Could I Have This Dance? (26 page)

Eventually, he realized he’d have to get all the way off the road. Curiously, the officer followed and parked right on his bumper, his lights flashing.

The reality dawned through Clay’s fog. Quickly, he began throwing the beer cans out the passenger window. It wouldn’t do for the officer to see these.

The police officer pulled a blue cooler from his vehicle. It had a large black mark across the side, and the top was askew. He plopped it down beside Clay’s door. “This belong to you?”

Clay flinched. The officer was only returning his cooler. “Looks like mine. Only mine didn’t look so bad.”

“It pays to keep your tailgate up when you travel. Now could I see your license and vehicle registration?”

Clay made three attempts to get his wallet from his jeans pocket, before opening the door, standing up beside the officer, and retrieving it from his back pocket. “Here.”

The officer read the information. “Are you Wally’s son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll have to come with me.” He motioned for the police cruiser and helped Clay into the back.

Clay looked around. He’d been inside a police car once, but never in the back.
Hey, there are no handles back here. How do you get out of this contraption?

The officer pulled out a funny-looking tube and made Clay blow his breath into it.

Then he shut the door, leaving Clay in the police car, and went up to Clay’s pickup and removed the keys.

Clay felt sleepy. The police officer took forever to fill out some forms. The car started moving, and just before Clay fell asleep, he heard the officer muttering, “A chip off the old block.”

Chapter Seventeen

D
ays passed. Claire spent hours memorizing trauma protocols during the days, and hours at night acting them out. She could name five reasons for hypotension following chest trauma quicker than she could say her full name. She knew the different kinds of shock and how to manage them. She could put in a central line and a chest tube unassisted, and she felt certain she could assemble the rapid infuser and blood warmer in her sleep. On her eighth night of call she finally got her first appendectomy, and the team toasted her “first blood” on rounds the next morning. She loved her job. She disliked working with Beatrice, and she was actually looking forward to a month on cardiothoracic surgery.

She had been stymied in her search for answers about possible Huntington’s disease in Stoney Creek. She felt bound to honor her grandmother’s wishes that she not alert her father to her concerns, and until her grandmother returned from her cousin Hilda’s place on Martha’s Vineyard, Claire didn’t have an inside contact in Stoney Creek to search out her suspicions.

Finally, on her last night off of the month, she decided to call her old family physician and mentor, Dr. Jenkins. If he was true to form, she’d find him at his office on Sunday evening sorting through the books in preparation for a new week.

He picked up on the second ring. “Dr. Jenkins.”

“Hi, Doc. Doing the weekly books?”

It took him a moment to recognize her. “Claire? Uh, Dr. McCall?”

“Stop it. I’m Claire to you. Always will be, too.”

“Are you in town?”

“Nope. Still in Lafayette. I’ve survived my first month.”

“How is it?”

“I’ve been on the trauma service. It tends to be a lot of night stuff. So I’m learning what I can do without sleep.”

“Medical school should have taught you that.”

“Medical school was like kindergarten compared to this.” She paused. “Well, maybe first grade.”

He laughed. “Sanguines always exaggerate, Claire. I’m on to you.”

“Me exaggerate? You’re the one who always told me the stories about the worst cases you’d ever seen, every patient within a breath of death, within one red blood cell of exsanguination.”

“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

She listened to his laughter for a moment before proceeding. “I guess my mother talked to you about my father.”

She heard him sigh. “Yes.”

“Listen, I need to run something by you. Something in complete confidence, okay?”

“Of course.”

“My grandmother Elizabeth isn’t sure Wally is John McCall’s son. She was raped by a man named Steve Hudson just before her wedding. It’s possible that he’s my biological grandfather.”

Claire pulled the phone away as a loud clattering noise penetrated her ear. She heard a scuffle followed by Dr. Jenkins clearing his throat. “I remember him. When did you find this out?”

“My grandma just told me. She’s kept this a secret all these years. She never told anyone until now. And she shared it with me only because she wanted to warn me that I might be in a direct bloodline to inherit the curse.”

