by Peter Straub
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“A blood clot entered her brain and cut off the flow of oxygen. If oxygen cannot reach a certain area of the brain, that area experiences tissue damage. In your mother’s case, the area involved represents a portion of the left hemisphere.” He touched the left side of his head. “Soon after admission to the ICU, her heart developed arrhythmia, due to the general shock to her system. I’ve given her medication for that condition, but we observe a general weakening of heart functions. Is your mother a heavy smoker?”
“She doesn’t smoke,” I said.
“Star worked in a lot of smoky nightclubs,” Aunt May said. “She has a lovely singing voice.”
“To your knowledge, has she ever taken drugs of any kind?”
“She smoked her share of pot,” May said. “Some of those people she hung out with, you could smell it on them.”
“Secondhand cigarette smoke and a history of marijuana use could be contributing factors,” the doctor said. “Your mother is …” He looked at the clipboard and did an almost invisible double take. “Fifty-three. Ordinarily, that would give us a good prognosis. We are hoping that the Coumadin will break up the clot. If your mother survives the next twelve hours, we are looking at a long recovery involving extensive therapy. That’s the best news I can give you.”
“Twelve hours,” I said.
His face smoothed out like a mask. “Everything depends upon the state of the individual patient.”
“Will she recognize me?”
“You shouldn’t expect much more than that.” He looked at his clipboard again. “Do you in fact have any siblings?”
“No,” I said, and Aunt Nettie immediately put in, “I told you that. Star only had the one boy, this one here.”
Dr. Barnhill nodded and left. May had disappeared somewhere behind me.
“Siblings?”
“Zwick went to town on whatever your mother was babbling when we got here, and you know, if someone sets it down on paper, someone else is going to believe it.”
I looked over my shoulder. Aunt May was leaning on her cane and talking to a burly young man with a short blond beard and a lot of hair pulled back into a blunt ponytail. He stepped back and said, “Hey, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
I pushed aside the curtain and went in. The stranger at the focus of all the blinking machines instantly resolved into a frail but still recognizable version of Star Dunstan. Her cheeks looked distended and waxen. Clear fluid in suspended bags ran through lines that entered beneath the bandages low on her forearms. A glowing red light had been taped to her right index finger. I took her hand and kissed her forehead.
Both of her eyes opened wide. “Uunnd.” The right side of her mouth tugged down and stalled like wax softening and rehardening. She fought to raise herself from the pillow, and her hand tightened on mine. “Aaah … vvv … ooo.”
“I love you, too,” I said. She nodded and sank back onto the pillow.
Little sounds and signals kept on announcing themselves with a discreet stridency that seemed on the verge of falling into a melodic pattern. The light on the blanket, the rises and falls of the moving graph, the descending curves of the tubes were more present to me than my own feelings. It was as though I, too, were in a sort of coma, moving and walking on autopilot.
My hand rose from the guardrail and touched my mother’s cheek. It was yielding and slightly chill. Star opened her eyes and smiled up with the working half of her face.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Eee spitl.”
“Right. I’m going to stay here until you get better.”
Her right eye clamped shut, and the left side of her mouth opened and closed. She tried again. “Whaa … mmmdd … kkk … kkmm … rrr?”
“I thought you were in trouble,” I said.
A tear spilled from her right eye and trailed down her cheek. “Pur Unnd.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, but she was asleep again.
17
A white-haired Irish politician introduced himself as Dr. Muldoon, the heart specialist assigned to my mother’s case, and described Star’s condition as “touch and go.” His confidential whiskey baritone made it sound like an invitation to a cruise. Shortly after Muldoon’s campaign stop, the muscular guy with the ponytail who had been talking to May went into the cubicle, and I followed him.
He was taking notes on the readouts of a machine that would have looked at home in the cockpit of a 747. When he saw me, he stood up, nearly filling the entire space between the equipment and the side of the bed. The tag on his chest said his name was Vincent Hardtke, and he looked like an old high school football player who put away a lot of beer on the weekends.
I asked him how long he had been working at St. Ann’s.
“Six years. This is a great staff, in case you have any doubts. Lawndale gets the fancy Ellendale clientele, but if I got sick, this is where I’d come. Straight up. Hey, if it was my mom, I’d want to know she was getting good care, too.”
“You’ve seen other patients like my mother. How did they do?”
“I’ve seen people worse off come through fine. Your mom’s pretty steady right now.” Hardtke stepped back. “That old lady with the cane, she’s a piece of work.” He pushed the curtain aside and grinned at Aunt May. She snubbed him with the authority of a duchess.
By late morning, visitors had gathered in the passages between the nurses’ station and the two rows of cubicles. Stretching my legs, I walked all the way around the nurses’ station a couple of times and remembered something Nettie had said.
