Читать книгу Writers & Lovers - Lily King - Страница 12

At lunch, Fabiana seats me two doctors in the corner. They’ve kept their big laminated name tags clipped to their shirt pockets. They’re both internists, their tags say, at Mass General. When I pour their water, they’re talking about a laparoscopic liver biopsy, and when I drop their sandwiches they’ve moved on to giardia.

If they hadn’t been talking medicine the whole meal, I wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t get up the nerve until I’m serving their espressos.

‘May I ask you a quick question?’

The one on the left busies himself with a sugar packet. He’s on to me. But the older one nods. ‘Be our guest.’

‘My mother went to Chile last winter. She flew from Phoenix to LA to Santiago. She had a cough left over from a cold but no fever. Apart from that, she was in full health. Fifty-eight years old. No medical issues.’ It comes out of me perfectly, like memorized lines. ‘They spend five days in the capital then fly to the Chiloé Archipelago where they visit a few islands, and on the island of Caucahué she wakes up feeling cold and short of breath. Her friends get her to a clinic there and they put her on oxygen and radio for an air ambulance and just before it comes she dies.’

Both doctors seem frozen. The younger one is still holding the sugar packet.

‘What do you think happened? The death certificate says cardiac arrest, but it wasn’t a heart attack. Why did her heart stop? Was it a pulmonary embolism? From the long plane flight? That’s what my brother’s boyfriend, Phil, thinks. But he’s an ophthalmologist.’

The two doctors look at each other, not in consultation but in alarm. How do we get out of here?

‘There was no autopsy?’ the younger one says, finally releasing the sugar into the demitasse.

‘No.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ the older one says. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’

‘Without her history and a full report…’ the other one says and turns up his hands.

‘It was most likely an embolism.’

‘Could we get the check when you have a chance?’

They knock back their espressos while I print it out, put down two twenties, and bolt out of the dining room.

My mother’s friend Janet was with her at the clinic on the island. She wasn’t struggling, Janet told me. She wasn’t in pain. She was dozing. Sort of in and out. Then she sat up, said she had to make a phone call, lay back down again, and was dead. It was very peaceful, Janet told me. Such a pretty day.

I tried, in phone calls with Janet, to get more detail than pretty day and peaceful. I wanted everything, my mother’s exact words and the smell of the clinic and the color of the walls. Were children kicking a ball outside? Was she holding Janet’s hand? Who did she sit up to call? Was there any noise at all when her heart stopped? Why did it stop? I wanted to hear my mother tell it. She loved a story. She loved a mystery. She could make any little incident intriguing. In her version, the doctor would have a wandering eye and three chickens in the back named after Tolstoy characters. Janet would have a heat rash on her neck. I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

Her suitcase arrived at Caleb and Phil’s house three days after the funeral. Caleb and I opened it together. We lifted out her yellow rain slicker, her two cotton nightgowns, her one-piece bathing suit with the pink-and-white checks. We pressed our noses to every item, and every item smelled of her. We found gifts in a paper bag, a pair of beaded earrings and a man’s T-shirt. We knew they were for us. When the suitcase was empty I slid my hand into the interior elasticized pouches, certain there would be something in writing, a note or a sentence of goodbye, of premonition, in case of. There was nothing but two safety pins and a thin barrette.