“Who’s the singer?” Karp asked.
“Laurie Anderson,” said Lucy shortly, not looking up.
“She’s not exactly singing, is she? Not the kind of thing you can dance to.”
“I like it. I like the words.” Silence afterward.
“Put the book down, Lucy,” said Karp after a minute of waiting. “We need to talk.”
She huffed and snapped it down on the bed, and sat up against the wall, looking at him with that angry, bored expression every parent of an adolescent dreads to see. She had scrubbed her face and pulled her hair back severely and had changed into baggy black shorts and a white T-shirt printed with the photograph of a professorial-looking man with bushy hair, underneath which was the text colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
“Your mom’s in jail again,” he said, thinking once more that this was not a sentence he had ever imagined speaking in former years.
“What did she do?”
“Allegedly shot a couple of gangsters trying to bust into the shelter and grab some woman.”
“She kill them?”
“No, as a matter of fact, she did not. As I understand it, she waded into a hail of bullets, disabled the two bad guys with four shots, and got punched out in the scuffle when the cops got there. A pretty heroic deed, it seems. Uncle Harry’s down with her to help get her through and bail her out. She should be home later tonight.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thank you for your concern,” said Karp, and was immediately ashamed of the sarcasm. Sarcasm had been a major tool in his own upbringing, and he had resolved never to use it with his own children. It was worry, and tension, and suppressed anger, he supposed. He went and sat down next to her on the bed and placed an arm over her thin shoulders. She was stiff as a tailor’s dummy. The Laurie Anderson tape came to an end. Off in the loft they could hear the sound of the TV and the ringing of the phone.
“Lucy, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“You’re not fine. You were kidnapped and beat up today. It’s okay to feel a little stunned. Maybe a couple of days at home will do you some good. It shouldn’t take longer than that to pick up those guys.” No response. He said, “Have you thought of anything else you’d like to tell me?”
“No,” said Lucy, and then the door to her room burst open and there was Posie, looking distraught. “Butch! Harry Bello’s on the phone, he says it’s an emergency.”
So it had been. Harry was calling from Beth Israel Hospital. Something was wrong with Marlene’s brain, which Karp already knew, but this was different, she was in surgery. This announced, shrieks and wails from Posie, sympathetic crying from the two boys, from Lucy, to Karp’s surprise and bemused relief, a cool efficiency. The girl got Posie on an even keel again, comforted the babes, organized cocoa and cookies, dialed the TV to an anodyne program involving space creatures. Karp grabbed his wallet and a jacket, made a call, and headed for the door. Lucy had her sneakers on and joined him.
“I’m coming,” she announced.
“You’re sure you’re up for this, Luce?”
“She’s my mother.” Looking down at her, Karp saw this fact reflected in the set of her pale little face and the look in her yellow-brown eyes. He grasped her hand, and they walked out together.
They went uptown in an unmarked, siren and lights. Harry met them at the neuro ward. Still in, no news.
“How long has he been here?” asked Karp.
Harry looked over at the corner of the waiting room, where Tran sat, motionless in a green plastic chair.
“About ten minutes after we got in. How did he find out? You got me. He hasn’t moved, hasn’t gone out for a smoke, and I know the little fucker smokes like a chimney.” Harry shook his head and did a sort of shuddering shrug, expressing a desire that such things not be: Italian mommies shooting and getting kicked in the head by Mafiosi and being friends with weird Asian bad guys. As he did this, his goddaughter (and that was another incomprehensible thing!) sat down in a plastic chair as far as the room allowed from Tran. Harry and Karp exchanged a glance and afterward looked elsewhere.
Something over an hour later, a small sandy man in green surgical scrubs came into the waiting room and asked for Mr. Ciampi and was surprised when three men and a girl leaped up. When he had got everyone sorted out, the surgeon, a Dr. Nagel, informed them all that Ms. Ciampi was in recovery, that the procedure had gone routinely well, and they could visit with her in about a half hour. He was under the impression that this was a sufficient interaction with the family and was about to toddle off when Karp and Bello both apprised him forcefully of the need to render more information, after which both of them shot questions at him as only a pair of consummately skilled questioners could. So they chatted about transient ischemic episodes and subdural hematomas for some time, the two men standing uncomfortably close, and when they got to the part about possible linguistic impairment, Dr. Nagel was startled to find that the skinny little girl was very nearly as well informed about the neurological basis of speech as he himself was, and he was extremely grateful that the surgery had been a fast drill and drain job and that the woman seemed to be perfectly healthy, because he would not have wanted to explain away any of neurosurgery’s innumerable possible fuck-ups to this gang, no, not at all.
Lucy was shocked at how her mother looked when they rolled her into the room. They had cut off her hair and wrapped a turban of bandages around her head, and the big, nasty bruises around her mouth added nothing to her allure. Lucy had in her darkest, most secret, never-to-be-confessed thoughts occasionally wished for her mother not to be so damned gorgeous, and now here it was (if only temporarily), and the eruption of guilt and shame it occasioned overwhelmed the child and she gave a piteous wail and ran from the room. Tran hesitated a moment and then followed in her wake.
Karp cursed softly and pulled a chair up next to Marlene’s bedside.
“How are you?”
She gave the inevitable reply, a slurred “Honey, I forgot to duck,” and then asked, “What’s with the kid?”
“She had a rough day. She’ll be okay.”
“I look like hell, huh?”
“Heaven,” he said. Behind him Harry Bello murmured, “Take care, Marlene. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“Thanks, Harry.”
“You’re covered on this; the firm will take care of everything,” he said, and left.
“That’s a relief,” she said. She grasped her husband’s hand, hard. “I can’t remember anything after I talked to you, about Lucy, except a little at the cells there, with Harry. I knew something was wrong with my brain, but I didn’t know how to say it. I couldn’t find the words. Would you still love me if I couldn’t talk?”
“Somewhat more, maybe,” he said, and got a smile. “We have to stop meeting in hospital rooms, Marlene. Marlene?” She had drifted off, the smile still in place. He stayed there, holding her hand, also unable to find the words.
Lucy, meanwhile, had run through a teary blur to an exit door, gone down a flight, and collapsed on a stair, sobbing, her face against the unyielding cold steel of the railing.
“I want to die,” she cried, in French, as soon as Tran was seated next to her.
“Yes, I know the feeling,” he said, “and yet remarkably, at the times I most wanted death-I was presented with the opportunity to die in a very large number of convenient and glorious ways-I never took them. Also, I observed that death came to people who very much wished to live. So after that I was impressed with the idea that my life might have an interesting purpose, after all, not one I might ever have thought of either. This seemed enough reason to go on, until death should make up its mind to take me.”
Lucy snuffled, received one of Tran’s infinite supply of clean hankies, blew, asked croakingly, “What was the purpose?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe it is you. Perhaps I am to teach you how to manage your gifts. Perhaps the fates that gave them to you, in a moment of hilarity, decided that a horrible old Asiatic person would be just the one to make sure you became the sort of woman who could put them to good use.”