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Claire took her own car and returned to the hospital. Michael left when she arrived. Separate shifts, the new order.

C
HAPTER
9

A
round 10:00 the next morning, as Claire was discussing Nicholas’s feeding tube with Dr. Sheldon, a nurse interrupted to tell her that there was someone to see her. “I explained to the gentleman several times,” the nurse said, “that we only admit family members to the ICU. But he was insistent. A Mr. Bricker?”

Somehow, Claire managed to smile pleasantly and tell the nurse to let him know she’d be out shortly. She finished with the doctor and filed the notes she had taken into a loose-leaf binder with a trembling hand, alongside the bits information she’d started to gather about Nick’s condition and treatment. Then she walked through the ICU door hearing her shallow breath echo in her ears.

Andrew Bricker stood behind a gray chair, leaning the weight of his body over its back and clutching the armrests. Claire watched him lift his head as the doors shut behind her. She had the sensation of sinking.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed, walking past him out of view of the ICU window, looking over her shoulder.

He followed her down a long corridor. “I called you.”

She stopped short in front a stained glass wall that listed major donors to the hospital. Michael’s corporation headed the Silver Benefactor list above their heads. “You what?”

“You seemed shaken up after I left. I called for two days. I knew Michael was gone. Finally I got your housekeeper.”

“You called my house? You talked to Maria?”

He nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I didn’t have your cell. I told her I was an old friend, and she said you were at the hospital with Nicholas. Something about a diabetic coma?”

Around the corner, elevator bells rang, people filed out. More doors opened and closed. Claire thought she heard someone call her name, and she looked over her shoulder only to see Michael’s $50,000 corporate gift acknowledgement confronting her from the stained glass wall. She stepped in closer to Andrew, trying to shut out the commotion round them. “So you just show up here? How would you explain this to Michael?”

“Relax. I made sure he wasn’t here before I asked for you.”

She stared into his eyes, which looked not exactly predatory, as she feared they might in the unsparing glare of the hospital, but no longer beautiful either. “Nicholas is
not
in a diabetic coma. Nick overdosed on your little stash of cocaine.” She stabbed her fingers into his chest as she spoke in a muted shout, tears beginning to roll down her face. “It must have fallen out of your pocket, and he found it in the bedroom after you left, when I was taking a shower.”

“Holy shit.” Panic froze his features.

“And he snorted it and ended up with a brain hemorrhage. They had to do surgery, and he still hasn’t woken up.” Her body was shaking.

Andrew fumbled in a stunned silence and reached out for her shoulders. “I’m so deeply sorry. I never thought—”

She felt the warmth of his hands through her shirt and backed away. “Yeah. Neither did I.” As she raised her hand to shove him away, she looked into his face and saw shock and fear and remorse. She dropped her arm and leaned against the wall next to him.

“What are the doctors saying? Is he going to be okay?”

“They don’t know when he’s going to wake up. They don’t know if there’s been any permanent damage.” She turned to him. “And I don’t know when Michael’s going to be back here, so you need to leave. Now.”

“He knows about us?” His voice quavered.

“He pieced it together. So I’d go back to New York without any more phone calls. We’re trying to keep things private for everyone’s sake. And I’m trying to save my marriage.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Her stomach felt explosive and empty at the same time.
What’s going to happen?
“We’re going to get Nicholas through this and then, I don’t know. Hopefully Michael will be able to forgive me some day.”

“If there’s anything I can do, Claire. Anything.”

“You can pray for my son. I don’t know if you pray, Andrew. I never really did, but I do now.”

He nodded.

“And I’m going to have to live the rest of my life with this, so it would be much easier if you would just disappear. That’s what you can do.” She wiped her eyes. “Cut off your deals in Denver, and disappear. I think that would be in everyone’s best interest.” She stared into his eyes as she emphasized the
everyone,
making sure he understood exactly what he risked with his presence, before she turned to walk back to the ICU. “Good-bye,” she said firmly, still holding onto the image of Andrew’s mouth, his lips trembling under the scar.
Please, just be smart, and be gone.

