I headed on back downtown, planning to take a bath, change clothes, and then recalibrate my game plan. Maybe, I thought, I ought to just go up to the editing room at Applecore, try some rote work to help tranquilize my thoughts.
But first things first. About halfway there, at Thirty-eighth Street, I pulled over and double-parked by a Korean deli, and surveyed the flowers they had out front, an array of multicolored blooms that virtually blocked entry to the doorway of the tiny grocery. Azaleas, chrysanthemums, birds-of-paradise, but I wanted the pink roses. At ten dollars a bunch, they seemed the right touch. I dug out a twenty and picked two.
Still standing on the street, I pulled them to me and inhaled deeply. As far back as I could remember, I'd always loved the scent of roses. I'd never really thought myself pretty, the natural-blond often-dyed-brown hair notwithstanding, but just having roses around somehow made me feel that way. I wanted to be engulfed in them, especially any time confusion threatened to get the upper hand.
Five minutes later and I was at Twenty-first Street. I'd arrived. My refuge, my one-bedroom cocoon. Time to collapse into a hot bath, wonder why Alex Goddard had given me illegal drugs, and contemplate roses. I was looking for a parking space when my cell phone rang. No, don't bother, I told myself. Enough intrusion for one day. Then I remembered I'd sprung for the caller-ID feature, and I glanced down at the little liquid crystal slot. It was a number I happened to know, Lou's place downtown. One eye still on the street, I reached over and picked it up.
"Finally got you," he boomed. "Where the heck are you?"
"I just got home from-"
"Yeah, I know where you been. Dave told me." He paused, as though he was holding off on some important announcement. "Hang on a sec. There's somebody here might like to speak to you."
I thought about Lou's makeshift digs, lots of "heirloom"-worn-out-family furniture he'd lugged along with him. Sarah and I used to play on the couch, and it still had a dim mauve stain where I'd once dumped a glass of "grape" Kool-Aid on her head when she was six. Whatever else, definitely not a Soho look.
Then I heard a whispery voice.
"Hi, Morgy."
It was a tentative utterance I'd heard only once before, when she was waking up after falling off a playground swing. She'd been knocked out cold for a moment and I'd been frantic, wetting a handkerchief in the nearby fountain and desperately rubbing it over her face. When she came to, she'd gazed up into my eyes and greeted me as though we'd just met.
My God!
Before I could recover and say anything, Lou came back on. "We're practicing eating chicken-noodle soup. And we're trying to do a little talking. Why don't you come on down? She asked about you earlier this morning, said, 'Where's Morgy?' "
"Lou! This is incredible!"
"You gotta believe in miracles, right? Just come on down."
"Is she… God, you've got it." My hopes went into orbit as I clicked off the phone and revved my engine.
I could have swamped him with a lot of questions then and there, but I immediately decided I wanted to see her first, with my own eyes. I still couldn't quite believe it was true. On the other hand, a weekend partial recovery was not totally beyond the realm of medical possibility. With a coma, so little is understood that anything's possible. Lou was right. This was definitely a weekend of the unexpected.
I'd been close to the deaths of people near to me, both my parents for starters, but I'd never been close to the restoration of life. It's hard to explain the rush of joy when you think somebody is gone for good and then they pop up again, like they'd never been lost. And with Sarah that feeling was especially jarring. It was almost as though some part of me had come back alive.
The fact is, since Sarah and I were both only children, we'd identified a lot with each other. True, we'd traveled our separate paths, each looking, perhaps, for something to fill the lonely void in our lives that a sibling might have taken. As a child of the dusty, empty plains of West Texas, I didn't see other kids very much during the summer, and I made up reasons why she and I should visit each other as often as possible.
Once, when I was plowing, turning over oat stubble-yes, my dad warily let me do that if I asked-I unearthed a rabbit nest full of little baby cottontails. Sarah was coming to visit the next day, and I rescued the infants so we could play nursery. We fed them milk with little eyedroppers, and before long Sarah decided she was actually a reincarnated mother rabbit. That was when she became a vegetarian, and she remained so-by her account-till she finished college. It was just another of those magic moments of childhood I ended up sharing with her.
