Falling in Place (40 page)

She paid her bill at the cash register at the front of the delicatessen. There was an index card Scotch-taped to the side of the register, with a smiling face on it that said:
SMILE, I HAVEN’T HAD A VACATION IN FOUR YEARS
.
The
FOUR
had been crossed out and 4½ was written above it
.

She went back and just what she thought would happen happened: She walked in and Spangle was there. She told him what she thought about that and, exhausted, went into the bedroom
.

It could have been anything in the bed—a lump, in the dark. It was what she thought it was, though. It was John. He moved in the bed. He opened his eyes and looked at her as she was undressing
.

“I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I have the feeling that I’d sound illogical and you could give a perfectly logical answer,” she said
.

“I’m hiding,” he said
.

“You’re hiding,” she said. “It must be wonderful.”

“He wants you,” John said. “He told me so tonight. He’s after you, Nina.”

“You make him sound like a bloodhound,” she said. “And me some piece of meat.”

She got into bed. “You’ve got a great deal of nerve, both of you.”

“You’re mad at me?”

“I’m going to sleep,” she said
.

“You can’t go to sleep mad.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. He squeezed her cut finger. The stab of pain made her eyes well up with tears. She was going to go to hell for this. He was going to go to hell. They would all meet in hell. It would be small, and swamped with men she knew. All their paths would keep crossing. Spangle was snoring in the other room. She moved against John, to get warm
.

Twenty-One

“
ITHINK
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to most everybody but to you. How do you feel?”

“Like hell,” Mary said.

He nodded. It was going to form a scar—puffy and ugly, the doctor had told him the day before—but there could be a second operation, later, to graft skin over the scar. The doctor thought that a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn’t have such a reminder of what had happened. He told Mary that when the plastic surgery was done, she could wear a two-piece bathing suit and no one would know. They would take skin from another part of her body—the inside of her thigh—and graft it. Mary nodded. She closed her eyes often, even when the doctors were there talking, and imagined other diseases, other things gone wrong, that might have put her in the hospital. It could have been mono. Appendicitis. Something simple. Two psychiatrists came to visit her every day, to tell her that this was not simple. It
had
been simple, though. She remembered saying goodbye to Angela. She thought Angela was going to trail her home, insisting that she go to another party at Lloyd Bergman’s, but Angela had given up on her. “If you don’t want to, you don’t want to,” Angela had said. Then she had
walked through the field, being careful to avoid the poison ivy. Once Angela gave up, the idea of the party seemed more interesting. Walking through the field, she thought about changing her mind. She was still wondering whether she should go to the party or not—the last one hadn’t been as bad as she thought—when she knew that something was wrong. It was just a peculiar feeling she had, that something was going to happen. She looked back, suspecting that Angela was following. She saw a bug alight on her jeans and flicked it off. Before she had turned fully around again, and before she thought to look up in the tree, she felt a terrible explosion in her side, and that was all she remembered. One psychiatrist wanted to know what she had thought when she heard the sound, and she told him there was no sound—just pain that knocked her over, and then she didn’t remember anything. The psychiatrist told her that there was no such thing as a totally silent firing of a gun, even with a silencer. He asked her to try to remember the sound. She smiled at him. She couldn’t. After only three meetings with him, she had figured out that anything she couldn’t remember or didn’t want to talk about could be taken care of with a smile. When she smiled, he smiled. It also worked with the woman. Then, if she didn’t speak, after a while they went on and talked about something else.

She was amazed that John Joel had shot her, of course, but she was also amazed that now she hated him less. In fact, she didn’t hate him at all. She was embarrassed to have been shot. She told the psychiatrist that, and he asked whether she was saying that she somehow deserved to be shot, whether she felt it was something she had asked for. “But this was a real gun. It was shot with the intent to kill you.”

She realized that it was real. That didn’t matter. It mattered that she hurt, but she couldn’t believe that she might have died. Now her father was in the room, and he was smiling at her. She did what the psychiatrist did when she smiled: smiled back and didn’t say anything. Finally he was the one who spoke. He whispered, “Do you hate me?”

She shook her head no.

“That was a selfish question, I guess. Coming to stand by your bed and be absolved of guilt.”

“What did
you
do?” she said.

“I went to live in Rye,” he said. “Among other things that I’ve done.”

“Rye seems like a pretty nice place to me,” she said. It was a joke. Only in this context did it seem reasonable. It wasn’t reasonable. John Joel knew that, and she thought that it was part of the reason why he had shot her. Although their mother liked John Joel better than she liked her. Rye. If he wanted to live in Rye, let him live in Rye. She did not think it reflected on her. But she thought it explained why her brother had done it, in part. The psychiatrists wanted her to think about all the reasons why her brother had shot her, and then they wanted to hear what she thought about those reasons: why she did or didn’t think she deserved to be shot. One of them gave her a legal pad. She made criss-crosses on the page, doodled flowers and moths and birds, wrote her name and inked over it and over it until the letters were tall and wide. She would just tell the psychiatrist again why he had done it. That it was because they didn’t like each other. That she taunted him. That her brother wasn’t happy. That he probably wasn’t thinking about what he was doing, for some reason. No—she didn’t think John Joel was sick. She thought that he had shot her maybe without even deciding to do it, and that now it was over. Things were going to change. The psychiatrist asked her how.

