Final Stroke (13 page)

SEVE
N

Although the doctor insisted Steve’s seizure was minor,
Jan couldn’t help worrying that when he came around this time, he wouldn’t recognize her. Perhaps he would smile at her and hold her hand, and even say her name, but would he really know her? Or would he, as he did when his mother and sister visited from Cleveland, fake it?

It was quiet on the third floor because most residents had gone to second floor rehab. A while ago two newly arrived stroke patients named Linda and Frank had come by to wish Steve luck, then left when they saw he was asleep. Both were right-brain stroke victims with something in common. Instead of having difficulty coming up with the right word, they talked incessantly about nothing at all. Now that they were gone, Jan could not remember what they had said.

Steve’s rehab had been canceled for the day so he could rest. Ear lier in her vigil a nurse had tried to cheer Jan by joking that stroke victims in this place had seizures to avoid rehab. Jan sat in the chair beside Steve’s bed staring alternately at his face and at the three-ring binder on his nightstand that contained the goals diary she’d been
keeping for him.

Yesterday afternoon she had been here with more magazines from the back seat of her car, and Steve had made more entries in the ten-year chart. The chart was stored in the closet, leaned into a corner behind hanging clothing. As she glanced toward the closet door, Jan wondered if the notes Steve had made on the rolled-up chart were be
ginning to fade.

Steve continued sleeping soundly as Jan moved close. She stared at this man who had come into her life a decade earlier at a time when her marriage to a man she hardly knew ended in tragedy. And now she recalled vividly the night she realized she loved him.

She had been kidnapped. She had been riding her ten-speed, and the van had blocked the exit of the bike path from the woods. The men wore rubber masks and dragged her into the van. The men blind
folded her, gagged her, and tied her outstretched in the back of the van. She was to drop the investigation of the fire that destroyed her husband’s adult book and video store, the fire that killed her husband and a detective named Sam Pike who turned out to be a friend of Steve’s. They said her husband’s business was evil and he was an evil man who deserved to die. They kept her in the van that afternoon and into the evening, fondling her as they spoke of God and justice and death.

As she stared down at Steve she could feel the warmth from his face. He was a beautiful man. Of course she’d never told him this. Handsome, yes, but she’d never told him he was beautiful.

His cheeks were rosy, his hair bushy and disheveled like the hair on a stuffed bear. His skin looked perpetually tanned, perhaps be cause of Gypsy blood from centuries earlier. She reached out and touched his nose. Even though he’d always said it was too large, she liked it. She studied his face. He had a few more lines and his hair
had gone more toward gray, but he didn’t look much different than he had the night she realized she loved him.

The men in the van had let her go, careful not to leave marks on her. They tied her loosely with her own shoelaces, blindfolded her with a spare inner tube from her bike bag, and left her on a dark road. It was obvious they had tied her loosely so she would escape. It was obvious they left nothing behind that would point to them. Because of lack of evidence and the nature of the business her husband was in, it was obvious the police did not believe her story.

But Steve believed her story. He stayed with her after the po
lice were gone. He questioned her in detail, but also cheered her up by telling stories about himself. One of those stories was of a bomb that had been thrown through the window of his one-man detective agency office.

Despite what had happened to her that afternoon, when Steve ani
mated the circumstances of the explosion in his office, she found her
self laughing. He went into detail about how he was sleeping at his desk and how he’d gotten hit by glass through the cutout in the back of his cheap office chair. He told about the ordeal at the hospital dur
ing which an emergency room resident picked glass from his buttocks while several nurses and a Catholic priest who happened to be pass
ing by looked on. Then he told about how he once studied for the priesthood.

“My mother’s greatest dream was that one day I’d give her Communion.”

“And your father?”

“He died after the first tuition payment.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. He died of a heart attack shortly after we received the first bill from the seminary. Of course everyone says it had nothing to do
with the tuition. But I’ve always wondered.”

“What brought you to Chicago?”

“A girl.”

“Did she jilt you?”

“Sue was killed in a robbery attempt at the drugstore where she worked. We’d been engaged a few months. Obviously I’d aban
doned the priesthood by then. I came to Chicago to get away. But the thought that someone could simply walk into a drugstore and shoot a clerk worked on me. I met Sam Pike after I got to Chicago. He was going to the police academy and one day I joined him. After we’d been on the force together for over ten years, Sam Pike went private, then lured me into it, painting a rosy picture of freedom and big bucks.

“Sam Pike saved my life while we were in the force. We were in the projects tracking down armed robbery suspects when shooters opened up from the third floor while a uniformed cop and me were on the lawn on our way in. The uniformed cop was killed. I was saved when Sam rammed the car through the chain-link fence and took hits in the shoulder and arm saving me. I’ll never forget how mad Sam was in the hospital when he found out the captain was upset about the damage to the car. Besides the damage caused by the fence and the bullets, Sam had opened the passenger door for me and busted it clean off the hinges while slamming on the brakes to pick me up.”

