4

He seemed too young. Perhaps I’d misunderstood. Maybe he was a therapist of some sort or other, but hardly the kind entitled to call himself “doctor.” With a haircut fresh off a Marine base and an eager grin, he looked like a big goofy kid. His tweed jacket and muted paisley tie had probably been chosen to make him appear older, and he must have inherited the half-moon reading glasses tucked into his breast pocket. He sure hadn’t aged enough to need them.

She was a willow-thin blonde with nervous hands. It took her ten minutes just to remove her raincoat, fingernails clacking against the buttons. She wasn’t paying attention to the task; her eyes were darting all over the place, noting the water stains on the ceiling, eyeing the furniture as if she were pricing it for an auction gallery.

I was glad I’d made Roz take the painting down.

I did some appraising of my own. The beige suit, piped in a darker shade, maybe six hundred bucks, and I constantly undervalue due to years of Filene’s Basement shopping. Double it to include the shoes, bag, and leather gloves. The raincoat had a plaid lining and a Burberry label. Her slim gold watch and massive solitaire diamond told me she could probably afford both a private eye and a therapist.

The skirt of the fancy suit gapped at the waist and bagged at the hip, as if she’d recently lost weight. Deep purplish-gray shadows tinted the skin under her eyes. A woman who spent megabucks on a precision wedge haircut ought to concentrate more on her makeup, I thought.

Keith Donovan made a ceremony of hanging her raincoat on the coat-tree while she fumbled with her gloves. Clasping her handbag tightly against her chest, she managed the single step down to my living room with an elbow assist from the therapist.

Normally I invite clients to sit in the chair across from my rolltop desk, but I hadn’t readied a second chair so I motioned them farther into the room. The woman chose my aunt Bea’s favorite rocker, with its needlepoint cushion and faint welcoming creak. Donovan waited for me to take the couch before selecting an easy chair.

The woman absorbed the surroundings with a practiced glance, and I wondered what deceptive conclusions she’d drawn from the antiques and Orientals. The room is exactly as my aunt left it when she died, except for the addition of my desk.

Her eyes fastened on the silver-framed photo centered on the mantelpiece. She mumbled and looked at me expectantly.

“What?”

“Is she your daughter?” she asked in a low urgent tone.

“My little sister.”

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

“Ms. Carlyle,” Keith Donovan said, “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Woodrow, Emily Woodrow.”

She twisted her hands, rubbed them along the length of her thighs, clasped them in her lap. Said nothing.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked.

No response.

“You’ve been sending me pictures of your daughter?” I made it a question only by inflection.

“She looks like me, doesn’t she?” the woman said. On the surface her pale face seemed as passive and calm as an old portrait in an art museum, but I felt uneasy scrutinizing her. She had an odd voice, faint and hoarse.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Your daughter.”

The woman lowered her head suddenly. Her hair, falling in wings from a center part, covered her face, so I couldn’t tell if tears came with the wrenching sobs. I had a fix on her hoarseness now. Crying jags roughened vocal cords more quickly than Jack Daniel’s and cigarettes.

Donovan seemed to be studying his knuckles. I wondered if he was billing my time as one of the woman’s treatment sessions.

She did the hand routine again, her fingers rubbing her thighs as if she were searching for something to grasp or tear. Her long fingernails were unpolished and neglected.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.

Color flooded her cheeks. Her chest rose and fell so quickly I thought she might hyperventilate and pass out. I hoped Donovan, young as he was, had some medical experience.

“Doctor,” she muttered to him. “I don’t know where to—”

“Would you like me to provide some background information?” he asked gently.

“Yes,” she said, seizing the words like a lifeline. “But first, I want—I’d like to give her this.”

It was a pale blue rectangle. I was going to get my Friday photo after all.

The envelope seemed identical to the ones underneath my blotter, but the enclosed photograph was a formal study, on thicker stock. The child … well, the girl wore a hat, but the floppy-brimmed straw was no cover for the fact that she’d lost her bouncy curls. I could practically see bones through her papery skin. She was gamely attempting her angelic smile, but it couldn’t make the jump to her sunken eyes.

