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“You know I’m like a shark. If I don’t keep swimming, I sink to the bottom.”
I was the only person in the waiting room tonight. The last thing Dr. Williams told me before I came in here was to not be in here too long, what Jimmy needed most right now other than the antibiotics was sleep.
“I can get along without you for a few days,” I say.
“Care to take a polygraph on that?”
“Come on, the trial is about to be over. Nothing more for you to do. Good time to catch your breath, big boy.”
“As soon as I do, I am going to find out who killed the Carsons,” he says. “Or had them killed. And who killed Gregg McCall. Or Iamgonna die trying.”
Suddenly I feel my throat closing up like a fist.
I swallow hard.
“You always say that.Stop saying that!”
He raises the hand not attached to the IV and says in a soft voice, “Okay, Janie. Okay. Relax.”
I try to answer him but feel my throat closing up again, like a door being slammed shut.
I see him staring at me.
“Janie,” Jimmy says. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise.”
“Okay,” I say in a small voice.
He smiles at me.
And then it happens, that fast, something I’ve been trying to contain for weeks. I start to cry, softly at first, but not softly for very long. Then it’s like a seawall being breached, and I’m sobbing, hugging myself as if to keep myself from flying completely apart, struggling for breath.
I try to get some air into me, but for the life of me I can’t.
“Janie?” Jimmy says. “What’s wrong?”
Everything,I want to tell him.
But I don’t sayanything. I’m rocking back and forth in the chair now, somehow crying even harder than before, still gasping for air, wondering if they can hear me outside.
“Janie?What’s the matter?”
“I’m the one who’s dying,” I say.
Ninety-Eight
Jimmy
HE LIES THERE INthe dark and the quiet, or at least as much darkness and quiet as you can ever have in a hospital room at night, after Jane has finally left.
Thinking:She might have needed to be sedated more than I do.
He asked how she planned to get back to Amagansett—he could call somebody at the bar to come get her. She said she was going to Uber. Jimmy told her that maybe it was not the best idea for her to be alone right now.
“Kind of my thing,” Jane said to him. “Being alone.”
By then she had taken him through all of it, from the time her friend Dr. Wylie gave her the original diagnosis.
“How’d she come up with fourteen months?” Jimmy asked.
