Five Fortunes (32 page)

Amy’s bedroom had been made over into Retta’s sewing room, to an extent Amy would never have discovered had she not appeared unannounced. Obviously Retta had to rearrange things for days to make the two bedrooms ready for Jill and Amy when they came for their scheduled visits. Amy was now sleeping in a bed cleared of piles and piles of patterns and fabric, and her night table was the cabinet of the sewing machine.

249

250 / Beth Gutcheon

On her first night at home, Amy had wanted to take her mother to the Resort on the Lake for dinner. Retta said, “Oh, hon…I always go along with you because you and Jilly like it, but, tell you the truth, I’d rather stay home. I’d have to get into my girdle to go to the Resort, and when I get there they won’t let me smoke my pipe.”

“Your what?” Amy thought there had been an odor of smoke in the house.

“Riley next door, he gave me a little pipe and some cherry tobacco.

I like the smell of it. Reminds me of your daddy.”

“Daddy never liked to see women smoke,” Amy said, remembering a most painful New Year’s Eve when she was seventeen, and her father had smelled cigarette smoke on her sweater when Johnny Kalmbach brought her home.

“Well, he’s not here to see, is he?” said Retta calmly. “Riley said he always enjoyed smoking a pipe with his mother, and now she’s gone he gave her pipe to me.”

“I didn’t know Riley was still next door—his house looks all closed up.”

“Oh, that’s just till he gets home. He’s down at the state hospital.”

“Has he been sick?”

“No, just mental.”

“Well,
Mother
…” Amy could hear herself taking the tone she took with Jill, when Jill took the subway home from SoHo after midnight instead of taking a taxi as she’d been told to. Riley had gone mental and he was right next door; what if he came over here with an ax?

He was a big, shambling, loose-limbed man, plenty strong, Amy guessed, in spite of his age.

“Oh, hon. It’s nothing. He’s just like he’s always been, only from time to time a little more so. His mother used to remind him where he was and that would snap him back, but now he’s alone so he gets a little out of orbit. I always know when it’s time for him to go away for a rest.”

“You do? How?”

“Most times, he’ll pull all the flowers out of his window box and start planting Triscuits.”

Five Fortunes / 251

The first night Amy was home, she and her mother ate frozen pot-pies, and then sat in the den together where Retta smoked her pipe and watched MTV. For a day or two Amy jumped whenever the phone rang, imagining it would be Noah calling to beg her to come home. Surely he couldn’t be so dense that he wouldn’t know where to find her? But she was forgetting that to Noah, Coeur d’Alene was a place to have been from, not a place to think of as home. Noah would be looking for her in Martha’s Vineyard, or in Rome; he would picture her staying with glamorous friends and running amok with his charge cards on the Via Veneto. On Monday when she called her lawyer, the young toad who had represented her when Noah insisted on the pre-nup, she found that Noah had been calling him all weekend, “
AT HOME
,” the lawyer added as if it were Amy’s fault.

Noah had been bullying, demanding that the lawyer reveal at once where his wife was hiding from him.

“Don’t,” said Amy.

“I won’t,” said the lawyer, “but I have to tell him that I’ve heard from you.”

“Fine. Tell him he can contact me through you but in no other way.”

“And do you want me to file?”

“I want an allowance first. Then we’ll talk about an agreement.”

“How much do you want?” the lawyer asked.

“Well, the prenuptial agreement said…”

“Amy, you’ve been married over twenty years. The pre-nup is toilet paper. Gone, good-bye, forget it. And New York is not a no-fault divorce state. Now, how much do you want?”

Amy named a sum. The lawyer laughed. “I tell him that, he’ll guess where you are. What would you need if you were in Paris, staying at the Georges V?”

Amy named a much larger sum. “Fine,” said the lawyer. “I’ll call you in a day or two.”

“Amy!” Retta called. Amy was upstairs getting out of the shower when she heard her mother calling from the den downstairs. “Come on down, hon, that friend of yours, Laurie Knox, is on the television!”

252 / Beth Gutcheon

Amy piled down the stairs wrapped in a towel, just in time to see a story taped at the Boise zoo earlier in the day.

