Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

Peter glanced around the bar. There was a guy at a booth, working on a laptop, maybe grabbing a little of the wireless bleed from the Starbucks next door. Asking someone in a public place to use his Internet connection was an almost unthinkable gaucherie; you might as well ask to slip your hands down some guy’s pants and cup his ass cheeks in order to warm yourself. For Peter-who had sung in this bar, and danced, and made himself ridiculous and obnoxious in probably ten thousand ways-going up to a stranger and asking if he could use his laptop was the most self-conscious thing he could imagine.

“It’s a matter of life or death,” Peter said as the man waffled. “Honestly.”

And perhaps because the request was so outside the realm of accepted behavior, the guy slid his laptop toward Peter, saying only, “I’ve got Google open.”

Peter’s first Google search was unwieldy, returning dozens of versions of the same stories, with no more detail than what he had glimpsed on CNN. Then he finally thought to go to the home page of the local newspaper, the Beacon-Light . Yes, there it was-a story that claimed to have been updated within the past hour, along with the promises of streaming video from the paper’s “television partner, WMDS, channel 7.” Peter clicked on the link. The guy’s computer was slow to load, and it blinked ominously at one point, as if it were going to lose the connection. But the story surfaced at last.

“ Baltimore County police have released the names of the victims in today’s shooting at Glendale High School but are withholding the identity of the girl who is expected to be charged, although she is 18 and will be treated as an adult.

“The victims are Katarina Hartigan, 18, who was killed by a single gunshot to the chest, and Josie Patel, also 18, who is being treated at Greater Baltimore Medical Center for a gunshot wound to her foot.”

Peter quickly closed the page, as if it were something he would have been embarrassed to be caught reading, like really sleazy porn.

“You okay, man?” asked the stranger.

“Sure,” he said automatically, wanting to retreat into the world of normal manners and customs. But when Colin repeated the same question moments later, he couldn’t sustain the lie.

“No. I’m a long way from okay.”

“Hey, that’s from Pulp Fiction, ” Colin said. Then: “I’m sorry. Fuck.”

“Did you actually know…” Simone’s voice trailed off.

“Oh, yeah.” He was tempted to add in the biblical sense, as if making a joke could help him regain his balance. The only thing was, it wasn’t true, and he wouldn’t say such a thing about Kat even if it were. There was a reason that Peter Lasko hadn’t been cast to play the tough guy but the sensitive younger brother to the tough guy, the one who was going to die in the leading actor’s arms, coughing up fake blood.

And if there were a part of his mind that whispered to him to remember this feeling, to use it later as he had been trained in his acting classes, it was only a faint voice at the back of his head, one he immediately silenced before getting blind-heaving-hurling-blackout drunk.

When Josie wokeat 2:00 A.M., she had no confusion about where she was, not even for a second. Hospital, her brain supplied instantly, GBMC. Greater Baltimore Medical Center was the same hospital where she had been born, in the middle of a blizzard. At the school today, the paramedics had wanted to take her to Sinai, but Josie had wailed and screamed, determined to come here, and they had obeyed her, much to her surprise. GBMC was safe, familiar. GBMC was a place of happy endings.

Josie’s birth was a famous story in the Patel family, one that Josie had asked her parents to tell over and over again when she was small. Then, about the time she turned thirteen, she decided it was all too embarrassing, that the problem with a story about one’s birth is that it kept pointing back to the fact that one’s parents actually had sex, which was simply too gross to contemplate. Besides, she had decided that it wasn’t really about her after all. She may have been the title character, but it was her parents’ adventure. Josie was little more than a series of contractions causing her mother to squeal, which made her father push harder on the accelerator, so the car skidded off the road. “You were so determined to be born,” her father would say, “that you almost killed us all.”

This was when her parents still lived in the city, in South Baltimore. GBMC was ten miles up Charles Street from the rowhouse the Patels were restoring in a then iffy neighborhood. There were closer hospitals, but her mother’s ob/gyn preferred to deliver at the suburban hospital, which no one expected to be a problem. And even with the snow, her father was making good time until he came to that final curve.

It was then that the car-an ordinary Honda Civic, her father always pointed out, not an SUV or a minivan, for her parents were still young and giddy then, just beginning to be parents-had fish-tailed and swerved off the road, hitting the gatehouse at Sheppard Pratt, the psychiatric hospital next to GBMC. This was when the road to Sheppard Pratt led through a stone gatehouse, which everyone just assumed was a charming relic. Josie’s parents had never known that someone actually lived in this quaint structure, famous as it was, but on the night their car plunged off the side of Charles Street and into the side of the gatehouse, a caretaker had emerged, a parka thrown over his pajamas. He was angry at first, sputtering about what fools they were to take the curve so fast. But when he saw Josie’s mother in her down jacket, which wouldn’t zip over her belly, he stopped yelling and put her in his pickup truck, leaving Josie’s father behind to wait for a ride in the tow truck.

(Her father always said here, “And for all that, your mother was another eleven hours in labor, so what was the rush? She could have walked to the hospital, and I could have gotten the ride in the pickup truck. I was the one who had hit my head on the steering wheel and cut my forehead. I was the one who had a cracked rib, although we didn’t know it at the time.” Of course, he could say these things, because everyone in the Patel family knew that Vikram Patel could have been dying in a ditch and he would have insisted that the gatehouse keeper take care of his wife first.)

Many years later the road to Sheppard Pratt was redone, at great expense, so instead of going through the gatehouse, the road now swept to the side. It was an article of faith in the Patel family that Josie’s birth had led, at least indirectly, to that bit of reconstruction. My road, Josie always thought when she passed it. Eight years later, then ten years later, her younger brothers had been born at GBMC, but far less dramatically.

Meanwhile Josie had been in GBMC several times since then-she was something of a regular in the ER because of her physical fearlessness-but this was her first overnight stay. Her parents had explained that the doctor wanted to keep her here for observation, but Josie hadn’t felt observed so much as guarded. She had been given a sedative, but she vaguely remembered someone coming to the door and being turned away, on the grounds that she just couldn’t speak right now. Part of her had wanted to call out, groggy as she was, and part of her had been glad to fall back into the dreamless sleep afforded by the pill.

Now here she was, at 2:00 A.M., wide awake. What were the rules? Was she allowed to ring for water? Turn on the television, or even the light, or was there someone on the other side of the curtain? Would they bring her a bedpan if she had to pee? Oh, God, she would rather hold it all night than pee in some basin, a nurse standing by. She had been allowed to limp to the bathroom throughout the afternoon, a nurse or parent supporting her. How bad was her foot anyway? It felt funny-throbbing and fiery, with a pins-and-needles sensation.