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  I pull my hand from his.

  “Nurse,” I yell. “Nurse.”

  Two days he’s been here, and he’s already getting antsy. They’ve taken him to run a bunch more tests, gotten him a private room, and barely have him propped up in the bed with his lunch tray pushed against his chest before he’s asking me, “When can I go home?”

  “You can’t even get your own self out of the bed,” I say.

  “I feel fine.”

  “That’s what you said the other day, too. While all the blood was seeping out of your brain.”

  “Be sweet to me,” he says, frowning. He’s still slurring his words a little. They sound swollen. It’s only the drugs that have him loosened up enough to talk in public like this. After his heart surgery, you’d have thought I was some monster come to terrorize him, the way his eyes roved to rest on every single surface in the room but me.

  “There’s too many old people here,” he says, peering suspiciously out the door. “They kept wheeling them past my door, all night long.”

  “How would you know? You were passed out on drugs the whole time.”

  “The squeak of the wheels gets into your dreams,” he says.

  His hands tremble on the white sheets, shake for the sheer terror of uselessness, and his jaw keeps chewing invisible cud. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  “The doctor’s supposed to come by in a little bit,” I say. “You need to eat your lunch.”

  “I can’t even tell what my lunch is.” Each compartment on his plastic tray is filled with a different color of mush. “Ain’t they already feeding me through one of these?” He paws the bundle of IV tubes. The colored nurse fastened them with a few straps of velcro to get them out of his way.

  “It’s just sugar water,” I say. “Eat. You need to get your strength up. The sooner you do, the sooner we can go home. My rear end’s permanently sore from sitting in these chairs all day.”

  He looks put out, but he reaches for his spoon. His fingers shake so bad they have trouble closing around it. And that’s the hand that still works right. The other one he can’t even ball up in a fist yet.

  “What are you scared of?” I say. “The applesauce?”

  He frowns at his fingers, as if he could whip them into stillness with just a stern look, and closes them, real deliberate and tight, around the spoon’s handle. And he does get them under control, but it looks like he’s squeezed their tremors up into his wrist: it rocks his whole hand back and forth so hard it dumps half the spoonful into his lap before he can get it to his mouth. I may have to request him a bib before it’s all over.

  I’ve got the TV on the court channel, where Little Larry’s mother is holding a press conference to unveil the police sketches of the strange man she kept seeing in the days before her baby disappeared—pretending to trim a bush in her apartment building’s parking lot, leaning against the side of the soda machine at the laundromat, crouching in the third-story window of the abandoned cigarette factory across the street from her bedroom.

  “Ooh,” Frank says. He pushes himself up in the bed to get a better look. He loves murders and kidnappings and things like that. The suspect’s perfectly clean-shaven, and his hair is black and oiled and combed neatly back from his pale forehead and dark eyes, with a level-straight part along one side, the way I used to keep mine.

  “She’s the one that did it,” Frank says.

  “You think?”

  “Look how much makeup she’s got on.” It’s caked all over her face so thick you can see the line along her jaw where it stops, and the skin above that line is a whole different color from the skin below. She’s got her blond hair done up in ringlets, sprayed stiff into place like she’s going to a fancy party, and a tight blouse with the top three buttons undone so it’s only by pure chance we can’t all see her brassiere. Mascara runs down her cheeks in cloudy black tears, cutting through big swaths of rouge.

  “If that’s not the face of guilt itself,” he says, “I don’t know what is.”

  “Please,” she says, “if anyone watching has seen this man, call the police. And if this man is watching, please, bring my baby back. I’m begging you. Bring Little Larry home, please. I won’t—I’ll give you anything. Anything. All I want is my little boy. That’s all.” Her face twists into sobs. She has to hold the podium to keep herself standing.

  “Look how hard she’s crying,” I say.

  “You mean to tell me you believe that?”

  “I sure do. Nobody that concerned about how she looks would come on national television and cry that ugly if she didn’t have a good reason.”

