by J. A. Jance
“What’s going on?”
Bree sighed. “How long since you talked to Reenie?” she asked.
“I saw her briefly over Christmas,” Ali replied. “But there were all kinds of other people there. We didn’t have much of a visit. Why?”
“Reenie had been having trouble with her back before Christmas,” Bree said, “but she didn’t get around to going to the doctor until January. She just got a firm diagnosis last week-ALS. She had an appointment to see the doctor-a neurologist out at the Mayo Clinic-in Scottsdale on Thursday. She went there, but that’s the last anyone’s seen of her. She never came home.”
“ALS?” Ali asked. “As in Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
“That’s right,” Bree said. “It’s a death sentence-a crippling degenerative neurological disease with no cure. Once you’re diagnosed, it’s pretty much all downhill after that, three to ten years max. Reenie was devastated when she got the news. How could she be anything else?”
Ali felt sick to her stomach. It was incomprehensible that Reenie, her beloved Reenie, could be dying of some horrible disease, one that would leave her children motherless within a matter of a few years. Why hadn’t Reenie called? Why hadn’t she let Ali know?
“How awful!” Ali breathed.
“Awful isn’t the half of it,” Bree returned. “I’ve been reading up on it. ALS takes away muscle control. People are left bedridden and helpless, hardly able to swallow or even breathe on their own, but their mental faculties are totally unaffected. I think Reenie looked down the tunnel at what was coming and decided to do something about it.”
“You mean you think she committed suicide?” Ali asked.
“Don’t mention it to Howie,” Bree returned. “But that’s what I’m thinking. She would have hated being helpless and dependent. That isn’t Reenie. Never has been.”
You’re right about that, Ali thought.
Reenie Holzer had always been a doer, a mover and shaker.
“How are the kids doing?” Ali asked.
“Okay, I guess,” Bree replied. “The folks are here right now. They came up from Cottonwood as soon as church was over, so that’s a big help. They took Matt and Julie out for pizza. They just got back a few minutes ago.”
“Should I talk to them, to the kids, I mean?” Ali asked.
Bree hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Howie’s trying to play this low-key, and if everybody makes a big fuss about it…”
“What’s he told them?”
“That their mom has a disease, that she’s gone off by herself to think things over, and that she’ll be home very soon.”
“I don’t blame him,” Ali said. “It’s bad news either way. And now that you’ve told me what’s up, I think I’ll wait a while to talk to Matt and Julie,” she added. “That way I won’t end up blurting out something Howie would rather I not say.”
“Sounds good,” Bree returned.
“How are you holding up?” Ali asked.
“All right, I guess,” Bree said. “Things are pretty tough, but I’m glad I can be here to help. Howie’s taking it real hard.”
Howie had always struck Ali as a bit of a prig, but he was a lot easier to tolerate than Reenie’s first husband, Sam Turpin, had been. Besides, where was it written that friends had to like their friends’ husbands? Truth be known, Ali’s own husband didn’t care for Reenie or Howie much, either, referring to them as “nobodies from Podunk, Arizona.” Ali supposed that made things even.
“I’m glad you’re there, too,” Ali said. “It sounds like Howie needs all the help he can get.”
During the phone call, Ali had made her way through the house and settled into her favorite chair-the oversized one. The soft brown leather was smooth and buttery against her bare skin. It was also solid and substantial.
Looking for comfort-for someone to tell about Reenie, for someone who would sympathize and tell her how awful it was to lose a friend-Ali dialed Paul’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer. She tried to remember exactly where he was scheduled to go on this trip, but with him doing most of his travel by corporate jet these days, it was hard to keep track. Since it was late Sunday afternoon, however, she could be relatively sure that wherever he was, he was out playing golf. Wherever Paul went, so did his Pings, and once on a golf course, Paul made it a practice-a religion almost-not to take calls, from anyone.
