The third thing he noticed was that the girl was not just a girl. It was Kendra Rhode.
If he could have sat up or reached for anything in any way, he would have grabbed the white styrofoam cup that was sitting next to a can of ginger ale on a flat, high table next to his bed. Ginger ale would be good. Anything would be good. His mouth was dry. His head still hurt. He wanted to reach out and touch Kendra’s arm, that perfect arm. In a world of ghosts, of outlines of people without substance, Kendra was one of the very few whose outlines had been all filled in.
She was leaning against the heating register under the windows, looking at him. She knew he was awake. Jack stuck the tip of his tongue out and tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry. He was lucky it didn’t stick out there, making him look like a retarded person.
“Kendra,” he said. It came out, but only barely. He made another effort. “I thought you. Weren’t. Weren’t. Talking.”
Kendra came over and looked down at him in the bed. It wouldn’t occur to her to offer to get him ginger ale, but he didn’t mind that. He was a ghost. She had no reason to think he needed ginger ale. He really was blithering. He was. How close to the sun did you have to get before you got warm? How close to the sun did you have to get to burn yourself dead? Was heat better than light? Would light illuminate you if you were only an outline of a person, if there was nothing really real about you?
He put out his hand, and she got the idea. She picked up the cup and looked inside it. Then she popped the top on the can of ginger ale and poured some of it in. Jack’s hand was still out. She put the styrofoam cup full of ginger ale in his hand. It was his left hand. It didn’t work that well. He spilled more ginger ale down the side of his face than he got into his mouth.
Still, it worked. It worked well enough. “I thought,” he said, and this time the words came out the way they should have, although he sounded hoarse, “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”
“I’m not talking to you,” Kendra said. “Why should I talk to you? You betrayed me.”
“I didn’t betray you. I sold one picture. I have to sell pictures. That’s how I make a living.”
“You sold the wrong picture.”
“No,” Jack said. And this was true. He remembered the pictures. He remembered the one he sold, and he remembered the ones he still had back at the house. “There were other pictures,” he said. “There were worse pictures.”
Kendra turned away, back to the window again. Jack hated this. He hated it. When she was not looking at him, he felt as if he weren’t really real. It was as if she took some part of him with her. This was an important point. Before the movie people had come to Margaret’s Harbor, Jack had spent most of his time feeling not really real, feeling as if he were a ghost, but he hadn’t been able to pin it down to something specif c. Now he thought he had, and it was only this terrific dryness in his mouth and throat that was keeping him from articulating it.
He tried to drink more ginger ale. He got some. He got more down his face and neck. There was a point here. There really was. He only had to grasp it.
“Why am I here?” he said.
Kendra turned around again. Jack felt warm. “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “Something happened to your hand.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Kendra said. “I didn’t even know you were in the hospital. Marcey’s downstairs. With alcohol poisoning, the silly cunt. I was walking back to the Point from the inn and there were all these paparazzi, trying to get a picture of Marcey on her ass, so I ducked in a door. It’s not true that I always want my picture taken.”
“I know,” Jack said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Marcey,” Kendra said. “It’s bad enough with Arrow. Not that I think she killed anyone. But the police do. Maybe they’re going to give her the electric chair. Do they have the electric chair in Massachusetts? Maybe it’s all lethal injection now. I don’t like lethal injection. It lacks drama. It lacks everything, really. People go to be witnesses at executions, but with lethal injection there isn’t anything they can see that they wouldn’t be able to see anytime. The electric chair would be better. People would jump.”
Jack wanted to put the styrofoam cup back on the table, but he didn’t know how to do it. He was suddenly infinitely, inconsolably depressed. He had no idea why Kendra had come into this room, or why she would have been going back to the Point on the back streets she would have had to use to end up at the hospital, but he did know that she had done none of those things out of a desire to see him. It should have been enough that she still recognized him, but it wasn’t. And that was in spite of the fact that he knew she was perfectly capable of treating people as if they had never existed, even after she’d known them for years.