The woman looked up at the window and her mouth moved. Eve strained to hear, pushing her forehead against the window pane but the voice was too faint. The woman spoke again, moving her lips very deliberately, and Eve read, “Watch out.”
Eve gasped, jerked her head sideways, and banged it against the window frame.
“Eve!” Joe Rubin cried. He was holding a Dixie cup in one hand and a bottle of Glenfiddich in the other.
She staggered; he slammed the cup and bottle on the desk, ran to her, and helped her back in the chair.
She sank into it, put her head against his shoulder, and smelled his piney aftershave and the starch in his white coat.
“Evie...”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It really is. I just... I guess I’m a little shocked.”
Joe picked up the Dixie cup and handed it to her. Everyone was feeding her liquor lately; if they kept it up she’d be an alkie before her seventh month.
“And why’re you shocked?” Joe asked gently. “What’d you think would happen if you screwed without protection?”
“I guess I didn’t think.”
“Eve, you’re not going...”
“To have an abortion? Not if everything’s okay.”
But maybe everything wasn’t okay, maybe that’s what the woman in the vision (a great-great-great grandmother, a long-gone Tilden matriarch and victim of “the thing”) had meant by watch out. She gulped the scotch, which was smokey and smooth and went down like liquid silk. “That’s your last drink,” Joe Rubin said. “Except for a glass of something at Sunday dinner—one glass, once a week. I’ll give you some vitamins, and take Tylenol if you get a headache. You shouldn’t swallow a lot of crap when you’re pregnant. How’s your tolerance for iron?”
It was after three when she left the office. The street was just a street with asphalt, not tanbark, and the elms were the struggling scraggly ones she was used to. The sun glinted off the chrome on the cars at the curb and she wondered if small towns in Germany had as many Mercedes and Beamers as they had in Bridgeton.
She looked across at the spot where she’d seen the woman under the fine old long-dead elm trees and thought, “Watch out for what, Granny?”
A man passing gave her a startled look and she realized she’d said it out loud.
At that moment, Max Jergens turned over the last page of Riley’s piece and looked up at him. It was hot for early May; sun coming though the dirty window bleached the dingy gray walls to a soft, almost pretty color.
“Wolfman,” Jergens said almost reverently. “Jesus, that’s good, Jimmy. That’s terrific. The Wolfman... how’d you ever think of it?”
“It’s an old movie,” Riley said, then imitated Maria Ouspen-skaya’s crackling old voice. “‘Eeffen de man who iss pure in heart and saysss hiss prayers by night, may become a volf ven de Volfbane bloomz...’”
“What the fuck’s volfbane?”
“It’s wolfsbane, actually, a member of the aconitum family. I looked it up.”
“Oh. Well, can it, most people won’t know what you’re talking about.”
Riley shrugged and Jergens said, “The rest’s good, only... only...” He looked down at his hand curled on top of the computer paper. “Only...”
“Only what?”
Jergens hated saying anything unpleasant, one of the reasons the Register was the vanilla rag it was, Riley thought.
“Only it’s... well... it’s fluff, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, but it’s fun fluff for a change. It’s May, and we’ve already printed sixteen recipes tor rhubarb pie, with and without strawberries; twenty-five descriptions of spring-fling dances and coming-out parties; and fifty pieces on garden shows. At least this is good down-and-dirty fluff.”
“Yeah, it’s got it all, doesn’t it?” Jergens turned the pages over, title up: The Cop, the Clairvoyant, and the Wolfman. “Everyone loves murder and creepy-crawlies and dumb cops.”
“He’s not a dumb cop.”
“No? He consults a psychic in the middle of a serial murder investigation? What would you call him?”
“Desperate.”
“And what’s this desperate cop’s name, Jimbo? And the psychic’s?”
“And the Wolfman’s?”
“Don’t get nasty. How do we do a story like this without names?”
“The woman’s rich. I mean a few hundred million worth of rich, with probably forty lawyers on retainer. I use her name and you might as well lock the front door for good. The cop... the cop...”
U mon.
“The cop’s a good cop; what he did was dumb and I expected better of him, but he’s still a good cop and I don’t want to hurt him.”
“It better not be Lem Meers. I know he comes off like a retarded Abe Lincoln but he’s the last man on earth you want to fuck with. And that Polack who shills for him is the second last—” Jergens stopped, then laughed. “Fair-skinned Irishmen can’t hide shit, Jimmy; you look like a stoplight. It’s him, isn’t it? The Polack.”
“I’m not saying, and if naming whoever is the only way this sees light...”
He reached for the stack of papers. Jergens slammed his hand down on it and passed Riley’s death sentence by saying, “Leave us not be hasty—you don’t want names, we don’t print names.”
11
“It’ll be bad, won’t it?” Ellen Baines asked Adam. She meant the chemotherapy and he knew she was praying for him to say, “Not bad at all, piece of cake.” But it would be bad, possibly horrible, depending on her reaction to the drugs, and he wanted her to be ready for it. Not terrified, but ready. So he told her, quietly and precisely so she’d know what to expect. It sounded as bad as it would probably be, but she didn’t moan or whine, didn’t interject any Oh Gods or why me’s or other crap most patients came up with. She just listened in silence, her head tilted a little to the side, and when he’d finished she asked the only question worth asking, at least to his mind.
“Is it worth it?”
“Yes.”
“Really worth it, Adam?”
He didn’t let his patients call him Doctor when he called them by their first names. If they wanted formality, he was Dr. Fuller, they were Mr., Miss, or Mrs. So-and-So, otherwise they called him Adam.
He said, “Let me put it this way, Ellen. I believe you will be trading a few miserable months for years of a normal, healthy life.”
“Years!” She sounded startled, and he smiled and took her hand, which was swollen and discolored from the IV.
“Years. Of course, you can walk out of here and get hit by a truck...”
Then she asked the question she’d have had to be a bald male not to ask. “Will I lose my hair? I’ve heard people lose their hair.”
They’d start the drug as soon as she’d recovered sufficiently from the surgery—two, maybe three weeks, he figured. In the meantime, he’d send her home to her husband; she’d see her kids and grandchildren and work in her garden.
Before he let go of her hand, on an impulse that didn’t come from any emotion he was aware of, he raised it briefly to his lips, then left her and went down to the cafeteria for lunch.
He got a boiled-looking hamburger from the steam table, added some limp cole slaw and a diet Coke, and looked for a table. The place was packed, but three interns were piling their dishes on the trays for the conveyor belt into the kitchen and he went to their table.