Ghostheart (36 page)

When Annie again woke Jim Parrish was there.

‘Time is it?’ she asked as she slurred into semi-consciousness.

‘A little after four,’ he said. ‘Monday morning.’

‘I’ll be able to go home today,’ she said.

‘That a question or a statement?’

‘I want to go home today,’ she said.

‘Let’s see how you’re doing in a few hours,’ Parrish said. ‘Rest some more … you’ve been through something that you don’t recover from in a day.’

‘But people do recover?’ Annie asked. Her eyes were wide, brimming with tears.

Jim Parrish stepped forward and sat on the edge of the bed where Annie lay. He reached out and took her hand.

‘Recover?’ he said. ‘Sure they recover … as will you Annie O’Neill, bookstore owner.’

She smiled weakly, and then she closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

‘I brought something for you,’ he said quietly, and from his coat pocket he took a slim volume. ‘You know Hemingway?’

‘Ernest or Mariel?’

Parrish smiled. ‘Ernest.’

‘Not personally, no.’

He held the book in his hand for a moment and then passed it to her.

Annie took it. It was
A Farewell To Arms
.

‘You’re giving this to me because it’s a tragic love story, and you thought that was the kind of thing I needed to read right now?’ she asked, her tone a little sarcastic, perhaps a little defensive.

Parrish shook his head. ‘No, I’m giving it to you because Hemingway was a drunk, and when he was drunk he was a foul-mouthed son-of-a-bitch and I thought you guys might relate.’

‘Jeez, you really have switched on the charm tonight haven’t you?’

Parrish smiled, and there was something in his expression that told Annie this was a little more than the standard bedside manner.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she looked at him directly, and with as little emotion in her voice as she could manage said, ‘Thank you Doctor Jim Parrish. I appreciate that you brought me this, but right now I have a headache the size of Texas, my boyfriend just dumped me, and I really don’t think I can handle whatever it is you think I might be able to handle.’

Parrish shook his head. ‘Take the book,’ he said. ‘It’s a helluva story, and if you read it and want to return it you know where I am, okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said. She wanted him to go away, to leave her be. However handsome and sympathetic he might have been he was still a man.

Jim Parrish didn’t speak again, merely sat with her for a little while, then got up and walked away. He didn’t look back, didn’t even glance.

Just like the rest.

Standing at the front entrance of St Luke’s, Jack Sullivan propping her up against the rain and wind that rushed towards her as the automatic doors slid open, Annie O’Neill was suddenly filled with the impulse to turn back, to hurry down the antiseptically white corridors, find the bed where she’d lain and crawl beneath the disinfectant-smelling sheets to hide from the world.

The world was rough edges and sharp corners, and sometimes you collided with them, and sometimes it hurt so bad you couldn’t breathe, could barely stand, and there was nothing you could say, nothing
anyone
could say, that would make it feel better.
Beautiful, but worthless
, a voice said.
He said you were beautiful, but what he did made you worthless
.

They took a cab – Jack and Annie – and when they arrived at the apartment building it was all Jack could do to bring her from the car to her own doorstep.

‘Don’t want to go in,’ she kept saying. ‘Don’t want to go inside,’ and so he carried her up the stairwell and took her into
his place, and he put on the TV, turned it up loud, because Jack Sullivan knew all about the need for noise, the need to have something mindless to drown out the sound of the ghosts inside.

Always recover
, she kept telling herself, but she knew it was a lie, and early afternoon came, and then it went, and even as darkness started creeping along the sidewalks and filling the spaces between things, she remembered Forrester.

‘Go,’ she told Sullivan. ‘Go tell him I can’t be there,’ but Sullivan was determined not to leave her alone.

‘I mean it Jack … he’s a good man, probably the best man I know aside from you. He’s too old to want me for anything other than company, right?’

She insisted, insisted more than Sullivan imagined she could, and so he took a cab down to The Reader’s Rest and he waited there for Forrester to arrive.

Annie left the TV on, and when it started to drown out her thoughts she turned it off and crossed the landing to her apartment.

