Run (18 page)

On the other side of the city, Father Sullivan’s namesake realized that he had made a critical error. Teddy had asked him to come to the old priests’ home and he had managed to sidestep that easily enough by claiming exhaustion. But once Teddy had left the hospital, Sullivan remembered he had nothing of value on him save a single Percocet. In the course of one transatlantic flight he had gone from being a moderately well-to-do man in a poor country to being indigent in the land of plenty. His wallet, which was sitting on the bedside table of his boyhood room, had been exhausted by the r u n

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wildly overpriced taxi ride from Logan. He sat down heavily in a chair near the front door, not too far away from where his father and brothers had sat the night before, and thought about the long haul back to Union Park. Boston was a walk-in freezer turned to its lowest setting and the men with shovels and blowers were only now starting to venture out to cut a path where the sidewalks had been. In the same way Sullivan believed that his clock was still set to African time, he believed his blood was still suited for an African climate. He had finally learned how to remain temperate in the tropical heat, but now he was physiologically unprepared for this kind of cold. It could not be good for him. It was possible that he could go back to ask Tennessee Moser for assistance. She was family in some sense, the mother of his brothers, and he felt for her genuinely. He would be glad to help her, and so it was reasonable to think she would want to help him in return. He wouldn’t even need cab fare, he would take a dollar twenty-five for the T. Still, the thought of tapping a woman who had probably already started preopera-tive sedation, even for such a small amount of money, made him uncomfortable. Why hadn’t Teddy remembered that he didn’t have any cash? Why didn’t any of them seem to remember that there was another brother? Teddy wouldn’t have walked out of there if it had been Tip who had forgotten his wallet, but that was hardly a reasonable example, seeing as how Tip had never forgotten anything in his life. Tip probably had a stash of backup tokens sewn into the linings of his pockets. Now Sullivan would have to call the house and Doyle would have to come and pick him up while he stood on the corner, shivering in his high school clothes. No, that he would not do.

Sullivan took the elevator back up to the third floor, thinking at the very least he could get a cup of coffee before setting out. The day shift would be coming on soon and he might as well go up while there were still people working who had seen him before. None of a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 140

the nurses and doctors understood what they had in this hospital, certainly the patients didn’t, the clean floors, the working elevators whose doors opened and closed without complaint, the drugs and the beds, the water and light, such abundance that the situation practically demanded waste. Had he taken something from a hospital like this one it would never have been missed, but then again there would be virtually no market to sell what was stolen. Everything was too readily available in America, nothing was contraband.

“Is there some coffee around here?” he said to the young Asian man in bright blue scrubs behind the desk.

“Coffee shop, fi rst floor.” He was sifting through an enormous stack of charts as if the one he really wanted was the one he couldn’t fi nd.

“That’s good to know,” Sullivan said. “But I don’t want to go down to the fi rst floor. I don’t want to leave this fl oor.” The young man put his thumb in the pile and glanced up.

“She’s on her way to
surgery
,” Sullivan said.

The man nodded and separated the stack into two piles. “Sorry.

Black?”

“Milk actually.”

The nurse brought back the coffee and a glazed doughnut resting on a napkin. Sullivan thanked him for the kindness.

And then there was the Irish girl coming down the hall towards him like an old friend. “I shouldn’t have run you off. Turns out they’re not taking her down for another hour at least.” She didn’t have a bad face. It wasn’t the kind of face that Sullivan liked, and she was fat, but he gave her credit where credit was due. People must have said it to her all her life, such a pretty face.

“Really?” He took a bite out of the doughnut.

“It’s the snow. Everybody’s running late. Dr. Zhang isn’t even here yet. It’s one big parking lot out there.” r u n

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“So you’re not leaving?” He gave up half a smile. There was no reason not to. For an instant she reddened and then faded back to chalk.

“Just as soon as someone comes to take my place.”

“Well, I’ll be here too. My brother walked off with my wallet.”

“That kid was your brother?”

“Long story.”

