Come Out Tonight Read online

“St. Vincent’s Hospital,” I said, closing the door. He stepped on the gas and set off into the wet street, past the dozens of people with their umbrellas blown inside out, waiting in puddles for cabs that wouldn’t stop.

  I walked into Sherry’s hospital room at 9:27, surprised to find that Dr. and Mrs. Pollack were already there. Their flight had either been early, or the cab driver had wings on his wheels. Or, perhaps, who knows, maybe they had hired a private plane. I hadn’t considered that before, but from what I had found by googling Phillip Pollack, he was one of the most highly regarded plastic surgeons in the country. Most likely money would be no object if he decided to speed to his daughter’s bedside.

  They didn’t notice me at first, hunched over Sherry’s bed as they both were. There was some sniffling, nose blowing, muffled whispers.

  “Sherry! Sherry Darling! Look, Phil. She turned toward me! I think she hears us!”

  “Don’t be silly, Rhonda. She’s in a coma.”

  “There, see? She just recognized your voice.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

  “I’m not jumping to conclusions, Phil. A mother knows,” Rhonda said, touching her daughter’s pale cheek.

  “Sherry? Sherry?” her father said. Long pause. “Forget it, Rhonda. She can’t hear us. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”

  I cleared my throat, and they turned toward me. I walked toward them, hand out.

  “Hello, Dr. Pollack. Mrs. Pollack. I’m Detective Sirken,” I said. “Sorry to have to meet under these….”

  “It can’t be helped,” Phillip Pollack replied, shaking my hand. He was powerfully built; with graying hair and steel blue eyes that seemed to take my measure in a single scan.

  Behind him, beautifully dressed but with eyes rimmed in red, Rhonda stood holding the limp hand of her daughter, who, head bandaged, eyes closed, connected by a fan of colored wires and tubes to screens and devices, lay very still.

  By the window stood a single chair. I pulled over another from the other side of the room to face it. Dr. Pollack sat in one. I offered the other to his wife, but she just shook her head, turning back toward her daughter on the bed; so I took it myself.

  “Did her boyfriend do it?” Pollack asked the moment I sat down.

  From what Jackman told me, he had never met the parents. In fact, Sherry rarely talked to them; hadn’t gone back in five years, and as far as Henry knew, they rarely came to visit her. I wondered why. “Do you know Sherry’s boyfriend?” I asked.

  “No, but she’s talked about him. A ne’er-do-well as far as I can determine. Works in a rundown pharmacy and has no ambitions beyond that. She said they’re just friends, but he wants more. I told her she should break up with a character like that…” He trailed off before adding, “But since Sherry was a little girl, she always went her own way....”

  I waited for more, but he was finished. “When did you last talk to Sherry, Dr. Pollack?” I asked.

  “A few weeks ago,” he said. “On the phone, of course. Sherry always had some excuse - usually it was her work – about why she couldn’t fly out and visit. We haven’t seen her much in the past five years.”

  “Do you come out here?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Rhonda,” he called, “when was it we saw Sherry last?”

  His wife, gazing down at her pale, still daughter, hesitated, then said softly, “Last April, I think.”

  “Yes, yes,” Pollack agreed. “It was Sherry’s birthday. We flew in to New York to take her out to dinner….But what about this boyfriend? Have you checked him out? She told us he has a nasty temper.”

  “Really?” I said. That was the first I heard of that. “Sherry told you that?”

  “She said he could fly off the handle at the smallest things. She told us she was afraid of him.”

  “Really?” I said again. “Well, I’ll certainly look into that. As of now, we’re considering a number of individuals, but no one is a formal suspect.”

  Sherry’s father stood up and walked over to Sherry’s bedside. His back to me, he said, “Then there’s this Ryan fellow, who works with her. I met him once. Very shifty character. Something about him stealing credit for Sherry’s work.” He turned back. “Have you talked to him?”

  “We know of him, Dr. Pollack, and have plans to question him.” I wanted to wrest the conversation away from possible suspects and back to Sherry’s background. Fact is, I already knew Sherry came from a wealthy family; raised in California, the father a successful plastic surgeon; mother a homemaker. But I wanted to get the story from him.

