Loving Time (24 page)

Clara’s eyes moved back to his desk. On the wooden extension pulled out halfway sat a quart bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label with a nearly empty glass beside it. The top was off the bottle and only about half an inch of the rich golden-brown liquid remained. Harold must have been drinking all afternoon.

“Oh, God!” He started screaming. He stared at the wall, shuddering and gasping. “Ahhhhhh. Oh, God. Ahhhhhh. Bugs. Ooooh. Bugs … eeeeee. Running up and down the wall … Eeeeee. Clara!!!! You brought bugs in here,” he cried. “You brought the bugs.”

“What bugs?” She twisted around to look at the wall where he pointed. There were the usual diplomas, awards, museum poster. Harold lurched toward her accusingly.

Clara held out her hand to stop him. “There aren’t any bugs in here, Hal,” she said evenly. “No recording devices. No crawlies. No FBI, no CIA coming after us. It’s just us kids. Calm down, Hal. We’re going to be just fine.”

He stopped, stood still, and for a moment struggled to haul himself back into lucidity. “I’m … sorry, Clara … I don’t know what’s the matter with me.” He shook his head, as if to push the crawlies out. “It must … be the summer heat.”

“Hal, it’s November. It’s cool.”

“That’s right. August. Don’t worry. I’m all right now.” He raised his teaching finger, trembling all over, swaying on his feet. His face flushed cherry red.

“Hal—?”

The red in Harold’s face darkened to purple. His body hurled backward, hitting the corner of his desk, knocking over a pile of files, and sending their contents in all directions as he fell heavily by the feet of his analyst’s couch. He landed on his side, hitting his head with a sickening thud.

“Oh!” Surprised, Clara lunged toward him just as his back arched unnaturally and his legs started kicking out at the scattered papers. As he began writhing on the floor, she scrambled for the phone on his desk.

“This is Dr. Treadwell in 1917. I have an MI. Call the code. Nineteenth floor, room 17. Call the code!” she screamed. Then she slammed down the receiver and sank to her knees.

Hal’s sphincters had let go, releasing the contents of his bowel and bladder. Foul foam-flecked vomit trickled everywhere. On the rug, on the papers, on her pants.

“Life is wet,” Hal always used to say, laughing at how surprised, year after year, his students were to find out how messy every aspect of human existence was. “Love is wet. Life is wet. Death is, too.”

“Oh, God, Hal.” She began to work on him. He was still now, cyanotic.

She rolled him onto his back, opening his mouth and sticking her fingers in it to clear away the vomit and mucus. He was apneic, had stopped breathing. She struck his chest with both fists together, wiped his face and mouth with the handkerchief she’d snatched from her jacket pocket.

“Come on, get going.” It was all automatic. She struck him
again, then put her mouth to his. Struck him again and again, breathed into his foul mouth.

Two pants to fill his lungs and one strike to the chest. She didn’t hear people running down the hall, rolling the gurney.
Breathe. Breathe. Strike
.

Guards tumbled into the room, trampling the files.

“Oh, shit, it’s Dr. Dickey.”

“Heart attack?”

Breathe. Breathe. Strike. Clara didn’t answer. She made a motion with her hand and one of the guards took over the chest massage as the other brought the gurney as far into the room as it would go. Together they lifted him, continued to administer CPR.

Within seconds, the gurney was out in the hall and three paramedics from the main hospital building down the street ran toward them, pushing the crash cart from the closet on the end of the floor. Wordlessly, a young man with a ponytail found a vein in Harold’s wrist and shoved the IV needle into him, so he could start a drip. Another opened Harold’s mouth and inserted a short oral airway attached to a breathing bag.

The third set the defibrillator machine. He looked to Clara. “Juice him?”

Clara nodded.

He ripped open Harold’s shirt, squirting contact jelly on the two steel paddles. He placed them under Harold’s left arm and on his chest, looked to Clara again. Again she nodded.

“Get back, everyone,” the paramedic said, and hit the buttons on the paddles.

Harold’s arms shot up, fell down, and suddenly they were all running to the elevator as his chest heaved.

“Here, I got it. Move aside, please.”

Silently they piled in. Gurney, guards, paramedics, Clara.

“Jesus. Who’s that?” a white-suited aide said.

