Syl gave me a coy smile. “Angelo is family.”
“You're related to ⦠?” I asked
Angelo looked uncomfortable. Syl filled in the blank. “Tony was his uncle.”
“I'm sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “I'm here to evaluate Ms. Jackson. I'm working for the public defender.”
“Can't you people leave her alone?” He scowled. “First that cop, now you. What are you evaluating?”
“Ms. Jackson's memory.”
He stared at me thoughtfully, his thumbs working at the back of Syl's neck. “You a friend of her ex?” he asked.
“No. I have to be impartial. Any connection with the defendant, the victim, the family, other than this professional one with Ms. Jackson, suggests a conflict of interest.”
He looked intrigued and seemed to be about to ask another question when Syl stretched out her arms and yawned.
“Tired, babe?” Angelo asked.
She smiled weakly and shifted in her chair.
“I can come back tomorrow to finish up if you prefer,” I offered.
Angelo came around and knelt in front of Syl. He took her face in his hands and kissed her gently on the forehead. “You look beat.” She wearily lay her head against his palm and closed her eyes.
“No problem. Tomorrow, then.” I was glad to have an excuse for bagging it early. I was suddenly overwhelmed by fatigue, left in the wake of those fight-or-flight hormones.
I gathered up my test materials and walked back to the nurses' station. A man in a baggy brown suit, his back to me, was leaning casually against the counter and chatting with Nurse Lovely. Lovely was perched on a stool, her chin resting flirtatiously on her palm, laughing at something he'd just said. When I got closer, I noticed his hand on the counter was covering hers. When she saw me, the pleasure melted from her face and she reddened. She yanked away her hand and drew herself up to a standing position. I pretended not to notice and reached past her to put away Sylvia Jackson's chart.
“Hey, Doc,” Angelo called out as he came trotting down the hall. “Hang on a sec.”
I turned and waited.
“So, how's she doing?”
“I really can't tell you how she's doing because I don't know. That's something you have to ask her doctor.”
“But come on, Doc, how's her memory?”
I shrugged.
He continued, “Listen, she's going home in a couple of weeks. It would sure help me to know, you know, if there's anything I should set up to help her out.”
“Really, I'm not the right person to ask.”
“She remembers, Doc. She remembers everything that happened to her. You think so, too, don't you?”
Exasperated, I repeated myself, “I really wouldn't know. Head injury is very unpredictable. You never know what someone will remember.” My voice echoed off the hospital walls. I turned around and realized both nurses and the brown-suited man were staring at me.
“What do you mean, unpredictable?” Angelo persisted.
He reminded me of a bulldog we had when I was a kid. Thick as a brick, physically and mentally. Couldn't let go once he'd latched onto something. I lowered my voice. “I once had a patient who ran his car into the back of a truck. He was ejected right through a closed sunroof. Didn't remember that he was in
a car accident. Hadn't a clue where he was going. What does he remember? He remembers the license plate of the guy he hit. Head injury is a very unpredictable thing. I'm constantly surprised by it myself.”
I left Angelo with his mouth hanging open, waggled my fingers at Lovely, and walked over to wait for the elevator.
The man in the brown suit must have followed me because a moment later, he'd inserted himself in the small space between me and the closed elevator doors, his face two inches from mine. This definitely wasn't my day. He hitched up his trousers, waved a gold badge at me, and boomed. “I understand you've been annoying Ms. Jackson.”
Now I recognized him â the hair matched the blazing red ears. I wondered if Sergeant MacRae recognized me. It had been dark in Johnny D's and I'd kept my back to him.
“Annoying her? I could ask you the same thing. I'd have thought a legitimate police investigation would have been wrapped up by now.”
MacRae glared at me, his eyes simmering. He poked a finger into my chest. “Why are they letting someone like you in here to mess with her recovery?”
“I'm neither messing with her recovery nor am I annoying her,” I said, trying to resist the urge to poke back or pop him one. “And what the hell business is it of yours, anyway?”
“Just watch your step. She's already been through enough without quacks giving her more grief.”
