While Daniel checked his patient’s pulse and heart rate, he said, “I think those kinds of questions should be put to your dad, don’t you?”
“Sure. If I had one!”
Daniel arched his brows.
“He skipped out when I was five. Cokehead.”
Daniel nodded. Not an unusual story. He recalled now that Deke’s mother, Bethany Watson, a special ed teacher, had been raising him single-handedly for a long time. Dealing with childhood cancer was a kick in the gut for a couple; it was a body blow for one parent to handle alone. He had to admire her bravery.
“If you don’t wanna give me the goodies . . .”
“Goodies?”
“The details about sex,” Deke explained. “You could always just give me a Playboy magazine . . . you know, if you’re too shy to talk about sex. One of the old magazines, not one of the new PG versions.” More batting of eyelashes.
Daniel laughed. “Nice try, kiddo.”
“My buddy Chuck says it feels like every hair on your body is doin’ the hula, and your cock is like a train racing to the finish line.”
Cock? A ten-year-old using that word? Daniel shouldn’t be surprised. Kids today knew things that would have been shocking twenty years ago. Still, he stopped checking the latest white cell count on Deke’s chart to stare at him. “Chuck has had a lot of sex, huh?” Now, that would shock him.
Deke ducked his head sheepishly. “Nah! He’s only ten, too, but he has seen a Playboy magazine. Three of them. The good ones, too. He has older brothers.”
“Wow! A man of experience!” Daniel could remember the time his identical twin, Aaron, now a pilot, had shown him a stash of Playboy magazines he’d hidden under his mattress . . . a cool trade scored with AJ Coddington for five Snicker bars and a Big Blaster water pistol. Come to think of it, they’d been about ten, too . . . more than twenty years ago.
That evening he went to his mother Dr. Claire Doucet’s house for dinner. Already he could hear Barry Manilow crooning through the sound system he and Aaron had given her for a Christmas gift last year. Big mistake, that. Now they got to hear Barry in every room of the house and outdoors on the patio. Their mother and Melanie Yutu, her longtime significant other, best known to them as Aunt Mel, had attended dozens of the crooner’s concerts . . . thought nothing of flying cross-country, one end of the United States to the other, to hear him in person.
Sad to say, he and Aaron knew the words to every Barry Manilow song ever written, and there were lots of them.
But tonight he had something else on his mind. After he sat down at the dining room table, he asked Aaron, who’d also been invited for dinner, “Do you remember those ratty old Playboy magazines you used to hide under your mattress?”
Aaron grinned at him. “No, I don’t think I do. Unless you mean . . . oh, let me see . . . um, Karin Mantrose, May 1992. Turn-ons: Being naked on a fur in front of the fireplace. 36–20–34. Which had nothing whatsoever to do with that Sherpa bath mat I bought from Walmart with my paperboy money. Uh-uh.”
Daniel grinned. “Or DeLane Velasquez, June 1991,” Daniel reminded him.
“Turn-ons: Bubble baths for two,” they both said at the same time, then gave each other high fives.
“How about Patti Ann Jones? Remember that one,” Daniel said.
“How could I forget? Her ideal date was with a brown-eyed, curly-haired male.”
“And our hair was curly in those days. We were sure she was just waiting for us to grow up.” It was amazing what stuck in a young boy’s head, Daniel thought. Hell, a man’s head, too.
“You two are idiots,” his mother said as she placed the big tureen of jambalaya on the table. “Thirty-something adolescents!”
Coming up beside her, Aunt Mel scoffed, “Any gal with a twenty-inch waist beyond the age of twelve is anorexic or wearing a corset.”
“Could someone please turn down the volume on that music? I can barely hear myself think,” Daniel said.
“Barry is best at full volume,” his mother asserted, although she did go over and turn a knob so that “At the Copa” was only a distant backdrop.
“What brought up the skin mags? You’re not usually a memory lane kinda guy.” Aaron leaned back in his chair and studied him in a way he knew would annoy Daniel. “Oh, don’t tell me. You met a centerfold today at the medical center. You have all the luck!”
