Simon Said

by Sarah Shaber

  David left a half an hour later, after promising to go by Simon's house in the morning and tend to the cat. Right after he left, Julia called him.

  "This is kind of an extreme way to get out of our date tomorrow, isn't it?" she asked. "Are you all right?" "I will be," Simon said. "I'm lucky I wasn't killed, or didn't kill someone else." "Do you want to postpone tomorrow?"

  "Absolutely not. I might gasp every now and then, but I think I'll be fine. How did you know I was here?" "From Sergeant Gates. I was still at the office when he came in to file a report." "Do you know what he did with my car?"

  "It's been impounded. It's locked in the county lot. They'll release it to you when they're done with it." Simon didn't much like the sound of this.

  "Why would Sergeant Gates impound my car? I need to get it repaired." "You haven't talked to him?"

  "No. Why?"

  Julia was silent for a few seconds. Simon couldn't help but think she was trying to get out of an uncomfortable situation. "Look," she said. "He's a very thorough policeman. He must have had a reason." "I can't imagine what it could be."

  "Let's just say that, generally speaking, carbon monoxide poisoning attracts his attention. Don't worry about it. You can probably have the car tomorrow." After Simon hung up the phone, he had the distinct impression that Julia knew something that he didn't know about his own accident. It was a feeling he did not like at all, not just because he didn't want to be in the dark but also because he didn't want to think that she would hide anything from him.

  Simon wondered where anyone had gotten the idea that a hospital was a restful place. The only people who could rest here were in the morgue. It was unbelievably noisy. People walked around all night, talking as if they were on the streets of New York City in the middle of the day. Their sex lives and grudges against supervisors were the main topics of conversation. The doctors, nurses, orderlies, and janitors all dressed the same— in jeans or wrinkled slacks with lab coats that didn't fit. Simon figured that the ones carrying stethoscopes were medical personnel, but he wouldn't have bet his life on it.

  The only concession to night was that the overhead lights in the rooms were turned off. Television was the drug of choice for everyone—patients, doctors, and nurses. Every bed had a little TV set above it, all tuned to different channels. Situation comedies prevailed, so raucous laughter and applause burst inappropriately from rooms full of sick people. People who were unconscious or asleep were not spared. Nurses would automatically turn on any set in any room they entered. Exhausted interns would slip in, change the channel, and sedate themselves for a few minutes before the next crisis. George Orwell got it backward, Simon thought. Instead of Big Brother watching us, we're watching Big Brother.

  A new nurse walked into Simon's room. The evening shift, he assumed. "Don't you want the TV on?" she said.

  "No," Simon answered. "Absolutely not."

  "Get some rest, then."

  "How could anyone sleep here? This place is like Grand Central Station," Simon said. "I could bring you a sleeping pill."

  "Please do."

  Even under the influence of a sedative, Simon didn't sleep very well. The oxygen thing under his nose irritated him, and his room turned out to be next to the helicopter landing pad. About one in the morning, a huge helicopter landed with a noisy whir and rotating blue-and-red lights that filled his room. Simon rose about a foot out of his bed. He thought he'd had a close encounter of the third kind—contact with alien space invaders. He got to his window just in time to see the helicopter, which had a big red cross on its side, discharge some poor soul on a stretcher. He went back to bed, but it was a long time before his adrenaline stopped pumping. Another helicopter landed about four. This one had military insignia on the side and three stretchers.

  There was no way Simon could go back to sleep. So he waited until morning, which was about 5:00 am on this ward. That was when the nurse came in and took his temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. When she was finished, he asked her to take the oxygen tube out. It was driving him crazy, and his chest barely hurt anymore.

  "I can't do that without doctor's orders," she said. After she left, Simon removed it himself. When breakfast came, all he got was a little box of cereal, milk, and coffee. Simon devoured it in about one minute. He was still hungry, and he could smell hot food somewhere.

  "Could I get more to eat?" he asked the aide when she came into his room to pick up his tray.

  "You got cereal because you weren't here in time yesterday to fill out a menu," she said.

