Page 18 of Take Your Breath Away

Andrew: Look, Brie had this very brief … I don’t know what you’d call it. It wasn’t an affair or anything.

Detective Hardy: What’s that person’s name?

Andrew: I don’t think there’s any point in making his life any more miserable than it already is. And anyway, I’d been kind of an idiot myself in that area.

Detective Hardy: Would that be with Natalie Simmons?

Andrew: Jesus.

Detective Hardy: She’s the woman you had an affair with, correct?

Andrew: (unintelligible)

Detective Hardy: I’m sorry, what was that?

Six

Albert McBain pushed tentatively on the hospital room door and stepped in quietly. He didn’t want to wake his mother if she was sleeping. He would settle into the vinyl-covered chair across from her bed and play some Reversi on his phone, or take the spiral notebook from his pocket and make some notes for the play he had written and was currently directing, and wait until Elizabeth McBain woke up on her own.

He needn’t have worried. As he approached the bed, he saw her eyes were fixed on the television that hung on a swing arm from the ceiling. The headset tucked into her ears was barely visible under her stringy gray hair. Her jaw was moving back and forth, suggesting to Albert that she was grinding her teeth, something she did when she was angry.

Before Elizabeth realized her son was in the room, she said, “Idiots!” under her breath. “Morons,” she added.

But then she caught sight of her son standing there. Her grim expression morphed into a smile and, awkwardly with her spindly arms, pulled off the headset.

“Albert,” she said, trying to shift herself into more of a sitting position.

“Let me help you,” he said.

He got an arm around her back and helped her up, taking a second to glance at the television to see what had gotten her thin blood boiling. It was one of the cable news networks, a panel of talking heads debating the latest scandal out of Washington.

“Hey, Mom,” he said. “How we doing today?”

Elizabeth pointed a bony finger at the screen. “You wouldn’t believe what that pinhead just said. They just spread lies, without any regard whatsoever for the facts. They know they’re lying, but it gets their base riled up and they make money off it. Assholes, the lot of them.”

“I know, I know,” he said, trying to calm her.

“What happened to facts? What happened to evidence?” Her speech became breathy.

“Take it easy,” Albert said. “You get a little winded when you’re upset.”

She sighed and closed her eyes briefly, composing herself. “I’m fine.” She raised a finger again. “It’s just that these lying—”

“Mom, let’s talk about something else. How was your night? You get a good sleep?”

Another sigh. “They never let you rest around here. Waking you at the crack of dawn.”

Albert nodded sympathetically. “They kind of get going around six a.m. in the morning here.”

His mother shot him a look. He knew instantly he’d stepped into it, wished he could claw back his words.

“Albert, you can say it’s six in the morning, or you can say it’s six a.m., but there’s no need to say six a.m. in the morning. It’s redundant. It’s like saying it’s six o’clock in the morning in the morning.”

He cracked a smile. “Maybe I was just testing you.”

His mother rolled her eyes. Elizabeth had never been able to resist correcting him, or his sisters, when they misspoke. She might have retired nearly two decades ago, but she hadn’t forgotten what she’d learned from a career in newspapers. She’d bounced around several Connecticut dailies, starting in Hartford, then back and forth between New Haven and Bridgeport, almost all of that time on copy desks, turning reporters’ error-riddled accounts into something that was not only readable, but unlikely to necessitate a correction in the next day’s edition. Elizabeth McBain had waged a lifelong war against vagueness, woolly thinking, accusations without evidence. It was a battle she fought on the home front as well. If Elizabeth asked one of her kids how school had gone that day, and heard, “Okay,” in return, she wanted specifics. What made it just okay, instead of great? What was the source of disappointment? Was it a friends issue? A bad mark on a test? A forgotten assignment?

Albert fussed with his mother’s pillow until she waved him off. He looked hurt, briefly, but he was used to his mother’s brusqueness. If anything, her hard-edged nature was one of the things he loved about her most. And he was strangely grateful that, if these were to be his mother’s final days, at least they were happening now, and not when that virus was raging. Back then, he probably wouldn’t have been allowed in to visit her at all.