The Missing Year (20 page)

Morgan made her way back to Ross and Lila’s table. She refilled Blake’s Seltzer and looked at Lila’s untouched wine glass.

“Is there something wrong with the wine?”

“No, nothing.” Lila leered at Ross. “I’m suddenly not in the mood.”

“I’ll leave it in case you change your mind, but can I get you something else?”

“Unsweetened iced tea, please.”

“Are you ready to order?”

“Just the tea for now, thank you.” Lila waited for Morgan to leave and said, “Did your wife want to stay at home, you know—?”

“Until the end?” Blake said. Lila nodded. “She did. Sarah hated hospitals. We went over everything before she got too sick. I needed to know what she wanted.”

“Then she said things to you in confidence? Things she’d only say to you?”

“She did. Sarah always said she could tell me anything.”

“Even if it hurt you? I mean, do you think sometimes she tried to spare your feelings?”

“Probably, though less so than others. She was most protective of her mom at the end. Sarah felt that there were things she couldn’t handle.”

“Like the fact that she was suffering?”

“Eventually,” Ross said. “Sure.”

“Then you understand why Blake wanted things kept from Ruth, and why maybe I knew things about him she didn’t?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Did Sarah ever ask you to end her suffering?”

“No, never,” Ross said, but it was a lie.

“If she had, could you have done it?”

Ross shook his head. He had asked himself the same question, nearly crossing the line on several occasions in those final painful days. Accepting Sarah’s death was inevitable. Ending her suffering seemed the humane thing to do, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Why do you ask?”

“Do you remember in the news a couple years back, the woman who was on life support for something like ten years because her husband and parents were fighting over whether or not to take her off the machines? The husband wanted to let his wife die in peace.”

“And her parents said it was because he was covering something up, right? Harrow, or Harris, wasn’t that her name?” Ross would have had to be living under a rock not to have heard about her.

The woman’s husband eventually won in court.

“Nelda Harris,” Lila said. “She was about Blake’s age when she died. I always felt bad for the things the media said about her husband.”

“You believe he had nothing to do with her injuries?”

“I think the media likes juicy stories. The case made good television. You ever tell yourself you can handle anything, but when you see someone else go through it, you wonder, could I actually do that?”

Ross nodded.

“Blake had watched his father die a horrible drawn-out death. He didn’t talk much about it until the Harris case came up, but he said he was always thinking of him, not how he was when he was alive and healthy, but how he was at the end. Blake said his mother had done the wrong thing, trying to hold on to his father when he didn’t want to be held on to. Did you know suicide is the third leading cause of death in Huntington’s patients, after aspiration pneumonia and heart failure?”

Ross shook his head. “I probably
should
know that.”

“Blake said his father had wanted to go to a long-term care facility, but his mother insisted on keeping him home. I don’t know if that was for his benefit or hers. Ruth became the round-the-clock caregiver; everything from feedings to changing adult diapers. When her husband died, Ruth died with him. She’d been taking care of him for so long that she didn’t spend time with anyone else. She used to quilt, play Bridge, and go to Bingo. Her friends tried to have her back, to do things with her again, but Ruth wanted to be left to her suffering. Blake said he didn’t want that for me, or for himself. He didn’t want anyone to remember him the way he remembered his father. He knew, eventually, he’d become like Nelda Harris—suffering, unable to communicate—and everyone who loved him would be too damn selfish to let him go. For Blake, Nelda Harris being removed from life support was a victory. That night he asked me if it were him, would I make sure he was never kept alive by machines?”

“That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone.”

“It is, but I didn’t think it would come to that, so I agreed. I had done enough research to know Huntington’s didn’t end with the patient on life support. Blake knew that too, when he made me promise. I should have known something was wrong then, that Blake was worried, but him ever getting sick at that point was only a possibility. He knew, Ross. He was waiting.”

“We’ve been over this, Lila. There was no way Blake could have predicted the shooting.”

“He couldn’t have, no. But he was smart enough to recognize a window of opportunity when he saw one.”

Lila picked up the glass of wine she had been ignoring and polished it off in a few long sips. A familiar look came over her, the same confessional expression Ross had seen on Arlene Pope’s face before she admitted to murdering her infant in cold blood. In Ross’s experience, there came a point when people needed to unburden themselves. He could see Lila was there.

“The local papers called Blake a hero for saving that family,” she said. “By all accounts he took a bullet that could have been for any of them. The shooter was out of his mind.”

“How did you even
get
to the paper?” Psychiatric inpatients were generally kept away from the news.

“The articles started long before I went into the hospital. But it wasn’t the paper, or the news reports, or the people calling my house, or the memorial on my front lawn that reminded me of Blake throwing himself at a strung-out eighteen-year-old. It was seeing the goddamned tape, over and over again in my head. ”

“Tape?”

