The Edge of the Gulf (23 page)

Chapter 34

Hudson had fallen asleep early on the sofa. One hand still lay on the crossword puzzle book, the top of which had come to rest on his chin.

Startled, he reached out and grabbed the phone in the other hand and was saying hello before it had become clear to him where he was, or why or when.

The aspirated whispering voice sounded like a small child or perhaps a very old person.

“Huh…duh.”

Silence.

“C…cuh…come.”

Silence. Then a muffled rattle.

“Charlie?”

Silence.

“Charlie?”

***

He had made it to the house in less than ten minutes, slaloming down the drive just behind a county police car. The two officers made him wait in the Highlander. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. An emergency medical vehicle arrived and the man and woman went in, carrying a stretcher and a crash kit.

One of the officers jogged back through the rain. Hudson slid the window down.

“What was that name again, sir?”

“Hudson DeForest.”

“Friend of Mr. Brompton?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid he’s been shot. Looks maybe like a burglar, we don’t know.” He paused. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Is he
alive
?”

“Just barely. He must have regained consciousness for a moment and hit a couple of his speed dials. His hand was near the phone. They’ll be taking him to the emergency room at St. Andrews in Panama City. Any family we should call?”

All Hudson could think of for the moment was how pleased he was that Charlie had added him to his speed dial list. He could guess the names his fingers had missed. Libby. Camilla.

Seconds passed before he remembered Chaz and Sydney. “Only the son of a cousin. He and his wife are staying here from Atlanta for a couple of weeks, but they’re in Tallahassee tonight. They’re due tomorrow…I mean, this afternoon.”

“You know where they’re staying?”

“No.”

They were bringing the stretcher out. He couldn’t see Charlie’s face.

“May I go with him in the ambulance?”

The officer went over and spoke briefly to the EMS people as they got the stretcher into the ambulance. The woman looked over at Hudson. The officer came back. The rain was a drizzle now, but it still poured in rivulets from his cap.

“They don’t know that he’s gonna make it to the ER.” He locked his eyes on Hudson’s. “It’s bad. You can ride in the back with him. Just don’t get in their way.”

***

At noon, Camilla took the job of waiting for Chaz and Sydney. Naturally, she would rather have been at the hospital with Hudson and Libby, but they decided that one of them needed to be at the house when they arrived.

By daybreak, the county sheriff’s office had already tentatively ID’d the shooter, matching the tone and content of the letter with the ATF composite sketch. Three local investigators, under the direction of a team of four ATF agents, combed the house and grounds.

A county policeman stood at the entry to the drive, lifting the yellow crime scene tape that stretched between two stanchions only when an official vehicle entered or left. Trying to read, occasionally turning on the radio, Camilla waited in her car for nearly four hours. Occasionally, the officer would come over and make polite conversation. At one point, she thought she would have to make a run to the restroom at the Blue Bar. She told him she didn’t want to leave even for ten minutes. They might come. He got permission from one of the agents for her to use the john in the ATF mobile unit. The agent accompanied her and stood just outside the small compartment.

The plan was to take them first to the hospital. Hudson would put them up in his guestroom until the agents allowed them back in the house. It might be, they were told, as long as three or four days.

Later they would tell one another that they’d each had to fight a gut-level rage of resentment. They wanted to be near Charlie, even though there was nothing to do but go in one at a time, once an hour for only a moment, to look at him—and the ICU waiting room was a claustrophobic nightmare.

But, at the time, looking out for these two people with whom none of them had been able to grow comfortable seemed something they could do, if only indirectly, for him.

Camilla watched the lovely home, crawling now with strangers. The house that someday—soon?—would belong to Chaz and Sydney Cullen.

The rental car slowed to a crawl. Before it came to a stop behind her, Camilla was out of her car. She saw Chaz pull up on the brake and both doors opened at once, the engine still running. He started forward. “Charlie!” Sydney hung a step behind.

“He’s in the hospital,” said Camilla. She started to reach out and take his hand or perhaps touch his arm or shoulder. But she did not.

Their faces looked as though the bones and muscles had melted. Their eyes were blank.

