Life Support

by Tess Gerritsen

  “Seventy-two is young! He could still have years ahead of him.”

  “But he was obviously sick in the ER. If they find his body, if they can show he already had a terminal illness, it’ll work to your advantage in court.”

  She rubbed her face. “That’s the last place I want to end up. In court.”

  “Let’s worry about that if and when it happens. Right now, we’ve got other political issues brewing. We know the news has already reached the media, and they love nightmare stories about doctors. If the hospital board starts to feel any pressure from the public, they’ll be on my back to take action. I’ll do everything I can to protect you. But Toby, I can be replaced, too.” He paused. “Mike Esterhaus has already expressed interest in being ER chief.”

  “He’d be a disaster.”

  “He’d be a yes-man. He wouldn’t fight them the way I do. Every time they try to cut another RN from our staff, I scream bloody murder. Mike will politely bend right over.”

  For the first time it occurred to her. I’m taking Paul down with me.

  “The one thing we have to hope for,” he said, “is that they find the patient. That will defuse this crisis. No more media interest, no threat of a lawsuit. He has to be found—alive and well.”

  “Which gets less and less likely every hour.”

  They sat in silence, their coffee growing cold, their friendship strained to its weakest point. This is why doctors should never marry each other, she thought. Tonight, Paul will go home to Elizabeth, whose work has nothing to do with medicine. They’ll have none of these tensions hanging between them, no shared worries about Doug Carey or lawsuits or hospital boards to ruin their supper. Elizabeth will help him escape this crisis, at least for an evening.

  And whose help do I have?

  6

  No rubber chicken tonight, observed Dr. Robbie Brace as a waitress set a plate before him. He looked down at the rack of spring lamb and new potatoes and glazed baby vegetables. Everything looked tender and so very young. As his knife sliced through the meat, he thought: The privileged prefer to dine on babies. But he did not feel particularly privileged tonight, despite the fact he sat at a candlelit table, a flute of champagne beside his plate. He glanced at his wife, Greta, sitting beside him and saw her pale forehead etched with a frown. He suspected that frown had nothing to do with the quality of her meal; her request for a vegetarian plate had been graciously filled, and the food was artistically presented. As she gazed around at the two dozen other tables in the banquet room, perhaps she was taking note of what her husband had already observed: They’d been seated at the table farthest from the dais. Banished to a corner where they’d be scarcely noticed.

  Half the chairs at their table were vacant, and the other three chairs were occupied by nursing home administrators and an extremely deaf Brant Hill investor. Theirs was the Siberia of tables. Scanning the room, he saw that all the other physicians were seated in better locations. Dr. Chris Olshank—who’d been hired the same week Robbie was— rated a table far closer to the dais. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it’s just a screwup in the seating arrangements. But he could not help noting the essential difference between Chris Olshank and himself.

  Olshank was white.

  Man, you’re just screwing around with your own head.

  He took a swallow of champagne, drinking it down in a resentful gulp, the whole time intensely aware that he was the only black male guest at the banquet. There were two black women at another table, but he was the only black man. It was something he never failed to take stock of, something that was always in the forefront of his consciousness whenever he walked into a room full of people. How many were white, how many Asian, how many black? Too many, one way or the other, made him uneasy, as though it violated some privately acceptable racial quota. Even now, as a doctor, he couldn’t get away from that painful awareness of his own skin color. The M.D. after his name had changed nothing.

  Greta reached for him, her hand small and pale against his blackness. “You’re not eating.”

  “Sure I am.” He looked at her plate of vegetables. “How’s the rabbit food?”

  “Very good, as a matter of fact. Have a taste.” She slipped a forkful of garlicky potatoes into his mouth. “Nice, isn’t it? And better for your arteries than that poor lamb is.”

  “Once a carnivore—”

  “Yes, always a carnivore. But I keep hoping you’ll see the light.”

