Which was fine with Bessie. No way did she intend to be waylaid again and miss the Big Sur, she thought, watching Tanya, who stood with her back turned as she drew up the injection. Her annoyance with the girl vanished. After all, she’d just been doing her job. “Don’t worry, Tanya,” she said with a chuckle, wanting to make amends for her nasty glance of a moment ago. “I won’t faint if I catch sight of the needle.”
The nurse laughed, but continued to shield the syringe from Bessie’s view as any thoughtful nurse or doctor does when preparing a hypodermic for a patient. “I know, Bessie. It’s force of habit. You’d probably do the same with me if the situation were reversed.” She dropped the bottle in a plastic container for medical waste, pivoted around, and walked to the bedside. “Where do you want it?”
“Actually, in the mornings I’ve started giving them to myself.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. In case they want to keep me on the stuff when I go to my son’s. I don’t want to be totally dependent. Just leave the syringe on my nightstand.”
Tanya frowned. “You’re sure?”
“Yep.”
Tanya hesitated, the capped syringe in her hand, then shrugged. “Okay. You’re the doctor,” she said with a grin, and placed it on Bessie’s side table along with an alcohol swab. “But I can’t stay to talk. We’re short-staffed again.”
Time to sleep, Bessie decided.
She rolled over and reached for the syringe and swab. “Might as well be at the good old belly button,” she muttered, whipping up her nightdress and exposing what looked like a horseshoe of pinpricks around her umbilicus. She wiped the skin with an alcohol swab, then managed to bunch up a roll of flesh using the limited movements of her right forearm. With a quick thrust, she sank the needle in to its hilt, and slowly pushed in the plunger.
Chapter 4
That same evening, Tuesday, November 6, 9:30 P.M.
Hampton Junction
Mark brushed aside a cobweb and sent a nest of spiders scurrying for cover. From a wall of cardboard cartons, he pulled out the third box he’d been through that evening. He was in the basement of his house, the home where he grew up and now lived and worked, rummaging in the inactive files that his father, Dr. Cam Roper, had stored here for as long as he could recall. The voice of his mother complaining about it ran as clear as a recording through his head.
“Honestly, dear, you’ve got lots of space in that office of yours in the village. Why clutter us up with this junk? We could make a workshop down here.”
“That’s why I’m filling it up with this stuff,” his dad had whispered to him, then winked. “To make sure I don’t have to spend our Saturdays down here building stupid shelves.”
Our Saturdays. Mark smiled at the resonance those words could still evoke.
That was before he’d lost them both.
First his mother. Pricked her finger on a needle, he’d been told. Then she fell sick and died in a matter of days. To a five-year-old boy it sounded like something out of a fairy tale, an evil spell cast by a wicked dwarf involving a spinning wheel. But no magic kiss brought her back. Later he’d learned the needle had been a syringe, and the evil had been meningococcus bacteria from a patient with meningitis. She’d infected herself while helping out at his father’s office drawing blood samples.
Two years later his father died, killed in a freak explosion.
Aunt Margaret, his mother’s older sister, already widowed at fifty-five and childless, had insisted on moving in and taking care of him. “For a while,” the crusty old woman told him at first.
She’d stayed for good.
Even when he’d come back from medical school, she continued to live here. At the time he sensed she wasn’t finished watching over him. Since they were each other’s only family, he didn’t mind.
Initially he’d set up his own office in town, finding one with a spacious apartment above it. But when Margaret died, he moved in here, practice and all. Just until he had time to dispose of the estate, he told himself. That was two years ago.
Outside the wind had come up, moaning and whistling against the wooden slat door that led to the yard. The beams above his head creaked and groaned as if the whole structure threatened to lift off the stone foundation, but it never had and, Mark guessed, never would. He easily ignored the sounds, having snuggled under blankets and fallen asleep to them throughout his life. Instead he concentrated on going through the Mcs.
“You have a dad who’s a great doctor, you know,” Kelly had said to him on many occasions, puffing him up with pride. “He saw me first when I was a little girl and was very sick. Now I’m healthy, but he’s still the one I talk with. Lucky you to have him all the time.”
Not for long.
The summer she disappeared, he lost his father in the autumn.
Funny about sound memories. Recalling a person’s voice seemed far more vivid than conjuring up a face. It was as if the dead spoke to him.
He moved on to checking the Bs.
Whenever Kelly came up from New York, she’d always made it a point to come over. As a little boy Mark assumed it was to play with him, especially since she had been his baby-sitter for most summers up until medical school kept her in the city. She always made such a big deal out of seeing him, scooping him up in her arms for a hug and a big smooch. He smiled, remembering how her skin smelled like cinnamon. She made him feel important, the first adult outside his mom and dad or aunt to do so, and he loved the way she fussed over him on account of she liked him, not simply because they were related.
But the truth was she’d also been there to see his dad. An hour became a slow, unendurably long torture whenever he had to wait outside the study, listening for the two of them to finish talking so she’d be all his again.
Kelly might have told his father about her troubles. And if he acted as her physician, even if only as a sounding board, he might have kept a file documenting whatever they discussed. If such a record existed, Mark figured he might find an adult’s point of view as to what was going on in Kelly’s life just prior to her death.
His own youthful recollections of that time came to him filtered through love. When his mother died, Kelly became so much more to him, even though she was in medical school by then, and her visits were less frequent. For a year he felt safe only when she hugged him, said everything would be all right, and softly sang to him. “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Yellow Submarine,” “To Every Season” – no matter what the lyrics, her voice in his ear made them both invincible. Eventually his mother’s death started to seem long ago, and at times he could again be a carefree kid in endless sunny days. She’d given his childhood a reprieve, resurrecting it before the world grew dark again.
He flicked over voluminous sets of labeled manila tabs before Braden-McShane, Kelly popped up. Looks promising, he thought. the folder being thicker than the rest. Pulling it out of the box, he carried it over to a workbench, snapped on a lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling, and opened the front cover.
The first page contained a faded clinical entry dated July 13, 1951.
His father’s first year in practice. He began to read.
Kelly is six years old. Mother states she’s had a long-standing stomach disorder that no doctors in New York have managed to help her with. Complaints, according to her mother, range from intermittent abdominal pain, nausea, loss of appetite, irregular bowel movements, and diarrhea alternating with constipation. The problem has been episodic since infancy. No history of fevers. No history of tarry stool or blood by rectum. No discoloration of urine, nor jaundiced skin or eyes. Recurrent nonspecific rashes. Repeated investigations, including X rays of her upper and lower intestinal tracts using barium, have been negative.