Dr. Jenkins sputtered. “W—what? That’s ridiculous. This stupid legend is—

“Hear me out. Grandma tells me that Daddy’s acting a whole lot like Steve did. Stumbling around, slurring his speech.” She paused. “So when Daddy started acting the same way, Grandma started thinking about Steve and worrying that he might be Daddy’s real father.” She cleared her throat. “It all looks a lot like Huntington’s disease to me.”

“Steve Hudson was crazy. And he drank like a fish. I was away at college when he died. I can still remember my mom’s phone call. She said he couldn’t stand to see your grandmother with another man.”

“Don’t you see, Doc? The Stoney Creek curse may be nothing but an undiagnosed pocket of Huntington’s disease.”

“Claire, I’ve been the health care in this valley for over thirty years. There is no rare genetic illness stalking these hills.”

“But how can you be so sure? Steve Hudson’s mother may have had it, too. Grandma said she died at Steve’s birth, so she could have carried the gene. And her father was none other than Harold Morris, the still owner who spawned the whole Stoney Creek curse legend.”

“He was an alcoholic, too, Claire. He was addicted to the corn liquor he sold to half the men in this valley.”

“How can you be so sure? My future is resting on this knowledge.”

“You’re being melodramatic, Claire. And may I suggest something else?”

“Well, I—”

“You’re falling into a trap that many young physicians fall prey to. I call it ivory-toweritis. You go up to the big university medical center and see all the rare and unique cases, and have access to all the latest medical miracle machinery, and think that’s the way medicine is practiced out here in the real world. Well, it just ain’t so. Your attendings in the university may be able to look down from their ivory towers on the rest of us, but this is where most of the people in this county go for their care.”

“No one’s looking down on you, Doc—”

“Let me finish. We had a saying in my day. ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.’ So while you might see the rare diagnosis at the big referral centers, we go right on treating the bread-and-butter illnesses of the world. So when I see someone who loves the bottle stumbling around town, losing their temper, and slurring their speech, what do I think? Huntington’s disease? No. I don’t think zebras, I think horses. Your father is an alcoholic, Claire. And from the sounds of your grandmother’s confession, his real father may have been, too.”

Claire sighed. “I was hoping I could talk you into getting his blood screened for the HD gene.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Number one, your dad hasn’t come into my office for care in a long time. And number two, even if he did, I’d be way out on shaky ground ordering a test like that. His insurance plan may never allow it, unless I could demonstrate a positive family history.”

“That would be difficult to do.”

He huffed. “Claire, you’re a smart young woman. But my advice to you is to drop this search right now before you get yourself in the middle of a huge family tangle. You bailed out of your family at a young age, and for good reason, as I recall. Why do you want to go stirring things up so?”

“I just can’t stop thinking about the patient I saw with HD. He looked just like my dad. What if we’ve been blaming him and his drink for his actions all this time, and it’s really been out of his control all along?”

“Tell me the truth, Claire. You’re not suddenly concerned about your father, are you? You stopped worrying about him years ago. You moved on. You made your own life. Why act as if you’re so concerned about him now?

His words stung. There was truth in them, Claire knew. She hesitated, then admitted softly, “Because now the issue is my life, my future.”

“Stop worrying, Claire. You’ve got enough to do up there without obsessing over some rare genetic disease.”

“You’re right about that.”

“I know I am. Drop this, Claire. I’m the one paid to worry about the people in this valley, not you.”

“But I keep thinking that—”

“Claire. Listen to me. I’ve been a friend of your family’s for a long time. Don’t bring these kind of secrets out into the open with your curiosity. People could be hurt by this stuff.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She yawned. “Ivory-toweritis, huh?”

“Exactly. Now follow my advice and I won’t tell my old buddy Dr. Rogers that he’s not giving you enough to do.”

“You know better.”

“You do too.”

“Okay, Doc, I give. I’m gonna crash early tonight. I’ve got call tomorrow ‘cause it’s an odd day, the thirty-first. And unfortunately, when I switch services for August, I’ve been assigned the odd-day calls there too.”

