“Not yet,” she said, her eyes intent on the numbers on Meghan’s transducer. “Which hand moved and how did it move?”
“Her right hand,” I said, holding up my hand and showing her the motion, demonstrating over and over again. “Like this, like this.”
“How many times?”
“I—once. I only saw the once,” I said, desperately wanting to lie, to tell her it was four times, seven times, just to make sure she took it seriously.
“Okay, do what you did again,” she said, making notes on the chart and stepping back, motioning me forward. “Do it again exactly the way you did it the first time.”
I took a deep breath and tried to still my shaking hands, clenching and releasing them several times while I tried to remember exactly what I did, in what order, with what pressure and speed. As I gathered my courage to start, the other nurse, Jessica, slipped into the room.
Reva glanced at her and quietly said, “Her hand moved.” I heard Jessica’s little gasp, and had I not been steeling myself to lean over the railing at the perfect degree I would have hugged them both to me. Reva had not said, “She thought her hand moved,” and Jessica’s gasp had been a hopeful, optimistic sound. Neither of them thought I was deluded, and I was suddenly very glad that I had not lied.
I did it. I leaned over, I kissed her, ran my hand over her cheek, then back into her hair, tucked once lightly, tucked a second time, harder. I kept an eye on her hand. It didn’t move. “Meghan,” I said, “move your hand again. Do it, honey, move your hand, please.”
“Do it again,” Reva said quietly.
Lean, kiss, hand on cheek, into hair, tuck once, tuck twice. Nothing. I started trembling, and realizing that I’d been holding my breath, I let it out in a rush and then inhaled again quickly, feeling light-headed.
“Again,” Reva encouraged.
Lean, kiss, hand, cheek, hair, hair. Nothing. Oh, God. I groaned in frustration and began to do it again, did it three more times before Jessica silently backed out the door and Reva finally put her hand on my arm and handed me a tissue from the box on the side table. I hadn’t even realized I had tears on my face.
I fell back into my chair and dropped my head into my hands as Reva rubbed my back. “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay, I know it’s hard.”
My usual anger at anyone telling me that they “knew” anything about this, about me, didn’t flare at all, in fact, all I felt was relief and a desperate longing to turn into her arms and let her tell me it would be okay for a few hours. Instead, I took a quivering breath and said, “Thanks. Should I keep doing it?”
“I certainly don’t think it could hurt,” she said. “I’m going to call Dr. Tyska and let him know what’s happening. Buzz me if anything happens again, okay?”
I nodded, a little surprised and excited that she didn’t just believe me, didn’t think it was the desperate imaginings of a broken-hearted mother, but that she believed me enough and felt it significant enough to call the neurologist at a rather ungodly time. I thought about calling Cal, but he’d be rising just after four for a full day on the water, making our only paycheck.
If it had happened again, if it had turned into anything, if the nurse had said anything particularly hopeful, then I would have called him. As it was, I thought it kinder to let him sleep. There could be a hundred little instances like this, a hundred little hand motions that meant nothing. Would we call every time?
I kept my eyes on Meghan while I pulled my purse out from behind my back, where it was lodged uncomfortably. As I did I felt something come with it and stood to clear out what I thought was a newspaper Cal had left behind.
But it was a manila envelope filled with paper, and I remembered Cal telling me he’d printed out some information for me. The bag he’d told me he’d left was beside the chair, unnoticed by me in the excitement of Meghan’s hand, and I pulled it onto my lap as I started reading, stopping just long enough to peer into it and see two pieces of wood, a small flashlight, and more music CDs.
I lowered the bag to the floor and settled back to read Cal’s research, regularly looking up to check on Meghan, and occasionally rising to repeat the whole lean, kiss, cheek, tuck, tuck process, with no luck. An hour later, I was rubbing my eyes, but fascinated by the things Cal had found.
In many ways I felt good about the fact that I had spent so much time at the hospital. I was doing the only thing I thought I could for Meghan, the only thing I thought I could for me. But seeing the amount of information Cal had managed to put together made me feel short-sighted.
I could have spent some time at home, researching on our computer. I knew I didn’t use our computer the way other people did, and I couldn’t blame it on age. I was only forty, certainly young enough to have been fiddling around expertly on the Internet for years now. But, as evidenced by our dial-up connection, I took a certain amount of pride in my Luddite status.
I didn’t need to get online to know how to manage a particular shade of green, and Cal certainly didn’t need it to find new types of fish. Our professions did not rely on, or even benefit from, computer use. The kids used the computers at school until we got a laptop for Marshall when he was a senior, and Meghan had no use for high-speed access yet.
But had I known how much was out there, I could have been learning more than I had been from the library books Sandy brought me. This was real information, things I could be doing, and he’d even printed out pages of parents’ conversations, actual back and forth between mothers and fathers whose children were in the same or similar situations.
I was determined that I would ask Cal to show me how to use the new laptop and leave it with me so I could put any downtime to better use than I currently was with alternately feeling sorry for myself and angry at everyone else.
I had read through all the pages twice by the time Reva returned. She squatted down next to my chair to talk to me. “Dr. Tyska is going to come in by seven, but he’s asked me to call if we see anything else.”
