Southampton Spectacular (28 page)

In any case, he and Cynthia were enjoying a quiet night on their own with the Southampton house empty. They had even allowed themselves a couple of drinks, despite the doctor’s warnings to the contrary. By 11:30, which was approximately the same time that Austin was leading Devon up the stairs to a floor where no women were ever supposed to go, Peter and Cynthia Hall were ready to call it a night.

They crawled into bed without even turning on the bedside lamp, because there was no use pretending that either one of them had the energy for reading. Or for anything else. This was the latest that Peter had been up since coming home from the hospital, and Cynthia’s nerves were still frayed from having to stand constant watch; changing her husband’s bandage every day kept her in a state of permanent vigilance, permanent fear. The fear that Peter might fall suddenly. Or begin slurring his speech. Or any one of the half-dozen things that would indicate a complication – an aneurysm, a stroke, anything at all – stemming from his injury. Nighttime was a relief for her, simply because she
could not
be on watch. She had slept more deeply in the last two weeks than she had since the age of seventeen.

They had settled in now, adjusted the pillows and the sheets and the comforter in the personal, idiosyncratic ways that couples do. Peter with one leg outside the blanket. Cynthia with her entire body wrapped up as tightly as possible, like a caterpillar awaiting metamorphosis. Then the quiet came down on them, and already Cynthia was beginning the small, involuntary twitches that meant sleep was coming upon her; her head sunk one inch deeper into the pillow.

Peter whispered in the dark.

At first she thought she had dreamed it. She took a quick breath through her nose and opened her eyes. She stared up at nothing and waited, as if listening for the second step of a prowler downstairs in the kitchen somewhere. Then her husband spoke again.

“What did they call it?” he whispered.

Cynthia gave her mind a second to process, wondering if they had been in the middle of talking about something right before bed, something she had forgotten as she drifted off. But no previous thread occurred to her. No conversational blocks dropped into place.

She closed her eyes again, and the need to sleep was so strong that she almost forgot to answer. “What did who?” she whispered. Even more quietly. “Call what?”

There was a long pause, and Cynthia was relieved. She had dreamed it. He hadn’t been speaking to her. She could go to sleep.

No she couldn’t.

“When I was out,” Peter whispered. “All that time when I was unconscious after the accident. What did the doctors call it? How did they refer to me?”

She let this sink into her head. Then all at once she could see where he was going. She could predict, could almost
hear
the exact words that would make up the rest of this conversation.
They called it a coma-like state
, she would say. He would think about this, and then he would say,
Which is like a vegetative state?
To which she would reply that she wasn’t sure, and they would go back and forth trying to put their fingers on the exact, precise definition of what his condition had been at the time. Eventually there would be no more room for stalling, which would force him finally to ask if he had ever been declared – in a binding,
legal
sense – to be in a state that would require a transfer of powers of attorney, and
blah blah it didn’t matter because it would eventually get all the way to the place she didn’t want to go.

All the way him actually speaking the phrase.

Non Compos Mentis
.

She would be forced to reply. She would be forced to
react
. And whether she lied or told the truth or said nothing at all, he would know. He would know that the lawyer had come with his hateful briefcase of notes and papers and large manila envelopes, and Peter would know that she had read the note. That she had read it, and that she knew.

That she knew
all
of it.

Cynthia could not imagine what would happen to them as a couple – as husband and wife – if they were ever forced to confront that kind of truth together. So she used the only tool available to her. She feigned sleep. Sleep and ignorance. “Life-threatening,” she mumbled, trying to sound vaguely annoyed. As if she didn’t want to rehash the details of this ordeal. As if he were being self-indulgent. She rolled away and pulled the blankets around her more tightly, like a lover spurning an advance. “They said you had suffered a life-threatening injury, and an ischemic event, and that you were in critical condition,” she said.

And there’s nothing more to say about it.

She made her breathing sound deep and heavy, like that of someone drifting off to sleep again, and she waited for him to push back. To ask again, in a way that she would be unable to parry with medical terms and emotion.

But he did not ask again. He sighed once and turned over the other way.

Cynthia was careful not to cry. She would have trouble going to sleep now, but she could wait. She could wait as long as necessary, just so that Peter would think she had drifted off to sleep, completely unconcerned. No idea what he was driving at. She had fielded Devon’s question about this a few days ago, and now she had handled her husband. So maybe they could all just go back to the way it had been.

And this might have been true, if it hadn’t been for what Devon saw at the Racquet Club that night.

The name on the wall.

5

“This doesn’t look so special,” Devon said when they had reached the top of the stairs. The layout here on the third floor was less formal. There was a wall-to-wall green carpet on the floor and less free space. More walls, more chairs and corridors and doorways. Directly ahead of them was an open door leading to a gym area with weights and treadmills. “What, women aren’t allowed to see workout equipment?”

“This whole floor is essentially a locker room,” Austin explained. “The dressing room is down there to the right, and the showers and sauna and steam room are to the left. There’s a pool, too. Point is, naked men walk through here all the time during the day. Sometimes they wear a towel, but sometimes not.”

Devon looked left and right, as though checking for stray naked men who might have forgotten to leave the club at the proper hour.

“Don’t get excited,” Austin said. “Anyway, the squash courts are over here, and above us are the Racquets courts and the Tennis courts. We’ll get to those in a minute.”

“I thought you said there was no tennis here.”