Ali hung up without bothering to leave a message. Feeling hungry-or was it just a matter of nerves? — she went out to the kitchen and scrounged through the refrigerator. Before the cook, Elvira Jimenez, left for the weekend, she usually made sure the place was stocked with lots of suitable salad makings. Fighting to keep her figure newsroom thin, Ali survived on salads. Right now what she really wanted was one of her father’s Sugarloaf special chicken fried steaks. Unfortunately that wasn’t an option.
Using the kitchen clicker-Paul had one in every room-she turned on Paul’s new Sonos sound system to play a full program of Mozart piano concertos. Then she busied herself at the granite countertop, whacking up lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers and onions, as well as a perfectly ripe avocado. She added a few hunks of rotisserie grilled chicken and a thimbleful of dressing. Lots of calories in dressing. Then, she took her salad and a glass of chilly Chardonnay (Paul’s current favorite, Far Niente, the 2002 vintage, of course) to the glass-topped umbrella table situated beside the sparkling heated pool with its unobstructed view of the city.
The sweet scent of orange blossoms wafted through the air. The bougainvillea climbing the side of the stuccoed pool house was just starting to blossom. The colorful pots arranged around the patio overflowed with the fat petunias and lush snapdragons that Jesus Sanchez, the gardener, somehow always maintained in wild abundance. Now that the rains had finally stopped, spring had arrived in southern California with a vengeance. Meanwhile it had snowed five inches in Sedona two days ago-the same day Reenie had been reported missing.
ALS, Ali thought. What would I do if it were me?
She thought about Reenie’s kids, Matt-red-haired, freckle-faced, and serious beyond his years-and about Julie-a bright, blond, blue-eyed, perpetual-motion machine who seemed to dance rather than walk wherever she went. Wouldn’t Reenie have wanted to spend every possible moment with those adorable children of hers, or had she made some other choice, one she hoped would spare them the worst of the dread disease that was bearing down on all of them?
That line of questioning took Ali back to a very dark place of her own. In October of 1982 her first husband, Dean Reynolds, had come home from work one night, complaining of a headache. Ali hadn’t thought that much about it. He was twenty-four years old, for God’s sake. How serious could it be? He had gone to bed. In the middle of the night, she had heard him retching in the bathroom. A few minutes later he passed out. She had heard him fall-a dull thump on the wooden floor of their two-bedroom apartment. Leaping out of bed to help him, she’d had to shove his body out of the way with the bathroom door before she could get inside to reach him. In the confined space of the tiny bathroom, she hadn’t been able to gain enough leverage to help him to his feet. Instead, she left him lying on the floor and called an ambulance.
Two days later, in Dean’s hospital room, the doctor had given them the bad news-glioblastoma-a word Ali had never heard before and wouldn’t have known how to pronounce. She and Dean, holding hands, had listened in stunned silence as the doctor-a resident oncologist-delivered the bad news. The tumor was large, inoperable, and probably fatal within one to two years. They could try chemo they were told, but glioblastomas were aggressive and generally resistant to treatment. A few months later, Dean was dead and Ali was not only a twenty-three-year-old widow, she was also seven months pregnant.
The baby was born on a bright June day two months after Dean’s funeral. Ali named her newborn son Christopher Dean Reynolds. Ali’s mother had left Bob and Aunt Evie in charge of the Sugarloaf. Even though Edie Larson had never been on a plane before in her life, she had fl
own out to Chicago to be with her daughter and her new grandson and to help Ali get organized.
Surprisingly enough, Dean’s company benefits had provided a fair amount of group life insurance. Their apartment was anything but extravagant. Using the life insurance proceeds and by carefully managing the social security survivor’s benefits, Ali had managed to keep the apartment, hire a live-in baby-sitter, and go back to school to finish her Masters. (She’d had to drop out that one semester because Dean was so sick.)
Dean had died in 1983. More than twenty years later glioblastoma was still a grim diagnosis, but there were now some new promising treatments-particle-beam radiation and chemo protocols-that had only been a gleam in some cancer researcher’s eye back in the eighties. Ali wondered if there was a chance things were a little more hopeful now with ALS as well.