On the thirty-minute drive to Panama City she told them what, at that point, was known. Chaz sat in back, wild-eyed, asking questions. Sydney asked only one or two. Otherwise, she did not speak. Twice, she half-turned and reached her hand back between the seats to hold Chaz’s hand. Several times she put her fingers to the corners of her brimming eyes as she stared, seemingly numb, out the window.

***

The bullet had hit Charlie just right of his sternum. He had probably just raised up and turned toward the man.

He went into surgery early in the afternoon. When the surgeon came out three hours later, the best he could muster for Hudson and Libby was a tight-lipped compassion. He spoke softly. “
That
went well. We were able to do what we most needed to do. But we don’t know at this point. The prognosis is uncertain. Your friend sustained an enormously traumatic injury.”

One lung was collapsed, they’d removed bone splinters from his severely bruised upper stomach wall, he was on a respirator and hooked to a complex system of IVs. His heart was uninjured but functioning erratically, throwing dangerously high v-tach waves. If the medication didn’t level the rate, stroke was an imminent risk.

Chaz took the next three-minute visit and, an hour later, Sydney the next. They sat in the waiting room tentatively, spent most of their time pacing the halls and going for coffee.

Hudson, Libby, and Camilla looked up from their books and magazines to one another and back. For most of that evening and throughout the night, they stayed close by one another, reading or trying to. When the particularly disagreeable family that occasionally dominated the waiting room became too oppressive, they, too, walked. On these occasions they grappled with their inability to believe what had happened.

And the shared feeling that Chaz and Sydney, for some reason, didn’t deserve turns in the ICU. That the three of them should have those additional little windows of time, to hold Charlie’s hand, to tell him to come back.

Once, around four in the morning, the three of them went into the small chapel on the floor above. It was dim and quiet and they sat without talking for several minutes.

Hudson felt the current of their fear and their questions.

And an uneasy sense of jealous, outraged vigilance.

Chapter 35

At noon Sydney leaned into the pay phone stall in the food court of the huge outlet mall in Destin. She picked up on the first ring.

Terry’s voice. “
Marcia
?”

“Hi,” said Sydney, keeping an eye and an ear on the two stalls to her right. “I’ve just dropped the guys off at J. Crew. Got us a twelve-forty-five tee time.”

“How are things?”

“No change. Hanging by a thread.”

“Well, I’ll see you there at twelve-forty-five. You remember the directions?”

“Yes.”

***

Forty minutes later, in the busy parking lot of a supermarket in Fort Walton, Terry left his vehicle, walked over, and got into Sydney’s.

“I have to be back in Laurel half an hour ago,” she said, her voice threatening to break in fury. “I can’t be missing in action.” She paused. “So, now what?”

“We have to finish the job.”

“Your job.”

“I’m telling you there was no pulse, no breath.”

“Well, there may not be one for long—but the point is, there still
is
!”

Terry spoke with forceful calm, giving each word equal weight. “We are in this together. We were, we are, and we always will be. And you know we want to get it right.”

She nodded, even calmer now than he. “Yes. Can you be absolutely certain that he didn’t see you?”

“Don’t you think that’s what’s keeping me awake? But, no, he couldn’t have. For all intents and purposes he was dead.”

“Well, he came to enough to pick up the telephone and drag it to his mouth.”

“For the ninety seconds I was in that room he wasn’t conscious. I know he wasn’t.”

“You’d better hope so.”

“So had you. What chance are they giving him?”

“They don’t know or won’t say.”

“We have to make sure he doesn’t come out of the coma.”

“We’ve thought about that. I’m sure you have. We know who has to do it. The most you can do is pay a visit or two. We’re the ones who are there on a regular basis.” She looked at him dismissively. “You fucked it up but you’ll still get your five million. As you say, there’s no turning back now.” She looked into the rearview mirror. The skin around her eyes was puffy and ashen from lack of sleep, but the eyes were bright.

“We’ll do it all right. And we’ll do it soon. He’ll simply stop breathing. They have a shunt in his esophagus. Nobody’ll think twice about it.”

***

The next day he was moved to a private room in the intensive care unit. There was no major change. The vital signs had improved slightly. The medication was helping his heart rate. But not enough.

