Metropolis, p.19
Metropolis, page 19
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Jason says miserably. “I’m sorry, Mom. I—”
“Oh, Jason, I thought I raised a smarter boy. Why would we care where your office is?”
37
Liddy
Liddy doesn’t recognize the doorman when she enters the lobby of The Tower. It’s been a little over three months since she walked out of here on that crisp fall afternoon, and except for the unfamiliar face and the snow outside, it’s exactly the same as when she left. Which feels odd, although it probably shouldn’t. Why would it be different just because she is?
“Welcome home, Ms. Haines,” the doorman says. Is there a Tower resident recognition test that potential employees have to pass in order to be hired? Either that or he saw her picture online or in the Globe.
“Thank you,” she says, and quickly walks to the elevator. Normally, she would introduce herself, find out his name, a little about his life, but nothing is normal today. She hesitates before pushing the elevator button, shudders at the thought of climbing into the box. But what choice does she have? It’s fifty floors up.
As she rises, Liddy’s stomach slips. She can visualize Garrett sprawled on the top of the car, almost feel the weight of him over her head. Jason and the police made sure she didn’t see his broken body at Metropolis, but her imagination is strong, and it’s almost as if she had.
When she walks through the door and turns on the lights against the encroaching afternoon darkness, the condo is also exactly as it was. Blanca, who comes in twice a week, must have been here this morning. Liddy catches the faint scent of lemon oil, and when she walks into the bedroom, there are vacuum marks on the carpet.
Liddy’s mind careens as she tries not to think about Garrett. About the accident. About her culpability. What a thing to have happened. What a thing to have had a hand in. Fortunately, she’d never told anyone about discovering the PI or trying to figure out how to counter Garrett’s next step. She’d purposely never mentioned this to Marta. And she’s pretty sure she never discussed the girl’s accident at Fenway with anyone but Garrett.
She was forced to show the police her unit, as they asked what she and Garrett were doing at Metropolis. When they saw it, she explained that she used it as a writer’s retreat and sometimes slept there when she was working late. To say they were skeptical would be an understatement. The popcorn and marijuana didn’t help. When they find out she’s been hiding from Garrett for months, all bets are off. Many people, including friends, Burke colleagues, and the staff at The Tower will report they haven’t seen her since September. And then there’s Garrett. If he’s able to tell his side of the story, she’s screwed.
Robin and Scott are at the hospital with Garrett, have been for hours. Even though he’s in the ICU in an induced coma and they only allow visitors in one at a time, every hour, for only five minutes. Until the swelling in his brain is reduced, he’ll most likely remain in that state for days. If not weeks.
How will this mess with the twins’ world? With their heads? Their futures? Liddy shudders. The rush of images, sounds, and the unpredictable forking outcomes are relentless. Earlier, as Liddy had scanned the faces of the arriving passengers at Logan, she almost hadn’t recognized her own children. In the four months since they’d left for school, Robin had grown at least two inches and lost a cushion of baby fat that left her appearing more like a young woman than a child. Scott, on the other hand, could have been Robin’s younger brother. He’d gained no height but had added on quite a few pounds.
When they caught sight of her, they hurled themselves at her, clutching her the way they had when they were small. Liddy wrapped her arms around them, pressed her nose to their hair, and drank in their slightly sour smell. Her babies. Her poor, poor babies. “It’s going to be okay,” she murmured over and over again. “It’s going to be okay.”
Robin, dark like her father, was the first to pull away, her long eyelashes clumped together with tears. “Is it? He’s going to be okay?”
Scott, light like Liddy, raised his face to her.
“The doctors are hopeful,” she told them. “He’s in pretty bad shape now, but there are reasons to think this could turn around.”
They accepted her words, but the fear didn’t leave their eyes, and she took them directly to the hospital. Liddy begged the ICU nurse to let the three of them go in together, but she was allowed to take in only one at a time. Robin wanted to go first, but as soon as she stepped around the curtain, she backed away from the bandaged, bruised, and unconscious man, then fled to the waiting room. Scott was more stoic, but he didn’t last much longer than his sister.
