Edge (6 page)

“In broad daylight,” said Rhonda.

Again, Rhonda's style was all wrong, her eyes full of feeling. “Right after late lunch at his favorite restaurant,” said my mom.

John's Grill, I thought. Dad liked the mashed potatoes there; he was one of those guys who never gain much weight. Right about the time Chief had been showing the man in the bikini bathing suit how to focus his Leica so he could take our picture delivering his brand-new spa.

“A car-jacking,” said Rhonda, plainly trying to fit words we had all heard on the news into what was happening.

“Robbery,” said my mom, with a flip of her hand—what difference did it make. “There's a police detective in there now, along with—” She didn't want to say the name of Dad's new wife just now. She gave a little shrug. “You know everything I do.”

“Did they catch whoever did it?” asked Rhonda, her voice breathy, not meaning any harm, but doing it anyway, forcing my mom to say things she wasn't ready to. Maybe Rhonda was doing it deliberately, now, forcing the answers like a newspaper reporter. She had a copy of every one of my dad's books.

“No,” said my mom. “They didn't catch who did it. His car went through the intersection and ran into something.”

“It's terrible, Florence,” said Rhonda. My mother wasn't crazy about being named after a city in Italy. She preferred the pet names my dad used to call her. My mother acts like a person cheated by life, carrying on with humor but not expecting much. She thanked Rhonda in a tone that surprised me, gentle, dignified.

“But he's going to be all right,” I said.

Mom took my hand. Her fingers were very cold. My parents had never suffered the heavy-artillery sort of divorce you hear about all the time. She was always in a hurry to get to a bank before it closed, and Dad was always off to the Yucatan or Honolulu. When he fell in love with a younger woman, Mom reacted by cutting costs at the office she managed, installing new computers, firing half the staff, and winning a seat on the Governor's Economic Task Force. I think she always imagined Dad would remarry for a third time, to her, his first wife, my mom. Maybe I even hoped it was possible in some wistful cul-de-sac of my mind. Dad had always been upbeat with Mom and me, but that was how he dealt with everything, quick to get his way.

She walked me down to look out a window, the glass cross-hatched with wire mesh so no one could break in, or out.

“How did your test go today?” she asked.

I didn't respond. She wouldn't let go of my hand.

“Zachary,” she said. “The police detective is in the operating room in case your father says something.” She liked saying
police detective
, two words, taking solace in the way it sounded, like there were authorities in charge.

N
INE

“Please do call me,” said Rhonda.

She was looking at my mother, but she was talking to me, not a trace of Texas in her voice.

“If there's any news,” my mother said, and if you didn't know her, you would think she had not a single negative feeling in the world toward Rhonda Newport, watching as she clip-clopped toward the elevator.

Half an hour later my mom got tired of pacing, running her fingers through her tumble of red hair, and got on the phone. It was a pay phone down the hall, and I could not hear what she was saying but I could hear her voice, a lot of talk over a period of some twenty minutes. She flicked her address book like a fan, looking up at the ceiling, white tiles with tiny holes.

She marched back into the waiting room to report, “We can move him if we're not happy,” she said. “Stanford, anyplace, if we aren't satisfied with the medical treatment here. There's someplace he's going to track down for me, where they grow nerves in a petri dish, somewhere in L.A.”

This was vintage Mom, one of the things my dad couldn't stand—when in doubt do something, something smart, something stupid, it didn't matter.

She didn't look at me. “I called Billy Brookhurst. I had to track him down, he was all over the place.” Billy Brookhurst was a white-haired lawyer, wrinkled and blind in one eye, a handicap that made him seem more shrewd than any of us. He looked at reality through an unusual pair of glasses, one lens blank white.

“It's up to Dad and Sofia,” I said. “Isn't it?”

An hour later my mother came back to report, “Sofia is in intensive care with him. She's tripping over tubes.” She generally called Sofia something disparaging, even crude.

