The Fixer (24 page)

A
ndrea Messina is talking to him, looking more gorgeous than ever, backlit as if in a TV commercial for shampoo. But he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. He asks her to repeat it, but now she doesn’t understand what
he’s
saying, and he can’t keep his eyes open, and when he opens them again, she’s gone.

The next thing Rick was aware of was light, blindingly bright. He wondered if he’d died and gone to heaven, but he also felt as if he’d been hit by a truck—no, as if the truck had rolled over him and was still parked on top of his body—and he didn’t think you could be in heaven and also be in a world of hurt.

Everything was bright and glary, and he realized he was only looking out of one eye. His left eye wouldn’t open. He heard steady beeping and another sound, a strange sound that went
whoosh-click,
whoosh-click,
whoosh-click.
He heard a hubbub of loud voices as if he were in the middle of a crowd.

He coughed and realized something was in his throat, something big, and now he began to gag, to choke, and then he tried to breathe in, but it was like breathing through a straw, he could barely get any air, and he had to get that thing out of his throat or he’d choke to death. He was overcome by panic. He struggled, tried to get up, tried to rip this thing out of his throat, and then there was a loud beeping and he heard a woman’s voice saying, “He’s awake, he’s bucking the vent.”

“The doctor’s right here,” said another voice.

He couldn’t clear his throat, couldn’t stop choking.

“Okay, relax, relax, you’re feeling the ventilator,” a woman said. “You need to show me you can breathe on your own. I need you to breathe out and cough.”

Rick, in full panic mode now, struggling with all his strength, managed to free one hand and reached up toward whatever the hell it was that was lodged in his throat.

“Mr. Hoffman, relax, you have a tube in your throat, you’re on a ventilator, but—Mr. Hoffman, if you understand me, give me a thumbs-up, okay?”

Rick stuck his thumb up, with the only hand that seemed to be working, thinking,
There’s your goddamned thumb, get this thing out of my throat,
but unable to say anything.

“Mr. Hoffman, take a nice breath in and out.”

Rick tried to breathe in, but he could barely suck in any air.

“Okay, excellent,” the woman said. “Now I want you to cough for me. Or push out really hard as if you’re coughing. Make a big cough. On three, I want you to cough. One, two, and three—excellent.” Rick coughed, though it felt more like he was gagging, he hacked and then caught his breath—and a moment later he was taking a deep, wonderful breath, and it was like coming up from the bottom of a pool; he gulped the air in and it was great. And then at almost the same instant, he felt a terrific stabbing pain in his chest.

“Good, there you go. Now spit.”

And someone was holding a pink plastic bowl under his mouth and he spit out gobs of something and it felt terrific.

“Mr. Hoffman, I’m Dr. Castillo. You were intubated because they were worried you might not be able to protect your airway. Do you remember what happened?”

The doctor was out of focus. Rick blinked a few times and she began to swim into focus, but he was looking at her only with his right eye.

“Uh,” he said.

“Your vital signs look good. Can you say your name?”

“Uh . . . Rick Hoffman,” he said. His voice was hoarse and his throat hurt.

“Excellent. Now, it looks like somebody beat you up pretty good. Do you remember what happened?”

Rick just looked at the doctor, who was dark-haired and pretty and looked barely out of her teens. “Uh,” he said. The room was white and dazzlingly bright and mostly out of focus.

He remembered the baseball bat and the guy with the shamrock tattoo swinging it at him, remembered shouting at the guy to stop. And the guy not stopping. He couldn’t figure out how he got here, how he ended up in this hospital, wherever it was.

But why could he see out of only one eye? He reached up to touch his left eye, pulled it open, and he could see blurry shapes, and when he let go, his eye closed again.

“Well, you got banged up, quite a bit,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a left lateral nondisplaced clavicle fracture—that’s a collarbone fracture. Plus you’ve got some fractured ribs on your left side—posterior ribs three, four, and five on the left. The CT scan showed you have a fracture of your left cheekbone, a zygomatic arch fracture.”

He took a deep breath and gasped as he felt the stabbing pain in his chest once again.

