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The pain woke him at ten after three in the morning, and Jackson Healy did what he had done with every pain he'd ever had in his life, which was get up quietly and go sit somewhere by himself until it passed.
It didn't pass. He sat at the kitchen table in the dark in his undershirt and boxers with a glass of water he didn't drink, one hand flat on his stomach just above the navel, and waited it out the way you'd wait out a drunk at a bar who wanted to fight: patiently, not looking at it directly, sure it would get bored and wander off. It was a dull, sick, central ache, like he'd swallowed a fist. It came in slow swells. Between them there was a sort of queasy low tide where he could almost convince himself it was the chili from Tuesday.
He could hear March snoring down the hall. Not loud. March snored like he did everything else, with a lot of variety: a little whistle on the in-breath, a little flutter of the lips going out, now and then a sort of indignant snort, as if somebody in his dream had said something he disagreed with. Healy sat and listened to it for most of an hour. It was a good sound. After two years he still hadn't gotten tired of it. He'd lived alone for a long time before this house, a long time in rooms where the only sound at three in the morning was the refrigerator and the traffic on the street below, and there were still nights he woke up and lay there listening to March breathe and couldn't believe his luck.
At a quarter past four the ache eased off enough that he went back to bed. He got in on his side carefully, the way he'd gotten in carefully every night for two years, because March woke up at the slightest movement and then wanted to talk. March rolled over anyway and flung an arm across his chest and mumbled, "Where'd you go." into his shoulder.
"Water."
"Mm. You're cold."
"Go to sleep."
"You go to sleep." March muttered, and did.
Healy didn't. He lay there with March's arm heavy across him and the ache sitting under it like a stone in his belly and watched the window go from black to grey.
He didn't eat his eggs, and that was how March knew.
It was a Thursday in April, one of those soft grey mornings where the marine layer sits on the city until noon like a lid on a pot, and March had made eggs because it was his turn, and he'd made them the way Healy liked them, which was scrambled hard enough to shingle a roof. He'd made them with a certain amount of ceremony, since breakfast was not, as a rule, a thing Holland March participated in voluntarily. He put the plate down in front of Healy with a flourish and a little bow. Healy looked at it, said thanks, picked up his fork, and moved the eggs from one side of the plate to the other.
March watched him do it over the top of the sports page.
"You're not eating."
"I'm eating."
"You're relocating. That's not the same thing. That's urban planning. You're building a freeway through my eggs."
"Stomach's a little off." Healy put the fork down. "It's nothing. Something I ate."
"You ate what I ate."
"Then you'll be sick in an hour and we'll know."
"I have a cast-iron constitution, Jackson. I once ate a gas station burrito in Barstow that had been in the warmer since the Carter inauguration. I was fine."
"You were not fine. You told me about it. You said you saw God."
"I saw a god. A minor one. It was a spiritual experience, I don't regret it."
Holly came through the kitchen at a dead run with her hair wet and her book bag half zipped, grabbed a piece of toast off March's plate, and kissed March on top of the head. Then, after a small hesitation, she kissed Healy on the cheek too. She'd stopped hesitating about that about a year ago, and then started again sometime around her fifteenth birthday, when she had become briefly and comprehensively embarrassed by everything, including the fact of her own continued existence. Healy had noticed the hesitation come back. He'd said nothing about it. He'd noticed, too, that she always went through with it anyway.
"You look green." she informed him.
"Thanks, kid."
"Like actually green. Like a lima bean." She squinted at him, toast in her mouth. "Dad, he looks like a lima bean."
"I've been telling him."
"You haven't been telling him anything, you've been reading the box scores."
"I've been telling him with my eyes, Holly. It's a whole language. You wouldn't understand, you're a child."
"I'm fifteen."
"Exactly. A child. A baby. An infant with a learner's permit."
"I've been driving since I was eleven."
"Illegally." March said, pointing a butter knife at her, "which we don't discuss in front of Jackson, because he's a law-abiding citizen and it upsets him."
"I'm right here." said Healy.
Holly had the regional academic decathlon at Long Beach State that day, which she had been preparing for since January with a kind of cold, unblinking ferocity that frightened her teachers and, on at least one occasion, the librarian. There were index cards all over the house. There were index cards in the bathroom. Healy had found one tucked into the sun visor of his car that said TREATY OF WESTPHALIA 1648, END OF 30 YRS WAR, SOVEREIGNTY!!! with three exclamation points, and had driven around with it for a week because he didn't have the heart to take it down.
The team was going down on a school bus that morning. It was coming back on the school bus too, supposedly, except the bus company had called the night before and said the bus had a cracked axle and they'd have to find another one, and the school had sent a mimeographed note home that said parents might want to "make alternate arrangements for return transportation" in a tone that made it very clear nobody had any idea what was going to happen. The last event ended at three-thirty. Long Beach was forty minutes on a good day.
"I'll get you." March said. "Three-thirty. I'll be early. I'll be there so early they'll think I'm a janitor."
"You don't have to be that early."
"I'll bring a mop. For verisimilitude."
"Please don't talk to anybody on my team."
"I'm going to talk to everybody on your team. I'm going to ask them about their feelings. I'm going to ask them what they want to be when they grow up and then I'm going to tell them it's a mistake."
"Dad."
"Kidding. I'm kidding. I'll sit in the back like a ghost. You won't even know I'm there. I'll be a presence. A felt absence." He folded the paper and looked at Healy again. Healy had a hand pressed flat to the middle of his stomach, under the ribs, rubbing a slow circle with his palm, and he didn't seem to know he was doing it. "Jackson. Seriously."
"Seriously it's nothing. Go get dressed."
"You didn't sleep."
Healy looked up.
"You got up at three." March said. He'd gone quiet, which he did sometimes, when the joke ran out and there was something underneath it. "I felt you get up. You didn't come back till after four. And you were freezing."
"Couldn't sleep. That's all."
"Mm-hm."
"Holland."
"I'm just saying, I'm observant. I'm a trained investigator. People pay me to notice things. Some of them even pay me on time."
Healy drove Holly to school. He always drove her; it was their thing, the morning drive, the two of them and the radio and not much talking, and he wasn't going to miss it for a stomachache. He took the turns slower than usual. At the light on Fountain, Holly looked over at him, at the hand on his stomach and the sweat at his hairline, and said, "You should go to the doctor."
"I'm fine."
"You always say that. Dad always says that too. You're both terrible at it."
"Good luck today." Healy said. "Knock 'em dead. Westphalia."
"Sixteen forty-eight." said Holly automatically, and then, looking at him hard: "Go to the doctor, Healy."
He dropped her at the curb and watched her go up the steps, and she turned at the top and looked back at the car the way she always did, and he lifted his hand off the steering wheel the way he always did. Then he pulled away and drove straight to the office without going home, because he didn't want March to look at him again the way he'd looked at him over the eggs.
By eleven o'clock the pain had moved.
That was the thing about it, Healy would learn later. It moves. It starts in the middle, a vague bad ache around the navel, like you've swallowed something wrong, and then over a few hours it slides down and to the right and settles in low on that side, just inside the point of the hip bone, and sharpens, and stays. By ten he was sitting at his desk in the office over the comedy club with the Burbank file open in front of him and hadn't turned a page in forty minutes. By half past ten he'd stopped being able to sit straight in the chair and was leaning over to the left, away from it, one arm folded across his belly. By eleven there was a cold sweat along his hairline and down his back that made his shirt stick, and he felt hot and cold at the same time, and every time he shifted in his chair something low on his right side caught like a hook set in meat.
He knew, a little, by then. He'd known a lot of pain in his life. He'd had his nose broken four times and his hand twice and he'd once had a man put a screwdriver through the meat of his thigh in a parking garage in '71, and he knew the difference between a pain that was going to go away and a pain that meant business. This one meant business.
He sat there anyway. He didn't know how not to.
At a quarter to twelve March came up the iron stairs, whistling, with two sandwiches from the deli on the corner and a bottle of cream soda, pushed the door open with his hip, took one look at him, and put the sandwiches down on the floor.
"Okay." March said. "Okay. We're going to the hospital."
"We're not going to the hospital."
"Jackson, you're grey. You were green this morning and now you're grey, you're going backwards through the color wheel. Next you'll be beige. I can't live with a beige man. Stand up."
Healy stood up. Or started to. Halfway up, something in his right side tore loose and grabbed him, and he made a noise he'd never made in front of March in two years, a raw involuntary grunt from the bottom of his chest, and sat back down again hard, hunched over, gripping the edge of the desk with both hands.
March was around the desk before he'd finished making it.
"Where." he said. His hand was already on Healy's back, flat between the shoulder blades, and his voice had changed completely. "Show me where."
Healy pointed. Low, right side.
"Does it hurt when you push on it?"
"It hurts when I think about it."
March pushed on it anyway, gently, two fingers, and Healy breathed out through his teeth, and then March took his fingers away fast and the pain came roaring up on the release, much worse than the pressure, whiting out the office for a second like a flashbulb going off. When Healy could see again March was crouched in front of him with his hands on Healy's knees and his face very pale.
"Right." March said. His voice had gone very calm, very level, the voice that came out only when things were actually bad; Healy had heard it maybe five times. "That's your appendix. That's a textbook appendix. My uncle Lyle had that. He thought it was the clam chowder and he didn't go in, and it burst at a Rotary Club luncheon in Pasadena in front of about a hundred and fifty people. There was a whole thing. He was in the hospital for a month. They named a scholarship after him. Not because he died, he didn't die, just because it was so dramatic that the Rotary felt they had to do something. We're going now. I'm getting the car."
"I can drive."
"You can't stand up."
"I can drive sitting down."
"Jackson." March said. He was looking up at him, still crouched there on the floor between Healy's knees, and his eyes were very blue and very serious. "I love you very much. I am getting the car. And if you try to get up and follow me, I'm going to sit on you, and I weigh about as much as a coat rack, so it'll be embarrassing for both of us."
He got the car. He pulled it right up to the foot of the iron stairs in the alley, where you weren't supposed to park, and ran back up and got Healy's arm over his shoulders, and they went down the twenty-two steps one at a time, very slowly, Healy's weight tipping onto March on every step so that March's knees shook under it. Neither of them said anything. At the bottom, March got the passenger door open and got him into the seat, and Healy sat back and closed his eyes, and March reached across him and fastened the seat belt, which Healy never used, clicking it carefully into place with his hands shaking.
"I'm fine." Healy said, with his eyes shut.
"You're a liar." said March. "You're a big, stupid, gorgeous liar, and I'm driving you to the hospital, and you can be fine in the hospital. They've got beds there. It's a great place to be fine."
Hollywood Presbyterian took one look at him too.
A young doctor in the emergency room, a kid with a mop of red hair and a stethoscope around his neck like a scarf, pressed on him in the same place March had, and did a few other things with his hands, and asked Healy to lie on his left side and lift his right leg against the doctor's hand and watched his face while he did it. Then he drew blood, and went away, and came back forty minutes later with a slip of paper and said that Healy's white blood count was eighteen thousand and his appendix was very inflamed and needed to come out that afternoon, before it did something they'd all regret.
"This afternoon." Healy said.
"We've got an operating room at three. Dr. Lindqvist will do it. It's a very common operation, sir. You'll be in for two or three days, depending." The doctor smiled. He was maybe twenty-eight. "It's actually more common in younger people. But we do see a funny little bump in men your age. Nobody really knows why."
"Great." Healy said. "I'm a bump."
"You're a statistic." March said from the chair. "That's much more distinguished."
They put him in a curtained bay in the ER to wait, in a gown that didn't close in the back and didn't close in the front either, not on him, with an IV in the back of his left hand running something clear. The pain was bad. They'd given him a shot of something for it and the something took the edges off and put a kind of warm gauze over everything, so that the fluorescent lights got soft halos around them and the voices from the other bays came to him slightly delayed, like a movie dubbed badly. But the thing in his side was still there under the gauze, hot and heavy and throbbing, like somebody had left a coal in him and walked away.
A nurse came with a clipboard. She had to fill in the admission forms. Name, address, date of birth, insurance, which they had now, which March had insisted on after last fall with a fervor that approached the religious. Allergies. None. Previous surgeries. Healy thought about it. He told her about the leg in '68, the pin and the traction, and the thing with his thigh in '71, and the time in '74 somebody had to go in and fish out a piece of a broken bottle from his forearm. The nurse wrote it all down with her eyebrows going slowly up.
"Next of kin?"
Healy looked at March.
March looked back at him. There was a little pause, the pause there always was in rooms like this, the pause that was about 1979 and a nurse with a clipboard and the long list of things the two of them had learned not to say in front of strangers.
"Holland March." Healy said. "M-A-R-C-H. Same address."
"And his relationship to you?"
"He's my." Healy said, and stopped. The shot was making it hard to do the thing he usually did, the smooth quick swerve around the true word to a safe one. For one second he was very close to just saying it. He's my everything. He's the man I love. He's my family. He could feel it right there in his mouth.
"Business partner." March said, quickly and brightly. "And roommate. We share a house. Economical. It's a very big house, it'd be a waste. And there's my daughter, she's fifteen. We're all very close."
The nurse looked at the two of them, the big grey-faced man in the gown and the skinny blond man in the tan suit holding his hand, which he had not let go of, which he hadn't even thought to let go of, and she looked for a second longer than she needed to. Then she wrote something down, and didn't say anything, and went away. March let out his breath.
"Business partner." Healy said.
"And roommate. Don't forget roommate. I'm a very good roommate. I do the dishes."
"You do the dishes once a week."
"Consistently, though."
Healy squeezed his hand. March squeezed back.
He sat in the plastic chair next to the gurney and held on, and kept looking at his watch. It was ten past two.
Healy watched him look at it. He watched March check it, and then check the curtain, and then look back at Healy, and then look at the watch again, like the hands might have moved backwards while he wasn't looking. He knew what March was thinking about. He'd been thinking about it too.
"Go." Healy said.
"I'm not going."
"She's in Long Beach. There's no bus."
"She can get a ride with somebody. One of the other parents. She's got a whole team. There's a girl named Deborah whose father drives a Cadillac, she's mentioned the Cadillac a lot, I think she's jealous of the Cadillac."
"She doesn't know anybody's parents well enough to ask. You know what she's like." Healy tightened his fingers around March's. "Come on. The last event ends at three-thirty. She comes out. She looks for the car. The car's not there. What's she gonna think?"
