Stephen White - Critical Conditions

“Oh, God. I’m sorry, sweets. She doesn’t need this. How is everybody taking it?”

“Teresa’s here, she’s keeping everyone’s spirits up.” Teresa, Lauren’s younger sister, was a stand-up comic. “Teresa’s absolutely sure it’s nothing. You know my mom’s kind of flat-chested? Teresa said the lump would have to be benign, that the alternative is too ironic. She says that my mother having breast cancer would be like Dan Quayle having brain cancer.”

I laughed. “When will they know?”

“Biopsy is today around three.”

“Call me, okay?”

“Yeah. Miss you. Can you come out? I think I’ll be here for a while. Dad’s helpless.”

“I’m going to try. This case-the adolescent I told you about?-is still acute. When I’m sure this kid’s safe, I’ll be out. Are you feeling all right?”

“Same.”

“Is that okay?”

“No, but I can live with it.”

I was going to have to guess what she meant.

Although there were a lot of things about the case I was working on that I couldn’t reveal to Lauren, I had told her that Chaney was Sam’s niece. I don’t think she was surprised when I changed the conversation and said, “Sweets, I want to offer Sam some money. For his niece’s medical fund.”

“How much?”

“The remodeling money.”

“How much is that?”

“Almost thirty-one thousand.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Go ahead, I think it’s a great idea. But Sam won’t take it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’ve known him a long time, Alan. I don’t think he’ll take it.”

“It’s for the little girl. Not for him.”

“We’ll see.”

We talked mindlessly for a few more minutes, trying to find some way to feel some connection across the miles of despair. I desperately wanted to jump on a plane to do what I could to comfort Lauren, and to allow her to do what she could to comfort me.

I agreed to meet with John Trent at nine-thirty at my office and told Cozier Maitlin’s secretary that I would meet him at the Robilio house at eleven-thirty.

I left a return message for Miggy Monroe telling her that I didn’t know anything new about Madison, and not telling her what I suspected.

Adrienne and I agreed to try and have a late dinner after I got back from seeing Merritt and after she got her son to bed that night. I said, “What, eight-thirty?”

She said, “No, closer to ten, Jonas is a night person. Will you pick up some food? I have a hell of a day ahead of me.”

She hung up on me before we had a chance to compare the horrors lurking in our Day-Timers.

John Trent looked like a daddy who had been up all night wondering if his baby was going to continue to breathe.

Seeing a fellow psychologist in a therapeutic milieu is always tricky. There’s a tendency to want to treat him like a colleague, not a patient. I fought the temptation.

After I asked about Chaney and he filled me on her uneventful night, and he asked me about Merritt and I told him that there was nothing new, I said, “You wanted to see me, John?”

“Yes.”

I waited. He knew I was waiting, so he cut the delay short.

“There’s something you should know. Two days before he died, I went to see Ed Robilio to plead for his help with Chaney.”

My pulse jumped and I knew my breathing was about to change. I said, “Go on.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe Merritt knew where I went. Maybe she heard me discussing it with Brenda, maybe she followed me somehow. I don’t know. That night, I came home, and…and Brenda and I talked in the kitchen for the longest time. I told her all about my visit to Robilio’s house. I don’t remember seeing Merritt, but she could have heard the whole thing.”

“What whole thing?”

He rubbed his open hand over the bald parts of his head. “I told Brenda I was so angry at his reaction to my visit that I could have killed him. And then I said…that…if I thought it would do Chaney any good, I would kill him. I was furious.”

“Tell me about your visit to Dr. Robilio. The same way you told Brenda. The same way Merritt might have heard you tell Brenda.”

John started by saying, “You have to understand how desperate this feels-the situation with Chaney. I’m cornered, Alan. I don’t have any good choices. This was one of the bad ones.”

I said, “I understand.” I thought I did.

“I decided to approach him personally after all attempts to work through channels at MedExcel had failed. There’s a medical board-you probably know all this-that reviews atypical medical procedures like the one we want for Chaney. They’d reviewed her case already and turned her down. Her physicians at the hospital wrote a long, eloquent appeal for a reconsideration. The head of the medical board seemed gracious enough, he invited her cardiologist in for a meeting. I attended, too, though they wouldn’t let me talk. The doctor who ran the meeting, the head of the board, he seemed, I don’t know, open-minded. But the next day, they turned down the appeal.”

“On what grounds?”

“Same ones as before. If they approve a heart transplant, what’s to keep the virus from infecting the new heart? The cardiologist argued that the drugs being used in Seattle have shown promise in two cases. The head of the medical board replied in his finding that that sounds to him like the very definition of ‘experimental.’

“I called him, the head of the medical board, oh, half a dozen times after that. He wouldn’t talk to me. His secretary told me the matter was closed.

“That avenue seemed like a dead end, so I learned what I could about Robilio. That he’s a father. Where he lived. What he liked. He’s quite a public figure; it wasn’t hard to get the information, found most of it on the Internet. I tried to act professional at first. Called him at his office. He wouldn’t return my calls. I asked his secretary for an appointment. She wouldn’t give me one. She told me to address my concerns to the director of the medical board.

“I felt like I was going around in circles. It was absurd. I lost it with her, I admit I was a jerk. I raised my voice and asked her if she was a mother, if she had kids? And she hung up on me. Maybe I deserved it.”

Trent stood then and walked to the window of my office. He gazed outside vacantly. Without turning toward me, he continued. “My good choices were used up. So I started on the bad ones. I followed Robilio home from work twice. He left early, three, four o’clock. He went inside, changed clothes, came back out wearing these ridiculous matching sweat-suits. They made him look like one of the three little pigs. Then he went for a walk. By himself. Maybe thirty minutes.

“The third day I waited for him after his walk. He has this portico over his front porch where there are a couple of wooden benches between these immense cement pineapples. The pineapples are a traditional sign of welcome. Did you know that? Anyway, I decided to act as though I was welcome. I waited on one of the benches.”

I almost said, “I did, too,” recalling the day Dead Ed’s body had been found and I was waiting for Sam Purdy to finish up inside so we could go to the hockey game. I was also embarrassed to admit I thought the statues were artichokes.

“Robilio walked up, right on time. I said, ‘Hello, I’m John Trent, I’ve been trying to reach you at your office about my daughter, Chaney.’ What he did then was so cowardly.” Trent shook his head disdainfully and returned to his chair. “He turned around to make sure his path of escape wasn’t blocked. He had been carrying this bottle of water and it just slid out of his hands to the ground.

“I remember being so disappointed in his voice; it was like listening to a weasel. He said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help. You shouldn’t be here. Call me at work. You need to go. I’m sorry.’ And then he took a step back, like he was afraid I was going to swing at him. God, that pissed me off.”