Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre Read Free Book Online Page B

a plastic bag hanging on a pole delivered a clear liquid to his arm. He was pale.
    What a way to start the year
, she thought. She struggled to suppress her fears. With him, she had what seemed to be an open-ended future. He had banished a nagging feeling of finality that had started after she’d turned fifty. Now his vulnerability had been revealed. She placed a hand on his, and the warmth was reassuring. His face, in sleep, was firm, his mouth firmly shut. His sleep was still and silent. The hospital shirt was open at the chest, and the curled hair she could see there stirred her, as did the snugness of the plastic band around his sturdy wrist.
    “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said to her when he came in to check on JC. “By tomorrow you’ll see a big change. Give us twenty-four hours. Right now, he’s heavily sedated. We’re going to keep him that way for a while.”
    So she went home.
    January 2 was a Saturday. The hospital was quiet, the normal stream of visitors and staff reduced by the holidays. Perhaps it was the unnatural heat and humidity of the place that made her nervous, or the distracting sounds and smells of steamed food, biochemistry and crisis; the whispered private conversations in darkened rooms and the harsh impersonal announcements on an intercom; awkward visitors with coats on, solitary patients attached to IV poles or shapeless under sheets. By the time she reached his room, she was feeling vaguely miserable.
    He was propped up slightly on the bed, eyes closed. She touched his hand.
    He smiled a brief, thin greeting. “I was just thinking,” he said, “what it must be like to be stuck here with some chronic illness.”
    He looked away, toward the window. “I wouldn’t have blamed you for finding an excuse to stay away. Hospitals. Christ, deliver me.”
    “Come on,” she said. “A hospital is a hopeful place. I was here yesterday, but you were sleeping.”
    “They told me. Maybe I’m just antsy because I see a lot of hospital in the future.”
    “What the hell are you talking about?” she said, forcing a laugh.
    “Look at me, flat on my back. And because of some teenage punk …”
    “Please,” she said. “There was an accident. You got conked on the head.”
    “I don’t know,” he said, examining his hands. “I don’t know—there was a day.”
    “What happened?” she asked.
    He grimaced. “Actually, it was the cat’s fault.”
    “The cat?”
    The story came out in fragments. The cat had bolted just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. JC was placing an empty wine bottle in his recycling box on the back deck before setting out for her place. The cat slipped between his legs and vanished up a fence and a tree and onto the roof. JC followed, up the fence, from the top of which, by stretching, he could reach a fire escape.
    The cat, being long-haired and snow white, shouldn’t have been all that hard to find in the darkness. Effie had named him Sorley, after a white-haired Scottish poet whose work she taught to undergraduates. She could easily imagine it: JC up on the roof, prowling, swearing quietly, angry mostly at himself for the momentarycarelessness that enabled the cat to dash for the deck while the patio door was open.
    JC’s roof was part of a continuum of rooftops on Walden, which though called an avenue was more like a narrow one-way lane between two rows of old, mostly semi-detached houses in what had once been a factory area but was now a second Chinatown. JC lived in number 14.
    He stood on the roof for a long time, watching for movement. On an earlier visit to the rooftops he’d learned to avoid skylights, of which there were four, having once inadvertently peered down and caught sight of two naked men struggling in what seemed to be an act of intimacy.
    He finally spotted the cat about four units along, on the roof of number 20, he estimated. Being an indoor cat, Sorley had the kind of confidence that apparently diminished as the surroundings lost