The First Stone (9 page)

Keeping his finger on the
open
button, Jack said, “Sorry, but I've got to get back to work.” He appeared to be speaking to Leeza, but it was her mother who turned to face him.

“Right now?” Diane asked.

He nodded. “I've missed a lot of time. Things are piling up. You understand.”

Gritting her teeth, Leeza found it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. But she didn't really need to hear the words. She could read the look on her stepfather's face, see him groping for whatever excuse would permit him to leave. Nor did she blame him. Now.

He reached out of the elevator and gently squeezed Leeza's free hand. “I'll see you soon, honey.” Then, to his wife, “I'll take a taxi so you can keep the car.” He released the button and the doors slid shut.

Leeza watched her mother stare at the elevator for a moment, trying to rearrange the expression on her face into something other than disapproval. Leeza wanted to tell her it was okay.

Of course, it hadn't been okay at first. She'd learned that Jack had been to the hospital only a handful of times while she was in the coma, and he hadn't stayed long after she'd regained consciousness. In the short time he was there, she'd noticed how he avoided her eyes when he spoke to her, his gaze fixed on some point above her head. Not that Leeza commented on this. She was only concerned about one thing now: the next morphine injection that made the pain less immediate, more bearable.

She'd watched her stepfather that morning as they'd wheeled her stretcher down the hospital corridor toward the elevators and the waiting ambulance in preparation for the ride to the Halifax Rehabilitation Center. Watched him glance furtively through open doorways at patients in rooms along the hall. If someone's eyes happened to meet his, he looked away quickly, his face drawn, his lips a straight line. It was then that she realized how hard this had been for him. First Ellen. And now her.

No, she didn't blame her stepfather. How could she? The night before, she had tried to look at the pile of cards and notes she'd received, but the pain had made the task unbearable and she'd given up after reading only a few. She'd noted, however, that nearly all of them had arrived within a day or two of her accident, and only Jen and Robin had called her mother in the last two weeks to ask about Leeza and pass along good thoughts. Neither had asked when they could visit.

No, she couldn't blame her stepfather for not wanting to be there. No one else did, either. Herself less than anyone.

“Well, then,” her mother said, and Leeza could hear her trying her best to mask the annoyance in her voice as she turned to the others. “Lead on.”

Rolling the stretcher down the hall, the ambulance attendant resumed the steady patter he'd begun the moment he'd arrived at the ACU. He'd talked about growing up in Conception Bay, Newfoundland; about the basketball team he played on in his spare time; about the best choices for pets, the rising cost of gasoline. how buying in bulk never seemed to save him any money. Leeza hadn't been able to focus on his wordsand was thankful that her mother had responded with equally meaningless small talk. But now her mother was quiet.

As if sensing the sudden awkwardness, Matt McKillup began cracking jokes nonstop in his thick Newfoundland accent. By the time they'd reached Leeza's room, the nurse was laughing out loud, and even her mother had begun to smile. Leeza, however, stared straight ahead. The rehab's sixth floor was where she'd be living for at least the next three months, and she fought to keep a lemon-sized lump of homesickness from rising in her throat. How different this place was from their cozy two-story on Connaught Avenue. There, everything was color and light. An interior decorator, her mother had transformed their home from its original traditional blandness into a stylish combination of comfort and elegance that drew admiring comments from everyone who saw it. Now, as the attendant steered the stretcher through a doorway near the end of the hall, Leeza's heart sank. She closed her eyes to the beige walls and listened to the sounds around her: voices low in conversation, a television host describing fantastic prizes to be won, a toilet flushing, footsteps at the other end of the hall, a guttural moaning that suggested someone in terrible pain. That last sound reminded her of the agony awaiting her when the nurse and ambulance attendant would move her from the stretcher to the bed. She clenched her teeth and opened her eyes.

