How I Spent My Summer Vacation (17 page)

“I did.”

He turned my way slowly, reluctantly. “You did what?”

“Find something out of the ordinary in my clothes.”

YOU’D THINK HE’D BE EXCITED—a genuine, honest-to-God clue to the presence, in this room, of another woman besides Sasha. But his attitude suggested that I was fixating on a bit of flotsam simply to add to his workload and give him grief.

He lumbered over with all deliberate sloth, grunted as he bent and reached for the pearl with thick fingers.

“Wait!” I said. “I mean, of course you know what you’re doing, but isn’t it possible that—don’t you think an earring might—probably would—have fingerprints on it? I mean, given how you’d—how I’d—put one in, you’d almost have to get your prints on it, wouldn’t you? Do you think you—do you think we should touch it that way?” It was necessary to overstate the case because he failed to react normally. He hunched over the earring, watching it with the blank goggle eyes of a guppy.

I was proud of my tact and reserve. I had refrained from using the word
stupid
or any of its synonyms, which was better than he deserved. But virtue was rewarded because the patrolman slowly unbent and gave me a hooded, disdainful look, as if all on his own he’d decided against pawing the earring with his bare hands. “It’s not like I don’t know about prints,” he said.

It was no mystery why, at nearly retirement age, he was still precariously balanced on a very low rung of the police ladder.

“But have it your way,” he said in a standard-issue dismissive male tone that makes my viscera churn. He picked the earring up in a piece of tissue, looked at it and made a small
pfffut
exhalation. “Not much,” he said. “What do you people see in pearls, anyway?”

“Us people?”

“Yeah. You people. Women. What do you see in pearls?”

“Normally, nothing. Right now,
evidence
.”

“Not really. Lots of people use this room. Atlantic City’s real popular, you know. Number one tourist destination in the U.S.”

I wondered how many times a day that statistic was dragged out.

“You know,” he continued, “some of the help nowadays, well, they’re not necessarily the most perfect cleaners in the world. I could tell you stories—”

“I’ll bet you could. But as I’m sure you realize, that particular earring couldn’t have been left here by a previous tenant. No matter how sloppy the chambermaid was. Don’t you agree?” I was really afraid that out of spite toward me, or life, or bad cleaning-women, the oaf was going to discount and thereby ruin this chance to prove Sasha’s innocence. “I mean,” I said in such a simpering tone I nearly made myself nauseous, “one need not be female to know that does not compute, isn’t that so?”

“Well,” he said with a shrug, “I guess I…what was that again about computers?” His face grew ruddy, as if slowly building up pressure.

“What I mean is, even if a person doesn’t wear earrings, he can understand that a little leftover pearl earring cannot jump into a shoe. It’s funny even to think of such a thing.”

“Not so silly if you think about it a little longer, miss. If you think about it
logically
, you’ll realize that if, say, it gets itself stepped on the right way and ricochets…”

I cut to the chase and did not react to his emphasized
logically
and its sexist undertones. “Have you ever noticed that if the back of an earring comes off—as in a struggle of some kind—then the front part’s unmoored and it can fly through the air like a little missile when the woman shakes her head. Want me to show you how?” I reached for my own earring. “

He didn’t want to see, which was lucky, since I was wearing a hoop that was all one piece, and I couldn’t have demonstrated a thing. “Somebody wearing that earring was in this room last night,” I said. “Somebody who is not my friend Sasha.”

“Yeah? How can you prove this doesn’t belong to your friend? Or even”—an actual idea had just now crept into his head—“it could belong to you!” His voice dripped with suspicion—of what, I couldn’t have said.

Did the dimwit think I would have mentioned the earring if it belonged to one of us, or that I would have shown the thing to him if it were in any way self-incriminating? He should have been suspicious about whether I was planting false evidence to implicate somebody else. But I saw no need to direct his thinking or to instruct him. I was on vacation, after all.

“Maybe you brought it from Philly,” he said.

“You mean accidentally? The way ships carry rats, or produce carries insects?”

“You probably packed it. It’s pretty small, you know.”