I expected some change in the light, in the color of the walls, at this news, but the floor and the ceiling stayed as they were, bright, fluorescent light off every surface.

“I want to see him,” I said.

My mother had new, fine lines round her eyes. The waiting room was empty except for the two of us, the old magazines, the potted serpent plant—an imitation living room. She said, “One visitor at a time,” giving the words a spin, invisible quotation marks.

“Where is Intensive Care?” I asked, unable to control my voice.

She shook her head.

I couldn't talk.

“Zachary,” said my mother, putting her lips close to my ear and speaking in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “Zachary,” she began again. She liked my name, loved saying it.

She held my head to her shoulder, a fine, feminine tweed, heather brown, something wintry she had thrown on against the cool of San Francisco summer. “I hate hospitals, too,” she said.

“The surgery was successful,” said the doctor. “The initial trauma is repaired as far as possible for now, and I think we can all breathe a temporary sigh of relief at this point.”

“You extracted the bullet,” said my mother.

“This was a through-and-through wound,” said the surgeon, without stopping to choose the words, ready for the next question.

He looked like he could have been my dad's brother, a little younger than my father, but with the same high forehead, one of those people so intelligent they look handsome even when they are bone tired. My mother is not tall, and when she is insistent, she stands right in front of a person and looks up.

“Of course, I have to caution you,” he said, trying to buy time with a little extra conversation, avoiding questions about sutures and disinfectant.

I could tell what my mother was thinking: Why
of course?

The doctor said, “He is not, for example, breathing on his own.”

For example.

“When you have major damage like this we have to be willing to give everything a little time,” said the doctor. “He's not conscious yet,” he added.

“Where, exactly, was he shot?” I heard myself ask in a kind voice, gentle, being nice to this man. I felt that I had to be especially sweet-tempered toward this surgeon and avoid hurting his feelings in any way, as though I had some power over him.

“In the neck,” said Dr. Monrovia, shaking his head a little as he said it, hating having to report such a thing. He touched his forefinger to a place below his ear, just above his collar.

“The perpetrator,” said my mother, gathering her strength to say this, “put a gun up to him at an intersection. And—” She couldn't say
shot him
.

I had a bad taste in my mouth, like after I've run to catch a bus and missed it, and kept running, all the way to the next stop—an attempt that almost never works. As slow as they look, buses are faster than people.

“The bullet shattered one of the cervical vertebrae—one of the bones of the neck,” he said.

We waited, but it wasn't like any of the pauses in normal life, while a video starts or a movie begins, or while a lecturer finds the right place in the notes.

He put his hand to the back of his head, rubbing his skull, perhaps without being aware of what he was doing. “The transverse process, the spinous process—parts of the vertebra—are badly fragmented.”

The scientific-sounding words would have been a comfort to my dad, but to me at that moment they sounded shocking, obscene. At the same time, they meant that he was in the hands of science, like hearing that a traveler is delayed in a foreign city, a famous, faraway place.

We could both tell that Dr. Monrovia was working up to something without being sure how to go on. I had the feeling that with most families he would simply talk, stop talking, and leave.

“The spinal cord is involved,” he said.

A nurse padded across the tile floor, wearing white shoes with white soles, a tanned woman as tall as Dr. Monrovia. He turned his head and listened to her whisper, and gave a nod.

“You can go in and see him now,” he said. “Both of you.”

This sounded like good news, but the way he said it made me pause. Something had changed. My father's condition was not the same as it had been. We could all go see him because it didn't matter if there was one visitor or three.

T
EN

Sofia met me at the door. Her eyes looked smaller than usual, her face without makeup, so she looked even younger than she was, reduced to a little, bare core of herself.

I had always seen her through my mother's eyes, a minor-league temptress and not very bright, one of my father's lab assistants when he was doing work on the internal structures of the killer bee. “Bee gonads,” my mother had exclaimed. “This woman is an expert on bee dicks.”

