Chances Are (38 page)

“I called Lilly,” he said. “She’ll get me out of here.”

“You called Lilly?”

“Left a message on her cell. If you don’t spring me, she will.”

“She springs you over my dead body.” The woman would iron his wrinkles and treble his fiber content before he knew what hit him.

A young, fresh-faced nurse popped into the cubicle. “How are we doing in here?”

“He wants out,” Claire said with a roll of her eyes.

“I know,” said the nurse. “Everyone in the hospital knows.”

“One X ray,” her father bellowed. “How the hell long does it take to take one X ray?”

“You’re not the only one in the hospital who needs an X ray, Mr. Meehan,” the nurse explained with more patience than Claire had at her command. “We haven’t forgotten about you. You’ll be taken as soon as possible.”

“I’m old,” Mike Meehan said. “I’ll probably be dead before you get to me.”

“Dad!” Claire wanted to throw herself in front of a runaway gurney.

“Let me see what I can do,” the nurse—clearly a woman with a heart of gold as well as the patience of a saint—offered. “Be right back.”

“You’re worse than Billy,” Claire said as soon as the nurse left the cube, “and he’s only eight.”

“A lot of fuss about nothing,” her father said. “Take a picture, wrap it up, send me home. They’re acting like it’s brain surgery. Go fuss over Barney Kurkowski.”

“Barney? What’s he doing here?”

“Smoke inhalation. He waved when they brought him through.”

“Don’t move a muscle,” she warned him. “I’ll be right back.” The only good thing about that broken ankle was it lessened the chances of a jailbreak.

“Bring my clothes with you,” he called after her, “or I’m leaving here in my skivvies.”

Kathleen and David were chatting in the waiting room while a Larry King rerun blared from the television suspended overhead. They both jumped up when they saw her.

“How is he?” David asked.

“A pain in the ass,” she said, and Kathleen laughed.

“Good,” her daughter said. “That means he’ll be okay.”

“The nurse went to see if she could move him up to the head of the line,” she said to Kathleen. “Would you go keep an eye on him for a second?”

Kathleen pretended she was gearing up for battle, then marched down the hallway.

“Great kid, that daughter of yours,” David said.

Claire crossed herself. “From your mouth to God’s ear.” She glanced around the waiting room. “Have you seen Billy anywhere?”

“You just missed him. He raced through with one of Donna Leitz’s kids.”

“Go home, David Fenelli,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night. At least let me spare you the sight of my father breaking out of the hospital in his underwear.”

“I don’t scare easy.”

Maybe he didn’t, but she did. She needed a larger buffer zone between family and friends. It was a lesson she had learned during her marriage.

“I’d love a rain check on that movie,” she said, hoping he would take the hint.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Dinner was terrific. Chadwick’s was even better than I remembered.”

“So was the company.”

“Thanks for inviting me.”

He gave her a look she couldn’t decipher, a combination of affection, curiosity, and maybe a touch of irritation. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “You have a way to get home?”

“Kathleen brought my car.”

“Okay then.” He hesitated, and this time she knew exactly what he was thinking and she took a step backward.

“Drive carefully,” she said.

That was the thing about nice guys. They played by the rules. “I’ll call you,” he said, and she had no doubt that he meant it.

She waved good-bye and dashed through the double doors like a maiden hell-bent on preserving her innocence, which, considering her stretch marks, was pretty funny.

Kathleen was flirting with a strapping young intern near the nurses’ desk. Cubicle 3 was empty except for her father’s copies of
Sports Illustrated
and the
Racing Form
. This seemed as good a time as any to hunt down her youngest before he turned the hospital on its ear. Her father was more than enough trouble for the nice men and women of Good Sam.

“WE CAN’T LET you in right now,” the attending physician told Corin as he tried to sneak into the ICU.

“I’m sure Kurkowski wouldn’t mind.”

“You’re probably right,” the attending physician said, “but the rest of the patients and their families might have something to say about that.”

