"You know, a pine snake won't hurt you. We want those around. They eat other snakes."
"Well, excuse me, Mr. Zookeeper," Cindy said, smiling. "I just failed to ask him for his license and registration when he walked in the door."
We helped them clean up, then ambled down the walk toward the boat, which Charlie had fortunately remembered to turn off. We loaded up, and Cindy threw us the bowline. She sank her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and looked a bit embarrassed. "Sorry, guys."
I held out my hand. "Don't even think about it. You did the right thing."
I bumped the stick into drive, and Charlie purposefully bumped it out.
"Hey, we're doing a pig on Saturday and wanted to know if you guys want to join us."
I looked at Charlie. "We are?" He elbowed me, and I said, "I mean, we are. Right, we've been planning it a long time."
Cindy smiled. "What do you mean, `doing a pig'?"
"Ohhhhhhh." Charlie licked his lips, ran his fingers along his belt line, and did his best Ray Charles imitation. "That's where we take this whole pig, usually about a hundred pounds, and cook it all day, low and slow, and then spend the evening pulling off some of the best pork you've ever tasted. Essentially, it's a mountain of sin on a plate, and most folks don't eat for about a week afterward."
"About like that Transplant you guys made me eat."
"Something like that." Charlie nodded.
Cindy thought for a minute, no doubt running her work schedule through her mind. "What time you want us?"
"'Bout noon. And bring your bathing suits."
Cindy looked at Annie, who was nodding. "See you at ..." She slapped her forehead with her open palm like she had forgotten something and said, "Oh! Dang!"
Charlie heard the smack, the change in tone of voice, and said, "What?"
I interrupted her. "Don't worry. I'll pick you up, right here. Noon."
Cindy smiled, put her arm around Annie, and walked back up the walkway, keeping one eye on us and one pointed in the general direction of where I had released the snake.
We revved the engine, idled down the creek, and emptied into the Tallulah where we skirted the no-wake zones. As we pulled into the boathouse, Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. "Looks like you better get to town and buy us a pig."
"Yeah," I said, turning the wheel, lining up with the lift, and then cutting the engine. "I gathered that."
"Oh, and ..." He turned around with a huge grin on his face. "Don't forget the grass skirts."
Chapter 40
walked down Main Street Tuesday afternoon carrying a plastic bag overstuffed with two drugstore grass skirts that were spilling over the edges. Walking up the sidewalk en route to Vicker's Meat Market, I saw a lady wearing a baseball hat walking directly toward me, led by her husband and two children. When I saw her face, something snatched the air out of me and left me standing like a man with no skeleton.
Shirley. Her son had grown two feet. He was handsome and strapped with muscle. Her daughter had long hair, had turned beautiful, and had long legs like her dad. Harry was barrel-chested and walked proudly down the street, his name printed on his shirt.
I stopped, looked for an exit, and couldn't find one. The street was too open, the shops to my left too confined, and it was too late to turn around. Shirley's eyes passed over me. Something in her brain registered, and she looked again. She let go of Harry's hand and started toward me. I stopped next to the newspaper machine, pulled down the bill of my cap and fumbled for two quarters, hoping the earth would open up and swallow me.
Shirley eyed me with suspicion, looked past the hat, the long hair, and the beard, and then her face lit up like a bulb. "Dr. Mitchell?" she whispered.
I spilled a dollar's worth of change across the sidewalk.
She touched my shoulder as if she were touching a ghost. `Jonathan?"
I turned slowly, the quarters circling my feet like swirling water, and looked at Shirley's face-she'd gained weight, which was good-and saw the tears welling in her eyes.
I took off my sunglasses and hat and ran my fingers through my almost shoulder-length hair. I took her hand in mine, felt a strong distal pulse, and said, "Hey, Shirley. You ... you look great."
She wrapped her arms around my neck as the rest of her family gathered around. I shook Harry's hand and marveled at their son who was taller than I was. Shirley said, "He's been awarded an appointment to the Academy."