Lila raised her hand to catch Morgan’s attention.

“What can I get for you?” Morgan said.

“Another glass of wine, please, and an order of spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Make that two of each,” Ross said.

Morgan smiled. “I knew you’d come around.”

“Nothing goes with a glass of Merlot like a plate of spaghetti,” Lila said.

Morgan rubbed her stomach. “Remind me of that in another few weeks.” She walked away chuckling, and picked up the billfold off a recently cleared table.

“What tape?” Ross said.

“The convenience store surveillance tape from that night. I shouldn’t have watched it, but I had this sick feeling in my stomach that Blake’s shooting wasn’t an accident.”

“You’re saying that Blake
tried
to get himself shot?”

“Blake was smart enough to recognize someone not in their right mind, Dr. Reeves. He knew what would happen. The kid’s name was Garrett Wade. I looked him up on Facebook when Blake was in the hospital and found a picture of a teenage boy hugging a Yellow Lab. I wouldn’t have believed it was the same person that was in the video. The Garrett Wade I saw was thin and strung out. He later admitted he was on PCP and something else he didn’t know, something his dealer had given him. Stupid kid didn’t even ask what it was. He said shooting Blake was the only way out of that store. He was desperate. There’s no way Blake didn’t see that.”

“How did Jeremy get involved?”

“I called him. Blake was taken to Merrick Memorial, but I had no idea how bad things were. I didn’t want to believe the worst, and if Blake could get better, if the gunshot wasn’t fatal, I didn’t want to expose the fact that he was sick. Jeremy had staff privileges, unlike you at Lakeside.”

Ross’s incomplete paperwork reared its ugly head. Without a completed file, he didn’t have treating privileges. He should have known that Lila, having been married to a surgeon, would have understood that if he told her.

“I’m sorry if it seemed like I was talking over your head.”

“We’re from the same social circles, Dr. Reeves. I filled out my fair share of Blake’s paperwork.”

“Why ask Jeremy to act as attending?”

“He was the only other person who knew Blake was sick. Someone had to make sure that his treatment didn’t cause an interaction. Jeremy was supposed to watch over Blake, and he did. Maybe too well.”

“The ASO?”

Lila nodded. “Jeremy never talked to me about it or I would’ve told him no. Joyce Coleman, Merrick Memorial’s CEO, called me when he filed the paperwork. The hospital was one of several authorized for the trial. ASO may have slowed the Huntington’s, but it couldn’t stop it. I knew it, Blake knew it, and Jeremy knew it, too. But he insisted that once Blake pulled through from his surgery, he’d see things differently.”

“Jeremy expected Blake’s near-death experience would make him want to live?”

“He did.”

“Did you ever tell him you suspected Blake had put himself in harm’s way?”

“No. If I had,” she paused for a long moment, “he’d have expected what I was going to do next.”

“Which was?”

Lila finished her second glass of wine, which had come while they were talking. “I asked Joyce to have the Ethics Committee vote against Blake being started on the trial. It meant telling three more people that Blake was sick, but they were sworn to secrecy.”

“And they went along with the CEO’s request?”

“Come on, Ross. You’ve worked at a hospital, right? No one steamrolls the CEO.”

“Why did Jeremy think Blake would survive? Once the extent of his injuries made it clear he had little chance of recovery, why try him on an experimental drug protocol?”

“The early tests were inconclusive, making Blake’s prognosis uncertain. There were small signs of hope, the kinds of things people would hold on to.”

“But not you?”

“Especially me, but I kept going back to the Nelda Harris case, to what Blake had asked me to do. Jeremy and I argued over the ASO. I told him Blake wouldn’t have wanted it and that asking for it had more people than Blake would have wanted knowing he was sick. Jeremy and Blake were like best friends. Jeremy wasn’t thinking clearly. He said he was going to help Blake regardless of what Blake wanted. That’s when I knew I had no choice. Without an advance directive, Jeremy was going to expose everything Blake wanted hidden.”

“What about Ruth? Why didn’t Jeremy tell her Blake was sick?”

“Same reason I didn’t, I guess. Jeremy had made a promise to Blake to not tell Ruth, specifically. Whether he told her or not didn’t matter. She was going to take his side. Taking mine meant letting Blake die.”

“Ruth said there was no way Blake would have signed that kind of paperwork.”

Lila stared at the center of the table, her eyes filled with tears.

“Lila?” Ross tilted his head to get a better look at her face. “What’s the matter?”

“When you love someone, you do anything for them, right?”

“What did
you
do?”

A long silence passed.

“Lila, what did you do?”

“What I had to. I knew what Blake wanted the night the Nelda Harris verdict came in, but he was so preoccupied after that, so … not himself … that he didn’t have time to make sure everything was taken care of, legally speaking.”

