Mary and O'Neil Page 0,32

tired face said: Now this. “Couldn’t they have cleaned you up a little?”

“That was extra.” O’Neil held up the magazine he had been reading, which was Business Week. In two hours, since the nurses had wheeled him back to the waiting area, he had read through the rack, everything from Highlights for Children to Modern Maturity. “Now,” he said, directing her attention to the article, “it says here that what we are experiencing is not so much a recession strictly speaking, as a period of contraction before an expansion. Does this make any sense to you?”

“You’ll have to ask Jack. O’Neil, what did they give you?”

He returned the magazine to the pile. “Some Demerol when I first got here. It made me throw up.”

“It can do that. Listen, honey. I hate to ask, but do you have any insurance?”

“A technical question,” O’Neil said, and paused for effect; the news was not good. “Technically, no.”

Kay paid for everything with her Master Charge, then pushed O’Neil’s wheelchair into the parking lot, where the orderly, a large black man named Donnelle, helped her drape O’Neil across the backseat of Kay’s Volvo. The light in the parking lot was evening light—the day had disappeared—and insects throbbed in the trees.

“Thanks for everything, Donnelle.” O’Neil leaned out the window so the two could shake hands; Donnelle met his hand with a firm grip.

“You mind that leg, now,” Donnelle said.

When they had pulled out of the lot, Kay lifted her eyes at O’Neil through the rearview mirror. “Please don’t pout, honey. I didn’t even get the message until forty minutes ago. I came as soon as I could.”

He had left messages for her everywhere: her office, the house, even the restaurant where she sometimes met Jack after work for dinner. “Oh, it’s all right,” O’Neil said after a moment. “Donnelle was good company.”

“I can stop somewhere if you’re hungry,” Kay offered.

O’Neil shook his head. “There was a candy machine at the hospital. Also, they gave me some codeine, after the Demerol wore off.”

In the front seat Kay sighed hopelessly. “What am I going to do with you?”

O’Neil tilted his head back and let the codeine wash over him like a warm, salty bath. He had more, twelve pills in all, in a little paper sack. “It’s anybody’s guess,” he said.

They drove on, into the June evening. Under the spell of the codeine the headlights of the oncoming cars pulsed benevolently, and O’Neil watched them until his eyes fell closed. He began to dream, a loosely knitted patchwork of images from the past, but then his mind turned sharply to the moment of the accident: the noise below as the ladder popped loose, his roll down the roof and then the long fall through open air to the ground below. It had taken forever, and was over in an instant. The orthopedist who cast his leg had marveled at the quality of his injury—like a crack in porcelain, he said.

“Aw, fuck.”

Again, Kay’s eyes met his through the rearview mirror. “O’Neil?”

He shook his head to send the memory away. “It was a long way down,” O’Neil said.

The accident occurred on a Wednesday, the third Wednesday in June. O’Neil had been painting houses for six weeks, since returning from eight months of backpacking around Europe. The company he worked for was called Professor Painter. The parent office was in Montreal, but Professor Painter had franchises all over the East Coast, and O’Neil worked for a branch that operated out of an apartment building in South Norwalk. O’Neil had no experience with this kind of work, but after he’d watched the training video, his boss, a Canadian named Joe, asked him if he’d like to be a foreman. What this meant was that O’Neil worked alone, though sometimes Joe sent other people to help. Usually they were college students, and most lasted only a few days before finding better, easier jobs.

The work was hard and paid just five dollars an hour, but O’Neil liked it and took care to do it well. Painting a house was a large undertaking that required a certain amount of tactical thinking, but once O’Neil laid out his plans, his mind was free to go where it wanted. His months abroad had been a happy time, and that was where he spent his days, remembering the golden light of sunset on the Lido of Venice, or the sad, exciting spectacle of a bullfight in Barcelona. For many years he had been afraid of heights, but he