by Lou Allin
When she opened her eyes, she blinked at a strong white light. She could make out no figures, instead a vision from the wrong end of a telescope. “Mother? I didn’t want to come this soon.” She tried to rise on her elbows, but fell back from a punishing feebleness she’d never imagined. Something pricked at one arm, but if she didn’t move, the pain subsided. The rules were clear. Then she closed her eyes and slept pillowed in a peaceful place with no more dreams.
When she awoke again, she saw streaks of dawn creeping through a window. But not her window. Not her spacious, comfortable room with its undulating waterbed across from the framed silhouette of her mother. A light came on. A jolly white-haired man with a big belly and a snowy beard stood by her side, holding her wrist, his soft hazel eyes crinkling. “Santa?”
“I’ve been called worse.” He offered a cherubic smile. “Sorry about the harsh light, but I need to look at you. Feeling better?”
She felt restored, as if she’d had a blood transfusion. Lifting one leg, then the other, she breathed in deliciously. Her systems were working again, power and energy on the rise. Palmers were made of the same stern stuff that had sent their forebears thousands of miles from Inverness to the Holy Land, bearing their signature fronds. He affixed a blood pressure cuff, pumped and waited, nodding approval at the result. “120/70. Good.” Then he flashed a penlight into her eyes. I’m ready for my close-up now, Mr. DeMille.
“What . . . happened?” Somehow she knew, but the details were splices of film stuttering across a broken screen.
“Welcome back, lucky lady. I hear you’re in the real estate business. You came within a whisker of buying a lot from Saint Peter. If your core body temperature had reached 105°F, your organs would have shut down.”
105°F. That was nearly the last image in her memory. On the empty bed beside them, he took a seat. Belle raised her hand. “What’s this?”
“Simple fluids and electrolytes. The ice bath saved you.”
“You gave me an ice bath here?”
Jim McAlister, according to his plastic nametag, chuckled softly and shook his head. “Maybe ‘icy’ is more the word. Your quick-thinking friends placed you in the lake. The ambulance would have taken an hour to reach your place. Close to thirty deaths in Canada each year from heat stroke. Usually athletes or the elderly shut up in apartments, but saunas can do an efficient job.” He consulted her chart and levelled his eyes at her, clear and honest, like her father’s. “No cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. The woman, Mrs. DesRosiers, is it? said you aren’t on anti-depressants or neuroleptics as far as she knows, but your blood showed traces of alcohol. That’s a bad combination for high temperatures, especially if you’re alone.”
Belle tried to remember. “One beer, but I guess it was a strong one.”
He raised a mildly chastizing eyebrow and cleared his throat. “You must have passed out.”
Chunks of memory were assembling like dominoes. “The door! It stuck!” She shifted in bed and winced at a pain in her right elbow.
“Surely not enough to have imprisoned you.” He moved her arm gently, examining the purple bruise. “You’re a strong woman. Look at those biceps. Do you lift weights?”
“It’s heredity. My father looks the same. Or at least he did.” The doctor was so kind, his admonition about the beer so gentle a lecture that she felt near tears. She licked her dry lips as her gaze gravitated to the water pitcher. Nodding, he poured her a glass, helping her shaking hands lift it to her mouth. City tap water she avoided, but now she sipped from the fountain of youth.
Paged by a nurse at the door, he said, “You can have visitors, but I want you to stay one more night. The blood tests look fine. I’m ordering an electrocardiogram to be on the safe side.”
He patted her arm and left at eight, according to her watch on a night table, still ticking after its licking in the lake. Belle was vibrating at the idea he planted about coronary problems. “Snap out of it, you hypo,” she muttered.
Half an hour later, in came Miriam, who ran to the bed and deposited a box of a dozen doughnuts. Even the luscious assortment pictured on the cardboard couldn’t tempt Belle. She needed water more than food. Miriam hugged her fiercely, her Brillo-pad hair surprisingly soft, like the woman herself, who could scare off a mugger but wept at Dark Victory. Miriam rarely wore perfume, but a light dust of lilac talcum powder rose from her warm skin.