Nurse Zwick ignored me until I had come to a full stop directly in front of her. “Nurse,” I said, indicating my duffel bag and knapsack against the wall, “if you think my bags are in the way, I’d be happy to move them anywhere you might suggest.”
She had forgotten all about them. “Well, this isn’t a luggage car.” She momentarily considered ordering me to take them to the basement or somewhere else equally distant. “Your things don’t seem to be in anyone’s way. Leave them there for the time being.”
“Thank you.” I moved away, then approached her again.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Barnhill told me that you spoke to my mother this morning.”
She began looking prickly, and a trace of pink came into her cheeks. “Your mother came in while we were having the first patient summaries.”
I nodded.
“She was confused, which is normal for a stroke person, but when she saw my uniform, she got hold of my arm and tried to say something.”
“Could you make it out?”
Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. “I didn’t make her say anything, Mr. Dunstan, she wanted to talk to me. Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr. Barnhill displeased your aunts, I’m sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition.”
“She must have been grateful for your attention,” I said.
Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. “It’s nice to deal with a gentleman.”
“My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly.” This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say, You have to give some to get some. “Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?”
Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. “At first I couldn’t make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said, ‘They stole my babies.’ ”
18
As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses’ station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.
Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother’s heart. 5, Mr. Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs. Helen Loome,
the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr. Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr. Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.
“It’s the alcohol leaving his system,” said Nettie. “Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker.”
May said, “Mr. Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life.”
Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr. Temple.
Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world of Cherry Street as if born to it. Queenie’s marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.
“Is Toby Kraft still around?” I asked.
“Last I heard, dogs still have fleas,” Nettie fired back.
Aunt May levered herself to her feet like a rusty derrick. Her eyes glittered. “Pearl Gates turned up in her second-best dress. Pearlie’s in that Mount Hebron congregation with Helen Loome, you know, she went there from Galilee Holiness.”
Nettie craned her neck. “The dress she dyed pea-soup green, that makes her look like a turtle?”
Aunt May stumped up to a hunchbacked woman outside cubicle 9. I turned to Nettie. “Pearlie Gates?”
“She was Pearl Hooper until she married Mr. Gates. In a case like that, the man should take the woman’s name, instead of making a fool out of her. Considering the pride your Uncle Clark takes in our family, it’s a wonder he didn’t call himself Clark Dunstan, instead of me becoming Mrs. Annette Rutledge.”
“Uncle Clark is all right, I hope?”
“An expert on everything under the sun, same as ever. What time is it?”
“Not quite twelve-thirty.”
“He’s driving around the parking lot to find a good enough place. Unless Clark has empty spaces on both sides, he’s afraid someone’ll put a scratch on his car.” She looked up at me. “James passed away last year. Fell asleep in front of the television and never woke up. Didn’t I give you that news?”
“I wish you had.”
“Probably I got mixed up if I called you or not.”
For the first time, I was seeing my relatives from an adult perspective. Nettie had not considered telling me about James’s death for as long as a heartbeat.
“Here comes your Uncle Clark, right on schedule.”
The old man in the loose yellow shirt coming around the desk bore only a generic resemblance to the man I remembered. His ears protruded at right angles, like Dumbo’s, from the walnut of his skull. Above the raw pink of his drooping lower lids, the whites of his eyes shone the ivory of old piano keys.
Uncle Clark drew up in front of his wife like a vintage automobile coming to rest before a public monument. “How are we doing at the moment?”
“The same,” said Nettie.
He lifted his head to inspect me. “If you’re little Ned, I’m the man who saved your mother’s life.”
“Hello, Uncle Clark,” I said. “Thanks for calling the ambulance.”
He waved me aside and moved through the curtain. I followed him inside.
Clark went to the side of the bed. “Your boy is here. That should help you pull through.” He examined the lights and monitors. “Hadn’t been for me, you’d still be on the kitchen floor.” He raised a bent finger to a screen. “This is her heart, you know. You get a picture of how it beats.”
I nodded.
“Up, down, up, then that big one—see? That’s a strong heart.”
I wrapped my hand around my mother’s. Her breathing changed, and her eyelids flickered.
Clark looked at me with a familiar combination of provisional acceptance and lasting suspicion. “About lunchtime, isn’t it?”
My mother’s suddenly open eyes fastened on me.
He patted Star’s flank. “Get yourself back on your feet now, honey.” The curtain swung shut behind him.
Star clutched my hand, lifted her head a few inches off the pillow, and uttered my name with absolute clarity. “Hvv … tkk tt ooo.”
The machines emitted squawks of alarm. “You have to get some rest, Mom.”
She propelled herself upright. Her fingers fastened around my bicep like a handcuff. She dragged in an enormous breath and on the exhalation breathed, “Your father.”