  He sighs. “You never were very good at this sort of thing,” he says.

  The sheriff puts his arm around her shoulders and leads her into a crowd of deputies. They shield her from the cameras.

  “I don’t think she did it,” I say.

  “It’s always the mother that did it. Who else but a mother would want to commit a crime against a baby? Nobody else cares enough about babies to commit crimes against them. They’ll have her in jail by the end of the week.”

  “You want to bet?”

  “What do you have to bet that I would want?” he says. “Not a thing.”

  Another two bites of applesauce and he’s asleep again. I watch continued coverage of the empty podium until a doctor knocks lightly on the open door. He looks like the one from before, only older and somehow, against all odds, even more pleased with himself, as if thirty years had passed during the night, each one of them further confirming his unwavering faith in his intelligence and skill. My neck hurts from leaning my head back to see the television.

  “How’s he doing?” he whispers, louder than if he’d just said it normal.

  I get up and go to the door so we don’t wake Frank. “Shouldn’t you be the one to tell me?”

  He bestows a smug, benevolent smile upon the entire room.

  “Who are you?” I say.

  “The cardiologist.”

  “I don’t remember you. When did he see you?”

  “He didn’t. He saw the radiologist.”

  “Then where’s the radiologist?”

  He gives me that same smile, this time all for myself.

  “We’ve had a very in-depth consultation,” he says.

  You can’t have just one doctor anymore, one person who knows all there is to know about you. They keep dividing us up, down and down into parts too small for a knife blade, and then they go and invent an implement with a finer edge. You’ve got to have your heart man, your lungs man, your digestive man, your skin man, your brain man, until you’re nothing more than an assemblage of organs they can split apart and divide among the needy if you check the right box on the form to renew your driver’s license. The woman at the Department of Motor Vehicles tried to give me a real shaming look last time I told her no, I did not want to be an organ donor. I prefer to keep my organs to myself.

  “What we’re looking at,” the doctor says, flipping through a stack of charts and test results, “is cardiomyopathy. Dilated cardio-myopathy.” After a second of me staring at him in anticipation of something that will pass the slightest scrutiny as an actual explanation, he adds, “An enlarging of the heart. A weakening.”

  “I already told that young doctor he’s had a valve replaced. How can his heart be—”

  “In one way,” he says, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. What we’re really looking at is just the fact that his heart’s wearing out. Wearing down.”

  “He’s getting old? That’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “In one way,” he says, nodding encouragement.

  “What’s the other way?”

  He presses his fat, shiny lips together and pumps air in and out of the skin around them for a moment, like a frog, while he ponders the best way to gild the information he’s about to deliver. “Between his high blood pressure and cholesterol and some narrowed arteries, that heart of his has to work pretty hard, and it’s probably been damaged
a little. This causes the muscles to stretch—to dilate—which then damages the heart’s ability to—”

  “I brought him here so you could fix his stroke. Not come up with a hundred more problems for us to worry about.”

  “Well,” he says. “It’s all connected.” He holds out his interlaced fingers.

  “How long does he have to stay here?”

  “You’ll need to check with the neurologist on that one.”

  “And what’s wrong with his hands? It looks like he’s got some kind of palsy. Can you fix that?”

  He scrunches his mouth into one corner of itself, then the other. “Here.” He pulls Frank’s chest X-rays from a folder at the bottom of the stack. Against the black background, and inside a cage of ghostly, translucent ribs, his heart hangs like a stuffed sock from his breastbone. Back when we had Fancy, one of our beagles, he used to take an old white tube sock, stuff a couple other wadded-up socks inside it, down into the toe, and use it to play tug-of-war with her. After a few rounds, he’d let her have it to rip and shred, then spend half an hour with her on his lap, lifting her jowls and pulling the strings out from between her teeth and under her tongue. She’d just lie there and let him do it, didn’t growl or nothing, and that sock would hang over the arm of his chair, torn up and sagging and sopping with drool: that’s what his heart looks like in his chest.