Neither of the kids is particularly close to Garrett, but huddling with her stricken children in the waiting room reminded Liddy that, despite his coolness to them and what he’d done to her, he was their father and always would be, that they loved him and needed him. It was Robin who insisted that she, Liddy, go home to shower and get a change of clothes. As reluctant as Liddy was to leave them alone, she was desperate to get out of the hospital. She promised to return in an hour and told them not to go in to see Garrett until she did.
Now she strips, throws the clothes she knows she’ll never wear again into the hamper, and steps into the shower. She turns it as hot as she can tolerate, stands under the almost blistering water, and cries. At first, she was so shocked she couldn’t cry, and since Robin and Scott arrived she hasn’t let herself. Now she does. Wrenching, full-bodied sobs, wails—for what happened, for what might happen to Garrett, to Marta, to herself. But mostly for her children, whose lives will never be the same. And for the fault she bears in that.
When there are no tears left and her throat feels as if it’s been stripped of its lining, she climbs out of the shower, overwhelmed by a torrent of conflicted feelings for Garrett. Her husband, the father of her children, is either going to die or remain severely incapacitated. She’s been furious at him for years, even wished him dead at times, but now she remembers the other Garrett, the good Garrett.
How much fun they’d had together in the early years. The cross-country road trip, the trek through Greece, the sweet nights in her tiny apartment and even tinier bed, summer evenings in the company box at Fenway, the outfield grass an Ireland green. All the laughter, all the love and hope. How generous he’d always been to her and the kids, the millions of dollars he’d donated to charities every year, how he’d stepped in to help her mother.
Admittedly, she’s wanted to be free of him, and there’s no denying that his fall might hand her exactly that. Which gives her motive. She left him and lied about where she was going. There are people who can testify to her real feelings for him. She’d inherit many millions of dollars. The spouse is always the first to be suspected. A bolt of terror drives itself between her ribs.
The detectives asked her the same questions over and over and over again, both last night and this morning. From the details of the accident and their argument to how much money Garrett is worth. “So if the worst happens, you’re going to be a very rich lady,” one cop had remarked.
“I’m already a very rich lady,” she told him.
And although Jason smiled at her statement, the cop did not.
She thinks she managed to give the same answer each time and knows she didn’t mention Marta, but it was all so confusing she can’t be sure. At Metropolis, Jason had patted her back when they finally let her go, so at least she’d convinced him. Unless he was just trying to show the police that he believed her. “No comment,” was all she’d said to the media outside Metropolis, the hospital, and the police station. The same when they’d stormed her just now on the sidewalk in front of The Tower, three doormen forcing them into the street, the concierge promising police assistance to keep them from the building.
Liddy towels her hair dry and puts on her bathrobe, which hangs on the back of the door, as it always has. Her creams and cosmetics are on the counter, exactly where she left them, and she applies them by rote. She looks at herself in the mirror and would have been shocked by the swelling around her red-rimmed eyes, by her sunken cheeks and blotched skin, if she weren’t so shocked by everything else.
She tries not to picture Garrett as he lay in the ICU, almost unrecognizable, intubated and hooked up to an impossible number of machines, tubes running in and out of his body, his face purple, eyes invisible under the swollen folds, curved metal tongs screwed into his skull. But she can’t stop herself. Nor can she stop the overwhelming guilt for her role in this.
He suffered multiple bone fractures, including to the ribs, limbs, and face, contusions to the lungs and other internal organs, and an unspecified traumatic brain injury. But the greatest concern is the partial severing of his spine at C2, one of the highest cervical vertebrae. It wasn’t completely cut through, which would have guaranteed quadriplegia, total paralysis from the neck down. Although that might be the case anyway.