  At last he smiled, reflecting on the beauty of his own wife. Greta had more than just eye-of-the-beholder beauty; one saw fire and intelligence in her face. Though she seemed oblivious to her effect on the opposite sex, Brace was painfully aware of how other men looked at her. Aware, too, of how they looked at him, a black man married to a redhead. Envy, resentment, puzzlement—he saw it in men’s eyes as they glanced between husband and wife, between black and white.

  A tap on the microphone drew their attention. Brace looked up and saw that Kenneth Foley, the CEO of Brant Hill, was standing behind the podium.

  The lights dimmed and a slide appeared on the projector screen over Foley’s head. It was the Brant Hill logo, a curly baroque B intertwined with an H, and beneath it the words:

  WHERE LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REWARD.

  “That is a disgusting slogan,” whispered Greta. “Why don’t they just say, Where the rich folk live?”

  Brace gave her knee a squeeze of warning. He agreed with her, of course, but one didn’t spout off Socialist opinions in the presence of the mink and diamonds set.

  At the podium, Foley began his presentation. “Six years ago, Brant Hill was only a concept. Not a unique concept, of course; across the country, as Americans grow older, retirement communities are springing up in every state. What makes Brant Hill unique isn’t the concept. It’s the execution. It’s the degree to which we carry out the dream.”

  A new slide flashed onto the screen: a photograph of the Brant Hill common, with the swan pond in the foreground and the rolling hills of the golf course stretching into a soft shroud of mist.

  “We know that the dream has nothing to do with a comfortable old age followed by a comfortable death. The dream has to do with life. With beginnings, not endings. That is what we offer our clients. We’ve made the dream a reality. And look how far we’ve come! Brant Hill, Newton, is expanding. Brant Hill, La Jolla, is sold out. Last month we started construction on our third development, in Naples, Florida, and already, seventy-five percent of those unbuilt units have been sold. And tonight, on the sixth anniversary of our first groundbreaking, I’m here to announce the most exciting news of all.” He paused, and on the screen above him, the Brant Hill logo reappeared on a background of royal blue. “At eight A.M. tomorrow,” he said, “we will be making our initial public offering of stock. I think you all understand what that means.”

  Money, thought Brace as he heard the murmurs of excitement in the room. A fortune for the initial investors. And for Brant Hill itself, it meant an infusion of cash that would spur construction of new developments in other states. No wonder there was champagne on the table; as of tomorrow morning, half the people in this room were going to be even more wealthy than they already were.

  The audience burst out in applause.

  Greta did not, which Robbie noted with some discomfort. The old stereotype about stubborn redheads held true for his wife. She was sitting with arms folded, her chin jutting out, the very picture of a pissed-off Socialist.

  More slides appeared on-screen, reflecting a changing collage of colors on Greta’s face. Photos of La Jolla’s Brant Hill, designed as a cluster of Mediterranean-style villas overlooking the Pacific. A photo of the health club in Newton, where a dozen aging women in snazzy warm-up suits danced aerobics. A shot of Newton’s fifth green, with two men posing beside their canopied golf cart. Then a photo of residents dining in the country club restaurant, a bottle of champagne chilling in a silver ice bucket.

  Where the rich folk live.

  Brace shifte
d in his chair, uncomfortably attuned to what Greta must be thinking of all this. Taking care of rich folk was not what he’d planned for his life’s work when he’d been a medical student. But then, he hadn’t anticipated the pressures of student loans or a home mortgage or saving for their kid’s college fund. He hadn’t imagined he would be forced to sell out.

  Greta uncrossed her legs, and as her thigh brushed against his, he felt an unexpected dart of anger that she couldn’t see his side of this. She was the wife; she could hang on to her principles. He was the one who had to keep their family fed and housed. And where was the sin in taking care of the rich? Like everyone else, the rich got sick, they needed doctors, they needed compassion.

  They paid their bills.