  "That's not what I asked," Simon said. "Can I get any more?"

  "Let me see if there's an extra tray on the cart," she said. A few minutes later, she came back carrying another breakfast.

  "The man in four-oh-seven died last night," she said. "You can have his." The guy in must have had a good appetite until the end, because he had ordered scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, and yogurt. What was it that John Steinbeck had said? That you couldn't get a decent dinner or a bad breakfast anywhere in America. Simon enjoyed every mouthful of this breakfast, and he appreciated that he was alive to eat it.

  After breakfast, Simon got up, got dressed, shaved, and brushed his teeth. He used the disposable razor and disposable toothbrush that was in the cute little toiletry package they gave him when he was admitted. Then he was ready to go home. It was 6:15 in the morning.

  Simon rang the call button, and a nurse came in.

  "When can I leave?" Simon asked.

  "Let me go see if anyone's written any discharge orders," the nurse said. God, let there be discharge orders, Simon thought. The nurse came back.

  "No orders," she said. "You'll have to wait until the pulmonary team has rounds. Then they'll decide if you can leave."

  "Hold on," Simon said. "The doctor in the emergency room said I could leave today." "Well, he can't do that. You were automatically transferred to the pulmonary team when you were admitted," she said. "They haven't even seen you once yet." "Listen," Simon said, "I'm an American citizen. You can't hold me here if I want to go. I haven't been charged with anything. I have my rights." "It's hospital policy," she said.

  "What time does the pulmonary team make rounds?" Simon asked.

  "Oh, early afternoon sometime," the nurse said. Then she left.

  Like thousands of others before him, Simon wondered if he was a mouse or a man. If he was a mouse, he would stay patiently in his room until the powerful forces of the American health-care establishment allowed him to leave. If he was a man, he would walk out right now.

  Simon stayed. He worried that he might still have something wrong with him he wasn't aware of that would kill him as soon as he got home. Then everyone at his funeral would say, "If only he had stayed until the pulmonary team had made rounds, he could have had that innovative lifesaving surgery and still be alive, listening to CDs and drinking beer."

  "You don't look too bad to me," his own doctor said from the doorway. "Considering that you spent the night in this madhouse." Ferrell was leaning up against the doorway, hands in his khakis. He wasn't wearing a white coat, but he did have a stethoscope wound around his neck. It gave him that requisite look of authority all doctors acquired before they left medical school. Simon wondered if they took a course in it.

  "God, I am glad to see you," Simon said.

  "I'm sure you would have told me eventually that you were hospitalized with carbon monoxide poisoning," Ferrell said.

  "The guy in the emergency room said I was okay, and I didn't want to bother you after hours."

  "Couldn't figure out the phone system, huh?"

  "Can you get me out of here?"

  "Let's see," Ferrell said. He walked over to Simon's bedside, warmed the stethoscope with his hands, and listened intently to Simon's chest.

  "I don't hear anything to worry about. No wheezing, no fluid buildup. You won't feel great for a couple of days still, but you'd be better off in your own bed than here." But instead of leaving, Ferrell sat down in the chair
next to his bed, as if he was planning to visit for a while. Simon thought he seemed more serious than usual. He sat tensely, with his legs crossed and both hands gripping the chair arms.

  "Aren't you going to discharge me?" Simon asked.

  "Probably," Ferrell said. "How do you feel really?"

  "A lot better than last night."

  "I mean, emotionally."

  Oh, hell, Simon thought. I'm not in the mood for this.

  "A lot better, really."

  "Sleeping better, eating better?"

  "I've been eating like a horse."

  "Two breakfasts, I see," Ferrell said, looking at the two trays stacked on the bedside table.

  "I only got cereal on the first one. Listen, I've got a date tonight. It's okay to go, isn't it? I won't faint or anything?" Dr. Ferrell relaxed visibly and grinned at Simon.

  "You've got a date tonight?"

  "Yeah. I want to go, but not if I'm going to be sick."

  "I think you'll be fine. Better let her drive, though."

  "She'll have to. I don't have a car that's running."

