The tanned, perky young receptionist behind the glass information booth registered surprise when Kate asked for Brenda Golightly’s room, as if not very many people asked that particular question.
“Are you friends or family?” she asked in a syrupy southern accent.
Kate seemed frozen by the question. She didn’t answer, only gave him an anguished look that sliced at him worse than any prison shiv.
He stepped forward, his best charming-cop smile in place. “Something like that,” he said.
The receptionist preened a little, like a turtledove. “Well, Ms. Golightly will be absolutely thrilled at the company, I’m sure. She’s in the north wing, room 134. Just take the hallway to the left of the elevators. Follow that hall as far as it goes and Ms. Golightly’s room is on the right. You can’t miss it.”
The halls had more holiday decorations, garlands of looped green and red paper, a smiling plastic Santa Claus pulling a sleigh and eight reindeer, and even a life-size poster of the Grinch.
Kate didn’t appear to notice anything about their surroundings. The closer they walked to room 134, the more her color faded, until he was afraid she would disappear against the whitewashed walls.
He stopped outside a plain wood door devoid of ornamentation. “You don’t have to put yourself through this, Kate. I can go in and interview her alone.”
She seemed to steel her shoulders like a soldier heading into a firefight. “No. I appreciate the offer but I have to be there. I have to face her. After all these years, I have to.”
Watching her battle her own fears was humbling and made him grieve for a blond little girl stolen from all she knew and thrust into a world where she knew no peace.
“Have I told you I think you’re one of the strongest women I’ve ever met?” he asked, his voice low.
Her mouth parted a little in surprise but then he saw gratitude blossom in her eyes.
His words seemed to steady her, calm her. She drew in a deep breath and pushed open the door.
In contrast to the holiday gaiety in the hallway outside, room 134 was spartan, cheerless. His grandmother Bradshaw had spent the last year of her life in a nursing home. She’d died when he was in his early teens, but he remembered her room as an extension of the prissy, orderly house she had lived in before, with frilly doilies on the bedside table, lacy curtains and her favorite oil painting of a mountain sunset.
This room was like dozens of other hospital rooms he had seen in his life. Sterile, bland, and wholly lacking in personality.
A single bed with nobby blue institutional bedding dominated the room. A TV mounted high on the wall was playing a soap opera and the room smelled of antiseptic and the faint ammonia of urine.
The bed was empty. He wondered if they had come to the wrong room until he saw Kate’s attention was focused on the window, where he now realized a woman sat in a wheelchair staring out.
She had dirty-blond hair with glaring bald patches. It wasn’t unkempt, just long and unstyled. An oxygen line tethered her from a nasal cannula to the wall and she wore a sweat suit the color of kiwi fruit.
As he looked closer, he saw a face worn down by the grim ravages of time and a harsh life. She had a two-inch scar on her chin, a quarter-size pockmark on the other and she was missing a tooth.
There was a blankness to her features, an emptiness, and Hunter’s heart sank.
Kate’s brother was right, this was likely a wasted trip. How could this pitiful creature tell them anything?
Kate’s eyes, blue and stormy, gave away some of her tumult as she stared at the faded shell of the woman she had both loved and hated. He saw she had reached the same grim conclusion he had—that their mission was doomed to failure—but still she drew a deep breath and walked into the room.
If he hadn’t already loved her, he would have tumbled at that moment, hard and fast.
“Hello.” Kate walked in and sat in one of the vinyl armchairs near the wheelchair.
Brenda Golightly narrowed her eyes then blinked rapidly several times as if coming awake from a long sleep. “Do I know you? I don’t think I know you. Are you a new nurse? I don’t like new nurses. Jane is my favorite nurse. She brings me extra pudding. Do you like pudding? I like pudding.”
For all its singsong pitch, her voice was rough and raspy—from the oxygen or from her life choices, Hunter couldn’t tell. Her speech was slightly slurred, rounded a little at the vowels.
At least she was verbal, he thought wryly, as she went on for several moments longer about her favorite kind of pudding.