March didn't say anything.
They both knew what she'd think. There'd been a Tuesday last fall, the Tuesday Healy never talked about and March only talked about at three in the morning, when Holly had stood on the school steps waiting for a car that didn't come, because her father was bleeding on a kitchen floor in Echo Park. She'd been fine. Chet had come. She'd been completely fine. And every single afternoon since then, Healy had watched her come out of the school doors and look for the car first, before she looked for anything else. Before her friends, before the weather, before the sky. The car first. And the way her shoulders came down when she found it.
"She'll wait." Healy said. "She'll stand out there till dark, and she won't call anybody. She'll stand there on the curb thinking something's happened and not wanting to be a bother. You know she will."
"You're going into surgery, Jackson."
"I'm gonna be asleep. I'm not gonna know you're here. They're gonna knock me out and take it out and sew me up, and then I'll be in the recovery room for an hour or two, and I'll be so dopey I won't know my own name. And they won't let you in there anyway. It's two-fifteen." He made himself say it evenly. "Get there at three. Get her at three-thirty. You're back here at a quarter to five, easy. Five at the latest. I'll still be in recovery. I'll wake up upstairs and you'll both be there. You'll be sitting right there. Okay?"
What he wanted to say was stay.
He felt it very clearly. It surprised him. It came up out of somewhere under the shot and the pain and sat right on his tongue: stay, don't go, I don't like this, I've never liked hospitals, I don't want to go under with nobody out there. He was fifty-three years old and he'd been cut open before and he'd never once wanted anybody to stay, and he wanted it now so much it scared him.
He didn't say it. He'd had a whole life of not saying things like that, and it was a hard habit to break in an afternoon. And there was the kid on the curb in Long Beach. There was always the kid.
March looked at his watch again. He looked at the curtain. He looked at Healy for a long time.
"We'll be right there." he said. "When you open your eyes. I'll be sitting right there. I'll bring her and we'll both be sitting right there."
"I know."
"I'm serious. I'm going to be the first thing you see. I'm going to be so close to your face, it'll be upsetting. You'll wake up and think you're being attacked by a very handsome walrus."
"I know. Go on."
March stood up. He bent down fast, the curtain be damned, and kissed Healy on the forehead, and then on the mouth, quickly, and then stood there for one more second with his hand on Healy's shoulder. His hand was cold. Healy could feel it through the thin gown.
"I'm leaving early." March said. "Look at me. Leaving early. That's growth, Jackson. That's me being a responsible adult. Remember this. I want it entered into the record."
"I'll remember it."
"I'll be back before you know I'm gone."
"I know."
He went. Healy heard his shoes squeak on the linoleum all the way to the ER doors, fast, almost running, and heard the automatic doors hiss open, and then shut.
He lay there looking at the curtain for a while.
It was two-seventeen.
They came for him at ten to three. An orderly and a nurse and a lot of cheerful noise, a gurney ride through corridors, the ceiling going by in white squares, an elevator, a cold room full of light and steel and people in masks. Somebody put a rubber mask over his face and told him to count backward from a hundred. He got to ninety-six. The last thing he thought before it took him, clear as a bell, was a quarter to five. They'll be there by a quarter to five.
Everything went right until it went wrong, and when it went wrong, there wasn't a thing in the world March could have done about it. He would go over it later a thousand times, looking for the place he'd made the mistake, and there wasn't one. That was almost the worst part.
He got to Long Beach State at two fifty-eight. He'd driven, for the record, like a man with somewhere to be but not like a lunatic, because Healy always said he drove like a lunatic and he wanted it on the record, for later, that he had used his turn signals every single time. He found a parking spot on the first try, which he took as an omen. He found the right building on the second try. He found the auditorium, which was big and cold and smelled, he assumed, like all school auditoriums smell, and he sat in the back row in his good tan jacket and watched the last forty minutes of the super quiz.
He'd meant to sit there thinking about Healy. He'd meant to sit there counting minutes. And he did, for a while; he kept looking at his watch and doing the math, they'll be putting him under now, they'll be starting now, and his leg jiggled, and the woman next to him gave him a look. But then Holly's team came up for the final round, and they read out a question about the Peace of Westphalia and which two treaties comprised it, and before the moderator had even finished reading it Holly's hand was on the buzzer. She said "Osnabrück and Münster" in a clear flat voice that carried to the back of the room, and she pronounced Osnabrück correctly, with the umlaut, and the moderator blinked at her. March sat in the back row with his hand over his mouth and his eyes stinging and didn't think about anything else at all for forty minutes.
He did not talk to anybody on her team about their feelings. He wanted that on the record too.
At three thirty-four Holly came up the aisle with a silver medal around her neck, second place overall in the region, looking like she wanted to die of pride and also of embarrassment that she was proud, holding her index cards in a rubber band against her chest. She saw him, and her face did the thing it always did now when she found him somewhere unexpectedly. The small collapse of the shoulders. The breath let out.
Then she saw he was alone.
"Where's Healy?"
"In the hospital." March said. "He's fine. He's having his appendix out. It's very common. He's a bump, apparently. Come on. I'll tell you in the car, we have to go."
She went white, very fast, the way she did. Then she went very organized. She had her bag and her coat and had said goodbye to her coach and handed off her index cards to a boy named Martin and told Deborah with the Cadillac-owning father that she'd call her later, all in about ninety seconds flat. In the car she sat with her medal in her lap and asked him questions. When did it start. What did the doctor say. What time was the surgery. Was he scared.
"He's Jackson." March said. "He doesn't get scared. He gets quiet."
"That's what scared looks like on him, Dad."
March glanced at her. She was looking out the windshield, turning the medal over and over in her fingers.
"Yeah." he said, after a moment. "I know."
They got on the freeway at three forty-six.
The 405 north was moving. Not fast, it was never fast at that hour, but moving, forty, forty-five, the long river of taillights going up past the refineries in Carson with the storage tanks all lined up behind the fences like giant white pills. The sky over the harbor was the color of dishwater. March did the math out loud because it made him feel better: they'd get off at the 10, take it across to the 101, get off at Vermont; forty minutes, maybe fifty, with traffic. Healy would still be in recovery. They'd be sitting in his room before he ever got there. They'd be sitting there when the orderlies wheeled him in.
"You're going to talk his ear off when he wakes up." Holly said.
"I'm going to be extremely close to his face. I promised him."
"He's going to hate that."
"He's going to love it. He's going to pretend to hate it. That's his whole thing. He's like a cat. You pick up a cat and it acts outraged, but it's purring the whole time."
"Healy's not a cat."
"Healy's the biggest cat."
Holly almost smiled. Then she said, looking at her medal, "Is he going to be okay? Really?"
"Really. It's the most common surgery there is, practically. They do it on children. They do it on dogs, probably. He'll be sore and cranky for a couple weeks and then he'll be back to lifting heavy things and frowning at them."
"You promised you'd be there when he woke up."
"I did."
"He doesn't like hospitals." Holly said. "Does he. He never says. But he doesn't."
March didn't answer right away. He was thinking about a brick wall two blocks from home, warm in the sun, last fall, and a big man sitting beside him on it, looking at his hands. Nobody came. I sat in an apartment by myself with my leg up for four months, and nobody came.
"No." he said. "He doesn't. Somebody let him down once. A long time ago. Before us."
"Who?"
"Everybody." said March. "Everybody he had."
Holly was quiet for a while after that.
At eleven minutes after four, a little south of the 110 interchange, everything in front of them turned red at once.
It wasn't a slowdown. It was a stop. A whole wall of brake lights, five lanes of them, lighting up one after another in front of them like a row of dominoes going over, and March stood on the brake and they stopped with about two feet to spare behind a Ford Pinto with a surfboard strapped on top. The car behind them stopped with maybe a foot to spare. Somebody somewhere was leaning on their horn.
And then they sat. And then, maybe a minute later, they saw the smoke.
It was a long way ahead. A thick black column of it going straight up into the grey sky, oily, rolling, fattening at the top like a thunderhead. March looked at it and felt something cold go through him and settle behind his breastbone, the old cold, the one he'd lived with every day for years after a night in a house that no longer existed, and he made himself take his hands off the wheel and put them in his lap.
Then sirens behind them. Then fire engines, trying to get up the shoulder, horns blaring, and everybody inching over to the right to make room, and then nothing. Nothing moved.
Nothing moved for a very long time.
At four-thirty he turned the engine off to save gas, the way everybody around them was doing. At four-forty he got out of the car and stood on the door sill and looked up the freeway, and it was cars as far as he could see, in both directions, the southbound side stopped too, and people standing on their door sills like him, looking. Up ahead a man in a business suit had climbed up onto the roof of his Buick. March shouted up to him, can you see anything? and the man shouted back that it looked like a truck. A big rig, a tanker maybe, on its side across all the lanes. It looked like it was on fire. It looked like there were other cars in it.
March got back in the car.
"We're not moving." Holly said. "Are we?"
"We'll move. They'll clear it."
"That's a fire, Dad."
"They'll put it out. That's what the fire trucks are for. That's their whole deal. They love that stuff."
She looked at him. He was holding the steering wheel again with both hands, very tightly, and she looked at his hands and then at the smoke and then back at his face, and she didn't say anything, but she reached over and put her hand on his arm. She didn't talk about the fire with him. She never had, not once, not with him. She'd been tweleve. She remembered some of it and not the rest, and she'd decided a long time ago, without ever saying so, that the parts she didn't remember were his to keep.
He looked at his watch. Four forty-eight. In his head, Healy was coming out of the operating room. In his head, Healy was being wheeled into a room with a window, and there was a chair beside the bed, and it was empty.
At four fifty-two he saw the call box.
It was on a post on the right shoulder maybe a quarter mile back, a little yellow box, one of the new ones they'd put up along the freeways a few years ago that went straight to the Highway Patrol. He was out of the car before he'd decided to be. Holly shouted after him. He shouted back stay there, stay in the car, lock the doors and started running, down the shoulder, between the guard rail and the stopped cars, in his good shoes, the smooth leather soles slipping on the grit and the gravel and the bits of glass that always glittered along the shoulders of Los Angeles freeways like somebody had salted them.
It was farther than a quarter mile. It was a lot farther than a quarter mile. It was one of those distances that keeps getting longer as you run toward it, and people were watching him from their cars, a skinny man in a tan suit running full tilt down the shoulder of the 405 with his tie flying out behind him like he was chasing a bus that wasn't there. A kid in the back seat of a station wagon pressed his face to the window and waved. Somewhere around halfway the scar on his belly from last fall started pulling, a long hot seam of complaint from his breastbone down, and he pressed one hand flat against it through his shirt and kept going. By the time he got there he had a stitch in his side like a knife, which was, he thought, a little on the nose, and his breath was coming in whoops, and he yanked the box open and grabbed the handset.
A woman answered. A dispatcher, flat and tired. Behind her he could hear a hundred other voices, a hundred radios, a room full of noise.
"There's an accident." March panted. "On the 405. North. By the 110. We're stuck."
"Yes, sir. We're aware of the incident, units are on scene. Is anybody in your vehicle injured?"
"No. No, nobody's, listen. I need you to call somebody. I need you to call a hospital. Hollywood Presbyterian. There's a man there, he's in surgery right now, Jackson Healy, H-E-A-L-Y, and he's going to wake up soon and we're supposed to be there, and we're not going to be there. And I need somebody to tell him. Tell him Holland March is stuck in traffic. Tell him Holly's with me. Tell him we're coming."
There was a pause.
"Sir, this line is for emergencies."
"This is an emergency."
"Sir..."
"Please." March said. He heard his own voice crack in half, right in the middle, and didn't care. "Please. I'm asking you. I'm begging you, I'm a grown man standing on the side of the freeway begging you. I promised him. I promised him I'd be there when he woke up. He's going to wake up in a room, and nobody's going to be there, and he's going to think. He's going to think nobody came. And that's the one thing. That's the one thing, it's happened to him before, and I promised. Please. It's one phone call. Please."
Another pause. He heard her breathe out. Something in it changed.
"Hollywood Presbyterian." she said.
"Yes."
"Patient name Healy."
"Jackson Healy. He's in surgery. His appendix. Tell him, tell him Holland said right here. He'll know what that means. Those words. Right here."
He heard her writing. He could hear the scratch of the pen.
"I'll have somebody pass it along, sir. I can't promise more than that. Please return to your vehicle and stay in it."
"Thank you." March said. "Thank you. God bless you. I mean that. I'm not a religious man, I don't even know if I believe in God, I'm very confused on the whole subject, but I mean it."
"Please return to your vehicle, sir." said the dispatcher, and he could have sworn, just faintly, she was smiling.
He walked back. It took longer than running. He walked with his hand pressed against his side and his breath coming back to him slowly and the sweat going cold under his shirt, and people in their cars watched him go by again the other way, and the kid in the station wagon waved again, and March waved back. When he got to the car Holly was standing beside it with the passenger door open and her arms wrapped around herself, and the moment she saw him her whole body sagged.
"You can't just run off." she said, furious and teary. "You can't just run off down the freeway, Dad, you don't know if somebody's going to pull onto the shoulder, you don't know, and you had your hand on your stomach the whole way back, is it your scar..."
"I called." he said. "From the box. I got a lady to call the hospital. She's going to tell him. She's going to tell him."
Holly looked at him. At his face, shiny with sweat, and his good shoes, scuffed grey with road grit, and the hand he still had pressed against his old scar without seeming to know it.
"Okay." she said, quieter. "Okay. Good. That's good."
They sat.
The black smoke column got thinner and went grey and then white and then, around five-thirty, it was gone. Nothing moved. The sun started coming down orange and swollen behind the haze over the harbor. Five-forty-five. Six. March drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then made himself stop, then started again without noticing. Holly tried to do homework on her knee and gave up after one page. She took off her medal and put it in the glove box, very carefully, like she was putting it away for a long time.
At six-twenty a man two cars up started laying on his horn and didn't stop for three full minutes until somebody got out and walked up and yelled at him through his window. At six-forty they moved forty feet, and everybody started their engines, and then they stopped again, and everybody turned their engines off. At seven-oh-five they moved another sixty. The radio said a gasoline tanker had overturned and caught fire after colliding with a station wagon, two people dead, the northbound freeway closed, the southbound slowed to a crawl by onlookers, avoid the area. March turned the radio off. He sat with his hands on the wheel and did not look at Holly and thought about the two people dead. He thought about somebody sitting beside a bed in a hospital room waiting for one of them, looking at the clock.
