"Just some research I've been doing at work. Nothing, really. Do you by any chance have their address?"
"I don't know, " Samuels said, somewhat distractedly. "In the Rolodex over there on my desk, perhaps. I really don't know. Kate, you know it is my way to reason, not to beg. But for the sake of my son and myself, if not for yourself, I'm begging you to put the chairmanship on the back burner and devote yourself for a few years to your family and to helping Jared get his foot in the political door."
At that instant, a chime sounded from the kitchen. Kate glanced instinctively at her watch, but she knew that it was exactly seven o'clock. She rose. "When is Jared due back? " she asked. "Wednesday or Thursday, I suspect."
"Win, I have no response to what you just asked. You know that, don't you?"
"Perhaps before too much longer you might. Let us eat. After our meal, there is a trip we must take."
With a faint smile, Samuels nodded Kate toward the dining room and then took her elbow and guided her through the door. The IV nurse, a square-shouldered woman overweight by at least thirty pounds, rubbed alcohol on the back of Ellen Sandler's left hand, slapped the area a dozen times, and then swabbed it again. "Now, Ellen, " she said in the patronizing, demeaning tone Ellen had come to label hospitalese, "you've got to relax. Your veins are in spasm. If you don't relax, it will take all night for me to get this IV in."
Relax? Ellen glared at the woman, who was hunched over her hand. Can't you tell I'm frightened? Can't you see I'm scared out of my wits by all that's happening to me? Take a minute, just a minute, and talk to me.
Ask me, and I'll try to explain. I'll tell you how it feels to be seven years old I and to learn that your father, who entered the hospital for a "little operation, " has been taken to a funeral home in a long box with handles relax?
Why not ask me to float off this bed? Or better still, just demand that I make the blood in my body start clotting, so you'll be spared the inconvenience of having to plunge that needle into the back of my hand.
Relax?
"I… I'm trying, " she said meekly. "Good. Now you're going to feel a little stick."
Ellen grabbed the bedrail with her free hand as electric pain from the "little stick" shot up her arm. "Got it, " the nurse said excitedly.
"Now don't move. Don't move until I get it taped down, okay? You know," she continued as she taped the plastic cathe er in place, "you've got the toughest veins I've seen in a long time."
Ellen didn't answer. Instead, she stared at the ceiling, tasting the salt of the tears running over her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth, and wondering where it was all going to end. Apparently blood had begun appearing in her bowel movements. The intravenous line was, according to the resident who announced she was going to have it, merely a precaution. He had neglected to tell her what it was a precaution against. "Okay, Ellen, we're all set, " the nurse announced, stepping back to admire her handiwork. "Just don't use that hand too much. All right?
Ellen pushed the tears off her cheeks with the back of her right hand.
"Sure, " she said. The woman managed an uncomfortable smile and backed from the room. It isn't fair. With no little disgust, Ellen examined the IV dripping saline into her hand. Then she shut off the overhead light and lay in the semidarkness, listening to the sighs of her own breathing and the still alien sounds of the hospital at night. It isn't fair. Over and over her mind repeated the impotent protest until she was forced to laugh at it in spite of herself. Betsy, Eve, Darcy, Sandy, the business, her health. Why had she never appreciated how fragile it all was? Had she taken too much for granted? asked too few questions? Dammit, there were no answers, anyhow. What else could she do? What else could anyone do? Here she was, almost forty, lying in a hospital bed, possibly bleeding to death, with no real sense of why she had been alive, let alone why she should have been singled out to die. It just wasn't fair.
A soft tap from the doorway intruded on her painful reveriestanding there, silhouetted by the light from the hall, was Sandyhe was holding his uniform hat in one hand and a huge bouquet in the other'permission to come aboard, " he said Ellen could feel, more than see or hear, his discomfiture. "Come on in, " she said. "Want the light on?"
"I don't think so. On second thought, I'd like to see the flowers."
Sandy flipped on the light and brought them to her. Then he bent over and kissed her on the forehead. Ellen stiffened for an instant and then relaxed to his gentle hug. "How're you doing? " he asked. "On which level?"
"Any."
"The flowers are beautiful. Thank you. If you set them over by the sink, I'll have the nurse get a vase for them later on."
"Not so great, huh." He did as she asked with the bouquet, then pulled a green vinyl chair to the bedside and sat down. Ellen switched off the overhead light. "You look nice in your uniform. Have you been home yet?"
"Just long enough to drop off my things and look in on the girls."
"How do they seem to you?"
"Concerned, confused, a little frightened maybe, but they're okay. I think it helped when your sister brought them up to see you yesterday.
I've moved back into the house until you're better."
"You may be there a long time."
"That bad?"
"Kate says no, but her eyes, and now this"-she held up her left hand-"say something else."
"But they don't really know, do they?"
"No. No, I guess not."
"Well, then, you just gotta hang in there a day or an hour or if necessary a minute at a time and believe that everything's going to be all right. I've taken an LOA from the air line to be with the girls, so you don't have anything to worry about on that account. I'll see to it that they get up here every day."
"Thanks. I… I'm grateful you're here."
"Nonsense. We've been through a lot these nineteen years. We'll make it through this."
Softly, Ellen began to cry. "Sandy, I feel like such a… a clod, an oaf. I know it's dumb, but that's how I feel. Not angry, not even sick, just helpless and clumsy."
"Well, you're neither, and no one knows that better than I do. Hey, that's the second time you've yawned since I got here. Are you tired, or just bored?"
She smiled weakly. "Not bored. A little tired, I guess. It turns out that lying in bed all day doing nothing is exhausting."
"Then how about you don't pay any attention to me and just go to sleep.
If it's okay with you, I'll sit here for a while."
"Thanks, Sandy."
"It's going to be okay, you know."
"I know."
He took her hand. "Kate's watching out for you, right?"
"She's in twice a day, and she's doing everything she can to find out why I'm bleeding." Her voice drifted off. Her eyes closed. "Don't be afraid."
"I'm not, " he said. "I'm not afraid… It's going to be okay." + The ride in Win Samuels's gray Seville took most of an hour along a network of dark country roads heading south and east from the city.
They rode largely in silence, Samuels seeming to need total concentration to negotiate the narrow turns, and Kate staring out her window at dark pastures and even darker woods, at times wondering about the purpose of their journey and at times allowing disconnected thoughts to careen through her mind. Jared… Stan Willoughby… Bobby Geary … Roscoe… Ellen… Tom… even Ros'beekes, her elementary school principal-each made an appearance and then quickly faded and was replaced by the image of another. "We're here, " Samuels said at last, turning onto a gravel drive. "Stonefield School." Kate read the name from a discreet sign illuminated only by the headlights of their car.
"What town is this?"
"No town, really. We're either in southernmost Massachusetts or northwestern Rhode Island, depending on whose survey you use. The school has been here for nearly fifty years, but it was rebuilt about twenty-five years ago, primarily with money from a fund my firm established."