He was certainly no developmental expert but she seemed more like a child of seven or eight than a woman in her fifties. He found it rather disconcerting to hear inane, innocent chatter from someone who looked so world-weary and hardened.
After a moment, Kate put a hand on Brenda’s knee to distract her from her soliloquy. “I’m not a new nurse. I…it’s me. Kate. Katie.”
At first, Hunter didn’t see any visible reaction on Brenda’s features and he wondered if she had even heard the words, then Brenda gave Kate a furtive, wary look out of the corner of her gaze.
After a moment, she gave a sharp, raspy laugh. “You’re not my Katie! My Katie is little! You’re all grown up.”
Kate knotted her fingers together, obviously disconcerted.
“No.” She cleared her throat, her eyes so distressed Hunter wanted to bundle her up and carry her out of here. “It’s me, M-Mama. Katie.”
Brenda smiled at something Hunter couldn’t see. “I have a little girl named Katie. She’s so pretty. Her hair is blonde like yours, but she’s just a little girl. She likes pudding too. She has a doll named Barbara. Her doll has brown hair and freckles. I wish I had a doll named Barbara. Do you have any dolls?”
“Um, not anymore.” Kate’s attempt at a smile just about broke his heart. He couldn’t stand the defeated devastation he saw in her eyes as she listened to Brenda and absorbed the true extent of her brain injury.
He saw all her hope for answers slip away like her childhood and he knew he couldn’t sit by and watch it go.
He pasted on a smile he was far from feeling and stepped toward the two women, pulling a second armchair over to them.
“Hi, Brenda. I’m Hunter.”
She studied him solemnly but said nothing. As he tried to formulate a strategy for questioning her, he noticed a couple of crayon drawings taped near the bed. Simple pictures of flowers and houses and trees, but he saw one that looked like a little girl with blond curly hair.
“Do you have any pictures of your little girl?”
He thought for a moment she wasn’t going to answer him, then Brenda nodded. “I drew some.”
He pointed toward the pictures by the bed. “Is that one?”
Her reserve melted like an ice-cream cone under the hot tropical sun and she nodded more vigorously.
“It’s nice,” he said.
“I have more. Do you want to see?”
“Sure.”
She pointed him toward a drawer in the bedside table. He opened it and stared at the contents. Stacks and stacks of drawings showed the same little girl in a pink dress with yellow-crayon hair and huge blue eyes.
He took a few out and showed them to Kate, who looked stunned and baffled.
“These are very good.”
“Told you she was pretty.”
“You were right. Brenda, where is Katie?”
“Right there, in the pictures.”
“No, where’s the real Katie?” he asked gently.
Brenda blinked at him again then her eyes suddenly filled up with tears. “Gone. She’s gone.”
“Where?”
“They took her. It’s not fair. They took her.”
“Who took her?”
“The bad people. They said I wasn’t a good mama but I was. I was!” The tears vanished as quickly as they had come. “I took care of her. I brushed her hair. I gave her animal crackers and dressed her in pretty pink clothes. I was a good
mama but they took her and hid her from me.”
Her eyes darted to his with a sly, sidelong look. “But I showed them. They hid her from me but I was smart and I found her. I found her and I stole her back.”
Ah. Here it was. What they had traveled three thousand miles to learn. His heart pounding, he leaned forward. “Stole her back? How did you do that?”
She ignored his question, her eyes focused on Kate with such a fierce look of concentration Hunter wondered if somehow they were finally beginning to unwind the gauzy layers of memory. Maybe this damaged woman with her vague eyes and her worn-out body was beginning to reconcile the child to the woman.
Brenda stared at Kate for a long time, her dark eyes intense, then a radiant smile burst out, broken tooth and all. “Chocolate pudding is my favorite. What’s yours?”
Kate’s gaze shifted to his and the anguish in her eyes cut his heart to shreds. She swallowed hard a few times then mustered a grim facsimile of a smile. “Um, I like rice pudding. And tapioca.”
