American Savior (2 page)

“Sure I do,” I said.

“You made this thing with your mouth,” the woman hissed, twisting her mouth down on one side. “You don’t believe any of it! We’re all liars to you, all of us down here in F-ville. I seen you on TV, plenty of times. You always have a little wise look when you do a story about people like us. Right? Don’t he?”

She made a half circle with her eyes but there were no takers in the group.

“What’s your name?” I asked the hissing friend.

“None of your business.”

“Well, I believe the story. Maybe it’s you who doesn’t believe it.”

“Eat me,” she said.

“Fine.” I turned my attention to the mother of the saved child. “Ms. Montpelier, listen, we’d like to have you on the evening news, lead story. Would you mind if I called the camera truck down here? And would you
mind holding Dukey Junior while you tell the story to us on camera, just like you told it to me now? I’m glad he’s all right, by the way.”

Ada didn’t mind. She seemed dazed, preoccupied, maybe in shock—normal reactions, as far as I was concerned, after you’ve seen your kid, or anyone else’s kid for that matter, fall three stories. While we waited for the camera truck, she smoked one unfiltered cigarette after another, waving the smoke away from her little boy’s face as if she’d heard somewhere that it might not be good for him. More friends stopped by to touch the child and hug the mother and listen to the remarkable tale. On camera, she proved to be relaxed and genuine, and even provided an excellent description of the baby’s savior—tattoo of a flower on his left forearm, torn jeans, shaggy black hair. (Still eagerly standing by, Randy Zillins was jotting all this down with a smirk on his face.) The real story, of course, was that no one knew who the tattooed miracle worker was. As I noted in my concluding remarks, “The mystery man had never been seen around Fultonville before he came up and touched young Dukey Junior on the shoulder. And he has not been seen since. This is Russ Thomas, reporting live….”

We aired the story at the top of the six o’clock show. Thirty seconds after the report concluded, the station started receiving calls from viewers who claimed to know the man, or claimed that similar things had happened to them but they’d been afraid to go public with their experience. The usual, in other words.

Next morning, Randy Zillins called and asked if I thought the story was real. I told him, off the record, that it smelled. “Probably,” I said, “the kid fell, but probably not that far. Had the wind knocked out of him. This other guy, passing through, came up and looked at him, maybe even got down and checked him out, as if he was going to do CPR or something. And then the kid came around, the guy took off, and the rumor started.”

“I agree,” R.Z. said, as if I cared whether he agreed or not. “But that wasn’t the way you made it seem on the show last night.”

“We usually hype things up a little, you know how it works, R.Z. TV
news would be pretty flat otherwise. We don’t have the integrity of you newspaper guys.”

“But why would all these people make it up? Mass psychology, right? That’s the real story. That’s what
I’m
working on.”

“They didn’t make it up, they exaggerated. They were upset to begin with, the mother was ecstatic that her son was okay. It just swelled into something, that’s all.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said.

And that seemed to be the end of it.

THREE

But then—we were into the first part of June—Wales summoned me to his office for the second odd assignment. Standing at the window in another finely made suit he pronounced this memorable nugget of observation: “Since the miracle story we’ve been getting a lot of calls.”

“BS, all of them,” I said. “We checked them out. I talked to my sources in the police, even Chief Bastatutta. False reports, as they say.”

“Right. I agree. But now we have one from Wells River. Now, as in today. This morning. Seems like it could be, maybe, you know….”

“Real thing?”

“Could be. Who knows? What else are you doing?”

“Not much. The football player in Homersville who’s putting together a ham supper at the church for his grandparents who just got back from the Peace Corps.”

“Right. Go up there.”

“Wells River?”

He turned around again. “No, Mars. Of course Wells River. The hospital there, whatever the name of the place is now. Guy about the same description as the other guy, in Fultonville. Walked down a corridor of the hospital, looked in on this little girl who had … I don’t know, something bad … and a lot of people who used to be dying aren’t anymore. Including the girl.”

“Mercy.”

“Right. Third floor. Where the bad cases are.”

