The Fourth Hand

The only other person in the pool besides Wallingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wallingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets,

preferring the water undisturbed. He gradually grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.

She was a woman past the young side of middle age. Wallingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.

The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who'd called him a "carrion feeder" at breakfast--hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, all the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.

She was the first to speak. "This is awkward." Her voice had a softer edge than what Wallingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.

"I don't want to antagonize you," Patrick told the woman. "I'll just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway." He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub's surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.

The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering--her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a small pouch. "Please stay a minute," the woman asked. "I want to explain."

"You don't need to apologize," Patrick replied. "In general, I agree with you. It's just that I didn't understand the context. I didn't come to Boston because JFK, Jr.'s plane was missing. I didn't even know about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand." He instinctively lifted his stump, which he still spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he'd pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.

She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pulling him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he'd been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman's lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.

"Please listen to me," the woman said. She pulled his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the small bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.

"Okay," Wallingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater. Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?

"I was married twice, the first time when I was very young," the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. "I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actually loved them both."

Christ! Wallingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot's story? "I'm sorry," Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn't want to be interrupted.

"I have two daughters, from my first marriage," the woman went on. "Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid all the time."

It sounded like a true story. (Wallingford couldn't help judging the start of any story this way.)

"But they survived," the woman said, as if most children didn't. "They're both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kills me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don't sleep."

Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swell of her abdomen.

"Now I'm pregnant," the woman told him; his forearm didn't respond. "I'm fifty-one! I'm not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion--my doctor recommended it. But I called the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it."

"Have you talked to your daughters?" Wallingford asked. Her lion's grip on his arm was there again.

"They'd try to convince me to have the baby," the woman replied, with renewed intensity. "They'd offer to raise the child with their children. But it would still be mine. I couldn't stop myself from loving it, I couldn't help but be involved. Yet I simply can't stand the fear. The mortality of children ... it's more than I can bear."

"It's your choice," Patrick reminded her. "Whatever decision you make, I'm sure it will be the right one." The woman didn't look so sure.

Wallingford wondered who the unborn child's father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.

"The father doesn't know," she said. "I don't see him anymore. He was just a colleague."

Patrick had never heard the word "colleague" used so dismissively.

"I don't want my daughters to know I'm pregnant because I don't want them to know I have sex," the woman confessed. "That's also why I can't make up my mind. I don't think you should have an abortion because you're trying to keep the fact that you've had sex a secret. That's not a good enough reason."

"Who's to say what's a 'good enough' reason if it's your reason? It's your choice," Wallingford repeated. "It's not a decision anyone else can or should make for you."

"That's not hugely comforting," the woman told him. "I was all set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don't understand what you triggered."

Wallingford had known from the beginning that all this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman's grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.

"I don't know what got into me when I spoke to you. I've never spoken to anyone like that in my life!" the woman continued. "I shouldn't blame you, personally, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?"

"No." Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman's upper lip.