He had not rinsed the washcloth well enough. The razor wasn’t put carefully on the back of the sink, but dropped on the small table among her make-up. He was a bad guest. The guest who brings flowers, then gets drunk and chews off the heads. When he left, and didn’t come back for two weeks, he had been such a coward that he had sent tulips. Then guilt caught up, and he began the weekend visits. Then his son shot his daughter. In between, there was life with his mother and Brandt, life with Nina, working with Nick, dealing with Metcalf. And then his son had shot his daughter.
Leaving Mary’s room, he went to the phone booth. He was about to call Nick, when he realized that he couldn’t remember what he wanted to talk to him about. He was standing there, dime in hand, trying to think, when Mrs. Patterson came toward him, carrying his raincoat.
“Thanks,” he said. “I knew I’d forgotten something.”
When she turned to go back to Mary’s room, he continued to stand by the phone, holding the raincoat. The weather. People called other people and talked about the weather. He would call Nick and talk about the weather, the thunder outside the hospital, and it would come to him why he had tried to reach him before.
Nick answered.
“It’s raining like hell here,” he said. He waited. He tried to think. He thought: I would have walked out into the rain and never remembered bringing my raincoat. Maybe I would have remembered. Gone back. He had tested himself a lot of times, and as little as he thought he could stand it, he was always able to walk into Mary’s room. Over and over.
“Do people die from guilt?” he said to Nick.
“No,” Nick said. “They die from being interrupted when they’re screwing, because some nut calls to talk about the weather. Call me back in half an hour.”
From his car in the parking lot, he looked back at the hospital. The thunder had stopped, and it was raining lightly. He counted fourteen windows up, and looked across to the window he thought might be Mary’s. It was just a dark square, high up.
Metcalf had heard about what happened somehow, and he had come into his office and sat down without saying anything, picked up the Nantucket picture from the desktop and studied it.
“What can I say?” Metcalf had said. “The truth is, everything shocks me. I couldn’t believe what happened between my wife and Jenny last summer. This summer, I can’t believe what’s happened to you. A man in the elevator this morning that I didn’t even know told me a joke about an eggman delivering eggs to a convent that shocked the hell out of me. What if I had been a Catholic? There are still Catholics, aren’t there?”
“What was the joke?” he said.
“Never mind what the joke was. It was filthy. You wouldn’t laugh at it. You probably need a laugh, though. I was going to come in and tell you some other joke, but I don’t have a joke in my head today.” He put the picture back in place. “I came in to offer to do anything, if there’s anything I can do. How’s your daughter?”
“She’s going to be all right.”
“Good.” Metcalf pushed himself up straight in the chair. “Anything I can do?”
“No. Thank you, though.”
“What could I do, huh? I could do something, but it wouldn’t have much to do with your daughter or her being—” Metcalf bent over, pulled up his pants leg, tugged his black sock higher. “Her being shot,” he said. He pulled down his pants leg. “I’m giving you a raise,” he said.
“You are? What kind of a raise?”
“Whatever raise you want,” Metcalf said, and got up and went out. “Be reasonable about it,” Metcalf called back, going down the hallway. He said something else that John didn’t catch.
Nina had made that crack about his not supporting her, about having to go to work because she didn’t have somebody to take care of her. What would she think, now, about the way he had taken care of Louise and his family? Did she still think that he would be a good father?
Louise had parked her car far down in the lot, and didn’t see him. He watched as Louise and Tiffy walked through the lot and across the one-lane road that separated the parking lot from the hospital. Tiffy was always with her, never even an arm’s-length away. They walked at the same pace, step for step. He watched their backs disappear through the tall glass doors, into the lobby of the hospital.
Driving away, he wondered what he would do with it if he were granted just one wish. He thought that the wish should be a selfish one, not a wish to change things for other people, but a wish for self-salvation, a wish that dared whatever force governed wishes to come through: that his family all disappear in a puff of smoke, and that he could start over again with Nina. That was two wishes, not one. Either the disappearance, or the starting over with Nina. As he drove, though, it came to him that he was now thinking about wish number three. What had numbers one and number two been? One and two and then a million more: for enough money not to have to work, for a perfect kiss, for rain to change to sun, sun to change to rain, a bee sting to stop itching, a photograph not to show the lines on his forehead, a ball to fly into his glove, to tag the runner in time, to find pesto in a New York restaurant in the winter, for his headache to go away, for the shell of the robin’s egg never to break. He had used up his wishes. So if it happened, it would just have to happen. There was no way he could wish for it
He wished for it. And that the car radio wouldn’t be full of static so he could hear music instead of his thoughts. And that the police not catch him for speeding. That he miss the frog hopping across the road. He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the frog, still hopping. Mary was alive. He was alive. The doctor was wrong: It wasn’t John Joel he identified with, but Mary. He was the victim, not the one who pulled the trigger. He certainly did not think that he had charge of his own life. As the doctor would have put it, he had the sense of reacting instead of acting.