Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [3]
Because it’s impossible to begin with.
The phone rang a second time, but I let it ring. A minute passed and it rang again. I checked the faceplate. It read, “Dr. Ruddy.”
“Hey, Ruddy.”
“Doss.” His voice was quiet. Subdued. I could see him, leaning over his desk, head resting in his hands. His chair squeaked. “The scan results are in. If you two could get around the speakerphone, thought maybe we’d talk through them.”
His tone of voice told me enough. “Ruddy, she’s sleeping. Finally. Did that most of yesterday. Maybe you could just give them to me.” He read between the lines.
“I’m with you.” A pause. “Umm…they’re uhh…” He choked. Ruddy had been our lead doctor since the beginning. “Doss, I’m sorry.”
We listened to each other listening to each other. “How long?”
“A week. Maybe two. Longer if you can keep her horizontal…and still.”
I forced a laugh. “You know better than that.”
A deep breath. “Yep.”
I slid the phone back in my pocket and scratched my two-day stubble. My eyes stared out over the water, but my mind was a couple hundred miles away.
Empty-handed and lungs half full, I climbed down and back through the window. Running my fingers along the trim tacked to the wall, I crept down another flight. The staircase was narrow, made of twelve-inch-wide pine planks, which at nearly two hundred years old, creaked loudly—tapping out a story of age and the drunken pirates who once stumbled down them.
The sound lifted her eyelids, but I doubted she’d been asleep. Fighters don’t sleep between rounds. A cross breeze slipped through the open windows and filtered across our room, raising goose bumps across her calves.
Footsteps sounded downstairs, so I crossed the room, closed the bedroom door and returned. I sat next to her, slid the fleece blanket over her legs and leaned back against the headboard. She whispered, “How long have I been asleep?”
I shrugged.
“Yesterday?”
“Almost.” While we could manage the pain with medication, we couldn’t deter its debilitating effects. She would lie still, motionless for hours, fighting an inner battle in which I played helpless spectator. Then for reasons neither of us could explain, she’d experience moments—sometimes even days—of total lucidity, when the pain would relent and she was as normal as ever. Then with little warning, it would return and she’d begin her own private battle once again. It is there that you learn the difference between tired and fatigued. Sleep cures tired, but it has no effect on fatigued.
She smelled the air, catching the last remnants of aftershave that still hung in the air. I lifted the window. She raised an eyebrow. “He was here?”
I stared out over the water. “Yup.”
“How’d that go?”
“About like normal.”
“That good, huh? What is it this time?”
“He’s”—I lifted both hands in the air making quotation marks with my fingers—“‘moving you.’”
She sat up. “Where?”
More quotation marks. “‘Home.’”
She shook her head and let out a deep breath that puffed up her cheeks like a blowfish. “For him, it’s my mother all over again.”
I shrugged.
“How’d you leave it?”
“I didn’t. He did.”
“And?”
“He’s sending over a team of people in the morning to…‘collect you.’”
“He sounds like he’s taking out the trash.” She pointed at the phone. “Give it to me. I don’t care if he is four heartbeats from the President.”
“Honey, I’m not letting him take you anywhere.” I flicked a piece of paint off the windowsill.
She listened to the sound of footsteps downstairs. “Shift change?”
I nodded, watching a barge slowly putter up the Ashley.
“Don’t tell me he talked to them, too.”
“Oh, yeah. Really put everybody at ease. Basically read them the riot act disguised as an ‘attaboy.’ I just love the way he gives you what he wants you to have under the pretense of your best interest.” I shook my head. “Sleight-of-hand manipulation.”
She wrapped her leg around mine, using it as leverage to push her head up, allowing her eyes to meet mine. The once fit thighs now gave way to bony knees, thin