Chapter 11: The Hospital Steps

Leo was standing at the foot of the bed.

I hadn't heard him get up.

He watched his mother hold Blythe's hand on the yellow couch, and his face didn't move at all.

"Easily led," he said.

The nurse with my tray looked from the TV to him and quietly backed out of the room.

"Leo."

"She knew I'd see it." He picked up the remote and turned it off. "She booked that show the day I moved my meetings."

"Why would she do it now?"

"Because I stopped answering her calls."

By noon there were photographers outside the hospital.

I could see them from my window, a little cluster of them by the main entrance with long lenses and coffee cups.

A nurse came in to check my blood pressure and said three of them had already tried to get onto the maternity floor.

"Security walked them out," she said. "One of them said he was your brother."

"I don't have a brother."

"We figured."

My phone, the cheap prepaid one, had started ringing that morning.

Numbers I didn't know.

New York area codes.

I turned it off and put it in the drawer.

Leo had been on his own phone in the hallway for an hour.

When he came back in, he'd shaved.

He'd put on the one suit he kept at the bait shop, charcoal, with a white shirt and no tie.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Going outside."

"Leo, don't. Whatever you say, they'll twist it."

"Then I'll say it plainly." He stood by the bed. "You asked me to show you. Not tell you."

I didn't have an answer for that.

"Do you want me to?" he asked. "Go out there? If you say no, I won't."

It was the first time in a year and a half that he'd asked me what I wanted before he did something.

I noticed.

"Go," I said.

He went.

The nurse came back in with two of her friends from the station and turned the TV on to the local news.

"They're carrying it live," she said. "Do you mind if we watch?"

"Pull up a chair."

They pulled up three.

On the screen, the hospital's front doors opened, and Leo walked out into the sun.

The photographers surged forward.

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