Before the Fall Page 8

  “Ready to go home?” he asks.

  They get dressed. The hospital gives Scott a pair of blue surgical scrubs to wear. He puts them on one-handed, wincing as the nurse maneuvers his fragile left arm into the sleeve. When he comes out of the bathroom the boy is already dressed and sitting in a wheelchair.

  “I’m giving you the name of a child psychiatrist,” the doctor tells Eleanor, out of earshot of the boy. “He specializes in post-traumatic cases.”

  “We actually don’t live in the city,” says Doug.

  Eleanor shushes him with a look.

  “Of course,” she says, taking the business card from the doctor. “I’ll call this afternoon.”

  Scott crosses to the boy, kneels on the floor in front of him.

  “You be good,” he says.

  The boy shakes his head, tears in his eyes.

  “I’ll see you,” Scott tells him. “I’m giving your aunt my phone number. So you can call. Okay?”

  The boy won’t look at him.

  Scott touches his tiny arm for a moment, unsure what to do next. He has never had a child, never been an uncle or a godfather. He’s not even sure they speak the same language. After a moment Scott straightens and hands Eleanor a piece of paper with his phone number.

  “Obviously, call anytime,” he says. “Not that I know what I can do to help. But if he wants to talk, or you…”

  Doug takes the number from his wife. He folds it up and jams it in his back pocket.

  “Sounds good, man,” he says.

  Scott stands for a minute, looking at Eleanor, then at the boy, and finally at Doug. It feels like an important moment, like one of those critical junctures in life when you’re supposed to say something or do something, but you don’t know what. Only later does it hit you. Later, the thing you should have said will be as clear as day, but right now it’s just a nagging feeling, a clenched jaw and low nausea.

  “Okay,” he says finally and walks to the door, thinking he will just go. That that’s the best thing. To let the boy be with his family. But then as he steps into the hall he feels two small arms grab his leg, and he turns to see the boy holding on to him.

  The hall is full of people, patients and visitors, doctors and nurses. Scott puts a hand on the boy’s head, then bends and picks him up. The boy’s arms encircle his neck, and he hugs hard enough to cut off Scott’s air. Scott blinks away tears.

  “Don’t forget,” he tells the boy. “You’re my hero.”

  He lets the boy hug himself out, then carries him back to the wheelchair. Scott can feel Eleanor and Doug watching him, but he keeps his eyes on the boy.

  “Never give up,” he tells him.

  Then Scott turns and walks off down the hall.

  * * *

  In the early years, when he was deep in a painting, Scott felt like he was underwater. There was that same pressure between the ears, the same muted silence. Colors were sharper. Light rippled and bent. He had his first group show at twenty-six, his first solo show at thirty. Every dime he could scrabble together was spent on canvas and paint. Somewhere along the way he stopped swimming. There were galleries to commandeer and women to fuck and he was a tall, green-eyed flirt with a contagious smile. Which meant there was always a girl to buy him breakfast or put a roof over his head, at least for a few nights. At the time this almost made up for the fact that his work was good, not great. Looking at it, you could see he had potential, a unique voice, but something was missing. Years passed. The big solo shows and high-profile museum acquisitions never happened. The German biennials and genius grants, the invitations to paint and teach abroad. He turned thirty, thirty-five. One night, after several cocktails at his third gallery opening of the week to celebrate an artist five years younger than himself, it occurred to Scott that he would never became the overnight success he thought he’d be, the enfant terrible, the downtown superstar. The heady exhilaration of artistic possibility had become elusive and frightening. He was a minor artist. That’s all he’d ever be. The parties were still good. The women were still beautiful, but Scott felt uglier. As the rootlessness of youth was replaced by middle-aged self-involvement, his affairs turned quick and dirty. He drank to forget. Alone in his studio, Scott took to staring at the canvas for hours waiting for images to appear.

  Nothing ever came.

