A sharp, sweet smell was in the air. Rune didn't know whether it was disinfectant or medicine or the smell of illness and death. She didn't like it; she hated hospitals.
"Where's your mom?" Rune asked Claire.
"At her hotel," the girl said. "She was with me all night. That's something about mothers, huh? Abuse 'em all you want and they keep coming back for more."
Courtney clumsily set a paper bag on the bed. "I got this for you."
One-handed, Claire shook it open. Out fell a stuffed dinosaur. Courtney made it walk across the bed. "Rune helped me buy it," her daughter told her.
"How'd I guess?" Claire examined the plush face with serious scrutiny. "He's like sensitive and ferocious at the same time. You can really pick them."
Rune nodded absently. "It's a talent."
Fight it. Fight it down…
Claire didn't look good. She could sit up okay, with some help, but otherwise she was pretty immobile. Her skin was paler than Rune had ever seen it (and Claire was somebody who went as a vampire on Halloween the year before and hadn't bothered with a costume).
"I won't see in my left eye," she announced matter-of-factly. "Ever again."
Rune looked her straight in the good one and was about to offer something sympathetic when Claire moved on to another subject. "I got this job. At a department store. It's kinda bullshit. I have a couple bosses and they're like, 'Well, we'll try you out,' And I'm like, 'What's to try?' It's not, like, the best thing in the world but it's working out okay. Like listen to this – I've got health insurance? I got it just before I left to come down here. Man, they're going to get some friggin' bill."
This room was better than the Intensive Care Unit where she'd been for a few days. From here Claire had a view of rolling Jersey hills and the Hudson and, closer to home, one of Rune's favorite hangouts: the White Horse Tavern, the poet Dylan Thomas's hangout, where Rune had spent a number of afternoons and evenings with a literary and artistic crowd.
Hospitals were pretty icky but here at least you got a view and sunlight and history.
Claire was talking about her mother's house in Boston and how weird it was that nobody in the neighborhood wore black leather or had shaved heads and how she hadn't met any musicians or short-story writers but the one guy she met who she liked was a salesman. Wasn't that the craziest thing you ever heard?
"Crazy."
Rune nodded and tried to listen. The muscles in her abdomen clenched against the crawly feeling, like she was possessed by a space creature that was getting ready to burst out of her. Fight it down… Fight it!
Then Claire was into a travelogue, telling Rune and Courtney about Boston – Faneuil Hall and Cambridge and Chinatown and the lofts and antique stores around South Street Station. "There's this one really, really neat place. It sells old bathtubs that must be three feet deep."
Rune nodded politely, and a couple times said, "Wow, that's interesting," in an uninterested way, which Claire seemed to take as encouragement to keep rambling. Rune found she was holding Courtney's hand tightly. The little girl squirmed.
Fight it…
Rune didn't say much about Boggs or Maisel or theCurrent Events story. Just the bare bones. Claire must have known Rune was the reason she'd been shot and Rune wanted to steer clear of that. Not that she was racked with guilt – you could also say that Claire got hurt because she'd abandoned her daughter. But that got into the way gods or fate or nature worked and if you started thinking too much about cause and effect, Rune knew, it'd drive you nuts.
There was silence for a minute. Then Rune said, "I bought Court a new dress." Nodding at the little girl.
"Look, Mommy."
Claire twisted her body as far as she could so the unbandaged eye got a good look at the dress, and the way the young woman's damaged face blossomed with love as she looked at her little girl clearly answered the single scorching question that had been consuming Rune since Claire had returned.
When she considered it now, of course, she realized there really had never been any chance that Courtney could stay with her and she was mad at herself for hoping things might turn out otherwise. After all, she'd readThe Snow Princess. She knew how it ended. This business about fairy stories having happy endings -that was bullshit. Sometimes people melt. People go away. People die. And we're left with the stories and the memories, which, if we're lucky, will be good stories and good memories and then we get on with our life.
Claire was reaching forward, awkwardly, across the bed with her good arm, saying, "Did you miss me, honey?"
"Uh-huh." Courtney let go of Rune's hand and tried to climb onto the bed. Rune boosted her up.
Rune said, "So you're going back to Boston, huh? The two of you?"
Claire said, "Yeah, like, we'll live at my mom's until I can get some money saved up but apartments are cheap there. It shouldn't take me much time."
Fight it…
Rune swallowed. "You want, I can keep Courtney with me until you get settled. We're pretty good buddies, huh?"
The little girl was playing with the dinosaur and didn' t hear what Rune said. Or didn't want to. In any case she didn't answer. Claire shook her head. "I kind of want her with me. You know how it is."
"Sure."
"Look, Rune, I never said it but I like really, really appreciate what you did. It was a pretty bad thing, just leaving like that. A lot of people wouldn't have done what you did."
"True, they wouldn't," Rune said.
"I owe you."
"Yeah, you do. You owe me."
"The doctor says I can be transferred to Boston in a couple of days. And, guess what?"
Rune's face burned. "A couple of days?"
"I'm gonna take an ambulance, like, the whole way. Is that cool, or what? My mom's paying for it."
And with that Rune realized it was no good fighting it anymore. She'd lost. She took a deep breath and said, "Well, ciao, you guys."
"Aw, come on," Claire said, "stay for a while. Check out the doctors. There's this cute one. Curly hair you won't believe."
Rune shook her head and started for the door.
"Rune," Courtney said suddenly. "Can we go to the zoo?"
Pausing to hug the girl briefly, she managed, somehow, to keep her voice steady and to hold back the tears for the time it took her to say, "Before you leave, honey, we'll go to the zoo. I promise."
Rune remained steady and calm for the few seconds it took her to say this and walk out the door.
But not an instant longer. And as Rune walked down the corridor toward the exit the tears streamed fast and the quiet sobbing stole her breath as if she were being swept away, drowning and numb, in a torrent of melting snow.
"Look at this. Like a damn dragon burned me out."
Piper Sutton looked at her. "You and your dragons."
They stood on the pier, where the glistening, scorched hull of the houseboat floated, hardly bobbing, in the oily water of the Hudson.
Rune bent down and picked up a soggy dress. She examined the cloth. The collar was a little scorched but she might be able to cover it up with paint. She thought about the lawyer, Fred Megler, an expert at repairing clothes with pens.
But she sniffed the dress, shrugged and threw it into the discard pile, which looked like a small volcano of trash. Both the fire and the water from the NYFD had taken their toll. On the deck was a pile of books, pots and pans, some half-melted running shoes, drinking glasses. Nothing real valuable had survived, only the Motorola TV and the wrought-iron frames of the butterfly chairs.
"The 1950s were indestructible," Rune said, nodding at the frames. "Must've been one hell of a decade."
It was a stunningly gorgeous Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of three-dimensional blue and the sun felt as hot as a lightbulb. Piper Sutton sat on a piling she'd covered with a scrap of blue cloth -one of Rune's work shirts – before she'd lowered her black-suede-encased thighs onto the splintery wood.