Act of God

head lifted enough so she could speak clearly. “What was it?”
    I spoke softly into her ear. “When I was having the MRI thing today, the machine is like being slid into a coffin.”
    “Oh, John, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
    “It’s okay. It’s okay, it’s not even really that. It’s more … when I was finished, and felt kind of, I don’t know, relieved that I was through it, there was this kid in the locker room.”
    “The locker room?”
    “Where they have you get ready for the machine. He couldn’t have been more than ten, maybe not even, but his face was so... weary, and he was wearing one of those head bandages, like a turban.”
    Nancy pushed back some more, so that she was looking me square in the face, her hands resting on my collarbone. “Go on.”
    “It was... it was just so much like what... the way Beth looked the last couple of months, just before she couldn’t get up by herself and move around. And he was so little, Nance, and so down. Depressed, I mean. So I tried to lighten it up for him, and he just looked at me. He’d been through the thing before, I don’t know how often, but I’m pretty sure that what they told him didn’t get any better. And I thought of Beth, of how... hopeless it was all the time that we wouldn’t talk about how hopeless it was. And I couldn’t keep talking to the kid, Nance, I had to get out of there. And I went to Nautilus, and that was some help, but not much.”
    I suddenly realized how long and hard I’d been looking into Nancy ’s eyes, losing something in them. And getting something back, too. Getting back a lot more than I’d left there. “God, Nance, I just felt... scared.”
    “It’s okay to be scared.”
    “No. I mean, I’m not scared of what’ll happen with the knee and shoulder. It’s more because...”
    Nancy cocked her head. “Because of what, John?”
    “Remember when Renfield was hurt, you got drunk and told me how scared you were about leaving him at the vet’s for the operation?”
    “Because it hit home how fragile life could be?”
    “Right. Well, since Beth died, in a sense I haven’t been scared.”
    “You haven’t been?”
    “Everything I cared about, the one person I cared about, she’d already been taken from me.”
    “There was no way for anything to hurt you anymore.”
    “Right. Well, I just realized something.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t feel that way anymore.”
    Nancy ’s eyes moved left-right-left on mine. “You feel scared?”
    “More that I could be scared again. That I could be scared of losing you, because I’m talking with you the way I talked with her, the way she let me talk with her.”
    “John, you’ve always been able to do that with me.”
    “Not quite, Nance. I’ve always been allowed to talk with you like that, because you were open to it. I’ve just never been able to feel that I could, and I covered for it by lumping it under professional conflicts of interest, the public prosecutor and the private investigator. I never really opened up with you, because I didn’t want there to be another person I was afraid to lose, another person I could be scared to not have be a part of me.”
    More tears, but through a smile. “You know what?”
    “What?”
    “I think I like you better when you can be scared.”
    “From what I remember of it, it’s not such a bad way to be.”
    She came in for a kiss. “Not a bad way at all.”

16

    Most of Friday morning was spent working on other cases in my office. About eleven, I went down to the Prelude and took the Southeast Expressway to Route 128, the belt-way around Boston . At Route 24, I turned south for Sharon . Reaching the main drag, I found the pharmacy where William Proft worked. There was a pay phone outside it, and I tried Pearl Rivkind’s home number. No one answered, and no tape machine broke in to take a message. I hung up and walked inside the pharmacy.
    It was the kind of place every town had before the chains took over. Newspapers and magazines in racks at the front, two elderly men casually reading without buying while a young girl yawned at the cash register. On the right wall was a preserved if nonfunctional soda fountain with a gray marble top and chrome accessories. Aisles of greeting cards, hair and skin products, cold remedies, and so on, but without signs to tell you what was where because you’d shopped there long and often enough to know. The prescription counter was at the back and elevated above its cash