A nurse brushed me aside to place one hand on my mother’s chest, the other on her forehead. “Valerie, you have to relax. That’s an order.” She hitched up the bedclothes, introduced herself as June Cook, the head nurse in the ICU, and clasped my mother’s hand. “We’re going to go out now, Valerie, so you get some rest.”
“She’s called Star,” I said.
My mother licked her lips and said, “Rob. Ert.” Her eyes closed, and she was instantly asleep.
Outside the cubicle, Uncle Clark was tottering up the row of curtains in black-and-white spectator shoes, like Cab Calloway’s.
“Where’s he going?” I asked.
“Late for lunch,” Nettie said. “Lunch is late for him, more like.”
On the way out, I took off my blazer, folded it into my duffel, and zipped the bag shut again.
19
Nettie lowered her bag onto a table in the visitors’ lounge and pulled out sandwiches wrapped in cling film and a Tupperware container filled with potato salad. “No sense spending good money on cafeteria food.”
Clark dumped potato salad onto his plate, sectioned off a portion the size of a gnat, and raised it to his mouth. “When did you blow in, Neddie, a couple days ago?”
“This morning,” I said.
He cocked his head. “Is that right? I heard something about a big-money poker game.”
May gave me a look of bright approval.
“I don’t play poker.” I bit into a roast beef sandwich.
“Where did you happen to hear a thing like that?” Nettie asked him.
“Checking my traps.”
“Uh-huh.” Nettie rolled her eyes at me. “The old fool can hardly walk upstairs anymore, but he has no trouble getting to his favorite bars. If he missed a day they’d think he dropped dead.”
“Neddie, did you win a lot of money?” Aunt May asked.
“I didn’t win any money,” I said.
“Where was the game?”
Clark took a minuscule bite of his sandwich. “Upstairs in the Speedway Lounge. My friends there treat me like royalty. Like a king.”
“Friends like that common tramp Piney Woods, I suppose.”
Clark coaxed another pebble of potato salad onto his fork. “There’s no harm in Piney. Son, I hope to have the pleasure of introducing you to Piney Woods one of these days. I consider Piney a man of the world.” He brought the speck of potato salad to his mouth. “Matter of fact, it was Piney who told me about you winning that money.”
“How much?” May asked. “A whole lot, like a thousand, or a little lot, like a hundred?”
“I didn’t win any money,” I said. “I got into town this morning, and I came straight to the hospital.”
May said, “Joy told me—”
“You heard him,” Clark said. “Joy doesn’t see too good these days.”
“How are Aunt Joy and Uncle Clarence?” I asked.
“Clarence and Joy don’t get out much,” May said.
Clark nibbled at his sandwich. “It could be put that way. My advice is, die young, while you can still enjoy it.” He examined the contents of my plate. “A boy like that could eat you out of house and home.”
“I’d be happy to help out with the shopping and cooking, things like that.”
“Is that what you do now, son? You a short-o
rder cook?”
“I’m a programmer for a software company in New York,” I said. His expression told me that he had never before heard the words programmer or software. “We make things that tell computers what to do.”
“Factory work keeps a man out of trouble, anyhow.” He bit off a tiny wedge of sandwich and put the rest on his plate, getting into stride. “The problem today is that young men do nothing but hang out on the street. I blame the parents. Too selfish to give their children the necessary discipline. Our people are the worst of all, sad to say.”
He could have gone on for hours. “Tell me about this morning, Uncle Clark. I still don’t know what happened.”
He leaned back in his chair and aimed his best sneer at me. “Carl Lewis wouldn’t have been out of his chair by the time I was dialing the second 1 in 911. Saved the girl’s life.”
“The bell rang about six in the morning,” Nettie said. “I’m up at that hour because I have trouble sleeping. That’s Star, I said to myself, and the poor girl needs her family’s loving care. I could feel my insides start to worry.”
“The Dunstan blood,” Clark said, nodding at me.
“As soon as I opened the door, Neddie, your mother fell right into my arms. I never in my life thought I’d see her look so bad. Your mother was always a pretty, pretty woman, and she still would have been, in spite of how she let herself go.”
“Extra body weight never hurt a woman’s looks,” Clark said.
“It wasn’t the pounds she put on, and it wasn’t the gray in her hair. She was scared. ‘You’re worried about something, plain as day,’ I said. The poor thing said she had to get some sleep before she could talk. ‘Okay, honey,’ I said, ‘rest up on the davenport, and I’ll make up your old bed and get breakfast ready for when you want it.’ She told me to take her address book from her bag and call you in New York. Of course, I had your number right in my kitchen.
“I had a feeling you were already on the way, Neddie, but I didn’t know how close you were! After that, I did the coffee and went up to put clean sheets on the bed. When I came back down, she wasn’t on the davenport. I went into the kitchen. No Star. All of a sudden, I heard the front door open and close, and I rushed out, and there she was, walking back to the davenport. Told me she was feeling dizzy and thought fresh air would help.”