Mountain Song (6 page)

“She’s always been so
independent,” Claudia said wistfully. “Always managed everything on her own,
especially after Grandpa died.”

“Look around.” Andy
arced a hand around the dusty, musty room, not taking his eyes from her face. “You
can see she really hasn’t been up to the task for some time. Have you been
upstairs?”

Another storm cloud
passed her eyes. “Yes...it didn’t look so bad.”

“Yes, because she can’t
get up there. She’s been sleeping in the guest room down here. I think she’s
behind in her bills because she can’t focus on anything but the pain in her
hip.”

“She never said
anything,” Claudia repeated, her eyes losing their focus, her hands tightening
on her knees. “If I had known—If Dad knew—”

“Look, Claudia, you
really can’t afford to be too hard on yourself about this,” Andy said. “Bea’s a
stubborn person, as you well know. And smart. She didn’t want you to know about
her growing disability and so she made sure you didn’t. The important thing now
is to take care of her hip.”

“What do you mean?”

“Replace it. Total hip
arthroplasty. Give her a new hip joint.”

“A new hip,” Claudia
repeated slowly. “Andy, forgive me but I’m having a little trouble absorbing
all of this. You have a cast on her arm, her leg in traction. Now you tell me
she needs to have her hip replaced.”

“And she’ll get
through this surgery just fine,” Andy said, sensing his opening. “If we can
talk her into it.”

“We?” Claudia said
sharply. “You haven’t discussed it with her yet?”

“Of course I have. Come
on, Claudia, I consider Bea to be a friend. I’ve talked to her about it as
often as she’ll listen. In fact I first brought it up when I noticed a change
in her gait last year. But she denied having any pain. When she began to lose
function, she became more and more adamant that she could handle it.”

“She hates hospitals,”
Claudia said slowly.

Andy nodded. “I can
understand. Losing her husband to lung cancer with a long hospital stay...well,
that would turn anybody against the place.”

“It’s not just that. Bea’s
always been into, you know, alternative treatments. I think she might be the
original hippy. She was brewing herbal teas for our sniffles when I was just a
kid.”

“Yeah, I know. Healing
through crystals and all that. She’s given me an earful of what she thinks of
science. Well, this is one time when Bea really needs to capitulate to modern
medicine. Somehow, we have to get around her fear—”

“Fear!” Claudia
interrupted sharply. “My grandmother is the most fearless woman I’ve ever met.”

Andy held his hands
up, palms out. “I know,” he said. “And if I ever had to fight off a band of
muggers, she’s the person I’d want at my side. But this is a different kind of
fear. You know how it is. Isn’t there anything you’ve ever had to face that
frightened you into making a wrong decision? A time when you’ve given in to
your fears?”

The change in Claudia
was sudden and remarkable. She ducked her chin and turned her head slightly
away, but not before Andy saw the slight trembling of her jaw.

She didn’t answer.

“I’ll do everything I
can to help,” Andy finally said. He didn’t like seeing Claudia lost in a trance
like this. It was a side of her he’d never seen before. Tentatively, he reached
out a hand and let it glance off her knee. A small touch, insignificant really,
but it brought Claudia’s attention back around.

“All right.” A trace
of determination showed in Claudia’s subtle shifting of her weight forward in
the old sofa. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow. You can do the surgery soon?”

Andy nodded. “I’ve
already got a friend of mine, an orthopedist, ready to take this on. I’ve taken
the radiographs and the diagnosis is textbook. Her right hip needs attention
right now. The left is in a lot better shape, and we can treat it with a
program of exercise and drug therapy.”

“How long is the
recovery?”

“She’ll be up in a day
or two...then there’s intense physical therapy for several months.”

“And she’ll be good as
new when it’s done?”

She’d gotten straight
to the point. That was Claudia’s way. She’d always had an economy about her, a
talent for plowing right through to the heart of the matter, an impatience with
any clouding of issues. At first Andy had thought it was the result of a child
getting her way since birth, a sense of entitlement.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

With someone else, a
stranger, a patient’s family member in a clean hospital office somewhere, Andy
would have put her question off. Evaded it with a quick escape into
terminology, statistics. Left the truth for someone else to deliver.

But this was Claudia
he was talking to.

“I can’t answer that.”

Saw the fear rise in
her eyes.

“Look, Claudia, Bea’s
in debilitating pain, much as she tries to convince herself and the rest of the
world that it’s manageable. Hip replacement will address that, I can almost
guarantee it. But as far as returning to full functioning...Bea has already
lost so much range of motion that it’s impossible to say.”

“How bad could it be?”

“90 per cent of
patients coming out of this surgery recover a good range of function. But in
Bea’s case, she’s suffered a progressive limitation in motion of her right hip
and groin as she has lost nearly all the cushioning around the hip joint. That’s
the osteoarthritis I was referring to. With such extensive damage, there is a
chance that she won’t be able to...” Andy swallowed, looking for the wherewithal
to continue. He knew he was doing the very best he could, taking advantage of
all his skills, which were considerable. But even so, he was about to add to
Claudia’s pain, and he hated like hell to do it.

The urge was there,
under his carefully delivered opinion, under his rigid posture in the
uncomfortable chair. He wanted to comfort. To use touch to express what he was
to clumsy to say with words...

“What?” Claudia’s
demand teamed with a fierce expression.

“To...put on socks. To
tie her shoes. To bathe herself. To climb stairs. To pick up a laundry basket
or walk without a cane. Or a wheelchair.”

Claudia’s face drained
slowly of color.

“If she’d addressed
this sooner...”

Andy waved her
question away. “It doesn’t pay to think that way, but no, I don’t think that it
would have made a difference.”