As Claire rounded the corner toward the ICU, she bumped into—and was practically smothered by—an enormous bouquet of orange-pink roses. She let out a yelp as both she and the person behind the flowers simultaneously jumped backward.

“Oh, Claire, here you are! I was just coming to see you,” a woman said, lowering the flowers to reveal her face. It was Jeannie Chase, an old Junior League friend and member of the museum gala committee.

Claire swallowed her surprise and did her best to appear unruffled and gracious, checking behind her to be sure Andrew was, indeed, gone, while making small talk and cutting short this latest unexpected visit. “These are beautiful, and you are so kind to come,” she managed, accepting the bouquet and Jeannie’s sympathy over Nicholas’s condition. “I was just on my way to a meeting with one of the doctors, so I’m afraid I can’t sit down with you and—”

“Oh, please. No apologies,” Jeannie said, nodding solemnly. “I completely understand. You go do what you need to do.” She gave Claire a hasty embrace and retreated toward the elevator, waving and wishing her and Nicholas her best.

Dazed, Claire made her way back to Nicholas’s room, where she crumpled into her chair and read and reread a flyer on rehabilitation facilities. A new shift nurse appeared, whom she didn’t recognize. Her nameplate read Anne Corbett. She stared at Anne Corbett across the web of wires and tubes above Nicholas, trying to quiet her brain. If Nicholas had been a girl, they would have named her Anne, and called her Annie. But Claire knew that this woman with her severe black bun and dry, down-turned lips had never been called Annie. She was someone, Claire was certain, who had witnessed all the pain and sadness life had to deliver, and at some point became resigned to its unfairness with quiet reserve. Claire looked away until she heard the squeak of the nurse’s white rubber soles exit the room.

She walked to Nicholas’s bed and softly rubbed the stubble that had begun to grow back on his scalp. “Do you remember all those trips we made to the ER, Nicky?” she asked. “The monkey bar incident and your arm cast? Your chin stitches.” He grunted and ground his teeth—reflexive responses that she had grown used to, but responses nonetheless. “At one point they knew you by name downstairs, didn’t they, kiddo?” She smiled, remembering how she would read from his favorite book,
The Phantom Tollbooth,
to keep him calm and entertained as he was being stitched up or wrapped in a cast, always the same chapter about the Senses Taker, over and over, as his fear and pain disappeared into the cleverness of the wordplay.

She rested her fingers on the zipper-like staples on Nick’s skull, and it occurred to her that maybe her little boy just needed an old, familiar key to get back to them.

 

Claire ran her hands along the spines of the books on Nick’s bedroom shelves and bookcases, searched the drawers of his desk. She worried if during one of her cleaning flurries she had boxed up his childhood books and given them away. She looked in the closet, among the cubbies of old trophies and jerseys, computer games and art projects, taking in, as she did, the range of her son’s young life. She pulled out a blue notebook with a squirrelly spiral binding. Eighth-grade history. Claire opened the worn cover and thumbed through the pages, tentatively at first, tracing her son’s maturing script, the unexpected flourish around Dr. King’s initials, the sharp angles of a Washington Monument rendering; and then faster, flipping through the pages like an animator trying to bring it all to life. Claire pressed her nose into its pages, but only smelled a faint staleness. As she went to replace the binder, a note fell to the carpet.
Meet me after school. xxoo P. P.,
it read in purple ink.
P. P.? Peyton Pierce?
She smiled and bent down to pick it up.
Nick and Peyton had a crush?
Neatly she folded the note and reinserted it into the middle of the binder, acknowledging that her son did have a life beyond what she knew.

Claire closed the closet door and returned to the bookcases, reading each title aloud this time, book by book, shelf by shelf, to be sure she hadn’t missed it. Lodged between two yearbooks near the bottom, she finally found
The Phantom Tollbooth.
Clutching it, she went down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea before returning to the hospital.

