Beach Town (46 page)

She felt suddenly dizzy. And nauseous. She held on to the laminated surface of the counter while the room swirled around her.

Mr. Gower's face was fuzzy. He ran around the counter, took her by the arm, and led her to one of the chairs. “Are you all right? Miss?”

She swallowed, trying to fight off the wave of nausea. Finally the room tilted back into the proper frame. “I guess I forgot to get lunch today.”

“I'll be right back,” the clerk said, and true to his word, a minute later he was handing her a Fiber One bar and a Dr Pepper. “Let's get your blood sugar up,” he said, sitting down beside her.

Greer chewed the bar and sipped the drink, and the dizziness subsided. “I'm okay,” she said weakly. “Really. I've just had a long couple of days. Can I go back and see him now?”

“Let one of the nurses know if you feel dizzy again,” he said. “We can't have you in a double room with your dad now, can we?”

The thought horrified her.

*   *   *

When Greer pulled the curtain aside she found a white-coated doctor, who had the darkest skin she'd ever seen, standing beside a hospital bed, taking the patient's pulse.

She assumed the patient was Clint, but it was hard to tell. The top portion of his head was swathed in a large bandage. Tufts of white hair stuck out above the bandage, and his jaws were covered with thick white stubble. An oxygen mask covered the lower portion of his face.

He looked, she thought, small and broken. The neck of his cotton hospital gown had slipped down, and his bony pink chest reminded her of an underfed broiler chicken. His arms and hands were crisscrossed with cuts and scrapes. His head lolled back against the pillow, eyes closed. He was either asleep or in a coma.

The doctor turned and smiled. His hair was a brilliant silver, and he had a tiny clipped mustache. “You're Greer? Clint's girl?”

The accent was foreign, Pakistani maybe?

“I'm Greer Hennessy,” she said. He took her hand and pumped it vigorously.

“I'm Dr. Gupta. Nobody here can say my last name, so it's just Doc. I'm so glad you came, Greer. Your father will be very, very glad, too, when he wakes up and sees you here.”

“How is he?”

She realized she was holding her breath.

“Lucky to be alive.”

“Oh God. It's that bad?”

“No, no,” Doc said quickly. “His injuries are not at all life threatening. I didn't mean it to sound like that. He has a concussion and, you can see, lots of cuts from broken glass. Also a cracked rib. If he were a younger man, without the medical issues Clint has, we would have discharged him already.”

“What kind of medical issues does he have?”

Doc frowned. “He hasn't discussed this with you?”

“Do you know my father?” Greer asked.

“Oh sure. Everybody knows Clint. We play poker. Well, he plays poker. I sit in sometimes. He's a terrible card player, but a wonderful man. But you already know that.”

She shook her head. “The thing is, I don't know that much about him. My parents divorced when I was five, and up until a couple weeks ago, I hadn't seen or talked to him in nearly thirty years.”

“What?” Doc glanced over at Clint. He lowered his voice. “But he talked about you all the time. He has pictures of you, tells us about your work on the movies. He was so excited last week, when he went to visit you in Cypress Key.”

Greer shrugged. “I guess maybe my mother sent him pictures, recently. We'd been … estranged, I guess you'd say. So I really don't know anything about his health.”

Doc put a hand on her arm. “Let's go to the coffee shop and talk, shall we? I don't want to disturb him.”

*   *   *

They found a table in the tiny coffee shop. Doc drank green tea, Greer had a bottle of water.

“Your father should make a complete recovery from this accident,” Doc started out. “He does have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, because I gather he smoked quite a bit when he was younger.”

Greer nodded. She remembered sitting on Clint's lap, as a child, complaining of the tobacco smell that clung to his clothes.

“We're keeping him overnight because he had an irregular heartbeat when he was brought in,” Doc said. “And with the concussion, and his age, I want to keep an eye on him.”

