It’s just so…so unfair for you. To have to clean up that filth, I mean.”
“My department. Don’t even think of it. Eventually I’ll want a key to the outside door. I’ll probably get started over the weekend. You just stay off that ladder, okay? I’ll get it painted along the way.” He held out his hand. “Deal,” he said. “We can get a rental agreement, whatever it takes, later.”
They shook hands, and for the first time in her life she fully understood the old expression: to touch a live wire. She knew that he went out to the porch, that he put his shoes on, waved to her and walked out of sight, but she had become immobilized by that touch. Abruptly she sat down and looked at her hand, opened it, closed it hard, opened it.
“Oh, my God,” she said under her breath.
4
“What it means,” Greg Boardman told Naomi on Thursday night, “is that it’s a legal tangle, a nightmare. When the court granted the power of attorney to Thomas, there was another document, a power of acceptance. Since Donna had a will, the court ruled that her intentions were perfectly clear, and the terms of the will had to be satisfied. Her shares will go to their kids when she dies. Thomas said that when they wrote their wills they were still trying to get the kids interested in the clinic, and had hopes that Lawrence, at least, would get involved. It seemed a good idea, I guess, to bequeath them shares. And now that old will is the determining factor in who will control the clinic.”
Thomas Kelso’s kids were middle-aged, and none of them, as far as Naomi could tell, gave a damn about the clinic. Lawrence was a molecular biologist at Princeton; the twin daughters were both married to well-to-do businessmen in Los Angeles.
“I thought Thomas had the authority to vote her shares, even to sell them,” she said.
“He does. But if he wanted to sell them, he would have to prove it was a real sale with a bona fide buyer. There would have to be an evaluation with a real market value, and then the proceeds of the sale would have to be used for her care, and when she dies, anything left over would go to the kids. He can’t sell them to me for a buck.” Very bitterly he added, “Thomas is beaten, and he knows it. He’s plenty pissed.”
“Not just Thomas,” she said after a moment. Greg’s craggy face was drawn and he looked tired. She knew he had not been sleeping well. His face always revealed his inner self: conflicts, concern, love, whatever emotion was uppermost was as visible to her as if written in script on his features. It was not only that he was close to his sixtieth birthday, she also knew, although that was a factor. Where he could go at his age was problematic. But he cared deeply about the work at the clinic. Everyone who went to work there and stayed cared deeply. Maybe that was a mistake, getting personally involved, caring so much. It was a disturbing thought. She pulled her attention back to what Greg was saying.
“He’ll try to get the power of acceptance changed, but it will take time, and if the judge doesn’t agree to the change, David McIvey will end up in charge.”
More and more often during the past few years Thomas Kelso had found himself pondering the unanswerable questions that he should have put behind him as a youth. When did life begin and, more important these past months, when did it end? Joyce McIvey had been brain-dead for forty-eight hours when they disconnected her life support; her body had resisted death for another forty-eight hours. When did she die? Brain-dead? Heart-dead? Which was the final death? When? If there was a soul, when did it depart? At the funeral service for Joyce, sitting apart from the family, he had regarded them soberly: David with his pretty little wife on one side of him, his two children on the other, Lorraine, his first wife, at the end of the row. The two wives and the grandchildren had all wept for Joyce, but David had been like a statue among them, untouchable, unmovable, remote.
Thomas had heard the story of how David had signed the order to discontinue life support for his mother, and then had gone straight into surgery. Had his hand trembled, his vision blurred?
Thomas felt he could almost understand David, not entirely, but somewhat. His mother had had a good life and had lived to be eighty with no major health problems. She had been happy most of her life, and her end had been merciful. A fulfilled life. An enviable one. David was merely accepting of the fact of death, and perhaps even grateful that it had been merciful. He was a scientist, a doctor. He understood and accepted death in a way that a layperson could not.
But he should weep for his mother, Thomas added to himself. He should not order her death one minute and draw blood with his scalpel the next.
He did not go to the cemetery, or to David’s house after the funeral. Instead, he went home, but his own house seemed oppressive, too silent, too empty. That afternoon the silence and emptiness were more like a vacuum than ever, like a low-pressure area where there was not enough air. The silence was that of holding one’s breath, not simply the lack of sound.
He left the house and sat in his car for a minute or two, tracing the pattern of wear on the steering wheel cover. He had worn it down to nothing in spots. Realizing what he was doing, he stopped. The salesman had said nine out of ten Volvos ever sold were still on the road. Twenty years ago? Twenty-two? Now and then he thought he might trade it in on a new model, then he forgot until the next time he noticed that it was old. He shook himself and drove to the clinic.
He parked in Greg’s driveway, walked the path to the alley, across it, and into the garden, where he made his way to the waterfall and sat on a bench in the shade, listening to the splashing water, watching the koi swim back and forth effortlessly. There, listening to the music of the water, he let his grief fill his eyes with tears. Grieving for his wife, for Joyce and William McIvey, grieving for the clinic. They had shared a vision, the four of them. Now he was the only one left, and the vision was fading.
He had not yet moved when he heard a girl’s voice. “You bastard, you moved the chair farther away!”
“Maybe a little farther,” Darren said. “And does your mama know you use such language?”
“Who the fuck do you think taught me?”
Darren laughed. “The deal still goes. You walk to the chair and earn a ride back.”
Thomas could see them when they rounded a curve, Darren and a teenage black girl. Sweat was running down her face. She was using two canes, learning how to walk with a prosthetic, an artificial leg from the knee down. They rounded the curve and were heading out of sight again when she began to sway.
“I can’t feel it! Darren, I’m falling!” Her voice rose in a wail.
“No, you’re not. You’re fine.” He had his arm around her before she finished speaking, and for a time neither of them moved. “See, what happens is that something in your head wakes up and says, ‘Hey, I don’t have a foot down there,’ and you feel like you’re going to fall. What we have to do is convince that something in your head that it’s okay, there’s a working leg and foot, and it’s yours, so get used to it. Ready? Just a few more steps now. Here we go.”
Thomas watched them out of sight, then he realized his hands were clenched into tight fists, and he relaxed them and flexed his fingers.
“I’ll fight you, David,” he said under his breath. “I’ll fight you every inch of the way.”
Everything was muted at the clinic that afternoon. A few appointments had been canceled. Some of the therapists and nurses had taken time off for the funeral, and some of the volunteers had excused themselves. Greg and Naomi were gone for the
