T. Boyle - Talk Talk

It was only then-only when he lifted his right hand to reply-that she noticed the cast on his forearm, and the sight of it was like an accusation, a pointed finger, a curse. The closed hand, up and down: “Yes.” And then: “Are you okay?”

She nodded.

“Did they get him?”

She watched his face darken, the color seeping out of the bruise to mottle his jaw, his cheek, the orbit of his open eye. He already knew the answer. Already knew that the pain, the frustration, the anger and hate and obsession-and the fractured ulna and the crushed larynx too-were in vain. He could see it in her eyes.

“He got away,” she said, signing under it. “But they got his car-”

“His car? Is that all? Shit!” He pounded his fist against the cast in a quick violent jerk of the arm and then he tried to say something, his eye glaring and his jaws grabbing at the air, but he wasn't saying anything, she could see that, she could feel it. Bridger. The gauze at his throat, the cast on his arm. He was furious, angry, angrier than she'd ever seen him, and before she had a chance to question it-was he blaming her, was that it? — his mother was there, sweeping her roughly aside to hammer at the nurse's buzzer and then the nurse was propelling herself into the room and doing something to Bridger, to his mouth, his throat, his oral cavity, that Dana didn't want to see. Even as she turned her head, Bridger's mother took hold of the bed curtains and pulled them shut.

For a long while she just sat there beside Terri and stared at the pleated white folds of the curtains on their aluminum track. She felt as if she'd been slapped in the face. She'd felt bad enough as it was-her fault, everything her fault-and now she just wanted to sink through the floor. “Don't worry,” Terri signed. “Hell be all right.”

She didn't respond. She was feeling too low. And tired. As tired as if she hadn't slept in a week. The light drew down suddenly-a cloud passing over the sun beyond the window at the end of the room-and she glanced up and for the first time noticed the second bed there. It was nearly walled off by the masses of flowers Bridger's mother had marshaled round the room, and those flowers represented another level of accusation-she hadn't thought to bring so much as a daisy herself, but then how could she? She was going through this too-she could have been murdered, didn't they know that?

The curtains on this second bed were drawn too, but she could see through a gap at the near end that there was someone there, visible only as a pair of crossed ankles and two bare feet with their canted yellowish soles and ten yellowed toes hanging from their joints like decayed fruit. Those toes fascinated her, those anonymous feet, and her eyes passed over the easy attraction of the flowers to fixate on them-who was back there, she wondered? Some auditory voyeur, silently attuned to the drama playing out round Bridger's bed, the cries of the mother, the gagging of the patient, the wet fleshy wheeze of the nurse's ministrations. Nothing wrong with him at all-you could tell that by the way he'd crossed his ankles. He'd just come here and hidden behind the curtains in witness. That was what she was thinking, watching those feet and letting her thoughts pull her down, when she felt the familiar tactile squirming of the cell in her pocket.

It was her mother. “Peterskill Station,” she messaged, “3:45,” and cut the connection.

Terri was watching her. “Your mother?”

“Yeah. She's coming in at three forty-five.” She shrugged, dropped her eyes. “I guess I'm going to have to pick her up.”

There was a suspended moment, and then Terri tapped her wrist with a single finger to get her attention. “I can drive you to your car if you want. You remember where you parked it?”

She saw the street suddenly, the shade trees, the cracked sidewalk and the kids on their bicycles and it was like the mise-en-scène of a play she'd seen somewhere a long time ago. “Yes,” she said, and she nodded her head for emphasis.

The nurse emerged from behind the curtains then and reached up to draw them open with a brisk snap of her wrists. The mother was there too, rising to her feet from the chair beside the bed, her face strained and eyes leaping out at them as if to say, “What do you want here?” And Bridger-the crisis had apparently passed, and he was watching her, his face flushed beneath the mask Peck Wilson had crafted for him, his scalp so red she could see the individual hairs in relief against the skin. He'd been coughing. Coughing or gagging. The man with the feet would have known as much, Terri and the mother and anybody passing by the door would have known, but not Dana. Because the curtains had been closed.

“Is he all right?” she said now, coming up out of the chair and taking a step toward the bed. The nurse gave her an odd look, ducked her head and left the room on her quick padded feet. Bridger's mother wore her face as if it weighed a thousand pounds, as if it had been hammered out of concrete. She angled away from the bed, moving ever so subtly-perhaps even unconsciously-to interpose herself between Dana and her son. Her mouth was in motion: “What? What did she say?”

She was asking a question, but she wasn't asking it of Dana. She wasn't even looking at her. She was looking at Terri.

Terri said something then, and Bridger's mother said something back. Bridger was flushed. His hands were still, his good eye open and staring.

She felt Terri's hand on her arm and turned to her. “Mrs. Martin says he's having trouble breathing,” she said. “They think maybe it's just an adjustment to the surgery, but it's possible maybe a suture”-she finger-spelled it-“came loose, inside, and they might have to reinsert the breathing tube, but it's probably not that and it's nothing abnormal, really-”

“Tell her,” Bridger's mother said, waving her arms as if she were flagging a cab, “that they're going to have to run some tests and he'll be here overnight, one more night at least-”

Dana reached for the woman's arm, a simple gesture, to take hold of her if only for an instant and tell her that she understood, that she could talk directly to her, that they were both involved in the same struggle, the same hope, the same love, but Bridger's mother shrugged her off and gave her a look she knew only too well. Dana watched the pale blue eyes, Bridger's eyes, focus on Terri. “Tell her he needs to rest now,” she said, and Dana read her perfectly.

And Bridger? He never raised his hand-no, he didn't so much as lift a finger.

*

Then they were out on the pulsing streets with the heat in their faces and the too-green trees closing in overhead, the hateful oppressive trees and denunciatory shrubs and the screaming lawns, and she was back in the conduit of the nightmare, hurting all over again. There was the intersection, the first one-“No,” she said to Terri, directing her, “turn right here. Yes, that's right, and at the end of the block hang a left”-and the sidewalk scrolled by and the cars parked along the street announced themselves one by one until she saw the Jetta, right where she'd left it, front wheels turned into the curb, the windshield black with the shade of the trees.

HE WAS IN HIGH GEAR NOW, pedal to the metal, any last vestige of cool blown right out the tailpipe when he took that moron down in the bar, and he might as well have sent up one of those balloons they float over the used-car lots with a big inverted arrow pointing to the bull's-eye on the back of his head. Another mistake in a day full of them. But he had no choice except to back down and he never backed down, no matter what the cost. And he was angry, he'd admit that. Angry at himself, at Natalia, at Bridger Martin and Dana Halter and the whole sad scary circus he'd somehow got himself involved in. He'd gone low on the guy, for the knee, because the big blowhards with the flabby tits and bowling-ball heads were always top-heavy and they went down fast. The only problem was the guy was swinging as his knee buckled and he'd grazed the side of Peck's face with the plane of his fist and his assortment of biker rings, the silver swastika and the death's head and the like, and now there was blood there.