First there was the hospital. Memories of it were sporadic, vivid, unorganized. Bits and pieces of colored glass in a clear jar. Moments of knifing pain. The upended bottle and long tube attached to one arm. An oxygen tent. A whirring circle of crisp clean whiteness. Faces, of course. Expressions of masked uncertainty, professional optimism.
And fear. Elaine was the one who was afraid. She held tight to one hand during the great swinging loops in and out of darkness, the bird-wing beat of pain in my stomach. Then the hand wasn’t there and the faces were careful little masks until there wasn’t anything but eyes peering at me and the measured drip of chloroform on a pad across my nose. I wasn’t very interested in anything. I couldn’t quite remember why I was there. It didn’t seem to matter, except that I was probably sick. No, not sick. I remembered, then. Shot. Maybe it was bad. There was no time to worry about it. There was no time.
Afterwards I was bound tightly about the middle. They wouldn’t let me eat. Tubes in the veins nourished me. Elaine’s face was more cheerful. The faces that came with badges weren’t. They were weary and irritable from overwork and trying hard to be polite but not really caring. Some of them were government badges. I told them everything I thought was safe for me to tell. I told it about nineteen times on successive days with a doctor standing by and after a while the badges went away with tired sighs. The papers printed very little, Elaine told me later.
I grew stronger. Lying in bed, I tried not to think. One of the badges — gold-filled — came back to see me, a well-dressed guy with a pink face. He talked to me for a long time, alone. Afterwards I was completely clear. He got mad at me three separate times because I wouldn’t tell him everything he wanted to know. He tried to convince me I had enough information to wreck organized crime in the area. I told him it wouldn’t stay wrecked six months, and meanwhile I’d have bought myself a hole in the head. He saw my point. He signed some kind of release and the hospital said I could go home. My doctor from Orange Bay came down, checked me over suspiciously and took me back in a red and black ambulance.
Two days later Elaine came into my room at the clinic with the morning newspaper.
“Good morning,” she said. “How did we sleep last night?”
“Better,” I yawned. “Still have that middle-of-the-night period. Wake up reaching for a gun that isn’t there. Then lie awake as if I never have slept and never will again.”
She took away the breakfast tray with the food I hadn’t eaten and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap.
“You promised you’d finish telling me about it when you could,” she said.
I sighed, put aside Steve Canyon and the other denizens of the comic strip page, and began the long story of hate and vengeance. I told her of the old fire and its lone survivor, the little orphan named Carla Kennedy who grew into a lovely woman carrying the terrible scars of the fire on her back and the even more terrible scars of hatred in her festering mind. I told it all, how she had used the dull-wilted giant, Taggart, as a messenger of death, how she had ruthlessly removed all obstacles to her crazy plan: the ineffectual drunk, Owen Barr; the crippled newsdealer who had been like a father to her; me, when I began to dig too close to the truth. Except that she had failed to get me, three times.
Elaine’s face tightened when I told about Taggart’s last, nearly successful try at me. Her fists clenched as I described the gunfight and my long, tortured trip to the outside, too late to do the job Macy had called me back to do.
I began to tell of Macy’s last, long struggle to the gatehouse and the death switch, but Elaine shut her eyes and put her hand on my lips. “That’s enough,” she said. “It’s... terrible. I don’t... ever want to hear you mention it again, Pete. Never. It’s just a miracle you’re alive. I want to forget all that ever happened.”
I took her hand, kissed it. She looked at the door, then leaned back on the pillows with me. I put an arm around her shoulders. “As soon as I’m well enough to get away from here, we’ll be married. Then we’ll take a long trip. Havana or Nassau, maybe. It was nice of the cops to turn over that envelope they found in Macy’s pocket to me, just because he had put my name on it. Five thousand dollars. We’ll spend some of it because I think I earned it. The rest belongs to Aimee.”
I felt Elaine stiffen slightly, but her eyes remained closed.
“How is she?” I said.
Elaine smiled bleakly. “She eats. She sleeps, a little. But she won’t respond to me, or to anybody. She... just sits, and stares with those dark terrible eyes. Dr. Richman says she’ll probably snap out of it.”
“We’ll do what we can,” I said.
“Yes, Pete,” she said obediently.
“You didn’t like it when I had her brought here, did you?” I said after a short pause.
“Pete, we don’t need to talk about it now.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s clear it up.”
She twisted a little, indecisively. “Pete — she doesn’t belong with us, really. She... she’ll never fit in. We know nothing about her, except that she’s probably not legitimate. We know about the filth and squalor she came from. She was wild once. She could go back to being wild. She might grow up to be nothing but grief. A... busty, sullen little tramp, easy pickings for every boy in town. She’s — trouble for us, Pete. Trouble we don’t need to take on ourselves. We’ll have children of our own to think about.”
I tried to tell her the way I felt, but I knew I couldn’t explain. Not now. It was something she would have to learn, and maybe she was right, and I was wrong. But I had to do it this way and because Elaine believed in me she would go along with it. Reluctantly. But she’d try.
“Maybe she’ll turn out to be nothing but trouble for us,” I said frankly. “But I think she deserves some sort of chance. Macy gave me more than a chance once. I — I don’t quite know what to say.”
She got up then. A smile warmed her eyes. She bent over and kissed my forehead. “It’s all right, Pete. Really. We’ll do the best we can. And it’ll work out for us. Just... be patient with me, darling. Understand me. I guess I was born a snob, that’s all.”
I held her for just a moment. “With you as a model, Aimee will turn out just about perfect.” Her lips touched my face again; then she walked out quickly, snuffling and having some kind of trouble with her eyes. She slipped through the door, and it clicked softly behind her. I smiled once, then turned on my side, so the sun was warm on my face. I waited for her to come back.
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