Grand Avenue (37 page)

But Chris wasn’t laughing, and she wasn’t coming home. “You’ll never see your kids again,” he’d threatened, and he’d made good on that vow. Chris shuddered, remembering the look on Montana’s face as she’d turned away in disgust from the mother who was standing almost naked in the snow, begging to be allowed back inside for even more abuse. Chris never wanted to see that look on anyone’s face again.

She was so tired, she thought now, fighting off the urge to curl up in the middle of the steel examining table and fall asleep. Tired of being an object of scorn
and derision, of pity and concern. Tired of the worried looks on the faces of her friends. Tired of reassuring them she was all right. Tired of moving from one horrible little apartment to another. Of learning the ropes for a job she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep. Tired of always looking over her shoulder. Of living in fear. Of being disappointed. Of being alone. Tired of being tired.

What was she waiting for?

The answer was so simple.

“Damn,” she whispered, the solution suddenly clear.

“Dr. Marcus,” one of the nurses called out, as Chris became aware the doctor was still beside her.

“Be right there.” Dr. Marcus hesitated, as if aware of Chris’s thoughts.

“You better go,” Chris told him. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Thank you for everything.”

Chris stood absolutely still in the center of the room for several long seconds after the doctor had left, then moved quickly to the cabinets along one wall, opening each one in turn, until she found the medication she was looking for. How much different could animal tranquilizers be from sedatives meant for human beings? Surely swallowing a bottle of one would prove as lethal as a bottle of the other. She pocketed one box of pills, then another. What the hell? Might as well be sure. Maybe in her next life, she’d come back as Emily Hallendale’s tiny teacup toy poodle.

Chris returned to her desk to get her coat and purse
and was startled to find Emily Hallendale standing there waiting for her.

“I want to apologize,” Emily Hallendale began.

“Apologize?”

“For my rudeness, the things I said.”

“Really, there’s no need.”

“I’m busy next Wednesday,” Emily Hallendale stated sheepishly, Charlie’s tiny white head peeking out from underneath her massive black mink coat. “After all that fuss I made about you mixing up the dates, I forgot all about this meeting I’m supposed to be chairing on Wednesday. I remembered it just as I got to my car.”

Chris smiled. “Kathleen will take care of you,” she said, slipping into her brown cloth coat as Kathleen replaced her behind the desk.

“Dr. Marcus said you quit?” Kathleen asked, as if she might have misunderstood.

“You quit?” Emily Hallendale repeated.

“You quit?” Lydia echoed loudly from the top of her cage.

“Not because of anything I said, I hope!” Emily exclaimed in growing horror, bringing a gloved hand to her chest. Immediately the tiny white poodle began licking it.

“No,” Chris said quickly. “Trust me. You had nothing to do with what happened.”

“What happened?” Emily asked.

The phone started ringing. Kathleen answered it on the first ring. “Mariemont Veterinary Service.”

Chris held her breath, felt her blood drain to her toes.

“Hello? Hello? Anybody there?” Kathleen shrugged, replaced the receiver. “Probably a wrong number.”

Chris grabbed her purse. “I have to go.”

She was halfway down the street when she felt the hand at her elbow. “What do you want from me? You win! I give up! Can’t you just leave me alone?” She spun around, not sure what she would see first—Tony or his fist slamming toward her face.

Instead she saw Emily Hallendale.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“The same someone who’s been phoning all afternoon?”

Chris said nothing, not trusting her voice.

“You dropped these on your way out,” Emily told her, pulling a box of sedatives out of the pocket of her mink coat.

Chris’s eyes widened in alarm.

“I think you could use a cup of coffee,” Emily said.

Chris decided she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, that Emily Hallendale and the tiny white poodle at her throat didn’t exist, and that she might as well go along with whatever this apparition was suggesting.

“We’ll go to my place,” Emily said.