“Ride's over,” Matt announced. He eased the stretcher to a stop beside one of the room's two beds. Although both were empty, a hairbrush, several chocolate bar wrappers and other personal items on the table next to the bed by the window were evidence of another occupant. Leeza saw a name written in marker on a card at the head of the bed: Brett Turner. She was sharing a room with a guy?

The nurse must have noticed her startled expression. “It's not what you think. Brett's a woman. You'll like her. She's only a couple years older than you are.”

“I brought her in …” Matt looked to Carly for confirmation. “What's it been? Six weeks ago? Seven?” The nurse nodded as the ambulance attendant moved around to the other side of the bed. “A real character, that one,” he said. He and Carly grasped opposite edges of the stretcher sheet and gently eased Leeza onto the bed, then slowly drew the sheet out from under her. Despite their efforts to move her smoothly, Leeza gasped as white-hot needles jabbed at her left side, and she tried to focus on Matt's steady stream of words. “You'll have to be on your toes, Leeza, sharin' a room with the likes ‘a her.”

“I heard that.” Although the result was another stab of pain, Leeza couldn't help turning slightly to see a tiny redhead grinning at them from a wheelchair in the doorway. “Carly, do they still let goofy Newfies in this place?”

Matt grinned. “Speak ‘a the devil.”

“Devil?” the redhead chided. “This from a guy with a stretcher for a back seat?”

Matt shook his head at Carly. “By now I should know better than to tangle with that one, eh?”

Smiling, the nurse made introductions. “Leeza, meet Brett Turner. Brett, this is Leeza Hemming.”

The wheelchair rolled into the room and around to the other bed. “Hi, Leeza. Guess we'll be bunk-buddies for a while.”

Leeza's response—a muted “Hi”—was fainter than she'd intended. She cleared her throat to repeat it but her mother was already introducing herself: “I'm Diane Morrison. Leeza's mother.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Morrison. Despite what Matt the Rat here says about me, I'm pretty harmless.”

“Pretty, yes. Harmless, no,” Matt said. “I still have a bruise from that time you rolled over my foot.”

The girl lifted herself out of the wheelchair and lay back on her bed. “That'll teach you to get in front of a wheelchair race.”

Carly turned to a clearly startled Diane. “We don't allow races, Mrs. Morrison. But Brett, here, never met a rule she didn't break.”

Brett threw an arm over her eyes in a gesture of eternal suffering. “That's right. Pick on the gimp.”

Carly chuckled, and Leeza could tell her mother was impressed by the easy relationship between patient and nurse. Leeza was more cynical. After all, what wasn't there to like about a person who brought youpain medication on a regular basis? She'd be Carly's best friend as long as the morphine was on time.

“Well, Leeza,” said Matt, lifting the brake on the stretcher, “looks like you're all settled so I'll be leavin' you with the rehab race queen. If she gives you a hard time, Just call me.” He nodded at the other three people in the room. “Later, ladies,” he said, then he guided the stretcher into the hallway and was gone.

Leeza lay back on her pillow and tried not to think how much time would elapse before her next needle, tried instead to focus on her mother bustling about the room. “Where's the best place for this?” her mother asked the nurse, pointing to the blue suitcase at her side.

Carly turned to the two narrow metal doors in the corner. “Both these lockers are yours, Leeza. You might want to put your shirts, sweaters, things like that in the top locker and your footwear in the bottom one. But it's up to you. Whatever you find easiest.” She glanced at Diane. “Maybe you could just leave that there and let Leeza deal with it when she's feeling up to it.”

Leeza's mouth opened. She managed to close it before speaking the words her lips had nearly formed. How in hell was she supposed to unpack a suitcase when she couldn't even imagine lifting her head off her pillow? There wasn't enough morphine in the world to make
that
happen. Her suitcase could sit there until someone fell over it. It wasn't as if she needed what was in it anyway. It'd be a hell of a longtime before she could wear something besides the hospital gowns that had been her only clothing since the accident.

The nurse spoke again. “I have some papers that need to be signed. Perhaps we could go take care of those now and leave Leeza to get settled.”

