T. Boyle: Talk Talk

The road was narrow here, climbing now, and he was so focused on the phone he nearly ran a little Japanese car into the bushes, but then he had the number and for an extra charge they connected him and he was talking to the receptionist.

“Peterskill Hospital. How may I assist you?”

“You have visiting hours today?”

“All day till nine p. m., for all patients except intensive care.”

“And can you tell me if someone's been admitted-if he's there. Or still there, I mean?”

“One moment, please.” A pause, the sound of keys tapping. “And what was the name?”

“Martin,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”

He picked up a newspaper on the way and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the stems wrapped in tinfoil under a cone of plastic, just in case anybody should wonder what he was doing there parked in the lot amongst the sunstruck chassis and glinting windshields of a hundred other vehicles. It was hot, eternally hot. The radio gave him nothing, classical, talk, a garble of Sunday devotion, hallelujah and amen. Very slowly, with infinite patience, he read through the paper, section by section, keeping one eye cocked on the front entrance. And when he saw her there, finally, at half past two in the afternoon, her features working and her hands jumping in the face of the woman beside her as she came out the double doors and into the sun, it was no less than he'd expected. And when she ducked into a rust-streaked yellow Volvo with New York plates, the other woman at the wheel, there was nothing he could do but crank up his rented SUV, with all its ominous high-riding authority, and follow her out of the lot.

SHE STOOD AT THE DOOR of Terri's car, the smell of the exhaust running at her in the humid breeze that had come up suddenly to agitate the branches of the trees and lift a scrap of paper from the gutter and fling it down the street. There was rain coming, yet more rain, one of the late-afternoon thunder showers that blew up this time of year to douse the streets for half an hour before the sheen of water evaporated and the air grew dense and hot all over again. “Thanks again, thanks for everything,” she was saying for the second or third time, leaning into the window frame as Terri, her hair bound up in a black scrunchie to keep the weight of it off her shoulders, said it was her pleasure and that she hoped they'd keep in touch.

“Oh, definitely,” Dana said. “I've got your phone and e-mail, and you've got my cell-we want to have you down for the day. I'll treat you to dinner. We can go shopping or something.”

“Or something?” Terri said, showing her teeth in a smile that radiated up to her eyes and pulled the skin tight along her cheekbones. This was a genuine smile, real and spontaneous, not like the pained contortion of the lips most people gave her. And the term came to her then out of her storehouse of odd bits of vocabulary-this was what physiologists called a Duchenne smile, in which two different facial muscles fired simultaneously, a smile that couldn't be faked.

Dana glanced up the street and back again. She was smiling too, feeling good, feeling liberated, the whole thing over now, out of her hands. “Shopping,” she said. “Definitely shopping.”

“Okay then”, Terri signed.

“Yeah, okay.”

She was turning away to cross the street to her own car, when she felt a tug at the back of her T-shirt and turned round again. “Here,” Terri was saying, and she was holding something out to her-a scrunchie, lime green, with crimson polka dots. “So you can put your hair up for the ride home,” pointing to the side of her own head in illustration. “For the heat.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?” Dana said, and she felt so good suddenly she was clowning, making a show of raising her arms to sniff at the armpits of her T-shirt and then dropping them to smooth out the fabric as if she were trying on an evening gown. “I'm not reeking that much, am I?”

Terri laughed-the flash of her teeth, her head rocking and chin dipping, and here came the breeze again, an ice cream wrapper spinning out from under the car and cartwheeling down the street. “Not yet,” she said, “but you're pushing it.”

And then she was waving goodbye and working her hands through the thick mass of her hair to pin it back in a ponytail, the sweat cooling already on her neck and around the collar of her shirt. She stood there a moment, watching Terri's car-the hand-me-down Volvo she'd got from her parents after her teenage brother had put it through some rough use-as it moved off down the street, shedding light. Then she looked both ways, crossed the street to her car, unlocked the door and slid into the driver's seat.

The station was no more than five minutes away, and though she got turned around and went down the wrong street-a dead end-she still got there with fifteen minutes to spare. As she pulled into the parking lot, the sun dimmed suddenly and she glanced up through the bug-flecked skin of the windshield to see a torn patch of cloud trailing past; beyond it, across the river, the thunderheads rose up out of the mountains in a dark unbroken band. There were flashes of lightning-no streaks or tendrils, just random swellings of light as if there were a bombardment going on in the next county over. The air through the open window smelled fecund and rich, as if it had been pumped up out of a deep well. Or a cavern. “Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea,” she chanted to herself, just to feel the words on her tongue, the small solace of the beat. Then she eased into a parking spot, shut down the car and began to sift through her purse for change for the meter.

She didn't know what she was going to do with her mother. She'd thought of treating her to lunch at the cafe at the depot, sitting outside under one of the umbrellas, off in a corner by themselves with the view and two glasses of chilled white wine and a grilled ahi sandwich or a salad, something to pick at-but the storm would ruin that. Her mother was going to want to go see Bridger before they drove back down to the city, but there was some part of her-a large and growing part-that resisted the notion. She didn't want to go back there. Not yet. She really didn't think she could take it, the whole symphony of her guilt building to a crescendo all over again, the look on the face of Bridger's mother, the smells, the nurses, the man with the feet, Bridger. Bridger lying there in his plaster and gauze, settling into his bruises, “having trouble breathing,” and who'd given him the trouble?

For a moment the picture of the two mothers squaring off rose up before her, but almost as soon as it came to her, she changed the channel. She wasn't ready for that. She wanted to be selfish now, purely selfish. She wanted to hook her arm through her mother's the minute she stepped off the train, lead her to the car and drive directly back to the city, the trees dwindling behind her and the road narrowing in the rearview mirror. She wanted to be in the cluttered room with the door shut behind her, her hair washed and wrapped up in a towel, the air conditioner breathing its mechanical breath as she settled into a corner of the bed and pulled the shades and let this new feeling bloom inside of her, the feeling of release, of letting go absolutely and completely and without regret, as if she were standing on the ledge outside the window on the nineteenth floor and letting go of every hand held out to her till she just floated up and away or dropped hurtling into the vacuum.

She got out of her car. Shut the door, clicked the remote to lock it. She was thinking she might walk a bit, stroll along the platform as far as it would take her in either direction and feel the wind on her face. There weren't many people around, Sunday afternoon, midsummer, the deep charcoal bank of clouds crowding closer and the boats on the river changing color as the light failed overhead. She walked past the cafe, the ticket office and waiting room, mounting the steps to the platform, and only then did she feel the seismic shift through the soles of her feet, the furious contained irruption of power, and there it was, her mother's train, pounding into the station five minutes early.