“They just reopened the bird house,” Retta was explaining, “and your friend Laurie took her children, and she ran into Senator Turnbull…” Amy was trying to shush her mother so she could hear what was being said on the newscast.

The picture on the screen was of the inside of the aviary, newly refurbished, the air filled with the squawk of birds. “Remember how Jilly always loved that big crow…”

“Raven, Mother. Shhh!”

“…Senate hopeful Laura Knox Lopez with her five children, when they were surprised by the arrival of Senator Jimbo Turnbull, with his daughter Caroline,” said the newsreader’s voice as the tape ran.

There on the screen was Laurie with her son Carlos, and two younger daughters, each holding a hand of one of the twins. There were some extra children too. Those must be the cousins, Amy thought as she watched Laurie turn in response to something that was said to her. Then after some bobbling of the camera, Senator Turnbull walked into the shot with his long arm outstretched toward Laurie. Laurie shook hands with him, and then the senator wrapped an arm around her shoulder and turned them both to face the camera.

Beside Jimbo, his slim blonde daughter Caroline looked at the camera as if it were a gun pointed at her.

The reporter who had been covering the aviary opening pushed forward with her microphone.

“Judge Lopez, is this the first time you and Senator Turnbull have met since you declared your candidacy?”

Jimbo was way ahead of her.

“This little lady and I go back a looong time,” he boomed affably, and the body language of their two poses said that he was the grownup who had taken this amusing child firmly in hand. “This little lady and I have been friends since she was in pinafores. In’ that right?”

“We go back a long time,” said Laurie.

“We been friends since she was a little girl, way back when her daddy was governor of this state. And here she is, running for the
Five Fortunes / 253

Senate, and we’re going to have a lot of fun.” He gave Laurie’s shoulder a squeeze.

“I’m sure we’re both going to learn a lot,” said Laurie, smiling to the camera. Around her, you could see the children pressing close to her and looking at the reporter. Birds screeched and flapped.

Amy called Information in Hailey and asked for Laurie’s number.

She was surprised when the operator gave it to her. She dialed again.

“Lopez for President, Anna speaking.”

“Hello…this is Amy Burrows, a friend of Laurie Lopez. Is she in?”

“Just a minute. Mom!” Anna could be heard, yelling.

Laurie came on the line. “Hello?”

“Laurie, it’s Amy Burrows, from The Cloisters.”

“
Mon général!
Hello! Where are you?”

“I’m in Coeur d’Alene. We just saw you on the news!”

“You’re here? How great! Are you here visiting your mom?”

“Yes—”

“Am I going to see you?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. I may be here for some time and it occurred to me that there might be some way for me to help you.”

“Be still my heart! You mean you could volunteer for a little while?”

“Maybe for quite a while.”

“Are you serious?”

“Very. But I’m afraid I don’t know how to do much.”

“Come meet Walter.”

“I’ll be there Wednesday.”

“God bless you.”

Sitting in her childhood bedroom with the phone in her hand, surrounded by stacks of fabric and patterns and pincushions shaped like tomatoes, Amy thought about Noah. Noah sitting in his romantic hideaway with his doe-eyed girl. She thought about all the excuses she had fallen for, all the signals she’d missed, and she felt completely defective, robbed of home, of love, of dignity. And good and angry. She felt ready for a fight, and hoped she had just found a fair one.

C
oleman and Cecily hadn’t had dinner at home together in almost three weeks. Tonight would be the same. Cecily would have to spend hours putting the patients’ files in order, transcribing notes she and Coleman had dictated during patient conferences throughout the day. Coleman had three grant proposals to finish and a dozen unvarnished begging letters to write to potential donors. On top of it, he was hoping Cecily was pregnant. She’d been more tired than usual lately, and he was pretty sure she’d missed a period, but he hadn’t had time in the last two days to ask her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to ask as you passed in the hall. “You pregnant?” “Think so, yeah.” “Good. Do we have any Imitrex injectors in the closet?”

“Take a deep breath for me, please,” he said to the thin brown boy who was sitting on the treatment table before him. The boy, dressed in a paper gown, looked at him with black eyes. Coleman took a big breath, to demonstrate. The boy copied him as Coleman listened to his lungs. He moved the stethoscope and said, “Again.”

