Hot Water (10 page)

“Jeremy, Jeremy, wake up!” David tugged at his arm; it flopped to Jeremy’s side. He made a groaning noise, the kind David made when he wanted to sleep past the alarm before school. “Jeremy, where’s Flora?”

No response except another snuffled snore. Jeremy stank of liquor—which was strange because David had never seen him take a drink, not even beer. Yet, here he was, passed out drunk.

But where was Flora?

ELEVEN

David grabbed his cell phone from the knapsack that hung on the back of his chair. In case of emergencies, that was what the phone was for, times like this. He dialed the summerhouse.

“Good evening, Palladino residence,” Elizabeth answered in a formal tone like she was their secretary or maid. Any other time and David would have laughed.

“I need help,” he said, fighting to pause between words so they didn’t crash headlong together. “Something’s wrong with Jeremy. And I can’t find Flora.”

“I’m coming.” She hung up.

He dared to leave Jeremy and crossed out of the room into the foyer. And found Flora crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Was she breathing?

Using the banister to balance on, he left his chair and knelt beside her. She was breathing, but slowly. Her pulse was racing, hard to feel, impossible to count. She was clammy—from the heat or . . . he thought. Insulin. Flora had bad diabetes, “brittle,” they called it.

The front door pushed open and Elizabeth rushed in, turning on the light.

“Oh my God,” she gasped, freezing with her hands half up like she was getting ready to surrender, her gaze darting from Flora to Jeremy and back. She knelt down and looked like she was about to straighten Flora’s body.

“No. Don’t,” David told her. “She could have hurt her neck.”

Elizabeth snatched her hands back. “Of course. You’re right.” She got back up to her feet. “I’ll call 911.”

She started toward the kitchen where the phone was. David was going to hand her his cell but figured it was better to use the landline.

“Grab her blood sugar monitor,” he called. “It should be in the drawer beside the fridge.”

He heard Elizabeth talking to the emergency operator. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud, like she was the one in shock. Beneath his fingers, Flora made a moaning noise.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, one hand on her forehead to keep her still in case she was waking up. “We’re here, everything’s going to be okay.”

Jeremy took that moment to roll off the couch, landing face-down in the puddle of vomit. Then he began puking some more.

“Elizabeth! Hurry!”

Elizabeth returned, carrying the phone receiver in one hand and Flora’s machine in the other. “I don’t know how to use it.”

“I do. Help Jeremy before he chokes.”

She did a double-take, made a gagging noise herself, and put the phone down before reaching to tug Jeremy’s collar, trying to haul him up without touching the vile fluid running down his chin.

At least he was out of danger of choking. David focused on Flora, using the machine to test her blood sugar, just like Jeremy had shown him. He winced at the
clack
of the lancet snapping out to pierce her skin and then waited impatiently for the machine to give him a result.

Danger. Low Blood Sugar.
The way the letters bounded off the screen, if the machine had a voice it would be shouting.

Elizabeth had her hands full with Jeremy, so David hauled himself back into the wheelchair and pushed through to the kitchen. What had Jeremy said? Low sugar, low sugar . . . icing. He had small tubes of icing that would bring it back up. David rummaged through the drawer that held all of Flora’s medical supplies and found the pack of icing.

Wait? Was it safe to give her something by mouth when she was unconscious? There was something else, what was it, glucose—no, that wasn’t it—glucagon.

David searched again and grabbed the bright red emergency kit. Inside was a bottle of powder, a syringe with liquid, and some alcohol swabs. He quickly plunged the needle into the bottle and injected the liquid to dissolve the powder.

He wheeled himself back to Flora, shaking the bottle as he went. It turned clear and he drew it back into the syringe. His hand shook so bad he could barely read the markings on the syringe. What if he was wrong? But he couldn’t wait—Flora could go into seizures and die from low blood sugar. He leaned back and glanced into the living room, hoping Jeremy had miraculously recovered and could tell him what to do.

No such luck. Jeremy was now sitting on the couch, head dangling between his knees, holding it as if afraid it would fall off, and vomiting onto his shoes.

It was up to David. Hands shaking, he turned to Flora. Her color was worse, more faded than the thin cotton housedress she wore.

Now or never.

The Landing Motel was just as much of a dump as Grandel had promised. A single-story strip of rooms marked by dingy white doors and faded gray siding, it boasted a small café-slash-souvenir shop whose claim to fame was homemade cherry cider and candied pecans. I hauled my luggage inside my room and turned the AC on high. While the window unit sputtered and spit out tepid air that felt about body temperature, I regretted not taking the beachfront accommodations Grandel had offered. But this wasn’t a vacation.

I didn’t bother to unpack more than the basics, hoping that I wouldn’t be here long enough to get to the bottom of my bag. I plugged in my cell after noticing that there was barely one bar and reached for the landline to call home. I was already missing David and wishing I hadn’t come—suddenly all the money in the world seemed meaningless compared to sitting at Flora’s big table having dinner with my family.

David. This was all for him. So he could have a real future instead of fighting for mere existence like I had.

No answer at the summerhouse, even though it was after eight and getting close to David’s nine o’clock bedtime—which I was certain he’d conned Elizabeth into postponing. I tried Flora’s. Elizabeth answered.

“I’m glad you called,” she said, her tone anxious. “Something terrible has happened.”

