Love on Call

by Shirley Hailstock

She leaned him back and looked into his eyes. “Her face is disfigured, but she’s not grotesque. She’s listless and incommunicative. I told her you and Owen were here and that you’d be in to see her. She didn’t act as if she’d heard or understood me.” Mallory didn’t want to sound like a doctor. Brad needed a friend, and she was trying to play that role.

  He stepped around her and faced his mother’s doorway. Then he took Mallory’s hand and pulled her with him.

  Mallory felt helpless. Brad had spent his life trying to find his mother and she’d retreated long ago from everything and everyone, including her sons.

  The door clicking closed registered in Brad’s mind, but his heart did double-time as he saw the woman who was his mother for the first time in decades. He held Mallory’s hand, his cold fingers gripping her smaller ones in a painful grasp.

  Dr. Diaz’s description had not prepared him for what he saw. He didn’t think he could be prepared even if ten doctors talked to him before allowing him to come and see for himself. The woman across the room was old. Her hair was gray and wiry. Her eyes looked out vacantly as if the world around her had no reality for her.

  “I told her you were here,” Mallory whispered, as if the situation warranted soft voices. “She didn’t react. Her stare remained unchanged.”

  Brad took that in. His medical training had him looking deeply into her eyes, noting the grooved lines around them and her mouth, the scar that covered most of one side of her face. Her skull was misshapen and her jaw looked as if it had been broken and not set. A wave of anger went through him at seeing her in this condition. What had happened? he wondered. His hand went automatically to his waist, where he kept the pocket flashlight he used to check fluid pressure on the optic nerve. It wasn’t there. He wasn’t wearing a lab coat. He wasn’t here to examine her or to prescribe treatment.

  “Mom.” The word felt foreign to his tongue. He studied her for some kind of recognition. She gave none. She sat stoically, almost, as if she were alone in the room, alone in the world. The fact that two other people occupied the room was immaterial to Sharon Yarborough.

  Brad wanted her to wake up, wanted to force her to focus on him. He’d spent more than half his life looking for her, searching for answers to questions that invaded his dreams and shaped his actions. Was this all he would get, a catatonic old woman so lost inside herself that she might never find her way back to reality?

  He crossed the sterile institutional room, softened only by a vase of dying wild flowers. Brad had never thought much about flowers. They were a staple in hospitals. He’d seen so many of them that he was desensitized to their presence. Yet he wondered about these. Who’d sent his mother flowers? A woman who’d had no visitors for fifteen years had flowers in her room. It didn’t fit.

  “Sharon.” Brad hunkered down to eye level with her. She stared blankly into space. “Sharon, it’s me, Brad. Do you remember me? I was smaller, only a boy. Owen is here, too.”

  He realized he was talking as if she were a child.

  “Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?”

  He might as well have been talking to himself. Sharon didn’t answer or acknowledge him in any way. Brad straightened up and glanced at Mallory, who stood quietly where he’d left her. He returned to her, twisting back to look at the woman who’d commanded so much of his life.

  “I’m ready to leave,” he said. It had been a waste of time. Whatever he wanted to know was locked up inside her, and she wasn’t about to release a single bit of news. They turned to the door.

  It opened before they reached it. An older woman stood there with flowers in her hands. She looked from one to the other in surprise and suddenly smiled.

  “Are you here to see Sharon?” Not giving them time to answer, she went on. “That is very nice. She never gets any visitors. She has two sons, but they never come to see her. Just like my son.”

  “Mrs. Seleig,” the duty nurse said, coming in behind her. “This isn’t a good time. You can come back later.”

  The woman looked at the nurse. Mrs. Seleig was in her seventies. Her face was scored with lines and wrinkles, but her smiling eyes sparkled with life.

  “Oh.” She put her hand to her mouth as if she’d done something wrong. “Well, I’ll just put these in the vase and I’ll be off.” She walked spritely for a woman of her age. Dropping the dead flowers in the trash, she laid the new ones on the table and took the vase into the bathroom.