The doctors decide to bring Garrett out of his coma. Although the brain swelling hasn’t subsided as much as they would like, he has to be awake in order for them to determine the extent of his injuries. An unconscious man may not respond to a pinprick even if there’s feeling in his limb. Robin is with Garrett when he begins to stir, and after alerting the nurses, she comes into the waiting room to tell them. For once, the staff allows all three of them into the ICU together.
“Dad,” Robin whispers, tears running down her face. “It’s me, Robin. We’re all here.”
“Hey, Pops,” Scott says, choking back a sob.
Liddy remains silent.
“R-rrrr,” Garrett says as he tries to speak through his swollen and cracked lips.
“Yes, it’s me. It’s Robin, your daughter.”
Garrett tries to move his head, but it’s immobilized by the tongs. “Wa-wa-wa,” he stutters, then lets out a sound like the shriek of an injured and terrified animal.
The howl reverberates inside Liddy’s skull, as it clearly does for the kids, and they all jump back from the bed. A nurse gently suggests it’s best if they return to the waiting room. No one argues. When they get there, they collapse in a heap on the couch, holding on to each other.
Liddy presses the twins to her. Her babies are completely devastated, and her heart rips open. She hasn’t fully explained what happened, just told them Garrett accidentally stumbled into the elevator door and described the Fenway Park incident. When Scott asked what they were doing at Metropolis, Liddy said they had a storage unit there and were bringing in some boxes.
“He tried to say Robin,” Liddy says, trying to console them. “He recognized you. That’s a good sign.”
Scott wipes his face with a tissue from the box on the coffee table and stands at the window, hands shoved into his pockets. “I don’t know what to wish for.”
Liddy closes her eyes, hiding from the anguish on her son’s face. A wish for Garrett to live might lead to a life of pain and paralysis. To wish him to die is, well, to wish him to die. “Let’s wish for a full recovery,” she says.
Scott turns. “And if that’s not a possibility?”
“Don’t say that!” Robin cries. “It is possible!”
Scott looks at his sister, his face set, then it softens. “Right. Right. Let’s go with that.”
Liddy knows if Garrett pulls through, he’ll tell a different story. He’ll accuse her of trying to kill him, counter her contention that she sidestepped his attack and claim it was she who pushed him. Although it would be his word against hers, his word might hold more sway, especially with the police’s suspicions already raised. And if he recovers, he’ll turn Marta into ICE. He’s been cuckolded by her, a woman. A man scorned, particularly W. Garrett Haines III, is not a force to be underestimated.
Five days later, Garrett is still heavily medicated and sleeps almost twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. He’s strapped to a rotating bed, both his legs and one arm in casts. There are weights attached to the tongs in his head, stretching his neck. It’s a horrible, wrenching state, bad for the twins to see every day.
He hasn’t responded to the pinpricks, isn’t able to move anything below his neck. Nor can he speak, his attempts a guttural mishmash of sound. The doctors say it’s still early, that things might change, but as the days pass, that outcome is becoming difficult to believe in.
Robin and Scott insist they’re going to stay until Garrett is stable, that they won’t leave Liddy alone before there’s a more definitive diagnosis, but it’s clear to her that they have to return to school. There’s nothing for them to do in Boston but stare at their paralyzed father. She supposes she could find a private school in the area, but it’s halfway through the year and if they’re in Zurich, they’ll be distracted by their classes and friends and extracurriculars. Here, this is impossible.
Their presence as well as their company has been such a support, and Liddy doesn’t want them to leave. She wants to beg them to stay with her forever, but she doesn’t. Instead, she forces them to go.
38
Marta
It has been over a week, and although she has spoken to Liddy on the phone, this will be the first time they have seen each other since the accident. Liddy is enduring the worst days of her life, and Marta assumes that the woman who will come through the door will be a very different Liddy than the one she has known.