Hudson, Libby, Camilla, Sydney, and Chaz were on a rotation of four hours, with Fentry and Victor each taking two-hour shifts. Each of them was now allowed to sit beside him for fifteen minutes of every hour.

***

In the late afternoon, Chaz and Sydney talked quietly in the guestroom at Hudson’s cottage. Moon had apparently decided that if it was okay with Hudson that these people had been here twice now when Hudson was not, and without acknowledging him with even a cursory pat on the head, it must be okay, and had sauntered off for a nap.

Hudson was at the hospital. They were trying, futilely, to rest.

“We’re going to split an Ambien,” said Sydney, reaching for the glass of water by the lamp. “We
have
to get a few hours of sleep. We
have
to be able to think.” Chaz looked her and reached out to put his hand on her thigh, as if to make sure she was really there. There had never been any question which of them would do it, but he asked, “Are you sure you’re okay with it?”

“Yes. I have to be. For us.” She fished the pill from her bag. “Now take this and let me sleep. He’s due back around eleven or twelve. I’ll get you up.”

***

Moon, too, had been unable to rest. He wagged slowly back up the hall, looked into Hudson’s empty bedroom, and then at the closed door down the passageway. He approached it slowly, nosing the air, his eyes quizzical. He turned and went halfway back to Hudson’s room. As if confused and not knowing what else to do, he lowered himself to the floor. He lay his head on his paws for a few minutes, watching the closed door. Then he roused himself again.

For some time he wandered circuitously, down the long hall, around the great room to the front door, and then back again.

Chapter 36

Hudson sat and stared, one hand idling along Moon’s head and neck, the other holding a scotch. The small lamp beside him gave the only light in the room and without really seeing it he looked at the wan reflection of his head and upper body in the black windows. He wore only an old thin pair of gym shorts; his hair was still damp from the shower.

When he had come in a half-hour before, he had been hot and tired, covered with that layer of clammy film that is the unique memento of airplanes and hospitals. He was glad to have the cottage and its middle-of-the-night cool quietness to himself. Even Olive had given a rare indication that this was the preferred state of affairs, choosing the ottoman instead of the sofa, dozing close to his feet.

They had, as before, left a note. Sydney had written:

10:45

We’re leaving now. Victor came by and so did Susie, so we’re well-stocked. And Fentry must have spread the word to friends—the phone didn’t ring and no one came by. We slept nearly six hours!

Please eat something. And please get as much sleep as you can.

S & C

Below, Chaz had added:

Susie gave us her number so we can get to you if we need you.

Why not take the phone off the hook?

At seven-thirty, Charlie had been taken off the respirator by the physician in charge and seemed to be breathing peacefully. But he had not regained consciousness and with every hour that he did not the odds that he ever would were ebbing. The doctors still weren’t committing themselves to much. “His vital signs continue to strengthen, there’s no apparent brain damage, and those are good signs…but we just can’t know. The situation is grave. We can only wait.”

He didn’t know whether to interpret the day’s other new development as positive or simply innocuous: they were now allowed to sit beside him around the clock. When he’d arrived for his shift, before he had even entered the room, he’d heard the low tones of Libby’s marvelous voice, tinged with fatigue but still vibrant by most standards. She sat as close to Charlie as possible. Awkwardly, probably very uncomfortably, she balanced a large book against the edge of the bed with one hand and with the other held Charlie’s hand. As he came in Hudson could see that she was gently squeezing for emphasis. She looked up over her reading glasses and tilted the book.
The Wind in the Willows
. She smiled. “I really didn’t know what to bring. But I always liked it.”

***

Hudson
did
need to get as much sleep as he could. The shapeless present tense, like some dull mysterious pain, kept expanding unpredictably. He’d probably had a total of about six or seven hours in the last seventy-two. His concentration hadn’t been reliable on the drive home.

There had been no time for sleep. The drive time to the hospital was nearly an hour each way, and when he hadn’t been at the hospital, he’d been interviewed and re-interviewed by the ATF people and the local investigators.

They all had. Actually, it had given him and Libby and Camilla something do in the endless agonizing hours. They compared notes. It seemed no more real than Charlie lying near death, but it provided at least some focus and at least the illusion that they weren’t merely drowning in helplessness.

