The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [44]
Afterward, she won't remember which came first, the slap or throwing his cell phone into the road. He runs to get it. “Go to hell!” she says as he grabs her arm, trying to steer her down the street to their car. “Just go to hell, the two of you! I don't care anymore.”
“Get in the car!” he demands. “Get in the car and listen to me.”
“No!” She struggles to pull free.
“Is this what you want, a scene? A public scene?”
“Yes!” She laughs. “Yes, I do! And that way everyone will know what a—”
His hand clamps over her mouth. Two couples come out of the gallery. They turn in the opposite direction. Nora slumps against him. She feels numb. Numb and cold. Her teeth chatter as she gets into the car. Deadness. All of it.
Listen, he says as he drives. Will she at least listen? It was Bob on the phone. Bob Gendron. “Something happened, but I couldn't understand him. I don't know if he's drunk or—”
“Stop lying to me!” She hits his arm. “It wasn't Bob, it was her. It was, wasn't it?”
He can't even look at her.
“Did you call her?”
He sighs. “I had to. She left this hysterical message.” He speaks over Nora's bitter laughter. “There was a fight. Between Drew and Clay, and it sounds like our guy got the worst of it.”
Ken had turned off his cell phone in the gallery. When he checked his messages he saw Robin's three calls. He called her back and she said she was at the emergency room. Clay and Drew had been at the same party, and there'd been a fight. The gallery was only a few blocks from Franklin Memorial. How badly hurt is he, she asks. Ken's not sure, but from the way he's driving she's imagining the worst. He speeds into the doctor's parking lot and pulls into a reserved space. The attendant shoots out of his booth and tells them they have to park behind the hospital in the visitors' lot.
“I'm calling security!” he warns in a high-pitched, accented voice as he stalks Ken and Nora through the emergency room doors into the crowded waiting room.
Robin hurries toward them. Behind them, the attendant squeals into his walkie-talkie, calling for backup, a security guard.
“How is he?” Ken asks.
“Good. He's good. The doctor's with him,” Robin says.
“I better go move the car. I'll be right back,” Ken says, and, as he hurries outside, Nora knows he can't face this meeting between them.
“We're in the wrong place,” she says, weak with the irony of her words.
The waiting room is filled with haggard-looking people, none more so than Nora. She feels drained, pinched with distress, while Robin's every word and gesture is a flourish of feelings, warmth, sympathy. Even in gray sweats, no makeup, and her hair tied back in a frazzled pony tail, her girlish prettiness glows. Lyra kneels on the floor, in Cinderella pajamas and pink bunny slippers, coloring on paper a nurse has given her. Unaffected by their last meeting, she smiles up at Nora, a familiar face in this sea of stress and pain. A toddler wails as his mother struggles to hold an ice pack on his forehead. An old man with his hand wrapped in a bloody towel stares dazedly at the floor. His fly is open. At the nurses' station a tearful young girl is trying to translate for the two frantic Spanish-speaking women with her. One is searching through her purse for pill bottles while the other holds her belly, moaning.
“Drew's okay, but he's got a mild concussion. A black eye and contusions on his face. A cut. Here,” Robin says, touching her cheekbone. “The right side. And a broken tooth. Well, chipped anyway. This one.” She points to her eyetooth. “He's already been X-rayed. They're just stitching him up. I wanted to stay, but he didn't want me to. Just as well, because then I could be here to tell you.”
Nora starts down the hall. Robin scoops up Lyra and hurries alongside Nora through two sets of double doors, down the harshly lit corridor into a treatment ward.