Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  No ankle-deep carpeting—a status symbol of the past, along with the office fireplace in the center of the room. None of the shiny new hardwood floors preferred by the edgy firms in entertainment law, none of the creaky old wood floors found in the hallowed halls where the business of making money is sometimes confused with social significance.

  Roubideaux’s office had Berber carpet, the wealthy man’s form of indoor/outdoor: practical, pricey, ugly. The front desk was small and the receptionist clearly limited to answering the telephone. Marsden worked with two other attorneys, and there were no cubicles or horseshoe work areas for legal secretaries, researchers, paralegals, or the amazing and generally underpaid legal creature who does all of the above.

  There was a receptionist, aged twenty or twenty-two, and as it was five fifteen and Friday she was happily putting away the pencil that was the only clutter on the tiny oak desk behind the kind of partition one usually finds in a small doctor’s office or veterinary clinic. She pointed me to a small hallway on her way out the door. I followed the sound of a man and woman who were laughing in the way people do when they are in a waiting room somewhere, anxious about the appointment ahead, and trying to keep their spirits up.

  I understood from Clayton himself that he and his wife—ex-wife—hadn’t been divorced that long. A year at most. I was wary about being in the office with the two of them, but the only tension I could sense arose when I walked through the door. I wasn’t used to being dreaded.

  Clayton Roubideaux stood up the minute he saw me, but the first person I noticed was Emma Marsden, who sat with her legs crossed in a high-backed maroon chair. She wore blue jeans and a black sweater and worn, dirty Nikes. We were dressed just alike, except I wore high-topped Reeboks, which were white and new. Her hair was clean, but pulled back in a rubber band, and she hadn’t bothered with makeup. She looked like she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since the last presidential election. Many of us hadn’t.

  Emma Marsden was thirty-seven years old, and her hair was already threaded with gray. Her forehead was ridged with worry wrinkles that were startling but not unattractive on such a young face. She had the look of a woman who has forgotten how to be beautiful.

  She looked at me over her shoulder, steadily, without smiling. Her ex-husband, already on his feet and waiting for my attention, shook my hand across the oak veneer desk.

  “Lena Padget? Clayton Roubideaux.” His grip was firm, his smile toothy. “This is my wife … ex-wife, I mean. Emma.”

  Her hand was ice cold, fingers slim, nails cut short, a tall woman whose hand dwarfed my own.

  “Please, sit down,” Roubideaux said.

  I took the other wingback chair and sat all the way back in the cushion so that my feet did not quite touch the floor. I didn’t feel ridiculous. I’m used to my height, and the posture had exactly the effect I wanted. Emma Marsden smiled and loosened up, settling back in her own chair. She wasn’t rude enough to laugh out loud, but the vision of me with my feet dangling over the edge of the seat clearly amused her.

  “We appreciate you coming in after business hours,” Clayton said.

  I nodded. Why lose credit by explaining that I set my own business hours, that I had slept late that morning and had plenty of time to drink coffee, read USA Today, and peel the threadbare indoor/outdoor carpet away from half of the little screened-in porch in the cottage I shared with my significant other?

  The old carpet had been evocative of many faded but diehard layers of ancient cat urine, an odor that is as hard to kill as a cockroach, although it does not run away. But I had soaked in my claw-foot tub, and changed to clean jeans and another of the black sweaters that make up a significant portion of my wardrobe. I was clean and crisp and smelled only of the vanilla lotion I buy from Bath and Body Works. I was ready to go to work.

  Clayton Marsden looked at his ex-wife, who looked back at him. “Emma, do you want to start, or do you just want to interrupt me later?”

  Great.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  She had an interesting voice, a little scratchy, like she was recovering from laryngitis.

  Roubideaux looked at me. “Lena, do you have any children?”

  “I have a cat.”

  He didn’t smile. Neither one of them did. Cats, clearly, did not count, although I was not being flip, and I absolutely love my cat.

  “Emma and I had one child together. She also has an older daughter. Her youngest child, our son, died two years ago, while being treated by Dr. Theodore Tundridge at Fayette Hospital. Tundridge is a pediatrician and the director of the Tundridge Children’s Clinic.”

  Clayton and Emma exchanged looks.

  The faint music of “La Bamba” drifted into the room from somewhere, the hallway maybe.

  “How old was your son when he died?”

  “Right at two and a half.”

  A toddler, I thought. “What did he die of?”

  Emma Marsden looked at her feet, and Clayton ran a finger along the edge of his desk. Their silence interested me.

  “His liver failed,” Clayton said.

  Neither of them met my eyes, but pain seeped like acid through their self-containment. They weren’t looking for sympathy, they were looking for help. They were looking for somebody to be on their side.

  I wondered why they wanted me.

  Marsden leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips along the edge of his desk. He seemed absorbed in placing those fingertips in some kind of preordained and essential alignment, and to manage this he wasn’t able to look at me while he talked.

  “I don’t know if you know this, Ms.… Lena. But in this day and age, if you give permission to have an autopsy performed on a family member who dies in a hospital, or if, as in the case of our son, an autopsy is required, that’s pretty much license to plunder.”

  He looked at me.

