Life Blood Part 18

"You're welcome to think what you like," she bristled. "But I have to tell you I don't appreciate your tone."

I guess I'd really ticked her off, and it hurt to do it. Then, finally, her own rejection of me was sinking in.

"So that's it? You're telling me if I try anything except exactly what you want me to, then just don't ever come back."

"I've said all I intend to." She was resolutely ushering me toward the door, her eyes abruptly blank.

Well, I told myself, going from anger to despair, then back to anger, whatever else I might think about Alex G.o.ddard, at least he doesn't kick people out because of their problems, even a sad soul like Tara.

Still, what about these illegal drugs? There I was, caught in the middle--between an honorable woman who had failed, and Alex G.o.ddard, who'd just lived up to my worst suspicions. Heading down in the elevator, alone, I could still hear Hannah Klein's rejection, and warning, ringing in my ears. Maybe she had just confirmed that still, small voice of rationality lecturing me from the back of my mind.

I marched out onto the empty Sunday streets of upper Broadway, and when I got to the corner, I stood for a long moment looking up at the pitiless blue of the sky. The sun was there, but in my soul I felt all the light was gone.

Finally I opened the first bottle and then, one by one, I began taking out the gel-caps and dropping them into the rainwater grate there at my feet, watching them bounce like the metal sphere in an old pinball machine before disappearing into the darkness below. When both bottles were empty, I tossed them into the wire trash basket I'd been standing next to.

The next time I saw Alex G.o.ddard, he was going to have a h.e.l.l of a lot of explaining to do. Beginning with why he'd given me a glimmer of hope, only to then cruelly s.n.a.t.c.h it back. I found myself hating him with all my being.

Chapter Ten

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 coc.o.o.n. Time to collapse into a hot bath, wonder why Alex G.o.ddard had given me illegal drugs, and contemplate roses. I was looking for a parking s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d!

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 . . . G.o.d, 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 La.s.sie), liked to climb trees and dig holes in the hardscrabble West Texas earth. Maybe that was why I felt so at home--free a.s.sociating now--when I filmed my doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentary. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, on tables, the desk, several on the walls. Mostly they were old, several blown up and cropped from snapshots, grainy. The s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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.