  He woke up one day and found he was a forty-year-old man with twenty years of booze and debauchery ballooning his middle and weathering his face. He had been engaged once and then not, had sobered and fallen from the wagon. He had been young once and limitless, and then somehow his life became a foregone conclusion. An almost was, not even a has been. Scott could see the obituary. Scott Burroughs, a talented, rakish charmer who had never lived up to his promise, who had long since crossed the line from fun-loving and mysterious to boorish and sad. But who was he kidding? Even the obituary was a fantasy. He was a nobody. His death would warrant nothing.

  Then, after a weeklong party at the Hamptons house of a much more successful painter, Scott found himself lying facedown on the living room floor. He was forty-six years old. It was barely dawn. He staggered to his feet and out onto the patio. His head was pounding and his mouth tasted like a radial tire. He squinted in the glare of sudden sunlight, his hand rising to shield his face. The truth about him, his failure, came back as a throbbing head pain. And then, as his eyes adjusted, he lowered his hand and found himself staring into the famous artist’s swimming pool.

  It was there that the artist and his girlfriend found Scott an hour later, naked and swimming laps, his chest on fire, his muscles aching. They yelled at him to come for a drink with them. But Scott waved them off. He felt alive again. The moment he entered the water it was like he was eighteen again and winning a gold medal at the national championship. He was sixteen, executing a perfect underwater pivot. He was twelve and getting up before dawn to slice the blue.

  He swam backward through time, lap after lap, until he was six years old and watching Jack LaLanne tow a thousand-pound boat through San Francisco Bay, until that feeling returned—that deep boy certainty:

  Anything is possible.

  Everything is gettable.

  You just have to want it badly enough.

  Scott wasn’t old, it turned out. He wasn’t finished. He had just given up.

  Thirty minutes later he climbed out of the pool and, without drying off, put on his clothes and went back to the city. For the next six months he swam three miles a day. He threw away the booze and the cigarettes. He cut out red meat and dessert. He bought canvas after canvas, covering every available surface with an expectant white primer. He was a boxer training for a fight, a cellist practicing for a concert. His body was his instrument, battered like Johnny Cash’s guitar, splintered and raw, but he was going to turn it into a Stradivarius.

  He was a disaster survivor in that he had survived the disaster that was his life. And so that’s what he painted. That summer he rented a small house on Martha’s Vineyard and holed up. Once again the only thing that mattered was the work, except now he realized that the work was him. There is no separating yourself from the things you make, he thought. If you are a cesspool, what else can your work be except shit?

  He got a dog and cooked her spaghetti and meatballs. Every day was the same. An ocean swim. Coffee and a pastry at the farmers market. Then hours of open time in his studio, brushstrokes and paint, lines and color. What he saw when he finished was too exciting to say out loud. He had made the great leap forward, and knowing this he became strangely terrified. The work became his secret, a treasure chest hidden in the rocky ground.

  Only recently had he come out of hiding, first by attending a few dinner parties on the island, and then by allowing a Soho gallery to include a new piece in their 1990s retrospective. The piece had garnered a lot of attention. It was bought by an important collector. Scott’s phone started ringing. A few of the bigger reps came out and toured the studio. It was happening. Everything he had worked toward, a life’s p
ursuit about to be realized. All he had to do was grab the ring.

  So he got on a plane.

  Chapter 9

  A dozen news vans are parked outside the hospital, camera crews assembled and waiting. Police barricades have been erected, half a dozen uniformed officers keeping things orderly. Scott spies on the scene from the hospital lobby, hiding behind a potted ficus. This is where Magnus finds him.

  “Jesus, man,” he says. “You don’t do anything half-assed, do you?”

  They man-hug. Magnus is a part-time painter and full-time ladies’ man, with just a trace of Irish lilt in his voice.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Scott tells him.

  “No worries, brother.”

  Magnus gives Scott the once-over.

  “You look like shite.”

  “I feel like shite,” Scott says.

  Magnus holds up a duffel bag.

  “I brought some skivvies,” he says, “a fetching frock and some panties. You want to change?”

