The Governor's Lady (18 page)

Cleve’s chief of staff and campaign manager, Willis Tuttle, was waiting for her in the hospital parking lot. Mickey was the mastermind, but Willis was the candidate’s keeper, the man in the background—balding, round-faced, droopy-eyed, tireless, unflappable. She climbed out and stood for an instant with the door open, searching his face for a clue. “Willis …”

“Nobody knows, Cooper.”

“What do you mean?”

“People …” He waved his arm. “It hasn’t gotten out.”

“What hasn’t? What’s going on?”

“They’re doing tests. It’s probably just fatigue. He’s been working pretty hard.”

She took off toward the building, Willis on her heels.

“We’re keeping things low-key. No need to raise an alarm.”

When she reached the door, she looked back and saw that Willis had stopped and was standing in the lot, looking as if he needed to do something but had no idea what. Cooper felt a pang. Willis was much more than a political addendum to Cleve. He was friend and confidant, a man Cleve trusted above all others. She went back to him, gave him a hug.” I’m mighty glad you’re here,” she said.

The hospital had put Mickey in a tiny conference room—three metal-and-canvas chairs, a small round table, bare walls, pallid fluorescent light. She looked up slowly as Cooper opened the door. She was wan, drawn, hair a mess, clothes rumpled. She shook her head. “Nothing yet. Fate’s been in a couple of times. They’re doing some tests … I can’t remember what.”

Cooper closed the door behind her. “What happened?”

Mickey stumbled over the words. “We were up early. Willis was there, they were heading to Ashton for a campaign thing. We had breakfast, Cleve went upstairs for his tie and jacket. Fifteen minutes and he didn’t come down, so I went up. He was standing there with the two ends of his tie in his hands, just frozen, looking at himself in the mirror, and he turned and gave me this awful look and then … he just fell down.”

She took a chair next to Mickey, and they sat in silence. Then Mickey reached for Cooper’s hand and clutched it tightly.

“He looked fine last week,” Cooper said. “Had you noticed anything?”

“He had a physical last month. Nothing.”

A long, awkward silence. A wall clock ticked. Cooper wished the room had a window, wished she could look past the stark, bare walls that pressed in on them. A light rap on the door, and they both looked up with a jerk as it eased open. Willis.

He stood there with just his head poked in. “It’s getting out, Mickey.”

“For God’s sake, Willis, come on in,” Mickey said.

Willis closed the door and stood with his back to it. “I just had a call from Wheeler Kincaid,” he said. “Somebody tipped him off, probably somebody here at the hospital.”

Mickey pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.

“He’s pretty much got the story, as much as there is at this point. Now, he wants more.” He paused, studying Mickey. “What do you want me to tell him?”

Mickey stared at him blankly.

Willis’s brow furrowed. He cut his glance to Cooper, back to Mickey. “We should get out ahead of this thing as much as we can,” he said. “If rumors start flying …”

Still, Mickey said nothing.

“Mickey …”

“Tell him the truth,” Cooper heard herself saying. “Tell Mr. Kincaid that Daddy’s resting comfortably, undergoing tests.” A glance at Mickey, who was staring now at some vague point just above the door, “Mother, is that all right? Mother?”

“Yes,” Mickey said faintly. “Yes, that will do.”

“Okay,” Willis said. “I’ll be just down the hall. If you need anything.” He cut another quick look at Mickey, then left.

Cooper turned back to Mickey and started to speak, only to freeze when she saw in Mickey’s upturned face the glazed, feverish cast of her eyes, the look of sheer, mindless terror, the trembling lower lip. She had
never seen Mickey cry, nothing remotely close.

Mickey’s voice was a bare, ragged thing. “I could never begin to tell you how much I owe Cleve Spainhour,” she said. And then she pulled away, withdrawing, huddling into herself while Cooper, unnerved, fought against the panic rising in her own throat.

They waited through what remained of the afternoon, though time ceased to mean anything. Willis brought coffee, returned sometime later with food that was still untouched when Fate Wilmer came to them finally. Exhausted, devastated, he slumped into a chair, elbows on knees. “I’m sorry.” It was all he could say for a long moment, which was all it took for Cooper to know her father was dying.

Fate gathered himself. “Pancreatic cancer.”

Mickey sat mute and still.

“How …?” Cooper breathed.

“It’s hard to detect,” he said. “There aren’t many symptoms—maybe a little weight and energy loss, sometimes abdominal discomfort, often not even that. Nothing to raise a red flag until it spreads to nearby tissues or gets in the bloodstream and moves to other organs.”

“And has it?“ Cooper asked. “Moved?”

