After my hand touched the skin flap of Sherry’s amputation, she’d quickly pulled up her suit and stroked over to the steps. On one leg, she hopped up and out of the water and grabbed a nearby towel, slung it around her waist, and made her way inside. I stayed in the water, rested the back of my head on the gutter, and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of night insects, taking in the odor of night-blooming jasmine.
Later I sat at the kitchen counter, drinking beer in the dark, feeling sorry for myself. There were techniques I’d taught myself to control my anger when I worked on the streets of Philadelphia as a foot patrolman: when a punk-assed kid mouthed off when I asked him not to loiter in front of the bistro on South Street, or when some dealer was lucky enough not to be carrying when I finally thought I’d outsmarted him and he just smirked and turned out his empty pockets.
Grain of sand, I’d tell myself, let it go. Form that omega sign with your ring finger and thumb, a reminder not to let the anger rule you. Get the small rubber pinkie ball out of your pocket and squeeze it in your palm-a hundred times, no, two hundred. I’m not sure any of them worked then; I wasn’t sure they’d do tonight.
I’d made love to Sherry hundreds of times, many of them joyful moments in that very pool. But I’d never made love to one-legged Sherry. It had been nearly a year; no matter how understanding I tried to be, knowing my needs were no match for what she was enduring, I was still failing. You’re insensitive, Max. You’re thinking with your dick, Max. Don’t be a Neanderthal, Max. Finally, I poured half the beer out in the sink and rinsed it. The third bottle of the night wasn’t helping; a fourth or fifth wouldn’t, either.
When I went to her room, the lights were still on. She was sitting up in bed, dressed now in one of my big Temple Owls T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants. She was on her side of the bed, the same side she’d had since our relationship started. But a long rectangular mirror was propped lengthwise against her inside hip and extended to the foot of the bed. From my viewpoint, it was a four-foot, framed length of particle board. The mirrored side faced her.
“Hurting?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah, a little bit,” she said without looking up. Her head was cocked to the side so she could stare into the mirror.
Within the first couple of months of her amputation, Sherry had developed a pain in her leg, the missing one. She began complaining that the missing leg was in such pain she couldn’t stand it. This is a woman with a pain threshold higher than anyone I’ve ever met. When I dragged her through the Everglades with a compound fracture, she’d refused to cry out. So my layman’s logic asked: How could something that’s not there anymore hurt? But I also knew that she was suffering.
The pain was in her brain, as it is in everyone’s, her doctors told her. Pain is a perceived thing. They explained cortical perception and told her she would have to change the feeling that it manifests. Sherry was skeptical. Hell, I was completely unbelieving. But after a series of different techniques, Sherry’s therapists found that mirror-imaging treatment worked for her. By positioning the long mirror beside her, she could see the reflected image of her healthy leg, lying right there, a replacement, at least in her brain, for the missing limb. Using this, the pain subsided.
I stripped off my clothes, put on a pair of workout shorts, and climbed into my side of the bed. I had always slept naked in the past. Sherry dimmed the lights but did not turn them off. I rolled onto my left shoulder, facing the opposite way, knowing she might spend hours gazing at the faux image of herself.
Finally, she reached out and laid her fingers lightly on my head.
“I’m sorry, Max.”
“It’s OK, baby,” I said, lying again.
“I thought I was ready,” she said. “I was trying.”
“I know, baby. It’s OK.”
The lying came off my tongue with such simplicity, with such martyrdom. I rolled over onto my back and took her hand in mine, interlacing our fingers.
“It’s going to take time,” she said.
“I know,” I said, and this time it was the truth. But the next lie came quickly, too. “I didn’t mean to pressure you.”
When I looked at her face, the familiar line of her nose and slant of her jaw, the way her blonde hair fell across her cheek, I also saw the framed piece of particle board, the barrier between us.
“Are you working for Billy tomorrow?” she said.
“No. Not till Friday.”
“Will you come with me to meet this guy at the gym?”
“Which guy?”
“The one I was telling you about-the deputy from the hit-and-run.”
It is unusual for her to ask me along. In the past, we’d worked some cases together because the circumstances demanded it. But Sherry is the kind of detective who likes her independence, even when carrying out quasi-official duties.
“OK, sure,” I said. “If you don’t think I’ll be in the way.”
She squeezed my hand and grinned. “Just stay in the background. And don’t knock anything over.”
I smiled back, right before she moved her eyes to the mirror again. I stared up at the ceiling, and at some point rolled back onto my shoulder.
A bond between us is fraying, I thought, but we are both trying not to let the fibers go loose.
At 11:00 the next morning, I loaded Sherry’s wheelchair into the bed of my truck and we took a drive up to A1A in Fort Lauderdale. I had the windows down, which I try to do whenever the temperature falls below eighty degrees. Out at my river shack at the edge of the Everglades, it never gets as hot as it does in the city. Out there, I am constantly shaded by towering water oaks and cypress trees that are hundreds of years old. And my shack sits up on stilts that are speared down into waist-deep water. You cannot get to my place without a canoe or flat- bottomed boat. The shade and the water eliminate two of the heat sources that plague South Florida: dominating sunshine and thermal-absorbing concrete. An eighty-five-degree day in downtown West Palm Beach or Miami is a seventy-five-degree one at my shady spot on the river.
What I don’t have out there is the ocean breeze and the smell of fresh salt air. When we hit A1A at the Las Olas Boulevard intersection, I took a deep and appreciative lungful and looked out over the vast blueness of the ocean. I thought, If I could move my shade trees and my cool river water to the shore, I might live here forever. But the only way to do that would be to eliminate 120 years of urban development. Forget it, Max; this isn’t the Florida of the 1890s.
When the driver behind me blew his horn, I realized I’d been sitting at a green light and moved on. A few blocks later, Sherry directed me to turn into a city parking lot. While I unloaded her chair, I surveyed the area. There was some sort of high-rise construction site to the south, the International Hall of Fame Pool behind us to the west, and an older, 1970s-style retail complex to the north. The north building was a two-story sun-washed stucco box. The first floor featured a liquor store, a sandwich shop, and a beachwear boutique. Upstairs was a place called the Iron Pump, which had a neon sign and floor-to-ceiling windows.
I already doubted that there would be an elevator in the place as Sherry climbed out of the truck and into her wheelchair. But as we approached the entrance to the building, we got a heads-up from a skinny guy sitting on a stool just inside the shade. When he nodded, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth nodded with him.
“You goin’ upstairs, they’s a freight elevator in the back there,” he said, hooking his thumb down the hall. The man’s arms were covered in tattoos from his wrists to his bony shoulders, and he was holding a small miniature poodle in his lap. His eyes were as yellow as the dog’s.
Though both Sherry and I were casually dressed in shorts and shirts, they weren’t the kind that would indicate we were going for a workout. Our natural cop wariness must have shown.
“They’s another chair dude up there now,” the man said, again with the nod. “Tol’ me to give y’all directions.”
“Thanks,” I said, matching his head movement, minus the cigarette.
The freight elevator was clunky and smelled of stale booze and sweat, which only served as a hint of odors to come. Sherry was silent. I knew she was anticipating the scene, steeling herself for the introduction to come, working out a dialogue ahead of time. I had already decided to make myself as unassuming as possible.
When we got off the freight elevator, we entered a corridor open to the outside at either end. Along the hallway, there were two doors to the east, two to the west. On the west side, I could hear music. And it took a