“So you’ve got two call nights in a row?”

“I told you medical school was kindergarten.”

“So this is how they create surgeons. No wonder most of them are jerks.”

“Doctor Jenkins!”

“Just a lifetime observation. Don’t let ‘em change you.”

“I’ll try not. Bye.”

“Good night, doll.”

Claire hung up the phone and collapsed on her bed.
I may have ivory-toweritis, but at least I have an open mind. Blindness is worse.

Far worse.

I just want to be sure. Is that so bad? Why are there so many roadblocks to the truth?

Dr. Jimmy Jenkins set down the phone in its cradle and tried to quell a rising tide of panic in his gut. He walked to a large closet in the back hall of his office and opened the door. The shelves were lined with pharmaceutical samples, each arranged in neat rows according to alphabetical order. He reached for Valium and pressed two tablets from a bubble pack into his hand. He swallowed them dry and shuffled through the medicines to locate the Pepcid. He took forty milligrams, four times the over-the-counter dose, and returned to the phone, glancing first to be sure the door leading to his house was closed.

He called Della McCall. She answered after six rings.

“Hello.” Her voice was cheerful, something that had always endeared her to him, but irritated him in his present mood.

“Della.”

Her voice became immediately softer, stiff, and formal. “Yes?”

She must be with Wally. “Claire just called.”

“And?”

“Della, I thought I told you to tell her to forget about this Huntington’s disease notion.”

“I did. I told her exactly what you told me. That you’d never seen the disease in this valley, so she shouldn’t give it another thought. Why, what’s the deal?”

“She talked to Wally’s mother—”

“She didn’t! I told her specifically not to do that! The last thing my family needs is to alienate Elizabeth with suggestions that she—”

“Della, calm down. She didn’t accuse Elizabeth of anything. But Elizabeth confided in her that she’d been raped, and that she wasn’t sure that Wally is really John’s son.”

“W—what? She never said anything to us!”

“She never told anyone, Della. She must have been too ashamed. But now, with Claire questioning the family tree, Elizabeth must have felt obligated to tell her. In fact, Claire said her grandmother wanted to warn her that she might be in the bloodline to inherit the Stoney Creek curse.”

Jimmy heard the sound of a squeaky hinge and the slam of a screen door. He could imagine Della walking into the backyard.

“This is crazy. Did she say who did this to her? If John McCall wasn’t Wally’s father, who was?”

“She thinks it may have been a man by the name of Steve Hudson. Do you remember him?”

“Yes, but I didn’t really know him. I was a teenager when he died.”

“He killed himself, Della.”

“I know. Everyone in Stoney Creek talked about it for weeks. He shot himself in the barn that belonged to Elizabeth’s parents.”

“I hadn’t remembered that. I knew he committed suicide, and that rumor had it that he was lovesick over Elizabeth, but I didn’t know he had killed himself at her home place.”

“Right in the hayloft.”

He shook his head to erase the mental image of Steve Hudson’s corpse. “Anyway, Steve’s grandfather was Harold Morris. Elizabeth evidently worries that some curse placed on him might be passing through the generations. And Claire has it in her mind that this might be Huntington’s disease.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think she’s in left field, worrying about something so rare, when the real problem is staring her in the face. These men have all been alcoholics. The curse is nothing but the ravages of alcohol abuse.”

“So why did Claire call you?”

“She wanted to talk me into having Wally tested. She wants to look for a faulty gene to blame for his behavior.”

“What would be wrong with that?”

“Della, the last thing I want is to focus attention on Claire’s gene pool.”

“You’re afraid for your own reputation, aren’t you?”

“And what about you? You’ve been consumed with your own secrets, afraid that Elizabeth wouldn’t keep the children in the will if she suspected—”

“I’m concerned about my children, yes, but also about how all this would affect Wally. He’s a proud man, Jimmy. He wouldn’t take this news quietly. He forgave me, but he never suspected that the children—”

“We don’t know about the children,” he interrupted. “It’s never been proven for sure that—”

“You told me yourself that you knew. As soon as you saw Clay’s hair, you felt it.”