“Fair enough.” There were some boundaries that deserved respect. “Did you see where the rest of the film crew went?”

“Surgical waiting. They’re following the Morantz kidney transplant.”

“The sisters?”

“Good story,” the doctor said. “Reminds you that the world is more than assholes and bastards.”

“Hey, Doc, watch it, will you?” He gestured toward the kid who had been following him up and down the corridors for almost an hour now.

“Yours?”

“No. I was hoping you knew where he belonged.”

“Take him down to patient services. They’ll track down the parents.”

The doctor’s pager went off, and he disappeared down the hallway.

“Where’s he going?” the kid asked, turning away from his inspection of the inner workings of an empty water cooler.

“His pager went off.”

“Did he have an emergency?”

“He didn’t hang around long enough to tell me.”

“Wow! Bet there was a big crash on the turnpike, and they brought all the dead bodies here.”

“There’s a happy thought.” Blood, gore, twisted metal. The stuff of dreams for a whole lot of little boys in a country where it wasn’t business as usual.

“Where you going now?”

“Up to surgical waiting.”

“They don’t let kids up there.”

“Then I guess we’ll shake hands and say good-bye.”

The kid had one of those faces that got under your skin. “But I don’t know where my mom is.”

Great. Now he was bringing out the heavy artillery. Next thing he’d whip out a puppy and a baseball mitt.

“Where did you last see her?”

“Home. She went out with some guy and left me there.”

Shit.

“So how’d you end up here?” It was obvious there was nothing physically wrong with the kid. No broken bones. No blood.

“My grandpa broke his ankle.”

“So why aren’t you with him?”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Why don’t I take you to the patient information center, and they’ll tell us where your grandpa is.”

“I’m hungry. Can we go to the cafeteria first?”

He had the suspicion that he was being worked over by a master manipulator.

“Are you sure there’s nobody waiting for you?”

“Nope.”

“I’m thinking maybe you’re a short doctor.”

“I’m not old enough.”

“I’ve seen those interns,” Corin said. “They’re not much older than you are.”

“I’m eight. You can’t be a doctor when you’re only eight.”

“I was making a joke, kid,” he said, holding open the door for the literal little rug rat. “I know you have to be at least thirteen.”

A tired nurse looked up from her knitting, as they walked in, and glared at his cameras.

“Take one picture of me,” she warned, “and you’ll be on life support.”

“I hear you, Florence Nightingale.”

She had a great bawdy laugh, and he was smiling as he slung his gear onto a tabletop and claimed a chair. The kid took a chair across from him.

He pulled out two singles from his back pocket and pushed them toward the kid. “Why don’t you get us something from the vending machine?”

“Get what?”

“Surprise me.”

“Cool!” He was off like a shot.

The kid was worse than the barnacles he’d watched the fishermen scraping from the hulls of their boats that morning. He reminded Corin of the way he had been at the same age, sparking with curiosity, a dry sponge ready to soak up everything the world had to offer, even if he took out a phalanx of adults in the process.

The kid darted from the sandwich machine in the corner to the candy and snack machines near the door then back again. He had one of those great all-American faces: a sprinkling of freckles, huge dark blue eyes, straight nose, what they used to call an impish grin. He’d love to take a few shots of him, but you didn’t photograph kids without express—and preferably written—permission from a parent or guardian. With a face like that on the cover, the companion book to the Paradise Point documentary would hit the
Times
list the first week on the stands.

His gaze drifted from the kid, to the refrigerated case, to the knitting nurse with the bawdy laugh, and he let his mind drift with it. They’d asked him to zero in on the firefighting and fishing parts of the community. He’d spent the day on the docks, photographing the different families who made their living from the sea, then headed over to the firehouse in time to join the crew for an early supper that was interrupted three times by emergency calls that were easily brought under control.

