“What did you do?” Jean asked.
“I just turned my head away. And neither of us ever said anything about it.” Frank sighed, then looked down at his small white hands. “The world is cruel to short men. I was never an athlete. They used to call me girly in high school. For a long time, I worried that Howard knew something about me that I didn’t know myself.”
Jean patted him on the thigh, rather high up, Claire thought, but it brought a smile to Frank’s face. His shoulders relaxed.
Claire wasn’t quite ready to drop the idea. “Just because Howard is gay, it doesn’t mean he couldn’t have fathered her child.”
Frank shrugged. “I guess anything is theoretically possible, but I think Liz would have needed a lot of coaxing before she had sex. She was very modest and shy when we were growing up. And she never got Nova’s off-color jokes. Why would a gay man go to all the bother of seducing a female virgin?”
“Well, if it wasn’t Howard, then who could it have been?” Claire asked. “Did your sister ever date anyone else besides Allen?”
“Allen was Liz’s first boyfriend. They had only gone on a few dates when suddenly she was flashing this big ring around. Anybody who grew up in my house was eager to vacate it as soon as they could. Maybe after he shipped out, Liz found another boyfriend that none of us knew about. It would have to have been someone she saw frequently, though, someone who might be able to get her to the point she let down her guard.” Frank snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute. I just thought of something. Remember that Tom guy? The one who was building the wall? What about him? I mean, think about it, Charlie. As far as you know, they were the only two at the house before you came over that day you found my sister. And day after day he was out there working on the wall. She used to watch him work, find excuses to bring him glasses of lemonade. And I still remember the way he used to look at her.”
Charlie didn’t say anything for a minute, but Claire knew she was forcing herself to imagine the scene. Tom was certainly strong enough and resourceful enough to have staged a suicide if he had accidentally killed Elizabeth. Had Elizabeth’s body already been dangling in the living room when Charlie arrived with the picnic basket? Had they argued about the baby just beforehand, and then there had been a fall, a shove, a sudden panic? And then had Tom hurriedly strung her up, one eye on his watch?
“He liked her,” Charlie said slowly. “But I saw his face when we found her, and he was just as shocked as I was. It is true that Tom watched her, but so did everyone. Elizabeth was beautiful. You cannot turn your eye away from such beauty. It was the beauty of a young girl. I used to envy her that beauty, because I could not be innocent like that. She was like a princess in a fairy tale for children. The kind of girl who had learned her life from books, not living.”
“Oops!” Frank said. “I forgot that you and Tom used to be an item. Well, I’m sure you’re correct.” His tone implied that he wasn’t sure at all.
Claire thought of another possibility, but waited until she and Charlie were in the car to voice it. “I didn’t want to say this in front of Frank – but what did Nova say again about Elizabeth? That she was worried she had sinned and the baby would be a monster? Maybe that’s the reason no one can figure out who the father of her baby was. You said Elizabeth’s dad was drunk and violent. Could the child have possibly been his?”
Charlie seemed to be turning this idea over. “It is possible, but I do not honestly think he was clever enough to cover his tracks. I keep returning to the idea that no matter who fathered Elizabeth’s baby, it must have been Allen who killed her when she told him.”
Chapter 40
SIR5ER
Back at the house, Claire and Charlie found Dante and Tom busy in the kitchen. The room was filled with the good smells of sweet onions, tomatoes and basil.
“You missed yourself on TV,” Dante told Charlie. “Not just the local news. They even put a little clip of you on the NBC Nightly News. You sounded very articulate.”
Charlie colored. “Who would want to be known for this?”
Tom looked up from the cutting board. “It’s 6:35. Aren’t you girls going to go to the rally?”
Everyone looked at Charlie. There was a long pause, while she considered it. Finally she nodded.
“If Tom thinks he can hold down the fort,” Dante said, “I’ll come with you.”
Tom waved a wooden spoon at them. “You go on. I’ll keep an eye on the house.”