“I wish! No, it was a young kid, a new cancer patient, who wanted me to buy him a Playboy.”
“Don’t you dare,” his mother said. “With all the malpractice suits today, you could be sued. Somehow they’d find a way to prove that pornography causes cancer.” His mother was a GP in a small medical group that struggled under the burden of monumental malpractice insurance premiums.
He noticed his mother’s hand shaking as she sat down next to him and placed a napkin on her lap. Reaching over, he took her hand in his. “Mom? What’s up?”
She and Aunt Mel exchanged odd glances.
Oh, this is not good.
“Tell them,” Aunt Mel prodded, her eyes welling unexpectedly with tears.
Definitely not good. Aunt Mel was not a crier.
Squeezing Daniel’s hand, which she still held, his mother took a deep breath and said, “I have cancer.”
He and Aaron said the same foul word under their breaths. To show how serious the situation was, neither woman reamed them out, as they would normally.
For a moment, Daniel felt faint with shock, but then he choked out, “What kind of cancer?” Being an oncologist, that was the most important question he had to ask.
“Uterine.”
The most deadly. “What stage?”
“Two. It’s already spread to my lymph nodes.”
Oh, shit!
“And that’s all I’m going to say on the subject tonight,” she declared. “I’ll show you all the records tomorrow, and you can start interfering in my medical care then. For tonight, I just want to have a nice family dinner.”
He and Aaron, who was equally stunned, looked at each other. They didn’t have to be twins to read each other’s minds this time. Their mother was in big, big trouble.
“I knew it!” Aaron stood angrily. “Mom, I even asked you last month if you were sick when I noticed how much weight you’d lost, and then I caught you at home in the middle of the day, puking your guts out. You said it was the flu.”
His mother shrugged. “I didn’t want anyone to know yet. I was waiting for the right time.”
“There’s a right time to discuss cancer? Coulda fooled me, and I’ve been dealing with it for ten years. How long have you known?” Daniel narrowed his eyes when his mother squirmed in her seat.
“Three months, and don’t take that tone with me, Daniel. I have a right to handle this any way I want.”
Daniel stood now and shoved Aaron in the chest. He had to have some way to vent his fury, and, yes, fear. “You knew something was wrong and didn’t tell me? I’m a doctor, lamebrain!”
“Mom’s a doctor, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Aaron shoved him back.
“Yeah, but she’s a GP, not a specialist.”
“Whatever!”
“Both of you, sit the hell down and listen,” Aunt Mel yelled.
Duly chastened, they sank back into their chairs and watched with disbelief as their mother calmly served up the jambalaya and salad, then passed slices of warm bread to each of them. Aunt Mel poured iced tea into four glasses.
They expect us to eat? Now?
“And don’t be such sad sacks,” Aunt Mel added. “Things aren’t hopeless. Your mother and I are still going to Hawaii this summer.” They had been planning that two-week vacation for years. Icing on the cake was the fact that good ol’ Barry would be performing there at the same time for a few days.
Four months away, Daniel thought. Please, God, let her get a chance to wear that lei. Help her and I’ll lobby for Barry Manilow songs, rather than Muzak, in the hospital elevators . . . a penance for all my past si
ns . . . and any forthcoming ones, too.
Nine months later . . . prayers are answered, but not always the way we expect . . .
Daniel’s eyes burned, and he blinked back tears as he approached the little house on Arctic Lane.
His mother had died two days ago at the far-too-young age of fifty-three, after what had turned into a painful battle with cancer, despite several trips to the Mayo Clinic, and some experimental treatments outside the U.S. Cliché though it was, death had been a blessing. Didn’t make the loss any easier, though.
And now here he was, asking for another dose of heartache. He should have developed thicker skin by now, considering his specialty, but instead he felt like he was at the end of his rope. He had no business coming to this particular house over which the heavy cloud of hospice care hovered. His work as a pediatric oncologist had ended when Deke left the medical center last week, for good. In-home nurses had taken over.
The hospital lawyers would deem it unwise, from a legal standpoint, for a physician to involve himself personally with a patient. Especially off-premises.
