by Ali Vali
"Does that happen every morning?" asked Raul of Mona. She looked up from the skillet of eggs she was cooking and snorted.
"Yes, but only on clinic days. Surgery days Harry leaves here before the little one gets up, so God only knows how she bids her goodbye on those days."
"Harry, I have to admire you for ever leaving the house," her father said from the table. He lifted the paper up as a barrier before Harry could make any comments.
By ten that morning Harry had seen four new patients and seven follow up patients before Diana wheeled herself into the waiting room. When she saw that there were no suspicious looking people in the room, she called for Tyrell. He had met her and her ride in the lobby and was waiting for her call in the men’s room down the hall. The nurse who took their information explained everything they would be doing that day and the tests which would be necessary before Diana got to see Harry.
"Since your initial surgery wasn’t done at this hospital, Dr. Basantes wants to run a few tests and get some new x-rays of the injury site. Don’t worry though, it can all be done in this building and we’ll have the results right after lunch. Do you have any questions?" asked Becky, one of Harry’s office nurses.
That was a polite way of saying ‘your surgery was done in the charity hospital cause you have no money’. Diana shook her head and signed in all the places where the nurse pointed to in order to have the tests run. She and Tyrell were shocked when they found themselves in one of Harry’s exam rooms at one thirty.
"I’m used to waiting all day to see a doctor, this is different. Thanks for doing this for me Ty, I hope this one can do some good." Like Desi had done so many months before, the siblings sat in the consultation exam room and admired all the pictures of Harry with some of her patients.
"Good afternoon Ms. Lagrie, I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Harry Basantes." Harry held out her hand positioning herself so that Tyrell was in front of her.
"Nice to meet you doctor, you know my brother Tyrell." Diana pointed to the man sitting next to her.
"We’ve met. I’ve been looking at your pictures Ms. Lagrie, and I’m not liking what I’m seeing." Before the two could get alarmed Harry explained that the first surgery had left a tremendous amount of scar tissue in Diana’s back, which would explain her pain. The scar tissue was pressing on nerve endings in her back and that was most likely causing her discomfort. "It’s not a simple procedure but it can be done, and I can almost guarantee that you’ll be more than pleased when we do."
"Is there any chance that you’ll do this for my sister?" asked Tyrell. They had gotten more answers and gotten more accomplished in a day than they had since Diana’s accident. The convict could see where it would have been an easy choice for anyone to leave Byron for this woman. Tyrell could tell that Diana had been instantly taken in by the compassionate doctor holding her hand while she explained what was wrong.
"I assumed that’s why you were here, not just to get my opinion but to retain my surgical services. Of course I’ll do the surgery, all you had to do was ask. You two are aware that I don’t just practice here? I teach at the medical school and Diana’s case will be of interest to my students." Harry started writing orders in the chart sitting on her lap. The look on Tyrell’s face when she had given them the last piece of news did not project happiness.
"You won’t do it here?"
"Do what here?" asked Harry.
"The surgery. You are going to ship her off to Big Charity?"
"Mr. Lagrie, I will agree that life is not fair. Your sister unfortunately is one of the many people in this state with no type of insurance, so yes the surgery will take place there. It insults my integrity as a doctor and as a person that you would think Diana will get any less than my best effort just because of the location." Harry turned her attention to the woman in the wheelchair and reached for her hand again. "I have a lot of influence here Ms. Lagrie, but not that much. What I am talking about here, in case you didn’t understand, is an extensive hospital stay followed by physical therapy. If I do the procedure there, the state picks up the tab and we both get what we want, and that’s for you to feel better than you do now. Is that all right with you?"
"Yes Dr. Basantes, I just can’t live with the pain anymore. Don’t mind Tyrell, he’s just looking out for me like he always has." Diana patted the hand holding hers while she shot Tyrell a look that told him to calm down.
"Now Mr. Lagrie, I believe you have a job to do for me." Harry wasn’t holding out any hope that the man would find Byron and Mike but stranger things had been know to happen in New Orleans. The main reason she had insisted Serena not call the police on the big man sitting beside his sister, was his history. What he had done was violent, but it would have been the same course of action she would have taken if someone had done what happened to Diana to Desi.
"You promise you’ll fix her?" There was a look of pleading to be assured in the dark brown eyes that made Harry aware of how much this man had sacrificed for his sister.
"You have my word Mr. Lagrie. You two take the rest of the day and tomorrow to get ready, and I’ll be waiting for you Wednesday morning. Becky will tell you where you need to go and what you need to bring with you. Remember this won’t be a short process so make arrangements to be our guests for at least six weeks." Becky stepped back into the room with a list in her hand when Harry called. After knowing they had no other place to be, she sent them to the hospital to pre-register.
Harry headed to her office to call Desi and tell her how the appointment went and that she was all right. She cracked open a pistachio nut from the bowl on her desk before dialing her house number, smiling when she thought of her favorite potter.
"Basantes’ residence," said Mona.
"What are you wearing?"
"Harry you fool, what do you want?"
