Strong Motion (63 page)

“Well, yes, I see your father has given you a clear picture of the extremely private dilemma I was facing. And it’s exactly as you say: she advised me to sell my stock.”

Louis hobbled to the desk and sat down. “She
gave
you the advice? Or did she sell it?”

“You may ask her that yourself, Louis. I’m not going to tell you.”

“She was in surgery for four hours last night. She’s in, like, horrible shape. And you want me to ask her?”

“I don’t see what conceivable difference it could make to you. All I’m going to say is that I
do not recall
the precise arrangement we had.”

“Meaning she sold it to you.”

No reply.

“Did she tell you she knew me?”

“She said that you and she were not involved.”

“Well, we aren’t, strictly speaking.”

“She also said that you and she had not
been
involved.”

“Well, she lied.”

“Well, and I suppose I knew that. I suppose I knew it all along.”

Louis hung up and clutched his forehead, which had begun to ache. The bathroom was still steamy and herbally scented from Eileen and Peter’s showers. Alongside Peter’s French skin-care products (“poor lum”) and the wide variety of makeup pencils and brushes and pancakes that Louis had been a little surprised to discover Eileen used, he saw the bloodstained washcloth, the empty box of sterile bandages, the wastebasket full of Kleenexes stained with blood and Betadine, the evidence of the quarter hour he’d spent here before he went to bed. He saw the sun in the window. He pictured Somerville Hospital in the daylight, the daylight of a holiday—Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July—that had fallen on a weekday, when the plug is pulled on ordinary activities, and the empty white hours stretch out towards the evening’s obligatory turkey, the night’s fireworks, or, in this case, the afternoon’s visit to the hospital. They’d told him there was a chance he’d be able to see Renée briefly. He raised the toilet seat, which like every other horizontal surface in the bathroom was dusted with the baby powder Eileen had been using on summer mornings for at least twelve years, and he was just beginning to pee when the telephone rang again. He returned to his room.

Hi, this is Lauren Bowles
—

He reached for the receiver, but his fingers curled into a fist. He felt how an object, a chair, must feel, the fibers of its wooden members tensed, its arms and legs paralyzed by the geometry of equal and opposing forces. Watching his fingers nonetheless uncurl and raise the receiver was like watching a chair move in an earthquake.

“Hello?” Lauren said. “Hello? . . . Hello? Is someone there?”

“It’s me, Lauren.”

“Oh God, Louis, you sound so far away. Are you alone? Can I talk to you?”

Now his lips were the stationary object.

“Are you there?” Lauren said. “I was going to wait to call you like you said to, but I was watching Good Morning America and I saw her. It’s so bad, Louis, it’s really really bad, because I’d just been thinking how I wished she didn’t exist. But they said she’s alive. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You know they called her a hero? Like, Louis’s girlfriend is such an incredibly good person they put her picture on TV and say she’s a hero. Like she’s one of the best people in the country or something. And I’m such a good person I’m sitting there wishing she was dead, right up to when I actually saw her.”

“Yeah, Lauren,” he said harshly. “You shouldn’t listen to what they say. She had that abortion to be spiteful. She uses men for sex. She has a smaller heart than you do.”

Lauren was hurt. “I don’t believe you,” she said. It was the first time he’d ever tried to hurt her. He wanted her to hate him and forget him. But it wasn’t pleasant to be hated, at least not by Lauren, whose goodwill towards him had always been a mystery that made the world seem like a hopeful place. He’d be very sorry to live without that goodwill. He asked her where she was.

“I’m at home. I mean with Emmett. I haven’t let him kiss me, though.”

“He must be delighted to have you back.”

“Right, we’re having some real fun talks.”

He stood on his aching, throbbing feet. As the silence on the line lengthened, it took on the particular curdled flavor of daytime long-distance rates.

“This is the end, isn’t it, Louis.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Were you back together with her?”

“No.”

“But you wanted to be?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Lauren sadly. “I’m so jealous of her, you can’t believe it. You’d think I was a monster if you knew how jealous. But I swear to God, Louis, I hope she gets better. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

She considered this. “OK,” she said. “I’ll see you. I mean—I won’t see you. I guess . . . I guess I’m going to let Emmett kiss me now.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you jealous of him?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

“Louis.” There was urgency in the word. “Just say yes. Say yes and I’ll hang up, and it will be the end. Please say yes.”

