been moved to the third floor, and when he got up there the girl at the desk said visiting hours were over and she was sorry but there was nothing she could do, he’d have to come back in the morning.
Gordon stood looking down at the young woman in her chair. Her large brown eyes. A hundred small tight braids drawn back from her temples and collected in a thick snakeball on top of her head. monique rose, said her ID.
“What about the father?” Gordon said, and the young woman’s brows bunched up.
“Sir?”
“Can the father go in there?”
“Into her room? Yes, of course he can. But you are not the father.”
“How do you know?”
“Pardon me?”
“How do you know I’m not him.”
The young woman turned her face a little to one side and spoke carefully. “Because I’ve seen him? Because I know him by sight?”
“You know him by sight.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Sir, I’m not sure I understand—”
“Did you see him tonight?”
“Yes, sir, but . . .”
She looked Gordon up and down. She was looking for some evidence of his authority, of his right to ask her such questions. He could see that she found none.
“Look,” he said more gently. “I drove all the way up here and all I’m asking now is can you go tell him that I’m here, and that I’d like to talk to him?”
“Tell who?”
“The father. Her father.”
The young woman said nothing. Her mind was working.
“He might be sleeping,” she said, and Gordon looked at her. He tried to give her a smile.
“Trust me,” he said. “He’s not sleeping.”
He took a seat in one of the plastic chairs and sat staring at nothing, the opposite wall, the TV up in the corner, and he stared at the dark screen of the TV for a long while before he realized that the man sitting back in its gloom, as if in another room altogether, or another world, must be himself; when he got out of his jacket in the overheated room, the man in the TV got out of his too. Some minutes later another man came into the image of the room, and into the room itself, and except that he was waiting for this man, expecting to see this man and no other come around the corner, Gordon would not have recognized him, and not because the man wasn’t in uniform. He saw what he’d already known but would have known anyway in that first glance, which was that this man coming toward him was not well. Considerably down in weight, his flannel shirt hanging on him as it would on a hanger, and when Gordon stood he saw that the man had grown shorter too, as old men do, though this man was a good five years younger than Gordon himself. And yet when the man put out his hand, Gordon was surprised by the strength of the grip. Surprised by the blueness of the eyes too, down in the wells of their sockets, blue and sharp as ever.
“Gordon,” said the man in that same rough smoker’s voice.
“Sheriff,” said Gordon. “How is she?”
“She’s OK. She’s busted-up some, but she’s gonna be all right.”
The man, Tom Sutter, passed his jacket from one hand to the other and stood looking at Gordon, Gordon looking at him. Sutter’s face so thin now. His hair, gone purely white, looked as if it would blow from his skull in a strong wind, like milkweed seeds. The man was sick and there was nothing to say about that. It was too big a thing to ever say aloud.
The young woman behind the desk sat watching them. Light tubes hummed in the ceiling. Machines beeped behind doors.
Sutter raised the jacket and said, “Well, you’re here, Gordon. Do you care to join a man for a smoke?”
They had the shelter to themselves and they stood in its weak light, Sutter smoking and Gordon blowing into his hands. He put his hands back into his jacket pockets. Sutter was watching him.
“I saw it on the news, is why I drove up here,” Gordon said.
Sutter flicked the ash from his cigarette, raining tiny embers that flared out before they hit the ground. “She’s hardly been awake two minutes,” he said. “I’m not even sure what in the hell happened down there, except that she’s alive, and her friend isn’t.”
Gordon looked down and toed his boot in the thin remains of ice. “I figured it was too soon to see her,”