She stood silent and immobile for a time. She looked at where David had sat. She stepped through to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. A bed where she had felt safe beside him only hours before it seemed. From there she could see through to the front room, the small table upon which had sat a vase, now a thousand pieces swept up and emptied away somewhere unknown. Like her emotions perhaps. Like her life.

She leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees, and put her face in her hands.

She was too empty to cry, too hollow, like a clay gourd waiting to be filled. But there was nothing to fill her, nothing to rid her of the sense of absence and longing and heartbreak.

She asked herself what there was now, where she would go, what she would become.

Is this it? she asked herself. Is this all there will ever be? This apartment, the bookstore, my evenings with Jack Sullivan – wonderful man though he is, he is not my lover, nor my soul-mate, nor
…

Nor my father
…

And then she cried again, because she wished her mother and father were there, wished they would hold her and tell her everything would be alright, because moms and dads didn’t lie, did they? No, moms and dads never lied.

And by the time Sullivan returned with the message from Robert Forrester Annie was sleeping, curled up in the middle of her bed like a little child. Sullivan tugged the quilt out and covered her, and because it seemed right and fitting, because for some reason he didn’t wish to be alone either, he lay beside her, his arm over her to protect her from things unseen, and he slept too.

The wind crept up to the windows and pressed against the glass, for it was warm inside, and out beyond those windows Manhattan teemed with a hundred million thoughts, each one special, each one unique, and yet all of them – in some strange way – silent and alone.

‘A fascinating man altogether, your Mister Forrester,’ Sullivan said.

He was sitting at the table in Annie’s front room. It was Tuesday morning, a little after eleven, and when they’d woken earlier Annie had seemed comforted by the fact that Sullivan had stayed with her through the night.

‘He said very little about himself at all. He didn’t seem guarded as such –’

‘You want tea or coffee?’ Annie called from the kitchen.

‘Coffee,’ Sullivan said, and rose from the chair. He walked to the kitchen doorway and stood there watching her for a moment.

‘It wasn’t as if he didn’t want to answer questions … more like there was something about him that made you feel any kind of question would have been an invasion of his privacy.’

‘And he said he would come Wednesday?’

Sullivan nodded. ‘Wednesday, seven as usual.’

She handed Sullivan his coffee and they walked back through to the front.

‘When he told me about it, the first time, you know? … well, he went through this whole thing about how if you were going to be late you didn’t show up at all. He said my dad was a perfectionist, wanted everything just so or not at all.’

‘Your father’s not there this time,’ Sullivan said. ‘Maybe he figured things could relax a little. He also said he wanted you to have the last section of the manuscript.’

‘The last section?’ Annie asked.

‘’S what he said.’

Annie was quiet for a while. She wanted a cigarette. She wished Sullivan smoked, would have convinced herself that she could have smoked only one and not been tempted again.

‘So what do I do about David Quinn?’ she asked eventually.

‘What d’you wanna do about David Quinn?’

Annie shrugged. ‘Hell Jack, if I knew what to do about David Quinn I wouldn’t have asked your opinion, would I?’

‘Most times people only ask for someone else’s opinion to confirm what they’ve already decided themselves.’

‘Well this doesn’t happen to be one of those times,’ Annie said. ‘You want the question again?’

Sullivan shook his head. ‘I got it the first time.’

‘So?’

Sullivan went silent, then he eased himself back on the couch as if he was settling in for the duration.

‘One time,’ he said, ‘I was on the subway.’

‘Good,’ Annie said. ‘I was on the subway one time as well.’

‘You wanna hear what I have to say or you want I should go home?’

She smiled. ‘Please continue Jack … I am deeply sorry.’

‘Too smart for your own fucking good, Annie O’Neill. Anyway, I was on the subway one time and I saw this girl. This was maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. She must’ve been maybe thirty, thirty-two, something like that, you know real old –’

Annie raised her hand to take a mock swipe at Sullivan.

Sullivan pretended to duck.

