Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

doctor says, if she makes it through the next couple of days.”
    I finally managed to speak. “When did it happen?”
    “We’re not sure. She didn’t show up for poker, so Jake went down to check on her. She was already unconscious by then. Notch was lying by her side.”
    Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.
    Marguerite leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “Jake is kind of…punishing himself. He thinks he should’ve checked on her earlier. I guess he was working late.”
    Mrs. Langston, I thought. Mrs. Langston and her fucking hedges.
    “I’ll speak to him,” I said.
    Brian and Shawna joined us. We didn’t hug—somehow it wasn’t the right thing.
    “I’m glad you’re here,” I told them.
    Brian nodded. “You too.”
    “Are we allowed to go in?” Ben asked.
    “Sure,” said Shawna. “It just got kinda crowded in there.”
    I nodded a greeting to Selina ( Jake’s other flatmate, the investment counselor, a Korean-Canadian) as Ben and I entered the room. Selina returned the nod. I’d met her maybe three times at the most, but her total devotion to Anna was painfully apparent.
    Anna was lying flat on the bed with her eyes closed, robbed of her usual color by a hospital gown and a respirator. I know you’re supposed to talk to people in comas, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. It wasn’t like Anna at all. There was nothing to connect with but the wheezing of the machinery and the grim drizzle of the rain against the window.
    Don’t blame the rain, I told myself. Without it you wouldn’t even be here.

    Back in the corridor, I had a few moments alone with Jake.
    “How long have you been here?” I asked.
    “A few hours. I dunno.”
    “You looked exhausted. Why don’t you go home?”
    “I can’t, boss.”
    “Yes, you can. We’ve got cell phones. I can take it from here.”
    “What am I gonna do at home?” (That pretty much answered my question about Connor.)
    “The three of you should go,” I told him. “Selina and Marguerite both look beat…and we’re gonna have to do this in shifts. Get some rest and come relieve me later.”
    “But, what if—?”
    “You’ve done everything right, Jake.” I laid my arm across his shoulders. I knew he wouldn’t start crying again. He was being a man about it.
    “I was responsible for her,” he said quietly.
    “No, you weren’t. She was. And that’s the way she wanted it… wants it. There was no way in the world to know this would happen.”
    He seemed to get that I meant this.
    “Ben and I were ready for a red-eye,” I added, “so now we’re just doing it somewhere else. Besides, somebody’s gotta check on Notch.”
    This hadn’t occurred to him. “Fuck,” he said softly.
    “There…you see?” I cajoled him with a look. “C’mon, sport. I just blew off my mother’s death. Help me make it mean something.”
    He put his hand on my knee and shook it. “I’ll check with the gals. Marguerite’s got a class in the morning. She could use the sleep.” He rose to his feet in full bear-cub mode.
    “How were Mrs. Langston and her hedges?” I asked.
    “A bitch,” he replied.
    I chuckled. “Same as it ever was.”
    “Hey…it’s the job.”
    I was touched by the pride in his voice. He reminded me of me in my early days at the nursery.
    Jake added, as an afterthought, “I bet even ol’ Capability had to deal with some crabby old Lady Somebody-or-Other.”
    I’d recently told Jake about Capability Brown, the eighteenth-century landscape designer who persuaded the British aristocracy to tear out their formal gardens in favor of clumps of trees and free-form lakes. Jake, to my professorial delight, had adopted him as a hero.
    “Yeah,” I said, smiling. “He probably did.”
    He gave me a little salute.
    “I’ll call you,” I said. “If there’s any change at all.”

    An hour later, nothing had changed. Brian and Ben went out to scout for food, leaving Shawna and me alone. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt—and without her usual makeup—so she looked eerily young. I could still see the girl on Heart’s Desire Beach.
    “Do you think she knew, Mouse?”
    “What?”
    “That this was gonna happen. Giving me her purse and all.”
    I told her what Anna had said to me at the top of the de Young tower, explaining that I’d taken it largely as a sign of her general preparedness. “But she’s very intuitive, as you know. She knew the very moment her mother died—in