by David Bell
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“If you need help covering your classes next week or anything, I can do it.”
“I know,” I said. “Thanks.”
“I’m glad you called,” he said. “I mean, I wish you didn’t need to, but I’m glad you did.”
“It felt like I needed you,” I said.
“Is that a problem?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m okay with it.”
I didn’t know how much time passed with the three of us sitting mostly in silence. It must have been twenty minutes or so before a nurse came through the swinging doors and called out for the family of Ronald Hampton. We all perked up, and Paul and I moved quickly toward the nurse.
“The doctor is coming to speak to you,” she said. “You can wait in this room here.”
She pointed us toward a door. Paul went through. I asked, “Is my brother okay?”
The nurse smiled without much joy. “The doctor is on his way. I don’t know anything about his condition.”
Paul and I waited with the door closed. I was glad Dan hadn’t tried to follow us. He could have come into the room and heard the news from the doctor. But was it his place? Were we there as a couple? My heart started to thump as we waited. I tried to read the tea leaves. Would they have left us here to wait if Ronnie was dead? Would they tell us he was dead in a room like the one we were in? Is that how things worked?
“Your friend seems nice,” Paul said.
“He is.”
“It’s thoughtful of him to come.”
“Yes. Paul, do I really have a half sister?” I asked.
“Had,” Paul said. “She’s dead.”
His voice sounded cold and flat as he said the words. Almost angry. Was he angry with me for bringing it up? Or was he angry about something else?
“I never told you about the will—”
The door opened, and a middle-aged woman in scrubs entered the room. She reached out and shook hands with us, introducing herself as Dr. Something-or-other. I didn’t catch her name. I didn’t care what it was.
She didn’t beat around the bush.
“Ronald is stable now,” she said. “We’re moving him to a bed in intensive care for a while, probably the next twenty-four hours or so. After that, we’ll move him to a regular room and continue to monitor him there.”
“He’s alive?” I asked, my voice sounding like a child’s in the small, cramped room. A child pleading with an authority figure. Please tell me my brother is alive.
“He is,” the doctor said. “Very much so. Like I said, we’ll watch him and make sure there isn’t any long-term damage. It doesn’t look like the dose he took was that high, so there’s reason for optimism.”
“How did this happen, Doctor?” Paul asked. “He has Down syndrome, and he’s been in Dover Community.”
“They’ll be figuring that out over there in the coming days, I’m sure,” the doctor said. “But my guess would be he’s been holding pills back and not swallowing them. Maybe everything they give him. Your brother takes a variety of medications, which is not unusual for Down syndrome. He could create a pretty good cocktail over there. But like I said, thankfully not enough to do the job he wanted to do.” She stood up. “You’ll be able to go up and see him in about an hour if you want to go home or get something to eat. Someone will let you know when it’s time.”
She nodded at us and left the room.
I felt relief. A small measure, but it was there. I also felt something else. I turned to Paul and said, “I think I’m hungry.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Dan was still there when we came back into the waiting room. He looked at us expectantly, and I suspect he could tell simply by the looks on our faces that we hadn’t received terrible news.
“He’s okay,” I said to him. “I mean, as okay as he can be, considering.”
“Good,” Dan said.
“We’re going to get to see him in ICU soon. They’re moving him up there now.”
“Good,” Dan said again.
Paul said, “We were going to go get something to eat, if you’d like to join us.”
“He can’t,” I said.
Both Dan and Paul looked at me. I sounded edgy and firm, like someone giving commands to a small dog. I could read the look on Dan’s face. He seemed a little hurt. I knew he thought all the progress we had made—my needing him—had evaporated with one sentence barked out by me.
“Can you excuse us just a moment, Paul?” I said.
He nodded and walked away, heading to the cafeteria.
I turned back to Dan. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need to talk to my uncle. Alone.”
He still looked hurt, but he put on a brave face for me. “I understand.”
“It’s about that person I was talking to today,” I said. “And a bunch of other things.”
“Okay,” he said. “Family stuff. You know, someday we are going to have to talk about all of this… and you’re going to have to tell me what’s going on.” He paused. “If we’re going to be in any kind of relationship.”
“I will,” I said. “I wish I could tell you all about it today. Right now. But I just can’t. I have to get some other answers first. Believe me, I’d rather be with you than doing any of this.”
He nodded. “Call me when you can.”
I leaned up and kissed him. Right in front of everyone.
“Later,” I said. “I promise.”
• • •
I selected a lot of food as we went through the St. Vincent’s cafeteria line. I took a plate of roast beef and gravy with a side of mashed potatoes—and more gravy. I also grabbed a piece of chocolate pie. I hadn’t eaten all day, and it was well past lunch. I didn’t even care that the pie looked like it had been sitting on the cafeteria line since the Reagan administration.
Paul was more controlled. He picked a salad and a turkey sandwich. When we reached the cash register, he paid. I made a token offer to pick up the tab, but he refused. I doubted I had more than a few dollars in my wallet.
