Brass Ring (4 page)

She glanced into Pat Wykowski’s empty corner office as she passed it, wishing the foundation’s part-time psychologist had come in today. Pat might have been able to offer some insight into Margot St. Pierre’s behavior—or maybe into her own. But Pat, whom Jon affectionately referred to as a party animal, was still up in Harpers Ferry with a few other die-hard conference attendees, dragging out the recreational element of the conference, making the most of the snowstorm.

Claire stopped at the kitchenette, picked up their bagged lunches and a couple of Cokes, then walked into Jon’s office. He was sitting in his wheelchair behind his desk, talking on the phone. Claire pulled their sandwiches from the bags, along with his apple and her orange, and set them on paper plates. Then she sat down across the desk from him. When he hung up, he sighed.

“Are we overbooked for next month or can you handle one more workshop?” he asked.

“Where?”

“Georgetown.”

She laughed. “Do you need to ask?” They never turned down an opportunity to talk to students. Never.

“And guess what?”

“What?”

“We’ve got an invitation to the Accessibility Conference in Baltimore next month.”

“Fantastic.” She tried to get some zest in her voice, without success. It was truly terrific news, but she couldn’t seem to shake herself free from Detective Patrick’s phone call. “Would you like to know what I learned from the police?” she asked.

“Of course.” If he was put off by her lackluster response to his news about the conference, he didn’t show it. He took a bite from his sandwich and looked at her expectantly.

She repeated the information Detective Patrick had relayed to her, and he listened with interest. He even asked a few questions, but when she had told him all she knew, he glanced at his watch.

“We’ll have to figure out the best way to handle the Accessibility Conference,” he said. “We have to make the most of this invitation. Do you think we should host a reception in the hotel?”

His voice sounded far away. She rubbed her temples with the tips of her fingers. “I’m sorry, Jon. I’m having trouble thinking about anything other than Margot right now.”

He looked at her over the rim of his Coke can. “You sound as though she was a personal friend. She was a stranger, Claire. And you did all you could for her.”

She sighed, looking down at the untouched sandwich on its paper plate. “I know.”

Jon leaned forward to reach across the desk, and she met his hand halfway with her own. “I think about the other night sometimes, too,” he said. “It feels like a dream to me. The snow. The darkness. I feel as though it didn’t really happen.”

She wished she shared that sense of unreality. Every detail of those few minutes on the bridge was sharp and clear in her mind, and her body jerked involuntarily just thinking about it. She tightened her grip on his hand.

Jon was looking at her oddly. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” She let her hand slip from the desk to her lap. “I just wish I knew what her diagnosis was. Why was she in the hospital for so long?”

“Well, we can guess.” Jon shifted in his chair. He seemed tired and restless, as he always did when he’d missed a few days at the gym. “Three years is a long, long time. She was delusional. Hallucinating. Obviously psychotic. And obviously a danger to herself.”

Claire leaned forward. “But was she always that way? And who was she really? Did she have any family? Did she leave any children behind?”

Jon gave her a wry smile. “You really can’t let go of this, can you?”

She ran her fingertip around the rim of her Coke can. “I think I need to understand, for my own peace of mind, why she would do what she did.”

Jon balled up his lunch bag and tossed it, with perfect aim, into the wastepaper basket in the corner. “Two points,” he said with a satisfied nod of his head. He looked at Claire again. “Maybe you need to prepare yourself for the fact that there might not be any answers.”

She barely heard him. She looked out the window at the snowcovered trees. “Margot St. Pierre,” she said. “Someone once cared enough about her to give her a beautiful name.”

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

A COLD SEATTLE RAIN
was falling outside Lassiter Hospital for Children as Vanessa Gray stepped through the automatic doors into the lobby. She closed her umbrella and pulled the scarf from her straight blond hair before walking toward the elevator. The traffic had been abysmal, and she was going to be more than a little late for rounds. But then, she was the attending physician in the adolescent unit; they wouldn’t start without her.

