“I came,” he says.
“No you didn’t.” I turn to him. “Did you?”
“After the play, on my way back here.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember because you were asleep. You’d just gotten out of surgery.”
“You came after the play? It must have been too late for visitors. They let you in?”
“I told them I was your brother and that I’d come as fast as I could. The nurse let me sit by your bed.”
Joe, who never lied, could lie fluently when it was necessary.
“Did you leave her a note?” Maisie asks.
He shook his head. “If I’d left her a note she would have known I was sitting by her bed like some kind of weirdo, thinking how pretty she looked when she was sleeping.”
Oh, Joe, working all day on the farm and then driving down to play the Stage Manager and then coming to the hospital to sit in a vinyl chair and watch me sleep. And I had missed him. “Sebastian didn’t stay?” Emily is disappointed. She needs Sebastian to be better than that.
But Sebastian was better than everyone. He parked the car and carried me into the emergency room, and all the while I was thinking how romantic it would have been had Duke been the one to do the carrying. More romantic, though less practical, as Duke would have played it as a screwball comedy or hospital drama whereas Sebastian told the doctor what had happened with so much specificity they must have thought he was a doctor himself. “He stayed until they got me in a room but then I toldhim to go back. I knew he wanted to see Pallace and I knew she would want him there.”
“How was Pallace?” Nell asks her father. She cannot help herself.
“Pallace was just fine,” he says diplomatically.
“She was excellent,” I say.
“Were you scared?” Maisie asks me.
“Of Pallace?”
Maisie rolls her eyes. “Of being in thehospital, of surgery.”
There is no scenario in which one of our girls would be in a hospital without us. We would find a way to get there and they know this. But I was the girl who’d left college for Hollywood, who’d lived alone in a furnished apartment in L.A., who’d offered to sleep with the wrong person in her efforts to get a part in a play, who came to Michigan with two suitcases. It never occurred to me to call my parents and tell them what had happened. I was an adult, after all, with good insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. “I was scared later,” I say. “I wasn’t scared then.”
“Were you scared of Pallace?” Nell asks.
“Later,” I say.
I woke up in the morning to a fat beige rotary phone ringing on my bedside table. I didn’t know where I was or what the phone was doing there. I didn’t have a phone in my room at Tom Lake. When it finally occurred to me that the only way to make it stop was to answer it, I picked up the receiver. A man said, “Lara?”
“Ripley?”
“Believe it or not.”
The room was sunny. The shades were up. The second bed was mercifully empty. “Ripley, I’m in the hospital.”
“Why do you think I’m calling you in the hospital?”
“Why are you calling?”
“One of the camp counselors at the lake said you had an accident.”
“Do they know you?”
“No.”