As the water was heating, Claire’s cell phone rang. Michael’s private line glowed on the screen.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Has something happened?” She was already grabbing her car keys from the counter.

“Yeah, something’s happened. But not with Nick.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just got a call from Robert Spencer.”

She could hear the agitation in his voice, but wasn’t sure where he was going with it. Jackie had taken messages from Robert and Carolyn Spencer about Nicholas, but everyone was calling. “And?”

“And he wanted to let me know about a ridiculous story he’d just heard from Jim Chase and his wife about you and a younger man, and a cocaine overdose.” His tone grew more hostile. “Who have you talked to, Claire?”

Claire lowered herself into the breakfast area banquette. “No one,” she choked, replaying Jeannie Chase’s polite willingness to cut short her visit, and trying to imagine just how much she might have overheard in the lobby.

“Cut the bullshit, Claire.”

“Do you think I’d want anyone to know about this? Jesus, Michael.” All along she had harbored a fantasy—Michael’s fantasy—that they would get through this privately, that no one else would ever have to know what she’d done. She felt nauseous, as she looked at the bouquet she’d brought home from her “friend.”

“Yeah.
Jesus
.” Michael’s words stung with a fury and sarcasm that seemed to be flourishing in him by the day.

She sank back into the cushions and closed her eyes, imagining her husband’s angry face. “What did you say to Robert?” she asked in a barely audible voice.

“It doesn’t matter what I said.”

C
HAPTER
10

C
laire tried to focus on the road as she headed to the hospital, but the vision of Jeannie and her camouflage bouquet flashed in her head, imprinted in her mind’s eye like the final image on a television screen the moment someone switches it off. When she batted at her calfskin bag on the passenger seat searching for a tissue, it tipped forward, spilling its contents onto the floor of the Mercedes. She swerved into the next lane trying to reach it.
Carolyn and Robert heard a ridiculous story.
Word leaks, the other shoe drops. And knowing that her darkest regret and God knows what other embellishments were now “Can you believe it?” lunchtime fodder,
that
knowledge seared. She had reduced her family to a story.

Cars were rapidly approaching in her rearview mirror, and Claire gripped the steering wheel tighter, locking her arms out in front of her. A pedestrian jumped back onto the curb as she hauled through a yellow light. From under the passenger seat, she heard her cell phone ring. She fished for it over the center console but decided not to make any more unwise moves. Not while she was navigating thousands of pounds of German steel through downtown. The ringing stopped.

As she continued east, she noticed a faded pickup truck in front of her, which, according to its bumper sticker, was powered by Jesus. She scoffed, thinking how confident and prepared that driver must be for the randomness life might hurl at him. She slowed for a red light, and a muffled shout suddenly filled the car. Claire looked at the silent radio and clock displays, puzzled, imagining her own dashboard Jesus calling her out for her sins.

Another muted shout emanated from the floor. She followed the angry voice to the base of the passenger seat and was able to grab her cell phone. “Hello?”

“Finally. I’ve been shouting for you for the last two minutes. What’s going on, Claire?” the voice asked frantically.

“Mother?”

“Of course it’s me. I’m calling you back. And why did you leave me hanging like that?”

“What? I didn’t call. The speed dial must have—”

“That’s not important.
What
is going on there for God’s sake? I called Michael’s phone by mistake before I called you, and he was very unpleasant and told me I should talk to you about the latest developments? Did Nicky take a turn for the worse?”

Claire exhaled loudly as the light turned green, and she pulled nervously into the intersection. “No, Mother. Nothing’s changed with Nicky.” She weighed the dreadfulness of admitting an infidelity to a spouse versus a parent. Either way it was a shitty proposition, but she didn’t have much choice, considering it would all be out there soon enough. “I, um . . . you don’t have the entire story, the reason Nicholas is in the coma.”

“What? You said it was an insulin reaction.”

