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  “Raped?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “Basically, yes, we think. There’s a lot of damage. She’s on her way to OR.”

  “Is Jack there?”

  “Jack?”

  “Detective Collins.”

  “He’s en route.”

  “So am I. Please tell him that.”

  He stood as, twenty minutes later, I came off an elevator that opened directly onto the waiting room to which I’d been directed by the elderly man at the information desk downstairs.

  “She’s in surgery,” he told me.

  “How bad is it?”

  “You know she was raped, right?”

  I nodded. “Where was she?”

  “MDC.” The so-called Mental Diagnostic Center, usually the way station on a cruise to one or another of the local psychiatric facilities. Even had their own little kangaroo courtroom set up in there. “No one else had room for her on such short notice.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Besides the rape? Her face is pretty well banged up. Some broken ribs. Looks like the fingers of one hand got bent back hard, dislocated, maybe they’re broken too. Could have been worse—she didn’t struggle.”

  “Of course she didn’t struggle. With her history?”

  He started to say something else, stopped himself. “I’m sorry.” Doors swung open then, and a young woman in oversize scrubs stepped through. The scrubs were poor camouflage for the shape beneath or for her carriage, for the beauty of olive skin, golden eyes. She walked directly to Jack.

  “Dr. Boudreaux: Jenny Rowan.”

  She smiled. Possibly I read more into her momentary pause, into her eye contact, than was intended.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Dr. Boudreaux said. “Three broken ribs, which we’ve taped. They’re fairly stable, but she’s going to be sister to pain for a while.”

  Pain, she was used to. Pain, she understood.

  “We’ve splinted the hand. I put in a couple dozen stitches around her mouth and one eye. Used the finest thread I could. With luck there’ll be little or no scarring.”

  “They did a rape kit in ER?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks, Lisa.”

  “You’re welcome.” Briefly her hand, nails cut almost to the quick, touched his. “She’s coming up from the anesthetic. You’ll be able to see her shortly. One of the nurses from Recovery will let you know. Meanwhile, I’ve got to go sew up a bladder and put it back where it belongs.”

  “You two know one another, I see,” I said once she’d gone back through the automatic doors.

  “We’ve been out a time or two. Dinner, a movie—like that. Tried more often, but one of us is always getting reined in by our beeper.”

  “She’s gorgeous.”

  Jack nodded. “We met here—where else am I going to meet someone like Lisa? Before that I’d given up dating. I’d go out with a secretary, someone who worked in a department store, there we’d be, she talking about her family or what was on TV, me sitting across from her with a smile pasted on my face thinking about the dead child we’d found stuffed into a gym bag that day, or the guy we’d had a few years back who broke into upscale homes and hammered railroad spikes into the owners’ hands and feet, pinning them to the wall.”

  A nurse coming through the magic doors saved us further awkwardness.

  “You go,” Jack said.

  Coming into Recovery, I faced an expanse of stretchers upon which lay perhaps two dozen huddled shapes. Some looked as immobile as sand dunes; others, either unable to do so or urged back down by staff, repeatedly tried to sit up; a couple were turned to the side, vomiting into basins. Stretchers sat nosed into service bays much like those in mechanic shops.

  Cheryl tracked me as I approached. I reached for her hand, which found its way out from beneath the stained, torn, crisply starched sheet.

  “Sorry, girl.”

  Tears swam into her eyes.

  “Life’s a bitch, then you die,” I said. “They just forget to tell you the dying goes on for years and years, and how much it can hurt. Who did this, Cheryl?”

  She shut her eyes. New tears squeezed out around the lids. They’d wash it all clean. She’d open her eyes to a better world. It hadn’t worked yet, but what else was there?

  “I have a list of all intakes. Just tell me who it was.”

  “I can trust you, right?”

  “You wouldn’t be asking if you hadn’t already decided you can.”

