"I had to make arrangements. I couldn't wait-"
"— for me to attend my own daughter's funeral?"
Renee jabbed at the television remote and muted the sound. Jacob watched the silent interview guest fighting her hem line. The woman's knees were a little too knobby for his taste. Back when he had taste, that was. He turned his attention to the fly in the syrup.
Wasn't there a saying about the fly in the ointment? Dr. Masutu's tranquilizer worked miracles, freed his mind to explore the foolish. Jacob had stopped fighting, and the injections had been replaced with twice-daily pills. Diazepam. The quicker-picker-upper.
Or the easier-to-forgetter.
Or the don't-give-a-damner.
"Jake, we're going to have to talk about it."
"There's nothing left to talk about."
"There's plenty."
"There's nothing. It's all gone."
"No. There's still us."
"There's no more 'us.' There's just you and me. Or maybe just you."
"Don't talk like that. You've always despised failure. That's not the Wells way."
"I've had a lot of time to think. Hospitals are good for that, maybe even better than prisons." Jacob pulled the straw from his milk carton and poked it into the syrup near the fly. The fly's wings beat frantically.
"I know this is terrible. But maybe we can get through it together. Start over."
"The way we did after Christine? You saw how that one turned out."
Renee finally sat, in the oak and mauve vinyl chair near the window. The sun had grown a shade more yellow outside, rising above the fog that hazed the horizon. In the old world, the happy distant past, Jacob would be at his desk at the M amp; W office, talking on the phone, cutting deals, lining up subcontractors. Or else out on the job site, looking at blueprints as a bulldozer ripped brown gashes in the mountainside.
Developing.
That was an interesting word, with several connotations. Developers made things happen. But development was also the term for a baby's trek through the cycle, from microscopic fertilized egg to alien peanut creature to bawling, squealing reality.
"Funny, isn't it?" he said. "The kids were born in this hospital."
"That's not so funny."
"Think about it. They took their first breaths from this very same air. The same sick air." He waved the hand that held the straw and the fly finally broke free and arced across the room like a crippled bomber returning from a death run.
The door swung open. A nurse came in, a male with a sour expression and two days of stubble. He stared at Renee as if she were the patient, then wiped his palms against his hospital blues and slipped on rubber gloves. He squeezed ointment from a tube and rubbed it softly into the skin of Jacob's arms.
"You're looking good, my man," the nurse said. His ID nameplate read "Steve Poccora" and his picture beneath it was clean-shaven and smiling. The smile looked as if it had been computer-generated in a photo manipulation program.
"The doctor says I'm getting better every minute," Jacob said.
"Aren't we all?" Poccora said. Then, to Renee, "We'll have him home to you in no time."
"No hurry," Renee said.
Poccora started to grin at the joke, sensed the coldness in the room for the first time, then rubbed the ointment faster. Jacob barely felt the contact. The skin had roughened and much of the damaged layer had sloughed off. He was new in a way, pink as a baby, slick as a snake after molting.
If only he could shed his soul as easily. He'd read that the body completely remade itself every seven years as cells died and were replaced. That meant he'd been a different man when Mattie was born. A better man.
Less like Joshua.
"How's the appetite?" the nurse asked.
"Crazy," Jacob said. "Renee smuggled me in two buckets of the Colonel's finest."
"That's why you didn't like the cafeteria grub." Steve Poccora moved the rolling table with the food tray to the corner of the room. "You didn't touch it. Figured you'd be used to it by now."
" Mez compliments au chef," Jacob said in mutilated French.
The nurse took his blood pressure and pulse, wrote numbers on a chart. "Your diastolic's a little high, but nothing to be worried about."
"Do I look like I'm worried?" Jacob asked.
"He's not the worrying type," Renee said. "I do that for both of us."
Poccora looked from one to the other, as if deciding not to be the birdie in their badminton game. "Yell if you need anything."
"'Scream' is more likely." On the television, the talk show host had a parrot perched on his shoulder. The bird's trainer stood nearby, holding up a snack food. The host looked nervous, as if he feared an embarrassing episode involving droppings. The bird gave a soundless squawk, warming up for a ribald wisecrack.
Poccora picked up the food tray. "I hate parrots," he said, looking at the television. "They always get to cut you down, but you can't make a snappy comeback. They're too dumb to get it. Like talking to a ventriloquist's dummy."
"The worst ones are the dummies who look just like the ventriloquist," Jacob said. "They let their evil side out."
"Hey, you try being nice when some guy has his hand shoved up your rectum," Poccora said.
"They call that a 'prostate exam.'"
The nurse started to laugh, then gave up. He walked between them with the food tray, paused at the door. "You sure you don't want any of these pancakes?"
Jacob looked around the room for the fly. "No, Steve. They're all yours."
Steve dipped a finger into the syrup and pretended to lick it. "Hate to see good food go to waste. But this is no good. I know the infections that go through this place."
He left, and the forced humor shifted back to unbearable tension.
"Where do we start?" Renee asked after twenty seconds of silence.
"Please. You're starting to sound like my old shrinks." He fumbled for the remote, wanting to punch up the volume.
"Let's start at the beginning, then."
"The beginning. My first big mistake."
"Jake, don't do this."
"You're the one who wants it to be over. Isn't that what you've wanted all along? It's just pathetic that you needed this kind of excuse to get your nerve up." The tears were hot in his eyes, burning with the memory of the fire and all the rest of it.
His thumb pressed the volume button. Renee moved forward with angry speed and slapped the remote from his hand. He stared at the silent television as its colors blurred in his watery vision.
"Talk to me, you bastard," she said.
His throat was tight, rasped raw from the ventilator tube that had been stuffed into his lungs. He tried to convince himself that the fire had damaged him, taken the soft words from his tongue, leaving a handful of ash in the cavity where his heart used to beat. Part of him wished he had died in the fire. Part of him had died in the fire. But not the right part, the half that needed killing.
Renee's breath was on his cheek, but he was miles away, in the dark, searching for that cool grotto that the drugs carved in the stony recesses of his skull.
"You can't keep your eyes closed forever."
"Long enough."
"That won't make it go away. We've got to deal with it. You can't crawl into your shell and pretend it never happened."
"Take the money. It doesn't matter."
"Donald called me. He wanted to know when you'll be ready to go back to work." "I'm through." And he was. M amp; W Ventures, Inc., had built ten apartment complexes, a half-dozen subdivisions, three shopping centers, the country club, and a pair of chain motels. That qualified as a life's work, didn't it? Even for the son of Warren Wells. Maybe Donald Meekins could take the oversize prop scissors they used for ceremonial ribbon cuttings and snip the W off the corporation's name.
Jacob had made his mark on the world. A reputation you could take to the bank. Something you could use for collateral.