  “You mentioned that Sherry always went her own way,” I began. “Why did she leave the West Coast in the first place?”

  Phillip’s face turned dark. “She’s headstrong, that’s why. I thought we had agreed that she would go to med school. Her grades were excellent. She had her pick of any of them: Stanford, UCLA, anywhere, even Harvard, if she insisted on going to the East Coast. I had contacts at all of them. But, no, she decided against them all. She wanted to go someplace where I had no contacts, where she could get in on her own merits. Vandenberg, she tells me, at the last minute!”

  “Vandenberg is world-renowned,” I said.

  “She did it to spite me…,” he said, sitting back down.

  “You’re being hard on her again, Phillip,” I heard from across the room.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, glaring, and Rhonda turned away.

  “I see,” I said. There was obviously some bad blood there. Sherry left home some five years ago, and never went back. Rarely talks to her parents. Hints of disagreements between Sherry and her father; maybe expecting a lot but never giving her the praise she may have craved. So she gets a fellowship to the Vandenberg Institute – thinks that will please him. But he wants her to do it his way. They lock horns. She leaves. “But, still,” I said, “you must have been very proud of her when she discovered that blockbuster drug, Somnolux.”

  “Of course we are,” Rhonda said from across the room. Not a peep from her husband.

  I think I get the picture. Rejected daughter goes on to prove herself, but the father will never be satisfied, and the mother is too timid to get in the middle between them. It explains her high level of ambition: always trying, at least in principle, to please a father who can’t be pleased. A recipe for success but not happiness. Unfortunately, it explains Sherry’s psyche but not who or why she was attacked.

  “How long will you be in town?” I asked.

  “A day, maybe two,” he said, scanning me again with those steel-blue eyes. “There isn’t much we can do.”

  At that he stood up, and I got up with him. We moved over to the bedside, where he took his wife’s other hand. Sherry was lying there exactly as she was before. Nothing moved except the slight elevation of her chest as she breathed. We stood there gazing down at her.

  “Sherry, darling.” he said to his silent daughter. “Just remember how much we love you.” Why did I have the feeling this was for my benefit, not hers?

  HENRY

  I heard Sherry’s parents came out to see her. But it must have been for such a short a time that I missed them entirely, even though I’d been there every minute I could spare. The nurse said that Dr. and Mrs. Pollack flew in from California, watched Sherry sleep for awhile, talked to that Detective Sirken and left early that same evening.

  What kind of parents can they be to leave their only child alone and comatose in a hospital bed and just go home? To not care how Sherry might feel, waking up in a strange place, alone and disoriented? That’s why I’d been there so much - just so that she could see a friendly face the moment she opened her eyes. I’d come and sit by her every night and every weekend, watching for the flutter of her eyelashes, waiting for the moment when her eyes would focus and she would all of a sudden make out my smiling face. I watched and I waited, but nothing really changed until a couple of weeks after she was hurt.

>   “Come quickly, Mr. Jackman,” the nurse said as I rounded the corner of the nurse’s station that evening.

  “Something happened?” I asked.

  “See for yourself,” she said.

  I half ran into Sherry’s room. There she was, still lying there, this time on her back. I didn’t notice much until I came right up to her. Her eyes were open.

  “Sherry! You’re awake!” I shouted and went to take her in my arms, but she didn’t react. Her eyes seemed to track me for a moment, and then they went off somewhere else.

  “Sherry!” I cried. “It’s me! Henry!”

  Her lips seemed to curl into a smile, but then they didn’t. I didn’t know what to think. The nurse was standing there, confused as well. “I’m sorry. I thought by the time you came, she would be fully awake.”

  I wasn’t really listening at this point. I was holding Sherry’s hand, whispering in her ear, kissing her face: anything to get her to focus on me. She was there but she wasn’t there. It was maddening. Meanwhile, the nurse went out and came back with Dr. Mehta. I backed off while he examined her reflexes and shined lights in her eyes.