  I stood holding her hand, listening to periodic retching and rattly coughs, to the ringing of phones, to the chatter of others at the front counter, nurses, unit secretaries, residents and interns, anesthesiologists, transporters, X-ray techs.

  “He works there,” Cheryl said.

  Two days later Jack was waiting by lockers as Jeremy “Jerry” Dunne, Psych Tech II, arrived for work.

  “You’re under arrest for rape, assault, and battery,” Jack said, spinning out the Miranda-Escobedo formula. A uniformed cop relieved Dunne of his backpack as Jack cuffed him.

  Dunne’s history was a long one. He’d begun as strong-arm orderly at the state hospital; moved from there to major abuse at two nursing homes, from both of which he’d been fired; then found employment at MDC.

  “What, you don’t follow up on references? Don’t bother to check work history?” Jack asked. I never again saw him as angry as he was that day.

  The medical director looked up from what must have been very important paperwork. “You have any idea how many positions we have to fill? How easy do you think it is to hire people at just over minimum wage? Anyone has significant experience, nine out of ten times HR’s going to go ahead and process them.”

  “Magic 8-Ball time again,” I said.

  They both looked at me.

  I mimicked turning the ball over in my hand. “Signs point to yes. Concentrate and ask again.” Neither knew what I was talking about, of course.

  “Do you have any idea what a piece of shit this girl’s life has been, you smug asshole?” Jack said. “Drive up in your Beemer and park it in your reserved space, have a nice lunch, pull down, what? a hundred thou a year, twice that?”

  “Watch yourself, Detective. Our lawyers—”

  Jack’s stare stopped him cold.

  “You hired a man who all his life has preyed on weakness,” Jack said. “Now he’s about to find out how that looks from the other side. I only wish you could be there with him.”

  We’d walked out into ambiguous late afternoon–early evening, my favorite time of day, homing as though on instinct to a diner near the cop house. Locusts gave witness in trees outside.

  “Down, boy!” I’d said back at MDC.

  “I know, I know. Don’t much care for doctors in the first place.”

  “You seemed to like Lisa Boudreaux well enough.”

  “True. Different species, though.”

  Jack shoveled a piece of coconut-cream pie into his mouth as I sipped coffee.

  “There’s no anger in you, is there, Jenny? None at all. I don’t understand that.”

  “Who would you have me be angry with?”

  “Your parents?”

  “I never knew them.”

  “The man who abducted you.”

  “Danny? He was just being true to what he was, being Danny. He couldn’t help himself. And that was many and many a year ago—”

  “In a kingdom by the sea.”

  “Exactly. There’s nothing I can do to change any of it.”

  “Society, then—for allowing this to happen.”

  “Way too big a bag to haul around, on such a short trip.”

  The waitress brought us refills on coffee, asked if we needed anything else. Gina, according to her name tag. Kind brown eyes, beautiful silver-gray hair cut short. Slight limp—or maybe just sore feet from all these hours on them? She tucked the check under the ashtray. Jack covered it with a twenty.

/>   “You want it all to make sense, don’t you?” I said. “Our lives, the world. Clear reasons. Explanations. Even when you know better than most how untidy the world and all our lives are.”

  Outside, locusts’ songs had given way to the cold, silent light of fireflies. As a child we’d catch them in our hands and put them in jars with punctured lids. Lightning bugs, we called them. First time I heard about Diogenes, I had an image of him holding one of those jars high. That would be his lantern as he went about on his search.

  I woke witnessing the birth of the universe.

  Static on the TV screen, physicists say, is residual radiation left over from the Big Bang.

  I looked around as, slowly, it came back to me.

  Jack and I had adjourned to his apartment and gone on talking. He’d had three or four pours of Scotch, I’d had two. At some point he phoned for a pizza. We watched Bell, Book and Candle as we ate. He loved old movies and thought Kim Novak the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. I must have fallen asleep. He must have draped the quilt over me. Not that I needed it, with weather warm and sultry. I’d promptly thrown it off.