Lawyers! They couldn’t know, or care, how close Daniel had gotten to the kid over these past nine months, even with all the time he’d taken off for his mother. There was just something about Deke that touched him, deeply.
He was dragging with him the most pitiful example of mankind. Jamie Lee Watson, once a promising Marine lifer, now a thirty-five-year-old thin-as-a-skeleton, nose-bleeding cocaine addict. Apparently, the man had seen things in Iraq that only drugs helped him forget. Daniel had found the whereabouts of Deke’s father last week, but it had taken him all that time, when he wasn’t at his mother’s bedside, trying to get the man halfway lucid, showered, and dressed in clean clothes. The new, barely improved Jamie Lee was not a happy camper.
“This is a train wreck about to happen,” Jamie Lee complained.
“Not if I can help it.”
“My kid . . .” His words trailed off as he choked up, fully aware of Deke’s rapidly deteriorating condition. “My kid doesn’t need a loser like me.”
“He needs you, all right.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re his father. Simple as that. He doesn’t care if you’re the President of the United States or a circus clown.”
“Bethany is gonna have a fit.”
“She’s the one who asked me to find you.”
Jamie Lee stared at him with the most incredible hope in his bleary eyes before he masked the emotion by rubbing his hands over his face, a face which Daniel had personally shaved for him, removing a year-old beard. Jamie Lee would have probably slit his own throat.
Before Daniel had a chance to knock, the door flew open and Bethany smiled . . . a smile that did not reach her bloodshot eyes. “You came.”
It wasn’t clear if she was referring to Daniel or her long-absent husband.
Daniel stepped aside and shoved Jamie Lee forward. “Go for it, buddy.”
“I am so sorry, Bethany,” Jamie Lee said. That apology covered a whole lot of ground, Daniel suspected.
She nodded, seemed to hesitate, then opened her arms to give Jamie Lee a comforting hug. Almost immediately, she stepped back, putting space between them.
“Deke’s been in and out of a coma for days, but he asks for his daddy when he wakes up.” She laughed, but there was no mirth, just an odd tone of near-hysteria.
With a squeeze to her shoulder, Jamie Lee walked into the dining room which had been converted into a sickroom with a hospital bed and medical equipment. The oxygen machine whooshed away while an obscene number of tubes ran from the child’s frail body, no attempt to hide his bald head under its usual baseball cap. A nurse moved away from the bed to give the stranger room. Daniel and Bethany stood in the open doorway, watching.
It was odd the things you noticed in times of crisis. Birds chirping outside the open window. A Disneyland souvenir glass on the sideboard. A framed photo showing a much younger Deke with his mother and a guy in a buzz cut and military uniform, all of them smiling.
“Hey, slugger,” Jamie Lee said, clearly uncertain what to do, where to put his hands. But then he leaned over and kissed his boy’s cheek. “That’s what I always called him. Slugger,” Jamie Lee nervously told Daniel.
Miraculously, considering his sedation, Deke’s eyes fluttered open. “Dad?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Jamie Lee choked out.
“I prayed . . . that . . . that you . . . would come,” Deke finally got out. Talking was difficult at this stage.
“That’s me . . . the answer to a little boy’s prayer,” Jamie Lee muttered.
“Am I dead yet?” His little hand clung to his father’s. “Are you an angel?”
Jamie Lee started to weep then. Hell, they all had tears in their eyes.
“No, I’m hardly an angel, son. Just your daddy.”
“I’m afraid. Will you stay with me?”
“As long as you want, slugger.”
And he did stay with him for the next five hours, never moving from the seat the nurse had pushed behind him, never releasing his son’s grip on his hand, until Deke slipped away. The death was almost an anticlimax.
Daniel had gone back to his office for several hours and returned just in time. As he left for the last time, he wondered how many more of these cancer deaths he could handle without going insane.
A dog is a dog, no matter the breed . . .
Samantha Starr walked down the corridor of the French Quarter courthouse with her new lawyer, Lucien LeDeux, at her side. They were headed toward a conference room where they would meet with her horndog ex-husband Dr. Nicholas Coltrane (aka Nick the Prick), his shark lawyer Jessie John Daltry, and an associate judge for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, District of New Orleans.