The four men and two women, all in their early to mid-twenties, were sitting in a half circle on the plastic and chrome chairs in the small conference room. The junior resident, one fellow, two interns, and two medical students all wore their white jackets, crisp and bright against the dark blue chairs. They were laughing when she opened the door, but quickly sobered. They had started their new rotation in adolescent medicine a couple of weeks earlier. None of them was certain yet how much levity she would allow. She knew they had heard about her. She was certain they’d been subjected to numerous tales of her mercurial temper, her attention to detail, her high expectations of her staff, and her unrelenting advocacy for her patients.

She sat down in the empty chair nearest the door. At thirty-eight, she felt far older than any of these green young doctors and students, and the feeling was not in the least unpleasant. She nodded across the room to red-haired Pete Aldrich, the resident. With pale, lightly freckled hands, Pete opened one of the charts resting on his lap.

“Couple of new admits,” he said. “A new anorexic in one-oh-three. Fifteen-year-old female. Electrolyte imbalance. Bradycardia. Dehydrated. Eighty-three pounds at five-three. She’s—”

“Does she have a name?” Vanessa interrupted him. She had one mounting concern about Pete Aldrich. He was bright—perhaps brilliant—but he tended to see his patients as little more than symptoms and diagnoses and treatment plans.

“Shelley Collier. She’s a pacer. Paced the halls all night. Actually tried to run through the unit, but the nurses stopped her.”

Vanessa sat back in her chair and looked around the group. “So, what should we do about Ms. Collier?”

“Prohibit exercise?” The female medical student spoke timidly.

“The nurse should be with her while she eats,” the fellow added.

“She threw up her breakfast,” Pete said.

“She can’t use the bathroom for an hour after her meals,” Vanessa said. “If she won’t eat, give her osmolite. If she doesn’t drink the osmolite within fifteen minutes, tube-feed her. Has a psychotherapist been assigned to her yet?”

“She was in to see her this morning.”

“Good. Keep me posted on her. Who’s the other admit?”

Pete opened a second chart. “Fourteen-year-old male CF, in for a tune-up. Been having increasingly hard time breathing at home. Hasn’t been able to go to school and”— Pete caught himself and quickly glanced at the name on the chart—”Jordan Wiley,” he said.

“Ah, Jordy.” Vanessa let a sad smile pass over her face. Jordan Wiley hadn’t been admitted to the hospital in two, maybe three, months, but he had been a regular visitor during the three years she’d been at Children’s. The thought of him being once again under her care gave her both pain and pleasure. He was a terrific kid whom she couldn’t help but admire. She had never seen such strength and courage in a patient. But no amount of bravado would save Jordy from the inevitable. He had cystic fibrosis. His breathing was always a struggle. It was anyone’s guess which admission to the hospital would be his last. Leaning forward, she questioned Pete closely about his condition.

Pete looked down at his notes. “He’s very small for his age— looks about ten or eleven—with a deformed chest. He’s having trouble breathing, but he’s not cyanotic. Nail beds are pink.”

She could picture those nails, overlarge and thick from lack of oxygen. She remembered the rounded shoulders and protruding sternum—the result of Jordy’s struggle to draw in air.

“Really junky lungs,” Aldrich continued. “Coughing up huge amounts of mucus. Good appetite, though. He ate an enormous breakfast—I mean, this kid can pack it away—and then threw it up after he was percussed.”

“He shouldn’t be percussed too soon after his meals,” Vanessa said.

“That’s exactly what he said.” Pete looked amazed at hearing the same words from her mouth. “He’s really an irritating kid. He tells you what you should be doing for him, and he asks questions about everything. What kind of antibiotic is he getting, shouldn’t the dosage be different, and on and on. Thinks he knows more than we do, you know?” He looked at one of the interns for support, and the young woman nodded in agreement.

Vanessa crossed the circle to take the chart from Pete’s hand. “I would guess he
does
know more than you about his condition,” she said, sitting down again. “He probably knows more than the six of you put together. Possibly more than the seven of us. He’s been studying cystic fibrosis longer than you have, Dr. Aldrich.” She opened the chart but didn’t look inside. “He’s an expert,” she said. “I suggest you listen to him.”