  He crossed his arms, withdrawing both physically and emotionally from Greta, and stared at the projector screen. So this was Ken Foley’s real purpose for the dinner—to drum up excitement about the initial public offering, to fire up demand for the new stock. Foley’s speech was intended for a far wider audience of investors than was now in this room. Already, Brant Hill must be showing up on radar screens of brokerage firms across the country. Every word he said tonight would be piped straight to the business media.

  A new slide appeared, an artist’s rendition of the new nursing home wing now under construction. Yesterday the concrete foundation had been poured, and next week excavation started on yet a second addition. They were building as fast as they could, yet the demand would only keep growing.

  Foley had described the product; now he explained the market for it. The next slide was a bar graph representing the growth of the elderly population in the United States, the surge of baby boomers progressing into old age like a pig swallowed and digested as it moves through a snake. The me-generation was graduating from skis to walkers. Here’s our target population, Foley said, his laser pointer circling the statistical pig in the snake. Our future clients. By the year 2005, boomers will start retiring, and Brant Hill is just the sort of development they’ll turn to. We’re talking growth— and extraordinary returns on your investment. Boomers will be looking toward an exciting new phase in their lives. They don’t want worries about sickness or infirmity. Many of them will have money saved up—a lot of it. They’ll be getting old, but they don’t want to feel old.

  And who does? thought Brace. Which one of us doesn’t look in the mirror and feel a sense of dismay that the face staring back is too old to be me?

  Dessert and coffee finally arrived at their wilderness table. Greta, tasting artificial something-or-other in the whipped topping, didn’t eat hers. Brace ate both their desserts in a depressing orgy of calories. He had his mouth full of whipped cream when he heard his name spoken over the microphone.

  Greta gave him a nudge. “Stand up,” she whispered. “They’re introducing the new doctors.”

  Brace shot to his feet, accidentally flicking a glob of cream across the front of his suit. He stood for only a second, fumbling with a napkin as he waved to the audience, then quickly sank back into his chair. The other three new doctors rose to their feet, waving as they were introduced, no one else wearing whipped cream on their clothes, no one else tight-faced with embarrassment. I graduated second highest in my med school class, he thought. I was voted intern of the year. I did it against all odds, and without a penny of help from my family. And I am sitting here feeling like a goddamn imbecile.

  Under the table, Greta touched his knee. “The air’s too rich in here,” she whispered. “I think I’m choking on the gold dust.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “Do you?”

  He looked at the dais, where Foley was still talking about money. Returns on investment, growth of the retiree market. There’s gold in them thar old folks.

  He threw his napkin on the table. “We’re outta here.”

  Angus Parmenter was not feeling well, not feeling well at all. Since Thursday the trembling in his right hand had come and gone twice. He found that if he concentrated, he could suppress it, but it took great effort, and it left his arm aching. Both times the twitching stopped of its own accord. For the last two days, it had not recurred at all, and he’d managed to convince himself the attacks meant nothing. Too much coffee, perhaps. Or too much time at the Nautilus machine, overexerting those arm muscles. He had stopped using the Nautilus, and the movement had not returned, which was a good sign.

  But now something else was wrong.

  He had noticed it upon awakening from his afternoon nap. It was dark, and he had switched on the lamp and looked around at his bedroom. All the furniture seemed tilted. When had that happened? Had he moved things around today? He couldn’t recall. But there was the nightstand, way beyond arm’s reach. It was tottering on its edge, ready to fall. He stared at it, trying to understand why it didn’t topple over, why the glass of water set on top of it was not sliding to the floor.

  He turned and looked at the window. It, too, had shifted position. It was now far in the distance, a receding square at the end of a long tunnel.

  He stepped out of bed and immediately swayed. Was that an earthquake? The floor seemed to roll like swells on the open sea. He stumbled one way, then the other, and finally caught himself on the dresser. There he paused, clinging to the edge, trying to regain his sense of balance. He felt something dribble onto his foot. He looked down and saw that the carpet was wet, and he smelled the warm, sour odor of urine. Who the hell had peed in his bedroom?

  He heard a chiming. The notes seemed to float around the room, like tiny black balloons. Church bells? A clock? No, someone was ringing the doorbell.