“Yeah, you’re going to hurt a lot, pretty much all the time.” She gave a low chuckle. “We’ve got you on some pain-killers but you may need some more, looks like. You’ve got some big bruises on your back and on your chest and over your left kidney. You had some blood in your urine, what we call hematuria, from the renal contusions.”

Rick suddenly realized he felt a strange, unfamiliar sensation down there, and he reached down and felt it.

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “you’ve got a tube down there, a Foley catheter, and we can get that out of you in a couple of minutes. Your urine’s going to be pink for a little while. Oh, and it looks like you may have a sternal fracture—you got hit in the solar plexus. I don’t know if you want to take a look.” She handed him a mirror with a white plastic handle. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t.”

He took the mirror. He wanted to see how bad he looked.

It was bad. He barely recognized the face in the mirror. One side of his face looked mostly normal, just some scrapes here and there, but the left side of his face was swollen and misshapen and eggplant purple. His left eye was shut and dome-shaped. He looked like a boxer after twelve rounds. Like a purple Pillsbury Doughboy. He put his hand to his face and pulled open his left eyelid again, just to make sure his left eye worked. It did. He moved his jaw up and down and was pleased to discover that worked. Gingerly he rolled his head back and forth on his neck a few times. It hurt, but it worked, too. He handed the mirror back to the doctor.

“Looks pretty bad, huh?” she said.

“Pretty bad.”

“But really, I’d say you were lucky.”

“Lucky.” He laughed mordantly, which made his head hurt.

“I’ve seen a lot worse. You’ve got a lot of contusions, anterior and posterior, but apart from the rib fractures and the clavicle, you came out of this okay. You had a concussion, so we want to be careful about that. You’re going to look pretty swollen for a week or so—you’re going to have raccoon eyes for a while—and you’re going to have a lot of pain.”

“What pain meds am I on right now?”

“A fentanyl/Versed IV drip.”

“It’s no good. It’s not working.”

“We titrated the meds down until you woke up.”

“Yeah, well, it hurts to breathe.”

“It’s going to be that way for a while. Everything’s going to hurt. You’ll feel like a pro football player the day after a big game. But we’ll give you some pain meds for breakthrough pain. Oh, and stay out of fistfights. A concussed brain is a lot more likely to get a repeat concussion.”

“Okay. Where am I, by the way? Mass General?”

“North Shore Regional Medical Center in Salem. I think the EMTs picked you up in Marblehead?”

He nodded, groaned. He wondered who called 911. Conklin? The bouncer, when he was finished working with his baseball bat?

“When can I get out of here?”

“Maybe later today when your friend comes back.”

“My friend.”

“Ms.—Messina, I think? Given your condition, I’m unwilling to release you except into somebody’s custody.”

“Andrea? I don’t understand.”

“Anyway, do you have your own doctor, Mr. Hoffman?”

“Doctor . . . yes, I think so.”

“Good. You’re going to have to follow up with your doctor or a trauma clinic. The staples will need to come out in a week.”

“Did you say staples?”

“You got a pretty bad cut on your scalp. Also, there’s some stitches to your left cheek. Those are absorbable, but you might want to get them out anyway.”

Someone, a male voice, said, “Can I talk to him now, Doc?”

Rick saw a uniformed police officer enter the curtained-off area.

“I think he’s good to talk now, don’t you agree, Mr. Hoffman?”

“Talk to . . .”

“Mister, uh, Hoffman,” the cop said, “I’m Detective Harrison. Can we talk for a minute?” He was young and overweight, with black hair and gray eyes and deep circles under his eyes.

“Sure, I guess so.”

“All right, Mr. Hoffman,” the doctor said, “I’ll see if we can reach Ms. Messina.” She tugged at a curtain and was gone.

“Mister Hoffman, who beat you up?”

“I don’t . . . know.”

He thought:
The bouncer at Jugs. What was his name again? Don’t answer.

“Lemme, lemme back up a second. Do you remember anything about the incident?”

“Just being beaten with a baseball bat. Everything else is kind of vague.”

“But you don’t know the person who attacked you?”

“Right, I don’t.”

“Can you describe him?”

“All I saw was the baseball bat.”

“Do you have any idea why he beat you up like this?”

Rick tried to shake his head but it hurt too much. “No.”

