The Edge of the Gulf (26 page)

It was after midnight before Hudson made Camilla at home in his bedroom and went off to sleep in the loft.

Chapter 40

By early afternoon the job was nearly completed.

Hudson had met with Tim Faraday in his office at six to go over things again, and half an hour later they had met the carpenter, electrician, and technical consultant outside Charlie’s room. The security guys across the hall were sent home.

Camilla, still whispering to an extremely wide-eyed Fentry, sat with Charlie while Hudson, Faraday, and the workmen went into the empty bay just west of Charlie’s room.

It had been a multipurpose space for years, most recently a temporary coffee and food service room while the new wing was being built. It was soon to be reincarnated as a medical records storage office, but for now it was merely an empty room with an adjoining bath, half-fitted with terminals and crates and coiled wire.

After Faraday’s appearance with the crew that morning, none of the staff thought much about the sounds of minor construction that came from the room throughout the day or the men who came in and out of it and, occasionally, quietly, Charlie’s.

The physician in charge came in and was pleased. The heart rate had steadied and the neurology reports from the tests the day before were encouraging.

Victor traded places with Fentry at eight, and Hudson sat with Charlie while Camilla went through the story again down in the coffee shop. When they came back up, Victor still looked flustered, and Hudson could tell from the way Camilla frequently touched his arm and the soothing tone of her voice that the big man didn’t want to leave and go to work. As he held Charlie’s hand in his and looked at the two of them, Hudson could sense his free-floating bewilderment giving way to something tightly focused and coiled, as if, given a signal from Camilla, he would throw Charlie’s own team of doctors to the ground one by one. Finally, Camilla walked him down the hall as far as the elevators, reassuring him that they would be in touch. Soon.

Whether anything happened or not.

As the day wore on, Hudson and Camilla looked and listened as the work went on. They watched the clock. They took turns by the head of Charlie’s bed, reading to him. When the men had to use their drills, Camilla put the headset over his ears and played favorite music.

He was coming to, though only for a minute or two at a time, with some regularity now. He clearly recognized them both. And though they debated whether it was wishful thinking or not, they thought they discerned just a faraway hint of the old glitter in his eye. Even when he lapsed away from them again, it seemed less an utter absence and more like sleep.

At two, Rogers and Fields arrived. At two-thirty, the men thought they had it finished. Hudson called Tim Faraday and he came up immediately.

They went next door. They came back into Charlie’s room. They tested. Re-tested. Made adjustments and readjustments.

At three-thirty it was as right as they could make it. Faraday left for a meeting. Rogers and Fields disappeared.

Libby called at four-thirty. She had gotten some decent sleep despite a constant nagging that she was out of the loop.

When they had told her first about Charlie and then the preparations, Hudson said, “You know you’re right here with us.”

“Call me.”

“We will.”

They waited.

***

At five-fifty, when Chaz and Sydney walked in, Charlie’s eyes were open again and he was steadily returning Hudson’s pressure on his hand. Chaz put down some papers and magazines and a small bag on the sofa. Sydney came straight to the bed.

Camilla and Hudson moved slightly, and when Charlie’s eyes swam weakly over to Sydney they saw something like the faint light of pleased recognition again, which seemed to delight Sydney. She reached out her hand excitedly. “Chaz!” She leaned down and kissed Charlie’s forehead. “You’re doing so well, Charlie. We’re right here.”

Chaz went around to the other side of the bed. He seemed to Hudson out of breath and a bit edgy, nearly snagging the catheter meter with his foot and then catching his watchband momentarily on the IV as he took Charlie’s other hand.

“Hey, guy. You’re looking really good.”

Charlie dozed off again and for a moment, they stood there, looking at one another, one of Charlie’s hands in Hudson’s, the other in Chaz’s.

“There’s more good news,” said Camilla, smiling evenly. “The cardiovascular surgeon was just in and said that the slight tear in the esophagus should be mended and that he wants to dissolve the shunt tomorrow morning. Charlie will be able to start taking liquids by mouth and in a day or so soft food.”

“He wanted to talk today, we’re sure.” Hudson smiled as well.

Sydney looked over Charlie’s bandaged chest at Chaz. Her widened eyes began to fill with tears, but she lifted her chin just perceptibly and smiled at him.