She studied me while the silence that surrounded us spoke volumes.
"I heard about ... about Emma." She put her hand across her heart as the tears fell off her face. "And I heard what you did. About me, I mean. I'm so sorry."
She hugged me again, and I felt how strong her back had become. Shirley had made it. She was a survivor. And based on the look of things, she'd live to see her grandkids.
She let go, and I tried to break the tension. "Royer treating you well?"
Harry spoke up. "Yeah, next to you, he's the best." He looked at Shirley and then back at me. "No kidding, he's taking great care of us."
Shirley smiled and wrapped her arm around Harry. "I can run three miles without stopping." She patted Harry on his flat stomach and said with a smile, "I'm not setting any speed records, but we're healthy and ..." She choked back the emotion. "And we're good."
She wrapped her arms around my neck a second time, as if I'd disappear if she didn't, and squeezed as hard as she could. Her children edged in closer, put their arms around me, and even Harry joined the group hug that they were staging front and center in downtown Clayton.
Harry handed Shirley a white handkerchief from his back pocket, and she tried to laugh.
"Whoever had this heart before me must have been a real crier," she said, "because I didn't used to be this emotional."
It had belonged to a twenty year old, but I never told Shirley that. She needed to be able to live, not feel guilty for doing so. And I don't know how she'd ever heard about my phone call with Royer. Sometimes it's hard to keep stuff like that quiet. Even in hospitals.
I looked down at Shirley's daughter, who reached up and hugged my neck. She kissed me on the cheek and said, "Thank you, Dr. Jonathan ... for saving my mom."
My name echoed in my ears and sounded strange, stiff and starched, though I knew it was stained.
I nodded and put my sunglasses back on while I still had control over my eyes.
Harry saw I was having a difficult time, so he herded them in front of me and said, "Okay, okay, we've embarrassed the doc enough for one day. You guys get going. Our reservation won't wait forever."
Shirley kissed my cheek and as she did, her tears ran down my face. They tasted salty and sweet.
The four of them leaned on one another and walked off down the sidewalk while I steadied myself against a lamppost and looked inside the shell of me. A minute or so later, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
Sal Cohen stood smiling at me with a curious look spread across his face. He pointed down the sidewalk and said, "Friends of yours?"
A tear slipped out from beneath my glasses. I looked down at Sal, nodded, and whispered, "Yeah. Old friends."
Sal took off his hat, wiped his brow with his handkerchief, and let his eyes follow them down the sidewalk. He gave me a knowing look. "Feels good, don't it?"
I watched them walk away and nodded. When I caught myself nodding, I looked back at Sal, but he was gone.
Chapter 41
sat in the tub for almost two hours, soaking, sleeping, sipping some red wine, and thumbing through the last month's Chest. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when I dried off, dressed, and walked into my office and shut the door. Charlie would be on the dock in a little less than three hours and, if my passwords still worked and could get me the access I needed, I had some work to do. There was always the possibility they had locked me out, but if I knew Royer, he'd have made sure they kept my accounts and codes active. I'd probably be leaving a trail that could lead Royer right to my doorstep, but I'd take that c
hance.
AFTER A DAYLIGHT ROW WITH CHARLIE THAT LEFT ME SPENT but feeling temporarily clean, I left him rolling around on the dock with Georgia and returned to the house to put on a pot of coffee. The voice-mail light on my phone was flashing. Even before I punched the Play button, I had an idea who it was. The tape rewound and then clicked forward. Background noise filled the air, and Royer's voice launched in without even a hello.
"Hey, Doc, although to be quite honest, I'm being a bit liberal with the term. Our IT people called me pretty early this morning and said somebody'd been playing with my confidential files. Said whoever'd done it knew all my old codes and most of the shortcuts. Poked around a good bit, read several active files, and then left without stealing or rearranging a thing.