“I know what we said, but there was more to it than that. The truth is—” The dreadfulness stabbed at her. “The truth is that he overdosed. On some cocaine.”

“Cocaine? What kind of people is Nicholas around?” Cora’s voice was frenetic, just like a blade on glass. “At Andover of all places.”

“Mother, the drugs weren’t Nicky’s. They belonged to a man who came to the house. He left it behind accidentally.”

“What kind of man? What are you talking about, Claire?”

“I’m just going to say this because people have found out certain things. I had something with him, a fling or whatever you want to call it, and—”

“You had a . . . a fling with some kind of drug fiend?”

“Mother, he isn’t a drug fiend. He was just a person I thought I—” Claire heard honking horns and noticed a crush of traffic behind her in the mirror, and the wide-open space ahead. She gunned the gas. “I don’t know. It was a colossal mistake and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. But it happened, and Nicky found the cocaine.” As the frayed scenery of apartment buildings gave way to the traffic of Colorado Boulevard, she slowed to thirty-five. “It was a fluke that he had the reaction he did.”

“Oh, good lord. And everyone knows about this now?”

Claire felt her sense of dread congeal like refrigerated pan drippings.

 

Pulling into the hospital parking lot, Claire wondered how they would get through this already untenable situation under a public magnifying glass. To think clearly about anything seemed so tricky, like trying to unzip a heavy fog. She rested her hand on Nicholas’s book and imagined sitting down with him and reading in smooth, reassuring tones. And she imagined Nick coming back to her. Slowly opening his eyes, squeezing her fingers, waking with no memory of what had taken him away.

When she arrived at Nick’s room, it was empty, his bed gone. And with her last nerve shattered, Claire heard herself cry out. A passing nurse rushed in to assist her.

“Mrs. Montgomery, Dr. Sheldon wanted to run another CAT scan. He saw some increased eye movement and responses during his rounds and thought it was worth a check. I thought your husband would be waiting here to tell you.”

Adrenaline pumped through Claire’s body. “He’s coming out of it? Isn’t he?”

“They should be bringing Nicholas back in twenty minutes or so, and Dr. Sheldon should be in to see you.”

She asked to go to him, but the nurse indicated Claire’s regular chair in the corner of Nicholas’s suddenly cavernous-looking room. Instead she walked over to the window and placed the book on the ledge. Beyond the glass, life was in motion—birds, people, cars. Clouds made their animal shapes for those who stopped to notice. But from where she stood, time seemed suspended.

She opened
The Phantom Tollbooth
to a dog-eared page and began to read aloud.

 

 

The page morphed into a dancing jumble of words, and Nicholas’s profile appeared to Claire in the black-and-white print, a lost boy in a surreal world, just like Milo. If he just knew how she would gladly swallow a thousand half-baked ideas and climb The Mountains of Ignorance to take back that night and have him whole again.

Pressing the book to her chest, Claire paced and sat, repeating her silent prayers of hope. She looked out at the gunmetal horizon. It seemed impossible to her that the sun had risen and set six times since Nicholas was last able to speak to her. And like the predictable but still surprising pop of an overblown balloon, it hit her just then—the date and time—and the fact that the art museum benefit would be starting in just a couple of hours. Earlier in the week in what seemed like an hallucinatory phone call, she’d given everything over to Peggy, her co-chair for the event, to handle, and had promptly hit the delete button in her mind.

How strange and awful it seemed, peoples’ lives proceeding as usual. While the mere act of changing her shirt in the morning had become a distraction for Claire, women all over town were, at that very moment, having their hair done, removing their gowns from garment bags, trying to decide between the black or the red, the Oscar or the Valentino. She put down the book and checked her cell phone. No new calls. But her voice-mail box was already full of messages about auction items, centerpieces, and a hundred other last-minute details, in addition to all of the Nicholas calls. The act of ignoring them had, for those long days, fueled her delusion that her friends’ declarations of concern and sympathy were premature and unnecessary.