She tested her father: “Are things going to be different?”

“You’re going to get well,” he said. He looked huge, standing by the window. Everything in the room was low: the tray that came over the bed so she could eat, the little night table. He was playing with the cord to the Venetian blinds.

“Be different,” he sighed. “Yes. Things certainly seem to have changed, don’t they?” His little joke. She had made a little joke that it would be better to be in Rye with her grandmother than to be in Connecticut with her family, where she had been shot; he had made a little joke that being shot was a change.

Mary had been shot, and John was standing in her hospital room, playing with the cord to the blinds. The private nurse usually went out when someone came into the room, but he noticed that when he was there alone, she stayed. She feigned interest in the book she
was reading, but from time to time she would look up. She disapproved of his fiddling with the cord.

“How would you like things to change?” he said.

“Am I going to flunk summer school? Or will she feel sorry enough for me to pass me? If she passes me, I never want to read another book as long as I live.”

“Summer school,” he said. “Summer school. Shell pass you, I’m sure. If you have to make up work, you can make up work.”

“But I don’t have to go back?”

“It’s almost over. You won’t be out of the hospital, I don’t think.”

“I mean ever.”

“To school?”

“Yeah. To school.”

He looked uncomfortable. He didn’t answer. He had made a knot in the cord that was too tight. It was going to be a problem to untie it. He ran his thumb over the knot. He thought about it-how to untangle the knot. Then he realized that it was there before he had started fooling with it. The other cord also had a knot. They were made that way. He hadn’t done it. He smiled, holding the cord.

“I’d be embarrassed to go back,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said. “It wasn’t anything
you
did.”

“Yes it was.”

“No it wasn’t. What do you mean?”

The private nurse turned the page. She was reading a copy of
Life. Life
was back. Gone, then back. He wondered how
Life
was doing.

She would have shrugged, but it hurt to move her body that way. She looked at her hands. Angela had painted her nails before it happened. They were an orangey-red, a color she didn’t much like. She had already picked the polish off two of the fingers. It felt like a match had just been lit in her side.

“What can I do for you?” he said. “What would you like? Is there something I can bring you here, or something I can promise you?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said.

“But you want things to change. You want things to change-how? By my being in Connecticut?”

“Be where you want to be,” she said.

“I don’t blame you for taking it out on me.”

“I’m not,” she said. “Be where you want to be.”

The night before, Louise had said to him: “Maybe you flatter yourself. Maybe all of this doesn’t have much to do with you.”

The private nurse coughed. “If they keep making movies like this, the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket,” she said. She looked at John. “Please excuse me while I get a drink of water,” she said. She looked at Mary. “Is there anything I can get for you?” she said. “A Coke?”

“No, thank you,” Mary said.

It was the same private nurse his mother had had when she had a tonsillectomy five years ago. Then, he remembered, the nurse had been reading Robert Frost. Now she was reading
Life
. She had also dyed her hair the color of a tangerine, and she wore necklaces that you could hang ornaments on. There were several chains around her neck, but whatever dangled from them was hidden under her white uniform. She wore white clogs and white stockings and a white uniform with a pleated top and a wide skirt. He had no idea whether Mary liked her. Her name was Mrs. Patterson. He had no idea what her first name was. His mother paid the nurse. His mother had arranged for the nurse, and she was picking up the bill. Louise and his mother had worked it out and he didn’t know anything about her being there until he walked into the hospital room and she was there. Louise said that she had more things on her mind than to tell him about the nurse—did he
mind
that there was a nurse? Did he suddenly want to be consulted about decisions made in the family?

Mrs. Patterson came back. “They had a perfectly fine movie, a good movie, and they had to do it: They had to show Sally Field’s breasts. Norma Rae couldn’t just be a winner—she had to be a sexy winner. It disgusts me that a good movie like that existed, and they had to stoop to a—pardon me—a boobies shot.” She coughed into her hand. “Pardon me,” she said again.

“I thought we might go to Nantucket,” he said. “Your grandmother said she’d look after John Joel for a while. He’s seeing a doctor. You knew that?”

She nodded yes. He had sniped her, from up in a tree, when she didn’t know he was there. It was the first time he had ever
gotten the best of her. It was hard to hate him for winning just once. She decided not to tell anyone that she didn’t hate him anymore, though. If she ever started to hate him again, she did not want to have to explain it.

“Mary?” John said.

“What?”

“What do you think about the idea of going to Nantucket?”

“If you want to,” she said.

“When you get out,” he said.

“If you want to,” she said. She began to chip the polish off another nail. It was sour on her tongue.

“Your mother and I would like to do something
you’d
like to do. Is there somewhere you’d like to go?”

“The beach is fine.”

“You don’t want to go,” he said.

“It’s okay. We can go.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’m just guessing about what you might like. What can I do, send for Peter Frampton?”

“He wouldn’t come.”

“I was just kidding,” he said. “But is there anything I could do? Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

“You know what she probably wants,” Mary said. “You could get her another German shepherd.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah. That’s what she’d like. Another dog. I’ll bet you.”

“I think she just liked that particular dog. If she wanted another one, I think she would have gotten it.”

“Maybe not,” Mary said. “Maybe she just never got around to it.”

“Would you like to have a dog around the house?”

“She would. She talks to Tiffy all the time about the dog.”

“She talks to Tiffy all the time about you, too, you know.”