I swallowed and was glad I hadn’t eaten breakfast.

Centered at the bottom, beneath a black border, elaborate calligraphy spelled out: Rebecca Elizabeth Woodrow. 9/12/85–1/6/92. The newborn in the hand-knitted bunting—funny how the word for the damn thing came back to me—the two-year-old in the pink striped shirt and bib overalls, hadn’t made it to her seventh birthday.

I glanced up. Emily Woodrow stared at my little sister’s photo with an intensity bordering on hunger. I was glad I held her daughter’s picture in my hand. It gave me something to look at, besides her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “She was beautiful.”

The woman tried to smile. A mistake. Her lips quivered.

“Mrs. Woodrow has been seeing me since her daughter’s death,” Keith Donovan volunteered, his voice low and soothing.

“Three months ago,” she whispered, as if she were reminding herself. Her hands were working again. The nail on the index finger of her left hand was broken, jagged. “Have you ever had a serious illness?” she asked abruptly.

“No,” I said.

“Then you don’t know what it’s like when a doctor looks at you in that special kindly way, and then he rips your heart out.”

I tried to guess how old she was. Forties by the hands. Thirties by the face.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” I shot Donovan a sidelong glance, but if he’d caught me doing my imitation of a therapist, he didn’t react.

She lowered her eyes and addressed the carpet in a voice as flat and melancholy as a foghorn. “There’s no place to start. No beginning. Becca seemed to get a lot of colds, maybe three times as many as the year before. And the fevers. Scary high fevers, where she’d just go limp, with her face flushed and her hair soaked.”

As she spoke, Emily Woodrow lifted a hand to her own hair, as if she were unconsciously feeling for dampness. She left her hand there, forgotten, suspended, and went on.

“One day I kept her home from school, even though she wasn’t running a fever. Her father says—said—I babied her. But the listlessness; it wasn’t like her. I called our doctor. He said bring her in—no appointment, just bring her in—and I was scared.” She swallowed audibly. “For the first time. I was always scared after that. He gave her a quick exam—eyes, ears, throat, heartbeat—and said she seemed okay. She went back to school, but I could tell she wasn’t right. She cried a lot, cried for no reason, and she’d never been a complainer. And then she got a bruise on the inside of her leg, big as an apple, but she couldn’t remember bumping into anything, and it didn’t go away, so I took her back to the doctor—I remember that day. There was such a wind howling; I held her hand. I thought she might blow away. She’d gotten so thin; she’d stopped eating. I bought her whatever she wanted. Pistachio ice cream …”

“Go on,” said Donovan.

She shrugged and glanced down at her expensive shoes. “Something was wrong with her blood. Platelets. He sent us to a specialist. And another one. They diagnosed Becca with ALL.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It’s ninety-five percent curable. That’s the cure rate. Ninety-five percent. They kept telling us that, over and over. When she lost her hair, when she couldn’t eat, not even applesauce like a baby, when she’d throw up every five minutes, too weak to turn her head, so I was afraid she’d choke on her own vomit, they always came back to that. Ninety-five percent.”

I didn’t like the way this was going.

“Mrs. Woodrow,” I said as gently as I could, my voice barely above a whisper, “I’m sorry. Believe me, I am sorry for your loss and your pain. But five percent die. If the cure rate is ninety-five percent, then five percent die.”

Emily Woodrow accorded my observation the same polite interest she might have given if I’d commented on the weather. “At first it didn’t matter. Nothing did. My daughter … my only child … There had to be a funeral and people came and people went and brought food and took food away. Casseroles and covered chafing dishes. Bread. Pots that steamed but never smelled. Nothing smelled, except the flowers. I didn’t want any flowers. I hate lilies. The first day, they’re beautiful, especially the star lilies, and by the second day, they reek. I remember I couldn’t go to her bedroom. I stood in the hall by her door, but I couldn’t go inside. I remember that. Her chair is at the kitchen table. I won’t let Harold take it away. I want to move, but Harold, my husband—”

Dammit, I ought to keep a box of Kleenex on my desk. She fumbled for tissues in her handbag.