  “What we’re looking at,” the doctor says, “is his heart.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Well, as I’m sure you can also see, the problem here is that when the muscle stretches like this, it actually weakens the heart. Damages it even more. It’s a sort of terrible cycle. The heart can’t pump blood the way it should, and eventually, usually, it leads to long-term heart failure.”

  “Can you do surgery? Get him a pacemaker or something, get him a new valve. Get him a heart transplant.”

  “At this stage, surgery’s not really what we want to be looking at. Especially open-heart. For now, we’ll put him on some new medications, up his blood thinner, get him on some stronger statins. As long as he’s careful, he could keep living for years.”

  “Could?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” he says. “I have seen worse. But: I have also seen better. You really want to make sure he doesn’t exert himself. The last thing you want to be looking at is him putting too much strain on this thing.” He taps the X-ray. “We want him to stay active, of course. That’s very important. Crucial. Keep him moving around as much as he can, keep the blood flowing. Just not too too much. Don’t let him exert himself. Any other questions?”

  Bronchi enclose his heart like bare, winter branches folded about it. I shake my head.

  “All right,” he says, and slips me a business card from his pocket like it’s an illicit substance. “I’ll need to see him in a month. Go ahead and make the appointment now. Before we get booked up.” And then he’s strutting off down the hall to dole out his knowledge to another waiting customer.

  I sneak back into the room. Frank lies sound asleep in the bed, his jaw working silently, while inside his chest, his heart slowly wears out. Can’t say I blame it. It’s worked hard, keeping the blood flowing through a man as big as him, and never once has it gotten a break. Even on the downbeat, when it felt beneath my hand like it had stilled in his chest, it was only opening itself to the blood, preparing to wring itself dry.

  As the sun starts to go down, the colored nurse brings his supper and leaves it on the tray beside his bed. I promise her in whispers that I’ll try to get him to eat. A breeze picks up outside, blows so steady that the silver undersides of the upturned leaves on the trees don’t even flutter, look like they grow that way, pointing still and straight up. Around the horizon, the sky’s as bright red as that woman’s rouged cheeks. I open the window. I don’t know if we’re allowed to do that in here or not, but the warm wind feels good. This hospital’s always chilly. When I shuffle back to his bed, Frank’s sitting up. The breeze flutters the hem of his sheet. He looks out the window, confused for a minute, before he remembers where he is.

  “Sailor’s delight,” he says.

  His hair’s so thin you can see plain through it to his pale, spotted scalp. At the top of his chest, peeking out over the sea-foam collar of his paper gown, is the scar, the pale white line where they opened him up the last time and sewed him back together.

  He frowns. “What was supposed to be so good about a red sky at night?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You ought to. You grew up around all them ships.”

  “Eat some supper,” I say, and push his tray toward him: creamed spinach, creamed corn, and creamed potatoes, and jello red as the sky, with chunks of peaches and pears in it, and peeled, halved grapes that look like somebody’s fingertips after they’ve been in the water too long.

  “I hate the red kind,” he says.

  “It’s all ground-up horse hooves. What difference does it make what color it is?”

  “I can taste the chemicals they use to get it that way.”

  “You cannot.”

  “I can. I can taste the chemicals.” He stares down at it, mounded up like the lump of his old, limp heart. “Red sky at morning,” he says, and sighs.

  “Sailors take warning.”

  “Have you heard anything about Larry?”

  “No. Though they have managed to talk for two full hours about the lack of new developments.”

  “For such a little guy, he sure is a big story,” he says, raising his eyebrows jauntily on the word big.

  “I should have asked if they can cure you of your terrible sense of humor while you’re here.”

  “I believe I may be a terminal case,” he says, chuckling. “There is no cure.”

  I rest my hand on top of the sheets, next to, but not touching, his leg.

