As she turned away, I turned to her folks. “Can you give us a few minutes?”
Her mom started to say, “Don’t get her — ”
“I know,” I said. “I won’t.”
When the door closed behind them, I walked straight over to the bed and gently turned Mindy to face me. I kissed her so desperately that I thought my heart might explode. The rest of the world fell away, and there seemed there was nothing between us. It had never been this way for us, not even when I was deep inside her and our bodies were in harmony. I’d never felt anything like it before and I doubted I ever would again. When I eased back, I saw that we were now both crying.
I said, “I love you.”
She blinked her eyes. I knelt by the side of the bed, resting my head on her thigh, her hands on my head. I stayed that way for a few moments until Mindy prodded me to look at her. When I looked up, she brushed my left cheek with the back of her hand. She put her other hand on my heart. No one needed to interpret that for me.
I asked, “Are you okay?”
She nodded yes and smiled. “S-s-oon,” she struggled to say.
“I know.”
Then the smile ran away from her face. “B-bob — B-bobby?”
My heart sank a little. After everything between us, I thought, it was Bobby whom she really cared about. I was right. For girls, it’s always about their firsts. When she saw the dejection on my face, Mindy slowly shook her head no and cupped my face in her hands. It was as if she had read my mind and was saying, “No, that wasn’t what I meant.” It was amazing what people could communicate to one another with only a very few words and gestures. She took her hands away from my face.
“B-bobby,” she repeated, balling her hands into fists and crashing them into each other.
Now I thought I understood. “You were right to warn me. Someone tried to run him over the day this happened to you, but he’s fine. You know Bobby, he’s always fine. He’ll live forever.”
She shook her head and the look of consternation on her face was profound. I knew that look. You grow up a Prager, believe me, you know that look.
“Danger!” The word exploded out of her like a cannon shot.
“Look, I’m good. I’m safe,” I lied, stroking her face to calm her. “I think I’ve sort of figured out some of what’s going on.”
Mindy’s eyes widened, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or curiosity. I opened my mouth to explain that I had tracked down Abdul Salaam, the man who’d put her in a coma in the first place, and that someone had already seen to it that he paid severely for what he’d done. I said nothing, reminding myself that she might not remember everything that had happened during the time surrounding her attack. I didn’t want to confuse her any more than she might already be.
“Relax, Min. It’s gonna be okay. I think I know what happened, some of it, anyway. No one’s gonna get away with anything.”
But instead of relaxing or comforting Mindy, that just seemed to set her off. She shook her head furiously and wagged a finger at me. She struggled to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. Her face bright red with frustration, she pounded her fists into the mattress. When I tried to hug her, she pushed me away. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I reached over and pressed the call button. Mindy was so caught up in her own world that she barely noticed.
If I’d expected to see her parents come rushing in, harsh judgment on their faces, I would have been wrong. Only Nurse Havemayer walked through the door.
“I’m not sure what I did,” I said, looking up at her like a panicked little boy. I guess that’s just about what I was. “I don’t know what to do.”
“It will be okay, Moe. Mindy is fine, believe me. Why don’t you say so long to her for now. I’m sure she’s tired and frustrated at not being able to say what she wants to say to you, in the way she wants to say it.”
It was only when Mindy stopped pounding the mattress that I realized Nurse Havemayer wasn’t talking to me at all, that she was talking to and for her patient.
I wiped Mindy’s tears away with a sweep of my thumbs. I kissed her on the cheek and she let me hold her. “I love you, Min. I’ll be back soon.”
When I stepped outside the room, Mindy’s folks were nowhere to be found. Maybe they’d gone to get a cup of coffee or a lungful of air that didn’t smell like a hospital. Wherever they’d gotten to, I was just glad they had gone there. I don’t think I could have dealt with their distress or judgment. I was already sick with guilt for upsetting Mindy, and for not loving her fully enough when I had the chance. I may not have slept with Samantha that time at her apartment, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t wanted to. I think I must have spent half the time I’d been with Mindy, thinking about Sam. There had been so many times I was inside Mindy when the woman inside my head was Samantha, so many times when my mouth was pressed to Mindy that it was Samantha’s taste I imagined. The world may judge you only by your deeds, but that’s not how we judge ourselves. Even though I don’t think we can ever know ourselves, not really, we know things about ourselves the world can never know. We know what’s in our hearts. We know our lies and desires. And suddenly I knew something else. I finally knew what I had to do, and I didn’t give a shit about the fallout.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Knowing what I had to do and doing it wasn’t nearly the same thing. I understood that what I was about to get myself into was stupid, and possibly dangerous, and a dozen other things that should have prevented me from even considering it, but there are times when the Brooklyn motto of “Hey, what the fuck!” applies, and you push ahead. The dead winter calm that hung over Manhattan Beach didn’t exactly inspire me to action. The only sounds I heard other than the huuh … huuh … huuh … of my own nervous breaths were the water gently slapping the wood pilings in the Sheepshead Bay side of the peninsula, and the whispered rush and retreat of the ocean on the other side.
I parked near Doc Mishkin’s driveway, staring through the night and the bare hedges at Hyman Bergman’s house. With no lights on, the place seemed as black and lifeless as an abandoned coal mine. I think even a single lighted bulb in any window would have given me some hope of success, but there was only darkness. I’m not sure what I had expected. It was, after all, just before midnight and I didn’t really see either Bergman or Susan Kasten as night owls. One was more taciturn than the other. I’m not sure I had ever met two less friendly human beings in my life. At least the old man had the Nazis as an excuse.
I got out of the car and made my way across the street. Once there, I hesitated at the edge of the driveway for no good reason, or maybe for the best of reasons: I was scared. Just recently, scared seemed to be my baseline state of being. Forcing myself to move, I slinked quietly down the driveway, which, since I intended to ring the bell or pound on the front door until someone answered, didn’t make much sense. So when I got to the door, I went all in and pressed the bell so many times that not even the deaf could miss the sounding of the chimes. It went on that way for more than a minute. My finger was getting tired and I was getting discouraged — discouraged, as in losing whatever little courage I’d mustered up. But I just kept thinking about Mindy, about what her face looked like and how she might never be herself again. Then, just as I was about to stop ringing the bell and start pounding, a light popped on in the front room and the door pulled back.
Susan Kasten stood in the doorway, her usual disdainful glare replaced by a look of utter surprise and grudging respect.
“You wanna talk to me,” I said, “then let’s talk.”
“Come in and close the door behind you.”