by Kate Flora
I considered Andre’s question. “He seems so supercilious. He’s a general, and he acts like one. Like a man who wants to boss us all around and shape us up, and then march away and leave us to handle things. He doesn’t strike me as someone who’d be attracted to a fifteen-year-old.”
But that could all have been a smokescreen. Plenty of women had been fooled by such men. And anyway, that kind of targeting behavior was not about normal attraction and men who targeted children were damned good at hiding it.
“Some fifteen-year-olds can be pretty hot,” he reminded me. “And mature for their age. Or innocent and childlike, not yet into puberty. Both of those can attract the wrong type of men.”
“I haven’t met her yet, but I don’t think that’s Heidi. She’s more like a plaid flannel hippie. Definitely not the flaunt-her-body type. After all, she was nearly eight months pregnant and nobody noticed. Not even her own mother and she was just home for two weeks in March.”
“That’s sad,” he said, and I thought about Ted Basham’s comment to his wife. If Lorena had hugged her daughter, how could she have missed the pregnancy? It was sad to think of a child flying all the way across the country to visit a parent who never touched her.
A yawn came over the air. “I’m going to bed. Someone who will remain unnamed got a call at an ungodly hour this morning and now I’m short on sleep.”
“Sorry,” I said. We both loved a good night’s sleep and this pregnancy was making me regard sleep with a far deeper appreciation. Not that he hadn’t interrupted my sleep plenty of times. When a homicide detective gets a call, he answers.
“Call me when you know something,” he murmured.
I imagined him arranging his pillows and pulling up the covers. “You bet.”
He was gone. I was alone again in the dark. The metronomic slap of the wipers and the hiss of the tires created a sense of being in a bubble as I raced through the night. It lasted until the GPS announced that my exit was coming up. I moved into the exit lane and followed the blue hospital signs. My anxiety, which I’d kept at bay while talking to Andre, was back—a huge hand squeezing my stomach and interfering with my breathing.
I pulled into the parking garage and wound my way through the echoing darkness into a parking space near the exit stairs. I am easily spooked by parking garages at night. My life has been eventful enough that I am entitled to be wary about what lurks in the dark. Tonight, at least, I had no reason to expect that I was being followed by bad guys. This bad lay in real world circumstances that had nothing to do with my work. Still, I checked my surroundings carefully and paused a few times to listen for footsteps. The lighting was terrible, faint and a sickening yellow.
My feet clattered down the slippery steps of a stairwell that smelled of urine, coffee, cigarettes, and fear. I was sure I’d added my own fear scent by the time I reached the bottom and pushed through a heavy door into the hospital itself.
Nine
A kindly woman at the information desk directed me to the cardiac unit, a place of bright, sterile lights, the sotto voce hum of machinery, permeated by the anxious beeping of machines that kept track of the inhabitants’ vital functions. When I gave my father’s name to the stern, harried male nurse, he shook his head. “Only two visitors at a time,” he said. “Are you family?”
I suppressed the smart-assed urge to say, “No. I just like to visit strangers who’ve had heart attacks.” Smart-ass tends to be my visceral reaction when I’m terrified. Instead, I simply said, “I’m his daughter.”
The sternness softened. “Come with me,” he said. I followed him down a hallway crowded with equipment and into my father’s room. From his comment about two visitors, I expected to find my mother and Michael. Instead, I found Uncle Henry and Aunt Rita and was immediately smothered in familiar embraces, comforted by the well-known scents of Rita’s perfume and Henry’s aftershave. Released, I moved toward the bed, where my father—my larger-than-life, big-voiced father—was sleeping, still and pale against the pillows, connected to an array of wires and tubes.
I kissed him and squeezed his hand. Told him to snap out of it. Then I drew Henry and Rita into a corner. “What do we know?”