“Oh, my God. It’s Dr. Dickey.” A fat nurse cradling her take-out coffee and doughnuts started to cry, dribbling coffee down her pink angora sweater. “Oh, no, is he dead?”

“Shut up.”

“Who said that? Who told me to shut up?”

The paramedic with a ponytail and two earrings that Clara hadn’t noticed before shot the sobbing nurse a furious look, then went on with his work.

“Shit, don’t stop,” Clara cried as the doors slid open on the wrong floor.

“Sorry, Doctor.”

The doors closed on the appalling stink. Everyone was panting, sweating. Someone swore softly. The patient wasn’t responding. They couldn’t shock him with the paddles again in this tiny, crowded space with no electricity. Clara’s head pounded.

Finally they were at the front doors, rolling down a ramp out on the street. Then they were running with the gurney and the IV dripping an anti-arrhythmia drug, the breathing bag pumped by a paramedic. It was a block and a half to the emergency room. Traffic clogged the street around the ER entrance. None of it was going well. Everyone knew it. Harold wasn’t coming around. They were silent, running, gasping.

Suddenly a car careened through the changing light at the corner and the gurney tipped off the curb as they frantically tried to stop it from rolling onto the street into the oncoming car.

“Oh, Christ, hang on.”

Two paramedics held the patient as two pedestrians ran up to help the third right the gurney and get it going again. “Oh, man. Did you see that? Guy just kept going.”

Through ER, they moved into a back treatment room and continued working. Clara silently watched procedures she’d seen a hundred times. The airway removed, Hal’s mouth opened again, illuminated by a laryngoscope, a clear plastic tube was slid down into his trachea, then attached to a black ambu bag so that oxygen could be pumped into his lungs. Six, seven people were working on him now. He was hooked up to a respirator, an electrocardiogram. Adrenalin was shot directly
into his heart. Clara stood back as they worked for the full required hour, trying desperately to resuscitate a man she knew had been dead almost from the moment he hit the floor.

Hal’s internist finally strode in. He’d been called from a tennis game and was wearing a black warm-up suit. He was tall and young and fit, and seemed surprised to be there.

“Jesus, smells like someone’s been hitting the bottle pretty bad,” he said, even before he looked at the flat line on the EKG or picked up the chart.

“Yeah, the patient.”

Dr. Chatman turned to Clara. “You’re Dr. Treadwell?”

“Yes.” She put out her hand and he shook it.

“Ivan Chatman. You were with him?”

She nodded.

“What happened?”

“He was in his office, pretty upset, I guess. He’d been drinking. He called me at home. I came over to check on him and almost the moment I arrived, he keeled over.”

The young internist frowned. “I checked him out only a few weeks ago. He was in excellent condition—”

“A man over sixty, you never know,” Clara said.

“I was fond of him.” The internist shook his head and pronounced Harold Dickey dead. The machines were turned off.

The ER cardiologist turned to Dr. Chatman. “Ivan, we’d like permission to do an autopsy.”

Chatman nodded. “Sure, I’ll call his wife. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. She’s a former nurse.”

The oxygen mask was off the dead man’s face now. The EKG and other machines were unhooked. The IV bag was detached, but the needle was still stuck in his hand with some tubing hanging from it. They had left it in him because they wouldn’t be using it again. He was blue, his hands already slightly clawed. All the efforts to save him made him look as if he had been beaten to death.

“Problem?” The cardiologist watched Chatman.

Chatman moved to stand by the dead man’s head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “This doesn’t feel right to me.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara said.

“I knew him pretty well. He didn’t take narcotics or any medication that I know of. He was fit as a horse.… ” He frowned, then turned away from the body. “Oh, well.”

“You want to run the toxes?” the ER cardiologist asked. “You never know. If there’s a question later, I don’t want any problems on this end.”

“Yeah, okay. I’ll speak to his wife. If she gives the okay, then go for it,” Chatman said.

“Any ideas what we might be looking for?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara muttered again. “The man had a heart attack. This is absurd.”

Chatman looked at the cardiologist, then shook his head. “I can’t imagine him taking anything.” He reached out and pulled a sheet over the dead man’s face.

Clara stalked out. They were going to run toxes on Hal. She didn’t want to hear Chatman’s side of the conversation with Sally Ann, Harold’s wax-museum figure of a wife. Or anything else, for that matter. Suddenly she was uneasy, deeply uneasy. Her mouth was dry and had a sour taste. Her whole body ached, smelled of sweat, vomit, and Hal’s Johnnie Walker.