  I looked back. “What exactly do you mean by that? Plunder?”

  Emma Marsden faced me. “What it means is that they stole my son’s internal organs; kept some of them for research, and donated others for profit.”

  “Technically, it’s not for profit,” Clayton said.

  Emma looked at him the way I had looked at the urine-scented carpet on my screened-in porch. “Their ‘fee,’ my dear ex-husband, is simply a non-profit way of saying profit. Creative accounting. The not-for-profit medical profession makes the corporate profiteers look like small-timers. You know this, Clayton, and she’s not going to sue us, she’s not wearing a wire. Stop dancing around and say what it is.”

  “My dear ex-wife is right,” Clayton said.

  I slid forward in my chair, feet on the floor. Their habit of calling each other “dear ex-whatever” was annoying; also, I didn’t like being called “she” when I was actually in the room.

  “Are you telling me the hospital took your son’s organs without permission?” I asked. I found it hard to believe.

  “Not the hospital,” Clayton said. “Dr. Tundridge’s clinic. They treated our son when he first got sick, and Dr. Tundridge was in charge when Ned was admitted to the hospital.”

  “Tundridge was head of the committee of doctors who treated my son,” Emma said. “It’s an assembly line these days, don’t you know? Each specialist looks at one small part, and nobody’s really looking at the whole.”

  “But … you’re saying they did all of this without your permission?”

  “That’s what we’re saying,” Emma said.

  Clayton made a tepee of his fingertips, which I was ready to cut off, every single one, since he paid them so much attention and refused to meet my eyes. Odd, for a courtroom litigator. Why was he so uncomfortable with me? It made me think he was up to something. Of course, Joel says I always think people are up to something.

  “It’s a fuzzy area,” Clayton said. “There’s a blanket permission form you have to sign when someone is admitted to a hospital. On the other hand, it is so broad and vague that it really doesn’t stand up. In addi
tion, because there is very little choice about signing—which means, sign, or forget having your child treated—it could definitely be argued that it amounts to duress.”

  “We shouldn’t have signed it,” Emma said.

  “We didn’t have a choice.”

  Clayton Roubideaux looked at Emma, and it was such a look that I was embarrassed to be in the room. He wasn’t up to anything other than trying to distance himself from the pain of losing a child. I felt ashamed, because I was so judgmental. Just because I was happy these days did not give me an excuse for forgetting what it was like for people who were going through the dark times.

  It’s strange that happiness does that to you—makes you just a little less compassionate, a little less willing to listen, because you don’t want it to intrude, that darkness, you don’t want it spilling over into your life and shadowing your relief and peace of heart. I think it is an instinctual and primitive reaction—like a fear of infection. Sometimes it’s easier to be effective in my line of work if you’re depressed before you interview the client.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “Or is that what you want me to do—to find out?”

  Emma Marsden shook her head. “We know already, believe me. We know because someone from the clinic called us and notified us that our son’s heart was not buried with him, and what did we want them to do with it. It was like a … a storage issue. They let us know they were going to be billing us. And then we called back—”

  “I called back,” Clayton said.

  “Does it really matter who called back, Clayton?” Emma said.

  “It might.”

  She looked at me. I shrugged. It might or it might not, but I wasn’t getting in the middle until I was ready. I was planning to take sides, I just wasn’t sure how many there were. We had started with two, but watching the both of them made me wonder if there weren’t going to be three. Of the two of them, Clayton Roubideaux probably had the money to pay my fee, which meant his was the most practical side to take, but that fingertip thing was putting me off.

  “Okay, so you’re telling me that the clinic actually informed you that they had your son’s, Ned’s, heart. That they’d … kept it? How did they explain that?”

  “Research,” Clayton said. “They explain everything with that one word. It’s the medical-legal version of diminished capacity. It means they think they can do anything and everything they want, and so far, since the eighties anyway, the courts have concurred.”

  “So what happened when you called? Did they back down? Tell you it was all a big mistake?”

  Clayton shook his head. “Not at all. They did say there was a mistake, but it wasn’t that they didn’t have the heart, but that they had … other things too.”

  Silence settled while I thought this through. I looked at Emma Marsden. “What other things?”

  “Spleen. Liver. Both corneas. His … tongue.”

  I took a breath. “You know this for sure, or that’s what they told you?”

  “I went there. After they called. I went there to pick them up. I didn’t know what to put them in. I just took some bags that were in the drawer in my kitchen. Sloane’s bags, Sloane’s Grocery? I probably should have taken a cooler, but I didn’t know what the hell to do.”

  I nodded, chewing my bottom lip.

  She looked at me, and her eyes were tight, her voice hard, but her hand, of which she seemed unaware, was clutching the neckline of her sweater and squeezing it in her fist.