“Hélène called me last night, but visiting hours were over. I’ll take the Auger showing this afternoon. I know your tricks. Drop of vanilla on the stove racks for a home-baked touch.” She cupped Belle’s face in her hands for an assessment, a worried crease dividing her light grey eyes. “I didn’t know what to expect. You look all right. A bit pinker than usual.”
“Medium rare. I’m okay, just humiliated. What would I do without you?” Belle tried to sit up for a marginal dignity, but the hospital gown gave “off the shoulders” a new meaning.
“Hélène told me the basics about your accident. She was too busy with Ed to go into much detail.”
“Ed?” Belle’s blood pressure spiked forty points. “What’s wrong with him?” She ran fingers through her short red hair, embarrassingly greasy and no doubt peppered with additional grey. This was no beauty salon, even at two thousand dollars per day.
Miriam stroked her arm, her face stern but reassuring. “You’re getting pale as the chicken I stuffed for dinner. Don’t fade out on me. It’s nothing serious. He had some chest pains.”
“Chest . . .” Belle felt a sudden nausea. Was she responsible for this crisis? Soon she’d need a keeper.
Miriam turned toward the door as a clamour arose in the corridor. Hélène wheeled Ed into the room while he barked directions. Parking him with a sharp look and kicking the tire for good measure, Hélène approached the bed. “You’re awake. The nurse came and told me in the ICU.”
Craning her neck with difficulty, Belle looked at Ed, fussing with his standard blue gown, trying to cover one large, freckled shoulder. “Ed, are you—”
With the professionalism of one who’d visited many elderly relatives in the hospital, Hélène cranked the bed up and adjusted the IV line. “Dad’s fine. A pulled muscle in his rib cage. You know what happens when fat old men mention chest pains. They get every ding dong test tout de suite. Women have to grow their own bypasses like my sister Maria.”
Ed grunted. His bare pink feet, totally hairless, bounced on the footrests like newborn piglets. “I haven’t had a bite to eat since lunch yesterday. Do they starve people to get them out faster?”
Belle pointed to the box, and Miriam passed it around. Ed’s round face broke into a holiday smile as he juggled a doughnut.
Hélène told most of the story, in deference to his gobbles. Freya had arrived on their deck and barked, joined by Rusty until the door was opened. Hearing all the ruckus, Dave and Ed came up from the dock.
“How did you know where to find me?” Belle asked.
“It was Lassie to the rescue,” Hélène said.
Ed smacked his lips, red jelly dribbling down his unshaven chin, and reached for a maple dip. “Rin Tin Tin, more like.”
“Leave some for Belle.” Hélène snatched the box from his grasp. “Freya galloped along the road, down your drive, and straight to the sauna, jumping at the door. We couldn’t imagine what could have happened, but we knew something was terribly wrong.” She paused for breath, her bright eyes caught up in the drama, laugh lines softening the corners. “Dave was so fast. He ran like a sprinter and had you in his arms minutes before Dad and I could make our way down.”
“Dave saved my life?” He’d paid her back in a way she couldn’t have imagined.
“Forced the darn door. Said it stuck some wicked. You were out cold.” She paused with a grin. “Well, not cold. Then the men put you into the lake. Dipped like a Dairy Queen cone.” She looked at the cross on the wall and did a fast genuflection of gratitude. “Or maybe baptism is a better description.”
“C
all me born again.” Belle shuddered to recall that chill. “So that’s why—”
“Dave took the St. John Ambulance training. You were burning up. Face red as a lobster.”
And without much more clothes, she thought, her helplessness a result of body and mind parting company. She’d never gone under anaesthesia and hoped she never would. Nor would she enter a sauna alone again. Social occasions only. Hélène cocked her thumb at Ed. “Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger had to carry you to our car, show off his new hip. We told the 911 people that we’d meet the ambulance on the way to save time. We pulled a transfer at the North Star Confectionary on Skead Road. Dad had keeled over by then, so they got a twofer.”
“I never keeled,” Ed said with a pout. “You’re exaggerating as usual, woman. Ought to write a book, the way you make things up.”
