Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
I refuse to humor him, Dave thought. He deserves better.
‘You’re hallucinating, pal.’
Ollie was unfazed. ‘Just now he was in the common room, watching TV with the rest of the early birds. I waved to him, and he waved back.’ A grin, startlingly youthful, broke on Ollie’s face. ‘He also tipped me a wink.’
‘White bike shorts? Sleeveless tee? Twenty-two and good-looking? I may be straight, but I think I would have noticed that.’
‘He’s here for me, so I’m the only one who can see him. QED.’ He hoisted himself to his feet. ‘Shall we go back? I’m ready for coffee.’
They walked toward the patio, where they would climb the steps as carefully as they had descended them. Once they had lived in the Reagan Era; now they lived in the Era of Glass Hips.
When they reached the flagstones outside the common room, they both paused for breath. When Dave had his, he said, ‘So what have we learned today, class? That death personified isn’t a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks.’
‘I imagine different people see different avatars,’ Ollie said mildly. ‘According to what I’ve read, the majority see their mothers once they reach death’s door.’
‘Ollie, the majority sees no one. And you’re not in mortal—’
‘My mother, however, died shortly after I was born, so I wouldn’t even recognize her.’
He started for the double doors, but Dave took his arm. ‘I’ll keep the watch until the Halloween party, how’s that? Four months. And I’ll wind it religiously. But if you’re still around then, you take it back. Deal?’
Ollie beamed. ‘Absolutely. Let’s go see how Olga’s doing with La Tour Eiffel, shall we?’
Olga was back at the card table, staring down at the puzzle. It was not a happy stare. ‘I left you the last three pieces, Dave.’ Unhappy or not, she was at least clear on who he was again. ‘But that will still leave four holes. After a week’s work, this is very disappointing.’
‘Shit happens, Olga,’ Dave said, sitting down. He tapped the remaining pieces into place with a satisfaction that went all the way back to rainy days at summer camp. Where, he now realized, the common room had been quite a bit like this. Life was a short shelf that came with bookends.
‘Yes it does,’ she said, contemplating the missing four pieces. ‘It certainly does. But so much shit, Bob. So much.’
‘Olga, I’m Dave.’
She turned her frown on him. ‘That’s what I said.’
No sense arguing, and no sense trying to convince her that nine hundred and ninety-six out of a thousand was a fine score. She’s ten years from a hundred and still thinks she deserves perfection, Dave thought. Some people have remarkably sturdy illusions.
He looked up and saw Ollie emerging from the closet-sized craft center adjacent to the common room. He was holding a sheet of tissue paper and a pen. He made his way to the table and floated the tissue onto the puzzle.
‘Here, here, what are you doing?’ Olga asked.
‘Show some patience for once in your life, dear. You’ll see.’
She stuck out her lower lip like a pouty child. ‘No. I’m going to smoke. If you want to take that damn thing apart, be my guest. Put it back in the box or knock it on the floor. Your choice. It’s no good the way it is.’
She stalked off with as much hauteur as her arthritis would allow. Ollie dropped into her seat with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s much better. Bending’s a bitch these days.’ He traced two of the missing pieces, which happened to be close together, then moved the paper to trace the other two.
Dave watched with interest. ‘Will that work?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Ollie said. ‘There are some cardboard FedEx boxes in the mail room. I’ll filch one of them. Do some cutting and a little drawing. Just don’t let Olga have a tantrum and disassemble the damn thing before I get back.’
‘If you want photos – you know, for matching purposes – I’ll get my iPhone.’
‘Don’t need it.’ Ollie tapped his forehead gravely. ‘Got my camera up here. It’s an old Brownie box instead of a smartphone, but even these days it works pretty well.’
III
Olga was still in a snit when she came back from the loading dock, and she did indeed want to disassemble the not-quite-complete jigsaw, but Dave was able to distract her by waving the cribbage board in her face. They played three games. Dave lost all three, and was skunked in the last. Olga was not always sure who he was, and there were days when she believed she was back in Atlanta, living in an aunt’s boardinghouse, but when it came to cribbage, she never missed a double run or a fifteen-for-two.