  “When I got there, they showed them to me. The girl who worked there … she was new, and she showed me where they were kept. Down in the clinic basement. It was very clean, very well lit, lots of fluorescent lighting. Bright white floors. Did I tell you how clean it was, Clayton? It made my shoes squeak. I was embarrassed because it … my shoes looked so worn out and dirty on that floor. And I’m standing there with my plastic grocery bags, wondering if I ought to have brought a cooler, thinking about Tupperware, for God’s sake, wondering why the parts weren’t being released to some … undertaker or something. And then she changed her mind. That girl. She’d left me there for twenty minutes, and she came back, and obviously she was in a lot of trouble, because she was just red in the face, like she was embarrassed or something, and she said I would have to leave and they would call me later. And so I … I asked to talk to her supervisor, some man named Mr. French, and while she went away to go get him, I put everything marked MARSDEN AGED TWENTY-NINE MONTHS in my grocery bags and ran out of the building and into the parking lot and got in my car and drove away.”

  She looked at Clayton, who reached across the desk and squeezed her hand. He was still in love with her, and she knew it, but she didn’t care. But she felt sorry for him, and it was his eyes that filled with tears, and it was he who could not speak and finish the story.

  “Forty-eight hours later I was called by Child Protective Services and informed that I was being accused of Munchausen by proxy in the death of my son Ned. They refused to give me any further information, except that the complaint had just been filed by the physician who treated my son—Dr. Theodore Tundridge. They said they were investigating, and wanted to offer me the option of voluntarily releasing custody of my daughter, Blaine, to the state. That if I did so, and that if I admitted that I was guilty of the charges, of making my own son sick enough to die, they would let me have custody of my daughter back after I had taken a prescribed list of parenting classes. But that my daughter would have to be examined periodically by Dr. Tundridge, who would oversee her health care and make sure she was not suffering from any form of abuse or induced illness.”

  I felt it rising within me, the anger that fueled my job. Like a helium balloon in my chest. And I got that feeling that I usually get when I go to work—I really wanted to help, meaning I was ready to take sides. Their side.

  Clayton looked at me, eyes shrewd. “Can you imagine it? The power this doctor and this state organization have when they work together?”

  “Sounds like they’ve done it before.”

  He nodded. “I thought of that. But there’s legal precedent in several other states, not just here. It happens everywhere.”

  “You mean this kind of deal making? Pressuring mothers to back down off of medical complaints, or they lose their kids and face criminal prosecution? It goes that far?”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “And did you agree?” I looked over at Emma Marsden.

  She stared at me, hard. “No, I did not.”

  “Good for you,” I said. Wondering how she’d found the strength to be so brave, so smart, and so wise.

  Emma Marsden wiped tears out of her eyes, making them go red. “I need a minute,” she said, and left the room.

  Clayton Roubideaux opened his handkerchief, blew his nose, folded the handkerchief over one more time, and blew again. “This is hard,” he said.

  I nodded. “Clayton, do they have any reason to suspect Emma had anything to do with your son’s death? You said liver failure. That’s … broad.”

  “They don’t know what killed him,” Clayton said. There was no anger in his voice, just something that sounded bereft. “He was so sick. He would have these attacks, they were so … they were horrible. Pain in his stomach, high up, and vomiting, violent vomiting that went on and on and on, he just couldn’t stop. We’d take him to the emergency room. They’d do blood work, and his liver enzymes would be sky high, nine hundred when they were supposed to be forty. And then they’d come back down. And they’d do all kinds of tests, and nothing made any sense. And then he’d be okay. And then it would start back up again. They’d rerun every medical test, Emma kept food diaries, we had the paint in the house analyzed, my God, we tried everything. There just didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.”

  “What did the autopsy say?”

  “You know, they never actually gave us all that much information. Just that the liver had lesions, but was in better shape than they thought it would be.”

  “T
hat’s it?”

  He nodded. “I should have asked. Asked more questions. But he was gone, and Emma and I were falling apart. Ned was my son, my only child. And Blaine—she was Emma’s daughter from her first marriage. I said … something I said made Blaine think that I loved Ned more than her and that the wrong kid died, and Emma asked me about it. And I told her the truth. That I’d never said anything like that to Blaine, but that Ned was my real son and … and Emma asked me to leave that day and filed divorce papers that week.”

  He looked at me. “I did love Blaine. I still do. Very much. And maybe I did love Ned more, but so what? It’s hard to be straight about that kind of thing when you go through something like this. And Blaine—she’s a good kid, but she likes to play victim. Kind of an aggressive martyrdom, which is a scary thing, let me tell you.

  “You know, we had a good marriage. Emma’s first husband was a piece of shit. And I was good to both of them, to Emma and Blaine, and all I did was try to be the best husband and stepfather and father I could possibly be.”

  I wondered if he was aware that he’d separated out his role to Blaine and Ned right there. Stepfather and father. If that was his worst sin, he was probably a pretty good guy. Of course, there were two sides to every story. Two sides at least.

  “Okay, then. I’m interested. But what exactly do you want me to do?”

  Roubideaux’s voice went crisp. “Information gathering. Take a look at this doctor. See if he has a record of any other unusual deaths on his watch. Anything that takes the blame off Emma and puts it somewhere else. Look into his clinic. See if any other parents have had him keep back, you know, parts.”

  “So what you’re looking for is proof that Dr. Tundridge, and maybe others in the clinic, or that he associates with professionally, have accused your ex-wife of Munchausen by proxy in retaliation because she objected to, and is causing trouble over, their use of … their retention of your son’s … organs.”