by Jim Kohlberg
“There won’t be someone else to sign releases and insurance information?”
“I gave the nurse her wallet last night. She must be covered.”
“Her insurance isn’t the problem. We’d prefer a relative to sign.”
He paused, then said, “No siblings?”
“No.”
“Can you sign?”
“I have no legal standing.”
“You’ll have to sign as a temporary guardian.” He handed me a clipboard with ten pages of legalese and bold printed exculpatory releases for the hospital. I flipped to the back page and signed.
“You’ll need to initial every page.”
“Why?”
“It’s our procedure. She may need surgery.”
“Now?”
“Possibly. Probably when the results come in.”
“Why? You must know something.”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Look, Dr. Macintyre. I can’t sign without some idea,” I said, as I scanned down each page, flipping them over and glancing up at him as I spoke. He was a solid man, with black hair receding from a broad forehead, slight stubble on his cheeks from an overnight shift, and a hangdog look to his brown eyes from the deep and ineradicable pouches underneath. His hands were strong, palms meaty, the fingers thin with clean, well-clipped nails. He took the clipboard from me and put it under his arm.
“This is preliminary, you understand?”
“I do.”
“It may change, depending on the test results.”
“Doctor, just tell me. Did she have a stroke?”
“We don’t think so. The bleeding from her ear was probably not serious. Most likely a punctured eardrum. It’s unusual, though, in an adult; the membranes are stronger than children’s, and usually it occurs through some accident, some trauma to the head.”
“Did she fall?”
“There’s no evidence of a concussion. But she may have fallen. We can’t tell.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Based on preliminary X-rays and MRI results . . .” He stopped. “This is before the radiologist has interpreted the MRI. You understand? I’m not giving you a diagnosis.”
“Yes. Yes. Go on.”
“There appears to be an archaic mass between her optic nerve and the ear canal. It’s relatively large. Has she had symptoms before this? Shaking hands? Reduced eyesight? Dizziness?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any abnormalities at all?”
“I don’t know. Archaic mass? What does that mean?”
“How much time have you spent with her lately?”
“Not much.”
“How well do you know her? The nurse said you told her you were close.”
“We were. I . . . we hadn’t seen much of each other recently.”
“How recently?”
“Look, Doctor. Can you just tell me what’s going on? Without the third degree?”
“The mass is large, larger than I would have suspected in someone with no symptoms. There’s no sign of hematoma, or other . . .”
“Doc,” I interrupted. “Speak English. What is wrong with her?”
“Based on what I know—and that’s very little at this point . . .”
“I know.”
“I think she has a growth in her left occipital lobe.” He paused and looked at his hands, then turned them over. “Sorry,” he said and took a deep breath. “She has a tumor in the left side of her brain; it seems to be between her optic nerve and the ear canal.”
“But, Doctor. Those. That. They’re not that close. I don’t understand.”
“I’m afraid it’s quite large.”
“Large as in . . .?” I couldn’t finish. How do you imagine the size of a tumor in someone’s brain?
“It’s about the size of a baseball.”
“A baseball?”
“Maybe as large as your fist.”
“Is that possible?”
“It’s possible.”
“With no symptoms?” I was about to ask another question, but a muffled rumbling began behind us. First there was the steady murmur of nurses quieting an agitated male baritone. Then the volume escalated until finally we both heard the loud man’s words.
“Where the hell is she?” Footsteps came up behind us as we turned around.
“Is this her?” the man asked. He was young and buffed, facial skin the color of new olives, forearms a shade deeper. Black, oily hair and blue eyes. He wore an orange sport shirt that hung out over his jeans.
“Is that her?” he asked again, as he looked at Christina in the bed. His tan faded under the whitening face. The ventilator was loud in the room while he looked at her.
Dr. Macintyre stepped forward into the door, blocking his way. He was a shorter man and he had to peer up at Macintyre. I could tell he didn’t like it. “Who are you?” Macintyre asked.
“Is that Christina?” the man asked, much more quietly, a crack in the voice gurgling at the end.
“That’s Christina Lawson. I must ask you again. Who are you? I need some ID.”
The man kept looking at Christina. “I’m her fiancé,” he said. Something made the small, thin man turn around. He looked at Macintyre.
“Her fiancé?” Dr. Macintyre asked.
The man took a step toward the doc, invading that unmarked boundary all of us desperately seek to maintain. The doctor’s cheekbones moved closer to his eyes a notch and there was a twist to his mouth that could have been a smile. He slouched against the doorjamb, put his shoulder on the sill, and crossed his arms in front of him. He was unruffled. Down the hall several different-toned beeps began. Nurses pattered down the hall to silence them. Christina’s ventilator heaved and hissed.
“Then you won’t mind telling us who you are. You can sign the papers I was just showing Mr. Smoller here.”
“What papers?”
“Your name?” said the doctor.
“What papers?”
“I can’t very well divulge confidential information to a stranger off the street, can I?”
They were quite close, and the small man could not budge the doctor’s large mass, the beefy forearms crossed across a spreading stomach. Macintyre just watched.