We found a table out of the way. The cafeteria wasn’t very crowded on a Saturday. People in Dover seemed to be falling ill and having accidents mostly during normal business hours. I dug into my food as soon as we sat down. And I started with the questions right away.
“So, it’s all true?” I asked. “What this guy told me?”
“I don’t know everything he told you,” Paul said. He picked at his salad with a plastic fork.
“I’ll give you the gist,” I said. “Mom was married to that guy—and not just for a short amount of time. They had a daughter. Oh, and her name is Elizabeth, same as mine. That’s not creepy at all, Paul. Not at all. And on top of that, this daughter, this other Elizabeth—my namesake apparently—ran off and was murdered, possibly by a serial killer. And Mom never told me about it. Neither Mom nor Dad—or you—ever told me about it.”
Paul looked as though he didn’t know what to say. He concentrated on his food, his head drooping a bit between his shoulders. My little rant had brought something home to me, something I hadn’t fully comprehended before. This was no longer just about Mom. Sure, she had kept things from me. But so had Dad—and I thought he and I had understood each other in ways Mom and I didn’t. And Paul. He was supposed to be the cool one, the favorite uncle.
Why didn’t anyone tell me?
“For the record,” Paul finally said, “I think your mother should have told you. I encouraged her to.”
“Why didn’t she?”
He laid the plastic fork aside. “Honestly, I think she was embarrassed. You know what she was like. Private, closed off. Strong. She didn’t admit weakness very well, and here she would have had to tell someone very important to her, someone whose opinion she valued, that she had made a horrible mistake in marrying Gordon Baxter. But she had her reasons for doing it.”
Paul’s response seemed to miss the point. I mostly wanted to understand why I
had never been told about having a sister who’d been murdered. Paul seemed more concerned with Mom’s marriage.
“Why was marrying him a horrible mistake?” I asked.
“You met him,” Paul said. “What did you think of him?”
I summoned a mental picture of Gordon Baxter. An odd man, that was for sure. Yes, a little creepy. I couldn’t imagine my mother marrying or spending time with someone like that, but then I couldn’t imagine my mother spending time with any man. I knew she and my father loved each other, but their marriage sometimes looked like a relationship between platonic roommates.
“I think I’m missing something,” I said, taking another couple of bites of my food.
“He’s a criminal, Elizabeth,” Paul said.
“What do you mean?” I chewed, trying to concentrate on what Paul was saying.
“He’s spent time in jail.”
“And Mom married him?”
“This was after he and your mom split up,” Paul said. “Several years after. But make no mistake: the guy’s bad news. I never liked him. He was an asshole back in high school, and I’m sure he hasn’t changed.”
Asshole? Paul rarely cursed.
“Mom was a good judge of character,” I said. “She didn’t tolerate anything. She acted like leaving the toilet seat up meant you were going to hell.”
“They met in high school,” Paul said. “Your mom was quiet. Bookish would be the polite way to put it. A nerd, I guess, is what young people would say now. She didn’t have a lot of friends. She certainly never dated. She didn’t even go to the dances we had at the school. And Gordon… he was something of a big man on campus. He played sports, football and baseball. He had a lot of friends. I guess he was handsome in his own way, even though he was short.”
Again, I visualized the man I’d spoken to in McDonald’s, the man who’d been married to my mother. “Handsome” didn’t come to mind. “Toadish” was more like it. But I was meeting him fifty years after the fact. In the wedding photo, he had looked only okay, but I wouldn’t say handsome.
“Go on,” I said.
“He took an interest in Leslie,” Paul said. “I don’t know why. She was a pretty girl when she was young, even if she was reserved and quiet. You’ve seen the pictures of her. It would be easy to see, given her looks, that a young man could be taken with her. I suspect her quiet nature, her refusal or inability—I’m not sure which it was—to reveal anything of herself to the world made her seem even more alluring. You know, the power of mystery. So he pursued her. Asked her out on dates. Took her to dances. He fell for her, and she for him.”
“What did she see in him, then, if he was such an asshole?”
“You remember high school,” Paul said. “What would it be like to have a popular guy show an interest in you? Everybody wants to feel special, to feel pursued and desirable. Right? Your mother was different, but she wasn’t that different. Inside, she was a teenage girl who wanted the things teenage girls want.”
“She wanted them enough to marry him?”
“They got married during their senior year in high school and settled in Haxton.”
“Wait—during their senior year. They got married while they were still in high school?”
“Yes.”
“Was Mom… ?” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. The whole idea seemed so crazy to me.
Paul nodded his head. “She became pregnant with Beth during her senior year and had her when she was just seventeen. Your mom’s birthday is late. July. She didn’t turn eighteen until after graduation. After Beth was born in June.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Mom? Mom got knocked up?”
“Don’t be crude,” he said.
“Was it a scandal? Didn’t they used to send girls away for that?”
“They did. Sometimes. But your mom got married to Gordon as soon as they realized what had happened. They cut it close. I’m sure people did the math and figured it out, but they got married so fast it couldn’t really become an issue. Some couples just got married during high school back then, pregnant or not. This was small-town Ohio. Kids got married young. Girls started having babies young.”