  He staggered out of the bedroom, holding on to the walls, doorways, anything he could cling to. The hallway seemed to elongate, the door gliding away from his outstretched hand. Suddenly his fingers closed around the knob. With a grunt of triumph, he yanked open the door.

  In astonishment he stared at the two midgets standing on his front porch.

  “Go away,” he said.

  The midgets stared at him and made mewing sounds.

  Angus started to swing the door shut but couldn’t get it to close. A woman had appeared and was holding it open.

  “What are you doing, Dad? Why aren’t you dressed?”

  “Go. Get out of my house.”

  “Dad!” The woman was forcing her way in now.

  “Get out!” said Angus. “Leave me alone!” He turned and staggered up the hall, trying to flee the woman and the two midgets. But they pursued him, the midgets whimpering, the woman yelling: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with you?”

  He tripped on the carpet. What happened next went by gracefully, like a slow dance underwater. He felt his body flying forward, gliding. Felt his arms stretching out like wings as he soared through liquid air.

  He did not even feel the impact.

  “Dad! Oh my God.”

  Those damn midgets were screeching and pawing at his head. Now the woman crouched over him. She turned him over on his back.

  “Dad, are you hurt?”

  “I can fly,” he whispered.

  She looked at the midgets. “Get the telephone. Call nine one one. Go!”

  Angus moved his arm, flapping it like a wing.

  “Hold still, Dad. We’re getting an ambulance.”

  I can fly! He was floating. Gliding. I can fly.

  “I’ve never seen him like this. He doesn’t recognize me, and he doesn’t seem to know his own grandchildren. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called the ambulance.” The woman shot an anxious glance into the exam room, where the nurses were trying to take Angus Parmenter’s vital signs. “It’s a stroke or something. Isn’t it?”

  “I’ll be able to tell more after I examine him,” said Toby.

  “But does it sound like a stroke?”

  “It’s possible.” Toby gave the woman’s arm a squeeze. “Why don’t you sit in the waiting room, Mrs. Lacy? I’ll be out to talk to you as soon as I know more.”

  Edith Lacy nodded. Hu
gging herself, she went into the waiting area and sank onto the couch between her two daughters. The three of them hugged one another, arms forming a warm and compact universe.

  Toby turned and entered the exam room.

  Angus Parmenter was strapped down on the gurney in four-point restraints, babbling something about strangers in his house. For an eighty-two-year-old man, his limbs were taut and surprisingly muscular. He was dressed only in his undershirt. That’s the way his daughter had found him, naked from the waist down.

  Maudeen peeled off the blood pressure cuff and slid it neatly into the wall basket. “Vitals are fine. One thirty over seventy. Pulse is ninety-four and regular.”

  “Temp?”

  “Thirty-eight degrees,” said Val.

  Toby stood by the man’s head and tried to engage his attention. “Mr. Parmenter? Angus? I’m Dr. Harper.”

  “. . . came right into my house . . . wouldn’t leave me alone. . .”

  “Angus, did you fall down? Did you hurt yourself?”

  “. . . goddamn midgets, came to steal my money. Everyone’s after my money.”

  Maudeen shook her head. “I can’t get a word of history out of him.”

  “The daughter says he’s been healthy. No recent illnesses.” Toby shone her penlight into the man’s eyes. Both pupils constricted. “She spoke to him on the phone only two weeks ago and he sounded fine. Angus! Angus, what happened to you?”

  “. . . always trying to take my damn money. . .”

  “We have a one-track mind,” sighed Toby, flicking off the penlight. She continued her exam, searching first for evidence of head trauma, then moving on to her exam of the cranial nerves. She found no localizing signs, nothing to pinpoint the cause of the man’s confusion. The daughter had described a staggering gait. Had the man suffered a stroke of the cerebellum? That would affect coordination.

  She unstrapped his right wrist. “Angus, can you touch my finger?” She held her hand in front of his face. “Reach up and touch my finger.”