"He's awake by now." Holly said.
"Yeah."
"He'll know. The lady called."
"Yeah." March said. "He'll know."
She fell asleep a little after seven-thirty, curled up against the passenger door with her cheek on her fist and her mouth a little open. He took off his jacket and put it over her. Then he sat in the dark car in the middle of the stopped freeway with a thousand other dark cars around him, all their windows glowing faintly from the lights on the southbound side, and he let himself cry for about five minutes, silently, with his forehead against the top of the steering wheel, because there was nobody to see it and nothing else to do. He cried because he was so tired, and because he was so scared, and because he knew. He knew in his bones, the way he sometimes knew things about a case before he could explain them. Whatever that dispatcher had done, whatever she'd meant to do, Jackson was lying in a bed somewhere watching a clock.
Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and sat up and waited.
At eight thirty-one they finally crawled past it: one lane open, flares burning pink on the asphalt, a long black scorched stretch of freeway still steaming under floodlights, the burned shell of the tanker lying on its side against the center divider like some huge dead animal, and a highway patrolman in a reflective vest waving them through with a flashlight, bored and exhausted. March didn't look at it. Holly woke up at the change in the engine and didn't look at it either.
He drove the rest of the way like a lunatic. He didn't use his turn signals once.
Healy woke up in pieces.
The first piece was sound: a beeping, and a woman's voice saying Mr. Healy, Mr. Healy, can you open your eyes for me, and somebody else coughing somewhere far away. The second piece was pain, a deep, dull, dragging pain low on his right side, much worse than before and completely different; not a coal anymore but a cut, a clean wrong line drawn through him. The third piece was cold. He was so cold his teeth were going. Somebody put a heated blanket on him, and then another, and he could have wept at how good it felt.
The fourth piece was his eyes opening. There was a ceiling. There was a nurse in a paper cap. There was a green curtain.
There wasn't anybody else.
I'll be right here. I'm going to be so close to your face.
"What time is it." he said, or tried to. It came out in a croak that scraped his throat raw.
"About ten after five." the nurse said. "You did great. It's all over. You're in recovery. Your appendix is out."
Ten after five. Okay. That was fine; he'd just been wrong about the timing, that was all. They'd be upstairs, waiting in his room. They wouldn't let them in recovery anyway. He knew that. He'd told March that himself. He went back under, easily, like sliding into warm water.
The next time he was moving. The ceiling going by, lights, lights, lights. An elevator. A hallway. A room. Two orderlies counting to three and shifting him from the gurney to the bed, and the pain in his side flaring up so white and total that he heard himself make a sound, a thin high sound like something being stepped on. Then it was quieter. Then there was a window, dark blue now, evening, and a curtain half pulled around a second bed where somebody was snoring.
The chair beside his bed was empty.
He looked at it for a while. It was a vinyl chair, tan, with a split in the seat patched with a piece of grey tape.
"Anybody." he said to the new nurse, a young Filipina woman with a gentle voice and a name tag that said IMELDA who was hanging a bag on his IV pole. "Anybody ask for me? Out there? A guy, blond, skinny. Talks a lot. With a kid. Fifteen. Dark hair."
She looked at the chart. She looked at the door. "I don't think so, Mr. Healy. Not up here. Let me check at the desk."
She was gone a while. When she came back she shook her head, kindly.
"Nobody's been by yet. Visiting hours go till nine. Maybe they're on their way."
"Yeah." Healy said. "Maybe."
It was six-forty.
He watched the clock on the wall across from the bed. It was a big white one with black hands and a thin red second hand, like the clock in every hospital in America, like the clock in every waiting room he'd ever sat in. The red hand went around in small hard jerks. It made a very faint tick he could only hear when the man behind the curtain stopped snoring.
Six forty-five.
Seven.
He'd been in the hospital before. Plenty of times. He'd been in the hospital with a broken hand and a broken nose and three broken ribs, twice. With a screwdriver wound in his thigh in '71 that got infected and had to be opened up and drained. With a bullet crease across the top of his scalp from a man in Compton who'd had a very bad aim and a very good reason. None of those times had there been anybody in the chair. He'd never expected anybody. He'd get himself sewn up and put his own clothes back on, and walk out with his discharge papers folded in his back pocket and take a cab home to an empty apartment, and that was what it was. That was his life. He'd never thought about it one way or the other.
Except once.
At five past seven he got his hand on the phone.
There was a telephone on the bedside table, a beige one with a rotary dial, and it was just out of his reach, and he got it by stretching, and the stretch pulled at the incision like somebody tugging on a fishhook sewn into him, and he said God through his teeth and got it anyway. He dragged it into his lap by the cord. He dialed 9 for an outside line and then the number of the house.
It rang.
He lay there with the receiver against his ear and listened to it ring in the kitchen, eleven miles away, on the wall by the refrigerator next to the calendar with Holly's decathlon circled in red. He could see it. He could see the kitchen. The table where he'd pushed his eggs around that morning. The ceiling light off. The phone on the wall ringing into the dark and nobody coming to pick it up.
He let it ring fifteen times. Then he hung up and dialed the office.
It rang there too. He could see that as well: the dark office over the comedy club, the two desks, the file cabinets that didn't close, the phone ringing on March's desk next to the ashtray and the framed picture of Holly with her science fair volcano. Twelve rings. Nobody.
He put the receiver back in its cradle very carefully. He sat there holding the phone in his lap.
It was fine. They were on their way. That's why nobody was home; they were on their way. They'd be here any minute.
Seven-fifteen.
The morphine they had him on was good. It was better than good; it lifted him up off the bed about an inch and floated him there, and the pain in his side was down below him somewhere, waiting, and his thoughts came slow and big and soft, like heavy wet snow. And they kept drifting back to the same place, no matter how many times he steered them off. They kept coming back to 1968.
County General. A ward with twelve beds. A June so hot the fans just pushed the air around. His right leg hung up in the air in front of him in traction, a steel pin driven straight through his shin just below the knee and a U-shaped bracket on either end of it, and a cable running from the bracket up to a pulley on a frame over the bed and down to a stack of iron weights that hung off the end. Five weeks, like that. Five weeks on his back, with his leg up. A bedpan. Sponge baths from an orderly named Leon who never looked him in the face. The man in the bed next to him had died in the second week, at night, very quietly, and they'd pulled the curtain and taken him out in the morning, and nobody had come for him either.
Nobody had come at all.
There'd been nobody left to come. June had left him the summer before, in July of '67, eleven months before the car on Figueroa. He hadn't let himself think about that in years, and it came up now out of the morphine whole, like something surfacing in a lake. June with her dark hair set in rollers on Saturday nights. June who laughed at his jokes, the few he made. June who had sat across from him at his father's table every other Sunday for six years of marriage, passing the potatoes, while his father told the same stories about the war and looked at her.
He hadn't seen it. That was the part he could never get past. He was a man who noticed things for a living, even back then, and he hadn't seen it. It had been going on for a year before she told him, standing in their kitchen in her good coat with a suitcase by the door. She'd said she was sorry. She'd said it just happened. She'd said your father's lonely, Jack, since your mother, as if that explained anything, as if his mother hadn't been dead for thirty years. And then she'd gone out the door and gotten into his father's Oldsmobile, which was idling at the curb, and his father hadn't even gotten out of the car. Hadn't even looked up at the house. They'd gotten married in Reno in the fall. He'd heard about it from a cousin.
So when the nurse at County General had come around with the clipboard, that summer of 1968, and asked him for next of kin, he'd opened his mouth and started to say his father's name out of pure habit. And stopped. And lain there with his leg hung up in the air and his mouth open like a fish, while the nurse waited with her pen. And then he'd said, nobody. Put nobody. And she'd written it down.
Five weeks. Nobody.
Then afterward. The apartment. The walk-up on the third floor in Echo Park that he'd moved into after the house was sold, with the boxes still stacked in the bedroom that he'd never gotten around to unpacking, because unpacking them meant he lived there. The crutches leaned up against the wall by the couch. Four months. He had to go down three flights on crutches for groceries, and some days he just didn't, and ate saltines. And the phone. The phone on the kitchen table, where he could see it from the couch. Black. Heavy. He'd watched that phone for four months. He'd gotten to where he could tell the time of day by where the light from the window fell across it; it went from one side of the dial to the other between noon and four. And the worst of it, the part he'd never told anybody, not even March on the wall: some part of him had been waiting for it to be them. His father. June. Somebody saying we heard, Jack. We're sorry. How's the leg. It had rung maybe six times in four months, and every one of them had been somebody selling something or somebody asking for a guy who used to live there.
He'd come out of that apartment in October a different man. Harder. He'd understood something in there, lying on that couch looking at that phone. He'd understood that you couldn't count on anybody, and that that was fine, it was just how it was. And he'd built himself around it after that, like a bone knitting crooked around a pin. You don't wait for anybody, so nobody can leave you waiting. You don't need the chair filled, so it doesn't matter when it's empty.
And it had worked. For ten years. It had worked right up until a skinny drunk whose arm he'd broken himself had come screaming out of a bathroom stall at him, and then somehow, without him ever deciding it, it had stopped working.
Seven-thirty.
I'll be right here. I'll be sitting right here.
He tried to be reasonable about it. He was a reasonable man, mostly. Something had come up. The kid's thing ran late; they had a tiebreaker, an overtime round, whatever they did at those things. March had gotten lost; March got lost going to the grocery store sometimes, he'd once gotten lost going to the office. March had stopped for a drink.
That one came in sideways, low, and he pushed it away hard, because March didn't do that anymore. Not since last fall. Not once in six months. He'd made the coffee cup of club soda with a lime in it on the back step every night into a ritual, and Healy had sat out there with him most nights, and he hadn't slipped. Not once. Healy knew that. He knew.
But it came back. It came back because the morphine didn't let him push anything very far; everything he pushed just floated a few inches off and drifted back to him. March had stopped for a drink and then another one. March was sitting at a bar right now on Pacific Coast Highway with Holly waiting in the car. No. March had gotten distracted. March had gotten Holly and taken her out for ice cream to celebrate whatever she'd won, because of course she'd won something, and they were sitting in a booth somewhere laughing, and March had looked at his watch and thought, he's asleep, he won't know, he won't even know the difference.
Eight.
He knew it wasn't true. He knew. He'd have told anybody who asked him that he knew. But there was a part of him, way down at the bottom where the morphine was pooling like warm water in a ditch, that didn't know anything at all. It was fifty-three years old and flat on its back in a hospital bed with a new hole in it, looking at a chair with a split in the vinyl, and all it knew was that nobody had come. Again. Just like before. That he'd let himself think it was different this time. That he'd gone soft and stupid and let himself get used to people. To mornings. To eggs scrambled wrong on purpose because he liked them that way. To a kid kissing him on the cheek. To a warm arm flung across him in the middle of the night and somebody mumbling where'd you go into his shoulder. And it was different, sure. It was all very different. Right up until the minute you needed it. And then you were back in the bed, looking at the clock, and the phone was ringing in an empty kitchen, and it was 1968, and it had always been 1968, and all the rest of it had just been a very nice dream.
He didn't know when he started crying.
He noticed it the way you notice it's started to rain. Something wet on his face first. Then his breath going ragged in his chest. Then a pressure in his throat that got bigger and bigger until he couldn't swallow around it. And then he couldn't stop it. It was the drugs. He knew that too. He hadn't cried in front of another human being since he was nine years old at his mother's funeral, and his father had cuffed him for it on the way home, and he'd hardly cried at all since then, except once, last fall, in a waiting room at Queen of Angels with Holly asleep against his arm. But it came up out of him now from somewhere very deep and he couldn't hold it down. And every time he dragged in a breath to try to stop, the incision pulled and hurt, a hot tearing sting, and that made it worse. He lay there on his back in the dim room, with the snoring man behind the curtain and the phone still sitting in his lap and the red second hand going around and around, and cried with his mouth shut, silently, the way he'd learned to do anything he couldn't help doing. The tears ran out of the corners of his eyes and down his temples and into his ears, cold, and pooled there.
He thought, very clearly, I shouldn't have let him go.
And then, worse: I should've said stay.
And then, the worst one, the one that came up from the very bottom: He wouldn't have stayed anyway. Nobody ever stays.
Imelda came in at eight-twenty to check his pressure and stopped in the doorway.
"Oh, Mr. Healy." she said softly. "Oh, are you hurting? Do you want more for the pain?"
He turned his face to the wall.
She took the phone off his lap and put it back on the table. She gave him more for the pain. She stood by the bed afterward with her hand on his shoulder for a moment, very lightly, and he let her, because he didn't have it in him not to. She didn't say anything. She'd been a nurse for six years and she'd seen a great many men cry in the dark in this hospital, and she knew that sometimes the kindest thing was not to say anything at all. Then she went away again.
The last thing he saw before it pulled him under was the clock. Eight thirty-one.
The chair was still empty.
They came through the doors of the fifth floor at nine forty-four, after visiting hours, March in front at a flat run and Holly right behind him, and the night nurse at the desk half stood up to stop them and then saw March's face and sat back down.
"Healy." March said. "Jackson Healy. The appendix. Please."
"Five-twelve." said the nurse. She looked at him over her glasses for a moment. "He's asleep. He had a rough evening."
March was already moving. He didn't hear the second part until later, lying awake that night, when it came back to him in her voice and wouldn't leave. He had a rough evening.
He stopped in the doorway of 512. Holly almost ran into his back.
Healy was asleep on his back in the near bed with the covers pulled up to his chest and the rail up. There was an IV in his left arm and a clear bag hanging, and a pale green hospital gown, and his big hands lying on top of the blanket, loosely curled, the knuckles scarred. His face in the light from the hallway looked grey and old and swollen, older than March had ever seen it, fifty-three going on seventy. And there were dried salt tracks running from the outer corners of both his eyes down into his hair. Both sides. Silvery in the light from the door. His lashes were still clumped together with it.
