The Euthanist (10 page)

I’ve visited enough sick people that I should have felt right at home, but I was apprehensive as hell. Leland warned me she could be violent. If she was anything like her brother, she might lunge from her seat and slap me, stab me, shoot me. I checked her hands. Other than the remote control, she wasn’t holding anything. No weapons. I stepped within striking distance.

Her eyes puffed, and her lids were dotted with the pinprick moles I’d seen in the video. From the grainy footage I’d assumed they were chalazia, but I was wrong. They were milia, bumps built up by dead skin cells. They were linked to some dietary imbalances, so they wouldn’t be unusual to find on a diabetic either. Helena smelled sugary, or maybe I imagined it. The nose can smell what it wants sometimes.

She muted the TV and tugged at my scrubs. “You just get out of surgery?” Her usual nurse, if she remembered the man, probably didn’t wear these kind of OR scrubs. Helena wasn’t testing me now. She was trying to get comfortable with me, and had a gentle laugh that contrasted the brash tone she used when I first came in.

“Brain surgery,” I cracked.

“Is that right?”

“You got a drill? I can take care of you right now.” Gallows humor. It’s my favorite kind.

She remarked at my physique, accusingly. “You’re tall.”

“I get that a lot.”

“What are you, six feet?”

“Not quite. About five ten. But you add heels…”

She peeked at my shoes. “You’ve got clogs on.”

“That’s a kind of heel.”

“Look at me. When I was skinny, I was a tiny little thing. You could carry me in a change purse. I wanted to be tall like you.”

“It’s not as nice as you think it would be.”

“Says the tall person…” She shared Leland’s sharp wit. I liked it more on a person who wasn’t holding me captive. “You’ve got a cute figure.”

“Thank you.” I looked for a chair to sit and unpack my satchel.

Her attention drifted to the soap opera. “Jill had more curves, but you probably have a foot on her.” I didn’t know who she was talking about, and she nudged, “My usual nurse. You’ve met her, right?”

Leland prepared me for this. He had given the name of Helena’s regular nurse. “I know Dimitri.”

“Who the hell is that?” Either she was testing me or she forgot. I couldn’t tell.

“That’s your usual nurse.”

She laughed, “Says who?”

“The hospital, your medical records, and Dimitri.” Helena’s smile froze. She was trying to figure out if she’d forgotten. Then it came back to her, unless she was just faking recall for my benefit. “Dimitri—ass like a coconut. That’s why I picked him.”

“That’s him.”

Around the room, Helena’s belongings overflowed from cardboard boxes. A couple of previous clients had done this—packed up their possessions to make less work for their family. Like Leland’s staged home in Clayton, I couldn’t find any photographs on the walls either. No smiling Lelands looked on while I got to work. Normally a client’s house was full of family pics. Perhaps the Mumms weren’t sentimental. For all I knew, Leland and Helena hated each other, and he was tending to her now out of a fraternal obligation. Still, even in the most strained family dynamics I’d see photos of kids, parents, friends.
Someone
. I’d shrugged off the anomaly with Leland, but took note of it now. I told myself she’d just boxed them up with her other things.

The only thing hanging on the walls was a framed black and white poster of a half-naked woman who might have been a darker Josephine Baker, sexualized with long lashes and a fan of feathers obscuring her breasts and pelvis. If I could add a third certainty to death and taxes, I would add that the woman in the poster was not Helena Mumm.

Without a chair handy, I placed the pizza box on the floor and sat on the corner of the coffee table. Her scent cut through the gardenia fumes. Hygiene is as much social ritual as health, and most clients fall out of that ritual. They peed and pooped a little in their clothes, and you could smell it for miles. Hospitals did a better job at masking it by bleaching out the pores in the linoleum, but they never cleaned out the smell entirely. I used to snort a little perfume so I could sit next to a client and not look like I was sniffing the expired milk. Helena smelled a little of excrement, and I found it comforting, because it smelled the way someone who was dying should smell. She didn’t smell like FlyNap.

I almost liked her, as much as I could like anyone related to Leland Mumm. The empathy didn’t come easily this time, because I didn’t want to be there. Helena must have sensed it too. But we both faked it, and as I was faking it, I found her false smile assuring. Her contrived effort was still an attempt to put us both at ease.

On the edge of the coffee table, I unzipped my satchel. Leland’s black box waited inside, but I wouldn’t take it out yet.

While I stared into my satchel, Helena suddenly latched onto my wrist. She couldn’t see the gauze under my sleeve, but her hand clamped right where Leland had cuffed me. Indian sunburn.

My eyes went wide and I jerked my arm away. “That hurts!” I fumed, shaking out my wrist. “Why would you do that?” Kali didn’t get angry with clients. Not ever. But my fist balled up, and I pushed the coffee table away from her chair.

Helena withdrew her hand, stunned at my reaction. “Just trying to thank you for coming,” she said. “Just trying to show you affection.”

Neither of us spoke. We were both confused. For me, it wasn’t so much that she had held my arm, or that she had grabbed the tender part of it, but that she had so much power in her grip. For someone with an advanced disease—and let’s face it, at least another co-occurring disorder—she was stronger than I’d have guessed. Most clients don’t have much physical strength by our final meeting. I’d gotten used to quavering hands. Not Helena. She’d clamped down on my wrist like a lobster claw.

I wondered if she was healthier than I’d been led to believe. I wondered about the different ways Leland Mumm might have lied to me about his sister. People killed their relatives all the time. But he couldn’t be killing her for money, not unless she’d buried a pot of gold in the backyard.

“I didn’t grab you that hard.”

I rolled up a sleeve, “See the gauze? I’m hurt.”

She squinted at the bandages. “Did you try and kill yourself?”

“Of course not.”