They walked the seven blocks in silence. Dante and Claire carried umbrellas, but kept them furled, as the clouds had been emptied of rain. Twilight was settling in. The closer they got to the park, the more cars were parked along the road. In the low grassy bowl that usually held soccer or baseball games, there were several dozen people, perhaps as many as a hundred, standing in a rough semi-circle. They faced, not the road, but the canopy of maples and firs that edged the rising slope at the back of the park. A few people carried signs. “No hate.” “We are God’s children.” “Hate is not the answer.” “No skinheads in our town!” Almost everyone held either a cupped candle or a flashlight. A few held disposable lighters. The flickering lights reminded Claire of an ancient church. Even the TV crews were keeping a respectful distance.
Charlie, Dante and Claire walked to the outer edge of the crowd, their shoes sinking slightly into the wet grass. Heads turned, and there was a murmur as people recognized the sight of the slight figure of Charlie and elbowed their neighbors.
The rain had stopped, but people were still dressed in slickers and hooded raincoats. There were many children, wide-eyed and silent.
From somewhere in the middle of the gathering, a woman began to sing in a rich contralto voice. “Let There be Peace on Earth.” A few voices joined in, then others took courage, until finally the whole crowd was singing. When they came to the end of the first verse, they simply repeated it. Even without accompaniment, their voices were in perfect harmony, with not a single off note.
Chapter 41
TWL8ZN
“The more time I try to figure things out, the more confused I become,” Dante told Claire, Charlie and Tom over breakfast. He rubbed his eyes and stretched. All of them had spent a restless night, alert for the sounds that would tell them the spray-painters had returned to cause more and worse damage. “And the other curators I’ve been talking to have nothing but rumors to pass along. They all agree there are a lot of drawings on the market right now, but some of them think it’s just rising prices that have caused them to be put on offer. Only a couple of people are telling me that they’ve had their doubts about a particular piece. And no one will own up to acquiring one.”
The phone rang, and Claire went to answer it. The Caller ID read Riverwalk.
“May I speak to Charlie, please?” a woman said.
“Could I tell her what this is regarding?” Claire asked, ready to run interference. Damn! She thought they had been careful not to leave any trace of themselves behind when they toured the Riverwalk campus, but clearly Riverwalk had still somehow scavenged their number. Maybe Jean had given it to them. Now the only questions was how rude would Claire have to be to get Charlie’s name back off the list.
“Her?” the woman echoed, clearly surprised.
“Are you calling for Charlie Heidenbruch? Her given name is Charlotte, but she goes by Charlie.”
“I guess so. I just have this name and a number. This is M.E. Froehlich, the head nurse at Riverwalk’s skilled nursing facility. I’m calling about Nova Sweeney. We found the words ‘Must call Charlie!” and this phone number written on a pad next to her phone.”
“Is she dead?” Claire asked. Charlie, Dante and Tom stopped eating and turned to stare at her.
“Sorry, I should have said that to begin with. Nova’s not dead, but she did have a stroke last night. A pretty bad one.”
Claire thought of Nova’s continual cigarette. Was any pleasure worth such a terrible price?
“What’s Nova’s current condition, then?”
Claire chose words that answered some of the questions she could see in the others’ eyes. Slowly, Tom let his breath out and then put his arm around Charlie’s shoulders.
“Fair. Luckily, she managed to pull the emergency cord over the bed, or it could have been much worse. As it is, she’s facing a long stretch of rehab.”
“Can we come see her? We’re old friends of hers. That’s why Charlie’s number was by the phone.”
“You could come to visit, but she’s pretty worn out, so you can’t stay very long. But I’m sure she would be comforted by your presence. Visiting hours end at two.”
###
Dante had never met Nova, and they figured a hospital ward wasn’t the best place for introductions. He planned to spend the time they were gone continuing to make circumspect inquiries about faked drawings on the phone and Internet.
Riverwalk’s skilled nursing facility hadn’t been one of the buildings they toured. Claire could see why. While its airy foyer, marble floors and fresh flowers made it look more like a luxury hotel than a nursing home, it still smelled like the latter, an amalgam of cleaning products, overcooked food, and the subtle tang of urine.
