The Red Lotus Page 20

  “As in a fishing hook?” Alexis asked.

  “No, some kind of knitting hook. She was using it to get cat hair out of wax she was applying on top of a photo. That’s a thing, apparently. She just came back from X-ray. There’s an old guy who’s having chest pain in two. He seems good now, but Callie May thinks we should probably check him in when there’s a room. Smoker. Ischemic pain. His wife is kind of wigging out.”

  She looked at the paperwork on the clipboards, taking it all in. “I see we also have a kid we’re treating for an asthma attack and some poor homeless guy with pneumonia.”

  “Who doesn’t want to be admitted.”

  “If Callie May is in with the chest pain—”

  “Possible MI. She’s ordered an EKG and the lab work.”

  “So, she’s on it. I’ll go take a look at Captain Hook.”

  He smiled at her small joke. “How was your vacation? It looks like you got some color.”

  She gazed at him. He was a tall man, a runner in his early forties, with receding mousy brown hair that was starting to gray and a face that was scarred by what must have been a Herculean battle with adolescent acne. He wasn’t handsome at first glance, but he was so smart and so kind that he was the sort of person who became handsome in conversation. “It was really wonderful and then it became god-fucking-awful. I mean that: god-fucking-awful. And while you are really sweet to ask, I don’t want to talk about it. At least right now. But maybe over the course of this shift, when we’re not extracting hooks from hands or explaining to the elderly why stools aren’t supposed to be black, I’ll be able to tell you. But right this second? I just want to work.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Alexis liked this older fellow in ER cubicle five, she liked him a lot. He was seventy-nine. He didn’t know it, but she feared he was dying. His name was Daniel Gotfried, he lived on Thirty-Third Street, and in the time she had spent chatting with him as she’d examined him, she’d learned that he was a retired public defender, the son of a Holocaust survivor, a grandfather, a widower, and—until recently—a pretty good tennis player. His heartburn had been getting steadily worse, however, and it had become incapacitating at lunch today. He could barely swallow. He’d lurched to the ER from the Italian restaurant where he’d been dining with a friend. (Clearly, he had lots of friends.) But he hadn’t told his luncheon companion that he was going to the ER. He hadn’t wanted to worry or inconvenience him. So, he’d struggled here alone, and by the time he’d arrived, he was convinced he was having a heart attack.

  Most likely, he wasn’t. He wasn’t presenting any other heart attack symptoms, and she was able to relieve the pain of the heartburn with a histamine blocker. But she had other concerns.

  “I picked Italian because I figured a cream sauce or a caprese salad wouldn’t do this to me,” he said, his voice still hoarse. “I mean, it’s not like I picked a burger joint or a Mexican place.”

  “That was a wise choice,” she agreed. “Let me look at your eyes.”

  He was no longer in serious pain—certainly not in agony—but he was still uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he smiled as he pulled off his eyeglasses. “This is the mystery of medicine. I have heartburn, and you want to look at my eyes,” he murmured.

  “You have nice eyes,” she told him, and she meant it. His irises were hazel. She shined the ophthalmoscope into his left eye. She really didn’t need the light, but it helped. The eye was showing signs of jaundice, a yellow reminiscent of the end of a bruise. His skin had the same tint.

  “Any changes in bowel movements?” she asked.

  “Oh, God, must we go there? It’s heartburn.”

  “Alas, we must.”

  “Some constipation. I deal with it.”

  “By eating more high-fiber foods or with fiber supplements?”

  “The latter.”

  “I have a feeling you ate better when your wife was alive. True?”

  He shrugged good-naturedly. “Well, I ate more fiber. But it wasn’t like she did all the cooking. I’m actually a pretty good chef. I just don’t especially like to cook alone.”

  “No one does,” she agreed. “I’m not exactly a culinary role model, in that regard. Now, any weight loss lately?”

  “I think so. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “How old are you?”