“He stole it?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Nothing like that. There was just a little mix-up in the coat closet. My fault, really.”

“So she’s your—”

“Aunt,” he said. “By marriage.”

“Sally,” said the Asian nurse, bearer of doughnuts, and pointed to the phone. “Anesthesia.”

Sally waved Sullivan on like a doorman at a club. She seemed to take enormous pleasure in her own largesse. “Go back and sit with her. She seems pretty out of it, your aunt.” Sullivan nodded and took a long sip of coffee. “She was hit by a car,” he said by way of explanation, and he headed down the hall.

The electrical light that had burned over the bed was off now but the sun was pulling up over Boston and the walls and the fl oors were washed over in strips of gold that fell through the tilted Ve-netian blinds. It was a hospital room, and nothing could soften the seafoam walls or the gray tile floors. A hospital room could only be made beautiful by light, but the opportunities for light to come into 315 were rare and fleeting. Tennessee Moser was folded into stiff white sheets, her arms down straight by her sides. Her eyes were closed. The bed next to hers was empty and it looked like an oasis of rest and peace the likes of which Sullivan had never known.

He could fall into that bed and sleep until June. He should have told the nurse that he was her husband, since husbands, unlike a n n p a t c h e t t ❆ 142

nephews, could probably lie down in the empty beds and not be made to move. But the Irish girl wouldn’t have gone for that. It was one thing to have a black aunt or a black brother, those were matters beyond your control. A black wife was something else entirely.

Sullivan finished off the coffee and doughnut and washed his hands in the little sink.

He kept his eye on the woman sleeping in the bed. Her face was swollen, sliced and stitched, undone and reassembled. There were bits of gauze tape holding her together and flecks of blood clinging to the roots of her hair. It hurt him to look at her but Sullivan did not turn his eyes away. He saw her as a box of clues. He tried to assemble the faces of his brothers and the face of the little girl they’d brought home from the features she provided. Doyle could deny it all day long but there they were: Tip’s forehead, Teddy’s mouth.

Most of all he tried to remember her in the landscape, to scan the faces on every street he had walked down as a child to see if she was there, but there was really no remembering something like that. Besides, he imagined the woman he saw in this bed only bore a faint resemblance to the woman who was hit last night by a car. The question was, what did she look like smiling? What did this woman with blood in her hair look like when she was standing up? What if it was springtime and a breeze stirred the branches of fl owering apple trees over her head? That was how he wanted to see her, in the brilliant light of late April, standing in a rain of apple blossoms, but it was too large of a gap to cross. In this bed she looked tired in a way that was greater even than last night’s violence could account for. It was clear that she had been tired for years before she ever saw the lights of the car. Sullivan understood this because he was tired himself. He wanted to lie down in the bed beside her as much r u n

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as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He wanted to sleep for both of them.

“Maybe you’d get me that water now,” she said, and he startled.

He was leaning over her, his face too close to hers.

“I’ll ask again. They’re running late.”

“Where’s Teddy?”

“He had to go home.”

Tennessee stopped talking. She had not opened her eyes. There was no way to be sure if she was actually awake, but Sullivan made his way down the hall to see about getting her something to drink.

Everything was quiet there. The patients were still sleeping and the visitors had been kept away by snow. The nurses clustered together at their station, complaining idly about a certain doctor who never returned his pages. “Just like the boys I used to date in high school,” one woman said, leaning a hip against the counter, and the tall Ethi-opian woman replied, “He wants you to beg.” Sullivan motioned for his friend Sally, and when she came to him, standing a half a step too close, he pressed her for the favor. She relented easily this time, coming back with a few chips of ice in the bottom of a cup. She was tired after working all night and what difference was it going to make, really? The surgery was looking later all the time. She handed it over with all the gravity of a first visit to a methadone program.

“Give it to her slowly. Don’t let her have it all at once.” He assured her that he understood.

“I looked at her chart,” Sally said. “We don’t have any insurance information. We need to get her cards.”

“If I don’t have my own wallet I certainly don’t have hers,” he said.