TWELVE

I stood up so fast the base of the phone flew off the nightstand and clanged to the floor.

“Elizabeth? Are you there? What happened?” My voice sounded very loud and shrill, but that was the least of my worries.

“Calm down. Everyone is all right.”

Hard to calm down when the sound of an ambulance’s siren broke through her words.

“David? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, he’s fine. It’s Flora. Her blood sugar went too low and we had to call an ambulance. But she’s okay—they gave her a shot and some IV fluids and she was already awake and joking with the medics as they carried her out.”

“If she’s so fine, then why are they taking her to the hospital?”

“Precaution. Said she’d probably be there a night or two.”

Her calm tone only riled me up. These kind of things weren’t supposed to happen—not to my family. “Where was Jeremy during all this? Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“Flora made me promise not to call you,” Elizabeth said.

“Like hell she did. I’m coming home.”

“No. She’s fine. Really. And so is David.”

“How did this happen?”

“The paramedics said Jeremy must have mixed up her long-acting insulin with her short-acting—so when he gave her the shot that was supposed to last all night, it all went to work at once. If David hadn’t found her—”

“David found her?” This couldn’t be happening. Not after David watched Cole die. “You’re sure he’s okay?”

“Okay? AJ, he did great. Stayed calm, took control, knew exactly what to do. He reminded me of you.”

“Where was Jeremy through all this?”

Long pause. “Passed out. Drunk. Couldn’t remember anything.”

No. That was wrong. Very wrong. “Elizabeth. Jeremy doesn’t drink.”

“That’s what he told the cops, but they arrested him anyway.”

“Why? On what charges?” No, this couldn’t be happening. Could Jeremy have been lying? Had he fooled us all into believing he was someone he wasn’t? It was like I was listening to a soap opera in another language, one that made no sense.

“AJ, if he was drunk and caused Flora’s accident, then it’s a criminal matter.”

“No. You have to get him out. This is all wrong. Make them do a blood alcohol and a tox screen.” I twisted the phone’s cord around my thumb so tight it went white. Didn’t feel any pain. “I’ll talk to Grandel. I’m coming home.”

“What good would that do?” Worst thing about having a lawyer as your friend—they’d argue the sky was fuchsia if you said it was blue, just for the hell of it. “All you’d do is get the cops mad and make things worse. I can take care of Jeremy. David’s fine. Flora’s fine. You have much more important things to do there.”

More important than my family? Never.

But the work I was doing here would secure my family’s future.

I paced until the cord stretched to its limit. The future has always been a murky, intimidating concept for me, uncertain, filled with spooky shadows and too many chances to get things wrong. I much prefer the clarity of the here and now.

Only right this instant, my here and now wasn’t so very clear. I twisted in a circle, eyes darting from corner to corner, searching for an answer in the dingy motel room. I knew what I wanted to do—but I also knew what I needed to do if I wanted to protect my family.

Elizabeth broke the silence. “AJ. You know I’m right.”

I blew my breath out, aiming away from the speaker so she wouldn’t hear. There was nothing worse than being trapped here, so far away, helpless to do anything. Except for maybe being right
there
, back home, helpless to do anything.

“You’re right. Did you call Ty?” Ty would straighten all this out. He was good at that, making sense of chaos—probably why we were such good friends; the chaos that was my constant companion didn’t seem to faze him.

“He’s headed into the station to check on Jeremy. Everything will be all right. I promise.”

“David,” Elizabeth called out. “It’s your mom. She wants to talk to you.”

David wheeled himself in from the front porch, wishing he could be riding in the ambulance with Gram Flora—lights and sirens and getting all the cars out of the way.

One of the paramedics had given him a shiny plastic fake Junior Firefighter badge. Like David was some kind of kid standing around watching instead of the person who had just saved Flora’s life. Not even Elizabeth had known what to do, but he had.

Not that anyone gave him any credit for acting like an adult.

He sighed as he took the phone from Elizabeth. No matter what he did everyone still treated him like a little kid—and Mom was worst of all. “Yeah.”

“Are you okay?” Her voice had that high-pitched sound it got when she was really upset and trying to hold it all together. Putting on a brave face, she called it, but she never looked very brave when she got like that. More like she was gonna cry.

“Mom. I’m fine. I wasn’t the one who got sick.”

“Right. Of course not.” A pause as she took in a breath. “I heard you did good—Elizabeth said you knew just what to do.”

“All I did was what Jeremy taught me. How come they arrested him?”

A longer pause and he knew she was deciding whether or not to lie to him. His mom almost never lied to him—or anyone, for that matter—it was one of the reasons he put up with her and her constant questions about what he thought and felt and was doing.

“They think he got Flora’s medicine mixed up and that’s what made her sick.”

No duh. He wasn’t six. “You mean the Lantus and the regular Humulin. But Jeremy wouldn’t have done that—”

“He might have if he wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Mom. Stop treating me like a baby and start using your brain. Jeremy doesn’t drink. And Elizabeth and I were here for dinner only around an hour before this happened—is it even possible to drink that much that fast? Plus, regular insulin starts acting around fifteen minutes after you take it, so that means Jeremy would have had to be drunk before he gave her the insulin—and Flora never noticed? Gram Flora notices
everything
. So, if he was drunk, why didn’t she just come down to the summerhouse? It doesn’t make any sense.”