“I don’t,” said Josh. “Can we please talk about something else?”
“No, I’m not finished yet,” she said. “There’s one more issue we need to discuss. I’ve noticed some animosity toward us, especially from Lisa, and I don’t want it to get any worse.”
“Mom, there’s nothing I can do about that,” said Josh.
“Of course there is,” she said. “Lisa is an intelligent girl, and she’ll be friendlier once she realizes we don’t mean her any harm. That’s where you come in. It doesn’t matter how obnoxious she is to you. You have to be nice to her.”
Josh didn’t want to upset his mother, but he was afraid of the consequences if he didn’t set the record straight. Her expectations had always been a heavy burden for him to carry, but he clung to the hope that it would be less painful for both of them if he prevented her from getting her heart set on something that was impossible.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “We moved into her house without any warning and turned her whole life upside down. She has every reason to hate us.”
“Josh, would you stop being so difficult?” said his mother, flinging her skeletal arms into the air in a gesture of frustration. “I’m not asking much. I just want you to be pleasant. Can’t you at least do that for me?”
“I’ll do whatever you want, but I can’t guarantee Shannon will play along, especially if Lisa doesn’t stop making snide remarks to her,” said Josh, who felt like he was sinking into a sea of misery. “If Shannon decides she doesn’t like Lisa, I’m not going to be able to change her mind. You know how stubborn she is.”
“I don’t care about that,” said his mother. “I’m depending on you to keep the peace, even if that means turning the other cheek. As for Shannon, if you anticipate a problem, you’ll just have to intervene before the situation gets out of control.”
“I can’t be everywhere at once,” said Josh. “It’s too much.”
“No, I’ll tell you what’s too much,” she said, laughing bitterly. “Being confined to a bed and dying—that’s too much. Your life is a breeze, Josh. You’ve got nothing to complain about.”
Josh was embarrassed because he knew Agnes was listening to the conversation. He wanted to leave, but he couldn’t move. His mother relaxed against the pillows and the excitement in her eyes faded.
“I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” she said. “I just couldn’t understand why you were being so uncooperative. Of course you’ll do your best. Don’t worry about Lisa. I’m sure she’s not a naturally spiteful person. In fact, she could be very good for you.”
Her dreamy expression terrified Josh. He knew what she was thinking, but he refused to entertain the idea. He wished she would stop talking about Lisa. Things were already awkward enough between him and Lisa without the added pressure of a hypothetical romance. He didn’t want to give his mother a chance to pursue the matter, so he stood up, leaned over, and kissed her on the forehead.
“I love you, Mom,” he said. “I’ll see you after school tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “I don’t want you moping around in here. Besides, you’ll be much too busy to bother about me anyway. I’m sure your dad will keep you updated on everything. I’m not planning to die tomorrow, but if I do, you’ve been a wonderful son, and I couldn’t love you more.”
She extended her hand to him, but he was too afraid to take it. She looked so frail that he couldn’t shake the mental image of her face dissolving into dust. Her skull grinned at him through her skin, and the sight paralyzed him with horror. He forgot to breathe, and the room began to spin.
“Josh, I think you’d better run along now,” said Agnes. “I’ll take care of your mom. Don’t you worry.”
Her voice brought him back to reality, and he felt the air entering his lungs again. The room stopped spinning. He heard footsteps in the hall and turned his head. The door opened and his father hurried in, followed by Richard and Lisa’s father. They looked tired, but there was a triumphant air about them. Lisa’s father was carrying a container used for transporting biological specimens. He set it on the table beside the bed. Josh saw his mother’s eyes light up with incredulous joy.
“You did it,” she said in a breathless voice.
Lisa’s father put on a pair of gloves and opened the container. It was full of ice. He pulled out a glass vial and held it up so Josh’s mother could see it. For a moment, it glowed with the color of gold, but condensation gathered on its surface and shrouded it in a smoky blur.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “When can we start?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know the ideal dose, so we’ll start low and work our way up. I’ll give you some fluids tonight to increase your blood volume. Agnes, you can go ahead and put in a central line so we’ll have reliable access.”
“We don’t have baseline clotting studies,” said Agnes.
“I’ll order them,” he said. “I have to go to the hospital tonight anyway to get some work done. We’ll get a complete blood count and a basic metabolic panel too, and I’ll arrange with the blood bank to have platelets on standby just in case we need them. We’ve already got four units of packed red blood cells in the refrigerator.”
All the talk about blood made Josh feel faint. He turned to leave and stumbled against his father, who had been standing behind him.
“Are you okay?” said his father.
Josh hated lying, but he felt guilty about being so weak. His father had enough things to worry about without having to worry about him. He took a deep breath and tried to sound like he didn’t care.
“I got dizzy for a second, but I feel better now,” he said.
“Josh, you don’t have to pretend,” said his father. “I know you want to help the family as much as you can, but you need to take care of yourself first. You’re under an enormous amount of stress, and if there’s anything I can do to help—”
“There’s not,” said Josh. “I’m fine. Just focus on Mom. I can always talk to Richard.”
His father looked surprised.
“Is that what you’ve decided to call him?” he said.