He sighed. “Seriously, just wait. You’ll see what I mean.”

“I don’t see any lockers. Where do you keep all your gear, all your athletic clothes and sneakers and stuff? Do you bring a backpack?”

Austin let out a good-natured laugh. “You just come to the dressing room, and someone brings your clothes in a roll.”

“They
bring
them?”

“When you’re done you go shower, and you leave your sweaty stuff on the floor. By the time you’re back from your shower it’s been picked up. And it’s clean the next day when you come back.”

Devon smiled. “So you’re nothing but a bunch of spoiled boys.”

“Correct.” He pointed up above the doors to the gym. “This is what I wanted to show you. Look there.”

Devon looked, and she saw another series of huge boards hung along the wall. Like the ones she had seen in the billiards room. These boards had titles like “Racquets Ladder Champion” and “Court Tennis Challenge Cup.”

“That one,” Austin said, pointing. “About a quarter of the way up.”

Devon scanned the board he was pointing to. It said “Doubles Squash Annual.” She scanned the names, each one painted in a firm, gold copperplate. The older ones had started to fade, and they were difficult to read. But lower down the paint was fresher, and the names there stood out in brilliant contrast to the dark green background of the boards themselves. She finally found what Austin was talking about.

At first she was delighted, but then she was confused.

And then troubled.

1990………… Peter Hall

“There you go,” Austin said triumphantly. “Squash champion. I’m sure you already knew he was good at it, but there’d be no way you would ever actually have a chance to see his name on the board. I wanted to get you up here. So you could take a look for yourself.”

Devon nodded slowly. Tried to smile back at him. Tried to look appreciative. Then she just stood there, looking up at her father’s name. She
did
like seeing it there.

But there was a problem.

I didn’t know he played squash.

Not that she cared. Not that she needed to know what sports her father played, or how he spent his time when he was out of the house. And yet something about it made her uncomfortable. It nagged at her.

He won the whole tournament
, she thought
. He was the champion. There isn’t a squash racquet in our house. Or a squash ball. Or a shirt with a little picture of a squash racquet on it. There’s nothing.

And again, no big deal. Not really. The year he had won, 1993, was the year just before Devon had been born, so maybe Peter Hall had simply decided to abandon the game once his baby girl had come along. Maybe he had decided he no longer had the time. Which would have been fine. Which would have made
sense
.

Except for this: there was another name on the board.

It was a doubles championship, so Peter Hall had not stood alone that year. He had needed a partner. The line on the board read, in full, as follows:

1993…………Peter Hall & Jerry Dunn

And
that
seemed strange.

Because her father and Jerry Dunn could never have been partners. In squash, or in anything. Then, or now, or ever. They had nothing in common. Her father was refined and gentle and focused, and Jerry Dunn was simply a lout. Yes, the Dunns and the Halls belonged to the same clubs in Southampton, but that was just a coincidence. Jerry Dunn and Peter Hall were not friends. They didn’t joke with each other. Or even talk
with each other. Neither one seemed to acknowledge the other’s existence.

“Devon?” Austin was looking at her with a concerned expression.

She took a little breath. Shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t know my dad played squash, that’s all.”

Hearing the words come out of her mouth, Devon felt immediately better. She was making something out of nothing. Her father had played squash years ago, but now he didn’t. And he had joined forces with Jerry Dunn one year, probably because the two of them just happened to be the strongest players at the club at the time. Simple as that.

Austin nodded, and his easy expression helped calm Devon even more. “So you can congratulate him when you get back to Southampton.”

Exactly. I can congratulate him. And then maybe I can ask him why he hasn’t spoken to Jerry Dunn in twenty years or so.

“Okay, onto the weird stuff,” Austin said. He led her up the next flight of stairs, and now he seemed to be getting genuinely excited. As they made their way to the fourth floor, he was almost hopping up and down. “Have you ever seen Court Tennis?”

His enthusiasm was infectious, and Devon smiled in spite of herself. She was able to let her confusion over those names on the squash board melt away. “No,” she said. “Show me.”

They came to the top of the stairs and then moved into an area of real darkness. She was glad he was still holding her by the hand. “I can’t see anything,” she said.

“Hold on.”

They moved a little farther, and then Devon had the sense that they had come to an opening of some sort. She could feel the difference in the way the air was moving. And in the sound of her feet on the floor. There was an echo.

Austin flipped a switch, and there it was.

“Holy mother,” Devon whispered.

There were only ten Court Tennis courts in the entire United States, and two of them were at the Racquet Club. The court itself looked incidentally similar to an ordinary tennis court, in that there was a net stretched across the middle of the playing surface, separating one player from another. But there the similarity ended. The court was surrounded on all sides by polished stone walls. On one long side, the wall rose straight up, unbroken, all the way to a height of thirty feet. On the remaining three sides the court had a penthouse, or a balcony, that ran continuously around three edges of the enclosure. There were also a series of smaller nets built right
into
the walls.

“This is ridiculous,” Devon said.

“This is an adventure. We’re seeing new things.”

“
I’m
seeing new things. You’re just playing tour guide.”

He stepped closer to her, and his footsteps echoed on the polished concrete beneath them. “Well, yes,” he said. “But I also get to do this.” He held her and kissed her, and Devon could not help wondering how many girls had been kissed in this place. She pulled away from him. Gave him a suspicious look.