Near Death (33 page)

Cyrus was relieved to hear the siren approaching from the direction of Mass General close by. “The ambulance is on the way,” he told the young woman.

“Do CPR!”

Avakian got up off his knees. “Lady, he’s conscious. He doesn’t need CPR.”

Within half a minute the ambulance arrived and Gelb was stretchered out with Lilly in tow. Cyrus and Avakian returned to their table and Avakian poked his sandwich, which had cooled.

The manager came right over. “Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. Lunch is on us.”

“Jimmy, I’d love to take a freebie but you know our rules,” Avakian told him. “You can, though, put my sandwich back under the heat.” He sucked thirstily through his straw.

Cyrus was about to do the same when his mobile rang. “Marian,” he explained. He answered, listening; then he snapped the phone shut. “It’s Tara. I’ve got to go.”

O’Malley’s eyes told the story. “I’m sorry, Cy,” Pete said. “Give me the list; I’ll take care of everything. Call me later and let me know how she is.”

Cyrus picked his coat off the hook and ran out to Cambridge Street to hail a cab, leaving Avakian to finish his meal alone.

After he was done eating, Pete groggily asked for the check. When the waitress returned she found him slumped forward, his bald head balanced precariously on the table.
“Jimmy!” she yelled. “Call the ambulance again!”

The manager ran over, took one look and cried out, “What
the hell
is going on today?”

Forty-six

13 DAYS

The ICU sounded like a mechanical rain forest with its chirping monitors and windlike whooshing of ventilators. Tara was in and out of consciousness but breathing on her own. The neurosurgeons told Cyrus she’d bled into her brain from scar tissue near the tumor. She’d had a sustained seizure in the ward before being transferred to the unit but she was relatively stable—for now. Surgery was not an option. It would kill her.

Marian had gone downstairs for a coffee and he was grateful to be alone with Tara, free from his ex-wife’s venomous stares. He whispered to her that he was there and lightly stroked her cool cheek. It was late afternoon. His cell phone was off per ICU protocol and he hadn’t given work a thought until one of the nurses came in and told him they were holding a call for him from a Stanley Minot.

At the nurse’s station, Cyrus picked up one of the flashing lines.

“Cy, Stanley.”

“Thanks for calling. Tara’s had a setback; I should’ve let you know I wasn’t coming—”

“It’s Pete,” Minot interrupted. “Someone probably slipped him Bliss while you were at lunch. They took him over to Mass General. When he woke up, by all accounts he was calm. He was smiling, talking about seeing his dad, couldn’t have been happier. Then he got a hold of his service weapon and shot himself. I’m sorry, Cy …”

Cyrus’s cop brain overrode his emotions for a few moments and he said mechanically, “There was a fat guy at the restaurant. He must’ve faked a heart attack while a girl, Asian, spiked our drinks. The ambulance took him to MGH.”

“Cy,” Minot said gently, “we’re all over it. He checked out of the hospital against medical advice. We know who he is and we’ve gone looking for him. Tell me what I can do for you.”

Cyrus began to sob. “Has someone called Jeanne?”

“I talked to her. She’s on the way to Boston.”

“I … I want to see her,” Cyrus said, trying to speak, “… b-but I can’t leave Tara.”

“I’ll tell Jeanne. You stay with your daughter.”

Tara died that night.

An hour before she passed she gave her parents one last gift, a couple of minutes of lucidity. Her eyes opened and she felt for her stuffed bear and smiled when her hand clenched its ragged plush. She looked to her left and saw her mother, who was fighting back tears. Then she looked to her right at Cyrus. “Hi Daddy.”

“Hey, baby.”

“Can I have some juice?”

Marian rushed out to get some and Cyrus said with a catch in his throat, “You know I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you too, Daddy.”

“Do you hurt anywhere, are you comfy?”

“I’m okay.”

Marian brought in a cold juice box and put the straw in her mouth.

“How’s my baby?” Marian asked.

“I’m okay.” She drank some more and said, “Can Freddy come with me?”

Marian didn’t understand but Cyrus did.

“Yeah, he can come with you.”

“I’m not scared.”

“I know you’re not. You’re the bravest girl in the world,” Cyrus said, close.

“I’m sleepy.”

