Vultures At Twilight Part 21

'So, Wayland, you remember Wendy Conroy? Right, exactly . . . Yeah, I know she was up there; that's why I'm calling. I'm working on the murders and something came up. We're going to need to take a look at her records . . . Maybe fifteen years ago . . . How hard will that be? So if we left in like half an hour, you think you could get them? You're a stand-up guy . . . Hey, I wouldn't know about that, but it is your third kid . . . Thanks, man.' He hung up, and like a child wanting his mother's approval, he looked at Mattie.

'So?' she asked.

'He said her records were either in the warehouse or on microfilm, but he'd track them down.'

'Strong work,' she acknowledged. 'So who's Wayland?'

'Wayland Green, he's a Grenvillian.'

'Helpful.'

'Nice guy,' he said, missing Mattie's point entirely. 'We went to school together. He's the director up there. I figured it would just be easier to call him than have to bother the judge for a subpoena.'

'Let me think about this,' she said. 'You have to be careful with anything that might become admissible.'

'What do you mean?'

'You need to be careful in how you acquire and handle evidence. I can't tell you how many good cases fall apart because of short cuts with the evidence.'

'You think we should get a subpoena, anyway?' he asked.

'I do,' she said. 'And it really puts a crimp in doing this today.'

'Not necessarily.' He grinned and picked up the phone. 'Yeah, Marge, you want to get me Judge Blasely . . . Try his cell; he's probably playing golf . . . Thanks.' He made a quick note under the number for Silver Glen, and then dialed. 'Hey, Ken, it's Kevin Simpson . . . Look, I'm working on the murders and I need a favor . . .'

TWENTY-NINE.

'Mother, stop it.' Barbara scolded. 'The doctor said you should stay for at least another twenty-four hours.'

'It's not his life, is it?' I shot back as I hunted for my belongings.

'You're behaving like a child,' she scolded. 'What would Daddy say?'

'Don't bring your father into this. All they want to do is keep me for observation, and frankly, I'm feeling better and I want to get home.' The last thing I needed was for Barbara to get on her high horse. Why couldn't her plane have been delayed?

'Fine, but if you drop dead . . .'

I looked at the concern on my daughter's face as she hovered. I stopped and sat on the bed. 'I'm going to be fine, dear. The doctor said the damage was minimal. And besides, your father always said the hospital was the worst place to stay once you were feeling better, that you could pick up all sorts of bacteria that would make you sicker than anything you came in with.'

'Maybe you shouldn't have taken that job at the Antique Center,' she offered. 'Maybe it was too stressful.'

'Maybe I should take up knitting and plant myself in a rocking chair?'

'That's not what I meant.'

'Dear, we seem to have gotten off to a bad start. Why don't we get out of here and go for a sit-down somewhere.'

'I wish you'd stay.'

'I know.' Satisfied that I had my few possessions, I went into the fluorescent-lit bathroom to check my appearance. I daubed on a quick swipe of coral-pink lipstick that Ada had brought and tried to pinch some color into my cheeks. I could see why Barbara was concerned. The hospital was no beauty cure. I looked a sight, my hair hopelessly flattened by the hours in bed, and my face G.o.d, I look old like I'd aged ten years in the past twenty-four hours. When I walked, a deep throbbing pain reminded me of where the catheter had gone up my inner thigh.

I tried not to think about the hang-up caller. Even though that that was part of why I had to get out of here. Someone was trying to frighten me, and they were doing a d.a.m.n good job. I tried to tell myself it was just a prank caller, someone trying to rile me up . . . a lady who'd just had a heart attack; maybe they wanted to frighten her into another . . . into her grave.

In the mirror, I watched Barbara pace in front of the bed. She had Bradley's chin, my pale blue eyes and a tall, thin frame that she maintained with daily jogs and Pilates. Her short, beautifully styled chestnut hair was not entirely natural, and I wondered if she'd started to go gray. I subtracted backwards and realized she was thirty-six; Christina was two years younger. My children are middle aged, I thought. Despite all these magazine articles insisting that thirty was the new twenty and sixty the new forty. At that moment I felt far from forty and looked about a hundred. Maybe being in the hospital made that more explicit, that we were all getting older. I remembered a not-funny joke Bradley used to make: 'In every day and in every way we're just that much closer to death.'

