very quickly. One of the bartenders got you into your car. Robin and Laura drove you here. They said you woke up for a second, then passed out again before you got to the hospital. There was a lot of blood. Eddie was really upset.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t go with you. I’m so ashamed.”
“Don’t start apologizing, for Christ’s sake.”
She smiled.
“It would have been hard to explain bloody clothes to Roy. But I checked on you this morning. I know a girl on the third floor. She asked around and they said you were fine. You don’t look fine.”
“Just a little hole in my head. Match the one on the other side.”
“I was having such a good time.”
“Sorry I messed it up.”
“Now you’re apologizing. No fair.”
I looked around at our exposed position in front of the big ER double doors.
“We probably shouldn’t be sitting here.”
“I know. I just couldn’t stand wondering.”
“I gotta go get Eddie. He’ll think he’s back in stir.”
Amanda was sitting on the edge of the bench, all clenched up. She looked pale and tired. I frowned at her.
“Amanda.”
“Sam.”
“You do this a lot?”
She looked down at her hands, clasped and held tightly between her knees.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah you do. You’re married.”
“Oh, that.”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do this. Never did.”
She tightened up even more.
“I see.”
“No you don’t.”
“You don’t want to see me.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
I leaned around to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.
“I told Sullivan that I didn’t know who slugged me. But I do. At least, I know what he looks like.”
Now she looked at me.
“Then why didn’t you say?”
“You remember the day we met at the beach? Do you remember a guy in a long coat hanging around our cars when we left?”
“I don’t know. I suppose not.”
“Roy know any big Italian guys, say about six-two, two hundred plus pounds?”
Her eyes shifted away again. But right before it did her face changed. It turned into something complicated.
“Impossible.”
“You could make a case.”
“If it was Roy, I’d be the one in the bandages, not you. You, at least, can fight back.”
Then she stood up and did what she was getting good at doing. Walking away from me. I got up and followed her across the street to the parking lot. When she got in the gray Audi, I got in the passenger seat.
“Okay, I’m a dope,” I said.
“No, you’re not. I’m a fool.”
It was still early in the morning, but it didn’t look like it was going to be much of a day. The sky looked uniformly gray through the red leaves of the maple trees that shaded the hospital parking lot. My head was a little wobbly on my neck and my limbs were fitted with lead weights. I wanted to go home and lay down on the porch, but for some reason I wasn’t ready to go.
“Thanks for coming to see me.”
She started the ignition and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. I reached over and pulled her thick auburn hair back off her face. Her eyes were closed. Her cheekbones were flushed red, deepening the copper and olive tones of her skin, filling her face with color where before she’d been sallow and pale.
I leaned over and kissed her neck right below the little freshwater pearl earring that dangled from her right ear. Her skin was very smooth and her neck strong. It smelled like a blend of hope, dread and calamity. She turned her head, still resting on the steering wheel, her face softening back toward normal.
“Just remember I tried to tell you things and you didn’t want to hear,” she said, before leaning across my lap and opening the door.
“About big Italian guys?”
“Things. Just things.”
I got out of the car and watched her drive away. I found the Grand Prix parked up on a grassy mound at the back of the lot. There was blood all over the back seat. I got an old blanket from the trunk to cover it up. I thought I might have to throw up before I could drive away, but after sitting down with my legs out the door for a few minutes, I recovered.
Eddie almost pulled me off my feet in his desperation to get out of the vet’s and into the Grand Prix. He sniffed at my head, but was good enough not to say I told you so.
No one greeted us at the cottage. No notes, no mail. I pushed my way through the door, sampled the salty, dry wood smells and swam in the deep comfort of familiar surroundings. I banged a big cast iron fry pan down on the burner, crumbled in some ground meat and filled another huge pot with water. When it started to boil I tossed in a handful of spaghetti and made myself a tall Absolut from out of the freezer. The clear liquid burned the wound on the side of my tongue and warmed up my extremities. The woodstove did the rest once I got it cranked up with choice, bone-dry split red oak. I changed into my oldest blue jeans and a thirty-year-old sweatshirt. I put some early Thelonious Monk on the CD player and slopped some sauce from the Italian place in the Village on the pasta. I could only chew on one side of my mouth, but it was worth it. I went out on the porch to watch the clear skies paint the Little Peconic a metal-flecked, pale gray-blue. The angled October sun tipped each little wave with reflective silver that winked at me like the sequins of an evening gown. The pink hydrangea were beginning to brown at the ends of their leggy pale-green stalks. But the lawn still looked like a deep forest pool.
And I wasn’t dead.
After we ate, Eddie and I both slept the rest of the day. Too exhausted to feel any more fear, too hardened to thank whoever might be responsible for yet another reprieve, deserved or not.
Three days later I finally got Regina Broadhurst put in the ground. The funeral home was owned by an oversized Greek guy named Andre Pappanasta. He had thick curly black hair and a beard and a voice that came out of somewhere inside his chest. He smiled and laughed a lot, mostly because he never went near his funeral business, preferring to work the counter at one of the five or six pizza joints he owned around the Island. You only talked to him when you made arrangements, which he’d do between phone orders for large pepperoni pizzas and baked stuffed zitti.
The day was brand new, sunny, and the air reasonably clear. My tongue was still sore and my lower ribs ached, but my head had healed enough to leave off the bandage. With a little work my hair covered the wound. The funeral guys were composed and friendly and the priest was bored, but efficient. Half a dozen old cranes from the Senior Center, Roy and Amanda Battiston, Jimmy Maddox and I made up the congregation. We gathered in a viewing room decorated in the calm civility of thick, peach-colored carpet and semi-gloss paint.