  Ferrell rang for the nurse. When she appeared, he asked for Simon's chart so he could write discharge orders.

  "You can't do that," she said. "He was assigned to the pulmonary team last night. They're the only ones who can discharge him."

  Simon had never heard anyone say no to a doctor before. He waited for Ferrell to explode. To Simon's surprise, he didn't. "I am Dr. Shaw's family physician. He's my patient. Please get me his chart." "But the pulmonary team—" she began.

  "I've fired those guys," Simon said. "They have terrible bedside manners." She gave in. "All right," she said.

  "It's not the staff's fault," Ferrell said later while writing in Simon's chart. "These specialists think they're the only people in the world who can tell if you're breathing." Ferrell gave Simon a ride home on the way to his office.

  "By the way," Simon said as he got out of the car, "how did you know I was in the hospital?"

  "That detective friend of yours called me," Ferrell said. "He said he was looking into your accident."

  "Oh," Simon said. He watched Ferrell drive off in his ten-year-old gray El Dorado. He wondered why on earth Gates had thought it necessary to call his doctor. For that matter, what interested the detective so much about Simon's little accident? Surely he had better things to do.

  Once home, Simon entered that middling state of convalescence where one doesn't feel well enough to do anything much but is too bored to rest. He took a long shower and washed his hair. He discarded the clothes he had put on yesterday morning and changed into clean jeans and a knit shirt. He fed his cat. He opened a Coke. He checked his answering machine. Walker Jones, Judy Smith, and Marcus Clegg had left concerned messages. Julia said she assumed his car was still out of order, so she would pick him up at his house at six, unless she heard differently from him. That was all. It was ten o'clock in the morning. He had nothing to do until it was time to go to the ball game with Julia. The eight hours he had to pass until then loomed lengthily ahead of him.

  Then he caught sight of his blue blazer where he had thrown it over a chair before he set out for the grocery store the day before, and he remembered the florist cards he had collected at Anne Bloodworth's grave site. Here was something he could do.

  He took the cards upstairs to the library, collected the phone and the phone book, and turned on his CD player. He sat cross-legged on the floor and spread the four cards out in front of him. One read "All our love, Lillie and Sallie." Another simply said "Bessie." Simon figured that his chances of locating three old ladies in Raleigh named Lillie, Sallie, and Bessie this morning were nil. Another card was signed "Mrs. Irene Parker." The final one gave Simon hope. It read "With fond memories, Blanche Caviness Holland." It was a full name, and the salutation implied that Blanche Holland had known Anne Bloodworth personally.

  Simon took a chance. He opened up the phone book. There were a zillion Hollands, but no Blanche or B.C. She could be listed under her husband's name. She could live with a relative, or in a rest home. Or out of town. Simon set her aside and looked for Irene Parker. There was a Mrs. I. V. Parker listed on Cowper Drive. Simon took another chance, and a woman answered the telephone. Simon explained who he was and why he had called, and the woman didn't hang up on him.

  "I am Irene Parker," the woman said. "But I didn't know Anne Bloodworth. My mother did. They were fast friends, and my mother wondered her entire life what had happened to Anne. Mother died ten years ago, but when I saw the article in the paper, I knew she would want me to send flowers, so I did."

  "Did your mother ever talk to you about Anne Bloodworth's disappearance?" Simon asked. "Anything you remember could be helpful."

  "Not really. I just know she vanished. My mother and all her friends thought she had run away."

  "Really? Why?" Simon asked. "Because her father wanted her to marry her cousin, and she didn't want to—at all. And after old Mr. Bloodworth died, they all thought she would come back to town, or at least contact her friends. She didn't, so Mother suspected she must be dead. And she was right."

  Simon asked her if she knew Lillie and Sallie, or Blanche Caviness Holland. "Lillie and Sallie, I can't place. Mrs. Holland was old Dr. Caviness's daughter. She and mother were in the same bridge group for years."

  "Do you know where she lives, or what her husband's first name is?" asked Simon. "Sorry," Mrs. Parker said. "I didn't know she was still alive. I lost touch with all Mother's friends after she died."

