“Don’t!” Pearse batted at Bubba’s head with his free hand.
“Well, call a hot line, but don’t call me, Pearse, ’cause I don’t fucking care.”
Bubba shoved his knee into Pearse’s spine, lifted his feet off the floor.
“Please!” Pearse kicked at the air, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, sure,” Bubba said.
“Oh, God!”
“Hey, asshole? Say hi to the fucking dog for me, will you?” Bubba said, and then he blew Scott Pearse’s brains out the other side of his head.
36
I was in the hospital for five weeks. The bullet had entered my upper left chest just below the collarbone and exited through my back, and I’d lost three and a half pints of blood before the EMTs reached the house. I was comatose for four days, and I woke to tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes in my arm, and tubes in my nostrils, hooked up to a respirator, so thirsty I would have signed over the contents of my savings account for a single ice cube.
The Dawes apparently had some pull downtown, because a month after we’d rescued their son, the illegal weapons charges against Bubba simply vanished. Sure, the DA’s office seemed to say, you walked into the Plymouth bunker with enough illegal firepower to invade a country, but you brought a rich kid out alive. So no harm, no foul. I’m sure the DA would have adopted a different attitude had he known Pearse’s original extortion leverage had stemmed from evidence linking the Dawes to a baby switch, but Pearse wasn’t around to discuss it, and the rest of us who knew the secret declined to mention it.
Wesley Dawe came to visit. He held my hand and thanked me with tears in his eyes, and he told me the story of how he’d met Pearse through Diane Bourne, who in addition to being his therapist had also been his lover. She, and eventually Pearse, had controlled his fragile mind through manipulation, mental and sexual power games, and erratic withholding and dispensing of his medication. It had been his own idea, he admitted, to blackmail his father, but Diane Bourne and Pearse had taken the idea several steps further, ultimately turning it lethal when they came to thinking of the Dawes’ fortune as their own.
In mid-’98, they’d made him their hostage, kept him tied to the chair or his bed, exercised him at gunpoint.
I hadn’t regained my voice yet. It had disappeared when the bullet nicked off a microscopic shard of collarbone and sent that shard careening into my left lung, collapsing it. When I did try to speak those first few weeks, all that came out was a high-pitched wheeze, like a kettle, or Donald Duck losing his temper.
But voice or no voice, I doubt I would have said much to Wesley Dawe. He struck me as sad and weak, and I couldn’t shake the image of a little petulant boy who’d stirred up all this trouble-whether intentionally or not-simply because he needed to throw a snit. His stepsister was dead, and I couldn’t blame him, exactly, but I didn’t feel much desire to forgive him either.
When he visited my room a second time, I pretended to be asleep, and he slipped a check from his father under my pillow and said, “Thank you. You saved me,” in a whisper before leaving the room.
Since Bubba and I were both stuck in Mass General for a while, we ended up beginning our physical therapy together, my arm withered and his right hip replaced by a metal one.
It’s an odd sensation to owe your life to another. It humbles you and makes you feel guilty and weak and your gratitude is sometimes so immense, it feels like an anvil tied to your heart.
“It’s like Beirut,” Bubba said one afternoon in hydrotherapy. “What’s done is done. Talking about it won’t do any good.”
“Maybe not.”
“Shit, dude, you’d have done the same for me.”
And sitting there, I felt a calming certainty in my chest when I realized he was probably right, though I’m not sure that with one bullet in my hip and another in my thigh I’d have been capable of what he pulled off against a guy like Scott Pearse.
“You did it for Ange,” he said. “You’d do it for me.”
He nodded to himself.
I said, “Okay. You’re right. I won’t thank you anymore.”
“You won’t talk about it anymore either.”
“Cool.”
He nodded. “Cool.” He looked around the collection of metal tubs. Mine was beside his, and there were six or seven other people in the room, all soaking in hot, bubbling water. “Know what would be really cool?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Some weed. Right about now?” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it, though?”
“Sure.”
He nudged the middle-aged teacher in the tub beside his. “Know where we can score some pot, sister?”
The woman Bubba had shot when we’d first entered the bunker was identified as Catherine Larve, a onetime model from Kansas City who’d specialized in print ads for midwestern department stores during the late eighties and early ninties. She didn’t have a criminal record and very little else was known about her during the years since she’d left Kansas City with the person neighbors had assumed was her boyfriend-a handsome, blond man who drove a ’68 Shelby Mustang.
Bubba was released from the hospital ten days before I was. Vanessa picked him up, and even before they went back to his warehouse, they drove over to the animal shelter and got themselves a dog.
Those last ten days in the hospital were the worst. Summer died and autumn encroached outside my window, and all I could do was lie there and listen to the sounds of seasons trading places in the voices of people ten stories below. And I’d be left to wonder how Karen Nichols would have sounded in the newly minted briskness if she’d held on long enough for the heat to end and a leaf to fall.
I took the stairs to my apartment slowly, one arm around Angie, the other squeezing a racquetball in my hand, working the muscles in my ever-so-gradually healing arm.
The entire left side of my body still felt weak, depleted, as if somehow the blood on that side wasn’t as thick, and nights sometimes, it felt cold over there.
“We’re home,” Angie said when we reached the landing.
“Home?” I said. “You mean my home or our home?”
“Ours,” she said.
She opened the door before us, and I stared down my hallway, which fairly reeked of recently applied oil soap. I felt the warmth of Angie’s flesh on my good palm. I saw my ratty old La-Z-Boy waiting for me in the living room. And I knew that unless Angie had drunk them, there would be two cold Beck’s waiting in the fridge.
Living is not bad, I decided. The good lies in the small details. The furniture you’ve molded to your shape. A cold beer on a hot day. A perfect strawberry. Her lips.
“Home,” I said.
It was midautumn before I could reach both hands above my head and stretch, and one afternoon, I went looking for my torn, frayed, had-it-since-high-school, favorite sweatshirt, which I’d tossed with my good hand up onto the top shelf of the bedroom closet, where it hid in the darkness of a shadow thrown by the top of the door frame. I hid it because Angie hated it, said it made me look like a bum, and I was sure she had homicidal designs on it. I’ve learned with women never to take their threats against your clothing too lightly.
My hand sank into the faded cotton, and I sighed happily as I pulled it out and several objects fell onto my head along with it.
