Hit and Run (15 page)

“She told me she was going to miss me,” she said. “I think she is the only person who told me that.
I will miss you
.” Mrs. Jhun whispered the words. “She hugged me before I got in the taxi. Your mother always hugged people.”

She used to hug me maybe a dozen times a day. By the time I was eleven, I was squirming away from her as soon as I saw her coming toward me, arms outstretched. “Aw, Mom!” I'd say. “Jeez, I'm almost twelve!” Like that made me too old for all that stuff. Now I would have killed for one of those hugs.

“She hugged me and I got into the taxi and she walked away. She was going home to give you the comic book after you brushed your teeth. She said you never liked to brush your teeth.”

That was true. But a couple of years ago the dentist found some cavities. That cured me of toothbrush avoidance. If you ask me, five minutes at the sink beats five seconds under a dentist's drill any day of the week, not to mention all the squawking Billy did when he had to pay the bill.

“She stopped and talked to that man, too,” she said. “She was friendly to everyone.”

“What man?”

Mrs. Jhun smiled. “The man with the shiny mouth,” she said. “He sparkled like the sun.”

“The man with the shiny mouth?”

She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

“Mrs. Jhun, are you okay?”

“This has been a long day, Michael,” she said. It was only two o'clock in the afternoon. “I am very tired.” She started to get up but was unsteady on her feet. She gripped the arm of the aluminum chair she had been sitting on. The chair wobbled. I jumped up and grabbed her arm to support her. She leaned on me all the way to the door.

“Goodnight, Michael,” she said as she slipped inside.

Goodnight?

“Mrs. Jhun—”

The door closed softly in my face. I stood on the
porch, trying to decide what to do. Confused, I retreated down the steps. When I reached the sidewalk I looked back at Mrs. Jhun's house. Then I went looking for a different kind of answer.

I didn't hesitate on Riel's front walk this time. I marched straight onto his porch and hammered on the door. When Riel appeared, he had a tenth grade history textbook in one hand and a notebook in the other.

“There's a doorbell, you know,” he said. “Saves wear and tear on the door.”

“You said you were going to talk to your friends. You said you were going to look into what happened.”

“You want to come inside, Mike?”

“No! I want to know why you lied to me.”

He stepped aside quietly and waited until I forgot that I had said I didn't want to come in.

“You thirsty?” he asked.

“Nobody's talked to her yet.”

He stuck a pen in the textbook to mark his place, then set the book on the table next to the telephone.

“Mrs. Jhun, you mean?” he said. At least he had
remembered her name. I nodded. “Excuse me,” he said. He picked up the phone and punched in some numbers. “Steve? Riel. Look, about that favor I asked you?” He glanced at me while he listened to whatever Steve was saying. “Yeah, sure,” he said at last. “You let me know.”

He sighed as he set the receiver back into the cradle. It didn't sound like a good omen.

“I used to work with Steve,” he said. “He's a good cop.”

“He didn't talk to her, did he?”

“Not yet.”

“But he's going to?”

“He's going to see what he can do.”

Jeez! “What does that mean?”

“It means that he's a busy guy. I don't know whether you're aware of it or not, but the police service is laboring under severe budget constraints. Used to be someone grabbed your wallet, a cop would show up at your house inside of thirty minutes to take your information. It's not like that anymore, Mike.”

“You're comparing my mom's death to a stolen wallet?”

“No, I'm not.” He didn't raise his voice to match mine, didn't seem annoyed that I was yelling at him. “But we're talking about something that happened a few years ago, and these guys are up to their eyeballs in stuff that happened this week, if not this morning. He says he's going to get to it. And if says he will, he will. I know this guy, Mike.”

I believed him. I didn't want to. I didn't think I'd ever want to believe something a cop—well, an ex-cop—told
me. But with Riel, I just did. I can't explain it. He reached for his textbook and started to open it.

“She remembers something,” I said.

The book stayed closed.

“You talked to her?”

“I went over to ask her if the police had been around. She told me she saw Mom talking to some guy with a shiny mouth.”

“A shiny mouth? What do you mean?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I'm not even sure she knows what she meant. She was acting kind of strange. I don't think she's feeling well.”

“What do you mean?”

I told him about how she hadn't noticed me at first, and about her lopsided smile and the funny expression on her face. I told him how unsteady she had been on her feet, and how tired she was.

When I said she had told me “Good-night,” Riel said, “I hope she doesn't live alone.”

“She does,” I said. “Why?”

“Is she generally in good health?”

I said I didn't know.

“How old would you say Mrs. Jhun is, Mike?”

I didn't know that, either.

“But you know where she lives, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on. Show me.”

We drove to Mrs. Jhun's house. Riel did a sloppy job of parking in front of it. I would have thought a cop
could drive better than that, but I guessed they could park pretty much where they wanted to, so maybe careful parking wasn't a top priority for them. Riel bounded up the steps and hammered on the door.

“There's a doorbell.” I pointed to it before I pressed it. “Saves wear and tear on the door.”

He pressed on the bell, waited, and pressed again.

“Maybe she went out,” I said.

“Maybe.” He crossed the porch and, shading his eyes, peered into the window. Suddenly he was back at the door, trying the knob with one hand and pulling a cell phone out of his pocket with the other.

“What's the matter?”

He tossed the phone to me. “Dial 911. Give them the address. Tell them there's someone unconscious inside, you don't know the cause. Tell them to send an ambulance.”

“What's wrong? What's—”

“Just do it, Mike,” he said.