She’s also really lucky, Dave thought, not without resentment. Who winds up with twenty points in the goddam crib?
Around quarter past eleven (Fox News had given way to Drew Carey flogging prizes on The Price is Right), Ollie Franklin returned and made his way to the cribbage board. A shave and a neat short-sleeved shirt made him look almost dapper. ‘Hey, Olga. I have something for you, girlfriend.’
‘I’m not your girlfriend,’ Olga said. There was a small, meanly amused glint in her eye. ‘If you ever had a girlfriend, I’ll be dipped in bearshit.’
‘Ingratitude, thy name is woman,’ Ollie said without rancor. ‘Hold out your hand.’ And when she did, he dropped four newly constructed jigsaw pieces into it.
She glared at them suspiciously. ‘What’re these?’
‘The missing pieces.’
‘Missing pieces to what?’
‘The puzzle you and Dave were doing. Remember the puzzle?’
Dave could almost hear the clicking beneath her frizzy cloud of white hair as old relays and corroded memory banks came to life. ‘Of course I do. But these will never fit.’
‘Try them,’ Ollie invited.
Dave took them from her before she could. To him they looked perfect. One showed that lacework of girders; the two that had been close together showed part of a pink cloud at the horizon; the fourth showed the forehead and pertly cocked beret of a tiny boulevardier who could have been promenading on the Place Vendôme. It was pretty amazing, he thought. Ollie might be eighty-five, but he still had game. Dave returned the pieces to Olga, who tapped them in, one after the other. Each fit perfectly.
‘Voilà,’ Dave said, and shook Ollie’s hand. ‘Tout finit. Wonderful.’
Olga was bent so close to the puzzle that her nose was touching it. ‘This new girder piece doesn’t quite match up with the ones around it.’
Dave said, ‘That’s a little thankless, even for you, Olga.’
Olga made a hmpf sound. Over her head, Ollie waggled his eyebrows.
Dave waggled back. ‘Sit with us at lunch.’
‘I may skip lunch,’ Ollie said. ‘Our walk and my latest artistic triumph have tired me out.’ He bent to look at the puzzle and sighed. ‘No, they don’t match. But close.’
‘Close only counts in horseshoes,’ Olga said. ‘Boyfriend.’
Ollie made his slow way toward the door opening on the Evergreen Wing, cane tapping its unmistakable one-two-three rhythm. He didn’t appear at lunch, and when he didn’t show up for dinner, that day’s duty nurse checked on him and found him lying on the coverlet of his bed, with his talented hands laced together on his chest. He seemed to have died as he lived, peacefully and with no fuss.
That evening, Dave tried the door of his late friend’s suite and found it open. He sat on the stripped bed with the silver pocket watch laid on his palm, the cover open so he could watch the second hand go around in the little circle above the 6. He looked at Ollie’s possessions – the books on the shelf, the sketchpads on the desk, the various drawings taped to the walls – and wondered who would take them. The ne’er-do-well brother, he supposed. He fished for the name, and it came to him: Tom. And the niece was Martha.
Over the bed was a charcoal drawing of a handsome young man with his hair combed high and spangles on his cheeks. On his Cupid’s-bow lips was a smile. It was small but inviting.
IV
The summer came full, then began to ebb. Schoolbuses rolled down Maryland Avenue. Olga Glukhov’s condition declined; she mistook Dave for her late husband more frequently. Her cribbage skills remained, but she began to lose her English. Although Dave’s older son and daughter lived close by in the suburbs, it was Peter who came to visit most frequently, driving in from the farm in Hemingford County sixty miles away and often taking his father out to dinner.
