Life Blood Part 19

"I'll get you something great, Sar, don't worry." I reached to stay her hand. It was, I thought, extraordinarily cold, even though the loft itself was warm as toast. What kind of clothes should I buy for her? I found myself wondering. Blouses with b.u.t.tons? Pullovers? What could she manage? Maybe I'd bring some items from home first and let her try them out. We used to be about the same size, though now she was all skin and bones.

I moved a chair next to her, took her other hand, and leaned as close as I dared. I desperately wanted to put my arms around her, but I wasn't sure how she would respond to my touch. Her eyes, however, were clear and had never looked a deeper blue. "Sar, what's the matter?

Why're you crying? You should be happy. Your dad's right here and he loves you and we're going to take wonderful care of you."

"Who? Him?" she asked, looking straight at Lou, her blue eyes like an unblinking camera's lens.

The plaintive question took my breath away. Hadn't they been talking for two days?

"Don't pay any attention when she says things like that," Mrs. Reilly declared, her voice just above a whisper. "She's still not quite herself. She drifts in and out."

She seemed to be drifting in and out at the moment, though it was mostly out.

Then she looked directly at me, only now her eyes were losing their laser-like focus, were starting to seem glazed. "Who're you?" She reached out and touched my unwashed hair, running her hands through the tangled strands.

Next she stared off, terrified, her eyes full of fear.

"The smoke," she whispered. "The knife. I'm next."

Abruptly she was off again in the reverie that had enfolded her that first time in the hospital. Or at least that was what I guessed.

"What are you talking about?" I felt like shaking her, except I was too shook-up myself.

She turned back, and for a moment she just stared gla.s.sy-eyed, first at me, next at Lou, and finally at Mrs. Reilly. Then she reached for a gla.s.s of orange juice on the table beside her. She looked at it as though it were some potion, then slowly drank it off, not pausing once.

Outside, a faint police siren could be heard, and I was afraid it was distracting her. Anyway, something told me her momentary seance was played out. Her face had grown calm and rested, though I could barely repress a tremble.

"Whatever you think," I said finally, slipping an arm around her shoulder, "we're both right here. And we love you and we want to help you get better."

She didn't say anything more, just closed her eyes and drifted away.

But it wasn't back into a coma, since her breathing was growing heavier. I wanted to grab her and yell at her and demand that she come back to us, but I was fearful of what effect it might have.

"What the h.e.l.l was she talking about?" Lou asked finally, his voice quavering.

"I don't know," I said, as puzzled as he was.

That was when Mrs. Reilly spoke up. She was the only one not upset.

"When they come out of a coma, sometimes they're not right for a while." She patted Sarah's hand then gave it a solicitous squeeze. "I once had a man wake up and start talking about magic trips through the air, about how he was a dual citizen of the earth and the sea. He was talking like a lunatic. One day he would know his family, and the next he would look at them and start screaming they'd come to kill him. You just never know how these things will go at first. But she'll be herself before long." She lifted Sarah's limp hand up to her cheek, then kissed it. "You're going to be all right, dear. I've seen enough like you to know."

"Then what do you make of what she just said?" Lou asked her, having given up on me. "Earlier this morning she was fine. Knew who I was, everything. Then the minute Morgan comes in, she starts making up that loony jabber."

The sanguine Mrs. Reilly just shrugged as if it didn't really matter.

For my own part, I didn't necessarily like him implying my arrival had caused her to relapse into her dream world of terror. It seemed to me that whenever I showed up, she started trying to tell me what was really eating away at her soul.

Well, I told myself finally, maybe she's regressed back to when we were kids, when we only had each other to share our secrets with. What if we've rebonded in some new, spe

cial way? It would be natural, actually. She's trying to reach out to me, like long ago.

Now she appeared to be dozing off, exhausted, her head tipping downward toward her blue hospital s.h.i.+ft. Mrs. Reilly took that as a hint, and slowly began wheeling her toward the bedroom, leaving me alone with Lou.

I glanced over at him, thinking more and more that I had to do something, track down what had happened to her. I wanted to do it for me, but even more for him. I'd never seen him so despondent. Maybe it was the thing scholars call the curse of rising expectations. Back when she was hardly more than a vegetable, he was overjoyed by a flickering eyelid. Now that she was talking, he wanted all of her back. Instead, though, it seemed as if she had returned to us for a moment, only to be s.n.a.t.c.hed away again. I could tell it was killing him.

"Look, I'm sorry that when I showed up, she started going off the deep end." I wanted desperately to help, but at that moment I felt powerless. "Maybe I should just stay away for a while."

"Nah, she loves having you here. Don't worry. But anyway, Dave said something about you taking a couple of days off. Maybe I can use that time to be here with her and settle her down." Then he grimly took out her locket and rubbed its worn silver in his fingers, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with his heartache. "This is all just so d.a.m.ned confusing."