Josh didn’t know what to say. As strange as it was to refer to his grandfather by name, it made more sense than attaching a family title to a person who had never participated in his life before. He still didn’t know why there was so much animosity between his father and Richard, and he regretted mentioning him.
“Do you want me to call him something else?” he said.
“I don’t care what you call him,” said his father. “I just don’t want you depending on someone who won’t be there when you need him.”
“He’s here now,” said Josh.
His father smiled without humor.
“That’s because it doesn’t cost him anything,” he said. “When it’s not convenient for him anymore, he’ll disappear. He’s not reliable, Josh. I should never have let him spend so much time with you. He’s incredibly manipulative.”
“I don’t think he’s trying to cause trouble,” said Josh.
“That’s because you don’t know him well enough,” said his father. “It’s only a matter of time before he shows his true colors. For future reference, don’t believe anything he tells you. He’s nothing but a delusional old man.”
Josh glanced at Richard, who was near enough to hear them. To his surprise, Richard didn’t appear to be offended. Josh realized his father wasn’t trying to hurt Richard by insulting him. He was merely speaking his mind with no consideration for Richard’s feelings. Somehow, this made the feud between them seem more irreconcilable than ever.
Chapter 8
After the children left for school the next morning, Agnes gave a concoction of medications to Sabrina to minimize her chances of reacting badly to the drug. Sabrina began to feel drowsy. She relaxed, only opening her eyes occasionally to look at her husband’s face. Arthur refused to leave her side, and even though she didn’t always agree with him, she was glad he was there
.
Her thoughts became sluggish, but she congratulated herself. Everything was going according to plan. The older children were safely out of the way at school, and Nora had volunteered to take care of Yvonne. She barely paid any attention as Lisa’s father mixed the drug in a bag of saline, attached the tube, and turned on the pump.
Sabrina envisioned her body being infused with something wonderful—a glowing light that spread with each contraction of her heart. She listened to its steady beat, and after an indeterminate length of time, she felt it accelerating. She tried to open her eyes, but she didn’t have the strength to move. She started shivering. Her extremities went numb, and sweat drenched her face. A horrible diffuse pain spread through her body until she couldn’t think about anything else.
“Sabrina, what’s going on?” said Agnes.
Sabrina didn’t reply. Her mouth was dry, but she felt sick.
“Andrew, we need to give her more pain medicine,” said Agnes.
He must have agreed, because a moment later, Sabrina felt a rush of weakness that chased away not only the pain, but everything else as well. When she opened her eyes again, the intolerable agony had faded into a gnawing ache that seemed to originate from her bones. As long as she lay completely still, she could endure it.
She listened to the rhythmic whirring of the pump and began to feel tired again, despite her discomfort. The drug was gone; it had been released into her body to work its mischief or its miracle, but the saline was still dripping into her arm, a precaution against the deadly fluid loss that would occur if she started to bleed. No one else was in the room. The house was peaceful.
She was about to fall asleep when a noise startled her. She was too lethargic to move, but she opened her eyes and looked out from between the lids. Her gaze wandered to the table at the foot of the bed. Someone was standing there: a man wearing a suit.
He sifted through the papers on the table and read the notes on Agnes’ clipboard. Then, he shuffled to the waste basket and fished around in the plastic wrappers and alcohol wipes and scraps of gauze. Not satisfied, he lifted the sharps container where Agnes had discarded all the used needles and rocked it back and forth. The empty vial that had contained the drug rolled around inside with a hollow sound. He put his eye up to the opening to confirm its presence and tried to get it out, but the construction of the lid stopped him.
Sabrina’s fear finally got the upper hand. The terrified sound that emerged from her mouth frightened the man, and by the time Agnes dashed into the room, he was gone. Agnes grabbed Sabrina’s shoulders and steadied her.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Sabrina. “It seemed so real, but it couldn’t have been. There was a man in here, standing over there by the table. He was looking for something, but he ran away when I screamed.”
“I was only gone for a minute,” said Agnes.
She checked Sabrina’s pulse and a frown appeared on her face.
“Please don’t tell me you think Richard is right,” said Sabrina with a groan. “He’s been driving Arthur crazy with his ridiculous predictions, and if he has a legitimate reason to believe someone broke into the house, his paranoia will get worse than ever. There’s no way it could have been real. It was just a hallucination.”
Agnes searched for evidence of an intrusion, but she found nothing conclusive. Sabrina eased herself back down onto the pillows. The fear receded from her mind, but the pain intensified. It eventually demanded her full attention, and she began to realize how difficult it would be to maintain her courage.
“Why does it hurt so much?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said Agnes. “Peterson thought the drug made the immune system go into overdrive, but he wasn’t entirely sure. It was one of the things he was studying when Richard betrayed him.”
“Using you?” said Sabrina.
“Yes,” said Agnes. “It sounds horrible, but I was actually one of the lucky ones. You may have noticed that we diluted the drug and put it directly into your bloodstream. That’s because it’s toxic in its concentrated form. It causes massive tissue damage. Talk about pain! There were people who lost their arms.”
“I hope that doesn’t happen to me,” said Sabrina.