March had seen Jackson Healy take a punch in the face from a man wearing brass knuckles and smile about it through a split lip. He'd seen him set his own broken finger on the hood of a car. He'd seen him cry once, in a waiting room last fall, and even then it had been almost nothing, just a few tears he didn't wipe away while he sat with Holly's head on his arm. He had never, not once, seen these. The marks of a man who had cried himself to sleep on his back, alone, until the tears ran into his ears.
He stood in the doorway, and something in his chest went out from under him.
He went in. He sat down in the chair. It had a split in the seat, patched with grey tape, and he felt it under him. He took Healy's hand, the one without the IV, very carefully, and held it in both of his. Healy's fingers twitched. His eyes came open, slowly. They were fogged and bloodshot and wet.
He looked at March.
For a second nothing happened in his face at all. It was just open, and confused, and so tired. Then something came over it, fast. Like a door swinging shut on a hinge. Like a man pulling down a blind in a window.
He took his hand back.
He did it slowly. He didn't yank it. He just drew it out from between March's hands and laid it down on his own chest, on the far side, where March couldn't reach it. And he turned his eyes to the ceiling.
"Jackson." March said. "Jackson, I'm so sorry. There was an accident on the 405, a tanker, a gas tanker, it turned over and caught on fire, the whole freeway was closed, both ways, people died, we were stuck for four and a half hours, we couldn't get off, there was nowhere to go, I tried, I called, I ran down to one of those call boxes and I called the Highway Patrol and I made them..."
Healy wasn't looking at him. He'd turned his eyes past him, to the doorway, where Holly was standing with her book bag hugged to her chest.
"Kid." he said. His voice was a scrape.
"Hi." Holly said. It came out very small.
"C'mere."
She came. March stood up out of the chair so she could have it, automatically, because that was what you did. Healy watched him stand. Then he said, still not looking at March, very low and very flat and very clear:
"I want to see Holly."
March stood there.
"Okay." he said. "Yes. Of course. We're both, we're here, we're both right here, we can..."
"Just Holly."
The room was very quiet. Behind the curtain, the other patient had stopped snoring.
Holly looked at Healy. Then she looked at her father. She looked like she'd been slapped. She opened her mouth, and March saw her gather herself up to fight, saw the whole of her fifteen-year-old sense of justice rising up in her like steam, and he shook his head at her, once, very small. Don't.
"Healy." she said anyway. "He..."
"It's fine." March said. It was the fastest thing he'd ever said. "It's fine. It's totally fine. That's fine. I'll be right outside. I'll be right outside the door, Jackson. If you need anything. Anything at all. I'm right there. I'm not going anywhere."
Healy didn't answer. He'd closed his eyes.
March backed out of the room. He did it carefully, without turning around, as though he were leaving the presence of something that might go off. He pulled the door most of the way shut behind him but not all the way, and stood with his back against the wall beside it. The hallway was bright and quiet and smelled, he supposed, of whatever hospitals smelled of; he'd never know. He stood there. And after a minute his legs decided they were done for the day, and he slid down the wall and sat on the floor of the hospital corridor with his knees up, in his good tan slacks gone grey with road dust up to the shins, and his scuffed shoes, and his hands hanging between his knees.
The night nurse looked at him from the desk. She looked for a long moment. Then she politely looked away.
Through the gap in the door he could hear them. Not every word. Enough.
"He tried." Holly was saying. Her voice was low and fierce and wobbling. "Healy. Listen to me. He tried. We were stuck. We were stuck in the middle of the freeway behind a fire. There was nowhere to go. There were cars as far as you could see. Nobody could move. There were people who died up there, it was on the radio, two people, in a station wagon. He left early. He left so early. He was at my thing before it even started, he sat in the back, he didn't embarrass me at all, he didn't talk to anybody, not one person. We were going to be back by five. We were going to be here."
Nothing from Healy.
"He ran down the freeway." Holly said. "On the shoulder, with all the cars, to one of those yellow call boxes. It was like half a mile. He ran the whole way in his good shoes, and his scar was hurting him, I could tell, he had his hand on it. And he got a lady from the Highway Patrol and he begged her to call the hospital and tell you. He begged, Healy. I could see him doing it from the car. I could see his face. Didn't they tell you? Didn't anybody tell you?"
A long silence.
"Nobody told me anything." Healy said.
"Well they were supposed to."
"Nobody came." It was so quiet March almost didn't hear it through the door. "I woke up and nobody came. I waited. I watched the damn clock. I called the house. I called the office. Nobody picked up. Nobody came, kid."
"I know. I know, but it wasn't his fault, it wasn't anybody's fault, it was a truck..."
"He said he'd be there."
"He wanted to be there. He wanted to be there so much. You should have seen him, Healy. You should've seen his face when..."
"I'm tired." Healy said. "I'm real tired, Holly. I don't want to talk about your dad."
"Healy."
"Please." Healy said. And that one word, that please, from Jackson Healy, who never said please to anybody for anything, went into March like the knife had last fall. "Just sit with me. Would you? Just sit. For a while. Just you."
After a moment March heard the vinyl chair creak as she sat down in it. He heard her not say anything. He heard her start, very quietly, to cry, and then stop herself, the way she'd learned to from him.
Out in the hallway, sitting on the floor, March put his face in his hands.
He didn't cry. He'd decided that somewhere between the doorway and the floor. He didn't get to. This wasn't his. He'd made a promise and he hadn't kept it, and it didn't matter one bit why, not to the man in that bed. The man in that bed had woken up alone, and waited, and watched the clock, and picked up a phone and called an empty house, and cried himself to sleep with nobody there. And that was the exact thing. The one exact thing. The thing Jackson Healy had told him about last fall on a brick wall two blocks from home, sitting in the sun with his big hands between his knees, not looking at him. Nobody came. The thing that had happened to him once, a long time ago, and that nobody had ever made right. March had sat on that wall with his head on Healy's shoulder and thought, as clear and hard as he'd ever thought anything in his life, never again. Never while I'm alive. Not to him.
And here it was. It had happened again. On his watch. With him running down the shoulder of a freeway in his good shoes, trying.
He thought about Healy's face when he'd opened his eyes and seen him. That door swinging shut. He'd seen that face before, too, he realized. Not on Healy. On Amy. On a night six years ago when he'd come home three hours late and very drunk, and she'd stood at the top of the stairs in her robe and said, for the fifth or sixth time that month, that she could smell gas. That Holly could smell it too. That it was worse in the kitchen, and worse at night, and when in God's name was he going to call somebody. And he'd stood at the bottom of the stairs sniffing the air like a fool, smelling nothing, because he hadn't smelled anything in two years, and said tomorrow, I'll call tomorrow, I promise. And she'd looked down at him with that exact face. The closed face. The blind pulled down. He'd told himself then it would be fine. He'd call in the morning. He'd tell her he was sorry. He'd make it up to her.
He hadn't gotten a tomorrow with her.
He sat on the hospital floor with his face in his hands and breathed.
It didn't matter about the truck. It didn't matter about the call box or the dispatcher or the fire. He'd make it not matter. He'd make it up. He didn't know how yet. He'd find a way. He'd do whatever it took and he'd keep doing it, and he wouldn't say a word about how hard it was, and he wouldn't make it about himself, and he wouldn't ask Jackson for one single thing. He'd just be there. Every minute. Every day. Right here. Until it was enough.
A nurse came down the corridor at a quarter past ten, a sturdy woman with a long dark braid down her back, going off shift with her coat over her arm. She stopped and looked at him sitting there on the floor. Then she went away and came back with a paper cup of coffee from the machine in the break room and held it down to him without a word.
"Thank you." March said. His voice didn't sound like his.
"Your friend in there?"
"Yes."
"He'll be all right." the nurse said. "Appendix. He'll be up and walking tomorrow, grumbling about the food."
"I know." March said. "I know he will."
She looked at him a moment longer, at the grey dust on his trousers and the red around his eyes, and then she patted him twice on the shoulder, like you'd pat a dog that had been left tied up outside a store, and went on down the hall.
He sat on the floor outside 512 until eleven, when the night nurse finally came over and crouched down beside him. She told him kindly that the girl had fallen asleep in the chair and he really needed to take her home now, and that Mr. Healy was stable and resting comfortably and would be up tomorrow, and would probably be discharged in a day or two, and they'd see him in the morning.
He went in and woke Holly up. He was very quiet about it. He didn't look at the bed, because he didn't think he could stand to. But as he was steering Holly toward the door, half asleep, with his arm around her shoulders, he did look. Just once.
Healy was lying there with his eyes open, watching them go.
Their eyes met. For a second March thought something might happen. He stopped. Holly stopped with him.
Then Healy closed his eyes again and turned his face to the window.
In the car Holly didn't say anything until they were out of the parking structure. Then she said, "That was so unfair."
"Holly."
"It was. It was unfair. You didn't do anything wrong. You did everything right. You left early. You called. You ran down the freeway, Dad, you could've been killed, some idiot could've pulled over onto the shoulder and hit you, and he won't even look at you, he wouldn't even let you in the room..."
"He's allowed." March said.
"He's allowed to be mean to you?"
"He's allowed to be hurt." He kept his eyes on the road. Hollywood at night, the lights on Sunset, the people on the sidewalks, going on with their Thursday like nothing had happened. "He's allowed to be as hurt as he wants for as long as he wants. And we don't get a vote. You understand me? He had a bad night. A very bad night. The kind of bad night he's had before, a long time ago, and he's never really gotten over it, because nobody ever helped him get over it. And this time we were supposed to help. I was supposed to be there. I told him I'd be there."
"But it was a truck."
"It doesn't matter what it was." March said. "It doesn't matter to him right now. And I'm not going to make him feel bad about it. I'm not going to make it about me. You hear me? Not you either. We're not going to say but it was the traffic one more time. He knows. You told him. He heard. Now we just have to be there, and be there, and keep being there, until it doesn't hurt him anymore."
Holly looked at him for a long time in the light from the streetlamps going by.
"And what about you?" she said.
"What about me?"
"Doesn't it hurt you?"
March didn't answer that. He drove. After a while Holly reached over and put her hand on his arm again, the way she had on the freeway, and left it there all the way home.
The house was dark. The phone was on the wall by the refrigerator. March stood in the kitchen looking at it for a long time after Holly went to bed. He thought about it ringing in here at seven o'clock with nobody to pick it up. He thought about Jackson on the other end of it, lying in that bed with the receiver against his ear, counting the rings.
He went down the hall to their bedroom and stood in the doorway. The bed was unmade from that morning, the covers thrown back on Healy's side where he'd gotten up at three and on March's where he'd gotten up at seven. Healy's reading glasses on the nightstand. Healy's shirt from yesterday over the back of the chair.
He couldn't do it. He couldn't get into that bed.
He went and lay down on the couch in the living room in his clothes, on his back, with his shoes still on and his feet hanging off the arm, and looked at the ceiling until it got light.
The two days in the hospital were bad.
March came every morning at eight, after dropping Holly at school, and went up to the fifth floor, and asked the nurse at the desk to ask Mr. Healy if he wanted to see him. And the nurse went down the hall and came back, and said, gently, that Mr. Healy was resting. And March said okay, thank you, and went and sat in a chair in the hallway outside 512, or when there wasn't a chair, on the floor. He sat there all day. He sat there until Holly got out of school and took the bus to the hospital. Then he went out and sat in the car in the parking structure while she was inside, because he didn't want Jackson to feel like he was being watched, like there was a guard on the door. Then he drove her home.
He brought things. The newspaper, the Times, every morning, with the sports section on top because Healy liked the sports section first. A paperback Western from the rack at the drugstore, a Louis L'Amour, because Healy had read every Louis L'Amour ever written and would read them again. A thermos of real coffee, because the hospital coffee, Holly had reported, tasted like it had been strained through a gym sock. A bag of the black licorice Healy liked and nobody else on earth liked. A clean pair of pajamas and his own robe. His reading glasses. He left them with the nurses at the desk. The nurses took them in.
The newspaper got read, the nurses told him. The coffee got drunk. The pajamas got worn. The Western sat on the bedside table and didn't get opened.
On Friday, a nurse with a long dark braid, the same one from the first night, came out and sat down next to him on the hallway floor during her break, which he thought was probably against some rule. She had two cups of coffee. She gave him one.
"You know." she said, "they all call you the hallway man. The girls on the floor."
"Do they."
"Mm-hm. Is the hallway man here yet? Did somebody bring the hallway man a coffee?" She sipped hers. "It's nice. It's the nicest thing that's happened on this floor all week. You should see what we usually get. Wives who come by once and look at their watches."
March didn't say anything.
"He asks, you know." the nurse said.
March turned his head.
"Not in so many words. He's not a words man, your friend. But he asks. Is he out there. In the morning when I do his vitals. I say yes, he's out there. And he doesn't say anything, and he turns over. But he asks every morning."
March looked down at the coffee in his hands. It had a skin on it. After a while he said, "Thank you for telling me that." in a voice that almost held.
"Don't give up on him." the nurse said, getting up. "The big ones take longer. They've got more to move."
It was Healy who told himself, lying in that bed on Friday afternoon, that he ought to let March in.
He knew it. He'd known it on Thursday night when Holly was crying in the chair, and he'd known it when he watched them go out the door at eleven, March with his arm around her and his face all hollowed out, stopping in the doorway and looking back at him like a dog that had been kicked and couldn't understand what for. He'd known it every morning when the nurse came in with the thermometer and he asked is he out there and she said yes and he turned over toward the window with something so thick in his chest he couldn't breathe past it.
The coffee was in the thermos March kept on the kitchen counter by the toaster, the dented red one. The pajamas were the blue flannel ones, the ones March had bought him for Christmas and made fun of him for liking. The licorice. Nobody bought him the licorice. Nobody knew he liked it. He'd mentioned it once, a year and a half ago, in a drugstore, and March had made a face like he'd been poisoned and said that's a candy for undertakers, Jackson, and here it was on the bedside table, a whole bag.
He knew what March was doing. He knew exactly. And every time he thought about telling the nurse yeah, send him in, the part at the bottom clenched up like a fist around the memory of the clock, and the empty chair, and the phone ringing in the kitchen, fifteen rings, and a nurse with a clipboard writing down nobody. And he didn't say it.
He didn't know what he was so afraid of. That was the thing. He lay there trying to name it, and he couldn't. He wasn't afraid of March. He'd never in his life been afraid of Holland March. He thought maybe he was afraid of what would happen if he let March in and looked at him and felt what he felt when he looked at him. Because then he'd have to admit how much he'd needed him to be in that chair. How much it had mattered. And he'd spent ten years, since the couch in Echo Park, making sure nothing ever mattered that much.
