Desert Heat (12 page)

Joanna had retraced her steps back up Elm to Campbell which she crossed at the light. As she started up the sidewalk along the hospital driveway, she thought she caught sight of her mother’s purple dress in the shadow of the portico. Sure enough, as she got closer, she saw Eleanor pacing back and forth in the small patch of shade.

The moment Eleanor saw her daughter, she motioned to her frantically and then came rushing down the sidewalk to meet her. As her mother approached, Joanna was surprised to see that her mother’s mascara was smudged. Obviously she had been crying.

“What’s the matter, Mother,” Joanna asked. “He’s gone.”

“Who, Andy? Where’d he go? Did they move him somewhere else?”

Eleanor Lathrop was puffing and out of breath. “You don’t understand, Joanna,” she said. “Andy’s dead.”

Joanna stopped short, thunderstruck. “He’s dead? No. When did it happen? How?”

Eleanor shook her head. “After you left, my good friend Margaret Turnbull stopped by. She and I were sitting there watching “The Young and the Restless” when some kind of alarm went off and people started running around and yelling ‘code red’ over the loud-speaker, whatever that means. Pretty soon some doctor comes out and says to me that it’s all over, that Andy’s dead.”

Joanna dropped the bag, pushed past her mother, and raced into the building. She sprinted through the lobby and shoved her way inside an elevator just as the doors were closing. She stood there shaking her head, not believing it had happened. It couldn’t be true.

Andy couldn’t be gone, not without her being there to say good-bye.

On the ICU floor she slammed open the door to the waiting room. A little knot of people stood near the painting on the far side of the room. They turned to look at her when the door opened. Ken Galloway separated himself from the group and started toward her, but she dodged around him and darted into Andy’s room. The machines were eerily quiet. The bed was empty. He really was gone.

A nurse from the nurse’s station looked up, saw her, and started toward her just as a pair of arms closed around her from behind. “Where is he?” Joanna demanded. “What have you done with him?”

“Hush now,” Ken Galloway said, holding her, trying to calm her.

“But where is he?” she repeated, her voice rising. “I’ve got to see him.”

The nurse was there now, too, reaching out, offering solace, but Joanna was beyond the reach of consolation.

“I want to see him,” she sobbed. “Where is he? Where?”

“They took him back to the operating room.”

Joanna stopped struggling in Ken Gallo-way’s arms. “The operating room? Then he isn’t dead, is he! It’s all a mistake.”

The nurse shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brady. We tried to find you, but he went into cardiac arrest. Afterward, we had two doctors in to check him, and they both pronounced him brain dead. The form was there in his file, and everything was in order. We contacted the medical examiner and he gave us permission to go ahead. With harvesting organs, there isn’t a moment to lose. I thought you knew.”

Before Ken Galloway could stop her, she lunged out of his arms and raced back out through the waiting room. Another grim-faced family was just then filing into the room to start their own vigil of waiting and worrying. Seeing them, Joanna realized that she was separated from those people by a vast, impassable gulf. The ICU and its waiting room were for those who still clung narrowly to life. The place held nothing for her any more. Andy was dead. There was no reason for her to stay.

In the hallway, her mother was just stepping off the elevator. “Joanna, there you are.”

Without glancing at her mother, Joanna rushed onto the elevator and pressed the but-ton for the lobby. “Where are you going now?” Eleanor Lathrop asked.

“I don’t know,” Joanna choked as the door closed between them. “I don’t know at all.”

Later she would have no remembrance of fighting her way through the lobby or of recrossing the busy intersection at Elm and Campbell. When she came to herself, she was sitting in a tall wooden chair in a shaded patio somewhere on the green, flowered grounds of the Arizona Inn. She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there or how long she’d been crying, but someone was speaking to her.

“What seems to be the problem?” a woman was saying. “Are you a guest here?”

Joanna tried to stifle another sob. The woman, tall and elderly, planted her feet squarely in front the chair. She carried herself with patrician bearing—from her silver hair, cut in a short, elegant bob down to her old-fashioned saddle oxfords. One hand rested sternly on her hip while the other held an old, bentwood cane. Only when she took a step forward did Joanna notice that one leg was en-cased in a heavy metal brace.

