Vanishing Acts (27 page)

18 Cr 1.0 glue 110 Ca 9.0 INR 1.2 PTT 33.0; Urinalysis Sp Gr 1.020, 25-50 WBC, 5-10 RBC, 3+ BAC 1+ SqEpi, +nitrite, +LE

ED decision-making: Pt presented to ED with s/s consistent with severe envenomation. After receiving 2 mg versed i.v. the patient was initially improved, but became agitated when Dr. Young attempted to remove the patient's clothing in order to fully assess her. Antivenin was unavailable. Additional doses of versed were ineffective, and the decision was made to sedate and paralyze the patient for intubation. Because of the copious secretions, orotracheal intubation was impossible, and a needle cricothyrotomy was performed successfully. The patient was then admitted to the PICU and underwent, a subsequent tracheostomy by peds general surgery. Pt ventilated for 3 days. Urinalysis also revealed a urinary tract infection, and the PICU team has been notified of this finding.

“I don't understand what it says,” Delia murmurs.

“You couldn't breathe,” I say, skimming the notes. “So the doctors made a surgical opening in your throat and hooked you up to machines that breathed for you.” I read further down the page:

ED social worker was requested because mother presented as intoxicated; father notified.

Here is proof, in black and white, that medical professionals thought Elise Hopkins was so drunk she was unable to take care of her child. Delia turns to me. “I can't believe I don't remember this.”

“You were young,” I justify.

“Shouldn't I have at least some sense of being in a hospital for a few nights? Of breathing with a ventilator? Or of fighting the doctor? I mean, look at what it says, Eric. I had to be sedated.”

She gets up suddenly and walks out of the closet, asking the administrative assistant where the pediatric ICU ward is. Determined, she gets into the elevator and heads upstairs.

It looks different, surely, than it used to. There are bright murals of aquariums and Disney princesses on the wails and rainbows painted on the windows. Children tethered to IV poles navigate the hails with their parents; babies cry behind closed doors.

A candy striper gets off another elevator and pushes past us, her face hidden by a bouquet of balloons. She brings them into the room opposite us; the patient is a little girl. “Can we tie them to the bed,” she asks, “and see if I float?”

“I didn't have balloons,” Delia murmurs. “They weren't allowed in the ICU.” She crosses in front of me, but she might as well be a thousand miles away. “He brought me candy instead ... a lollipop shaped like a scorpion. He told me to bite it back.”

“Your dad?”

“I don't think so. This is crazy, but it was someone who looked like Victor. The guy my mother's married to now.” She shakes her head, bewildered. “He told me not to tell anyone he came to visit.”

I scuff my shoe on the linoleum. “Huh,” I say.

“If I got bitten in 1976, my parents were still married.” Delia looks up at me. “What if... what if my mother was having an affair, Eric?”

I don't answer.

“Eric,” Delia says, “did you hear me?”

“She was.”

“What?”

“Your father told me.”

“And you didn't tell me?”

“I couldn't tell you, Delia.”

“What else are you holding back?”

A hundred answers run through my mind, from details of conversations I have had with Andrew in jail to the deposition I took from Delia's former nursery school teacher, things that she is better off not hearing, although she would never believe me if I told her so. “You're the one who wanted me to represent your father,” I argue. “If I tell you the things he tells me, I get tossed off the case, or disbarred. So, you pick, Delia. Do you want me to put you first... or him?” Too late I realize I never should have asked that question. She shoves past me without saying a word, and strides down the hallway.

“Delia, wait,” I say, as she steps into the elevator. I put my hand between the doors to keep it from closing. “Stop. I promise; I'll tell you everything I know.” The last thing I see before the doors close are her eyes: the soft, bruised brown of disappointment. “Why start now,” she says.

