American Savior Read online

  “Mercy.”

  “Right. Third floor. Where the bad cases are.”

  WELLS RIVER WAS ABOUT as opposite from Fultonville as a place could be. A clean downtown with fancy shops selling four-hundred-dollar dresses, an art theater, and a dozen or so cafes where nicely dressed thirtysomethings with one child asleep in an expensive Italian stroller sat around fondling designer sunglasses and talking fair trade. A women’s college where the yearly tuition was alarmingly close to my annual income. Old Victorians near old mills that young couples originally from New York were fixing up, or having fixed up, so they would be able to live within walking distance of their pottery studios.

  Forgive me if I sound sarcastic. Wells River was a perfectly nice place. Every place should be so nice. It’s just that every place isn’t, and when you spend Monday in one of West Zenith’s poor neighborhoods interviewing some mother who’s just buried her only daughter who was killed in a drive-by, and on Tuesday you get sent up to Wells to talk with, I don’t know, some famous writer who’s teaching his two young sons how to play tennis so they can take their rackets on vacation to Barcelona … well, I digress.

  They have a decent hospital in Wells River, I can testify to that. My girlfriend Zelda’s cousin had her twins there, in a hot tub or something, and when we went to visit her afterward it seemed clean and fresh smelling. Mercy Hospital, it was now called, though the joke was that when you got the bill for your colonoscopy or whatever, the name suddenly changed to No Mercy. Anyway, I went up there, parked in the Mercy lot, and didn’t worry about what I left on the seat of the car. As I approached the building, who did I see coming out the front door but Randy Zillins. Zillins was shaking his head and studying his notes and almost tripped over the curb.

  “R.Z., what’s it look like in there?”

  “They sent somebody up from the Boston Herald a while ago. Guy just left. Man, they’re sharp.”

  “The big time. You’ll get there some day.”

  “Nah,” he said in a voice that showed how bad he wanted to. During those rare moments when I was in a negative mood, I had thoughts along the lines of: R.Z. and I aren’t so different. We both dream of the big time, and we’re both caught in the small time. It caused a particular kind of pain in me.

  “These religious people are a bunch of phonies, man,” he said. “I’m tellin’ ya.”

  “You’re a nonbeliever, I take it.”

  “An anti-believer,” he said. “Like anybody with half a brain. When you die, you’re dead. Get it while you can.”

  INSIDE MERCY, ON the third floor, I learned that the head nurse, one Alba Seunier, was the person to see. I’d met Alba years before, in a different part of the hospital, under not very pleasant circumstances. She was fiftyish, weighed all of a hundred pounds, and you’d want her on your rugby team. She took me off to one side so we’d be away from the bustle and phones.

  “Amazing stuff,” I suggested, to get a conversation going. This kind of semi-neutral offering is one of the tricks they teach you in journalism school.

  Alba took the bait. She said, “Your lack of belief is written all over your face, mister.”

  “All right. I’m skeptical. It’s professionally required, like you having clean hands.”

  “I was skeptical, too,” she admitted. “I’ve worked in this hospital twenty-nine years, and I’ve seen plenty of strange things, including things people refer to as miracles, though I don’t like that word. I’ve never seen this. The newspaper people who were here clearly didn’t believe me, but I’m telling you, it’s true.”

  “Give me the details, if you would.”

  She didn’t ever seem to smile. Small tight lips, small blue eyes, small nose, but somehow all of that added up to large.

  “We have fourteen beds on this part of the third floor,” she said. “Terminal illness, for the most part. Many of them are children. At present, nine of the beds are occupied. Various cancers. A rare blood disorder. A patient who is allergic to everything—all foods. And we have one little girl, Amelia Simmelton, who has chronic lung disease and struggles for breath. The struggle puts a strain on her heart so we take her vitals hourly. Like many patients here, she’s in and out of ICU. This morning Amelia had a visitor. The man claimed to be a relative of some sort and had flowers and knew enough about the girl—her date of birth, her middle name, her mother’s name—so we believed him. But, as it turned out, he wasn’t a relative at all. We were fooled and don’t you dare put that in your report.”