“We’re here to see Nova Sweeney,” Claire said to the young woman sitting behind the highly polished mahogany counter. She wore a white fitted dress and white hose, and even had a white nurse’s cap bobby-pinned onto her hair. Claire wondered if the woman was really even a nurse. Maybe Riverwalk just asked her to dress to fit a ninety-year-old’s idea of a nurse, formed back in the days when women were told they didn’t want to be doctors, they wanted to marry them.
The young woman’s smile could have been used to sell toothpaste, and she had the swooping intonations of a commercial announcer. Claire figured she probably whiled away her days behind the desk dreaming of being a spokesmodel. “Ms. Sweeney’s in Room 102, which is the first door on the right behind me.” Her gesture would have been perfect for emphasizing the lines of a convertible on a TV game show.
They walked around the lobby divider. A row of about a dozen doors, all closed, faced an empty nurses’ station. The three of them were standing in front of the door marked 102, uncertain of whether to knock, when a doctor came walking briskly down the corridor that formed a T with the one where they stood.
“Can I help you folks?”
“We are here to see Nova Sweeney,” Charlie said. “Can you tell me how she is doing, doctor?”
Even to Claire’s eyes, the doctor, with his short brown hair dyed to yellow spikes at the tips, seemed very young. Claire had the disconcerting thought that she was probably two or three years older than he was. Without his crisp white coat and the stethoscope around his neck, she would have taken him for some resident’s grandson.
“Are you her next of kin?”
Was he aware that Nova’s only child had died years ago? Yet he might not tell them anything if they weren’t relatives. Claire claimed the middle ground. “Great niece,” she said.
“And I’m Nova’s sister-in-law,” Charlie added. She squeezed Tom’s arm. “And this is her step-brother.”
The doctor didn’t seem to question their kinship. “Her condition is fair. As you know, she’s had a fairly severe stroke. In many ways, it was to be expected. She was 67” – Claire noted with amusement that Nova hadn’t been above lying to her own doctor – “and she’s been smoking two packs a day since she was 14, most of those in the years when they didn’t even make cigarettes with filters. Like everyone else I see, she was in denial. I was afraid it would come to what did happen, which is an occlusion. In layman’s terms, a blockage. She had some warning symptoms. What we call TIAs, transient ischemic attacks. The last time I saw her she admitted to occasionally having double vision, tingling in her legs, and once she was unable to speak for a few minutes. So I ordered a brain angiogram. Even though it showed some damage, she refused to moderate her habits. I put her on some medications to dilate her blood vessels, but I suspect she never filled the prescription.”
“Will Nova recover?” Charlie asked.
“To put it frankly, your sister-in-law’s stroke has caused some brain damage to the left side which has left her with aphasia.” He finally noticed their blank looks. “Right now, the part of her brain that controls communication is damaged.”
“She can’t talk?” Tom asked.
“Not at the present time.”
Claire saw Charlie’s hand tighten on Tom’s arm. She was probably thinking, as Claire was, that Nova loved talking more than anything, more than men, even more than cigarettes. Was a Nova who couldn’t talk really the same person?
“She can’t communicate at all?” Claire felt her stomach turn over.
“Well, she makes sounds. It almost sounds like she’s saying a word, but we haven’t been able to figure it out yet. I’m fairly certain she knows what she would like to say. It’s just that she’s lost contact with the part of her brain that would allow her to say it. So don’t be surprised if she seems upset when you go in there. For a patient, it’s very frustrating not to be able to communicate. Of course, she can still nod or shake her head, but anything more complicated than that, well ...” His voice trailed off and he looked down at his scuffed shoes.
“Is she brain-damaged?” Tom asked.
“Perhaps not in the way you mean. Ms. Sweeney doesn’t seem to have any trouble thinking. If we ask her to roll over, she can do it, or at least try to do it, since the right side of her body was also affected. We think she’s ‘all there.’” He made quote marks with his fingers. “What’s damaged is her ability to communicate. While she understands everything you say to her, she can’t answer you just yet. She’s also very weak, so you’ll need to keep your time with her to under fifteen minutes to avoid tiring her out. In fact, she’s probably asleep right now.”