Ruth had been right.

“You forged the advanced directive?”

Lila wiped the tip of her nose with the back of her hand and nodded.

The early bird diners had long since gone home, the Downtowner nearly silent. Morgan balanced herself on a stool at the end of the counter in front of a towering slice of apple pie. Her feet were so swollen that she had untied her shoes.

Ross tucked a hundred dollar bill into the billfold for charges totaling less than fifty and gestured for Lila to follow him.

“It’s getting late,” he said. “We should go.”

Ross wanted to understand why Lila had forged the advance directive, but part of him wondered if Ruth and Jeremy weren’t right in their anger. While Blake was terminal, his death wasn’t necessarily imminent. Head shots where the bullet had been successfully retrieved could have meant a partial recovery at the very least.

The fine line between compassion and murder was blurry.

Lila put on her windbreaker and said, “I don’t want to go back.”

“You don’t have a choice.” Ross set the money on the counter next to Morgan’s plate.

Morgan opened the billfold. “Don’t you want your change?”

“No, thank you. We’re all set.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Good luck with the baby.”

The crisp night air felt good as Ross left the diner with his jacket slung over his arm. The smells of grease, onions, and meatloaf permeated his sweater, making him feel like he needed airing out.

“That was a nice thing you did.” Lila crossed her arms over her chest, stopping the wind from grabbing her jacket.

“She was attentive.” Ross didn’t want a big deal made.

Lila climbed into the passenger’s seat and hesitated to fasten her seatbelt. “Wait.”

“For what?”

“Can’t we stay out a while longer? I feel like we still need to talk. With you leaving and all—”

“If you’re worried I’m going to tell someone what you did, don’t be.”

“I’m not.” Lila shrugged. “I’ve had thoughts of telling someone myself to get rid of this guilt, but that’s not what this is about. I thought you might support what I did, having watched your wife suffer. I’m worried that you, the one person who might see my side of this, can’t, and I wonder if that means I did the wrong thing.”

“I’m not here to judge, Lila.”

“Maybe I want you to. I need someone to know what I did and at the very least agree with
why
I did it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Ross said, “because acknowledging that you made the right choice means admitting I made the wrong one. You wanted to know if Sarah had ever asked me to help her die when things got really bad for her. I lied.”

“She did ask for your help.”

“She was in the worst pain and I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t be the reason she was gone. I wasn’t sure I could face our friends and family afterward if I had given her the right combination of pills to help ease her into a peaceful death. Turns out, I couldn’t face them anyway. I was sure they could see Sarah had begged for a merciful passing and that I had refused her. I was ashamed for not being able to be what she needed, for doing the wrong thing.”

“There’s no right answer.” Lila wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “No matter what, you would have blamed yourself. The day of Blake’s funeral, I almost told Ruth everything. Nearly everyone held me responsible for his death. I pretended not to know that, but I heard them whispering. I loved my husband more than anything and I would have thought the people who knew us knew that, but even Ruth questioned my motives. She threatened to expose me, to ruin my life. The only way to stop her was to ….”

“Attempt suicide?”

Lila turned to face the window. The diner lights cast her features in shadows and glistened off the tears rolling down her cheek. “I wanted the whole thing over, but I wasn’t about to go to jail for doing the right thing.”

“You’ve been hospitalized for a
year
to avoid being exposed?” No wonder the medications hadn’t worked. “What was with that stunt at the lake?”

“I meant what I said. Every day since losing Blake has been like drowning. I have no idea how to live without him. I don’t know what to do next.”

“But at least now you don’t have to look over your shoulder, right? Now that Ruth knows Blake was sick, she’ll back off. Me telling her that lets you off the hook.”

“Maybe. I had expected Jeremy to tell her long before now.”

“What about Jeremy?”

“Jeremy had enough of a hand in things to want to keep quiet.”

“If all you needed was for someone to clue Ruth in, why didn’t you do it?”

“Mostly because I’d promised Blake I wouldn’t, but if I had told her, do you think she wouldn’t have been suspicious of that, too?”

“Did you ever plan on going through with it?”

“Killing myself? Yes. I had every intention of dying. I locked the door between the garage and the house and disabled the carbon monoxide detector to keep from alerting the neighbors. I got into Blake’s car and put our song,
Keep on Loving You,
on repeat on my mp3 player
.
” She smiled. “It was my way of having Blake with me when I went. I closed my eyes and waited.”

“You didn’t tell anyone what you planned to do?”

“Brenda, the woman who found me, obviously suspected, though I didn’t come right out and tell her I was suicidal. Ruth knew when I gave her Princess. I could tell she knew, but she didn’t bother trying to stop me.”

“Now that she realizes Blake was sick, I think she feels bad about that.”