Benighted (25 page)

“See,” he says, soft as snow, “when you say those things, you really are the way people see you.”

“Who sees me?” My throat is closing up, a wire inside pulling tighter and tighter.

“Nobody,” he says. “But if you want people to treat you like a person, if you hate it so much when people point and call you names, why the hell do you play the bareback card so often?”

Bareback. The word, in his voice, cuts a red, wet piece out of my heart.

I curl up, wrap myself around a cushion, turn my head away from him and burrow into the sofa. My voice is barely audible. “You said you didn’t use that word.”

“Why not? You say it yourself.”

“It’s different.”

“Of course, everything’s different for you. Lola, you really need to get over yourself.”

He says it, the adolescent phrase, the simple, snap-out-of-it solution. Get over myself. Not the world, not life, not silver bullets in the back of men’s heads. Myself, as if I was a wall I could scale, as if I was a grief to recover from.

I lay my cheek on the cushion, turn away from him. “Leave me alone.”

“I’m not the one who started this, Lola.”

“Leave me alone.”

“What, have you had enough fighting? Guess you wouldn’t be so tired of it if you’d been doing all the shouting. It’s hard to take, isn’t it?”

“Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me
alone
!” Something black and scalding floods me, and I turn and hurl the cushion at him. It flings itself out of my hand, spins in the air. He catches it, stands with it in his grip, and this maddens me. I throw another, then another, pull and wrench at the sofa, dislodging all its comforts, laying waste.

He stands, the cushion in his hands, looking at me. He doesn’t say a word. I curl up, press my face into the last cushion left, cover my head with my arms, wrapping up as small as I can go.

Finally I hear a sound. He tosses the cushion down, picks up his keys and heads for the door. “I’m going out,” he says.

There’s nothing I can say.

I hear the door open, and then he speaks. “I’ve got my cell with me, call me if anything happens.” He sounds no less angry than before. “And don’t forget to lock up after I’m gone.”

Then the door slams, and he’s gone. It’s a long time before I can move.

He’s gone for an hour. In this time, I raise my head and look around me. There are cushions all over the room. I want to lie down, but I can’t; my tiny island that I’ve left on the sofa is too small, it confines me. It’s long, weary work to stand up, fetch the cushions one by one, replace them one by one.

The sofa is reassembled, but it doesn’t look right. Something about the angle of the cushions is wrong, it’s become different, as if a new piece of furniture had replaced the old when I wasn’t looking. But since there’s no one here to see, I can get back on it. It’ll do to lie down on.

The feeling of shame is like a bridle, it checks me every time I turn my head. Too much of what he’s said is just. Still I think Becca has betrayed me, still I think Paul shouted at me, but they both of them said things that I can’t shake off. My sister and Paul tangle in my head, I fight both of them at once, hear again what they said to me. What I want to say to them now is that I know I’m not a good woman. I never was. Most of the time, I’m not even a pleasant woman. But if they’d had my life, if they’d had everything that happened to me happen to them, would they have been any better than I am?

The trouble is, I don’t think Paul would consider that an excuse.

I lie very still. It’s too empty in here. I wish I hadn’t quarreled with Paul. He’s gone, and I may have driven him away for good. That thought is worse than anything, it cuts so deep that I don’t even have the strength to watch the door, search the corner for assassins. All I can do is hold a cushion, pull it to me as hard as I can.

He said he’d keep his cell phone with him, he said to lock the door. Those were things about my safety. The more I think about what he said, the more the bridle tugs. Because the overwhelming thing is that he fights fair. He didn’t say I was a bitch, he said I was being a bitch. He didn’t say I was a coward, that I was stupid. He said that was how I was acting. It’s such a big difference. He didn’t call me a bareback. He said it was a word I used. I called him a lyco, I said I didn’t like lycos, but he never called me a bareback.

I hold tight to the cushion, because this is no good. I really am in love. The thought is not a happy one; it brings no warm flushes or songs about Paris in the springtime. There aren’t many roses in my view. It’s a cold, tight absence in my chest, flowing cool through my veins, making me need him, need to get close enough for him to warm me up. The timing is bad, the prognosis worse, but for all my doubts and fears and grudges against the world, I can’t stop shaking and holding the cushion and wishing for him to come home.

When he does return, the sound shakes me, as the door comes open with a sudden bang. Paul enters the room with a startled look on his face as if he was expecting more resistance.

“Didn’t you double-lock the door?” he says. There’s a slight awkwardness to his voice, a little resignation, a little frustration. “Come on, Lola, you know you have to be careful.”