The elevator arrived. The doors slid open and the people waiting inside were baffled by the backside of a brown suit that filled the opening.
“Whatever you say, Mac.”
He drew himself up. “Excuse me?” I enjoyed watching his reaction.
“That's what they call you, isn't it, Detective Sergeant MacRae?”
He stared at me, his eyes cold. “And I know what they call you, too, Dr. Zak.”
Then slowly, deliberately, he started moving forward. I could stay where I was and get run over or shift aside. I shifted.
I got on the elevator and turned back. MacRae strode down the hall toward Sylvia Jackson's room. Nurse Lovely watched him moving off. Then her eyes locked briefly with mine, but not before she'd shut down an expression of anguish.
THE NEXT day started off auspiciously. I got to the boathouse before the crowd and was alone on the river as the sun was rising through a haze of pink and gold beyond the aquamarine glass Hancock Tower. The sun lit fires in the windows of one floor, then the next of MIT's Green Building, until all the windows were ablaze and I could imagine the weather dome on top taking off like a great flying saucer.
The water was flat as glass â the only sound the swooping of the oars, the only wake the ribbon of silver I was laying down behind me. Each dip of the oars left two indentations in the water, dots on either side of the silver line. I pulled harder until the stem cleared the puddles before the oars dipped again. Boat, body, mind became one as I pushed it, harder and harder, and the hull lifted, the water providing less and less resistance.
The Zen-like calmness, the exhilaration lingered long after I'd showered and dressed. I surfed my car through the morning traffic and there was no Lovely breathing fire at me from the nurses' station.
I found Sylvia Jackson in her room. She was in her wheelchair, eating breakfast from a tray. She looked up at me without
a flicker of recognition. She took a deep breath and pushed out the words. “You looking for someone?”
Detective MacRae was lounging in a plastic cushioned chair, his feet up on the bed. He'd traded the rumpled brown suit for a dark blue one. He took one look at me, scowled, picked up a newspaper from the bed, and put it in front of his face.
“Ms. Jackson? Dr. Zak. Back, as promised.”
The light dawned. “Oh, gosh!” she said, smoothing her hair. “Of course.”
“Hope I'm not interrupting,” I said, checking my watch.
Syl said, “I was just finishing,” as Mac growled something unintelligible.
She handed the tray to me and I set it down at the foot of the bed. “Can you just give me a minute?” she asked. “I need to use the little girls' room.” She wheeled herself into the private bath and closed the door.
MacRae folded up the newspaper and slapped it down on the bed. He shook his head. “Next thing you know, they'll be fingerprinting people who get mugged.”
“Listen, Sergeant. You have your job to do. I have mine. A man's life is at stake.”
He stood up slowly, puffed out his chest so far his chin turned double. He hooked his thumbs over his belt. “Scumbag,” he spat the word out. “Deserves everything that's coming to him. And more.” He stomped out of the room.
Was this just a guy who'd seen too many creeps get away with murder? My own anger at the team who defended my wife's murderer came back to me. My fury at the supercilious psychologist whose evaluation traced Ralston Bridges's problems back to abuse he'd suffered as a child. Then I remembered the cop who had arrived that night to investigate. Like MacRae, he made no secret of what had probably been drilled into his head at the police academy and reinforced by experience â nine times out of ten, the husband did it.
Syl reappeared with a little pleated paper cup in her lap. “Sorry. I need another minute. Forgot to take my pills.”
“Doesn't the nurse usually watch you take those?”
“I guess so.” She looked momentarily perplexed, her eyebrows together. Then she brightened. “Oh, I know. I was on the phone so she left them for me. You know, Carolyn and I have a special relationship. I must have taken them into the bathroom and then forgotten all about them.”
One by one, Syl placed each pill on the back of her tongue, took a drink of water, and swallowed deliberately. A verse from a folk song went through my head, “There's a green one, and a pink one, and a blue one, and a yellow one ⦠.” Only instead of boxes made of ticky-tacky, these were a smorgasbord of the wonder drugs that have rendered straitjackets and talk therapy obsolete. There really did seem to be more of them today. I made a mental note to check Syl's chart to see whether they had her on any new meds.