“Okay,” she said. “I meant to ask, how did the accident happen? His friend … Wally?… said it was a wreck, but that's all I know.”

“Oh my goodness,” Doc said, shaking his head. “I meant it when I said Clint was lucky to be alive. He pulled out into an intersection, right into the path of one of those huge log trucks. Luckily he was going slowly, for once in his life, and the truck was, too. Otherwise your father would be dead.”

Greer looked down at the hand holding the water bottle. It was shaking.

“Wally said you needed me to sign some kind of authorization? For a test, or a procedure? What was that about?”

Doc smiled ruefully. “Well, I'm afraid that was a bit of subterfuge on my part. I didn't feel right, letting Wally know about your dad's confidential medical information, but I had to be sure you would come today, so I can impress upon you how serious Clint's condition is.”

“But … you just said he should make a complete recovery. I don't understand.”

“Clint is losing his eyesight,” Doc said gently. “That's what caused this accident. He has macular degeneration.”

 

54

Greer was holding her breath again, waiting.

“Clint's known about this for some time now,” Doc said. “I told him he had to stop driving but, well, he's a car guy.” He reached across the table and patted her hand. “I'm sorry this is all such a shock to you. I had no idea you and Clint weren't close.”

“I've heard about macular degeneration,” she said, trying to assimilate the barest facts she could recall. “It means he's going blind, right?”

“Maybe not totally blind. I'm not an ophthalmologist, but basically what you need to know is that there are two kinds of macular degeneration. Your dad has the rarer variety, wet MD. It's where you develop tiny blood vessels that leak fluid and cause your macula to degenerate. Right now, Clint tells me, he can see some things, but it's as though there's a large blot in the center of his field of vision. The blot is growing larger. There are some treatments that may help slow the progression of the disease, but there is no cure.”

“He never said a word,” Greer said. “I didn't have time to talk to him last week, when he delivered that car to the set. But earlier, when I went to his house, he didn't mention it.”

“I think he's still in denial,” Doc said. “This wreck he had today, it's not the first. He's had a couple of small fender benders in the past year. And I noticed, on poker nights, that he seemed to have cuts and bruises on his arms and his shins. Finally I flat-out asked him about it, and he admitted he was having vision problems. I referred him to a specialist at Shands, and they made the diagnosis.”

“Shands?”

“I forget you're from California,” Doc said. “It's the teaching hospital at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. They're one of the leading research institutes in the field. He's lucky they're so close by.”

Greer picked at the paper label on the water bottle. “What happens next? I mean, he'll be blind, right? But how will he live? Who will take care of him? He can't keep living alone, right?”

Doc shrugged. “I can't answer those questions. People with visual impairments do live alone, and independently, and that includes people with macular degeneration. Fortunately, your father is fairly healthy. He's active, and he's lived alone for some time now, right? Also, he has you in his life now. Right?”

“I don't know.” She shook her head. “This is a lot.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I live in L.A. I travel all the time for my job. I don't know anything about him. Thirty years he's been gone. I can't tell you how old he is, or his birthday.…”

“There's time for all that,” Doc said, his voice gentle. “He should have been moved over to a room by now. Shall we go check?”

*   *   *

Clint had been moved to a bed in a private room. He was still sleeping. She sat down in a pleather recliner near his bed and glanced down at her phone.

There was a text from Bryce.

Zena told me about your dad. Hope he's ok. Don't worry about shoot. Zena doing great job.

And another one from Eb.

Call me when you get a chance.

She laid her head back and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the room was in semidarkness. She yawned and looked around.

Clint was looking right at her, sipping water through a straw.

“Hi,” she said. “You're awake. How do you feel?”

“Like I got T-boned by a gee-dee log truck,” Clint said, laughing at his own joke.

“Does your head hurt?”

“Yeah. But I'll live. Thanks for coming. I guess Wally called you, huh?”

“That's right.”

“I probably shouldn't have done that. You got work and all.”