“I was taking pills, medicine. Pills and water, pills and water. Waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping again. I never ate. There’s an oak outside my window. I watched its branches rustle. Empty branches. An empty tree. Dead, but living. Why should it be dead, but living? I thought I heard God talking to me. Just the once. He said—or she said—it was a whispery kind of voice: ‘If you don’t believe in me, it’s because you haven’t suffered enough.’ And I felt almost triumphant, as if I must have found some sort of religion—because I had suffered enough. Not like Becca, but enough.”

I glanced at the therapist, tried to send him the silent urgent message that this was his country, not mine.

“The funny thing is,” she went on, “I made phone calls and commitments. Friends would ring and say, ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you meet us for lunch?’ And I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I had these perfectly sane conversations, talking about books and gardening, and I made plans, and I don’t remember any of it. It was like floating in a fog bank. I never could see or hear anything clearly.

“I spent a lot of time thinking. Brooding. About what I’d done wrong. About why I was being punished. About how I hadn’t listened to her when she first said she wasn’t feeling well, about how I hadn’t taken her to the doctor soon enough, and then about how I must have taken her to the wrong doctor. Keith says I was angry, terribly angry, but I turned my anger inward …”

Keith. Not Dr. Donovan. I glanced at his pleasantly earnest, unlined face, and wondered who would choose a shrink so apparently unscarred by life.

Mrs. Woodrow seemed to have run out of steam. Even her hands lay idle in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” I said, again as gently as I could, forming the words with the care a child takes in trying to blow a large soap bubble, “but I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I’m getting to it,” she snapped, her voice brittle, her eyes staring deeply into mine. “I can’t just tell you cold.”

I was sorry I’d interrupted. I’d seen the photos: the baby, the toddler, the child, the beautiful girl. I’d watched her grow.

“I have a picture in my mind,” the woman said. “And I can’t make it go away.”

She sat for a time, a statue frozen in her chair. Lines appeared and disappeared in her narrow face. Sometimes they seemed deeply etched; sometimes a superficial shading of the light. At the right side of her jaw, a tiny muscle twitched.

“You have to remember how hard it was for me,” she said finally. “I was taking pills, medicine. Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s about the last day, her last day.”

“Did she die at home?” She flinched when I said the word.

“At the hospital,” she said, staring directly into my eyes, holding them with her gaze. “It was her regular chemotherapy session. The doctors had been, well, noncommittal. But encouraging, very encouraging. She was handling everything well …”

“Yes?”

Her eyes were blue, an icy bottomless lake. “I have this picture in my head. The last day. It went wrong so fast. I was sitting near her, in a beige chair, on the right side of the bed, so close I could stroke her forehead. We were in the regular room, the one with the blue wallpaper. Blue wallpaper, with a white lattice pattern and flowers, yellow-and-gold flowers. Zinnias. I used to stare at the wallpaper when I couldn’t stand watching the pain in Becca’s face. Only for a moment; otherwise, I felt like I was deserting her. But there were times when I’d stare till there were only yellow and blue blotches. It was quiet. The regular nurse was present. She hadn’t had any trouble inserting the IV. Everything was ordinary—if horrible things, if your child’s pain, can ever be ordinary. And then there was a man in white, a man I hadn’t seen before, but he must have been a doctor. Bursting in like that. Yelling. And he pushed me out of the room, shoved me. And through a tiny window, I saw the mask over her face, over Becca’s face. He jammed it over her mouth, her nose. The noise she made, I hear it in my sleep—”

“It’s okay, Emily,” Keith Donovan said quietly. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Her silence was more unnerving than her sobs. She sat motionless, staring inward, seeing her child’s last moments with the intensity of a fever dream.

“Where was your daughter treated?” I asked.

“JHHI.”

