Ill Will

by J. M. Redmann

  Hours passed, a book, a magazine; I flitted between the pile of reading material I’d brought. I tried not to wonder where she was and what was happening to her. The harder I tried, the less I succeeded. She’d explained what they were doing, taking some marrow from her hip to run more tests on it, going into medical detail that would have required me to ask her to explain every other word if I really wanted to understand. She needed to talk, to use information as a shield against what was happening to her. I knew enough—she would undergo a painful procedure so they could have more information about which type of lymphoma she had and therefore how to treat it.

  How had our world changed so much? A few weeks ago life was normal; we didn’t need to pretend otherwise. I had to cling to what she’d claimed—it would be hard, but it would be okay. She was young, relatively speaking; she had access to good medical care. We would get through this. It seemed a cruel irony that we were finally getting beyond what had happened in the past, finding a new level of trust and connection, only to slam into the hard wall of disease, illness, mortality.

  She was moving slowly when she finally came back to the waiting area, but flashed me a wan smile. She seemed relieved to have it over. I joined her as she finished with paperwork and making the next appointment.

  “I’m not used to this,” she admitted to me as we left the building. “I usually just ask one of my coworkers, to see if my throat is red, or diagnose myself and get them to write me a prescription when we meet at the coffeepot.”

  “And now you’re just a lowly patient like the rest of us,” I said.

  She gave me her small smile again. “But with a great girlfriend to take care of me.”

  And that was what I did. I drove her home, insisted that she plop in the comfortable chair, found something suitably mindless and entertaining on TV, fixed a lunch of soup and sandwiches. Left her in front of the small screen while I cleaned up after lunch.

  After a while she was tired. I insisted she go ahead and take a nap, something she rarely does. But she fell asleep quickly, which told me how wearing the day had been.

  I considering running by my office for an hour or two, just to catch up and make sure no fires were burning, but I didn’t want her to wake and not find me here. The little things had become important now because all I could control were those little things. I did some cleaning although after my last frenzy, there was little that needed more than a quick dust. I played with the cats so they wouldn’t go in and bother Cordelia. I turned to my standard fail-safe, cooking, making dough for a pizza, chopping several onions and caramelizing them. This was one of Cordelia’s favorites, a white one with a layer of the onions topped with sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts. I cried while I made the dough, I cried while she slept.

  I wanted to be cried out by the time she woke.

  The evening was slow, we ate, we talked. I listened as she told me about what she went through, my tears used up, so I heard it all calmly, holding her hand when she needed it. Sticking a needle in and extracting bone marrow is a painful procedure. She downplayed it, but she moved slowly and I knew it had to be hurting her.

  The next day she went to work and insisted that I go, too.

  It’s how we get through the days, I thought as I drove to my office. We pad them with the mundane, the activities that don’t touch our hearts, so we can rest before the next break.

  But I did little, save what was required. I knew the test results would take days, maybe even a week to come back. Time felt too small to allow for anything more than waiting to hear from her, to hear her fate.

  The mundane did indeed await me. Or maybe it just seemed mundane compared to my worry about Cordelia.

  Prejean had left another message, again asking me to call off the cops. I deleted it.

  Danny also left a message. It was a brief update—basically Dudley was still out of it although his doctors predicted that he’d be awake in a day or two and able to talk.

  Mr. Charles Williams called asking for a favor. Maybe I could talk to his nephew. He might listen to me. He suspected it might be a long time before his nephew ever talked to him again. “Guess I can kind of come on strong,” he admitted. This isn’t your heartbreak, it’s someone else’s, I reminded myself. I couldn’t help Mr. Williams. I suspected it might be forever before he’d talk to his nephew again.

  The Grannies had done more digging for me. They’d even done some field work. Not surprising, it looked like Prejean was involved with insurance fraud. As I had noticed, his burned house didn’t seem heavily damaged. According to his insurance claim, it had been almost destroyed. It wasn’t just that house. He also had two more houses under different names, one had been vandalized and the third one also burned.