  “She’s another patient,” the nurse told them. “She attends to Mrs. Yarborough as if they were sisters.”

  Mrs. Seleig returned from filling the vase with fresh water. She smiled at the small grouping waiting for her to finish. Taking her time, she arranged the flowers, then turned around. Slowly she walked across the room.

  Stopping in front of them, she looked at Mallory. “I don’t know you.” Her comment could have been a statement or a question. Brad didn’t know which, but what she said next, as she turned to him, nearly knocked him off his feet. “Are you Bradley or Owen?”

  The three people in the room stared at her in astonishment.

  “Mrs. Seleig, how did you know who this was?” The nurse had taken a step forward. She stood next to Brad and Mallory as if they were all part of the same family.

  “I may be seventy-eight years old,” the woman scolded, “but my mind is as sharp as a twenty-year-old’s.” She stood up as straight as she could. Brad could see the start of osteoporosis curving her back, but she must have kept herself in shape as long as she could or it would be much worse by now.

  “I’m sure it is,” Mallory told her. “We’re just a little surprised. Mrs. Yarborough hasn’t spoken to us, and no one here in the center thinks she’s talked in years.”

  “She talks all right,” Mrs. Seleig contradicted. Then she looked down. “At least she used to. I haven’t heard her now in a long time.” She glanced up with a sad frown on her face.

  Brad understood she felt as if she’d lost a friend. His heart opened to her. Mrs. Seleig crossed the room and put her arm around Sharon’s shoulders, who sat unmoving in her chair. “I know she’ll talk again. She’s just resting right now. So which one are you?”

  “I’m Bradley.”

  Chapter Ten

  Mallory and Brad had only been in Sharon’s room ten minutes, yet the nurse felt her patient was tired. Before Owen went in she wanted her to rest for a few minutes. They used that time to interview Mrs. Seleig.

  “Why didn’t you tell us she’d talked to you?” Dr. Diaz asked.

  “You never asked.” The logic of it all made Brad want to laugh. The simplest questions were often overlooked.

  The doctor appeared exasperated. He probably had to deal with Mrs. Seleig on many levels. “Is there anything else I never asked about?”

  “You never asked where the flowers come from.”

  “They come from you. The florist delivers them every Monday and you bring them here.”

  “That’s wrong,” she declared firmly, pointing her finger in the air. “The flowers are from her daughter.”

  “She doesn’t have a daughter,” the doctor said. Brad had told him her only children were Owen and himself.

  Mrs. Seleig looked at Mallory. “Doctors,” she said conspiratorially. “They never know anything.” The older woman turned to Brad and Owen as if she were bored with the doctor and his questions. “Why didn’t you stop?” she asked Brad.

  He didn’t know what she meant, and wondered if her age was causing senility. “Stop where?”

  “In the airport.”

  “We drove, Mrs. Seleig,” Brad said.

  “Not today.” She frowned as if they just weren’t getting it. “Back then. When you were running and she called you?”

  Brad looked at the doctor. He shook his head, and Brad thought she must have gotten him mixed up with someone else.

  Mrs. Seleig got up then and headed for the door. “I have to go now,” she told them. “I’m late for my television show.”

 
“Is she all right?” Owen asked.

  “Sometimes she gets mixed up,” Dr. Diaz answered.

  “Mrs. Seleig,” Brad called before she reached the door. “Is there anything else you haven’t told us? Anything at all?”

  She cocked her head to one side and thought a moment. “I don’t think so.” She pulled the door open and left them.

  “Do you believe her?” Mallory asked.

  “Believe what? That she saw me in an airport?” He shook his head.

  “Not that. The part about a sister.”

  Both brothers looked at each other. In unison they shook their heads. But the seed had been planted. Dr. Diaz said their mother had been sexually and physically abused. She could have become pregnant from sexual abuse, and since they hadn’t seen her in years they really had no way of knowing.

