Mercury (21 page)

S
TRANGE AS IT HAD
been to sleep on the waiting-room sofa, it was even stranger to occupy our familiar bed, with Viv lying a few inches away. I was conscious of every scrape of fabric, every breath. If I could, I would have slept at the opposite end of the house, the opposite end of the street. Hour after hour I lay awake, clicking away on my nocturnal abacus. I know I slept at last only because I had the sensation of waking. The bed was empty: Where was Viv? Then I understood: she had already left for Windy Hill. What else could she do? And what else could I do but take the children to school and Nabokov to my office? As soon as he was safely in his cage, I broke the news to Merrie. When Jack was my patient, the two of them had enjoyed trading Catholic jokes.

“Oh, my god,” she cried. “What kind of person shoots a blind man?”

For several minutes I endured her shock, fury, incredulity, dismay, horror: a carousel of emotions. Finally I retreated to my office and, once again, telephoned the hospital. Mr. Brennan's vital signs were good, the nurse said. The wound was healing well.

“So he's eating and drinking?”

“Not yet. He hasn't woken up.”

“You mean,” I said, “he's still unconscious?”

“Right,” she said. “Asleep, unconscious.”

Better? Or worse? I asked patient after patient that morning. My own answer was worse, always worse. Everything was shrouded in darkness, mired in confusion. When Hilary phoned, I tried to reassure her—Jack's body was healing, resting, etcetera—but I could not reassure myself. Then, at lunchtime, my mother phoned.

“Viv was beside herself,” she said. “She seems to feel responsible because it happened at Windy Hill.”

I reached for my model eye. Silently, while she continued to exclaim, I named the sclera, conjunctiva, cornea, iris, vitreous humor, retina, choroid, optic nerve. My world was in ruins, but this little machine went on working in exactly the same way. “Our main concern is Jack,” I said at last. “He still hasn't woken up.”

“Oh,” said my mother, suddenly understanding.

I promised to let her know as soon as there was news.

Alone with my eyeball, I recalled how Viv, when she first met my parents, had asked if my father minded that my mother was so much more successful. I had been startled—I had never thought of my parents in this way—and told her what I believed at the time: my father had too many interests to devote himself to work. But soon after he moved into the nursing home he had told me another version. “Made your mother crazy,” he said. I leaned close to his chair, struggling to understand. His slurred speech was the subject of his last haiku.

    
My words, once fitted

    
close and straight as stones,

    
now scattered on dry ground.

That afternoon at the home I did not catch every detail of his story, but enough to understand the implications. My father had noticed that certain maintenance jobs at the railway were routinely awarded to the highest bidder. One day, at a local restaurant, he had run into the department head, who awarded the contracts, dining with his brother-in-law.

“My bad luck,” my father mumbled, “that I recognized his name.”

Later my mother had filled in the gaps. He had pursued the matter over hill and dale, first talking to his supervisor and, when nothing changed, moving relentlessly up the hierarchy, oblivious to threats, overt or subtle. Finally he promised to notify local newspapers and radio stations. “After that,” she said, “he was never going to get promoted.”

“What would you have done,” I said, “if your company was involved in something shady?”

“Asked Edward. Remember when I stepped down from that yogurt campaign? It was a big account, but he'd discovered the company had dubious connections. He's never bought the argument that if you don't do it, someone else will. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror.”

I cannot begin to count how often, in those days and nights, I longed for my father's counsel. Nor how many mirrors I avoided.

T
HE AUTUMN
I
WAS
twelve, still struggling to make friends in America, my mother had urged me to join the Boy Scouts. You'll learn to light fires, she had said, recognize birds. Both were appealing, but almost immediately I discovered I could not bear the scoutmaster's constant refrain to be prepared. I quit after three meetings. Certainly nothing could have prepared me for Jack not waking up, for the awful prospect that he might become one of those people kept alive by machines, his excellent brain generating a barely flickering line. At the hospital that evening I found a note on the bedside table: “Gone to café.” I bent over Jack. His beard had come in thick and dark, making him look even paler. The bones in his forehead were sharply visible. Once again I reached for his good hand.