  All through the same insurance agent.

  With all the destruction that had taken place here, insurance companies were overwhelmed just as much as everyone else. They didn’t always have time to investigate each claim as thoroughly as they might have otherwise. The claims were still rolling in, with destroyed houses now stripped of copper or new appliances stolen. Prejean had clearly found a crooked insurance agent and was taking advantage of him having little oversight. The Grannies had taken a ride and snapped pictures of each of his supposedly damaged properties. As I suspected, there wasn’t much damage visible to the naked eye. As they noted, being an old lady was the perfect disguise. They could cruise with impunity.

  I’d turn this over to Danny. This might be the pressure that would get Prejean to admit he’d hired Dudley and turn on him.

  The randomness of life took me on a detour—two calls, several e-mails, mundane cases to work on—as mundane as finding a person gone missing can be, and tracing the tangled web of ownership for a property that was owned by the heirs of the heirs—every single second cousin had to be found and persuaded to sell. It was mostly tedious culling through dusty records, but I had to pay enough attention to make the hours—and the days—pass. The missing person was for another PI; he needed extra eyes and the money wasn’t bad.

  The hours added into days, the heirs located, the missing person traced to Atlanta and a drug habit that made him unwilling or unable to contact his parents. That it wasn’t my case meant that I wasn’t the one to deliver the news to the family. A final phone call to tie up the details of the case and then I was left staring at the neat piles on my desk. Everything had been sorted and filed, there was nothing to readily claim my time.

  The hours became empty. I didn’t know what to do next. I started to pick up the phone and ask Cordelia to meet for lunch, but I couldn’t cling to her. It felt like Katrina again, Cordelia was trapped inside Charity and I was far away in a safe land and couldn’t help her.

  I had long ago given up believing in “God and His mysterious ways” as some catch-all explanation for bad things. Like God wanting to punish gay men with AIDS and mysteriously orphaning ten million children in Africa to get less than a million gay men in America and Europe.

  Cordelia had cancer. I didn’t. It was a small tragedy, one that happened every day to millions of people. Cancer or HIV or car wreck or any of the hundreds of ways life takes a sudden and jarring turn. It hit both those affected and those standing next to them.

  Time changed. Would I hold her hand in the next springtime? Or visit a grave? I looked at a year that felt impossibly fleeting and as if it would take forever.

  “She’ll be okay,” I said.

  I was the one who had lived on the edge—alcohol, even cocaine and a few other things when I was young and could pretend nothing bad ever really happened. I’d stumbled over a few cases that had been dangerous, bullets instead of the usually moldy records.

  It was a twist of fate too bizarre for her to be the one staring at her mortality and me still firmly left in the land of the healthy and well.

  “Like life is ever fair,” I said, my voice loud against the stillness of my thoughts.

  I couldn’t bear to be with those thoughts anymore.

&nbs
p; I made a list of every possible office supply item I might need in the next year, drove out to the suburbs where the mega-office-type-crap stores are and distracted myself with avoiding the insane drivers—tiny blondes in big SUVs are the worst; the rude shoppers—why on earth would I be upset with you rolling your cart over my toes?; and clerks who had to use a calculator to understand that $120 minus $118.90 meant I got a buck and a dime in change.

  By the time I got back to my office and put everything away, it was time to go home.

  Even though it wasn’t late, Cordelia had gotten there before me.

  She was in the kitchen, doing the dishes.

  She hates doing the dishes, usually approaching them with a glum determination that borders on the dourest Protestantism—that there was no possible joy because joy was an indication of sinning and eternal damnation. We often traded laundry and ironing for doing dishes. She was fair enough to feel that if I cooked—which I often did—that she should do the cleaning up afterward. But fairness didn’t make her like sticking her hands in soapy water and dealing with grease, so her being alone in the house and deciding that the few dishes from breakfast were how she wanted to spend her evening was unusual.

