“I’ll still like you,” he’d promised. He’d also promised to check in on her and the kids from time to time — if she didn’t mind.
Molly didn’t mind one bit.
Moving the ultrasound scanner over her gel-smeared, slightly expanded lower abdomen, Dr. Lantz studied the sonogram and announced, “We’re looking good here, Molly. Everything is as normal as normal can be.”
Molly studied the sonogram monitor and the little oblong cloud that was supposed to be her child. It still didn’t seem real.
“By the way,” Dr. Lantz said. “This is strictly off the record, but I talked to Jenna Corson’s doctor for you a few days ago. Mrs. Corson wasn’t pregnant. She thought she was — and refused to believe she wasn’t. Anyway, sounds like a hysterical pregnancy.”
Molly actually found herself pitying Jenna — until she thought about all the tainted pills and peppermints Jenna had given her.
“Are you sure everything looks okay with the baby?” Molly pressed.
Dr. Lantz nodded, and moved the scanner a bit. “Do you want to know the sex?”
Molly hesitated. She hadn’t wanted to before, but somehow it mattered now. She didn’t want to think of this baby as it anymore. She nodded. “Tell me. . ”
“It’s a boy,” he said.
Molly gazed at the cloud on the sonogram, and smiled. She was looking at her son. “Are you — are you sure he’s okay?” she asked. “I mean, after all, he’s been through a lot. . ”
“So have you,” the doctor said. “But I guess he’s a real survivor, just like his mom.”
Molly kept staring at the screen. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
“I hate these stinking lights,” Chris announced.
He’d assembled the fake Christmas tree in the family room and carefully arranged three of the four white light strings on the branches. But one string in the middle had just gone out. Now he was testing each bulb to find which son-of-a-bitch light was screwing up the whole son-of-a-bitch string.
He didn’t even want Christmas this year, but he was putting up the tree to make Molly and Erin happy. They were in the kitchen, baking Christmas cookies for Erin’s class tomorrow. Erin sat on a step stool on the other side of the counter, frosting the cookies. The sweet, homey smell filled the house — as did the sound of Johnny Mathis singing “Winter Wonderland” on Molly’s iPod Christmas mix.
“I want to put the star on top of the tree!” Erin declared.
“You did it last year,” Chris said. “It’s Molly’s turn. She hasn’t had a chance to put the star up yet.”
“But I want to,” Erin whined.
“Oh, it really doesn’t matter that much to me,” Molly sighed.
She’d said the same thing last year when his dad had suggested she do the tree-topping honors. Erin had wanted to do it then, too. And Molly — obviously still trying to win them over — had insisted that Erin have her way. But Chris remembered his dad hadn’t been pleased. He’d told them later that it would have been a nice gesture to let Molly put the star on the tree — to acknowledge she was part of the family.
That was last year. Chris really didn’t have time for all this Christmas tradition now. He still had schoolwork to catch up on from the two weeks he’d missed when first his mom and then his dad had been killed. He also had to start looking for colleges that might offer swimming scholarships. It was the kind of thing his dad might have helped him with.
His dad would have been putting up the tree, too.
Chris missed him. He missed both of them so much.
Maybe another reason he didn’t really feel like Christmas was because it would be his last one in this house. Molly wanted to move in the spring. After what had happened in the guest room, she didn’t feel like converting it into a nursery. Chris didn’t blame her a bit. He didn’t even like going in there. Though they’d replaced the carpet in that room and in the hallway, he could still picture where the bloodstains had been.
As much as he hated to leave this house, where he’d once been happy with his parents, all of that had changed. He understood Molly’s need to have a place that was hers, where no one dead had a hold over them.
“Just for the record, I’m not having fun here,” Chris said, still trying to locate the defective light. “I hate these lights, and I hate this tree.”
“Well, take a break,” Molly said, putting on a pair of oven mitts. “I can do that later. There’s no rush. We still have two weeks until Christmas.” She opened the oven and took out a sheet of cookies.
He shook another little bulb, and suddenly, all the lights on the faulty string went on.
“Yippee!” Erin cried, a smudge of frosting on her cheek.
Chris glanced over at her and Molly. He worked up a smile.
But Molly put a hand over her mouth, and her color suddenly didn’t look so good. “Excuse me,” she muttered, rushing out of the kitchen.
He heard her footsteps racing up the stairs, and a few moments later, a door slammed. He scratched his head. “I don’t get why she always goes all the way upstairs to barf when there’s a bathroom down here.”
Erin shrugged. “I think she likes barfing upstairs.” She went back to frosting the cookies.
She didn’t seem to understand why Chris was chuckling. He’d have to share his kid sister’s little pearl of wisdom with Molly when she came downstairs again. In the meantime, he finished arranging the last of the Christmas lights. The tree was actually starting to look pretty.
He began to wonder if Molly was all right. Usually, she was back downstairs and feeling better a few minutes after praying to the porcelain god.
He went to the foot of the stairs. “Molly?” he called. “Are you okay?”
No answer.
He started up the stairs. In the second-floor hallway, he saw the stairwell door to her attic studio was open. He heard murmuring up there. It sounded like she was on the phone.