Their words poured out in an overlapping jumble, the gist of which was that he’d had a mild heart attack and they were keeping him overnight for observation. The mild part was good, but no one reacts well to the idea of “observation,” particularly with respect to a beloved family member. It always smacks of obfuscation. What did “mild” really mean? What were they observing? And why? These days, hospitals send people home before they’ve even stopped bleeding. It sounded fishy, but they didn’t know. Rita and my dad, brother and sister only eleven months apart, had always been like twins. Right now, she looked almost as bad as the man in the bed.
“How long has he been like this?” I asked, and then, not waiting for a reply, “How long has he been here?”
I got another chorus of overlapping responses. Hours. He had been restless and cranky, earlier, wanting to go home. Then he’d fallen asleep, and had been like this for hours. Backtracking, Rita explained that he’d been feeling a little light-headed in the morning, and my mother had wanted to take him to the emergency room. He’d refused. He was finishing some project in the office, so he wanted to wait until he felt better and go in to work. By the time she persuaded him to go to the ER, he was having chest pains. They’d done one of those cardiac catheterizations and things looked fine. They would watch him tonight and send him home in the morning.
The man in the bed looked anything but fine to me.
“We convinced your mother to go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat. She hasn’t eaten all day. You know how she is,” Rita said. “She should have gone with Michael. I mean, he should have insisted she go with him, but you know how Michael can be. He and Sonia did that, ‘We’re just stepping out for a moment,’ thing and disappeared. They didn’t even ask if she, or we, wanted to join them.”
She checked her watch and frowned. “That was nearly five hours ago. That Sonia…” None of us liked Sonia, who was utterly self-involved and brought out the worst in Michael. But she stopped herself from saying the obvious—that my dad had had a heart attack and was in a precarious situation and I hadn’t been here at all. I’d been dealing with other people’s problems.
I would have felt guiltier if I thought my mother had been waiting for me all this time. But since she’d failed to let me know what was going on or where she was, that could not have been the case. Logically, since I was without information and she and I have zero psychic connection, I couldn’t have rushed to my father’s bedside. She wouldn’t see it that way.
Where I did feel guilty was thinking that my father might have needed me.
“Mom didn’t call me,” I said. “Or leave any messages about what was happening. I tried a dozen times to reach her or Michael and got no response.”
Rita patted my arm and looked away. “We know,” Uncle Henry said. But he hadn’t called me, either. Perhaps assuming Mom had called me and I simply hadn’t responded. Family. Maybe how Heidi’s mother was behaving wasn’t so strange after all. Perhaps all families are dysfunctional?
Still, I felt rotten that the situation had seemed critical and my mother hadn’t bothered to include me. A single phone call without a useful message did not count as inclusion. All the complaining she’d undoubtedly done since didn’t change that. This wasn’t about our relationship and however good or bad it was. This was about our family.
My brain was whirling. What could be worse than wanting to scream at my mother for not including me in events that would make me want to scream? I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t called. Why Michael hadn’t called. What was wrong with them, to think I didn’t want to be involved? Even when obligatory family events were nothing short of torture, I always showed up.
My mother believed I was too wrapped up in my job. Had she used this as an opportunity to make a point? Truth check, Kozak. If
one of them had called, would I have stopped what I was doing and rushed here? Bad as the situation at Simmons was, the answer was of course. Except that I’d been so immersed in Simmons’s problems, I had stayed to clear a few things up, hadn’t I?
Stop it. This is not about you, Kozak, I reminded myself. Whatever had happened before, I was here now. Here and wanting Andre with me—my own personal piece of family. Someone on my side. But he would only be one more person anxiously pacing, probably excluded from the room, given the two-person rule.
Why was I even thinking about sides?
How did one do any of this right?
I’d call Andre and update him, now that it looked like my father was stable. He’d sleep better knowing he wasn’t about to be summoned here to deal with a crisis. My father would be going home in the morning. If only he didn’t look so awfully sick.
“Have the two of you eaten?” I asked. I was sure my mother had forgotten her normal care-taking habits in the face of this.