W
ould you like a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Susan smiled at Vicki, who sat erect beside her, her canary yellow pantsuit clashing with the too pink walls and burgundy vinyl furniture of the hospital waiting room. The August sun streamed in the windows through thin venetian blinds, casting dark shadows, like the stripes of a zebra, across the white linoleum floor. Stacks of surprisingly up-to-date magazines sat on various small tables scattered around the large room. Artificially cold air blew toward their faces from several nearby vents. Susan wondered how it was possible for a room to be too hot, too cold, and airless all at the same time. “I can’t tell you how much your being here means to me. I know how busy you are.”

“Slow day,” Vicki said.

Susan knew Vicki was lying, that she’d probably canceled several appointments to be here.

“How’s she doing?” Vicki asked.

“Not good.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“That there’s nothing more they can do, that she probably won’t last the week.” Susan glanced down the long hospital corridor toward the room in which her mother, barely recognizable beneath the ill-fitting blond wig Susan had bought her when she’d started losing her hair, lay sleeping. Years of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation had reduced the poor woman to less than half her normal weight, robbed her of the strength she needed to fight the unmerciful progression of her cancer.

Vicki nodded understanding, clasped Susan’s hand inside her own. “What can I do for you?”

“You’re doing it.”

“Do you need me to call anyone? Your brother and sister …?”

“Kenny’s flying in tonight. I’m still working up the nerve to call Diane.”

Susan pictured her older brother and younger sister, the tortoise and the hare, her mother had once jokingly referred to them. Kenny was tall, stocky, sedentary, whereas Diane was gaunt, wiry, and never able to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. While Kenny moved slowly and methodically through the various stages of his life, Diane, for all her excess energy, always seemed to be running around in circles. Running away, Susan decided now, remembering how her sister had fled when she’d emerged from the water with her legs covered in leeches. Not much had changed in the ensuing decades. Her sister was still running away from even the vaguest hint of unpleasantness.

“The last time I spoke to Diane, she said she’d love to come see Mom,” Susan told Vicki now, “but it was a
real
bad time for her. I think the moon, or something, was in the wrong planet. I don’t know.”

“Why don’t I try her for you now?” Vicki offered.

Susan scribbled her sister’s Los Angeles phone number on a scrap piece of paper she found in her purse and handed it to Vicki, watching as her friend approached the pay phone on the far wall. Poor Vicki, Susan thought. She has no idea what she’s in for.

Diane was one of those people who thought death was contagious. When her husband had died of a sudden heart attack in his sleep five years earlier, Diane had thrown out not only the sheets, but the bed as well. She’d immediately put their house in Westwood up for sale and moved into a small cottage in the Hollywood hills. There were no children because she’d always been convinced she’d die in childbirth; she refused to fly because she was absolutely certain the plane would crash; she even had a thing about driving over bridges.

“I don’t think the doctors expect her to last that long,” Susan heard Vicki say quietly into the phone. “No, I understand that. It’s just that …”

Susan took a deep breath and forced herself out of her chair, her brown cotton pants sticking to the vinyl of the seat, making a rude sucking noise as she pulled away. “I better speak to her,” she whispered, holding out her hand for the phone. Vicki might be a genius when it came to handling wily criminals and clever DAs, but she’d never run up against anyone quite like Diane.

“You know I really want to be there,” Diane whined as soon as Susan said hello. “It’s just that this is a real bad time for me.”

The correct word is
really
, not
real
. It’s an adverb, Susan wanted to shout. Instead she said, “There isn’t much time left.”

“Aren’t you being a tad melodramatic?”

Susan had always hated the word
tad
. She had to bite down on her tongue to keep from screaming.

“She’s been like this for months now,” Diane insisted.

Susan heard the puff of her sister’s ever-present cigarette. “This is different.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I’m here every day.”

“And I’m not, is that it? Is that what this is really about?”

“It’s about our mother,” Susan said slowly, picturing the ashes of Diane’s cigarette hanging precariously from their filter, then breaking off and falling toward the floor, scattering in the air like dust. “Who is dying.”

“She’ll get better.”

“She’ll get worse.”

“You’re being obstinate.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

“Hang up,” Vicki instructed impatiently from beside Susan. “Don’t waste your breath.”

“Who is that?” Diane demanded. “Did she just tell you to hang up on me?”

“Diane, I have to go.”

