HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (19 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Where is his mother?”

Elizabeth was coming to. She licked her lips, which felt waxy and swollen. Her tongue was fat in her mouth. She had been dreaming about the pond, and in the dream it had been daytime, and yet the pond had been as black as night itself, and full of stars. She had been sitting in the Adirondack chair.

This nurse nearby was not the buxom nurse, Matty or Matilda or whatever her name was. It was a young woman with auburn hair and thick-rimmed black glasses on and a white coat. She wasn’t a nurse, after all.

“Hello. I’m Sophie. I’m a resident here.”

Liz wasn’t quite sure what the young woman was talking about. She tried to sit up, pushing herself to her elbows, at least, and looked over to the bed beside her. It was empty.

“Where did he go?”

“He’s fine,” said Sophie. “How are you feeling?”

“Where is his mother? Why isn’t she here?” Liz was still looking at the bed and when she looked back to Sophie, the “resident,” with the clipboard and binder held together against her flat chest, Liz saw concern on her face. “What?” asked Liz. “Did everything go okay?”

“Everything went very well,” said Sophie, but she remained pensive, conciliatory.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Where’s Maddy?” That was her name. Maddy.

“Ms. Kruger is getting some rest. So should you. You’ve had a busy night.”

Liz looked down at herself. There was still the IV coming out of the top of her hand with a piece of gauze tape over the needle. Around the place where the IV went in was a yellow, sour looking spot. Liz was wearing the silly gown that hospital inpatients wore, only she couldn’t remember changing out of her clothes.

“I don’t want to rest. I want to get up. I want to see the baby. The little boy. Where is he?”

“He’s down in pediatrics. If it makes you feel better, a police officer is down there with him.”

“Why is there a police officer with him? What’s the matter?” Liz stretched further up in the bed so that she was sitting, still resting on her elbows. It made her dizzy, and she shut her eyes.

“You should lie down.” Sophie stepped closer to the bed and put a hand on Liz’s head, and attempted to ease her back. Liz moved her head away.

“Sorry,” said Liz.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s the officer that came with you. The one in the red-checked jacket. He’s not there for any sinister reason. I think he’s resting too. Keeping our little friend company.”

Sophie’s face transformed from the wrinkled, concerned look into a bright smile. She was much more attractive with a smile, Liz thought. A skinny young woman, maybe around thirty. Bookish, a librarian type. She reminded her of Finna. Liz started to feel very alone, very lost. She hated the feeling.

“I don’t understand where the baby’s parents are,” Liz said, still sitting, blinking away the quicksilver of dizziness. “Why they aren’t here.”

“Well,” said Sophie, and the smile was gone and the pinched, overthinky look appeared again. Liz thought she was hiding something.

“Maddy told me about them. A really young girl. An addict. Is she dead? Why wouldn’t she be with her baby?”

“We’re still trying to figure a few things out.”

“About what? About where she is?”

“About
who
she is.”

“You don’t know who she is?”

“Well,” said Sophie again, and she turned her head. A man Liz had not seen before was standing in the doorway, also with a white coat on. He wore a blue shirt underneath and a golden and amber tie with diagonal stripes. Liz thought he was handsome. Maybe a few years older than Sophie. He had tight curly hair, short against his head. Even across the room Liz could see the gray around his temples, above his ears. His nose twitched and he rubbed it with a finger. He carried a clipboard of his own in his other hand.

“Hello,” the man said. “How are you feeling?”

Oh boy, thought Liz, here we go. The man walked across the room slowly, his head at a slight angle, smiling at her. Liz had seen that look before; too many times. The last guy that looked at her like this was bringing her first breakfast after her detox. “I’m Dr. Simpson.”

He reached the foot of the bed. He didn’t look at Sophie, only at Liz. His eyes were cobalt; in their center hard pieces of coal, the color of his hair. He reminded her, in a way, of an older Christopher.

“I’m feeling okay.”

