The Smart One (20 page)

“Hello, Sam.”

It was Detective Miller. Behind him was Detective Dunn. I’d nearly forgotten they had flown down to Florida a few days before.

“What are you doing here?” Sam asked.

“We went looking for you in your room, and an orderly told us where to find you.”

“What do you want now?” Sam said. “I answered all your stupid questions.”

“We want a sample of your DNA.”

“I already told you. You can’t have my goddamned DNA.”

Detective Dunn produced a document from his pocket. “We have a warrant, Sam. You have no choice in the matter.”

Kenny held his hand out and Dunn passed him the document.

“I don’t give a fuck about your warrant!” yelled Sam.

It was shocking to hear Sam Waxman curse like that. He seemed nothing like the man I had grown up next door to. I glanced behind me at Doreen’s kids, who were staring, wide-eyed.

“I’m not giving you shit,” Sam said as he tried to pass Miller.

“Actually,” Kenny said, “I think they just need saliva.”

No one laughed.

“You have no choice, Sam,” said Miller, who blocked the doorway.

“Just cooperate and it’ll be over in a few seconds,” Dunn said. “But if we have to force you down we will.”

Renee was wailing. “Do what they say, Sam! I don’t want them to hurt you.”

Sam turned, his eyes filled with the terror of a trapped animal. He looked around like he was searching for a quick escape. And then, seeing none, he closed his eyes and his body loosened. It was over and he knew it. The air in the room seemed to change, as if someone had pulled the plug on the atmosphere’s electrical current. I glanced over at Kenny to see if he noticed it too. His head was down but he must have sensed it because he raised his eyes to meet mine. Yes, it was obvious to both of us. Sam’s hope had just vanished.

Sam Waxman approached his wife and took her hand, an unspoken intimacy passing between them. It seemed to me that in some very personal way, he was saying good-bye. Then he let himself fall into his wheelchair with a lifeless
thump.
Miller got behind him and grabbed onto the handles.

“What are you going to do to him?” Renee asked.

“It’s just a simple cotton swab inside his cheek,” Dunn said. “We’ll do it in his room.”

Miller unlocked the wheelchair and pushed it toward the door.

“Sam,” Renee said as they passed. But she stopped. What was there to say?

“The water is running,” Sam said feebly, as if keeping the charade going was a habit he just couldn’t break.

Renee collapsed against Kenny in sobs.

Later, after my mother was released from recovery and sent back to her room, Dad and I relaxed in the chairs beside her bed, waiting for her to be lucid enough to talk. Her surgery had gone smoothly, but as my father had predicted, she was on strong painkillers that kept her on the stupid side of zonked.

I touched her hand and asked her how she felt.

“Glrg,”
she said.

Dad switched on the television—it was still playing in Spanish.

“They never fixed this?” he said.

“I’ll see if I can find someone to take care of it,” I said. “I need a walk anyway.” I leaned in toward my mother. “I’ll be back in a little while, Mom.”

“Frlmp.”

“I love you too,” I said, and kissed her forehead.

I took my pad and charcoals and left, fully aware that it wasn’t just the exercise I was after. I was still reeling from that scene with Sam Waxman and needed to clear my head.

After stopping at the nurses’ station to report what was going on with my mother’s television, I wanted to take a walk outside so I could find a pleasant, shaded bench somewhere
to sit down and draw. But the local landscape made finding such a spot unlikely, and sitting on the hood of someone’s sun-baked car in the parking lot to sketch a palm tree didn’t strike me as an especially pleasant diversion, so I went down to the hospital cafeteria, got myself a cup of coffee, and took a seat by a window overlooking a small, tidy garden.

I opened the pad and studied the static arrangement of tropical greenery. It wasn’t much to look at, and I tried to imagine enlarging it, making it just a little wilder, putting a bench in the middle.

I started to draw, wondering who I would place on the bench. When I got to that part, I let myself go and a female form emerged, her face turned away. I stopped to think about how I wanted to position the rest of her body. When a pregnant woman carrying a container of yogurt walked by, I put my charcoal back on my female figure, giving her a swollen belly, her hand resting on the lower part, connecting to the life within.

As I worked, I thought about what would happen next with Kenny’s family. The lab results from Sam’s DNA would probably come back in a few weeks, proving he was the father of Lydia’s baby. They would arrest him, then. There would be a media frenzy, and poor Renee would be hounded. Then there would be a lengthy trial, and she’d have to testify. So would Kenny. Perhaps my family would too. I tried to imagine my father on the witness stand.

“How long have you known the accused?”

“We used to play bridge together.”

I looked at my woman on the bench. Her head was turned, so I followed her line of vision to consider what she might be looking at. Out the cafeteria window, the garden had sculpted shrubbery in that spot, which didn’t seem right at all. I needed something with more vitality. Water, I thought,
and started sketching a pond, letting it reflect the lushness around it.