“No,” Joanna managed guiltily. “I’m sorry. I’m not. I’ll leave right away.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the woman said impatiently. “I didn’t mean to chase you away, but you were crying as though your heart was broken, and I wondered if there was someone I should call for you or if there was anything at all I could do to help.”

Joanna straightened in the chair and wiped the tears from her cheeks. The woman’s small act of kindness seemed to work some kind of recuperative magic.

“Thank you,” she said. “I believe you already did.” She stood up.

“Where are you going?” the old woman asked.

“Back to the hospital,” Joanna answered with resigned hopelessness. “I’m sure there are papers to sign, arrangements to be made.”

The gaunt old woman’s skin was wrinkled and parchment thin. She must have been nearing ninety. Age and wisdom both allowed her to see beyond the surface of Joanna’s relatively innocuous words to the real message and hurt behind them.

She nodded slowly. “I see,” she said. “So it’s like that, is it?”

Joanna nodded as well. “Yes.”

The woman reached out and patted Joanna’s arm with a gnarled, arthritic hand. “It will take time, my dear,” she said kindly, “but someday things will be better for you. Just you wait and see.”

EIGHT

Leaning on her cane, the old woman escorted Joanna as far as the hotel lobby. There, swinging the braced leg off to one side, she sauntered off into the dining room while Joanna stopped short in front of the telephone alcove. Much as she dreaded the prospect, it was time to tell Jenny. Past time if Joanna wanted to deliver the news herself. Unless she wanted Grandma Lathrop to do it in her stead, then there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Quickly she placed a long-distance call to the Methodist parsonage in Bisbee. Jeff Daniels answered.

“Hello, Jeff,” Joanna began, trying to observe at least a vestige of good manners. “I need to speak to Jennifer.”

“You sound upset, Joanna,” Jeff returned. “Are you all right? How are things?”

She tried to answer but at first the words caught in her throat. “Andy’s dead,” she managed finally. “It happened earlier this afternoon. Please don’t tell Jenny when you call her. I want to be the one to break the news.”

“She’s outside with Marianne right now,” Jeff said. “Hold on. I’ll go get them both.”

While she waited, Joanna dug her finger-nails deep into the palms of her hands. It hadn’t been necessary for anyone to tell her of her own father’s death. She had been right there on the shoulder of the road and had seen it all for herself firsthand. Now, though, she found herself praying for strength, for the ability to find the right words to say. Moments later Jenny’s cheerful, childish voice came on the phone.

“Hi, Mom. Reverend Maculyea and I have been outside playing on her swing. I think she’s weird. And Jeff, too. They have a swing, but they don’t have any kids.”

“Jenny . . .” Joanna began and then stopped when she heard the unmistakable tremor in her voice.

And clearly her distress was obvious, even to a nine-year-old. “What’s the matter, Mom?” Jenny asked. “You sound funny. Are you all right?”

Joanna took a deep breath. “I’m okay, but your dad’s not,” she said. “He’s dead, Jenny. Daddy’s gone.”

Her announcement was met with shocked silence. For a moment she thought maybe she’d been disconnected. “Jenny,” Joanna said. “Are you still there? Did you hear what I said?”

“Is he really?”

“Yes, really, honey. I’m sorry.”

Again the phone seemed to go dead in a baffling, achingly long silence, one Joanna had no idea how to fill. Finally Jennifer said, “Why were those nurses so mean to us? Why wouldn’t they let me see him? I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

“I know, Jenny. Neither did I. Hospitals have rules, I guess, and everybody has to go by them, even if they don’t always make sense to anybody else.”

Jennifer began crying then. For almost a minute the only sound was that of Jenny sobbing brokenly into the phone. Joanna longed to be in the same room with her daughter. She wanted to hold her close and shield her from the hurt, but from one hundred miles away there was nothing she could do but listen. The sound of Jennifer’s broken-hearted weeping tore Joanna apart.

At last, in the background, she heard Jeff Daniels speaking soothingly. After a shuffle, the phone was handed over to someone else while Jenny’s disconsolate sobbing moved away from the receiver.

“Jeff told me,” Marianne Maculyea said when she came on the line. “How did it happen? After listening to Dr. Sanders, I thought he was doing all right.”