On Friday afternoon March came in anyway.
He came in while Holly was down at the vending machines, just walked in the door without asking the nurse first, and stopped at the foot of the bed. Healy was sitting up, eating a cup of red Jell-O, badly, because it tasted like cough syrup and he'd told the nurse so twice. He looked up when March came in, and his face did the door thing again. He felt it happen. He felt the blind come down. He didn't know how to stop it.
"I just want to say one thing." March said from the foot of the bed. He'd practiced it; Healy could tell. He'd practiced it in the car, probably in the mirror, probably fifty times, because he was talking very carefully and not waving his hands around, which he always did when he talked, and was holding them clasped together in front of him instead, very tightly, the knuckles white. "And then I'll go. I promise. I'll go right after."
Healy didn't say anything.
"I'm so sorry." March said. "I know that doesn't fix it. I know it doesn't. I know you were alone, and I know what that is for you. I know exactly what that is for you, because you told me. You sat on that wall with me and you told me. And I promised. I stood in that ER and I promised. And I wasn't there." He swallowed. "I'm not going to make excuses. I'm not. You already know. Holly told you. I'm just sorry. I'm so sorry, Jackson. That's all. That's the whole thing. I just needed you to hear me say it."
Healy looked at him. At the dark circles, deeper than yesterday. At the same shirt as yesterday. At the tremor in his clasped hands.
Say something, he thought. Say it's okay. Say come here.
He looked back down at the Jell-O.
"Okay." he said.
That was all.
March stood there for a second. Then he nodded, very quickly, several times, like a man agreeing to something he hadn't quite heard.
"Okay." he said. "Okay. Good. Okay."
He went back out into the hall.
Healy put the Jell-O down on the tray. He sat there. He could hear March out there; he could hear the little scrape of the chair as March sat back down in it, right beside the door. He could hear him let out a breath. A long, long breath, with a catch at the end of it.
He sat there with his hands flat on the blanket and didn't call him back, and hated himself for it, and still didn't.
Healy came home on the Saturday.
The surgeon, Lindqvist, was a tall slow-talking Swede with enormous hands and a way of looking at you over the top of his half-glasses like he was reading the small print. He sent Healy home with a list. The incision was about four inches long, low on the right side, running at a slant just inside the point of the hip bone, closed with a row of black stitches and covered with a gauze pad. It was to be kept dry for a week. The dressing was to be changed every day, the wound looked at for redness or swelling or pus or red streaks going out from it, and if there was any of that, or a fever, he was to come back in immediately. He wasn't to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk for four weeks. He wasn't to drive for two. He wasn't to do anything that involved twisting or straining or bending, which in Healy's line of work covered most of it. He'd be sore for a good while. He'd be tired for longer than he expected. Men his age, Lindqvist said, always thought they'd bounce right back. They never did.
"I'm not most men my age."
"No." said Lindqvist mildly, looking at the scar tissue on his knuckles and the long white seam on his thigh and the puckered circle on his shoulder. "I can see you've been busy."
March drove him home.
It was the first time Healy had been alone in a car with him since the morning in the office, when March had crouched on the floor between his knees and said I love you very much, I'm getting the car. He sat with his hand pressed to his side over the dressing and looked out the passenger window the whole way. March drove like somebody was carrying nitroglycerin in the back seat, taking every corner at a crawl, easing the car over every bump and seam in the road, slowing to a near stop for the railroad tracks on Santa Monica. He didn't turn on the radio. He didn't say anything at all. Twice, at stoplights, Healy saw him look over out of the corner of his eye and open his mouth, and then close it again. At the second one, his hand came up off the gearshift toward Healy's knee, the way it always did, the way it had done at stoplights a thousand times. It stopped in the air halfway there. Then it went back to the gearshift.
Healy saw it. He looked out the window.
At the house, March had moved things around.
Healy saw it as soon as he came into the bedroom. March had pushed the bed across the room so that Healy's side was nearest the door and the bathroom, which must have taken him an hour and a lot of swearing, because it was a heavy bed and March had the upper body strength of a folding chair. He'd put a sturdy chair from the kitchen next to it, where Healy could get a hand on the back to push himself up. There was a pitcher of water on the nightstand, and a clean glass. There were the pill bottles from the hospital lined up in a row with a hand-lettered index card propped against them, one of Holly's Westphalia cards turned over and written on the back in March's big loopy writing, underlined twice: PAIN PILLS 6-10-2-6-10. ANTIBIOTIC W/ FOOD 8 AM 8 PM. DO NOT SKIP!!!
There was a cookie sheet on the dresser. Healy recognized it. It was the same one from last fall, the one Holly had scrubbed out and declared was for medical purposes, the one they'd hung up in the garage afterward like a trophy. It had been taken down and scrubbed out again and laid with clean gauze pads and a roll of tape and a brown bottle of Betadine and a pair of scissors and a little box of cotton swabs, all in a neat row, like instruments on a tray.
His robe was laid across the foot of the bed. His slippers were set side by side on the floor below it. His Westerns, all of them, had been brought in from the living room and stacked on the nightstand.
And the couch in the living room was made up with a pillow and a folded blanket.
Healy stood in the hallway and looked at the couch.
"So I don't bump you." March said, behind him. Very neutral. Very careful. "In the night. I kick. You know I kick. You've told me I kick, you've got the bruises. Lindqvist said you shouldn't get jostled. I'll be right out here if you need anything. Just yell. I'm a light sleeper. You know I'm a light sleeper. I'll hear you."
Healy didn't say anything. He went into the bedroom and lowered himself down onto the edge of the bed, slowly, grunting, with his hand on the back of the kitchen chair, and then swung his legs up, which hurt, and lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes.
He heard March stand in the doorway for a long moment. Then he heard him go.
That was how the next week went.
March got up at five-thirty. He didn't need to set the alarm, Healy found out later; he was already awake, because he was sleeping on a couch that was six inches too short for him, with his feet hanging off the arm and his neck bent up against the other one. But Healy didn't know that then. He only knew that every morning at a quarter to six he'd hear the couch creak and then the coffee maker start gurgling in the kitchen, and then the sound of the frying pan. March made breakfast. Real breakfast, eggs and toast and bacon, the eggs scrambled hard, every day, for Healy and for Holly both. At six-thirty he brought Healy's in on a tray and set it down on the bed across his lap, with the pills in a little cup beside the orange juice and a napkin folded into a triangle, and said, "Morning. Antibiotic's with food, don't forget." and went back out without being asked to.
At seven-fifteen he drove Holly to school.
That was Healy's. That had always been Healy's, since the very beginning, the morning drive, and March had never once done it in the two years they'd lived together, because March was not, by his own frequent and emphatic admission, a person who existed before nine a.m. He had described mornings to Holly once as "a rumor spread by farmers." And now he got up in the dark every day and made breakfast and drove her in, and Healy lay in bed and heard them go out the front door, heard the car start in the driveway, and thought about Holly in the passenger seat, looking over at her father.
He came back at a quarter to eight and did the dressing.
Healy had assumed he'd do it himself. He tried, the first morning. He got up and went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror over the sink and peeled back the tape. He got as far as seeing the incision: an angry red line four inches long, puckered along its whole length by the black stitches, bruised purple and green and yellow down both sides, shiny and orange with the Betadine they'd painted on it in the hospital. Then he tried to bend a little to get a good look at the bottom of it, where it went down below the waistband of his pajamas, and the pain folded him over the sink like a jackknife and he hung there on his elbows with his forehead almost touching the faucet, breathing, seeing sparks. When he could see again, March was standing in the bathroom door.
"Let me." March said.
Healy didn't answer. After a second he straightened up, slowly, with one hand braced on the sink, and stood still.
March did it well. That was the thing Healy noticed, even through everything else. March had been on the other end of it last fall; he'd lain there twice a day for fifty-one days and watched Healy's big clumsy hands fumble with forceps and gauze, and shrieked at him, and learned. His hands were cool and light and quick. He knelt on the bathroom tile in front of Healy with the cookie sheet on the floor beside him and cleaned around the incision with a cotton swab dipped in Betadine, in small careful strokes, always outward from the line, never across it. He patted it dry with gauze. He leaned in and looked at it closely, close enough that Healy could feel his breath warm on his skin, checking each stitch, one at a time, his lips moving a little as he counted them. Then he laid the new gauze pad on and taped it down at all four corners, and smoothed the tape once with his thumb, very lightly, the way you'd smooth a letter in an envelope before you sealed it.
"Looks good." he said quietly, still kneeling. "No redness. No swelling. Lindqvist does nice work."
"Fine."
"Do you need anything? More coffee? I can make more coffee. Pills are at ten."
"I know when the pills are."
"Okay." March got up off his knees, which popped. "Okay."
He went out.
He went to the office. Healy heard the car leave. There were two cases open: a deadbeat husband in Van Nuys who owed three years of child support and was allegedly living in his car, and an insurance claim in Burbank, a slip-and-fall in a grocery store that smelled wrong to both of them. And there was the gas bill and the mortgage and the car payment and the phone, and the hospital, and Lindqvist's fee, which would come in the mail any day. March was working both cases now, alone, days, because somebody had to.
He came back at noon with lunch, a sandwich from the deli and a cup of soup, and put it on a tray, and brought it in. He went back out. He picked Holly up from school at three. He brought her home and went back to the office. He came home again at six and made dinner, real dinners, meat and potatoes and green beans and once, disastrously, a pot roast from a recipe in one of Holly's home ec books. He washed up after dinner. He did the evening pills and the evening check of the dressing. He sat at the kitchen table after Holly went to bed and did the invoices and the bills and the case notes and the checkbook, with a cigarette going in the ashtray and a cup of coffee going cold at his elbow, until one, until one-thirty, sometimes later.
Then he lay down on the couch that was too short for him, and didn't sleep.
He didn't complain. Not once. That was the part that Healy, lying awake in the dark bedroom listening to all of it, didn't know what to do with.
Holland March complained about everything. It was his art form. He complained about the weather in Los Angeles, which was nearly perfect three hundred days a year. He complained about his shoes, which he chose. He complained about the price of cigarettes and the Dodgers' bullpen and the way the man at the dry cleaner's looked at his shirts. He'd complained about his stab wound last fall so eloquently and so constantly, in such an astonishing range of metaphors, that by the third week the nurses at Queen of Angels had started a betting pool on what he'd compare it to next. The winner had been an angry badger living in a pillowcase, which had paid out eleven dollars.
He didn't complain now. He didn't talk much at all. That was even stranger. He came in and did whatever needed doing and asked if Healy wanted anything, and when Healy said no or fine or said nothing at all, he said okay and went out again. He was careful. He was so careful. Careful in a way Healy had never once seen on him in two years and didn't like, didn't like at all: as though he were walking across something thin that might crack under him and drop him into cold water.
And Healy let him.
He knew he was doing it. He'd lie in bed and hear March come in the front door at six with the grocery bag, and hear the little sigh March let out when he set it down on the counter and thought nobody was listening, a long tired sound that went down and down like a balloon losing air. And Healy would think, go out there. Get up and go out there and say something. And then he'd remember the clock. The red second hand. The vinyl chair with the grey tape across the split. The phone ringing and ringing in an empty kitchen. And the part of him at the bottom, the part that had been sure, lying there in the dark with tears running into his ears, that it was 1968 again, would clench up like a fist around all of it. And he'd stay where he was.
He wasn't cruel. He told himself that. He said thank you for the tray. He said fine. He said okay. He just didn't let March in. He didn't touch him. He didn't look at him longer than he had to. When March knelt on the bathroom floor to do the dressing, Healy looked at the towel rack. Every time March came into a room, some part of Healy went quietly out of it. And he knew March could feel it happening, because March could always feel everything, every change in the air, every shift of weight; that was what made him good at his job and bad at his life. And some small hard mean part of Healy, a part he wasn't proud of, a part he hadn't known was still in there, thought: Good. Now you know. Now you know what it's like.
On the fourth day, he needed a shower.
Lindqvist had said to keep the incision dry for a week, but a man could only go so long with a washcloth at the sink, and on the fourth morning Healy stood in the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, at the stubble and the grey in it and the hair flat and greasy on one side from the pillow, and couldn't stand himself anymore. March was standing in the door with the cookie sheet.
"I want to shower." Healy said.
March looked at him for a second. Then he nodded and went away and came back with a roll of Saran Wrap and the tape.
He wrapped the dressing himself, kneeling again, laying the plastic over the gauze and taping it down along every edge so no water could get under it. He ran the shower and held his hand under it until it was the right temperature, not too hot. He brought the kitchen chair in and set it in the tub, because Healy couldn't stand that long, and Healy looked at the chair in the tub and felt something hot and humiliated go up his neck. He was fifty-three years old and he needed a chair in the shower. And March just stood there holding the shower curtain, waiting, with a towel over his arm, not looking at anything in particular. Not saying anything.
Healy got in. He sat on the chair. The water came down on him and it felt so good he closed his eyes.
He couldn't wash his own feet. He couldn't wash his legs below the knee. He couldn't bend. He sat there on the chair under the water trying to reach down, and the incision pulled, and he stopped, and tried again, and it pulled again, and he stopped. He sat there with his hands on his knees and the water running down his face.
After a minute the curtain moved. March stepped into the tub, fully dressed, his trousers rolled to the knee and his shirt sleeves pushed up to the elbow, and knelt down in the water. He picked up the washcloth and the soap. And he washed Healy's feet.
He did it carefully and without hurrying. He washed each foot and then each leg to the knee, in long slow strokes, with the water pouring down over both of them and soaking the shoulders of March's shirt, plastering his hair to his head. He didn't say anything at all. Healy sat on the chair and looked down at the top of his head, at the pale wet hair and the part in it and the pink skin of his scalp showing through, and at his thin wrists with the sleeves pushed up, and at the washcloth moving over his own big scarred feet, which he'd always privately thought were the ugliest part of him. He felt something rise up in his throat and sit there, huge, like a stone.
Say it, he thought. Say his name. Just say his name.
He opened his mouth.
"The water's getting cold." he said.
March looked up. His face was wet and Healy couldn't tell what was water and what wasn't.
