Mortal Remains

by Peter Clement

  As for music, they couldn’t get through a day on the wards without hearing the radio blast Paul Anka’s “Having my Baby” or Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were.” In the OR surgeons cut and sewed to newcomer Elton John’s big hit, “Bennie and the Jets.”

  But to Earl’s gang, only one troubadour counted.

  Thousands of tiny flames, each a point of light held aloft, filled the darkness.

  Bob Dylan stepped forward on the stage.

  Robbie Robertson stood to the right of him, lean as a silhouette hunched over a guitar, The Band at his back.

  You say you love me,

  And you’re thinkin’ of me,

  But you know you could be wrong.

  He snarled the last word, loud and long.

  The crowd roared the words with him.

  “You sing that like you mean it,” Jack MacGregor called to Kelly. Shadows played over his thin face, resculpting its hollows.

  “You better believe I do,” she yelled back. Her eyes danced in the flicker of the tiny fires.

  Earl had rarely seen her look so radiant.

  … you go your way

  and I go mine.

  It was at that moment she slipped her hand into his and simply held it, the darkness preventing anyone from seeing.

  Melanie Collins leaned toward him from his other side. “Some study group,” she said, then laughed.

  “And we’ll be payin’ dearly for it, children,” Tommy Leannis added from his end of the row, the musical lilt of his Irish sounding false. His constant fear of failure emanated off him like a bad smell and made him a fifth wheel. Yet he insisted on tagging along whenever they knocked off the books for a night, as if he was just as afraid to be alone with all the material they still had to learn.

  “It’s all right, Tommy,” Kelly hollered back at him, never letting go of Earl’s hand. “If an old woman like me can get through, what have you got to worry about? Top five, all of us,” she predicted, sounding confident in the din.

  … Then time will tell just who fell,

  And who’s been left behind…

  Earl’s senses had contracted solely to the feel of her fingers entwined in his. He kept his eyes on the stage, uncertain how to respond. He already knew he loved her, and before that night had wondered if she felt just as strongly about him. But he’d never dared to speak his feelings, frightened that the crystal clarity of such words would shred the fragile, amorphous limbo in which they remained close friends, able to speak intimately of everything else, without ever trespassing on her marriage. Yet this sudden overture – her fingers played over his like flames – invited him to risk that step, and the possibility exhilarated him. Feeling her start to withdraw, he immediately tightened his grip, and she gently squeezed back. He stole a look sideways and saw her staring straight ahead, apparently enraptured by the music. Then she smiled, slowly, as though savoring something delicious, and her hand clung hard to his.

  After the concert all of them trooped toward the subway, arms linked and voices raised in loud renditions of what they’d just heard.

  Jack, Melanie, and Tommy scooted across the intersection at Forty-second Street ahead of them. “I don’t want to go home,” Kelly whispered, as she and Earl waited at the red light.

  “Where then?” said Earl, trembling inside, all the time wondering, What about your husband? But he was too intoxicated by her to put the brakes on.

  “Offer to stay behind until I get a taxi,” she whispered before they rushed to join their friends.

  He nodded.

  “Guys, I’m going to take a taxi tonight,” she announced when they reached them. “It’s too late for a woman alone.”

  “You three go ahead. I’ll make sure she gets one,” Earl said, certain they’d see through him. “No cabbie in his right mind would stop for a gang of rowdies like you.”

  “Well, I’m insulted,” Jack quipped.

  “Come, children. ‘Tis back downtown where we belong,” said Tommy, linking arms again with Melanie. Then all three of them disappeared down the entrance to the Forty-second Street station, their voices echoing back above ground until the noise of traffic swallowed up their off-key singing.

  Earl felt acutely self-conscious. What now? he wondered, turning to look at Kelly.

  She studied him a few seconds, then moved closer and took his hand. The wind played with her long hair, and strands of it brushed against his face.

  “Earl, whatever happens between us, just remember that my marriage to Chaz is finished.” Her voice sounded as steady and matter-of-fact as if she were giving a case history on one of their patients. “He’s a brute, and I intend to leave him. That mess has nothing to do with you.”

  Her face upturned to his, the glitter of the streetlights captured in her eyes, the scent of her – all drew him in. He lowered his head and gently kissed her.

  He awoke to find Janet leaning over him, her lips caressing his. “Hi, love,” she said, glancing down to where the covers slipped below his waist. “You seem happy to see me.”

  Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 A.M.

  Geriatric Wing,

  New York City Hospital

  Bessie woke up shivering.

  God, had they turned the heat off?

  She huddled deeper under her blankets, and realized her nightgown was soaked, her skin clammy.

  What was going on? She’d never had night sweats before.

  And they weren’t welcome, usually being the portent of a serious problem. An infection, some inflammatory condition, even an occult carcinoma – her mind automatically scrolled through the list, until she put a stop to it. No point in getting ahead of herself. The proper thing to do would be to see if they kept recurring, then tell her doctors. A solitary sweat didn’t necessarily mean much. But she should take her temperature. Whether she had a fever, and if so, how high, would be important to know. A big spike would shift the diagnosis toward an infectious cause; low grade, it could signify anything.