He knocked on the door, then called out “Ms. Sweeney?” and opened it, although Claire hadn’t heard anyone answer. “Go on in,” he said, holding the door for them. “I’m sure she’ll wake up once she realizes you’re here. She’s hardly slept at all, jumps at the slightest sound. I think,” he lowered his voice to a whisper that still carried. “I think she’s afraid of dying.”
Who wouldn’t be, Claire thought. This wasn’t the kind of place they took you for miraculous recoveries.
Charlie went into the room first, followed by Tom and then Claire. The room was furnished in dark cherry pieces, but nothing could hide that at the center was a hospital bed with stainless steel railings. Nova lay flat and unmoving on the bed, her eyes closed. Her body barely made a bump under the blanket. Her arms lay on top of the covers, and Claire had the uncomfortable feeling they had been placed there. Her left hand was open and relaxed, but her right looked as if someone had tightened invisible strings inside of it, drawing up her fingers until they curled almost to her wrist, like a shrimp head. Against the white of the sheet, her skin was gray, and her hair looked as dead and artificial as a Barbie doll’s. Two clear plastic tubes snaked into her nose. Her mouth was drawn down on the right, the stroke still gripping her tightly even in her sleep. A thin line of drool snaked down from her lips to the flat pillow. Nova looked more dead than asleep, as if she were halfway into the next world already.
As she turned to softly close the door behind them, Claire noticed the plush white terry-cloth robe that hung on the back. The pocket was embroidered with the words “Nora Sweeney.” Claire guessed the robe was supposed to make even the hospital wing of Riverwalk feel upscale, but the misspelling just made it feel all the more impersonal.
“Hello,” Charlie said softly.
Nova jerked. Her eyes opened wide. The one side of her face that was mobile pulled backward as if she were opening her mouth to scream.
Charlie quickly patted her hand while leaning over so that Nova could see her face. “ It is just Claire and Tom and I, Nova-le. You remember Tom, from the old days? Were you having a bad dream?” She soothed the wisps of dyed blond hair back from Nova’s brow. “Would you like us to fix y
our hair up for you, perhaps put some makeup on? You always told me a woman feels best fully armored.”
Nova’s left hand shot out, and grabbed at Charlie’s arm with curled fingers. Her mouth opened, but the only sound that came out sounded like a groan.
“Maybe we’re upsetting her, Charlie,” Claire said. “Maybe we should go.”
Charlie, who was presumably more comfortable with the way life could warp you on the way to death, said, “We will just stay and keep her company for a little while. Maybe Nova cannot talk to us right now, but she hears and understands, right Nova-le?” She sat down in a chair next to the bed.
Nova nodded vigorously. She stared first at Tom, then Charlie, then Claire. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was a loud string of vowels, the sound insistent even if it was meaningless.
“Gosh, Nova, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Tom perched on the arm of Charlie’s chair. “Still, it’s almost like I can hear you, Nova, at least in my mind. Your eyes are so expressive.”
Nova shook her head and uttered another long drawn out groaning series of sounds. Frustration twisted her features. A steady stream of drool ran from the corner of her sagging lip and down her chin. Charlie took a tissue from the bedside box and wiped it up.
God, Claire didn’t want to get old. Not if it meant being like this. And Nova hadn’t wanted to be healthy, not if it meant giving up all the things she enjoyed. Looking at her, Claire resolved to give up Doritos entirely. And Snickers. And Payday bars. No more Chez N Sticks packs, no matter how good the little breadsticks tasted after a dip in the bright orange “chez,” sweet and fatty and salty all at once. She would eat a dozen servings of vegetables a day. Two dozen. Maybe it was already too late. Was some fatty deposit just hanging on to the wall of an artery by a thread, ready to break free and clog up something important?
While Claire was worrying, Charlie was nattering on, about how nice the weather was outside, about how Jean was still dating Frank, about how she and Tom had found each other again. Tom told Nova about his two children, the loss of his first wife (Claire heard the word ‘first’ and wondered if he meant anything by it, subconsciously, as there had not yet been a second), and about his produce stand at the Hillsboro farmer’s market. In the middle of one of Tom’s sentences, Nova began to moan again.