"Okay." March said. "Okay, I'll hurry."
He finished. He got out, dripping. He helped Healy out, and dried his legs and his feet with the towel, kneeling again on the bathmat in his soaked clothes, and got him into his robe and back to the bed. Then he went and changed his clothes and hung the wet ones over the shower rod, and went to the office, and was fifteen minutes late for the Burbank adjuster, and didn't tell anybody why.
On the Tuesday night, March sat outside Vic's liquor store in the car for twenty-two minutes.
Nobody knew. Nobody would ever know, unless he told them, and for a long time he didn't. He'd gone to Vic's for milk and bread on the way home from the office, and he'd parked, and he'd turned off the engine, and he'd looked through the lit front window at the rows of bottles behind the register. The good stuff up top, gold and amber in the fluorescent light. The cheap stuff at eye level. The little ones, the airplane bottles, in a wire rack right by the cash register, bright and festive as Christmas ornaments.
He sat there. He didn't get out of the car. He sat there with his hands on the steering wheel and looked at the little bottles and thought, very calmly and clearly, about how good it would feel. Not a lot. Just one. Just one of the little ones, the size of a thumb, just to take the edge off. Just to sleep. Just to get one night on that stupid couch where he wasn't lying awake listening for Jackson to call his name and hearing nothing. He thought about the burn of it going down. The warmth spreading out through his chest into his arms. The way the whole world would soften up at the edges, just a little. Just enough.
Twenty-two minutes. He watched the clock on the dash.
Then he thought about Jackson lying in that hospital bed at eight o'clock, telling himself that March had stopped for a drink. Because he'd have thought it. Of course he'd have thought it. March would have thought it himself, in his place. And the only reason, the only reason in the world it wasn't true, was six months of club soda and lime on the back step every night with Jackson sitting beside him.
He started the car. He drove to the Thriftimart on Sunset instead, which was out of the way, and bought the milk and the bread there. He got home forty minutes late and said the line had been long.
Holly didn't talk to Healy much that week either.
She was polite. She was very polite, which was how he knew. She brought him the paper and her homework to look over, and they watched a Rockford Files rerun together one night on the little black-and-white television March had carried into the bedroom from the den so Healy would have something to do. She laughed at the right places. But she looked at him sometimes, when she thought he wasn't looking, and it was a look he'd seen on her before. It was the look she got when she'd figured something out and was waiting, with limited patience, for everybody else to catch up.
On the Thursday he heard her in the kitchen with March. He wasn't trying to listen. The house was small and it was late and they didn't know he was awake.
"Why are you letting him?" Holly said.
"Letting him what?"
"Treat you like that. Like you're the help. Like you're a nurse. He doesn't even look at you, Dad. He looks at the wall. He hasn't said your name in a week. I counted."
A pause. The sound of a dish going into the drying rack.
"Because he's allowed." March said.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true." The water ran and shut off. "Holly. Listen to me. Some people, when they're hurt, they yell. I'm one of those. I yell and I carry on and I make a big production and everybody within a mile knows exactly where it hurts. And some people, when they're hurt, they go quiet and they go away somewhere inside themselves, and they shut the door. Jackson's one of those. He's had to be, his whole life, because nobody ever came and knocked on the door. You understand? Nobody. Ever. So he learned to live in there by himself."
"So knock." said Holly.
"I am knocking. This is knocking. The eggs are knocking. The dressings are knocking." March's voice cracked a little and he stopped, and started again. "I'm just going to keep knocking. As long as it takes. And I'm not going to kick the door in, and I'm not going to yell through it. I'm just going to be out here, so that when he opens it, and he will, somebody's there. That's all. That's the whole plan."
"And what if he doesn't?"
A long silence.
"He will." March said. "He's Jackson. He will."
Holly didn't say anything for a while. Then Healy heard a chair scrape, and a shuffle, and he knew, without seeing it, that she'd gotten up and put her arms around her father, because he heard March make a small sound like the air going out of him.
"You should go to bed, Dad." Holly said, muffled. "You look like a ghost."
"I've got the Burbank invoice."
"You always have the Burbank invoice."
"It's a very long invoice. It's practically a novel. It's the War and Peace of invoices."
Healy lay in the dark bedroom with his hand pressed over the dressing, and his eyes open, and his throat so tight he couldn't swallow.
He's Jackson. He will.
He didn't get up. Not yet. But something turned over in him, lying there, very slowly. Something heavy that had been sitting in one position for a long time, the way a ship turns: so slowly you almost can't see it happening, until all at once you're facing the other way.
On the eighth day, March burned the dinner.
Healy smelled it first. He was lying in bed half asleep in the late afternoon with a Louis L'Amour open face down on his chest, and it came creeping in under the bedroom door: sharp and black and bitter, the smell of something scorched down to the metal. He lay there for a second trying to place it, in that thick slow way you do when you're half under. Then he placed it, and he was sitting up too fast and swearing at the pull in his side.
"Holland?"
Nothing.
"Holland!"
Nothing.
He got up. It took far too long. He got a hand on the back of the kitchen chair and pushed himself up and stood, hunched over the incision, and shuffled to the door, and down the hall in his robe and bare feet, with one hand on the wall. The smell got worse with every step. By the time he got to the living room there was smoke, a thin grey haze of it hanging at head height in the kitchen doorway and curling out along the ceiling.
There was a pot on the back burner of the stove, with the gas flame still going blue under it. Whatever had been in it had boiled dry and burned and was now a black crust across the bottom, cracked like a dry riverbed, smoking steadily. The handle of the pot was too hot to see through the heat shimmer above it.
March was sitting at the kitchen table.
He was asleep.
He'd put his head down on his folded arms on top of a stack of manila folders. There was a pen still in his hand, and an open ledger under his elbow, and a cigarette burned all the way down to the filter in the ashtray beside him with a long grey worm of ash still holding its shape. He was deeply, completely asleep, his mouth a little open against his sleeve, his breathing slow. The smoke was drifting over his head. He couldn't smell it. He hadn't been able to smell anything since 1971, when a man he'd been tailing for a divorce case turned around in a parking garage in Pasadena and hit him across the back of the head with a length of pipe, and he'd woken up in the hospital two days later with fourteen stitches and a world that had gone permanently, completely scentless. He'd put potatoes on to boil and sat down for just a minute to finish the Burbank invoice while they cooked, and his body had simply, finally, overruled him.
For one long second Healy couldn't move.
He knew about the fire. Not from March. March had given him pieces of it over two years, at three in the morning, in bars, once in a car in the rain parked outside an empty lot in Silver Lake where a house wasn't anymore. But March always stopped before the middle. He'd get to a certain point and his voice would go and he'd light a cigarette instead.
It was Holly who'd told him the middle.
She'd told him when he’d first met this strange little broken family, a man she’d just met one of the most painful things that happened to them, maybe because there was no one to talk to about it, maybe it was so he’d understand her father a little better. That for weeks before, her mom had kept smelling gas. In the kitchen, mostly, and worse at night. And her dad had stood in the kitchen and breathed in, and looked at them both, and couldn't smell a thing, not a thing, not since the man with the pipe. And he'd said it was probably the drains. And he'd said he'd get to it. And he'd been drinking and he hadn't gotten to it.
He knew the rest from the newspapers, which he'd looked up himself, later, at the library, without telling anybody. March out late, drunk. Home after midnight. The explosion a little before two. March getting Holly out through her bedroom window. March going back in, and back in, and the firemen dragging him out the third time with his hands burned and his eyebrows gone. Amy upstairs. And there were still nights, Healy knew, that March woke up and went and stood in Holly's doorway until it got light, just to watch her breathe.
And here was March, asleep at a kitchen table, with smoke hanging in the air over his head, and no way in the world to know it was there.
Healy thought: If I'd been at the office. If Holly had had debate. If I'd been asleep. If I'd taken the pain pill an hour ago instead of putting it off.
He thought: He'd never have known.
He moved. He got across the kitchen faster than he'd moved in a week, and it hurt like a white-hot wire pulled through his side, and he didn't care. He turned the burner off. He grabbed a dish towel and got the pot by the handle and moved it to the sink, and the weight of it, which was nothing, a couple of pounds, pulled at the incision so hard that he saw sparks. He ran the water into it, and it hissed and spat, and a big gout of steam and smoke went up into his face. He wrenched open the window over the sink. He stood there with both hands gripping the edge of the counter, breathing, his whole body shaking, the steam rising.
Then he turned around and looked at March.
He looked at him properly. For the first time in eight days, he let himself actually look.
March was thin. He'd always been thin, but he'd put on a few pounds over the winter, finally, after last fall, and they were gone again. There were bruise-colored hollows under his eyes that went down into his cheeks. His hair needed washing. He was wearing the same shirt he'd worn yesterday, Healy realized, and maybe the day before that; there was a coffee stain on the cuff and the collar had gone limp. There was a red crease across the side of his neck from the arm of the couch, like a scar. His hand, the one still holding the pen, had a little tremor in it even in his sleep, a fine fast trembling in the fingers, and for one cold second Healy thought drink and his heart dropped. And then he saw the coffee cup beside him, and the pot on the counter, empty and burned too, and the ashtray, overflowing, and he understood it was only this. Just a man running on three or four hours of sleep a night on a couch he didn't fit on, and eight cups of coffee a day, and nothing else, for over a week.
Under his elbow the ledger was open to the household accounts. Healy could see March's handwriting on the page, the big loopy letters crammed small to fit into the narrow columns. Mortgage. Gas. Phone. Car. And the hospital. And Lindqvist's bill, the surgeon's fee, which Healy hadn't even let himself think about, which was more than a month of their mortgage. There was a note beside it in the margin: Call Monday, ask about payments?? Take from savings? DON'T TELL J. Underlined twice.
Under the ledger was a yellow legal pad. On it was a list, in the same handwriting.
pills 6 / 10 / 2 / 6 / 10 Antibiotic w/ FOOD Dressing AM + PM. Check for red!! streaks = hospital Wrap for shower (Saran) H. school 7:15, pickup 3:00. (Thurs 4:00, debate) Van Nuys: stakeout Tues night? Ask Chet to sit w/ J?? Or H. Burbank invoice. Burbank chiropractor?? (Glendale?) Milk, eggs, bread, Jell-O (GREEN, not red, he said red tastes like cough syrup) Licorice (the black, ugh) Call Lindqvist re: bill Get J. the good pillows from the office couch Don't talk too much Don't make it about you
Healy read the last two lines three times.
Don't talk too much.
Don't make it about you.
He stood there in the kitchen in his bathrobe, with the smoke thinning out the open window and his side burning and his hands still shaking from the pot, and something enormous that had been lying on its side in him for eight days rolled over, all the way, and sat up.
He'd said red tastes like cough syrup once. Once. On the second day in the hospital, to the nurse with the braid, when March wasn't even in the room. When March was sitting in the hallway. On the floor. Outside the door. Listening.
He heard Holly's key in the front door. He heard her come in and drop her book bag in the hall, and stop, and sniff.
"Is something burning?"
She came to the kitchen doorway at a run and saw him standing by the sink and saw her father asleep at the table and the smoke, and her face went white, all at once, completely white, the way it hadn't gone for Long Beach or the hospital or anything else, and she stopped dead.
"It's okay." Healy said. His voice came out strange. "It's okay. It's out. It's just the potatoes. He fell asleep. He didn't smell it."
Holly was staring at the stove. Then at her father. Then at Healy. Healy watched her breathe. He watched her remember something she'd told herself she didn't remember, and then put it away again, very carefully, somewhere deep.
"He's been doing that." she said. Her voice shook, and then it firmed up. "Falling asleep. Everywhere. At stoplights. When he picked me up Tuesday he fell asleep at the light on Sunset and the guy behind us honked for like ten whole seconds before he woke up. He sleeps on the couch with his shoes on because he says it's not worth taking them off." She looked at Healy, and her face had that look on it now. The waiting look. "He does the bills at the table till two in the morning. I get up to pee and he's still there. He sits in the car in the driveway sometimes when he gets home. Just sits there. With the engine off. Like he can't make himself come in."
Healy didn't say anything.
"Healy." Holly said. "He's so tired."
"I know."
"You don't." she said. "You don't know. You haven't looked at him in a week."
It was fair. It landed right in the middle of him, exactly where she'd aimed it, and it was fair, and it went in all the way.
"I know." he said again. And then, after a second: "I'm looking now."
Holly stood there a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, very like her father, and came into the kitchen and went past him to the sink and looked into the black pot, and put her hand very briefly on his arm as she went by.
"I'll make grilled cheese." she said. "Don't wake him up yet."
He didn't wake March up. He sat down across the table from him, which hurt, and watched him sleep while Holly made grilled cheese and tomato soup from a can. He watched the tremor in his fingers. He watched the pulse going in his temple. He watched him breathe.
March woke up on his own at twenty past six, all at once, with a gasp, the way he always woke from real sleep: sitting bolt upright with the pen still in his fingers and the imprint of a folder's edge pressed red across his cheek, looking around wildly like he'd been dropped there from a height.
He saw the stove. He saw the pot in the sink with the black crust in it and the window wide open and the last thin haze of smoke still hanging up near the ceiling light.
Healy watched it hit him.
All the color went out of his face at once. His eyes went huge. He came up out of the chair so fast it went over backwards behind him with a crash, and he stood there staring at the stove, and his chest was heaving, and his hands came up in front of him, open, shaking, the way they'd come up in front of him on a kitchen floor in Echo Park last fall.
"Holly." he said. "Holly..."
"I'm right here, Dad. I'm right here. I'm fine."
"Where's, is everybody, the smoke, I didn't, oh God, oh my God, I didn't..."
"It's out." Healy said. "Holland. It's out. It was just the potatoes. Everybody's fine."
March turned and looked at him. And Healy saw that he'd gone somewhere else entirely. He wasn't in this kitchen. He was in another kitchen, in another house, six years ago, with the air full of black and his daughter screaming. He was looking at Healy but he wasn't seeing him.
"I fell asleep." March whispered. "I fell asleep. I didn't smell it. I can't. I can't smell it. You know I can't smell it, if Holly had been asleep, if you'd been asleep, you can't get out of bed by yourself, Jackson, you can't even get up without the chair, and I put it on and I sat down and I fell asleep, and I didn't, I never, I would've never known, I'd have..."