She remembered Hal’s door had been left open. She had to go back to the Centre and secure his office. She didn’t want to go through the front doors and answer a lot of questions. She thought about the questions and how she would answer them. Her head was down; her eyes were on her feet. She felt numb, queasy, didn’t want to go back to the Centre. Had to. When she lifted her head, she was horrified to see the man Harold had mentioned in his message. Bobbie Boudreau was leaning against a tree across the street, smoking a cigarette, looking the other way. Clara had seen him many times on the locked ward, where he had been a nurse. She recognized him immediately.

“
A
eiiiiii!” Sai Woo stood in the doorway of her daughter’s apartment, screaming. The sound was shrill and piercing like the radio signal for disaster.

Startled, April swung around to face her, the dangerous new Glock 9mm automatic that could fire off sixteen rounds without reloading still level in her hand.

Skinny Dragon Mother clapped both hands to her head. “I mother,” she shrieked. “No kirr me.”

Disgusted, April lowered the gun. “Maaa, haven’t you ever heard of knocking? I could have shot you.”

“Go ahead, shoot me. I dead awleady.” Sai’s screams brought Dim Sum scampering up the stairs. When the dog saw her mistress, she crouched like a panther and jumped several feet straight up into Sai’s arms, trembling all over.

“Oh, come on, Ma, give me a break.”

“Rook,” Sai said accusingly, “you scare
ying’er
.”

“Ma, I hate to tell you this. That thing is not a baby, it’s a dog.”

“Onny baby I eva see,” Sai muttered angrily, hugging the puppy to her chest. “You no have baby.
Boo hao, ni
.”

“Oh, come on, Ma, don’t start that.” April swung around and put the gun on the table beside the couch in her living room, then hunkered down to unstrap the weights on her ankles.

She’d been exercising with the gun and the weights, trying to keep her forearms strong and develop some perceivable curvature in her butt. The last thing she needed at the moment was Chinese torture. Skinny Dragon Mother seemed to have other ideas.

“What kind dautta prays with gun?” She answered her own question. “Long kind dautta.
Boo hao
dautta. You hear me,
ni?
No good dautta.”

Her mother sounded ready for a good long fight. Never mind that they lived in a free country, never mind that her U.S. citizenship papers said she was American now. Skinny Dragon Mother was old, old Chinese to the core. She believed giving birth to April made April hers forever. She also believed the path to heaven was paved with abuse and terror. She had crowded April’s dreams with demons and ghosts and monsters so terrible April had to become a cop to defend herself. Out there she felt relatively safe; it was at home that she couldn’t defend herself against the breaking and entering of her own mother.

This had not been the deal she had struck with her parents when they bought the house. The deal was April had the top floor, it was hers and she was supposed to be able to live as she wanted, come and go as she pleased. That was the deal. But not for a single day had it worked out that way. Although the second floor had a door and a lock, the two apartments shared the downstairs front door and front hallway. Sai not only knew the exact timing of her worm daughter’s coming and going, she also had a key to worm daughter’s apartment and dropped in whenever she felt like it. Now, as she studied April’s living room with an expression of extreme disapproval on her suspicious, Skinny Dragon Mother face, she dangled the keys she had used to get in.

“I thought you had a date,” she said in Chinese. “I came to help you get dressed.”

April was clearly not getting dressed for a date. She was sweating freely in a ratty Police Academy tee shirt and shorts. She did not look her mother in the face as she went into the kitchen for some water.

“It was canceled,” she answered in English.

Her kitchen was decorated with the same pea-green tiles as the bathroom. April had added many open shelves on which her collection of colorful ginger and pickle jars was displayed all the way up to the ceiling. Hung on hooks were two frying pans and two woks, many plastic bags of dried tree ear, dried
mushrooms, dried lichees, tiny dried shrimp, gingko nuts, pickled radishes, and a dozen other items, all gifts from her father. Her collection of boning, hacking, carving, and chopping knives (and cleaver) was stuck on a magnet rack by the side of the door. They were the old-fashioned kind that rusted if they were not properly dried after each washing and had to be sharpened endlessly. These staining steel knives, too, were a gift from her father. April had known how to use her father’s set by the time she was seven.