“I was thinking about calling the housekeeper,” Sofia was saying, keeping her voice quiet. “I wondered if I should tell her to bring Daniel.” She meant more than she was saying. Her mascara-free eyes reminded me of fragile living creatures, parameciums, transparent beings light would kill.

I turned around to consult with my mother, but she was standing off to one side, giving Sofia a civil smile, but not wanting to break into our conversation. Sofia folded her arms and allowed herself a moment of gazing at my mother, and I wondered what Sofia saw in the first Mrs. Madison, what hard feelings Sofia experienced herself. We had all avoided being in the same room together.

“I'm so glad you're here,” said Sofia to my mother, to both of us.

This was not necessarily the right thing to say. It implied that we were here to assist Sofia in her difficult hour. My mother ran her fingers through her thick red hair, considering. I braced myself inwardly. It was impossible to tell by the half smile on my mother's face what she about to say to the young woman she called
Ms. Tits
.

“I'm glad we can help,” said my mother, and I was warm inside, proud of her, as though she had just performed a very difficult anthem, high notes almost no one could hit. But the tension in my mother's face made her look like someone just back from the dentist, jaw numb.

It was impossible that we should be standing there uttering words like normal people on just another night. I had the feeling that both women were taking strength from me.

I was stalling, not wanting to look closely at what lay beyond us in the room. Besides, for perhaps the first time I saw my father's second wife in my own way, without my mother's own shadows-and-fog lighting. I had never seen Sofia so beautiful. She couldn't talk just now, leaning into me. I looked past her toward the bed, unable to see very well, not wanting to wait any longer, impatient to be with my father.

“What have you told Daniel?” my mother asked.

“I told him Daddy was hurt,” said Sofia, standing a little more erect, challenging us to say that she had said the wrong thing.

There was nothing to see, just bright red digits, numbers on various pieces of equipment. The room was dark. But then, as I entered, it was not so dark after all.

I thought it was a mistake. I knew otherwise, but a part of my brain flashed the signal:
Wrong
. Wrong room. Wrong man.

In the bed lay a drowned, shriveled creature. His body was the homing place of colored and transparent tubes, a machine wheezing, alarm signals going off without any particular urgency, a steady
mweep mweep
nurses hurried in to silence.

A woman in a San Francisco Police Department uniform stepped from the shadows. “I want to have a long talk with you,” my mother said, her voice hoarse with feeling. I could hear the challenge in her voice, but she was delaying that moment when she stood beside my father.

“You should wait to speak with Detective Unruh,” said the cop.

Straps held my father. His neck was captured by large white absorbent pads, his head held firm. His face was puffed into a Halloween joke by a white air tube. It looked like my father was committing some embarrassing sex act, fellatio with a robot, something he was doing for laughs:
How's this for grotesque, Zachary
. A tube was stuck into his nose, white tape crisscrossing his face. His hair stuck out all over a flat, white pillow.

He was naked under a thin brown blanket, exposed down to his navel, and beyond, skinnier than I had expected. The skin of his chest and much of his face was slathered with a brown-yellow stain, and it would have been easy to believe that this was not my father at all, but some derelict they had stuck full of shunts and tubes and hooked to a machine.

“Dad?” I said, like someone just coming home, announcing himself to an empty house. I didn't think it was right for us all to crowd in, so much like a deathbed scene it might frighten him.

A machine somewhere picked up its pace, my father breathing faster or his heart pumping harder. A nurse nudged me aside, adjusting a tube. “He hears you,” said my mother.

I turned to her and gestured: you talk. Maybe I felt my silence would be as reassuring as anything I could say, forestalling any panic he might feel.

Mom shook her head, a little sadly. Then, like someone about to step to the edge of a high dive, stepping to the edge, stepping off, she said, “I'm here, too, Teddy. We're all here.” I wasn't sure this would reassure him, three key people in his life standing around with so much to say they could barely talk.