Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [41]
“That’s right.”
“We have instructions. You’re not to visit any patient on this floor.”
“Dr. Riggs in the hospital? I’d like to speak to her.”
The nurse turned abruptly and went through a door behind the counter, where I could hear her speaking to someone. When she returned, she said, “Dr. Riggs is not available.”
“Tell her I drove an hour to see her.”
After a moment a second nurse emerged from the back room, closing the door behind her. The first nurse began shuffling paperwork on the desk. The other one turned her back to me. When an Asian man with the look of a lifelong menial worker came down the hallway and stepped behind the counter, I said, “Excuse me. Can you please go back there and tell Dr. Riggs I’m going to wait out here until hell freezes over?”
He glanced at the two nurses quizzically.
That was when I began singing. At the top of my lungs. “Peggy Sue. Peggy Sue. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue. Oh, Pegggggy, my Peggy Sue-ue-ue-ue-ue . . .” Under ordinary circumstances I was a credible singer, but today my screeching was horribly off-key.
Stephanie Riggs popped out of the door like a cork out of a bottle, face compressed in anger, strawberry-blond hair down around her shoulders. Several more nurses and aides showed up behind her at the counter.
“You’re making a scene,” Riggs said.
“I can make a bigger one.”
“Call Security.”
“I know what’s wrong with your sister.”
“Bullshit. Call Security.”
I thrust out my hands. “She have this?”
“Hold up,” Stephanie said to the nurse who was dialing Security. Stephanie stepped around the counter, took one of my hands in hers, turned it over, then walked brusquely down the corridor in the direction of Holly’s room.
When I followed, the nurse with the phone said, “You still want me to call?” Stephanie didn’t hear her.
As soon as we got to the room, I lost all my zip. Holly was in a wheelchair, head sagging at an angle that looked painful. Nothing else in the room had changed. Her eyes were open and unfocused. Her sister leaned over and kissed Holly’s brow, a move that provoked no reaction from my former girlfriend.
Stephanie Riggs reached under the blankets and brought her sister’s right hand out.
It was pale and waxy-looking, just like mine.
“Was it like that from the beginning?” I asked.
“From a few days before she went down. At least according to this.” Stephanie produced a small black journal from the pocket of her lab coat. I found it touching that she carried her sister’s diary on her person. God only knew what was written about me in there.
I handed her the card I’d been carrying.
She sat down, the three-by-five card in one hand, her sister’s diary in the other, comparing the itinerary of Stan Beebe’s last few days with that of her sister’s. Brahms played in the background.
“Where’d you get this?” Stephanie asked, looking up with a new openness and sincerity in her dusty-blue eyes. In a heartbeat we’d gone from squabbling like archenemies to whispering like lovers. “These symptoms are almost exactly what my sister reported. Where’d you get it?”
It took ten minutes to explain about Stan Beebe, Joel McCain, Chief Newcastle, and Jackie Feldbaum.
When I finished, Stephanie caressed her sister’s hair and pocketed the journal, my list of symptoms tucked into the pages. She took both my hands in hers. “They weren’t like this yesterday, were they? Your hands didn’t have this crust yesterday.”
“No. But Stan Beebe’s did.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about your friends?”
“I did.”
“Do you know what this means?”
“It means my life is over.”
“Yes. That. And I’m sorry. But it means my sister didn’t try to kill herself. That probably doesn’t seem important to you, but our father killed himself. I thought . . .”
“It might be a family thing?”
“Yes. You have any other symptoms?”
“Yesterday I had the shakes.”
“Bad?”
I held out one hand and demonstrated.
“And today?”
“A headache. My legs feel weak.”
“You’re describing the symptoms my sister documented in her diary.