“Don’t say anything,” Luc warned her. “You know the good doc will try ta rile you into a hissy fit, which won’t sit well with the judge. Just let me do all the talking.”
“I’ll try.”
“Not good enough. I’ve studied the records, chère. You’re paying Coltrane as much alimony as you do because of your outburst last time.”
She stiffened and raised her chin haughtily. “Or because the judge was a female influenced by my ex’s dubious charms. Nick commented on my lack of sex appeal as an excuse for his adultery, and the judge didn’t even reprimand him.”
“Huh? No way! You are as hot as a goat’s behind in a pepper patch.”
“Charming.”
“Oops. That’s my Tante Lulu’s favorite Cajun saying. Hang around her long enough and she wears off on you.”
Samantha knew and even worked on occasion with Louise Rivard, better known as Tante Lulu to everyone, and she was outrageous in appearance, actions, and general reputation. Not the role model Samantha would set for herself.
Luc grinned. “Anyhow, don’t let the asshole put you down.”
“Oh, please! I am what I am.” Samantha was five-foot-ten in her bare feet. When she wore heels, she was taller than Nick’s five-eleven frame, which had annoyed him to no end. If that wasn’t bad enough, her body was covered with freckles from forehead to toes, and not the attractive kind. Once, in a drunken rage, Nick had likened her freckles to tobacco juice spit on her by a redneck farmer. Orange spittle. As for her bright red hair . . . no more! She paid a fortune to her hairstylist to keep it a more subdued auburn.
Samantha hated that she’d taken so much care with her appearance today . . . white, long-sleeved, Chanel pantsuit with a fitted peplum jacket, matching stiletto pumps, and tailored, jade-green, collarless, silk blouse . . . to match her green eyes, her only feature that she really liked. Her auburn hair was swept off her face in a neat chignon. Emerald drop earrings in a platinum setting and her great-grandmother’s emerald-and-diamond filigree ring were her only jewelry. Unfortunately, there was no way to cover the freckles on her hands, face and neck. She hadn’t dressed to impress Nick, but for her own self-esteem which always tanked in his presence. “I don
’t need phony compliments.”
“The dickhead has done a job on you, darlin’. Talk about!” Luc just shook his head. “We can discuss that later. Maybe you should have stayed home and let me handle this.”
“No. I am not going to let him continue to bleed me. Did I tell you that a friend of mine saw him in the South of France? He was on the freakin’ French Riviera for a month. A month!”
Luc sighed. “Yes, you told me. His lawyer says it was a medical conference.”
“For a month? What kind of medical conference lasts a month? SDU? Slimy Doctors United?”
Samantha had been married to Nick for five years and divorced for another five, but she was still paying for that mistake. And not just with the continuing humiliation of his serial adultery, or the very public, acrimonious divorce. Nope, the jerk had demanded alimony, that on top of her having paid his way through medical school. And he kept wanting more and more.
It wasn’t just that Nick knew the salary and benefits she drew from her family business, not to mention stock she owned in the company and a sizeable savings account. But he was aware of the gold coins and bullion, worth anywhere from a million and a half to two million dollars, depending on the market, stored in her bank safety deposit box. It started out as a million dollars in gold, a gift her grandfather gave on the birth of each of his grandchildren. In her case, it had almost doubled in value. Being of conservative Scottish stock, her grandfather preferred hard, cold metal, over stocks and bonds. Portable wealth. Since that gold wasn’t “earned” during their marriage, the courts had denied Nick access to it, over and over. But he kept trying.
During the course of her relationship with Nick, she’d met many of his physician friends, and they all seemed to be focused on their net worth and what expensive toy they could buy next. Very few were in the profession for the good they could do. And most had been divorced at least once, or were blatant adulterers. And talk about the conversations when Nick and his gynecologist buddies got together! If she heard the joke “I’ve seen more pussy than Hugh Hefner,” one time, she’d heard it a hundred.