Impact (34 page)

“He's really not that bad,” she said after a sip. “You get used to the situation quite quickly.”

After a second sip of coffee, she started down the hall, giving him no alternative but to follow. At the bedroom door she took his hand. “Ready?”

“Is he … can he understand what I say?”

“It's hard to tell what he grasps and doesn't grasp. He's not glib, but he makes sense sometimes, at least to me. They're working him like crazy now—cognitive rehabilitation, they call it.”

“So he's getting better.”

She frowned. “In a sense. But he's a stranger, Keith. If I'm going to help him, I have to find out who he is.” She refused to meet his eye.

“You think he won't make it without you, don't you?”

“In the beginning I did, but I'm not sure I do anymore. I'm not sure I'm up to the job.”

“Of course you are. If you want to be.”

She sighed. “After a while I started assuming Jack would never change, would never be anything more than what he was right after the crash. A ‘persistent vegetative state,' they called it. I got used to the life I led while he was in the hospital—the solitude, the freedom, the simplicity. Now that he's conscious, I'm not sure I know what to do. That sounds funny, doesn't it?”

He gave her a quick hug. “You'll be fine.”

“But what if I'm not? Do you know what a
defeat
that would be for me?”

“I'm beginning to,” he said, and was doleful in her silence.

“So how is he physically?” he asked after a moment. “Can he move his legs yet?”

“He's still paralyzed on the right side. And generally unsteady. But most of it's mental. He's … strange. He loses track of what he's saying and can't remember much of anything. They say that's normal with brain damage, that memory takes a long time to return, but I don't think they're telling me everything.”

“That's probably because they don't know everything.”

“True.” She hesitated. “Do you mind if he's naked? I've been rubbing him with lotion and—” She reddened. “That was stupid of me, wasn't it? Wait here a minute.”

She opened the door and disappeared. Too soon, she was back. Grasping his hand, she towed him toward her husband.

The room was dim—shades pulled, curtains drawn, lights focused toward the ceiling and corners. Tollison took two steps, then freed his hand and stopped. Nothing moved but Laura, who continued to the bed and stood beside it like a shopkeeper next to a bin of bananas, urging him to admire her wares.

Beside the bed were two chairs, one suitable for a lengthy vigil, the other stiff and temporary. He started to sit on the latter, but a glance at Laura stopped him. Leaning over her husband's high-tech pallet, she murmured incantations as though Jack's brain could be healed by conjuring and magic. Watching anything but the body on the bed, Tollison waited for her to stop.

When Tollison coughed at the vapors in the room, Laura turned. “Well,” she began, her compassion now extended to encompass him, “what do you think?”

So he had to look, at the man who had unknowingly been his rival for his wife's affections and was now unknowingly his client. His vision caught the details—sunken eyes, foggy pallor, chiseled cheeks, arid lips, stubby beard, skull as bare and faceted as a peeled potato. But bad as it was, the sheet stretched parallel over his legs and torso implied that the worst was out of sight.

A moment later the eyes below him blinked. Convinced the flutter was not a mindless tic, Tollison held his breath and waited. When nothing happened, he glanced at Laura, then did what seemed to be her bidding. “Hi, Jack. Uh … how's it going?”

“He's doing well today,” Laura interjected into the void beyond his question.

“Great.”

“He's had a nice nap.”

“Good.”

“And he's watched some television. A show about fishing. Jack loves to fish.”

“I know. I went with him once. Up at Lake Berryessa. We caught some nice bass, didn't we, Jack?”

From within the mire of illness, Jack Donahue's eyes might have belonged to the species just evoked. When they closed once again, this time to provide a rest, Tollison backed away from the bed and waited for Laura to join him. “Do they say he'll recover fully?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Do they say he'll get worse?”

“They say I should be ready for anything.”

He glanced at the bed again. Jack's eyes were open, his head conceivably inclined his way. Tollison took a further step beyond his range. “How long do you stay with him every day?”

