My doctors have assured me happily that I lost so much blood in the Burial Ground that I nearly died. I have had sufficient pain since awakening that I have wondered once or twice whether I might have been better off had the paramedics taken a little longer to find me. Not all the pain has been physical. Yesterday afternoon, I opened my eyes to find Kimmer dozing in the armchair, a thick legal memo on her lap, then opened them again to find her gone. I decided I might have dreamed her presence. When the nurse dropped in to see whether I was dead yet, or at least whether there might be a reason to call in a code and have everybody come running, I asked if my wife had been in to visit. My voice did not come out right, but the nurse was very patient and, eventually, we managed to make contact. Yes, I was told, your wife was here for a while, but she had to go to a meeting. Which is when the pain settled in as a permanent companion. Same old Kimmer. Dutiful enough to visit me despite our estrangement, but not at the risk of losing billable hours.
I asked the nurse if I could have something for the pain. She flipped coolly through my chart, then fiddled with my IV for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes again it was night and I had two detectives as company.
Dr. Serra, my surgeon, bustled in and told them I was too weak to talk.
Lots of flowers, but nobody from the law school on the first day, because I was not allowed visitors other than my wife. One of the critical care nurses, a robust black woman named White, turned the television on and surfed through the channels for me, but I paid little attention to the programs. She finally settled on a movie, something involving Jean-Claude Van Damme and lots and lots of guns. I turned my face to the pale green ceiling, remembered those last moments in the cemetery, and wondered when I could see my son.
I slept some more.
At some point I asked Dr. Serra how it was that I came to be in a private room, but he only shrugged, his palms turning upward as his shoulders sashayed, suggesting through this ornate Mediterranean gesture that his concern was the state of my health, not the state of my finances. I asked for a phone and was refused. A hospital can be like a prison. I wanted to make this point to Dr. Serra, but he rushed off to see his other almost-dead patients. Then Nurse White was back, explaining to me that, because of my guarded condition, I could have only a few visitors, which I had to list for her; once she told me that children were barred from Intensive Care, I lost interest in the exercise.
Five names, she told me, plus family.
I quickly listed Dana Worth and Rob Saltpeter. I listed John Brown. After a moment’s desperate thought, I listed my next-door neighbor Don Felsenfeld. And I asked Nurse White, as a favor to me, to call the Reverend Morris Young, the fifth name on my list. She smiled, impressed. As Nurse White left, I noticed a man in dark blue serge sitting outside the door, and I wondered before falling asleep again whether I was under guard or under arrest.
When I next awakened, there was a Bible on the table next to the bed, a large-print King James Version, along with a note from Dr. Young in an old man’s shaky hand. Call me anytime, he had written. Another nurse came in, and I asked her if she would read to me from Genesis 9.
She was too busy.
The police came back, with Dr. Serra’s grudging permission, and one of them was my old friend Chrebet. I told them what I remembered, but they had talked to the FBI and Dana Worth and Uncle Mal and Sergeant Ames, and seemed to know an awful lot already. They asked me only one question that really seemed to matter: whether I had seen my assailant. That was the word they used, assailant. A word from the newspapers and the movies. I found I liked it. Despite pain and muzziness, the semiotician awakened, wondering why officialdom would choose so impressive-sounding a term to describe a brutal criminal. Perhaps because it made their job seem to lie higher on the social scale than it really did. They were not catching petty hoods, the uneducated and desperate detritus who had been, in the lovely coinage of Marx and Engels, “precipitated” into the Lumpenproletariat, they were chasing down assailants. Well, I had been assailed, all right. I had been struck by an assail of gunfire. Croaking out the words, I explained to the two patient officers that Colin Scott, the man who had done the assailing, was dead. They looked at each other and then shook their heads and told me that the three bullets that struck my abdomen, my thigh, and my neck were recovered, and only two of them were fired from the gun of the late Mr. Scott. Meaning that I was also shot by a fourth person in the cemetery that night.
The person Dana tried to catch. Now I knew why. Because, certainly, there was no need to recover the stolen box.
“We’re not sure yet whether it was an accident,” one of the detectives said. It was that third bullet, they added, that did most of the damage, catching me low in the chest. In the movies, they told me, people shoot for the heart, not a bad idea, but the heart has ribs around it; in real life, you often do more damage aiming for the belly, hoping to smash a kidney or, better still, the liver. And even if you miss those organs, they went on, you cause so much bleeding that there is a good chance that the victim will die long before help arrives.
Trying to scare me. Worked pretty well, too.
Then they told me the rest. Colin Scott was also hit three times. But only the final shot, the one that killed him, was from the same mysterious gun that pinpointed my abdomen from the darkness. The first two bullets to strike him were fired from yet another weapon. Two slugs dug out of headstones near the site of our confrontation also matched this gun. One possibility, the detectives said, is that the secret shooter out there in the mist ran out of bullets and pulled a second gun. Another is that there were not four but five people in the cemetery that night: Dana, myself, Scott, and two unknowns.
Stunned, I told them part of the truth: that I saw nothing except the muzzle flash, that I never knew I had been shot until I collapsed.
They shrugged and went away, never asking me the right question. I dozed, worrying about accident versus intention.
The next time I awakened, Mariah was at my bedside, and I gaze at her now, pert and mature and decidedly rich in designer jeans and ski sweater, a breath of royalty come to call on the commoners’ wing. Crying for me, and telling me that her children think I am a hero.
“What are you doing here?” I manage to croak.
“Your dean tracked me down.”
“No, I mean… I mean, you’re a new mommy.”
“And I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” she sobs, but laughing at the same time. “I go into labor and you go and get yourself shot.”
“How’s the baby?”
“The baby is beautiful. The baby is perfect.”
“And, what? Two days old?”
“Four. She’s fine, Tal. She’s perfect. She’s downstairs in the van with Szusza. Matter of fact, Mommy has to go feed her in a few minutes.” Mariah is smiling as she weeps. “But look at you,” she whispers, twisting her hands in her lap. “Just look at you.”
“I’m fine. You should have stayed home. Really.” I stifle a cough, because coughing hurts. A lot. “I mean, I’m glad you’re here, kiddo, but… well, you really didn’t have to leave the baby for this.” I do not want her to know how touched I am. Nor could I form the words if I wanted to. I may be in Intensive Care, but I am still a Garland.
“Well, no, maybe if they just shot you once. Or even twice. For that I would have stayed in Darien. But, Tal, you’ve always been an overachiever. You have to go and get yourself shot three times!”
I manage a smile, more for Mariah’s sake than mine. I remember, when my mother was dying, how she seemed to think it her role to offer some word of comfort to every tongue-tied visitor who dropped by Vinerd Howse to pay next-to-last respects. I spend a moment’s thought on my brother, wondering why only Mariah is here, but he never came to the Judge’s confirmation hearings either: Addison only likes happy endings.
“I guess you have enough to do,” says Mariah, pointing. My pocket chess set and my laptop computer are lined up neatly next to the bed. I smile like a kid on Christmas. Resting my voice, I gesture. My sister opens my laptop for me on the little table arm that swivels over the bed and turns it on.
Thank you, I mouth as Windows toots its cheery hello.
Kimberly brought them, says Mariah. “She thought you might want them.”
Kind of her, but infuriating too.
“Kimmer’s leaving me,” I tell my sister in a flat tone, but I have to say it three times before my words are clear.
Mariah has the good grace to look embarrassed by her answer. “I think everybody on the East Coast knows
