She picked up her purse from the floor.
Charlie asked, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” Sam said. “I need this shit like I need another hole in my head.”
Rusty’s bark of laughter followed her out the door.
9
Sam sat on a wooden bench in a large garden behind the hospital building. She took off her glasses. She closed her eyes. She tilted her face toward the sun. She breathed in the fresh air. The bench was in a walled-off area, a water fountain trickling by the gated entrance, a sign reading SERENITY GARDEN – ALL WELCOME mounted directly above another sign showing a cell phone with a red line through it.
Apparently, the second sign was enough to keep the garden empty. Sam alone sat in serenity. Or at least in an attempt to regain her serenity.
A mere thirty-six minutes had passed between Stanislav abandoning her at the front doors and Sam abandoning Rusty in his room. Another thirty minutes had passed since she had found the Serenity Garden. Sam had no qualms about interrupting her driver’s lunch, but she needed time to compose herself. Her hands would not stop shaking. She did not trust herself to speak. Her head ached in a way that it had not in years.
She had left her migraine medication at home.
Home.
She thought of Fosco stretching his back into a reversed C as he lolled on the floor. The sun streaming through the windows. The warmth of the swimming pool. The comfort of her bed.
And Anton.
She allowed herself a moment to think about her husband. His big, strong hands. His laughter. His delight in new foods, new experiences, new cultures.
She could not let him go.
Not when it mattered. Not when he had asked her, pleaded with her, begged her to help him end the misery of his existence.
Initially, the fight was one that they had taken on together. They had traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, back to Sloan Kettering in New York. Each specialist, each world-renowned expert, had given Anton anywhere from a seventeen to twenty percent chance of survival.
Sam was determined he would best those percentages.
Photodynamic therapy. Chemotherapy. Radiation therapy. Endoscopy with dilation. Endoscopy with stent placement. Electrocoagulation. Anti-angiogenesis therapy. They removed his esophagus, raising his stomach and attaching it to the top of his throat. They removed lymph nodes. They performed more reconstructive surgery. A feeding tube was placed. A colostomy bag. Clinical trials. Experimental treatments. Nutritional support. Palliative surgery. More experimental treatments.
At what point had Anton given up?
When he had lost his voice, his actual ability to speak? When his mobility was so reduced that he lacked the strength to shift his frail legs in the hospital bed? Sam could not recall the occasion of his surrender, did not take notice of the change. He had told her once that he had fallen in love with her because she was a fighter, but in the end, her inability to quit had prolonged his suffering.
Sam opened her eyes. She put on her glasses. A wave of blue and white hovered just beyond the reaches of her narrowed right peripheral.
She told Charlie, “Stop doing that.”
Charlie came into her line of sight. Her arms were crossed again. “Why are you out here?”
“Why would I be in there?”
“Good question.” Charlie sat on the bench opposite her. She looked up into the trees as a light wind rustled the leaves.
Sam had always known she had inherited Gamma’s striking features, that obtuse coldness that chilled so many people. Charlie’s affable countenance stood in direct opposition to their mother’s line. Her face, even with the bruises, was clearly still beautiful. She had always been so clever in the way that made people laugh rather than recoil. Relentlessly happy, Gamma had said. The kind of person people just like.
Not today, though. There was something different about Charlie, an almost palpable melancholy that seemed to have nothing to do with Rusty’s condition.
Why did she really ask Ben to email Sam?
Charlie leaned back on the bench. “You’re staring at me.”
“Do you remember when Mama brought you here? You broke your arm trying to save that cat.”
“It wasn’t a cat,” Charlie said. “I was trying to get my BB gun off the roof.”
“Gamma threw it up there so you couldn’t play with it anymore.”
“Exactly.” Charlie rolled her eyes as she slumped down onto the bench. She was forty-one years old, but she might as well have been thirteen again. “Don’t let him talk you into staying.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.” Sam looked for her cup. She had purchased some hot water at the cafeteria along with a sandwich she’d been unable to finish. She pulled a Ziploc bag from her purse. Her tea sachets were inside.
Charlie said, “We have tea here.”
“I like this kind.” Sam dipped the sachet into the water. She had a quiet moment of panic when she saw her bare ring finger. Then she remembered that she had left her wedding ring at home.
Charlie did not miss much. “What is it?”
Sam shook her head. “Do you have children?”
“No.” Charlie did not return the question. “I didn’t bring you here to kill Rusty. He’s going to do that to himself eventually. His heart isn’t good. The cardiologist basically said he’s one strained bowel movement away from death. But he won’t stop smoking. He won’t cut back on the drinking. You know what a stubborn jackass he is. He won’t listen to anybody.”
“I can’t believe he hasn’t done you the courtesy of drawing up a will.”
“Are you happy?”
Sam found the question both odd and abrupt. “Some days are better than others.”
Charlie tapped her foot lightly against the ground. “Sometimes, I think about you all alone in that shitty, cramped apartment, and I just get sad.”
Sam didn’t tell her that the shitty apartment had sold for $3.2 million. Instead, she quoted, “‘Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy.’”
“Flannery O’Connor.” Charlie had always been good with quotes. “Gamma was reading The Habit of Being, wasn’t she? I had forgotten all about it.”
Sam had not. She could still recall her surprise when her mother had checked out the collection of essays from the library. Gamma had openly disdained religious symbolism, which ruled out most of the English canon.
“Dad says she was trying to be happy before she died,” Charlie said. “Maybe because she knew she was sick.”
Sam looked down at her tea. During Gamma’s autopsy, the medical examiner had discovered that her lungs were riddled with cancer. Had she not been murdered, she likely would have been dead within the year.
Zachariah Culpepper had used this as part of his defense, as if a few more precious months with Gamma would have meant nothing.
“She told me to look after you,” Sam said. “In the bathroom that day. She sounded so strident.”
“She always sounded strident.”