Pickin Clover

by Bobby Hutchinson

  1

  PICKING CLOVER

  BOBBY HUTCHINSON

  PROLOGUE

  It was a wet Vancouver morning.

  Dr. Michael Forsythe burst through the entrance doors to Emergency at St. Joseph’s Hospital, black raincoat flapping around his tall, powerful frame like crows’ wings. His curly, coal-dark hair was damp from the dreary February drizzle. His heart was pounding and his stomach knotted with dread.

  “Where is she, Leslie?” The triage nurse stood behind the desk. She was the one who’d called his office with the urgent message.

  Years of experience and an iron control during medical emergencies ensured that Michael’s voice was calm, reasonable. It revealed nothing of the turmoil inside him.

  “This way, doctor.” Leslie led him to a private treatment room.

  Michael paused for a moment, hand on the door. “Thanks, Leslie. Has she been seen by anyone?”

  “Dr. Duncan spoke with her when she arrived, and she called in the psych resident, Dr. Keeler, when it became obvious Mrs. Forsythe was in crisis. He was with her until just a few moments ago. He’s seeing another patient at the moment, but he’ll be around if you wish to speak with him. Mrs. Forsythe asked us to call you immediately when she arrived, and of course we’ve put in a call to her general practitioner, Dr. Hudson.”

  The nurse was far too professional to share her own feelings, but Michael recognized warmth and compassion in her tone and was grateful.

  “Thank you, Leslie.” He waited until she’d walked away, then he took a deep breath and opened the door.

  “Polly? It’s me, sweetheart,” he said in a soothing tone, moving toward the slight figure huddled on the bed.

  She lay with her back to the door, curled into a fetal knot, arms locked around her knees. Her long tawny hair was caught in a single thick braid. She was wearing brown tights and a loose, matching sweater, twisted now around her painfully thin body.

  Michael approached slowly, then reached out a tentative hand to stroke the vulnerable curve of his wife’s fragile back. He kept his voice soft, reassuring, forcing his own despair back into the dark corner of his soul where he’d managed, only barely, to contain it.

  “Polly? Can you talk to me, my love?” She was trembling. He could feel the faint vibrations rippling down her spine. She rocked her head, and he could hear her rapid breathing. Her eyes were closed, long dark lashes fanned against pale clear skin that pulled too tight across elegant high cheekbones. She’d lost a frightening amount of weight during the five months of Susannah’s illness. As a result, she looked almost childlike, much younger than her thirty-five years.

  “Valerie told me you tried to reach me at the office this morning, Pol. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I had an emergency, one of my patients at the Spalding nursing home fell and broke her hip, and I left in a hurry, without my cell phone.”

  She nodded just once, and Michael felt immense relief. At least she was responding to him, however faintly. “Do you want me to hold you?”

  He realized that he would never have asked before. He would have just gathered her into his arms and cradled her. Now, however, there was this distance between them that he couldn’t seem to bridge.

  She shook her head and he flinched, trying to withstand the pain her rejection created in him. “Can you sit up, then, darling, and talk to me?”

  “I...can’t. I already talked to the other doctors. I told them how it is. I can’t go over it all again, Michael, it hurts my heart. I can’t stand feeling this way anymore.” Her voice was suddenly shrill. “I need...I need to be sedated. I want to be taken up to the psych ward. Please, Michael. You tell them I want to be taken to the psych ward. I want them to give me something, to knock me out so I can’t feel.” She was pleading now. “Just for a while, Michael. For a few days, a week. They said no, but you can make them do that for me, can’t you, Michael? You’re a doctor, you can sign an order or something.”

  “Polly. Oh, sweetheart. Listen to me, love. That’s not the answer. You know it’s not.”

  “Shut up.” Her voice became a shriek, and in a single sinuous motion she was sitting, startling amber eyes huge and crazed, features twisted with rage. “Just shut up. Don’t you ever dare tell me what the answer is for me. You don’t know. You can’t know. You...you’re never there. Nobody’s ever there, I’m alone all day. I can’t stand being alone. I can’t...I can’t...” She started to cry, that awful keening that signaled utter agony. “I want my baby. I want Susannah back. Oh, God, I want my little girl.”