“So did I, but according to the nurse he went into another episode of cardiac arrest. This time they weren’t able to bring him back. Two separate doctors came in and certified that he was brain dead. And then they took him away. I wasn’t even there.”

“I’m so sorry, Joanna. Do you want me to come back up to Tucson? If you need me, I can be there in less than two hours.”

“No. I’d much rather have you there with Jenny right now. I’m all right, really. I had to leave the hospital for a little while to try to get myself sorted out, but I’m on my way back there now. I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

“Call if you need me,” Marianne told her. “I’ll stay by the phone.”

“Thanks, Mari. I will.”

After hanging up, Joanna detoured through the hotel restroom where she used a handful of tissues to wipe her face and blow her nose. Looking at her image in the mirror, she was shocked by what she saw there—by the deep, dark circles under red, puffy eyes, by the gray pallor of her skin, by her lank, dirty hair. She still hadn’t had a chance to shower or change out of the blue dress and the yellow smock, and her teeth were crying for a toothbrush. But all that would have to come later. For now she had to go back to the hospital and handle whatever needed to be handled.

Again, the walk back to the hospital seemed to take forever. As she entered the lobby, she felt shabby and dirty and ill at ease. She felt even more so when a well-dressed young woman fell into step beside her.

“Mrs. Brady. Could I please have a word with you?”

The woman was a stranger yet she seemed to know Joanna by sight. “Who are you?” Joanna asked.

“Sue Rolles. I’m a reporter with the
Arizona Daily Sun.”

“What do you want?”

“About your husband’s suicide . . .”

“Murder,” Joanna interrupted, correcting the reporter the same way she had corrected Dr. Sanders hours earlier.

“But I was under the impression that the case was being investigated as a suicide.”

Joanna stopped in mid-stride and turned to face the reporter. Hurt and rage, the two war-ring emotions that had simmered hot and cold inside her all morning long, combined into a volatile mixture and came to a sudden boil. “You can talk about suicide all you want,” she declared, “but not to me, and not about my husband. Do I make myself clear?” The re-porter nodded.

“Andrew Brady was murdered,” Joanna continued. “He was an experienced police officer. Cops know all about how guns work. When they set out to commit suicide, they know how to get the job done—they usually blow their brains out. I believe that’s a statistic l read in an article in your very own newspaper.”

“I’m here to tell you that Andrew Brady never shot himself in the gut. He wouldn’t have done something like that in the first place, and even if he had, he never would have done it where I’d most likely be the one to find him.”

Properly chastised, the reporter moved back a step just as Ken Galloway materialized out of nowhere.

“What’s going on?” he asked, extricating himself from a crush of homeward-bound people exiting an elevator.

Joanna turned on him as though he were as much an enemy as the reporter. “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” she said. “Andy’s dead and I’m sick and tired of people telling me he committed suicide. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I won’t listen.”

“Who’s this?” Ken asked, nodding toward Sue Rolles.

“A reporter,” Joanna answered. “With the
Sun.”

“Maybe you’d better go,” Ken Galloway said hurriedly to Sue Rolles. “I think Mrs. Brady has had about all she can handle for one day.” To Joanna he said, “Your mother sent me down to see if I could find you. She’s waiting for you upstairs. Come on.”

He started away, but Joanna didn’t move. Right that moment there were few people Joanna wanted to see less than she wanted to see her own mother, but she could hardly tell Ken Galloway that. When Joanna didn’t move, Galloway came back.

“I’ll be up in a little while,” Joanna said. “I need to stop off at the billing department and make arrangements to pay the bill.” It was a lame excuse but enough to delay the inevitable confrontation with her mother for a few minutes longer.

“But what should I tell your mother? She’s waiting to give you a ride home,” Ken explained. “She said you rode up here with Sheriff McFadden last night and that you didn’t have a way back to Bisbee.”

Wearily Joanna passed her hand over her eyes. “Ken, you know my mother, don’t you?”

”Some,” he admitted.

“Well enough to know how much of a pain she can be at times. You may think I’m a terrible daughter, but I’m just not up to riding home with her right now. Too much has happened. I need some time to sort my way through things, some time to think without her constantly yammering at me. You’re here, Ken. You have a car, don’t you?”