I sat down in the waiting room and tried to look at a magazine.
I would have liked to pray but I couldn't think how to go about it.
AA meetings generally close with either the Lord's Prayer or the serenity prayer, but neither seemed especially appropriate at the moment, and giving thanks for everything just as it was felt like a joke, and not a very tasteful one. In the course of things I did say some prayers, even including that one, but I don't really think anyone was listening.
Every now and then I would go to the desk, only to be told that nothing had changed and that she couldn't have anyone in the room with her just yet. Then I'd go back to the waiting room and wait some more. I dozed off in my chair a couple of times but never got deeper than a sort of waking dream state.
Around five in the afternoon I got hungry, which wasn't too surprising given that I hadn't had anything since Mick and I ate breakfast. I got some change and bought coffee and sandwiches from machines in the lobby. I couldn't manage more than half a sandwich, but the coffee was good. It wasn't good coffee, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was good to get it inside me.
Two hours after that a nurse came in with a grave expression on her pale face. 'Maybe you'd better see her now,' she said.
On the way I asked her what she meant by that. She said it looked as though they were losing her.
I went in and stood at her bedside. She didn't look any better or any worse than she had before. I picked up her hand and held it and waited for her to die.
'He's dead,' I told her. There were nurses around but I don't think any of them could hear me. They were too busy to listen. Anyway, I didn't care what they heard. 'I killed him,' I told her. 'You don't ever have to worry about him again.'
I suppose you can believe people in comas hear what's said to them. You can believe God hears prayers, too, if that's what you want.
Whatever makes you happy.
'Don't go, anywhere,' I told her. 'Don't die, baby. Please don't die.'
I must have been with her for half an hour before one of the nurses told me to return to the waiting room.
A few hours after that another nurse came in and talked some about Elaine's medical condition. I don't remember what she said and didn't understand much of it at the time, but the gist of it was that she had passed a crisis, but that an infinite number of crises lay ahead of her.
She could develop pneumonia, she could throw an embolism, she could go into liver or kidney failure— there were so many ways she could die that it seemed impossible for her to dodge them all.
'You might as well go home,' she said. 'There's nothing you can do, and we have your number, we'll call you if anything happens.'
I went home and slept. In the morning I called and was told that her condition was about the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed and went over there. I was there all morning and part of the afternoon, and then I rode a crosstown bus through the park and went to Toni's memorial service at Roosevelt.
It was all right. It was like a meeting, really, except that everybody who spoke said something about
Toni. I talked briefly about our trek out to Richmond Hill and back, and mentioned some of the funny things Toni had said in her talk.
It bothered me that everybody thought she'd killed herself, but I didn't know what to do about that. I would have liked to tell her relatives in particular what the real circumstances had been. Her family was Catholic, and it might have mattered to them. But I couldn't think how to handle it.
Afterward I went out for coffee with Jim Faber, and then I went back to the hospital.
I was there a lot during the next week. A couple of times I was on the verge of making an anonymous call to 911 to tip them off about the dead body at 288 East Twenty-fifth Street. As soon as Motley's corpse was discovered, I could phone Anita and tell her she could stop worrying. I couldn't reach Jan, but sooner or later she would reach me, and I wanted to be able to say it was all right to come home. If I said as much to either of them ahead of schedule, I might someday be called upon to explain myself.
What kept me from calling 911 was the knowledge that all such calls were taped, and that I could be identified as the caller through voiceprint comparison. I didn't think anyone would ever check, but why leave the possibility open? At first I'd thought Ms. Lepcourt would come home to her apartment and discover the body, but when that didn't happen over the weekend I had to consider the possibility that she'd never be coming home.
That just meant I had a couple more days to wait. On Tuesday afternoon a neighbor finally realized that the odor she was smelling was not a dead rat in the wall, and that it wasn't going to go away of its own accord. She called the police, they broke the door down, and that was that.
On Thursday, almost a week after Motley left her bleeding on her rug, a resident internist told me he thought Elaine was going to make it.
'I never thought she would,' he said. 'There were so many things that kept threatening to go wrong. The stress she underwent throughout was enormous. I was afraid her heart might fail, but it turns out she has a real good heart.'
I could have told him that.
A little later, around the time she came home from the hospital, I had dinner with Joe Durkin at the Slate.
He said it was on him and I didn't argue. He downed a couple of martinis to start, and he told me how neatly Motley's suicide had closed out a batch of files. They were hanging Andrew Echevarria and Elizabeth Scudder on him, and there was an unofficial understanding that he'd caused the deaths of Antoinette Cleary and Michael Fitzroy, the young man Toni'd landed on. They also figured him as the probable killer of one Suzanne Lepcourt, who'd floated to the surface of the East River earlier that week.
It was hard to tell what had caused her death— as a matter of fact, without dental records it would have been next to impossible to tell who she was, let alone what had killed her. But there wasn't much doubt that she'd died as the result of foul play, or that the foul player was Motley.