The investigators seemed increasingly accepting of the fact that Charlie had been shot by Mark DeWayne Lukerson, a twisted venomous zealot who was wanted for bombing a family planning clinic in South Carolina. He had been renting a room in a boarding house in Pensacola for several months and working as a painter. The letter at the scene seemed to fit his m.o. and the handwriting was a match.

They knew from Terry Main that he had done a small painting job almost five months earlier at the Blue Bar. He was a replacement for the regulars who had just moved away and he came with references. Main suggested they also talk with the Alburtys on Potero. He’d done their garage. They were away and had only had one five-minute conversation with him. Main had been busy at the time and spoken to him only twice, ten minutes if that. The guy had certainly given no indication of knowing Charlie, but he did make one or two weird comments about politics and the big revival in Pensacola which, Terry said, would be reason enough not to have hired him again.

But that was more than four months ago and he hadn’t been heard of since. Why he had the idea that Charlie was a hard-core porno producer was still anyone’s guess, but then why did people like Lukerson think that the Holocaust never happened or that Oprah Winfrey was the Anti-Christ?

Charlie had either heard Lukerson coming down the hall, had his gun ready, lain still, and tried to shoot first, or, more likely, heard something only in time to get it out of the drawer. In either case, both men apparently fired at the exact same moment. Libby was just a bit surprised that Charlie had kept a gun, an unregistered one. But it really wasn’t very unusual in the area. Between them, she and Camilla knew three or four other people who did, including Brad, who had remembered to bother with the paperwork only to avoid even the slightest chance of embarrassment when a cousin had been elected to the state legislature.

***

But instead of taking any satisfaction from the official satisfaction, Hudson felt that things were hurtling out of control. Something was wrong and he didn’t know what it was and every step forward seemed less like progress than a frustration, adding up to nothing, leading nowhere.

He needed to sleep but he couldn’t let go of some unformed idea that he needed to sit up and stay awake until he got a handle on something. Knew something. They had worked out this schedule so that they could each get at least some rest. That made sense, was necessary. Fentry, along with Camilla’s assistant, was covering the 26-A. Other than some reading, Hudson hadn’t thought about work. But he was uneasy with the other result of the rotation. If you weren’t with Charlie, you were trying to sleep. They were passing like ships in the night. Out of touch. The circle broken.

It was eleven-fifty. If he got to bed before one, he could still get a good night’s sleep.

He sat in a stupor of weariness so profound that he couldn’t feel his body, but his mind paced like a wild beast. Utterly still, his breath even and light, he grew more and more detached from the reflection of the man in the window and imagined as a beast indeed whatever it was that comprised the invisible self, out in the night beyond, ranging farther and faster, now beside Charlie’s inert form, now at the dinner party, Camilla across the table, silver gleaming in candlelight and Sydney and Chaz gleaming from their ends of the table, now running on the beach toward a vague and lowering horizon in the hot milk-white morning. Running. Running.

Just at the moment the beast circled back to lift him by his guts on a gorge of anger, he fell asleep.

***

He was watching a preview of a film, as he sometimes did, on a Saturday morning. He sat near the back of the theatre, alone in the dark. He had stopped at a Starbucks on the way and held a large cup of black coffee.

In the scene in the film, a teacher was talking with a high school class about
The Great Gatsby
. The teacher was animated, intense, and the students were enthralled, questioning her and one another in vigorous discussion. She had voguishly short, spiky, red hair and wore thin wire-rimmed glasses. Her voice, however, was Libby’s voice, throaty, rich, burnished. And Hudson recognized what she was saying about the novel, the lines that came out in Libby’s voice, as exact phrases
he
had spoken.

But the teacher was Sydney Cullen.

Something at the back of the classroom caught her eye and she stopped talking. The principal and her associate had entered the room. Kate and Camilla. The students turned as the associate came forward along the outer row of desks. The principal spoke calmly but authoritatively from the back. “I’m sorry, but we’re having something like a practice fire drill and we need to move quickly and silently to the front hallway downstairs. We’re in no danger, but I want you to come now. Don’t worry with your things. You can get them later. Quickly now.” She gestured to those students nearest her and they began to filing out.