“I’m Joe Arbeddo,” the man said. “We were engaged.” Another Joe? No way would Christina be such a cliché. That alone would rule him out.
“Were?”
“Are. We are engaged.” He put out his hand to the doctor.
Macintyre shook it. He said, “This is Max Smoller. He brought her in.”
Joe Arbeddo pushed out his hand to me. There was a deep scratch on the back of it, and the palm had two hard, raised calluses, one at the base of the thumb and another on the heel. The fingers and joints had ridges with taut skin as well. It was a hardworking hand.
“That was nice of you,” he said.
“Least I could do.”
“Mr. Arbeddo,” Doctor Macintyre asked, “you got a wallet on you?”
“Sure. But I don’t have much money on me.”
“ID is what I’m after,” said the doc.
“Sure,” he said, “sure.”
Joe Arbeddo opened a buffalo wallet, faded and embossed with ridges and a brass buffalo nickel embedded in it. He opened it up. Credit cards were on one side, on the other a flap with a faded picture of a girl with braces grinning frankly at the camera in a blue sweater and plaid argyle shirt. The child had multicolored glass hanging at her neck between braids of reddish-brown hair. Clearly divorced or he’d have more recent photos. He slipped out a California driver’s license. Macintyre took it and gave it a quick glance, moved his lips for half a second, then gave it back.
“Thanks, Joe,” he said, then turned and grabbed the sheaf of papers and pushed them at Arbeddo. He had no choice but to take it like a football handoff during a broken play.
“Go on over there,” Macintyre said, pointing his eyes at the nurses’ reception and a barren chair and table. �
��Even if you don’t want to sign, you should look at them.”
Joe took the handoff and walked off, looking down at the papers, then shot a last glance over his shoulder at us. A nurse nodded him into a chair.
Macintyre turned his back and took out a pen. He turned his palm over and wrote something on it. Surprise must have showed on my face.
“His license number.”
He looked at me for a second. “Med school trick,” he said.
“Photographic memory?”
“No. A type of mnemonics. I watch myself write it down in my head. It’ll stay there for a couple of days. Then it will fade like something in Harry Potter’s magic book.”
“I’ll have to try that sometime. I get phone numbers stuck in my head for weeks. But damned if I can remember my mother’s best friend when I come to meet her again.”
“You think you’ll forget Arbeddo over there?” he asked, nodding to the dark head hunkering over the sheaf of papers.
“Not likely,” I said.
“I didn’t think so,” he said. He took out his hand again and rubbed at the palm where he wrote the number down. “I’ll get my assistant to call and check it.” He rubbed it once more, then looked up at me. The brown eyes rested on me and I started to fidget a bit.
“What?” I asked.
“Did you know?”
“What?”
“She was engaged.”
“I thought she was living with Joe.”
“Another Joe?”
“Joe Dempsey. I buried him yesterday.”
“I see,” he said and looked at his hand. He rubbed at it again, even though there was nothing left but a smudge.
“Who is this Joe?”
“No clue.”
“You never heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“Is it possible?”
“That she was engaged to him? He doesn’t seem the type.”
“Meaning?”
“Christina liked more substantial men. Movers. Shakers.”
I was neither, of course, just a modern scribe, a dusty, pale accountant, recording the gold strikes, the buried treasure and the secrets, the hidden things that the money trail left in its wake. You could follow that path through the maze, but never would I have the secret code for the hidden door, or the string to follow home.
“I see,” the doctor said. My gaze swept up to his face and searched it. I didn’t see anything in particular, but I couldn’t hold his eyes. Arbeddo walked up behind us, waving the stack of papers in his hand.
“This stuff,” he said, flipping it back and forth making the pages riffle in the air. “What is it? What does it mean?”
“It’s just a power of attorney,” said Macintyre. “It lets me operate if I need to.”
“She needs an operation?”
“We don’t know.”
“What kind?”
“Mr. Arbeddo, this is awkward, but I have to ask. Do you have any evidence of your engagement? A ring? Anything?”
Arbeddo flushed under the V of his shirt, and it spread up to his cheeks and then his forehead. “So it’s like that?”
The doctor spread his hands. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask.”
“We were engaged. I don’t have to prove it to you.”
“No, you don’t. But I would like something.”
“What about him?” Arbeddo said and shoved the papers at me; they whiffled and fluttered, a noisemaker at a party gone quiet. “You ask him to prove it?”
“Prove what?”
“Anything.”
“He brought her in. I think that proves something,” said Macintyre.
“What?”
The doctor looked at him and nodded. “Maybe you’re right.” He put out his hand for the papers, and Joe Arbeddo put them in the doctor’s open hand.
“You can have ’em,” Joe said. “Go wipe your ass with ’em.” He whipped around, strode down the corridor, and slammed the exit bar on the door, shoving it against its stops. The hard staccato of his boot heels went with him.
“Well,” said Macintyre.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I guess I better go to legal on this. It’s looking tangled.”
“It’s probably best.”
