Free The Accident by Chris Pavone Page B

right before Thanksgiving. Then it took just a few days, cycling through specialists and tests, until bam: stage IV.
    His mortality rate was supposedly higher than 95 percent, though no doctor or physician’s assistant or nurse would admit how much higher, exactly. Forty-four years old, would be lucky to see forty-five. Extremely lucky. It’d be a good idea to get your affairs in order.
    He went to New York for the holiday, as planned, as every year, the one weekend of the year when DC truly empties out, a few weeks after Election Day, when 100 percent of the people in the vast political machinery are willing to say “No thanks” to the producers of Face the Nation and Meet the Press , “I’m going home for the weekend.”
    He attended the annual Thursday supper at his mother’s house in Brooklyn, the whole big hodgepodge of extended family and friends, now mostly people who could only be characterized as old, people who’d once held him as a baby, far-left-wing people who looked at that grown-up baby with the unmistakable disenchantment that accompanies shattered illusions, not just in a person, but in the unremitting disappointments of their historical materialism, embodied by him.
    On Friday and Saturday he attended hastily scheduled medical consultations, sitting around in bland waiting rooms, inoffensive nonrepresentational art in aluminum frames, three-month-old magazines, tissue boxes. By Sunday he was nearly delirious from exhaustion, a long weekend of mostly sleepless hotel-suite nights, staring out the enormous picture window at the deep dark of the vast park, rooting around in the cluttered little minibar-fridge, taking brief unsatisfying strolls through the hall’s humming fluorescence to the hulking, groaning ice machine.
    He took a long Sunday walk, and paid a rare visit to his ex-wife. She was the first person he told. Then Amtrak back to Washington, the train pulling into stations and occasionally sitting there, actionless, waiting for the timetable to catch up to the reality, the emergency lights glowinggreen in the aisle, like a runway, guiding passengers to the bathroom, to the bar car, to the exit, with the whir of the circulation fans blowing too hard and unevenly, something caught in a duct, the bathroom door sliding open and clicking closed as a drunk disheveled man emptied himself from either end. A young woman was talking low-volume nonstop into her phone, next to a college kid with his chin on his chest and a variety of textbooks strewn around in pretend studiousness, in front of a West Indian couple, the man’s mouth filled with gold teeth.
    He was surrounded by all these strangers, alone with his regrets. Despite having been raised to disdain money, he’d made a lot of decisions in his life based on its pursuit. He’d started making those decisions way back in college, and had continued throughout the quarter-century since, as if on capitalist autopilot. For a while he told himself that he was merely professionally ambitious, not money-hungry greedy, and it’s hard to disentangle success from wealth. Each is a measure of the other, inseparable.
    The train traveled in fits and starts down the spine of New Jersey, passengers boarding and disembarking at Newark and Trenton and Philadelphia, at surprisingly slummy Dover and relentlessly bleak Baltimore, at the big parking lot of BWI and finally abundantly gentrified Union Station, Washington, DC.
    He arrived at the offices just after dinnertime. From down on the street, he could see that the lights were on in Charlie’s corner. He headed straight to his own big office, the opposite corner from Charlie’s, with his luggage in tow. It was unusual but hardly unheard-of for someone like him to arrive at this hour, at the close of a holiday weekend, distracted by everything that would need to be accomplished tomorrow, starting tonight, everyone wearing khakis and polo shirts and running shoes, eyeglasses instead of contact lenses, the