  Nice thought, though.

  “You’re awake. Good. I wasn’t sure when you needed to be at work. Bad sleeper myself, so I can’t abide waking anyone up. Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  Steam leaked from the bathroom he’d just left, frosting the full-length mirror on the closet door alongside. He wore a red terrycloth robe from which tangles of snagged threads hung like dreadlocks.

  “What time is it?”

  “Little after seven. Sugar, milk?”

  “What, and mess up good coffee?”

  “Black it is.”

  Detouring to shut off the TV, he brought the coffee to me, along with my options.

  “We can grab bagels at the corner or, if by some miraculous chance you have a taste for rubbery eggs and half-raw bacon, I can cook for you.”

  “Tough choice …”

  “That’s life.”

  “On the other hand, there’s nothing like a bagel in the morning.”

  “Good choice.” He hoisted his coffee cup in tribute. “Bathroom’s yours. I laid out towels and a washcloth.”

  He had a fresh cup of coffee waiting when I came out. He’d changed into blue slacks, light blue dress shirt, old-style penny loafers. Back in my own clothes, body still remembering the hot shower, I’d wrapped myself in a quilt. Been a long time since my last sleepover.

  “I’ve had that quilt since I was sixteen,” Jack said. “Went to college with me, probably deserves its own BA, all the bookwork I did under its aegis.”

  “Aegis?” First abide, now this.

  “What good’s a liberal arts education if you can’t drop in a word like that now and then?”

  “And just how long have you waited?”

  “Been on the tip of my tongue for, oh, fourteen years or so.” His eyes lowered to the quilt, then came back to mine. “My mother made it.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It was half done when she went into the hospital for tests. She finished it there, while going through radiation therapy and chemo. Her doctors later admitted they knew it wouldn’t do any good. She was thirty-six.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Don’t be. She had a good life. One of those quality-over-quantity things.”

  Strangely, the Bagel Place was all but deserted, a single elderly man sitting with his newspaper, oxygen tank, and go-cup of coffee at the foremost of six tables inside, a pair of thirtyish men in crisp white shirts, ties, and razor-cut hair at one of the tables out front.

  Jack ordered an espresso and a bagel with jalapeno cream cheese. I switched to tea, asked for plain cream cheese and capers, bagel double-toasted. Thing people don’t understand, Jack said, is how much less caffeine there is in espresso than in regular coffee. It’s the time the water spends in contact with the beans.

  Workers, possibly management, had the radio dialed to the local NPR. The host and her daily pickup band of authorities were talking about books and whether they mattered in today’s world, whether they had an effect. Do the math, one interviewee said. For every word in Mein Kampf a hundred and twenty-five people died. For every chapter, two hundred thousand.

  Chapter 5

  A month or so back, squatters had moved into the house next door. Boards still covered door and windows. The squatters came and went via the alley and back door, usually at night. Carefully packaging waste, by night they placed it in our neighbors’ disposal bins. Ever so often I’d pack up food and take it over. There was a core group—a young man named Snake, new mother Josie, Dolly Partonish Judy-Lynn, adult runaways Buddy and Dana—with others wandering in and out of the assembly.

  I walked in the back door to find Josie there in the kitchen nursing her baby.

  “Pizza’s here!” she said.

  “Well, not exactly. But there’s a bunch of tuna, canned soup, and pasta in the sack. Some bread and crackers, apples, cheese. Couple of jars of peanut butter. A gallon of milk and vitamins for you.”

  “Thanks, girl.”

  Snake, having heard Josie, stood in the doorway.

  “Who’d of thought it? A good neighbor.”

  “Yeah, well. I’ve been meaning to speak with you about the yard.”

  “I’ll get right on it. It the old tires or the three-foot-high johnsongrass that bothers you?”

  “The tires are a nice touch.”

  “Planters, like,” Josie said.

  “Stay and eat with us? Can’t remember whose turn it is to cook—”

  “You know damn well whose turn it is, Snake.”