Chris knew it wasn’t any of his business, but he crept to the doorway.
“It’s all right, Mother,” she was saying. “I understand why you couldn’t come to the funeral. You didn’t even know him. But I want you to think about coming here for Christmas or New Year’s. I miss you, Mom. Most of all, I think it’s time you met my kids. Chris and Erin are really pretty great. . ”
Smiling, Chris quietly walked toward the stairs. He would go down to the kitchen and talk to his sister. He’d get her to agree. They’d ask Molly to put up the star.
Visitors needed to be cleared in advance. He saw a note attached to the clipboard with the sign-in sheet that the patient’s sister, Elaine Lawles, would be coming by at sixthirty.
In the hospital hallway, the uniformed police guard sat outside Jenna Corson’s door. He was tired, and desperately trying to stay awake. Last night, he’d pulled an eight-hour shift working security on his second job at Westlake Mall. The thirty-four-year-old had wavy red hair, a mustache, and — at the moment — dark circles under his blue eyes.
He sat at a desk outside room 404. In front of him was a small poinsettia plant, a bottle of Evian water, a Sports Illustrated, the clipboard with the sign-in sheet for visitors, and a phone he wasn’t supposed to use except on official business. The ringer was turned down low.
He barely heard it ring when the call came through at 6:25. It was the front desk, telling him that they’d issued a visitor’s pass to Elaine Lawles, and she was on her way up. He thanked them, hung up the phone, and got to his feet.
The door to 404 was open. Nurses and doctors had been in and out of there all day. He peeked in on the patient. She was snoozing. She had a pasty complexion, and her limp brown hair needed washing. The hospital gown was hardly flattering. Still, she looked like she might have been kind of pretty — when not borderline comatose with a tube in her nose. They had Jenna Corson hooked up to an IV drip. Her heartbeat was monitored on a small screen at her bedside. There were no flowers or Christmas decorations in the room. Elaine Lawles was her first family visit
or.
When she didn’t show up by six-forty, the guard started to wonder if Jenna’s sister had gotten lost. That was easy to do in this maze of a hospital. He sat down, and was about to call the front desk when he saw someone approaching. She wore her visitor’s badge on the lapel of her trench coat. In one hand, she carried a little Christmas evergreen plant with tiny red and gold ribbon bows on it. He gaped at her.
“I’m Elaine Lawles, and I’m here to see my sister, Jenna Corson.” she said. Then she frowned at him. “It’s impolite to stare.”
He cleared his throat. “Um, sorry,” he muttered, reaching for the clipboard. “Could you sign in, please? And I’ll need to hold on to your purse while you’re in there.”
Putting down the Christmas plant, she surrendered her bag, and then scrawled her name on the form. It was barely legible. “I’d like to talk to my sister in private. May I close the door?”
He didn’t see anything wrong with it. There was a window in the door. He wanted to warn her that it wouldn’t be much of a conversation. Jenna Corson was still very weak, and they’d pumped her full of painkillers and antidepressants. So far, he’d chalked up about fifty hours of guard duty here in the last three weeks, and he’d heard the patient mutter about twenty words — tops.
He watched the woman stroll into Jenna Corson’s room. “Hey, sis,” she said. “It’s me, Elaine. Are you awake? You don’t look so bad. . ”
Then she closed the door behind her.
The guard could hear murmuring. He started reading his Sports Illustrated.
After a while, he heard a muffled, high-pitched hum.
At that very moment in another wing on that same floor, Elaine Lawles was passed out in the last of three stalls in the women’s room. Someone had stolen her trench coat, her purse, her shoes, and her visitor’s pass. A syringe — with just a trace of propofol left in it — was on the gray-tiled floor between her and the toilet.
Anyone resourceful enough could have figured out how to get their hands on a syringe and the sleep drug if they’d been around the hospital for two weeks.
Elaine had come empty-handed to visit her sister — no flowers, magazines, or candy.
The Christmas plant now on the nightstand table in room 404 had been a gift for another patient in the hospital, a teenage girl who was in there for a series of skin grafts.
The guard outside Jenna Corson’s room got to his feet. Moving closer to the door, he heard the incessant high-pitched drone more clearly now. The guard looked in the window — at the woman standing at Jenna Corson’s bedside. She was holding a pillow over Jenna’s face.
That sound came from the cardio monitor. It accompanied the flatline on the screen.
He heard a stampede of footsteps, and a doctor hurriedly issuing instructions. A crew of doctors and nurses were racing up the hallway toward room 404. The guard counted seven of them. Two were pushing a resuscitation cart.
They would be in there working on her for the next thirty minutes — with one of them periodically yelling, “Clear!” But the line on that monitor graph would remain flat.
The woman they pulled off Jenna Corson had a hospital gown under the trench coat. For someone who was so scarred up, she was awfully strong. She would later tell the police that suffocating Jenna Corson hadn’t been too difficult.
The hard part had been giving Jenna’s sister the shot of propofol. “You try working a syringe when you don’t have all your fingers,” she told them.
Still, somehow, Courtney had managed to do it.
FB2 document info
Document ID: afb41be6-dc9b-4283-a946-a197d1948261
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 11.11.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.25, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
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Disturbed Page 46