  “You mean to tell me you never once asked somebody to explain that saying to you?” he says.

  “No,” I say. “I did not.”

  He makes a grumbling noise of disappointment at my lack of intellectual rigor. Then, with great concentration and effort, he flicks his jello with one big finger. Inside it, the pears and peaches and grapes, suspended, slowly sway.

  TWO

  I was wiping the blood off my hands when I saw him. I was twenty-three years old, and outside, the whole town, buildings and trees and the first green buds of tentative spring, was coated in a casing of ice from a late-winter storm like something in a museum, something fragile and important that had to be preserved, kept from all the grubby hands that would want to touch it. The power lines sagged beneath the weight, and the trees and streets and sidewalks held themselves tense, waiting for the snap. But in those last minutes of afternoon, as the trees darkened and flattened into silhouettes against the sky, the ice began to loosen, gathering slow into cold drops that hung so heavy and still it seemed they would never fall.

  I was on my way to the window to flip my notice from OPEN to CLOSED—though of course nobody’d set foot in the shop in the three days since the storm hit, and I’d been reduced to skinning squirrels out of sheer boredom—dragging a rag across my fingers so they wouldn’t stain the sign, and there he was, standing on the train tracks that ran down the middle of the street to the depot on the corner, wearing an old coat a few sizes too small, the cuffs of which didn’t even come down to his big, knobby wrists. He was about the tallest fellow I’d ever seen, with wide shoulders squeezed up and together by his jacket. He didn’t have any gloves on, or a hat, and his cheeks were red and raw, his hair yellow, thin, and straight, all except for one curled forelock that rested on his brow like something wilted.

  You could tell he hadn’t been home long from the war. He stood stiff upright, as if constantly startled by the world around him, and he had that look, as he turned to survey its thawing landscape, of trying to find anything that seemed familiar.

  It was getting dark, but the sky above the buildings was bright pink with light reflected off the snow. He lifted his hands to h
is lips, clasped them together, and breathed onto his fingers before shoving them as far as he could into the pockets of his coat. The glow of the street lamps filtered cold through the window, twice distilled by ice and glass.

  I opened the door, and the noise was so loud I couldn’t even walk into it. All around was the thud of snow clumps falling into snow piles, the groan of ice as it spread beyond itself, the crackle as it split apart.

  “Excuse me,” I yelled. “Were you looking for something?”

  He turned, startled. “Naw,” he said. “Nothing in particular.”

  “Oh.” I shoved the rag, stiff with dried blood, into my back pocket. “I thought you might be lost.”

  He shook his head and took a few steps toward me, ducking under the branch of an elm. The thin layer of ice atop the snow broke under his bootsole, and its jagged edges caught on his khaki pants, tugging them up from his ankle. He squinted at the hawk mounted on an ossified branch in the window, at the snake curled about the bough. They stared back, impassive. The collar of his coat was half bit away and unraveling, and the seams were pulled so tight over his shoulders you could see each stitch that barely cobbled them together as he held out his hand. It was enormous, with big, wide fingers, and knuckles the size of walnuts.

  “Frank Clifton,” he said. Water dripped from an icicle, lashed the pile of shoveled snow at his feet.

  “Wendell Wilson.” I shook his hand harder than I needed to, and wished I didn’t have black crusts cupped in my cuticles. His sleeve drifted further up his forearm, where a dark scrawl on the skin barely slipped out from beneath the cuff.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, smiling wide and earnest, and I thought I’d be struck down by it, the way it struck down mortals to behold Zeus in his full, blazing divinity, reduced them to ash, the painful glory of him. The branches shuddered off their casts of ice, and the power lines broke free of their insulation, snapped taut and scattered it over the street in pieces that still cupped the hollow channel where the wire had run. Icicles plunged from gutters and shattered on the sidewalk, sheets of snow slid from roofs. The din of it, the creak and thump and shatter, sounded like the world coming undone.