He couldn't finish. His hand went over his mouth. He was shaking all over now, big shudders going through him from his shoulders down, and his eyes were wet and wild.
"I'm sorry." he said through his fingers. "I'm sorry, Jackson, I'm so sorry, I just sat down for one second. You had to get up. You shouldn't have gotten up. You shouldn't be lifting, the pot's heavy, Lindqvist said, did you lift it? Did it pull? Let me see. Let me see, I'll check it, I'll clean it up. I'll clean all of it, I'm sorry, I'm, sit down, please, I'll bring you a plate, I'm so..."
"Holland." Healy said.
March stopped talking.
It was the first time Healy had said his name in eight days. Healy saw him hear it. He saw it go through him from the top of his head to his feet, like a bell rung inside him. His hand came down from his mouth. He stood there by the overturned chair and just looked at Healy. And slowly, slowly, his eyes came back from wherever they'd been, and he was in this kitchen again.
Healy got up. It took a while. He got his hand on the edge of the table and pushed himself up, and March came halfway around the table automatically to help and then stopped himself, and stood there with his hands out, not touching, not sure if he was allowed.
Healy crossed the rest of the distance himself. He put one hand on the side of March's neck, under his jaw, where he could feel the pulse going like a rabbit's. He held it there.
"Everybody's fine." he said, low. "You hear me? Look at me. Everybody's fine. It's out. Holly's right there. I'm right here. Nobody's hurt. It was potatoes."
March looked at him. Healy felt him swallow under his palm.
"Eat your dinner." Healy said. It was the best he could do right then, with his own heart still going like a hammer, and Holly standing at the stove with the spatula in her hand not pretending not to watch, and the words he actually wanted to say piling up in his throat so thick they wouldn't come through. "Just pick up the chair and sit down and eat your dinner. Okay? I'm fine."
March sat down. He ate half of a grilled cheese sandwich, very slowly, like he'd forgotten how. He didn't say another word through the whole meal. Healy didn't either. But at one point, reaching for the salt, Healy's hand brushed March's on the table, and he didn't take it away. He left it there, the backs of their fingers touching. March went very still. He looked at their two hands for a long moment, lying side by side on the oilcloth, and then he looked down at his plate, and Healy saw a tear drop off the end of his nose and land on the crust of his sandwich, and March didn't wipe it, and didn't move his hand.
That night Healy couldn't sleep.
He lay in the bed with the lamp off and listened. He heard Holly go to bed. He heard March wash the dishes, one at a time, and scrub the burned pot for a long time, a very long time, much longer than it needed, with steel wool, the harsh scraping sound going on and on in the dark kitchen. He heard the kitchen chair scrape and the rustle of papers. Then nothing, for a long time. Then the click of the table lamp going off. Then the creak of the couch in the living room as March lay down on it, and the long, slow sigh he let out as he did, a sound like it came up from the very bottom of him.
Then he heard something else.
It was very quiet. He almost didn't hear it. He lay there for a long time before he was sure. A small, muffled, hitching sound, over and over, from the living room. Somebody trying very hard to make no noise at all, with their face pressed into a couch cushion.
Healy lay there and listened to March cry, and couldn't breathe.
At two, he got up. He told himself it was for the pills.
He'd lost track of whether he'd taken the ten o'clock, which was the kind of thing March kept track of for him, and the index card with the times was on the nightstand, but he'd knocked it off somewhere in the dark. He went looking for it. He found instead, in the drawer of the nightstand, the manila envelope from Hollywood Presbyterian with his discharge paperwork in it. March had brought it home and put it there on Saturday, and Healy hadn't looked at it once. He opened it now, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking for the pill schedule.
There were the instructions, typed, three pages. The list of don'ts. Lindqvist's appointment card for the follow-up, a week from Monday. And something small and pink stuck to the back of the last page with a paper clip, as though somebody at a desk had gathered up a pile of papers in a hurry and it had come along with them by accident.
It was a telephone message slip. The kind with the printed form and the blank lines to fill in. WHILE YOU WERE OUT.
For: Pt. HEALY, J. (surg., room ??) From: CHP Dispatch, relaying for Holland MARCH Time: 4:58 pm Message: Stuck on 405 N, major accident (tanker fire), freeway closed. Daughter is with him. Coming ASAP. Says he is very sorry. Says to tell him "right here."
Under that, in a different pen, in somebody else's writing: Pt. still in OR. Give to 5th flr.
Nobody had given it to the fifth floor.
Healy sat on the edge of the bed with the pink slip in his hand and read it by the light coming in from the hall. He read it again. He read it a third time.
Says to tell him "right here."
A dispatcher somewhere, a woman sitting in a room full of radios on the worst traffic night of the year, with a tanker burning on the 405 and people dead in a station wagon and a hundred calls coming in, had taken the time to write that down. Because a man on a freeway call box had asked her to. In quotes. Like it was important. Because it was. Because it was the most important thing on the whole slip.
He thought about March running half a mile down the shoulder of the 405 in his good shoes with his hand on his scar.
He thought about the list on the kitchen table. Don't talk too much. Don't make it about you.
He thought about March kneeling in the bathtub in his clothes, washing Healy's ugly feet with the water pouring down on him.
He thought about March standing by the overturned chair tonight with his hands up and his face gone white, back in the other kitchen, the one that burned. I can't smell it. You know I can't smell it. And the first thing he'd said, the very first thing, after Holly's name, was about Healy not being able to get out of bed without the chair.
And he thought about the clock in the hospital room. The red second hand. And the small mean voice at eight o'clock that had said he stopped for a drink. How he'd known, even then, even with the morphine in him, that it was a lie. How he'd let it talk to him anyway. How he'd let it keep talking for eight whole days, while March slept on a couch that didn't fit him and got up in the dark and did everything, everything, without one word of complaint. How he'd lain in this bed and listened to March come home tired every single night and thought: Good. Now you know what it's like.
He'd done to March exactly what had been done to him. He'd left him in the hallway. He'd let him sit out there on the floor and wait, and watch the door, and listen for his name, and never hear it. For eight days. He'd done it on purpose.
He put the slip down on the bed beside him and put both his hands over his face.
Then he got up. He went out to the living room.
March was on the couch, on his back, with his feet hanging off the arm and his shoes still on, just like Holly said. One arm was flung over his eyes. He wasn't asleep. Healy could tell by his breathing, which was too careful. He'd been lying there awake in the dark, listening to Healy get up, holding himself perfectly still. The couch cushion under his head was damp.
"Holland." Healy said.
March moved his arm. His eyes were red and swollen and bright in the light from the kitchen.
"Are you okay? Is it your side? Is it the dressing?" He was already sitting up, already swinging his feet to the floor. "Is it bleeding? Did you pull it with the pot? I knew you pulled it. Let me see, let me get the light, let me..."
"It's not my side."
March stopped halfway up.
Healy held out the pink slip. His hand wasn't quite steady.
March took it and looked at it. He read it, and read it again, and Healy watched his face do something complicated and then just crumple, all at once, the way Holly's had crumpled in a waiting room at Queen of Angels last fall.
"She called." March said. His voice had gone thin and high. "She really called. I didn't know if she really would. They never gave it to you. Jackson. They never gave it to you?"
"No."
"So you thought. The whole time. All night. You thought I just..." He couldn't finish it. He put his hand over his mouth. "You called the house. You called the house and it rang and rang and you thought I was... Oh, Jackson."
Healy sat down on the couch next to him. It took a while, and it hurt, and March's hands came out automatically to help him down, the way they'd been coming out for a week, the way Healy had been stepping out from under them for a week. This time Healy let them. This time he held onto March's arm on the way down and didn't let go when he got there.
"I didn't need the slip." Healy said. "That's the thing. I want you to know that. I need you to know that. Holly told me. That first night. She sat right there in that chair and told me about the fire, and the call box, and you running, and your scar. I heard every word. I knew. I knew it the whole time. And I didn't care."
He looked down at his hands. At the right one, the one with the knuckles that had been broken twice.
"I knew it wasn't you." he said. "I knew you did everything right. I knew you left early. I knew there was nothing you could've done. I knew, Holland. And I was lying there. And it was '68. It was the traction and the ward and that nurse with her clipboard asking me who to call, and me saying nobody, because my wife was off married to my own father and there wasn't anybody else. It was that apartment. It was that phone. And I couldn't get out of it. I've been in it all week. I've been sitting in that apartment for a week, and I've been making you pay for it. And you didn't do anything. You didn't do one thing. You left early."
"I promised." March whispered. "I promised you I'd be there."
"There was a tanker on fire."
"I promised." March said again. And that was when he broke.
It was the week coming out of him, Healy thought. It was eight days of five-thirty a.m. and two a.m. and the couch and the bills and the school run and the dressings and the eggs, and keeping his mouth shut, when keeping his mouth shut was the hardest thing in the world for him. It was going out of every room Healy was in the second he could see he wasn't wanted. It was sitting on a hospital floor, and on a bathtub floor, and in a car outside a liquor store, and not saying one word about any of it to anybody. It came out of him in big, shaking, ugly sobs that he couldn't keep quiet anymore. He folded forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and shook like a tree in the wind.
Healy put an arm around him. The angle was bad and it pulled at the incision, and he didn't care. He pulled March in against his good side and held on.
"I'm sorry." March was saying, into his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry I wasn't there. You told me. On the wall. You told me nobody came, and I sat there with my head on your shoulder and I swore to God, I swore, never again. Not to you. Not while I'm alive. And I wasn't there. And you were all alone, and you cried, Jackson. I saw it. When I came in, I saw the marks on your face, I saw where it went into your ears. I saw it. And I did that. I did that to you." A long ragged breath. "I'm such a fuck-up. I try so hard. I try so hard, every day, I try so hard, and I'm still, I'm always, I'm still the guy who..."
"No. Hey. No."
"I'm always going to be too late for something. That's who I am. That's always who I've been. I was late for her too. She told me. She told me for weeks, Jackson. She smelled gas. Holly smelled gas. And I stood there in that kitchen and I couldn't smell a thing, and I said it was the drains, and I said I'd get to it, and I came home late and drunk and I said tomorrow. I'll fix it tomorrow. I'll make it up. And then there wasn't a tomorrow. And I thought, this time, this time, I'm going to be on time, I'm going to be there, I'm going to get it right for once in my life. And I sat on that freeway for four and a half hours watching the clock, knowing, knowing you were in that bed watching one too. And there was nothing I could do. I couldn't do anything. I just had to sit there. And it happened anyway. It happened again. It always happens again."
Healy held him tighter.
"You're not late." he said. "You hear me? You're not the guy who's late. You're the guy who ran half a mile down a freeway to a call box with your hand on your scar. You're the guy who got a Highway Patrol dispatcher on the worst night of her life to write right here in quotes on a message slip. You got up at five-thirty every day this week. You. Holland March. You drove the kid to school at seven-fifteen in the morning, which I know for a fact you think is a time that only exists for farmers and bakers."
A wet, broken sound came out of March. It might have been a laugh.
"You did every dressing." Healy said. "On your knees. On the bathroom floor. You cooked every meal. You made a pot roast."
"It was a terrible pot roast."
"It was a terrible pot roast, and I ate all of it. You worked both cases alone. You've been sleeping on a couch that's a foot too short for you so I don't get bumped. You've been doing the bills till two in the morning so I don't have to see that surgeon's number and worry." Healy took a breath that shook. "You got in the bathtub with your clothes on. You washed my feet. You wrote Jell-O, green, not red. You wrote licorice, the black, ugh."
March lifted his face out of his hands. It was blotched and wet and his nose was running and his mustache was a total disaster.
"You told the nurse." he said. "About the red. You said it tasted like cough syrup."
"I know. And you were sitting on the floor outside the door listening. Weren't you."
March looked down.
"I didn't want to be in the way." he said. "I didn't want you to feel like I was, like there was a guard on the door. I just wanted to be close enough. In case. In case you called for me." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "You never did."
That one went in. That one went in so deep that Healy had to close his eyes for a second.
"I know." he said. "I know I didn't."
"I was just trying to be useful. I wasn't trying to make you feel bad. I didn't want to make it about me. It wasn't about me. You were the one who. I just wanted to do it right. For once in my life. I wanted to not talk and not make a joke and not make a production, and just do it all right, every little thing, and you'd see. You'd look up one day and you'd see. And then it'd be okay again."
"It's okay."
"Is it?"
"I'm the one who wasn't okay. Not you. It was never you." Healy put his hand on the back of March's neck, under the hair, and held it, the way he did sometimes when they were driving or when March was upset or just because. He felt March lean back into it, the whole weight of him, slowly, like something being set down after it had been carried a very long way. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Holland. I was hurt, and I was scared, and I was lying in there feeling like I was forty-three again and nobody in the world gave a damn whether I lived or died. And I took it out on the one person who's ever given a damn. I was a son of a bitch to you for a week. And you didn't deserve one minute of it. You hear me? Not one single minute."
"I left you alone."
"A truck left me alone. A truck and a station wagon. And I left you alone. For a week. On purpose. Out in the hall." His voice cracked, finally, all the way, and he let it. "I did the exact same thing to you. The exact thing. I made you sit out there and wait. And you just kept waiting. You kept coming back. Every day. Every morning, the eggs. And I kept thinking, I kept lying there thinking, he's going to get tired of it. He's going to give up and go. That's what people do. And you just. You didn't. You never did."
"Of course I didn't." March said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Where would I go? You're here."
Healy couldn't answer that. He pulled March in closer against him with the arm around his shoulders, and bent his head, and put his face in March's hair, and stayed there. After a while he felt his own face get wet, and didn't do anything about it. March felt it too. March didn't say anything. He just reached up without lifting his head and put his hand flat on Healy's cheek and left it there, holding the wet in.
They sat like that for a long time. March's breath hitched a few more times and then slowed down, and then evened out. Healy sat in the dark living room at two in the morning with his side aching and the man he loved folded up against him, and let the week go. He could feel it go. He could feel it leave him, like a fever breaking.
"You were right here." Healy said eventually, into his hair. "The whole time. On the floor. Every day. Weren't you."
"The nurses started bringing me coffee." March mumbled into his shoulder. "The one with the braid. She said they call me the hallway man."
"She told me you were out there. Every morning. I'd ask."
March lifted his head. "You asked?"
"Every morning."
