Douglas Kennedy: Woman in the Fifth

‘Did your daughter recover?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Does it look good?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know what to say but “sorry”.’

‘Thanks for that.’

‘If you want to sleep now, the room’s ready.’

‘Please call me at four, in case I don’t get up.’

I slept straight through the afternoon. I was out of the hotel by four thirty. I was outside Margit’s front door just at five. I stepped inside the parallel world. I climbed the stairs, she opened the door on the first knock. That’s when I slugged her, catching her with my fist right in the mouth. She fell backward on to the bed.

‘You fucking bitch … you punish me by trying to kill my daughter …’

She stood up, holding her cheek.

‘You have no proof.’

‘Don’t fucking say that again,’ I shouted and then caught her across the face with the back of my hand. She collapsed back on the bed again, but then turned up at me and smiled.

‘You forget, Harry — pain means nothing to me. But pain means everything to you. All you do is live in pain. And you know what you’ve just demonstrated? You’re like every man I’ve ever known. When you discover you’re powerless, you lash out … even though the act of punching a woman is nothing more than a testament to your complete pathetic impotency. But go on, Harry. Punch me again. Pull off my clothes and ravage me while you’re at it. Anything to make you feel better.’

‘The only thing that is going to make me feel better is if my daughter comes out of her coma and has a complete recovery with no lasting side effects.’

‘You ask a lot, Harry.’

‘You’ve got to help me—’

‘No, I’ve got to help her . But that can only happen if you play by the rules of the game. Here from five until eight every three days without fail. If you say yes now, and then don’t show up for our next rendezvous, your daughter will die. As soon as you are here—’

‘I promise I will be here.’

Silence. She sat up.

‘That’s settled then. You can go now. We will start again at our next rendezvous as if this never happened. But do know that if you ever hit me again …’

‘I will never hit you again.’

‘I’ll hold you to that, Harry. Now go.’

‘Before I do, I need to know something. Are these rendezvous of ours going to go on indefinitely?’

‘Yes, they are. A bientot … ’

En route back to the hotel, I stopped in a kiosk and rang Susan’s cellphone. When I explained that I was back in Paris, her reaction was angry.

‘That’s so damn typical of you, running away in the middle of a crisis …’

‘I had no choice. I have a job interview today, and you will be needing money to keep going …’

‘Don’t guilt trip me here, Harry.’

‘Why, why , do you always think I’m having a go at you when all I’m doing is—?’

‘Reminding me I have lost my goddamn job and am just praying that Blue Cross will cover these hospital bills. Otherwise it’s bankruptcy and—’

‘Is there any change there? Any sign of improvement?’

‘Not so far.’

‘Did you get any rest?’

‘A bit, yeah.’

‘Please call me as soon as there’s any change.’

‘OK,’ she said and hung up.

A day went by. I ventured up to the hospital for a previously arranged appointment with the specialist. He ordered an X-ray and gave me a very hard time when he saw the state of my lungs.

‘You’ve been on a plane, haven’t you?’

‘My daughter is seriously unwell, and I had no choice but to—’

‘Try and kill yourself ? I warned you, monsieur , about the tremendous dangers that pressurized environments cause. By choosing to ignore me, you have retarded your recovery completely. The reason you have blood in your phlegm is evident. Take another journey in a pressurized cabin and you might do yourself fatal damage. You are grounded for at least six months. Understood?’

I returned to my room in the hotel. I counted out the cash I had left after paying for the ticket to the States. Around eighteen hundred dollars. Don’t think about it. Just take everything as it comes now. What else can you do?

I stayed in the room, trying to read, trying to think about everything but Megan. Eventually, around ten that evening, I climbed into bed. Three hours later I was jolted awake by the ringing phone.

‘A call for you, monsieur ,’ said the night clerk. With a click he put it through. It was Susan. And the first words she said to me were, ‘She opened her eyes.’

THE SAME EVENING that she opened her eyes, Megan began to speak again. The next day she was able to be fed by spoon. Forty-eight hours later, she insisted on getting up out of bed to use the toilet. Despite having a cast on her left arm and leg she still managed to hobble there on crutches. The following morning, the police found the driver of the hit-and-run vehicle. It was a messy story — a recently divorced woman in her forties; a lawyer in a big-deal firm in Cleveland, with ‘alcohol issues’. On the morning of the accident, she had been drinking in her motel room during breakfast. She was blotto and smashed into Megan around five minutes after leaving the hotel. She panicked and kept on driving, eventually checking into a motel near the Kentucky border where the cops found her. She was heavily insured — and the lawyer now representing Megan threatened publicity if she and her law firm didn’t settle quickly.

‘The negotiation was very fast,’ Susan told me in our daily transatlantic phone call. ‘Our guy was a complete son of a bitch and very shrewd. Megan will be getting a check for half a million dollars. So that’s her college education sorted out — and it will give us a little cushion until I find a new job.’

I said, ‘The important thing is, she will have no lasting physical effects from the accident. The psychological scars, on the other hand—’

‘—will be added to the large amount of shit that her parents have already dumped into her lap … and the fact that her mother is a slut who slept her way back into a tenured position at the college by fucking a pedophile.’

‘I really think you should stop blaming yourself here—’

‘But I do. I do .’

‘Well, I blame myself too.’

‘You’re being magnanimous again … which is a way of making me feel bad.’

‘You think that, by being reconciliatory, I’m actually trying to get at you? I just feel very sorry for you …’

Silence. I could hear her weeping into the phone.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’ she whispered. ‘I’ve messed up so badly. I’ve …’

‘Our daughter is alive and well. That’s the only thing that matters right now. And I do want to speak with her again,’ I said.

‘I did tell her you rushed over to be by her side. She seemed happy about that, but couldn’t understand why you had to hurry back so fast to Paris.’

Because the dead woman who had put Megan in the path of that car demanded her twice-weekly ‘service’. If I had failed in this obligation, our daughter would have remained in her coma.

‘As I tried to explain to you in that phone call … I had a job interview …’

‘You could have told them your daughter was seriously injured,’ she said at the time.

‘I did tell them that — and they were very understanding, but also said that they had to fill the post immediately. I have no money. Nor do you. So I really couldn’t tell them to wait—’

‘That’s right — rub it in again that I lost my job. Heighten my massive guilt about—’

‘Susan … stop.’

‘But if I stop, you won’t have to listen to the truth. And the truth is—’