  But she didn’t feel feverish.

  If anything, she was really freezing, as in cool to the touch, not hot the way someone feels when they have a fever with the flu or pneumonia.

  And she was hungry. Her stomach seemed clamped in on itself because it was so empty. That was new. Since entering the hospital she’d practically no appetite at all.

  She reached for her call button to summon her nurse and ask for a thermometer.

  Then hesitated.

  The night shift here were often a bitchy bunch. Most were floats, especially on geriatric floors where the mission was custodial, not nursing in the curative sense. Always understaffed, they rarely missed an opportunity to express what a burden the elderly were. Most requests for the simplest of items, like a bedpan or medication for pain, they met with rolled eyes and exaggerated sighs. They saved outright contempt for those who committed the ultimate crime of placing extra demands on them by being sick as well as old.

  No, better she not invite the witches to her bedside. Leave everything until morning rather than risk trouble now. Not that she’d tolerate any rudeness from one of those shrews. She felt uncharacteristically aggressive tonight.

  Curling into a ball, she drew the covers over her head, trying to conserve body heat.

  It didn’t help.

  He skin continued to feel slimy. The pain behind her eyes grew worse.

  She emerged and reached to where the call button was pinned to her bedding. Her hand shook as she gathered it into her palm and pressed.

  “They better not mess with me tonight,” she muttered, staring through the gloom at her closed door, waiting for one of them to arrive.

  No response.

  Bloody cows!

  She pressed again.

  The silence of her room became a rushing noise in her ears. The moon outside her window shone unusually bright. It hurt her eyes to look at it, yet the darkness closed in on her, immune to illumination.

  She pushed the call button over and over.

&nbs
p; It mustn’t be working, she thought, tugging on the end that looped past the head of her bed to where it attached to the wall.

  It came freely as she pulled, until the plug itself lay in her hand. Staring at it, she had to make a massive mental effort to realize it wasn’t hooked up anymore. Her thoughts all at once shattered into fragments, and she couldn’t thread them together.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”

  No response.

  “Come and help me.”

  Still nothing.

  That’s right, she remembered, her mind working again. People shrieked and yelled all night on this ward, yet no one paid them any heed.

  With great effort she kicked off her covers.

  The shivering increased, and she could feel her limbs twitch in the cold. Somehow she managed to get them over the edge of the bed.

  Now to sit up.

  Her vision dimmed, and she became locked in the black confines of her own skull. Then tiny explosions of light, like stars scintillating in space, invaded the darkness. These stars grew taller and wider, becoming squares of white, each encroaching on the night and peeling it away in strips. The experience seemed vaguely familiar, but her mind couldn’t piece her symptoms into a diagnosis. Neither could she see where to plug in the disconnected wire.

  She pushed herself erect until she perched on the side of the mattress, her bare feet brushing against the floor, her thinking reduced to shreds of instinct until she felt only the impulse to launch herself forward and walk.

  She levered herself off onto the cold tiles and took a step, flailing ahead with her arms like a blind person.

  She took another step, and flailed some more, seeking something to lean on.

  But she found nothing.

  She tottered forward.

  And slapped her palms against a wall.

  Her thinking cleared enough to remember where the door should be and, feeling her way along, she lurched toward it. When her fingers found the handle she steadied herself, took a deep breath, and pulled it open. “Help me!” she cried, barely able to keep herself upright. “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

  Her voice blended in with the howls and shrieks of the senile old crones on the ward, the ones whom a phenothiazine cocktail never seemed to knock out and whose pleas to go home reverberated ceaselessly up and down the halls.

  She felt certain that their calls sounded louder tonight. How could she have ignored such cries before, the way the nurses did?

  She tried again to make herself heard, yelling as she sank to the floor, half-in, half-out of her room. Her mind vacillated between lucid seconds of frantically attempting to figure out what could be happening to her and timelessly floating through a searing light that she still found familiar – something some patients had once described to her, yet she couldn’t quite remember their disease.

  The plaintive wailing grew in volume, closed in and swallowed her.

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 P.M.

  Hampton Junction

  “Dr. Roper, you said my arthritic knees would be better by now. Look at them. They’re the size of cauliflowers.”

  “What I said, Nell, was that the pills would make the pain better, not that they’d take away your arthritis.”

  “But the pain came back.”

  “Are you still taking those pills the way I told you?”

  “The prescription ran out. I figured you only wanted me to take ‘em for a month. That’s all the time your father ever needed to get me better.”