“You’re a strange guy,” she had said. “First you try to cheer me up, then you depress the hell out of me.”

“I want to make sure you still want to go through with the investi
gation. Telling you about my past is my way of saying nothing is cer
tain and no one can guarantee success.”

“I want to go through with it. I’m tired of being pushed around.”

Steve had stood and held out his hand. “I wanted to be sure.”

When he shook her hand that night ten years earlier he held it
longer than necessary, smiling and looking sad at the same time. Even though she had known him only one day, she knew then that she loved him and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

An aide came into the room and she sat up straight. A bed table had been brought in because the doctor said Steve would probably take his breakfast in bed, and the aide replaced the water glass and pitcher. The aide paused, glancing down at Steve then smiling at her. He was a tall black man she’d seen before. As he paused she noticed his large hand almost wrapped completely around the water pitcher.

“He’ll be all right, ma’am. Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ve seen this before. Sometimes when they come out of it they don’t make much sense. It’s like they been dreamin’ and they’re still in the dream. But eventually they come out of it and go back to therapy and every
thing’s fine.”

When the aide turned to leave, she said, “Thank you,” and watched as he paused to smile back at her before disappearing into the hall.

When she turned back to Steve, his eyes were open. She bent close and kissed him.

“Shave,” he said.

This simple word made her want to hug him and weep, but she controlled herself. “Yes, you do need a shave.”

“He gone?”

“Who?”

He motioned with his head toward the door.

“That aide?”

He nodded, pulled his good hand from beneath the cover and held his finger to his lips. “Later. Tell me aide later.” Then he held her hand, closed his eyes, and rested.

By that afternoon, with lunch in him, Steve seemed physically recov
ered from the seizure. While he took a prescribed walk in the hall
way, Jan stood at the nurses’ station talking to the LPN on duty about Marjorie Gianetti and the circumstances surrounding her death. The reason Jan did this was because after lunch Steve kept repeating Mar
jorie’s name along with the phrase, “Fly in the ointment,” and the phrase, “Investigate now.” When he said these things, he held Jan’s hand the way he always did when they spoke seriously.

After Steve’s stroke, Jan had discovered that, along with shakes of his head, she could tell a lot about his reactions to questions, or exactly how he felt about something, by holding his good hand. The world of words had become a secondary world for Steve, with time needed to interpret what he was trying to say. The subtle squeezes and move
ments of his hand filled in the blanks, especially at a time like this when he was excited. Coming out of the sleep following the seizure had left him more excited than she’d seen him in a long time. She wanted Steve to concentrate on physical recovery as suggested by the head physical therapist, but Steve wanted desperately to communicate something and was having a hell of a time doing it. And, significantly, he was not smiling the way he usually did.

Jan tried to convince Steve they already had a very important mys
tery to solve, and that it would be better to let the system handle Mar
jorie’s death. But he was persistent, squeezing her hand harder than usual. Perhaps because of his agitation, the words came out in a jum
ble. And when she alluded again to them having a more important mystery to solve, he squeezed her hand very hard and shouted at her.

“What goddamn mystery?”

And she shouted back.

“You, Steve! Remember? We were trying to find out who the hell
you were! Or have you given up on that?”

The result of this outburst, one of the rare ones they’d had, was a long embrace, a bunch of sobs, looking into one another’s eyes for a while, and an unspoken agreement to resume their patience and resolution in trying to communicate around the roadblock set up by the stroke.

And so, as Steve did a slow march up and down the hallway regain
ing his strength by using his walker, as prescribed by the head physical therapist, Jan spoke on his behalf. Jan knew the reason he kept up the pace in his walker instead of joining in was because he might interrupt with an inappropriate word or phrase and keep the questions from being answered as they were asked. But he did manage to hear part of the conversation, nodding toward them each time he passed while Jan questioned the LPN about Marjorie Gianetti’s death.

She was told the night LPN named Betty had found Steve down on the first floor staring at the puddle that had caused Marjorie to slip and fall. Jan knew something about Marjorie’s death was bothering Steve. But more importantly, she knew he wanted her to find out ev
erything she could about the circumstances of the death. She smiled and nodded to Steve when he passed to let him know she understood the assignment and would do the best she could.

According to the LPN—a thick-bodied woman who wore no makeup and, whenever Jan dealt with her, seemed all-business—Mar
jorie’s death had been an unfortunate accident that resulted from the fact there weren’t enough staff to watch each and every nursing wing resident when a thought from out of the blue hits them and they go off on a tangent.