"She told me that. I didn't believe her. I thought she was just being nice."
"I asked every morning." Healy said. "I'd ask, is he out there, and she'd say yes. And I'd turn over and look out the window and think, thank God. And then I still wouldn't let you in." He shook his head slowly. "I don't know why. I've been trying to figure out why all week. I think I was scared of how much I needed it. How much I needed you in that chair. I spent ten years making sure I never needed anybody that much. And then I did. And the one time you weren't there, it scared me so bad I couldn't see straight."
March looked at him for a long time in the dim light.
"Jackson." he said. "You're allowed to need me. You know that, right? That's the whole deal. That's the entire arrangement. I need you so much it's embarrassing. I need you to open jars. I need you to tell me when I've got spinach in my teeth. I need you to sit on the back step with me every night so I don't go to Vic's."
Healy went still. "Did you go to Vic's?"
March held his eyes.
"I sat outside." he said. "Tuesday. For twenty-two minutes. I watched the clock. I didn't go in. I drove to the Thriftimart instead and bought milk. I thought about you in that bed thinking I'd stopped for a drink. And I thought, well, that's one thing I can make sure isn't true." He swallowed. "I wasn't going to tell you. I didn't want to make it about me."
Healy put his forehead down against March's.
"Make it about you." he said roughly. "Please. Sometimes. You're allowed. That's the deal too."
"Okay." March whispered.
"Next time you sit outside Vic's, you come home and you tell me. And you wake me up. I don't care what time it is."
"Okay."
"Promise."
"I promise." March said. "And you know me. I keep my promises. Eventually. Traffic permitting."
Healy laughed. It hurt, all the way down, and he held his side and laughed anyway, and March laughed too, wet and cracked and helpless, and put his hand over Healy's on the incision to hold it for him while he did.
"Come to bed." Healy said, when he could. "Come to bed, hallway man."
March lifted his head.
"I'll bump you."
"I don't care."
"Lindqvist said..."
"I don't care what Lindqvist said. I'll lie on my left side, and you'll lie on your side and keep your feet to yourself for once in your life, and if you bump me, you bump me." Healy got his hand on the arm of the couch and started, painfully, to push himself up. "I'm done sleeping in that room by myself. I did enough of that. I did ten years of that. I don't want to do it anymore."
March was up before he was, getting an arm around him, taking the weight.
"Take your shoes off first." Healy said.
"Holly told you about the shoes?"
"Holly tells me everything. She's on my side."
"She's on my side. She told me she was going to yell at you."
"Yeah." said Healy. "She did."
"She's very frightening when she yells. She gets it from me."
"She gets it from her mother, I bet."
March was quiet for a second, and then he said, "Yeah. She does." and Healy felt him lean into him, a little, as they went down the hall. It was the first time March had ever said anything about Amy to him without it being three in the morning.
It was a little after three by then, actually. But it felt different.
They got into the bed very carefully, March on the far side, Healy on his left with his back to the door and his right side up and clear, the way Lindqvist would've wanted. March lay stiff as a board for about five minutes at the very edge of the mattress, so far away from Healy that there was a cold gap between them you could have parked a car in, and Healy finally reached back without turning around and found his wrist and pulled until March moved over and fit himself carefully against Healy's back. His arm came around, slowly, and settled across Healy's chest, high up, well away from the dressing, the way it had been settling across him in the middle of the night for two years.
"Where'd you go." March mumbled into his shoulder, already half asleep.
It was what he always said. Healy had heard it a hundred times.
"Nowhere." Healy said. His throat was tight. "I'm right here."
March was asleep in about thirty seconds. Really asleep, heavily, his whole body going slack against Healy's back and his breath slowing and deepening against the nape of his neck, the first real sleep he'd had in almost two weeks. His arm got heavy. Somewhere in the second minute he started to snore: the little whistle going in, the flutter of the lips going out.
Healy lay there in the dark and listened to it for a long time. It was a good sound. It was the best sound he knew.
March kept taking care of him. Healy let him.
That was the difference, afterward. Not that March did less. If anything he did more, because now he didn't have to do it from the doorway. But now Healy let him in.
When March came in with the tray in the morning, Healy moved over, and March sat on the edge of the bed while he ate and read him the funnies from the Times in voices. He did Garfield like Orson Welles. When March knelt on the bathroom floor to do the dressing, Healy looked at his face instead of the towel rack, and when March said, "No redness, Lindqvist does nice work." Healy said, "So do you." and March went pink to the tips of his ears and dropped the Betadine. When March came home from the office at six with a bag of groceries, Healy was sitting at the kitchen table peeling carrots into the sink, because it was something to do with his hands and something he could do from a chair, and March stopped in the doorway with the grocery bag in his arms and stood there looking at him for a long moment before he came in.
"You're doing chores." he said.
"I'm peeling carrots."
"You're doing chores, Jackson, sitting down, in your robe, in my kitchen, it's the most erotic thing I've ever seen."
"It's our kitchen."
March put the bag down. "Say that again."
"It's our kitchen." Healy said, and March came over and kissed him on the top of the head, hard, and then went to put the milk away and stood with his back to Healy at the refrigerator for a while longer than it took to put away milk.
They split the work. Healy couldn't lift or drive or bend, but he could make phone calls, and he could write reports, and he could sit at a kitchen table with a telephone and a legal pad and the Burbank file and run the whole thing down from right there. He called doctors' offices and pharmacies and chiropractors all over the Valley in a voice that sounded exactly like a bored insurance adjuster, until on the second afternoon he found a chiropractor in Glendale who'd been treating the claimant's bad neck for three years before she slipped on a grape in the produce aisle. March went and got the records. They closed it in four days. The check covered Lindqvist, with some left over for the car.
Chet came over and sat with Healy on the Tuesday night so March could do the Van Nuys stakeout. He brought a paperback and a six-pack of root beer and they watched the Dodgers lose to the Reds and argued about the bullpen. March came home at three in the morning with a roll of film full of pictures of the deadbeat husband, who was not living in his car at all but in a very nice condo in Encino with a woman who was not his wife. He came into the bedroom in the dark, very quietly, and got into the bed very carefully on the far side, trying not to jostle. Healy, who hadn't been sleeping, who had been lying there listening for the car, reached out without a word and found his hand.
"You were supposed to be asleep." March whispered.
"I was waiting up."
"You didn't have to wait up."
"I know." said Healy. "I wanted to. I wanted to hear the car."
March didn't say anything for a while. Then he squeezed Healy's hand, and held on, and fell asleep like that.
Holly went back to looking at Healy normally. She caught his eye across the dinner table on the Wednesday, while March was telling a very long story about the motel clerk in Encino who had tried to sell him a timeshare, and she didn't say anything, but she raised her eyebrows at him. Healy raised his eyebrows back. She held it a second longer, measuring. Then she nodded, very slightly, and went back to eating her green beans.
That was all it needed.
Later, while March was in the shower, she came and leaned in the bedroom doorway.
"You did good." she said.
"I did bad for a week first."
"Yeah." She considered that. "You did pretty bad."
"I know."
"He never stopped, though. Not once. Even when you were being." she searched for the word, "a wall."
"I know that too."
Holly looked at him for a while. She looked, in that moment, very much like her father, and also very much like somebody else, somebody Healy had never met and only knew from one photograph in March's wallet, a laughing dark-haired woman on a beach.
"He'd do anything for you." she said. "You know that, right? Anything. He'd go through a wall. He'd go into a fire."
"Yeah." Healy said quietly. "I know he would."
"So don't make him have to."
She went off to bed.
On the fourteenth day March took the stitches out.
Lindqvist had said Healy could come in and have them done at the office, or have somebody at home do it if they were careful, and March said he'd be careful, and he was. He sat on the edge of the bed with a pair of little curved scissors and a pair of tweezers, sterilized in boiling water in the saucepan on the stove, and his reading glasses, which he'd recently and very bitterly started needing, pushed down on the end of his nose. He snipped each stitch just above the knot and slid it out with a small tug and laid it on a square of gauze, one after another, in a row. Eleven. Healy lay there and watched him do it: the pale hair falling in his face, the tip of his tongue caught in the corner of his mouth, the little frown of concentration between his eyebrows.
"You're staring." March said, without looking up.
"I'm allowed."
"You're making me nervous. I've got a sharp object near your abdomen, Jackson."
"I trust you."
March's hands stopped, just for a second. Then they went on.
"There." he said at last, and dabbed the line with Betadine one more time, and laid a fresh small bandage over it. "Nice and neat. You're going to have a very small, very tasteful scar. Classy. Understated. Not like mine. Mine's a scar with ambition. Mine has a five-year plan."
"Yours is a zipper."
"Mine is a statement." March put the scissors down. He looked at the little row of eleven black stitches lying on the gauze. Then he took off the reading glasses and looked at Healy, and his face was serious. "Jackson."
"Yeah."
"If it ever happens again. If you're ever in a bed like that. If I'm ever late, for any reason at all. If there's a fire, or an earthquake, or a flood, or, or, a meteor, or I get kidnapped by a man with a hook for a hand, or I'm lying dead in a ditch..."
"You're not gonna be dead in a ditch."
"If I'm lying dead in a ditch." March said, right over him, "I want you to know that I'm coming anyway. I want you to know that that's where I am. That I'm on my way. That I'm trying to get to you as fast as I possibly can with whatever I've got left. That's what it means. When I'm not there. If you ever look at that chair and it's empty. It means I'm on my way. It never, ever, ever means anything else. Okay?"
Healy looked at him for a long time.
"Okay." he said.
"Say it back to me."
"You're on your way."
"Right." said March, and his voice wobbled on it, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. "Right here. Or on my way. Those are the only two. There isn't a third one. There's never going to be a third one."
Healy reached up and took hold of that wrist and held it.
"I know." he said. "I know that. I knew it the whole time. I think I just needed somebody to remind me."
"Well." said March, and sniffed hugely, and managed a smile. "I'm very good at reminding people of things. Constantly. Repeatedly. Past the point of all reason. I'm told it's one of my most exhausting qualities."
"Remind me every day." said Healy.
"I'll put it on the list."
"You've got a list?"
"Jackson." March said, with great dignity. "I always have a list."
"Come here." said Healy.
March came. He lay down carefully on the bed on the left, on the good side, and put his head on Healy's shoulder and his arm across Healy's chest, well clear of the new pink line low down on the right. Healy put his arm around him. Outside the window the marine layer was burning off, and the light was coming in gold across the bedspread, and down the hall they could hear Holly on the phone with somebody from her decathlon team, talking very fast about the state finals in Sacramento, which were in six weeks, and which she had already announced they were all three driving up for together, and leaving a full day early, in case of traffic.
After a while March fell asleep again. He'd started doing that. Falling asleep in the afternoons, all at once, whenever he sat still near Healy for more than five minutes, like his body had finally been told it was allowed to and was making up for lost time. Healy didn't mind. He lay there with his side aching a little and March warm and heavy against him and let himself be exactly where he was.
His arm went dead. He didn't move it.
He watched the clock on the nightstand for a while, out of habit. It was a small brass one that had been March's mother's, with no second hand, just the hour and the minute, and it didn't tick. Then he stopped watching it, and closed his eyes, because there was nothing to wait for anymore. Everybody was already here.
Three weeks later, when he was allowed to drive again, Healy drove to the California Highway Patrol communications center in Los Angeles with a two-pound box of See's Candies on the passenger seat.
It took him most of a morning to find out who she was. He made some calls. He called in a favor from Ed Marroquin at Hollywood Division, who called somebody who called somebody, and he got a name and a shift. He went up to the front desk at eleven o'clock in the morning in his blue leather jacket, with the box under his arm, and asked for a Mrs. Ruth Ann Bixby, please, if she wasn't busy, it wouldn't take a minute.
She came out after about fifteen minutes. She was maybe sixty, heavy-set, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a headset pushed down around her collar, and she looked at him with frank suspicion, the way a woman looks at a very large strange man who has asked for her by name.
"Can I help you?"
"You took a call." Healy said. "Five weeks ago. The night of the tanker on the 405. From a call box. A guy. Skinny. Blond. Kind of hysterical. He asked you to call a hospital."
Ruth Ann Bixby looked at him for a long moment. Then her face changed.
"Right here." she said.
"Yeah." said Healy. "Right here."
"Oh, honey." She put her hand on her chest. "Oh, I remember him. I remember that one. I had a hundred calls that night and I remember that one. He was crying. He was trying not to, but he was. He said you'd know what it meant." She looked at Healy, up and down, at the jacket and the size of him and the look on his face. "You're him. You're the one in the hospital."
"I'm the one."
"Did you get it? The message? I called it in myself. I didn't hand it off, I called it in. I wanted to be sure."
Healy thought about telling her the truth. About the pink slip stuck to the back of the discharge papers with a paper clip, and the empty chair, and the red second hand, and the week after. He thought about it, and then he didn't, because it wasn't hers to carry and she'd done everything right. Everybody had done everything right. It was only a truck.
"Yeah." he said. "I got it."
He held out the box of See's. She looked at it, and at him, and something in her eyes went soft and a little wet behind the reading glasses.
"Well, you didn't have to do that."
"Yeah." said Healy, "I did." and he put the box in her hands, and shook the other one, and went back out to the car.
March was waiting in the passenger seat. He'd insisted on coming and then insisted on staying in the car, because he said he'd cry if he went in and he'd already cried in front of the Highway Patrol once this year and that was his limit. He looked up when Healy got in.
"Well?"
"She remembered you."
"She did not."
"First thing she said. Right here."
March stared at him. Then he turned and looked out the window, very hard, at the parking lot, for a while.
"She said you were crying." Healy added.
"I was sweating. It's different. I've told you, it's a completely different fluid."
Healy started the car. He reached across and put his hand on March's knee, the way he did at stoplights, the way March had done a thousand times and had stopped himself doing, halfway, on the drive home from the hospital. He left it there.
March looked down at it. Then he put his own hand over it.
"Where to?" Healy said.
"Home." said March. "Let's go home. The long way. Surface streets. No freeways. I've had it with freeways. I'm never getting on a freeway again as long as I live."
"We're driving to Sacramento in three weeks."
"We'll take the scenic route. We'll leave a week early. We'll go by covered wagon."
Healy laughed, and put the car in gear, and pulled out onto the street, and took the long way home.