Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Oh, yeah, that was really inspired leadership there,” I said, walking over and taking it from her. “You learn that from reading a book or did you get it from the sensitivity seminars they make you attend?”

“Hey, it worked,” she said. “You’ve got your spy, don’t you?”

I filled Tommy in on the latest details and how I had come to believe Irving Wallace was the Director. Tommy listened well. As I wound down the conversation, I reminded him to stop in the office and pick up a copy of the police sketch Red had provided, then gave him one last warning.

“Remember to stay hidden,” I said. “I don’t want this guy to make you, because then Tina and I will have to explain to your father why there are all these homosexuals at his son’s funeral.”

Ileft Tina’s apartment with a sisterly kiss on the cheek to speed me on my way. It was like being in middle school all over again, except I no longer felt it was appropriate to drape my arm around her shoulder in a lame attempt to cop a feel.

Still, between breakfast, the shower, and my new clothes, I felt like I had been reinvented. On the way to my car, I stopped at a flower shop and picked out an arrangement in a simple glass vase. The card I selected had a blank space for my own individual message. I wrote in neat script, “My sincerest apologies. Carter Ross.”

Upon arriving at University Hospital, a sprawling, ever-expanding complex of buildings in the middle of Newark, I wandered around for twenty minutes before finding the burn unit. I asked at the nurse’s station for Brenda Bass, and was pointed to a room just down the hall. I’m sure if they’d known I was with the newspaper, they would have thrown a fit. But I wasn’t really there as a reporter. I was just another guy clutching flowers, looking for a sick person I cared about.

I walked softly into the room. Miss B was lying still with her eyes closed. The lower half of her face was covered in a mask connected to an oxygen tank. She was breathing on her own, though I thought I heard some raggedness with each inhalation. A bag of fluids hung to her left, slowly dripping into her through an IV in her arm. Other than that, she appeared quite peaceful. I didn’t see any burns, any gauze, any sign of trauma.

Tynesha, who had been asleep in a chair pulled next to the bed, stirred as I entered. I wasn’t sure what to expect from her, given the way she had received me outside the Stop-In Go-Go.

But it seemed her bedside vigil had taken some of the spite out of her. Or at least she didn’t immediately move to claw out my eyeballs.

“Hi,” I said cautiously.

“Hi,” she said. There was no anger in her voice, just fatigue.

“I came to drop these off,” I said, and placed the vase down on the ledge next to the window. The card dangled down and Tynesha grasped it, turning it over.

“You’re apologizing?” she said.

“I owe her at least that much,” I said. “I owe it to you, too. I. . Look, I had no idea this was going to happen. To say I feel awful about it wouldn’t even be a start. I wish I could go back to Monday and have myself hit by a bus. I just. .”

I let my voice trail off. She turned toward the window and gazed out, maybe so she wouldn’t have to look at me. She was wearing what appeared to be borrowed clothes-sweatpants with a nonmatching sweatshirt. Her hair was matted and I guessed she had spent the night in that chair. Her eyes, which were brown without the aid of the amber contact lenses, had dark smudges underneath them.

“I shouldn’t have been so rough on you yesterday,” she said.

“I had it coming. Believe me, I did.”

“Yeah, you did,” she said, smiling slightly for the first time, and we left it at that. Miss B made a ragged, gasping noise, then quieted.

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Not good. The doctors say her lungs are, like, melting or something. Maybe it starts getting better or maybe it don’t. They say there ain’t much they can do.”

“Is she going to make it?”

“They don’t know. They say she’s holding on for now but they don’t know how bad it’ll get. They said sometimes it looks like someone ain’t going to make it and they do, but sometimes someone who looks like they’re going to make it don’t.”

Tynesha shook her head and continued. “I don’t think these doctors know what the hell they’re talking about. Half the time they talk to me like I’m stupid. The other half the time I feel stupid ’cause I don’t know what they’re saying.”

“Are they giving her any drugs or anything?” I asked.

“Just painkillers.”

“Has she been awake?”

“Not since I been here.”

“It’s probably better that way,” I said.

We watched Miss B breathe for a minute or so. I had written about enough fires to know what was going on inside her. All the delicate mechanisms that normally kept the lungs clear of junk were failing and the congestion was building up. If it stabilized in time, she’d pull through. If not, she would drown in her own fluids.

“Wanda’s funeral was supposed to be today,” Tynesha said, breaking our silence. “We told ’em to hold off for a few days. The family decided Miss B wouldn’t want to miss her daughter’s funeral.”

Or maybe, I thought grimly, the family was thinking the funeral might have to become a double feature.

“So you’ve been here all night?” I said. Tynesha nodded.

“I hope you don’t take it the wrong way when I say you look like you could use some breakfast and a change of clothes,” I said.

“Ain’t got no clothes to change into. They all burnt up.”

“Yeah, mine, too,” I said. “But I had a guardian angel buy me a new outfit this morning. How about I do the same for you?”

Tynesha looked at Miss B, frowning.

“I don’t think I should leave her,” she said.

“Tynesha,” I said, “I really don’t think she’s going anywhere.”

That bit of logic was enough to convince Tynesha to join me for breakfast-or perhaps it was the combination of logic and hunger.

We went to an IHOP across the street, continuing the global theme to our dates, and were soon seated in a corner booth with formidable stacks of pancakes in front of us. This was, technically, my second breakfast of the day. But I found room.

“The cops get any further with Wanda?” Tynesha asked as she forked a bite of omelet into her mouth.

“Well, technically, it’s not the cops’ case anymore,” I said. “They handed it over to a federal agency called the National Drug Bureau, which claimed jurisdiction over it.”

“So have the National Drug Bureau cops figured it out?”

I thought about L. Pete and the toe fungus I hoped he was developing.

“Probably not,” I said. “They think it has something to do with this guy, Jose de Jesus Encarceron. Ever heard of him?”

Tynesha shook her head.

“Well, neither had I,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure the NDB is just grasping at straws. They don’t know the real answer so they pretend they know.”

“Just like those doctors in there,” Tynesha said, and I chuckled.

“Sometimes doctors are too smart for their own good,” I said. “They get so used to being smart, they have a hard time admitting that they don’t have the answers.”

It was a cautionary tale for any profession, especially mine. The reporter who assumes he has all the answers is usually a reporter who finds his stories being mentioned in the correction column with considerable frequency. It’s an easy trap to fall into when your job is to find the truth. The trick is never assuming your information is absolute or infallible. You have to stay flexible enough to still be able to recognize when your premise is all wrong. You also have to remember to keep going back to your sources with new knowledge and seeing what else they know.