by Dick Cluster
“I don’t remember one like that. Of course, if it didn’t have any threats or anything, I might not remember it. I’ll make a note to ask him as soon as I see him, if it’s important…” She sounded just mildly curious, fishing.
“So you didn’t answer a letter like that? Or maybe Jay dictated an answer saying sorry, not interested? Or he told you to pull the standard discouraging word off a disk?”
“No,” Deborah said. “I don’t think so. Is it important?”
“I don’t know. This Binder knew Foster. Depending on what she said, her letter could have contained enough information for somebody else, someone besides Foster, to concoct that blackmail note. Or it could be important for another reason: this Binder is somebody Jay had a kind of a fling with once.”
“Really?” Deborah looked interested. “Not the one he used to live with, that had the Persian cats?” She laughed. “The trivia we know about these men we work for. But she would have come later. You mean this was somebody who actually knew this Foster guy?”
“Yeah. So ask him for me, will you? Whenever he turns up.” Alex stood and headed for the door, but he stopped and leaned against the frame to give his legs a chance to get solid and give Deborah time to find something more to say. “Noon tomorrow, then, but he should call me of course if anything happens, or if he thinks of anything.”
“Noon tomorrow. I hope it’s all over by then. When you gave them the money, they promised to have it back by tomorrow, according to Jay.”
“I saw the note,” Alex said. “Two days, they promised. I can testify to that.” He wondered about his choice of words. He hadn’t meant to imply a threat— or had he? He’d only meant he knew this from his own experience. As opposed to what? He shook his head, trying to shake off the San Francisco fog that seemed to have settled past his brain.
Deborah had said he “gave them the money.” Something bothered him about that. He’d seen the note. He hadn’t ever seen the money. For all he knew the mailbag could have been full of shredded medical records or leftover supermarket receipts. He shook his head again. That was an occupational hazard of this line of work. You stopped believing anything anybody told you. The old Jefferson Airplane song occurred to him, the one that started “When the truth is found to be lies…” He went home hoping he would find somebody to love.
19. Still Alive
With a start, Linda Dumars woke to dim light in her room. She thought it must be morning and she ought to be getting up and making lunches and hurrying the kids and going to work. She felt a strangeness but thought it was the accustomed strangeness, the dislocation of sleeping in the former TV and guest room downstairs. Like dogs, people grew accustomed to sleeping in certain spaces. It was hard to adjust to a new space. That was a lot harder than adjusting to sleeping alone.
Only when she reached for the lamp did it all come back. She felt the cold metallic shaft of the pedestal thing, the equipment rack. She knew she wasn’t alone, separate, but had these tubes sewed into her, above her breasts, down in her belly. With an effort she made the tubes less awful by remembering the name. They weren’t horrid, invasive snakes. They were only Hickman caths. Now, what about the other dread, the nameless one?
She lay there, on her back in the bed, her extended hand not yet searching for the controls. That was true, it wasn’t a dream. Her marrow was missing, stolen. She reached for the control, pushed buttons till she was sitting up, tried to scratch where she itched without dislodging any tubes. That much she ought to be able to do.
The curtains between her space and the anteroom were closed, but a shaft of light came in through the portal. As always. That was the source of this morning’s dim glow. But was it morning? She didn’t know whether it was day or night. She used another piece of sterile tissue to blow her nose and dry her eyes. Then she fumbled for the button that worked the outer curtain, the picture window one.
The fabric folded itself with a hum, a motor noise, a new noise on top of the blower that never stopped. Outside she could see vestiges of blue and orange sky. Whatever had been happening, which she could barely remember, evidently she was still alive. Otherwise she might have opened the window and found nothing there. To live this way, with no world outside, that would be her own particular hell. She tried to laugh at the idea. It made no sense. She was only here temporarily. Because it was worth the chance. Then she would be her own woman again.
The twilight sky surrounded another building opposite, another hospital, nothing but hospitals here, what was that one called? The Deac. The Deac, Yvonne had said. Deaconess. At the time she’d pictured somebody, some Protestant church official, a woman with long hair and a stern face and a flowing robe. Another time Yvonne had asked what religion she was, because there were chaplains available. Catholic, she’d said, since she and Tom were nominally Catholic, she from her German ancestors and he from his French ones. Nominally, but when the priest had stopped by to see her, she’d told him with some bravado that she’d neither made confession nor taken communion in too long a time. If she was going to start again, she’d said, she wouldn’t want to do so out of weakness. If she were going to return to religion, she’d said, she’d rather do it out of strength. The priest had said something guardedly noncommittal, that illness was not the same as weakness, and had promised to stop by again.
Linda opened her eyes. She realized she’d fallen back asleep, but not for long. She took her bearings now, determined to understand what was happening at least: twilight, the Deac, patients over there seeing the other side of the sky, seeing her window, her room. She was hooked up to four drips, it seemed like. She remembered talk of a white-cell transfusion. She remembered what Harrison had told her about white-cell transfusions. That had been in response to a logical, academic question she must have asked in his office, an age ago, before she’d checked in. White-cell transfusions could be done, but the effect didn’t last very long. White cells were very important but very short-lived. Also there were side effects: fever, spasms, chills, respiratory distress. Something like that.