“Jack,” I said, “come back to the daylight world. We need you here.”

Mindful of his complaint that people often shouted at him, I kept my voice low. I reminded him of how he loved Latin and Greek and swimming, of how his friends and students loved and needed him, of how the world was waiting for his book. “You can write a chapter about what it's like for a blind person to be shot,” I said. It was a Jack-like joke.

I was telling him about the research into an artificial retina—
a sheet of electrodes combined with a camera that offered the possibility of vision—when Hilary returned.

“Any sign?” she said.

“Not yet. His breathing seems a little stronger.”

She laid her hand on his chest. “I know it's stupid, but I feel that if I leave him for more than a few minutes, something terrible will happen.”

I did not say—I did not need to say—that the terrible thing had already happened.

A
T SUPPER, WHEN
V
IV
asked her standard question, Marcus said he had learned there were numbers that just went on and on. “Whenever you picture the last number, you add one more.”

Carefully rearranging the lettuce in her tacos, Viv said she'd learned that Claudia had decided to install a security camera at the stables, and a gate at the bottom of the road.

“So you'll be in a movie,” said Trina. “I learned that mice smell like sweet cardboard.”

“Why would you want to smell mice?” said Marcus. “What about you, Dad?”

I learned that my best friend might not wake up; that grief and guilt are infinite numbers. Speechless, I stared at my plate.

Trina leaned over to pat my arm. “Dad, it's okay if you didn't learn anything.”

She gave me an encouraging smile. Viv offered seconds. In the back-and-forth of plates and food, I managed a question to Marcus about his swimming; a few minutes later I told a feeble story about Nabokov and a patient. After supper Trina insisted on following me to the study. While I read about bullet wounds and comas, the scratching of her pencil—she was working on a portrait of my mother—kept me company. At last Viv took her off to bed.

Once again we sat at the kitchen table, each with our Scotch. “My turn,” I said.

I had shielded Hilary from my fears, but I wanted to inflict every last one of them on Viv. I began with what I had just learned about comas. As I spoke, I glanced around the room, taking in the red vase my mother had given us, Trina's paintings on the fridge, the cacti on the windowsill, the print of Edinburgh Castle that Viv and I had bought on our visit there—all the evidence of our shared life, the life that she had sundered.

“So is there anything to be done?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “Would it help if I went to the hospital?”

“This isn't a fairy tale. You can't just knock three times and say you're sorry.” I had no interest in her regrets, was desperate to confide my own. “Remember the night Marcus left his book at the stables?”

She nodded; I hurried on. When I described stepping into the arena, Charlie riding Mercury, Viv let out a wail of pure sorrow.

“You mean,” she said, “all the break-ins were Charlie?”

“She and her boyfriend. She's like you. She just wanted to ride Mercury.”

“So it was Charlie who set off the alarm at Thanksgiving?”

“Yes. Then one night after the second break-in, you asked her to lock up. She made a copy of the key.”

“Oh, my god.”

She began to sob with utter abandon. I had been braced for fury, not this outpouring of grief as she understood that Mercury had never been in danger. Everything she had done in the name of saving him had been unnecessary.

Watching her, her face twisted, red, wet with tears, I in turn
understood what she had still to grasp: if I had told the truth when I came home that night from Windy Hill, or indeed at any moment during the next few weeks, Jack would not now be lying in a hospital bed. I was not just an accessory to his shooting but an accomplice.

I
N THE ORRERY OF
the past, my wife, my children, my parents, and I had orbited each other in our own devoted system. Nearby, in their own systems, were Jack, Claudia, other chosen friends. Mercury, I had thought, despite his name, was only a random meteor veering into our little cosmos. Charlie was another. Until the night I found her riding Mercury, I knew her only through casual encounters at Windy Hill and Viv's occasional comments. She lived in town, she attended the local high school, she had two younger brothers both keen on baseball, her parents worked in software. They had bought Charlie a horse for her twelfth birthday and been dismayed when she devoted every waking hour to the animal. When it sprained a tendon, they sold it, and she started working at Windy Hill. I thought of her as a child, but at her age Mary, Queen of Scots, had been married for a year.

