I hadn't been to Brockton in years, and here I was for the second time in as many days. I got only a little lost but soon found the VA hospital. It was going on nine-fifty. I had no idea what the visiting hours were. The visitors' lot was mostly empty, dotted with pools of coppery light. I took along the copy of Ben Nickerson's high school yearbook, thinking it might come in handy, and headed for the lobby, passing folks wearing postâbedside-visit looks of relief coming out. When I asked at the information desk about hours, the kindly old volunteer's face got as long as Joe Camel's. “They end at ten,” he said. “You better hurry.”
I found the elevators and rode to the fourth floor, where I oriented myself and headed for Wing C, room 406. As I passed a nurses' station, trying to move by unnoticed, or at least unobtrusively, a broad-shouldered nurse called out to me. “Sir, can I help you?” It was delivered like a sentry's challenge.
Tentatively, I lifted
The Torch
. “I wanted to drop this off for a patient. It's his class yearbook. I thought it might cheer him up.”
“Which patient, sir?” She looked a bit like a sentry, at that.
I told her. She glanced at one of the other nurses, who pushed up out of a desk chair and joined her at the counter. “Who told
you you could do this?” This nurse was a petite thing, but she sounded just as forceful.
“I wasn't aware anyone had to authorize it. It's still visiting hours.”
“This is a private ward,” the broad-shouldered nurse said, not bothering with “sir” now. They had smoked out an invader in the smoothly functioning routine of their ward, and they were having none of it.
“But a public hospital, no?”
“You can't be here,” said the short one. “You can leave the book with us.”
I gave them my disarming smile. “It's a personal keepsake. I'll only be a minute.” I'd come this far; I knew now it would be the only chance I got, and all at once I felt a need to see Teddy Rand.
“That makes no difference. You've got to leave right now, sir.”
She was a charmer. “Can I stay if I lay off the stewed prunes?” The petite nurse gave me some thin, menacing mouth action, then spun on her heels and marched off quickstep on a mission. Broad-shoulders reached for a phone.
I hurried along the hall, scanning the numbers above the doors. Two-thirds of the way down, 406 stood open. I glanced back before entering. At the far end of the corridor, the petite nurse was talking with a black orderly, pointing in my direction, saying something I could only see in pantomime.
The room was a double, but the bed closest to the door was unoccupied. The other bed, near the window, had a man in it. He was on his back, hooked up to monitors and IV drips. My first thought was that he was asleep, or even comatose, but as I went nearer I realized he was awake. His head didn't move, but his eyes rolled my way. His face had not changed a lot from the photos I'd seen. The clean jaw and the bright eyes remained, though admittedly they were gaunt. The body, though, which lay under just a sheet, belonged to a different man. Trauma, inactivity, and time had wasted it. The shoulders and arms, which weren't covered by the sheet, lay slack and stick-thin, the muscle bulk gone. I stepped near the bed, and his eyes moved with meâthe only part of him that
could
move, I realized.
“Teddy Rand?” I said.
He gave no response, but his eyes held mine, and suddenly I felt exposed by them. Why was I here? What had I imagined I would accomplish by coming? I hadn't brought well-wishes or flowers or hope. I was an utter stranger to him. I had only a book under my arm. The book.
I stepped nearer, so that the blue eyes were full on mine. I said, “I'm Alex Rasmussen. I'm an acquaintance of Red Dog's.” I told it then, in quick, streamlined fashion, no time for a back-story, and he didn't need it. Ben Nickerson and his daughter were the centerpiece. I took out the photograph of Michelle to show himâobviously he had never seen her, but I wanted it to go with my tale. He looked at it, but there was no change in his eyes that I could detect. From the corridor outside, I heard a doctor being paged with that controlled urgency of a crisis situation. I held up the yearbook, so that Teddy Rand's eyes could see the title embossed in black on the pale gray coverâ
The Torch
.
I flipped pages to the picture of Teddy himself and showed him that. No reaction. I bypassed Van Owen's portrait and went straight for the sports section, to the shot of the two of them as football heroes. Nothing. I paged backward to Nickerson's portrait. Same. I was dealing a losing hand. In the hallway, I heard a mutter of voices, and the quick patter of footsteps on rubber tile, moving this way. Desperate, I flipped through the big shiny pages one last time, fumbling past strangers in the hairdos and garb of twenty years ago. I found what I was after.
Teddy Rand looked at it. It wasn't one of the senior portraits, because she had been a junior that year; but she was in the sports section, and as head cheerleader, Ginny Carvalho was featured alone, standing in her short pleated skirt and letter jacket, her pom-poms held out, smiling.
In Rand's face there was nothing, no visible change. I closed the yearbook. And right then, at the corner of his eye, I saw a tear form and roll down his cheek. He moved his glance to mine. Suddenly, it seemed deep with meaning. I laid my hand on his thin arm.
“All right, what is going on here?” someone demanded from the door.
He was a squat man with a large face, and more jowl than a Saint Bernard, and a voice trying to be firm. A stethoscope protruded from the breast pocket of his white coat, stitched on to which was the name I'd heard being paged moments ago. Dr. Joffrey. “You have no business here!” he said.
“I think you're wrong,” I said, not sure what I meant.
“No,
you
are!” The stethoscope jiggled like a rubber squid. “Security is on their way.”
Behind him, someone said quietly, “That's okay, Doctor. I know this gentleman.” It was Ted Rand.
Looking uncertain but relieved, Joffrey retreated. Rand stayed in the doorway, not looking toward his son. “Can we take this outside, Mr. Rasmussen?” he said with half the volume Joffrey had used, and twice the force.