On her way out of the room, the wheelchair got stuck on a large green gym bag that was half under the bed. She struggled, back and forth, to free herself. “He's always leaving his junk here.”
“Sergeant MacRae?” I asked.
“No â Angelo. Says it's a Ruggiero family trait. Genetic. Tony's the same way ⦔ Her voice broke. Then she cleared her throat, inhaled, and spoke carefully. “Was the same, that is. Always used to leave his things ⦔ She left the sentence dangling, as if unsure where to go next.
“It's been hard, hasn't it?” I said.
Syl nodded as if she didn't trust herself to say the words. Then she stared at me. “You do understand, don't you?”
There was that uncanny intuition again. I tugged the gym bag from beneath the wheel. Then I pushed Syl down to the conference room. I was careful to sit at right angles and beyond arm's reach. Today we'd do the Rorschach Test, but I never start with it. It provides a peephole directly into the subject's emotional
insides. I usually start with something much more neutral, as I did today with questions from an intelligence test.
Just as I'd expected, Syl scored well on the test of general knowledge. What direction does the sun set? On what continent is the Gobi Desert? If you went from New York to Rio de Janeiro, what direction would you be going? She knew the answers. Her recall of old stuff was largely intact. But after every question, there were long stretches of silence while Syl pondered, then picked her words, and finally tried to coordinate her breathing with her voice to get the words out. Occasionally she forgot the question before she could deliver her answer. And if I tried to move on to the next question while she was still thinking, she'd become upset and confused. The normally fifteen-minute test took nearly a half hour to complete.
When we finished, I pulled over the stack of inkblots I'd left facedown on the table. I'd learned to expect the unexpected with this test and I was interested to see how Syl would respond.
“Did you ever sit on a beach looking at clouds?” I asked her by way of preamble. Syl nodded. “Ever imagine that clouds look like something familiar?”
She shifted in her seat, like she was trying to get comfortable. I hadn't noticed how pale Syl was. The dark lines of her blood vessels, like long narrow bruises, ran down her neck and disappeared under the V-necked T-shirt. I tapped the stack of cards against the table edge to straighten them and flipped through quickly to be sure they were in the right order.
“Well, I'm going to show you some inkblots, and what I want you to do is tell me what they look like, what they could be. This is very much like looking at clouds. There are no right or wrong answers; different people see different things. Are you ready?” Syl was breathing rapidly. Her nod was little more than a shudder.
She grasped the arms of the chair. I took the first card, flipped it over, and held it out with one hand while starting the stopwatch
with the other. I held it close to her so she could take it from me.
But she didn't. She brushed the back of her hand lightly across her forehead and looked distractedly around the room. “Doctor,” she whispered. Then she reached out and clutched my hand instead of the card. Her fingers were icy cold. The skin of her face looked like parchment and her lips were bluish. She was breathing rapidly and pushing out the words, “I feel ⦠funny ⦠fuzzy ⦠c-c-c-cold ⦔
She took a shallow breath and her head dropped. Then she lifted it and looked toward me with unfocused eyes. She shuddered violently just before her eyes slid up under her eyelids and she slumped over.
“Ms. Jackson?” I shouted, shaking her by the shoulder. “Help!” I shouted, even though no one could hear me through the closed door. I scanned the room. I hit the emergency call button. Then I yanked the door open and ran toward the nurses' station. “She's unconscious!” I yelled, hoping I was right.
Lovely appeared out of nowhere and charged past me with a what-have-you-done-to-her-now look on her face. The Code Blue announcement barely registered as a doctor and another nurse materialized, one from a stairwell and the other from a nearby room.
MacRae emerged from the men's room. The two of us watched from the hall, picking up little snatches of conversation from the group huddled over Syl, who was now stretched out on the conference table â “Blood pressure's falling,” “When did she have her last meds?” and finally, “Lavage!”
“Shit, shit, shit,” I hissed, under my breath. I couldn't stand that feeling of helplessness, of knowing something terrible was happening and being powerless to act, to help, to prevent.