The fourth one, however, was the real thing. A grease fire at one of the local fast-food drive-throughs had quickly grown serious, and he watched through his viewfinder as a well-trained crew walked straight into hell and tamed it. He’d seen a lot of brave men and women do a lot of brave things in his lifetime, but this ranked high on the short list.

This was what Billy O’Malley had been doing when he died. He had heard a lot about Claire’s late husband, and there wasn’t much he had found to admire about the guy, but this was something nobody could take away from him. He didn’t much like finding anything good about O’Malley, but a man who would walk through fire to save somebody else—hell, it was more than he had ever done with his life.

The kid ran back to the table with two packs of Oreos and a bag of Goldfish.

“We need milk,” the kid said, “but it costs another dollar for a container.”

“You’re a hustler,” Corin said. “A midget hustler.”

“You can’t say midget,” the kid told him sternly. “My mom says they want to be called little people, and that’s what we should do.”

So liberal sensibilities were alive and well on the Jersey Shore. He wondered how political correctness managed to coexist with the more conservative mom and apple pie values he had encountered on the docks and in the firehouse.

“The milk,” the kid prodded him. “We’ve gotta have milk, or we can’t eat the cookies.”

He slid two more singles toward the blue-eyed bandit. “That’s it,” he warned. “The bank’s closed.”

Did all kids move that fast, or was this one turbocharged? Wait until he sucked up those cookies and the sugar rush hit. He would be doing wheelies on the ceiling. He watched as the kid slid a single into the machine, punched a button, then waited for the thunk as a carton of milk hit the tray. He slid in another single, punched a button, collected the second container of milk, then brought everything back to the table.

“We each get a pack of Oreos,” the kid said. “We can flip for the Goldfish.”

The kid really was a little hustler. He would go far in life.

“I have a better idea. We can split the Goldfish.”

They each tore into a pack of Oreos and jammed the cookies into their mouths like a pair of four-year-olds. Which wasn’t that big a stretch for the kid but wasn’t something Corin wanted captured on film for posterity.

He was about to rip into the bag of Goldfish and start doling them out when the kid looked past him.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “It’s my mom.”

“If she wants Oreos, she’s on her own,” he said. “You took my last single.”

He heard footsteps behind him and then a familiar voice. “Thanks for keeping your eye on him, Corin.”

She sounded tired, a little puzzled, definitely wary. The second the words hit the air, it all fell into place, and he wondered how the hell he had missed it. The kid was his father all over again. He’d spent enough time looking through photos of Billy O’Malley at the firehouse that afternoon, studying the face of the dead man who had been Claire’s husband. The dark hair. The straight nose. The dark blue eyes. That off-center grin. There it was, right in front of him, in miniature.

He must have been blind.

“Don’t you feed this kid?” he asked as he turned to look at her, opting for the easy joke to get them past this moment. He stood up, instinctively knowing he would need every advantage he could get.

Too bad she didn’t see the humor in the remark. “I’ll reimburse you. How much did he take you for?”

“I was making a joke.”

She plunged her hand deep into her purse and pulled out a fistful of singles and put them down in front of him. “That should cover it.”

“I don’t want your money.”

“Please,” she said. “You don’t have to pay for my son’s cookie habit.”

“Claire—”

Billy jumped up in a flurry of cookie crumbs. “I’m going to go see Grandpa.”

“He’s getting his ankle X-rayed right now.”

“I’ll wait for him,” Billy said.

“You don’t know where they took him.”

“Yes, I do. The nurse showed me.”

“Take Kathleen with you,” Claire said. “You’ll find her outside of Grandpa’s cubicle.”

Billy started to make his escape, but Claire stopped him with some kind of invisible maternal force field. “Thank Corin for the cookies.”

“Thanks,” the kid said, then tore out of the coffee shop at warp speed.

“He’s eight,” she said, patches of color staining her cheeks and throat. “They’re not known for their manners.”

“He’s better than the camera crew filming upstairs.”

She tried to smile, but the results weren’t very impressive. “I hope he wasn’t too big a pain in the ass.”