Reluctantly, Rita shook her head. “We haven’t. We didn’t want to leave him. If you wouldn’t mind…”
“Go,” I said, making shooing motions.
It was only then that she studied me, and her drawn face lifted in a sudden smile. “Oh, Thea, how wonderful!” She swept me into another hug. “Your mother didn’t mention…” A hesitation, then, “Oh dear. Does she know?” A meaningful glance at the bed, and then, “Does your father?”
I shook my head. “I was going to tell her tonight. We were going to have dinner to plan that shower for Sonia.” Rita and I both burst into tears. True, my father knew that he was going to be a grandfather. Michael and Sonia had announced their pregnancy practically on the day of conception. He’d be a great grandpa. It was a role he’d been preparing for all his life. But, despite our differences, I was his favorite. He would be thrilled that Andre and I were finally having a baby.
What if things got much worse and MOC never got to know this wonderful man? I stifled the thought.
“Go get something to eat,” I said. “I’ll be here. I’ve got your cell numbers. I’ll call if anything happens.”
They left. Against those hospital admonitions not to use cell phones, I made a quick call to Andre. Then I sat. My father lay unmoving, his stillness utterly terrifying. From time to time, something would beep, or someone would come in and perform some procedure. The leaden minutes passed like hours. I felt like I had been in the room for half of my life. I hate hospitals.
Despite my efforts to be present here, in the cold stillness my mind drifted to Simmons, and Heidi, and a small baby everyone was ignoring. It was horrible to imagine that tiny human being born with no one around who cared about her. No loving, worried face peering down at her. No warm hands comforting her. No reassuring voice crooning her name. The poor infant had no name. With an effort, I pushed those images away.
Concern about my dad merged with my other worries until I was a cauldron of anxiety. I had the sense that bad things were happening at Simmons, but restrained myself from checking my phone for messages. In my haste to get here, I’d left my briefcase in the car. I wasn’t leaving my father alone to go and get it, so I couldn’t fill the time with work.
I was glad I was alone when my father woke up. It gave us some special time together. He seemed weary, but very much himself. “Everyone’s making too big a deal about this,” he said. “All this darned hovering professional medicine to establish that something happened, it wasn’t serious, it’s over, and maybe I should get some rest. How are things with you and Andre? Crazy as ever?”
“We have some news,” I said, and guided his hand to where our little acrobat was performing tonight’s act.
“Wow!” he said. “A baby! You are in for it now, you know. This is just how you were. Your poor mother never got a decent night’s sleep. She thought she was going to give birth to a monkey.” He was grinning like I had never seen him grin.
“You’re going to be one busy grandpa,” I said.
The grin stayed on his face. “I can’t wait. One of them better like fishing.” He dropped his hand back onto the covers, and I took it and held on. “Somehow, I don’t see Michael and Sonia’s child as a fisherman.” He laughed.
“Maybe she will turn out to have a mind of her own.” I could say ‘she’ because we knew they were having a girl.
“So what are you having?” he asked. “Did you do that testing?”
“A baby. That’s all we know. We wanted to be surprised.”
“Oh. You’ll be surprised all right. Just you wait. You got names?”
“Mason, Oliver, or Claudine. We’re calling it MOC.”
“That’s going to stick, you know. Kid will be ready to graduate high school and you and Andre will still be calling it MOC.”
“I know.”
He grinned. “Your mother know?”
“I was going to tell her today. At dinner.”
“Oh. Right. Sonia’s shower.” A grimace. “She’s going to be mad at you.”
“Because I told you first?”
“You bet.”
“Rita and Henry know, too.”
“Brace yourself, then,” he said. “She’s going to be double mad.”
“I never could do anything right.”
“I know. It’s not you. It’s just…she worked too hard to have you. All those miscarriages. It changed things. It’s never been about who you are…and then when Carrie…”
Carrie. My adopted sister. My little sister who was murdered. Getting involved in that investigation was how I met Andre.
My dad lost his train of thought, sighed, and closed his eyes. “All this medical business has made me very tired.”