  Enough that it worried me.

  “Hey, honey, I’m home,” I called. She wasn’t going to just blurt out what was going on. I needed to let her work her way to it.

  “I was wondering when you’d get here.” There was an edge to her tone that did nothing to ease my worry.

  “Am I late?”

  She put the bowl she had been washing back in the sink, abruptly turning off the tap. “No, no you’re not. Sorry.” She turned to me and managed a ghost of a smile.

  I walked behind her and put my arms around her, just held her, saying nothing.

  “It’s…uh…it’s not been a good day,” she said softly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, tightening my embrace.

  “Traffic was horrible coming home. Three people did a left turn from the right lane. Without signaling. The morning at the office was crazy. Brandon and Lydia got into a fight and Ron had to break it up—which is so not how things usually go.”

  “Mr. Abrasive as peacemaker?”

  “Dr. Abrasive,” she corrected. “None of the patients were routine—every one of them required extra time and extra paperwork. We had a mess with someone trying to use his brother’s insurance—they only caught it as he paid, realizing that his card had a different name on it.”

  “Why would someone do that? Everyone checks IDs these days.”

  “Desperate. They were brothers, looked enough alike to use each other’s IDs. The man that came in was laid off, lost his insurance, had gone fishing last weekend. The tip of a fishhook broke off in his hand and he wasn’t able to get it out and had infected the wound. He needed to be seen, didn’t want to pay an emergency room fee.”

  “What a mess! So what happened?”

  “We let him slide by with paying out of pocket. Using a check that’ll probably bounce. If it does, then he’s going to be in even more trouble. The poverty spiral, how not having money for one thing affects everything you do. His brother is going to have to find another doctor. And I got to be the one to tell him.”

  “Ouch. That’s not a good day,” I agreed.

  “That’s not all,” she said softly.

  I wanted her not to talk, not to say anything. I could handle traffic, other people’s tragedies, but not here, not now, not in these walls, the ones that had always kept me safe before.

  I had to fight to get out the words, “Tell me.”

  “Chemo and radiation in the next few days. It’s stage three, an aggressive form.” She paused for a moment, picked up the bowl as if to continue washing, then put it down again. “It’s what I expected—lymphoma is often only detected once it’s progressed to several nodes. The advantage to the more aggressive form is that it can be eradicated; the less aggressive forms rarely clear, although they may move so slowly that they don’t need immediate treatment.”

  I recognized the information dump for what it was—distance, control. For both of us. Letting her talk meant that I didn’t need to respond. She ran down the various subtypes, how the tests worked, a list of chemo drugs, the advantages and disadvantages of each—a wash of medical jargon that I understood well enough to not ask for the definition of each word—she had cancer, it was serious, the treatment would be aggressive, and our lives would change.

  My mind ran through a gamut of emotions, skimming past the most brutal of what-ifs and focusing on going to the grocery to get ingredients for chicken soup, stocking up on sports drinks. Chemo would probably cause nausea, and those were the small things that I could do to help with this big thing that had invaded our life.

  Our lives. Suddenly we were very different people on very different journeys.

  She abruptly said, “I’m sorry. I’m just spewing out facts. Like if I know enough about this, then I’m in charge and not these aberrant cells growing in my body.”

  “What do you need from me?” I asked.

  She was silent. She tried to smile. Failed. Finally answered, “I don’t know. I don’t think I know anything at the moment. I don’t know what I want, let alone what I need from you.” She picked up the bowl again and washed it.

  I let her go and fed the cats. They had been unusually patient, as if they knew that this was a time their begging would go ignored.

  Cordelia finished the last few dishes in silence. Suddenly, she threw the dish towel she had been drying her hands on at me. “Let’s have a good time. Let’s do the things we’ve been promising ourselves we’d do—eat out at the restaurants we’ve been meaning to try. Do a swamp tour—I haven’t done that in years. Drive over to the coast, maybe even go to a casino—I’ve never played a slot machine.”