  “Agreed.”

  She looked at me like my word wasn’t worth much. “He stayed all of five minutes, and Amelia isn’t struggling for breath now, and hasn’t been, apparently, since the moment he left her room. After this man’s visit, three other patients on the floor showed what I would term extremely unlikely improvement in their conditions, though that improvement is starting to erode in one of them. Amelia’s isn’t eroding. Her parents—the foundation people, Norman and Nadine Simmelton—have been here most of the day and just stepped out for something to eat. They’re guardedly ecstatic.”

  “Simmelton Foundation,” I said. “Big money.”

  “Enormous money. And enormously nice.”

  “I can talk to the girl, I hope.”

  “You may, yes. The Simmeltons said they’d allow it as long as there was no camera. Five minutes only.”

  “Fine. How old?”

  “Nine and a half. Until today I would have given her about another three weeks to live. Now I won’t say, and you won’t say anything about that either.”

  “Of course not. I’m not an animal.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I’ve seen you here before, haven’t I?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Well, I see you on the news once in a while. You look shady, if you want to know my honest opinion. You look like someone I wouldn’t want my daughter going out with.”

  “You look shady yourself,” I tossed right back, though it wasn’t remotely the case. “I wouldn’t want my father going out with you.”

  She was marching away by then, toward Amelia’s room. At that point I should have kept my mouth shut—after all, she could easily have told me to get lost, or wait until the parents came back so they could tell me to get lost—but keeping my mouth shut has always been hard for me, and, truthfully, it might have been one of the impediments to my climb up the television news ladder. Plus, I didn’t appreciate being called shady. So, as we walked down the hall in a kind of fast, two-person parade, me a couple of steps behind, I called out, “All right, all right. I’ll give you two of my autographed pictures then, if it means that much to you. But I want the box of Viagra samples in return. That was the deal.”

  Which wasn’t, as Zelda would have said, appropriate.

  Hospital rooms are not my favorite places, and it’s much worse, of course, when the patient is so young. But there was Amelia, coal black skin and corn-rowed hair, perched on the edge of her bed and looking happily past a vase of flowers and out the window. Nurse Alba was kind enough—given our recent past—to leave me alone with her.

  “Hey, kid!” I started out, and I gave her the smile.

  She turned her big, dark eyes up to me. For a few seconds I pictured myself as her dad, standing next to the bed, knowing that she had a few weeks to live and that all the money in the world couldn’t save her. Even imagining it I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest.

  “Hi, TV guy.”

  “So you know me, huh?”

  “Everybody knows you. ‘And this is Russ Thomas reporting for the Wizard, WZIZ, in West Zenith.’”

  “Tell me, do I seem, you know, like a straight shooter?”

  “Mom says she likes your hair.”

  “And Dad?”

  “Dad thinks you’re too hyper sometimes.”

  “I actually resent that.”

  “I’m with Mom.”

  “Good. I bet you can guess why I showed up.”

  “Because you heard the thir
d floor has the best food in Wells River?”

  Just like that, she said it. Little sweet spark in her face, and I thought: imagine what this kid has been through in her nine and a half years. And she sits there with the IV in her arm, making jokes with a stranger.

  “All right, I admit it,” I said. “I made the drive for one reason and one reason only: Mercy’s world-famous chicken à la king.”

  She smiled and pointed to the chair, the IV tube swinging with her arm. “You can sit, if you want. I’m kind of tired of telling the same story, but I’ll tell it one more time if you want.”

  I sat. I studied her round face, the intricately braided hair, the sad, pretty, adult-seeming eyes. I asked myself—who could help asking—what God had in mind when he decided to give a kid like this a disease like that. “All right,” I said, “I’ll spare you. R.Z. can give me the—”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Zillins, the newspaper reporter. I saw him outside. He can give me the details. But tell me, this guy who stopped by, how did he seem to you? I mean, kids have a radar for good guys and bad guys. What was he like? A freak or what?”