“It really happened,” I said. “I really did see it.”
She nodded. “I believe that you did. It’s just, it doesn’t always mean anything—” She held up her hands as I tried to talk over her. “Sometimes it does though. People have opened their eyes, spoken, and then gone back into the coma. Other people have been in a coma for years, wake up, and have almost all their memory, start talking as soon as they open their eyes. The thing is, we just don’t always know, and, well, we’re a pretty small hospital here, Mrs. Tobias.”
“You think we should take her somewhere else?” I asked. “What about the other guy? Who comes over from Miami? He’s supposed to be a specialist.”
“He’s great,” she agreed. “But he’s only here every six weeks. I’m just saying that if this goes on for much longer, you might want to think about transferring her somewhere that’s better equipped to handle things for her, give her the most up-to-date treatments. We’ve got great trauma people, but there are better places for longer-term care.”
“I’ve just—” I started, holding up the sheaf of papers, “I mean, my husband has just started doing some research online. Maybe we should start looking around.”
She nodded. “If you talked to Dr. Tyska, I’m sure he’d help. I know we all want her to get as well as she can.”
“I know,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure I did. Why weren’t they doing some of the simple things Cal had printed out? Why weren’t there people in here strobing lights in her eyes every forty minutes? We had physical therapists, neurologists, everything we thought we needed, but there was still more that could be done, and it was clearly up to us to find out what those things were and to do them.
“Would you mind shutting off the lights when you leave?” I asked Reva, and she patted my shoulder before she left, flipping off all the lights but the ones that illuminated the machines beside Meghan’s bed.
I fell asleep rereading Cal’s papers and didn’t wake until the next morning, when Tessa and Mingus arriv
ed.
THE nurses, as instructed, would not allow Mingus to pass, only Tessa, Sandy, Cal, and myself were allowed beyond the nurses’ station. Reva had been the first one challenged by a journalist the previous week. He’d been escorted out by security, and there had been at least one a day since then. Security accompanied me out whenever I left the hospital, and only one person had dared to approach Cal.
Another article had appeared, but there had been little new information in it, only a brief interview with the prosecutor, in which he mostly declined to comment. Tessa had brought the paper that day with a grim look on her face, and when she woke me that morning she had the same fixed scowl.
I steeled myself and looked for a newspaper in her hands, but I was completely unprepared for what Tessa said.
“Chloe, Cal’s gone to get Marshall.”
I bolted upright, gasping at the pain that shot through my lower back as I did so. “What?”
“Charlie’s at the nurses’ station. Could you let them know it’s okay for him to come down and he can tell you.”
I didn’t even bother answering, I just scrambled out of my chair and ran for the door. Mingus pointed me out to the nurse as I hustled up the hallway, and when she turned I waved for him to come on and she gave him a nod. He met me halfway and took me by the elbow as we hurried back to Meghan’s room.
As soon as we got through the door I turned to him. “What’s going on? She said Cal’s gone to get Marshall? What happened? How come nobody called me?”
“Hang on, let’s sit down, we need to talk about some things,” he said, looking around the room, at everything but Meghan, whom Tessa was talking to, her hand gripping Meghan’s tightly. Mingus dragged the chairs over to the little table and Tessa joined us, leaning against the windowsill.
“Let me just say this quickly,” she said, holding a hand up to Mingus to keep him from speaking immediately. “I am here as Chloe and Cal’s attorney, their friend, too, but Chloe, you don’t have to say anything, okay?”
I nodded. I didn’t care, I just wanted to hear about Marshall. “Is he okay?” I asked, reaching my hands across the table, not even sure what I was reaching for.
Mingus nodded. “Yeah, he’s okay. Hang on a sec.” He looked at Tessa. “You all set now? What do you think I’m going to do, Tess?”
“Just making sure, Charles.”
“Can I tell her what her husband said now?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” Their eyes held for a moment longer than necessary, and I wanted to scream that they could take their Boston Legal banter elsewhere after this and screw each other’s brains out, but right now I wanted to hear about my son. Luckily, he started to speak, to me this time.
“Cal called me early this morning. Evidently Marshall called him from his grandmother’s—”
“What?”
“Cal’s mother? In central Florida, I think he said, about five hours away.”
“How the hell did he get there? How did he know where to go?”
“I don’t know,” Mingus said patiently. “He said he wasn’t staying. He was going to go, pick him up, grab something to eat, and come home.”
“What then?” I asked, glancing between them, suddenly nervous.
“I advised your husband that Marshall was a fugitive and that the only thing I could advise him to do is to drive him to the police station immediately on their return and have Marshall turn himself in. He said he would call from the road so that I can arrange things, and I’ll be there when they arrive.”
“He’s not going to get out, is he?” I asked, my hands gone cold.
“No. He will be considered a flight risk and new charges will be filed against him. No, he won’t get bail this time. I’m sorry.”
I sighed. “What are we going to do?”