Halloween rolled around. The staff decorated the common room with orange and black streamers. The residents of Lakeview Assisted Living Center celebrated All Hallows with cider, pumpkin pie, and popcorn balls for the few whose teeth were still up to the challenge. Many spent the evening in costume, which made Dave Calhoun think of something his old friend had said during their last conversation – about how, in the late eighties, going to the gay clubs had been too much like attending the masquerade in Poe’s story about the Red Death. He supposed Lakeview was also a kind of club, and sometimes it was gay, but there was a drawback: you couldn’t leave, unless you had relatives willing to take you in. Peter and his wife would have done that for Dave if he had asked, would have given him the room where their son Jerome had once lived, but Peter and Alicia were getting on themselves now, and he would not inflict himself on them.
One warm day in early November, he went out onto the flagstone patio and sat on one of the benches there. The paths beyond were inviting in the sunshine, but he no longer dared the steps. He might fall going down, which would be bad. He might not be able to get back up again without help, which would be humiliating.
He spied a young woman standing by the fountain. She wore the kind of shin-length, frilly-collared dress you only saw nowadays in old black-and-white movies on TCM. Her hair was bright red. She smiled at him. And waved.
Why, look at you, Dave thought. Didn’t I see you not long after World War II ended, getting out of your boyfriend’s pickup truck at the Humble Oil station in Omaha?
As if hearing this thought, the pretty redhead tipped him a wink and then twitched up the hem of her dress slightly, showing her knees.
Hello, Miss Yummy, Dave thought, and then: Once you did a lot better than that. The memory made him laugh.
She laughed in return. This he saw but could not hear, although she was close and his ears were still sharp. Then she walked behind the fountain … and didn’t come out. Yet Dave had reason to believe she would be back. He had glimpsed the life-force down there, no more and no less. The strong beating heart of beauty and desire. Next time she would be closer.
V
Peter came into town the following week, and they went out to dinner at a nice place close by. Dave ate well, and drank two glasses of wine. They perked him up considerably. When the meal was done, he took Ollie’s silver watch from his inner coat pocket, coiled the heavy chain around it, and pushed it across the tablecloth to his son.
‘What’s this?’ Peter asked.
‘It was a gift from a friend,’ Dave said. ‘He gave it to me shortly before he passed on. I want you to have it.’
Peter attempted to push it back. ‘I can’t take this, Dad. It’s too nice.’
‘Actually, you’d be doing me a favor. Because of the arthritis. It’s very hard for me to wind it, and pretty soon I won’t be able to at all. Darn thing’s at least a hundred and twenty years old, and a watch that’s made it that far deserves to run as long as it can. So please. Take it.’
‘Well, when you put it that way …’ Peter took the watch and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks, Dad. It’s a beaut.’
At the next table – so close Dave could have reached out and touched her – sat the redhead. There was no meal in front of her, but no one seemed to notice. At this distance, Dave saw that she was more than pretty; she was downright beautiful. Surely more beautiful than that long-ago girl had been, sliding out of her boyfriend’s pickup with her skirt momentarily bunched in her lap, but what of that? Such revisions were, like birth and death, the ordinary course of things. Memory’s job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.
The redhead slid her skirt up farther this time, revealing one long white thigh for a second. Perhaps even two. And winked.
Dave winked back.
Peter turned to look and saw only an empty four-top table with a RESERVED sign on it. When he turned back to his father, his eyebrows were raised.
Dave smiled. ‘Just something in my eye. It’s gone now. Why don’t you get the check? I’m tired and ready to go back.’
Thinking of Michael McDowell
There’s a saying: ‘If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.’ Total bullshit, and here’s a case in point. Tommy wasn’t his name, and he wasn’t the one who died, but otherwise, this is how it went down, back when we all thought we were going to live forever and change the world.
Tommy
Tommy died in 1969.
He was a hippie with leukemia.
Bummer, man.
After the funeral came the reception at Newman Center.
That’s what his folks called it: the reception.
My friend Phil said, ‘Isn’t that what you have after a fucking wedding?’
The freaks all went to the reception.
