completely anything Schutz told him. But this theory made him unaccountably uneasy. “I don’t even want to hear about that nonsense,” he said to Waxman.
“Fine by me.” Waxman carefully brushed raindrops from his hair without mussing it. An oddly feminine gesture. “Verlane hasn’t been back to work since Danielle died,” Waxman said. “They told me at the brokerage firm he’d taken some vacation time. We got the usual story there, how he loved his wife and they seemed happy together, all that stuff.”
“You’d have heard the same thing about Bluebeard’s wives,” Morrisy said. He meticulously placed the pipe in an ashtray, as if it were actually lit.
“Guess that’s true.”
“Stay tight on him,” Morrisy said. “Wherever he’s booked a flight to, when he leaves home, I wanna know how much luggage he’s carrying.”
Waxman nodded and turned to leave.
“When I say tight,” Morrisy said, “you know what I mean?”
“You mean tight,” Waxman said. He smiled and left the office.
Morrisy turned back to the window and watched the rain, falling much harder now. It had been raining when Bonita-
He picked up the pipe and clamped it between his teeth again. Stared harder at the grayness beyond the glass.
Squeeze anything tight enough, he thought, and something’s sure to break.
16
An overweight nurse with a blotchy complexion and too much perfume sat down with Mary and confirmed Angie’s Blue Cross status, then she told Mary to wait and someone else would talk to her shortly. She stood up and walked behind a long, curved desk, where she sat down again. The woman apparently wasn’t the one who’d talked to her on the phone, so Mary asked again, “Who was it checked my mother in here?”
The nurse squinted at her computer’s glowing green screen. She tapped a few keys and caused the tiny printed information to scroll slowly while she peered at it, then she swiveled in her chair to face Mary. “Sorry. Whoever brought her here didn’t leave a name.”
A very tall man in a wrinkled white uniform came in and laid some yellow forms on the desk, and the nurse turned her attention to them. She began methodically stapling blue forms to the yellow ones.
Mary walked across the hall and sat down in one of a dozen molded plastic chairs in a drab green waiting room with a low table cluttered with tattered copies of Time and Newsweek. High in a corner, a TV mounted on an elbowed steel bracket was silently showing a rerun of “Wheel of Fortune.” Vanna White was waving her arms gracefully above an expensive-looking stereo outfit, as if trying to cast a spell and make it play without benefit of electricity. She was smiling broadly, even though Angie might be dying. Mary picked up a Newsweek with a photo of Mikhail Gorbachev on the cover. He was smiling like Vanna White. Mary tried to read the magazine but couldn’t concentrate. She tossed it back onto the table, crinkling the cover and causing Gorbachev to frown.
A woman who looked as if she was from India pushed through wide swinging doors and stopped to talk to the nurse behind the admissions desk. She was tiny and attractive, and wearing a pale green gown and cap. She had on white shoes with clear plastic wrappings over them, so that even her dainty feet were sterile for wherever she’d been or was going.
The nurse pointed to Mary, and the Indian woman walked over to her, very precise and delicate in the way she moved, and with an exotic, somber face. Mary’s imagination superimposed a sari over the surgical outfit, and a jewel on her forehead.
“I am Doctor Keshna,” the woman said in a high and musical voice, smiling faintly now and offering her hand to Mary.
Mary shook the hand, also delicate, and very limp and dry. “How’s my mother?”
“Not well, of course, though she will be better as soon as the alcohol is out of her system. But naturally that won’t solve her problem. Our records show she was a patient here in Detoxification before.”
“Yes, about three years ago.”
“So, your mother has an ongoing problem with alcohol?”
“Yes. But off and on.”
“I see. Has she been dealing with it through a support group?”
“She’s been to a few AA meetings, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean.” The tall man in the wrinkled white uniform shuffled past with another handful of forms. Dr. Keshna glanced somberly at him and nodded. Farther down the hall, he began to whistle “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” “Do you think you can persuade her to resume attending AA meetings?”
“It’s difficult to persuade Angie to do anything.”
Dr. Keshna smiled again. “You and your mother live separately, I believe.”
“Yes, we have for years.”
“When she leaves here, I think you should make sure she has no alcohol in her place of residence, and that she understands it’s extremely dangerous for her health if she resumes drinking.”
“I think she already understands that, though she doesn’t admit it. Can I see her now?”
“Briefly. She’s about to undergo some tests. Preliminary examination indicates she’s been imbibing heavily for a very long time. Is that true?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“We need to know what damage has been done.”
“Damage? What’s that mean? She only got drunk, didn’t she?”
Dr. Keshna shook her head sadly. “Alcohol ravages the body slowly, then suddenly the damage makes itself evident. Your mother seems disoriented beyond what is normal for her present alcohol-to-blood ratio. I want to make sure there is no permanent mental impairment.”
“My God!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.”
But Mary was scared. She wanted her mother to remain Angie, not some mentally enfeebled victim of alcoholism. She remembered the inane ravings of her grandmother, Angie’s mother, who’d secretly and silently drunk herself to death long before her withered body had surrendered to time in an Illinois nursing home. Mary didn’t want to lose Angie, to be alone, to be lonely. Thinking of myself again. “Is she conscious?”
“Yes, but not totally coherent, and not feeling very well, I’m afraid. We want to keep her overnight.”
“If you think that’s best.”
Dr. Keshna smiled and nodded. “The nurse at the desk will tell you your mother’s room number. You can have about ten minutes with her.”
“Thank you.”
Dr. Keshna nodded rather shyly, then turned and walked back through the swinging doors.
The nurse behind the desk directed Mary to Room 242 on the second floor, cautioning her which elevator to take.
The room smelled like iodine. Angie was propped up in bed, looking ancient and dazed. Her pale lips arced down tightly, and her eyes gazed dully out from shadowed hollows with the bewilderment of the suddenly and inexplicably old. She seemed to be wondering how she’d gotten here, to this room and this point in time and space. At first she didn’t seem to recognize Mary.
“How you feeling, Angie?” Mary asked. She perched on the edge of the high bed and barely touched Angie’s arm, surprised by the coolness of the flesh. “You warm enough? I can pull the sheet up around you.”
“S’okay the way it is.”
“Why’d you go off and get stinking drunk like this?” Mary asked. She was afraid of the answer, because she knew it might in some measure be her fault for noticing Fred Wellinger with the woman at Casa Loma, then letting herself be noticed. That might have started something that had unraveled and led to this.
Angie merely shrugged and looked away.
