The Believers by Zoë Heller Read Free Book Online Page A

forget about Lenny, will you?"
    Jean nodded emphatically. "No, of course not. I'll speak to Darius about it today."

    By insisting that the taxi make a couple of illegal left turns, Audrey managed to get to the Long Island Hospital in Cobble Hill in less than forty minutes. She found Kate, Joel's paralegal, sitting alone in the ICU Family and Friends Lounge.
    "So what happened?" she asked.
    Kate began diligently to describe what had taken place in the courtroom.
    "Yeah, all right, love," Audrey interrupted, "I don't need the police procedural. What do they say is wrong with him?"
    Kate put her hand to her mouth. "Oh! I thought you'd been told. They think he's had a stroke--"
    "A stroke!"
    "Well, that's what the ambulance men said. I haven't spoken to anyone since. A doctor is meant to be coming to talk to us in a bit."
    Audrey sat down in an armchair. The walls of the lounge had been painted with a special sponging technique to give the impression of fresco. Hanging above the sofa where Kate was sitting was a group of nautical prints: unmanned schooners on glassy seas. A low table in the corner of the room was piled high with back issues of American Business and American Baby . "Well, this is a real shit-hole, isn't it?" Audrey remarked as she took out her phone.
    Kate pointed apologetically to a sign on the wall: "We Thank You for Not Using Cell Phones in the ICU."
    "Oh, fucking hell." Audrey paused, weighing whether to heed the prohibition, then stood up. "All right, I'm going downstairs. Look after my handbag while I'm gone, and come and get me if anything happens."
    Outside the hospital's main entrance, she took out a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and went over to a man standing against a pillar. "You got a light?"
    "Nope," the man replied in the piously emphatic tones of a non-smoker.
    Audrey felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to find a tall black woman in a turban, holding out a lighter. The woman watched intently as Audrey lit her cigarette, and when Audrey made to hand the lighter back, she shook her head. "You can keep it."
    "No, love," Audrey protested. "It's all right, you don't need to do that."
    "Really," the woman said, smiling. "Have it. I've got another one in my bag."
    Audrey looked at her suspiciously. There was something in her manner--some knowingness or unwarranted intimacy--that seemed to augur impertinent questions and unasked-for confidences. It gave her the creeps. "All right then," she said ungraciously, slipping the lighter in her pocket. "Thanks."
    She walked away now and sat down on a bench to make her calls. Karla, her older daughter, did not pick up. Neither did Lenny or Rosa. She left them each a purposefully oblique voice mail: "Just to let you know, something's up with Dad. Give us a ring when you can." Then she called the Coalition for the Homeless office to tell them that she wouldn't be coming in. There were other people she needed to inform: Joel's mother; her sister, Julie. But she did not feel up to dealing with all that feminine hysteria right now. She would get one of the kids to make the calls later. She put the phone away and sat quietly on the bench for a moment, taking in the insulting normalcy of the scene around her. A mother wandered past, pushing a stroller. Across the street, a man leaned out from the cab of an idling delivery truck and hissed an obscenity at a passing woman. Frowning, Audrey put out her cigarette and went back into the hospital.
    When she came out of the elevator on the fifth floor, she spotted Joel's young colleague, Daniel Leventhal, talking intently to a nurse at the other end of the corridor. His crumpled shirttails were hanging out of his pants and he had slung his jacket over his shoulder in the glamorously insouciant style of a TV detective. The nurse to whom he was speaking was staring at him in much the same way that Virgin mothers contemplate their oversize baby Jesuses in Renaissance paintings of the Adoration.
    Audrey's lip curled