“Or he with her?”
“Right. Craig was E. L.’s twin in a lot of ways, and Nancy is a pretty little girl, or was, anyway. They’re both probably fighting to make sense of events and attitudes they haven’t handled all that well by themselves.”
“Nancy was doing all right, wasn’t she?”
“Until Craig contacted her again.”
“Do you think they’ve been following RuthClaire and Adam around, waiting for an opportunity like tonight’s?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then tonight had to be a dream-come-true for your… well, your Puddicombe Conspiracy. Everything fell into place. Nancy was able to walk off with Paulie as easily as a kid steals an apple from a produce bin. Doesn’t that strike you as—” she hunched her shoulders, shivering in recollection— “weird?”
“But everything didn’t fall into place. Bilker came along. You and I came along. They had to make some of their own luck, and they did that. Nancy’s costume, her choice of the balloon handout as the best time to approach us, their goddamn perfect getaway.” I took a quick glance at Caroline. “What are you trying to imply? That there’s something fishy about this business?”
“Paul, please don’t take this wrong—”
“God save me, take what wrong?”
“I don’t know RuthClaire. I don’t know Adam. For that matter, I really don’t know you. It crossed my mind—just briefly—that this might be a, you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and David Blau’s gallery.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Look, Paul, I know it’s backasswards and egotistical, but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of.”
“Sport of? What do you mean, sport of?”
“Not after the police arrived. And not really before, either, but nothing that happened at the club seemed real. I felt like an outsider, someone not getting the joke.”
“What cynicism! Five minutes ago you were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the same evening my godson gets abducted!”
“Paul, I was confessing a doubt I had, not leveling an accusation. You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”
I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned RuthClaire and Adam’s integrity as artists and parents? I thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket and slipped it under my tongue.
“Take me home, Paul. You don’t need me at the hospital. Adam doesn’t need me there, either. I’m sorry this has happened—deeply, deeply sorry.”
I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton, not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had wounded me by taking potshots at my friends. I had wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness and vanity.
Caroline’s apartment building had pinkish stucco walls, gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before I could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the evening.”
“Oh.”
“Parts of it, I did.” She slammed the door and hiked up her walk like a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I waited until she was safely inside before giving a salute and driving wistfully away.
“He’s awake,” the nurse on Adam’s floor said when I showed up at the hospital to fulfill my role as Evil Messenger. “He doesn’t sleep that much anyway, but after Mrs. Montaraz called to tell us you were coming, I went to see if he needed to be awakened. He didn’t.” A middle-aged woman with strong features and eyes like indigo marbles, the nurse tilted her head. “Is there anything I can do, Mr. Loyd?”
“Make sure we’re not disturbed for a while.”
The nurse could not contain herself. “What’s wrong?”
“If RuthClaire didn’t tell you when she called, then I can’t tell you.” My words came out, unintentionally, like a reprimand. I patted the woman’s shoulder to soften their impact. Then I walked down the long, antiseptic corridor.
Adam was sitting up in bed in the dark. He had two pillows behind him, and his legs were crossed beneath his sheet in the lotus position of an Oriental contemplative. The IV bottle beside him, its tube running to his wrist like a life-giving amber fuse, glinted eerily in the darkness. The bandages on his lower face gave him the look of an unfinished plaster-of-Paris bust. He sat remarkably still, and I felt as I had felt as a small boy, approaching my father after some terrible disobedience. I did not reach for the light switch—maybe for reasons of self-concealment. I stood in the doorway letting my eyes adjust and noticing with what stoic endurance Adam’s own eyes tried to allay my fears. Somehow, he had sensed them, like a faint but acrid odor. Don’t quail from necessity, his eyes said. Come sit down.
I crossed the room and sat down in the chair that RuthClaire ordinarily used. But I must have appeared ready to bolt, for Adam lifted the arm attached to the IV tube and gently patted me, as I had patted the nurse.
Go ahead, he was telling me: Be as brutal as your news demands.
“RuthClaire would have come to tell you this, Adam, but circumstances don’t allow. I’m her emissary. I’m here to tell you what nobody—not even your own wife—could tell you easily.”
Adam made a series of signs that somehow permitted me to interpret them.
“No one’s died. So far as we know. Tiny Paul’s been taken.” And I told him in detail what had happened at Sinusoid Disturbances and afterward, including the police’s conviction that we would soon receive a ransom demand and my own speculations about the identities of the kidnappers. At the moment, though, everyone was walking gingerly across a rope bridge over a chasm of indeterminate depth. We would not be able to see how far it was to the bottom until Craig Puddicombe or Nancy Teavers called. Lamely, I concluded, “All we can do is wait.”
Adam pulled the IV tube free of the plastic connector in his wrist and lifted himself up high enough to hook the tube over its pole. There, it ceased to drip. My friend wore one of those hospital gowns with the split up the rear, a design feature of curious motivation. Was the split to make it easier for orderlies to administer enemas, or was it a sartorial aid to patients frequently victimized by sudden diarrhea attacks? These seemed mutually exclusive goals, but the gowns were an immemorial hospital humiliation. Adam managed to wear his without looking totally ridiculous (maybe because nudity held no terror for him), but when he hopped nimbly down from his bed in the garment, I found myself glancing around the room in search of a safety pin with which to close up the vent in back. At Sinusoid Disturbances, I would have had no trouble finding one.
“Adam, what are you doing?”
He brushed past me to the sink and mounted a stair-step stool allowing access to his image in the mirror. His hairy buttocks peeked through the split, and the backs of his thighs tightened and relaxed as he raised and lowered himself on tiptoes. I then realized he was undoing the gauzy cerements binding the lower half of his face.
“Adam!”
He shot me a warning look and resumed unpackaging his jaw. He had already dropped the foam-rubber cup for his chin into the sink. Only the light spilling in from the corridor enabled him to work, but he was peeling off layer after layer with an alacrity that suggested he knew his business. Had he practiced for a moment such as this? It hardly seemed likely, but how else account for the knowledgeable speed of his fingers?
I whispered, “Adam, there’s nothing any of us can do until they call.”