While Hudson and Camilla gathered up a few things, Sydney asked a number of questions. All intelligent, all earnest. Was it important now to keep talking and reading to him? To play music? What if he tried to speak? Did he need just to sleep?

Hudson thought the solicitude as genuine and normal as anyone might expect in the circumstances and as he and Camilla went down on the elevator he wondered aloud for a moment if they weren’t perhaps desperately wrong after all.

“I don’t think so,” said Camilla as they walked down the long front hall. At the doors, she stopped and turned to him, her hand gripping his upper arm for a moment. “And if we are? If we had to live this over again, knowing what we know and what we don’t know, are you saying you wouldn’t try it again?”

“No.”

***

St. Andrews is a moderate-sized hospital. Its one large parking lot wraps around the front and down one side of the building, both flanks of which were visible from Charlie’s room.

As Hudson first walked Camilla to her car and then went several aisles over to the Highlander, he imagined he could feel their eyes on his back. They would be able to see him leave through the gate and drive down the street as far as the access road that would take him west to Highway 98, back to Laurel.

They wouldn’t be able to see him when he circled two long blocks over and returned to the hospital from the south, entered the small underground lot for physicians and senior staff, and parked in a taped-off slot beside the administrator’s.

Chapter 41

Sydney was worried more about Chaz than any other variable. He was like a sick cat, alternating between anxious testiness and a distanced morose sulk.

The latter had seemed preferable for awhile.

Their first five hours in the room had become almost unbearable. It was as though some time-warp synapse had fired and he had been transported back to the throes of some very bad coke rush. Manic, he stalked the small room one side to the other, over and over and over again. She sent him out to walk the halls when she couldn’t stand it anymore, telling him to slow down as much as he possibly could and to try to look encouraged, relatively happy. She knew that fatigue from anxiety was expected, a helpful cover, but she didn’t want him drawing attention by running up and down the halls half-crazed.

Neither of them looked often at Charlie, and they went to the bed even less.

Chaz got juice and coffee and water and saltine crackers and anything else he could find down the hall in the small service room. He went down to the cafeteria twice and came back. He rattled three papers and read two magazines cover to cover. He stood. He reclined tentatively on the sofa with a pillow behind his head. He sat on the sofa, he sat in the chair. He held the remote control as if it were some hold on a fleeting reality, channel-surfing wildly, repeatedly, watching perhaps one entire sitcom and probably three hours of fragmented snippets as brief as seconds and no longer than a few minutes.

He talked back to the screen, indirectly to her, muttered to himself. With the remote still in his hand and clicking away, he would walk over and pick up something from the pile of reading materials, look at it, mouth out disparate snatches.

But now it seemed, as the clock inched toward midnight, that he was even worse. He had sunk into an unreachable chasm, sitting in the armchair and scarcely moving, watching a talk-show at low volume on the tilted screen above without giving the slightest indication that he was seeing or hearing it. He didn’t go out into the hall, he didn’t go for juice or crackers, he didn’t look for something new to read, he didn’t respond to her suggestions, he didn’t respond well when she had attempted, twice, to kiss him, to tell him it would be over soon, it would be all right.

She understood his nerves and knew what to do about them. She knew less well what to do about his dangerously imploding fear. It had descended an hour before.

Chaz was in the john and she had control of the remote long enough to stay focused on Angelica Huston’s final scene in
The Grifters.
It seemed fortuitous that she had happened on this scene of this film, on this night, at this moment. She’d always liked the way the mother’s body dropped into a hopeless hunch over her dead son and the heaving guttural animal sounds of stunned grief. She watched now utterly transfixed.

Chaz came out just as it ended.

And just as Charlie’s eyes suddenly flew wide open.

Sydney saw the sick terror in Chaz’s eyes and turned toward the bed. Charlie was smiling at them and slowly, with obvious effort, was lifting his left hand from its usual resting place at his side.

It was a salute. He nodded his head slightly. Proud that he’d accomplished it. That he reached them.

He drifted off again.

Chaz reached blindly behind himself, flailing for a moment, before his hand closed tightly on the edge of the bathroom door. She got up and went toward him. But she touched nothing. He had ducked, almost falling backward, into the harsh fluorescence. The door slammed in her face.

She whispered. “Chaz!”

