He looked at her, startled. “You’re Sara Lowell?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am,” he said. “You’re not what I pictured.”
“What did you picture?”
He shrugged. “Something a little gruffer-looking, I guess.”
“Gruffer-looking?”
“Yeah. Dark, curly hair. Cigarette dangling from lip with an ash about to fall of. Manual typewriter. Black sweater. A little on the meaty side.”
“Sorry if I disappointed you.”
“Hardly,” he said. “What are you doing here, Miss Lowell?”
“Sara.”
“Sara.”
She sneezed.
“God bless you,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Have a cold?”
She nodded.
“So what can I do for you, Sara?”
“Well,” she began, “I’d like to come in and ask you a few questions.”
“Hmmm. This whole scenario seems a tad familiar to me. Do you have a sense of déjà vu too, Sara, or is it just me?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“On if you slam the door in my face like you slammed the phone in my ear.”
He smiled. “Touché.”
“Can I come in?”
“First, let me ask you a question,” he said. He feigned taking a pencil out of his pocket and writing in a small notebook. “Why the cane?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” he continued in his serious, reporter-like voice. “You’re using a cane and you have a brace on your leg. What happened to you?”
“Playing role reversal, Mr. Silverman?”
“Michael. Just answer the question, please.”
“I was born prematurely, with permanent nerve damage in my foot.”
“Was it bad when you were young?”
Her voice was soft. “Not good.”
She lifted her head and saw the gentle, almost soothing expression on his face. He’d have made a great interviewer, she thought, except there was an undeniable tension between them, a tension that was not altogether unpleasant.
“You say you were born premature,” he continued. “Were there other complications?”
“Not so fast,” she replied. “My turn. When did you start playing basketball?”
“I don’t know. When I was six or seven, I guess.”
“Were you one of those kids who played all the time, who lived on the playground?”
“It was the best place to be,” he replied.
“What do you mean?”
Michael did not answer. “What were your other complications, Sara?”
“Lung infections,” she said quickly. “So when did you start playing the piano?”
“When I was eight.”
“Your parents hired a music teacher?”
A humorless smile came to his lips. “No.”
“Then who—”
“I think you’d better leave,” he said.
“Let’s change the subject.”
“No.”
“But I was just going to ask—”
“I know what you were going to ask,” Michael interrupted. “How hard is this for you to understand? I don’t want my personal life splashed all over the papers. Period.”
“I just wanted to know the name of your piano teacher,” she said. “I thought you would want to give your teacher credit.”
“Bullshit, Sara. ‘Let’s change the subject’ is just another way of saying you want to try to attack from another angle. You figure if you keep probing, eventually you’ll get what you want—no matter what the cost.”
“And what are the costs, Michael? Your story could give hope to thousands of children who are being abused—”
“Jesus, how low will you stoop to get this story?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she replied. “I want every story I’m assigned.”
“Have you no ethics?”
Sara’s fists clenched. “Spare me the morality play. We reporters are great as long as we’re telling the world what a wonderful guy you are. We’re your best pals when we pat you on the back and help you get more endorsement money. But oh, if we dare to criticize, if we dare to dig deeper—”
“My personal life is none of anyone’s goddamn business.”
“Afraid I’ll shatter your precious image? Afraid I’ll make you look like something other than Superman?”
She could see him wrestling with his temper. “Good-bye, Sara,” he said with too much control. “I really didn’t want to do this.”
“Go ahead. Slam the door in my face. I’ll be back.”
“No,” he said, “you won’t.”
“We’ll see.”
And then he closed the door in her face just as Sara let loose with another sneeze. Her breathing was shallow from the effects of her cold. Sara wheezed, each drawn breath a painful struggle. She turned away from the door and huffed of.
“The man is a major-league pain in the ass.”
Back home, she began to reread his file. As the words passed in front of her, her anger softened and then evaporated. Could she really blame him for being so defensive? His childhood read like something out of Oliver Twist. She sat back, laced her fingers behind her head, and sneezed again. Her breathing was still labored, even worse than before. She had tried to dismiss it, but the truth was becoming more and more apparent. With something near terror, Sara knew what she had to do. She reached for the phone and called her father.
The next morning the doctors confirmed Sara’s diagnosis.
“Pneumonia,” John told his daughter in her hospital bed. There were tears in his eyes. “Third time for you in the last two years, Sara.”
“I know,” she said.
“You have to slow down a little.”
Sara glanced up at her father but said nothing.
“Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she replied. “How long will I have to be here this time?”
“The doctors don’t know, honey. I can stay with you for a while, if you’d like.”
She nodded. “I’d like that very much.”
John Lowell left his daughter’s bedside at nine p.m. Sara did not want him to go. Irrational as it might seem, she hated being alone at night in the hospital. Despite all the time she had spent in hospitals, Sara was still scared to close her eyes, afraid that someone or something might sneak up on her. She felt like some movie character left alone to survive a night in a haunted house. It was the hospital sounds that made her shudder, the sounds that reverberated louder in the blackness and stillness of the night: footsteps echoing much too loudly against the tile floors; the constant beeping, gurgling, and sucking noises of life-saving machines; the random moan of pain; the scream of terror; the squeak of wheels; crying.