Thursday's Child (2 page)

What once upon a time had been the luxurious mansion of a forgotten silent film star now housed the wealthy and mostly helplessly ill. The gleaming-white exterior and surrounding lush green grounds gave no indication of what was going on inside.

On a day like today, when he was feeling sort of bad about what he'd had to do to poor Ernie, Robert could cheer himself up considerably by wondering what all the others did. The others who had loved ones in Ledgewood and who also had to come up with the ridiculous monthly charges. Probably there were some who did things that were a lot worse than just ridding the world of one more greasy little hustler. Like the industrialists whose factories polluted the air and made kids sick. Compared to
that
, whacking somebody like Ernie hardly counted at all.

Before getting out of the car, he took the gun from its holster and locked it in the glove compartment. Hard to believe that a place like this would have a metal detector at the entrance, but it did. The device had been installed a couple of years earlier, after a patient's husband walked into the building late one Saturday night, went to his wife's room, and swiftly ended her battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. A single well-placed shot did the job. The woman had been dying anyway and suffering like hell, so Robert didn't really see what all the fuss was about. Apparently, it just didn't look good, PR-wise. So up went the damned detector.

Inside the lobby, the receptionist greeted him with an automatic smile, the guard with an automatic glare. Robert ignored both of them as he went to the elevator and pushed the button for the third floor. The smiling (it must have been a job requirement, except for the guards) nurse on three pushed the visitor's log across the desk toward him. “Everything okay?” he asked, bending to scribble his name.

She removed one chart from the carousel and pretended to read the hen-scratched notes. “The patient remains stable, Mr. Turchek,” she said pleasantly.

Stable. Yeah, right. Big surprise.

After nearly three years, what else?

They all went through this same stupid playacting every damned time he came in here. Robert didn't really know why.

He walked down the hall and into room 4.

This was a corner room, which cost extra, and it was still bright with the afternoon sun. Robert was so used to the medicinal smells, the soft beeps of the monitors, and even the sight of the emaciated figure lying curled up in the bed that he just barely noticed any of it by now. He pulled the lone chair over to the side of the bed and sat down. “So, pal, how's it going?”

There was no response, of course.

Robert reached out and lightly tapped his brother on the cheek. “You hear the game last night, didja? Damned Mets trounced us again.” He had no way of knowing whether or not the nurses actually turned the radio on for all of the Dodger games the way he told them to. He really hoped so.

Andy Turchek used to be a hell of a pitcher. There had even been talk of a tryout with the Dodgers. That was the dream they had shared for so long. Maybe Robert Turchek was only a wise guy, but his little brother Andy was heading for something much better.

“They sure as hell could use your fastball,” Robert said.

Yeah, it was always a beautiful sight watching Andy bullet the ball across the plate. His last year in college, he won every game he started. Quality, real star quality.

Who the hell could have predicted the broken arm? Oh, the bone healed okay, but the arm was never the same again. Andy tried. More than once the kid brought himself to tears as he tried to get the magic back, but it never happened. For a kid who'd thought the whole world was waiting for him, reality was a cold, hard thing to face.

Robert changed the subject; it wasn't healthy to dwell on the past. “You remember me telling you about poor old Ernie?” he said. “I'm afraid he's gone to that big racetrack in the sky. Wouldn't you think that guys like him would learn? They never do, though.” He gave a soft laugh, poking his brother in the arm. “Guess we should be glad for that, though, right? Their stupidity keeps me working.”

It also kept him able to pay the freight for this place. Otherwise, Andy would be shoved into some state hellhole. Robert would never let that happen, no matter how many punks like Ernie Gallos had to get their brains blown out.

The coma was most probably irreversible; nobody had ever said anything else, even from the very first. And Robert accepted that. He really did, especially when he was sitting there looking at the twisted body that now weighed about ninety pounds. He knew, intellectually, that Andy was never going to come out of this. But still … There was movement that
might
be read as a response. A twitch when a question was asked. Sometimes, even, the eyes would open and it seemed that he was looking right at you, trying desperately to communicate.