"I want to talk to my girl if she’s available."
"Hold on. Oh, before I let you go, when are you coming home?"
"In about an hour, I just have a few more people to see then I’m out of here. Why, you need something?" Harry leaned back in her chair and popped another nut into her mouth.
"No, I have everything I need but, the weather is turning nasty and Desi’s starting to worry about you. That means come home bonehead." Mona pointed her finger in the air like Harry could see her.
"Put your lethal digit away grandma, I’ll be home soon I promise."
"I didn’t think you thought my fingers were lethal, but I’ll keep that in mind the next time you’re feeling frisky." Desi laughed at the choking sound coming from the other end of the phone.
"Sorry." Harry coughed trying to get the pistachio skin out of the back of her throat.
"Don’t be sorry Harry, just get home. It’s freezing outside and it’s starting to rain." Desi gripped the phone as she looked at the driving rain outside from the sunroom wishing Harry were home.
"Just two more patients and I promise I’ll head out. I just wanted to tell you I saw the escapee and his sister, and lived to tell about it."
"Harry, are you sure you are not going to get in trouble for this? If the police find out you are holding out on them, I’m thinking they are going to be pissed. I know you are doing this for me so we can find Byron, but I think you should call Detective Landry and tell him."
"Let’s talk about that when I get home baby. Go kiss Jack for me and I’ll be there in less than an hour, if I can."
The drive home was far from pleasant and Harry was glad the house was so close to the hospital. The rain had started just after nine that morning and had kept up at a steady pace all day. Harry noticed there were cars parked on the median ground on the way home, people hoping the extra eight inches would keep the rising water out of the vehicles. Uptown was beautiful, but a driving rain could flood it in a matter of hours. When she pulled into her driveway, the trees that were visible through the rain were waving and losing the last of their leaves in the wind.
Mona looked up from her cutting board when the b
ackdoor slammed shut to see a dripping wet Harry standing in her kitchen. "She’s upstairs in front of the fireplace waiting for you. And change out of those wet clothes before you go anywhere near the two of them bonehead," shouted Mona to the retreating figure. Harry had leaned over and kissed Mona’s forehead before starting up the stairs, leaving the woman to her domain of pots and ingredients.
"Oooh honey, you are all wet."
"Yeah damn wind was driving the rain so hard that it didn’t make a difference that I parked under the overhang."
"Well get out of that before you get sick."
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"What choice do I have dumb ass."
The two brothers were still sitting in the bushes behind the Basantes house, both shivering as the temperature started to drop along with the rain. Through a hole in the brick fence Byron had seen Harry drive up to the side of the house and run through the unlocked backdoor. He guessed that because of the bad weather there had been hardly no traffic along the back street, and there had been no sign of Desi all day. The need to get warm and dry had become more important than trying to get into the house they were watching as the day progressed.
"We have the choice to get out of here and someplace dry at least. Since we don’t have any money, we are stuck with these clothes, but if we don’t get warm we are going to die out here stupid." Mike was looking forward to going back to Angola. He would have to look at dull gray walls for the rest of his life at night, and hard labor during the day, but he would be dry and full while he did it.
"Come on, there’s got to be some place around here that we can crash for the night and get dry. This stuff doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon," said Byron. He got to his feet and helped his brother up while looking down both ways of the street, trying to find a solution to their current problem. Half way down the block he saw a man putting suitcases into the truck of a car while his wife waited on the porch for him to finish.
"Let’s go." Byron hit Mike on the arm to get him moving. The couple driving down the street never noticed the two men heading toward their house. They were headed to Texas for a week’s vacation and the only thing that they were worried about was the weather they were going to have to drive through.
Seeing no alarm system in place, Bryon broke through the back window and crawled into the dark space. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust and to make sure there was no one left in the house. The room he had landed in seemed to be one of the bedrooms, and he could see the couple had left the bed unmade and the closet doors open. "Come on Mike, there’s nobody here."
Mike crawled in after his brother relieved to be out of the freezing rain. Being on the run for almost three weeks had not been a fun experience, but things were starting to look brighter. They were in an empty house that had a bathroom, and hopefully food that hadn’t been thrown out by someone. Bryon was already taking a tour of the house seeing what booty he could run across, but Mike decided to stay in the master bedroom and take a hot shower. When he stripped and started the shower, Mike took the opportunity to brush his teeth while he waited for the water to get hot. The face looking back at him in the mirror was one he hardly recognized. His beard was almost fully grown in and his hair had gotten longer. There were black circles under his eyes and along with the new hair growth, the gaunt look made him appear to be a different person.
"All right." Byron screamed from the kitchen when he found the keys to the car parked in the garage. The fact the people that owned the house were gone meant they wouldn’t miss it until they got home, and the police wouldn’t suspect them driving around in a new looking sedan. The refrigerator didn’t have much food in it, but there was plenty of beer and sodas. Byron had better luck when he looked in the freezer. The space was crammed with microwave dinners and Tupperware containers of cooked food. "Yes this place will do nicely for now. We even have a key to the front door." He slipped the wad of keys he had found lying on the kitchen counter in a bowl into his pocket and slammed the refrigerator closed. As he went to move away to tell Mike about their good fortune, something caught his attention on the door of the appliance.