“Good. Good to hear. Have you gotten any rest?”

“Yes,” she said.

Thanks to the drugs, thanks to this fuck-circus of a day. A day that began with me shooting my ex-boyfriend, who, only the night before, had peed a barrel’s worth all over my floor, a day where I got hauled away from my house in some redneck detective’s car, wanted to kill myself, lost the ability to speak or move, got taken to a hospital where they told me that I was the best candidate for a baby’s blood transfusion, and then, after the lights went out in the goddamned hospital, rode in the back of an ambulance for two hours to come here, undergo the strange, somehow clandestine operation, get sedated and awake to find you all staring at me like I’m mentally retarded and spit-bubbling at the mouth. Yes, I’m rested.

“Elizabeth, I need to ask you some very personal questions, okay?”

Liz just looked at him. She looked at Sophie, who offered a wan smile. It was tough to hold her concentration, as if something was deliberately trying to keep her just off-center, floating out on tangential clouds instead of grounded to the here and now.

“Is there anyone you’d like to have here with you? Can we call anyone?”

“I don’t understand,” said Liz, “you mean a lawyer? Does this have to do with this morning?”

Sophie was shaking her head. “It has nothing to do with this morning, honey,” she said.
Honeydoll,
thought Liz
, honeybaby.
“We’ve spoken with Officer Milliner, and he’s told us not to worry about any of that; you’re fine, okay?”

Liz just looked at her, thinking that Sophie could use some lip gloss, and some conditioner wouldn’t hurt those split ends, either. Thinking that Sophie must be crazy if she thought there were no charges against Liz, who probably could have still smelled the gunpowder on her fingertips if it weren’t for all the antiseptic. Jared had said — what had he said? Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.

“Can I get something to drink?”

Sophie pulled a clear plastic cup of water from somewhere outside of Liz’s peripheral vision and handed it to her. Liz drank. “Slow,” said Sophie. “Slow. There you go.” She held her hand underneath the cup and Liz’s chin as if Liz were going to dribble it or drop the cup.

Liz finished the paltry contents and licked her lips and handed the cup back, looking at Sophie with her best put-on smile and said, “Thank you.” She then returned her attention to curly-headed Simpson. “What sort of questions did you want to ask me?”

Dr. Soap Opera walked around the bed and sat half on it next to Liz. He put one of his hands over hers. His touch was smooth, cool. The way he looked at her was making Liz start to feel uneasy. Like she was some sort of protozoan he was glaring at under a microscope.

“Do you have any children?”

The question made her forget, temporarily, her urge to flee. She forgot about where she was and what the circumstances were. For some reason, the question felt loaded. As if they knew something regardless of what she said.

“No,” she said, and looked at both of them. “No I don’t have any kids.”

In her mind she saw the blood transfusing out of her, flowing down the tube and away to the boy.

“I mean, you know, I’ve gotten around a little bit, you know, with the band. There could be kids in a few ports here and there that I don’t know about.”

Dr. Simpson smiled at her. She thought the smile was genuine enough, but she also detected some placation in it. She was feeling smothered again, and she pushed the sheet down past her waist. Sophie took the sheet immediately and started to rearrange it, to fold it neatly down over Liz’s thighs, and Liz was transported back to the previous night, sitting there by the pond, and she simultaneously remembered her dream, and the stars in the ink-black water.

“Yeah,” said Dr. Simpson, “my career as a movie star, you know, I may have, well—” He bobbed his head from side to side and made a funny, I’m-guilty face. “—I may have fathered one or two in Africa. But, then my movie star friends adopt them, so . . .”

He stopped and looked at Sophie who gave him a discouraging look.

Simpson reverted to his professional, how-are-you-feeling bedside manner. “Elizabeth, have you ever given up a child?”