Robert unfolded the newspaper he'd brought and read aloud, first the sports page, of course, and then the comics. Usually he read “Dear Abby,” too, but the letter this day was all about cancer and dying, which seemed a little too depressing, so he skipped it.

Andy was thirty now, but somehow Robert still thought of him as nineteen, the age he'd been when he last played baseball. God, he was so good. But once the hopes for a career fell apart, Andy could never seem to find himself again. He just bummed around, doing a little of this and a little of that, while Robert tried desperately to keep him out of trouble with the law.

Robert reached into his pocket and took out a cassette. “I brought you a tape, Andy. The new one by Bruce.” He stood and walked over to the desk where the radio/tape player was. He couldn't turn the volume up as loud as it should have been for real enjoyment, because the nurse outside would bitch, but he knew that Andy liked hearing the music anyway.

Listening to Springsteen, Robert went to the window and stared down at the lawn. A few patients were out there, resting and probably also getting heatstroke in the ninety-plus afternoon.

It was the feeling of complete helplessness he felt inside this room that Robert hated the most. Outside these walls, Robert Turchek was
somebody
. He controlled things. People respected him and more than a few feared him. But in here, with his brother, there wasn't a damned thing he could do except read the newspaper and play the music.

And think.

He'd sort of thought that Andy was getting his life together at last, up until the night he was the wheelman in an armed robbery where somebody ended up getting killed. Even though Andy didn't have anything to do with actually pulling the trigger, he took a fall anyway.

They never found out who actually started the brawl in the prison shower room, or why. Because of his contacts, Robert
did
know who struck the blow that sent Andy into this coma from which he was never going to emerge. And someday that guy would pay. Someday.

Robert pushed all of that out of his mind before he got mad. Anger like that was useless. He went back to his chair by the bed. He'd stay until the tape was over. Then he had to drive out to Santa Monica and talk to a man about some trouble he was in.

2

Beau Epstein pushed the swinging door open with his shoulder and went into the john. A fast leak before lunch.

There were already three boys gathered in the bathroom. They were perched on the sinks, sharing a joint. None of them spoke to Beau when he came in. He balanced his books on the one available sink and stepped to the urinal.

Beau stared at the graffiti-covered tiles and tried to ignore the snickers from the boys behind him. According to his grandfather, the all-wise and all-powerful Saul Epstein, it just took time for a newcomer like Beau to fit in. Just as it took time for
him
, back in the Paleolithic Era or whenever it was when he came over here from Russia. A poor immigrant boy trying to start a new life.

Beau couldn't see any connection.

Saul was a great one for stories of how hard he had to work to make himself over into the man he was. Beau listened to all the stories, because if you were eating a man's food and sleeping under his roof, you had to be polite. But he didn't bother to tell the old man that he didn't
want
to fit in with the creeps here at Paynor Academy. On the contrary, he was determined to do whatever he could to set himself apart.

One of the ways he did that was to continue dressing pretty much the way he always had, mostly ignoring the designer jeans and trendy shirts that had been purchased for him. Instead, he wore his ragged old khakis and faded, shrunken T-shirts.

Not the usual attire for Paynor Academy, a school that tried to educate the choicest pick of the Beverly Hills-Brentwood crop of adolescents.

Most of the clothes he had came from the American Baptist Mission back home. Along with the wrong way of dressing, his faults included hair that was too long for the neoconservative mood at Paynor these days. Even his shoes did not escape criticism; the handmade leather sandals would have looked more at home at Woodstock.

Behind him, there was more whispering and then a muffled laugh. What had to be his books hit the floor with a loud crash. The sudden noise stopped his heart for one endless moment. Until he realized that no one was firing an American-supplied M-16 in the boys' john.