The taxi drops me off at Hamilton, Hamilton, but instead of going into the office building I take a left and start walking the streets of Phoenix. I walk far enough that the tony stucco storefronts disappear and I find myself in places where kids in low-riding pants hang out on the corner, watching traffic without flicking their yellow eyes. I pass a boarded-up drugstore, a wig shop, and a kiosk that reads checks cashed in multiple languages.

Delia is right. If I managed to figure out a way to keep her from knowing what her father told me, surely I would have been able to figure out a way to keep the Bar Association from knowing what I might have told her. It doesn't matter that, in terms of legal ethics, I shouldn't have disclosed to her any information about her father's case, or her own absent history. It doesn't matter that I promised as much to Judge Noble, and to Chris Hamilton, my sponsor in this state. The bottom line is that ethics are a lofty standard, but affection ranks higher. What is the point of being an exemplary attorney in the long run? You never see that on anyone's tombstone. You see who loved them; you see who they loved back.

I duck into the next store and let the air-conditioning wash over me. There is the unmistakable yeasty smell of cardboard cartons; the ching of a cash register. One wall is covered with the emerald green bottles of foreign wines; the entire back shelf is a transparent panorama of gins and vodka and vermouth. The full-bellied brandies sit side by side like Buddhas.

I head to the corner of whiskeys. The cashier puts the Maker's Mark into a brown bag for me and hands me back my change. When I leave the store I twist off the cap of the whiskey bottle. I lift the bottle to my lips and tilt back my head and savor that first, blessed, anesthetic mouthful.

And, like I expect, that's all I need for the fog in my head to clear, leaving one honest admission: Even if I had been free to tell Delia anything and everything, I still wouldn't have done it. As Andrew has been trying to explain for weeks: It was easier to hide the truth than to hurt her.

So does that make me guilty ... or admirable?

What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken. But what about when those rules happen to be laws?

Tipping the whiskey bottle, I spill the entire contents down a sewer grate. It is a longshot, but I think I've just found a way out for Andrew Hopkins. Delia

By the time I reach my mothers house, my emotions are hanging by a thread. I've been lied to by Fitz and by Eric; I've been lied to by my father. I have come here because, ironically, my mother is my last resort. I need someone to tell me the things I want to hear: that she loved my father; that I have jumped to the wrong conclusion; that the truth is not always what you think it is. When my mother doesn't answer the doorbell, I let myself into her unlocked house. I follow her voice down a hallway. “How does that feel?” she asks.

“Much better,”' a man answers.

I peer through a doorway to find my mother gently tying a knot in a silk cord around a younger man's neck. Seeing me, he startles, nearly falling off his stool.

“Delia!” she says.

The man's face turns bright red: he seems incredibly embarrassed to have been caught, even fully clothed, with my mother. “Stay,” she says, “Henry and I are finishing up.”

He digs in his pants for his wallet. “Gracias, Dona Elise,” he mutters, shoving a ten-dollar bill into her hands.

He's paying her?

“You have to keep wearing your red socks, and your red underwear for me. Understand?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he replies, and he backs out of the room in a hurry. I stare at her, speechless for a moment. “Does Victor know?”

“I try to keep it a secret.” My mother blushes. “To be honest, I wasn't sure how you'd react, either.” Her eyes suddenly brighten. “If you're interested, though, I'd love to teach you.”

It is then that I notice the rows of jars behind her, filled with leaves and roots and buds and soil, and I realize we are talking about very different things. “What... is all this?”

“It's part of the business,” she says. “I'm a curandera, a healer. Sort of a doctor for the people doctors can't help. Henry, for example, has been here three times already.”

“You're not sleeping with him?”

She looks at me as if I'm crazy. “Henry? Of course not. He's been hospitalized twice because his throat keeps swelling shut, but no medical professional can find anything wrong with him. The minute he walked in here, I knew it was one of his neighbors hexing him–and I'm working with him to break the spell.” My own business involves things that cannot be seen, but it's rooted in the basics of science: human cells, attacked by bacteria, which create vapor trails. Once again, I look at this woman and think she is an utter stranger. “Do you honestly believe that?”