Clasping the yearbook, I glanced once more at Teddy Rand, then I stepped past the empty outer bed and followed Ted Rand into the corridor. The broad-shouldered nurse and the black orderly were standing by. “We tried to prevent him, sir,” the orderly said.
“Thank you, William.”
“Anytime, Mr. Rand. I'll just ride downstairs with you.”
The man did, and the three of us rode the elevator in silent descent. I didn't know if the orderly saw his role as lending physical protection or moral support. He and Rand exchanged good nights in the lobby. When Rand and I stepped outside, three other men were waiting.
I didn't know who they were: men from the Point Pines work crew, I judged from their general appearances. One was young, with a bodybuilder's size. The other two were somewhere between my age and Rand's, of medium size, but with the kind of leathery toughness that a life of pick-and-shovel work bestows. They fell into place around me, like an escort, and we headed for the parking lot.
A gray pickup truck and a green Lincoln flanked my car. At a signal from Rand, one of the older men asked me to lift my arms. I did, and he patted me down. The other one took the yearbook and the Polaroid snapshot Van Owen had given me and handed them to Rand, who looked at both briefly and reached through the open
window of his car and dropped them on the seat. Still speaking quietly, he said, “What were you doing?”
“Trying to find someone.”
“In the hospital?”
“I showed your son his high school yearbook. I'm still looking for Nickerson.”
“That's his daughter in the Polaroid?”
“Michelle, yes.”
“Well, that still doesn't explain what you were doing here.” A thought crept into my mind: Had Rand been the one who'd talked to Ross Jensen about dropping me? But why? How? “But that isn't important right now,” said Rand. “What you don't understand is that my son isn't to be disturbed. Ever.”
“I see that now. I wasn't fully aware of his condition. I'm sorry.”
“It's a little late for that. It's already happened, hasn't it?”
I sifted that for hidden meanings. Rand stepped back, his face wrathful in the sodium light from overhead. “You don't seem to know what you've gotten yourself into,” he said.
He turned and climbed into the Lincoln and drove away. I looked to the young bodybuilder, standing to my right. As Rand and I had been talking, the man had slowly been wrapping an elastic bandage around his hand. He flexed his hand several times. I wasted a second wondering why. I saw the blow coming and just managed to twist aside. His fist hit my car window with enough impact to spiderweb the safety glass. The man grunted in pain. I bulldozed my fist into his stomach. A flurry of short punches hit me in the lower back. His companions got into it. One poked stiff fingers under my bottom rib. I fought, even connected with a jaw or two, but I might as well have been swinging a fistful of cotton candy for all the effect it had. Hands spun me around and shoved my head against my car roof: once, twice. Quickly, the older two got hold of my arms and turned me back. I felt their strength, pinning me. It didn't last long.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground. Something wet splashed onto me. I thought I heard more crunching of glass, and another sound, a faint exhalation, like the life being let out of something. Maybe it was me. Maybe I'd been stabbed. I heard a vehicle start up, then a louder crash close by and a tinkle of breaking glass.
I lay in a curl on the asphalt. After a while another vehicle roared to life and lurched off with a squeal of tires.
I don't know how long I lay there. Sights and sounds were blurry and mostly dark, as if a wire had come loose and wasn't making a clean connection. I thought about getting to my feet, which meant I had to find them first. They were down the block. When I rounded them up and got them under me, I levered my way to a standing position with the aid of my car. I leaned against the passenger-side door, winded from the effort, and rested. I could hear the white noise of Brockton around me, but it sounded distant, unimportant. Crumbs of safety glass lay around my feet like bright little pebbles. The Probe's front end was pushed against the steel light pole, which told me what the crash had been. The tire that I could see was flat. I'd have to get out the spare and the jack.
First, though, I had to learn to walk. I took a step. My legs were rolled gym towels and rubber snakes. I knew what ninety was going to be like, with knees that wouldn't lock and a shuffling gait and aches in places I didn't like hurting in. My pants were wet. God. I wondered if I'd brought my bedpan. After a few days I got around to the driver side, noting en route that the other front tire was flat too. Keys. Keys? I patted myself down twice. No keys.
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I got through the big automatic doors and into the hospital lobby. No one paid me any mind; they'd seen and smelled it all too many times before. Someone may have asked me if I had medical insurance. I ignored them if they did. I pushed open the door to the first bathroom I came to and winced at the fluorescent glare. I braced myself on a sink, hoping it didn't come off the wall with my weight. When it didn't, and I didn't fall, and I had managed to keep my stomach down, I bent over. They were those faucets you press down and water gushes for all of two seconds. Cupping my hands under the flow before it quit took some practice, but finally I splashed a few drops of water on my face. I swished some in my mouth and spat it out pink and checked my teeth, which didn't tell me much. Finally I used the mirror above the basin. I wanted to tell the stranger to step aside and let me look, but he was a gruesome SOB and scared
me. One of his eyes was swollen almost shut, his nostrils had a crust of blood, and his lips were rubber hoses. He stank of booze. I was going to tell the lousy lowlife to move it, or I'd move it for him, when behind him in the mirror I noticed something else: a dispenser for sanitary napkins. I turned to see a row of neat little enclosed stalls, not a trough in sight. I took a step toward the door and fell, banging the floor against my head. As I lay with my eyes shut, my cheek against the cool terrazzo, I heard a woman's voice saying something, asking a question, I think. I tried to say, “Shh,” but I'm not sure it came out. I may have heard the flutter of angel's wings. Then, nothing.