I sat with him a while, and he licked my fingers as if grateful that I’d taken care of him. He looked sad, but then pugs always look a little depressed.
I told him, “You’re important to us, Al. You have to come back and claim the neighborhood bushes back from the coyotes. Your sister doesn’t know shit about marking territory.”
The following day I kept my appointment with Timothy Neilsen, partly because I was scared at what was happening to me and partly because I wanted the chance to get him alone, tell him I’d spoken to Detective Humphries, and watch his reaction. I also let slip what I’d found out from George Manriquez about him getting the report about Joseph being drunk. I didn’t do it in an accusing kind of way, just soft and wondering. But when I did that, he grew a little cold.
“There must be a mistake. Mallory Hollinger told me you wanted to see me about a health problem,” he said.
“I really do. And of course I’ll tell Jacquie what I’ve discovered, too. I just thought you’d be interested and while I was here—”
“Brigid, here’s something you probably don’t know, unless somehow it’s gotten into that gossip mill they call a church. When you saw my wife the other night, that was the first time she had been able to leave the house in months. She has this idea that if she leaves the house something awful will happen because it did the last time. Only she went to that function with the intent of telling off the Manwarings because she hates them. And then she lost her nerve. When she was saying she couldn’t do it, that’s what she meant.”
Rather than me watching Neilsen’s reaction to my information, he was sitting there watching mine. Satisfied that I had understood, he said, “There. Now you know what I find interesting. I’m really sorry that my stepson fell in the pool and drowned. I’d like to fill the thing with concrete so I don’t have to look at it anymore. Now all I’m interested in is getting back the woman I married, and I don’t think what you’re doing can make that happen. As a matter of fact, you’re about to make it worse by telling her I hid the information from her about Joe being drunk. I’m asking you as a favor, don’t tell her that.” Neilsen leaned forward a little so he was almost in my space and fixed his eyes on me as if they could pin me to my chair. “Listen to me. You can’t do any good here, okay? You can only do harm. Now let’s move on to your case, okay?”
If I had been feeling like myself I would have thought of half a dozen comebacks and then chosen the best in the space of a second. But Neilsen mentioning my “case” made me remember why this appointment had actually been set up. My body was going all weird on me and my brain was following suit. So for now I just repeated the symptoms I’d outlined for Mallory, told him how I’d gotten sick in the middle of the night, and that I had these feelings of manic anxiety that didn’t seem to have a cause. I didn’t tell him about the Carlo skeleton. He asked if I was on any amphetamines and I said no. Alcohol? he asked. Maybe a glass of wine a day. I didn’t tell him it was a nine-ounce glass. We all lie, right? Valium to relax. Ambien to sleep. He frowned at that. Not every night, I added. While talking about what was going on with me, I felt a tickle and brushed my hand against my cheek. “Good grief, what’s this now,” I said, looking at my glistening hand. I thought of the way Todd sweated when he was tense.
“You’re crying,” Neilsen said.
I went quiet, too embarrassed to acknowledge I didn’t know when I was crying. Who let this woman in and what did she do with Brigid Quinn, I wondered.
After taking my vitals and some blood to run through tests as if he doubted my honesty about either the amphetamines or the liquor, he started asking me questions: Have you been feeling very sad lately? I thought of Gemma-Kate and well, yes. Are you sleeping more than usual, or less? Less. Feelings of anxiety, fear? Physically agitated? Trouble concentrating? Feeling that physical problems such as achiness are symptoms of a serious disease?
I answered truthfully but knew where he was going. I’d been through this routine before when I was evaluated by Bureau shrinks after killing the unarmed suspect in the field, the case that tarnished my reputation and landed me in the Tucson field office. “I’m not depressed,” I said. “I don’t get depressed.”
Tim Neilsen leaned forward from his chair in front of the little desk where he had tapped my answers into his computer, a record for all time. The coldness had been replaced by that compassionate yet firm Dr. Kildare look. “Frankly, all your symptoms are pointing to it. You answered five of the standard questions in the affirmative.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but his look grew even more compassionate and firmer. “Are you sure there are no changes in your life right now? Something you can’t control?”
