He left and I looked up at the white rectangles of the ceiling, the fluorescent light. I closed my eyes and swallowed what felt like a dozen thumbtacks, and I wanted that sandy-haired married deputy to feel it too, feel the colonel’s thumbs breaking through his Adam’s apple like it was cardboard; I wanted this old friend of Lester’s to be at the fish camp when Lester put on his uniform and had me drive him to talk to the colonel; I wanted this friend to be in the house waking up to the whole family locked in the bathroom; and I wanted the deputy to be standing in the bedroom his father left him as Lester held his gun to the colonel’s neck in my car. None of these things I asked for. I didn’t ask for any of them.
A nurse and doctor came into the room. The nurse was younger than me. She smiled and introduced the doctor, a short man with silver hair and thick glasses that made his eyes look tiny. He read the clipboard at the foot of the bed, then came closer and put two warm fingers against my throat. My eyes began to fill up and I must’ve made a sound because the nurse took my hand and held it while the doctor looked down my throat with a tiny flashlight, then patted my shoulder and said my soft tissue was healing well and it would be best not to speak a word for at least two full weeks. Then they were gone, their white coats disappearing behind the door, and I didn’t feel mad anymore; maybe I didn’t deserve the deputy’s judgement of me for things I never did, but now I felt even more that I didn’t deserve the warmth the nurse just showed me, holding my hand like I was a victim in all this. Because I knew that wasn’t true. Neither picture of me was true.
My door opened and a round Chicana woman brought in my supper on a tray: a glass of water, a bowl of clear yellow broth, and a dish of vanilla pudding. She smiled at me and I could see a gold cap on one of her front teeth. She left the room and Connie Walsh stepped in. Her dark hair was shorter than when I last saw her, cut close to the sides of her head, which made her pretty face look older and a little harsh. On her feet were brand-new running shoes and I started to smile but my face felt funny, my lips thick and twisted, and I couldn’t look right at her.
She didn’t say anything, just stood there, and I felt her looking at me. She put her hand on my shoulder, pushed my food tray closer to me, and asked if I could sit up. I pressed the button, and once I was up, glanced at her, at her dark eyes that took me in with nothing but concern. I thought of Mrs. Behrani, how she looked at me like that too, and I felt I was with an old friend, one I was going to let down, if I hadn’t already.
Connie Walsh handed me a spoon. “How much do you know?”
I shook my head and pointed to my throat. She apologized and waved her hand in front of her face, opened the briefcase in her lap, then handed me a yellow legal pad and a pen. I pushed my supper tray to the side and wrote: They said Mr. Behrani is dead. Where’s Lester?
She read the note before I’d finished turning it to her and looked at me a second, her lips slightly pursed. I wrote: What happened?
She took the pen and pad and began to write, then stopped and shook her head at what she’d just done. I smiled and she started to smile too.
“Is Mr. Burdon your boyfriend?”
I nodded and I wished I could hear my voice as I answered yes.
“He’s in custody in Redwood City.”
I looked at her and waited.
Her eyes went to my supper. “The boy was killed.”
My whole face felt squeezed, the air pulling back in my throat.
“Evidently he’d gotten ahold of Mr. Burdon’s pistol on a busy street and was pointing it at him.” Connie Walsh’s voice was calm and controlled but she was looking at me like she’d only begun. “He was shot by police officers.”
This boy who this morning was walking so tall and straight down the hall, his black hair still mussed from sleep. I reached for the paper and pen, my fingers hot and thick: I thought Mr. Behrani was dead. The colonel.
Connie Walsh looked at me like she’d been waiting for the conversation to reach this point and now that it had, she wasn’t quite ready for it. She was leaning away from me slightly, her hands on her knees. I nodded for her to talk but even before she started to I couldn’t look directly at her anymore; I focused on her hands, on her knuckles, which were wider than her long thin fingers. Her nails were short, some with tiny scratches on them, and for a second I saw her on her knees after work digging in a garden, but then she was telling me everything, her hands coming together, her fingers intertwined, Mr. and Mrs. Behrani lying dead in my old bedroom, Connie Walsh’s voice talking of detectives reconstructing the scene. “They want to talk to you, Kathy.”
Now I looked at her, but it was like seeing someone through the wrong end of a telescope. She wasn’t talking anymore. She seemed to be waiting for me to try and speak, or write something, but her face was too far away to read, just an oval of flesh that was now asking me to write her everything, to write what the colonel did to me and when, to write how involved I’d been in holding this family against their will. “Write me everything, Kathy. Write me the truth.”
The word was a black bat flittering between us. I looked down at my own hands, at the cleaning calluses on my palms. I saw again Mrs. Behrani standing in her kitchen, pressing her hand to the side of her head. I thought of the pain she must’ve been in, and I hoped it wasn’t the last thing she’d felt. Connie Walsh’s voice was more relaxed now and she was getting up, telling me she was late for an appointment but would be back tomorrow to read the facts. That’s how she referred to what I would write. She touched my hand a second, then was gone.
I drank a spoonful of broth. It seemed to bathe my throat on the way down, but I didn’t drink any more. I imagined the Behranis laid out on a morticians’s table: the colonel, his suffering wife, his loyal son. My stomach drew backwards inside me and I sat up fast, my mouth filling with saliva. Connie Walsh’s notepad and pen fell to the floor and I left them there, moved to the chair by the window and sat. I breathed long and deep through my nose and mouth till I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up. Outside the window the parking lot was dimly lit with only a few streetlamps, and at the far corner cars passed on the road, their headlights and red taillights visible. In the hallway outside my door was the soft squeak of nurses’ shoe soles as they passed by, the metal wheel roll of a food cart or gurney, the talking and laughing of three women at the nurse’s station, a woman’s voice over an intercom calling a doctor to ICU, then more talking, an elevator door sliding open and closed, the flushing of a toilet in a room not far from mine, then someone humming, the flap of a wet mop hitting the floor, the humming a man’s voice, the tune unrecognizable; and I was unrecognizable. I could see my reflection in the window, a small shadowed face, hair flattened in the back. I looked like a sick child. But I felt dirty. My throat was dry and it was harder to swallow than ever, but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the facts for Connie Walsh but I kept thinking of Lester in Protective Custody, sitting alone in some cell separated from the rest of the prisoners because he’s a cop, the kind they would never understand, a man who would avoid shooting an armed Filipino boy, the kind that had risked his job to try and get me back into my house.
The mopping and humming had moved farther down the hallway, and I could hear the deputy on duty clear his throat, turn the pages of a magazine or newspaper. I got up and turned off the light switch near the door. The nurse’s button glowed white at the head of my bed, and I made my way back to the chair at the window, the vinyl upholstery sticking to the backs of my bare legs, and I remembered Mrs. Behrani bringing tea and kiwi fruit to her son’s room for me, her brown eyes full of compassion as she looked down at my bruised arms, as if her husband doing that had been the only reason I showed up at her doorstep drunk with Lester’s gun.