  She sank into thought for a moment, but didn’t take her eyes off me. “His face was nice,” she said at last. “He had a pretty big nose that was crooked, and the way he talked was very … gentle. He talked to me for a while and then he touched my leg, here.” She pointed to the outside of her left knee. “And then he said he’d see me later, that we had important work to do, and he went out. I thought he was just a nice guy the hospital sends around to talk with sick kids and bring them flowers, but as soon as he left, the nurse came in and checked my vitals and they were different and I feel a lot better. I’m not using oxygen, for one thing. I almost always use oxygen.”

  “And you’re sure you weren’t feeling better before he came by?”

  “I’ve never felt this better. It’s like I have another body or something. They’re coming back in a few minutes to do some PFTs.”

  “Which stands for what? Pretty fine tomatoes?”

  “Pulmonary function test.”

  “How do you know these things? I mean, ‘vitals,’ ‘pulmonary function?’”

  “Long story, Russ,” she said.

  At that point, Alba made her presence known to me. She was standing in the corridor holding up one finger. I nodded.

  “Last question, Amelia,” I said. “What did he say to you, this nice man?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Even for the TV guy?”

  The look she gave me then seemed to have something in it … pity is the word I’d use, I guess, though it doesn’t make me happy to admit that. I’ve never forgotten that look, or the sense that this nine-year-old saw through me and down into something I kept telling myself was not there. “He asked me to keep it a secret until he tells everybody, and I will,” she said with conviction.

  “All right,” I told her cheerfully. “They’re taking me away now. I’m sorry to have made you tell the story again, and I’m happy you’re feeling better, really I am.”

  I hoped she might ask for my autograph or something, but she’d met a lot of celebrities in her life, I guess. She just nodded and looked out the window again, as if my visit didn’t mean that much to her either way.

  I tried, of course, to get Amelia and her parents on camera, but it was no sale. They were nice people, shy people actually, who gave millions to various inner city and environmental causes. You could see that they were hoping against hope their daughter wouldn’t slip back into the iron grasp of her illness, and that they were not into having their faces on the TV for any reason. Nonetheless, I cobbled together a nice piece about the Good Visitor (Wales’s idea, nobody else liked the name), trying to sound neutral, maybe slightly skeptical but definitely not cynical. Maybe like I thought it might be partly true, and even if it wasn’t, it was a feel-good tale that balanced off the usual nightly misery.

  FOUR

  After my visit to Mercy Hospital I started making notes about the Good Visitor story. I had been a compulsive diary-keeper my whole life (growing up in an odd family will do that to you), so it was more or less natural to jot down the news of the day. The first entry looks like this:

  June 3

  W. River yesterday. Mercy. Alba S and the miracle girl. Parents say no to camera. Is there a chance all this is not b.s.? Later. Date with Z. Stewardess. Closet. Talk.

  The last part of it means that, on the night of my visit to Wells River, I had a “date” with Zelda. Date is what we called it when I went over to her place for the night or she came over to mine. When we went to a restaurant or a movie, it was “going out,” but we didn’t do that very often because we would inevitably attract the attention of some guy with a belly the size of three watermelons, and he’d come up and slap me on the shoulder like we were former shipmates, tell me I was looking good, and then remind me I’d made a slip of the tongue a few nights earlier, saying something like “Channel 23 Nude” instead of “Channel 23 News.” A guy like that can take the shine off a night out pretty fast.

  A night at Zelda’s carried no such risks. Her idea of a date was, for example, just what happened that evening: she met me at the door of her condo dressed up like a flight attendant: the tight skirt, the tied-back hair, the wings pinned to her white blouse (she spent a lot of time in vintage clothing stores). She had a martini in hand, and made me sit in the armchair and served me, then came back every few minutes as I sipped, and asked, in a certain tone of voice, if there was anything else she could do for me. And so on. You get the idea. Great imagination, that woman, and a pretty fair actress, too. We ended up in the closet, pretending it was the lavatory and we were thirty thousand feet above Arizona, ripping off each other’s clothes. Stewardess one night, policewoman another, dental hygienist, call girl, librarian. And then, a few times a month, just a pretty woman memorializing the missionaries. She had a constantly expanding repertoire of roles and enjoyed it as much as I did, which was a great deal. Plus, there were other sides of her I liked, and other sides of me she seemed to like, amazing as that may be.

