Cheating at Solitaire(128)

Linda was sitting in the visitor’s chair on the other side of the sliding table. She had been there for fifteen minutes, but Jack hadn’t said anything to her besides “Hello.” He couldn’t think of what to say, and there was something about the way she was sitting where she was that made him think there was more of a point to this visit than just visiting. Death bothered him, he realized, but only sometimes. The death of Mark Anderman hadn’t bothered him at all. Mark was and then he was not, and in between it was as if he had never been. He’d been a blank, or a black hole, a depression in the ether. The death of Kendra Rhode bothered him very much, but not just because she was famous, or rich, or somebody who had come to talk to him only moments before she’d fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her neck. It was just that, in his head, Kendra Rhode was not supposed to die. She was supposed to be incapable of dying. He had felt that way about presidents once, when he was very small. He had imagined that there was something about being famous that made you immortal, and that being famous meant being in the encyclopedia, and that presidents were always in the encyclopedia. Something like that. It was confused. He could even remember when he’d realized, for the first time, that this was not true. He was in his seventh-grade math class, and his math teacher, Mr. Lamont, had brought in the news that—but his mind had gone blank. He couldn’t remember. His body felt as if all the blood had been drained out of it. All he could see, or think about, was Kendra, on the tele vision in still pictures and video clips, giving interviews as if nothing like death had ever occurred to her.

“Somebody died,” he said out loud.

On the other side of the table, Linda stood up. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, somebody did. Kendra did.”

“Not now,” Jack said. He knew that Linda was taking this all wrong. She was assuming that he was behaving the way he was because he was sick, because he hadn’t recovered from the drugs and the things that had been done to his hand. He didn’t know how to tell her the truth. He didn’t know if it was important. “When I was in seventh grade,” he said. “Somebody died. Somebody important. And it was a big deal at the time. And now I can’t remember who it was.”

“When was it?” Linda asked.

Jack thought about that. Seventh grade. Junior year. He remembered most of his time growing up with markers like that, not with real years. He had to think hard to figure out the real years. “Nineteen eighty-two,” he said finally. “I think.”

“Brezhnev died in 1982,” Linda said.

Jack turned his head from side to side. He knew who Brezhnev was, sort of, but he wouldn’t have known in 1982. He tried to think about it. He thought about Kendra instead, looking so real up there, looking as if she really existed.

“John Belushi,” he said finally. “It was John Belushi. And my math teacher heard about it somewhere, it happened on the weekend, and he came in Monday morning and told us all about it. He was very upset.”

“Were you very upset?”

“Not exactly,” Jack said. “I just couldn’t understand how it had happened. He was famous, and famous people weren’t supposed to die. I’m not making any sense.”

“You’re making some,” Linda said. “They do die, though. She died. I know you were fond of her.”

It was, Jack thought, a very Linda-like phrase. “Fond of her.” What would that mean, if it meant anything? Had he been “fond of ” Kendra Rhode? He really didn’t know. He thought that most people who had come into Kendra’s orbit might have the same kind of confusion. Kendra wasn’t a person that you liked or disliked. It was far more fundamental than that.

“They don’t say what it was,” he said. “On the television, that is. They don’t say if somebody killed her, or if it was just an accident.”

“She fell down the stairs,” Linda said.

“I know.”

“She fell down these stairs, right here,” Linda said.

Jack turned to look at her. He had the bed propped up. It was one of those mechanical ones you could operate with a little handheld thingee. Linda was sitting in the chair without her back touching it. She was sitting straight up, the way grown-ups always wanted children to in church.

“She was in the room,” he said finally. “She was standing right over there, by the window.”

“You mean she came to visit you?”

“I guess. I got the impression that it wasn’t on purpose. She hadn’t come out to the hospital to visit me.”

“Just the impression? She didn’t tell you why she was here?”