The Survivor (3 page)

Now came more sirens, the chop of a helicopter, a megaphone bleat. The phone on the New Accounts desk rang and rang. Nate stared at the motionless tableau, all those people, too afraid to rise.

The little girl crawled over to her mother, still unconscious from the kick to her face. Nate crouched above the inert woman, laid two fingers on her neck. Strong pulse.

“She’s okay,” he told the girl. “Your mom’s gonna be fine.”

He stood again, his knees cracking, and announced to no one in particular, “I’m gonna … um, go get some help. Medics. Okay? Everyone okay?”

More stunned silence.

The girl held up her arms. He looked down at her, the familiar pick-me-up gesture twingeing his heart in a place he’d thought had long ago gone brittle and blown away. One of her pigtails had pulled loose, freeing a cloud of hair. The blood on her earlobe had hardened, a black crust. Both cheeks glimmered with tears, but her face remained blank with shock. He crouched and lifted her, grunting against the pain, trying to use his legs instead of his arms. Her wrist brushed the letter opener, sending through him a wave of nausea so intense that he thought he might vomit. But he kept on toward the door, blood warming the back of his shirt.

The security guard had landed faceup, his head corkscrewed unnaturally, white eyes aimed over at them. Stepping into the waiting elevator, Nate turned so the girl was pointed away from the death sprawl. She took his cue, bending her head into the hollow of his neck, the scent of no-tears shampoo bringing him back to Cielle at that age in the bathtub:
We
don’t
splash!

The elevator hummed its descent. His skin tingled—the afterglow of that invincibility he’d felt staring down the hail of bullets. How long had it been since he’d felt like that? He’d cheated something in that room, sucked a last taste of marrow from the bone.

The elevator slowed, the girl’s weight pulling at the crook of his arm. Her face was hot against the side of his neck, and he realized he’d been talking to her, whispering a quiet mantra: “—everything’s gonna be all right everything’s gonna—”

The doors peeled back, exposing the empty lobby. His footsteps grew heavier as he neared the tinted glass of the front wall. Beyond, cop cars, SWAT vans, ambulances, and fire engines crammed the street. Barricades and gun barrels alternated, a pattern of impenetrability. Sniper scopes winked from awnings and balconies.

The girl made a fearful noise and buried herself deeper in his neck. Firming his grip around her with one hand and raising his other painfully overhead, he shoved through the revolving door, staggering out to a reception of countless muzzles and the bright light of day.

Chapter 4

When Nate entered the emergency room, flanked by cops like an escaped convict, the TV in the lobby was already rolling footage from outside the First Union Bank of Southern California. Despite the bandages, blood trickled down his arm, drying across the backs of his fingers like an ill-advised fashion statement. The letter opener, removed from his trapezius and encased in an evidence bag, was handed off to a venerable triage nurse, who looked from it to Nate with an impressive lack of curiosity. She led him through a miasma of familiar hospital smells to Radiology, then deposited him in a room the size of a walk-in closet.

The doctor came in, scanning Nate’s chart as Nate crinkled on the paper sheet of the exam table. “So you got stabbed with a letter opener.”

“It sounds so unimpressive when you say it
that
way.”

She hoisted her lovely eyebrows.

“Sorry,” Nate said. “I just joke so people don’t notice my low self-esteem.”

“It’s not working.”

“It’s a long-term plan.” He exhaled shakily. The adrenaline had washed out of him, leaving him unsteady and vaguely drunk. Beneath the dull throb of a headache, a jumble of images reigned—a burst of red mist from a hooded head, patches of black mesh in place of eyes, the blood-sodden blouse of the bank teller whose hand he had clasped as she’d died. He was rattled, all right, but given what he’d just been through, he was surprised he didn’t feel worse.

A page fluttered up. The doctor’s pen tapped the chart. “Your liver enzymes are elevated. Taking any meds?”

“Riluzole.”

She looked at him fully for the first time, her gaze sharpening behind John Lennon glasses. “So that’s…?”

The familiar image flickered through his mind—Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man on the face of the earth, against the packed grandstands of Yankee Stadium, his head bowed, cap clutched in both hands to rest against his thighs. “Yes,” Nate said.

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“And so you’re … acquainted with your prognosis.”