Four days before the fatal Saturday, Charlie had come by my office. I was typing up notes on my last patient when Merrie appeared. “Charlotte Adams is here. She says she knows you and was hoping to have a word.”

“Charlotte Adams?” For a moment the name meant nothing. Then I said she was one of Viv's stable girls and, when Merrie still wore her inquiring expression, added that I'd offered to talk to her about protective glasses.

“Will you be okay on your own?” she said. “I have to pick up the dog.”

She was thinking, I knew, of her friend the teacher. Reluctantly I said I would be fine. After she left, I lingered at my desk, trying to imagine what Charlie might want. Whatever it was, I must be on my guard. By agreeing to keep her secret, I had put myself at her mercy as much as, if not more than, she was at mine. Before going out to the waiting room, I pulled on my seldom-worn white coat. Then I recalled how Marcus, at supper one evening, had recorded our conversation on my phone. After three attempts I found the function and turned it on. Whatever passed between us, I would have a record.

In the waiting room Charlie, like many of my patients, was standing beside Nabokov's cage. Only as I came closer did I see that she had opened the door and was urging him to step onto her arm.

“What are you doing?” I stepped over and closed the door, snibbing it tight. Nabokov eyed me askance but for once held his tongue.

“Sorry, Dr. Stevenson. We used to have a parrot. I didn't mean to take liberties.” Her manner was conciliatory yet subtly mocking.

In my office I left the door open wide. The chair for patients was across the room, and Charlie sat down, feet together, hands clasped. “Help me,” she said. She was wearing a bright red sweater, and I noticed, as I had that night in the arena, how her lips glistened.

“I think I already have.”

“And I'm super grateful, but I never get to see Mercury anymore. Viv won't let anyone else near him. It makes me crazy. I'm working all the time, and then I have to ride these
old duffers. Viv doesn't understand him. She's pushing him too hard.”

I offered the mildest protest: Viv was a very experienced rider.

Charlie smiled enticingly. “My bad for going behind her back. What I want to know is, how can I persuade her to let me ride him in events?”

As she described the competitions she wanted to enter, I recalled how Bonnie's childhood story about the Pekingese had made me lie to Viv. But there was nothing childish about Charlie's ambitions. “I'd be glad,” I said slowly, “to see Viv working less hard.”

“And she's too old for him.”

She saw at once that she'd gone too far. She gazed at her clasped hands, letting the silence expand. “He's Hilary's horse,” I said at last. “Besides, aren't you about to go to college?”

“That's right.” For an instant her face flared. “He is Hilary's horse.” Then she was back on her feet, saying politely that I'd been awesome.

I had watched her leave with a sense of relief, but as I drove home, I kept thinking I had said something wrong. But no, I told myself, it was only the aftermath of my actual wrongdoing of a few weeks earlier. Even in the emergency room, when Hilary mentioned Charlie visiting her office, I had not put two and two together. Only now, in the midst of Viv's grief and my own, did I begin to understand. Charlie was no random meteor; she was a guided missile, as driven as Viv, unhampered by children or moral codes.

B
Y
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON, WITH
no sign of Jack waking up, I had become convinced that my lie was one more barrier be
tween him and recovery. So much for rational thinking. Despite Marcus, despite Trina, I would go to the police station on my way home. I had just finished checking a patient for glaucoma when my phone rang.

“He's awake,” said Hilary. “It's a miracle.” And in the background Jack's voice, faint and irascible: “No, it's not.”

I said something incoherent, and promised to visit as soon as my appointments were over. Merrie, when I told her, jumped to her feet and hugged me. Nabokov ran up the side of his cage.