“I’m not jealous of him, Lauren.”

“Why not? Tell me why not.” She sounded like a crossed child. “Aren’t I pretty? Wouldn’t I do anything in the world for you? Don’t I love you?” Between the moment when a glass is irretrievably knocked from a shelf and the moment when it hits the floor, there is a charged and very finite silence. “I hope she dies!” Lauren said. “I hope she fucking dies right this minute!”

Louis knew that if he’d been in the same room with her, he would have gone away with her and lived with her; he knew it the way he knew his own name. But he was speaking on the telephone, with its little plastic guillotine for chopping heads off conversations. Some providence had steered him back to Boston from Chicago, had steered him in the first place to Chicago, where his father had said:
Let me tell you the hard half of the truth about women: They don’t get any prettier when they get older; they don’t get any saner when they get older; and they get older very quickly
.

“Look what you made me say,” Lauren said.

“Hang up.”

“All right. I will.”

“I’m hanging up,” he said.

As he removed the receiver from his ear, he heard her say, “
I wanted you!
”

He sat on the bed and looked at the motionless chairs and the motionless walls until the light in the window became an afternoon light and he decided it was late enough to try to see Renée. He would rather have seen Lauren. He dressed, loosening the laces of his shoes until he could fit his feet in them. He stamped one foot and then the other to settle them into their pain. He made himself chew and swallow two bananas.

At Somerville Hospital a new woman manned the reception desk. She had a long neck and a tiny head. “We have no Seitchek listed,” she said.

“What do you mean no Seitchek listed?”

“This is that poor girl from Harvard? Let me see what I can find here.” She flipped again through her jumbo Rolodex. “No, I’m afraid she’s not.”

“Are you telling me she’s dead?”

“Well . . .” The woman requested data on her telephone. She reported to Louis: “She’s at Brigham & Women’s. They just transferred her.”

Brigham & Women’s was back in Eileen’s neck of the woods, over behind Fenway Park in a whole small city of the sick and recovering, where brick and concrete hospital buildings had budded like yeast, putting out wings upon wings at odd angles, nourished by what was obviously an ever-growing stock of unwell people. There was no free parking. Louis went up an elevator, down an endless arterial corridor, through a lobby, down an elevator. He told a nurse at the octagonal ICU desk that he wanted to see Renée Seitchek. The nurse said Renée was in surgery. “Are you a family member, Louis?”

“I’m her boyfriend.”

The nurse dropped her eyes to a stack of folders with red tabs and shuffled them nervously. “I’m afraid it’s immediate family only.”

“What if I said I’m her husband?”

“But you’re not her husband, Louis. Mrs. Seitchek’s in the staff lounge around the corner if you’d like to talk to her.”

The staff lounge was empty except for a petite woman in pleated navy-blue slacks and a pink blouse who was pouring coffee into a styrofoam cup. Her hair was short, permed, and frosted. She wore heavy gold jewelry of simple design on her tanned hands and wrists. A soap was playing on the television next to her.

“Mrs. Seitchek?”

When the woman turned, he saw Renée’s very own expression of mild surprise. He was looking at a Renée who had aged twenty-five years; who had let the sun broil her skin to the color of crust on white bread; who had plucked her eyebrows and put on silvery pink lipstick; who had not slept last night; and who had been born very pretty. His first impulse was to fall in love with her.

“Louis Holland,” he said.

Mrs. Seitchek looked at him uncertainly. “Yes?”

“Renée’s boyfriend.”

“Oh,” she said. He watched her take in his baldness, his white shirt, his black pants. A trace of one of Renée’s own grim smiles bent her lips. “I see.” She turned back to the coffee cart and sweetened her coffee from a pink packet. “Are you from Harvard, Louis?”

“No. Chicago originally. But I wanted to know how she is, and when I can see her.”