“My shift is eight hours. Right now, it's two till ten.” She smiled. “A.M.”

“Are you sure he wouldn't be better off in a hospital?”

She shook her head. “The hospital wasn't doing anything but waiting for something to happen, so I insisted they discharge him. I had this huge fight with Dr. Ryan—he refused to consider it until I told him I'd been an LPN. That made him agree to release him, but only after they drew up a chronic-care program for me to administer.” She thrust her chest like a soldier. “So that's what I'm doing. I've become quite expert on the latest techniques.”

“Who's helping you?”

She frowned.
“That's
been an experience, let me tell you. The first nurse I interviewed took one look at Jack and informed me that if I just let him lie there—didn't turn him or anything—he'd drown in his own fluids and that would be best for all of us.”

“Can't the Altoona hospital find you good people?”

“Oh, they have. I've got a nice team now. We rotate shifts. I have the graveyard this week.” She gestured toward the corner of the room. A lumpy rectangle spread across the floor beneath the window, a narrow mattress covered with a thermal blanket and an uncased pillow, evocative of jails and monasteries.

She heard his question before he asked it. “I want to do it, Keith. I
need
to do it.” Her smile bore vague traces of the enthusiasm she had previously bestowed on him. “My normal life wasn't all that fulfilling, as you may remember. I think the first thing I ever said to you was, ‘God, I'm sick of cleaning this swimming pool.' Well, now I'm Florence Nightingale.” Her face was sweet and sour. “It's a much better job than being his wife.”

He reached for her hand, but she avoided his grasp.

“At least I have something to do.” She glanced at her husband. “It's a lot like tending a victory garden, I imagine.” She reddened. “Isn't that terrible? I've learned why battlefields and emergency rooms are such fertile grounds for humor.”

When he looked away from her, he noticed that the walls were laden with pictures of Jack—Jack with local celebrities and Little League teams, Jack beside the entrance to his subdivision, Jack in uniform with a softball team. Beneath the pictures was a row of pegs. On them hung a sportcoat, golf bag, fishing creel, and what looked like lingerie. He looked at Laura and raised a brow.

“Dr. Ryan says the sight of familiar things might help bring back his memory,” she said. “I play tapes, too; his favorite songs—Beatles, Beach Boys, things like that. Right now it's sleep music.”

“What's with the lingerie?”

She blinked. “It's what I wore the first time we made love.”

He could not resist. “If you want to
really
shock him out of it, why don't you put
my
picture up there?”

Laura was transfixed by his outburst. Tollison gestured with detachment. “The video people should get another shot of all this.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”

“I'm afraid the best I can do these days is be safe
and
sorry.”

They drifted to a hush.

“
Lau … ra?
”

The call came from beyond, an ancient urge rising from the speaker's core. “Lau … ra?” Jack Donahue repeated, his voice a drunken drawl.

She hurried to his side. Tollison followed until he was looking down on a figure who, if not precisely the person he'd known nine months before, was once again a man. Laura began massaging her husband's chest, rubbing him with oil, murmuring soft assurances, regressed to a level of healing and hospice where the rules were prehistoric and obscure.

The eyes suddenly rolled his way. “Whooo … yooo?”

The voice was raw and anxious, but the eyes stayed with Tollison until he squirmed. “I'm Keith, Jack. Keith Tollison. The lawyer. Remember?”

“I … Keeeith.”

“How are you, Jack? It's great to see you getting better.”

“Whaaat … done … meeee … Keeeeith?”

Uncertain whether the brooding inquiry addressed Jack's marriage or his flesh, Tollison stood frozen in confusion. When he glanced at Laura, he thought she urged him to respond.

“You were in an accident, Jack. A plane crash. You were injured very badly.”

There was nothing resembling comprehension in the eyes, only a narrowing that reflected the effort it had taken to make those few beseeching words. In the next moment they closed in a languid blink, then looked up through a cellophane of tears. “Helllppp … meee … Laurrr … ra.”