“Worried this might throw off your schedule?” MacRae sneered.
I turned on him. “You stupid sonofabitch.” I might have
taken a swing at him but just then, a nurse came out of the room and ran between us. She returned a moment later with rubber tubing and an oversized plastic syringe. The interruption gave me what I needed to regroup. I walked over to the window and stared out over the river. It was very quiet as they worked.
An orderly arrived with a gumey. A few moments later he departed, the gumey now bearing Syl's inert shape, one of the nurses trotting alongside holding aloft an IV bag.
MacRae turned to me and barked, “Don't leave the building.” As he strode over to the nurses' station to grab the phone, I flipped him the bird.
All alone, I walked back into the now empty conference room. My notebooks and Rorschach cards were strewn on the floor. Syl's wheelchair looked forlorn, shunted off into a corner. I squatted to gather up my things. I gagged. The sweet smell of vomit permeated the room.
I left the room and walked down the hall. On the way, I stopped at a water cooler and helped myself to a drink. I steadied my hand to raise the little pleated paper cup to my mouth.
As I sat and waited in the solarium, I reviewed the symptoms: low blood pressure, pallor, low body temperature, rapid breathing. Any one of a million drugs could cause symptoms like that and she was probably taking some of them. But where had those pills come from? Were they really left by the nurse when Sylvia Jackson was on the phone? If so, when?
I didn't have to wait long before MacRae reappeared. “She's in the ICU. She's going to be okay.” I didn't say anything. “It's a good thing someone was with her,” he added grudgingly, “otherwise ⦔ He took out a little pad and started to write. “Doctor, did you give her any medication?”
Now he wasn't being hostile. He needed something from me. I wanted to wrench the pad from him, tear off the pages, and shove them down his throat. Instead, I counted to five and said, “I'm not her doctor. It's not my job to prescribe or administer drugs. But I did see her take some.” MacRae's pencil paused in
midair. “When she came out of the bathroom, she had a little cup full of pills she said she'd forgotten to take.”
“Pills? How many?”
“A lot. She usually takes a half dozen, give or take a few.”
He scratched notes on his pad. “You say you watched her take them?”
“And I poured her some water.” I could see Syl, rolling out of the bathroom, the little cup of brightly colored pills balanced in her lap. “I wonder what happened to the cup.”
“Wait here,” MacRae barked, and he was up and out the door. Maybe he wasn't so stupid after all. I tried to remember. Had she put it down on the bedside table? Did she throw it into the wastebasket?
He returned a minute later, empty-handed. “You sure about that cup?”
I nodded. “Definitely. A white pleated paper cup.”
“Paper cup,” he said, jotting the words into his notebook.
“White pleated paper cup,” I said.
“Anyone else see her take those pills?”
I shook my head.
“Anyone else around at the time?”
“No one but you.”
He ignored it. “Depending on what happens,
we
may need to call you in for questioning.” He snapped his little notebook closed, fished a card from his pocket, and held it out to me. “Dr. Zak, if you remember anything, call me” â I looked at the card â “please.” I took it and shoved it into my pocket.
When I got back to the Pearce, I called Chip. “Sylvia Jackson collapsed this morning while I was testing her. They rushed her to intensive care.”
“The D.A.'s office called us. Already they're blaming us, though I'm not sure what for. Annie went over to the hospital to get it firsthand. So what do you think happened?”
“She'd just taken some pills she found in her bathroom.”
“Found?”
“She said the nurse left them for her. Definitely not standard hospital procedure. But it can happen. It's also possible that they gave her the wrong meds. That happens sometimes. Especially with all the float nurses they're using these days who don't know one patient from another.”
“Sounds suspicious.”
“And there's something else fishy â when the detective went to Sylvia Jackson's room to look for the cup she'd taken the meds from, he couldn't find it.” I wondered how hard he'd looked. “Of course, she might have thrown it away in the hall or in the conference room.” Or he might have found it and tucked it into his pocket. “Or it might have been in her wheelchair. Didn't occur to me to check.”