“Mr. Hoffman,” the cop said, exasperated, “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know. Are you afraid of this person, for some reason?”

“Take a look at me,” Rick said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“You must have some idea who did it.”

“No.”

“It just came out of the blue. You were walking down the street and someone went after you with a baseball bat and beat the crap out of you.”

Rick was silent.

“Here’s my card,” the detective said, handing it to Rick. “Just call and ask for Detective Harrison if you change your mind.”

Rick nodded, and it hurt, but less than shaking his head.

Why was he refusing to tell the police? He had no idea. Maybe because it seemed pointless. The police weren’t going to be able to do anything anyway.

A minute later he heard a woman’s voice and the curtain parted and he saw Andrea.

“Rick, you’re awake! What the hell happened? Who did this to you?”

He looked at her through his one open eye. He smiled, or tried to. She was wearing a green jewel-toned suit. Her honeyed brown hair fell to her shoulders in tangled waves. Her full lips, the lips that always looked slightly pursed, were parted. Her brown eyes, normally skeptical, were wide.

“They said your wallet is gone. Did you get held up and you tried to fight them off or something?”

“Something like that. Andi, why are you here?”

“Andi? No one’s called me that in, like, twenty years.”

“Old habits. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, it’s just . . . someone took your wallet and the only thing you had on you was my business card for some reason so they must have assumed we were friends.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t. . . .” She smiled ruefully. “You’re going to have to go home with me. Otherwise they won’t let you out.”

“That’s okay, I’ll be fine.”

“Have you seen yourself? You look like . . . Raging Bull or something. Anyway, I’ve got plenty of room.”

“I don’t want you to do this, Andrea.”

“As far as I can tell, you have two choices. Spend the next week in the North Shore Regional Medical Center in Salem or go home with me. As long as you don’t mind sharing a house with an eight-year-old boy.”

He closed his sole functioning eye, then opened it again. “Just for a day or so.”

“Let me see what I can do about getting you discharged.”

“Thanks.”

“On the ride home you can tell me everything.”

“Right,” he said. The question was whether he could safely tell her anything at all.

H
e sat in the front passenger’s seat of her Volvo station wagon. He could barely keep his eyes open. He wanted nothing more than to drift off in a narcotic haze.

“I hope you don’t mind my getting you out of the hospital that quickly,” Andrea said. “I’ve got to get back to my office.”

“Happy to get out of that place. I couldn’t sleep with all the beeping.”

“I’ve got a big meeting this afternoon with a foundation that’s interested in giving us a multimillion-dollar gift. So I have to be on my best behavior.”

“That’s why the fancy suit?”

“You got it.” She signaled and sped up to pass a slow-moving truck. “Rick, what happened to you?”

“I . . . got mugged.”

“Mugged?”

“I made the mistake of trying to fight the guy off.”

A long silence followed. “You were mugged in Marblehead.” She sounded dubious.

“Right.”

Another pause. “Okay. So they took your wallet but they didn’t take your iPhone.”

“You can’t use someone else’s iPhone if it’s locked with a code.”

“Strange.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, then back at the road. “You want to stop by your house and pick up some stuff?”

“My house?”

“Clothes, whatever.”

“Oh, right. No, I’m not living there.”

“Yeah, all that plaster dust . . . can’t blame you. Where’re you staying?”

He couldn’t remember. There’d been so many hotels and B&Bs. “Oh, right, the DoubleTree. On Soldiers Field Road. But I’m okay for now.”

“Think you’ll be okay if I just drop you at home and leave you for a while?”

“I got my pain meds, I’m all set.”

A couple of minutes later she said something he didn’t quite get, and the next thing he knew they were pulling up to her house on Fayerweather Street.

*   *   *

Some time later—hours, probably, but he couldn’t be sure—he awoke to find a pair of eyes staring at him from a few inches away.

“Wow,” someone said. A kid’s voice. Probably the owner of the staring pair of eyes.

It was a mop-headed boy wearing a Red Sox T-shirt. Rick lifted his head off the pillow, which hurt. Moving his head hurt. It wasn’t just the physical act of moving his head, the muscles in his neck. That was bad enough, but then there was a headache from hell. His eyes felt as if there were needles sticking into them from behind.