  Could Mrs. Seleig be believed? Brad could see signs of dementia and absentmindedness, and he wasn’t sure she had a real grip on reality.

  The door opened again and they all turned to see Mrs. Seleig stick her head inside.

  “I remembered something else,” she announced. “Sharon Yarborough isn’t her real name. It’s Mariette Joyce Randall.”

  “What is the daughter’s name?” the doctor asked. Brad was too stunned to say anything.

  “What daughter?”

  It was after three o’clock in the morning when Mallory stole into Brad’s room and climbed into bed with him. He wasn’t asleep. Owen had been there until two, and Brad hadn’t turned off the light that filtered under the door. She saw it was the bathroom light. Brad lay on the bed wide awake.

  He put his arm around her and pulled her close. She took in the scent of him and let it fill her nostrils. His arm across her was heavy, but she craved its pressure.

  “How do you feel?”

  He sat up then, crossing his legs and sitting Indian style on the flowered coverlet. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “You and Owen spent hours talking in here and you feel nothing?”

  “I thought I would feel something, anger mostly. I realize now that all the time I’ve been looking for her it was due to anger. I wanted so badly to fight with her, accuse her of being a bad mother, of leaving us to fend for ourselves, but when I saw her… When I saw the shell of a woman she’s become, there was nothing there. It’s like all the fight went out of me when I saw that poor woman. I couldn’t equate her with my mother. The person I knew wasn’t in that room.”

  “Then why did you and Owen stay up practically the entire night?”

  “I think we both feel a little guilty.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know what happened to her. But she was somewhere being abused while we were blaming her for leaving us. Yet when I saw her all I saw was another patient. Someone in need of care.”

  “I don’t believe that.” Mallory sat up. Brad was a much more sensitive person than the one he was describing.

  “It’s true.”

  “Are you going back to see her?”

  “Owen and I thought we’d go tomorrow. Then we have to tell the family.”

  “Why are you going?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If all you feel is that she needs medical care, and she already has a doctor who appears concerned about her, why are you going back?”

  “She is my mother.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Love her?” He thought a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going out of duty? Honoring thy mother?”

  “I don’t know why I’m going.” He levered himself off the bed and stood. She followed.

  “Of course you do.” She knew she was badgering him, but there were times when people needed badgering. “You feel sorry for her.”

  “Sure I do. How could you not feel sorry for someone who…” He stopped.

  “Who what?”

  “Who took care of you!” he practically shouted.

  “Who loved you.”

  Mallory didn’t have to see the glimmer in his eyes to know it was there. She went to him and he pulled her into his arms. His hold was so tight she could barely breathe.

  “Oh, Mallie, she looked so pitiful. I never expected that. I kept seeing her the way she was the last time, smiling, full of life. She was almost dancing around the room as Owen and I left for school. She blew us a kiss. She did that every morning before we left. That’s why it was so hard to believe she’d left us.”

  “Maybe you can find out what happened to her.”

  He released her enough to look into her eyes. Mallory took in a full breath, glad to be able to breathe again.

  “There must be records,” she continued pensively. “We know her real name and some minor details. We can find out where she came from before she was sent to the nursing home, and work backward from there.”

  “What about work? You were planning to go home today.”

  “I’m here for as long as you need me,” Mallory stated.

  Brad stared at her for a long while. Then he lowered his head and kissed her. It was the tenderest kiss she’d ever received and it brought tears to her eyes.

  Brad woke with Mallory in his arms. He’d only awakened this way a few times, but he loved having her there. She was a calming presence for him, and he was thankful that she was here to keep him sane. Yesterday had been traumatic. Mallory had instinctively understood. He and Owen had talked, but Mallory had forced him to open those feelings he held inside and look at them. Deal with them. And go on.