  “Could you get me a pin?” he asked the nurse, who nodded and went out of the room. I was about to speak, but he waved me off. We stood around for a couple of minutes until the nurse came back and handed him a pin. He pricked Sherry in the arm. I thought I saw her pull her arm away.

  “Notice the increased heart rate and respiration,” he said to the nurse.

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  “She’s in a vegetative state,” he said. “Wakefulness without consciousness.”

  I must have done a double-take. “But they’re the same thing.”

  “It’s a misconception,” Mehta said. “Consciousness is awareness, while waking is a state of arousal where our eyes are open, our muscles are toned, and we are physically able to interact with the world. The two usually occur together, but in actuality, they are separate. Only in abnormal states like vegetative states and sleepwalking do they disassociate. Anyway, patients usually go through a vegetative state on their way to full waking. Hopefully, she’ll progress to full waking within the month.”

  “But it’s already been two weeks,” I said.

  “It’s hopeful,” said the doctor.

  “Will she recover?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait another month,” he said. No statistics. No probability. I didn’t have a clue.

  “Sherry,” I whispered in her ear. “It’s Henry. I’m here.” But she didn’t answer.

  * * *

  By ten o’clock the next morning, there was already a long line of people waiting to hand in their prescriptions. Carl and I were both filling orders.

  “He says to wait another month,” I grumbled, closing a package.

  “But she opened her eyes, Henry! It’s good news,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, but she doesn’t look at you. She doesn’t do anything. It’s almost worse.”

  “You told me the doctor said it’s hopeful. Henry, you want to hand me that bottle? The little green one.”

  “I wanted her to wake up. But not like this. She’s like a zombie....” I stopped to count out thirty Lipitor, and slid them into a vial. “I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I come to visit her every day, but all she does is lie there. The doctor says she’s got normal sleep/wake patterns...”

  “Well, there you go!”

  “Yeah, but all that means is eight hours her eyes are closed, eight hours her eyes are open, eight hours closed, eight hours open.”

  “It’ll be okay, Henry. Be patient... Hey, someone’s over by the register.”

  I walked over to the front where a young blonde in tight Capris and a belly-button ring was hitting the bell over and over. “Hey, anyone there?” she called and hit it again.

  “Okay. We’re here. We’re here,” I said running over.

  “I have a prescrip...Hey, it’s you!” the girl exclaimed, a big smile on her face.

  “I don’t think we’ve...”

  “Yeah, yeah! Pacha last Friday night. You were the guy sitting at the table under the strobe lights.”

  I could hear Carl laugh. “Don’t think so! Last Friday night Henry would have been in his pajamas watching Antiques Roadshow...,” he called from the back.

  “Cut it out, willya Carl? Miss, I really don’t...”

  “Edward, right? You remember me. My name’s Heather!”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. I had never seen this person in my life. “My name is Henry,” I said.

  But she didn’t even stop talking long enough to listen. “Geez...I mean it’s not like we don’t know each other,” she went on. “My place was practically across the street. You mean you don’t remember coming up afterwards?”

  “I’m sorry, miss, but...”

  “Miss! Stop with the miss! My name is Heather! And you said you’d call me! You wrote my number down on your hand.” At this point, she grabbed my left hand, pulled it to her, and turned it over. She looked disappointed when she saw there was nothing written there.

  “My name isn’t Edward,” I said, pulling my hand away as gently as I could. “I never went to...What is Pacha?”

  She looked into my eyes for a long time, puzzled. Her own eyes lined in black and shaded in purple, were bloodshot. Her mouth was pouting, until suddenly, a crafty little smile turned the corners up. “I get it. You promised you’d call, but you didn’t. You’re pretending not to know me.” She shrugged. “Have it your own way.” She pivoted, started to sashay out, before she turned back. “Wait!” she said. “I need my prescription.”

  “Name?” I asked, as if none of this had just happened.

  “Heather Kuznitz,” she said.

  I reached behind me and riffled through the scrip carton. “Abernathy, Black, Epstein, Kuznitz,”I said, pulling out the right bag. Birth control pills. “Forty-seven forty.”