The teacher remained composed. She and the associate principal followed the last students to the back.

The principal put her hand on the teacher’s upper arm. “There’s been an accident.”

As though in a seizure, the teacher bent nearly double toward the floor. The two women reached down to support her as her limp body jolted with shuddering sobs.

The camera moved in for a close-up. A grimace dissolving in tears. Strands of red hair plastered on the cheek. Glasses dangling madly from one ear.

The screen went black and the sound system sputtered into silence.

He turned to look up at the projection booth but apparently there was no one there.

***

Though it felt as if he’d been asleep for hours, it had only been minutes. His legs were like cement when he stood up, but he got his bearings and headed over to the kitchen where he poured out a second small scotch and grabbed an ice cube.

He walked down the hall and into the guestroom. He turned on the bedside lamp. He looked first in the waste can near the desk and then in the one in the bathroom. There were several wadded tissues in each. He opened the closet door and looked at the few things they had brought. He opened the overnight case and the shoulder bag they’d had with them when they’d come back from Tallahassee. In the bathroom again he went through her small beaded cosmetics bag and his Moroccan leather dop kit.

He looked in the mirror. It was that haggard man in the middle of the night again. The brow furrowed, green eyes streaked with red and sagging in pinched sacks of bruised-looking skin, the hair a tangle of reddish brown and grey. The man he’d thought had gone away.

He leaned forward, his arms on either side of the sink. His face was only inches from the glass but he was blind with the old upsurge of dank emotions. What seemed an inescapable pain that kept compounding. With all the not-knowing of life. The not being able ever to do enough. With everyone going away and leaving him. With Kate. With Charlie. With fearing that that he would never want to reach out to anyone ever again and knowing that if he ever did he would be afraid to.

***

The mirror receded even farther and for the millionth time he saw Kate’s face. That early spring morning more than two years before that had become a fixed and eternal moment. Sitting beside him on the loveseat that flanked the small round table in the breakfast room. Talking idly about something in the paper. Laughing a low morning laugh. He had gotten up for more coffee. Only steps away. When he turned back, she had a look of astonishment on her face. She opened her lips as if to speak but instead suddenly sagged and fell forward heavily. Kneeling beside her, he looked up into her face. All in a handful of seconds.

But, already, she was no longer there. A small rivulet of blood inched from the crevice of her lip. Her jaw had hit the edge of the table. He called 911 and while he waited, rocking her, looking into her sightless eyes he had said over and over and over, Oh, sweetie, you’ve hurt your lip, your beautiful lip, your lip, your lip….

The paramedics were probably on the scene within eight or nine minutes, but those minutes had already become eternity. He propped her gently against the sofa to let them in and told her he would be back in a second. But he knew that when they reentered that room she would not be there. An aneurysm, he would later learn. No pain, the doctor assured him. Immediate. It didn’t matter. Her beautiful lip was bleeding, Kate’s lip was bleeding. The doctor. Aneurysm. Immediate. All that would come and go. Come and go.

But her beautiful lip was bleeding. Her lip would always be bleeding…

***

His face slowly swam back into view.

When it did he no longer saw a face of grief but one of rage. Just as the tears welled suddenly from his staring eyes, toppled over the red bottom lids, and coursed down to the corners of his lips, he thought suddenly of Sydney, of how, on entering Charlie’s room during the past few days, he had often found her with her eyes glistening with tears. Never actually in the act of crying. Never an obvious show, never an overtly manipulative performance—but, frequently, the suggestion of
having
cried.

That strained, reddish look in the whites of eyes that have been staring, held open, for awhile. Without blinking.

In an instant he was crouching beside the waste can. He couldn’t believe it—and neither could Moon, who had awakened and now joined him—but he was pulling out the tissues, examining each one closely. There were seven or eight. Most of them were still slightly damp. But there was no sign of anything like makeup. Or mucus. He lifted each one close to his nostrils and breathed deeply, over and over again.

He went out to the waste can by the desk and did the same thing.

Of course he couldn’t be sure.

But he knew something about tears. And in the slight, rather uniform moistness that remained in the wadded tissues there didn’t seem to be the faintest trace of salt.

He set the alarm for six.