His prognosis. Yeah. He was acquainted. He knew he would soon have trouble gripping, say, a pen. Then one day he wouldn’t be able to pick it up at all. He knew that his tongue would start to feel thick. Some slurring on and off, at first merely troubling, and then he wouldn’t be able to communicate. Or swallow. He knew that he would in due course require a feeding tube. That his tear ducts would start to go, that he’d need eyedrops and eventually someone else to apply them. He knew that he would feel some general fatigue, at first inconvenient, then debilitating. That he wouldn’t be able to get a full breath. At some point he’d need a CPAP mask at night. And then he’d go on a ventilator. He knew that the cause of the disease was unknown but that there was a significantly increased risk among veterans. There were no answers, and certainly no good ones.

“I am.”

“Where are you in the course of illness?” the doctor asked.

“I was told I could expect six months to a year of good health.”

“When?”

“About nine months ago.” He couldn’t help a dry smile—it so resembled a punch line.

“Any symptoms?”

“A little weakness in my hand. It goes in and out. The symptoms are intermittent. Until they’re not.”

She touched his forearm gently, a technique he employed now and again in his own job. “There are some experimental treatments.”

“Don’t.”

“Okay.” She moistened her lips. “I won’t say anything comforting.”

“Much appreciated.”

She slotted the chart into an acrylic wall rack above a torn-loose
People
cover sporting an elegiac portrait of Elizabeth Taylor and wormed her pale hands into paler latex gloves. After poking and prodding at the edges of the stab wound, she slotted an X-ray into the light box and regarded it, chewing her lip. “You’re lucky. The point bounced off your scapula instead of punching through to your lung. Mostly muscle damage. You current with tetanus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then just antibiotics and Vicodin, you’ll be back to form in a week”—she caught herself. “On this front, I mean.” Chagrin colored her face, and she busied herself opening a suture packet. “Should we stitch you up now?”

Nate smiled wanly. “We could just let me bleed out on the table, save us all the aggravation.”

“L.A.,” she said, threading the needle. “Everybody’s a comedian.”

He sat quietly, enduring the pinpricks of the local anesthetic, then the tug of his numb skin.

“Everyone’s talking about you,” she said. “The bank. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“The army.”

“You don’t seem the soldier type to me.”

“I’m not. Just signed up for ROTC to pay for college. It was 1994. I was never gonna get called up to active duty.”

She made a faint noise of amusement. A metallic snip as she cut the last stitch. “How’d that work out for you?”

“Not so hot,” he said.

WHAT WAS LOST

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

–Unknown

Chapter 5

At UCLA the National Guard is not about training soldiers; it is about olive drab T-shirts, jumping jacks, and shooting-range practice one weekend a month. Nate enjoys the sense of belonging and participates with gratitude, if not the
hoo-ah
earnestness his superiors might prefer. The choice is primarily a financial one; he is on his own here. In high school he buckled down and studied hard, aware that that was the best way out of a house that had been lifeless since his mom had succumbed thoroughly, brutally, to cancer when he was in third grade. After her funeral his father vanished into an effluvium of scotch, a still life in a frayed armchair, the eternal microwave dinner resting on the eternal TV tray at his side. There will be no parent weekends for Nate in college, no palmed-off cash to help cover books.

Most of the time, Nate is a normal student. His roommate, a fellow ROTC cadet named Charles Brightbill, is pathologically relaxed and full of childlike wonderment. Charles has an unsurpassed appreciation of all things everybody else noticed five minutes ago, marveling at planes overhead, a classmate’s cleavage, the color of his just-blown snot in a Kleenex. “Hey,” Charles says. “Look at that rainbow in the sprinkler mist.” Despite Nate’s best efforts, he loves the guy. Charles who is incapable of deception, who dispenses the occasional nugget of inadvertent wisdom, who sleeps in the hall when he forgets his key rather than wake Nate, no matter how many times Nate tells him to bang on the door.

After a particularly soul-destroying exam in their junior year, Charles drags Nate out of bed, beach towels in hand. “Rise ’n’ shine, podnah. Moping’s like listening to Iron Maiden when you’re hungover.” That’s Charles; he can boil down the world and put it in a fortune cookie. Nate relents. Ten minutes later he cranks open the window of Charles’s Datsun 240Z and lets the salt-rich breeze wash over him. Sprawled on the hot Malibu sand, he basks, feeling the life creep back into him.

