“Honest to God, it was just me. I don’t know why they saw me with anybody.”
Adult James asked me, “You don’t remember this, do you?”
“No.”
“Senior year. Two months before graduation. We went out one night to eat ice cream. I told you I wanted to do this—” He gestured toward the car. “—sneak into the Swids’ house and look around. You were supposed to say yes, Miranda. We were supposed to go in there and end up having sex. That was to have been our first time. The night that would have changed everything. Because the next day I was supposed to be arrested. Arrested and sent to prison for breaking and entering.”
“But we didn’t do that, James! What are you saying? What is this?” My voice was shrill and frantic. It knew nothing but still it was denying everything. The sun was in my eyes. Any way I turned, it jabbed me like an accusing finger.
James shook his head, exasperated. “I’m saying everything’s written, Miranda. The biggest secret of life: Fate is determined, no matter how much you deny or try to fight against it. But you’ve challenged your fate your whole life. And gotten away with it!
“You and Hugh were not supposed to stay together. He was fated to go back to his wife and have that little boy with her. That’s what the scene on TV was for: to show you how his life was supposed to have happened. You two were supposed to have a quick, red-hot affair. You were supposed to end up writing postcards from exotic places telling him how much you missed him.
“But none of it happened. You were able to change things. You changed fate. Again. Hugh stayed past the time he was supposed to and then he died. No reconciliation with his wife, no little boy Oakley, mother Charlotte, father Hugh. None of it happened, Miranda.”
He stopped abruptly and the racket of summer’s million insects instantly filled the air. Behind it, young James and the policeman continued talking in the car.
“What about the birthday party I saw the first day we went to the house? What about that little boy?”
“Never happened because he was never born. He was supposed to be born, but he wasn’t.”
“But you didn’t go to jail either! That was good!”
“No it wasn’t. That’s where I was supposed to have straightened out. The experience would have terrified and changed me forever. I had always been dancing around the flames, being bad, taking chances. But going to jail would have thrown me into the middle of the fire. It would have been hell. When I got out, I was supposed to get a job I liked and meet a woman who was right for me. And then I was supposed to have died an old man.” He chuckled, but it was a black, bitter sound. He pointed to one side of his nose. “See this mole? The little one? When I was old it went cancerous but I didn’t take care of it and it killed me.” The same chuckle, even more venomous. “Not a hero’s death, but nicer than driving a car into a pylon when I was barely thirty, chasing after a mean bitch with Russian poetry tattooed on her wrist.”
A loud bell clanged inside the school. Within seconds, doors slammed open and hundreds of kids flooded out. Almost instantaneously the parking lot was filled. Cars started, horns honked goodbye, kids shouted and talked, hurrying toward the street and freedom. The necessary part of their day was over, and after hours in class, all were eager to get to the good part.
James and I watched them leave. It didn’t take long. I remembered that from the old days. You were out of the school building and somewhere else as fast as you could move.
Minutes later a few stragglers still stood around the back door chatting with my old chemistry teacher, Mr. Rolfe. A bunch played basketball at the other end of the lot. Several cars remained, including the green Saab. The policeman and young James continued talking. It was supposed to be the first day of the rest of his life.
But it never happened. Because of me.
8. Fever Glass
McCabe and I looked at each other, waiting to see who would go first. The nurse at the reception desk had given us directions to the room, but once we’d stepped out of the elevator, we stood still, each hoping the other would make the next move.
“Go ahead.”
“That’s okay. You first.”
“What was the room number again?”
“Ten sixty-three.”
Unlike other hospitals or rest homes I’d visited, this one smelled altogether different. It was unnerving. None of the blunt, spiritless odor usually so prevalent in those places—disinfectant, medicine, and sickness mixed together so that it reeked of nothing good, nothing that gave comfort. Unable to stop myself, I raised my head and sniffed the air like a hound trying to recognize a scent.
McCabe saw me and spoke without hesitation. “Turkey. Smells like a turkey dinner in here. I noticed it first thing when we came in. Come on, let’s find Frances.” He started down the hall looking left and right for room 1063.
I had awoken in bed in the Crane’s View house fully dressed, a quilt over me, head on a pillow, arms at my sides. Normally it took time for my mind to clear, but not that morning. Instantly I remembered what had happened the night before with Hugh and his family on the kitchen television, and then going with James to visit our old high school.
All my life people joked that I looked dead while sleeping because of the position in which I lay. Once settled and asleep, I usually never moved. This morning I lay wondering how I had managed even to reach the bed. Then the telephone rang. Picking it up, I didn’t recognize McCabe’s voice until he identified himself and said Frances Hatch was in the hospital. She had called him from there and asked that both of us come to see her as soon as possible.
His voice was edgy and irritated. “What I don’t understand is why she’s not in Manhattan. She’s up in a place near Bronxville called Fever Glass or something. Strange name like that, but I’ve got it all written down. She gave me directions. Can you be ready in an hour? I’d like to get going.”
The building was one of those expensive, ludicrous copies of a Tudor mansion only rock stars and other momentary millionaires buy or build these days. First we passed through high, scrupulously trimmed hedges that hid the grounds from the street. Then, at the top of a long curving driveway, Fieberglas Sanatorium sat on a small rise amid acres of beautifully tended land that must have cost a fortune to maintain. Looking around, you got the feeling it could have been a golf course, an expensive research facility, or a cemetery. Or maybe all three in one.
McCabe pulled into one of the many empty parking spaces in front of the main building and turned off the motor. He had been playing a Kool & the Gang CD and the abrupt silence was unsettling. It emphasized, Here we are and now we have to do something.
He looked in the rearview mirror and ran his hands through his hair. “Pip-pip. Tut-tut. This place is all English wannabe. They wish they were Brideshead Revisited. Wouldn’t wanna be sick here. I’m sure they’re big believers in high colonies.”
I looked out the window. “You’re sure she’s here? It doesn’t look like a very Frances place.”
“True, but this is it.”
We got out and walked across immaculate white gravel to the front door. McCabe opened it and motioned for me to enter. Inside, I was surprised to see large numbers of people milling about the entrance hall. Some were in robes and slippers, others were fully dressed. We went to the reception desk and asked for Frances. Checking a computer, the nurse apathetically tapped a few keys. I glanced at McCabe. He was a handsome man, no doubt about it. I wasn’t crazy for the gelled hair, but in his double-breasted suit, white shirt, and black silk tie he looked very dashing.