“Look, I’ll see what I can do,” Diane said grudgingly,
exhaling a long puff of smoke from her lungs into Susan’s ear.

“That’d be great,” Susan said, hanging up the phone.

“Isn’t she a charmer,” Vicki said.

Susan laughed, thinking of her older daughter. “I guess there’s one in every family.”

“Ariel still giving you a hard time?” Vicki asked, as if she had access to Susan’s brain.

Susan shrugged, sinking back into a waiting chair. “I don’t know how my mother did it. She was always so calm, so fair. I don’t remember her ever raising her voice in anger.” Susan shook her head in wonderment. “I try so hard to be like her.”

“Just be yourself.”

“I’m always yelling. I don’t remember my mother ever yelling at me the way I yell at Ariel.”

“That’s because you aren’t your mother, and Ariel isn’t you. It’s a whole different dynamic. Trust me, I bet your mother yelled plenty at Diane.”

“You think?”

“You’re a great mother, Susan. Stop being so hard on yourself.”

“Ariel hates me.”

“Of course she hates you. That’s her job.”

Susan smiled gratefully, collapsing against Vicki’s side as the other woman wrapped her arms around her. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“So am I.” Vicki kissed the top of Susan’s head.

The two women rocked gently together, the sound of their breathing filling the room. Gradually, Susan became aware of other voices, other people—a couple whispering in the far corner, a man flipping through
the bathing suit issue of
Sports Illustrated
, a woman trying to read a book through eyes blinded by a steady stream of tears. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to handle this.”

“You’ll handle it.”

“I’m not ready to let her go.”

“I don’t think children are ever ready to let go of their parents,” Vicki agreed, a sadness in her voice Susan hadn’t heard before. “You know, I could really use a cup of coffee. How about you?”

“Okay,” Susan said. “Double cream. No sugar.”

“Be back in a few minutes.”

“I’ll be in with my mother.”

Susan watched Vicki until she was out of sight, then she pushed herself off her chair and walked down the quiet hospital corridor. Her mind had long ago absorbed the steady flow of hospital sounds—bells ringing, carts being wheeled across the floor, announcements over the PA, patients moaning behind half-closed doors—so that she barely heard them now. They blew past her ears like a train whistle in the distance.

She reached the door to her mother’s semiprivate room and pushed it open slowly, afraid of what she might see. “Hello, Mrs. Unger,” she said to the sweet-faced, white-haired woman in the bed beside her mother, and the woman smiled her response, although her eyes shone with the blank stare of someone who had no idea who she was. “Hi, Mom.” Susan sank into one of the two chairs pushed up against her mother’s hospital bed, lifting her head to her mother only gradually, preparing herself for her matte gray pallor, for
the skin stretched so tightly across her face it seemed in danger of splitting in half, for the eyes riddled with confusion and pain. But her mother’s eyes were closed, her face relaxed. Susan’s breath caught in her lungs as she listened for sounds of her mother’s breathing, heard none.

Only when she saw a slight twitch beneath the hospital sheets did she know her mother was still alive. Susan stilled the trembling hand beneath the bedcovers with her own, although it too was trembling, and kissed her mother’s chalky, dry forehead, dislodging the too blond wig that sat atop her head like a lopsided beret. Susan pictured her mother’s natural hair, how each strand had always stayed exactly in place from one washing to the next, not requiring so much as a comb to touch it up. Her mother’s hair had been one of the marvels of Susan’s childhood, she recalled now, trying to adjust the wig without disturbing her mother. She sank back in her chair, straining for a comfortable position. “Kenny’s flying in from New York tonight. And I spoke to Diane. She’s going to get here as soon as she can. So you better perk up.” Susan swallowed the threat of tears. “You know how Diane is around sick people.”

“Diane’s coming?” her mother asked without opening her eyes or moving her lips.

Was it possible Susan had imagined she’d said anything at all? “Yes, Mom, she’s trying to make arrangements right now.”

“I must be very sick,” her mother said, lips twitching into a smile.

“No, in fact you’re doing very well. The doctor said he saw a definite improvement.”