Darryl wore his cape.
There were sandwiches to eat and grape drink in Dixie Cups.
My friend Phil said, ‘What is this grape shit?’
I said it was Za-Rex. I recognized it, I said, from MYF.
‘What’s that shit?’ asked Phil.
‘Methodist Youth Fellowship¸’ I said.
‘I went for ten years and once did
a flannelboard of Noah and the Ark.’
‘Fuck your Ark,’ said Phil.
‘And fuck the animals who rode on it.’
Phil: a young man with strong opinions.
After the reception, Tommy’s parents went home.
I imagine they cried and cried.
The freaks went to 110 North Main.
We cranked up the stereo. I found some Grateful Dead records.
I hated the Dead. Of Jerry Garcia I used to say,
‘I’ll be grateful when he’s dead!’
(Turned out I wasn’t.)
Oh well, Tommy liked them.
(Also, dear God, Kenny Rogers.)
We smoked dope in Zig-Zag papers.
We smoked Winstons and Pall Malls.
We drank beer and ate scrambled eggs.
We rapped about Tommy.
It was pretty nice.
And when the Wilde-Stein Club showed up – all eight of them – we let them in
because Tommy was gay and sometimes wore Darryl’s cape.
We all agreed his folks had done him righteous.
Tommy wrote down what he wanted and they gave him most of it.
He was dressed in his best as he lay in his new narrow apartment.
He wore his bellbottom blue jeans and his favorite tie-dye shirt.
(Melissa Big Girl Freek made that shirt.
I don’t know what happened to her.
She was there one day, then gone down that lost highway.
I associate her with melting snow.
Main Street in Orono would gleam so wet and bright it hurt your eyes.
That was the winter The Lemon Pipers sang ‘Green Tambourine.’)
His hair was shampooed. It went to his shoulders.
Man, it was clean!
I bet the mortician washed it.
He was wearing his headband
with the peace sign stitched in white silk.
‘He looked like a dude,’ said Phil. He was getting drunk.
(Phil was always getting drunk.)
Jerry Garcia was singing ‘Truckin.’ It’s a pretty stupid song.
‘Fuckin Tommy!’ said Phil. ‘Drink to the motherfucker!’
We drank to the motherfucker.
‘He wasn’t wearing his special button,’ said Indian Scontras.
Indian was in the Wilde-Stein Club.
Back then he knew every dance.
These days he sells insurance in Brewer.
‘He told his mother he wanted to be buried wearing his button.
That is so bogus.’
I said, ‘His mom just moved it under his vest. I looked.’
It was a leather vest with silver buttons.
Tommy bought it at the Free Fair.
I was with him that day. There was a rainbow and
from a loudspeaker Canned Heat sang ‘Let’s Work Together.’
I’M HERE AND I’M QUEER said the button his mother moved beneath his vest.
‘She should have left it alone,’ said Indian Scontras.
‘Tommy was proud. He was a very proud queer.’
Indian Scontras was crying.
Now he sells whole life policies and has 3 daughters.
Turned out not to be so gay, after all, but
selling insurance is very queer, in my opinion.
‘She was his mother,’ I said, ‘and kissed his scrapes when he was young.’
‘What does that have to do with it?’ asked Indian Scontras.
‘Fuckin Tommy!’ said Phil, and raised his beer high.
‘Let’s toast the motherfucker!’
We toasted the motherfucker.
That was forty years ago.
Tonight I wonder how many hippies died in those few sunshine years.
Must have been quite a few. It’s just statistics, man.
And I’m not just talking about
!!THE WAR!!
You had your car accidents.
Your drug overdoses.
Plus booze
bar fights
the occasional suicide
and let’s not leave out leukemia.
All the usual suspects is all I’m saying.
How many were buried in their hippie duds?
This question occurs to me in the whispers of the night.
It must have been quite a few, although
it was fleeting, the time of the freaks.
