Part 4 (1/2)
”No. Stay.”
”You sure I'm not . . . ?”
”Take a look. You don't recognize her?”
”I don't know anybody in Tacoma.”
”Oh, I think you do.” It was at this point I realized all the sweet talk on the phone had been part of a ruse. I was always slow on the uptake, which explained why I was attracted to dim females, females who couldn't fool me, but I'd never been this slow. On the drive down, I'd alternated between euphoria and apprehension, seesawing between the thought that she'd summoned me either to slake her l.u.s.t or to de-man me with a scalpel. I could tell now by the sudden edge in her voice I was scalpel-bound. ”Step around here. You've seen patients before. You're a big brave fireman. Take a look.”
She moved aside to make room for me. It was a woman, older, faded, devoid of makeup, her features flavored with that lack of vitality a long-term patient acquires, her body so tiny and frail and motionless, I had to look twice to be certain she was breathing. When I turned to Stephanie, her eyes were like blue lasers.
”You don't know her?”
I turned back to the patient. ”I don't think so.”
”Look again. Sometimes it's difficult to recognize a person when they're horizontal. But you've seen her on her back before. That was the whole point, wasn't it? Getting her horizontal?”
It was with a queasy feeling that I realized we were standing over Stephanie's sister, Holly. I'd cherished Holly, made love to Holly, woken up beside her, and yet I barely recognized the skeleton she'd become. ”Oh, G.o.d.”
”Her doctors don't think so, but I believe she hears everything around her. I believe she's listening to us right now. You know how a stroke victim can hear what you say but can't respond. You ask them to move their hand, their brain sends the signal, but the signal never arrives. It's got to be the most frustrating feeling on earth.”
”What happened?”
”A cerebrovascular accident, although so far n.o.body's been able to figure out exactly what caused it. We think she had an aneurysm.”
”This is incredible.”
”Is it?”
”She's the second person I've seen today in basically this same situation.”
”I'm sorry you're having such a bad day.”
”That's not what I meant.”
”I know what you meant.”
”I don't get it. She's twenty-eight. People her age don't have strokes.”
”Not unless there are special circ.u.mstances. I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what those circ.u.mstances might have been.”
”That's why you came to North Bend? If I'd known she was sick, I never would have . . . Holly was in perfect health the last time I saw her.”
”Perfect mental health?”
”What are you getting at?”
She reached under the blanket for her sister's hand. ”We think she tried to kill herself. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?”
8. FREAK ME OUT.
Nothing she might have said could have rendered me quite so speechless.
At least now I knew the primary source of her antipathy toward me: Stephanie Riggs thought I had driven her sister to suicide-and a botched job at that.
Ten years ago our department responded to a young man who'd tried to hang himself in the woods; he was found minutes later by his brothers, who revived him so that he could spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state. We all thought about that patient from time to time. All of us who'd been on the alarm thought about him. There were endings worse than death.
What had happened to Holly, for instance. It was one thing to be ninety and have a stroke-live a couple more years. It was quite another to be twenty-eight and have a stroke, consigned to a bed for another half century.
”This was because of you,” Stephanie Riggs said. ”Because of your shabby affair.”
Our relations.h.i.+p had fizzled after Holly discovered I was seeing one of the Suzannes. I had had treated her shabbily. treated her shabbily.
”I can't believe Holly would kill herself. I certainly never saw any hint of depression or-”
”Not until you dumped her. They found her forty-some hours after you last spoke. As far as we could ascertain, she didn't speak to anyone else or leave the house after that last phone call with you.”
I remembered it.
The conversation had been one-sided and rambling, an hour during which Holly had cried over the fact that we were no longer an item, as if two people had never decided to go their separate ways before. Looking back on it, I could see now that our breakup had been my fault. What's tricky to explain without making me sound like a jerk, and what I would never admit to her sister, who already thought I was a jerk, was that during our last phone conversation I'd nodded off.
Twice.
Fallen asleep. I felt bad about it even as it was happening, but as was Holly's custom, she'd phoned late, after the girls were in bed, after I was in bed, having lost sleep the night before fighting one of North Bend's infrequent house fires. I don't believe she'd been threatening suicide. Still, there were a number of minutes during that conversation when I didn't partic.i.p.ate.
”I remember the call,” I said.
”Not that you're going to answer me truthfully, but how did Holly sound?”
Boring, I thought. The way any jilted lover sounds when she p.i.s.ses and moans and tries to rationalize her partner back into a relations.h.i.+p the partner wants no part of. ”If you're asking if she threatened suicide, the answer is no. She wasn't happy we were breaking up, but she never hinted she was going to do anything like this.”
”What would you say if I told you she wrote in her journal she'd been talking to you about killing herself?”
Holly had never mentioned a journal and Stephanie's question was most likely a subterfuge, but I had no way of knowing for certain. She hadn't said Holly's journal included mention of suicide, had only asked what I would say if it had. It was a trick trial attorneys and cops used, one my father had often wielded on me as a child, one the elders in our church had used on him and my mother both, on all the adults in the commune, a contrivance I was thoroughly familiar with. The secret was to not let the other person buffalo you into admitting something there was no proof of.
As far as I knew, during the minutes of that phone call when I was asleep Holly had continued talking about our relations.h.i.+p, nothing else. It had been a ghastly hour, though I gotta say the current one was stacking up to be worse.
In the days and weeks after that phone call, Holly had gradually faded from my thoughts and I believed I'd faded from hers.
All the while she'd been right here.
Comatose.
From the look of her, she hadn't thought about anything during the past month, least of all me.
”The electric meter reader went to the rear of her duplex and spotted her on the floor. He called the police, who called the fire department. By then she'd been on the floor G.o.d knows how long. Naked. Hypothermic. We think she went down right after that phone call with you.”
Okay, I admit it was all too easy to visualize Holly naked on the floor of her house. To my embarra.s.sment the first time we'd made love popped into my mind. It had been right there on her kitchen floor. We'd been too entranced with each other to do anything but kiss and drop to the linoleum after we came through her back door. The second time on her floor was the last time we made love, a desperate tryst instigated by Holly and calculated, I later realized, to replicate the circ.u.mstances of our first lovemaking, as if the cold kitchen linoleum would rekindle my ardor. Except for my sore knees, the s.e.x had been good, but the affection had not returned. I wondered if she hadn't planned to be found on that floor as some sort of message to me.