A distant waterlogged shriek startles him upright. A flailing feminine form, out beyond the break. Then a young man about Nate’s age is disgorged from the sea, landing on all fours on the wet sand before them, surf seething up his forearms. He heaves up salt water, and then his hoarse voice croaks at the beachgoers—“Riptide. She’s got a cramp.”

There is a moment of utter stillness, people frozen on their towels. A few heads swivel to the lifeguard station far along the beach. And then Nate is up and running, dried seaweed pods crackling underfoot. Charles is bellowing after him, but Nate hurdles a wave and strikes out for the break. The undertow grips him, sweeping him toward the woman, who sputters and dips from sight. Muscles on fire, he strokes into a forceful current, and then, finally, her rubbery arm is in his grasp. He sweeps her into him, spinning her so her spine presses to his chest. She spits and struggles, and the back of her head cracks his eye. He lets go, and she goes under the green-black surface and bobs up again, choking. He says, “Stop fighting.” He reaches for her arm once more. “Look at me. I got you.” She stares at him, drops clinging to her eyelashes, and it occurs to him that she is quite beautiful. They are being swept along, the backdrop of the beach whipping by, and she gives a quick, youthful nod. He spins her like a dance partner, and she surrenders into him, her muscles going limp. Clamping an arm over her shoulder and across her flat chest, he lets them drift with the riptide, reading the water. Then he paddles, offsetting them slightly from the current. They reach the sand a half mile up the beach, with Charles, two lifeguards, and a cluster of onlookers sprinting to meet them. They both cough water and pant, and she rises first, tugging him to his feet, and then they are helped and dried and checked to the point of claustrophobia.

The young man who dragged himself to shore stands sheepishly at the outskirts of the cluster. Wrapped in a towel, the woman turns to thank Nate, providing his first full glimpse of her. Her lips are big, almost too big, and the shape of her mouth leaves them between a sneer and a smile. She has creamy white skin and a turned-up nose with a scattering of freckles across the bridge that seem out of place, like they’ve showed up to the wrong party. Her blond hair is cropped tight, short enough to be daring. Her features carry it off, but then Nate thinks they could carry off anything. One flash of that quick, wide grin and he’d not notice if she were wearing a Carmen Miranda hat piled with produce. She has her original, factory-issue breasts—a rarity in Los Angeles—and her body is lean, slim-hipped. Usually he gravitates to girls with a little more meat on their bones, but he is quick to realize that there isn’t much sense in comparing her to anyone who came before.

She introduces herself as Janie. Hovering off Nate’s shoulder, Charles stage-whispers, “Dude, she’s
hot,
” once again narrating the thunderbolt obvious.

Nate offers his hand. “Nate Overbay.” And they shake, which feels a bit ludicrous given that their bare bodies have spent the previous fifteen minutes glued together.

At once Janie’s date is by her side, asking Nate, “Can I give her a ride home? Or you gonna handle that, too?”

Nate thinks,
Now would be a really good time to not say anything.

She and the guy begin to argue, Janie offering apologetic glances at Nate until the scene grows uncomfortable. Nate retreats from the commotion, Charles berating him all the way back to their crappy Westwood apartment for not getting her number. Lying awake that night, Nate realizes that Charles was once again dead-on and resigns himself to a lifetime of regret.

*   *   *

A few weeks later, Nate and Charles are eating Mama Celeste microwave pizza and watching
Melrose Place
when the doorbell rings. Nate answers and finds Janie outside, double-checking an address she has scrawled on her palm. Her short, wet hair sticks out at all angles, fresh from a shower, and she smells of lavender. Before he can figure out how to talk, she says, “I can’t stop thinking about it. How you pulled me out of the water.”

She has the faintest trace of a lisp, just enough to keep him in mind of her mouth, those lips shaping themselves around each word, however imperfectly.

Nate’s heart beats a double-time rhythm. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you either.”

“I
tried,
” she says, agitated. “I thought about all the things I probably wouldn’t like about you. All the stuff we’d fight about if we ever actually were together. How you really aren’t
that
good-looking.”