I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to know they are not restful places. “Try to get some sleep, if they’ll let you,” I said. “Morning will be here soon and you’ll be going home.”
“Happy news. I hate this…” he murmured and drifted off.
The hum of machinery did its thing, and I nodded off, too, until someone dropped something in the hallway with a huge clang. Hospitals are so restful.
Eventually, my mother returned. I wasn’t foolish enough to expect joy or an embrace. Well. I was that foolish, but I’ve learned to suck it up. She was on the attack even before she was fully in the room. How dare I tell Henry and Rita about my pregnancy before telling her? She went on for a good twenty minutes. Another time I might have argued or, my new strategy, simply walked away, since this was all about self-importance and her not being the first to know, but the circumstances called for patience and compassion. I dredged some up and let her have her say. From time to time, so entrenched were her habits, that she turned to the silent figure in the bed for confirmation. Each time it stopped her cold. But not for long.
When she ran out of steam, I said, “I wish you could be happy for me.”
Henry and Rita returned to say they were going home to get some sleep. Asked that we call if anything happened.
The doctors came by to examine and consult, and urged us both to go home and get some sleep. They said he seemed fine. They didn’t expect any changes. They would call if anything happened, but expected a quiet night and planned to discharge him in the morning.
I needed a few hours of rest, so I said I would get some sleep and check back in the morning.
My mother, of course, refused to leave.
Michael and Sonia never returned.
Ten
Back in the car, I checked my phone. The evening at Simmons, it seemed, had been blissfully quiet. I wasn’t sure I believed that. No doubt it would start up again by morning.
The roads were empty, but with ridiculous unseasonable snow splatting down, it took a while to get back to the little town where Simmons was located. Not eighty-mile-an-hour conditions. Times like this, when we get snow and slush instead of welcoming flowers, I wonder why any of us live in New England.
I parked, grabbed the overnight bag that lives in my car, and headed inside, feeling
like a vandal as I crept into the inn. I hoped they’d simply left an envelope and key. Instead, despite the late hour, a tall, bent, weary man in a Mr. Rogers cardigan was waiting. He greeted me, led me to my room, explained how things worked and said there was still cake and other desserts in the breakfast room. Then he padded quietly away.
I wanted cake. I needed sleep.
I did a slapdash toilette that consisted of brushing my teeth and braiding my hair, set my phone alarm for six, changed into my nightgown, and crawled into bed. I didn’t know if my phone would ring during the night with news about my father, but just in case, I set it right beside my pillow. I also didn’t know whether when I woke I might be making my excuses to Gareth and heading back to the hospital, or going back to pasting Band-Aids on his problem.
It was probably a nice room and a nice bed, but I was too distracted, and far too tired, to notice. I woke only a few hours later from a horrible dream in which I was the person who had to operate on my father to save his life. I’d just picked up the scalpel when the sounds of doors opening and closing, and loud footsteps on the stairs, pulled me from sleep. It seemed like a lot of commotion for such an early hour.
Maybe the proprietor was already up and making breakfast? But no. A quick glance at the clock said it was only four a.m. and the man who checked me in said breakfast was at seven. I went to my window and looked down into the parking lot. The outside lights were on, and despite the rain and the fog, I could see Mrs. Norris getting into a shiny black car while The General put their luggage in the trunk.
Leaving? It didn’t make sense. They’d barely seen Heidi. Barely spoken with Gareth and not at all with Dr. Purcell. The police hadn’t had a chance to speak with them. Nothing had been decided about Heidi’s future or about the baby. What on earth was going on?
Maybe they were moving to a different place to stay, but it was an odd time to be doing that. My finely-honed instincts for bad behavior said they were heading out of town. Just beyond them, hovering patiently, was a man with an umbrella. When he lowered it, I recognized the tall man with thinning hair who had greeted me last night. As the car drove off, I grabbed my robe and hurried downstairs to see what I could learn.