“All the valves?” Seventy-two-year-old Robert Covey asked his cardiologist, who was sitting across from him. The name on the white jacket read Dr. Lansdowne in scripty stitching, but with her frosted blond hair in a Gwyneth Paltrow bun and sly red lipstick, he thought of her only as “Dr. Jenny.”
“That’s right.” She leaned forward. “And there’s more.”
For the next ten minutes she proceeded to give him the lowdown on the absurd medical extremes he’d have to endure to have a chance of seeing his seventy-third birthday.
Unfair, Covey thought. Goddamn unfair to’ve been singled out this way. His weight, on a six-foot-one frame, was around 180, had been all his life. He gave up smoking forty years ago. He’d taken weekend hikes every few months with Veronica until he lost her and then had joined a hiking club where he got even more exercise than he had with his wife, outdistancing the widows who’d try to keep up with him as they flirted relentlessly.
Dr. Jenny asked, “Are you married?”
“Widower.”
“Children?”
“I have a son.”
“He live nearby?”
“No, but we see a lot of each other.”
“Anybody else in the area?” she asked.
“Not really, no.”
The doctor regarded him carefully. “It’s tough, hearing everything I’ve told you today. And it’s going to get tougher. I’d like you to talk to somebody over at Westbrook Hospital. They have a social services department there just for heart patients. The Cardiac Support Center.”
“Shrink?”
“Counselor/nurses, they’re called.”
“They wear short skirts?”
“The men don’t,” the doctor said, deadpan.
“Touché. Well, thanks, but I don’t think that’s for me.”
“Take the number anyway. If nothing else, they’re somebody to talk to.”
She took out a card and set it on the desk. He noticed that she had perfect fingernails, opalescent pink, though they were very short — as befit someone who cracked open human chests on occasion.
He asked her a number of questions about the procedures and what he could expect, sizing up his odds. Initially she was reluctant to quantify his chances but she sensed finally that he could indeed handle the numbers and told him. “Sixty-forty against.”
“Is that optimistic or pessimistic?”
“Neither. It’s realistic.”
He liked that.
There were more tests that needed to be done, the doctor explained, before any procedures could be scheduled. “You can make the appointment with Janice.”
“Sooner rather than later?”
The doctor didn’t smile when she said, “That would be the wise choice.”
He rose. Then paused. “Does this mean I should stop having strenuous sex?”
Dr. Jenny blinked and a moment later they both laughed.
“Ain’t it grand being old? All the crap you can get away with.”
“Make that appointment, Mr. Covey.”
He walked toward the door. She joined him. He thought she was seeing him out but she held out her hand; he’d forgotten the card containing the name and number of the Cardiac Support Center at Westbrook Hospital.
“Can I blame my memory?”
“No way. You’re sharper than me.” The doctor winked and turned back to her desk.
He made the appointment with the receptionist and left the building. Outside, still clutching the card, he noticed a trash container on the sidewalk. He veered toward it and lifted the card like a Frisbee, about to sail the tiny rectangle into the pile of soda empties and limp newspapers. But then he paused.
Up the street he found a pay phone. Worth more than 50 million dollars, Robert Covey believed that cell phones were unnecessary luxuries. He set the card on the ledge, donned his reading glasses and began fishing in his leather change pouch for some coins.
Dr. Peter Dehoeven was a tall blond man who spoke with an accent that Tal couldn’t quite place.
European — Scandinavian or German maybe. It was quite thick at times and that, coupled with his oddly barren office, suggested that he’d come to the United States recently. Not only was it far sparser than Dr. Anthony Sheldon’s but the walls featured not a single framed testament to his education and training.
It was early the next morning and Dehoeven was elaborating on the mission of his Cardiac Support Center. He told Tal that the CSC counselors helped seriously ill patients change their diets, create exercise regimens, understand the nature of heart disease, deal with depression and anxiety, find caregivers and counsel family members. They also helped with death and dying issues — funeral plans, insurance, wills. “We live to be older, yes?” Dehoeven explained, drifting in and out of his accent. “So we are having longer to experience our bodies’ failing than we used to. That means, yes, we must confront our mortality for a longer time, too. That is a difficult thing to do. So we need to help our patients prepare for the end of life.”
When the doctor was through explaining CSC’s mission Tal told him that he’d come about the Whitleys. “Were you surprised when they killed themselves?” Tal found his hand at his collar, absently adjusting his tie knot; the doctor’s hung down an irritating two inches from his buttoned collar.
“Surprised?” Dehoeven hesitated. Maybe the question confused him. “I didn’t think about being surprised or not. I didn’t know Sam personal, yes? So I can’t say—”
“You never met him?” Tal was surprised.
“Oh, we’re a very big organization. Our counselors work with the patients. Me?” He laughed sadly. “My life is budget and planning and building our new facility up the street. That is taking most of my time now. We’re greatly expanding, yes? But I will find out who was assigned to Sam and his wife.” He called his secretary for this information.
The counselor turned out to be Claire McCaffrey, who, Dehoeven explained, was both a registered nurse and a social worker/counselor. She’d been at the CSC for a little over a year. “She’s good. One of the new generation of counselors, experts in aging, yes? She has her degree in that.”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
Another hesitation. “I suppose this is all right. Can I ask why?”
Tal pulled a questionnaire out of his briefcase and showed it to the doctor. “I’m the department statistician. I track all the deaths in the county and collect information about them. Just routine.”
“Ah, routine, yes? And yet we get a personal visit.” He lifted an eyebrow in curiosity.
“Details have to be attended to.”
“Yes, of course.” Though he didn’t seem quite convinced that Tal’s presence here was completely innocuous.
He called the nurse. It seemed that Claire McCaffrey was about to leave to meet a new patient but she could wait fifteen or twenty minutes.
Dehoeven explained where her office was. Tal asked, “Just a couple more questions.”
“Yessir?”
“Do you prescribe Luminux here?”
“Yes, we do often.”
“Did Sam have a prescription? We couldn’t find a bottle at their house.”
He typed on his computer. “Yes. Our doctors wrote several prescriptions for him. He started on it a month ago.”
Tal then told Dehoeven how much drugs the Whitleys had in their blood. “What do you make of that?”
“Three times the usual dosage?” He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“They’d also been drinking a little. But I’m told the drug didn’t directly contribute to their death. Would you agree?”
“Yes, yes,” he said quickly. “It’s not dangerous. It makes you drowsy and giddy. That’s all.”
“Drowsy and giddy?” Tal asked. “Is that unusual?” The only drugs he’d taken recently were aspirin and an antiseasickness medicine, which didn’t work for him, as a disastrous afternoon date on a tiny sailboat on Long Island Sound had proven.