Ill Will (26 page)

It was a twist of fate too bizarre for her to be the one staring at her mortality and me still firmly left in the land of the healthy and well.

“Like life is ever fair,” I said, my voice loud against the stillness of my thoughts.

I couldn’t bear to be with those thoughts anymore.

I made a list of every possible office supply item I might need in the next year, drove out to the suburbs where the mega-office-type-crap stores are and distracted myself with avoiding the insane drivers—tiny blondes in big SUVs are the worst; the rude shoppers—why on earth would I be upset with you rolling your cart over my toes?; and clerks who had to use a calculator to understand that $120 minus $118.90 meant I got a buck and a dime in change.

By the time I got back to my office and put everything away, it was time to go home.

Even though it wasn’t late, Cordelia had gotten there before me.

She was in the kitchen, doing the dishes.

She hates doing the dishes, usually approaching them with a glum determination that borders on the dourest Protestantism—that there was no possible joy because joy was an indication of sinning and eternal damnation. We often traded laundry and ironing for doing dishes. She was fair enough to feel that if I cooked—which I often did—that she should do the cleaning up afterward. But fairness didn’t make her like sticking her hands in soapy water and dealing with grease, so her being alone in the house and deciding that the few dishes from breakfast were how she wanted to spend her evening was unusual.

Enough that it worried me.

“Hey, honey, I’m home,” I called. She wasn’t going to just blurt out what was going on. I needed to let her work her way to it.

“I was wondering when you’d get here.” There was an edge to her tone that did nothing to ease my worry.

“Am I late?”

She put the bowl she had been washing back in the sink, abruptly turning off the tap. “No, no you’re not. Sorry.” She turned to me and managed a ghost of a smile.

I walked behind her and put my arms around her, just held her, saying nothing.

“It’s…uh…it’s not been a good day,” she said softly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, tightening my embrace.

“Traffic was horrible coming home. Three people did a left turn from the right lane. Without signaling. The morning at the office was crazy. Brandon and Lydia got into a fight and Ron had to break it up—which is so not how things usually go.”

“Mr. Abrasive as peacemaker?”

“Dr. Abrasive,” she corrected. “None of the patients were routine—every one of them required extra time and extra paperwork. We had a mess with someone trying to use his brother’s insurance—they only caught it as he paid, realizing that his card had a different name on it.”

“Why would someone do that? Everyone checks IDs these days.”

“Desperate. They were brothers, looked enough alike to use each other’s IDs. The man that came in was laid off, lost his insurance, had gone fishing last weekend. The tip of a fishhook broke off in his hand and he wasn’t able to get it out and had infected the wound. He needed to be seen, didn’t want to pay an emergency room fee.”

“What a mess! So what happened?”

“We let him slide by with paying out of pocket. Using a check that’ll probably bounce. If it does, then he’s going to be in even more trouble. The poverty spiral, how not having money for one thing affects everything you do. His brother is going to have to find another doctor. And I got to be the one to tell him.”

“Ouch. That’s not a good day,” I agreed.

“That’s not all,” she said softly.

I wanted her not to talk, not to say anything. I could handle traffic, other people’s tragedies, but not here, not now, not in these walls, the ones that had always kept me safe before.

I had to fight to get out the words, “Tell me.”

“Chemo and radiation in the next few days. It’s stage three, an aggressive form.” She paused for a moment, picked up the bowl as if to continue washing, then put it down again. “It’s what I expected—lymphoma is often only detected once it’s progressed to several nodes. The advantage to the more aggressive form is that it can be eradicated; the less aggressive forms rarely clear, although they may move so slowly that they don’t need immediate treatment.”

I recognized the information dump for what it was—distance, control. For both of us. Letting her talk meant that I didn’t need to respond. She ran down the various subtypes, how the tests worked, a list of chemo drugs, the advantages and disadvantages of each—a wash of medical jargon that I understood well enough to not ask for the definition of each word—she had cancer, it was serious, the treatment would be aggressive, and our lives would change.

My mind ran through a gamut of emotions, skimming past the most brutal of what-ifs and focusing on going to the grocery to get ingredients for chicken soup, stocking up on sports drinks. Chemo would probably cause nausea, and those were the small things that I could do to help with this big thing that had invaded our life.

Our lives. Suddenly we were very different people on very different journeys.

She abruptly said, “I’m sorry. I’m just spewing out facts. Like if I know enough about this, then I’m in charge and not these aberrant cells growing in my body.”

“What do you need from me?” I asked.

She was silent. She tried to smile. Failed. Finally answered, “I don’t know. I don’t think I know anything at the moment. I don’t know what I want, let alone what I need from you.” She picked up the bowl again and washed it.

I let her go and fed the cats. They had been unusually patient, as if they knew that this was a time their begging would go ignored.

Cordelia finished the last few dishes in silence. Suddenly, she threw the dish towel she had been drying her hands on at me. “Let’s have a good time. Let’s do the things we’ve been promising ourselves we’d do—eat out at the restaurants we’ve been meaning to try. Do a swamp tour—I haven’t done that in years. Drive over to the coast, maybe even go to a casino—I’ve never played a slot machine.”

“All of that tonight, huh?” I echoed her mood.

“Perhaps not everything. How about going out to eat?”

I put my arms around her. “I think we can manage that. Where would you like to go?”

She managed a smile. “You know I hate making those kinds of decisions. This is what you can do for me, decide.”

I kissed her, a sign that I would take care of it.

I first thought of calling Torbin—he was a restaurant maven and see what he suggested. But I hadn’t heard from him since our last altercation and I wasn’t willing to deal with him.