The whole bronchial area was congested, a mess. He wished he could speak a word of this child’s language, whatever it was. Coleman’s Spanish was fluent, and he and Cecily were both picking up some Cantonese, but this boy was from the subcontinent. He either spoke no English at all, or had been warned not to answer any questions. It was like treating a sick animal who could only gaze at you.

He handed the boy his shirt and signaled that he should dress 254

Five Fortunes / 255

himself. Then he walked down the narrow corridor that connected the treatment rooms to the waiting room, a barely furnished storefront space on Valencia Street. Waiting here were two pregnant women, a young mother with a toddler who had a frightening cough, and a neatly dressed Chinese man. It was almost six o’clock, and doctors’ hours were nearly over for the day.

“Anybody here speak Hindi? Or Urdu?”

The people in the waiting room looked at him, but no one responded to the question.

Coleman sent the boy with the infected chest off with two prescrip-tions and instructions for his care written in English. He hoped that someone at home would be able to translate for him. Cecily was doing the gynecological exams; Coleman took the coughing toddler.

This one was easy; the mother was from Peru. When he had examined them both (the mother was looking a little jaundiced, he thought), written a prescription for the baby and given the mother a handful of antihistamine samples for her dust allergy, he went back to the waiting room. Only the Chinese man was left.

“You can come in now,” said Coleman.

In the treatment room, Coleman gestured toward the examining table and said, “Hop up.”

Instead the Chinese man sat in a cane chair and answered in surprisingly fluent English, “It’s all right, I’m not sick.”

“Oh,” said Coleman. He sat himself down on the rolling stool he used during examinations. “Well, what can I do for you?”

“I’d like to ask a few questions, if that is all right with you.”

Coleman nodded and gestured with his large splay-fingered hands. Sure, shoot. This wasn’t unheard of. Quite a few people had trouble with the concept of free medical treatment.

“You are Coleman Morrison?”

“Right.”

“And your wife is Cecily Buffman.”

Coleman tipped his head in assent.

256 / Beth Gutcheon

“You have been in private practice four years?”

“Four years for me. Cecily finished her residency two years ago.

You must have seen that article in
West Coast
magazine.”

“Yes,” said the Chinese man. “Was it accurate?”

“Pretty good,” said Coleman. “Except that we don’t have a receptionist anymore. She’s gone back to school to become a pharmacist.”

“Your sister?”

“You’re a careful reader.”

The Chinese man tipped his head and smiled slightly. “I have something for you,” he said, and produced from the pocket of his jacket an envelope, which he handed to Coleman. “I know you’ve had a long day, so I won’t keep you.” Quietly he took himself off while Coleman opened the envelope.

When he was sure he wasn’t going to faint, Coleman walked down the hall and tapped on the closed door of his wife’s treatment room.

“Cecily, could I see you for a minute?”

“I’m with a patient…”

“One minute.”

After a brief wait, Cecily opened the door. Her large green eyes had circles under them, but she was smiling; she and her patient, the very pregnant Chinese woman on the treatment table, had been sharing a joke.

Coleman said, “Some man who never told me his name just walked in here and gave us fifty thousand dollars.”

I don’t know how he found me,
Jill typed,
and it scares the
living crap out of me.

Darling, your language,
Carter tapped back.
Maybe he’s a
private investigator.

Glad you think this is funny.

I know it isn’t funny. But I can’t figure out what he wants.

Me either. All I did was look him in the eye and treat him like
a person.

Stop that. This is not your fault.

I know. But he scares me.

Has he spoken to you? Or touched you?

No. He just looms.

J
ill and Carter were in a private chat room on-line. It was mid-February. Jill was missing her mother, who was in Blaine County, Idaho, up to her eyeballs in politics. Carter was at home more than she’d been in thirty years, because she had very suddenly become a full-time foster mom. They liked talking to each other over the Internet because it was quiet, and didn’t wake the baby, and because if the other was unavail-257

258 / Beth Gutcheon

able you could just leave e-mail and pick up your answer at any odd hour that happened to suit you.

Jill was frightened about MacDuff because he had become the Unimaginable Other that wouldn’t go away. He was as different from Jill as one could imagine a member of the same species to be.