I also sometimes wondered, as you might have guessed, what it would've been like to be born a boy. I was definitely a tomboy, had a real collie (my own version of Lassie), liked to climb trees and dig holes in the hardscrabble West Texas earth. Maybe that was why I felt so at home-free associating now-when I filmed my documentary of the Maya village in Mexico's Yucatan. It was hot and dry and lay under a pitiless sun, a blazing white bone in the sky that seared the spare landscape. None of my crew could understand how anybody could bear to live in such a place, but to me it seemed perfectly natural, almost like home.
Thoughts of which now made me sad. I only wish my parents had lived long enough to see that documentary. Maybe then they'd have understood how terribly lonely I'd been as a child, a loneliness I shared so deeply with Sarah. Would we ever be together again?
On my hurried trip downtown, I kept wondering what I was about to encounter. Was it going to be the fantasy-bound Sarah of her girlhood, perhaps the same Sarah who'd spun out some stuttering vision of a jade mask? Or would all that be past and would she again be the ambitious, sparkling pre- med student she'd become when she was in college?
Getting to Soho took only about ten minutes, scant time to think. Lou's place was in what had once been a garment factory sweatshop. He'd rented it from another agent at the bureau, who had inherited it from a cousin, a well-known downtown artist, lately dead of AIDS. Lou paid virtually no rent, was there mainly to keep out squatters, and couldn't care less that he was living in one of New York's trendier sections. All he knew was that there was plenty of room, and free parking on the street for his old Buick.
I'd been down many times before. Inside, the space was still inhabited spiritually by the dead artist, with acrylic paint spattered on walls and graffiti I didn't fully understand in the bathroom. The place seemed to be a broom-free area, with layers of the past littered on the floor like an archaeological excavation. And the old Kool-Aid-stained furniture, fitting right in.
What always struck me, though, was the number of photos of Sarah. They were everywhere in the open space, on tables, the desk, several on the walls. Mostly they were old, several blown up and cropped from snapshots, grainy. The space felt like a shrine to her memory.
When Lou let me in, I was greeted by a spectral face, a wheelchair, and a valiant attempt at smiling normalcy. Maybe Lou thought it was real, was progress, but I was immediately on guard.
It was Sarah's eyes that caught me. They pierced into my soul and we seemed to click, just like always, only this time it was as though all our life together passed between us. I had the sense she was trying to tell me something with her eyes that went beyond words, that she was trying to reach out to me, perhaps to recapture that shared understanding we'd had years ago.
Lou introduced me to a Mrs. Reilly, a kindly, Irish-looking practical nurse who was part of the outpatient package the hospital provided. She wore a white uniform and was around sixty, with short-bobbed gray hair and an air of total authority. She'd just finished feeding Sarah a bowl of soup, and was brushing out her cropped blond hair, what there was of it.
Mrs. Reilly glanced at me, but never broke the rhythm of her strokes. "She's tired now, but she's already stronger than she was."
Then Lou spoke up. "They called me early yesterday morning. But by the time I got around to trying to reach you, you'd vanished. So I rang Dave and he told me where you were, up there with that crackpot." He was grinning. No, make that beaming like the famous cat. "By last night, she was walking with some help, so they said she might as well be here. Like I said, it's a miracle."
"You brought her home just this morning?" I couldn't believe the hospital would discharge her so soon, but this was the HMO Age of medical cost-cutting.
"Only been here a couple of hours." He pointed to a shiny set of parallel steel railings in the corner. "That's for physical therapy. Right now she can only walk with somebody on either side holding her, but in a few days, I figure…" His voice trailed off, as though he didn't want to tempt fortune. Then he turned toward Sarah. "In a few days, right, honey?"
She nodded, then finally spoke directly to me. "Morgy, I want some clothes. Please. I hate these horrible hospital things. I never want to see them again."
I noticed that she'd started crying, a line of tears down each emaciated cheek. Was it something to do with seeing me? I wondered. Then she began trying to struggle out of the blue bed shift she was wearing, though she didn't have the strength.
"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 buttons? 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 glassy- eyed, first at me, next at Lou, and finally at Mrs. Reilly. Then she reached for a glass 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 hell 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 shift. 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 snatched 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 brimming with his heartache. "This is all just so damned 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 pushing 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.