“Hey, Mr. Leary,” a voice says. I rub my hand over my eyes. My legs have taken me out into the vast parking lot, but I am nowhere near my car. A heavy young man sitting on the hood of a pickup truck is talking to me.
“Hello,” I say. The boy looks vaguely familiar.
“I dropped off your daughter,” he says. “I’m waiting to see how long she lasts in there. I bet her she wouldn’t stay very long. These kinds of family emergencies can be real stressful, you know.”
I stare at him. I wonder if exiting the air-conditioned hospital into this humid summer day has done something to me. My head aches. “You dropped off Gracie?”
He shakes his crew-cut head. “Lila.”
“Oh.” Now Lila has a boyfriend?
“I’m Weber James. Sorry about that—I should have introduced myself right off. It’s just that I feel like I’ve met you already. You look like Lila.”
I am placing him now. “You’re a fireman?”
“One of the full-timers.”
“I’ve seen you around with Joel Shane.”
“Yeah. He’s a friend. You probably saw me with him at the Municipal Building. When I’m bored I go with him on the mayor’s espionage missions.”
Something about the way he offers this information bothers me. In fact, everything about this boy sitting on the hood of a pickup truck in front of the hospital as if he is tailgating at a ball game bothers me. What does Lila see in him? Who are my daughters?
“Lila’s a medical student,” I hear myself say. “She spends half of her time in the hospital. Why would you think she’d have to leave after twenty minutes?” I force a smile, trying to lighten my tone. “It just seems like you might be wasting your time out here.”
Weber swings his legs to the side and, with a surprisingly graceful motion, jumps to the ground. “She doesn’t have very good attendance at school these days,” he says. “So she’s not crazy to spend time in this place. I’m betting she’ll show up soon.”
I scan the parking lot for my car and find it, dull under the late-morning sun, several rows away. This boy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “I need to get going,” I say. “Nice to meet you, Weber.”
“Hey,” he says. “I might have said something I shouldn’t have. I have a hard time keeping track of what Lila’s official story is about school. I might have blown it big time. Can you just pretend I never said anything?”
I am already a few steps away. I have to turn to hear him. My head is killing me. “No problem.”
“Thanks, man. I owe you one.” Weber’s face cracks into a smile, and I see in it the joy and the youth I saw in Lila’s face earlier. I nod in the boy’s direction, and then weave my way across the hot asphalt.
I HAVE no intention of leaving the parking lot right away, which makes the presence of Weber even more irritating. I can’t very well sit in my parked car while he sits on the roof of his truck a few yards away. I don’t know him, but I am pretty sure he would see that as an invitation to come over and continue to chat. To avoid that possibility, I turn on my engine. I pull slowly out of the parking space. As I take the car out of reverse, I see Lila. She slams out of the hospital door and pauses, just like I did, to breathe. Then she heads across the parking lot, book bag swinging from her shoulder, toward Weber. My only consolation, as I pull away, is that she does not look happy to see him.
I drive around to the other side of the hospital and into the portion of the parking lot that is reserved for the medical staff. I easily locate Eddie’s big white Cadillac. I drive past it and find a parking space near the hospital exit. I turn off the engine but leave the radio on, and settle in to wait. I heard Nurse Ballen tell another nurse that she was off at noon, which is a half hour from now.
I listen to the local news on the radio. The anchor lists the road closings in the county, the sites of major construction, the governor’s ambivalence toward the expensive renaissance of the city of Newark. I think about how Newark, just ten years ago, was more frightening to drive through than the worst sections