hospital, that he was hearing someone on a lower floor fighting off an attacker. Cars passing. He could hear them too. Raised voices.
"Drug delusions," said his mother. "You,ve got to be patient with them." She was adjusting the IV for the fluids she insisted he needed. She stared down at him suddenly. "I want to run some more tests."
"What on earth for?"
"You may think me crazy, Baby Boy, but I could swear your eyes are a darker blue."
"Mother, please. Talk about drug delusions." He didn,t tell her that Celeste had said the same thing.
Maybe I,ve at last acquired a distinctive and tragic expression, he thought mockingly, a little gravitas.
She was staring at him as if she hadn,t heard him at all. "You know, Reuben, you really are a remarkably healthy boy."
And he was. Everyone said so.
His best friend Mort Keller, from Berkeley, stopped in twice, and Reuben knew how much this meant, since Keller was facing his oral examination for the Ph.D. in English. This was the program Reuben had abandoned. And he still felt the guilt.
"You look better than I,ve ever seen you," Mort said. He himself had bags under his eyes, and his clothes were wrinkled and even a bit dusty.
Other friends called - guys from school, guys from the paper. He didn,t really want to talk. But it was nice that they cared, and he did read the messages. The cousins from Hillsborough called, but he assured them they must not come in. Grace,s brother who worked in Rio de Janeiro sent a basket of brownies and cookies big enough to feed the entire ward. Phil,s sister, in a nursing home in Pasadena, was too sick to be told what was going on.
Personally, Celeste didn,t care at all about his sleeping with Marchent. She was militant with the investigating officers. "What are you saying, he raped her and then she went downstairs and made out a handwritten will leaving him a five-million-dollar piece of property? And then the woman gushed to a lawyer on the phone about all this for an hour? Come on, do I have to do the thinking for all of us here?"
Celeste told the press the same thing. He caught a glimpse of her on television, firing answers at the reporters, looking adorably ferocious in her little black suit and white ruffled blouse, her fluffy brown hair framing her small animated face.
Someday she,ll make legal history, he thought.
As soon as Reuben could keep some food down, Celeste brought him minestrone soup from North Beach. She was wearing the ruby bracelet he,d given her, and a bit of lipstick that was the same color as the ruby. She,d been dressing especially nicely for him all during this ordeal and he knew it.
"Look, I,m sorry," he said.
"You think I don,t understand? Romantic coast, romantic house, romantic older woman. Forget about it."
"Maybe you should be the journalist," he murmured.
"Ah, now there,s that Sunshine Boy smile. I was beginning to think I,d imagined it." She ran her fingers very gently over his neck. "You know, this is all healed. It,s like some kind of miracle."
"You think?" He wanted to kiss her, kiss her smooth cheek.
He dozed off. He could smell food cooking, and then another fragrance, a perfume. That was his mother,s perfume. And then there were all these other smells that had to do with the hospital and its chemicals. He opened his eyes. He could smell the chemicals that had been used to bathe these walls. It was as if each fragrance had a personality, a distinct color in his mind. He felt like he was reading a code off the wall.
Distantly, the dying woman pleaded with her daughter, "Shut off the machines, I,m begging you."
"Mommy, there are no machines," said the daughter. The daughter cried.
When the nurse came in, he asked about the mother and the daughter. He had the oddest feeling - he didn,t dare tell her this - that the woman wanted something from him.
"Not on this ward, Mr. Golding," she assured him. "Maybe it,s the drugs."
"Well, just what drugs are they giving me? Last night I thought I heard two guys in a barroom fight."
Hours later, he woke to find himself standing by the window. He,d accidentally ripped the IV out of his arm. His dad was dozing in the chair. Celeste was someplace far away talking rapidly on her phone.
"How did I get here?"
He was restless. He wanted to walk, to walk fast, not just down the hall, dragging that