Authors: Elaine Viets
After all the experts yammered away, the judge asked Nancy why she’d married Jack. “For sex, your honor,” she said. The judge, a woman with a young face and gray hair, declared Nancy sane. So did every woman in the courtroom. Nancy promptly changed her will. The bulk of the estate was going to her beloved husband, Jack. Each child would get “only a million,” which they regarded as a poverty-level income. I could have probably eked out a decent life on a million bucks, but then I was a South Sider and used to making do.
Heather, the nurse Dr. Brentmoor was supposed to marry, gave birth to a nine-pound, six-ounce boy. DNA tests confirmed that Brentmoor was the father. Heather promptly sued the Brentmoor estate on behalf of her son. Brentmoor’s wife, Stephanie, hired
herself a real shark. The suit was dropped when Brentmoor’s parents agreed to support the child in exchange for generous visiting rights.
Stephanie had a fling with her attorney, who was recently divorced. She kept her house in Ladue, but moved into his condo in Clayton. She said he promised to marry her, and gave her an engagement ring. He said the ring was a farewell gift. All that is known for certain is the lawyer took up with a thirty-year-old nurse he’d deposed in the Brentmoor case, and Stephanie was out on her ear. The resulting palimony suit gave Stephanie plenty of ink in Babe’s column, but I don’t think she wanted it. Stephanie spent most of the money she got from Brentmoor suing her lawyer lover. The last I heard, she was selling real estate in West County. She was good at it, too.
Bill comes back to me in my dreams sometimes. I hear him say his final words and I see him fall backward and I hear the long silence before he landed. And scariest of all, I see that empty wall. That’s the part of the dream where I wake up with a pounding heart. When I see nothing.
The insurance company wanted to get out of paying death benefits to Billy Junior, claiming his father’s death was a suicide. I guess it was by their definition, but I considered it medical murder. I wrote a story about how the insurance company was leaving an orphan destitute. Readers felt so sorry for Bill’s son, they sent me money for him. I talked with his mother in Tampa. She used it to set up a college fund for him at a local bank. Billy had a future after all. His father’s death accomplished that much.
My dreams about Bill began to fade after that.
Maybe because Bill could finally rest, now that his boy was provided for. Maybe because I didn’t have to spend any more time at Moorton Hospital.
Georgia had finished her course of chemo and radiation after eight months. At her last chemo session, the nurses came into the room cheering and waving sparklers and blowing bubbles. She looked embarrassed and pleased at the attention. They presented Georgia with a nicely lettered Certificate of Achievement.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” asked Georgia on the way home.
“Keep it,” I said. “You earned it.”
“I didn’t do anything but stay alive.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
She’s gained back most of the weight she lost and all of her foul-mouthed high spirits. She looks good. She’s been cancer-free for a year. Four more to go, before the cure is official. She’s sure she’ll make her five-year anniversary. I am, too.
Georgia needed reconstructive surgery after the surgery healed and the radiation was over. She decided to have breast implants while she was at it—the saline kind. “Hell, why not,” she said. “The insurance company’s paying for it. Never too late to have tits.”
Speaking of tits, Charlie, my reptile of a managing editor, quit giving me sleazy stripper assignments after I cracked the Doc in the Box case. My series on the subject created quite a stir. I gave a lot of speeches about the killings to the Kiwanis and other groups, which the paper considered good PR. The audience, unless it was a bunch of doctors, was sympathetic to Bill.
The doctors, or the doctors’ relatives, would get all hot under the collar when I mentioned Dr. Jolley’s misdiagnosis. They’d say it was easy for any doctor to forget the basics, and I’d say, “For a whole year?” Or they’d try to explain away a cold fish like Brentmoor. “Isn’t it better that we have the doctors’ knowledge to save lives? Do we need their feelings, too?” they’d say. We did, I said. Many of the chemo nurses managed to have both brains and feelings. The nurses were far from perfect, but a lot more of them were recognizably human. I could hear the men in the audience snort at the radical notion that nurses might handle anything better than a doctor and see the women nod their heads in agreement.
And if doctors couldn’t deal with their patients’ pain, I’d add, maybe they should be in research. Slides and test tubes have no feelings. This was when some guy, usually older, would say that the oncologists saw so many bad things, they needed to “protect themselves.” But it wasn’t protection, was it? The doctors were dead, weren’t they?
