“Nothing,” I assured her. “I think—I think I’m okay.”
“Thank God,” she said, collapsing onto the bed beside me.
“God,” I heard myself say.
Lucinda stared down at him. “Who is he? Did you figure that out?”
“You know him,” I told her, “His name is Albert something. He was an orderly at your hospital.”
“What?” She turned and tried to see his face in the weird light of the room.
I bolted up, struggling to stand. “Andrews. And Melissa!”
She looked at me strangely. “They’re fine. Melissa’s already on her way to the hospital,” she said, her hand on my chest.
“Oh. Jesus.” I was having a lot of trouble staying with her. “How did—how did that happen?”
“Well…” she began.
But I didn’t hear the rest of what she was trying to tell me because Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers had taken up residence in the corner of my bedroom. They were playing a very spirited rendition of “Doctor Jazz” by King Oliver. I couldn’t be certain, but the man on tenor sax could have been T-Bone Morton. I know he was looking at me, even as he was playing, and there was overwhelming love in his eyes.
26.
I woke up with a start in a cold, dark hospital room because the night nurse, standing at the end of my bed, had dropped my chart and the noise had roused me.
I blinked. She gasped.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
I slowly recognized Stacey Chambers.
“Nurse Chambers,” I managed to say, struggling to sit up.
My voice was grating and garbled.
“Don’t try to sit up, sugar,” Stacey said excitedly. “We got you all hooked up.”
A quick survey of my physical situation confirmed that I had an intravenous needle in each arm and several electrical wires depending from my abdomen. Everything was attached to machines. My bed was the only one in the room. The blinds were drawn. Only one chair sat in the corner. It was a beige hospital chair, all metal and vinyl. It didn’t look particularly used.
“You try to stay awake, now,” Nurse Chambers said, fussing with one of the machines to which I was connected. “I’m calling Lucinda right this minute.”
She reached out and snatched up the receiver. “Hey, Reba,” she said breathlessly into the phone, “it’s Stacey. Get Lucinda right away. He’s awake!”
A wave of déjà vu washed over me and I asked, quite uneasy about the possible answers, “Have I been in a coma again?”
She spun around, smiling. “God, no. You just got here a couple of hours ago.”
I let go a sigh that could have cracked the walls, and sat back. “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear that.”
“You had a severely elevated heart rate,” she went on, all business, “combined with what appears to be fatigue and dehydration. You really shouldn’t drink liquor right after you come out of a coma, you realize.”
“I didn’t drink any liquor,” I protested.
“Winnie told me all about your little barbecue luncheon,” she sniffed.
“Andrews!” I snapped forward again, and one of the machines to which I was connected began to bleat.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” she assured me, her hand on my shoulder, giving me what I thought was a very strange look. “It’s Melissa we’re worried about. She’s gut shot, and it’s a mess.”
“How did they—who came to get them? How did Lucinda know?” I couldn’t focus.
Nurse Chambers stopped moving. “Oh. Well. Let’s just get Lucinda to tell you all that.”
I rubbed my face. “I have to tell you,” I mumbled, “that I’m having the weirdest sense of déjà vu ever.”
“That’s where you feel like you’ve already done something that you never really did, right?” She busied herself with something on the machine that had made a noise.
“Right,” I confirmed.
“Well, isn’t that supposed to feel weird?”
I had to agree. “I guess it is. Where is Lucinda, then?”
“She’ll be right in.”
“Thank God.” I slumped back into bed. “Andrews is in some other room around here?”
“What?” she asked me, as if I had lost my mind.
“I have to see him,” I told her.
“All right,” she said sweetly. “We’ll get to that in just a little while.”
“And Melissa?”
“She’s still in surgery,” Stacey said, her voice a little more still. It was obvious that she wasn’t going to say anything more at that point.
“Um,” I began, hesitantly, “what about the man who—the one in my room that Lucinda—is he dead?”
“Dead?” Stacey stared at me. “You think Lucinda would kill someone?”
“No,” I answered quickly, “but I saw a knife.”
“No you didn’t.” She shook her head, sporting a half grin. “You saw a syringe, baby. She jabbed that man full of so much Desflurane, he may not wake up until next week.”
“What is that?” I asked her. “Desflurane.”
“Anesthetic,” she answered simply. “Why don’t you just wait and ask Lucinda all this stuff, so you can get the whole picture firsthand? You seem to be a little—I don’t know—confused.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “I probably am.”
I turned toward the window.
“Is it night or day?” I asked softly.
“It’s morning,” she answered. “You want the blinds open?”
“I do.”
She came around the bed to the window and pulled the thin cord to raise the blinds all the way up. The morning sky was glorious, filled with golden sunlight and burnished clouds. As I gazed at them through the window, it appeared to me that they were a film, a documentary about clouds, or even a Walt Disney, Fantasia-style movie of gentle living things in the air and sky. Then I saw three minotaurs moving in the clouds. I was beginning to think that I might be hallucinating again, but before I could fully grasp what the clouds were doing, those mythological creatures, I was roused by Lucinda’s brisk entrance.
“Out,” she commanded Stacey.
