’s plenty.”
“There’s nothing. It’s all gone.”
“No. There’s still us.”
“There’s no more ‘us.’ There’s just you and me. Or maybe just you.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’ve always despised failure. That’s not the Wells way.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think. Hospitals are good for that, maybe even better than prisons.” Jacob pulled the straw from his milk carton and poked it into the syrup near the fly. The fly’s wings beat frantically.
“I know this is terrible. But maybe we can get through it together. Start over.”
“The way we did after Christine? You saw how that one turned out.”
Renee finally sat, in the oak and mauve vinyl chair near the window. The sun had grown a shade more yellow outside, rising above the fog that hazed the horizon. In the old world, the happy distant past, Jacob would be at his desk at the M & W office, talking on the phone, cutting deals, lining up subcontractors. Or else out on the job site, looking at blueprints as a bulldozer ripped brown gashes in the mountainside.
Developing.
That was an interesting word, with several connotations. Developers made things happen. But development was also the term for a baby’s trek through the cycle, from microscopic fertilized egg to alien peanut creature to bawling, squealing reality.
“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “The kids were born in this hospital.”
“That’s not so funny.”
“Think about it. They took their first breaths from this very same air. The same sick air.” He waved the hand that held the straw and the fly finally broke free and arced across the room like a crippled bomber returning from a death run.
The door swung open. A nurse came in, a male with a sour expression and two days of stubble. He stared at Renee as if she were the patient, then wiped his palms against his hospital blues and slipped on rubber gloves. He squeezed ointment from a tube and rubbed it softly into the skin of Jacob’s arms.
“You’re looking good, my man,” the nurse said. His ID nameplate read “Steve Poccora” and his picture beneath it was clean-shaven and smiling. The smile looked as if it had been computer-generated in a photo manipulation program.
“The doctor says I’m getting better every minute,” Jacob said.
“Aren’t we all?” Poccora said. Then, to Renee, “We’ll have him home to you in no time.”
“No hurry,” Renee said.
Poccora started to grin at the joke, sensed the coldness in the room for the first time, then rubbed the ointment faster. Jacob barely felt the contact. The skin had roughened and much of the damaged layer had sloughed off. He was new in a way, pink as a baby, slick as a snake after molting.
If only he could shed his soul as easily. He’d read that the body completely remade itself every seven years as cells died and were replaced. That meant he’d been a different man when Mattie was born. A better man.
Less like Joshua.