  The words reverberated in his chest so intensely, so hurtfully he thought his heart would literally tear apart. It was now eleven days since their nine-year-old daughter, Susannah, had died here at St. Joe’s, upstairs in Room 314, at 2:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

  Michael had brought her in earlier that night after she’d lapsed into a coma, knowing as he hurried through the Emergency entrance that his beloved daughter would never leave this place alive. And each night since then he’d come out of exhausted sleep—if sleep came at all—feeling the light, still weight of her as she rested against his chest; feeling the desperation, the agony, of knowing he could do nothing more except bring her here to the hospital.

  “It hurts, Daddy,” she’d said to him earlier that day. “It hurts me. Make it go away....” He couldn’t think of that, couldn’t allow himself to think of that.

  “I want my baby, I want my baby...” Polly’s awful wailing echoed in his head, and he reached out and took her shoulders in his hands, fingers tightening on her. “Listen to me, Polly. Stop this now.” His voice was harsh because there was no other way he could deal with this. “If you really want to be signed into the psych ward, of course someone will do it. But we both know it’s not the answer.”

  “Then what is, Michael?” Along with entreaty, a hard, unforgiving anger glittered in her eyes. “What can I do to stop the hurting? The pills you gave me don’t help. I can’t sleep, I’m awake all night.”

  He knew she was, because he was, too, but somehow they couldn’t comfort each other.

  “I don’t want to feel anymore. I just want to be sedated so I can sleep, so the pain...goes...away.”

  “They won’t do that, Polly. They must have told you they won’t do that. Sure they’ll give you meds temporarily, but they’ll also insist you talk to someone, just as I’ve been begging you to do.”

  He’d set up an appointment with a grief counselor, but at the last moment Polly had refused to go.

  “I can’t spill my guts to a stranger. I never have and I shouldn’t have to now,” she’d insisted. “You’re not doing that, why should I? And we’ve got each other, Michael. I want you with me. I want you to take a few weeks off and just be with me. Please.”

  “I can’t, Polly. I have patients relying on me.” His working had created a terrible chasm between them, but he couldn’t do what she asked. He could control his agony only when he saw one patient after another, putting every ounce of concentration into his job, doing so until he was exhausted.

  He’d instructed his office nurse, Valerie, to increase his patient load, to accept the new patients they’d formerly referred to other physicians, so that every moment of his day and most of his evenings he was frenetically busy.

  “Will you at least meet with the staff social worker?” he pleaded. “Will you let her come here and see you if I can arrange it? She’ll also suggest you see someone who does grief counseling, but for now maybe she can help. Then, after you talk to her, if you still feel you want to be admitted, I’ll see to it.”

  Polly slid back on the bed and braced her shoulders against the pillows, wrapping her arms once again around her drawn-up legs. She dropped her head until it rested on her knees; her voice was muff
led and passive. “If that’s what I have to do, Michael, okay, I’ll do it. Send for whoever you like. I don’t care anymore.”

  He looked down at her, this passionate, unpredictable woman he’d been married to for thirteen years, this exotic, broken butterfly he adored, and for a moment, more than anything in the world, he longed to bridge the abyss that yawned between them.

  He took a tentative half step toward the bed, but then he turned abruptly and quickly left the room. Frannie Sullivan would know someone who could help Polly, he assured himself. He walked to the desk, praying that Frannie was in her office and that by some miracle she’d have time to come to Emerg to deal with his wife, because he couldn’t. He had patients who worshipped him, who brought him gifts and wrote him letters and told him he’d saved their lives or their marriage or their sanity. And yet for Polly he could do nothing.

  “Mrs. Forsythe? How do you do? My name is Frannie Sullivan.” Polly lifted her head. The tall young woman who’d come into the room smiled at her, but it wasn’t her beauty or her friendly countenance Polly noticed first. It was her very pregnant belly.