  Afterward, I’d want to sleep and she’d want to talk. My listening to her talking was part of the deal, as it were, and that seemed fair enough to me, though after a day at the station or on the streets, I preferred quiet. After a day of listening to clients, she, naturally enough, wanted to talk. That night, after our exhausting flight across the country, we lay in bed, and just as I was sinking down into that heaven of postcoital rest, Zelda said, “Why didn’t you show pictures of that little girl on the report tonight?”

  “Not allowed.”

  “By who?”

  “Head nurse. Girl’s parents. The nurse probably shouldn’t have even let me in the girl’s room but the parents were away and she did.”

  “How old is this nurse?”

  “Twice as old as you and a tenth as nice. Did you think the story was kind of flat without the visuals?”

  “As flat as the front of the hospital,” Zelda said. One of the things I liked about her was that she could be perfectly frank without giving offense or trying to flatter. She was lying next to me, on her back, very close, and she took my hand and squeezed my fingers. “Don’t fall asleep yet, Russ.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think there’s something special about this story.”

  “Lots of people do. You should see the calls we—”

  “No. I mean it. It gave me a feeling tonight.”

  “That was me. In the closet. I gave you that feeling.”

  “Stop joking.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was as if I knew this would happen, or something. I was watching you and listening, and it was as if I’d seen the broadcast before.”

  “Danger view, is what the French call it.”

  “Stronger than that.”

  “Danger view with no ice. Straight up.”

  “You can be an ass.”

  “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately, in
varying forms.”

  “You wouldn’t know a great thing if it sat in your lap.… Plus, if you get a better job in some other city, what’s supposed to happen to me, to us?”

  This was, it seemed to me in my exhausted state, the actual heart of the discussion. I wanted to tell Zelda that there were days I knew I couldn’t live without her, but the dust storm of my past hadn’t settled enough for me to see my life clear yet, and I wasn’t ready for another marriage. She was one of those women who had happiness written all over her future, and deservedly so. It’s just that I was one of those men who had sadness written all over my past, and I was thirty then, ambitious as hell, and not ready. So I told a tiny lie. I said, “If a job someplace else comes through I have a plan, okay? Let’s not talk about it until then, so we don’t jinx anything.”

  From years of listening to troubled souls, Zelda had an instinct for the convenient untruth. She didn’t answer. I heard the whisper of the sheets as she rolled away from me, and I felt the nice warmth disappear. And then I was alone with the person I’d turned out to be.

  FIVE

  You would think that the occurrence of two apparent miracles in the same neck of the woods would make a splash in the media world. But it didn’t. The Wells River/Mercy Hospital/Good Visitor story evaporated from the collective consciousness like moisture off a sidewalk in a blast of summer sun. In the first place, most educated people don’t believe in miracles. And in the second place, very few stories have a lifespan of more than a day or two. The American news-watching public is promiscuous and impatient in its appetites, a fact well understood by the media conglomerates.

  In spite of that, for a couple of weeks I made calls to the hospital—without telling anybody, as a private project—and checked in with Nurse Seunier to see how things stood. (I kept notes about it in my journal, too. I had a weird intuition that it would turn into something big.) I was pleased to learn that Amelia Simmelton was doing well, and then continuing to do well, and then going home she was doing so well. From the sound of Nurse Seunier’s voice, I could tell the story had not evaporated from her consciousness. “This is so unusual in my experience that you should come up and talk to me about it again at some point,” she suggested, in our last conversation. “You people should do another story on it.” I thought her invitation was nice, but I had so many other things going then that I never went back to see the nurse. Wales didn’t mention the story again either, so there was, as we say, no professional impetus.