Marta is different also. Isolation and fear and unbearable longing will do that to a person. There are only a dozen apartments in Jason’s building, and they agreed that she should stay inside his place as much as possible. If ICE or the police come around, it will be best if the other tenants have no knowledge of her. This means she is a captive inside his small rooms.
The apartment is what Jason said is called railroad-style. There are three rooms back-to-back, and there is very little natural light. The front door opens into a small living room, filled with furniture too large for it, and there are two tiny windows facing an alley. The kitchen follows, with no windows at all. The bedroom is reached through the kitchen and has three windows, but they look onto the brick exterior of the building next door. Jason apologized for the lack of amenities, but Marta just laughed. She has been living in far worse conditions.
Jason leaves by six in the morning and often does not come home until ten at night. He is careful to stay out of her way. She tries to do the same, but this is difficult, as she has not been outside since she arrived that horrible night, and she works doggedly on her dissertation in his living room to muffle her fears. Her first draft is almost complete, and she is aware her time in Jason’s apartment is limited. As are her options. Perhaps she should return to Metropolis. Or take her chances with a judge. She searches for a premonition to guide her, but una hija is not there. Nor is una hija available for Liddy, both their futures dark and unknowable.
The intercom beeps, and Marta hurries to push the button. She opens the door at Liddy’s knock, but stays hidden until Liddy enters the room and she can close it behind her. Marta and Liddy lock eyes for a long moment, then they grab each other, press themselves together. They cry, then laugh, then cry again. Liddy’s tears take longer to subside.
Marta leads her to the couch and then goes into the bathroom to wet a washcloth with cold water and grab a box of tissues. She has no idea how Liddy will bear this. Witnessing Garrett’s fall. Feeling responsible for his condition. Being a mainstay for her children. Tolerating police suspicions and the media’s devotion to dramatic speculation. Spending days at the hospital, pretending she cares about a man whom she despises.
“Please lie down, Lid.” Marta gently tips Liddy so that her head rests on the soft arm of the couch and her legs are stretched out on the cushions. Marta presses the washcloth over Liddy’s eyes. Liddy has been strong for everyone else, and now Marta must be strong so that Liddy does not have to be. “There,” she murmurs. “This will make you feel better.”
Liddy does not respond.
Marta is horrified by Liddy’s appearance. She has lost at least ten pounds, and her beautiful cheekbones are so starkly defined under her pale skin that she appears otherworldly. “I will go make us some tea,” she says. “I have asked Jason to buy a box of your lemon ginger.”
“Good old Jason . . .” Liddy hiccups and tries to laugh, but it turns into a sob. “I’m sure I’m all cried out, but then it seems there’s always more.”
Marta kisses her on the forehead. “I am right here. I am with you.” When her words make Liddy cry harder, Marta adds, “If this is the way you feel about it, then I am not here. I am leaving. I am going to the kitchen.”
Liddy raises her arm and grabs Marta’s hand. “Just make sure you don’t go any farther.”
When Marta returns with two steaming mugs in her hands, Liddy has removed the washcloth and stopped crying, although her eyes are still closed and her breathing is ragged. Marta puts the tea on the coffee table, sits, and then lifts Liddy’s legs, placing them on her own lap. “You look like hell,” she tells Liddy.
Liddy opens one eye. “You don’t look so great yourself.”
“I am still glad to see you.”
“Me too.”
When Liddy says nothing else, Marta asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Do I have to?”
“No.” Marta raises Liddy’s hand, turns the palm upward, and kisses it. “We can be quiet, or you can talk about something else.”
“Is there anything else to talk about?”
“There is always the weather.”
“I haven’t even noticed.” Liddy pushes herself up on one arm and looks out the small window overlooking the alley. “Still winter,” she says.
“Would you like to talk about the results of my multivariate regression analyses?”
“Maybe later,” Liddy says with a small smile.
“How about my varimax rotation?” Marta asks, encouraged by Liddy’s response.
“They’re almost certain he’s going to lose the use of the lower half of his body.”
