Peter Straub - Mr. X

‘ Eee spitl. ’

‘Right. I’m going to stay here until you get better.’

Her right eye clamped shut, and the left side of her mouth opened and closed. She tried again. ‘ Whaa … mmmdd … kkk … kkmm … rrr? ’

‘I thought you were in trouble,’ I said.

A tear spilled from her right eye and trailed down her cheek. ‘ Pur Unnd .’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ I said, but she was asleep again.

A white-haired Irish politician introduced himself as Dr Muldoon, the heart specialist assigned to my mother’s case, and described Star’s condition as ‘touch and go.’ His confidential whiskey baritone made it sound like an invitation to a cruise. Shortly after Muldoon’s campaign stop, the muscular guy with the ponytail who had been talking to May went into the cubicle, and I followed him.

He was taking notes on the readouts of a machine that would have looked at home in the cockpit of a 747. When he saw me, he stood up, nearly filling the entire space between the equipment and the side of the bed. The tag on his chest said his name was Vincent Hardtke, and he looked like an old high school football player who put away a lot of beer on the weekends.

I asked him how long he had been working at St Ann’s.

‘Six years. This is a great staff, in case you have any doubts. Lawndale gets the fancy Ellendale clientele, but if I got sick, this is where I’d come. Straight up. Hey, if it was my mom, I’d want to know she was getting good care, too.’

‘You’ve seen other patients like my mother. How did they do?’

‘I’ve seen people worse off come through fine. Your mom’s pretty steady right now.’ Hardtke stepped back. ‘That old lady with the cane, she’s a piece of work.’ He pushed the curtain aside and grinned at Aunt May. She snubbed him with the authority of a duchess.

By late morning, visitors had gathered in the passages between the nurses’ station and the two rows of cubicles. Stretching my legs, I walked all the way around the nurses’ station a couple of times and remembered something Nettie had said.

Nurse Zwick ignored me until I had come to a full stop directly in front of her. ‘Nurse,’ I said, indicating my duffel bag and knapsack against the wall, ‘if you think my bags are in the way, I’d be happy to move them anywhere you might suggest.’

She had forgotten all about them. ‘Well, this isn’t a luggage car.’ She momentarily considered ordering me to take them to the basement or somewhere else equally distant. ‘Your things don’t seem to be in anyone’s way. Leave them there for the time being.’

‘Thank you.’ I moved away, then approached her again.

‘Yes?’

‘Dr Barnhill told me that you spoke to my mother this morning.’

She began looking prickly, and a trace of pink came into her cheeks. ‘Your mother came in while we were having the first patient summaries.’

I nodded.

‘She was confused, which is normal for a stroke person, but when she saw my uniform, she got hold of my arm and tried to say something.’

‘Could you make it out?’

Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. ‘ I didn’t make her say anything, Mr Dunstan, she wanted to talk to me . Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr Barnhill displeased your aunts, I’m sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition.’

‘She must have been grateful for your attention,’ I said.

Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. ‘It’s nice to deal with a gentleman.’

‘My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly.’ This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say, You have to give some to get some . ‘Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?’

Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. ‘At first I couldn’t make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said, “ They stole my babies .”’

As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses’ station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.

Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother’s heart. 5, Mr Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs Helen Loome, the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.

‘It’s the alcohol leaving his system,’ said Nettie. ‘Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker.’

May said, ‘Mr Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life.’

Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr Temple.

Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world of Cherry Street as if born to it. Queenie’s marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.

‘Is Toby Kraft still around?’ I asked.

‘Last I heard, dogs still have fleas,’ Nettie fired back.

Aunt May levered herself to her feet like a rusty derrick. Her eyes glittered. ‘Pearl Gates turned up in her second-best dress. Pearlie’s in that Mount Hebron congregation with Helen Loome, you know, she went there from Galilee Holiness.’

Nettie craned her neck. ‘The dress she dyed pea-soup green, that makes her look like a turtle?’

Aunt May stumped up to a hunchbacked woman outside cubicle 9. I turned to Nettie. ‘Pearlie Gates?’

‘She was Pearl Hooper until she married Mr Gates. In a case like that, the man should take the woman’s name, instead of making a fool out of her. Considering the pride your Uncle Clark takes in our family, it’s a wonder he didn’t call himself Clark Dunstan, instead of me becoming Mrs Annette Rutledge.’

‘Uncle Clark is all right, I hope?’

‘An expert on everything under the sun, same as ever. What time is it?’

‘Not quite twelve-thirty.’

‘He’s driving around the parking lot to find a good enough place. Unless Clark has empty spaces on both sides, he’s afraid someone’ll put a scratch on his car.’ She looked up at me. ‘James passed away last year. Fell asleep in front of the television and never woke up. Didn’t I give you that news?’

‘I wish you had.’

‘Probably I got mixed up if I called you or not.’

For the first time, I was seeing my relatives from an adult perspective. Nettie had not considered telling me about James’s death for as long as a heartbeat.

‘Here comes your Uncle Clark, right on schedule.’

The old man in the loose yellow shirt coming around the desk bore only a generic resemblance to the man I remembered. His ears protruded at right angles, like Dumbo’s, from the walnut of his skull. Above the raw pink of his drooping lower lids, the whites of his eyes shone the ivory of old piano keys.

Uncle Clark drew up in front of his wife like a vintage automobile coming to rest before a public monument. ‘How are we doing at the moment?’