As I came out of the bathroom, a stocky nurse entered armed with her clipboard. She quickly a.s.sessed the situation. 'What's going on?'

'Finally,' Barbara said, 'someone to talk some sense into her.'

The nurse looked at me expectantly.

'I was telling my daughter that I felt fine and was ready to leave. Doctor Green even said I was just here for observation.'

'You're not scheduled to be discharged until tomorrow.' As she spoke my roommate's intravenous pump began to ding. The nurse went to adjust the clogged tubing. 'Let me give the doctor a call and see what we can do,' she said over her shoulder as she reset the machine.

'I can recuperate much quicker at home. Please, tell him that.' And then added, 'And both of my daughters have come into town to take care of their ailing mother.'

Barbara shot me a look.

'Well,' I said, perching on the bed, my purse in my lap, 'apparently we have to wait for the good doctor.' I patted the mattress next to me. 'Sit.'

Grudgingly, Barbara obliged.

'Don't be that way,' I chided. 'If I was having any symptoms I'd stay.'

'I suppose you know what you're doing.'

'Thank you. I'm not completely senile.'

She looked at me. 'You're smudged,' she said, pulling a tissue out of the bedside box. I let her minister to my uneven lip line, enjoying the moment of calm.

'So when does Chris get in?' I asked.

'Soon. She was going to your condo first.'

'Good.' Please G.o.d let those journals be out of there! 'Then we'll meet her there.'

'You know you scared us to death,' she said, rubbing rouge into my cheeks.

'Not my intent.'

'Were you having pains before?'

'No, this came out of nowhere. They'll probably never let me back into The Brown Bear Diner. I'm sure having patrons drop on their floor can't be good for business.'

'So glad you can joke about it.'

'I don't want to make it bigger than it was.'

'I wish I could have been here sooner,' she said, looking out the doorway into the busy corridor.

'What for?'

'I just feel bad that you're out here all by yourself.'

'Yes,' I admitted, 'it is hard being the last living person in Connecticut.'

'That's not what I meant.'

'I know, dear, but I'm not alone.'

'You don't have family.'

'I do. I have you and Chris.' But I was thinking about Ada, and wis.h.i.+ng she were here to help bolster my case. But I'd told her not to come this morning, knowing that Aaron was with friends and she'd have to call a cab.

'On the other side of the country.'

'I'm not complaining.'

'I didn't say you were. I just think that it might be easier if we all lived closer.'

'I don't want to move,' I said. 'Do you?'

At that point the nurse returned with Dr Green. He looked first at me, dressed with purse in lap. Then he looked at Barbara.

'The nurse tells me your mother wants to sign out.'

'Yes, she's pretty insistent.'

'Let me take a look,' he said, flipping through my clipboard. 'Mrs Campbell, would you mind laying back on the bed?'

I obliged, not enjoying the odds of three of them against one of me. 'Really, I feel fine.'

With a finger to his lips he motioned for me to be quiet while he insinuated the bell of his stethoscope beneath my dress.

It was such an intimate gesture. How many times I had seen Bradley do the same. Of course, he always warmed the metal with his hands first.

Dr Green's fingers sought out the pulse in my wrist. I waited, listening to the silence and catching glimpses of my daughter. Despite the fact she was annoying me no end, I had a moment's pride noting how well she looked with her quietly chic navy suit and perfectly styled hair.

But how dare she blow in from out of town, albeit with the best of intentions, and attempt to ride roughshod over my life? I can't imagine what her response would be if I told her about the journals, the murders, or my mystery caller. Right then, I determined to tell her nothing.

The cardiologist withdrew from his perch beneath my bra and, with a clicking sound between his lips, he removed the stethoscope.