  She smiled. She was asked it all the time, and sometimes she was insulted. But not this afternoon. It was clear that Daniel had no doubts about her competence.

  “I’m thirty-three.”

  “I think I remember being thirty-three.”

  “It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “Oh, it was,” he murmured. “It really was.”

  “Okay, lie down, mister. No more stalling. Pull up your shirt.”

  He was wearing a white oxford shirt and T-shirt underneath. He pulled up both and, just as she feared based on what he’d been telling her and the yellow in his eyes, she felt an abdominal mass. He flinched.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Didn’t hurt much.”

  “Good,” she said. “I want to do a CT scan. Are you free this afternoon?”

  “You mean right now?”

  “No time like the present,” she told him, trying to strike a tone that was at once cheerful and firm.

  “You’re worried,” he said, and suddenly he sounded remote.

  She was. He likely had stomach cancer that had metastasized to the liver. It might also have spread to the lymph nodes and the esophagus. That was the heartburn that had first presented.

  “It’s an emergency room. Almost everyone I see worries me.”

  “Nah. I’ve been around the block enough to know. You felt a lump in my belly.”

  “You felt it, too?”

  “I figured hernia.”

  “Maybe it is,” she told him, but she didn’t believe that for a second.

  “You think it’s cancer.”

  “It might be,” she told him, and she looked him right in the eyes and gave him a small smile. “And if it is? We take it a step at a time. This is a very good hospital with very good doctors.” She took one of his hands and squeezed it between both of hers, and called in Mike Orosco, asking him to start the paperwork to get the scan going. She told Daniel that she’d check in on him after the test, gathered herself, and went to the next cubicle. She was pretty sure all she was looking at there was a high ankle sprain.

  * * *

  . . .

  Around three thirty, she hung up her stethoscope, got a cup of coffee, and checked her texts. Nothing from Austin’s father. No messages from Austin’s friends. But things were under control in the ER and there was no incoming—nothing from the EMTs on the radio alerting them to a stroke or car accident en route, nothing horrific involving semiautomatic rifles and schoolchildren—and she had a feeling that Austin’s parents had arrived at the hospital. And so she told the team that she was going to take a fifteen-minute break. She didn’t say where she was going and no one asked. They presumed she was going to stretch her legs or gaze up at the sky from the East River promenade: according to some of the patients, the horizon was lavender, and the midafternoon October sun was peeking out through the jagged edges of dramatic black clouds. But she grabbed her bag with Austin’s suit and his Speed Racer cycling jersey, and instead of going outside, she went down the long empty corridors to the wing of the hospital with the elevator bank that would lead her to administration, advancement, and the labs.

  And when she exited on the seventh floor, sure enough, there they were. Austin’s mother and father. At least she presumed that was who it was in Austin’s office: a couple that looked in his case to be early seventies and in hers to be early sixties. She saw that Sally Gleason was there, too. Austin’s boss dressed a lot like her mom, Ale
xis thought, as she surveyed the woman in a gray pinstripe suit, the skirt just above her knees, her white blouse open at the neck. Austin’s parents were dressed more casually, but she could still see the money in his chinos and soft leather loafers, and in her David Yurman bracelets and pink Arlette turtleneck. But Catherine Harper’s sunglasses rested atop her head like a hairband, black plastic against an impeccably styled helmet of white, and Alexis saw instantly that her eyes were red. She’d been crying over the last half hour. Maybe it was seeing her son’s office. Maybe it was something she had found here. When Alexis arrived in the doorway, Sally was perched on the radiator by the window with its view of the East River and the borough across the water, her arms folded across her chest, and Austin’s parents were standing beside his desk. They had a cardboard banker’s box beside his computer, its lid leaning against its side. The computer, she noted, was off.

