My father’s head tilted. “No,” he said, his voice utterly calm and laced with regret rather than anger. “Actually, I was going to ask you the same question.”
“No. No, I didn’t,” she said. She sat up straighter, looked him firmly in the eye. “I wish I had, but I was selfish enough to treasure every moment I had with him, right to the end. And yes, when it was all over, I admit I was relieved, for both of us.” Her voice wavered, taking her lower lip with it. She took a moment to steady both. My mother put a comforting hand on her arm. “I wish I’d been brave enough to put an end to his suffering, but I wasn’t.”
My father closed his eyes briefly in acknowledgment and I saw a fraction of the tension go out of him.
“Somebody was,” he said, with no more than a trace of irony, “and now they seem determined to cover up that act of mercy.”
“But surely the hospital’s to blame,” she said, anger leveling the wobbles out of her voice. “A mistake—”
“Miranda,” my father said gently. “There are no circumstances under which one would give a patient such an amount of morphine.”
Not if you wanted them to live.
She took in a sharp breath, as if he’d spoken the words out loud, a soft gasp.
“He was in tremendous pain. I thought, maybe … but you’re right, of course.”
“The thing is, darling,” my mother said carefully, “that someone’s trying to make it look as though Richard’s lying about this whole thing. The hospital are denying poor Jeremy was given the morphine at all and the drug company, Storax, seem to be doing everything they can to … silence us.” She ducked her head, waited until Miranda met her gaze. Something the other woman seemed suddenly reluctant to do. “So you see, if there’s anything you aren’t telling us—anything at all—we do rather need to know.”
Miranda didn’t answer right away, mutely pouring the tea as though grateful for something to do with her hands. She filled and passed cups to my parents, her brows knitted.
“Your husband is dead,” Sean said quietly. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d entered the house, and Miranda’s head turned almost blindly towards him. “There’s nothing you can do for him now except tell the truth.”
She sat for a moment longer, a small huddled figure, then got restlessly to her feet. With an impatient frown my father opened his mouth to speak but my mother shook her head and, to my surprise, he buttoned his lip.
Miranda went to the bookcase near the fireplace and picked up a framed photograph that had been lying facedown. She stared at it a moment and ran a hand lovingly across the glass, then caught herself in the self-indulgent gesture and hurried over to thrust the frame into Sean’s hands.
“That was taken four years ago,” she said, not breaking stride, crossing to a bureau against the far wall and digging through one of the drawers, throwing sentences back over her shoulder. “Virgin Islands. Our wedding anniversary. Three weeks. It was glorious.”
I edged over to Sean and glanced at the framed photo. In the foreground was a tanned man wearing close-fit swimming trunks, leaning out from the rail of a small yacht. From the angle of the horizon, the yacht was heeled over close into the wind, sails snapped bar-taut.
The man was standing on the side rail, supported by a safety wire, with his feet spread wide to highlight well-defined calves and muscular thighs. His back was braced, giving the impression of strength and agility. Wrapped in his left hand, like the reins of a Roman chariot, were the cleated-off lines for one of the sails, a brightly colored spinnaker.
Behind him, at the tiller, you could just see a woman. She was wearing sunglasses and a shade over her forehead, and she was slimmer and undoubtedly happier, but the brilliant smile could only have been Miranda’s. Both of them were waving to whoever held the camera, their movements synchronized.
I looked up. Miranda was back in front of us, waiting. She pushed a second picture into my hands. An unframed snapshot, curling at the edges, one corner bent over as though it had been shoved away out of sight rather than proudly displayed.
The second photo had been taken in this very room, I realized, the décor turned stark and gaudy by the harshness of the flash that had been used to illuminate the shot.
It was of an old man, sitting slumped awkwardly in the chair my father currently occupied. He was smiling determinedly for the camera, an orange party hat slanted on his head. But his face was gaunt, the graying skin tight across his protruding bones. Like it hurt him almost beyond endurance to produce such a show of happiness, but he would have died rather than admit it.
Pain was written loud and clear in every line of his body, from his twisted spine to his clawlike hands, the unnatural tilt of his neck. His feet were encased in ill-fitting Velcro booties and part of a Zimmer walking frame was just visible at one side of the shot.
There was something about the line of his mouth, the shape of his teeth, his ears, that was familiar, but it took a moment to put it together.
“This is Jeremy?” I said, not quite positive enough for it to be a statement.
“They both are,” she said sadly. “That was taken in April this year—on his forty-third birthday.”
I flipped back and forth between the pictures. His Korean heritage showed, I noted, in the fold of his eyelids, the shape of his nose. Even through the wastage, he retained a residual attractiveness.
Sean silently handed me the framed photo and I gave them both back to her. She put them down on the table, near the tea tray, careful to leave the one taken on the yacht uppermost.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. Not just his death, but the manner of it.
She glanced at me, dully, and gave a mechanical nod. A standard meaningless acknowledgment of a standard meaningless line of condolence. But what else did we have to offer?
“When did he start to get sick?” Sean asked into the uncomfortable silence.
Miranda cleared her throat. “A year ago, in the spring,” she said, her voice very calm. “He always went mountain biking in the White Mountains with some of his buddies from the hospital every year, soon as the snow cleared. They’d been gone a couple of days when I got a phone call. He had a fall, they told me. A bad one. I expected …” Her voice trailed off into a helpless shrug. “I don’t know what I expected, but when I got to the hospital, the doctors there said it looked like he’d been dropped off a building. His spine had practically exploded. It didn’t make sense.”
She broke off, gulped in air to steady herself before she could go on. “We went from specialist to specialist but nobody seemed to have a clue. Over the months that followed the accident, the breaks wouldn’t heal. Jeremy lost more than three inches in height and his back began to curve from the constant fracturing of his ribs and vertebrae.” Her eyes traveled almost resentfully over the width of Sean’s shoulders, his obvious strength, and swapped to me. “My wonderful, athletic husband was crumbling to dust right in front of me.” She drew in a shaky breath. “Eventually, they diagnosed spinal osteoporosis, but by then it was almost too late to do anything about it.” She flicked a quick glance across at my father. “That’s when I called you.”
My father put down his teacup. “Almost,” he said, “but not quite.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda tried to hedge, but the flush that stole up her neck told another story.
“When I first suggested trying Jeremy on the new Storax treatment, you were opposed to the idea, at a time when one would have assumed that you’d pursue any avenue open to you. I had to convince you to give your permission as his next of kin. At the time, I thought it was because the treatment was still in the experimental stage, but you knew it was pointless, didn’t you, Miranda?” he said slowly. “You knew he’d already tried it and that it hadn’t worked.”