  She’d also been a quarter century younger back then. Mark turned to wash his hands at the sink in his examining room, not wanting the feisty octogenarian to see his grin. Nell had been coming to him about her knees for seven years, ever since he’d reopened his father’s practice, and she’d argued her way through each visit. The idea that a prescription must be refilled and the medication taken longer than a month had never taken root beneath her frizzy white hair. It had nothing to do with poor memory or a lack of confidence in him. She resisted growing old and the idea she could no longer shake off what ailed her. She still lived independently, her mountain cabin twenty miles north of town on an isolated road overlooking the Hudson River Valley. The only reason she’d recently agreed to let a local handyman cut the twelve cords of firewood she used every winter was that he had four kids to feed and obviously needed the money. But Nell herself wasn’t isolated. Known for her prize-winning recipes at the fall fair – her peach cobbler had taken home the blue ribbon seven years running – her kitchen was a much-visited mecca for anyone caring to pick up her pearls of culinary wisdom. She also reigned as the unofficial queen of the town’s gossip network, a function she dutifully filled by welcoming all visitors and spending hours on the phone. The acquired information made her one of the most sought-after guests for Sunday suppers, afternoon bridge parties, and socials at each of the town’s two churches, neither clergyman willing to yield her soul to the other side, or go without her contribution of cobbler.

  Slowly wiping his hands with a paper towel, Mark laboriously explained yet again that she must ask Timmy Madden, the pharmacist, to refill her prescription when she ran out.

  Nell sighed, having endured his lecture while tugging her well-stretched pair of elastic stockings over varicose veins as thick as quarter-inch ropes. “And how are you doing, Doctor?” she said. “It must have been a shock, pulling the bones of Kelly McShane out of the mud. Who do you think killed her?”

  Now he understood the real reason she’d bothered to come and see him. “I don’t think anything, yet, Nell, and I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

  “Oh, come on. Was it that rotten husband of hers?”

  “Is that what everyone around here has decided? That Chaz Braden murdered her?”

  “You betcha’!”

  “Anybody got any proof?”

  “He’s mean and was known to get drunk on more than one Saturday night. It’s a bad mix.”

  Street justice in rural America could be just as arbitrary as its urban counterpart. In the countryside, though, it tended to be unanimous. “And that’s enough to make you sure it’s him?”

  “Yeah. Now tell me what you think.”

  Mark chuckled. “My lips are officially sealed, Nell. Besides, you and your friends have probably already snooped out everything there is to know.”

  She gave him a no-harm-in-trying shrug, then cocked her head and slipped him a sly jack-o’-lantern smile, missing tooth and all.

  A reminder of another argument he’d lost – getting her to wear the partial plate a Sarasota dentist made her.

  “You still seeing that pretty veterinarian from New York?” she asked.

  Reason number two for the visit.

  Nell had always been uncommonly interested in the women who’d occasionally visited him. From the very first day of his return she seemed to have elected herself the local record keeper of his private life. “We keep in touch, Nell,” he said, helping her off the table.

  Little wonder she chose now to get an update, especially if she and her friends really had exhausted all they could say about a twenty-seven-year-old murder. While Halloween and Thanksgiving provided lots of gossip – who was shooing away the kids, who intended to run the Christmas pageant, what couples were taking separate holidays – the weeks in between yielded few topics for discussion.

  “Not much to interest a young woman around here these days, I guess. Only us old folks left,” she continued, sitting down to put on her shoes – Nike air pumps that she’d sworn more than once did more for her arthritis than anything he’d ever given her.

  “Nell, you’re the youngest ‘old folk’ I know.”

  “Did you ever ask any of them pretty girls to marry you?”

  “Nell!”

  “I like your hair cut short like that. It’s black as your mother’s but gives your face the same lean good looks your father had. What with that hunky physique you’ve built up hiking and running all over the
mountains, the girls should be falling down over you. The only problem is you’re getting that same sadness in your eyes that he had.”

  “Jesus, Nell!”

  “Oh, go on. Who’s more fitting to talk frankly with you than me? I watched your mother change your diapers, bless her dear departed soul. And I used to baby-sit your father when I was a teenager.”

  “I know, Nell.” As they chatted he helped her down a short hallway and into the center of what used to be his parents’ living room but now served as his waiting area. It was packed as always, and she routinely saved a zinger or two for this audience, all of them nearly as old as she was, most of them women.

  “Guess what’s the trouble with your generation?” she asked.

  “I got a feeling you’re going to tell me,” he said, resigned to his usual role as her straight man.

  “None of you want to buy a cow because you get your milk for free.”

  He started to laugh, along with everyone else. “Nell, you’re wicked.”

  “Maybe you should take me out.”

  “I couldn’t handle you.”

  “Tell me, did that veterinarian woman cook?”

  He felt his face grow warm. Banter with Nell in private was one thing. In public it could get embarrassing. “We ate out a lot when she was here,” he said quickly, trying to end the conversation.

  She flashed him that jack-o’-lantern smile again. “Well, you know what I always say?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “If she’s no good in the kitchen, she won’t be worth much in the bedroom.”

  The oldsters found this one even more uproarious.

  “Oh Nell, how naughty,” yelled one of his blue-haired regulars.

  “But ain’t it the truth?” she fired back.

  The woman giggled. “I’ll say.”