The Jonas Hand/Helping Institute, created when the small Jonas Hand Hospital and the even smaller James Helping Institute merged in the late seventies, is housed in a dilapidated building in an area that swings between urban renewal and urban decay, teetering back and forth on the pendulum of local politics, never quite making it into the respectable zone. For years, there’ve been rumors of JHHI closing, or moving, but they’ve always proved false. JHHI endures, the major reason the neighborhood never quite succumbs to gang violence, racism, or sheer neglect. Said to be one of the nation’s top medical centers, it draws patients from as far away as Cairo and Santiago.

The locals bless the hospital for the police presence it commands. Most of them call the place Helping Hand, and believe it was named for some anonymous Good Samaritan. It’s no fly-by-night miracle-cure center, no south-of-the-border laetrile clinic.

Mrs. Woodrow rubbed her temples. “We took her there because of Muir, of course. Because of his reputation.”

I didn’t respond to the name. She looked at me as if I’d missed a cue.

“Dr. Jerome D. Muir,” Emily Woodrow insisted. The name did have a certain familiarity, like a name I might have read once in a newspaper.

“Wouldn’t Children’s Hospital have been the place to go?” I inquired. “Better known?” I’d certainly heard more about Children’s than I’d read about Muir.

“No. No,” Mrs. Woodrow said earnestly. “We checked very carefully. My husband does know doctors. He talked to them. We were afraid of a teaching hospital, of some enormous place where you never know who’s actually doing what. I mean, I realize medical students need to learn, and I know they need to learn on living people with real illnesses, but I thought, no, not on my daughter. So we chose JHHI. Because of Dr. Muir.”

Donovan said, “He’s the best man in the area, maybe in the country.” The woman seemed comforted by his assurance.

I asked, “Was Muir your daughter’s primary physician?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think an error was made in your daughter’s medical care?” I asked Mrs. Woodrow.

“I don’t know.”

“Sounds to me like you want a malpractice attorney.”

“I don’t,” she said vehemently. “I can’t and I don’t. My husband is an attorney who works closely with doctors, setting up corporations, partnerships, that kind of thing. I can’t risk his livelihood by starting up a lawsuit based on shadows. I don’t know anything for sure. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe the drugs I took afterward … maybe they altered my perceptions.…”

“You must have asked your daughter’s doctor what happened.”

“He explained. He explains, but it doesn’t make sense. He uses words I don’t understand, words with twenty syllables, and the next time I ask, after I’ve looked things up, he uses a different word and says I must have misunderstood him. And lately, he’s always out—on rounds or whatever. And the nurses, they don’t even bother to hide it anymore. They just whisper to each other. ‘It’s her again, the crazy woman.’”

A lawyer once told me that more doctors get sued because of rude receptionists than rotten care.

“You lost your daughter,” I said. “That’s enough to make anyone crazy for a while.”

I wondered what Keith Donovan thought about the nontechnical term, crazy.

“Becca looked like me, but she wasn’t like me,” the woman said fiercely. Her jagged nail snagged a beige stocking. She tore it loose, ripping a hole. Didn’t notice. “She was matter-of-fact. She accepted what was. Whatever they did to her, whatever those doctors and nurses did to her, she simply assumed they were doing their best. Even when she was so weak she could hardly talk, she never blamed me. She never blamed anyone. She cried when she couldn’t go to her friend Jessie’s birthday party, but she didn’t cry because she had leukemia. She just wanted them to make her well again. So her hair would grow back, and she could jump rope on the playground. And they said they would, and they didn’t.”

Children died. Parents lived. It broke your heart. Before I could open my mouth to tell her I couldn’t help her, she sped on.

“I want you to tell me, assure me, that nothing, absolutely nothing unusual or odd or wrong went on. I owe that much to Becca. To Becca and myself. I need to hear someone say it, before I can go on.”

“You want me to talk to her doctor?”

She licked her lips, spoke rapidly, softly. “I need to know that everything that could have been done was done, and done right. That no one could have done more. I don’t want to sue anybody. I don’t need money. I have money.”