  When Sally saw her, she stood all the way up and motioned at Alexis’s light-blue scrubs. “Looks like someone just came from the ER,” she said. Then she introduced her to Peter and Catherine Harper.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alexis began, and suddenly Catherine was embracing her, hugging her, and she could hear the woman sniffling and feel her body spasm with actual sobs. And so, within seconds, Alexis was weeping, too. She felt Peter’s hand on her shoulder. When they pulled apart, Alexis gave them a small, self-deprecating grin and continued, “Well, that was an awkward way to meet.”

  “No,” Catherine said. “It’s sad and awful, but it wasn’t awkward. It was just human. And the only way I will survive this is when people hold me and let me hold them.”

  She nodded. “I brought you something,” she said, and she handed them the Speed Racer cycling jersey and the suit bag. She had expected to need them as a peace offering, but that seemed less likely now. She really was just bringing Austin’s parents a few more small pieces of their son.

  Peter took the suit bag, and Catherine held open the jersey by the shoulders so she could see the image. She brought it close to her face to inhale it and Alexis told her, “I washed it.”

  The older woman smiled and rolled her eyes. “I guess that was good.”

  Alexis nodded. “Yeah. Kind of was.”

  “Peter told me that Austin had made up some strange story about us,” she said to Alexis. When her husband went to lean against the credenza, Alexis saw that he moved a little gingerly: that slight limp Austin had told her about. The fact that he still skied impressed her.

  “Well, yes. I mean, not about you. About Peter and about his uncle. And maybe strange is too strong a word. But…exaggerated or inaccurate, maybe.”

  Peter sighed. “I still don’t understand it. I don’t understand why he would say such a thing.” He turned to Sally. “Did Austin ever tell you that I was wounded—shot—in Vietnam, and this trip was to visit the sites where I was hit and his uncle was killed?”

  “Yes,” said Sally. “He did. He was clear that that was exactly the purpose.”

  Catherine blew her nose into a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack. Then she turned back to Alexis. “Did he ever say anything about that when the two of you were with his friends?” she asked.

  “We hung around mostly with my friends. Almost entirely with my friends. And, yes, he did mention it when we told them about our bike trip. It was, he said, the reason why we were going to bike there instead of, I don’t know, in Italy or Spain or Virginia.”

  They all heard a cell phone ring and Sally pulled hers from her blazer pocket and looked at the incoming number. “Excuse me,” she said, leaving. “I have to take this. I’m so sorry.”

  “I just can’t understand it,” Catherine said.

  Her husband nodded. “I don’t get it. I really don’t. It’s so strange.”

  “It is,” Alexis said, “and so I hired a detective.”

  “You what?”

  Telling them had been a reflex, an impulse because, she supposed, she felt bonded to them because of their shared tears. But instantly she regretted opening her mouth. She could see the transformation in both Peter’s and Catherine’s faces: umbrage on his, betrayal on hers. She had exacerbated their grief and she felt terrible. Her short sentence was a bombshell that seemed to suck the air from the room.

  Finally, Peter put up his hands, fingers spread. “Whoa. You met with a private investigator because—so you say—Austin told you that I was shot in Vietnam instead of injured in a go-cart accident?”

  “No,” Alexis said, but then she corrected herself. “I mean I did, yes, but only partly for that reason. I’ve retained a private investigator—and I’m paying for it, this is my thing—because I have some questions about his death.” She had phrased her response as delicately as she could, but she wished that she hadn’t brought it up in the first place. Catherine sat down on the edge of the desk. She brought her hand to her mouth and looked stricken.

  “Go on,” said Peter.

  “There’s not much more to say. But if you really want me to elaborate, I can,” Alexis told him.

  “I do.”

  “Please,” Catherine added briefly.

  And so Alexis told them about the wound on the back of Austin’s hand and the fact that there was no compatible mark or rip on the glove. She told them the chronology as she saw it, stressing the length of time between when he set off on his own and when he was most likely hit by a vehicle near the top of the mountain. She presented the story the way she would when presenting the worst possible news to a patient’s family in the ER of this very hospital. She was calm and honest and stressed that everyone had tried their best to find him. When she was done, for a moment no one spoke. It was Peter who finally broke the silence.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “I wanted to see you two,” she said, and she hated herself for speaking a half truth. “And I wanted to look around his office,” she added, coming clean.