"Well, almost. The person did do one very interesting thing. Wrote a note in Annie Stephens's file to request a TEE. That was my first cue that I wasn't dealing with some twisted computer hack hell-bent on deleting my files. But anybody who suggests a transesophageal echocardiogram for Annie knows two things: the risk is too great, and she can't pay for it.
"Then, just as I was about to call financing and argue the cost of the test to give a little girl one shot in a thousand, I got another rather unusual call. Wonder of wonders, financing called me and told me that Annie's account, which had been a little more than $18,000 in debt, had been paid up. And what's more, whoever called had paid in advance for a TEE. They wanted to know if I had ordered such a test.
`Jowly, you've been gone a while, and there's a few things you might not know. Annie's pretty well-known around here. Makes most of its smile most all the time, and whenever somebody starts tinkering with her file or her care, we get our dander up."
Royer's tone was harsh. I expected nothing less. A bear can be either a teddy or a grizzly, depending on the need.
He took a deep breath and continued. "So, naturally, I faked a page and said I needed five minutes. I checked the file; they were right-as are you-and so I've scheduled Annie. But you know as well as I do that she'll have to be sedated, and she's not going to like that, and Cindy is running the narrow ridge as it is and liable to crack any minute. And when you throw all that together, you've got a pretty good recipe for disaster."
Royer thanked a nurse who had evidently brought him a cup of coffee. He took a long sip while the machine continued to record.
Swallowing hard, he said, "The test is next Friday-that's ten days from now, in case you can't find your calendar. Now, you started this ball rolling, so here's the deal. I'll run the test, but if I don't see you here Friday morning, wheeling that little girl down the hall, I'm spilling the beans. And Jonny, that's not an idle threat."
Another pause, and I could practically hear Royer deliberating.
"Guess that gives you a little time to chew on your dilemma. So while you're chewing-and I got to be honest, I hope you choke on your own self-pity-I just want to ask you one question ..."
I hit the Stop button and walked toward the kitchen, where I found Charlie leaning against the doorframe, Georgia at his feet, both looking in my general direction.
"You don't want to hear the question?" he asked, his palms opened toward the machine like he was inviting someone into his house.
I walked past him out onto the back porch and wondered how far I could get by nightfall if I got in the car and started driving.
"Well, I do." Charlie clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together. "I rather miss that old son of a gun." The sarcasm grew thick. "Gee, I wonder what the old devil might ask you?"
Charlie felt his way along the wall and walked to the machine. He ran his fingers across the buttons and pushed the large one in the middle, and Royer's voice returned. It crawled through the house, over the rafters, through the floorboards, and out the screen onto the back porch. It found me on the landing at the top of the stairs where I stood holding on to the railing, steadying myself before the blow.
`Donny, tell me something, if you don't mind." His voice cracked. "If I could call Emma and tell her about Annie, what do you think she'd say?"
Charlie rewound the machine and then felt his way across the hallway to the kitchen. He rummaged through the coffee mugs, poured two cups, and shuffled his way slowly out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, where he found me weak-kneed and whiteknuckled atop the stairwell. He offered me a mug and I took it.
"Thanks."
We stood in silence a few minutes, letting the smell of coffee beans mix with the smell of lake water and mint.
Finally Charlie nodded his head back toward the machine and spoke. "What was he talking about?"
The taste of fresh beans filtered down my throat and warmed my cold stomach. The lake was starting to turn under a light breeze, and somewhere a boat was approaching at what sounded like half-throttle. Somewhere behind it, several kids were screaming with laughter.
"A TEE is when you insert a probe down the mouth and into the heart of a ... a sedated patient. It uses sound waves to look at the chambers."
I held the cup between both hands, asking myself if Annie's heart could handle the stress and if the risk was worth the information.
I continued, "The heart is divided by a wall in the middle, called the septum. Before we are born, we have an opening called the foramen ovale. Because our moms are doing all our breathing for us, there's no need for our blood to circulate through our lungs. At least not yet. So this opening allows the blood to bypass that step. When we're born, prostaglandins release and the hole closes, forcing our lungs to start working on their own."