W
ELLS
R
IVER WAS ABOUT
as opposite from Fultonville as a place could be. A clean downtown with fancy shops selling four-hundred-dollar dresses, an art theater, and a dozen or so cafes where nicely dressed thirtysomethings with one child asleep in an expensive Italian stroller sat around fondling designer sunglasses and talking fair trade. A women’s college where the yearly tuition was alarmingly close to my annual income. Old Victorians near old mills that young couples originally from New York were fixing up, or having fixed up, so they would be able to live within walking distance of their pottery studios.

Forgive me if I sound sarcastic. Wells River was a perfectly nice place. Every place should be so nice. It’s just that every place isn’t, and when you spend Monday in one of West Zenith’s poor neighborhoods interviewing some mother who’s just buried her only daughter who was killed in a drive-by, and on Tuesday you get sent up to Wells to talk with, I don’t know, some famous writer who’s teaching his two young sons how to play tennis so they can take their rackets on vacation to Barcelona … well, I digress.

They have a decent hospital in Wells River, I can testify to that. My girlfriend Zelda’s cousin had her twins there, in a hot tub or something, and when we went to visit her afterward it seemed clean and fresh smelling. Mercy Hospital, it was now called, though the joke was that when you got the bill for your colonoscopy or whatever, the name suddenly changed to No Mercy. Anyway, I went up there, parked in the Mercy lot, and didn’t worry about what I left on the seat of the car. As I approached the building, who did I see coming out the front door but Randy Zillins. Zillins was shaking his head and studying his notes and almost tripped over the curb.

“R.Z., what’s it look like in there?”

“They sent somebody up from the
Boston Herald
a while ago. Guy just left. Man, they’re sharp.”

“The big time. You’ll get there some day.”

“Nah,” he said in a voice that showed how bad he wanted to. During those rare moments when I was in a negative mood, I had thoughts along the lines of: R.Z. and I aren’t so different. We both dream of the
big time, and we’re both caught in the small time. It caused a particular kind of pain in me.

“These religious people are a bunch of phonies, man,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya.”

“You’re a nonbeliever, I take it.”

“An anti-believer,” he said. “Like anybody with half a brain. When you die, you’re dead. Get it while you can.”

I
NSIDE
M
ERCY, ON
the third floor, I learned that the head nurse, one Alba Seunier, was the person to see. I’d met Alba years before, in a different part of the hospital, under not very pleasant circumstances. She was fiftyish, weighed all of a hundred pounds, and you’d want her on your rugby team. She took me off to one side so we’d be away from the bustle and phones.

“Amazing stuff,” I suggested, to get a conversation going. This kind of semi-neutral offering is one of the tricks they teach you in journalism school.

Alba took the bait. She said, “Your lack of belief is written all over your face, mister.”

“All right. I’m skeptical. It’s professionally required, like you having clean hands.”

“I was skeptical, too,” she admitted. “I’ve worked in this hospital twenty-nine years, and I’ve seen plenty of strange things, including things people refer to as miracles, though I don’t like that word. I’ve never seen this. The newspaper people who were here clearly didn’t believe me, but I’m telling you, it’s true.”

“Give me the details, if you would.”

She didn’t ever seem to smile. Small tight lips, small blue eyes, small nose, but somehow all of that added up to large.

“We have fourteen beds on this part of the third floor,” she said. “Terminal illness, for the most part. Many of them are children. At present, nine of the beds are occupied. Various cancers. A rare blood disorder. A patient who is allergic to everything—all foods. And we have one little girl, Amelia Simmelton, who has chronic lung disease and struggles
for breath. The struggle puts a strain on her heart so we take her vitals hourly. Like many patients here, she’s in and out of ICU. This morning Amelia had a visitor. The man claimed to be a relative of some sort and had flowers and knew enough about the girl—her date of birth, her middle name, her mother’s name—so we believed him. But, as it turned out, he wasn’t a relative at all. We were fooled and don’t you dare put that in your report.”

“Agreed.”

She looked at me like my word wasn’t worth much. “He stayed all of five minutes, and Amelia isn’t struggling for breath now, and hasn’t been, apparently, since the moment he left her room. After this man’s visit, three other patients on the floor showed what I would term extremely unlikely improvement in their conditions, though that improvement is starting to erode in one of them. Amelia’s isn’t eroding. Her parents—the foundation people, Norman and Nadine Simmelton—have been here most of the day and just stepped out for something to eat. They’re guardedly ecstatic.”