I imagined Renee’s reaction upon hearing the guilty verdict, which I saw as inevitable. The evidence against her husband was overwhelming, and since Johnnie Cochran had already gone on to meet the Big Judge in the sky, there was no lawyer on earth who could get someone that guilty acquitted. Sam Waxman would not get away with murder.

The trial, I figured, would be in New York. But where would I be? In the desert, motivating a classroom full of kids? What if the job didn’t come through? Would I still be on the East Coast, getting messy with art projects as class after class filed in and out of my table-filled room? Could I possibly be happy there, or would the constant reminders of my failures keep me on edge?

I heard the scrape of a chair moving and looked up. It was Kenny.

“Mind?” he said, lowering himself into the seat next to mine.

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

He put a bottle of Poland Spring on the table and held his open bag of miniature pretzels toward me, giving it a little shake so I would understand he was offering me some. I took a few.

“What are you drawing?” he asked, popping a pretzel in his mouth.

I shrugged and turned the page toward him. He stared at it for a few moments and then nodded.

“You put her in paradise,” he said.

“Her?”

“Lydia. You created a serene and perfect little world around her.”

I turned the picture back around and looked at it. “Is that what I did?” It hadn’t even occurred to me that I was drawing Lydia again.

Kenny took a gulp of his water and put the bottle down. “Sam’s being released today. Told his doctor he wants to go home.”

“I’m surprised. I thought he’d want to continue playing up the idea of being sick.”

Kenny ran his hand through his hair, which looked so shiny in the florescent lights of the cafeteria that I wondered how a painter could capture that luminescence on canvas. He wore a blue oxford shirt—rolled up at the sleeves, natch—and the way the color reflected in his eyes was disquieting. I pulled myself out of it by looking away. I didn’t need to be thinking about Kenny’s shiny hair or his bright eyes.

“Guess he wants to spend his remaining free time at home.” Kenny stared out at the little garden. “Anyway, I should get going. I have my parents’ car today and I want to run it through a car wash before I pick them up. I don’t want my dad to lay into Renee for letting dust settle on his precious Crown Victoria.”

“You’re driving them home?”

He nodded. “That should be a fun trip, right? Not the least bit awkward. I’m sure my father will be thrilled to spend a little quality time with me and Mom.” Kenny downed the last drops of water. “Want to come along for the ride? Act as a buffer?”

I tried to think of something I’d rather do
less
than be in that car with Sam and Kenny, and all I could come up with was that scene from
Marathon Man
where Laurence Olivier is torturing Dustin Hoffman with dental tools.

I shook my head. “Can’t.”

“C’mon,” he said. “Your mom’s unconscious, and your dad
is probably engrossed in a fascinating article on congenital malabsorptive diarrhea in the latest
New England Journal of Medicine.”

Did he think that accepting the sketch pad meant I’d forgiven him? “Forget it, Kenny.”

He stood. “If you change your mind, I’ll be in that circle by the front entrance at four thirty.”

“I won’t.”

When I got back to my mother’s room, the television was blaring away in English, and contrary to what Kenny predicted, my father was not reading a medical journal. He was, however, so enraptured by something on the History Channel that he didn’t notice me come in.

“Dad? How is she?”

“Rommel had an ulcer.”

“Huh?”

“These World War II documentaries always get that wrong. They said that Rommel was at El Alamein when Montgomery attacked. But he was in Germany when the battle started—in the hospital with an ulcer.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m more concerned with Mom.”

“She’s fine. She’ll be coming out of it soon.”

“Did you know Sam Waxman’s being released today? Kenny is taking him home.”

“Can you do me a big favor, sweetheart? Can you tag along and pick up your mother’s white and green nightgown? She told me to bring it today and I forgot.”

“What’s wrong with the hospital nightgowns?”

“You know your mother. She won’t want to stay in a hospital gown one second longer than she has to. Be a good girl and fetch it so that your mother’s not disappointed when she wakes up.”

“But—” I started, and stopped. The guilt button froze me in place. I tried to push past it to find any possible argument I could make against running this errand. I opened my mouth, knowing there was an effective protest in there somewhere, if I could just manage to get it out.

My father lowered the volume on the television. “You look like you want to say something.”

I sighed. “What drawer is it in?”

“I knew you’d come,” Kenny said when I approached. He was sitting on the hood of the car in front of the hospital.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m tagging along to pick up my mother’s nightgown.”

“I once tried picking up your mother’s nightgown. She slapped me.” He patted the spot next to him. “Sit with me. I just had it washed—it’s clean and cool.”

I did what he said, and I realized that the last time I sat on a car with Kenny Waxman was more than twenty years ago. I didn’t feel much of a connection to the person I was back then, but when I looked at Kenny’s profile, I remembered one particular day when he’d worn the same expectant expression.

