“I want to know what happened to me,” he said.
Kendra turned away from the window. “I think I can get out now, if I go out this end. They’re all over there. They don’t seem to be moving. Marcey’s such an ass. She’s always flashing around making an idiot of herself.”
“I want to know what happened to me,” Jack said again.
“I don’t know what happened to you,” Kendra said. “Maybe it will be on the news, and you can find out that way. There’s going to be something about me on the news in a day or two. You should watch for it. That is, if Marcey and Arrow haven’t done some other stupid stuff and everybody is watching that.”
Jack wanted to say that Kendra was always on the news. She was even on the real news, like CNN. Instead, he watched her check through her purse for he didn’t know what and then send him the kind of little smile and wave she gave to photographers when she wasn’t feeling antagonistic about being photographed. Then she was gone, out in the hallway, out of sight. He couldn’t even hear her footsteps walking away.
He was still lying in bed with the styrofoam cup in his left hand. The cup was still half full of ginger ale. He still couldn’t put it down.
This was a metaphor for something, and as soon as his head cleared up, he would figure out for what. At the moment, he was only angry, as angry as he had ever been in his life, the kind of angry that makes some people rise up like rockets and lay waste the landscape, and in no time at all he was actually sitting all the way up.
2
If Linda Beecham had stayed just five more minutes in Jack Bullard’s room, she would have seen Kendra Rhode coming in, but she didn’t. Instead, she left while there was nobody else there, and not much of anybody on the floor. She walked down the long empty hall to the elevators, looking into empty rooms to the right and left of her. She wondered why nobody in Oscartown ever seemed to be sick in the winter, and then reminded herself that most of the residents who really were residents probably lacked health insurance. Health insurance was one of those things she had been careful to provide for all her employees at the Home News. She even provided it for part-time people and the cleaning staff. It was one of the things she remembered best about the years of having no money at all, and one of the things she resented most. If the Home News had had a political ideology, it would have been solidly liberal in most ways, but it would have been downright socialist on the subject of health insurance. If Linda Beecham got to run the country, health care would be universal, government-provided, and without limits. It would be like the best of the policies afforded to multimillion-dollar-earning CEOs, but for everybody.
There was a lot of commotion on the ground floor at the front, and Linda stopped for a minute to watch it. There was an assault going on, against the emergency room. Linda recognized the signs of what she had come over the last few months to think of as “the barbarian hordes,” and she wondered which of the women they followed had managed to get herself into a state this time. There was too much of everything wandering around Oscartown these days. The film people brought in everything bad the summer people did, but they brought in more. They brought in this mania for public display. Linda thought there was something profoundly wrong with anybody who wanted to have her picture in the papers. Publicity meant exposure, and exposure turned you into a target. Linda knew all about being a target.
She stood on the pavement near the hospital’s front door, watching the door a few yards down where the emergency room was. She thought that if there was a real emergency anywhere on the island, the ambulance wouldn’t be able to get out of its stall to get to it, and wouldn’t be able to get up to the emergency room door to bring the patient in. She thought about Jack upstairs in that empty room on that empty corridor, the nurse by herself at the station, reading through a magazine, noticing nothing that was going on. Lately, it was brought home to her again and again just how uninhabited Margaret’s Harbor really was. They were all out here, wandering around on their own. What they had once stood for didn’t matter to anybody, and most of them couldn’t remember what it had been. There was a Fox News van jammed right up onto the sidewalk in front, and Linda suddenly realized that its presence so far up on the pavement made the emergency room’s sliding glass doors stay permanently open, in the middle of winter, with temperatures below freezing and heading to something dangerous the closer it got tonight. They had a different set of priorities, these people. They cared about things that were—
But Linda didn’t know what they were, and finally she turned away from the scene and began to make her way toward the center of town. Nobody was interested in her anyway. She wasn’t a recognizable face, and she was middle-aged and tired. These days you had to sparkle and shine to get noticed, and sometimes even that didn’t work.