With half of her salad left uneaten, but with her wineglass empty, Ali stood up. The sun was still shining in the west, but she felt a sudden chill. Dean had fought so hard to live long enough to see his son-to have a chance to be with him. Faced with ALS, surely Reenie would do the same for her kids, for Matt and Julie, wouldn’t she?
But as Ali made her way back into the house, she realized she didn’t know the answer. The only person who did was Reenie Bernard herself, and she wasn’t talking.
After rinsing her dishes, Ali went upstairs to the little study off the master bedroom that was her own private domain. She logged on to her computer and Googled ALS. After spending an hour or so poring over what she found there, Ali finally realized that as far as Reenie and her family were concerned, it could just as well have been 1983.
As Yogi Berra said, “It’s deja vu all over again!”
Chapter 3
cutlooseblog.com
Monday, March 14, 2005
First of all, let me thank you once again for the kind wishes that continue to pour in. I’m astonished by your response. I’ll try to answer as many as I can-after all, I no longer have to go to work-but please forgive me if I don’t get back to all of you in a timely fashion.
When bad things happen, it’s easy to fall in a hole of self-pity and wallow around in it. Losing your job counts as a bad thing, and I would have been wallowing if I hadn’t had all those e-mails lifting my spirits.
Tonight, though, when I was channel surfing, I happened to catch a promo for the new news team at my former station-a team that now includes my very youthful and very blond replacement. Seeing her sitting and smiling out at the camera from the anchor chair that used to be mine and flanked by all the guys who used to do the news with me, it would have been easy to turn on the waterworks and go screaming down the street yelling that life isn’t fair. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. Because there are things in life that are lots worse than losing a job-losing a friend, for instance.
Because one of my friends is lost. Reenie, my best friend from high school, went missing on Thursday after going to a scheduled doctor’s appointment. On the day before I lost my job. No one knows where she is. Her family is baffled. Her husband and children are lost without her.
In the past two weeks, Reenie has received some devastating news about her health. In her forties and with a husband and two young children at home, she’s been diagnosed with ALS. Authorities investigating her disappearance have hinted that perhaps she committed suicide rather than endure the bleak future that particularly dread disease holds for all who are stricken with it. I’d like to think she’s gone off some place to gather her courage to face whatever may lie ahead. The Reenie I know and love isn’t a person who shies away from doing what needs to be done-however hard that may be.
So tonight, unable to sleep, I decided to tell you what’s going on in my life because I can tell from the e-mails that have come in that you care. But on the whole, I think you can see that compared to what’s happening to Reenie and her family, my problems are pretty small potatoes.
Posted: 1:52 A.M. by AliR
My Sister’s Keeper was run by the Sisters of Charity and operated out of a tiny donated storefront in downtown Pasadena. The neighborhood was trendy enough that well-heeled ladies in their late-model Lexus or Cadillac SUVs, or their personal assistants, could drop off clothing discards-things that weren’t good enough for consignment stores-without having to venture into some of LA’s grittier neighborhoods where the donated clothing might actually be put to use.
The person in charge, Sister Anne, was a tall spare woman with a cascade of braided and beaded hair. In the late eighties, the towering six-foot-seven nun had been known as Jamalla Kareem Williams, a standout player for the UCLA Bruins. Ali had met Sister Anne several years earlier when they had been seated together at the head table for a YWCA fund-raising luncheon. Having spent her whole life watching her father’s one-man charitable efforts, Ali knew more than she might otherwise have known about the needs of the homeless. Ali and Sister Anne had struck up a conversation during lunch. Realizing at once that they had a good deal in common, they had stayed in touch.
Dragging the first heavily laden bag into the store that Monday morning, Ali found Sister Anne sorting through a mound of donations. Dressed in shiny blue-and-white sweats emblazoned with UCLA insignias, Sister Anne looked as though she would have been far more at home on the sidelines of a basketball game than in a convent.
