“The night my wife died, she screamed,” Gregor said, wondering where the words had come from as soon as he’d said them, feeling the words like hailstones floating around his head, clogging up the air. “They wanted to give her this shot, this medicine, that didn’t really do any good but it was on their manifest, they were afraid I was going to sue them if they couldn’t prove they’d done everything possible, so you see it was my fault. That she screamed. That she was in pain. If they hadn’t been so worried about me they would have listened to her.”
Bennis Hannaford got out a cigarette and lit up. Gregor hadn’t seen her smoke in a week. “Jesus Christ,” she said.
“She was so thin at the end, her skin looked like paper,” Gregor said. “I think I’m going back upstairs to my own apartment. I think I’m going to pour myself a stiff drink.”
“You can’t possibly think it was really your fault,” Bennis said, “that they gave her medication. That she was in pain. You aren’t responsible for cancer. Doctors aren’t all that easily intimidated. For God’s sake. This is crazy.”
“I think I’m going back upstairs to my own apartment,” Gregor repeated, and he stood up. He spent half his life these days in Bennis Hannaford’s kitchen, but at the moment it didn’t look familiar. The thin stream of her cigarette smoke was curling like a ribbon through the latticework of the light fixture that hung from her ceiling. Gregor Demarkian was a big man—six foot four and over two hundred fifty pounds—and he felt suddenly bigger than ever, huge and awkward, poured from lead.
“Maybe I’d better go upstairs with you,” Bennis said.
Gregor turned away from her without answering. It was a million miles from the kitchen table to the kitchen door. It was three million miles from the kitchen door across the foyer to the door to the hall. He had a sudden vision of himself standing in the cemetery on the other side of Philadelphia, putting Elizabeth to rest in the earth next to his own mother. It was raining and a stiff cold wind was coming out of nowhere. There was a tarpaulin spread across the hole in the ground where they were going to put Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s casket was covered with white carnations. The cemetery was empty except for himself and the undertaker’s men and the Armenian priest whose name he had picked out of the phone book. He was still with the Federal Bureau of Investigation then and living in Washington. He had lost contact with the people he had known in Philadelphia years before. The cemetery that day had felt as empty as the inside of his head and the hollow of his chest. Elizabeth was gone and there was nothing left of him.
He had no memory of leaving Bennis Hannaford’s apartment. He had no idea how he got from her kitchen to her front door, or up the stairway to his own front door, or into his apartment. He came to sitting on the floor in his own bedroom, his hands deep into the bottom drawer of his bureau. Seconds later he came out with what he was looking for: his wedding album and the two thick albums of snapshots Elizabeth had used to keep her pictures of their vacations together. The plastic felt tense and wet and hot under his fingers, like something dangerous and alive. He pressed his forehead against the front of the bureau and closed his eyes. He remembered how, when he had first moved into this apartment, he had thought he could hear Elizabeth talking to him in the kitchen. Her voice would come out to him from the neat stacks of stoneware dishes in his cupboards and the tall bottle of milk in his otherwise empty refrigerator. The sound of her would follow him into his living room and down the hall to his bedroom. When he fell asleep, he would hear her singing lullabies. He didn’t remember when she had disappeared, but she had. He had become involved in Cavanaugh Street and the people who lived on it. He had found work to do as a consultant to police departments in homicide cases and books he wanted to read and political candidates he wanted to support and movies he was willing to see on the nights Bennis Hannaford couldn’t stand looking at the walls of her living room anymore. He had found a million things to fill up his life with, and now Elizabeth was gone.
Elizabeth died of uterine cancer four and a half years ago, he told himself. It was sticky hot outside, but he was cold. He counted to ten and took a deep breath and counted to ten again. His muscles were twitching just under the surface of his skin. I could sit here forever, he thought—and the thought scared the hell out of him.
The phone rang. He had the ringer in the bedroom turned up loud in case somebody needed to wake him. The shrill, long sound made him jump. He leaned back and took the receiver off the base of the phone, where it lay next to the lamp on his night table. He expected to hear Bennis or someone she had called, worried about what kind of shape he was in. Instead, he got John Henry Newman Jackman, the head of homicide detectives for the Philadelphia Police Department and, according to Bennis and Donna Moradanyan, the single most beautiful male human being on earth.