Keeper of the Keys

Ray laughed. “Some big deal, huh?”

The client shrugged, totally accepting. For a while, they just drank and moved through the water, the clouds scudding by, the white foam spraying their faces, the sun going down. Then they moved down to the netting for a while, lying side by side, arms behind their heads, companionable, like a raptor and a naive proto-chicken. Ray felt thoroughly beaten. He kept his smile and told a few good ones even so.

Back on deck, Antoniou excused himself. He returned looking refreshed and perfectly pleased with his life of mansions and yachts and dungeons.

“I love it out here,” he said. “My wife expects me at nine, but let’s open another bottle. Now, I want to know more about you, Ray. I’m hoping this evening’s the first day of a beautiful”-he paused and waggled his eyebrows-“business relationship. You have any kids? Tell me about your wife.”

“No kids.” He talked about Leigh, taking care to say nothing real. He talked about her furniture-making, the church where they married, the vacation they had taken a few years ago in Brazil. As he talked, he pictured his wife; her gravity, hollow eyes, the way she would trace his eyebrow with her finger before leaning over to kiss him, the thrilling deep kiss. He remembered her complete abandonment in bed, her soft breasts-

But he told Antoniou nothing of this, nothing of the reality of his wife. This, the client had not earned.

“You continue to love her,” Antoniou said, pouring himself a final glass of champagne. “Lucky woman. And she loves you, I am sure.”

“Oh, yes,” Ray lied, relieved to see that Antoniou had now turned his regard toward the young chef, who, judging by the twinkle in his eye, welcomed the attention. Ray had been a passing yen and there were no hard feelings.

Later, as darkness came, driving home, Ray realized that he had returned to the tricks of his childhood, cha

He wondered if this talent at impersonation masked an empty soul, as Leigh had once accused. Wasn’t he just calling up elements of himself to become other characters, tapping into places in his personality that lay undeveloped inside him? He couldn’t display grace under pressure, unless grace lurked somewhere inside there, correct?

He had kissed the client’s hand, pimped for the firm, saved the day. All right, it wasn’t grace he had displayed. Maybe he had been obsequious. He had nodded encouragingly while Antoniou talked about his columns and olive trees.

Leigh-her gray eyes. Her integrity. He swiped his fingers across his cheeks, erasing what he could.

Kat headed straight for the hospital. UCLA Medical Center held at least six hundred patients. Kat found the parking lot, vast, distant from the building, and tried to find a place as close to the palm-studded entrance as possible. Often, this counterintuitive action worked, and this time it did, when a blue Acura pulled out of a perfectly located spot not five spots from the front entry.

Kat let the Acura out, barely, then swerved her Echo into the spot it had left vacant, cutting off at least one other eager, possibly equally crazed, family member who would now have to spend the next hour cruising aimlessly.

Why hadn’t they called her?

She locked the car. Coming through the Westwood Plaza entrance, she made her way into the hospital.

A friendly receptionist told her she might find her sister on level five, so she waited with a motley crew for the double doors of the elevator to open. On her left, a man in a wheelchair, his head twisted to the right in a permanently frozen position, moaned. His wife bent down and caressed his cheek. On her left, a middle-aged woman, maybe fifty, with wiry blonde hair that flew out of her head like Medusa’s snakes, rested on crutches.

“What happened?” Kat asked, hoping this was not an awkward question.

“I fell off a sidewalk at a street fair,” the woman answered, “while checking out the bonsai booth. The silver lining is, I’m building my upper body strength.” She laughed.

The nurses’ station, a large central area surrounded by counter-space and speckled with computers, did not exhibit a neighborly air; no warm cuddly pictures, no flowers.

“Okay,” a male nurse said. “Her name comes up on page one.”

“What room?”

The man studied whatever it was he viewed on the computer screen. Games? Instant messages? Kat wondered.

“Hmm,” he said ominously.

I hate you, Kat replied internally. She realized the last time she had been in a hospital was when she went to find Tom there, and eventually found him in the morgue. “An ambulance brought her,” she said instead, helpfully.

“I’m thinking room five oh eight,” he said. “She’s in recovery. Just got there from the OR. Hmm.”

Stop saying that, Kat thought, or I will hit you.

“Through the double doors and on your right.”

She found 508 without too many wrong turns, opened the door, and greeted her sister inside. Raoul, looking like a man holding on to a lifeline, was clasping his wife’s hand with both of his.

Jacki had the window side. On the door side, Jacki’s roommate was a woman who spoke right up. “Arrgh,” the roommate cried in greeting. “Crap! I hate my life!” Thin and pallid as a tubercular character in a novel, she had thrown her white sheets off and lay splayed like an automobile crash dummy, post-collision.

“Hey,” Kat said to her sister.

“Hey.” Jacki’s droopy blue eyes gazed at her. “I know you.”

Scared, Kat just took her hand. Her sister, for the past few months whale-sized, now appeared diminished, the sheet over her stomach collapsed like a fallen parachute. Where was the baby? Kat didn’t dare ask.

Raoul said, “She’s okay, Kat. Really.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“No time. I’m really sorry. It happened really fast, and then they operated-”

All the pent-up concern Kat had been repressing flooded out and she started crying. “Jacki! Boo hoo hoo.”

“Quit that. Ma always said you sound like a dying animal when you cry and it’s true,” Jacki said groggily. “Ow, Raoul, something hurts bad down by my right foot.”

“She’s doped up, Kat,” Raoul said, apologizing for Jacki’s crankiness. “Just woke up. I’ll get the nurse in here, honey.”

“They doped me up, hoping I won’t notice every freaking thing went wrong that could go wrong.”

Kat said nothing, just squeezed Jacki’s hand.

“Ouch,” Jacki said weakly.

“Sorry,” Kat said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was crossing Sepulveda. Big street, so many cars. This-oh-so-L.A.-this stretch limo came out of nowhere. What I remember is the part where I rolled along the street like a bowling ball. Speaking of which-” She stared down at her stomach. “Oh, my God! Raoul! Our baby!” She clutched her husband.

Raoul bent down and kissed her forehead. He stayed there, cheek pressed to hers, and whispered, “Honey, you’re a mother.”

“We had-our baby? While I was sleeping?”

He nodded. “You went into labor after the accident, while they were setting your foot. Everything went fine. My brave girl. I love you.”

“The baby came?”

“A boy, sweetheart.”

Kat’s heart filled at the sight of the joy on her sister’s face.

“We have another boy in the family,” Jacki said. Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. “I want him! Where is he? Bring him here, my darling. Oh, Raoul, a little boy.”

“We can pick a name finally. Anything besides my dad’s, okay?” Raoul said.

“Middle name Thomas.” Jacki tried to sit up, but she groaned immediately and fell back on the bed.

“Congratulations,” Kat said. She smoothed Jacki’s hair and kissed her, then hugged Raoul. “I have a nephew,” she said wonderingly. A new being with an intimate co