“To the computer,” I pulled away from her. The Internet would have to substitute for my cousin. “How dressy?” I asked as I booted it up.

“All decisions are yours.”

Cordelia did hate to make decisions—save for the ones she wanted to make—so was happy to defer to me. I usually didn’t let her get away with that because I wasn’t going to be stuck with the full responsibility if things screwed up.

I couldn’t even complain that she was using cancer to get her way.

I choose fancy and dressy, one of the newer restaurants in the Warehouse District that some of our friends had been raving about.

We didn’t talk about cancer, we enjoyed the food and drinks, made a list of where else we’d like to go—some were real, like the swamp tour, some more a wish list, like biking across the country. We’d have to brush the dust off our bikes and make it cross-town a few times first.

It was scary and exhilarating to live so fiercely in the moment. The daily details of work and laundry and picking up cat food, brushed aside to focus on doing what we’d always longed to do.

As if the future could contain only the next few days and we didn’t dare to look beyond that.

On Saturday night we went out with Alex and Joanne. We talked about Cordelia’s diagnosis. She reassured them—and me—that this was a cancer that could be cured, that she’d be okay. Alex said that she was going to see if she could change her schedule to four long days and then most weeks have three days off. But we didn’t dwell on the hard topics; instead we enjoyed the cool, clear evening and the food, let the good parts of life flow over us like a river that might never end.

Monday brought me back to work and my life.

Normal, Cordelia kept insisting. I would do my best to honor her wishes.

I needed to get back to my cases, to not leave them sitting on the shelf too long.

There were things I could do. If I could link The Cure to NBG, I could help extract Fletcher McConkle’s aunt from the attentive grasp of Vincent. And perhaps find some justice for Reginald Banks, and someone who might be his uncle.

I quickly set up a fake e-mail for pink survey lady extraordinaire Deborah Perkins and e-mailed Vincent, asking for information about the meeting he had mentioned.

I also called up McConkle himself, although I actually talked to his wife. I said I wanted to give them an update on my progress on the case. Maybe they had some idea if his aunt had ever used The Cure and not just NBG. She seemed happy to hear from me, as if her being the one to sign on the dotted line made her responsible for my work. She asked if I could meet them at their workplace later in the day and I agreed. Driving was distracting, and I was willing to do most anything not to stare at these walls. She gave me an address in the Gentilly area.

Then I packaged up everything the Grannies had found out about Prejean—well, the stuff that they could legally find out, I wasn’t going to get them busted them for hacking—and e-mailed it off to Danny.

After that I completely dismantled and cleaned the coffeemaker. I wondered if it would taste as good without the sludge. A taste test was required, so I made a big pot. Caffeine can also be distracting. The caffeine was the motivator for me to file cases, catch up on billing, even to the woman whose dead husband was alive and newly married in Vegas—she might pay. The top of my desk slowly appeared.

Shortly after lunch, I got a reply from Vincent. Friendly, even a little sweet.

Dear Debbie,

That’s great! I’d love for you to learn more about NBG. We’re having a prospective Naturalist meeting tomorrow night and I’m one of the people leading it. It would be great if you could come, although that might be a little soon. You’ve probably got a busy schedule. I think you’d be a great fit and NBG could be great for you.

Looking forward to seeing you soon, Vincent.

Would it be too much to say that Vinnie was not a great prose stylist? He gave me an address in Metairie, one of the suburbs of New Orleans. His e-mail had an automatic signature, giving contact info and repeating his name. Vincent Tranner. I had to leave to meet the McConkles, but once I was back, I could see what I could find out about Vinnie. I had not only his name, but his license plate number.

Getting to the address that Mrs. McConkle gave me was a straight shot up Elysian Fields, then squirreling around several turns into a residential area I’d never been in. Before Katrina this had been a tidy zone of G.I. Bill houses for the working class and lower middle class. It was slowly returning to a decent neighborhood, only a few houses empty and desolate as if no one had been there since August 29, 2005. Some of the houses were clearly repaired, newly painted, cars in the driveway. Others were on the way, a FEMA trailer parked out front, or the kinds of trucks that indicated carpenters and electricians.

The house I pulled in front of had a big blue pickup in the driveway, an indication that someone was actively working here.

The workers turned out to be the McConkles. He was a carpenter, she was an electrician. I found them inside the gutted house. He was framing walls and she was running conduit.

“Break time,” she called when she saw me.

I suddenly liked them both a whole lot better. Fletcher had the sense to hook up with a woman who was both good with money and good with her hands. They seemed to be working together as a team. He was pulling his weight and had the sawdust in his hair to prove it.

“This your house?” I asked.

“Naw,” he answered. “Donna’s second cousin on her mother’s side. Just close enough to get the family rate.” He smiled a friendly tease at her.

“You offered,” she rejoined. “They would have paid going rate to get it done right.”

“They’d already been ripped off once. Thought they needed a break.”

“Any chance their rip-off artist was named Prejean? Or Pearlman?

He looked at her and she shrugged her shoulders. “No, don’t know the name,” he made explicit. “Why?”

“Another case I’m working on. Bunch of folks ripped off by this lowlife,” I explained.

“I can call Dad and get the info,” she said.

“How are you doing about my aunt?” Fletcher asked.

Almost as an offering, I handed them the printout of what I’d found on NBG. Fletcher took it, then handed it to his wife. She paged through it.

He looked dubiously at the stack of papers. I gathered that reading wasn’t his favorite activity. I did a verbal rundown of what I’d discovered, finishing with, “I think Vincent succeeds by giving your aunt attention. He’s a true believer, not just in the pills but in living well, and is trying to get her to improve her eating habits and make other healthy lifestyle changes. Maybe you should visit her more often.”