They were as dead as my love life. I spend a lot of time thinking about Lyle, and what we had and what we lost. I tried to pick up my life after we broke up. I went out with other men. My friends fixed me up with “nice guys” who were so nice, I had to struggle to stay awake when we went out. They weren’t men I could ever love. So I stopped going out. It was better that way. There are women who can be content with minor romances, but I’m not one of them. I’d rather have nothing.
I had my work, and that was enough consolation.
Especially since my Doc in the Box series was a finalist for the McNamara prize for distinguished feature reporting.
“Congratulations,” Georgia said, when I got the phone call from the prize committee. “This is the big time.”
“It’s an honor just to be chosen,” I said with uncustomary humility.
“Bullshit,” she said. “It’s a bigger honor to win. And you’ll get twenty thousand dollars if you do.”
The awards dinner was at the Sheraton New York in Manhattan. The
Gazette
offered to pay my fare and room—if I won. Georgia and I figured they had a good chance of popping for my trip. The other nominees were a
Los Angeles Times
series about police brutality, a
Des Moines Register
series on fraudulent home repairs, and a conservation magazine series about a Canada goose. The two exposés were solid stories, but not groundbreaking. The goose story wasn’t in the same league.
At the awards dinner in New York, Georgia and I and the
Gazette
brass all sat at the same table: Charlie said his wife, Nails, was home with the baby. My editor, Wendy the Whiner, ignored me and talked with Smiley Steve, the assistant managing editor for scummy stuff. Georgia tried to make conversation with me, but I was too nervous to talk coherently. I cut my sixty-five-dollar chicken into little pieces and pushed my food around on my plate. I wore a smashing Ungaro dress, and Georgia said I looked every inch a winner.
But I didn’t win. I lost to a heartwarming series about a state conservation agent named Gus who hand-raised a baby goose. The gosling imprinted Gus
as his parent and followed him everywhere. Everyone said it was a charming story. The judges agreed.
Charlie looked relieved when I didn’t win. I was trouble enough as it was—I’d be insufferable if I had won a big prize. After I lost, the brass left the table quickly, as if my failure embarrassed them.
Georgia and I went to the nearly empty hotel bar and for once in my life I set out to get plastered. “Here’s to Gus and his fucking goose,” I said, hoisting my glass of white wine. “I hope he winds up on a platter at Christmas.”
“Awww, he was kind of cute,” Georgia said.
“What?” I couldn’t take this final betrayal.
“I was pulling your leg. Besides, the guy who won is living with a goose, for chrissake. You want goose shit all over the house? You know how slippery that is?”
I said nothing.
“That was a joke, Francesca. Can’t you laugh about anything anymore? You need to lighten up. Lyle was the only one who could make you laugh. The task of cheering you up has become too much for me.”
Lyle. My other major failure. I couldn’t believe she would mention him tonight. I felt low enough already.
“When are you going to call that man?” she nagged. “You’re not seeing anyone else, and neither is he. You’re crazy about him and you know it.”
I could feel my face turn to stone. “I. Am. Not. Calling. Him.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I brought him here.”
I turned around and there he was, standing at the entrance to the hotel bar. I hadn’t seen Lyle in a year.
I did not know what to say. I did not know what to feel. Until he came forward and took me into his arms and kissed me.
“Oh, baby,” he said. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too,” I said. “Don’t leave me ever again.” The words that had been so hard to say slipped out so easily now.
“Never,” he said, between kisses. “Never, ever.”
I wrapped my arms around him, pressed my body against his, and felt just how much he missed me. How did I ever think I could live without him? All my anger and the awful year in the chemo ward melted away with his kisses. I felt the silky hair on the back of his neck, put my arms around his broad back, felt his strong arms around my waist and now going down to my …
We were interrupted by a tap on my shoulder. “You two better go to your room,” Georgia said. “You’re creating a spectacle, even in New York.”
For once, I listened to my editor.
Like her series character, Elaine Viets is a six-foot-tall newspaper columnist. Her thrice-weekly column is syndicated by United Feature Syndicate in New York. She was named Florida Author of the Year for her third mystery,
The Pink Flamingo Murders
. Elaine is president of the Florida chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, and was a judge for the MWA’s coveted Edgar Award for Best Novel 2000.
The St. Louis native now lives in Hollywood, Florida, with her husband, Don Crinklaw. Before that, she lived on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., where her dishwasher was repaired by the same man who fixed Al Gore’s washing machine.
Please e-mail Elaine at
[email protected]