  Scott looks over Magnus’s shoulder. Outside, the crowd is growing. They are there to see him, to get a glimpse, a sound bite from the man who swam for eight hours through the midnight Atlantic with a four-year-old boy on his back. He closes his eyes and pictures what will happen once he is dressed, once he steps through those doors, the spotlight and questions, his own face on TV. The circus of it, the blood frenzy.

  There are no accidents, he thinks.

  To Scott’s left is a long hall and a door that reads LOCKER ROOM.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Scott says. “But it involves you breaking the law.”

  Magnus smiles.

  “Just one?”

  Ten minutes later, Scott and Magnus walk out a side door. They are both in scrubs now, wearing white lab coats, two doctors going home at the end of a long shift. Scott holds Magnus’s cell phone to his ear, talking to the dial tone. The ruse works. They reach Magnus’s car, a seen-better-days Saab, with a sun-bleached fabric roof. Inside, Scott reaffixes the sling over his left shoulder.

  “Just so you know,” Magnus tells him, “we’re definitely wearing these out to the bar later. Ladies love a medical man.”

  As they drive out past the press line, Scott shields his face with the phone. He thinks about the boy, hunched over and tiny in his wheelchair, an orphan now and forever. Scott has no doubt that his aunt loves him, no doubt that the money he inherits from his parents will insulate him from anything close to ruin. But will it be enough? Can the boy grow up to be normal, or will he be forever broken by what has happened?

  I should have gotten the aunt’s number, Scott thinks. But as he does, he wonders what he would do with it. Scott has no right to force his way into their lives. And even if he did, what does he have to offer? The boy is only four, and Scott is a single man approaching fifty, a notorious womanizer and recovered alcoholic, a struggling artist who’s never been able to keep a single lasting relationship. He is nobody’s role model. Nobody’s hero.

  They take the Long Island Expressway toward the city. Scott rolls down the window and feels the wind on his face. Squinting into the sun, he can half convince himself that the events of the last thirty-six hours were just a dream. That there was no private plane, no crash, no epic swim or harrowing hospital stay. With the right combination of cocktails and professional victories he could erase it all. But even as he thinks this, Scott knows it’s bullshit. The trauma he suffered is part of his DNA now. He is a soldier after an epic battle, one he will inevitably return to fifty years from now on his deathbed.

  Magnus lives in Long Island City, in a condemned shoe factory that’s been converted into lofts. Before the crash, Scott’s plan was to stay there for a few days and commute into the city. But now, changing lanes, Magnus tells Scott that things have changed.

  “I’ve got strict fecking instructions,” he says, “to take you to the West Village. You’re moving up in the world.”

  “Strict instructions from who?” Scott wants to know.

  “A new friend,” says Magnus. “That’s all I can say at this moment.”

  “Pull over,” Scott tells him in a hard voice.

  Magnus gives Scott a double eyebrow lift, smiles.

  Scott reaches for his door handle.

  “Chill, boyo,” says Magnus, swerving slightly. “I can see you’re in no mood for mystery.”

  “Just tell me where we’re going?”

  “Leslie’s,” says Magnus.

  “Who’s Leslie?”

  “Geez, did you crack your head in the crash? Leslie Mueller? The Mueller Gallery?”

  Scott is at a loss.

  “Why would we go to the Mueller Gallery?”

  “Not the gallery, you tosser. Her house. She’s a billionaire, yeah? Daughter of that tech geezer who made that gizmo in the ’nineties. Well, after you called me I maybe shot my mouth off a bit about how I was coming to get you and how you and me were gonna hit the town, get some ladies’ numbers—you being a shit-you-not hero and all—and I guess she heard, ’cause she called me. Says she saw what you did on the news. Says her door is open. She’s got a guest suite on the third floor.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be stupid, amigo. This is Leslie Mueller. This is the difference between selling a painting for three thousand dollars and selling one for three hundred thousand. Or three million.”

  “No.”