It felt like I was back talking to Mallory. I thought of Gemma-Kate again. That was pretty close to uncontrollable. I didn’t like situations I couldn’t control. I was thinking about that when he said, “Depression doesn’t always manifest itself the way we expect it to. It makes some people manic. It can cause insomnia as often as it makes people crave sleep. It can even give you nausea. Arguably, we can run all kinds of tests, but if you want to see if I’m right I can give you a prescription.”
My right hand, which had been resting on the plastic arm of the examination room chair, jumped and shot forward a little. Neilsen noted it.
“How long has that been happening?” he asked.
“It hasn’t,” I said.
Neilsen looked a little more concerned than before. He took a piece of paper and a pen and asked me to write a sentence. I wrote
My name is Brigid Quinn.
Neilsen studied the sentence briefly. “Has your writing always been this small and cramped?”
“No,” I confessed. I remembered signing the credit card bill at the restaurant. “I’ve noticed that, too.”
“It’s called micrographia. Stand up a second.”
I started to rise. “No,” he said, “don’t use your arms to boost yourself from the chair.”
I tried to follow instructions, and frankly, it was a little hard.
Neilsen frowned. “Tell you what, walk down the hall for me.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Humor me.”
We left the examination room and he watched me walk down the hall toward the front desk. Then he watched me walk back.
“Hm,” he said.
“What, hm?” I asked again.
“Your gait is off. Your right foot is slapping a bit. How long has it been like that?”
I wondered if that was what Mallory meant when she said I was limping. I told him I didn’t know how long it had been that way.
He said, “Hm.”
We were standing in the hallway rather than in a private examination room, but I’d had enough hmmms. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure. I’d like you to see a specialist.”
“What kind of specialist? Would you please just tell me what you’re thinking? I’m a big girl, I can take it.”
Neilsen looked at an assistant passing us in the hallway who had glanced my way, and led me back into the examination room. He invited me to sit down. I did not, crossing my arms tightly in a way that, for the first time, I recognized had become a familiar stance.
“So what’ll it be,” I said, prepared for the worst, thinking about my sister-in-law, about Owen, about anyone I’d known with wasting kinds of diseases. “Multiple sclerosis? Lou Gehrig’s disease?” That was all I could think of, so I stopped.
“I’m not equipped to make a snap diagnosis. I don’t think anyone is. This sort of thing, you have to wait—”
“Would you stop making me play Twenty Questions and just spit it out?”
Neilsen said with studied calm, “This is nothing to be alarmed about yet, but along with some of your other symptoms I think we have to consider the possibility of Parkinson’s.”
The universe tilted away from me.
My body jolted despite my tough-gal assurance. Then, as when I’ve been in dangerous circumstances and have to turn into a machine or die, I became someone else. It’s the easiest way to put it. My voice felt cold and hard. “What’s the prognosis for that?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t know much about medicine, but…”
Neilsen didn’t jump in quickly enough with assurances. He appeared to think that my coldness was me taking things well and just sat there looking sympathetic, as if I had stopped being an annoyance and turned into a patient.
“What can I expect, loss of functioning? How long does it take?”
He shook his head. “This is way premature to be talking this way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything, but you insisted on knowing what I was thinking. Look, Brigid, this is all very unlikely. I just would like you to see someone who might be able to rule it out.”
He explained that the other doctor might do some tests like a PET scan, which, while not ruling out Parkinson’s, would check to see if they could discover some other condition. If anything, Some Other Condition sounded even more ominous. Swell, I thought with a coldness in my gut, let’s definitely do some tests. Let’s find out if my body is going to fail me just as I was beginning to enjoy my life.
