Читать книгу Spring Break - Charlotte Douglas - Страница 10

Pelican Bay Hospital was only a couple of miles from my condo, close to the former police department, now a county sheriff’s substation. During the entire drive, Bill’s recent warning about reconciliation rang in my ears, and I worried that I’d waited too long to mend fences with my mother. If she died before I could speak with her, I would never have the chance to bridge the gap between us. I’d long ago accepted that I didn’t really like my mother, and I’d also given up on gaining her approval, but I loved her, and I hoped I had a chance to tell her so.

I broke a few traffic laws between my place and the hospital, only to waste endless minutes circling acres of parking lots looking for an empty space.

After finally securing a spot on the far edge of a lot, I sprinted toward the emergency entrance. Nearing the building, I met Joe Fenton, a paramedic, who was leaving, and we spoke in passing.

“Hey, Maggie. Long time no see.”

“Hi, Joe,” I said without slowing my stride.

“You can tell it’s spring break.” He smoothed his mustache, which reminded me of a caterpillar. “Just had a drunken college kid take a header off a balcony at the beach.”

“Will he make it?”

Joe shrugged. “You know head injuries. Got another call. Gotta run. Good to see ya.”

Joe swung into the driver’s seat of the ambulance parked at the curb, and I rushed up the brick walkway to the E.R. entrance. The hospital doors slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and I hurried to the waiting room. I’d no sooner stepped inside than an unkempt woman in a floral patio dress and flip-flops threw herself at me. After extricating myself from her viselike embrace, I was surprised to discover that, instead of a Signal Twenty awaiting admission to the psych ward, the distraught and disheveled greeter was my sister. Her informal clothes, uncombed hair and face devoid of makeup made her appear much older than her fifty-seven years and underscored the seriousness of Mother’s condition.

“I came as soon as I got your message,” I said. “How is she?”

“She’s being evaluated now.”

“What happened?” I led Caroline to a corner of the waiting room less populated than the others and sat on a vinyl-covered sofa beside her.

My usually cool-as-a-cucumber sister wrung her hands. “A little before eight, Estelle went up the bedroom to tell Mother her dinner was ready.”

I nodded. A stickler for propriety, Mother always dressed for dinner and ate in the dining room, even when she dined alone.

“Mother was slumped in her chair, incoherent, unable to move her right arm or leg. Estelle called the paramedics, then me. I got here just as they were bringing Mother in.”

I glanced around the motley assortment of humanity that crowded the waiting room. An elderly couple held hands and watched CNN on the ceiling-mounted television. A young mother and father attempted to comfort a red-faced baby who was crying at the top of his lungs, and two teenage girls took turns talking and giggling on the courtesy phone in the corner opposite us. A man in work clothes sat stoically and cradled his arm, as if it was broken.

“Where’s Hunt?” I asked.

Caroline seldom went anywhere without her wealthy, socially connected husband, Huntington Yarborough, mother’s ideal, obsequious-to-a-fault son-in-law.

“Hunt’s in Palm Beach at a securities seminar. I talked with him right after I called you. He’s taking the first plane home.”

Recent events, mainly Hunt’s help in my last murder investigation and his and Caroline’s support after Mother disowned me, had me reassessing my relationship with my sister and her husband. We weren’t at the warm-and-fuzzy stage yet, but I no longer ground my teeth in their presence.

“Have you talked to a doctor?”

Caroline shook her head. “There’s been no time.”

“I haven’t seen much of Mother lately.” That was the understatement of the century. I hadn’t seen her at all since she’d laid into me after Thanksgiving for arresting Samantha Lovelace for her husband’s murder. “Has she been feeling all right?”

“You know how Mother is. She doesn’t talk about illness, as if it’s a social taboo. Funny, don’t you think, for somebody who was married to a doctor for so many years?”

I nodded. Mother had a long list of social taboos, most of which I’d broken at one time or another.

A nurse at the admitting desk called Caroline’s name, and my sister hurried to the counter. While she filled in forms attached to a clipboard, I considered calling Bill on his cell phone, but decided to wait until we’d heard from the doctor. Mother’s episode could have been a transient ischemic attack—one wasn’t a cardiologist’s daughter without picking up some of the lingo—or something much more serious. I’d wait until I knew the diagnosis before bothering Bill.

After what seemed hours but was only about twenty minutes, a young female doctor in pale blue scrubs came out of the emergency room and spoke to the nurse at the reception desk. The nurse pointed her toward Caroline, and I hurried over to hear what the doctor was saying.

“Margaret, this is Dr. Quessenberry,” Caroline said. “She’s treating Mother.”

Dr. Quessenberry smiled and looked about fourteen. Irrationally, I wished for Dr. Fellows. Seton Fellows, my father’s best friend, had been an eminent neurologist in his day, but I comforted myself with the probability that this girl was more up-to-date on the latest treatments than a man who’d been retired for a decade.

“How is she?” I asked.

“We’ve done a CT scan that shows your mother has suffered an ischemic stroke. We’re moving her to ICU and administering antithrombotics to dissolve the clot.”

“Can we see her?” Caroline asked.

“Just for a moment, after she’s settled,” the doctor said, “but you mustn’t upset her. She needs calm and rest.”

Don’t upset her. That left me out. I didn’t want to precipitate another stroke or aggravate this one.

“You go, Caroline,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

I returned to the chair in the corner of the waiting room, and Caroline followed the doctor into the E.R. CNN was broadcasting a hot pursuit on a California freeway. The driver was taunting police by sticking his bare behind out the window. Wondering how he maintained control of the vehicle with his fanny in the breeze, I watched to see if he had a passenger who was handling the steering while the driver mooned the cameras.

“Hello, Margaret.”

I glanced up to find Seton Fellows smiling down at me from his extraordinary height of six foot five, as if my thoughts had conjured him from thin air.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

The retired neurologist folded his lanky body into the chair beside me and took my hand. “Estelle called and told me what happened. I came to check on Priscilla.”

“Have you spoken with Dr. Quessenberry?”

He nodded. “And Dr. Katz will be taking over in ICU. He’s good. I trained him myself.”

“Is Mother going to be all right?”

“It takes about ten days before we know for certain that a stroke patient is stable. But the swiftness with which Estelle called for help definitely is a positive factor in your mother’s prognosis.”

“I’d like to see her, but Dr. Quessenberry says she shouldn’t be upset.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Why would you upset her?”

I was horrified to find my eyes filling with tears. Decades ago at the police academy, I’d learned never to let ’em see you cry. Tears don’t help, and, if nothing else, they rust your gun. I sniffed loudly and took a deep breath to forestall a sob. “She doesn’t approve of me. Never has.”