Sister Anne greeted Ali with a gap-toothed grin. “Time to lighten the load?” she asked.
Ali nodded. “There’s more where this came from,” she added. “It’s out in the car.”
Sister Anne trailed Ali out to the Cayenne and helped bring in the rest of the bags. “These yours?” she asked. Ali nodded again. “It’s always good to get clothes from tall ladies,” Sister Anne added with a laugh. “There aren’t enough of us to go around.”
Once back inside, Sister Anne started pulling items from the first bag. The clothes were mostly still in their separate dry-cleaning bags. After examining several of them, the nun whistled. “These are what I call designer duds,” she said enthusiastically. “And they’re in really good shape. Are you sure you want to get rid of them?”
Ali had told Chris and her mother about what had happened on Friday night after the newscast, but until that moment, she hadn’t confided in anyone else about the fact that she’d been fired. Not Jesus or Elvira-her Spanish wasn’t good enough. And for some reason, Charmaine, Ali’s personal assistant, hadn’t shown up for work this morning. Ali still hadn’t heard back from Paul, either, damn him, not since she’d called him the night before. And with Reenie still missing…
As Ali screwed up her courage to let go of the words and make her humiliation public, tears were very close to the surface. But Sister Anne beat her to the punch.
“I know about your job,” she said. “I saw it in the Times yesterday. What’s the matter with those guys? Are they nuts?”
Ali looked around the store and was grateful that they seemed to be alone. The news was out, and out in a big way, so at least there was no need for her to go around telling people about it.
She sighed. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to see you this morning,” she said, “besides dropping off the clothing, that is.”
“What do you need?” Sister Anne demanded.
“An attorney actually,” Ali said. “Know any good sex-or age-discrimination attorneys?”
“You’re going to sue the station?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“What about using one of your husband’s high-powered friends?” Sister Anne asked. “Seems to me they’d be chomping at the bit to take the case.”
“That’s part of the problem,” Ali admitted. “If I go after the station, Paul isn’t going to like it, and neither will most of his friends-whether they’re attorneys or not. He has a lot of clout in this town, and he isn’t afraid to use it.”
“Well then,” Sister Anne said, “it so happens I do know of one. Her name’s Marcella Johnson. We were teammates back in college. Marce is short, only five ten or so, but she was a scrapper, an
d believe me, she plays to win.”
“Winning’s good,” Ali said.
“She works for Weldon, Davis, and Reed on Wilshire. I’ve got her cell number. Want me to give her a call?”
Without a word, Ali handed over her phone, which was how, two hours later, she found herself waiting to meet Marcella Johnson in a secluded corner of the Gardens Cafe at the Four Seasons Hotel. Even though she thought she was fairly well out of the way, several people glanced in her direction and nodded in recognition as they were shown to their own tables.
Feeling self-conscious and wanting to while away the time, she ordered coffee and then called the Sugarloaf on her cell even though she knew her parents would be up to their eyeteeth in the lunchtime rush by then.
“Any news about Reenie?” she asked.
“Not that I’ve heard,” Edie Larson said. “Have you talked to her husband?”
“He was busy when I called,” Ali said. “I don’t want to bother him.”
“Call anyway,” Edie said. “Howie won’t be bothered. That’s what friends are for. How are you doing?”
“Hanging in,” Ali returned.
“You don’t sound like you’re hanging in,” Edie pointed out. “You sound upset.”
Ali was upset. Strangers from all over southern California somehow managed to know that she’d lost her job, some of them even before the station had made whatever official announcement had ended up in the papers. But none of her friends-make that none of her supposed friends-had bothered to send even so much as an e-mail, and none of them had called to check on her, either. And then there was Paul. Where was he? Why wasn’t he calling her back? He sure as hell wasn’t playing golf twenty-four hours a day.
Ali sighed. “I am,” she admitted to her mother. “I’m upset about Reenie, and I’m upset about my job situation, too. I’m in a restaurant right now, waiting to audition an attorney.”