Brenda rocked with sudden sharp laughter, one pale hand clapped over her mouth to contain her glee. “Ew. Tapioca tastes like fish eggs. I only like chocolate and banana.”
Hunter broke in before she wandered off again about pudding. “You said you found Kate again,” he said, trying to draw her back. “Where did you find her?”
Brenda didn’t seem to mind his efforts to shepherd her through the conversation. She smoothed a finger over the construction-paper portrait, that hard, used-up face gentling a little. “They hid her from me but I always looked for her. You can’t take a baby from her mama. It’s wrong. Don’t you think it’s wrong?”
Hunter couldn’t think how to answer that so he just nodded.
“Me, too. I looked and looked for her and one day I was driving my car and there she was. My little girl. My Katie.” Her voice took on a defiant edge. “She was mine and they shouldn’t have taken her so I took her back and we ran away where the bad people couldn’t find us.”
“But they did, didn’t they?” Kate spoke up, her voice rough, strained. “She was taken away from you again, wasn’t she? And this time you didn’t want her back.”
The sly defiance on Brenda’s features just as quickly turned to anger. Her face suddenly turned an alarming puce and her thin, nearly concave chest started heaving violently. “Go away. I don’t want you here. Go away! Where’s my pudding? Where’s Jane? I want my pudding!”
By the end she was nearly shouting, flailing her arms around violently, and Kate rose and laid a gentle hand on Brenda’s arms.
“Okay. Okay,” she murmured in a slow, nonthreatening voice she undoubtedly used with children in her medical practice. “We’ll get you some pudding.”
She had reached for Brenda’s bony hand and it took Hunter a few moments to realize Kate was taking the woman’s pulse.
“I think it’s best if you rest now while we buzz for Jane, all right?”
Somehow Kate seemed to stow away her own distress at dredging up this painful past. Her voice was brisk, professional, but still calming. “Let’s get you back into your bed now.”
Hunter had never been very comfortable with strong emotion. The Judge certainly hadn’t encouraged it in his only son. Bradshaw men were strong, stoic, invincible. They certainly weren’t supposed to throw temper tantrums or—God forbid—shed tears about anything.
Hunter had made a conscious decision to follow his father’s somewhat bloodless example rather than the wild pendulum of his mother’s mood swings. Angela Bradshaw had enough strong emotions for all of them, with bitter, angry episodes or bone-deep depression followed with jarring, dizzying speed by frenetic gaiety.
Her bipolar disease had made his childhood unpredictable and precarious and he had never been sure when he came home from school whether she would smother him with kisses when he walked through the door or screech and yell at him for some infraction or other.
His father’s way was safer. He had learned that even before the bitter humiliation of his arrest. In jail, he had done everything he could to shut off whatever stray emotions might flicker through him at odd moments. He couldn’t afford to feel in prison, to show any sign of weakness, of fear or anger or bitterness. So he had shown nothing. Had become nothing.
But as he watched Kate carefully tuck in this woman who had brought her nothing but pain—who had stolen her from a happy, healthy home life and thrust her into a dark and terrifying world he could only imagine—all those emotions he had suppressed for so long rose up in his throat and threatened to choke him.
He was appalled at the burn of tears behind his eyes at her gentleness. He blinked them away, grateful Kate was too busy tending to Brenda to see the telltale sheen of moisture.
How could she do it? he wondered. Show compassion and kindness to the catalyst of her pain?
* * *
A nurse responded quickly to Kate’s page. The infamous Jane of the extra pudding, she noted by her name tag. She was blond and round, in hospital scrubs printed with grinning cats.
“What’s this now?” the nurse asked as she helped her transfer Brenda from the chair to the bed.
Though she wanted nothing more than to run out, away from this sterile room and this wild, tangled rush of emotions, Kate forced herself to focus on Brenda’s physical symptoms.
“I’m afraid our visit has agitated her. I was concerned about her color and her pulse rate is nearly one-fifty.”
“Oh dear. We can’t have that now, can we?”
