Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“There’s still plenty of time for that,” I say, holding my hands up in surrender. “At least listen to me before you get kicked out of the hospital for assault.”

“You’re the Goddamn reason we’re in here,” he says. “They’d kick you out and give me a medal.”

“Maybe you should hear me out,” I say. “I have some interesting things to say. You are my lawyer, remember. You signed me out. That means it’s your job to talk to me. If not, I’ll go to your firm and find another lawyer. I’ll tell them all about you. All about that trip we took.”

“Fuck you.”

“You didn’t think it through, did you? I’m your responsibility until that court date has come and gone. See, you figured I’d be dead by then and it wouldn’t matter. But now it does. Help me out and I change lawyers. Nobody has to know what happened.”

“Go to hell.”

“Think about it. Calm down and think about it.”

He takes a step back and stands in the doorway of the ward. He looks at his daughter. She’s awake and hooked up to a bunch of machines. There is a TV going. She glances from the TV to her father. Then his wife, an attractive blond woman dressed perhaps a little too formally for a hospital, looks at me too. She knows something is going on, but doesn’t know what. There is no recognition. If there was she’d start screaming. She’d claw out my eyes. My lawyer turns back toward me.

“What do you want?”

I explain what I want, and the whole time he shakes his head.

“Impossible,” he finally says.

“I thought lawyers thrived on the impossible.”

“We thrive on sure things.”

“But you make more money on the impossible.”

“No judge will sign off on it,” he says.

“That’s the point, right? You don’t need one to. Just get the template for me and I can do the rest. Then you don’t hear from me again. Look, nothing is going to happen. I’m never going to tell anybody where I got it from.”

“No,” he says.

“No?”

“That’s right,” he says. “I go to my boss and explain what I did to you, and he understands. He’ll tell me he would have done the same thing.”

“And maybe I go to the papers and tell them about you. Even if they don’t believe me, it still puts your name in disrepute. People might sympathize with you, they might even relate, they’ll probably wish you’d pulled the trigger, but that’ll be on their mind every time they’re passing you over in preference for another lawyer.”

“Won’t happen. People will love me for it,” he says.

“I think you have a great misunderstanding of what people love. You prepared to take that risk?”

He looks back at his wife. She’s looking a little concerned, but I bet she doesn’t know about the field trip her husband took me on. My lawyer planned on killing me. He didn’t succeed, and I’m here to pull him deeper into the world he stepped foot in. Only I’m also giving him an exit. He just needs to see that-and, being a lawyer, I figure he will.

“Just the template,” he says.

“That’s all.”

“And where am I supposed to get this from?”

“See, that’s the thing. You must know people. I’m sure you can make it happen.”

“It’ll take an hour.”

“I’ve got time.”

I head upstairs to the cafeteria and order some coffee and a couple of chicken and egg salad rolls. There are a few newspapers lying around. There is nothing in the front-page photo of Father Julian to suggest that he was living a secret life. There is a stock quote from somebody high up in the police: “We are following up on leads, but can’t release any further details at this time.” They have a murder weapon and no suspect. There is another article a few pages in. It details Father Julian’s history. He was assigned to the church thirty years ago. He was born in Wellington to a middle-class family, he excelled academically at school, he joined the priesthood at twenty-one. His mother died twenty-five years ago, his father is still alive. There are facts and figures that would be thrown out of whack if I were to tell them Father Julian fathered all those children.

I read through the rest of the newspaper, but don’t get to the end before Donovan Green is back. He pulls out the seat opposite me, seems about to sit down, then changes his mind. He doesn’t want to sit with a guy like me. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out an envelope. He sets it on the table and keeps two fingers on it.

“We’re done now, right?” he asks.

“That depends.”

“On?”

“On whether that’s a Christmas card in there or what I asked for.”

He slides it across. I open it up and take a look at the court order. I’ve seen them before and know it’s the real thing.

“I don’t ever want to see you again,” he says.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Lawyers hear it all the time, right? Everybody’s sorry after the event.”

I don’t answer him. He stares at me for a few more seconds, and I can tell he’s thinking about how life would be different for him right now if he’d killed me.

“Worse,” I say.

“What?”

“It’d be worse. Trust me. You did the right thing.”

He nods, seeming to understand, then turns and walks away. I push the newspaper aside, finish my lunch, and head down to the car.

The traffic out near the nursing home increases a little on weekends, but it’s not like visiting hours at the hospital. The hospital is a temporary thing. Relatives and friends don’t mind making the visit because they only have to go a few times. Out here it’s permanent. The visits don’t fit in as often as they ought to in the schedule of day-to-day life. The nursing home is too depressing, even with its brightly colored artwork and flowers. There’s no covering up the pain and misery here.

I sit with my wife and hold her warm hand. She looks out at the rain, but doesn’t see it. It’s hard to imagine that a person doesn’t look forward to certain types of weather. Sun, rain, storms: they don’t even register.

“Things are getting better,” I tell her. “I’ve stopped drinking, but it’s hard, I’ll admit that. It’s hard to describe. Without drinking I feel like a part of me is missing. I feel like I need to have one more just to say good-bye to it,” I say, and I picture the one remaining glass in the back of my fridge. “One more won’t hurt, right? Just to say good-bye. I think of you all the time. I wish things were different, but I want you to know that you’re helping me get through this. You’re the reason I’m getting my life back on track.”

I tell her this, but I don’t tell her that it’s only been a day. Maybe in a week my speech will be different. Maybe I will be able to take that drink to say good-bye and not get pulled into the abyss. Maybe.

Back downstairs, Carol Hamilton is behind the desk.

“It’s good that you’re starting to come back,” she says.

“I miss her.”

“I know you do. It’s an awful situation, and it’s worse for you than it is for her. I just wish there was more I could do.”

“I know. I make the same wish every day.”

She doesn’t answer, and I let the silence fall down around us like a shroud, letting us think our own thoughts on how life could be different.

“I hate to ask,” I say, snapping her out of it, “but have you got a computer I can quickly borrow? And a photocopier?”

“I. . umm. .”

“It will only take me a minute or two. I promise.”

“That’s fine, Theo. Follow me.”

She leads me into an office that has more photos of family and drawings from children on the walls than anything else. There are so many personal items that it’s easy to see the people who work here need to stay grounded to a different kind of reality, one where the bad things that happen in life haven’t extended to their own families. I’m about to play around with the computer and photocopier when I spot a manual typewriter. I can’t remember the last time I saw one.