the partnership by up and dying on her.
There was another thing, too. A second thing that had saved him.
It was what Dr. Feldman told him.
When the pain was excruciating. When he realized that pain couldn't possibly get any worse.
That came after the period when he didn't know the difference between dream and reality. Even now, he wasn't exactly sure how long that period had lasted. Days, perhaps. More likely weeks. He heard voices sometimes, garbled sounds that pierced his thick fog. And he saw faces, bending over him, standing above him. Occasionally he felt things. Poking. Or movement; once he was sure that someone was turning him over. Another time he felt as if someone was walking him around a room, manipulating him as if he were a marionette. He tried to speak sometimes. Often he thought he was speaking. But no one ever seemed to understand him.
At some point, the fog began to lift. He was not yet anchored to the real world but he could, from time to time, touch down upon it. He would drift. Couldn't stop. Suddenly, there would be a flash of color, and with a start he would realize that he was looking at the back of his own flesh-colored hand. It was paler than he remembered, but it had texture. And it was startlingly vivid. He watched his fingers move and he could tell they were part of him, and somehow it seemed miraculous that wherever he was, whatever had happened to him, he was able to think, somewhere in the recesses of his brain, Move, and his fingers would follow instructions. They would wiggle and bend, they would obey, before he fell back into his fog, exhausted and drained.
Soon after, the jumble of noises around him turned into words. Then, occasionally, sentences. He kept hearing the word 'accident' and realized it was referring to him. After the accident, he heard. Or: Since the accident… It's a result of the accident… The trauma of an accident like that… And he wanted to scream, What are you talking about? It was no accident. It was not an accident! It was human savagery, unleashed and unfiltered. But it took more time before the sounds that came out of his throat began to be heard and understood. The first time he said the word 'thirsty' and someone appeared, a black woman, dressed all in white, to pick up his head and give him a drink of water, he wept; tears of relief streamed down his cheeks.
Every few days, something new began to come back to him. Then it was every day, and soon, hour by hour. The room came into focus. Details were remembered – words and numbers and places and names.
But when reality came flitting into Jack's new world, so did the extraordinary pain.
First they would make him move while he was still in the bed. Turn him over, gently twist his legs and his arms. The nurses would explain what they were doing. 'Don't want to get thrombosis,' one of them would say. Then when another one came to move him the next time, it would be, 'This is so we don't get a pulmonary embolism. We don't want a stroke, do we?' Jack didn't give a shit if he got a stroke. He certainly didn't give a shit if she got a stroke. All he cared about was that the pain go away. Because it flooded his entire being and dominated every waking moment and made him yearn for blessed sleep and, yes, even death.
He was forced into a wheelchair as soon as he regained consciousness. 'You've got to be mobile,' a nurse would tell him. And all he could think was: Please, let me die so I don't have to feel any more pain.
Jack knew he'd never forget the surgeon's words, not as long as he lived, because they changed everything. Good old Doc Feldman – well, not really so old, a year younger than Jack. And already the best orthopedic surgeon in New York City. Jack had been transferred back to New York, although he didn't remember any of the movement or the flight, as soon as he was stable, and placed in the intensive care unit of the Hospital for Special Surgery on East Seventieth Street. Feldman had performed a shoulder operation on Jack years before – nothing too complicated, a torn rotator cuff and bone spur – but he did a wonderful job and after that he began coming to the restaurant. He was usually with an attractive woman and once or twice the four of them – Feldman, his date, Jack, and Caroline – socialized. The life-changing words came when the doc was making his hospital rounds and saw his patient and friend lying there, unmoving. He leaned over the bed, didn't touch him, no attempt at bedside manner; a soothing demeanor was not important to Andy Feldman. He didn't even check to see if the still body lying flat on the mattress was awake. Just said, very matter-of-fact, 'I know you don't feel it, Jack, but you're lucky. Because the human brain is a remarkable thing. It can't do what you want most right now. It can't prevent pain; nothing can do that. But it does something almost as good. It won't remember pain. I promise you, it won't allow you to ever, not even for a moment, remember what you're feeling right now.'
That's when Jack knew he'd truly survive, understood that he'd make it. If he'd been told that the agony was permanent, thought for a minute that he'd wake up a year later, two years later, anytime later, and there it would still be, unchanged, enveloping him, invading his body, he would have killed himself.
Once Jack knew that he would live, he could allow himself to return to the past. The opening in Charlottesville. The fight in the restaurant. Running toward the stairs and rushing into the upstairs office. He could let that remarkable brain remember what had happened to him. As it did, the world began to make a little more sense.
And then all sense was taken away from him.
At first he didn't believe them. They were lying. They had to be. But they were so calm, so sure of themselves. So understanding and so pitying. So unrelenting.
They told him over and over again until he began to believe. They showed him newspaper articles and a Talk magazine story. They even had Dom come and say, yes, they were telling the truth, then he'd put his head down on Jack's chest and sobbed and sobbed.
And then Jack knew.
Caroline had not cooled his fever with the touch of her hand. She had not urged him back to life with her loving whispers. Those were the drugs, they explained. He'd been hallucinating. She had not been beside him in the hospital at all.
Because that night, the night of the accident, that final sound he'd heard before he'd passed out, that most distant of the explosions… it had not been in the distance. And it had not been an explosion.
It was a gunshot. A fourth shot, after the ones that had sliced through his hip and knee and abdomen and ripped him apart.
More human savagery. Meant to destroy. To erase. To kill.
No, there was no more sense to the world Jack returned to. Because he had indeed been lucky. He had survived his wounds.
But Caroline had not.
She had been shot once, in the head.
And then picked up and thrown through the office window.
The shot had killed her, he was told. She was dead before the two-story fall down to the bricks below.
That news did not surprise Jack, when he was conscious and able to absorb it. He knew the shot was meant to kill.
Just as he knew what the fall was.
A message from someone who knew about his past.
A warning.
From someone letting him know what his future would hold.
TWELVE
Before had gone so well.
During had been just fine.
But now After. It was all going wrong.
Oh, the first part was smooth enough. Meet them as planned, watch the pleased look on their faces, then the surprise in their eyes. Two quick shots. Quick. Relaxed. That was just swell.
And everyone was confused as hell. No one had a clue. No motive, no fingerprints. Clean as a whistle.
But it was supposed to be done. Before, During, After, Over. That was the Plan.
And now look what happened.
There they were, both of them in the room. Both ready for the taking. Even better than the Plan.
But he hadn't died. It was in the paper. Right there in black and white. After all that, Jack Keller had lived.
So it wasn't over. Not really. Not yet.