Stacey vanished without a sound.
Lucinda leveled a devil’s glee in my unprotected direction. “If I save your life one more time, do I get a free set of steak knives?”
“I know,” I moaned. “We’re going to have to get married now. People are starting to talk.”
“People will say we’re in love,” she corrected.
“One of those. Look. I’m all turned around.” I lowered my voice. “I’m feeling like this is the same thing as the last time I woke up in this room—you know, after my coma.”
“Not the same room.” She glanced around. “Look. You have TV.”
I looked up at the set, and then glanced again at the dancing clouds. “So I do. But the odd feeling lingers. And I have a lot of questions about your heroic rescue of our protagonist.”
“Oh,” she mocked, “you’re the protagonist?”
“You have to give me that,” I told her. “I’m allowed to be the protagonist of my own story.”
“Right,” she agreed. “But this story isn’t about you. It’s about a beautiful nurse who rescues an erstwhile layabout—twice!”
“I have become something of a layabout lately,” I concurred, “and I do see your point. But could we get beyond all the meta-fictional aspects of this exchange and on to the more pressing question?”
“And just what would that be?” she asked, her eyes burning into mine.
“What the hell happened in my house last night?”
She shrugged. “What did you want to know?”
“Most importantly, are Andrews and Melissa going to be all right?”
“Yes.” She avoided looking at me. “Melissa’s still in surgery. But, if you want the truth, it doesn’t look good.”
“And Andrews?”
“What?” She cocked her head. “He’s fine.”
“It wasn’t serious?” I sat up a little. “It looked serious.”
“What looked serious?”
“His gunshot wound,” I said slowly.
“Gunshot wound.” She sat on the bed. “Honey, Andrews didn’t get shot, Melissa did.”
“But—” I began, but I decided not to finish a sentence in which I told Lucinda that I had seen Andrews shot on my front porch. I was beginning to feel that some of the images in my brain might be slipping between various realities.
“What is it?” she wanted to know.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I settled back. “Skidmore left to go to Fit’s Mill, Melissa was doing some computer work in my kitchen, and Andrews and I went up to my room.”
“No, not exactly,” she said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Let’s see. You fell asleep in the middle of a fairly serious conversation with Andrews—which we’ll have to talk about in a minute because who knew you’d be related to jazz musicians, but anyway—so Andrews came downstairs. Skidmore was still there, and Andrews apparently talked the sheriff into letting him go along over to Fit’s Mill, since Melissa was there to protect you.”
“I see,” I said, trying to ignore what I thought had happened. “But then Albert came into the house at some point.”
“He did,” she affirmed. “Don’t know how long after Skid and Andrews left, but that boy, Albert, he busted into your house real good, running. Melissa saw him but didn’t get to her pistol quick enough, I guess. She managed to fire, but he’d already shot her two or three times in the abdomen. Albert—which we’ll have to talk about him in a minute too—he went on upstairs to your room and Melissa managed to get off an emergency call before she passed out.”
So. Waking up in my room to the gunshots, running down the stairs, seeing Andrews and Melissa shot, being shoved back upstairs and into my bed by Albert: all a phantasm. Or a dream. I decided that I would have to tell Lucinda about my delusions one day, but it was not to be that day. She was worried enough about me as it was. No need to add to her apprehensions. And, in truth, I was very happy to just put that particular set of images out of my mind for as long as I could, though discomfort lingered at having so vivid a series of hallucinations,
“Skidmore got the call from her,” I said softly, trying to sound as coherent as possible. “And he called you?”
“Melissa called Skidmore, yes, but she was already patched into emergency services, calling for an ambulance. So when they saw the address, the ambulance drivers, they called me.”
“You were here?”
“Yes, and I rode in the ambulance with them.” She closed her eyes for a second. “Like before.”
“Wait.” I tried to add it up in my head. “You heard Melissa’s distress call and you and the ambulance managed to get here before Albert shot at me? Did I talk to him that long?”
Her face lost a little of its color and it was obvious to me that she was trying her best to figure out how to say something. She settled on: “We got to your house in under eleven minutes.”
I shook my head. “No you didn’t. You can’t get from here to my house in eleven minutes.”
She looked away. “You can,” she said softly, “if I’m in the ambulance and you’re at the house with a gun to your chest.”
I let the full import of what she’d said, and what she’d meant, sink in.
She thought something more than mere force of will had been at work. Urging the driver to go faster had only been the beginning. She meant that something metaphysical had happened. I chose not to argue the point—largely because I did not entirely disagree.
“So.” I was momentarily at a loss for words.
“Anyway,” she said after a moment, “we got there. Melissa was unconscious, the EMT got to her before I could. He told me to get upstairs, check on you. For some reason, I didn’t run. I guess I must have heard your voice, and I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. So I tiptoed up the stairs, and heard the other man’s voice. It didn’t take much to hear the hate in his words. I knew he was the one, the man who shot Melissa, probably the man who shot you last year.”
She stopped, uncertain how to go on.
“So you—what? You had your kit.”