  She passed her debit card through the slot.

  “Sign here,” I said, handing her a pen.

  She signed.

  I extended the package to her, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she grabbed my hand again and turned it over and, with the pen I had given her, wrote her telephone number on my palm. Then she gave me the pen back, and with the same crafty little smile, said, “Well, it’s there now. Call me!” She turned to go, then twisted her head around coquettishly. “Edward.”

  Just after she left, I felt Carl’s big paw on my shoulder. “So now I see why you’re so sleepy all the time. You’ve been out clubbing every night! He pointed toward Heather’s receding butt. “How was she?” He laughed.

  I shoved his hand off my shoulder. “That’s not funny. I never saw her in my life, and I never did anything with her. I go see Sherry every night. Every night. That’s my life. Here and the hospital.”

  Carl shrugged. “That’s not much of a life. You’re a young guy, Henry. Maybe you should go out clubbing. ”

  I ignored that. Carl’s a nice guy, but he just never understood what I felt for Sherry. I didn’t want anyone else. “Anyway, the reason I’m so sleepy is my Somnolux ran out.”

  “Oh? Didn’t know you took that stuff.”

  “Well, you should. You filled it last month for me. I had thirty pills, but I’m out now, and it says no refills.”

  “Yeah. That’s because they’re addictive. Better than the benzodiazepines, but still addictive. You shouldn’t use them more than ten days in a row.”

  “Well, with Sherry in the hospital for the past month I can’t sleep for shit,” I grumbled. “I tried all the over-the-counter stuff - Sleep-Eze, Sominex, Nytol. Nothing works for me. All I get is constipated and drowsy the next day. Except when I use too much, and then I get wired and don’t sleep at all.”

  “Rebound drowsiness, yeah.”

  “So, I’m sleeping, like two hours a night.”

  “Too bad,” Carl said. “Well, so go see your doctor.”

  “Don’t have time. I’m here, then I’m at the hospi
tal.”

  “If you’re nice to me, I just might call your doctor for you. Tell him I’m your pharmacist and get him to renew over the phone.”

  “Wouldja? That’d be great.” I wrote the doctor’s name and number on a strip of paper and stuck it on the counter right in front of him.

  “Right after I finish this scrip...” We went back to work. Suddenly, Carl laughed. “Did I ever tell you about the time my wife and I were at the mall, and this bodacious babe came up to me and threw her arms around me?”

  “No, I...”

  “Yeah, threw her arms around me. Wife pulled her off me so hard she practically hit the floor, at which time she took a good look at my face, and said, “Sorry. Thought you was Mike.” Carl laughed again, and picked up the strip of paper with the number. “Hey pal, I’m doing this for you, but only until Sherry wakes up, and you lose all that stress. Capeesh?”

  * * *

  I’m not much of a swinger, really. You’ve got to believe me when I say I never saw that Heather Kuznitz babe before. I don’t know what she was going on about. I must have a double somewhere named Edward. It sure wasn’t me at that Pacha place carrying on under the strobe lights.

  Hey, I was born in Queens. My parents still live there: Mona and Jack Jackman. They’ve been living there for the last thirty years in this little brick house off of Hillside Avenue. They’re probably the only white, non-immigrants in the whole borough. The area used to be Jewish, Polish, Irish, Italian. Now it’s West Indian, Arab, African-American. Yeah, and it looks a lot better now. The current residents really cleaned it up. Property values are zooming. Come to think of it, that’s probably why Mom and Dad stayed.

  So, I’ve got this older brother and a sister, but both of them got smart early and moved away. Mom didn’t like it one bit when I decided to move out, too. She pleaded with me to stay a little longer. Don’t leave me, too, Harry, she said. My name is Henry, but she calls me Harry; don’t ask me why. I told her she still had Dad. I was thirty, for crying out loud, and it was time for me to leave. But Mom didn’t take it lying down. She never takes anything lying down. She still calls me every day. Fact is, I just filter the calls and call her back when I feel like it. It works for me.