The Fourth Hand

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Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wallingford's left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

"Hey, you're the lion guy!" the male guard said. He'd scarcely glanced at the small platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick's left forearm. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you, Mr. Wallingford," she said.

What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face? Wallingford had instantly known she was sad, but he'd not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a small, fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

Her colleague--the small, lean black man--was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. "Well, it's a hand. A left one. I get it!" he said excitedly. "I guess that would be your good-luck charm, wouldn't it?"

"Actually, it's for fertility. Or so I was told."

"It is?" the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fellow guard's hand. "Let me see that again. Does it work?" she asked Patrick. He could tell she was serious.

"It worked once," Wallingford replied.

It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced--more turquoise. Perhaps her belly button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn't get pregnant.

"Do you want it?" Wallingford asked her. "I have no further use for it."

The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. "Oooh-oooh! You don't want to go there!" he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she'd been begging to get her tubes tied, but her no-good husband wouldn't let her.

"You be quiet!" the female guard called after her departing colleague. He was still laughing, but she was not amused.

"You can have it, if you want it," Wallingford told her. After all, Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. "I would very much like to have it, but I'm sure I can't afford it."

"No, no! It's free! I'm giving it to you. It's already yours," Patrick said. "I hope it works, if you want it to." He couldn't tell if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sell it.

At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wallingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work--to all other eyes, she was just a security guard--but when she glanced in Patrick's direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand. Wallingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

It reminded Patrick of Doris's and Otto Clausen's wedding rings, shining in the flashlight's beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she'd nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand?

Or had she never looked? Did she only see them--as Wallingford now would--in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings' reflection in the lake more everlasting?

If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not really a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock still shone in Doris Clausen's dreams, and in her imagination.

When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wallingford was--at that moment, literally--as up in the air as Doris Clausen's thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wallingford would long remember the date; he wouldn't see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lambeau Field

HE WOULD HAVE TIME to heal. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary's apartment) first turned yellow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary's shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie's nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick's thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie's love-bite) went away. Where there'd been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wallingford's new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto's shoulder--that bare, that unmarked.

Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son's smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy. He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wallingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. All he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick's present contract. Hadn't it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

Yes, it had. (She'd said, "Ask for three years--no, make that five.") But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. "I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat," was all she said.

"I see," Wallingford replied. "Then I suppose I might as well keep the anchor job."

"But are you sure you want the job, Pat?"