Cheating at Solitaire (34 page)

One of the reasons Jack thought he might be waking up with a girl was that there was a girl in the room, over by the
windows, standing with her back to him, looking out. Jack wished that he could concentrate, or even make himself sit up. He had what felt like the mother of all hangovers. It had even invaded his limbs. They all felt weak. He wasn't certain, because he was numb all across his torso, but he was pretty sure his penis was weak too, and just lying there, which might explain why the girl was fully dressed and at the window while he was here in bed and definitely not. It had been a while since there had been hot and cold running girls in his life. College was not everything he had expected it to be. There, everybody had been “smart,” and a lot of people were smarter than he was, and a lot of them were richer, too. It was hard to compete when the girls thought it was sweet but kind of pathetic that he had never been to Europe. Jack thought that it might have been in college when he first began to realize that life was more complicated than he had expected it to be, and that he did not want to be the kind of corporation lawyer his education would best suit him for. Corporation lawyers made lots of money, but they weren't anybody. They were as invisible as he had been most of his life, and the money did not make up for it.

He was blithering in his head. Maybe he had blithered to this girl, and that was why she had gotten out of bed and left him alone in it. He wished he could think. He wished his head weren't pounding. He wished a lot of things, the most urgent of which seemed to be that he had been able to explain it all to his mother before she died. His mother had not approved of any of the girls he had gone out with in high school. She was always afraid he would get one of them pregnant and ruin everything.

The girl at the window turned, and Jack noticed a number of things at once. First, he was in a hospital room. It was a bare, blank hospital room, and from the silence all around him it seemed as if the rest of the hospital was empty. He tried to remember everything he could about the hospital in Oscartown, but there was nothing to remember. He'd spent almost no time there. He had no idea if it did a lot of business or not, if it was normal or odd that the place should be
dead silent and cavernously empty. Then there was his right hand. It was bandaged up like something in an Abbott and Costello movie, into a wad that looked almost like a fighter's glove. When he tried to move his fingers, they hurt badly enough so that he wanted to cry out in pain. He didn't. He wasn't entirely sure why. He felt as if he were in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, so that he knew that making noise would be bad for him, but he didn't know why.

The third thing he noticed was that the girl was not just a girl. It was Kendra Rhode.

If he could have sat up or reached for anything in any way, he would have grabbed the white styrofoam cup that was sitting next to a can of ginger ale on a flat, high table next to his bed. Ginger ale would be good. Anything would be good. His mouth was dry. His head still hurt. He wanted to reach out and touch Kendra's arm, that perfect arm. In a world of ghosts, of outlines of people without substance, Kendra was one of the very few whose outlines had been all filled in.

She was leaning against the heating register under the windows, looking at him. She knew he was awake. Jack stuck the tip of his tongue out and tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry. He was lucky it didn't stick out there, making him look like a retarded person.

“Kendra,” he said. It came out, but only barely. He made another effort. “I thought you. Weren't. Weren't. Talking.”

Kendra came over and looked down at him in the bed. It wouldn't occur to her to offer to get him ginger ale, but he didn't mind that. He was a ghost. She had no reason to think he needed ginger ale. He really was blithering. He was. How close to the sun did you have to get before you got warm? How close to the sun did you have to get to burn yourself dead? Was heat better than light? Would light illuminate you if you were only an outline of a person, if there was nothing really real about you?

He put out his hand, and she got the idea. She picked up the cup and looked inside it. Then she popped the top on the can of ginger ale and poured some of it in. Jack's hand was
still out. She put the styrofoam cup full of ginger ale in his hand. It was his left hand. It didn't work that well. He spilled more ginger ale down the side of his face than he got into his mouth.

Still, it worked. It worked well enough. “I thought,” he said, and this time the words came out the way they should have, although he sounded hoarse, “I thought you weren't talking to me.”

“I'm not talking to you,” Kendra said. “Why should I talk to you? You betrayed me.”