“Then shut your eyes, sweetheart. Mommy and I will be right here when you wake up.”

The chief resident in neurosurgery was called when Tara’s breathing took on a crescendo-decrescendo pattern. The doctor knew her patient well and was visibly sad when she told Cyrus and Marian that she thought Tara was having a second bleed, a bad one.

Marian held one of her hands. Cyrus tucked the bear under her arm and held the other one and the doctor stood at the foot of the bed watching the monitor instead of the girl. An ICU nurse closed the door to her room, pulled the curtain and joined the vigil.

When she took her last, long breath and her monitor showed zeros, Marian began to wail and ran out of the room, the nurse following her to help.

Cyrus stayed with Tara for the next hour while the nurses disconnected her lines and prepared her to be taken away. He didn’t want her to be alone.

It was too much to bear.

Two funerals in two days.

Cyrus was like a sleepwalker at Pete Avakian’s requiem service. He sat with Stanley Minot in a pew crammed with colleagues from the Boston bureau. The Armenian priest was
a young man with a heavy black beard, resplendent in a blue and gold silk robe. Cyrus was somewhere else, his mind in a thick fog until the beauty of the priest’s words penetrated and briefly brought him back to the moment.

“In the Heavenly Jerusalem, in the abode of angels, where Enoch and Elijah live dovelike in old age, being worthily resplendent in the Garden of Eden; O merciful Lord, have mercy upon the soul of our departed Peter.”

Tara’s funeral mass was harder, nightmarish. Cyrus was in the front pew with Marty, sandwiched between him and Marian. Nothing seemed real. It was as if he didn’t recognize the familiar confines of St. Anselm’s Church or the melodious voice of Father Bonner. Family and friends seemed strangers. The crying sounded like discordant music. Tara’s little coffin looked incongruous. What was it doing there? Where was she? Then he had an overwhelming urge to check that Freddy the Teddy indeed was inside with her. Perhaps Marty sensed Cyrus was about to stand because he put an arm around his shoulders until the impulse passed.

Outside the church, Emily was waiting for him. He hadn’t seen her since Tara passed. She was wearing a black dress under her blue overcoat. Cyrus thought it looked new. There was a hint of warmth in the air and he noticed the first birdsong since the start of long winter. “Will you
come to the cemetery with me?” he asked her. She nodded and an usher guided them to one of the limos.

Cyrus steered clear of the gathering at the home of one of Marian’s friends. In fact, when he walked past Marian at the end of the Rite of Committal at the graveside at St. Patrick’s Cemetery and suffered one more hateful glare he wondered if he’d ever have to see her again.

Instead, numb and tired, he allowed Emily to take charge and bring him to a diner not far from his apartment. He hadn’t eaten in two days and though still not hungry, he ate to eradicate the dull pounding in his head. She didn’t require conversation and he was grateful for that. They dined largely in silence and when they were done she said, “Let me take you home.”

Ordinarily, he might have had more pride about letting her come into his untidy place but he didn’t care just now. She followed him in. Though bright outside, the apartment was dark and when he opened the blinds in the living room his prosaic view of the parking lot was revealed in all its glory. What she focused on instead were stacks of books, growing out of the floor like stalagmites. She touched one of the piles, waist-high.

“Oh my … so many books.”

“I need bookcases,” he said, taking her coat.

“I like them this way.”

“It’s hard getting at the bottom ones.”

He had a bottle of vodka in the freezer and he went to fetch it while she wandered through his vertical library. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Keats. Burns. Hawthorne. Eliot. Proust. Fitzgerald. Steinbeck. Faulkner.

He uncapped the bottle, sat down hard on his reading chair and poured two measures. She took one.

“You’re an unusual man,” she said.

“Just because I like to read?”

“You don’t fit into a neat category, as do most people.”

They drank without toasting.

“What’s your category?” he asked.

She took the drink over to the sofa, swallowed the icy, viscous fluid and scrunched her face in its aftermath. “I’m going to let you come to your own conclusion about that.”

He noticed her looking at one small colorful stack by the window, children’s books. “Those are Tara’s. When she came over she liked to read with me.”

“She was such a lovely girl.”

He poured a second drink for himself and downed it. He
didn’t want to cry anymore if he could help it.

