Kem Nunn - Chance

The gland and broken fingers were in pretty good shape but the ribs and vertebrae still hurt like a bastard when the pain meds wore down and he was still subject to the odd moment of vertigo. Lucy had gotten the Cutlass out of compound and ordered a hospital bed installed in his apartment. She was proving invaluable and he was expecting her there to pick him up when he noticed a woman he didn’t recognize entering the main waiting room and walking in his direction. The woman had what looked to be very short, strawberry blond hair beneath a bright turquoise scarf and oversized dark glasses like something Jacqueline Onassis might have worn. He was expecting her to turn to one side or the other and was surprised to find her walking directly to him. “Look at you,” she said, in a voice at once strange and familiar and he saw that it was Jaclyn Blackstone.

There are times when it is good to be seated, if even in a wheelchair and this was one of them. Jaclyn told the nurse she would “take it from here.” And from there rolled him into the harsh light of what he took to be midday. “I like your slippers,” she said.

“Lucy picked them out,” he told her, but it was like talking at altitude where they were stingy with their oxygen.

She pushed him to the street where the Oldsmobile was waiting and asked if he needed help getting in but Chance told her that he could manage. She next wondered if he would need the wheels to get into his apartment. He reminded her of the stairs then waited in the passenger side of the front seat while she returned the chair and came back to the car.

“How is this possible?” he asked finally. They’d ridden for half a mile in stone silence during which time his pulse had returned to a somewhat more normal count.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “this for starters,” meaning her and his car.

“Your assistant and I reached an agreement,” she said.

“Should I ask about what?”

“Probably not.”

“And what about the rest?” he asked at length. “Should we talk about that?”

She didn’t say anything at all for another city block and then she did. “I remember some of it,” she told him. “He came back after he’d left to find you… and there was a knife sticking out of his chest… I could see it moving in time to his heart… I was still cuffed to the bed but the guy he’d left to watch me walked over and looked at it, and when he bent down, Raymond pulled out this special gun he carries and shot him with it, under his chin. It wasn’t that loud, really, but you could see part of his head come off. And then… before he could say or do anything else… the knife stopped and he was dead.”

“My God.”

“How does something like that even happen?”

“The heart’s a muscle,” he said after a good long beat. “It could do that… knot up around the blade. But the heart rests inside this membranous sack called the pericardium. The sack would fill with blood, constricting the heart. Imagine a small bird gripped in a hand, trying to spread its wings.”

They were both, he supposed, a moment in trying to imagine it.

“The condition is called cardiac tamponade—obviously fatal if left untreated. The severity of the bleeding, the speed at which the pericardium fills would determine how much time one has,” is what he said. This was me … is what he thought. He had missed the money shot, by which death would have come in a hurry, and hit the heart. There remained the question of why Blackstone had driven back to the motel and not tried for a hospital, or called for paramedics.

“I don’t know,” she said. “The guy he left there was supposed to have killed me if no one came back.”

Chance stared between the buildings that flanked them to a sliver of pale blue sky the color of Blackstone’s shirt.

“He always said he would protect me.”

“And you were still on the bed.”

“That’s when this big guy with a spider on his head showed up. He took the knife and he let me go. I asked if it was you but he gave me a look and I shut up. He’s a little scary. Where did you find him?”

“He fixed my furniture,” Chance told her.

“Right. But that’s a good answer. How is your daughter?”

“A little older, a little wiser, but otherwise whole. How is yours?”

Her hand moved to make some minor adjustment to her glasses before returning to the wheel. “She’s good. He never had her, you know.”

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

“Are you certain of that?”

She appeared to give this one some thought. “I know it’s strange… you look at everything else… but he was never much of a liar.”

Chance thought about that and what if anything there was to even say about it. The subject felt exhausted somehow and he fell to watching her instead. She had a funny way of holding herself as she drove, tilting her head up as if she were too short to see across the car’s hood, which of course she was not. She was five foot six and a half for Christ’s sake, with a good figure… and a bit tentative behind the wheel, which was somehow unexpected given every other thing he knew about her. She was, among other things, slow from red lights and got herself honked at on three separate occasions between the hospital and Chance’s apartment by which time he had stopped counting, lost in a study of her profile, the bones of her wrists as her hands opened and closed atop the wheel, the sunlight on her skin and he was trying to decide which one she was—not exactly the shyly flirtatious one from the Berkeley bookstore, but not the broken one from that first day in his office either, and certainly not Jackie Black. “Are you coming up?” he asked.

She all but laughed at him but it was good-natured enough, a little flirtatious even. “Really?” she asked. “You haven’t had enough excitement for one day?”

Two hours ago, a nurse carting away his bedpan, he could not have imagined that he would so soon be so dizzy with wanting… in spite of… because of… He supposed it written all over him.

She smiled again but it turned a little sad as she looked to the entrance of his apartment and Lucy seated on the stairs in front of the metal door where he and Jackie Black had once vied for his member. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” she told him, and got out.

Chance opened the door and using it for leverage managed to stand, first in the gutter then on the sidewalk, still bracing himself upon the car. There was a good breeze blowing in off the breakers at Ocean Beach where perhaps his very own surfing attorney was even now at play in the fields of the Lord and he could feel it stirring the hair on the top of his head where it had begun to thin and imagined that he must look very much like how he felt, a scarecrow in Romeos and baggy sweats. As she came around to his side of the car he saw that there was a manila envelope in her hands and that she wanted him to have it. “I decided this was something you should see,” she said. “It’s the least I can do.”

He wanted to ask if he would see her again but she had removed the dark glasses and the answer to that was written in her eyes as very suddenly she pulled him close, pressed herself against him, and was gone, fixing her glasses and walking briskly toward the coast before rounding a corner at the end of the block, and then she was really gone and there was only the sunlight pooling where she had been and then even that lost to the first traces of what he knew in very short order would turn to a dense and impenetrable fog. He might still have run after her, had it not been all he could do to remain vertical. And then there was Lucy to help him inside. “Don’t even ask,” she said.