  “Do you have issues with mental illness?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No!” she told him, though in her mind instantly she saw her cutting kit and the scars that marked her abdomen and thighs like constellations. “Of course not.”

  “Because this all sounds a little paranoid to me. A little crazy.”

  “Well, this is a really weird and crazy world,” she said defensively. “I see it every day here in the hospital. In the ER.”

  “The Vietnamese police said it was a hit-and-run accident. What in the name of God do you think a private investigator in New York City might turn up?”

  “I don’t know. But I want to know what really happened, if there is something more to the story.”

  Alexis felt Catherine watching her. No mother wanted to hear this. No mother wanted to hear any of this. “You wanted to look around his office,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you expect to find?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Catherine repeated.

  Alexis shook her head.

  “But you’re still going to nose around his life. You’ve hired a detective and you’re going to dredge up high school and you’re going to dredge up college. You’re—”

  “Catherine,” Peter said. “This isn’t about that. This is about Vietnam. That’s all. It’s okay.”

  “Vietnam?” Catherine asked, drawing out the last syllable and raising her voice. Suddenly she was reaching into the box and pulling out a paperback guidebook of the country and throwing it hard at Alexis’s feet. “How about a travel guide, in that case?” she hissed. Peter started toward his wife to calm her, but she pushed him away, her palms open on her husband’s chest, and then she lifted the banker’s box off the desk and turned it upside down so everything fell to the floor. “You want his pens?” she went on, raising her voice. “This stupid bobbl
ehead doll of a baseball player? This letter opener that someone gave him that I don’t think he ever—not even once!—used? Tell me, damn it, do you want his Speed Racer shirt?” She was almost hysterical now, and Peter tried to embrace his wife. But Catherine would have none of it.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked Alexis, her voice plaintive and inconsolable. “What do you want from us? Why are you doing this?”

  “I—”

  “Why?”

  Peter wrapped his arms firmly around Catherine’s whole body, and he was murmuring into her ear, “Shhhhh. It’s okay, it’s all—”

  “No,” she wailed, an almost biblical ululation, “it’s not okay! Nothing’s okay and nothing ever will be again! My child is gone! Our child is gone!”

  Alexis went to the woman to apologize, but Peter saw the small movement and shook his head no. She shouldn’t even consider that. And so instead she knelt on the floor and started to repack the box, wondering—in spite of the pain she had caused—whether she might find something of interest. Something to explain what Austin had been doing and who (or what) he really was. But there was nothing that she hadn’t already seen when (and it seemed so long ago, but it really had been only months) she had changed into a white cocktail dress in this very office. There was nothing surprising or unexpected or unusual. It was a small pile of photos and trinkets and office supplies. No flash drive she could secretly pocket, no Moleskine notebooks she could discreetly commandeer. The only item that had anything at all to do with Vietnam was that guidebook. She doubted it would have any use, but just in case she asked Peter if she could please have it as a keepsake. A remembrance of her last time with his son.

  He continued rubbing his wife’s back, but nodded. “Sure,” he said quietly. “Take it.”

  And so she stood and slipped it into her shoulder bag. When Alexis turned around, there in the doorway was Sally’s young assistant, again in that terrible blazer, and Oscar Bolton. Oscar seemed to be studying her, as well as watching Catherine Harper in her despair. He was trying to place her, Alexis realized, to recall where he had seen her. Today she was in scrubs with her hair back; yesterday, when she’d been in Sally’s office, she’d been wearing jeans and a windbreaker, and her hair was down. But then Oscar’s countenance changed ever so slightly: he remembered. She could see the recognition dawning on his face.