  “—but it’s the least we can do.”

  “I should get back.”

  “Have time for a drink, at least?”

  “Okay.”

  He poured red wine from a jug standing on the cabinet into an old jelly jar and a chipped water glass. He handed the glass to me.

  Josie cleared her throat.

  “Not while you’re nursing, sweetheart.”

  She pouted, dramatically. At the same moment, the baby threw up. That was the most movement I’d ever seen from it. Most of the time it could pass for a doll. Wiping away drool and milk with her shirtsleeve, Josie put the baby back to breast.

  Snake and I clinked glasses. Well, glass and jelly jar, anyway.

  “Appreciate your helping us out.”

  “No problem.”

  “Not a lot that would. Our kind’s not too popular.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “You think?” He threw back the rest of his wine. “God, how I’d like to be surprised.”

  Chapter 6

  Malls, a long piece in today’s Washington Post makes official, are on their way out, have been so for some time, in fact—causing me to reflect on my old homestead. High vacancy rates, low consumer traffic, a shift toward renovation of the central city, big-box stores such as Fry’s Electronics and Walmart, all have taken their toll.

  “They’re dinosaurs,” according to one expert, “as out of touch with today’s consumers as rotary-dial phones and vinyl recordings. Hundreds of regional malls lie empty, gutted, abandoned. Probably ten times that number have no true reason for being.”

  Grayfields, he called them, for their sea-like acres of cement parking lots, harking back to the designation of old industrial sites as brownfields.

  Roofs ripped off, sidewalks, canals, and palm trees laid in, town houses or apartment blocks added, select malls are being reworked by developers into quirky small villages. Interestingly enough, the first American malls were intended to resemble just that.

  I had a good life in one of those malls. My very own world. A biosphere of sorts, where I lived in harmony with my environment. Took food and clothing and shelter, fallen fruit, from the ground at my feet.

  So much passes. With every step we take, we leave so much behind.

  “Blink once and the world changes,” I remember a writer
saying in an interview I edited some years back. “Blink twice, you change.”

  Early one morning around the time I was editing that interview, not long after my snipe hunt for parents, I arrived at work to find that a message had been left for me. Would I please call the number below at my earliest convenience.

  Doing so, I was asked please to hold.

  “Miss Rowan?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Dr. Duhon, at George Washington University Hospital. I’m chief resident here. You know a Daniel Taylor, I believe?”

  Danny. I knew his name—I’d seen it on the dangling hospital name badge he still wore sometimes as he pulled me out from under—even if I’d misplaced my own.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Taylor is currently a patient here. The details are disturbing…. Not that this has anything to do with my reason for calling.”

  I waited. Often life is like raw footage. Suspend judgment, wait, watch, witness. Let it flow through you. Give patterns time to reveal themselves. One way or another, it all gets edited. Man’s a pattern-making animal—just as the writer in that interview said.

  “Are you acquainted with living wills, Miss Rowan?”

  I was. We’d done a documentary on them a year or so back.

  “Mr. Taylor had a living will on file with his physician. As the person designated to be his agent in all matters relating to his care, he lists you.”

  Moments of silence on the line.

  “Miss Rowan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be possible for you to come down here? The sooner the better.”

  “I’ve just this minute got in to work.”

  “I know. But here’s the thing. Following upon massive trauma, Mr. Taylor has sustained a series of medical crises, leading his caretakers to believe that the quality of life has been irredeemably damaged, which brings his living will into high relief. Our consensus at this time is that removal of life support is the most humane option. And for that we need your consent.”

  Further silence.

  “I realize how difficult this must be. You and Mr. Taylor were close?”

  So many questions, without and within.

  How had he found me, how had he learned where I lived, what name I went under? Had he been watching from afar? Why on earth would Danny name me as his guardian? He’d taken care of me, now it was my turn, the way parents and children so often reverse roles in later life?