“I’m sorry.” I sit up on the sofa, balanced back on my heels. I can’t look at him. My eyes are closed, keeping down tears. I sit still as a sacrifice and let him see me.

He sighs. “You know you should be more careful.” I take the reprimand. He isn’t free of the argument yet, not completely, but this reproach is better than some things. It’s not an attack.

“I’m sorry.”

I hear the sound of his keys being set down on the table. “Listen, I got a paper,” he says. It’s an attempt at peace. “Do you want to read it?”

He’s been out, he’s been somewhere where he needed a newspaper to read because I drove him out of his own home. I sit vertical on the sofa, ready to topple. “I’m sorry,” I say, because what other words are there?

The sound of something soft being laid down as he puts his paper on the table, and then he’s around by the sofa, his hand rests on my head. The gesture is like a teacher patting a boy he’s fond of, and I lift my hands, both of them, to catch hold of him, keep this concession pressing down on me. “I’m sorry.”

He sighs again. “It’s okay,” he says. “I know you’re under a lot, I shouldn’t have yelled. Just—try to be a little nice, okay?”

“Okay.” My voice is quiet. He’s earned the last word.

His fingers wriggle a little under my clasp, tapping on my scalp. “I don’t know what to say now,” he says. There’s an echo of rueful humor in his words that I lean my tired soul against.

“That’s okay,” I say. “Just—we needn’t say anything.”

He takes his hand off my head, leaving me with a bereft moment before he comes and sits down beside me. I lie down, let my upright spine give up its guarded equilibrium and slump with my head in his lap. He pats it. His touch is light, almost absent, although I know he’s paying attention. It isn’t passion, it isn’t ease. I don’t even know if it’s forgiveness. But I lie in his lap, let him pet me as if I were a child. Not his child, there isn’t that much intensity in his hands on my hair. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take whatever’s going. Anything that will let me lie down. I’ve been balanced too long.

TWENTY-TWO

C
enturies ago, before we discovered antiallergens, there was only one way to treat a silver wound: whisky and a saw and make your peace with God before I begin, my boy. As long as the silver stays in the wound, the allergy keeps going: white cells rush in and attack the inflamed flesh, the body fights itself. Tissue dies and dies, and you have to cut it away before the necrosis spreads. It used to be a punishment for prisoners of war, to cut open their flesh and stitch a silver ball inside, then wait for moonrise. The guards would lock themselves away in their compound, or chain themselves up if they were on the move, and lock up prisoners together. Sometimes they’d take bets on what would be left in the morning. That got condemned as an atrocity by the middle of the twentieth century, but by then some research-minded army doctors had learned something useful from experimenting with the survivors. There are several good serums now. Inject some and the necrosis can be stopped, as long as you’ve removed the source.

Seligmann’s friend, the man I shot, will have had to rely on traditional methods. There have been no hospital reports of a man with silver necrosis in the arm: he didn’t go in for treatment. But pliers or scalpel or woodwork saw, they must have got the bullet out, because no bodies have been found with a rotted-off arm, no severed limbs found floating in the river.

I shot him near the joint. Not easy to fix. He’d need someone who could steal hospital equipment. An orderly, a nurse, a doctor, even a janitor from the city hospital, St. Veronica’s. That’s the place to look.

A little hacking gets me in, and it’s there I find something unusual. There’s no record of instruments going missing, but used scalpels and forceps get incinerated when they’re discarded; someone would only need to grab a used sharps bag. Missing drugs, though, are another matter. The stores are watched, and thanks to this we’ve struck gold. The day after that night, the Day One that found Seligmann in our custody and this friend of his hobbled and suffering the torments of silver because of what I did to him, a little jar of pharmaceuticals went missing.

Lydia was at the hospital, and she knows medicine better than anyone else in DORLA that I know, so I approach her and show her the notes.

“It was a jar of Oromorph,” I say. “You familiar with that?”

She shrugs a little as she thinks about how to answer, and I realize it’s not the right question. Lydia studies, studies, reads every trade magazine, spends her wages on new textbooks. No one will ever call her “Doctor,” probably no one will ever come to her with more than a bite wound or a silver bullet lodged in their flesh or a tranquilizer overdose, yet still, for some reason, she carries on, trying to feel like a doctor in herself.

“I mean, is it a good choice? What kind of person would choose it?”