Their Free Fair is now underground
where they still wear their bellbottoms and headbands
and there is mold on the full sleeves of their psychedelic shirts.
The hair in those narrow rooms is brittle, but still long.
‘The Man’s’ barber has not touched it in forty years.
No gray has frosted it.
What about the ones who went down
clasping signs that said HELL NO WE WON’T GO?
What about the car accident boy buried with a McCarthy sticker
on the lid of his coffin?
What about the girl with the stars on her forehead?
(They have fallen now, I imagine, from her parchment skin.)
These are the soldiers of love who never sold insurance.
These are the fashion dudes who never went out of fashion.
Sometimes, at night, I think of hippies asleep in the earth.
Here’s to Tommy.
Drink to the motherfucker.
For D. F.
In 1999, while taking a walk near my home, I was hit by a guy driving a van. He was doing about forty, and the collision should have killed me. I guess I must have taken some sort of half-assed evasive action at the last moment, although I don’t remember doing that. What I do remember is the aftermath. An event that occurred in two or three seconds beside a rural Maine highway resulted in two or three years of physical therapy and slow rehabilitation. During those long months spent recovering some range of movement in my right leg and then learning to walk again, I had plenty of time to reflect on what some philosophers have called ‘the problem of pain.’
This story is about that, and I wrote it years later, when the worst of my own pain had receded to a steady low mutter. Like several other stories in this book, ‘The Little Green God of Agony’ is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I’m not in the business of confessional fiction.
The Little Green God of Agony
‘I was in an accident,’ Newsome said.
Katherine MacDonald, sitting beside the bed and attaching one of four TENS units to Newsome’s scrawny thigh just below the basketball shorts he now always wore, did not look up. Her face was carefully blank. She was a piece of human furniture in this big bedroom where she now spent most of her working life, and that was the way she liked it. Attracting Mr Newsome’s attention was usually a bad idea, as all of his employees knew. But her thoughts ran on, just the same.
Now you tell them that you actually caused the accident. Because you think taking responsibility makes you look like a hero.
‘Actually,’ Newsome said, ‘I caused the accident. Not so tight, Kat, please.’
She could have pointed out, as she had at the start, that TENS units lost their efficacy if they weren’t drawn tight to the outraged nerves they were supposed to soothe, but she was a fast learner. She loosened the Velcro strap a little while her thoughts ran on.
The pilot told you there were thunderstorms in the Omaha area.
‘The pilot told me there were thunderstorms in that part of the world,’ Newsome continued. The two men listened closely. Jensen had heard it all before, of course, but you always listened closely when the man doing the talking was the sixth-richest man not just in America but in the world. Three of the other five mega-rich guys were dark-complected fellows who wore robes and drove around desert countries in armored Mercedes-Benzes.
But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting.
‘But I told him it was imperative that I make that meeting.’
The man sitting next to Newsome’s personal assistant was the one who interested her – in an anthropological sort of way. His name was Rideout. He was tall and thin, maybe sixty, wearing plain gray pants and a white shirt buttoned all the way to his scrawny neck, which was red with overshaving. Kat supposed he’d wanted to get a close one before meeting the sixth-richest man in the world. Beneath his chair was the only item he’d carried in to this meeting, a long black lunchbox with a curved top meant to hold a Thermos. A workingman’s lunchbox, although what he claimed to be was a minister. So far Mr Rideout hadn’t said a word, but Kat didn’t need her ears to know what he was. The whiff of charlatan about him was even stronger than the smell of his aftershave. In fifteen years as a nurse specializing in pain patients, she had met her share. At least this one wasn’t wearing any crystals.
Now tell them about your revelation, she thought as she carried her stool around to the other side of the bed. It was on casters, but Newsome didn’t like the sound when she rolled on it. She might have told another patient that carrying the stool wasn’t in her contract, but when you were being paid five grand a week for what were essentially human caretaking services, you kept your smart remarks to yourself. Nor did you tell the patient that emptying and washing out bedpans wasn’t in your contract. Although lately her silent compliance was wearing a little thin. She felt it happening. Like the fabric of a shirt that had been washed and worn too many times.