“And Mom didn’t want to go to college?” I asked. “Even once she had the baby?”
“This was 1960,” Paul said. “Do you think women from Haxton, Ohio, went off to college, baby or not? Hell, the guys barely did. I was one of the few. When I told my father, your grandfather, I wanted to go to Ohio State and get a college degree, he laughed at me. It was another time.”
“But you said Mom was different.”
“She was. But even she couldn’t fight the combined societal forces of sexism and low expectations for girls. She did what she was supposed to do. More so, really. Do you think my parents ever expected her to get married? They probably looked at her all those years and imagined she’d end up an old maid, living at home with them until they died. Not only did she get married, she married a good guy. In their eyes. And in the town’s. She snagged a prize. Gordon had a respectable job as a salesman. He made a comfortable living. And…”
“And?” I prompted him.
“And they had a baby. Right away, they had a baby.”
I reached for my glass of milk and took a big gulp. “This is Elizabeth.”
“Beth,” Paul said. “We always called her Beth.”
My voice rose for the first time in our conversation. “Why the hell did Mom name me after a dead girl? If she’s really dead. Why did anyone let her do that? Why did Dad?”
“Leslie felt guilty about what happened to Beth,” Paul said. “Any parent would. She felt responsible. You know, she and Beth had a rocky relationship. It was the seventies. Beth was a strong-willed teenager.”
“I heard,” I said.
“Gordon told you all this?”
I nodded. “She had a rough time with her daughter. With my half sister. I still don’t know why she named me after a dead kid.”
“I know it’s strange,” Paul said. “I thought it was strange too. But I tried to understand where she was coming from. That name told me how much she valued you because I understood how deeply she was affected by losing Beth. You were a second chance, especially with Ronnie… you were her best chance. You really were.”
“I thought she had me just so I could take care of Ronnie.”
“Who told you that?”
“She did. She said it right to my face.”
Paul sighed. “That’s not the only reason they had you. And you know it.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Your mom was practical. She did think that way. She devoted her life to making sure Ronnie was cared for. But she also desperately wanted to have children. She loved being a mom. That was her whole life, you and Ronnie. She wanted you very much, just for you.”
A cafeteria worker pushed a big cart full of empty and dirty trays past us, the wheels squeaking against the tile floor. We couldn’t talk for a moment, and I took the opportunity to gather my thoughts. Had she really wanted me? Or was I a caretaker for Ronnie? A do-over for the first Elizabeth?
Would I ever really know?
Chapter Thirty-nine
I returned to my food for a few minutes. We both did. Maybe Paul hoped the conversation had run its natural course, that all of the questions I had come armed with as a result of my conversation with Gordon Baxter had been answered. Of course, that wasn’t true. Not by a long shot.
“Damn,” I said. “Mom got pregnant and got married in high school.”
“She did.”
“The girl,” I said.
“What?”
“The girl. Elizabeth. Gordon says she was murdered. Is that true?”
“She ran away. That’s the first thing you need to know,” Paul said. He looked down at his food and jabbed at the salad with more intensity than before.
“Out in the waiting room, you said you thought she was dead. Gordon said the same thing.”
“I’m sure she is,” Paul said, stil
l not looking up. “I’m sure she fell in with the wrong crowd. She was doing drugs. Hard drugs. You can’t expect a life like that to turn out well.”
He sounded cold, dismissive. His voice carried no empathy or understanding for Elizabeth. It didn’t seem like the Paul I knew, and I called him on it.
“Running away,” he said, “is the worst thing you can do to a parent. She put Leslie through hell when she was here, but once she ran away, that was the worst thing of all. To not let your mother know where you are? I can’t imagine.”
“Do you know about the will?” I asked.
He stopped jabbing at his food and looked into my eyes. “You said you had something to tell me. I’m afraid I know what it is.”
“What?” I asked.
He put his fork down and picked up his napkin. First he wiped his mouth, slowly and methodically. Then he balled the napkin up and tossed it onto his tray.
“It’s that crazy woman, that Elizabeth Yarbrough. Are you telling me your mom left her something in the will?”
“A third of the estate,” I said.
Paul closed his eyes. He looked as if he had just been struck by a heavy blow that knocked the wind out of him. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus.”
“You agree with Gordon?” I asked. “You think this woman is a con artist?”
His eyes remained closed. “The alternative is to believe that woman is my niece who’s been missing for thirty-seven years.”
“Why is that hard to believe?” I asked.
He started shaking his head. “I didn’t want to say this to you.”
I waited. I didn’t know whether I wanted to hear anything else from him. But I couldn’t not hear it. That was the problem. After being kept in the dark for so long, I needed to hear everything.
“Say what?” I asked.
He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, then opened them, blinking several times. “For several months before… before your mom died,” he said, “I worried about her. About her mental state. I thought she might have been… slipping a little bit.”
“Dementia?”
“Not severe. Not yet. But she might have been heading that way. Did you notice anything?”