“She’s in surgery again, her leg now. A bullet hit the bone.” Mrs. Seitchek’s shoulders drooped, and she rested her hands on the coffee cart. “She’ll be on a ventilator for a while, and very heavily sedated. You can get in touch with me in a week or ten days, when she’s on the floor and we have some idea who she’d like to have visit her. Maybe she’ll want to see you then.”

“Can’t I see her sooner?”

“It’s only immediate family, Louis. I’m sorry.”

“I’m her boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d sort of like to see her as soon as possible.”

Mrs. Seitchek shook her head, her back still turned. “Louis, I don’t know if you know anything about our relationship with Renée. I certainly don’t know a thing about you, I didn’t even know your name. So let me explain that Renée does not confide in me. We love her very much, but for whatever reasons, she’s chosen to be distant. I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me?” She turned to him. “How many boyfriends Renée has?”

“Just me,” Louis said. “Except—”

“Except.”

“Well, we had a fight.”

Again he saw a trace of Renée’s bitter smile. “And the young Chinese man. Howard. He’s not her boyfriend?”

“Not really.”

“Not really. I see. And the young man who was here just before you? Terry.”

“Definitely not.”

“Definitely not. All right. That’s not quite the impression he gave, but if you say so . . .”

Louis tried to think of someone who knew for sure that he and Renée had lived together, of some hard evidence of a relationship. He thought of saying:
Your son Michael sells real estate and your son Danny is an intern in radiology
. But he could already hear the obvious reply:
If you’re her lover, where were you yesterday afternoon?

Mrs. Seitchek dropped a coffee stirrer in a wastebasket. “You see the problem, don’t you? My daughter was the victim of a crime, and we have no idea who’s responsible. We didn’t have the tiniest inkling of her private life until we came here. And I have to say, things aren’t much clearer now. So under the circumstances I think it’s best if we just wait.”

“But next time you talk to her . . . maybe you could at least tell her that Louis is—you know. Around?”

“We’ll see.”

“Why is that a problem?”

“I said we’ll see. I don’t want to upset her if—”

“I am her boyfriend, Mrs. Seitchek. I’m going to die of grief if she dies. I’m—”

“So am I, Louis. So is her father, so are her brothers. We all love her, and we all want her to live.”

“Well, so tell her.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Excuse my stupidity, but—”

“Please go now.” Mrs. Seitchek’s eyes had filled. “Please go.”

Louis wanted to put his arms around her. He wanted to kiss her and take her clothes off, to have her be Renée, to bury his face in her. Suddenly close to tears himself, he ran from the room.

Outside, as he passed the octagonal desk, he saw a man he thought he recognized from the family picture Renée had shown him once. The man had bright red skin and thin white hair, combed straight back, and he wore a pair of very scary glasses—thick trifocals with outsized lenses and heavy-duty plastic frames. He was reading the fine print on a bottle of liquid medicine.

“Excuse me, are you Dr. Seitchek?”

The man’s eyes flicked up to the middle band of the trifocals and looked at Louis piercingly. “Yes.”

“I’m a friend of your daughter. I wonder if you could give her a message sometime in the next—days. I wonder if you could tell her Louis loves her.”

Dr. Seitchek returned his eyes to the bottle. He was a former dean of Northwestern’s medical school, and although Renée was as reticent about him as about everyone else in her family, Louis had gotten the idea that he was something of a major figure in American cardiology. His voice was low, limited, professional. “You’ve spoken to my wife?”

“Yes.”

“She explained our uncertainties?”

“Sort of.”

The magnified eyes stabbed Louis with another look. “Renée terminated a pregnancy yesterday. Were you aware of that?”

“Yeah. In fact I was the, uh, other party.”

“Your name is Louis.”

“Louis Holland. Yes.”

“I’ll give her the message.”

“I really appreciate it.” He touched Dr. Seitchek’s shoulder, but his hand might have been a fly alighting there for all the response it got. “Can I ask something else? —Who she thinks might have done it? Did they ask her?”

Dr. Seitchek again raised his eyes from the bottle of medicine. “I don’t think she has any idea.”

“That’s what she said? That she has no idea?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“She could talk?”

“She was conscious and alert this morning. But she doesn’t appear to have any memory of yesterday afternoon. I don’t think she saw anything anyway.”

“But what did she say?”