Mr. X (17 page)

“You’re …” He looked at his clipboard. “Ned, Valerie Dunstan’s son?”

I said, “Yes, I am.”

“Dr. Barnhill,” he said, and pursed his lips. His head seemed to bulge because it was out of proportion to his body and his vanishing fair hair exposed so much scalp. Short bald men are balder than tall ones. He gave me a brief, dry handshake. “Earlier this morning, your mother suffered an extensive stroke. Her condition remains grave. I wish I could give you better news.” Dr. Barnhill held his clipboard to his chest as if he feared we would try to read his secrets. “Do you know what is involved in a stroke?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“A blood clot entered her brain and cut off the flow of oxygen. If oxygen cannot reach a certain area of the brain, that area experiences tissue damage. In your mother’s case, the area involved represents a portion of the left hemisphere.” He touched the left side of his head. “Soon after admission to the ICU, her heart developed arrhythmia, due to the general shock to her system. I’ve given her medication for that condition, but we observe a general weakening of heart functions. Is your mother a heavy smoker?”

“She doesn’t smoke,” I said.

“Star worked in a lot of smoky nightclubs,” Aunt May said. “She has a lovely singing voice.”

“To your knowledge, has she ever taken drugs of any kind?”

“She smoked her share of pot,” May said. “Some of those people she hung out with, you could smell it on them.”

“Secondhand cigarette smoke and a history of marijuana use could be contributing factors,” the doctor said. “Your mother is …” He looked at the clipboard and did an almost invisible double take. “Fifty-three. Ordinarily, that would give us a good prognosis. We are hoping that the Coumadin will break up the clot. If your mother survives the next twelve hours, we are looking at a long recovery involving extensive therapy. That’s the best news I can give you.”

“Twelve hours,” I said.

His face smoothed out like a mask. “Everything depends upon the state of the individual patient.”

“Will she recognize me?”

“You shouldn’t expect much more than that.” He looked at his clipboard again. “Do you in fact have any siblings?”

“No,” I said, and Aunt Nettie immediately put in, “I told you that. Star only had the one boy, this one here.”

Dr. Barnhill nodded and left. May had disappeared somewhere behind me.

“Siblings?”

“Zwick went to town on whatever your mother was babbling when we got here, and you know, if someone sets it down on paper, someone else is going to believe it.”

I looked over my shoulder. Aunt May was leaning on her cane and talking to a burly young man with a short blond beard and a lot of hair pulled back into a blunt ponytail. He stepped back and said, “Hey, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

I pushed aside the curtain and went in. The stranger at the focus of all the blinking machines instantly resolved into a frail but still recognizable version of Star Dunstan. Her cheeks looked distended and waxen. Clear fluid in suspended bags ran through lines that entered beneath the bandages low on her forearms. A glowing red light had been taped to her right index finger. I took her hand and kissed her forehead.

Both of her eyes opened wide.
“Uunnd.”
The right side of her mouth tugged down and stalled like wax softening and rehardening. She fought to raise herself from the pillow, and her hand tightened on mine.
“Aaah … vvv … ooo.”

“I love you, too,” I said. She nodded and sank back onto the pillow.

Little sounds and signals kept on announcing themselves with a discreet stridency that seemed on the verge of falling into a melodic pattern. The light on the blanket, the rises and falls of the moving graph, the descending curves of the tubes were more present to me than my own feelings. It was as though I, too, were in a sort of coma, moving and walking on autopilot.

My hand rose from the guardrail and touched my mother’s cheek. It was yielding and slightly chill. Star opened her eyes and smiled up with the working half of her face.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Eee spitl.”

“Right. I’m going to stay here until you get better.”

Her right eye clamped shut, and the left side of her mouth opened and closed. She tried again.
“Whaa … mmmdd … kkk … kkmm … rrr?”

“I thought you were in trouble,” I said.