The sounds of him being sick went on for two or three minutes that seemed like hours.

Other than a couple of monosyllabic replies to questions she tried to shape as comforts to him, he hadn’t spoken for the past forty-five minutes. Only in the past ten did she seem to be making the crucial contact with him that would let her know she could get him through it. She had taken her chair over beside his and held his hand. She fed him crackers and cold water. After awhile, he rested his head on her shoulder for a minute. When he raised it again, he smiled sheepishly, pale, his eyes gorgeous and dark. “I’m fine.”

“I know you are. I count on you,” she said.

It was going to be fine.

She did something like pray.

For her poor, dear, weak, beautiful husband whom she really did love. He was the only person she had ever met who seemed emptier than herself, and that made her feel things she had never felt. Strong. Useful. Loved. She prayed for herself. She prayed for it to be over, for them to be away. She prayed for a hundred million dollars.

She prayed that she would be strong enough not to look at her watch or the clock every two minutes.

She prayed most of all that Charlie would not waken again to disturb them.

She prayed that less than two hours from now they could know for certain that they would never have to worry about that again.

She passed the remaining time by considering her reactions over and over again, matching specific reactions, or a repertoire of ready possibilities, to specific individuals and groups. When the time came, like any good actor, she had to believe it.

Chaz never looked at Charlie again. He worked a crossword puzzle with unrelenting concentration, his mournful mounting hysteria confined to the circumference of the pencil.

***

They would now have seemed, to anyone who might have seen them, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more or less than what they were—a handsome young couple keeping a late-night vigil by the bed of their loved one.

An expanse of hardware and fixtures and sockets and equipment rose before them, along the wall behind the bed, staring down impersonally on the figure in the bed, a cluttered mass of harsh necessities.

They sat amid the wires and tubes and monitors that blinked or dripped or clicked or whirred, each according to its function. They sat silently amid the seamless, inscrutable, almost submarine, sounds.

They could never have distinguished, among this confused but authoritative welter, three new sets of very small holes in the wall that had not been there before, one pair nearly six feet up from the floor, another a few inches lower to the right, and a single metal-collared aperture set in the bank of control panels and armatures just over the head of the bed.

Chapter 42

Hour by hour, the hall had slowly subsided from its usual daytime demeanor—charged, hurried, clamorous—into the suspended twilight that passes for night in a hospital.

By 12:30, the two nurses had made their rounds and were doing charts at their station, and a young man from housekeeping had swabbed the floor from side to side and moved on with a slow hypnotic rhythm and a faint diffusion of disinfectant.

***

At 1:30, Sydney got up from her chair, laying aside a recent issue of
Architectural Digest
. She murmured something to Chaz.

The blood left his face, but he nodded slightly.

He went to the door, opened it, and looked up and down the hall. He shook his head, and a few seconds later a med assistant pushed a cart by and gave him a wan, tired smile.

Seconds later he looked at Sydney, who stood near the bed, and nodded.

She leaned in over the edge of the bed, both her hands rising quickly toward Charlie’s face. Simultaneously and without hesitation she gripped his nostrils shut with one hand and clamped her hand over his mouth.

***

At the same moment Chaz let out an odd, strangled “No!” and her hands jerked to her sides.

A large man in a uniform was twisting him around and jamming his arms into his back.

A uniformed woman had hurtled past them and crossed four yards in three time-lapsed lunges and now gripped her own arms.

***

As they were escorted quickly down the hall, Sydney saw, incongruously, Hudson DeForest standing off to one side.

She didn’t look at him.

She was trying to silence Chaz with a look.

She was trying to think, but she could not.

She had never given a bad performance.

She always made everyone believe because she only played what she believed. But she found herself unprepared for failure. She had no script, no lines. No motivation.

Where was the truth?

She was aware of the stares and could only listen, passively, to the people around her talking. Remote external details.

***

When they emerged from the cool gray unreality and were taken through the harsh sodium vapor lights to a waiting police car, she suddenly recoiled. She heard, from somewhere far away, what sounded like gunfire.

“They
always
have to start early,” chuckled the big man to the woman and another officer who sat behind the wheel.

It was one week before the Fourth of July.

The window between the front and the back seats was like a cage. The woman’s sharply creased uniform smelled faintly of starch.