Lydia shrugs, folds her hands. “It was taken off a patient’s bedside table in the orthopedics ward. The patient was sleeping; he asked where his pills were when he woke up. Someone damn alert, I think.”

A bedside. “Probably not someone with access to the store cupboards, then? I mean, to take such a risk?”

Lydia shrugs again, and as she does, I can think of answers to my own question, none of which are cheering. It sounds like a risky way, but, like taking a discarded sharps box off a cart, it’s an opportunity seized. Someone with regular access to the store cupboard would be the first suspect if something went missing from it. And this was Day One. A and E would have been full of people, all the injured people we brought in from the shelters, patched up as well as we could manage and healed up a little in the ricking process, but still, Day One is worse than a Saturday night. Everyone in the hospital would be tired themselves from the night’s luning, stressed, a little overwhelmed at the new influx. People would get careless. A good day to steal something.

“It’s a good place to do it,” Lydia says. “They label the pills with the patients’ names rather than with what they do. If you were looking for a painkiller in any old ward, you’d likely find you’d picked up an antibiotic or a diuretic.” She grins, and both of us laugh a little at the idea. It’s not funny, not really, a man with a rotted limb fed a diuretic, conscious all the way through as they pulled a bullet out of him, but we need to laugh about something. “Orthopedics, I mean,” she says when we stop. “You’re looking for a painkiller, you have to choose from a range of unlabeled bottles—unless you want to take the time to look at a patient’s chart, which is gonna slow you down—then orthopedics is the place to go. You pick up a bottle in there, it’s a good chance it’ll be a painkiller of some kind.”

She really does know a lot. She really would have made a good doctor.

“So we want someone who knows about medication?”

Lydia shrugs a third time. It’s a frustrating thing to see, a smart person helpless in the face of too many variables. “Someone with some knowledge of the hospital, anyway.”

“Tell me about Oromorph,” I say.

“Well…” She touches her forehead, pats her hair. The braids are tight and flawless; they aren’t coming down. “They are pills. Oromorph’s an opiate, it’s a pretty common painkiller.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s analgesic, dulls pain. Quite powerful. It’s a narcotic.”

“Wouldn’t a local anesthetic make more sense, if you were going to take a bullet out of someone?”

“Harder to administer, though. You need to know where to inject.”

And harder to steal, too, on the spur of the moment. You’d need a syringe, for one thing, and even a half-sane man wouldn’t use someone else’s syringe, surely—

“So we’re looking for someone who wouldn’t know how to administer a local?”

“Maybe.”

Or someone who just couldn’t get hold of any. The more I think about this, the more the anesthetic seems like a chance snatched up, less essential to the plan. You can take a bullet out of a man without drugs, if you’ve got someone strong to hold him down.

I exhale, press my hands to my head. “So we want someone with some know-how who’s prepared to take a risk, who doesn’t plan in detail, who stole some Oromorph because it was better than nothing.”

“I suppose. Listen, I have to get going.” Lydia stands, walks out of the lounge where we’ve been sitting. On the way, she throws in the trash the paper cup that held the coffee I bought her. I have the feeling that’s about all she can tell me, but it’s better than nothing.

My mind is running well: the gears mesh smoothly and I’m having good ideas. I’m still making notes on the pad when the telephone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is a call for Miss Lola Galley regarding an inquiry she made.”

“I’m Lola Galley.” It’s a young, female voice, sing-song, automatic.

“Hello, Miss Galley. You made an inquiry last month regarding a telephone call that was made to an unknown number.”

I sit up. This is the call Ellaway made from the shelter, that first day. He made a call from his cell phone, to someone, we don’t know who. A tall, dark-haired man came and picked him up. This could be a piece in the sequence, what happened that morning. “Yes. Yes, that’s right. You’ve found out where he called?”

“That’s right, Miss Galley, do you have a pen?”

I take down the number. I take down the address. I thank the little switchboard girl, replace the receiver without looking at it, and sit, pen in hand, reading what I’ve written. For a moment, there’s just a nagging sensation, a sense of something tugging inside my head. Then I look it up, and it’s there for me to see.

It’s an address I recognize. Just east of Five Wounds park, it’s a house, a red brick house with a fenced-in garden. I’ve been there before. With Nate waiting, I climbed onto the roof of our van and stared over the fence, and saw half a dozen people luning in the open air.

“What was that about?” Nate said, and I didn’t know what to tell him. He died with the question unanswered.

Ellaway called the house where people were running loose in the open air. They howled at the sky, and I saw them. I watched them in the cold, bright moonlight.