We were only nine and were perched on his mother’s car as we waited for his father to arrive with Stella, a German shepherd mix Kenny had chosen at the North Shore Animal League a few days earlier. His parents had been promising him a dog for years and finally came through for his birthday. This was the day the dog’s shots had been completed and she was allowed to be picked up. Mr. Waxman was getting her on his way home from work. Kenny was so happy he beamed.

Our small feet dangled off the hood of his mother’s car as Kenny and I squinted into the evening sun waiting for his father’s car to round the corner. Finally we saw the dark green
Impala pull up, and we jumped down, holding our breath as we watched Mr. Waxman get out and shut the door behind him. He headed straight for the house without even looking at us.

“Where’s Stella?” I asked, confused.

He waved my comment away. “Bad idea, a dog,” he said. “Mrs. Waxman doesn’t like a mess.”

Without saying a word to Kenny, he walked in the front door, leaving us there, stunned. I looked at Kenny, who went white. I thought he would break right in half. I put my hand on his shoulder and waited for the tears to start, because I knew that even a boy would cry hard over an injustice this tragic. But Kenny’s eyes were dry and pale.

“Maybe he’ll change his mind,” I offered.

“He won’t,”

I was so confused by the lack of emotion that after I watched Kenny walk into the house I peered into his father’s dark car to see if there was something I had missed. Maybe the dog was really there after all. But the car was as empty and as lonely as any space I’d ever seen.

Kenny’s adult face was still inscrutable, but I knew how much pain it hid. I followed his line of vision to the hospital doors. They opened, but it wasn’t the Waxmans—it was an elderly woman patient being pushed in a wheelchair to a waiting taxi. The old lady rose slowly and said something to the nurse behind the chair, who opened the cab’s door. Frail and shaky, the woman sank into the vehicle’s backseat, and the nurse handed her a paper shopping bag, which I assumed held her belongings. As the cab pulled away from the curb, I saw the old white hand wave from the dark interior. I hoped she was going home to more than a dying houseplant and a hungry cat.

I looked at Kenny to see if he was watching the taxi, but his eyes were unfocused as he stared straight ahead.

“What are you thinking about?” he said, as if he could feel me staring at him.

“I thought you could read my mind.”

“I’m losing my powers. The Crown Victoria is my kryptonite.”

“I was thinking about Stella,” I said.

“Stella, the talking German shepherd mix whose tail wagged hard enough to knock over a small child? It was love at first sight.”

“Did you say
talking
German shepherd?”

“Yup.”

“She talked?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What did she say?”

“How the hell should
I
know? I don’t speak German.”

Kenny’s mother soon appeared, walking beside another aide pushing Sam Waxman in his wheelchair. Once they got past the sliding doors, the aide stopped and Sam pulled himself out of the chair.

Sam looked at Kenny and then turned to his wife. “Where’s Harold?”

“With Bernadette,” she said. “I told you. She just had surgery and I couldn’t ask him to leave.”

“Where’s
our
car?” Sam asked.

“This
is
our car.”

“Then why do we need a driver?”

“I’ve been too nervous to drive since…well.” She looked at Kenny for help.

“It’s no big deal,” Kenny said, opening the back door. “Just get in.”

His father paused and I feared there would be a showdown. I could see in his eyes that letting his son drive him home constituted some sort of defeat, but Renee stepped in, playing
the incompetent housewife so her swaggering husband could have something to latch onto.

“Don’t be too mad at me when you see how dry the grass is,” she said, sliding into the backseat. “One of the sprinkler heads is broken.”

Sam turned toward Kenny. “Give me the keys,” he said, opening his hand.

“Can’t. They took away your license, remember?”

Sam folded his arms. “I’m not getting in the goddamn backseat.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll sit in the back.”

“Bev,” Kenny interrupted.

“It’s okay. Really.”

Kenny rolled his eyes. He got behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. I slid in next to Renee, the interior hotter than I had expected. She leaned forward as Sam got into the car.

“Maybe you can hose down the lawn when we get home,” she said.

He didn’t respond. Kenny started the car and turned the AC on full blast. He pulled out of the front circle and drove toward the exit.

“It’ll feel good to sleep in your own bed, won’t it?” Renee continued.

He still didn’t respond.

“Sam?”

Nothing.

“He’s not answering,” Renee said, her voice rising. “Why isn’t he answering?”

“There’s nothing to say,” Sam snapped. “Just leave me alone.”

“Isn’t this special?” Kenny said to me. “All of us together like this?”

Sam pointed a finger at Kenny. “You’re not allowed to speak.”

Kenny laughed. “I’d say ‘try and stop me’ but I’m afraid I might wind up in an industrial drum.”

Oh no. Kenny was gearing up for a fight. I readied myself for an explosion from Sam.

“Kenny, please,” his mother said.

“You think that’s funny?” Sam said.

Kenny passed a slow car, accelerated. “Not especially. But maybe I can do better. Let’s see. My father is so guilty.” He paused. “C’mon, Bev, help me out. How guilty is he? My father is so guilty they’re going to lock him up and throw away the whole penitentiary.”