My next appointment had not yet arrived, and I stepped into the street. The day was brutally cold, the brick buildings rimed with frost. If during those forty-eight hours I had been asked to push a bell every time the thought that Jack might be going into a coma entered my mind, it would have rung almost without cease. Years ago a patient of mine, a woman in her fifties, described what it was like when she had a stroke. “In my head,” she said, “I was talking all the time—What's this pill? I'm thirsty. Hold my hand—but no one heard me. I thought I'd die of frustration.” The prospect of Jack similarly imprisoned was more than I could bear. I stood on the corner of the street, arms outstretched, giving thanks to the unnamed god of atheists.

And so an hour later I stepped into not the police station but Jack's hospital room. The news of his accident—“Blind Classics Prof Shot at Stables”—had spread like wildfire, and the windowsill was lined with flowers. The fragrance reminded me of Robert's parents' shop, which all year round had been pungent with freesias and lilies. Hilary greeted me solemnly, her relief too profound for ordinary exuberance.

“Jack,” I said. “How are you feeling?” I put my hand on his good arm.

He gave a lopsided smile. “My shoulder hurts. My head
aches. But I can talk, I can pee, and when no one's testing me for something, I can listen to music.”

“I can't tell you,” I said, “how sorry I am.”

“Why are you sorry? You didn't shoot me. Hilary said you drove like the devil to get me here, and kept an eye on everyone in ER, wielding your doctor's sword.”

“You mustn't blame yourself.” Hilary smiled warmly. “We all three decided to go to the stables. If anyone's to blame, it's me for wanting to see Mercury in the middle of the night. We couldn't know some madman was prowling around.”

There was so much goodwill in the room. Now, I thought, was the moment to tell the truth, to explain how Viv had mistaken us for horse thieves, had accidentally squeezed the trigger. But I had barely begun to speak, a lame, throat-clearing phrase about that night at Windy Hill, when Jack embarked on one of his stories: something about a friend stealing his uncle's pistol. He trailed off after a few sentences, and Hilary said he needed to rest. I left, promising to return tomorrow.

In the hospital parking lot I discovered that I did not want to go home. The prospect of celebrating Jack's recovery with Viv was like running full-tilt into a wall. For a few seconds, standing beside the car, I even thought of calling Bonnie. On the far side of the lot an ambulance swung silently through the entrance gates. I got out my phone and dialed Steve's number. He agreed to meet at the Y in half an hour. Once again I texted Viv. Until recently I had almost always phoned; now I welcomed the curtness of the little box.
Jack awake. Late home.

“Thank God,” said Steve when I told him about Jack recovering consciousness. “But I still don't understand who shot him. And why were you at Windy Hill in the middle of the night?”

“Hilary wanted to visit her horse.” I slammed my serve into a corner. “As for the rest, I don't have a clue.”

“But you were there. You must have seen something.”

I aced my next serve too as I said that the stables were poorly lit; we were all focused on Mercury. “One minute Jack was inviting him to their wedding. The next he was on the ground.”

Writing this now, I find it hard to believe that no one noticed something lacking from my account of the shooting. I should have been ten times more furious, ten times more bewildered. I can only suppose that my reputation as a dour Scotsman protected me. I was a descendant of those men who in letters home described the first day of the Somme as “trying.” “Mustn't grumble,” they wrote as the trenches filled with blood.

Steve, the good scientist, explained that people often fail to remember trauma. For reasons not yet fully understood, adrenaline prevented memories from imprinting in the normal way. “And seeing someone shot,” he said, “is pretty close to the top of traumatic experiences. So what are Viv and Claudia going to do? Turn Windy Hill into an armed stockade?”

I bent to pick up a tennis ball and said they were taking new security measures. Once again he didn't seem to notice anything amiss. My wife was working at a place where someone had been shot, and I was cool as a cucumber. But such thoughts came later. At the time I was overjoyed: Jack had returned to the daylight world.

I beat Steve that evening by a memorable 7–3. At home supper was over. I slid easily into the household: taking a shower, eating leftovers, talking to Trina and Marcus. Viv caught me alone at the kitchen sink to ask if I had been to the police. When I said no, she thanked me and went to help Marcus with his homework. For the remaining few hours of the day I allowed myself to be happy.