  He couldn’t go on yet. There was a lot left to do here. He had to find another place for his mother to live, a place where there wasn’t concern over budget cuts and staff reductions. He hoped he could find a doctor as caring as Dr. Diaz. And he hoped he could rest at night.

  Mallory stirred and he pulled her closer. He kissed her shoulder—the bare area where her nightgown met clear brown skin—and the warm body in his arms turned hot. Her bottom burrowed into him and instantly he was aroused. A single thought of her could turn him to fire. Her presence could render him unable to speak coherently, and making love to her took him to places he’d never known before.

  He kissed her arm down to her elbow before moving up to her mouth. His hand roamed across her belly and up to her breasts. He heard the tiny intake of air when his thumb smoothed the fabric over her nipple. He loved that sound. She made it when he touched a part of her that drove pleasure sensations through her.

  She reached out and linked her fingers with his. Pushing them down, running their joined hands up and down his leg caressingly. He always loved it when she touched him—the feel of her hands as they moved across his skin, the light rasp of her nails as she ran them over his back, that boneless way she melted when he kissed her.

  She turned over, her gown catching under her and pulling tight, outlining her body. She had a beautiful figure. As a doctor he appreciated it. As a man he worshiped it.

  Her mouth sought his and liquid heat poured from his body into hers. A hunger so strong it scared him rushed through him. He wanted her now! He lifted her gown over her head and dropped it on the floor next to the bed, leaving her totally unclothed. Almost reverently he swept his eyes downward, from the tips of her extended brown nipples, past her softly defined waist, to legs as long as the Rio Grande.

  “You know you drive me crazy,” he stated. His voice was lower than normal and tinged with a quiet desperation. Brad didn’t know what was happening to him, what happened every time he was near Mallory. He just knew he wanted to go on being around her.

  “I’m making it my life’s work.” She rolled closer, pressing against him, rubbing her leg up and over his. Pleasure burst and ricocheted inside him until he thought he’d die from her touch.

  He groaned. His body covered hers. He took her nipple in his mouth and felt the tremors passing between them. He continued his benevolent assault, aroused by the actions and reactions of her body, spurred on by the sounds she made and the way that long body grew even longer
as she stretched under him.

  Brad moved away to discard his boxers and slip on a condom. The hotel room air was cold and sterile, but together they’d formed a cocoon of warmth where desire was king and control didn’t exist. She cupped his face and drew his mouth to hers. Explosions went off in him as her tongue dived into his mouth. Mallory was different from any woman he’d ever known. She instinctively fit well in every aspect of his life.

  He felt the wave of desire as he slipped inside her. The soft gasp from her that accompanied his entry was like a bomb going off in his pleasure zone. He set the rhythm, fast and hard. Frenzy took over quickly and the two of them rushed toward ecstasy. Brad lost all sense of time and place, driven by a need so elemental he had no control over it. He’d never been this free, this uninhibited, this untamed.

  And he cried out when she took him to heaven. Her voice joined his as they rode through a new universe on stellar waves that took them higher and higher until they crested in a zone so full of pleasure that they burned in the glow of euphoria.

  Brad was out of breath as they fell back to earth, and sweat poured from him. His temples pounded and his body was spent. Mallory did this to him. No one else ever had or ever would.

  He realized it in that moment. With his body still joined to hers in the most intimate way, he knew why his world moved every time she was with him.

  He was in love with her.

  When Mallory got out of the shower she could hear the deep voices of the two brothers in the next room. She didn’t disturb them. She had her own feelings from this morning to ponder, and she relished the time alone. She and Brad had made love before—twice before—and he’d kissed her on several occasions, but this morning something was different.

  They’d both abandoned all reserve. She couldn’t be restrained when he was playing her body like an instrument. He drew out so much in her, gave her so much pleasure, that denying any part of it never crossed her mind. She had no inhibitions where Brad was concerned.

  Drawing the thick robe around her, she sat on the chaise-style chair, leaned back and closed her eyes. She relived the morning, thinking about how good it had been with him.