  Polly was instantly choked with anger. How could Michael do this to her? This promise of new life was the worst sort of betrayal.

  “I’ve spoken to Dr. Keeler and to your husband, Mrs. Forsythe. You’re having a rough time, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t be here—would I?—if my life was hunky-dory.”

  Polly’s sarcasm revealed her anger, but Frannie ignored it. Instead, she smiled again. “Gosh, I haven’t heard that expression since I was a kid. Hunky-dory, my father used to use it.”

  Polly suddenly remembered her own father vividly, and for the first time in years she longed for him. Dylan Rafferty, her huge, flamboyant Papa, was long dead. She remembered him best for bellowing at the three of them, at Polly, her sister, Norah, and their mother, Isabelle.

  "Get in the car, my girlies. We’re going home and everything’s gonna be hunky-dory from now on.”

  And for a month, or maybe six months or even ten, it was hunky-dory. Until her parents’ next massive fight. Then her mother would pack the huge brown suitcase once again and, dragging her sobbing daughters behind her, board a Greyhound bus. They’d get off in some nondescript little town and her mother would find a place for the three of them to live. Then she’d find a job, usually waitressing at the local greasy spoon.

  Polly and Norah would enroll in the local school, and for an indeterminate time they’d survive the terrifying interval it took for their papa to find them, make peace with Isabelle and bring them home.

  Yeah, it was hunky-dory, all right. Polly dragged her attention back to the hospital room because Frannie Sullivan was speaking again, asking the questions that seemed like litanies around this place.

  “Can you tell me how you’re feeling right now, Mrs. Forsythe?”

  Suicidal. Desperate. Sick, frightened, hopeless.

  Polly searched fruitlessly for a single word to describe all of it. “Awful. I feel awful. That’s why I came here.”

  “Can you tell me what particular thing you feel awful about?”

  Didn’t she know? Of course she did. Surely everyone in this entire hospital knew Dr. Forsythe’s daughter had died. So what was the point of making Polly verbalize it? Did this stupid woman think she needed to be reminded? The terrible rage that overwhelmed her at unexpected moments surged up like a firebomb inside Polly, and she screwed her face into a parody of concern.

  “Oh, gosh, didn’t anybody mention it to you? My kid died of brain cancer eleven days ago.” Polly used the snippiest tone she could muster. “I know around here death isn’t any big deal—you all just get used to it—but for me it was sort of traumatic, you understand.” Then the rage supporting her suddenly fizzled and the pain in her chest expanded again until it engulfed her.

  “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit.” Polly wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked, utter misery overwhelming her.

  Frannie’s voice barely penetrated. “Mrs. Forsythe, are you wanting to kill yourself?”

  The question didn’t bother Polly because it was exactly what she’d planned for today, before the inexplicable impulse came over her to drive to St. Joe’s and stagger through the door. She’d been heading for the Lion’s Gate Bridge. From there she’d thought to make her way through West Vancouver and onto the Squamish Highway. It was twisting and treacherous, high above the ocean. To go faster and faster, then miss a turn and fly off into blessed oblivion that dark February morning would have been so simple.

  Polly had lied to the psych resident when he’d asked the same question, but she didn’t have the energy for lies now, so she told Frannie Sullivan the truth.

  “Yeah. I planned it. I was going to do it today. Because I can’t go on. Don’t you understand, I don’t want to go on?”

  Frannie’s manner may have been gentle, but she was direct “It’s been eleven days since your daughter’s death. What’s kept you safe until now?”

  Michael? Michael was her safety net, or so she’d always believed. She’d waited so patiently through the endless days, waited for him to understand that she needed more than the few hours at night when he was there to hold her close; when, with the help of the medications he provided, she could sleep.

  She’d believed he would come to understand that she needed him more than his patients did, needed him to stay with her, that she was in a dangerous and terrible place. But this morning when she’d struggled up out of drugged sleep and he was gone again, when she’d called his office and he wasn’t there, she’d stopped waiting.

