Chapter 68

I PLANNED A quick visit to the hospital, just to say hello to my father, to spread some cheer, to banter like a bantamweight, and then I’d be free to finish my preparations. I had planned a quick visit, but Dr. Mayonnaise had different ideas. She was behind the desk at the nurses’ station on the fourth floor and when she saw me leave the elevator she nearly jumped out of her chair.

“Victor, I’m so glad you’re here. Have you spoken to your father? Have you heard the news?”

“No,” I said. “News?”

“Good news,” she said, her face bright, her blue eyes shining. “Great news.” She stepped out from behind the desk, took hold of my arm, started leading me down the hall. “We’ve scheduled your father for tomorrow.”

“Scheduled? You mean his release?”

“No, Victor. His operation.”

“I thought his condition had to be stabilized first.”

“But it has. His response to the Primaxin has been terrific. There’s no reason to wait. And you’ll be really happy to hear that a hole opened up in Dr. Goetze’s schedule and she’s agreed to do the operation.”

“Dr. Goetze?”

“She’s brilliant. Really. Amazing. The top pulmonary surgeon in the region. Your father’s very lucky.”

“Lucky lucky lucky.” I glanced at the door to his room, partially opened. “Does he know yet?”

“Of course.”

“Has he met Dr. Goetze?”

“Just this afternoon.”

“And?”

“And what? Victor, trust me. If you need someone to surgically resect your lungs, you want it to be Dr. Goetze. She practically invented the procedure. The operation is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Your father is fasting now and we’ll gently sedate him tonight so he gets a full night’s rest. He’ll spend the next couple days in intensive care and then, after a few more days of recovery, you can take him home.”

“It all sounds so easy. So tell me, Karen, how did a hole open up in Dr. Goetze’s schedule?”

She squeezed her lips together. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Things happen.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Good luck, Victor. We’re all very hopeful.”

“I’m sure all indicators are promising.”

My father was lying in his bed, his eyes closed tight, his arms placed at his sides. It was as if he was already in position for the coffin. I think all the death we see, all the funerals we attend, are in some ways practice for the day we bury our fathers. I should have been prepared, I should have been overprepared, but still, to see him there, lying peacefully, without his anger or bitterness, without his prickly personality, without everything that had made him my father, brought me to tears. I don’t think I would have felt like that before he entered this hospital, before he started to tell me his story about the girl in the pleated skirt, but something had changed, something in me, and now grief at the possibility of losing him overwhelmed me.

I closed the door behind me, sat down by his bed, leaned my head back, tried to gain control of myself. That was when something started shaking in my pocket.

Yes, I know, no cell phones in hospitals, but I was in the middle of an emergency, dammit, and so I hadn’t turned my phone off, just set it on vibrate. I grabbed it out of my jacket pocket and snapped it open.

“Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” I said softly. “Where are you, Phil?”

“Still outside that damn studio. She went out for a bit of errands, had a drink at that bar of hers, and then went back to her building. You said she had a bed in there, right?”

“That’s right.”

“It looks like she might spend the night. How long you want me to stay out here.”

“Until morning if you have to. If he shows up, call the FBI at the number I gave you. If she goes somewhere, follow and then call me. If we can take care of this tonight, that’s what I want to do.”

“All right, mate. It’s your call.”

“We have to find her, Phil.”

“I know we do.”

When he hung up I raised my chin and let out a great sigh of fear and frustration, and it was that sigh, I think, rather than my conversation, that woke my father, because when I looked down again there he was, eyes open, staring at me. It gave me a start, like a corpse coming to life, and I jumped a bit.

“You look like you seen a ghost,” said my father.

“Well, you woke up,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“Lousy. I’m hungry. Go get me a candy bar, why don’t you?”

“You’re not allowed to eat.”

“The hell with their rules.”

“You’re having your operation tomorrow.”

“The hell with their operation.”

“Your operation. How do you feel about it?”

“All of a sudden you care about my feelings? Well, this is what I’m feeling, I’m feeling hunger.”

“I heard the doctor came in and spoke to you.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you think?”

“Seems to know what goes where.”

“So you’re okay with the surgeon.”

“One can kill me as well as the next.”

“I thought you might, you know, not be thrilled that the surgeon is a woman.”

He let out a bark. “For the whole of my life, women been slicing me up and taking out pieces. Why should this be any different?”

“Well,” I said, patting his hand and starting to stand up. “You need your sleep.”

“What, you in a hurry?”

“No.”

“You look nervous, you got a date tonight?”

“No.”

“With that doctor of yours?”

“We’re just friends.”

“So where are you off to?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then don’t go so fast. I’m getting cut on tomorrow. Don’t go.”

“All right, Dad.”

“All right, then.”

“So maybe we can talk,” I said.

“Don’t get carried away.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations?”

“Screw off,” said my father.

“Okay.”

“You want to know, really?”

“Sure.”

“They’re the same they been every day of my life. To make it past tomorrow.”

I sat and thought on that for a moment. “By that standard, at least,” I said, “your life has been a roaring success.”

He laughed at that, my dad, and I laughed with him. We laughed together, laughed at the strange and wondrous fact that he was still here, sitting with his son, with enough breath in his lungs to be able to laugh. In the middle of it I thought back and wondered when was the last time I laughed with my father. I couldn’t remember. We never had anything to laugh at before, but now we did. He was still alive.

“So go on with the story,” I said, when our laughter had subsided and his disposition returned to his natural state of grump.

“I told it,” he said. “It’s over.”

“No, it isn’t. You were there, in your apartment, with the girl’s head on your chest and the box of coins sitting on the bureau. What happened the next morning?”

“She woke up,” he said.

“Go on.”

“She woke up, she stretched, she sat up in the bed.”

She wakes up, she stretches, she sits up in the bed and the blanket falls off her chest and her shoulders are smooth, her breasts are free, her smile, when she spies him sitting in the chair across the room, is iridescent. And her eyes, her wide moist eyes are as innocent as the morning. She is the very vision of loveliness, she is the very vision of perfection, she is all he ever wanted. Yet as she wakes up and stretches and sits up, as the blanket falls to reveal her proud breasts, a shiver goes through him.

Come to bed, she says, her voice still slow with sleep.

No, he says.

Then let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go first, Jesse? Anywhere but here. New York. Chicago. Hollywood. Someplace we can be somebody.

We can’t go anywhere, he says, his voice flat. There’s a man dead. He is connected to you, and through you to me. If we leave they will know it was us.

But then let’s buy something. We can sell one of the coins and buy something marvelous, something we could only dream about before.