“I didn't betray you. I sold one picture. I have to sell pictures. That's how I make a living.”

“You sold the wrong picture.”

“No,” Jack said. And this was true. He remembered the pictures. He remembered the one he sold, and he remembered the ones he still had back at the house. “There were other pictures,” he said. “There were worse pictures.”

Kendra turned away, back to the window again. Jack hated this. He hated it. When she was not looking at him, he felt as if he weren't really real. It was as if she took some part of him with her. This was an important point. Before the movie people had come to Margaret's Harbor, Jack had spent most of his time feeling not really real, feeling as if he were a ghost, but he hadn't been able to pin it down to something specif c. Now he thought he had, and it was only this terrific dryness in his mouth and throat that was keeping him from articulating it.

He tried to drink more ginger ale. He got some. He got more down his face and neck. There was a point here. There really was. He only had to grasp it.

“Why am I here?” he said.

Kendra turned around again. Jack felt warm. “You're in the hospital,” she said. “Something happened to your hand.”

“What?”

“I don't know,” Kendra said. “I didn't even know you were in the hospital. Marcey's downstairs. With alcohol poisoning, the silly cunt. I was walking back to the Point from the inn and there were all these paparazzi, trying to get a
picture of Marcey on her ass, so I ducked in a door. It's not true that I always want my picture taken.”

“I know,” Jack said.

“I don't know what I'm going to do about Marcey,” Kendra said. “It's bad enough with Arrow. Not that I think she killed anyone. But the police do. Maybe they're going to give her the electric chair. Do they have the electric chair in Massachusetts? Maybe it's all lethal injection now. I don't like lethal injection. It lacks drama. It lacks everything, really. People go to be witnesses at executions, but with lethal injection there isn't anything they can see that they wouldn't be able to see anytime. The electric chair would be better. People would jump.”

Jack wanted to put the styrofoam cup back on the table, but he didn't know how to do it. He was suddenly infinitely, inconsolably depressed. He had no idea why Kendra had come into this room, or why she would have been going back to the Point on the back streets she would have had to use to end up at the hospital, but he did know that she had done none of those things out of a desire to see him. It should have been enough that she still recognized him, but it wasn't. And that was in spite of the fact that he knew she was perfectly capable of treating people as if they had never existed, even after she'd known them for years.

“I want to know what happened to me,” he said.

Kendra turned away from the window. “I think I can get out now, if I go out this end. They're all over there. They don't seem to be moving. Marcey's such an ass. She's always flashing around making an idiot of herself.”

“I want to know what happened to me,” Jack said again.

“I don't know what happened to you,” Kendra said. “Maybe it will be on the news, and you can find out that way. There's going to be something about me on the news in a day or two. You should watch for it. That is, if Marcey and Arrow haven't done some other stupid stuff and everybody is watching that.”

Jack wanted to say that Kendra was always on the news. She was even on the real news, like CNN. Instead, he watched
her check through her purse for he didn't know what and then send him the kind of little smile and wave she gave to photographers when she wasn't feeling antagonistic about being photographed. Then she was gone, out in the hallway, out of sight. He couldn't even hear her footsteps walking away.

He was still lying in bed with the styrofoam cup in his left hand. The cup was still half full of ginger ale. He still couldn't put it down.

This was a metaphor for something, and as soon as his head cleared up, he would figure out for what. At the moment, he was only angry, as angry as he had ever been in his life, the kind of angry that makes some people rise up like rockets and lay waste the landscape, and in no time at all he was actually sitting all the way up.