“It’s all over his body.” He bowed his head. His voice broke. “I wish to God …”

Cooper stared at the top of his head, an unruly mass of hair that he kept worrying with the fingers of one hand. He and Cleve had been friends from childhood. Cooper reached for his hand. “If you didn’t spot it, it couldn’t be spotted.”

Fate looked up, tears brimming. “We’ll take good care of him. He’ll be comfortable.”

“At home,” Cooper said. “We’ll take care of him at home.”

“Of course. At home.” Fate looked up at the clock. “And let’s get him there now, before the vultures start gathering.”

As it was, a couple of still photographers and a TV camera were outside the hospital when the ambulance pulled away just before ten. And by the time they were home, others were clustered by the county road, kept at bay by sheriff’s deputies. Willis, hollow-eyed with shock, was at the house, answering the constantly ringing phone, parrying the curious as best he could.

Woodrow called. “I’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t come, Woodrow. There’s nothing you can do here. Stay and work.” A dumb thing to say, of course. Word had spread: Cleve Spainhour’s campaign was over.

A long pause. “Work?”

“Take some time,” Cooper said. “Decide what you want to do.” Silence. “One of the other candidates …”

“Goddammit, Cooper,” he said. “I just want to be with you.”

She felt the hard, unyielding denial inside her begin to fracture. She began to sob, and then on the other end of the line she heard Woodrow crying, too.

He was, as he promised, there by morning.

For the next week, the rest of the world was a blur. She was vaguely aware of things going on outside, people coming and going, flowers and cards and telegrams. The state was in a political uproar, the scramble among Cleve’s opponents in both parties for the apparatus of his campaign going full bore, some of it discreet, some shamelessly open. Visitors
were politely but firmly discouraged, and if they insisted on coming anyway were even more firmly turned away by Willis and Woodrow. They made no exception for the governor, who roared up unannounced in a motorcade and wandered about downstairs, grousing to anybody who would listen, then finally gave up and roared away, stopping up at the road to share with a gaggle of reporters that his good friend Cleve Spainhour was in fine spirits and resting comfortably.

The medical personnel did, as Fate Wilmer promised, make Cleve comfortable. The massive rice-carved bed in the upstairs bedroom was taken apart and removed, replaced by a hospital bed. Nurses worked in shifts around the clock. One intravenous tube fed glucose, another a powerful painkiller that kept Cleve in a near-twilight state. His eyes rarely opened, though he occasionally mumbled things Cooper couldn’t understand. The room became a cocoon where time had no meaning. She stayed at Cleve’s bedside almost constantly until exhaustion drove her away to a few hours of fitful sleep. She had no appetite, no desire or need of any kind except to be there with him. She had missed him so much for such a long time; she would not miss this time with him now.

Mickey was a wreck, wandering in and out of the bedroom, grieving and lost. Mickey, who had never been anything but in control and in charge—both of herself and everything around her—was now simply adrift. Cooper tried to start conversations, but Mickey seemed incapable of putting words together.

At first, it baffled and unnerved Cooper. And then it came to her on the third day as evening crept at the window beyond Cleve’s bed. They hadn’t turned on any lamps yet, and the light was soft, just past sunset. Cooper sat next to the bed, reading aloud. Fate had assured them that Cleve was more aware than he appeared, that he could hear and often understand, even if he couldn’t respond. He had lucid moments, but they became fewer. So Cooper had talked about everything she could think of—her job, friends, memories. And when she ran out of things
to talk about, she read—the newspaper (omitting anything remotely related to politics), a collection of poems, just now a book of Southern folk tales.

She stopped when she heard the door open. Mickey slipped into the room, crossed to the bed, and stood there a long while looking down at Cleve and brushing idly at his hair with her fingertips, her face gaunt, her eyes pleading. Cooper recognized it as pure, unadulterated fear—of what was happening to Cleve, of course, but perhaps even more than that, what might become of her without him. Cooper watched, mesmerized, understanding then that she was intruding here. She laid the book aside and left them, went down the back stairs to the yard, took a seat in an Adirondack chair, from which she could look out across the pasture toward the place where the pond was to have been.

Fate was there at least twice every day, and Cooper saw how he stooped under the burden of his own sense of loss and failure, a physician without the power to heal his dearest of friends.

On the fourth morning, Cooper sat in a chair in the hallway next to Cleve’s room while Fate was inside. After several minutes, he came to the door and said quietly, “We need to talk.”

They went to a small sitting room down the hall.

“Have you and Mickey discussed arrangements?”

“No.”

“I think you’ll have to take charge, and there are things only you can decide.” He looked at her closely. “Can you do that?”