The House of Thunder (11 page)

Susan smiled. “Sounds like you might have a memorable night ahead of you.”

“It’s virtually guaranteed,” Mrs. Baker said, turning toward the door.

“Uh ... before you go.”

The nurse turned to her. “Yes, honey, what do you need?”

“Would you ... uh ... check on Mrs. Seiffert?”

Mrs. Baker looked puzzled.

“Well,” Susan said uneasily, “it’s just ... she’s been so silent ... and even though she’s sleeping, it seems as if she’s too silent ... and I wondered if maybe ...”

Mrs. Baker went straight to the second bed, pulled back the end of the curtain, and slipped behind it.

Susan tried to see beyond the curtain before it fell back into place, but she wasn’t able to get a glimpse of Jessica Seiffert or of anything else other than the nurse’s back.

She looked up at Tracey and Hepburn gesticulating and arguing in silence on the TV screen. She ate a spoonful of the ice cream, which tasted wonderful and hurt her teeth. She looked at the curtain again.

Mrs. Baker reappeared, and the curtain shimmered into place behind her, and again Susan didn’t have a chance to see anything beyond.

“Relax,” Mrs. Baker said. “She hasn’t passed away. She’s sleeping like a baby.”

“Oh.”

“Listen, kid, don’t let it prey on your mind. Okay? She’s not going to die in this room. She’ll be here for a couple of days, maybe a week, until her condition’s deteriorated enough for her to be transferred to the intensive care unit. That’s where it’ll happen, there among all the beeping and clicking life support machines that finally won’t be able to support her worth a damn. Okay?”

Susan nodded. “Okay.”

“Good girl. Now eat your ice cream, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

After Thelma Baker left, Susan turned up the sound on the TV set and ate all of her ice cream and tried not to look at Mrs. Seiffert’s shrouded bed.

The exercise and the large serving of ice cream eventually conspired to make her drowsy. She fell asleep watching
Adam’s Rib.

In the dream, she was on a TV game show, in an audience of people who were wearing funny costumes. She herself was dressed as a hospital patient, wearing pajamas and a bandage around her head. She realized she was on “Let’s Make a Deal.” The host of the show, Monty Hall, was standing beside her. “All right, Susan!” he said with syrupy enthusiasm. “Do you want to keep the thousand dollars you’ve already won, or do you want to trade it for whatever’s behind curtain number one!” Susan looked at the stage and saw that there were not three curtains, as usual; there were, instead, three hospital beds concealed by privacy curtains. “I’ll keep the thousand dollars,” she said. And Monty Hall said, “Oh, Susan, do you
really
think that’s wise? Are you
really
sure you’re making the right decision?” And she said, “I’ll keep the thousand dollars, Monty.” And Monty Hall looked around at the studio audience, flashing his white-white teeth in a big smile. “What do you think, audience? Should she keep the thousand, considering how little a thousand dollars will buy in these times of high inflation, or should she trade it for what’s behind curtain number one?” The audience roared in unison:
“Trade it! Trade it!”
Susan shook her head adamantly and said, “I don’t want what’s behind the curtain. Please, 1 don’t want it.” Monty Hall—who had ceased to look anything like Monty Hall and now looked distinctly satanic, with arched eyebrows and terrible dark eyes and a wicked mouth—snatched the thousand dollars out of her hand and said, “You’ll take the curtain, Susan, because it’s really what you deserve. You have it coming to you, Susan. The curtain! Let’s see what’s behind curtain number one!” On the stage, the curtain encircling the first hospital bed was whisked aside, and two men dressed as patients were sitting on the edge of the bed: Harch and Quince. They were both holding scalpels, and the stage lights glinted on the razor-sharp cutting edges of the instruments. Harch and Quince rose off the bed and started across the stage, heading toward the audience, toward Susan, their scalpels held out in front of them. The audience roared with delight and applauded.

 
 
A few minutes after Susan woke from her nap, the bedside phone rang. She picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Susan?”

“Yes.”

“My God, I was so relieved to hear you were out of the coma. Burt and I have been worried half to death!”

“I’m sorry. Uh ... I ... I’m not really sure who this is.”

“It’s me. Franny.”