Belle was tiring from information overload. As her swollen lids fluttered, she saw Hélène elbow Miriam. The women kissed her, and Hélène promised to return that evening with her reading glasses and vitamins. Belle dozed, vaguely registering conversation in the hall, clinks of carts, rolling gurneys and the occasional laugh which relieved the poignant traffic of health care. When she was taken down for the electrocardiogram, she slept through the experience.
Back in her room at last, she felt a cool, gentle hand brush her forehead. A tiny woman in a white habit, bent from a humpback, hovered at her side, an odd plant in her wizened hand. The blood-red garnets in the rosary at her waist winked, the concession to luxury reminiscent of Chaucer’s Prioress. “I chose this one especially for you.”
It was Sister Veronica, a Cecilianist nun, who preferred the formal habit out of tradition or stubborn individualism. The Health Centre had originally been St. Joseph’s Hospital until the amalgamation of Sudbury’s three care sites. Of an age known only to God and probably fudged in personnel records, she worked sixty-hour weeks in “semi-retirement” and acted as Crisis Liaison Officer, comforting worried families and collecting toys for sick children and loaner plants for adults. Every few hours, she cruised the chapel, where she’d met Belle last year, who had been praying that her father would survive a choking incident.
Belle squinted at the strange growth, green cups with pink insides, fringed with tiny spikes which closed over their victims, the stuff of science fiction or The Little Shop of Horrors. “A Venus fly trap? I’m not that ruthless a realtor.”
Her thin mouth an enigma of dry humour, Sister gave an offended sniff from her patrician nose. “Cerberus is a personal favourite. It’s a Darwinian, like you, and it’ll provide entertainment . . . if a bug comes along.”
Belle laughed until her stomach muscles hurt. “I’ll leave the window open and whistle.”
Pushing an errant grey hair back under her wimple, Sister gave her a steely look, as if the fun was now over. “I heard what happened. Everyone’s talking about the woman with heat stroke at the beginning of October. Sounds rather foolish to drink like that.”
Belle felt her face flush with annoyance at the rumour mill. Did the hospital broadcast bloodwork results over the PA? “God looks out for fools, and I had one beer. One.” She described her friends’ efforts.
A rare smile of nostalgia broke out on the venerable old nun’s wrinkled face, a badger in drag. “Dave Malanuk. I remember Davey from that terrible tent fire. He was airlifted to Sick Children’s Burn Unit in Toronto, then came back here for a month while the grafts healed. Sixteen. He was so brave.” She paused in reflection. “Very determined. Nothing would stand in his way.”
“Maybe that’s why he chose fundraising as a career,” Belle said. “Never takes no for an answer and makes people feel good about giving more.”
“Yes, as I recall, he was instrumental in the drive for our long-awaited MRI machine.” Sister Veronica glanced at the gold lapel watch pinned to her habit. Then she excused herself for a grief-counselling appointment as lunch arrived.
“Bring me back a Big Mac,” Belle called.
She managed only the jello, juice and oatmeal cookie. What lurked in the other divisions of the tray would baffle scientists. A double chocolate doughnut added to the sugar fix.
At three o’clock, Len arrived with a bunch of red carnations, their fragrance adding a welcome spicy touch to the typical tang of disinfectant. “Dave called me. A sauna, for God’s sake. Who would have thought?” he said. “How long will you be out of commish?”
“Getting sprung tomorrow. Have a doughnut.”
“Sour cream. Mmmmm.” Len took three quick bites.
This was beginning to resemble a party. Guests, food, entertainment. What next? She worked her brain to remember her former life. It seemed like a week since she’d entered the sauna. Was that how coma patients felt? Pulling herself back to the present, she asked, “So did you hear about the test results on that bone?”
“Uh.” He struggled to swallow and looked out the window at an air ambulance settling down onto the helipad. “They . . . I’m afraid they lost it.” His voice was subdued, and his pouchy eyes darted back and forth.
She didn’t like the sound of this, and her voice rose. “The lab lost the bone? How could—”
“Not to worry. I’m sure it’ll turn up. Listen up, I have new information on Jason Lew—”
“What’s this about a lab and a bone? Are we talking about some half-baked civilian investigation?” A deep voice echoed in the doorway. In a charcoal trenchcoat, Steve walked in with an armful of reading material. He glowered at Belle as she squirmed like a shady ladybug on a pin, offering a few feeble sentences, reaching for the water in a bid for sympathy.