“It won’t,” said Agnes. “It’s totally avoidable when the correct route of administration is used. Peterson didn’t worry about such things at first, but by the time he got to me, he was somewhat more cautious. I suspect the bodies were piling up, and he was wondering if he was going to get into trouble.”
“So you don’t think he cared about you at all?” said Sabrina.
“Oh, he cared about me,” said Agnes. “He cared about me in the most disturbing way possible. I was his property. How else can I explain it? I was the canvas on which he painted his masterpiece. Once the work began, no one was allowed to touch me—no one except him. He was completely devoted to me. He wiped away my tears with one hand and cut me into pieces with the other.”
Sabrina heard the tension in her voice.
“I can’t imagine how you must have felt when you realized what he was doing,” she said. “To think you were dying, and to have him be the one who was supposed to be taking care of you—how did you survive?”
“It was complicated,” said Agnes. “I was angry for a long time after it was over. The fact that I wasn’t dead was a testimony to his genius, but I didn’t want him to get any of the credit, so I almost destroyed myself. I felt like I was betraying myself by existing at all. I didn’t start to recover until I found out I was pregnant.”
“I keep on forgetting you’re a mother,” said Sabrina.
“Oh, yes,” said Agnes. “My dear son graduated from college several years ago. I’m so proud of him. He’s been through a lot. I wasn’t around much when he was growing up, and there were times when I felt like I was neglecting him, but he never held it against me. It’s hard for me to imagine him on his own, but he seems to be doing fine.”
Sabrina thought about her own children, and grief overwhelmed her. She didn’t know if she would get the chance to see them grow up. Weariness and pain assailed her. If Agnes thought the intruder had been a bad dream, then that was good enough for her. She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
∞∞∞
Later that day, Agnes told Richard and Lisa’s father about the suspected intrusion. Richard was alarmed, but Lisa’s father dismissed the possibility. Even Richard’s account of Graham’s devious visit to his house with Uriah failed to convince him. They eventually reached a compromise which involved changing the locks and installing security cameras around the house. Lisa’s mother didn’t like the cameras. In fact, she was so annoyed about the whole thing that she became more and more reluctant to leave her room.
She appeared in the evenings to make dinner and disappeared again after the kitchen was cleaned. The only time she cheered up was when she was discussing Molly’s wedding. Not only was it a distraction, but it also annoyed Lisa’s father. That night during dinner, even though he wasn’t there, she brought it up again.
“Lisa, I talked to Molly earlier today, and she mentioned going shopping tomorrow to get some things for the wedding,” she said. “She’s worried about finding a dress on such short notice. She’ll have to buy one straight off the rack, but she’s an unusual size, so it might be difficult. She wants the two of us to go with her.”
Lisa couldn’t imagine Molly wearing a wedding dress.
“I have a lot of homework,” she said. “Does it have to be tomorrow?”
“The sooner the better,” said her mother. “I thought you would be excited to go, but even if you’re not, she’s depending on you to be there. You’re her maid of honor, after all, and she needs your support.”
Shannon, who had previously resisted the urge to retaliate against Lisa, bowed her head, wrinkled her eyebrows, and rounded her lips in a sarcastic display of sympathy that remained on her face until Josh kicked her under the table.
L
isa saw the exchange and ignored it. She knew Josh was up to something. Ever since his family had moved in, he had conducted himself in an admirable manner, almost to the point of being obnoxious. Lisa suspected he was trying to manipulate her, and she despised him for it. Her mother also noticed the contortions of Shannon’s face, but she misinterpreted their significance.
“Shannon, you’re invited, too,” she said. “We can all go together. It’ll be nice to get out of the house. We’ll have some bonding time and share some girl talk.”
Shannon was taken by surprise and forgot her manners.
“I would rather die,” she said.
Lisa’s mother looked shocked. Shannon blushed and glanced around the room, but no one vouched for her. The other adults were in the sickroom with Sabrina, and Josh was too startled to say anything. Lisa felt an ugly smile of satisfaction appearing on her face as Shannon struggled to explain herself.
“I already have a mom,” she said. “No offense, but it feels like you’re trying to take her place. You’re nothing like her. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it’s the truth. I don’t do girl talk. I don’t even know what it is. I can’t think of anything worse than being stuck in a bridal shop with a bunch of silly women—not that you’re silly, of course. I don’t mean that. I’m just not interested in going.”
“But it might be fun,” said Lisa’s mother. “Besides, I’m sure you miss your friends.”
Shannon leaped up so violently that she knocked over her chair. Her eyes flashed with anger.
“Why would you even say something like that?” she said in a shrill voice. “You must be completely out of touch with reality. Are you brain-dead? Do you think hanging out with you and Lisa and Molly will make me feel better? You’re all so shallow!”
“Shannon, shut up,” said Josh. “She’s just trying to be friendly.”
Lisa’s mother got up and retrieved Shannon’s chair from the floor. She didn’t look angry, but Lisa could tell she was offended. She couldn’t remember anyone confronting her mother in such a rude manner before. Shannon seemed to know she was about to be lectured. She crossed her arms and waited.
The Patient from Silvertree: Book One in the Silvertree Series Page 10