“Gross,” the kid said. “You look like Jabba the Hutt.”

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m Evan.”

“Evan who’s seven?”

“I’m eight now. I just had a birthday.”

“Right, with all the Goldfish. How was your party?”

“Good.”

“Get anything good?”

“I got Lego sets.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“AT-AT Walker from
Star Wars
.”

“Cool. How come you’re not in school?”

“I just got home.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“She’s still at work. Most days she doesn’t come home till six.”

“She lets you go home from school on your own?”

“Grandma walks me home. Anyways, what happened to you? You look like a monster.”

“Thank you. I had a disagreement with someone who had a baseball bat.”

“Like a baseball player?”

“Not exactly. But he had a pretty good swing.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yep.”

“Where? On your face?”

“Pretty much everywhere. Which reminds me it’s probably time to take one of my happy pills. Also I need to use the bathroom. Evan, is there a bathroom around here?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Evan pointed to the door.

“Got it.” Rick tried to bend his knees, to lift his legs, but that apparently involved muscles in his lower back, which were too stiff and painful to move. They shot out warning daggers of pain.

“Can I help?” Evan said.

“I’ll be okay.” Eventually, Rick was able to get out of the bed by lifting the chenille bedspread and revolving his straight legs around and down. He was wearing hospital scrubs, which must have been put on him in the hospital. The clothes he’d been wearing when he was attacked had been given back to him in a plastic bag. They’d been cut up.

He limped, like a very old man, across the carpet into the hall and into the bathroom. There he discovered that it hurt to relieve himself—no doubt a result of the Foley catheter—and that his urine was pink. They’d warned him it might be pink because of the renal contusions: The bouncer from Jugs had walloped Rick’s left kidney. They said the pink would go away.

When he came back to the guest room, Evan was still there waiting for him, sitting on the floor.

“You must really hurt,” Evan said.

“At least I can walk,” Rick said.

“Not really,” Evan said. “Not so good.”

Rick smiled. “True.” He lowered himself to the carpet next to Evan, wincing and groaning.

“Grandma said you’re a friend of Mommy’s.”

“We went to high school together.” He reached around to the bedside table and found a pencil stamped
GEOMETRY PARTNERS
. “Wanna see a trick?”

“Yeah!”

He put his hands together as if he were praying and parked the pencil in the hollow at the base of his thumbs. His left hand wasn’t quite working right, and it was radiating spasms of pain. But it was like riding a bicycle: You never forget how. His muscle memory compensated for the pain. He swiveled his left hand around and ended up with his hands flat on top of the pencil, thumbs hooked underneath. Fast and mystifying.

“Cool,” Evan said, wide-eyed. “Let me try it.”

But he was to discover that the truly cool thing about the pencil trick was when you tried it yourself and found it impossible to do.

“Wait,” Evan said as he struggled with it. “Wait.”

Rick watched benignly, patiently.

“Wait,” Evan said again, slowly growing frustrated. “Wait. I can do it.
Argh!
Do it again!”

Rick took the pencil back, hooked his thumbs around it, rotated his hands smoothly, ending up with the backs of his hands up and the pencil gripped underneath.

“Can you do it slower?”

“Sure.” Rick swiveled and twisted slowly.

Evan tried several times. “What’s the trick?”

“There is no trick.”

“Yes, there is. Can you show me how?”

“Sure.” Rick took the pencil. “Start with your thumb crossing like this, okay?”

“Okay.” Evan watched closely, mouth slightly ajar, mesmerized.

It took around five minutes to teach him, which was about how long it took Mr. Clarke a.k.a. Antholis to teach Rick years ago.

“I’m doing it!” Evan said excitedly. “I got it!”

“You got it.”

“But there’s no trick! I thought there was a trick, but there’s no
trick
.”

Rick laughed. “Want to know something, Evan? You’re a lot smarter than I was when I was your age. You got it. The trick is, there’s no trick.”

“Hi, guys.”

Rick looked up and saw Andrea standing at the door. She was holding a big balloon glass of red wine. He realized she’d been standing there for a minute or two, just watching.

“Hi, Mommy!” Evan said, springing to his feet. “Wanna see a trick?”