Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [14]
She moved aside to make room for me. It was a woman, older, faded, devoid of makeup, her features flavored with that lack of vitality a long-term patient acquires, her body so tiny and frail and motionless, I had to look twice to be certain she was breathing. When I turned to Stephanie, her eyes were like blue lasers.
“You don’t know her?”
I turned back to the patient. “I don’t think so.”
“Look again. Sometimes it’s difficult to recognize a person when they’re horizontal. But you’ve seen her on her back before. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Getting her horizontal?”
It was with a queasy feeling that I realized we were standing over Stephanie’s sister, Holly. I’d cherished Holly, made love to Holly, woken up beside her, and yet I barely recognized the skeleton she’d become. “Oh, God.”
“Her doctors don’t think so, but I believe she hears everything around her. I believe she’s listening to us right now. You know how a stroke victim can hear what you say but can’t respond. You ask them to move their hand, their brain sends the signal, but the signal never arrives. It’s got to be the most frustrating feeling on earth.”
“What happened?”
“A cerebrovascular accident, although so far nobody’s been able to figure out exactly what caused it. We think she had an aneurysm.”
“This is incredible.”
“Is it?”
“She’s the second person I’ve seen today in basically this same situation.”
“I’m sorry you’re having such a bad day.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
“I don’t get it. She’s twenty-eight. People her age don’t have strokes.”
“Not unless there are special circumstances. I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what those circumstances might have been.”
“That’s why you came to North Bend? If I’d known she was sick, I never would have . . . Holly was in perfect health the last time I saw her.”
“Perfect mental health?”
“What are you getting at?”
She reached under the blanket for her sister’s hand. “We think she tried to kill herself. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
8. FREAK ME OUT
Nothing she might have said could have rendered me quite so speechless.
At least now I knew the primary source of her antipathy toward me: Stephanie Riggs thought I had driven her sister to suicide—and a botched job at that.
Ten years ago our department responded to a young man who’d tried to hang himself in the woods; he was found minutes later by his brothers, who revived him so that he could spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state. We all thought about that patient from time to time. All of us who’d been on the alarm thought about him. There were endings worse than death.
What had happened to Holly, for instance. It was one thing to be ninety and have a stroke—live a couple more years. It was quite another to be twenty-eight and have a stroke, consigned to a bed for another half century.
“This was because of you,” Stephanie Riggs said. “Because of your shabby affair.”
Our relationship had fizzled after Holly discovered I was seeing one of the Suzannes. I had treated her shabbily.
“I can’t believe Holly would kill herself. I certainly never saw any hint of depression or—”
“Not until you dumped her. They found her forty-some hours after you last spoke. As far as we could ascertain, she didn’t speak to anyone else or leave the house after that last phone call with you.”
I remembered it.
The conversation had been one-sided and rambling, an hour during which Holly had cried over the fact that we were no longer an item, as if two people had never decided to go their separate ways before. Looking back on it, I could see now that our breakup had been my fault. What’s tricky to explain without making me sound like a jerk, and what I would never admit to her sister, who already thought I was a jerk, was that during