Byron cocked his head to the side trying to figure out what he found so familiar about it. The dark hair and the face, he had seen them somewhere before. He pulled the card with the picture printed on it off the frig sending the little magnet that had been holding it up flying across the kitchen. ‘We would like to announce the birth of Jackson Harry Basantes,’ the printing started. He read the whole thing four times before he let the scream of complete fury out. It was the line ‘to the proud parents Desi and Harry’ that had made his blood run hot.
Mike came running out of the bathroom dripping water after hearing his brother scream. "What in the hell was that?"
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"It sounded like something hit the roof." Harry got up from her comfortable spot behind Jack and Desi to see what had made the loud crashing sound.
"Harry?" Raul called up from the kitchen as he made his way toward the stairs. He and Maria had been sitting with June, Bobbie and Mona in the kitchen talking about places they had visited over the years when they heard what had sent Harry into the hall.
"I heard it papi, but I don’t see anything." Harry walked into every room on the second floor of the house looking for anything out of the ordinary. With the Simoneauxs still on the loose she was taking no chances with her family’s safety. When neither she nor Raul could find anything broken or tipped over Harry put on a rain slicker to go outside for a look around.
"You are going to be careful aren’t you?" Desi brought the hood on the jacket up to cover Harry’s head and snapped it closed. Their fears were like a shadow that followed them around. They didn’t talk about them often, one not wanting to add to the other’s burdens, but they were there non-the-less and they would be until Bryon and family were caught.
"I’ll just take a walk around the house and come back in, I promise. On a night like this I don’t want to be outside any longer than I have to. If it will make you feel better, just follow me through the windows." Harry kissed Desi’s forehead and stepped out the back door.
The wind was blowing leaves and other debris across the lawn, and when it hit the exposed parts of her skin it felt close to the freezing point. Harry headed into the backyard first looking up at the house to see if there was anything broken. Desi watched her from the sunroom wondering why her partner had stopped and pulled the hood off her head. Without needed to see anything else Harry headed back inside.
"What did you see?" Desi helped her off with the rain gear frowning at Harry’s wet hair and cold skin. She should have the flu by ten tonight.
"A big oak branch sticking out of our roof." Harry stood and allowed Desi to towel off her head before taking her hand and heading toward the stairs. She needed to get into the attic and see what was getting soaked by the torrential rain still falling.
"Let’s go big guy," said Desi. They headed out of the kitchen followed by the other five adults in the house.
Maria stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the attic holding Jack, who was getting fussier by the second, and looked up waiting for someone’s head to poke through the opening. "Well, what do you see?"
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"Son of a bitch."
"What?" Mike stood in the kitchen dripping thinking that Bryon had run across someone else in the house. Without another sound Bryon handed him the card in his hand and turned to grip the counter. Mike thought he was trying to anchor himself to something to keep from running out of the house.
The card was a heavy linen paper, with fanciful writing down at the bottom. A picture of one of the most beautiful babies he had ever seen graced the top. It was a birth announcement, and his face paled when Mike saw whose it was. If Byron had been hard to control before, this woul
d prove to be the breaking point.
Mike remembered one of the worst beatings Bryon had given Desi was when he found she had been taking birth control pills behind his back. Bryon had wanted children, it was what men did, procreate. The comments by their parent’s friends on the fact they didn’t have any children after so many years of marriage had driven his brother insane. Byron had taken them to mean that there was something wrong with him not Desi.
"I’ll be home in twenty minutes." Bryon stood at the sink at the back of his father’s garage washing the grease off his hands. Desi sounded almost surprised to hear from him since the sun was still out and it was so early in the afternoon. His habit had been to stop at his favorite watering hole in the afternoons and have a few drinks with his buddies.
"Ok. Dinner’s not ready yet, do you want me to go out and get something?"
"No we can eat later, I just missed you today and wanted to come home and see you. Don’t disappointment me Desiree." The tone of his voice, and the fact he was coming home early clued her in as to why. Unlike other women, Desi didn’t mind that her husband went out without her almost every night. When he did it meant that he usually too forgone to be very amorous when he got home, but about twice a month his need to sleep with his wife outweighed the need to hang out with his buddies.
"I won’t." She hung up trying to hold back the feeling of repulsiveness that always accompanied these calls. "Well I have twenty minutes, that should give me time to take a shower and get ready." Desi spoke to the empty room before heading toward the bathroom.
The steam from the hot shower she had taken was still thick in the bathroom. Desi had stood under the stream of water longer than she had planned in an attempt to relax. It was the reason she didn’t hear the backdoor close and Bryon coming into the bedroom they shared. She pulled the packet from where she kept them taped out of sight under the sink and popped one out. The small blue pill had just cleared the back of her throat when she felt the first blow to the back of her head.