  “Perfect. I hear you. But think about my career for a minute. This is Leslie fucking Mueller. My last show was at a crab shack in Cleveland. At least let’s go for dinner, let her rub up against that giant hero boner of yours, commission a few pieces. Maybe throw in a good word for your boyo. Then we make excuses.”

  Scott turns to look out the window. In the car next to them a couple is arguing, a man and woman in their twenties, dressed for work. The man is behind the wheel, but he isn’t looking at the road. His head is turned and he is waving one hand angrily. In response, the woman holds an open lipstick, half applied, and jabs it in the man’s direction, her face lemoned with distaste. Looking at them, Scott has a sudden flash of memory. He is back on the flight, seat belt on. Up front, at the open cockpit door, the young flight attendant—what was her name?—is arguing with one of the pilots. Her back is to Scott, but the pilot’s face is visible over her shoulder. It is ugly and dark, and as Scott watches the pilot grabs the girl’s arm tightly. She pulls away.

  In the memory, Scott feels the seat belt clasp in his hand. His feet are flat under him, his quads tensed as if he is about to stand. Why? To go to her aid?

  It comes in a flash and then it’s gone. An image that could be from a movie, but feels like his life. Did that happen? Was there some kind of fight?

  In the next lane the furious driver turns and spits out the window, but the window is up. A frothy rope of spit runs down the curved glass, and then Magnus speeds up and the couple is gone.

  Scott sees a gas station ahead.

  “Can you pull in here?” Scott asks. “I want to get a pack of gum.”

  Magnus digs around in the center console.

  “I’ve got some Juicy Fruit somewhere.”

  “Something mint,” Scott says. “Just pull over.”

  Magnus turns in without signaling, parks around the side.

  “I’ll just be a second,” Scott tells him.

  “Get me a Coke.”

  Scott realizes he’s wearing scrubs.

  “Lend me a twenty,” he says.

  Magnus thinks about this.

  “Okay, but promise we’re going to Mueller’s. I bet she’s got scotch in her cabinets that was bottled before the fecking Titanic.”

  Scott looks him in the eye.

  “Promise.”

  Magnus pulls a crumpled bill from his pocket.

  “And some chips,” he says.

  Scott closes the passenger door. He is wearing disposable flip-flops.

  “Be right back,” he says, and walks into the gas station convenience store. There is a heavyset woman behind t
he counter.

  “Back door?” Scott asks her.

  She points.

  Scott walks down a short hall, past the restrooms. He pushes open a heavy fire door and stands squinting in the sun. There is a chain-link fence a few feet away, and behind that the start of a residential neighborhood. Scott puts the twenty in his front pocket. He tries to climb the fence one-handed, but the sling gets in the way so he ditches it. A few moments later he is on the other side, walking through a vacant lot, his flip-flops slapping against his heels. It is late August, and the air is thick and broiled. He pictures Magnus behind the wheel. He will have turned on the radio, found an oldies station. Right now he’s probably singing along with Queen, arching his neck on the high notes.

  Around Scott, the neighborhood is lower-class, cars on blocks in driveways, aboveground pools sloshing in backyards. He is a man in hospital scrubs and flip-flops walking through the midday heat. A mental patient for all anybody knows.

  Thirty minutes later he finds a fried chicken joint, goes inside. It’s just a counter and stove with a couple of chairs in front.

  “You got a phone I could use?” he asks the Dominican guy behind the counter.

  “Gotta order something,” the guy tells him.

  Scott orders a bucket of thighs and a ginger ale. The clerk points to a phone on the wall in the kitchen. Scott takes a business card from his pocket and dials. A man answers on the second ring.

  “NTSB.”

  “Gus Franklin, please,” says Scott.

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Scott Burroughs. From the hospital.”

  “Mr. Burroughs, how are you?”

  “Fine. Look. I’m—I want to help—with the search. The rescue. Whatever.”

  There is silence on the other end of the line.

  “I’m told you checked out of the hospital,” says Gus, “somehow without being seen by the press.”

  Scott thinks about this.

  “I dressed up like a doctor,” he says, “and went out the back door.”

  Gus laughs.