“You did what? At a crime scene?” His dark brows crossed into storm mode and lightning backlit his black eyes. Len moved from the bed and retreated to a chair, lacing his hands over his belly.
No sense in lying. Pick your battles. Belle struggled to explain herself, choosing words carefully, like playing Scrabble. Steve took his job seriously, so prickly about interference. “It had already been removed by a coon or a fox. We only—”
“It’s a good thing you’re already in a hospital.” He gave a cursory nod at Len, whose head and neck were turtling into his torso then stabbed his finger towards Belle. “He’s a PI, if that’s any excuse. You’re a realtor. Do I have to read you the dictionary definition?”
“Sorry, I’ve got an appointment.” Len oozed out.
With an unintelligible curse which might have been Ojibwa, Steve dumped the pile on a table and strode out, leaving Belle like a child caught playing with hand grenades.
She amused herself until dinner by leafing through his thoughtful gifts. Maclean’s, Canadian Geographic, even a Storyteller, Canada’s fiction magazine. What surprised her was a hardcover copy of Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista, a comprehensive study of the era of babes, goddesses and working girls who came of age with the birth of sound and ran away with the times. $40.95. Ouch. He never stayed mad, but the tempest had to blow itself out.
Hélène returned at seven, carrying a wide-mouthed aluminum thermos and a couple of whole-grain buns. “Dad was still shovelling rigatoni when I left. Making up for lost time, since he shed a few ounces. Here’s some homemade minestrone.” She placed the reading glasses on the table with a baggie of pills. “Hope I got the right ones. Just took a general selection from that big jar in your bathroom. What’s this lecithin?”
“Brain food. I’d better triple the dosage. You’re an angel.” She pointed to the cumbersome tray with five kinds of mush in neutral tones. It might have been shepherd’s pie, lasagna or lamb stew.
“Kill it before it multiplies.” Hélène trucked the monster to the corridor where she deposited it like toxic waste.
“The nurse said all meals come from Ottawa in a cost-saving measure. Buying flats of TV dinners from Costco would be a hell of a lot tastier and cheap. Take a letter to the Minister of Health.” As she heard a dog bark down on the Lake Ramsey boardwalk where city folk took their pets, she realized that she hadn’t thought of the can
ine who had gone the distance.
“How’s Freya?” Belle asked.
Hélène shook with laughter, pouring out the soup and handing Belle a spoon. “She got a top sirloin as a reward. Could have had a couple of pounds of old moosemeat, too, but Ed cleaned out the freezer a few weeks ago and took it to the dump along with a ton of junk in the plow truck. My cousin in Bisco always brings us a fresh quarter at Thanksgiving.”
Belle snapped mental fingers. The ancient plow truck’s bed was half gone, and a culvert humped the road near where the suspect parcel had landed. “Wait a minute. Was the meat in an LCBO bag?” Hélène’s surprised nod gave the answer. That explained the arrival of the package. She felt sorry about having blamed the trapper, wherever he was now, probably working his fall line at Thor Lake.
“Any new developments on Micro?”
“Best news for last. The bike tracks matched his model. The Outside Store sold only five of those, and the police have accounted for the others. So he was there, Belle.” She squeezed her hand and managed a smile.
After her friend left, Belle picked up the Sudbury Star she’d brought. A grow-op in the news again. Members of the Joint Forces Drug Enforcement Unit had raided an apartment on Prete Street. Over two hundred plants were found, each with a value of a thousand dollars. In addition, by-products such as cannabis resin, shake and bud were recovered. This initiative made the personal pot farm she’d seen in the bush look like kindergarten. Two hundred thousand? Her eyes bugged out like Sylvester’s before a vat of cream. One good year and either early retirement, or a cell in the North Bay Penitentiary with no more bagels. She was still ravenous, despite Hélène’s scrumptious soup. She checked the doughnut box. Empty.
NINETEEN
Shortly before eight the next morning, a huge nurse with chestnut eyes and a Celtic foghorn voice bore down on her with a tray. “Breakfast.”