He stepped back a pace and went at the door foot-first. He had to kick it twice before he got it open, and by then I had a 911 dispatcher on the line. My voice was shaking as I gave her the information. I hung up and went inside.

Mrs. Jhun was lying on the living room floor. The teacup she had been carrying the last time I saw her lay shattered nearby. Riel was bending over her.

“She's breathing,” he said, and he sounded relieved, which scared me. It hadn't occurred to me that she might not be. “Hand me that blanket.”

I grabbed the knitted blanket that Mrs. Jhun had draped over the back of her couch. Riel laid it over her, covering her up to her chin.

“You get through to 911?” he asked.

I nodded. “They're sending someone.” I looked at Mrs. Jhun. I always used to tease her that she looked so young, but she didn't look young anymore. She looked old and frail, and it started to seem possible that she was dying.

“Sit down, Mike,” Riel said.

I heard the words, but couldn't make myself act on them. I kept staring at Mrs. Jhun lying there, looking so helpless.

“Mike!”

I looked from Mrs. Jhun to Riel.

“Sit down, Mike, before you fall down.” Again with the calm voice, the one that made you think he had the situation under control, even if he didn't. I backed over to the couch and dropped down onto it.

Pretty soon I heard the bleating of an ambulance siren. Car doors opened and slammed. Footsteps thundered on the porch steps, then on the porch, and then the room filled with paramedics and equipment and a gurney. Riel calmly filled them in, then stepped back. He nodded to me.

“Come on.”

“I want to see what's happening.”

He touched my arm. “Let's wait outside, Mike, and let the professionals do their job.”

I didn't want to leave, but I got up anyway, and we went outside. By now, any neighbors that were around had come out of their houses and were either standing on their porches or down on the sidewalk, wanting to know what had happened.

“You think she's going to be okay?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Riel said. At least it was an honest answer.

The paramedics came out of the house with Mrs. Jhun on the gurney. Her eyes were still closed. Riel followed them to the ambulance. I saw him asking questions as they loaded her inside. My heart almost stopped when they slammed the ambulance door. Riel came back onto the porch.

“They're taking her to East General,” he said. “You want to go?”

I nodded and headed for the car. He tossed me his keys.

“I'll be right there,” he said.

I wanted to tell him, “Now! I want to go now!” Then I saw what he was doing. He went over to the small group of people who were standing on the sidewalk and started talking to them. I don't know what he asked, but one of the people stepped forward. I recognized her. She lived next door to Mrs. Jhun. Sometimes they had tea together. Riel talked to her, gesturing back toward the house. He took a notebook out of his pocket, wrote down something, then tore out the sheet and handed it to the woman. Finally he came back to the car.

“The next-door neighbor is going to call someone
to fix the door,” he said as he turned the key in the ignition. “She says most of the family is back in Korea but that there's a niece in Vancouver. You know their names or how to get in touch with them?”

I didn't. “But they write to her all the time,” I said, “and I know she telephones them on Sundays. She always waits until the rates are low.”

Riel nodded. “I'll drop you at the hospital, then come back and see if I can find their phone numbers.”

The East General emergency room was packed, but it didn't take long for Riel to find out that Mrs. Jhun was there and being seen by a doctor.

“This could take a while,” he warned me.

I didn't care. I didn't have anything better to do.

“I'll be back as soon as I can,” Riel promised.

He was back thirty minutes later. He went straight to the nurse on duty, and I saw him give her a piece of paper. He talked to her for a while. When he came and claimed the chair next to mine in the waiting room he said, “Apparently she's had a stroke.”

“Is that bad?”

“It can be really bad,” he said, which surprised me. A lot of grown-ups would have just told me not to worry.

We waited through three cups of coffee for Riel and two cans of Coke for me and still nothing happened. Riel asked me if I wanted something to eat. My stomach had settled down a lot, but I wasn't interested in food.

“I'm not hungry,” I said.

He didn't push the issue.

Then I saw a woman with a stethoscope slung around her neck talking to the same nurse Riel had spoken to. When the nurse pointed out Riel, the woman looked faintly surprised. She came toward us. I nudged Riel and we both got to our feet.

“John?” she said. There were little frown marks between her eyes.

“Susan.” Riel turned to me. “Mike, this is Dr. Thomas.”

“You know Mrs. John?” Dr. Thomas asked Riel.

“Jhun,” I said. “It's Jhun.”

Riel introduced me and said, “She's a family friend of Mike's. We found her.”

“Do you know how to contact her family?”

“I gave the information to the nurse,” Riel said.

“How is she?” I asked.

Dr. Thomas glanced at Riel before saying, “Her condition is grave. We'll contact her family, John, but …” She shrugged.

“Can I see her?” I asked.

“Not right now, Mike,” Dr. Thomas said. “Maybe in a while.”

Maybe. Not definitely.

It was late in the day by now. “I'm going to take Mike home,” Riel said. “You've got my cell number. Call me if anything happens, Susan, okay?”

She said she would.

Riel drove me home—it wasn't far—but I couldn't make myself get out of the car, not without knowing for sure.

“Grave, that's not good, is it?” I said. That's how Dr. Thomas has described Mrs. Jhun's condition. Grave.

Riel looked straight at me and shook his head. “It's about as bad as it gets,” he said. Jeez, the guy never sugar-coated anything. “But it doesn't mean the situation can't turn around.”

“You think it will?”

I couldn't read what was in the long, hard look he gave me.