“I had my kit.” She nodded, mustering a bit more energy. “I wasn’t thinking, I guess, I just—it was an impulse. I got a syringe filled up with Desflurane. I’m not even certain why I had it in the bag. Maybe I thought I’d need it for you in case you were all shot up again. But what I came up with was to sneak in your room and dose the man.”
“You do realize,” I said, trying to lighten her mood just a little, “that it was a crazy plan.”
“Oh, God, yes,” she agreed. “I look back at it now and I wonder what the hell made me think—anyway.”
“You heard me talking to him.”
“Uh-huh,” she went on, “and I could tell he was distracted. And then you started up with that … what was that weird crazy talk you were doing? It was really scary.”
“That’s when you popped in and got him.”
“Yes.”
“So you heard my voodoo gris-gris.”
“I don’t know what I heard,” she said.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” I promised.
“Well, all I know is that in one second I was in your room, there was a man with a gun, I jabbed him with my juice, and he went down like a broken elevator.”
My breath momentarily caught in my throat. “What did you say?”
“Hm?” She was staring out the window. I realized that she might have been a little in shock, herself, or maybe just profoundly disturbed by the events of her morning—small wonder. But that particular phrase was eerily familiar.
“Why did you use the words ‘he went down like a broken elevator’?”
“What?” She turned my way. “Is that what I said? I don’t know. He did drop real good, real fast.”
I sat back. “That he did.”
“I’m kind of—I don’t know—I’m kind of in a daze or something.”
“Believe me,” I assured her, “I know the feeling.”
“I believe there must have been an angel in your room,” she confided in a much softer voice.
“An angel?” I managed to ask.
“Oh, I know I don’t talk about it much,” she said, trying to make light of it, “but you can’t work in a hospital for very long without considering the possibility that angels are around. I don’t mean like pretty girls with swan wings in choir robes, nothing like that. I mean the kind of angels that live in sunlight, or comforting words, or the inspired actions of others—in the better blood of our biological yearnings.”
“What?” I blinked. “Jesus, Lucinda, you’ve turned into a poet—a religious poet.”
“I just never talked to you about this kind of thing.” She smiled at me indulgently. “Because I don’t want you to tell me it’s foolish.”
“No, but I mean,” I took in a good breath, “I think you’d better tell me where you got a phrase like ‘the better blood of our biological yearnings.’”
“I got it from you,” she said softly. “It was something you said once.”
She was about to say something that I thought might be very important, when Nurse Chambers barged in, her face ashen. There were tears in her eyes.
“Melissa Mathews—they say she isn’t going to make it. She’s out of surgery, but they don’t expect her to live.”
27.
Andrews appeared behind Nurse Chambers in the doorway. She turned into his embrace, and they stood silently.
Lucinda reached for my hand.
I wasn’t even certain I’d heard the news correctly. How could Melissa Mathews die? She was just in my kitchen.
Somehow Skidmore made his way past Andrews and Stacey and stood at the foot of my bed. He tried several times to speak, but couldn’t seem to make any sound. His eyes were hollow, seemed carved out. I’d been with him, years before, standing in a field, when we�
��d discovered dozens of dead, decayed bodies. That was the only other time in our lifelong friendship that I’d seen the face he wore at that moment. It was barely human. It was Greek mask. All the muscles there contorted to conform to his grief.
All I could think about for a moment was the way Melissa’s hair exactly matched the autumn leaves on a certain tree in our town square. In my mind’s eye I could see those leaves fly upward in a sudden cold wind—upward and away. I could hear their sound, like a sudden rush of wings, and then the sky was clear: the leaves were gone.
“Your assailant,” Skidmore croaked, “is awake and screaming for his lawyer.”
“What?” I squinted in Skidmore’s direction. “Albert wants a lawyer?”
“Oh, he’s already got one. His organization has a very high-powered attorney on retainer. Or, lots of them, I think. This one’s from Atlanta. On his way up now. Should be here in a couple of hours.”
“The man broke into my house, shot a police officer, and almost succeeded in killing me. There are witnesses. What does he think a lawyer’s going to do?”
“You don’t know much about the way the law works, do you?” Skidmore shook his head slowly. “You have no idea what we’re dealing with. This kid, Albert? He could very well get off completely. He’s done it before.”
“Done what?” Andrews growled.
“He and some of his cohorts,” Skid said very softly, “they’ve gotten off scot free after they’ve done lots worse than this.”
“What could be worse than this?” Stacey sobbed.
“No.” Andrews held her tighter. “I’d rather not know what else these men have been up to just now, thanks.”
I agreed with Andrews. I wanted to change the subject. The idea that Albert and his clan might get away with their crimes was too much to consider just then.
“So, you all were—you hadn’t made it to Fit’s Mill,” I said haltingly to Skid, “when you heard Melissa’s call, I guess.”
“Right.”
“We got there just in time to see the ambulance men run into your house,” Andrews confirmed. “I have no idea how they beat us there.”
“I’ve contacted our friends at the FBI, “ Skid said, his voice a little stronger. “They’re going to round up every one of those boys over at Fit’s Mill and I’m personally going to interrogate them—all.”
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