  She’d finally understood that Michael wasn’t going to be there for her, wasn’t going to help. He was going to walk out the door, leaving her alone to face the empty hours, the empty house, the empty room at the top of the stairs.

  “Who do you have as support, Mrs. Forsythe? Who can you call on to help you through this? Is your mother alive, can you call on her? Do you have a sister you’re close to?”

  “My mother’s alive, but she’s no help.” Frannie Sullivan obviously had no idea how utterly ridiculous it was to suggest Isabelle lend support to her daughter. Polly’s mother was and always had been so thoroughly self-absorbed she had nothing to offer anyone.

  As for Polly’s sister, Norah... anger once again blazed inside her, the familiar anger of betrayal. “My sister’s busy with her own life.” The truth was, Norah didn’t have much of a life, no family, no husband, just her job as a nurse here at St. Joe’s. Which made it so much worse that Norah had deserted Polly.

  Right after the funeral, Norah had left. For four days she hadn’t answered her phone or called to find out how Polly was. Then, when she came back from wherever she’d gone, she, too, went back to work.

  Oh, she’d phoned during the past few days, asking if Polly needed anything, but she wasn’t available, not really.

  Polly knew Norah had adored her niece, that she was grieving also, but Norah couldn’t comfort her. She obviously didn’t have any idea how to even begin.

  The fact was, Norah didn’t really know her sister at all, Polly concluded with bitterness. They were and always had been opposites in everything.

  “Do you have close friends, Mrs. Forsythe?” Friends? There were women she knew, other doctors’ wives, the mothers of Susannah’s friends, but Polly had never bothered to pursue female friendships. Her life had been busy; she’d had Michael, her daughter, her art, her beautiful home.

  She’d been one of the special ones, the blessed ones. She had—used to have—such a perfect life.

  “No close friends. Nobody. Just my husband. And he’s...” She couldn’t betray Michael, even now. “He’s very busy, he’s a doctor. You know how that is.”

  “I see.” Frannie nodded. “So what I’m hearing is that you’re feeling alone and very disturbed, and you’d feel safer and more supported if you were admitted to hospital. Is that what you’re saying, Mrs. Forsythe?”

  “Yeah.” It was a relief to be heard
. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I’ve been saying it over and over again. Doesn’t anybody listen around here? I want to be admitted. ”

  “Okay, I hear you. And I firmly believe we all know what’s best for ourselves. Under the circumstances, a short stay is probably a really good idea, Mrs. Forsythe. I’ll speak to Dr. Keeler. And there are several grief therapists who are excellent. I’ll make some calls and find out which of them has an opening.”

  Polly looked up at the other woman, and her eyes slid helplessly to the woman’s rounded belly.

  “When is your baby coming?”

  “Six weeks.” Frannie stroked the mound beneath her navy shirtwaist. “I lost my first baby when I was five months pregnant. I’m just now starting to hope that this time we’ll be okay.”

  Now it was Polly who nodded, and something shifted a bit inside her. “I miscarried before Susannah was born.” She’d blotted out the memory over the years, but now it came back and she heard herself saying, “I don’t want a grief counselor. If I have to talk to someone, I’d like it to be you.”

  Frannie hesitated, looking into Polly’s eyes for a long moment. They were calm and very blue, Polly noted.

  “I’m not an expert in this field, you understand, Mrs. Forsythe. Perhaps someone else would be more helpful.”

  Polly shook her head. “I won’t talk to anyone else.”

  There was silence while Frannie considered.

  “Okay, then.” She held out a hand, like a businessperson sealing a word-of-mouth agreement. “If that’s what you want. But I’ll ask you to make me a promise.”

  Polly waited.

  “I want you to give me a no-harm commitment, a promise that you won’t attempt suicide during the time we work together. Your word of honor.”

  Polly thought it over. In the five months that Susannah was sick, Polly had gradually turned against her church, her minister, even her belief in God. She’d tested each and found each lacking. None had made her daughter better or eased the pain of her death. And today, Polly had lost faith in her husband. She certainly had no reason to trust herself. She’d lost hope in every foundation that had held up her world.