SHE WANTED TO SEE
Jordy herself. After rounds, she walked to the room he was sharing with another young-looking fifteen-year-old, a kidney patient. She stood in the doorway. Jordy was sitting in his bed, hunched over a pillow. He was turning the pages of the comic book lying on the mattress in front of him. He looked worse than she had ever seen him. He was a tiny, gaunt figure in the large bed. His skin was a pasty, papery white. His frizzy dark hair was pulled into a small ponytail at the back of his neck. She masked her distress at seeing him look so sick.

“Hey, kid,” she said from the doorway.

He looked up from the comic book and grinned. “You gotta get me out of here, Dr. Gray. My scout troop is going to this midwinter encampment in two weeks, and I’ve gotta be there.”

She smiled as she walked toward his bed. He had timed this. A typical “tune-up” for a typical CF kid was fourteen days. He wanted to be in the best shape he could for his encampment. She pulled the curtain between his bed and that of his sleeping roommate.

“Dr. Aldrich said you had to stop going to school.”

“Is he the one with the red hair? He wouldn’t listen to me. I told him I’d puke if I had percussion after breakfast.”

“I heard. It won’t happen again.”

“You can sit.” Jordy scooted toward the side of his bed to make room for her as she sat down. She would never have sat there without his invitation. She had chewed out more than one medical student for sitting on a bed without the permission of its occupant, invading the only space these kids had to call their own.

“So what’s this about school?” she asked again.

Jordy let out a ragged-sounding sigh. “It’s worse than ever,” he said, and she knew he was referring to his condition. “I can’t lie down anymore. I can’t breathe that way. Have to sleep sitting up. And I can’t get up the stairs.”

“Should you have come in sooner?” She thought—although couldn’t have sworn to it—that there was a faint bluish tint to his lips.

“Probably,” he admitted.

She noticed the small gold hoop in his left ear. “Where’d this come from?” She touched it lightly.

“You like it? Kinda cool, huh?”

“Kinda.” She felt the threat of tears in the back of her throat and behind her eyes. He would never fit in, this boy. At one time, when he was very small, he had. But his classmates had grown and played hard and flourished while he had stayed small, his body weakening, almost month by month. The earring was his attempt at normalcy. “You are definitely one of the coolest kids I know, Jordy.”

“Jordan.” He corrected her with a grimace.

“Oh. Jordan.” She had a vague memory of him telling her during his last hospitalization that he no longer wanted to be called by his nickname. He thought it made him sound too young.

“So, um, who else has been in?” There was trepidation in his voice, as there always was when a CF kid asked about other patients he might remember from previous hospitalizations. She rattled off a few names of kids he knew, updating him on how they were doing, before telling him, gently, that Holly Marx had died during her last stay.

“Damn.” He shook his head and looked down at his comic book. A patch of red formed on his throat, and his nostrils flared. “That sucks, man,” he said. “That really sucks.”

Vanessa nodded. “I know.”

He looked up at her, the look in his eyes a mixture of anger and fear. “Dr. Gray?”

“Yes?”

“I really want to go on that encampment.”

She smiled, squeezing his knee as she got to her feet. “We’ll do our best to get you there, Jordan,” she said.

It was dark when she left the hospital that night, but she took the time to stop at a stationery store to pick up a card for Brian. He would be home when she got there, after five days on the road. She wanted to celebrate, as she always did, his safe return. She hated those trips, knowing he was almost constantly in the air. Despite the safety record of commercial flights and the fact that he was one of the best pilots ever born, she couldn’t relax until he was securely grounded in the town house they’d shared for the past two years.

She read more than a dozen cards before finding one that had the right tone. It was clearly, strongly, loving, but without demands or expectations. Brian regularly invited her to ask more of him, but she was not yet ready to make herself that vulnerable.

It was after seven when she pulled into the garage of their town house, the garage her car shared with the metal pipes from Brian’s soccer goal, along with his varied collection of balls and bats and tennis rackets. He’d finally given up rugby this year—the week after he turned forty—but as far as Vanessa could tell, Brian Everett had simply channeled his passion for rugby into the other sports he loved.

Stepping out of the car, she could smell the aroma of something Asian—soy sauce and sesame oil—and she smiled to herself. He was cooking. He was in a good mood, as happy to be home as she was to have him there.