Linda looked at the sources of the drips. None of them seemed to be a blood bag. Not like when they’d given her platelets. Platelets and red cells could be transfused. You could live without manufacturing them, as long as you kept coming in for refills, till that drove you crazy.
She started to cry again, at her own helplessness. She didn’t know what day it was. She didn’t know what was being pumped into her. She pushed the call button. She did not need to go through all this on her own. Too bad it had to be evening, though. The shifts would have changed. It would be Connie on duty now, not Yvonne.
Well, that was one thing she knew correctly, anyway. Connie came in, brusque and businesslike, big and blond with a picture-book nose. Linda handed her the bedpan to take away. Connie put it back on the shelf and said, “So I don’t have to wake you later, let me take your temp.” Unlike the day nurses, the night nurses had several patients each. Linda thought Connie could have told her something, asked her something nonetheless. A thin, sharp chill rose up her spine, a terror of what she wasn’t being told. No marrow, and now somehow past the point of no return. The chill turned into a shiver. She let Connie pull the blanket up over her shoulders and stick the electronic thermometer into her mouth.
“A hundred and one,” Connie said a minute later. “You’re way down, still coming down, that’s good.”
“But what day is it,” Linda tried to ask. It came out a dry whisper, a whisper that hurt. Connie handed her the wet green plastic thing, to rub around the inside of her mouth. “What day?” she whispered not quite so painfully.
“Wednesday,” Connie said. “You’ve been sleeping mostly, and running a high temp, since I came on last night. Now you’re coming down.”
Wednesday. Wednesday equaled Day Number One, evening. This at least came easily to her, a correspondence between numbers and things. Thirty-six hours late for reinfusion, more or less. “Transfusion?” she asked.
“What? No, do
n’t talk.” Connie held out a glass. Lukewarm water. It felt like lead going down. But it must have done something, loosened something up, because Linda could remember more now. She remembered conversations going on around her, herself feeling too tired to follow or participate. Sweating. Tom being there, gowned and masked. Trying to shrink away from him. Trying to spit at him. It was hard to tell what was real, had really happened. Some of it could be delirium, if she’d had a fever for twenty-four hours, if a hundred and one was “way down.” She hung on Connie’s meager words. She’d had a high fever, a bad sign, but her fever had broken now. She’d survived some kind of crisis, even without her marrow. That was an accomplishment. Linda leaned back against the upright portion of the bed. Physically and mentally she straightened her spine.
Day One, evening, and Harrison had said the kidnappers promised her bone marrow back by Day Two. Promised! Kidnappers who kept promises! She remembered explaining to Nicky about promises, he must have been two or three. When it was a promise, you had to really do it, not just mean to. Thieves’ promises! And maybe the tooth fairy would come save her too.
Connie bent down to hear what she was trying to say.
“Transfusion?” she asked again. Drinking had helped her talk; the word came out better this time.
“Huh? Oh, no, antibiotic. Gentamycin. You’re coming along great. I’ll be back with bowel prep, okay? And then if you want to eat… or a bath? I bet a bath would be great.” Connie’s face lit up with a tired, synthetic smile. Bowel prep and a bath, very efficient. Wash the body, scrub the body, inside and out. “The scrub nurse is gone, but I think I can make time.” She means that, Linda thought. Making the time. Everybody does feel bad for me. Everybody does what they can for me, the limited thing they can.
“I feel better,” she said. “Wider awake. A bath, good.”
The bowel prep wasn’t so bad. She kept it down, even if it made her feel for the moment that she never wanted to eat again. Connie’s big hands helped her out of the bedclothes. It felt nice to be washed, the warm sponge moving over her. She rolled onto her back and asked Connie to sit her up again. Looking at her naked body, she wasn’t surprised anymore by the tubes growing out of it, or by her hairless crotch. But she remembered Kevin saying how he imagined giving her a bath. Did he imagine that part, she wondered? How much she looked like a little girl? She shivered. She had told Kevin so much. She’d told him the dog dream, in detail. Strike that from the record. Tell the jury to disregard it.
Connie said, “Cold?” and finished washing her, dried her, and put a clean johnny on. She maneuvered the garment over all the caths. “Anything else I can do?”
Linda ran the plastic thing around her mouth before answering. “No, thanks, Connie. That was great.” You were great, darling. “Oh, can you turn me toward the window? I just want to watch the sky get dark, and think.”
“Sure I can. Call if you get to feeling hungry. Call me if you want anything at all.”
If I want anything? When Connie turned her she felt vertigo, but it passed. The nausea would be less from now on, no matter what else. You bet I want something, she thought. I want my kids. I want them here. I want to hold Claire again when she throws up, nervous, the way she was about starting first grade. Six months ago. How nervous she must be now. I want to see Nicky start school, I want to see him grow up, be a man different than his father. I want a chance to make their tedious lunches for ten more years. I want my goddamn marrow, that’s what I want! But she’d made it through one crisis, that much she understood now. She’d been on the edge and come back, and here she was, able to be in control of herself and to feel emotions other than fear. While she was lucid like this, she needed to take some time to try and think.