Kate watched the nurse tuck in the blankets, then pick up the crayon drawing Brenda had been showing them from the floor where she had dropped it in her frenzy.
She slipped it through Brenda’s curled fingers and Kate was startled to see the silly, childlike crayon drawing seemed to have some kind of calming effect on Brenda.
Not sure how to identify the odd emotion tugging at her insides, Kate watched her clutch it like a talisman.
The nurse’s voice was calm, soothing. “Take a nap now and when you wake up, you’ll feel better, just in time for lunch.”
Brenda nodded, obediently closing her eyes like a child expecting a birthday surprise when she opened them.
Kate didn’t expect her to sleep but their visit must have sapped her energy reserves, obviously low. A moment later her breathing slowed and her thin chest began to rise and fall slowly.
The nurse waited until she slept, then picked up Brenda’s chart off the end of the bed and made a few notations.
“How often does she have these episodes?” Kate asked.
The nurse’s gentle demeanor with her patient turned cool as she surveyed them. “I’m afraid federal privacy regulations prevent me from talking to you about her condition.”
“I know all about HPAA. I’m a doctor.”
“Not her doctor.”
Kate drew a breath into lungs that felt tight and achy. “No,” she agreed. “But I also know you can speak with immediate family. I’m her…”
She faltered, not quite knowing how to complete the sentence. “My name is Kate Spencer,” she finally said. “But I legally changed it to that when I was eighteen. Before that, my name was Katie Golightly.”
The nurse’s eyes widened with shock, her arms going slack. “Oh my word! You’re Katie! She talks about you all the time. I thought you were dead!”
Emotions crowded Kate, too many for her to handle at once. She pushed them all away for now. “No. I’m very much alive.”
“And a doctor! She never said a word.”
“Can you tell me about her condition? I know she had a TBI a few years ago but that doesn’t account for all her symptoms.”
Jane fidgeted with the chart but not before Kate saw evasiveness war with compassion. “Perhaps you should talk to her doctor. I’m sure Dr. Singh would have no problem with you studying her charts. He should be in this afternoon.”
“I won’t be here that long. We’re just passing through.”
That information apparently didn’
t sit well with the nurse. Her amazed expression gave way to disapproval. “I see.”
She didn’t. She couldn’t possibly. How could this stranger understand the layers and layers of emotions here when Kate herself couldn’t comprehend them?
She decided to try a different tack. “One of the first things Brenda talked about when we arrived is how you’re her favorite nurse. She said you give her extra pudding.”
Jane’s sudden coldness eased enough for her to smile a little. “It’s just a little thing but it makes her happy. She does like her pudding.”
“Please. You seem like a kind woman. All I’m asking is for a little information.”
The nurse studied the drawing clutched in Brenda’s hands then looked at Kate again. “She has cancer. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma.”
She digested this and its implications. “AIDS?”
Jane’s slow nod confirmed what Kate had already begun to suspect. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, though it can appear in the regular population, had a greatly increased frequency in people infected with the AIDS virus.
She supposed she wasn’t really surprised by the grim diagnosis. Brenda’s lifestyle as a drug user and sometime prostitute made her a prime candidate to acquire the virus.
“Full blown,” the nurse said, her brisk voice a contrast to the sadness in her eyes. “She’s already had pneumococcal pneumonia twice this year. The cancer seems to be in remission for now but as I’m sure you know, it’s very hard to control in AIDS patients. She could relapse any time. I’m very sorry to have to tell you this way.”
Kate studied the wasted frame sleeping on the bed, suddenly awash with sorrow and regret for this woman who had lived such a hard life. What had led her down this road? she wondered, slightly ashamed of herself for never bothering to find out.
She knew very little about Brenda’s history. Those weren’t the kinds of questions a child asks a mother, especially one as unstable as Brenda, and as a teenager, she had been too angry and bitter at her for not letting the Spencers adopt her that it never would have occurred to her to dig into her past.
“Look, I’m going to give you my cell number and my pager number in Utah. Will you put it in her chart and have someone contact me when…when her condition changes?”
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