“What I believe doesn't matter. It's what he believes. People come to me because they get to help with their cure. The client knots the special cord, or buries the sealed matchbox, or rubs the candle. Who doesn't want to have a hand in controlling their own future?”

It was what I had thought I wanted. But now that I am starting to remember, I am not so sure. I touch my hand to the scar at my throat; the discovery that brought me here. “If you're a healer, why couldn't you save me?” Her eyes fall to the small hollow. “Because back then,” she admits, “I couldn't even save myself.”

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength–and the honesty–to break them down.

“Then do it now,” I demand. “Pretend I'm some client.”

“There's nothing wrong with you.”

“Yes, there is,” I say. “I hurt. I hurt all the time.” Tears pierce the back of my throat. “You've got to have some magic that makes things disappear. Some potion or spell or cord I can tie around my wrist that'll make me forget how you drank . . . and how you cheated on my father.”

She steps back, as if she's been slapped.

“What could you give me,” I ask, my voice shaking, “to make me forget. . . that you forgot about me?”

My mother hesitates for a moment, and then walks stiffly to her shelves. She pulls down three containers and a glass mixing bowl. She opens the seals. I smell nutmeg, summertime, a distillation of hope.

But she does not mix me a poultice or make a roux for me to swallow. She doesn't wrap my wrists with green silk or tell me to blow out three squat candles. Instead, she comes hesitantly around her workbench. She folds me into her arms, even as I try to break free. She refuses to let go, the whole time that I cry. It seems as if we have been driving forever. Ruthann and I take turns during the night, while Sophie and Greta sleep in the backseat. We head north on Interstate 17, passing places with names like Bloody Basin Road and Horsethief Basin, Jackass Acres, Little Squaw Creek. We pass the skeletons of saguaros, inside which birds have made their homes; and the smashed amber glass from beer bottles, which line the side of the road like glitter.

Gradually, the cacti vanish, and deciduous trees begin to pepper the foothills. The altitude makes the temperature drop, to a point where the air is so cool I have to roll up the window. Walls of striated red rock rise in the distance, set on fire by the rising sun.

I'm not running away, not really. I just sort of invited myself to accompany Ruthann on a trip to visit her family on Second Mesa. She wasn't too keen on the idea, but I pulled out all the stops: I told her that I thought it was important for Sophie to learn about the world; I told her that I wanted to see more in Arizona than the jail system; I told her that I needed to talk to someone, and that I wanted it to be her.

As we drive, I tell Ruthann about Fitz's story for the Gazette. I tell her about the scorpion sting, and what I remembered about Victor, and what Eric already knew. I don't tell her about my mother. Right now, I want to keep that moment to myself, a silver dollar tucked into the hem of my mind to take out in an emergency.

“So you really begged to come to Second Mesa because you're angry at Eric,” Ruthann says.

“I didn't beg,” I say, and she just raises a brow. “Well, maybe just a little.” Ruthann is quiet for a few seconds. "Let's say Eric had told you that your mother had been having an affair when he first found out. Would it have kept your parents from splitting up? No. Would it have kept your father from running away with you?

No. Would it have meant that your father wouldn't have been arrested? Nope. Far as I can tell, the only purpose served by telling you would be to get you even more upset, kind of like you are now."

“Eric knows how hard this is for me,” I say. “It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle and going crazy because I can't find the last piece, and then realizing that Eric's had it stashed in his back pocket.”

“Maybe he's got a reason for not wanting you to finish that puzzle,” Ruthann says.

“I'm not saying what Eric did was right. I'm just saying it might not be wrong, either.” We drive on in silence to Flagstaff, and then veer right onto a different road. I follow Ruthann's directions to a turnoff for Walnut Canyon. We park in a lot next to a ranger's truck, but the gates aren't open yet. “Come on,” Ruthann says. “There's something I want you to see.”