  “All of that tonight, huh?” I echoed her mood.

  “Perhaps not everything. How about going out to eat?”

  I put my arms around her. “I think we can manage that. Where would you like to go?”

  She managed a smile. “You know I hate making those kinds of decisions. This is what you can do for me, decide.”

  I kissed her, a sign that I would take care of it.

  I first thought of calling Torbin—he was a restaurant maven and see what he suggested. But I hadn’t heard from him since our last altercation and I wasn’t willing to deal with him.

  “To the computer,” I pulled away from her. The Internet would have to substitute for my cousin. “How dressy?” I asked as I booted it up.

  “All decisions are yours.”

  Cordelia did hate to make decisions—save for the ones she wanted to make—so was happy to defer to me. I usually didn’t let her get away with that because I wasn’t going to be stuck with the full responsibility if things screwed up.

  I couldn’t even complain that she was using cancer to get her way.

  I choose fancy and dressy, one of the newer restaurants in the Warehouse District that some of our friends had been raving about.

  We didn’t talk about cancer, we enjoyed the food and drinks, made a list of where else we’d like to go—some were real, like the swamp tour, some more a wish list, like biking across the country. We’d have to brush the dust off our bikes and make it cross-town a few times first.

  It was scary and exhilarating to live so fiercely in the moment. The daily details of work and laundry and picking up cat food, brushed aside to focus on doing what we’d always longed to do.

  As if the future could contain only the next few days and we didn’t dare to look beyond that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On Saturday night we went out with Alex and Joanne. We talked about Cordelia’s diagnosis. She reassured them—and me—that this was a cancer that could be cured, that she’d be okay. Alex said that she was going to see if she could change her schedule to four long days and then most weeks have three days off. But we didn’t dwell on the hard topics; instead we enjoyed the cool, clear e
vening and the food, let the good parts of life flow over us like a river that might never end.

  Monday brought me back to work and my life.

  Normal, Cordelia kept insisting. I would do my best to honor her wishes.

  I needed to get back to my cases, to not leave them sitting on the shelf too long.

  There were things I could do. If I could link The Cure to NBG, I could help extract Fletcher McConkle’s aunt from the attentive grasp of Vincent. And perhaps find some justice for Reginald Banks, and someone who might be his uncle.

  I quickly set up a fake e-mail for pink survey lady extraordinaire Deborah Perkins and e-mailed Vincent, asking for information about the meeting he had mentioned.

  I also called up McConkle himself, although I actually talked to his wife. I said I wanted to give them an update on my progress on the case. Maybe they had some idea if his aunt had ever used The Cure and not just NBG. She seemed happy to hear from me, as if her being the one to sign on the dotted line made her responsible for my work. She asked if I could meet them at their workplace later in the day and I agreed. Driving was distracting, and I was willing to do most anything not to stare at these walls. She gave me an address in the Gentilly area.

  Then I packaged up everything the Grannies had found out about Prejean—well, the stuff that they could legally find out, I wasn’t going to get them busted them for hacking—and e-mailed it off to Danny.

  After that I completely dismantled and cleaned the coffeemaker. I wondered if it would taste as good without the sludge. A taste test was required, so I made a big pot. Caffeine can also be distracting. The caffeine was the motivator for me to file cases, catch up on billing, even to the woman whose dead husband was alive and newly married in Vegas—she might pay. The top of my desk slowly appeared.

  Shortly after lunch, I got a reply from Vincent. Friendly, even a little sweet.

  Dear Debbie,

  That’s great! I’d love for you to learn more about NBG. We’re having a prospective Naturalist meeting tomorrow night and I’m one of the people leading it. It would be great if you could come, although that might be a little soon. You’ve probably got a busy schedule. I think you’d be a great fit and NBG could be great for you.