“Franny?”

“Franny Pascarelli, your next-door neighbor.”

“Oh, Franny. Sure. I’m sorry.”

Franny hesitated, then said, “You ... uh ... you do remember me, don’t you?”

“Of course. I just didn’t recognize your voice at first.”

“I heard there was some ... amnesia.”

“I’ve gotten over most of that.”

“Thank God.”

“How are you, Franny?”

“Never mind about me. I waddle along from day to day, fighting the dreaded double chin and the insidious, ever-expanding waistline, but nothing ever really gets me down. You know me. But my God, what you’ve been through! How are you?”

“Getting better by the hour.”

“The people where you work ... they said you might not come out of the coma. We were worried sick. Then this morning Mr. Gomez called and said you were going to be okay. I was so happy that I sat down and ate a whole Sara Lee coffee cake.”

Susan laughed.

“Listen,” Franny said, “don’t worry about your house or anything like that. We’re taking care of things for you.”

“I’m sure you are. It’s a relief having you for a neighbor, Franny.”

“Well, you’d do the same for us.”

They talked for a couple of minutes, not about anything important, just catching up on neighborhood gossip.

When Susan hung up, she felt as if she had at last established contact with the past that she had almost lost forever. She hadn’t felt that way when she had spoken with Phil Gomez, for he had been merely a voice without a face, a cipher. But she remembered pudgy Franny Pascarelli, and remembering made all the difference. She and Franny were not really close friends; nevertheless, just talking to the woman made Susan feel that there truly was another world beyond Willawauk County Hospital and that she would eventually return to it. Curiously, talking to Franny also made Susan feel more isolated and alone than ever before.

 
 
 
Dr. McGee made his evening rounds shortly before dinnertime. He was wearing blue slacks, a red plaid shirt, a blue vee-neck sweater, and an open lab coat. Chest hairs, as black as those on his head, curled out of the open neck of his shirt. He was so slim and handsome that he looked as if he had stepped out of a men’s fashion advertisement in a slick magazine.

He brought her a large, prettily wrapped box of chocolates and a few paperback books.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” Susan said, reluctantly accepting the gifts.

“It’s not much. I wanted to.”

“Well ... thank you.”

“Besides, it’s all therapeutic. The candy will help you put on the weight you need. And the books will keep your mind off your troubles. I wasn’t sure what kind of thing you liked to read, but since you mentioned Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler yesterday, I thought you might like mysteries.”

“These are perfect,” she said.

He pulled up a chair beside her bed, and they talked for almost twenty minutes, partly about her exercise sessions, partly about her appetite, partly about the remaining blank spots in her memory, but mostly about personal things like favorite books, favorite foods, favorite movies.

They
didn’t
talk about Peter Johnson, the Quince look-alike she had seen this morning. She was afraid of sounding hysterical or-even-irrational. Two dead ringers? McGee would have to wonder if the problem wasn’t in her own perceptions. She didn’t want him to think she was at all ... unbalanced.

Besides, in truth, she wasn’t entirely sure that her perceptions weren’t affected by her head injury. Her doubts about herself were small, niggling, but they were doubts nonetheless.

Finally, as McGee was getting up to leave, she said, “I don’t see how you have any time for a private life, considering how much time you spend with your patients.”

“Well, I don’t spend as much time with other patients as I spend with you. You’re special.”

“I guess you don’t often get a chance to treat an amnesiac,” she said.

He smiled, and the smile was not conveyed solely by the curve of his finely formed lips; his eyes were a part of it, too—so clear, so blue, filled with what seemed to be affection. “It’s not your amnesia that makes you so special. And I’m sure you’re very well aware of that.”

She wasn’t quite sure of him. She didn’t know if he was just being nice, just trying to lift her spirits, or whether he really found her attractive. But how could he find her appealing in her current condition? Every time she looked in the mirror, she thought of a drowned rat. Surely, his flirting was just a standard part of his professional bedside manner.

“How’s your roommate been behaving?” he asked in a very soft, conspiratorial voice.

Susan glanced at the curtain. “Quiet as a mouse,” she whispered.

“Good. That means she’s not in pain. There isn’t much I can do for her, but at least I can make her last days relatively painless.”