Of the hundred possible responses to that pitiable cry, Keith Tollison's was that Jack Donahue's statement of pain and suffering, if documented and preserved and presented to a jury, was worth a million dollars.

The eyes closed once again, and Laura backed away from the bed until she reached the open door. “We need to talk about some things,” Tollison said when he joined her.

“What kind of things?”

“How to prove the damages you've suffered.”

“You mean if I just
tell
them what happened they won't believe me? I have to draw pictures? I know—let's hire an actress to play my part. Meryl Streep would be wonderful. I'm sure she could live my life
much
more believably than I do.”

He persevered. “You can't ignore the lawsuit, Laura, much as you'd like to.
You're
the central part of the case, not Jack—loss of consortium is the strongest claim we have. I've been reviewing Jack's business records, and frankly, he was a disaster as a—”

Her eyes were flint that sparked against his thesis. “I know you think he can't understand,” she hissed angrily. “But I'm positive he can. So if you have something
insulting
to say, let's go in the other room.”

“It's not insulting, it's just the truth.”

“Please
. I have to finish with the lotion, then I'll join you. Go. Leave. Now.”

She shoved him toward the door. When he glanced back, it was to watch her place an apologetic kiss on her husband's clammy forehead and begin to rub his chest.

In a stiff pique, Tollison retreated to the living room and looked out the window to the driveway. Beyond his Cutlass and her Mercedes a line of oleander bushes circled the yard. Beyond them a vehicle was parked at the side of the road—the gray Taurus he'd seen on his last visit, the one Spitter had recalled at the jail.

He watched from the shadows until Laura returned. “So tell me,” she said. “How are we going to win our case besides show the home movies?”

He met her look. “You have to dig out your mementos. Go to the closets and the attic or wherever you keep photo albums and things like that and pull out the best stuff.”

“I take it the tactic is to prove the crash has made me insane.”

He refused to yield. “Make up a folder, a collection of items that describes your life with Jack. Photographs, letters, souvenirs, anything you have around the house that shows how you felt for each other. If he wrote you poems, put them in it. If he sent you flowers, put the cards in it. If you knit him sweaters, put pictures of them in the folder. I want the jury to see how strongly you and Jack cared for each other, how much you miss not … doing what you used to do together.”

“Shall I put in my diaphragm? How about my baby-doll pajamas?”

He closed his eyes against what he had done to her and what, with far more justification, she had just done to him. “This is hard for me too, you know. I don't want to think you
ever
had a decent life with Jack. But you did, and we have to show what it was like.”

“What it was like, or what I
wished
it was like?”

Because his answer would demean him, he plunged ahead. “I also want you to start keeping a journal of what you do each day, particularly what you do for Jack. It's very important, Laura. I think Alec is going to try to separate our cases from the rest and get an early trial.”

“I'm all for that.”

“Then we have to be ready. When the time comes, we have to be ready to go.”

She turned toward the window. “Every time I come across that stuff, I keep thinking there should be a child in there someplace. Baby pictures and locks of hair and bronzed booties and the like. I never realized how important all that would seem one day. It hurts that I'll never …”

That she did not suggest that he could fill the void wounded him more than anything she had ever done. “That's not what hurts
me
the most,” he retorted angrily.

“What is?”

“That you keep saying you still love me but doing things that say you don't. That in the process of being his nurse, you're falling in love with Jack all over again.”

She joined him in the shadows and reached for his hand and squeezed it to her cheek. A moment later a tear splashed onto a knuckle, then trickled toward his wrist. “We're being watched, you know,” he murmured. “That car beyond the bushes is the detective working for Chambers. He's out there digging up dirt.”

“Is that what we've become?”

Her question dissolved into a quiet mystery that neither of them could solve. Huddled out of sight of the intruder, his arm draped across her shoulders, her head nestled against his chest, they endured the morning side by side, lives in the lurch, sin under siege.