He zipped his trousers carefully and stepped back to the sink. His books lay scattered on the floor. First he washed his hands and dried them on a coarse paper towel. Then he knelt and started to gather the books.

“Sorry about that,” one of the boys said. Beau thought his name was Scott.

Beau didn't say anything.

Scott held out the remains of the joint. “Wanna hit?” he offered.

Beau just shook his head as he finished stacking the books.

All three of them snickered. “What's the matter?” Scott said. “Fucking nature boy doesn't do drugs?”

Beau stood. “It's not that,” he said with a shrug. “I'm just not used to the shitty quality of the grass you poor bastards have. Back home, we only smoked the good stuff.”

He smiled and left the bathroom.

Beau still wasn't used to being an orphan.

He didn't even like the word very much.
Orphan
. It sounded like something out of a book by Charles Dickens. All he needed was a bowl of gruel.

It just felt so strange. Sort of like having a black hole open up in the pit of his stomach. And it wasn't even that he was a
kid
, for Chrissake. He was fifteen, although sometimes he felt more like ten. Sometimes, he knew, he acted like that, too.

But what the hell; he was an orphan, right? Maybe he was entitled.

No one sat with him in the cafeteria.

Lunch was one of the really bad times of the school day. After having spent almost fourteen years of his life living in a Central American village, the total population of which was about three hundred, this room, filled daily with almost that many teenagers socializing over tofu burgers and Dove Bars, could be pretty overwhelming.

He just tried to eat and get out as quickly as he could.

But sometimes, in the middle of the rushed meal, it would all come back to him in a sudden, sickening flash of memory. He would stop eating and withdraw to a private place deep inside his own mind. The mingled smells of steam-table food and unrestrained youthful hormones were replaced by the far more familiar damp-heat odor of the jungle; the sound of rock music blasting from half a dozen radios was lost in the memory of sudden gunfire and the screams of frightened people.

It had been just an ordinary day. Nothing to make it any different from a thousand other days. The village where they lived was just trying to go on as it always had, despite the increasing troop activity in the countryside. His parents and all the other adults seemed to think that they could ignore the conflict between government and rebels.

Jonathan and Rachel, of course, supported the rebels. They were old-time rebels themselves; why else would they have fled their own country in the sixties and never returned?

They seemed to think that the government was going to let Santa María do as it wanted.

It was stupid to think that way, and such stupidity now left a bitter taste in Beau's mouth. Sometimes he blamed his parents for not telling him what a shitty place the world really was, them and their damned peace-and-love garbage. Maybe that had worked back when
they
were young, but no more. Not today. Could they have really been so dumb? Why the hell hadn't they prepared him for real life?

Beau became aware that someone was staring at him. He looked up, his eyes darting around the room nervously. Two girls at the next table giggled. Beau frowned in their direction, which only made them giggle harder. So he flipped them the finger.

Damn, they wouldn't even let a person eat his lunch in peace. Beau bent over his food again and took a bite.

The tuna sandwich almost gagged him as the memory of that day a few months ago in Santa María returned with sharp-edged clarity.

Just about everybody who lived in and around the village was gathered in the square that hot afternoon. It wasn't, as the government troops thought (or later claimed to think, anyway) a sinister gathering. The main topic under discussion was simply what they might do to avoid getting caught up in the escalating struggle between the nervous authorities and the rebels.

The attack came without warning.

Beau and several other boys had taken refuge from the afternoon sun by lying under a convenient pony cart. Stretched out on their bellies and talking idly about two girls across the way, they had a clear view of the scene as the camouflage-clad troops appeared from nowhere and began to hail machine-gun fire on the crowd. Beau saw both his parents die. Not surprisingly, they were holding on to one another when the bullets struck. It seemed weird that his first thought was one of familiar stabbing jealousy that, once again, Rachel and Jonathan seemed so complete within themselves. He knew, had always known, that while they loved him, they had never really needed him to complete their relationship. Even while dying, they thought of each other, it seemed, not of him.