Chapter 14
I hated this building. Hated the smell of it, hated the color of the walls, hated how the automatic doors opened like they were welcoming you somewhere you wanted to be.
Ten years of walking through those doors and they still opened the same way, cheerful and slow, like they had all the time in the world.
Winston walked beside me. He'd been quiet since we left the prison, since that man's mine had come out of his mouth like it was nothing, like he said that kind of thing every day.
Maybe he did. Maybe Texas Rangers went around claiming people in prison storage closets all the time. I didn't know what to do with him.
I signed us in at the front desk and walked to the elevator, hands in my pockets.
Cheerful thoughts, real productive. Keep it up, Lanza.
The elevator doors opened, and I walked through the hall without thinking past the nurses' station, past the room where an old man had died last spring.
He'd slipped away between one breath and the next while I sat with Chance, holding my brother's hand and wondering if that was what it looked like.
The door stood open, blinds drawn back to let the sun in.
I stopped in the doorway.
The smell hit first, antiseptic and the faint sweet rot underneath, the smell of a body that lived without doing any of the work of living. I'd never gotten used to it. I'd never wanted to.
Chance was on his back, same as last month.
Same as the month before that. Same as the ninety-some months before that.
His arms were at his sides, chest rising and falling like he was asleep.
They'd given him a haircut recently, and trimmed his nails and his beard.
I wondered if Chance would've worn his hair like that, parted down the middle like a proper citizen instead of the hustler he was.
Don't think about it too hard.
He was twenty-six now. Somewhere in the years since the lightning, his jaw had squared out and his shoulders had broadened, and his arms had wasted to nothing under the blanket because muscles needed a man inside them to stay.
The feeding tube ran into his nose. The IV ran into his arm.
The catheter line ran out from under the sheet, taped to his thigh, and somebody had emptied the bag this morning.
There was a paperback on the windowsill, dog-eared three-quarters through. Maria, the day nurse, read to him on her breaks. I didn't ask what she read. I was grateful, and I didn't want to know.
I crossed to my chair. The vinyl was cracked, and the armrests were worn smooth. It was the same chair I'd been sitting in since I was eighteen years old and too stupid to know this was going to be the rest of my life.
"Hey," I said.
The room was quiet. Chance's chest rose and fell.
"I missed your birthday. I'm sorry."
I rubbed my palms on my jeans and looked at the floor.
"Brought someone with me today."
Behind me, Winston's boots scuffed the linoleum. He stopped just inside the door. I didn't turn around. I could feel him there, though. I was starting to be able to feel him anywhere, which was either a gift or a problem, and I hadn't decided which.
"His name's Winston. He's a Texas Ranger." I cleared my throat. "You'd think that was funny. You always thought cops were funny, even when they were hauling our asses in."
The monitor beeped once, soft, tracking something I didn't understand. Chance didn't laugh. Chance wasn't going to laugh. But I kept talking to him like he might, because the alternative was admitting he couldn't, and I wasn't ready for that. I'd never be ready for that.
"He's good people," I said. "Reckless as hell. Talks too much. Broke a man's nose on a table this morning and wiped the blood off like it was nothing. You'd like him."
I sat back in the chair. The vinyl creaked under me.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I said. "I don't know what I'm doing with him.
With any of this. I keep waiting for it to make sense, and it doesn't, and I don't think it's going to.
" I looked at Chance's face, slack and still.
"You'd know what to do. You always knew what to do. Even when it was stupid, you knew."
Behind me, Winston moved. He didn't sit. He crossed quietly to the window, picked up the paperback, looked at the cover, set it down exactly where it had been.
He sat in the other chair, the one nobody ever used, and he didn't say anything either. He just sat there, present and not trying to fix it.
I looked at Chance's hands on top of the blanket, still and pale, the same hands that used to shove me off fences and steal food off my plate and grab my hand when things got bad, squeezing once, hard, like brothers did when they didn't have words.
I caught myself watching Chance's face, looking for any signs he might wake up. I made myself quit.
"You remember the dog," I said. "The one behind the laundromat on Solano. I was ten, you were eight. That big brindle mutt chained up by the dumpsters, half starved, mean from the starving."
My throat thickened. I pushed through it.
"You wanted to feed it. I told you no. I told you it'd take your hand off.
You looked at me with those big damn eyes and told me it was hungry.
Like that settled it." I rubbed my jaw. "So I stole a pack of bologna from Alvarez's and we went back and you held out a slice to that dog and it took your whole arm in its mouth up to the elbow. "
I could still see it. Chance's little arm disappearing into that dog's head. The silence of it, how neither of them moved for one long second.
"It let go. I don't know why. Maybe it decided bologna was better than an eight-year-old.
Maybe you just looked at it right. You pulled your arm out and there wasn't a mark on you, not one tooth, and you held out the next slice like nothing had happened.
" I leaned forward. "I stood there in that alley behind the laundromat with my heart coming out of my chest, and I understood something. You were the best of us."
I rubbed my face.
"I used to lie awake after that thinking about what I'd do to anything that came for you. Spent a lot of years thinking about it. Then the lightning came, and there was nothing to think about. There was nothing to do."
I stopped. The monitor beeped.
"I didn't know where the lightning was going to hit," I said.
"I didn't know what to burn down to keep you from that.
That's what eats at me. If somebody had pointed at it, I'd have stood there instead of you.
I'd have done it and never looked back. But you can't kill a lightning strike.
You can't get in front of it. You can't fight it or outrun it or outsmart it.
All you can do is endure it. And, by God, you did.
You still are. And that makes you a hell of a lot stronger than I'll ever be. "
I sat back.
"I saw Joe today. Remember Joe Dancing? We ran together back in the day. He always was a prick. Well, remember how he used to do jobs for Rex? He's paying for it now. You should see it. You'd laugh your ass off."
When I ran out of words, I just sat there.
The afternoon light shifted across the floor.
Winston stayed in his chair by the window.
I could hear him breathing, slow and even.
I could hear Chance breathing, slow and even.
For a minute the two sounds came together, and I closed my eyes and just let them.
Then Winston got up.
I tracked him in my peripheral vision as he crossed to the bed.
He stood there looking down at Chance for a long moment with his hat in his hands and his face I couldn't read.
He set one hand flat on the rail of the bed and looked at my brother's face like he was meeting him for the first time, which he was.
Then he spoke.
"Chance." He said it like he'd said Ransom the first night, like he'd thought about the name before he used it. "My name's Winston Valverde. I'm your brother's man. And he's mine."
The monitor beeped.
"Guess that makes you family of a sort." He took a deep breath. "Wasn't sure how to introduce myself to a man who can't tell me to fuck off, so I figured I'd start there."
Winston shifted his grip on his hat.
"Anybody comes for him, they come through me. You've got my word on that."
My throat closed up so fast I couldn't breathe.
I sat there with my hands pressed flat against my thighs and stared at his hand on the rail.
He stayed there a long moment. Then he lifted his hand off the rail and stepped back.
"We should go," I said.
Winston nodded and replaced his hat. "Whenever you're ready."
I stood up, crossed to the bed, and put my hand on Chance's shoulder. The blanket was warm.
"I'll be back next month," I said. "Same as always."
The elevator took us down into the too-bright lobby.
I walked through it without seeing anything.
Then we were in the parking garage, in the passenger seat of the truck, and my hands were shaking and I was hard.
Why the fuck was I hard right now? It felt wrong, and it felt right, and all I wanted in that moment was to feel alive.
I dug my fingers into my jeans.
Winston slid behind the wheel. "Where to?"
I stared at the concrete wall. "Buy me a beer," I said and finally looked over at him. "I know a place."