Part 9 (1/2)

”I'm just a close friend . . . no blood relation.”

”You need Oncology, Building O-Fourteen. Just go out these doors and take a right and look for the letter O building-or you can take the elevator here and there's a floating bridge that will connect you. If you get lost, pick up any phone and dial zero.”

”Thank you,” Danny said.

”I hope your friend feels better.”

Raquel's ward had its own private receptionist. There were vases of flowers on her desk, and balloons. One of the balloons had come untethered and touched the ceiling at a slight bend. The receptionist walked Danny along the hall. She offered to carry the magazines and cookies he had stuffed into a tote bag that read FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES.

Raquel was sleeping.

Her room was bright and luxurious. He stood by the window and looked out at Los Angeles in the distance. An endless stream of cars surged like colorful dots through the canyon. Traffic helicopters hovered over Sunset Boulevard. Danny quietly typed a message to Preston asking him to make sure insurance was covering Raquel's room.

Then he sat in a beige leather chair beside the sleeping woman who had brought an immeasurable amount of happiness to his life. She had been married to his agent and best friend for seven years. They were trying for a child when the doctor found a lump.

Danny took out the magazines and looked at the faces on the covers. Everyone was searching, he thought-trying to unravel the knot of their lives.

When Raquel woke up, she reached for his hand.

”Why aren't you on set doing something amazing?” she asked quietly.

”I prefer nursing.”

”I think Jack does too,” Raquel said, and sat up.

”I like your hair.”

Raquel giggled and fingered the thick strands. ”It's a wig.”

”You can't tell.”

She blushed. ”It's bad enough not being allowed makeup.”

Danny squeezed her hand. ”I spoke to Jack this morning.”

”I know,” she said. ”He called to say you were coming.” She paused for a moment. ”When he came yesterday, he couldn't stop crying. Did he mention anything?”

Danny shook his head.

”Don't tell him I told you.”

Jack had always seemed confident about what was going to happen, even taking cla.s.ses on the process of treatment and joining an online support group.

”Keep an eye on him for me, Danny.”

”I will,” he promised, searching her face for some sign of what was to come. She pointed to the magazines on her bedside table.

”Are those for me?”

Danny read the t.i.tles. ”French Vogue, Italian Vogue, British Vogue, Chinese Elle, World of Interiors, h.e.l.lo, OK, and Tatler.”

Raquel laughed, but it seemed painful somehow. ”Thank Preston for me, would you, Danny? You know how much I love magazines.”

”I brought cookies,” he said.

They talked about her treatments, and how soon she would be allowed home.

When she closed her eyes, Danny let her sleep.

He remembered her real hair, and how she tied it up when she came over on hot days to swim in his pool. Jack joined them after work.

One Sat.u.r.day, there was so much rain that the three of them stayed inside and had too much to drink. They played Monopoly and watched A Single Man. Jack smoked a joint and pointed to the television, ”That's like you, Danny, but no one's died.” Danny threw a cus.h.i.+on.

Raquel ordered food from Greenblatt's and they watched Sixteen Candles. Jack and Raquel stayed over in a guest bedroom. Danny lay awake, listening to them laugh and move around.

It rained all night.

The next day he called his mother and asked about his dad. She was silent for a while and then told him the whole story, not just the note he taped to the television saying he would never come back-but his childhood in the slums of Manchester, his own father's savage death on a battlefield in northern France. She told him how they met, how he took her out to nice pubs, and picked flowers for her on the viaduct behind their house where steam trains once swished hotly past. The smell of his aftershave. The gentle rough hands from a decade of factory work, and how quickly those hands became fists when anyone called her a name, or made racist remarks.

”I knew deep down he'd go,” she said. ”I was upset, but not surprised.”

She told her son that his father was not the love of her life, just someone she loved along the way.

As Raquel lay sleeping, Danny remembered his life in Scotland, the television studio where it all started and his daily commute through the mouse-gray morning. Then he imagined himself as a child, and felt the small house of his boyhood in Manchester. Cold white bottles on the doorstep, a fish-and-chip shop on the corner run by Bert Echlin, who always gave him an extra sausage. The people he had loved along the way.

But there had also been name-calling, insults, people telling him to go back where he came from. Their words tore into him, because he felt hated, but had done nothing wrong.

People made fun of his neighbor too, an eccentric old man with a deformed head who grew tomatoes and gave them out in small brown bags.

Raquel opened her eyes and blinked a few times. ”How long was I out?”

”Not long, maybe forty minutes.”

”You should have woken me up.”

”Never,” Danny said.

”What did you do while I was asleep?”

”I was remembering this neighbor I had growing up.”

”Your neighbor in Scotland?”

”No, when I was seven or eight. He was the neighbor in Manchester-the city where I was born. He seemed old to me then, but was probably only sixty. His head was deformed, and he spoke with a sort of muted voice. The people on our street called him the elephant man.”

”Jesus, that's unkind.”

Danny nodded. ”I think my mother would remember him, but I hadn't thought of him in years until lately.”

”Tell me more.”