“Because it looks like you slashed your wrists.” Abrasive like her brother. Often I wondered how I’d get along with a client if I met her when she was healthy. I don’t think I’d have liked Helena.

If this sort of interchange had happened with another client—which it hadn’t—Kali might have asked if that client was uncomfortable. Kali might even offer to leave. But there against my will, I couldn’t walk out. Bitch or not, I needed to get this over with.

Leaning forward, she snatched at my scrubs again and reached my other wrist. She twisted harder this time, to let me know the first time hadn’t been an accident. The pain ripped through my arm as she pulled me into her. “Who sent you?”

I chopped her radius with the meaty part of my hand. She was strong, so I had to whack her arm twice before she let go. If we arm wrestled, she’d give me a run for my money. I rose to my feet and shouted, “Psycho!” This would never have come out of Kali’s mouth. I gasped at my outburst.

Helena repeated, “Who sent you?” Furious this time.

Leland had requested that I not mention his name. She had problems remembering her family, and, according to her brother, she got angry when she couldn’t remember. In Clayton, I’d been willing to believe anything, but now I wondered how much of Leland’s story was bogus. “The hospital sent me.”

“Which one?”

I pulled from Leland’s script. “UCSF Lakeside.”

She sensed I was lying. “Who really sent you?”

I didn’t know how to answer. The woman wasn’t too addled to understand what was happening. She simply didn’t trust me. Had we bonded in the traditional Kali-client relationship, trust would have been forged through several meetings and phone conversations. This wouldn’t have been so awkward.

“You’re not going to touch me until I know,” she said.

I’d minimized how much I spoke. Leland had instructed me to keep as quiet as possible. But this was such a deviation from my traditional process, I wasn’t sure how to bullshit my way through it. Helena waited for a response. I didn’t see her opening up unless I built some trust. I said the first thing that violated Leland’s instructions. “Your brother sent me.”

Her mouth stretched into a bullfrog frown. “I haven’t spoken to my brother in years.” I didn’t trust Leland, but she might have forgotten that her brother visited yesterday. Some people are good at faking recognition, and appraising the authenticity of delusions wasn’t part of my training. For that matter, I didn’t even know with certainty what diseases and disorders currently degraded her, so I didn’t know what would be symptoms of her degeneration, or simply personality quirks. As she considered the possibility that I’d been in touch with her brother, she asked, “What did he say about me?”

“He briefed me about your condition—”

“What did my brother say about me?”

“We didn’t talk about your relationship.” Kali had never been this cold with a client. “It wasn’t my business.”

“What was my brother’s name?”

This one I didn’t know how to deflect. “Leland.”

I could tell she recognized the name. The way she digested the word “Leland” looked as if she’d just found a bone in her food.

“Sit down,” she said. I hesitated until she softened. “Please.” Slowly, I lowered myself to the edge of the coffee table, hands at my hips to keep my wrists out of reach. Piecing my story together, she said, “You’re my nurse?”

“That’s right.”

“Your name again?”

“Kali.”

“That’s right.” She nodded to herself, lost in thought as she examined the rocking horses on the walls.

I watched Helena’s hands as I unpacked the satchel. I brought out some rubbing alcohol to clean the arm. Kali would have explained every step of the process. For all I knew, Leland already had. I couldn’t tell what she thought was happening. Helena might have decided to die in a moment of lucidity, but now she might have been expecting her weekly injection of Byetta, which controls blood sugar for type 2 diabetics.

Helena may not have been comfortable with me, but she resigned herself. The chair creaked as her body sank further into the recliner.

“You’re here to stick me.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, start sticking.” Checking the time on my cell phone miffed her. “You got some place you need to be?”

“I’m trying to assess the timing of the medication.” That statement meant nothing. I needed to wait per Leland’s instructions, until he could be clear and in the company of whatever colleagues could vouch for his whereabouts. I had to stall.

“You’re nervous,” Helena observed.

“I’m fine.”

“You new at this?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then why so jumpy?” She focused sharply on my face and deliberately rolled up her sleeve. “Kali, whatever your name is. I know you’re not my nurse. Dimitri doesn’t have a coconut ass, although I wish he did. He’s about my size, but a white Russian.” She offered me her arm like a gift. “I know what this is, and I’m fine with it. Everyone’s got to go sometime.”

I had to remember to breathe.

Inebriated with thought, I swabbed her arm with alcohol and rubbed too hard.

Helena admonished, “You’re not going to wipe the black off, sweetie.”

I stopped. “I’m sorry.”

“If you’re going to prick me, prick me. But don’t think I’m a vegetable. And don’t you believe Leland. He’s not what you think he is.”

I didn’t want to derail us, but I needed more explanation. “He said you had delusions.”

“I know what’s going on, don’t you worry.”

“Is Leland your brother?”

“He might as well be family.”

“Are you ill?”

This dispirited her, either because it reminded her that she was actually ill, or because she considered how Leland must have conspired to bring about her death in this way. “That I am. I’m sick in all sorts of ways.”

“Are you dying?”

“Probably have a few months, so this works. Might as well be now. Might as well be you.” She held out her forearm again. “Do what you’re here to do.”

“You didn’t ask for this—”

“No,” she confirmed. “But I deserve it.”

I hesitated. Helena Mumm hadn’t chosen this. This didn’t fit Kali’s criteria, and it felt nefarious. Now I didn’t even know who Leland really was.

“You want this?”

She nodded. “I do. Stick me.” Sweetening her tone at last, she urged, “Please.”

I fondled Leland’s black case in the satchel, still hidden from her. For me to get out of this house, I needed to move this along. “I have sedatives. They can take the edge off.”

“Pills? What kind?”

“Valium.”

“Would you believe I’ve never taken those?”

“If you really want to go through with this, they’ll ease your nerves.”