Liz frowned. Her discomfort at having the two of them looming there, the kind of discomfort she’d felt back when she was just starting to “get better” and felt like she was going to be exposed for all of her secrets and misdeeds — that feeling shifted and was replaced by a kind of irritation. These people weren’t trying to expose her as a fraud, or liar, or make her feel helpless, weak, in need of help — they were just misinformed. Barking up the wrong tree. If they were this stupid about things, she thought, how could she trust the whole blood-type-compatibility thing? The diagnosis of the child having high sodium levels, or whatever they had said. How could she trust any of it?

“I told you,” she said, working to keep her tone pleasant, “I’ve never had any kids. I’ve never given birth. Pretty sure I’d remember that,” and she smiled to indicate she was being humorous, though she wasn’t.

Dr. Simpson nodded. It was a big, bobbing nod that shook the bed-on-wheels and made it squeak. His eyes flicked to Sophie for a fraction of a second, and then he stood up.

“Can I see him, please? Can I see the little boy? What’s his name? I helped save his life, didn’t I? I should be able to see him.”

Liz looked around the room. There was as a blue curtain on one side, to her right, about a dozen feet away, and a wall with a closed door — maybe to a bathroom, to her left, also about a dozen feet away. Beyond the foot of her bed was the door out of the room, and to the right of the door a bank of windows extended beyond the blue curtain. In the glass the windows appeared to have crosshatching, like exes, as though they were reinforced with wire. Liz realized she had no idea what time of day or night it was, and her dream of a black pond with twinkling stars had muddled her ability to judge. There was no clock she could see, and she craned her neck and arched her back and tried to look behind her. Nothing. She straightened and looked back at the doctor and the resident. They had seemed to be having a silent conversation with one another with their eyes.

“When can you let me out of here?”

“I think,” Dr. Soap Opera said, “maybe we’re giving you the wrong idea. Or asking the wrong questions.”

“Fair enough,” said Liz, “but when will you let me go?”

“That depends,” said Sophie.

Liz turned to look at the woman and instead of that attractive smile, or that haggish look of concern, Liz liked even less what she saw there now. It seemed as though the Olive Oyl of Fletcher Allen actually looked
peeved
at Miss Liz Goldfine.

“On?”

“It depends on whether or not we need to call your detective friend up here for a different reason,” said Sophie, and rotated at the hips to face Dr. Simpson, her binder and clipboard and notebook and whatever else all still held tight against her bustless chest. “Doctor? Maybe we should have him explain it to her.”

“Explain what? Please. Just tell me what’s going on, or I’m going to get up and walk out of here.”

Liz took the IV in her hand and sat up all of the way, looking at both of them. She was surprised; ordinarily confrontation was something she avoided like the plague, choosing to silently ride things out and then make her moves on her own terms, in her own good time. Christopher, and some other members of that initial NA group, had called it
passive-aggression
. That was fine by Liz. They could call it peanut butter for all she cared. What they couldn’t do, ever, was keep her where she didn’t want to be. She’d shown them that before; she’d show them that again.

“We’ve taken a sample of your DNA,” said Sophie. She blurted it out, it sounded to Liz, like someone who’d been holding something back that they hated withholding and couldn’t wait to expel.

“What? Why?”

“You’re a match for Caleb’s mother.”

It didn’t make sense to Liz. She looked from the resident to the doctor. His head was lowered and he was looking up at her from under his thick eyebrows, chewing on his lower lip, holding the clipboard to his chest like Sophie had.

“That’s his name,” said Sophie.

“Caleb? How do you — I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

And just like that, Sophie was conciliatory again. “It has happened. It’s rare, but it has happened.”

“Sometimes,” broke in Dr. Simpson, “the trauma of childbirth is so great that a woman actually blocks it out. Completely. Especially in very difficult cases, or if the mother has an active involvement with certain drugs.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re telling me,” said Liz, and truly she didn’t. It had hit her, yes, that they were telling her that the baby boy was her own child.
DNA,
they said, the great Pythia of the 21
st
Century. But it was still, to her thinking, impossible. She had only gotten pregnant once and it hadn’t ended in birth.