“I seem to spend as much time talking to lawyers and accountants as patients these days.”
“We’re the scum of the earth,” I said.
“I didn’t mean you. I just meant . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, waving a hand. I turned to go. “Can I call for an update?”
“Give me your card. I’ll call you with the test results. I will have talked to legal by then.”
I stopped and handed him a card from my wallet, and his eyebrows went up when he read it.
“I thought you were a lawyer.”
“Nope. Lowly accountant.”
“Taxes?”
“Taxes, estate planning.” I looked back at Christina’s room and took a very deep breath.
“I’ll call you,” he said. Then he turned and went down the hall and disappeared into another numbered room, continuing his rounds.
Chapter 15
The fresh air outside seemed as pure as oxygen straight from a cylinder. The stink of disinfectant, nitrile gloves, and the metallic smell of blood and bodily fluids had settled on my clothes and hair. As I walked down the broad sidewalk, looking up at the massive cliffs of Parnassus Heights behind the hospital building, I finally felt a breeze come up from the Cole Valley off Stanyan Street. Beyond, Stow Lake nestled like a sapphire pendant waiting for the skulking fog to steal its jeweled light.
I had arrived in the back of Christina’s ambulance, and taxis were a rare sight around the hospital complex. I pulled my eyes off the lake and began the walk down the hill toward Stanyan to look for a taxi stand. Failing that, I would have to call and get on the rush hour queue so that a rude dispatcher could lie to me about how soon a dial cab would meet me.
Wind began to brush away the decaying smells and gray memory that had settled over me. A dark Chevy Caprice without hubcaps pulled to the curb and idled at my side. The dark glass of the driver’s door rolled down, and DA Guthrie poked his square face and stubbled head out.
“Mr. Smoller, I presume,” he said.
“I’m not in the mood, Guthrie,” I said and kept walking. The car kept rolling. I hoped if I kept it up for half a block he might rear-end a parked minivan ahead. I could be a witness for the prosecution and attest to his driving negligence and get his license revoked. And pretty soon he’d bring me some good news, too.
He moved the car into the curb ahead of me and opened the door. He put a loafered foot on the pavement. The open door panel was blocking my way, but there was plenty of room to go around it. As I got nearer I could see his blue eyes, a shade so vibrant you could feel the energy and light vibrate in them. I slowed to get a better look inside and saw he was alone; I stopped. I rested my right arm on the door.
“Max,” he said, “I thought we were friends.”
“Right,” I said. “I love talking to you right when all my old friends are dead or dying.”
He looked up from my arm, taking ownership of his door, and met my eyes. “I’m sorry about that. The doctor says he’ll have tests ready later in the day.”
“Did you already talk to him? Before me?”
He shrugged. Up ahead a van started to crawl through hospital traffic. It was beaten-up and holed with rust, but it had the disc of an old-time loudspeaker welded flimsily to a roof rack. It was making noise, though I couldn’t hear words or melody, and the wind ripping behind me carried the noise out toward the fog belt encroaching over the bastion of sun in the valley. The lake water was beginning to froth with whitecaps, angry at the approaching extinguishment of light. Behind the van I could see people walking and holding signs.
Guthrie put one hand on the front windowsill and the other on the door pillar. He pulled himself out of the car and stood up. My arm came off the top of
the window and we turned into the sidewalk.
“We got the autopsy results,” he said. His words slapped harder than the biting wind.
“I thought you said . . .”
“I said he’d been killed with his baseball bat.”
“And he’d been killed asleep.”
“I only implied he’d been asleep,” he said. “There were far more broken bones, mainly in his fingers. One elbow was shattered. There was blood under his fingernails.” He poked at the ground with a tip of his shiny shoes. A lace had come untied. We watched it flop back and forth on the sidewalk.
“Gee, thanks for breaking it to me delicately,” I said. “And the autopsy means what?”
“That he was awake.”
“That he fought?”
“Oh, he fought. He fought like a cornered beast.”
He bent down to the ground and gathered his laces. I could see his naked head beneath me. The blanket of darkness that I had evaded in the hospital covered me now, wrapped me in a confusion I couldn’t unravel, a suffocating straitjacket. And now, underneath the confusion burbled a deep, curdling blood anger. I used it to get a grip on myself.
“What the hell does this have to do with me?”
Guthrie looked up from his laces on the sidewalk and his fingers stilled. “Wouldn’t you rather he went out fighting? Than get smacked in his sleep?”
“Does it matter?”
“I think the way you die does, yes.”
“He was no hero.”
“Nobody is. But it seems better that way to me.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Just what I told you.”
“No, there’s something more.”
He bent over his shoelaces and whipped them into a knot. The folds of skin on his neck bunched up under the collar.
“He knew,” I said.
Guthrie finished and tugged hard at the loops. He got up, sucking in a deep breath.
“Yes. He knew his attacker.”
“And this is your great evidence against Christina? That he knew her? That’ll really shock a jury.”
“Actually it cuts the other way.”
“Pardon?”
“I said it cuts the other way.”