Diane nodded. Leaning over the bed, she kissed her daughter lightly on the cheek. “I'll be back in a bit. Okay, honey?”

“Mmm.” Leeza stared at the ceiling.

“She'll be fine,” Leeza heard the nurse say as she led Diane out of the room.

A long moment passed.
She'll be fine
. Right, thought Leeza. Dislocated shoulder, broken arm and ribs, fractured leg and pelvis, metal sticking out of her like she was one of those half-human, half-machine characters in a sci-fi film. Or worse: something real. Like the turtle she'd once seen at summer camp flipped over on its back, unable to right itself, its legs waving uselessly in the air. Helpless. Like the feeble residents at Silver Meadows, diapered, washed and fed like babies. Completely dependent. Like Leeza was now.
She'll be fine
. She fought to keep a sob from tearing her chest apart, focused on the white tiles above her, tried to ignore the bass-drum throb that began in her legs and ended in her left shoulder.

Then, “The sprinkler on the left.”

Leeza turned slightly toward the voice from the other bed, gasped as cruel fingers scrabbled up anddown her neck. “Pardon me?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

Brett lay on her back too, pointing at the ceiling. “Up there, the sprinkler on the left. That was my focal point. When the pain got too much for me, I'd concentrate on that one thing. Sometimes it worked.”

Leeza scanned the ceiling and saw four chrome-plated sprinkler heads. She'd seen hundreds like them in the past—in school, in department stores, in the many hospital rooms where Ellen had lain. Inside each was a thin, mercury-filled glass tube designed to burst when heat from a fire expanded the red liquid. Leeza felt exactly like that tube—fragile, ready to burst. She swallowed hard to keep from crying. “Why that one?” she asked, and was immediately ashamed of how pathetic her voice sounded. Like a croak.

Brett didn't seem to notice. “The four of them make a rectangle and that one's in the top left corner. I've got a thing about top left corners. Like with envelopes? Most people focus on the name of the person they're going to. Or the stamp. Me, I look at the return address. Top left corner, right? I guess I'm more interested in where letters have been than where they're going.”

Leeza tried to follow the logic in what she was hearing but gave up, listening instead to the musical quality of the girl's voice. She sounded like one of those radio personalities whose voices run up and down three octaves when delivering everything from ads to late-breaking news.

“So. Where're you from?”

It took Leeza a moment to realize it was a question that required an answer. “Here. I live in Halifax.”

“I'm from the Annapolis Valley. Little town called Brookdale. about two hours' drive from here.” She chatted about growing up there and how she still lived with her parents; about clerking at the Brookdale Home Hardware store; about Sam, her boyfriend, who worked shifts at the air force base in Greenwood, so he didn't get into the city often to visit but called at least once every day. Brett continued to talk, but Leeza's mind held on to only one fact: the size of Brett's community. “You could probably fit all the people in Brookdale inside this one building,” she'd said.

Leeza tried to imagine that. Having everyone you loved in one building. Her house had been like that once. Before Ellen had died. She turned her attention to the ceiling again. Focused on the top left sprinkler. Became aware that the chatter had stopped. A long silence followed, a silence Leeza had neither strength nor inclination to end.

Finally, “Carly told me you were in a car accident.”

Leeza didn't respond. It hadn't seemed like a question.

“Uh … Anybody die?”

Leeza said nothing for a while, listened to the moaning that filtered through the doorway from somewhere down the hall. Then, “Just me,” she said.

Greg Matheson's rusted Ford Escort hesitated, wheezed and belched blue smoke each time the social worker floored the gas pedal, threading the car in and out of traffic. Several of the Saturday morning drivers passing him made throat-cutting motions, and an attractive young woman on the passenger side of a Land Rover held up a “PUT IT OUT OF ITS MISERY!” sign hastily scrawled on the back of a McDonald's napkin. Greg just smiled and waved good-naturedly, but Reef's face reflected his humiliation, and he avoided eye contact with anyone.