Newsome was speaking primarily to the fellow in the farmer-goes-to-town getup. ‘As I lay on the runway in the rain among the burning pieces of a fourteen-million-dollar aircraft, most of the clothes torn off my body – that’ll happen when you hit pavement and roll fifty or sixty feet – I had a revelation.’
Actually, two of them, Kat thought as she strapped a second TENS unit around his other wasted, flabby, scarred leg.
‘Actually, two revelations,’ Newsome said. ‘One was that it was very good to be alive, although I understood – even before the pain that’s been my constant companion for the last two years started to eat through the shock – that I had been badly hurt. The second was that the word imperative is used very loosely by most people, including my former self. There are only two imperatives in human existence. One is life itself, the other is freedom from pain. Do you agree, Reverend Rideout?’ And before Rideout could agree (for surely he would do nothing else), Newsome said in his waspy, hectoring, old man’s voice: ‘Not so goddam tight, Kat! How many times do I have to tell you?’
‘Sorry,’ she murmured, and loosened the strap.
Melissa, the housekeeper, looking trim in a white blouse and high-waisted white slacks, came in with a coffee tray. Jensen accepted a cup, along with two packets of artificial sweetener. The new guy, the bottom-of-the-barrel so-called reverend, only shook his head. Maybe he had some kind of holy coffee in his lunchbox thermos.
Kat didn’t get an offer. When she took coffee, she took it in the kitchen with the rest of the help. Or in the summerhouse … only this wasn’t summer. It was November, and wind-driven rain lashed the windows.
‘Shall I turn you on, Mr Newsome, or would you prefer that I leave now?’
She didn’t want to leave. She’d heard the whole story many times before – the important meeting in Omaha, the crash, Andrew Newsome ejected from the burning plane, the broken bones, chipped spine, and dislocated hip, the twenty-four months of unrelieved suffering that had followed – and it bored her. But Rideout was kind of interesting. Other charlatans would undoubtedly follow, now that all reputable relief resources had been exhausted, but Rideout was the first, and Kat wanted to observe how the farmer-looking fellow would go about separating Andy Newsome from a large chunk of his cash. Or how he would try. Newsome hadn’t amassed his fortune by being stupid, but of course he wasn’t the same man he had been, no matter how real his pain might be. On that subject, Kat had her own opinions, but this was the best job she’d ever had. At least in terms of money. And if Newsome wanted to continue suffering, wasn’t that his choice?
‘Go ahead, honey, turn me on.’ He waggled his eyebrows at her. Once the lechery might have been real (Kat thought Melissa might have information on that subject), but now it was just a pair of shaggy eyebrows working on muscle memory.
Kat plugged the cords into the control unit and flicked the switch. Properly attached, the TENS units would have sent a weak electrical current into Newsome’s muscles, a therapy that seemed to have some ameliorative effects … although no one could say exactly why, or if they were entirely of the placebo variety. Be that as it might, they would do nothing for Newsome tonight. Hooked up as loosely as they were, they had been reduced to expensive joy-buzzers.
‘Shall I—?’
‘Stay!’ he said. ‘Therapy!’
The lord wounded in battle commands, and I obey.
She bent over to pull her chest of goodies out from under the bed. It was filled with tools many of her past clients referred to as implements of torture. Jensen and Rideout paid no attention to her. They continued to look at Newsome, who might (or might not) have been granted revelations that had changed his priorities and outlook on life, but who still enjoyed holding court.