Was he telling me, indirectly, that I should go away and leave them alone? First Hannah Klein rejects me, and now _et tu_, Lou? Maybe, I thought, he's taking out his despair on me, blaming me for her relapse.

Truthfully, I guess I was blaming myself a bit too.

"Listen, I'm going to go home now and leave you two alone," I said.

"But why don't you see if you can get her to talk some more? Without me around, maybe she'll make more sense."

"If she wants to say something, I'll listen." He gave me a strong, absent embrace, his eyes still despondent. "But no way am I gonna start pus.h.i.+ng her."

I edged into the bedroom, unsure if I really should, to say good-bye to Sarah and to give her one last hug. Her eyes were open again and she just stared at me for a second, then whispered a word I couldn't quite make out. It might have sounded like "Babylon," but that made no sense at all. Finally she covered her eyes with her hands and turned away, gone from me, leaving me more alone than I'd ever felt.

Chapter Eleven

Heading home, finally, I told myself to try to calm down. I was determined to help Sarah get over her trauma, though truthfully I was too tired to really think straight at that moment. So instead I decided to let everything rest for a few hours and try for some distance. In fact, I began imagining myself in a hot bath, gazing at my now-wilting roses. Home Sweet Home.

Mine was a standard one-bedroom in a building that had been turned into a co-op five years earlier, the owner offering the individual apartments to the tenants. I'd stayed a renter, however, pa.s.sing up the "low" insider price, $138,000, because I didn't really have the money, and when I did have it someday I would want something bigger. I wished I had more s.p.a.ce--a real dining room and a bigger bathroom would do for starters, along with some place for more bookcases. And if a baby should someday miraculously come along . . .

I'd often thought you could tell a lot about somebody from where and how they lived; it's revealing as a Rorschach test. What, I often wondered, did my apartment say about me?

A decorator might conclude I'd done up the place with love, then lazily let it go. They'd decide I cared about nice things, but once those nice things were there, I neglected them. It would be true.

I'd covered the walls of the living room with pale blue cloth, then hung a lot of framed pictures and old movie posters. Okay, I like movies. For me even the posters are art. My couch was an off-white, more like dirt-colored actually, and covered with pillows for the "feminine" touch. I'd hoped you'd have to look twice to realize it was actually a storage cabinet in disguise, with drawers along the bottom of the front. The floor was polished hardwood, rugs from India here and there, in sore need of a vacuuming, and even a couple of deceased insects that'd been there for over a week. That sort of said it, I thought glumly. I'm a workaholic slob.

The bedroom revealed even more about me. The bed was a bra.s.s four-poster, queen-size, partly covered by an heirloom quilt. It hadn't been made in a week. (Who has the time?) The room itself was long and divided into areas for work and sleep. Opposite the bed itself was an antique English desk, on which sat my old Macintosh, and next to that was my file cabinet, the indispensable part of the "home office" the IRS loves to hate. On top of it was a stack of marked-up scripts, notes scribbled all over them in six different colors. You never realize movies are so complicated till you see a breakdown sheet. Camera angles and voice-overs and . . .

Next to the bed was a violin case and three books about Indian ragas.

What was that about? somebody might wonder. Some kind of Indian music nut? I was, albeit a very minimally talented nut.

The kitchen was the New York efficiency kind painted a glossy tan, the color of aerosol olive oil. The cabinets contained mostly packages of pasta, instant soup, and coffee filters. Not even any real food. I live on deli takeout these days. An inventory of my fridge at this moment would clock two cartons of "fresh squeezed" orange juice, a half quart of spoiling milk, a bag of coffee beans, plastic containers of wilting veggies from the corner salad bar, and three bottles of New York seltzer. That was it.

G.o.d help me, I thought, my mind-state turning even more

morose. This is my life. I had become that retrograde Woman of the Nineties: works ninety hours a week, makes ninety thou a year, weighs ninety pounds, and thinks (pardon my French) Cooking and f.u.c.king are provinces in northern China. Well, the ninety-pounds part of that obscene quip didn't fit--and it wasn't the nineties anymore, anyway.

In any case, was my apartment a place to raise a child? No earthly way.

Like Carly, I'd have to spring for some decent s.p.a.ce, preferably with a was.h.i.+ng machine. . . .

A parking slot was open right in front of my building, a minor miracle on this day of uncertain events. As I was pulling in, I glanced over to see a man walking past, not catching the face but sensing something familiar in the walk. He was in the process of unb.u.t.toning a Federal Express uniform, peeling away the top to reveal a dark suit. He certainly seemed to be in a big hurry, carrying an unmarked shopping bag. Maybe, I thought, his s.h.i.+ft was over and he was meeting his wife, or a friend.