“I don’t own pearl earrings.” I had to grit my teeth to keep my temper. “So it wouldn’t have been around my house, falling into my shoes. Besides, I wore those shoes yesterday. Here. I drove down here in them and kept on wearing them when I went on the beach. I didn’t change my shoes until I was going out later on. There wasn’t any earring inside of them. I would have felt it.”

“Okay, fine. We’re wasting time. I’ll take care of it. You packed?”

I ran into the bathroom for my toiletries, which were in appalling disarray all over the counter.

“Looks like they scuffled in here, too,” the patrolman said.

It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing, just tossed shampoo and eyeliner into my travel pack. I was relieved that I’d screwed the top back on the toothpaste before I left last evening, and ashamed of myself for thinking about such an inanity.

He stood at the bathroom door, arms crossed over his chest, waiting for me to finish.

“Okay, that’s it.” I rushed back to the bedroom and tossed the last of my belongings into the suitcase. I was beyond caring what he thought of my packing expertise or how I handled toothpaste tubes. “I’m out of here, okay?”

He shook his head. I had to walk through the living room with him, slowly checking whether any other possessions of mine were in evidence. I retrieved my untouched books, hoping he’d noticed
War and Peace
or
Gift from the Sea
and not the sex and shopping tome, and solemnly assured him that there was now not a trace of me left in there because I hadn’t had the time to further litter the premises.

“You know,” he said, “the eyewitness…what he saw was a tall dark-haired woman. You think much about that? Because you know, you’re not exactly short yourself, are you? What do you have to say about that?”

All I said was goodbye.

* * *

I couldn’t remember whether Mackenzie had mentioned when he’d be back. Since the scheduled program for the evening was breaking up, perhaps I’d blocked the time frame specifics. I tried reading
War and Peace
, but like Georgette, I had trouble concentrating on their various names. I wondered if life were more interesting when everybody called you something different the way they did in old Russia. I wondered if that tradition had persisted right through Perestroika.

I wondered, too, whether Mackenzie, had he been born Russian, would have actual names, and lots of them—or would he simply be known by ever-shifting initials? C.K. for one social situation, T.K. for another, and so forth, à la russe.

I wondered where Mackenzie was.

Although I was staying in Atlantic City for only one more day, I completely unpacked, stacking undies tidily, making sure my toiletries were arranged with military precision. Nothing encourages good housekeeping as effectively as having your most personal objects pawed through by officials.

I waited for Mackenzie some more. I was no longer certain that the man was ever going to show up, although a silent disappearance was not his style.

“I was stood up for my break-up,” I sang, plucking at an imaginary guitar. “Stood up ’fore my break-up. Breakin’ up is harder to do if there’s no one to break up with you.” The next Nashville sensation. Words and life by Mandy Pepper.

Just as I got to wondering whether I could stand a life of eternal touring and whether female stars had groupies, the phone rang.

The man sounded anxious and official. “Miss Pepper?” he asked solemnly.

“Yes?”

“I’m calling from the Atlantic City Medical Center to notify you that we’ve admitted Mr. Mackenzie.”

“
Mister
Mackenzie?” I pictured someone foreign, a gentleman in a bowler hat, a spy on
Masterpiece Theatre.

Medical Center, he’d said. My pulse escalated and words popped up and down like frightening flashcards. Hospital. Injury. Accident. Emergency. Dead? “But how could he be in the hospital? He isn’t even working!” I said.

“Am I speaking to the right person? Is this Amanda Pepper?”

“I…ah,
yes
.”

“Because your name was in his wallet as someone to call in case of an emergency. The message on your answering machine in Philadelphia said you could be reached at—”

“He has my name in his wallet?” I was surprised at how profoundly that affected me. I had my mother’s and sister’s names in those slots, but Mackenzie had mine. I would never have dreamed. Besides, while I fixated on that, I avoided letting the word “emergency” fully register.

“—this hotel, so I—”

“Please,” I finally dared. “What…what happened?” Everything slowed down—my breathing, time, the speed of light, and the course of my words, floating listlessly as dandelion fluff. Slowly—more slowly, please—toward the receiver, into the phone wires, down, through—everything slow except my brain, which was snapping and connecting double time and in no particular direction, so that between my question and his reply there was an epoch filled with theories and refutations.

First theory. Mackenzie’s heart broke. Literally. Heartbroken suitor—with my name in his wallet—requiring hospitalization. Extremely romantic. A reunion at bedside, complete with violin background.