  Simon thanked her for her help, and she promised to call him if she remembered anything else. Simon was excited. He had found out that Anne Bloodworth did not want to marry her cousin—to the extent that her friends thought she had run away, and stayed away. That seemed like an extreme act for a young woman in . There was clearly one serious stress within the Bloodworth family. And he had talked to a person who was related to someone who had known Anne Bloodworth. This gave him hope that he could locate a living witness to her drama.

  Simon called the florist who had delivered the flowers from Bessie, Sallie, and Lillie, and Blanche Caviness Holland. He was not nearly as cooperative as Mrs. Parker, nor was he impressed by Simon's mission.

  "There is no way I would give you the names or phone numbers—or anything else, for that matter—of my customers. You could be anybody. You could be trying to sell them real estate," the florist said.

  "But I'm not," Simon said. "I'm a history professor at Kenan College, and I can prove it."

  "I don't care who you are," he said. "People don't expect their merchants to hand out information about them to strangers."

  "If one of these women is a friend of Anne Bloodworth's, she will be happy to talk to me."

  "Exactly how am I supposed to know that?" "Please," Simon said. "Could you call them up, tell them what's going on, and if they're interested in talking to me, give them my phone number?" The florist grudgingly agreed, but he didn't sound as if he was planning to give the task much priority. Simon was frustrated. The Holland woman was obviously alive and functioning, and he desperately wanted to talk to her.

  Simon could think of only two more things he could do that morning. First, he called the newspaper and placed a classified advertisement asking for the elderly black lady who attended Anne Bloodworth's funeral to call him. The person who took his order acted as if she placed ads like this every day.

  "If you offer money for information leading to the identification of this person, you'll probably get a better response," the ad lady said. "Okay," Simon said. "How much money do you think?"

  "A hundred dollars," she said promptly.

  This detective business is getting expensive, Simon thought. He wondered if bribes were deductible. The woman read his ad back to him. "One hundred dollars reward for information leading to the identification of the elderly black woman who attended Anne Bloodworth's funeral. Call Professor Simon Shaw at five-five-five-six-eight-eight-four."

  Simon hoped the
title of professor would make him sound safe and reliable, the kind of person a little old lady wouldn't hesitate to telephone, despite the oddity of his request. Then Simon called his friend Mark Mitchell at the Pinkerton archives. He wasn't in, but Simon left a message asking Mark to send him anything that might be left in the Bloodworth files. Somehow, he thought this would be a dead end. Surely Mark would already have sent him anything he had.

  It was now 11:30 A.M. Simon was hungry. Unfortunately, he had never made it to the grocery store, so his choices were still raisin bran or cat food. He chose raisin bran, and ate two bowls.

  Now it was 11:45 A.M. Simon was losing his mind. He had just about decided to go to work and teach his class in spite of his doctor's orders when his doorbell rang. It was Sergeant Gates.

  "Hi there," Simon said. "Come in and sit down. Want some raisin bran for lunch? It's all I've got."

  "No thanks," Gates said. He came in, but he didn't sit down. He stood right inside Simon's door, restlessly jangling his car keys.

  "Do you feel well enough to go somewhere with me?" Gates asked. "We need to talk about your accident."

  "Speaking of my accident," Simon said. "I have a few questions to ask you, too." "In time," Gates said. "Right now, you need to come with me. If you feel okay, that is."

  "You certainly have your serious side," Simon said as he climbed into Gates's unmarked police car. "Can I have a hint what is going on?"

  "I'm not trying to be secretive," Gates said. "It's just that you need to see your car before I can explain anything. Be patient." The county lot where impounded vehicles were stored was on government property on the outskirts of town. The entire area was virtually treeless and crisscrossed with chain-link fences and nondescript one-story brick office buildings. The lot shared acreage with the police-and-fire-training center, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and was across the street from the youth prison. There was not a tree or a blade of grass anywhere, except for a line of brilliant pink azaleas that paraded inexplicably down the median of the access road. As they drove past the prison, Simon saw a knot of listless teenagers pressed up against the chain-link fence, watching the traffic.