Джеймс Паттерсон - The Midwife Murders

Then Cabot’s eyes open. He is trying to focus. He looks at Willie.

“No worry, little bro,” he says.

“Why’d you do this to yourself, Uncle Cabot?” says Willie.

Cabot tilts his head in the other direction, slightly away from Willie. Willie storms out of the dining room.

“Mom, call 911,” I say.

Big Lucy doesn’t budge. “No, Lucy. The EMTs are not going to do anything you haven’t already done. You saved him. Your injection. That’s what did it. God bless us all.”

“He needs rehab, Mom. He needs rehab that’s going to stick with him.”

My mother nods. Cabot is trying to sit up. He’s disoriented. He’s rubbing his leg. He’s reaching for his jeans.

“Don’t move, Cab,” I say. “Just stay put for a few minutes. Relax.”

Cabot ignores me. He continues to tug at his jeans.

Then Willie yells from the dining room doorway. His voice is loud and angry. “You heard the lady, Uncle Cabot. Don’t! Move!”

CHAPTER 42

TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN Willie and I spent Fourth of July weekend in Walkers Pasture, he and Cabot bonded over lots of crazy childish things—video games, cold spareribs smeared with grape jelly, the WeCrash Demolition Derby truck track—but, most passionately, they became best buds over (who would have guessed it?) miniature golf.

Not surprisingly, the two of them did not like the “course” in Wheeling. Not that I ever did a big survey, but all miniature golf courses look the same to me. Not to Cabot and Willie. No, their favorite place in the world was an hour-and-a-half ride away, the Hole in Fun, in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania.

How do my son and brother get to the Hole in Fun? Well, I’ve got to drive them while Mom stays home to watch Daddy. Fact is, Cabot lost his driver’s license about forty times for DUI. So if they’re going, I’m driving.

What about Cabot’s near-death experience less than twelve hours ago? Well, he still looks like a burlap bag full of loose bones. I take his blood pressure, and it’s a very low eighty over fifty-five. The man is still shaking. He’s refused anything to eat (except for half a jelly doughnut) since the emergency naloxone injection. But the most alarming thing is that Balboa Littlefield’s Mercedes is still parked across the street. Cabot has stood at the living room window and checked out the red car a few times, and I know my brother is just itching to pick up a few dozen Percocets or Vicodins.

“We should get heading to the golf place, Lucy,” Cabot says.

I offer him a deal. I tell him that unless I watch him consume one fried egg, one slice of buttered toast, and a cup of half tea, half milk, I won’t drive to Pennsylvania. I know he’ll do it for Willie.

Privately I tell Mom that Cabot should be in bed or in a hospital or in rehab.

Her answer is simple: “You’re absolutely right, honey, but the only place he wants to be is at a miniature golf place in Burgettstown, PA.”

Egg gets eaten. Toast gets eaten. Mom and I sit together at the tiny kitchen table. We’re alone for a few moments.

“You’ve been through so much, Mom. Daddy, Cabot. It never really stops, does it?” I say.

I’m not really expecting an answer, or at most, nothing more than a simple no or yes.

Instead she decides to open up. “It just looks a lot worse than it really is. Harold will join his maker soon, and a man as good as your dad is sure to be let into heaven. With Cabot, well, I still think he can make it to getting clean. He’s a son of a bitch with the drugs, but he could still pull through. Best of all, I got you and Willie, and even The Duke is being neat and nice this visit.”

She pauses. She closes her eyes. Then she opens them. “You might feel this yourself, you know. It’s the birthing life that brought me most of my joy and most of my sorrow. The beautiful new babes for the moms and dads who wanted them so bad … Nothing could have been nicer than that. But …” And she pauses again.

“You’re thinking about the babies you lost?” I suggest.

“No, not really. That’s God’s way. And, if I say so myself, I was a mighty fine midwife.”

“You were,” I say, and I do mean what I say.

“When I think about it,” she says. And she takes a moment to do exactly that. Then she reminisces for both of us. “So many nervous-making things. The Nickelson twins. They had to send one of the two boys to Children’s Hospital in Philly to figure out what his gender was. He had a whole hodgepodge of parts down there.”

“I remember that. Today they would have waited until the baby was older and let him or her decide.”

She talks about the time Larry Staubach, a farm equipment mechanic, was so drunk when Mom arrived for his child’s birth that he stood watching the four hours of labor with a bottle of Dewar’s in one hand and a pump-action hunting rifle in the other.

“I guess if I did something wrong, he was going to shoot me,” Mom says, not joking. “Good thing that little Larry came out as perfect as the Lord intended him. Course little Larry didn’t stay perfect. They got him for armed robbery of a hardware store up by Altoona.”

Mama’s memory battery is turned up real high now. She’s enjoying the talking. She remembers piecing together double boilers and goose down pillows to make an incubator until an ambulance arrived. She remembers little children helping out with the delivery when there were no adult hands available. She even remembers an encounter that was so frightening “I thought I was walking through a horror movie.”

I vaguely remember her telling me the tale once before.

“Two years ago, this very slick guy came up and sat next to me in Deedee’s Diner. Introduced himself very proper. Said his name was Eagleburg or Eaglehead or something like that. He said he supplied newborns for a few rich people who couldn’t have children of their own, all up in Harrison, New Jersey, some fancy-ass town outside New York. It sorta sounded creepy. I listened for a minute and then just moved myself to another seat at the counter. I needed money bad, but not that bad.”

Mom doesn’t even stop to catch her breath. She launches right into her next story. I serve myself a piece of lemon meringue pie.

“Some other time my friend Georgeann Shea—and I know Georgeann was usually an upright honest sort—wanted her and me to go into business together part-time. She knew a place in Maryland where you could get a certificate that legally let you use the title of doctor. She had this plan where she’d do massage therapy and I’d do prenatal and postnatal counseling. Once again, I could’ve used the cash, but I could never do something that evil. Midwives have to be honest.”

Mom is on a roll. She can whitewash her memory of the bad old days to come back now as the very best of times. And why not? Anyway, I love her stories. But I’ve got to say that four of them is just about my limit.

“Another time there was this woman showed up, same age as me, claimed to be a midwife from Maryland. Hazel was her name, a good old-fashioned name. Hazel says she’s a friend of an ob-gyn doc at Mercy Hospital in Charleston. Well, I had my doubts. After all …”

But Mom doesn’t have the chance to finish her story. Suddenly Willie’s voice comes shouting out from the living room.

“Mom, Grandma. Get in here fast!”

“Oh, shit,” mother and daughter say at the exact same time. It has to be something bad for Cabot.

But then we hear Cabot say, “This little bugger beat me in four straight Call of Duty games.”

“Are you crazy?” my mother says.

“No, really, Grandma,” Willie says. “I really beat him four times.”

“But your screaming out at me damn near killed me with fright,” she says. This is the first time since we arrived that I hear Cabot laugh.