Second theory. Mackenzie was dead.

The man from the hospital cleared his throat, hiding in my time warp, afraid to break the news. They must rotate the chore, take turns, punish employees by forcing them to make these calls.

Food poisoning.
Something he bought en route to the hotel. Some sleazy off-boardwalk stall food. My mother was right. You couldn’t trust those food vendors.

I knew it wasn’t that. Okay, then. What happened was: he gagged on the idea of our Talk with a capital T. Had to go to the hospital to have a Heimlich maneuver to get his heart out of his throat.

Appendicitis.

Jackpot. I’d found the acceptable emergency. I could imagine them wheeling him into surgery, no time to phone and cancel our last date.

“There was an accident, ma’am,” the man said with excessive politeness and patience. “He’s in surgery now.”

It took me a moment to remember what
accident
and
surgery
meant. “A collision?” Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of all the possibilities, the most logical, a car smash hadn’t even crossed my—He had walked back to his hotel, so this must have happened later, while he was driving to see me, and—

“A gun, ma’am.”

“A
gun
? He hit a gun?” An incredibly dumb response, but trust me, as soon as I’d heard this stranger say “Medical Center,” I’d burned off half my IQ, and whatever was left was busy trying hard to not hear, not know, not get it.

“A gun hit
him
, ma’am,” he said gravely, precisely, kindly, as if he weren’t talking to an idiot. “Or rather, a bullet from a gun.”

“You mean…you mean…” I knew what he meant. He’d been as clear and coherent as a person could be. But I couldn’t believe it or accept it until I heard the actual words, one after the other, in an orderly, definitive sentence.

So he provided that sentence. “Yes’m,” he said softly and gently. “I’m sorry, but your friend, Mr. Mackenzie, has been shot.”

“YOU’LL DO ANYTHING, MACKENZIE, won’t you? You’ll even get yourself shot to get out of a capital-T talk.”

He didn’t seem to be registering what was in front of him, i.e., me. He blinked, proving that he was at least partially alive. Otherwise, no matter what the nurse had said, I’m not sure I’d have believed it. His skin was a close match for the gray sprinkles in his curly hair, his features expressionless, his body inert.

And then he blinked again, did a double take as comprehension flooded his eyes into such neon-bright intensity, I was surprised the bandages on his head didn’t catch any of their blue light. For once, I knew precisely what it was to be a sight for sore eyes, and I knew how good it felt, too.

“Welcome back.” I was proud of my composure and lack of sentimentality. Here I was in a hospital room, the perfect setting for a schmaltz-intensive scene, and I was having none of it. I spoke in an upbeat bedside voice. “Do you know you’re in a hospital with a Frank Sinatra wing? And that you’re a stone’s throw away from Bally’s Grand and Caesar’s Palace?”

“Hey,” he whispered. He looked like a fair-skinned Sikh in his gauze turban. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

And that was it for stoicism and ironic detachment. I burst into tears. Flying Chagall characters did a freefall through the room, their violin bows going a mile a minute. So much for aplomb.

Hours had gone by. Hours that took days to pass. Hours during his surgery and post op, during which I grappled with
War and Peace
until I realized that I had read a sentence about Prince Nikolay Andreivitch Bolkonsky’s need for a regular schedule for seventeen minutes straight. Or perhaps it was seventeen hours straight. After that, I switched to a
Vegetarian Times
magazine that was sitting on a nearby table. After a few more decades, I retained only a headache and an impression that the rigid Prince Bolkonsky had eaten, at a set and specific moment each day, Easy Tofu Whip. And that the wait had been interminable.

The kindly woman whose function was, at least metaphorically, to hold relatives’ and friends’ hands, told me as much as she could find out about the shooting. It appeared that Mackenzie had attempted to stop an ordinary, garden-variety mugging. The woman’s purse and person were saved and the would-be thief arrested, but C.K.’s right leg had been taken hostage. As a result, he was going to go through the rest of his life setting off metal detectors at airports, given the number of pins now holding a significant portion of his skeleton together. He had also fallen sideways from the force of the blast and done a minor number on his skull, which obviously wasn’t nearly as thick as I’d assumed.