Deadly Beloved(100)

“If I were you, I wouldn’t listen to all those stories about people who are in comas for years and years and don’t come out until their children have children,” Shelley Marie said. “In cases like this, it almost never happens like that.”

“And you’re doing the best possible thing you can do,” Clare said. “You’re staying with her. You’re talking to her. The theory is now that she can probably hear most of what you have to say. It keeps her mind from atrophying.”

“Minds don’t really atrophy,” Shelley Marie said. “That’s a myth, like alligators in the sewers.”

“I was just trying to tell him to keep it up,” Clare said. “He should go on talking to her the way he does, and visiting her. It’s good for her. It’s probably good for him too.”

“I know it is. But her mind won’t atrophy. It isn’t a muscle or that kind of thing.”

One of Evan’s professors at college was always saying that the mind was a muscle, but he wasn’t a professor of anatomy, so maybe it didn’t count. Evan put his half-filled coffee cup down on the desk. He didn’t want any more of it. He hated the taste of nondairy creamer. He hated the sight of the bride on the first page of the Glamour magazine article.

“I’d better get back to Karla,” he said. “Maybe it’s my mind that’s in danger of atrophying.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat when dinner comes around,” Shelley Marie said.

Evan let himself out of the nurses’ station office. He walked past four empty rooms and one with a heart patient in it before he came to Karla’s door. The policeman who had been put there to guard her in the hours after the explosion was gone now. Evan went in and sat down in the chair next to her bed.

Later, he would wonder how long it had taken him before he began to realize that everything had changed. It was hot in the room in spite of the air conditioners. He was looking at the windows that looked out on the grimness of this Philadelphia neighborhood, wondering if they could be opened at all, just to let in a little air. Then he began to feel a little strange and he looked down into Karla’s face.

And her eyes were open.

Her eyes were wide open.

They weren’t staring.

They weren’t dead.

They were simply open, and while he watched, they blinked.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Shh,” Karla told him, her voice so hoarse it was a croak, and barely audible. “Don’t tell anyone.”





THREE


1.


THE PRINTOUTS ARRIVED BY messenger at 6:45 A.M. John Jackman arrived at 7:02, just as Gregor was about to leave his apartment to go to the Ararat. The brownstone was already a mess of noise and confusion. With the wedding now no further away than Sunday, Gregor no longer had Donna’s decorations to trip over. He now had the actual preparations for the actual wedding to trip over. Donna Moradanyan’s mother had come in from the Main Line God only knew when. Gregor was only sure that she was there when the printouts arrived; she was standing on the fourth floor landing, calling out directions in a voice that was half Katharine Hepburn and half Willard Scott. Bolts of cloth and bits of netting were everywhere. As John Jackman stood on Gregor’s doorstep ringing his bell, a long ribbon of ice green floated down out of nowhere onto his head. Moments later Bennis Hannaford rushed downstairs, grabbed it off him, and rushed back upstairs again.

“Good morning, Bennis,” Jackman said.

Bennis didn’t even look at him. “I don’t have time to argue with you now,” she said. “The flower girl lost all the trim off her dress at the dry cleaner’s.”

Gregor wanted to ask what the flower girl’s dress was doing at the dry cleaner’s when the flower girl shouldn’t even have worn it yet, but instead he shifted his stack of computer printouts from one arm to the other and said, “Your material came. Are we going to breakfast?”

“What’s going on up there?” Jackman backed into a stairwell so that he could look up. There was a big bolt of white lace draped over the banister. Donna Moradanyan’s mother was talking through pins.

“The Jordan almonds,” she was saying. “Somebody has to remember the Jordan almonds.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jackman said. “They’re going to kill somebody.”

Gregor stepped onto the landing himself and closed his front door behind him. “Ararat,” he said firmly. “Work. If you get caught up in the kind of thing that goes on around here, you’ll never get anything done at all. Let’s move.”

“You can’t have had much of a chance to look over the material.” John Jackman was looking back up the stairwell again. Gregor wondered if Bennis was standing there. “Don’t you want to study it for a while?”