Shirley oversaw the telephone system and, unofficially, the office. She was old and tired and would have retired years ago if she didn’t need the money. He felt a faint twinge of guilt at his mild rudeness. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll call right away.”
But the call-back number on the slip was not the number for Victoria Mathias. The area code was not Miami Beach. And the note read, Pls call Robt. Toland immediately in regards to your mother.
Moon frowned. What the hell was this? He punched the button for an outside line and dialed.
“Thank you for calling Philippine Airlines. How may I direct your call?” It was the voice of a young woman pronouncing each word precisely.
“Philippine Airlines?” Moon asked.
“Yes, sir. This is Philippine Airlines.” The tone had changed slightly to the one used for drunks, weirdos, and those who dial wrong numbers.
Moon swallowed his surprise. “Do you have a Mr. Robert Toland? My name is Malcolm Mathias. He left a call for me.”
“Just a moment.”
Moon listened to a telephone ringing. “Security office,” a man’s voice said.
“Robert Toland, please,” Moon said. Why would the security office- “Just a minute.”
Moon waited. No use thinking about this. No use speculating.
“Toland. What can I do for you?”
“I’m Malcolm Mathias,” Moon said. “I had a note to call you.”
There was the sound of paper shuffling. “Mr. Mathias, your mother became ill this morning in the waiting room here. An ambulance was called, and she was taken to West Memorial Hospital.” Mr. Toland, having exhausted what was written on his paper, stopped talking.
“ Ill?” Moon said. “How ill?”
“I don’t have that information,” Toland said. “What was she doing in your waiting room?”
Mathias asked. “Do you know who she was meeting?”
“She was preparing to board the flight. At least she had luggage checked onto the aircraft. Would you like to have the hospital number?”
Moon considered what he had been hearing. Victoria Mathias would not become ill in an airport waiting room. Nor would she be boarding an airplane. He laughed. “There’s been some sort of screwup,” he said. “I think you have the wrong person.”
“We take the next of kin from the passport,” Toland said. “Am I speaking to”-a pause-“are you Malcolm Thomas Mathias, Morning Press-Register, Durance, Colorado?”
“Yes,” Moon said. “I am.”
And he was, of course, Malcolm Thomas Mathias, managing editor for the past two years of the Press-Register. And that meant his mother had gotten her passport out of wherever she kept it, and found somebody to look after Morick in their Miami Beach apartment, and had gone out to the Miami International Airport and bought a ticket to fly somewhere on Philippine Airlines. Another thought occurred to Moon.
“Where are you?” he asked. “Where is this?”
“What do you mean?” Toland said. “It’s the airline security office.”
“At Miami International? I didn’t know Philippine Airlines…”
“LAX,” Toland said, sounding irritated. “ Los Angeles International Airport.”
For some reason that made it all suddenly real to Moon. “She’s alive? Was it something serious?”
“All I know is what I already told you,” Toland said.
“What flight was it?” Moon said. “Where the hell was she going?”
“The flight goes to Honolulu, Manila, and Hong Kong,” Toland said. “I could go ‘get her ticket and take a look.”
“Never mind,” Moon said. He knew where his mother would be going. Somewhere toward Southeast Asia. Somewhere toward where her bright and shining younger son had been burned to ashes in a broken helicopter.
SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 13 (UPI)- President Nguyen Van Thieu announced today that government control of the provisional capital of Xuan Loc had been reestablished in what he called a “resounding defeat of Communist forces.”
Yesterday Radio Hanoi had announced that Vietcong troops had captured the city, just 35 miles north of Saigon. Refugees pouring into the capital brought stories of bitter fighting between Communist tanks and ARVN paratroopers.
The Second Day
HIS MOTHER WAS ASLEEP. No, she was unconscious. Comatose. Or perhaps sedated. She lay in a position which no sleeping person would naturally choose: flat on her back, legs extended straight and parallel under the sheet, arms extended tight to the torso.
A transparent tube emerged from plugs in her nostrils. Feeding her oxygen, Moon assumed. Four insulated wires from monitoring machines disappeared under Victoria Mathias’s white hospital gown. One terminated under a patch of tape high on his mother’s rib cage. Another tube linked her left arm to a bottle hung above the bed. She looked smaller than Moon Mathias remembered her. Surprisingly small. She had always seemed to him the largest person in whatever space she had occupied. Now she seemed to have shrunken, as if all those tubes had drained away her substance.
Someone was standing behind him. It was a woman about Moon’s age, black, with a kind round face and a maze of wrinkles around her eyes. A nurse. What does one say under these circumstances? Moon could think of nothing that wouldn’t sound inane. He attempted a smile.
“You’re her next of kin?” the nurse asked. “Family?”
“I’m her son.”
“They think she’s going to be all right,” the nurse said. “It seems to be a problem with her heart. Dr. Jerrigan’s around here someplace. He can tell you about it.”
“A heart attack,” Moon said.
The nurse looked down at Victoria Mathias, up at the monitor, then at the bottle, and then at the chart. “Looks like they’re still waiting for test results,” she said. “Things are always slower on weekends. But when they brought her in here we were treating her for severe chest pains. It happened out at the airport, so the paramedics got there in a hurry. That helps.”
“I guess so,” Moon said. “Has she talked to you? Told you anything about what happened?”
“Not to me, she hasn’t,” the nurse said. “Maybe to the doctor. But it doesn’t look like she’s felt much like talking.”
“I don’t have any idea what she’s doing here,” Moon said. “Not the slightest idea. She lives in Miami Beach, three thousand miles away. Her husband’s an invalid. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Paralyzed. Stuck in a machine to help him breathe. She never leaves him alone. And she doesn’t even know anyone in Los Angeles.”
It occurred to Moon as he said it that he didn’t really know if that was true. He had no idea who his mother’s friends were these days. Or where they were. Or if she actually had any. Once she had had friends, of course, when they lived in Oklahoma. He remembered them from when he and Ricky were teenagers. Mostly they were neighbors, the parents of his own friends, people his mother did business with, people in St. Stephen’s parish at Lawton. But they were older people, of no interest to teenage boys.
Long, long ago. Before the army. Before Victoria Mathias had given up her business, and Oklahoma, and her independence, to give him, her disappointing elder son, a second chance to do something with his life.
“All I know is I heard the ambulance brought her in from the airport,” the nurse said. “Have you looked in her purse? Maybe that would tell you. A letter or something.”
Victoria Mathias’s purse was being held for her at the hospital business office. Moon showed his driver’s license, signed for it, and carried it into the lobby. He stopped there and sat for a moment, holding it in his lap. Some childhood inhibition kept him from breaking the tape that the airline’s security people had used to seal it. One doesn’t pry into one’s mother’s purse.