He looked at me and then turned to Barbara. 'Will anyone be at home with her?' he asked.

'Both me and my sister.'

'Hmmm,' he responded, weighing the options. He looked at me again, I thought he might even speak to me, but he turned back to Barbara. 'I'm going to want a home nurse to visit. I'll have the social worker make the referral.'

'Excuse me,' I said, having had enough of being referred to in the third-person invisible. 'I don't want some stranger in my home.'

The doctor looked at me and in the tone one takes with a young and not terribly swift child said, 'Mrs Campbell, you just had a heart attack. You're going to need to have someone check in on you.'

'For what? I can't see what some stranger coming into my home is going to do for me. If you want me to see my internist, or go for rehab, I'd be happy to do that.'

'Mother,' Barbara broke in, 'would you please listen to the doctor?'

'Fine, then at least have the courtesy to speak directly to me. I'm not a child.'

'I just find,' he said, sounding annoyed, 'that it is sometimes easier to communicate instructions to family members. You've been through a lot.'

'Yes, I have, and fortunately it didn't rob me of my ability to think. I'd like to leave . . .' I tried to regain my composure, while rewrapping the top of my dress. 'OK,' I said, 'I'll go along with the nurse for one visit. After that I'm not making any promises.'

'It's your life,' he said.

'Exactly.'

'You'll need to come in for some tests over the next few weeks.' He was about to turn back to Barbara and then stopped himself. 'I'll have my office give you a call.'

'That would be fine,' I said, already thinking that the first thing I would do when I got home was give my internist a call and have him refer me to another cardiologist.

'That's it then,' he said, rising from the bed.

'You're going to let her go?' Barbara asked, clearly alarmed.

'It's not like I'm a serial killer,' I reminded her, 'just your mother.'

'Are you sure she's ready?' she persisted, tagging after the doctor as he headed toward the door.

'Like I said earlier, I thought another day for observation was warranted, but clearly she doesn't wish to stay and as far as any imminent danger, she should be past that. It'll be important for her to rest for the next few days, take the medicine and follow up in the office next week. Then we'll get her started in rehab.' He flashed her, what I'm sure he considered, a rea.s.suring smile. 'She should be fine. Just keep an eye on her.'

Wonderful, now she's been given doctor's orders to boss me around. This is not what I needed. What I needed was time to think. There was too much already and the cavalry-like arrival of my children wasn't helping. I thought back to my dream as snippets of the dark wood and the river of blood flashed to mind. A few years back, Ada and I had gone to a series of lectures on dream interpretation. For a while, both she and I had been caught up in a daily ritual of sharing our dreams and then trying to decipher them. I had no doubt that my subconscious wanted to tell me something. But what?

Barbara followed the doctor into the corridor. I overheard whispered traces of their conversation. It did little to calm me. The theme appeared to be: what should I do with mother?

I thought about my own mother and how Bradley and I had taken care of her in those last hard years, when everything seemed to give out: her eyes, her ears, and finally her memory. We never once thought about a nursing home and up until those last few months, I looked after her in her own home. When things had deteriorated to where she could no longer remember to turn off the stove, we had it disconnected and she joined us for all our meals, or else I'd go over and fix her breakfast. When she couldn't make the stairs, we moved her bedroom into the back parlor and put a safety gate across the stairwell. We put support bars in the bathroom and installed a separate shower where I'd bathe her. I remembered the intimacy of that, of helping my mother dress in the morning, of carefully powdering her after her bath so that she wouldn't develop rashes or pressure sores.

The day she no longer recognized Bradley was the day we moved her into our house. In retrospect, I'm not certain it was the right thing to do. A month after she had moved into our spare bedroom, which we had arranged to mimic her own, she developed pneumonia, and within a week had died.

The end had been awful. Every day I had to hover over her, lest she bolt out the door and head back to her house. At least in Grenville people knew who she was and on those couple occasions where I didn't catch her fast enough, Hank Morgan or one of the neighbors would spot her and bring her home.