Jo shrugged herself deeper into her jacket and stood under cover, waiting out the burst of rain and glowering back at the ugly mess of additions that spread out from the old brick cube of Naskeag General Hospital. She did not want to go in there. She'd rather stand out here and flirt with hypothermia, given the choice.
Her experience was, people died in hospitals. Grannie, Grandfather O'Brian after his wreck, Nan Langlais back in high school . . . Hospitals meant pain and sickness and bad smells, all glossed over with the fake promise of healing. Oh, sure, some people came out better than they went in. The damned places didn't kill everybody. Go in with a nice simple broken arm and you might get out alive. Or you might die of the drug-resistant pneumococcus you picked up in the emergency room while sitting for three hours in a crowded stinking waiting area. That was what killed Grannie.
But they weren't going to cure Mom. "Therapy." "Rehab." "Adaptive equipment." "Support from visiting nurses." "Respite care." Those were the weasel-words for "She ain't gonna get better." Modern medicine offered damned few miracles for a brain damaged by a stroke.
The best Jo could hope for was, she wouldn't open the door to Mom's room to be greeted by a respirator wheezing and beeping next to the bed, holding death at arm's length and recording the battle on a paper chart. The best she could hope for was, her mother might know her own name, might blink twice in code as if she recognized Jo as one or the other of her interchangeable daughters. Or maybe the best she could hope for was an empty bed waiting for its next victim. Death.
Jo thought she'd rather die than end up where Mom was now. The first time, just seeing her had been a punch in the gut. As if that wasn't bad enough, Dad was in there. Dad, putting on the loving, "worried husband" look in between squint-eyed drooling stares at the nurse's butt and legs as she bent over the bed, adjusting pillows and the tubing of the IV drip. Head nurse had complained that he'd even groped her once when she squeezed past him to check the catheter bag.
Dad. That cheerful word carried some heavy chunks of psychological baggage Jo hadn't cleared away, between her and Maureen. The little twit had probably wiped it from her memory, burned it to ash and buried it under Buddy and then buried him under a rock the size of Mount Katahdin.
Jo ran her fingertips over the lumpy spot on her left side, the place where a couple of broken ribs had healed crooked. David had asked her about that once, making love. She'd told him it happened playing soccer. Like she'd ever played soccer in her life. She shook her head. We get so used to hiding, it's a reflex.
The rain and wind moved on to bedevil some other dumb pedestrian, leaving cold damp drizzle behind. Jo pulled the hood of her jacket back over her hair, gritted her teeth, and forced her feet towards the waiting morgue. Hospital. Whatever.
She trudged unwilling past the acres of cars -- clapped out rust-buckets like Maureen's old Toyota and dented, mud-splashed, backwoods pickups parked cheek by jowl with yuppie Beemers and SAABs wearing the wash of road grime like a barely tolerated insult. Naskeag Falls might be a backwoods hick village with delusions of grandeur, but it was still the closest thing to a city for a hundred miles in any direction. Rich or poor, you wanted medical services, you came here. Same for the airport and the shopping malls.
Security cameras recorded her face as she walked up to the entry. Rent-a-cops opened doors for her while meditating on her psychological balance and morals. She had to sign in at the reception desk and show picture ID. She was mildly surprised that they didn't run her through a metal detector.
Jo followed echoing tiled hallways, passing banks of elevators that either led to the wrong wing or were marked "Staff Only," turning corners marked by cryptic initials and moving through three different room numbering systems before she reached the proper wing and the proper set of elevators.
She wondered how long it took the staff to learn just what led where and how you got from one ward to another without going outside and starting in again from the beginning. She knew that she wouldn't have a clue which way to run if they had a fire while she was there.
And then she faced the almost-shut door of her mother's room and her brain couldn't dodge any more. She swallowed and pushed through. Dad was there.
She felt herself cringing, automatically. But again he was smaller than her memories, not much larger than she was, and somewhere he'd lost that sense of dominance. Maybe it was the touch of the Summer Country, and her living through other battles fought and won. He looked thinner, almost scrawny, with bony hands and big ears and brown hair rucked up into a blue jay's crest where he'd run his fingers through it, almost comical.
Then she met his eyes, and the clown image died. His eyes weighed her and squinted into a frown. Ice-cubes touched her spine. She remembered that frown. It meant pain.
She stiffened and slipped to the other side of the hospital bed. She'd learned very young that she was safer with Mom between them. Mom had shrunken as well, small and frail and suddenly old, lying there with her pale thin immobile face and eyes unfocused