“But don’t worry, I’m just covering all the bases, and the antidepressant could even help associated symptoms.” Then he tapped a prescription into the computer for twenty milligrams of a generic name I recognized from Mallory’s medicine cabinet. He told me to stop taking the Valium because there could be an adverse reaction in combination with the antidepressant. And he said to avoid the Ambien as well because that could be causing my irrational thinking. Irrational thinking, he said. And don’t drink. I left thinking he could be right after all. After all, the Valium and the wine, both depressants, hadn’t done anything but make me feel worse.
My hand shook while I was signing the charge slip for the insurance co-pay. Me, always so cool under duress, always quick to notice a flaw in another and use it to my advantage, I hated myself for this small weakness. But I left agreeing with Mallory that whatever Neilsen’s faults, whatever he was holding back, he was a very kindly and thorough physician.
At least I thought that until, waiting for the receptionist to give me my receipt, I glanced at the little holders containing the business cards of all the physicians in the practice. It was a big practice; there were six physicians with specialties all over the place, sports medicine, orthopedics, rheumatology … and that’s when I noticed the name of Dr. Lari Paunchese. The doctor who signed Joe’s death certificate was part of this practice. He was a dermatologist.
Timothy Neilsen gave the order to forgo the autopsy.
Timothy Neilsen requested the tox report and didn’t share the information with Jacquie.
The doctor who signed the death certificate was in the same practice as … Timothy Neilsen.
I thought of running back and confronting Tim Neilsen with the fact that I knew, and asking him why he had a buddy sign off. But I doubted they’d let me back into his office. I picked up one of Paunchese’s cards, to be played at a later time when I had more chips.
I dropped off the prescription at the drugstore and, feeling like I needed to practice before I said anything to Carlo, called Mallory from the parking lot.
“Can I come over?”
“Is it your niece again?”
“No, it’s worse.”
“How bad is it?”
“It’s martini bad. It’s dirty martini and extra blue cheese olives bad.”
“I’m out of vodka. I can’t stay out long, but meet me at Ramone’s.”
That was off the lobby at the Westin on Ina, what for Mallory amounted to a neighborhood bar. She was already there, her stool swiveled in my direction, while a bartender she probably knew poured our martinis over so many blue cheese olives they looked more like a salad than a drink. He smiled at me as if somehow aware that this was serious. Either that or Mallory had been flirting with him while she waited for me.
“This attractive young man is William,” she said. “He’s studying for a mechanical engineering degree.”
I said hello to William, and he drifted off, likely having been instructed to leave us alone.
Mallory raised her glass, and I clinked obediently if without enthusiasm. She sipped and said, “It’s about Neilsen, I figured out that much. What happened?”
I ate an olive. I hedged. “He gave me a prescription for antidepressants.”
“That’s what they all do these days. Especially women.” She cocked her head as if questioning, was this why I sounded the alarm? “Rextal slow release, twenty milligrams?”
“That’s the one.” We were too honest to pretend. “I looked in your medicine cabinet. He gave it to you, too.”
“I tried it. As you know, Valium is my drug of choice. But maybe you
are
a little depressed with having your home so out of your control. I hear it takes a couple of weeks for antidepressants to do any good, so stick with it. And you probably shouldn’t drink.” She eyed my martini, and I ignored her. “Is that all he did?”
“He was going to run some blood tests. And he gave me a referral to a neurologist. A specialist in movement disorders.”
She didn’t ask what for, she only blinked. I thought she had read enough about movement disorders to have already come to the same conclusion before Neilsen had.
I gulped, realizing I was telling my friend before my husband, but I had reached the point of no return. “He thinks there’s a small chance I have Parkinson’s disease.”
Even if she already had guessed, that made Mallory gasp. “Oh my God.”
“See, that’s why I don’t want to tell Carlo. I’m afraid he’s going to react that way, and it scares me. And while I’m on the subject, would you not talk about this with Carlo? I don’t want him to worry until there’s something to worry about.”
“Of course. But you need to tell him, and you need to make this your priority. You’re the one I care about. The Gemma-Kate foolishness, your investigating business, you need to put everything on the back burner and resolve this. You’re supposed to be retired, for God’s sake. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this before, but you’re a little … driven.”
“This is just who I am,” I said.