young, and we would never fuck the old, because that was how death got in—through your skin. Through your heart.
I got to Bunny’s house and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. I opened her side gate and went around the back and peered in the windows, but I couldn’t see anyone. I had texted her several times throughout the day with no response. It didn’t seem like a good sign. I turned and looked at her pool, and I had the instinct to swim, but it was too cold. I looked up the bus routes instead. It would take two hours to get to Cedars-Sinai, where Ann Marie was.
I sat on Bunny’s patio furniture, examining my motivations. It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to spy on Ann Marie so that I could report to Bunny on her medical condition, though, of course, I was desperate for any new information so that I could adjust my own internal Vegas odds on how things would play out legally for Bunny. Goodness knows I did not expect to speak to Ann Marie herself, since she was supposed to be in a coma. If anything, the fact that she was in a coma made visiting her more appealing. I was not sure I could have handled an awake Ann Marie, not least because she wouldn’t be at all glad to see me. But I did not want to go home and run the risk of having some kind of conversation with Jason or Aunt Deedee. I would delay opening that envelope for as long as I could.
I suppose what I wanted most was to see Ann Marie’s mother, Ms. Harriet, and bring flowers, and try my best to indicate that whatever Ann Marie had said about me, she hadn’t deserved this.
I boarded the 625 bus on Main Street, holding the outrageously overpriced flowers I had bought from the local florist. As gouged as I felt by the price, the experience of buying the flowers had been nice. The woman who ran the shop had a black cat and he sat regally, as though it were a throne, on a child’s armchair arranged artfully in the window of the shop, surrounded by buckets and buckets of flowers. She had picked out yellow and pink tulips and tied them up with scraggly brown string that looked like a thousand women’s Pinterest wet dreams.
The bouquet looked strange to me, in my own hands, as I boarded the bus. How weird it was—to cut off the sexual organs of plants and give them to each other. I hoped Ms. Harriet would not see the stamens tucked inside the tulips as tiny penises the way I did. I hoped they would look like regular flowers to her, and I would look like a regular boy.
* * *
—
I had not anticipated how restrictive the visitation policy would be, and I was surprised, when I finally found Ann Marie’s floor in the Saperstein Critical Care Tower, to speak to the nurse at the front desk and be told that I could most definitely not enter. “I brought flowers,” I said. “Maybe I could just leave them?”
“Sure you can,” the nurse said.
I frowned. I did not have a card, or even a piece of paper on which to write my name or explain whom they were from. I had ridden two hours on three different buses to get here. The nurse was jarring to me in her calm casualness. After all, she was at work. This was a regular day for her, and here was a kid hemming and hawing with flowers, and she didn’t have time to deal with him, did she?
Then Ms. Harriet, Ann Marie’s mother, appeared and saved me.
“My lord, it’s Michael Hesketh,” she proclaimed in that low voice of hers. “Come here and hug me, son,” she said. “Oh, you brought flowers. Bless your heart. Don’t tell me you think this was your fault.”
I walked toward her in the hall and she folded me up into a fierce hug. Her arms felt like iron bars through her sweater. “I was going to the cafeteria, care to join me?”
I walked with her to the elevators, still carrying the flowers she had not taken from me, grateful to be in the sway of her powerful and practical energy. Ms. Harriet had the peculiar ability of collapsing things flat. Of turning shades of gray back into black and white. As soon as the elevator doors closed on