voluminous scrapbooks that included clippings of everything to do with J. P. Beaumont. Some had been as early as Cub Scout endeavors. They included high school athletic competitions and later news mentions drawn from my long career at Seattle PD. There had been copies of Scott’s and Kelly’s newspaper birth announcements as well as a mention of Karen’s and my divorce proceedings. Wifely duty had kept Beverly from contacting me against her husband’s wishes, but seeing those secret scrapbooks, ones my grandfather had known nothing about, had told me everything I needed to know about Beverly Beaumont’s selfless love and constancy.
And then she met Lars. That had been an incredible bonus for all of us. Widowed by then, Beverly had come to help out at the memorial service for my late partner, Sue Danielson. Somehow my grandmother and Lars, my AA sponsor, ended up doing dishes together in the party-room kitchen at Belltown Terrace and had hit it off. They had married within months of meeting, and everything had been fine. Until now.
At Queen Anne Gardens I parked in the visitors’ lot and then signed in. “She’s not in their apartment, you know,” the desk clerk told me. “She’s been moved to our Care Center.”
Euphemistically speaking, Care Center was assisted living code for ICU. I thought they should have called it IWU-intensive waiting unit. There were two beds in the room, but only one was occupied. Lars, leaning on his cane and staring off into space, was seated next to Beverly. When he saw me he smiled and made an effort to rise.
“Sit,” I told him. “What’s happening?”
He shrugged and sank back down. “She’s sleeping now,” he said. “But she was asking for you earlier. That’s why I called.”
I looked at Beverly sleeping. I had never before seen her without her false teeth. That alone made her seem less dignified and far frailer. Somehow she appeared to be much smaller than I remembered, even though I had seen her only a few days earlier, shortly before Mel and I left for Ashland. At the time she had still been in their apartment. There she’d had Lars to see to it that she got wheeled back and forth to the dining room and to make sure she was eating. I doubted she was taking much nourishment now.
“Is she in any pain?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “She’s yust tired. We both are.”
A glance at Lars’s weathered face told me that was true. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery. “We had some good times,” he added. “But she’s ready to move on.”
I looked around the room. There was no heart monitor. No oxygen equipment. “Isn’t there something we should do? Some treatment? Something?”
Lars shook his head and gestured toward the bright yellow do not resuscitate placard that had been affixed to the door. “No.” he said. “There’s nothing. She yust needs to rest a little.”
“And so do you,” I said. “I’m here now. Why don’t you go take a nap?”
I was surprised by his ready agreement. “
Left alone in the room with Beverly, I sat there for a long time simply watching her sleep. She seemed serene, untroubled, and unafraid. Leaving her asleep, I went out into the corridor and placed the necessary calls, telling Scott and Kelly what was going on. They both wanted to know if they should drop everything and come home.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
“Have you talked to her doctor?” Kelly demanded. How my daughter somehow had transformed herself from a headstrong, dippy teenager into an amazingly practical adult is one of the mysteries of the universe, and it never fails to surprise me.
“Not yet,” I told her. “But I will.”
Ten minutes after I finished giving the news to my son Scott, my cell phone rang. “Sorry about this,” Dave Livingston said. “Anything I can do?”
Dave is my first wife’s second husband-Karen’s official widower. He’s also my children’s stepfather. I suspected that Kelly was the one who had seen fit to call him and let him know, but it could just as easily have been Scott. Dave is a likable guy and both my kids look up to him. Either way, I was glad someone had notified Dave, and I was touched that he had gone to the trouble of calling.
“No,” I said. “For right now, I guess it’s just a matter of waiting.”
“Waiting’s tough,” he said. I understood without anything more being said that the man knew whereof he spoke.
Back in Beverly’s room I castigated myself for not stopping by Belltown Terrace on the way and picking up Kyle’s picture. Not that it would have made any difference. She was asleep, and I doubted if she would ever waken enough to see the framed photo Kelly had wanted Beverly to have.
My grandmother had been a young bride when she had my mother, and my mother had been a very young not-bride when I was born. And so at a time when other men my age were losing their mothers, my mother, who had died young, was already gone, and I was losing my grandmother instead.
I sat there for the rest of the long afternoon listening to Beverly breathe, thinking about the few short years we’d had together, and regretting the many years we’d spent apart. I was glad for the happy times she and Lars had shared and felt sad when I realized how much it would hurt for him to lose a second well-loved wife.
In his day, Lars had been a serious drinker (that’s why he was my AA sponsor, after all). He had loved his first wife, Hannah, but I knew from things he’d told me over the years that he’d also neglected her-the way alcoholics often do, not out of any particular malice but because nothing’s more important to them than booze. Lars had done much better by Beverly, and losing her would be hard on him. I wondered, in fact, if he’d survive it.
Lars came limping back into the room and resumed his bedside watch about the time the sun went down behind the grain terminal out in Elliott Bay. The sky was layered with banks of clouds that turned pink, purple, and finally gray as the setting sun sank beneath the western horizon. I went down the hall to the nurse’s station and brought back a second chair.
“No matter what,” Lars said quietly, “I wouldn’t have missed this.”
I nodded. That’s always the bottom line where love is concerned. Is loving someone ever worth the ultimate price of losing them?
“And she’s very proud of you, Beau,” Lars added. “Always has been.”
That got me. “I know,” I said, blinking back tears.
Mel turned up about then, bringing with her Kyle’s missing photo. I was grateful she had gone to the trouble in the few spare minutes she had between the end of work and the start of her evening board meeting. After showing Kyle’s photo to Lars, who was suitably unimpressed, I placed the small framed photo on the nightstand next to Beverly’s glass and water pitcher. Mel was smart enough not to ask how I was doing or how long I’d be because I had no idea.
I badgered Lars into going down to the dining room for some dinner just before they closed. He offered to take me along, but I wasn’t hungry. He had barely left the room when Beverly’s eyes popped open. She looked first at the chair Lars had just vacated, then gazed anxiously around the room.
“It’s all right,” I assured her. “He went downstairs for some dinner.”
“Oh,” she said.
Then she mumbled something I couldn’t make out. For a moment I wondered if she even knew who I was. When I asked her to repeat what she’d said, she opened her eyes and looked at me impatiently.
“Where’s Mel?” she demanded.
That was clear enough. It left no doubt about whether she recognized me, and it told me plainly enough that my grandmother was in full possession of her faculties.
“Mel had to go to a meeting,” I said. “She’ll be back later.”
“Lars said you were on a trip,” Beverly mumbled a few seconds later. “Did you marry her?”
So that was it. Beverly had evidently decided that Mel’s and my trip to Ashland had been something it wasn’t.
“No,” I said. “We drove down to Ashland to see Kelly and Jeremy and their new baby…” I reached for the photo to show Beverly her new great-great-grandson. Ignoring Kyle, Beverly stared directly into my face.
“Marry her,” she commanded forcefully. “Mel’s a good girl, and she’s good for you. Don’t let her slip away.”
That single fragment of forceful and lucid conversation seemed to sap all Beverly’s strength and energy. She soon drifted off to sleep once more and was still asleep when Lars returned from the dining room.