Claire stared at the whiteboard near the door with its foreign language of medical abbreviations and dosages, at the hanging plastic bags and IV tubes, and she wished for normal life in color again. She shouldn’t be waiting for Nicholas to be wheeled back to the ICU. She should be tying his bowtie, checking to see that he had a full set of studs and cufflinks for his tux, and that Michael would be home early from his meetings. Longingly she imagined standing with both of them in the ballroom, holding them tightly, her two handsome men. She imagined Michael smiling proudly, and Nick nudging them with an eye roll to the center of the dance floor.

Claire drummed her fingers on the windowsill, hoping for a miracle, knowing that something good had to be happening in that scan room. She tried distracting herself with the chaos she envisioned for the night ahead inside the museum doors. She could hear Peggy extending apologies for her absence during her welcome speech. “As many of you are aware,” she’d say, “our friend Claire Montgomery and her husband Michael are by the side of their son tonight, and our thoughts and prayers are with them.” Claire also could hear more than a few guests whispering to their spouses that the Montgomerys were certainly not
together
at the hospital, given the latest turn of events.

She could see the scene playing out against the backdrop of breathtaking floral displays and ice carvings that she had ordered, the butler-passed hors d’oeuvres and champagne. How ironic, she thought, that it would probably serve as the backdrop of her family’s public undoing. The daisy chain of rumor and innuendo began to unfold in Claire’s mind as she imagined the women comparing couture designs, and deconstructing and magnifying one of the sadder bits of scandal in Denver since the former Miss America went public about her abusive childhood. Only this time, she’d be the one under the glass. A few friends would be vocal in her defense—Peggy certainly, and of course Carolyn. And Gail Harrold, if she were even in town. But on a night fueled by champagne and gossip, the air would be thick with conjecture. And she’d overheard enough games of telephone to know that the end message was generally far worse than the truth.

From the corridor came the sound of an approaching gurney. Claire ran out to greet her son, poised for the miracle. Grabbing on to the bed rail, she raced along as an orderly wheeled Nicholas back to his room. She held her breath and looked into his face, but his eyes remained closed. From down the hallway, Michael and Dr. Sheldon approached. She placed the book near Nicholas’s hand. “I brought
The Phantom Tollbooth,
Nicky.”

With everyone gathered, Dr. Sheldon explained that Nicholas had been showing increasing awareness of external stimuli all afternoon, and that the scan had shown improvement in his brain-wave activity. He walked over to the bed and motioned Claire and Michael in closer. He pinched Nicholas just below his collarbone, and Nicholas reached toward the doctor’s hand with his own. Claire gasped, transfixed as Nick’s skin reddened then slowly faded back to pale. Michael remained standing with his arms folded. Dr. Sheldon then walked away from the bed and clapped his hands together loudly. Though his eyes remained closed, Nicholas turned his head toward the sound.

“Oh my God.” Claire squeezed his hand softly, waiting for him to respond.

“Scratch his chin,” Dr. Sheldon suggested.

Nicholas swiped at the spot Claire scratched, and she immediately began to cry with relief.

“Why don’t we step outside and talk for a moment,” Dr. Sheldon said.

He explained that there were many levels of coma, and that Nicholas seemed to be emerging from one of the lowest levels of generalized response to that of localized, if inconsistent responses. Claire beamed at Michael.

“Now I can’t say with certainty that Nicholas is going to be fine, or that he isn’t going to be fine.” Dr. Sheldon chose his words carefully. “But I’m optimistic that we’ll be seeing some changes for the better.” He recommended that Claire and Michael look into getting a spot for Nick at a rehabilitation facility. It was entirely feasible that he could be moved in a week or two. The doctor asked one of the nurses to give them information on Craig Hospital.

“I’ve got some already.” Claire pulled a packet labeled “Craig” from the file folder in her bag and handed it to Michael.

Michael reminded her that Nicholas still had not opened his eyes or spoken.