Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Veronica lay on the giant white swoop of the couch, passed out, a handle of Tanqueray resting on the table before her. A crystal tumbler was tipped onto its side in a tiny puddle of melted ice.

No sign of the majordomo; perhaps he was off for the night. The dogs looked up at Evan, concerned. He crouched and petted their ratty little heads, and they licked his fingertips with rough tongues before scurrying off to curl up together in a corduroy disk of a dog bed by the bar.

He stepped down onto the lush carpet and approached Veronica. Her pajama top was hoisted slightly to show a band of her belly, which looked distended. Her face had an unhealthy pallor, jaundiced and sickly. Her breath whistled. He wondered again at her seemingly rapid deterioration. Was it because he was only now seeing her unvarnished? Or was it the haze of his own perception continuing to clear?

She blinked her eyes open lazily as he approached, and she reached for him, her fingers pale and thin. “Evan.” Tears beaded at the corners of her eyes, then dotted her temples. She tried to hoist herself up but couldn’t find the strength. Her words came in a slur. “What’re you doin’ back?”

“We have to talk about the next steps for Andre. If something happens to me—”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she said. “If something happened to you.”

He reached for the tumbler and set it upright. “You can’t keep drinking like this,” he said. “It’ll kill you.”

She produced a tease of a grin and stretched while barely moving, an elegant twist of her spine. “I’m already dead, Evan.”

“What does that mean?”

She sat up too rapidly, and her face yellowed even more with nausea. She lifted a trembling palm to her forehead, and then her pupils pulled north and she fell back against the cushions, seizing. She contorted, arched up onto the points of her shoulders, her mouth a twisted maw.

He shot around the coffee table and cradled her with his good arm, turning her head to one side to keep her windpipe clear. As quickly as it started, the seizure ended.

He held her and she breathed into his chest irregularly, one hand clawed in the fabric of his shirt.

“You okay?”

She nodded faintly, her hair rustling against him. “Happens sometimes. Just need … rest.”

He adjusted her back into the couch, doing his best to keep pressure off his wrapped right forearm. She felt frail, light as a bird.

He laid her head gingerly on a throw pillow, and she was asleep.

He drew himself up and walked over to the kitchen counter, where she’d moved her pill bottles.

He found the rifaximin once more, the antibiotic he thought she’d taken for traveler’s stomach, though it had numerous uses. Next to it the vitamin C, calcium, a bottle labeled furosemide, and several more.

With mounting dread he started tapping the names into his RoamZone, searching through medical websites, those graveyards of hope. At last he had enough overlaps to narrow the noose around a diagnosis.

“… used in the treatment of chronic hepatic encephalopathy, a syndrome observed in patients with cirrhosis of the liver.”

Scar tissue clogging her liver from excessive alcohol consumption.

And there were the symptoms. Wasted muscle in the arms, bloating in the stomach, jaundice, weight loss, fatigue, concentration and memory problems.

The prognosis was grim, the survival rate even lower in patients who continued to drink. Seizures were rare, often occurring only at the acute end stages.

I’m already dead, Evan .

Grief moved through him, pure and immediate. They had come so far to finally see each other with clear eyes. And now to lose her before anything could be built on the foundation they had imperfectly begun to lay seemed profoundly wrong, a joke from the universe itself.

He wasn’t sure how long he stood there at the counter, but when he finally moved, his legs had almost fallen asleep. He found a blanket in a guest room and draped it over her.

She moved as the fringe touched her chin, opened her eyes. She stared up at him, and he stared back, and at least they had this, a few moments as fragile as the surface of a still lake.

She finally spoke, breaking the surface tension. “We all know it’s near, but you never think it’s right around the bend. The ski accident, the yielding cough—it’s out there, sure. Your first friend dies, the end of an era. And then come your forties, the decade of breast cancer, heart attacks. Then the fifties, a few acquaintances felled by strokes. You’re not ready to lose your friends yet, let alone be the one who drops, but it happens. Then the next decade…” She paused to catch her breath. “And now I’ll be another cautionary tale, the name people lower their voices to mention when they speak over dinner tables. Veronica LeGrande, did you hear? She died a drunk.”

She reached out and took his hand, her skin papery and thin. “I spent so much time trying to numb what I’d done that I lost all the time to set it right.”

“Set what right?”

“What do you think, sweet boy?”

His face grew hot.

“I don’t have any wailing angels or pitchforked demons to concern myself with,” she said. “No reordering of a will, no woe-is-me final trip through the south of France or the Italian Riviera or wherever the hell people spend their lifetimes wanting to go. Just this. Just you. And him.”

“That’s why you found me now? Because you knew…”

He couldn’t get out the words.

“My whole life was a straight line running away from you. And Andre. We all have the story we tell, the tape that loops in our mind. Mine was that if I looked it in the face—” She stopped herself. “You. If I looked you in the face, I would crumble into dust from shame.”

“But you didn’t,” he said quietly.

She shook her head, wiped her eyes. “No. But what about you? What about the wasteland I consigned you to? What did that do to you?”

He felt a pressure beneath his eyes, his voice full of gravel. “I was a small kid. Powerless. So I made a vow to do so well, to be so tough, so perfect, that I would be invulnerable. That I would no longer have to feel human. I put my mind to it second after second, year after year. And the most awful thing happened.”

“What’s that?”

“I succeeded.”

She stared at him breathlessly. He felt breathless, too.

“But now maybe I have a chance to undo that,” he said. “Because of you. Because of Andre.”

And Joey .

And Mia.

And Peter .

She reached again for his cheek, and in the soft pressure of her palm and the boundless hazel of her eyes he felt something he never had before. A maternal warmth with a depth and breadth and reach like nothing he’d encountered. It was dizzying, terrifying in its scope, like staring at the night sky pinpricked with countless other worlds.

“Jacob,” she whispered. “Your middle name. Evan Jacob.”

He could never have anticipated the rush of emotion that brought into his chest, crowding his throat.

“One more piece,” she said. “Let that be one more piece toward making you whole.”

64Wear the Brown Pants

They staged the raid from a shooting range north of Vegas at the end of a winding dirt road that led up into a seascape of moonlit dunes. Evan and Joey arrived an hour past dusk and sat on the hood of his truck in the dusty darkness, the air flavored with chaparral and sage and the allergenic scent of hay from the bales that served as backstops. The moon was thin but fierce, casting a pale glow through a cloudless sky, making the shell casings gleam like treasure. Shredded paper targets snapped in the breeze. Somewhere a coyote howled, the plaintive cry joined by another and another and another, the pack zeroing in on its prey.