The Queen of Hearts(70)
“S’okay,” said Emma without opening her eyes. She leaned back into the couch, her face a smooth mask.
“How could he do this?” blurted Rolfe. “I mean, why? Why?”
“He went to see James this morning,” said Landley. “Some kind of money troubles.”
I couldn’t fathom it. This made no sense.
“. . . and I think that his dad used to be an orthopod or something,” Landley was saying, with a sideways glance at Emma, who had fallen asleep; her mouth was open and her head thrown back. “But he retired after he signed with one of those medical device companies. He invented something that made him a fortune, and apparently he had a lot to begin with.”
“So what?” Rolfe said.
“So, I heard he donated mucho dinero to the med school, that’s what. Graham would never talk about him, but his name’s on some plaque of high rollers outside Wormer’s office. Maybe this was some family fight?”
“He didn’t give jack shit to his son—that’s for sure,” said Rolfe. “Graham was always broke.”
“Hard to imagine Graham ever doing anything to warrant getting frozen out by his own dad, though, right?” said Landley, chugging another generous pour of the bourbon. He blinked hard and abruptly turned his head to look at a poster behind the sofa, but not before I saw the tears on his cheeks.
“Were you in the ER?” Rolfe asked, nodding at me.
“I was, but they realized what was happening and Dr. Elsdon hustled me out. Me and Em and James, too. They tucked us in the ED offices so we had no idea what was going on. Where were you?”
“I was in the quad,” said Rolfe.
It was the first time he’d confirmed this. We all looked again at Emma, who was snoring lightly, now shifted so her head was resting in Landley’s lap. His small gray eyes flashed a fleeting but fiercely tender expression, and he moved a little so Emma’s ear on one side was firmly pressed against his abdomen; he covered her other with a couch pillow. He looked up a little sheepishly: “Just in case.”
We looked back at Rolfe. He was transfixed by the searing memory replaying itself in the empty air in front of him. Rolfe was handsome, beautiful even, his unkempt black hair flipping at the ends ever so slightly into curls, all angelic curved eyelashes and very white teeth. It was difficult to reconcile his beauty with the story he was telling, his words flying out like shards of broken glass.
“I saw him,” he said. “He was across the quad from me, closer to the street, and I was coming out of the library. I think I meant to wave him over—but then the door to the side of me opened, and it was Breath of Freshness.”
We all nodded meaningfully. Rolfe had just finished his rotation on the general surgery service and he had fared poorly. It had been a brutal stint: the service was slammed, all the beds filling up and overflowing onto some of the internal medicine floors, much to the consternation of the nurses. There was never any sleep. Rolfe had become perpetually unkempt, staggering around with two-day stubble and reeking of tired perspiration. Grayish creases formed under his eyes, and he occasionally was spotted wearing a blob of drool-covered foam around his neck; he fell asleep with such prompt regularity during the seductive dimness of morning Morbidity and Mortality conferences that the surgeons had taken to slipping a neck brace on him to support his sagging cervical spine as soon as he crashed.
In the midst of all this grim deprivation, he’d become obsessed with an ethereal creature who worked as a unit secretary in the ER. He’d dubbed her Breath of Freshness because she was as wholesome and gorgeous as a gust of spring mountain wind roaring through a scorching slum; she had flawless white skin with blooming cheeks, pale red-gold Rapunzel hair, abundant breasts, straight pearly teeth, and clear eyes the color of heather. When looking at her, you almost had to shield your eyes from the luminous backlit shaft of celestial light in which she seemed to dwell. Nobody knew her name, and Rolfe was too downtrodden by the erosion of his own attractive countenance to approach her. Despoiling her blinding beauty by getting too close would have been like admiring a delicate, perfect monarch butterfly and then crushing it under a muddy boot.
So all of us knew spotting Breath of Freshness outside the ER, when he was clean-shaven and restored, would instantly distract Rolfe from anything else. He’d babbled about her the entire month of his rotation.
“I turned away the second I saw her,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know how long I stood there talking to her—a minute or two, maybe. I can’t even remember what she said her name was.”
Silence. No one, save Emma, seemed to be breathing. We waited for him to go on.
“It was loud. I knew right away it was a gunshot. But it was so out of context, and there was only one shot. I looked around, and I didn’t see what had happened at first. I was entertaining the idea of throwing Breath of Freshness down and rolling on top of her—um, in case there were more shots—but then I heard people screaming at the other end of the quad. None of them were dropping or running, though. They were just screaming.
“I could see a pool of blood dripping out on the rocks, then a hand. A big hand, a guy’s hand. There were people crouched all around him, so I couldn’t see his face. Most of the people seemed stunned, but one guy was trying to tamponade the bleeding—he had taken off his shirt and had stuffed it into this crater in the other guy’s chest. I still couldn’t see who was shot, but the guy on the ground with him was Mack Wolfson—you know, Graham’s friend in the class below us. He saw me and he yelled for me to help him. I took my shirt off too, and I knelt down beside Mack, and then I saw it was Graham.”