“Georgina was never abused, Scott. Dr. Sturges just made her think she was.”
“That’s not true!” Georgina leapt to her feet, snatching her hand away from Scott’s. “It happened! Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”
“Georgina, you had a collection of symptoms that were similar to the doctor’s own, which when put together in her own troubled mind screamed ‘abuse.’ But, they can also be symptoms of depression, Georgina.”
Georgina pressed her back against the refrigerator door as if she were trying to merge with it, sobbing. “No, no!”
“Christ!” Scott was on his feet, too. “Can’t you leave her alone?” He tried to gather his wife into his arms, but she pushed him away.
“I want you all to go away and leave me alone.”
“Georgina, just do me one favor. Ask your new therapist about it.”
Georgina stared purposely at a blank wall, her lower lip quivering.
At that inconvenient moment, the telephone rang. We all ignored it. I thought that the answering machine had picked up until Dylan poked his head into the kitchen. “It’s Aunt Ruth,” he announced. “She wants you, Daddy.”
Scott took a long look at this wife, as if to reassure himself that she wouldn’t disappear the minute he took his eyes off her. He raised a hand, palm out, in a hold-that-thought way, indicating that we were all to stay put until he had taken care of business. He reached for the extension which was mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator. “Yes, Ruth?” His face grew so serious that he had all of our attention. “I see. When?” He looked at me and shook his head. “Hannah and Paul are here. Sit tight, Ruth. We’ll be right over.”
“It’s your mother,” he said as he hung up the phone. His slender hands gripped the back of his chair. “She’s had another heart attack. It doesn’t look good.”
Georgina’s eyes grew wide and she slid down the refrigerator door until she was sitting on the floor just as she had done that day in my kitchen. “Mommy!” she wailed. “Mommy!” I didn’t wait to hear any more. I raced out of the house with Paul on my heels.
I beat Paul to my car and had the engine running even before he folded his long legs into the passenger seat. We lost a few precious minutes turning the car around at the end of Colorado, where I used some language I bring out only on special occasions.
The light snow had turned to rain, transforming the streets into a glistening black ribbon that rolled out ahead of me. The traffic signal at Falls Road and the lights of the Texaco station merged into a kaleidoscope of colors, patterns that changed every time the wipers swept across the windshield in front of my face.
“Slow down, Hannah.”
I accelerated through the intersection and swerved right onto the entrance ramp, then left, merging easily into traffic southbound on the JFX. “What if something happens before I get there?”
“Why don’t you pull over and let me drive?” The last time he’d used that tone Paul had been disciplining Emily.
“No. I’m fine, really.” I slowed to fifty-five and concentrated on the winding expressway, trying not to think about what life would be like without my mother. At the hospital, I screeched to a stop, wrenched my door open, and slid out, leaving Paul to deal with finding a space in the parking garage around the corner.
The revolving door spit me out into the hospital lobby, which was warm and dry. I brushed drops of water off my jacket and out of my hair and, ignoring the reception desk where I should have signed in for a visitor’s badge, I turned left and hurried past the various concessions, now closed for the night. A glass elevator took me to the coronary care unit on the third floor, where I pushed my finger impatiently on the buzzer until I could identify myself and the nurse let me in.
I was surprised when I saw Mother, because she looked just the same: a thin, pale form beneath a light blanket. The same number of tubes and wires still tethered her to a bank of machines that whirred and sighed and bleeped in the same familiar, almost comforting, way.
Daddy and Ruth had arrived and were sitting in armless chairs on either side of the bed. Ruth glanced up when I entered, but Daddy didn’t even seem to notice that I was there. My sister rose and pulled me aside. She spoke softly, her voice husky with emotion. “She’s stable now, Hannah. But her heart is too weak.”
I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt tears slide down my cheeks. “What are we going to do?”
Ruth’s fingers dug into my arm. “Daddy talked it over with Mother. She’s signed a paper that the next time her heart stops, they won’t try to revive her.”
Something inside me died. “Oh, no!”
“It’s what I want, Hannah.” My mother’s voice was surprisingly strong. She raised an arm, then let it fall back onto the covers. “Living like this is no life.”
I rushed to her side, knocking over the chair that Ruth had been sitting in. “Oh, Mom. Please. Don’t!”
“It’s my decision, darling.”
“But you haven’t even seen your great-granddaughter! You haven’t met Chloe!”
Mother sighed, and turned her head toward my father. “She’ll get to know her great-grandfather.”
“Please don’t talk like that! It sounds so final.” I had faced death before, the possibility of my own. But that was easier somehow, because it would have been I who was doing the going. When I thought about a future without my mother, it tore at my heart.
Ruth stood behind me, a steadying hand on my back. “We love you so much, Mother.”
Mother’s mouth curved into a half smile and her violet eyes, shrunken within their sockets, moved from my tortured face to Ruth’s. “Tell me more about Bali, Ruth.” The subject was closed.
Ruth righted her chair and positioned herself next to the bed, while I alternately paced across the small room or stared out the window into the wet Baltimore night, consumed with self-pity. When Paul arrived after parking the car, Ruth was describing emerald hills and rice paddies, ancient Oriental temples with fat golden gods. My sister had a poet’s way with words. Paul took up a position in the corner as if acknowledging that he wasn’t an integral part of the family by blood but would be there if I needed him.
“I’m sorry you had to cut your trip short,” Mother said when Ruth paused in her story to allow a nurse to check on the equipment Mom was attached to.
“I was coming home anyway, Mom.” Ruth jerked her head in my direction. “Someone needs to keep Hannah on the straight and narrow.”
If only she knew, I thought.
Paul spoke for the first time. “Hannah, have you told them?”
I gawped at him, like a stranded fish. How could it be that the events of the past four hours had flown so completely out of my head? Bali! What the hell did Bali have to do with anything? I had important news, and I’d nearly risked letting my mother go without telling her.
“Mom.” I approached her bed. “Dad.” I touched his hand where it rested on the covers. “They’ve arrested someone for the murder of Georgina’s therapist.”
Dad’s jaw dropped, and my mother lifted her head slightly from her pillow.
“It was her father who did it, Dr. Voorhis.”
“Dr. Voorhis?” My mother’s pale face grew even paler. “Isn’t he the children’s pediatrician?”
I nodded and sat down.
“Why on earth?”
Dad stood behind me while I talked, his fingers drumming rhythmically on the metal frame of my chair, sending vibrations skittering up my back. I told the whole story, except for the part about Dr. Voorhis’s attempt to silence me.
“They’ve taken him away,” I added. “I think he’ll have quite a headache in the morning.”
Mom’s eyes moved from my face to my father’s. “Thank God.”
“Have you told Georgina?” Ruth wanted to know.
“That’s what we were doing when you called.”