Johnny looked at the other reporters. Except for Bright, who looked rather embarrassed, they were watching avidly. They looked like the nurses peering at him through the glass; Suddenly he felt like a Christian in a pitful of lions. They win either way, he thought. If I can tell him something, they’ve got a front-page story. If I can’t, or if I refuse to try, they’ve got another kind of story.
‘Well?’ Dussault asked. The medallion swung back and forth below his fist.
Johnny looked at Weizak, but Weizak was looking away, disgusted.
‘Give it to me,’ Johnny said.
Dussault handed it over. Johnny put the medallion in his palm. It was a St. Christopher medal. He dropped the fine-link chain on top of it in a crisp little yellow heap and closed his hand over it.
Dead silence fell in the room. The handful of doctors and nurses standing by the lounge doorway had been joined by half a dozen others, some of them dressed in streetclothes and on their way out of the hospital for the night. A crowd of patients had gathered at the end of the hallway leading to the first-floor TV and game lounge. The people who had come for the regular early evening visiting hours had drifted over from the main lobby. A feeling of thick tension lay in the air like a humming power cable.
Johnny stood silently, pale and thin in his white shirt and oversized blue jeans. The St.
Christopher medal was clamped so tightly in his right hand that the cords in his wrist stood out dearly in the glare of the TV light bars. In front of him, sober, impeccable, and judgmental in his dark suit, Dussault stood in the adversary position. The moment seemed to stretch out interminably. No one coughed or whispered.
‘()h,’ Johnny said softly … then: ‘Is that it?’
His fingers loosened slowly. He looked at Dussault.
‘Well?’ Dussault asked, but the authority was suddenly gone from his voice. The tired, nervous young man who had answered the reporters’ questions seemed also to be gone.
There was a half-smile on Johnny’s lips, but there was nothing warm about it. The blue of his eyes had darkened. They had grown cold and distant. Weizak saw and felt a chill of gooseflesh. He later told his wife that it had been the face of a man looking through a high-powered microscope and observing an interesting species of paramecium.
‘It’s your sister’s medallion,’ he said to Dussault. ‘Her name was Anne but everyone called her Terry. Your older sister. You loved her. You almost worshiped the ground she walked on.’
Suddenly, terribly, Johnny Smith’s voice began to climb and change. It became the cracked and unsure voice of an adolescent.
‘It’s for when you cross Lisbon Street against the lights, Terry, or when you’re out parking with one of those guys from E.L. Don’t forget, Terry… don’t forget…’
The plump woman who had asked Johnny who the Democrats would nominate next year uttered a frightened little moan. One of the TV cameramen muttered ‘Holy Jesus!’ in a hoarse voice.
‘Stop it,’ Dessault whispered. His face had gone a sick shade of gray. His eyes bulged and spittle shone like chrome on his lower lip in this harsh light. His hands moved for the medallion, which was now looped on its fine gold chain over Johnny’s fingers. But his hands moved with no power or authority. The medallion swung back and forth, throwing off hypnotic gleams of light.
‘Remember me, Terry,’ the adolescent voice begged. ‘Stay clean, Terry.. . please, for God’s sake stay clean…’
‘Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!’
Now Johnny spoke in his own voice again. ‘It was speed, wasn’t it? Then meth. She died of a heart attack at twenty-seven. But she wore it ten years, Rog. She remembered you.
She never forgot. Never forgot … never
never. .. never.’
The medallion slipped from his fingers and struck the floor with a small, musical sound.
Johnny stared away into emptiness for a moment, his face calm and cool and distant.
Dussault grubbed at his feet for the medallion, sobbing hoarsely in the stunned silence.
A flashbulb popped, and Johnny’s face cleared and became his own again. Horror touched it, and then pity. He knelt clumsily beside Dussault.