2

If Linda Beecham had stayed just five more minutes in Jack Bullard's room, she would have seen Kendra Rhode coming in, but she didn't. Instead, she left while there was nobody else there, and not much of anybody on the floor. She walked down the long empty hall to the elevators, looking into empty rooms to the right and left of her. She wondered why nobody in Oscartown ever seemed to be sick in the winter, and then reminded herself that most of the residents who really were residents probably lacked health insurance. Health insurance was one of those things she had been careful to provide for all her employees at the Home News. She even provided it for part-time people and the cleaning staff. It was one of the things she remembered best about the years of having no money at all, and one of the things she resented most. If the Home News had had a political ideology, it would have been solidly liberal in most ways, but it would have been downright socialist on the subject of health insurance. If Linda Beecham got to run the country, health care would be universal, government-provided, and without limits. It would be like the best of the policies afforded to multimillion-dollar-earning CEOs, but for everybody.

There was a lot of commotion on the ground floor at the
front, and Linda stopped for a minute to watch it. There was an assault going on, against the emergency room. Linda recognized the signs of what she had come over the last few months to think of as “the barbarian hordes,” and she wondered which of the women they followed had managed to get herself into a state this time. There was too much of everything wandering around Oscartown these days. The film people brought in everything bad the summer people did, but they brought in more. They brought in this mania for public display. Linda thought there was something profoundly wrong with anybody who wanted to have her picture in the papers. Publicity meant exposure, and exposure turned you into a target. Linda knew all about being a target.

She stood on the pavement near the hospital's front door, watching the door a few yards down where the emergency room was. She thought that if there was a real emergency anywhere on the island, the ambulance wouldn't be able to get out of its stall to get to it, and wouldn't be able to get up to the emergency room door to bring the patient in. She thought about Jack upstairs in that empty room on that empty corridor, the nurse by herself at the station, reading through a magazine, noticing nothing that was going on. Lately, it was brought home to her again and again just how uninhabited Margaret's Harbor really was. They were all out here, wandering around on their own. What they had once stood for didn't matter to anybody, and most of them couldn't remember what it had been. There was a Fox News van jammed right up onto the sidewalk in front, and Linda suddenly realized that its presence so far up on the pavement made the emergency room's sliding glass doors stay permanently open, in the middle of winter, with temperatures below freezing and heading to something dangerous the closer it got tonight. They had a different set of priorities, these people. They cared about things that were—

But Linda didn't know what they were, and finally she turned away from the scene and began to make her way toward the center of town. Nobody was interested in her anyway. She wasn't a recognizable face, and she was middle-aged
and tired. These days you had to sparkle and shine to get noticed, and sometimes even that didn't work.

When she got out onto Main Street, she looked up at the Congregational church and the clock on its spire, and realized she'd spent more time than she'd thought she had watching the news vans. She'd left Jack's room at one—she knew because she'd checked her watch while she was waiting for the elevator—and it was now almost quarter to two. Main Street was as deserted as it would have been if this were an ordinary winter. She passed Cuddy's, looking through its tinted-glass windows while she walked. It was dead empty. Only Dora Malvern, who worked the afternoons as a waitress, and Chuck Verle, who did the same as a bartender, were inside. In a way, that was surprising. There were “real people” bars in Oscar-town, on the back streets and down near the ferry, but during the off-season the fishermen took possession of the places the summer people liked to go. It was a matter of pride.

She passed the front of the Oscartown Inn, which was also deserted. She supposed Mr. Demarkian must be inside, doing whatever consultants did when they were called in to a crime the police couldn't solve. She didn't see the point of it. The police had Arrow Normand under arrest. If Arrow Normand had been any ordinary girl from the island, she'd have been locked up for serious and on her way to a trial without calling in con sultants from as far away as Philadelphia. Linda had an editorial about it, set and ready to go in the next issue of the
Home News
. It was taxpayer money Clara Walsh was wasting on this Gregor Demarkian, and taxpayer money she was wasting on her attempts to tie herself into a pretzel so that the world wouldn't think she was being unduly harsh to Little Miss Pantyless Wonder. Or something. It was so very cold now. The wind was coming in off the ocean. It chased down Main Street and made the signs shudder and sway. Jack was up there at the hospital. He might never be able to use his right hand again. He would almost certainly never be able to feel anything with his fingertips.