“I’m not a whiz at medical terminology,” I said.

“I could help with that,” Donovan volunteered.

I turned on him. “Do you think this is necessary? Or wise?”

“You mean, do I think it will help Mrs. Woodrow?”

“Yes,” I snapped, surprised to find myself angry. I didn’t need any psychiatrist to tell me what I meant.

He paused, considering his words. “I think it may help to close off this area, wall up the past. So she can move forward.”

“Move forward,” Emily Woodrow repeated, shaking her head slowly. She kept moving her head back and forth as if she’d forgotten how to stop.

I sucked in a deep breath, tried to find another way to say what I needed to say. Couldn’t. This is what came out: “Mrs. Woodrow, I’m sorry, but I have to say this. Your daughter is dead. What Dr. Donovan means when he says ‘move forward,’ what he means is that no matter what I discover, no matter what I learn, your daughter will still be dead.”

Her eyes closed and she flinched as if I’d hit her. I glanced at Donovan. He inclined his head slightly as if I’d said the right thing, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

She wanted to write out a check immediately. I persuaded her to take a day to look over my standard contract, suggest any changes. I assured her that she could mail me the check.

I don’t usually go out of my way to avoid prompt payment. Usually I demand it, but there was something about this case—probably the woman’s visible pain—that made me want to stall. And what was the hurry? I asked myself. It wasn’t like the events had occurred yesterday.

She teetered on her heels when she stood to leave. Since she had her doctor along, I didn’t feel required to see her out.

When she reappeared in the doorway, clad in her Burberry, her index finger to her lips, I was surprised. Surefooted now, she glided across the room till she was well within whispering range.

“He thinks I’m looking for my glove,” she murmured. “Tell me quickly: Do you own any stocks? Do you speculate?”

“No.” I thought she was probably mad but I answered. It was something in her eyes. An intensity, a brilliance.

“Do you work for yourself?”

“Yes.”

“For anyone else?”

“I drive a cab.”

“What company?”

“Green and White.”

“I can check on them. Do you own a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Can you use it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Used it. Killed with it.”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it again?”

“If I had to.”

“What does Cee Co mean to you?”

“Seiko? The watch people?”

She handed me a slim envelope. “This is for you. Keep it. And stay here for me. On hold. Don’t take any other client. You’ll get something in the mail or by messenger. Keep it safe. Keep it for me.”

“Wait. Wait just a minute. Hire a safety deposit box.”

“No. It has to be this way. Please. You have to.” For a moment, her fierce gaze faltered.

“What is Cee Co?” I asked.

She ignored the question.

“Are you in danger?” I asked, louder this time.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why ask about guns? Do you need protection? Are you afraid?”

“Afraid? Afraid of what? There’s nothing to be afraid of now. When you’ve lost everything, there’s nothing left.”

She swiveled her head, as if she’d heard a noise, footsteps. All was quiet.

“No,” she murmured softly, turning to stare at me again. “No, I take that back. You’re right: I am afraid. I’m afraid I’ll forget her someday.” Her voice was a choked whisper, and the words came faster and faster. “Forget the feel of her hair. Forget the moment I named her. Forget the creases under her eyes when she smiled—”

“Did you find it?” Donovan hovered at the door. Instinctively I slid the slim envelope under my blotter, out of sight.

Emily Woodrow, her gait unsteady, yanked a glove from beneath the rocking chair. I hadn’t seen her plant it.

“Here it is,” she said automatically, the mask almost back in place. “Sorry to have troubled you.”

“I’ll be in touch,” I said.

She shot me a warning glance. “This is something I won’t discuss on the telephone. I cannot discuss it over the phone.”

“Still—”

“If you’ll do as I’ve asked,” she said mildly, her fierce eyes hooded, “everything will be fine.”

Sure, I thought.

“Ms. Carlyle,” she said, turning back as she reached the doorway.

“Yes.”

“Your little sister—”

“Yes?”

Her voice faltered. She bit her lip and took a deep breath before she could go on. “She’s very beautiful.”