A tear spilled from her right eye and trailed down her cheek.
“Pur Unnd.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said, but she was asleep again.

17

A white-haired Irish politician introduced himself as Dr. Muldoon, the heart specialist assigned to my mother’s case, and described Star’s condition as “touch and go.” His confidential whiskey baritone made it sound like an invitation to a cruise. Shortly after Muldoon’s campaign stop, the muscular guy with the ponytail who had been talking to May went into the cubicle, and I followed him.

He was taking notes on the readouts of a machine that would have looked at home in the cockpit of a 747. When he saw me, he stood up, nearly filling the entire space between the equipment and the side of the bed. The tag on his chest said his name was Vincent Hardtke, and he looked like an old high school football player who put away a lot of beer on the weekends.

I asked him how long he had been working at St. Ann’s.

“Six years. This is a great staff, in case you have any doubts. Lawndale gets the fancy Ellendale clientele, but if I got sick, this is where I’d come. Straight up. Hey, if it was my mom, I’d want to know she was getting good care, too.”

“You’ve seen other patients like my mother. How did they do?”

“I’ve seen people worse off come through fine. Your mom’s pretty steady right now.” Hardtke stepped back. “That old lady with the cane, she’s a piece of work.” He pushed the curtain aside and grinned at Aunt May. She snubbed him with the authority of a duchess.

By late morning, visitors had gathered in the passages between the nurses’ station and the two rows of cubicles. Stretching my legs, I walked all the way around the nurses’ station a couple of times and remembered something Nettie had said.

Nurse Zwick ignored me until I had come to a full stop directly in front of her. “Nurse,” I said, indicating my duffel bag and knapsack against the wall, “if you think my bags are in the way, I’d be happy to move them anywhere you might suggest.”

She had forgotten all about them. “Well, this isn’t a luggage car.” She momentarily considered ordering me to take them to the basement or somewhere else equally distant. “Your things don’t seem to be in anyone’s way. Leave them there for the time being.”

“Thank you.” I moved away, then approached her again.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Barnhill told me that you spoke to my mother this morning.”

She began looking prickly, and a trace of pink came into her cheeks. “Your mother came in while we were having the first patient summaries.”

I nodded.

“She was confused, which is normal for a stroke person, but when she saw my uniform, she got hold of my arm and tried to say something.”

“Could you make it out?”

Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. “
I
didn’t make her say anything, Mr. Dunstan, she wanted to talk to
me
. Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr. Barnhill displeased your aunts, I’m sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition.”

“She must have been grateful for your attention,” I said.

Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. “It’s nice to deal with a gentleman.”

“My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly.” This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say,
You have to give some to get some
. “Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?”

Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. “At first I couldn’t make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said,
‘They stole my babies.’
”

18

As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses’ station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.

Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother’s heart. 5, Mr. Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs. Helen Loome, the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr. Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr. Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.

“It’s the alcohol leaving his system,” said Nettie. “Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker.”

May said, “Mr. Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life.”

Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr. Temple.

Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world of Cherry Street as if born to it. Queenie’s marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.

“Is Toby Kraft still around?” I asked.

“Last I heard, dogs still have fleas,” Nettie fired back.

Aunt May levered herself to her feet like a rusty derrick. Her eyes glittered. “Pearl Gates turned up in her second-best dress.
Pearlie’s in that Mount Hebron congregation with Helen Loome, you know, she went there from Galilee Holiness.”

Nettie craned her neck. “The dress she dyed pea-soup green, that makes her look like a turtle?”

Aunt May stumped up to a hunchbacked woman outside cubicle 9. I turned to Nettie. “Pearlie Gates?”

“She was Pearl Hooper until she married Mr. Gates. In a case like that, the man should take the woman’s name, instead of making a fool out of her. Considering the pride your Uncle Clark takes in our family, it’s a wonder he didn’t call himself Clark Dunstan, instead of me becoming Mrs. Annette Rutledge.”