“Oh, is she your patient?”

“Yes. Delightful woman. It’s a shame that dying has to be such a long, slow process for her. She deserved a much better, cleaner exit.”

He went to the other bed and stepped behind the curtain.

Yet again, Susan failed to get a glimpse of Mrs. Seiffert.

Behind the curtain, McGee said, “Hello, Jessie. How are you feeling today?”

There was a murmured response, nearly inaudible, a dry and brittle rasp, too low for Susan to make out any of the woman’s words, even too low to be positively identifiable as a human voice.

She listened to McGee’s side of the conversation for a minute or two, and then there was a minute of silence. When he came out from behind the curtain, she craned her neck, trying to see the old woman. But the curtain was drawn aside just enough for McGee to pass, not an inch more, and he let it fall shut immediately in his wake.

“She’s a tough lady,” he said with obvious admiration. Then he blinked at Susan and said, “In fact she’s more than a little bit like you.”

“Nonsense,” Susan said. “I’m not tough. For heaven’s sake, you should have seen me hobbling around this bed today, leaning on poor Mrs. Baker so hard that it’s a miracle I didn’t drag both of us down.”

“I mean tough inside,” McGee said.

“I’m a marshmallow.” She was embarrassed by his compliments because she still couldn’t decide in what spirit they were offered. Was he courting her? Or merely being nice? She changed the subject: “If you drew back the curtain, Mrs. Seiffert could watch some TV with me this evening.”

“She’s asleep,” McGee said. “Fell asleep while I was talking to her. She’ll probably sleep sixteen hours a day or more from here on out.”

“Well, she might wake up later,” Susan persisted.

“Thing is—she doesn’t want the curtain left open. She’s somewhat vain about her appearance.”

“Mrs. Baker told me about that. But I’m sure I could make her feel at ease. She might be self-conscious at first, but I know I could make her feel comfortable.”

“I’m sure you could,” he said, “but I—”

“It can be excruciatingly boring just lying in bed all day. Some TV might make the time pass more quickly for her.”

McGee took her hand. “Susan, I know you mean well, but I think it’s best we leave the curtain closed, as Jessie prefers. You forget she’s dying. She might not want the time to pass more quickly. Or she may find quiet contemplation infinitely preferable to watching an episode of ‘Dallas’ or ‘The Jeffersons.’”

Although he hadn’t spoken sharply, Susan was stung by what he had said. Because he was right, of course. No TV sitcom was going to cheer up a dying woman who was teetering between drug-heavy sleep and intolerable pain.

“I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” she said.

“Of course you didn’t. And you weren’t. Just let Jessie sleep, and stop worrying about her.” He squeezed Susan’s hand, patted it, and finally let it go. “I’ll see you in the morning for a few minutes.”

She sensed that he was trying to decide whether or not to bend down and kiss her on the cheek. He started to do it, then drew back, as if he were as unsure of her feelings as she was of his. Or maybe she was only imagining those intentions and reactions; she couldn’t make up her mind which it had been.

“Sleep well.”

“I will,” she said.

He went to the door, stopped, turned to her again. “By the way, I’ve scheduled some therapy for you in the morning.”

“What kind of therapy?”

“PT—physical therapy. Exercise, muscle training. For your legs, mostly. And a session in the whirlpool. An orderly will be around to take you downstairs to the PT unit sometime after breakfast.”

 
 
 
Mrs. Seiffert couldn’t feed herself, so a nurse fed dinner to her. Even that task was performed with the curtain drawn.

Susan ate dinner and read a mystery novel, which she enjoyed because it kept her mind off the Harch and Quince look-alikes.

Later, after a snack of milk and cookies, she shuffled to the bathroom, supporting herself against the wall, then shuffled back. The return trip seemed twice as long as the original journey.

When the night nurse brought a sedative, Susan knew she didn’t need it, but she took it anyway, and in a short time she was sound asleep—

“Susan... Susan... Susan... ”

—until a voice softly calling her name penetrated her sleep and caused her to sit suddenly upright in bed.

“Sasan ...
”

Her heart was hammering because, even as groggy as she was, she detected something sinister in that voice.