that,” she says gently. She turns chipper. “But you’re better off without her. You know what Mom used to tell me when some guy broke my heart? There are many fish in the sea.”
I close my eyes for a moment. If a hospital is a prison, this is my sentence: listening to my sister telling me that I am better off living without the mother of my child.
“I love her,” I say, but so softly that I doubt Mariah hears. “It hurts,” I add, but far beneath the range of sound detectable by the human ear.
“I never liked her,” my sister continues, too distracted to heed any voice but her own. “She wasn’t good for you, Tal.”
We are, for a moment, alone together, for my family has no real emotional tools to support those in need, at least if those in need are relatives. Then I open my eyes and glance up at my sister. She is looking down at her lap, where her fingers are picking nervously at each other.
There is something else on her mind.
“What is it, kiddo?” I whisper, because whispers are the only tune my voice will sing just now.
“Maybe this isn’t a good time…”
“Mariah, what is it?” My swiftly rising fear puts some energy into my voice. “You can’t just come in here and not tell me. What?”
“Addison is gone.”
“Gone?” Panic. Memories of gunshots. And a spike, no doubt, in the blue machine that monitors my heart. I would probably sit up were I not half dead and strapped down besides. “What do you mean, gone? You don’t mean… he isn’t…”
“No, Tal, no. Nothing like that. They say he fled the country. He’s down in Latin America somewhere. They were going to arrest him, Tal.”
“Arrest him? Arrest him for what?” But I am exhausted again, my voice is faint and dry, and I have to repeat this several times, with Mariah leaning close, before she knows what I am asking.
“Fraud. Taxes. I’m not actually sure. A whole lot of money was involved. I don’t know the details. But Uncle Mal says that, whatever it was, they only found out about it from doing the background check.”
“Background check?”
“You know, Tal. On Kimberly.”
Biting the name off, suggesting through her tone that, had my wife not pressed so hard in her quest for a judicial appointment, Addison’s financial shenanigans, whatever they are, would never have been found out. It is my wife’s fault that Addison was ruined, just as it was Greg Haramoto’s fault that the Judge was ruined. Neither man was brought down by his own demons. In today’s America, and certainly in the Garland family, nothing is the fault of the person who does it. Everything is the fault of the person who blows the whistle.
“Oh, Addison,” I whisper. At least I know now why he was looking at property in Argentina. And what was scaring him.
“Just Alma says he has a girlfriend down there. Only, the way Alma says it, I think maybe she’s his wife.”
Perhaps it is the medication, but I have to chuckle at that one. Poor Beth Olin! Poor Sally! Poor whoever-it- was-last-week! Then I realize it may be years before I see my brother again, and my face sags. Oh, what wreckage the Judge left behind him.
“Are you okay, Tal? Want me to call the nurse?”
I shake my head, but I do let her give me some water. Then: “Has anybody heard… from him? From Addison?”
“No,” says Mariah, but the manner in which she cuts her eyes away from me conveys the opposite message.
Then, suddenly cheery, she changes the subject: “Oh, hey, guess what? We got the most incredible offer on the house.”
“The house?”
“On Shepard Street.”
I am fading fast, which might explain my confusion. “I… I didn’t know it was, um, on the market.”
“Oh, it isn’t, but you know how these brokers are. They hear somebody died, and they’re lining up buyers before the will has even been read.” Mariah misunderstands the concern she reads in my face. “Don’t worry, kiddo, I turned it down. I still have lots and lots of papers to go through.”
I signal her to lean close. “Who… who made the offer?” I manage.
“Oh, I don’t know. Brokers never tell. You know how it is.”
Although too weak to say so, I view this development more ominously than Mariah does. “Have to find out who,” I whisper, too softly for my sister to understand.
Mariah begins to talk about Sally, who is now in rehab at the fancy place in Delaware, but I cannot connect the dots. My mind wants some rest. The nurse comes in unapologetically to add some pain medication to the IV line. After that, things are hazy for a while.
The next time I awaken, Mariah is gone, but Dear Dana Worth is there, my first sight of her since-when was the cemetery? Three nights ago? Four? Hospitals, like prisons, erase the body’s natural sense of time’s steady passage. She is wearing a dress, which she rarely does, and looks rather cross. Perhaps it is Sunday, and she has stopped in on her way from that conservative church she so adores. She is wearing a white cardigan over her dress, and white shoes: she looks terribly small-town Southern. Her right arm is in a sling: a bone, she explains, was chipped by the ricochet of a bullet. “How many law schools have two faculty members who were shot on the same night?” she teases.
I struggle to smile back.
“I never caught up with him,” Dear Dana says, her tiny fists clenched. I realize that it is herself at whom she is angry. “I’m sorry, Misha.”
“It’s okay,” I mutter, but my voice is even weaker than before, and I wonder whether Dana even hears me.
“Then I came back to see how you were doing, and there was all this blood-”
I wave this away. I do not want to hear about her heroic rush down through the very drainage pipe I was looking for, or how she commandeered a telephone at a convenience store-maybe the same one!-and waited for the paramedics and the police and Samuel, to open the gate, and led them back into the cemetery, quieting their doubts and questions as the parade twisted and turned along the dark paths, or how they worked frantically to save me, carrying me out of the Burial Ground more dead than alive. I do not want to hear it in part because I have heard pieces of it already-from Mariah, from Dr. Serra-and in part because I cannot bear to think of Dana’s heroism, when it has become important to deceive her.
And Dana, with her swift empathy, understands my reluctance at once, and so veers off on another path.
“Everybody at the law school is rooting for you,” she insists, squeezing my fingers in the way that people do when they want you to know they are sincerely sad. Maybe the word is out that Professor Garland is not going to make it. “The students all want to know what they can do. Give blood, whatever. And the Dean wants to visit.”
Just what I need. I shake my head wearily. “What about… about the deadline?” I manage.
“Are you kidding? They won’t dare fire you now. We’re famous, Misha, we’ve been in all the papers.” She smiles, but it is forced. I gesture at her arm, whisper that I’m sorry.
“It’s okay.” She pats my hand. “My life is never this exciting.”
“You shouldn’t… shouldn’t have…”
“Forget it, Misha.”
“I… did they… did they…”
I can manage no more, but Dana gets the message. She glances toward the door before hazarding an answer. “Yes, Msha, it worked. As far as I know, they bought the story. And it’s a good thing.” She wags a tiny finger at me. “You owe me big-time, mister, and when you’re out of here…” She trails off. She smiles. The truth is, Dear Dana is complete. She has nearly everything she wants. There is nothing she can think to demand of me, even in jest. Whatever she lacks, she goes to her little Methodist church to find, and providing it is God’s problem, not mine. Dana sighs and shrugs. “Anyway, Misha, it worked.”
