The Queen of Hearts(71)
He paused again and then resumed.
“He was alive. His eyes were kind of glazed, but they were open and he was looking at me. He didn’t say anything. I don’t think he could speak; he was making a rattling sound when he breathed, and he was a chalky color. Mack was screaming for help, and he was doing everything he could to keep Graham’s blood in him. I don’t know how many minutes went by. Then Graham moved his hand toward me, and I picked it up and I held his hand until somebody official got there. He kept looking at me—he knew I was there and that I had his hand and I think he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t. He looked at me and looked at me and then he seemed not to see me anymore.”
Chapter Thirty
BUCKETS OF MONEY
Zadie, Present Day
I kept an eye on Emma as I gathered my voluminous skirts aloft, trying to cross the street without tripping on the fabric and face-planting onto the asphalt. Part of me had been certain she’d bail on the Arts Ball tonight, given her social isolation in recent months; even in the best of spirits, she tended to dislike parties. But her demeanor in the car on the way here had surprised me. Her voice, leaden and dull since Eleanor’s death, held a note of vibrancy, and she laughed—a real, unforced laugh—when Wyatt accidentally but gallantly presented his arm to help Drew out of the car. I realized how much I had missed seeing a happy expression on her face.
It was unseasonably warm for the Saturday before Halloween, which was fortunate, because a significant percentage of the people walking around the streets of uptown Charlotte appeared to be nude. The sidewalks and plazas were bright, with ambient light from the skyscraper lobbies mingling with the shine of the streetlamps, casting a warm glow over the revelers. Soft puffs of warm air wafted around the corners of the side streets onto Tryon Street, as if being exhaled from some hidden lounging giant, capriciously ruffling hair and thrusting stray scraps of paper aloft, whirling them around like fall leaves. Where Drew, Emma, Wyatt, and I stood, the most eye-catching thing nearby was a conga line of attractive women in their twenties wearing nothing but skillfully applied body paint. Next to this vision was a group clad in firefighting gear, with hoses draped in strategic locations but sans actual pants. They were a merry bunch, calling out bons mots to one another and trilling laughter in their wake. In front of them, cars inched down Tryon, windows open, the occupants ogling the throngs on the sidewalks: superheroes, naughty nurses, giant food items, aliens, leering political figures, enormous zoo mammals, football players, adults in diapers clutching pacifiers, and a whole host of young hipsters in bizarre dress we could not identify.
“I am so tired of the same old scene every time we go uptown,” remarked Wyatt as the light changed, and he nearly collided with a brigade of dudes who were naked except for inexplicable thatches of wispy purple troll hair covering their unmentionables.
“Sorry!” I breathed to an irritated kangaroo upon whose tail I’d just trod. The kangaroo sniffed and exaggeratedly stepped over the small train on the back of my gown, wiggling its bottom as it boinged away.
We made our way down Tryon, passing Trade Street with three of its corners crowned by glorious statues of Transportation, Commerce, and Industry, all of them looking toward the fourth corner, where a bronzed mother stood holding a baby aloft. We stopped in silence. On a more typical day, while whizzing by in a stream of disgruntled commuters, one didn’t really appreciate the subtleties expressed here: the foundations of the city’s past gazing solemnly and hopefully at its future.
“Ah,” said Wyatt finally. “I think we’re having a moment.”
“I never really noticed they’re all facing toward the moth—” I began, then stopped. “Wait. Where’s Emma?”
A search ensued. It really was very crowded here; we’d had no idea when we left the house for the Arts Ball that uptown would be overrun by costumed millennials. Drew, in an effort to avoid valeting at the Ritz, had insisted on parking in his personal space at Elwood Capital, but the garage turned out to be crammed with illicit vehicles, thereby necessitating a long slog from another parking structure farther away. I was fairly certain the Halloween frolickers must have come as a surprise to Hattie McGuire, too, since she and Reg were about as hip as dentures. But some advance warning would have been helpful, since strolling multiple city blocks in four-inch Jimmy Choos was a serious commitment.
We located Emma. She’d been waylaid a block back by some LGBTers who were convinced, probably because of her staggering height, that she was a man in drag. “. . . and I couldn’t look that fantastically dewy if I had a hyperbaric chamber in my boudoir,” one was gushing in admiration.
“Darling,” Wyatt said, bestowing a fabulous air kiss on Emma, who looked petrified, “I hate to tear you away from your people, but we really must scoot.”
“What’s he got that I haven’t?” the person muttered as we strode (limped) away.
“Buckets of money,” Wyatt called back over his shoulder. “Obviously.”
The Arts Ball, when we finally reached it, was worth the walk. Outside the hotel the tuxedoed and gowned couples formed a sinuous line snaking from the covered entrance all the way down the block. The theme this year was “Pompeii and Herculaneum,” so all along the line there were servants in tunics waving gigantic palm-frond fans over the partygoers as they inched toward a fantastic fifteen-foot-high volcano at the entrance. Roman aqueducts defined the borders of the line, with running water gushing into two lush pools representing the famed Roman bathhouses.