“It's okay,” Greer said. “My assistant took over for the afternoon.”

“She seems like a real nice girl,” Clint said. He gestured toward the window. “Getting dark out. Hadn't you better get back to Cypress Key?”

Greer had been thinking the same thing. She dreaded the night drive down that spooky two-lane country road. But how could she just walk away and leave him in the hospital like this?

“I can stay a little while,” she said, standing up and stretching. “Do you need anything?”

His laugh was wheezy. “I could use a lot of things. Did they tell you anything about my truck? I mean, was it totaled?”

“You really
are
a car guy,” Greer said. “Your friend … Doc? He told me you were sideswiped by a log truck. He said you were lucky to be alive. Do you remember that?”

“I remember looking up and thinking, ‘Aw, shit. There goes my insurance premiums.'” His chest heaved with the effort of laughing, and his face twisted in sudden pain.

“You've got a cracked rib,” Greer said. “I bet it hurts.”

“Like a sumbitch,” Clint agreed. “All those years of stunt driving I did, back in the day before air bags and safety harnesses, I probably don't have a rib that ain't been cracked.” His fingers groped his chest, beneath the gown. “Feels like I'm wearing a girdle under here.”

Greer smiled. “How do you know what a girdle feels like?”

He tapped his head lightly. “I got imagination.” Now his fingers probed the bandage around his head. “Did Doc say I've got a concussion?”

“Yes.” She paused. “He also told me you've got macular degeneration.”

Clint's face crumpled a little. “Gee-dee old tattletale. What ever happened to doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“He said you've known for a while. And that you shouldn't be driving. I guess that's why he wanted me to come to the hospital.”

“To gang up on me and take away my car keys,” Clint said with a sigh. “Is that why you're here?”

“Me?” The question startled her. “No. I didn't even know about your eyes until Doc told me.”

“Why did you come, then?”

She smiled. “I've been asking myself that same question.”

“What'd you come up with?”

“Wally said you asked the EMTs to call me. Because I'm your next of kin. He said the hospital needed me to authorize a test or a procedure, but that was really just a pretext Doc used to get me here. So he could tell me about your eyes.”

“If we didn't need him for poker nights, I'd sue him for malpractice,” Clint groused. He turned his head toward the window.

“How much can you see?” Greer asked.

“I can see the edges of things, mostly. It's like there's a dark hole in the middle of the picture. I can tell that it's getting dark outside, I can see some of you. I was watching you sleep just now.”

“That must have been fascinating,” Greer said.

“I was thinking how I used to watch you sleep, back when you were little. The first time Lise left me alone with you, I was terrified something might happen. I pulled a rocking chair up beside your crib and stared at you the whole time, until she got home. I remember I went and got a shaving mirror and put it right by your mouth, to make sure you were still breathing.”

He tilted his head away, and Greer was surprised to see a single tear slide down his cheek.

“I used to sing to you,” he said.

“What? The theme song from
Dukes of Hazzard
?”

He shook his head. “You weren't really into that. When you were about five you liked that song from
Golden Girls.
”

She shook her head. “I don't know that one.”

“Sure you do.” He coughed, then launched into a raspy high falsetto. “‘Thank you for being a friend … travel down a road … something something, friend and a confidante.'”

He looked at her hopefully. “Remember? They got the reruns on television here nonstop, because this is Florida and it was set in Miami, but that show was actually shot in L.A.”

She had a dim memory of sitting in the front seat of his classic red Mustang, and of him singing to her while they went to Carl's Jr. for burgers and milk shakes. She loved Carl's, and she loved riding in the Mustang.

More vivid was the memory of Lise screaming at her father for being an irresponsible idiot and not putting her in a car seat.
Ah, yes. Good times.

“Do you remember the time I took you to the
Dukes
end-of-season wrap party? And they gave you your own little director's chair that the whole cast signed? You'd have been four. I didn't drive the last season, 'cuz I'd hurt my back.”