“I’m not sure what started,” Lucy said.
They stood near the front door, neither one of them particularly keen to open it. Berger wondered when they would be alone again like this, or if they should be, and what Lucy must think of her. She knew what she thought of herself. She had been dishonest, and she couldn’t leave it like that. Lucy didn’t deserve it. Neither of them did.
“I had a roommate at Columbia,” Berger said, fastening her coat. “We shared this slum of an apartment. I didn’t have money, wasn’t born with it, married into it, and you know all that. During law school we lived in this most God-awful place in Morningside Heights, it’s a wonder both of us weren’t murdered in our sleep.”
She tucked her hands into her pockets while Lucy’s eyes held hers, both of them leaning their shoulders against the door.
“We were extremely close,” Berger added.
“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Lucy said. “I completely respect who you are and why you live the way you do.”
“You don’t know enough to respect anything, actually. And I’m going to give you an explanation, not because I owe it but because I want to. She had something wrong with her, my roommate. I won’t say her name. A mood disorder, which I had no understanding of at the time, and when she got ugly and angry I thought she meant it. I fought with her when I shouldn’t have, because that made matters only worse, unbelievably worse. One Saturday night, a neighbor called the police. I’m surprised you didn’t dig that up somewhere. Nothing was done about it, but it was rather unpleasant, and both of us were drunk and looked like train wrecks. If I ever run for office, you can imagine, if there are stories like that.”
“Why would there be?” Lucy asked. “Unless you plan on getting in fights when you’re drunk and looking like a train wreck.”
“There was never a threat of that with Greg, you see. I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Certainly never threw anything. We coexisted without rancor or much of anything. A relatively pleasant détente, much of the time.”
“What happened to your roommate?”
“I suppose it depends on how you measure success,” Berger said. “But nothing good, in my opinion. It will only get worse for her because she lives a lie, meaning she doesn’t live at all, and life is very unforgiving if you don’t live it, especially as you get older. I’ve never lived a lie. You may think so, but I haven’t. I’ve simply had to figure things out as I’ve gone along, and I’ve respected decisions I’ve made, right or wrong, no matter how hard that’s been. Many things remain irrelevant as long as they remain theoretical.”
“Meaning there wasn’t someone and hasn’t been when there shouldn’t have been,” Lucy said.
“I’m no Sunday-school teacher. Far from it,” Berger said. “But my life is nobody’s business, and it’s mine to mess up, and I don’t intend to mess it up. I won’t let you mess it up, nor do I intend to mess up yours.”
“Do you always start with disclaimers?”
“I don’t start,” Berger said.
“This time you’re going to have to,” Lucy said. “Because I’m not. Not with you.”
Berger slid her hands out of her coat pockets and touched Lucy’s face, then reached for the door but didn’t open it. She touched Lucy’s face again and kissed her.
Chapter 22
Nineteen floors below the prison ward, in the parking lot across East 27th, Marino was a lone figure obscured by hydraulic lifts, most of them empty at this hour, no valet in sight.
He watched them in the bright green field of a long-range night-vision monocular, because he needed to see her. He needed to look at her in person, even if it was covertly and from a distance and for only a moment. He needed to somehow feel reassured that she hadn’t changed. If she was still the same, she wouldn’t be cruel to him when she saw him. She wouldn’t disgrace or humiliate or shun him. Not that she would have in the past, no matter how much he deserved it. But what did he know about her anymore, except what he read or saw on TV?
Scarpetta and Benton had just left the morgue and were taking a shortcut through the park, back to Bellevue. It was dizzying to see her again, and unreal, as if she’d been dead, and Marino imagined what she’d think if she knew how close he’d come to dying. After what he’d done, he hadn’t wanted to be here anymore. While he lay in the guest bed of her carriage house the morning after he’d hurt her, he’d started going through a list of possibilities, intermittently fighting off nausea while the worst headache of his life hammered his brain to pulp.
His first thought was to drive his truck or maybe his motorcycle off a bridge and drown himself. Then again, he might survive, and he was terrified of not being able to breathe. That meant smothering wasn’t a good choice, either, using a plastic bag, for example, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of hanging, of twisting and thrashing after kicking the chair out from under himself and then changing his mind. He’d briefly considered sitting in a bathtub and slashing his throat, but with the first spurt of blood from his carotid, he’d want to take it back and it would be too late.
As for carbon monoxide poisoning? It gave him too much time to think. Poison? Same thing, and it was painful, and if he chickened out and called 911, he’d end up with his stomach pumped and a complete loss of respect from all who knew about it. Jumping off a building? Never. His luck, he’d survive and be maimed beyond recognition. Last on the list was his nine-millimeter pistol. And Scarpetta had hidden it.
As he’d lain in her guest room bed trying to figure out where she might have tucked it out of sight, he decided he’d never find it, was too sick to find it, and he could always shoot himself later because he had a couple extra guns in his fishing shack, but it would have to be a precision shooting because the worst scenario of all was to end up in an iron lung.
When he’d eventually contacted Benton at McLean and confessed all this, Benton matter-of-factly informed him that if an iron lung was the only thing stopping him, he had no worries unless he tried to kill himself with polio. That was exactly what he’d said, adding that most likely, if he did a bad job shooting himself, he’d end up with brain damage that profoundly compromised him but left him vaguely aware of why he’d wanted to off himself in the first place.
What would be really shitty luck, Benton had said, was an irreversible coma that became a discussion among Supreme Court justices before someone got the go-ahead to pull the plug. While he’d said it wasn’t likely Marino would have any awareness that this was going on, no one knew for sure. You’d have to be the person who was brain-dead to know for sure, he’d said.
You mean I could hear people saying they were going to take me off that . . . ?Marino had asked.
Life support,Benton had said.
So it wouldn’t breathe for me anymore, and I might be aware of it but nobody knows I am?
You wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. And it’s within the realm of possibility you might be aware that you were about to be taken off the respirator. Have the plug pulled, in other words.
Then I could literally watch the person walk to the wall and pull it out of the socket.
It’s possible.
And I’d instantly start smothering to death.
You wouldn’t be able to breathe. But hopefully loved ones would be there helping you through it, even though they wouldn’t know you were aware of them.