Sally gave him a stern look. “Well, call someone, okay? I need to get this in the computer.”

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Sullivan nodded and went back to the room. He held a piece of ice against Tennessee’s lips. “Don’t go crazy on this stuff because I don’t think we’re getting any more. It looks like you’re not covered for ice.”

“You didn’t go,” she said.

“I stayed with you.”

She kept her eyes straight up, fixed on the acoustical tiles of the ceiling. “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s just say you’re interesting to me.” Sullivan pulled up a chair beside the bed. “You’re like the spy who came in from the cold.”

Tennessee tried to open her mouth a little wider but her jaw was sore and her lips were swollen. She felt like somebody had beaten her with a fender and asphalt and a thick sheet of glass. She tried again and Sullivan took his finger and pushed the bit of ice inside.

He knew about these things. He had sat with the sick before. To look at the expression on her face a person would think that nothing in her life had felt as kind or tasted as sweet as that sliver of ice on her tongue. She took a moment to savor the melting before she answered him. “I’m not a spy.”

“Of course you are,” Sullivan said. “You’ve been following us around all our lives. What else do you call it?” Tennessee thought for a minute. She tried to get the right words because words were so hard to come by. “Wanting to make sure your boys are okay.”

He shook his head. “You knew they were okay. If anything had happened to the sons of the former mayor of Boston it would have wound up in the paper. Our entire life winds up in the paper.” She sighed then and closed her eyes. She said what every woman said. “You don’t understand.”

Sullivan considered the assessment and found it to be fair. “I r u n

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probably don’t. I probably couldn’t understand why you were spying, but at least I know that you were. And believe me, you have my complete admiration. You’ve been at this for a long time and none of us knew you were there. I don’t think you ever would have slipped up if that car hadn’t caught you.” Tennessee stayed quiet and Sullivan shook his head. “People like you never open up. You just get used to not telling anything. Spies always have a lot more information than they let on to. There are lots of spies in Africa, you know. You don’t see them for a long time but they’re always there: contractors, tour guides, kids with backpacks. They blend in like those moths whose wings look like dried out leaves. It was all a sort of game for me, learning how to spot them. The good ones were just like you, very low profile, very discreet. You won’t find one getting drunk in a bar and going on about Dubai. You just get a sense about them. Spooks, they’re called. As soon as you notice one they’re gone.”

“What were they spying on?” It was better to talk about spying in general rather than the specific ways it might apply to her.

“That part was never completely clear, though in the end I guess some of them were spying on me.” There were two black men who were too often together, too often in the places Sullivan went. For a time he thought they were looking to buy, but then he noticed their clothes weren’t right. They were shabby enough but they changed all the time. Two poor men and every day they had on different fi lthy shirts.

“What did you do?” It was an effort for her to make the words and so he patted his hand lightly against her wrist. Sullivan told her she should rest while she could, that he would leave so that she could get some sleep. “I won’t tell anyone about this. It will be our secret.”

“What did you do?”

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Finally he held up an ice chip and when she looked at him he put it in his own mouth. “I stole.”

Tennessee blinked as if this had managed to surprise her.

“I thought you knew everything about us already.”

“No.”

“Well, that isn’t fair. You couldn’t have known that. Nobody knows that. If you knew what I was doing in Africa I would spend the rest of my life trying to secure your position as the head of the NSA.”

“What did you steal?” she said.

He did not like the question, even though he had made the dec-laration himself. To announce a theft seemed cavalier, but to be asked about it felt like an accusation. Now he wanted to reword his statement. It wasn’t stealing exactly. It was skimming. He simply took a little bit off the top of everything he had to make more for someone else. He could turn twenty vials into twenty-one. Then he could turn ten into eleven. Then five into six. It was a kind of mathematical genius. In a country where the demand exceeded the supply by hundreds of thousands of vials he was saving lives and making money hand over fi st, and then spending it fi st over hand, pumping the fruits of his labor directly back into that fruitless economy. In that light it wasn’t even wrong. It was an expansive redistribution.