“Mrs. Tobias?” Mingus asked. “Forgive me, but, you don’t have to do anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Marshall is an adult in the eyes of the law. He’ll be charged as an adult, incarcerated as an adult, and tried as an adult. There’s not a whole lot you can do, except decide how cooperative you want to be with the prosecution and defense. You’re not responsible for anything else.”
“Wait, why is Cal picking him up?” I inhaled sharply and put my hand to my chest. “Where’s Ada?”
Mingus nodded as if wondering when I would get there. “Ada’s gone. She took Marshall’s car and left over a week ago.”
“You can’t be serious?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
Tessa leaned in. “When did he call?”
“About two hours ago,” Mingus said.
“Had he already left?” she asked.
“Just. So he won’t even get there for another three hours or so.”
She looked at me and clearly decided I was too shell-shocked to ask any more coherent questions. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
Mingus shook his head. “That was about it. Like I said, he told me he’d call when he had him and was on the way back.”
“Why the hell didn’t Cal call me?” I asked, just now realizing this fact.
“He said he did, but you didn’t answer at home. He left a message there and on your cell phone. He asked me to come talk to you in person so you weren’t alone.”
My anger at Cal melted slightly at that. Of course, he thought I was at home.
“I thought Tessa would want to be here, so I stopped by and picked her up.”
“And you knew she wouldn’t talk to you without me here,” Tessa said smugly.
I was glad that Tessa was so confident. It helped me to be confident, gave me an example, a pose to emulate. But she was so very wrong. If Mingus had told me he had news about Marshall, I wouldn’t have waited a heartbeat to ask him in.
They all—the lawyers, the doctors—amazed me. They worked hard to know their uncooperative client, their comatose patient, but the ones they often had to deal with the most, the parents, the caregivers, the decision makers, they seemed to forget that they weren’t simply an extension of themselves. I had my own ideas, my own concerns, and yes, even my own agenda, and it seemed as though few of the professionals I’d dealt with so far even considered that.
I didn’t bother correcting her. I sat back in my chair and tried to digest Marshall fleeing to Cal’s mother. How the hell had that happened? How had he even known where she was? And why hadn’t the woman called them? I thought about her staring at Marshall when he was just a toddler, the way her face had transformed, narrowing and hardening before my eyes. This was the person he ran to?
And speaking of unlikely saviors, it suddenly hit me that Marshall had called Cal. He’d called his father, the one who’d never understood, never tried to understand him. The one who was perfectly willing, no, adamant, that he go through a trial, possibly go to jail. I suppose I could understand Cal wanting to be the one to get Marshall, but I couldn’t understand Marshall choosing to call his father.
Except . . . Cal hadn’t been able to reach me. I was supposed to be at home last night. And my cell phone was on the kitchen counter, hooked into its charger. I’d left so quickly I hadn’t even given it a second thought. Oh, Marshall, I mourned. He must have called me. And I hadn’t been there.
He must have been so afraid to call, and then to not have me available, it must have just killed him. I’d always tried to be there for him, even when I was angry with him, uncertain of his intentions.
How bad had the conditions at Cal’s mother’s house been for him to call his father? I shuddered just thinking about him stuck in that place. The only thing the woman might have gotten accomplished was to drive Ada off. Or, I supposed Ada drove herself off, in Marshall’s car.
“What do we do about Ada?” I asked.
“Well, obviously they’re going to be pretty interested in questioning Marshall about her whereabouts,” Mingus said.
“She stole his car,” I said. “Can he press charges for that?”
“We don’t know that she stole his car,” Mingus said. “Maybe he gave it to her. I think that right now we should concentrate on Marshall.”
I looked over his shoulder at my daughter. She had splints on her legs, keeping her toes from pointing and shortening her calf muscles. Her toes formed tents at the end of the bed, and I remembered how she’d always hated her sheets pulled tight at the end of the bed because she didn’t like the way the bedclothes felt on her toes, she said she liked her feet to be free.
Instead of tucking her into bed at night, I was always pulling the peaks up off her toes. Instead of arguing with her over what movies were appropriate, I was playing Heathers at top volume on a laptop computer resting on her stomach, a stomach that I hadn’t made a meal for in almost a month.
I had worried about Marshall when he was gone. I had berated my husband for his lack of support of our son, I had beat my own chest wondering how I could have done something different. And, as Mingus said, I certainly had concentrated on Marshall during this whole time.
But as I looked at Meghan’s little toes pushing against the sheets just over Mingus’s right shoulder, I couldn’t stop concentrating on Ada.
If Marshall was coming back here to face the consequences, then I wanted her back here too. If I was going to have to see Marshall in a courtroom, then I wanted her in a courtroom too. If Marshall was in handcuffs, then I wanted to see them restraining her too. I thought I had never wanted to see her again, but I was wrong.
I very much wanted to see her again.
If Marshall had to pay, then she had to pay.
“I think I’m going to go home for a bit,” I said, rising slowly. “I want to check my messages.” I also wanted to get some things together. As soon as Marshall was back I was going to call the FBI agents who had been there. I’d give them all the information I had on Marshall’s car, as well as Cal’s mother’s address. Now that Marshall wasn’t with her, I wanted Ada found.
Matters of Faith Page 24