Claudia bit her lower
lip, hard enough that the skin went white. She pulled herself inward, hunching
over her crossed arms. That was her way of girding herself for a fight, he
remembered; her way of protecting her vulnerability while she prepared for a
challenge she wasn’t sure she was up to.

“I’ll...Dad and I will
hire a housekeeper. A skilled companion.”

“Claudia,” Andy said
gently, and without thinking reached forward to place two fingers under her
chin, tilting her face so her eyes met his again. “Bea needs to move. Somewhere
with no stairs, with an easy layout. Somewhere where she can get help caring
for herself.”

“What are you saying?”

“There are a lot of
options, a lot of possibilities. Continuing care facility, residential care
home, sheltered housing...we need to see where she is following surgery to make
that determination.”

A few more degrees of
color drained from Claudia’s face.

“Those all sound like
fancy ways of saying nursing home.”

“That’s not my
intention at all,” Andy said. “There are a lot of new approaches to assisting
the elderly live with as much independence as possible. And some really fine
facilities have been built in the last few years, many close by.”

“I don’t see why she
can’t continue to live here,” Claudia said, her voice rising. “This is her
home. So she can’t get upstairs—obviously she doesn’t need the room.”

Andy sighed. “Claudia,
for God’s sake, look around you.”

“It’s just dirty.” Defiance
flashed in Claudia’s wide gold eyes, the same look he’d seen a thousand times
in Bea. “A little elbow grease is all it’ll take. Once it’s back in shape, I
can arrange for someone to come in and clean every week. Or as often as
necessary.”

“Elbow grease isn’t
going to help her pay the bills,” Andy said sharply.

“What do you mean? She’s
sitting on a good chunk of the Canfield family fortune.”

“I don’t mean money. I
mean sitting down, taking a pen in hand, and writing the checks. The
electricity—”

“You’re telling me
that she...what, forgot?”

The pitiful expression
on Claudia’s face, her innocent shock, her reluctance to believe what she didn’t
want to hear—these were familiar territory. For a moment Andy was even
able to forget it was Claudia in front of him. After all, he had seen it
dozens, hundreds of times before in his professional life. Run the gamut of
human emotion through his patients and their loved ones, their despair and
denial when the news wasn’t good. He’d learned the hard way how to cushion
himself, how to deflect all that pain before it seeped into his own body. How
to delegate the task of dealing with the families altogether, if possible.

All in all, he’d
become pretty effective at shielding himself from the personal side of his
work. He focused on the illnesses and injuries, deliberately not learning
patients’ first names, studying his clipboard when taking histories so he didn’t
have to look into their eyes.

But then again, he’d
never had to deal with Claudia before. Not like this.

His fingers still
tingled from their contact with her chin, that little patch of soft skin that
had once tucked itself so securely over his arms circling her as they drifted
to sleep.

Step back. Deep breath. Focus
.

“I believe Bea may be
suffering from depression,” he said carefully, looking slightly past Claudia
out the window behind her, off to the mountains in the distance, a curl of
smoke rising from a chimney at a neighbor’s house down the road. “It’s common
enough in the elderly, especially those who are facing health problems, the
loss of a spouse or friends, isolation due to decreased mobility. It can result
in forgetfulness, listlessness, a whole range of symptoms.”

He gradually slipped
into the doctor voice, his protection from patients and their loved ones, from
their emotions and fears. It wasn’t that he was indifferent to their pain; on
the contrary, he felt it as deeply sometimes as though the families clustered
in the waiting room were his own.

But he couldn’t afford
to get emotionally involved. To be pulled in to all those complicated relationships.
It would take his attention away from his work, bring things up in him that
were far better left buried. It was better all around if he focused all his
attention on medicine. He was the doctor, and a damn fine one. No one could say
he didn’t do his part.

Claudia felt her chin
start to wobble and quickly clamped her jaw shut. The sun, so bright and
promising when she’d awoken at dawn, had wandered into a thin bank of clouds,
and now its light was filtered and weak on the dusty carpet. If only she could
turn the lamps on. The Tiffany that had been a gift from Bea’s father, the
prairie style floor lamps with their stark bases and lovely ochre glass
shades...

Depression
. She tested the word, turning it over in her mind. How could it possibly
have anything to do with Bea, who’d merely taken a little spill on the way out
of the grocery store, dropping a pint of strawberries and the season’s first
asparagus and her weekly six-pack of Budweiser beer on the sidewalk beside her?
“Thank goodness I buy cans instead of bottles,” she’d reported to Claudia last
night. “Can you imagine—all that broken glass?”

A depressed woman
wouldn’t make a joke like that, would she? No, Bea was far too...upbeat, too
alive, too
Bea
.

If it were anyone
else, Claudia would think Andy had made a mistake, mixed up some patient
records or something. But Andy never, ever made mistakes. Not on the job, at
least.

“I think she’s had
trouble with the paperwork for a while now,” Andy said gently. “I help when she
lets me—”

“Wait, wait. Stop right
there.” Claudia made a slashing gesture with one hand. She felt as if things
were flying out of control faster than she could even comprehend them. “Bea’s
taken care of her own finances forever, I mean even back when women didn’t do
that kind of thing, she was always reading the business pages—she read
the whole paper, front to back. But her father, that would be my
great-grandfather, and his company, well you know all about the family
fortunes, I guess—”

Claudia was aware that
she was rambling, that the thoughts that tumbled through her head were going
uncensored from mind to mouth, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

Not, that is, until
Andy reached out and lightly pressed his fingers against one knee again. The
first time he’d done that a few minutes before, it had caught her off guard,
robbing her of her train of thought, making her self conscious. This time, the
touch sent a tremor of sensation up and down her skin, radiating out from where
his fingers had brushed her leg.