Her iPhone chimed in her handbag. She glanced at it.

“Do you need to get that?” he asked.

“I’m not on duty. It’s just a news alert.”

“What?”

She looked closer. “President Redland’s just stepped down. The vice president’s going to be sworn in.”

“I suppose we ought to watch this,” he mumbled, then searched for the remote until he found it under the sofa.

The TV screen had the ubiquitous crawl of the Inner Peace Crusade’s countdown clock, which now stood at 11 days. A reporter was standing on the White House lawn in front of the curved driveway and portico.

“Beyond the terse announcement from the White House that President Redland is voluntarily resigning from office for health reasons effective five P.M. today, there have been no official statements. We have learned from high-level sources, however, that the president has never fully recovered from his Bliss poisoning at the G Eight summit in Japan and that administration officials and the vice president have been anticipating this development as increasingly inevitable.”

Cyrus changed the channel.

Beneath the anchor desk was yet another countdown
clock. The male and female anchors stared into the camera, grim-faced.

“While we await the swearing-in ceremony and Vice President—or should I say soon to be President—Killen’s first press conference, we’re going to take you out around the country to examine the current crisis. It’s an economic crisis, a social crisis, and now, increasingly, a political crisis. The cause, as everyone knows, is the worldwide Bliss epidemic and the evangelical and some would say
sinister
Inner Peace Crusade, which has resorted to worldwide acts of sabotage to promote its ends, whatever those may be.”

“That’s right, Sally. As bad as this epidemic was a few weeks ago, it has gotten much, much worse. The National Institute of Drug Abuse, which has been tracking usage patterns, estimates that fifteen to eighteen million Americans now have taken the drug at least one time, yet even that number, the agency admits, could be low. Whether you believe, as millions clearly do, that Bliss proves the existence of a divine afterlife or that contrary to that belief it’s a psychedelic fool’s gold, one thing is certain. The effects of Bliss in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the country have been devastating.”

“Larry, places like Willow Run, Michigan, have been hit hardest by the crisis as our reporter, Bob Tucker, found out earlier at Carlson’s Coffee Shop, a local gathering place for the shell-shocked residents of this town.”

The reporter leaned forward across a booth in a diner and posed a question to two burly men. “Can you tell me what life has been like in this town?”

One of the men looked him in the eye and said, “It’s been hell, worse than the last recession. We’ve got two big employers in town and both are in a tailspin. When you’ve got so many folks who just flat-out stop going to work after taking this Bliss, you can’t keep these production lines going. We’re not getting parts from other factories too. Before this started, we were running three shifts; now we’re down to one. A lot of people have lost their jobs. I don’t know any business in town that’s hiring. Most of my friends are living off of unemployment and draining their savings. We’re worried about our houses.”

The other man banged his coffee cup down on the saucer. “You add to that the personal problem that some folks have had with Bliss. My family’s been spared, thank God, but I’ve got friends and neighbors who’ve lost loved ones.”

“Lost to suicide?” the reporter asked.

“Doesn’t matter if they kill themselves—once someone’s taken that stuff, they’re good as gone,” he answered.

Out front of Gracie Mansion in New York City, another reporter stood under an umbrella. “This is Martin Flores. New York, like other major cities in America, has been particularly hard hit by the Bliss crisis. Adding to the woes of unemployment is a feeling that social decay and unrest are right around the corner. In the best of times, New York can be a tough place to live if you’re poor and disadvantaged. In times like these, no one was particularly surprised when the streets of Mott Haven erupted in violent riots last week after police attempted a mass arrest of members of a local gang who were allegedly supplying Bliss to their neighborhood. We asked Mayor Alex Strauss about the big mess in the Big Apple.”

The mayor gesticulated behind his office desk. “The problems we had last week in the Bronx could turn into something positive if it makes people realize we’ve got to come together and fight this drug problem with community unity. The alternative is divisiveness and disorder. For me, as mayor, that alternative is not acceptable.”

“People in that neighborhood were angry because the police were cutting off the flow of Bliss. What does that
tell you?”

The mayor hammered his fist into his palm. “It tells me that this is a dangerous, addictive drug. I’d like to see a lot more done on treatment and detoxification. I’m committed to education and treatment. That’s got to be the way forward.”