‘So I saw this girl,’ he went on, ‘and there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about her, she wasn’t what you would have called classically beautiful … but there was
something
. She looked right at me, you know, how you make eye contact in a crowded place, like a bar or something?’

Annie nodded. She thought of the priest on the train, and she willed herself not to blush.

‘So this girl looks right at me, and I look right back at her, and it’s one of those awkward moments when you know you
should just look away, like you just happened to be glancing in that direction and they were in the way. But it didn’t happen. Neither one of us looked away. And though it was just a second, perhaps less than a second, I knew.’

‘Knew what?’

Sullivan smiled. ‘I knew she was the one.’

‘The one?’

Sullivan nodded. ‘
The
one.’

‘And how the hell did you know that?’ Annie asked.

‘I don’t know … well, I do know actually … ah hell, how the fuck d’you explain something like that? I just looked at her and I knew that I should go talk to her.’

‘So what did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Sullivan replied.

‘Nothing … not even hi, or hey there babe, how goes it?’

Sullivan laughed, but there was something in the sound of his laughter that was forced. Even now, so many years later, he was looking at one of the small regrets of his life.

‘No, I didn’t say a damned word … I just sat there, every once in a while glancing in her direction, but she’d realized by then that I wasn’t going to say anything. And I knew how she felt.’

‘How did she feel?’

‘She felt the same sense of loss as me.’

‘How could you tell?’ Annie asked, intrigued by Sullivan’s story, a small part of this man’s strange life that had reached beneath the surface.

‘Because she got off at the next station.’

‘Maybe she meant to get off there.’

Sullivan shook his head. ‘No, she didn’t.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘Because when she got off she took three or four steps to a bench and sat down, like she was just gonna sit there and wait for the next train. And as the train pulled away I was looking at her, and you know what she did?’

Annie raised her eyebrows.

‘She held up her hand, you know, like when someone waves but they just raise their hand … it was that kind of wave, like she was saying goodbye.’

‘And she was looking at you?’

‘She was.’

‘That’s really fucking sad Jack … hell, that’s gotta be the saddest thing I ever heard.’

‘Saddest thing was there was a moment to take and I didn’t take it … that was by far the saddest thing.’

‘So what does this tell me?’ Annie asked. ‘That I should go down the subway and ride the trains until I connect with someone?’

Sullivan nodded, his face serious. ‘That’s
exactly
what it tells you Annie. Any time, night or day, every waking hour you should be down those subway tunnels trawling the carriages for single men to make eye contact with. Figure it’d go better if you dressed up a little, you know, a really short skirt, some fishnets with a hole in the back, silver stiletto heels an’ all that.’

Annie nodded, and then she smiled. ‘Seize the moment, seize the day, right?’

‘Carpe diem and all that goes with it.’

‘So what should I do?’

‘Fight for it Annie. That’s what I think you should do. Take a look at what you felt, how you felt when he was around compared to how you felt when he was gone. Weigh the two up, and if one feels better than the other go fight for it.’

‘It felt better when he was here.’

‘So go find him.’

‘Jeez, I wouldn’t know where to begin Jack.’

‘Marine insurance, that’s his business. Whoever he works for is bound to have an office in New York and an office in Boston, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So I’ll check out how many firms deal with marine insurance that run an office in both those places, and then we’ll make some calls.’

Annie nodded, and then she looked sideways at Jack Sullivan.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Figure the subways might be a better bet.’

‘Humor … the last line of defence.’

Annie shook her head. ‘No, I’m just a devout believer in the law of diminishing returns.’

‘And what the fuck would that be when it’s at home?’

‘The theory that the universe is constructed in such a way that you always get back less than you give.’

Sullivan nodded, his face once again serious. ‘Well Annie, as far as I’m concerned that’s the ripest heap of horseshit that ever assaulted my ears.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I reckon.’

‘You think he was serious?’

‘About what?’ Sullivan asked.

‘About me Jack … you think he was actually serious about me?’

‘I don’t know whether serious is the right word. Seems to me any guy who takes you to Boston for a couple of days has to have some kind of idea that he wants what you got.’