“Will he even know I’m there, Tara?”
A long pause. “I don’t know, Gerry. I thought he registered my presence, but maybe it was wishful thinking. Still, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I got to say goodbye. I think you’ll feel the same way.”
Easy for Tara, living in Greenwich, to say. She hadn’t required an entire day to make her visit. And she didn’t have a job, just a baby. Tara was probably happy for the melodrama of a deathbed visit. It relieved the tedium of her day-to-day existence, whatever that was.
“Is it—difficult? To see him, I mean.”
“Extremely. I worry it will blot out the memories I have of that gorgeous, gorgeous boy. But maybe it should, Gerry. Maybe if more people lose people they love, things will change.”
“Okay, Tara. I’ll go tomorrow.”
He hung up the phone, called Amtrak to check the schedules. There was a seven thirty train. He could reasonably expect to arrive at the hospice by eleven, be back in the apartment by four. He could do this.
I can do this, he said to himself the next morning, waiting in the line at Penn Station to buy his ticket. He had never realized what an active commuting culture Baltimore had. The station was bustling and full and he began to worry that the ticket line would not move swiftly enough for him to catch the seven thirty train.
And then he began to hope that would be the case. No one could blame him for missing the train, right? It’s not as if anyone were expecting him. In fact—how would anyone know if he had been there? Tara wasn’t the type to check behind him, to call the hospice and inquire if Gerry Andersen had visited Luke Altmann. He remembered shaking hands with Luke that first day at Princeton. “I know—I look like a Hitler youth, but my people ran away from Germany in the 1930s.” The shock of blond hair that he was forever pushing out of his eyes. Young Gerry’s heart had sunk at the thought of having such a good-looking roommate. What a laugh they’d had over that later.
7:21. 7:22. 7:23. It was about to be his turn at the window.
No one really knew how this disease worked. They said it couldn’t be caught through casual contact, but how could they be sure? Would he be expected to take Luke’s hand? What would he say? Could Luke even hear?
7:24.
He stepped out of line and left the station just as the announcement for the New York–bound train began. He waited two days before he checked in with Tara and described his visit with the dying Luke.
“Was it hard,” Tara asked, “seeing the lesions on his face?”
“Yes,” Gerry said. “Very tough.”
“Gerry, there are no lesions on his face.”
Luke died a week later. Tara and Gerry never spoke again.
April
WITH VICTORIA GONE and, along with her, the framework of her Monday-through-Friday schedule, Gerry no longer knows what day of the week it is. He’s fine with that.
“Gerry?”
“Yes?” He still doesn’t like the sound of his name in Aileen—Leenie’s—mouth.
“We need to talk.”
Not about marriage, he hopes.
“Okay,” he says, not looking away from his downloaded copy of The Daughter of Time.
“Wouldn’t it make sense for you to give me Victoria’s money? Without her kicking in, it’s going to be hard for me to make rent and we pay rent on the fifteenth.”
“How do I give you Victoria’s money?” he says. “I don’t have access to it.”
“Her paycheck, I mean. If you’re not paying her, why not pay me double?”
He almost says yes. That’s how weak he is, how feeble he has become. He’s not thinking things through clearly. Luckily, he sees the flaw before he agrees.
“Aileen—”
“Leenie.”
God, this is exhausting. “Leenie, if anyone ever did a forensic accounting”—he thinks that’s the term—“and saw this huge increase in your salary, it would be very suspicious, don’t you think?”
As “Aileen,” Leenie had thought physically, like Rodin’s Thinker, all furrowed brow and bent body. Leenie stands stock-still, her chin on her hand.
“I can’t make rent,” she says.
“You could find another roommate, couldn’t you?”
“No, Victoria’s the only one on the lease. I had some credit problems a few years ago and we thought it better that way. Legally, I don’t have standing. I could get in trouble if I brought another tenant in.”
So she’s comfortable carving up bodies and disposing of them, but worries about being hauled into rent court.