Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"You Promised," the robot declared.

Robbie emerged a few minutes later, as Evon was going back down the corridor, and he motioned her once more into the nursery. He was blowing his nose.

"She wants to talk to you later. Now that she knows you're FBI, she thinks you'll make me keep my word." He smiled faintly, but she felt a pulse, colder and more desperate, of what had traveled through her a moment before. She and Robbie had never spoken about this. Rainy must have just told him that she'd confided in her. Discovered in unexpected possession of a secret so intimate, Evon felt a brief impulse to double over in shame.

She said softly, "You don't have to do that, Robbie."

"Yes I do. I can't say I was lying. Not this time. I promised if she took it a day at a time, she'd always be in control. You'd do it, too, Evon. If you'd promised. If it was someone you loved."

Would she? The horror of the prospect sank through her. It was easy to say no, never, she'd learned right from wrong in church and in school, but those lessons took the living as healthy hopeful creatures, not the poor suffering soul who lay next door already most of the way to passing. The doctor visited every day now. He had told Robbie that he'd had one ALS patient who'd chosen ventilation at the ultimate moment, and remained alive for several more years. For days, Robbie had awaited that change of heart. But Rainey had seemingly made the other choice. As a trapped moth beats its wings, she breathed now, with famished urgency, requiring too much effort to allow normal slumber. The deprivation of oxygen and sleep would soon produce a hallucinatory state. While some clarity remained, Rainey was determined to go.

"Tomorrow," he said, "maybe Saturday. There are a few people she has to see. I don't know what to do about Morty and Joan right now. And I want to get past this fucking grand jury thing." Sennett had called the first session of the Petros grand jury for the next day. Robbie raked his fingers back through his hair and took a seat on the sofa bed. "It's not like you're thinking anyway. It's just letting nature take its course."

"I'm not judging, Robbie. Nobody has that right."

He accepted the reassurance, but, as ever, he talked. The doctor and he had tiptoed around this subject pretty carefully, he said. There were vials of leftover sleeping pills lined up on the bookshelf near her bed. Just a normal dose, the same amount she'd been taking a month ago, would be enough to plunge her into a slumber that would persist when he disconnected the cuirass. That was all. She would go on her own, in ten to twenty minutes, in peace. He was entirely still, imagining the event, the reality of being there with her at the moment she went from the present to the past. He took as much of it as he could stand, then his mind, predictably, jumped.

"So what exactly did you girls do that day when you were alone?"

She was vague. Read, she said. Talked sometimes. "About?"

"You two," she said. "Love."

"Yeah, love," he answered and shook his head over the largeness of life. Then he angled his face in curiosity. "What about you?" he asked "Ever been in love? Along the way? Like I told you about Rainey? You know: Boom. She's right. She fits. She gets me and I get her."

"You mean do lesbians fall in love?"

He reared back. "Fine, you don't want to talk about it, fine."

She suffered herself a second, then apologized, battling back the reflex not to answer him, or herself. Had she been in love? Tina Criant, if that had happened, that might have been love. But it hadn't and she wasn't going to pretend.

No, she told him, she couldn't say she'd been in love.

"That's too bad," he answered. "You missed a lot of fun." He gave her a level look. "There isn't a bonus round, you know." To soften that he took her hand for a second. Then he seemed to come back to his own troubles.

"Jesus," he said. "Talk about the week from hell." He keeled over on the sofa bed and lay immobile a second, his arms thrown wide. "So would it like violate the FBI Code of Honor if I ask you to sit here for a little, while I sleep?"

"Nope."

"I mean-"

"Hey," she said.

He did not bother undressing or pulling the coverlet back. She went down and got a magazine to read by the hall light. His eyes popped open when she returned.

"So can I say I slept with you now?"

She reached over to bat his foot with the copy of People.

"Straight up," he said, "have you ever thought about that?"

"What?"

"Sleeping with me."

Good Lord! She shot her eyes toward the wall behind which his wife lay dying.

"I mean, I understand that I'm not the main attraction," he said. "And I'm not even hinting about anything real. But I just wondered, if just for a second-"

"People think a lot of things for just a second, Robbie. Most of the world's inside your head, right? But that's not my play."

"No, I know," he told her quickly. He was pleased nonetheless.

She looked at him with the feeling of something as large as a monument moving within her. How in the world could you ever explain this? They said some sculptors often saw form, beauty in the flaws within stone.

"Go to sleep," she said.

He did. His mouth at moments moved involuntarily like a baby's, smacking his lips.

Once the silence settled in, she felt something returning that she'd shunted away. Then Pandora's trunk swung wide open and she heard him again: No bonus round.

She crept down the hall to one of the bathrooms, needing to contend with that in privacy. She knew. Oh, she knew. There were moments when she felt she would melt with sheer yearning. But she didn't want what some other people settled for, what Merrel had with her husband, a love inseparable from the riches the world showered on him, or even what Rainey had put up with, loved, but as a captive, humiliated and paralyzed long before her body had deserted her. She needed something better than either woman had. So she just had to hope, like so many other people in the world, who went to bed each night and prayed, God, God, please send me love. She prayed. It was probably going to be a woman, almost for certain. She'd gotten herself that far. But today, examining herself in a mirror again under harsh light, she believed for the first time in her life that she'd actually recognize love and be willing to accept it when it came along. She'd missed her chances in the past, she knew that. But she believed-oh, truly believed as you did when the feeling of the holy entered your heart she believed she was ready. She turned on a faucet and briefly bathed her face, then let her eyes rise so she could see herself as she dared even to think it.

She was someone else.

When our law school friend Clifton Bering was prosecuted for the bribe he'd accepted in that hotel room, Stan not only withdrew from Clifton's case but appeared as a witness in his behalf at his sentencing. It was a dramatic gesture, fond and forgiving, and I always admired Stan for it. But it also burnished the patina on his statue. It was important to Stan, the racially sensitive Republican, to be seen as Clifton's friend. The same, I realized, could not be said about me.

Sennett was sitting on the hood of my car when I got back to the garage under the LeSueur after my meeting with Stern. As I subsequently learned, agents had been out looking for me. When one of them had noticed me trudging down Marshall Avenue, Sennett had been called and he'd relieved the G-man who'd been staked out on my BMW. There was another agent at the door to my office and a third waiting a discreet distance down the block from my home.

I greeted Stan by telling him to get off the car. He didn't move.

"I want the tape," he said.

I had spent quite a bit of time by myself in Stern's club, sorting things out. It's said that a lawyer who litigates against a friend is likely to end up one friend short. I'd always known that. And I'd never had illusions about Stan's nature when he was on the job. As had once been joked at the Bar Show, Stan was the true Hobbesian man: nasty, brutish, and short. I didn't mind that he'd kept Mort's secret; he was obliged to, having promised him complete confidentiality. And he'd warned me from the start that Robbie was lying, and was thus at his own peril for saying that Mort knew nothing of the payoffs. All of that was rightfully as it should have been. But I knew our friendship was over, nevertheless.