she was there. When he looked back for Dizzy, Jude discovered his hand hanging empty.
“Who you talkin’ to?” the nurse asked.
“Old friend. I haven’t seen him since he died.”
She sniffed. “We got to scale back your morphine, hon.”
Later Angus wandered through the room and disappeared under the bed. Jude called to him, but Angus never came out, just stayed under the cot, thumping his tail on the floor, a steady beat that kept time with Jude’s heart.
Jude wasn’t sure which dead or famous person to expect next and was surprised when he opened his eyes to find he had his room to himself. He was on the fourth or fifth floor of a hospital outside of Slidell. Beyond the window was Lake Pontchartrain, blue and wintry in the late-afternoon light, the shoreline crowded with cranes, a rusty oil tanker struggling into the east. For the first time, he realized he could smell it, the faint briny tang of the water. Jude wept.
When he’d managed to get control of himself, he paged the nurse. A doctor came instead, a cadaverous black man with sad, bloodshot eyes and a shaved head. In a soft, gravelly voice, he began to fill Jude in on his condition.
“Has anyone called Bammy?” Jude interrupted.
“Who’s that?”
“Marybeth’s grandma,” Jude said. “If no one’s called her, I want to be the one to tell her. Bammy ought to know what happened.”
“If you can provide us with her last name and a phone number or an address, I can have one of the nurses call her.”
“It ought to be me.”
“You’ve been through a lot. I think, in the emotional state you’re in, a call from you might alarm her.”
Jude stared at him. “Her granddaughter died. Person she loves most in the world. Do you think it will alarm her less getting the news from a stranger?”
“Exactly why we’d rather make the call,” the doctor said. “That’s the kind of thing we don’t want her family to hear. In a first phone call with relatives, we prefer to focus on the positive.”
It came to Jude that he was still sick. The conversation had an unreal tinge to it that he associated with a fever. He shook his head and began to laugh. Then he noticed he was crying again. He wiped at his face with trembling hands.
“Focus on what positive?” he asked.
“The news could be worse,” the doctor said. “At least she’s stable now. And her heart was only stopped for a few minutes. People have been dead for longer. There should be only minimal—”
But Jude didn’t hear the rest.
49
Then he was in the halls, a six-foot-tall, 240-pound man, fifty-four years of age, the great bush of his black beard in ratty tangles and his hospital johnny flapping open in the back to show the scrawny, hairless cheeks of his ass. The doctor jogged beside him, and nurses gathered about, trying to redirect him back to his room, but he strode on, his IV drip still in his arm and the bag rattling along beside him on its wheeled frame. He was clearheaded, all the way awake, his hands not bothering him, his breathing fine. As he made his way along, he began calling her name. He was in surprisingly good voice.
“Mr. Coyne,” said the doctor. “Mr. Coyne, she isn’t well enough—you aren’t well enough—”
Bon raced past Jude, down the hall, and hung a right at the next corner. He quickened his step. He reached the turn and looked down another corridor in time to see Bon slip through a pair of double doors, twenty feet away. They gasped shut behind her, closing on their pneumatic hinges. The glowing sign above the doors said ICU.
A short, dumpy security officer was in Jude’s way, but Jude went around him, and then the rent-a-cop had to jog and huff to keep up. He shoved through the doors and into the ICU. Bon was just disappearing into a darkened room on the left.
Jude went in right after her. Bon was nowhere in sight, but Marybeth was in the only bed, with black stitches across her throat, an air tube poked into her nostrils, and machines bleeping contentedly in the dark around her. Her eyes opened to puffy slits as Jude entered saying her name. Her face was battered, her complexion greasy and pale, and she seemed emaciated, and at the sight of her his heart contracted with a sweet tightness. Then he was next to her, on the edge of the mattress, and gathering her into his arms, her skin paper, her bones hollow sticks. He put his face against her wounded neck, into her hair, inhaling deeply, needing the smell of her, proof she was there, real, proof of life. One of her hands rose weakly to his side, slid up his back. Her lips, when he kissed them, were cold, and they trembled.
“Thought you were gone,” Jude said. “We were in the Mustang again with Anna, and I thought you were gone.”
“Aw, shit,” Marybeth whispered, in a voice hardly louder than breath. “I climbed out. Sick of being in cars all the time. Jude, you think when we go home we can just fly?”
50
He wasn’t asleep, but thinking he ought to be, when the door clicked open. He rolled over, wondering which dead person or rock legend or spirit animal might be visiting now, but it was only Nan Shreve, in a tan business skirt and suit jacket and nude-colored nylons. She carried her high heels in one hand and scuffled quickly along on tiptoe. She eased the door softly shut behind her.
“Snuck in,” she said, wrinkling her nose and throwing him a wink. “Not really supposed to be here yet.”
Nan was a little, wiry woman, whose head barely came to Jude’s chest. She was socially maladroit, didn’t know how to smile. Her grin was a rigid, painful fake that projected none of the things a smile was supposed to project: confidence, optimism, warmth, pleasure. She was forty-six and married and had two children and had been his attorney for almost a decade. Jude, though, had been her friend for longer than that, going back to when she was just twenty. She hadn’t known how to smile then either, and in those days she didn’t even try. Back then she was strung out and mean, and he had not called her Nan.
“Hey, Tennessee,” Jude said. “Why aren’t you supposed to be here?”
She had started toward the bed but hesitated at this. He hadn’t meant to call her Tennessee, it had just slipped out. He was tired. Her eyelashes fluttered, and for a moment her smile looked even more unhappy than usual. Then she found her step again, reached his cot, planted herself in a molded chair next to him.
“I made arrangements to meet Quinn in the lobby,” she said, wiggling her feet back into her heels. “He’s the detective in charge of nailing down what happened. Except he’s late. I passed a
“What am I charged with?”
“Why would you be charged with anything? Your father—Jude, your father attacked you. He attacked both of you. You’re lucky you weren’t killed. Quinn just wants a statement. Tell him what happened at your father’s house. Tell him the truth.” She met his gaze, and then she was speaking very carefully, a mother repeating simple but important instructions to a child. “Your father had a break with reality. It happens. They’ve even got a name for it: age rage. He attacked you and Marybeth Kimball, and she killed him saving the both of you. That’s all Quinn wants to hear. Just like it happened.” And in the last few moments, their conversation had ceased to be friendly and social in any way. Her plastered-on grin had disappeared, and he was back with Tennessee again—cold-eyed, sinewy, unbending Tennessee.
He nodded.
She said, “And Quinn might have some questions about the accident that took off your finger. And killed the dog. The dog in your car?”
“I don’t understand,” Jude said. “He doesn’t want to talk to me about what happened in Florida?”
Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly, and for a moment she was staring at him with unmistakable confusion. Then the cold-eyed look reasserted itself and became even colder. “Did something happen in Florida? Something I need