“Simmelton Foundation,” I said. “Big money.”

“Enormous money. And enormously nice.”

“I can talk to the girl, I hope.”

“You may, yes. The Simmeltons said they’d allow it as long as there was no camera. Five minutes only.”

“Fine. How old?”

“Nine and a half. Until today I would have given her about another three weeks to live. Now I won’t say, and you won’t say anything about that either.”

“Of course not. I’m not an animal.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’ve seen you here before, haven’t I?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well, I see you on the news once in a while. You look shady, if you want to know my honest opinion. You look like someone I wouldn’t want my daughter going out with.”

“You look shady yourself,” I tossed right back, though it wasn’t remotely the case. “I wouldn’t want my father going out with you.”

She was marching away by then, toward Amelia’s room. At that point I should have kept my mouth shut—after all, she could easily have told me to get lost, or wait until the parents came back so they could tell me to get lost—but keeping my mouth shut has always been hard for me, and, truthfully, it might have been one of the impediments to my climb up the television news ladder. Plus, I didn’t appreciate being called shady. So, as we walked down the hall in a kind of fast, two-person parade, me a couple of steps behind, I called out, “All right, all right. I’ll give you
two
of my autographed pictures then, if it means that much to you. But I want the box of Viagra samples in return. That was the deal.”

Which wasn’t, as Zelda would have said, appropriate.

Hospital rooms are not my favorite places, and it’s much worse, of course, when the patient is so young. But there was Amelia, coal black skin and corn-rowed hair, perched on the edge of her bed and looking happily past a vase of flowers and out the window. Nurse Alba was kind enough—given our recent past—to leave me alone with her.

“Hey, kid!” I started out, and I gave her the smile.

She turned her big, dark eyes up to me. For a few seconds I pictured myself as her dad, standing next to the bed, knowing that she had a few weeks to live and that all the money in the world couldn’t save her. Even imagining it I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest.

“Hi, TV guy.”

“So you know me, huh?”

“Everybody knows you. ‘And this is Russ Thomas reporting for the Wizard, WZIZ, in West Zenith.’”

“Tell me, do I seem, you know, like a straight shooter?”

“Mom says she likes your hair.”

“And Dad?”

“Dad thinks you’re too hyper sometimes.”

“I actually resent that.”

“I’m with Mom.”

“Good. I bet you can guess why I showed up.”

“Because you heard the third floor has the best food in Wells River?”

Just like that, she said it. Little sweet spark in her face, and I thought:
imagine what this kid has been through in her nine and a half years. And she sits there with the IV in her arm, making jokes with a stranger.

“All right, I admit it,” I said. “I made the drive for one reason and one reason only: Mercy’s world-famous chicken à la king.”

She smiled and pointed to the chair, the IV tube swinging with her arm. “You can sit, if you want. I’m kind of tired of telling the same story, but I’ll tell it one more time if you want.”

I sat. I studied her round face, the intricately braided hair, the sad, pretty, adult-seeming eyes. I asked myself—who could help asking—what God had in mind when he decided to give a kid like this a disease like that. “All right,” I said, “I’ll spare you. R.Z. can give me the—”

“Who?”

“Mr. Zillins, the newspaper reporter. I saw him outside. He can give me the details. But tell me, this guy who stopped by, how did he seem to you? I mean, kids have a radar for good guys and bad guys. What was he like? A freak or what?”

She sank into thought for a moment, but didn’t take her eyes off me. “His face was nice,” she said at last. “He had a pretty big nose that was crooked, and the way he talked was very … gentle. He talked to me for a while and then he touched my leg, here.” She pointed to the outside of her left knee. “And then he said he’d see me later, that we had important work to do, and he went out. I thought he was just a nice guy the hospital sends around to talk with sick kids and bring them flowers, but as soon as he left, the nurse came in and checked my vitals and they were different and I feel a lot better. I’m not using oxygen, for one thing. I almost always use oxygen.”