He told them about awakening in a cage of metal and mesh. There were steel gantries called external fixators on both legs and one arm to immobilize joints that had been repaired with ‘about a hundred’ steel pins (actually seventeen; Kat had seen the X-rays). The fixators were anchored in the outraged and splintered femurs, tibiae, fibulae, humerus, radius, ulna. His back was encased in a kind of chain-mail girdle that went from his hips to the nape of his neck. He talked about sleepless nights that seemed to go on not for hours but for years. He talked about the crushing headaches. He told them about how even wiggling his toes caused pain all the way up to his jaw, and the shrieking agony that bit into his legs when the doctors insisted that he move them, fixators and all, so he wouldn’t entirely lose their function. He told them about the bedsores and how he bit back howls of hurt and outrage when the nurses attempted to roll him on his side so the sores could be flushed out.
‘There have been another dozen operations in the last two years,’ he said with a kind of dark pride.
Actually, Kat knew, there had been five, two of those to remove the external fixators when the bones were sufficiently healed. Unless you included the minor procedure to reset his broken fingers, that was. Then you could say there were six, but she didn’t consider surgical stuff necessitating no more than local anesthetic to be ‘operations.’ If that were the case, she’d had a dozen herself, most of them while listening to Muzak in a dentist’s chair.
Now we get to the false promises, she thought as she placed a gel pad in the crook of Newsome’s right knee and laced her hands together on the hanging hot-water bottles of muscle beneath his right thigh. That comes next.
‘The doctors promised me the pain would abate,’ Newsome said. His eyes were fixed on Rideout. ‘That in six weeks I’d only need the narcotics before and after my physical therapy sessions with the Queen of Pain here. That I’d be walking again by the summer of two thousand ten. Last summer.’ He paused for effect. ‘Reverend Rideout, those were false promises. I have almost no flexion in my knees at all, and the pain in my hips and back is beyond description. The doctors – ah! Oh! Stop, Kat, stop!’
She had raised his right leg to a ten-degree angle, perhaps a little more. Not even enough to hold the cushioning pad in place.
‘Let it go down! Let it down, goddammit!’
Kat relaxed her hold on his knee, and the leg returned to the hospital bed. Ten degrees. Possibly twelve. Whoop-de-do. Sometimes she got it all the way to fifteen – and the left leg, which was a little better, to twenty degrees of flex – before he started hollering like a chickenshit kid who sees a hypodermic needle in the school nurse’s hand. The doctors guilty of false promises had not been guilty of false advertising; they had told him the pain was coming. Kat had been there as a silent onlooker during several of those consultations. They had told him he would swim in pain before those crucial tendons, shortened by the accident and frozen in place by the fixators, stretched out and once again became limber. He would have plenty of pain before he was able to get the bend in his knees back to ninety degrees. Which meant before he would be able to sit in a chair or behind the wheel of a car. The same was true of his back and his neck. The road to recovery led through the Land of Pain, that was all.
These were true promises Andrew Newsome had chosen not to hear. It was his belief – never stated baldly, in words of one syllable, but undoubtedly one of the stars he steered by – that the sixth-richest man in the world should not have to visit the Land of Pain under any circumstances, only the Costa del Sol of Full Recovery. Blaming the doctors followed as day follows night. And of course he blamed fate. Things like this were not supposed to happen to guys like him.
Melissa came back with cookies on a tray. Newsome waved a hand – twisted and scarred in the accident – at her irritably. ‘No one’s in the mood for baked goods, ’Lissa.’
Here was another thing Kat MacDonald had discovered about those golden dollar-babies who had amassed assets beyond ordinary comprehension: they felt very confident about speaking for everyone in the room.
Melissa gave her little Mona Lisa smile, then turned (almost pirouetted) and left the room. Glided from the room. She had to be at least forty-five, but looked younger. She wasn’t sexy; nothing so vulgar. Rather there was an ice-queen glamour about her that made Kat think of Ingrid Bergman. Icy or not, Kat supposed men would wonder how that chestnut hair would look freed from its clips and all mussed up. How her coral lipstick would look smeared on her teeth and up one cheek. Kat, who considered herself dumpy, told herself at least once a day that she wasn’t jealous of that smooth, cool face. Or that tight, heart-shaped bottom.