The orange glow was all gone. Just the darkening blue sky and purplish clouds were left. The sunsets and twilights were actually very pretty here, if you tuned out the buildings. All that pollution did pretty things with light if not with lungs. Linda thought, suddenly and clearly, I want to live in the city after Tom and I are divorced. In the city, really? Someplace the kids could grow up not needing to go everyplace by car. Of course, it would depend on how much money she had, what she and Tom worked out. He’d be grateful not to be saddled with her. But how grateful, and who else did he already have commitments to? She hadn’t stooped to reading his credit card bills. For all she knew he could have negative balances all over town.
Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, stole a princess and away he run. When they’d first met, he’d driven her far out from Spokane over the dry lands of eastern Washington. She liked that sparse country, but he swore they’d both get far away from it. “Drink it in,” he’d said. “We’re headed for trees and lawns and back-yard barbecue. Oceanside vacations. Symphony orchestras. Major league sports.” He’d already applied for residencies the way some people bought lottery tickets, by the tens, and he’d made it seem like by the powers of tens. She’d warned him about the vagaries of probability. “My bright, cautious math major,” he’d said. Her stomach lurched at that memory. If there’d been anything in there, it would have come up all over her. Had she really rested in his arms and listened to him say those words? Worse still, had she really lapped them up?
She shied away from that memory, like skin withdrawing from a needle. It wasn’t just this one memory of her and Tom, it was that this was the way things happened over time. What seemed touching was fated to seem stupid someday. Like Kevin wanting to be her scrub nurse. Suppose she lived through this, and really took up with Kevin, unlikely as those combined possible outcomes seemed. How would that comment sound in six months, when she started to really know him, whatever he was really like?
He hadn’t talked very much about his own marriage, yet. He’d said her name was Carol, and she’d looked like a cheerleader, and it had taken him a long time to get past her looks. Linda hadn’t been sure whether that had meant she turned out to be ugly inside— or that Kevin was saying by the time he finally looked inside, it was just too late to get through. But she hadn’t asked him to explain, and anyway he’d egged her on to talk about herself.
Kevin had been a good listener, and interested, she had to give him that. Yet going over it again, she saw that what he’d jumped on had been the exploitation, if that’s what it was— how she worked and raised babies while Tom developed his skills, and how that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t had much to say about her own determination, what she’d accomplished lately in spite of that, what she’d accomplished primarily since her first diagnosis, as a matter of fact. That reticence could be because Kevin was intimidated by their differences. She liked to drink, herself, for instance, so she hadn’t had much to say about his accomplishments getting sober.
The sky was dark now, almost completely. A lot of lights were visible in the hospital across the street. Here I am going over my phone conversations with the boy next door, she said. I’m dying, dollars to doughnuts, and I’m going over phone conversations with the boy next door. The human soul had a lot of resilience to it. She’d meant to sit here and go over possibilities, try to evaluate them: Tom, again, or an angry relative of some patient who hadn’t made it. A disgruntled employee. Instead she was looking for love. And why not dream on, sitting here watching the faint stars come out, not truly faint, truly the stars were bright enough to shine all the way across light years of space and then through the city’s murk.
The sky went black, no more stars, which meant clouds must have blown in. She started to call Kevin. Halfway through she hung up. There wasn’t anybody to depend on. She pushed buttons to get the bed flat and hugged herself to sleep.
20. Parting Wild Horse’s Mane
Alex dreamed. He dreamed he was there in the hospital, the same hospital, not to get treatment but to get put to sleep. That was what they called it, same as you did with the pet cat. The whole thing was very genteel. For some reason he was at peace with being put to sleep, or at least resigned, even though he didn’t seem to be sick at all. There were some preparatory
procedures to go through first. He was waiting for one that involved removing a vein from the inside of his leg and replacing it on the outside. Maria sat at the foot of his bed, the way he’d so often sat at the foot of hers. She seemed very grown up and calm. Apparently it wasn’t time yet to say good-bye.
When he woke up it was dark in the room. He didn’t feel he was coming out of a nightmare— no relief, no sweat, no edge of fear to tiptoe up to and then back away. The dream had felt more like a fantasy. It was how he’d heard people describe acupuncture anesthesia. You knew everything that was happening to you but you felt no fear or pain. He sat up, took a breath and blew it out with a sound like whew. Maybe he’d simply been too exhausted to manage a nightmare. The clock said l0:30 in red numerals, with another red dot indicating p.m. He’d been asleep since around four.
“Hello?” he tried calling. With an effort he remembered what day it was. Still Wednesday, so Maria wasn’t here. She was at Laura’s till Friday. But Meredith might be here. “Hello? Meredith? Anybody home?”
Nobody answered, so he got up and trudged into the kitchen. The light bounced harshly off the sturdy wooden table where so much of his life with Maria, his life with Meredith went on. Behind the kitchen was a back stairway, where wooden steps led down and a spiral steel staircase led up to Meredith’s study. Alex had put the staircase in when he and Meredith had bought the apartment. The back half of the former attic was now a study for Meredith. In the front half Maria had her bedroom, which she reached by the old stairs from the front of the second floor.
