I sipped wine and continued stroking her hair.
“God won’t let anything happen to you, will He?” she asked.
“Nothing is going to happen to me, Lucy. I promise.”
“If you pray to God to take care of you, He does, doesn’t He?”
“He takes care of us.” Though I wasn’t sure I believed it.
She frowned. I’m not sure she believed it either. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
I smiled. “Everybody gets scared now and then. I’m perfectly safe. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
The last thing she mumbled before drifting off was “I wish I could always be here, Auntie Kay. I want to be just like you.”
Two hours later, I was upstairs and still wide-awake and staring at a page in a book without really seeing the words when the telephone rang.
My response was Pavlovian, a startled reflex. I snatched up the receiver, my heart thudding. I was expecting, fearing, Marino’s voice, as if last night were starting all over again.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
“Hello?”
In the background I could hear the faint, spooky music I associated with early-morning foreign movies or horror films or the scratchy strains of a Victrola before the dial tone cut it off.
“Coffee?”
“Please,” I said.
This sufficed for a “Good morning.”
Whenever I stopped by Neils Vander’s lab, his first word of greeting was “Coffee?”
I always accepted. Caffeine and nicotine are two vices I’ve readily adopted.
I wouldn’t think of buying a car that isn’t as solid as a tank, and I won’t start the engine without fastening my seatbelt. There are smoke alarms throughout my house, and an expensive burglar alarm system. I no longer enjoy flying and opt for Amtrak whenever possible.
But caffeine, cigarettes and cholesterol, the grim reapers of the common man – God forbid I should give them up. I go to a national meeting and sit at a banquet with three hundred other forensic pathologists, the world’s foremost experts in disease and death. Seventy-five percent of us don’t jog or do aerobics, don’t walk when we can ride, don’t stand when we can sit, and assiduously avoid stairs or hills unless they’re on the decline. A third of us smoke, most of us drink, and all of us eat as if there is no tomorrow.
Stress, depression, perhaps a greater need for laughter and pleasure because of the misery we see – who can be sure of the reason? One of my more cynical friends, an assistant chief in Chicago, likes to say, “What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?”
Vander went to the drip coffee machine on the counter behind his desk and poured two cups. He had fixed my coffee countless times and could never remember I drink it black.
My ex-husband never remembered either. Six years I lived with Tony and he couldn’t remember that I drink my coffee black or like my steaks medium-rare, not as red as Christmas, just a little pink. My dress size, forget it. I wear an eight, have a figure that will accommodate most anything, but I can’t abide fluff, froth and frills. He always got me something in a six, usually lacy and gauzy and meant for bed. His mother’s favorite color was spring green. She wore a size fourteen. She loved ruffles, hated pullovers, preferred zippers, was allergic to wool, didn’t want to bother with anything that had to be dry-cleaned or ironed, had a visceral antagonism toward anything purple, deemed white or beige impractical, wouldn’t wear horizontal stripes or paisley, wouldn’t have been caught dead in Ultrasuede, believed her body wasn’t compatible with pleats and was quite fond of pockets the more the better. When it came to his mother, Tony would somehow get it right.
Vander dumped the same heaping teaspoons of whitener and sugar into my cup as he dumped into his own.
Typically, he was disheveled, his wispy gray hair wild, his voluminous lab coat smeared with black fingerprint powder, a spray of ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers protruding from his ink-stained breast pocket. He was a tall man with long, bony extremities and a disproportionately round belly. His head was shaped remarkably like a light bulb, his eyes a washed-out blue and perpetually clouded by thought.