The wrinkle above Charlie's eyebrows grew deeper. "And if it doesn't close?"
"The blood jumps straight across the heart rather than through it."
"What's that mean ... for Annie."
"It means that most every day of her life, she feels like she's running the last turn of the quarter mile and never able to catch her breath."
Charlie stood next to me and "looked" out over the lake. "Like my big sister?"
Seconds passed, and I didn't answer. Finally he put his hand on my face and read the wrinkles. Something he had not done since Emma died. He asked again, "Like Emma?"
I nodded.
Charlie pulled his hand off my face. "Can it be fixed?"
"If caught in time. If not, the ripple effects are far-reaching and permanent. My thought was that if Royer saw an opening, he could close the hole with a catheter and a balloon. It'd be a shortterm fix, a Band-Aid, but Annie'd never know it, and that might buy her some more time. And right now ..." I lowered my voice. "Time is the enemy."
"How much has she got?"
The breeze off the lake was cool. A few mallards screamed overhead, circled, and then glided down the water near Charlie's dock where a drake was hiding beneath a rhododendron. Georgia tore down the steps in search of some fun. "Not much."
Charlie shuffled his way through the door and into the house. He was gone several minutes. I heard him in my office rummaging through my closet. Obviously looking for something, but sometimes it's best to just let Charlie do his own thing.
A few minutes later, he returned carrying the transit case. He appeared in the kitchen, holding both handles. He dropped the box in the middle of the floor and pointed at it. "Drink up."
He found his way to the back door and used the railing to guide himself down the steps. Two more minutes and he was midway, following the "dry" guide wires around the back end of the creek.
I walked into the kitchen and sat down next to the dust-covered box. The lid squeaked as I fingered my way through twenty years of history. At some point in our lives, Emma had read every book in here several times, many of them out loud to me.
At noon, my head was splitting. With every page I turned, the picture in my head of her doing the same grew more colorful and detailed. Surrounded by books, I lay down on the kitchen floor and ran my fingernail along the grooves of the wood. Deep inside, caked along the grooves and the cracks between, were small, almost pinhead-sized flecks of red.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Chapter 42
was on the road early Thursday morning, saying good-bye to no one. By daylight I was just a few hours from Hickory, North Carolina. At a quarter to eleven I pulled into the gas station and parked in front of the public phone. Leaving the car running, I rummaged through the rain-swollen phone book and found the number I was looking for.
After three rings, he answered. His voice resonated through the phone, kind and confident, but weaker now. It'd been more than ten years since we'd spoken. The picture in the alumni newspaper showed him and his wife arm in arm in their "getaway" in Hickory. Wearing a plaid vest, his pipe tucked inside his right hand, he looked content, living out what remained of his life with his wife, who, like many doctors' wives, had spent most of her life sharing him, with first the hospital and then the university. Now was her time. He had promised her that.
"Hello?" he said.
"Hello ... um, sir?"
Silence followed. Ten seconds or more. I heard his pipe slide from one side of his mouth to the other, and then the rattle of his teeth as he bit down again.
"I've often thought of you," he said at last. "Wondered how you're getting along. And if."
"Yes, sir, well ... I was in Hickory and wondered if we might have lunch."
The pipe moved again, and his tone of voice told me he was smiling. "You mean you drove all the way over here from wherever you've been living because you wanted to talk with me?"
I smiled. He had weakened, his voice told me that, but a weak body did not equate to a weak mind. "Yes sir."
Fifteen minutes later, I parked in front of his house. One look in the rearview mirror told me that he might not recognize me. In fact, I might scare him. It was a good thing I had called first.
I slipped my sunglasses into my shirt pocket, walked up the lawn, and rang the bell. Soon I heard the shuffling sound associated with old men who wear their slippers until afternoon.