The Wilder Sisters (47 page)

He cradled her gently against his chest.
El Niño
beat at the win- dows. “
Shh
. Lie quiet and let me tell you a story.”

She looked down at his penis, which was no longer firm and eager for her. How strange to study a man’s equipment at rest. She couldn’t imagine what it felt like to carry such an unpredictable appendage around twenty-four hours a day, never certain when it was going to act up. “What story is that?” she’d asked, terrified it was the I- love-you-but-I-just-can’t be-with-you story she’d heard so many times before.

“This is the story of a man who got smart late in his life. So smart he was allowed a second chance with someone he never should have let go in the first place.”

“This isn’t one of my grandmother’s stories, is it? Starts out great, but then somebody drowns the children in the river and they mess up your dreams every night for the rest of your life?”

Tres laughed. “No, this one might have a happier ending. It all depends. The man’s going to have a hard time of it, because she makes more money than he does, and he’s in the middle of redefining himself, never a pleasant task. It means financial sacrifices, for one thing, and probably going back to school.”

“What about the woman?” Lily asked. “Does she just go to sleep and believe the man’s going to be there in the morning? I think she’d be more comfortable with a guarantee.”

“Come on, Lily. You know the best stories don’t have guarantees.” She wanted to buy it. She wanted him inside her. She wanted her headache to sprout wings and fly out the window into the storm.

“But tonight was supposed to be their big reunion. Memorable.” “It already is. She can sleep right next to him, and her headache

is going to go away.”

“But these two characters in your story, they still make love, right? And it’s glorious, for a lot of years, like say at least until they’re eighty?”

He patted her shoulder and brushed his lips against her skin. “Yes, Lily. Mountains are moved, but they don’t have to do it six times a day to prove the mountain exists.”

Just like that, believe him? Before they had fallen asleep, Buddy Guy had heaved himself onto the foot of the bed. Tres had taken his right hand from the complex curve of Lily’s breast and slid it down the bedsheets until it rested on Buddy’s diamondback-rattler-shaped skull. Her bad blue dog growled a warning but did not snap. Lily shut her eyes and fell asleep in Tres’s arms. If he got bitten it was his own fault.

The day after a headache she always felt a little weird. Taking those pills was the equivalent of having her brain sucked out of her skull with a straw. The gray matter grew back, but never as quickly as she hoped it would. Her thoughts puddle-jumped from one rock to another as she packed her carry-on and tried to remember everything she needed to take along. As her ability to move through the world at Mach 1 returned, fragments of the evening returned to her in the form of mood swings, filling her with regret when she thought of Shep, and

uneasy triumph when she thought of Tres. Instead of taking him in out of the rain like that, maybe she should have told him she had other plans, to try back another time, and made the man wait and wonder the way he’d done to her. But didn’t there come a point when a woman could quit the games, just ask for what she needed outright? Lily told herself she had been too preoccupied with her migraine to manage female diversion tactics, but that was a lie. She didn’t want to take the chance Tres wouldn’t come back. She made a quick sweep of the condo before it struck her that she’d forgotten to make a boarding reservation for Buddy Guy.

She could leave him home, but what if she was gone longer than a few days? Southern California had enough kennel facilities that Buddy hadn’t yet been banned from them all, but she’d miss her plane if she stopped to find a new place right now. Maybe Tres…? Bad idea, no way. Fear of lawsuits kept her from trusting Buddy on an individual basis with anyone except Mami and Pop.

Tres walked into the kitchen, where Lily stood eating a cracker slathered in jelly. “I’ll watch the dog if you need me to,” he said, and reached into the sack for a cracker of his own. “It’s not like I have to be anywhere soon.”

He drove Lily to the airport, too. As she stood by the curb listening to that dreadful recording, “The white zone is for loading and un- loading of passengers only, no parking,” she handed him the various keys he’d need. Car key—well, that was obvious, it was in the igni- tion. The condo key presented a slightly different matter. She had to take Blaise’s old key and lay it in another man’s palm. The cool metal against her fingers reminded her of how much he’d hurt her, and that only hours earlier she’d dismissed Tres’s weeks of silence with a blanket forgiveness. Was this the right thing to do, just hand over her life? At her core, even without Shep’s reminders, she knew she could be foolhardy, at best a tempestuous idiot. However, what happened in her bed last night had dramatically altered her defini- tion of peak sexual experiences. Dr. Quintero was now five across the board, and every other guy was history, but the strangest thing was they hadn’t even made love.

As anxious as Lily had been to feel that pelvic reassurance, Tres hadn’t made a move other than to hold her in the crook of his arm, stroke the hair from her face, and kiss her—she wouldn’t have let him get away with anything less—and he had
talked
to her, some- times in

Spanish, other times in English, until she was asleep. Migraine medicine definitely loosened her pins, but painkillers didn’t have the power to make Lily surrender her heart. That she’d done all by herself.

He’d wanted to park the car and walk her inside the terminal, but Lily said no. She hated good-bye scenes, and airports only made them worse.

“Have a safe flight,” he told her, waving
adios
at curbside. “Call me if you need me.”

John Wayne had the best takeoffs in the world due to their noise abatement procedures. Lily shut her eyes and enjoyed the moment of weightlessness as the engines cut power before they throttled up again over the Pacific. She looked out over the water, visible only for moments through patches of winter clouds. It was a pretty sight, all that water, home to whales and so forth, but it sure wasn’t the Sangre de Cristos.

As soon as the seat-belt sign dimmed, Lily hit the ground running. “Ladies first,” she said, pushing past the pokey businessmen with whom she’d ridden in first class. She intended to be up the jetway and into the terminal proper before the coach passengers had time to sort out their carry-on luggage. The chill December air fingered its way through the bellows, but Lily didn’t stop to pull on her coat. She ran all the way to the escalator toward the rental car counters. Hoping to endure the least amount of red tape, she had prepaid by credit card, said yes to the insurance package, which came free with her Chairman’s Club membership anyway, and had given her card number to the clerk on the other end of the line. She wasn’t some first-time tourist out looking for bargains, she wanted a solid car with four-wheel drive and a CD player. The clerk suggested a Ford Expedition, and Lily said, “Now you’re talking.”

At the top of the escalator, she slowed down while a woman folded up her jillion-dollar baby stroller and tried to manage the flotsam that went along with having an infant as well as the kicking, squalling baby itself. Lily examined the baby with mostly a scientific interest. They were poorly designed packages that took far too long to evolve into an appropriate level of self-sufficiency. She tucked her pull-along suitcase handle into its disappearing pouch and opted for the stairs between the escalators. At the bottom the Avis Preferred Customer line was mercifully short. She tapped her foot, waiting for the people in front of

her to finish. While she waited it occurred to her that for once in her life, she’d left a man without worrying there would be no man to come back to. When the woman with the stroller and the baby got in line behind her, Lily decided maybe the baby was tolerable now that the crying had stopped, but a long way from cute. All that drool—ick—but still, a baby would be someone to talk to in the middle of the night. When the Avis clerk snapped her gum and asked whether Lily wanted to stick with the Plymouth Neon or up- grade to an Oldsmobile, Lily patiently unfolded her faxed confirm- ation for the Ford Expedition and waited for the retired rodeo queen to catch up.

She drove out of the airport and picked up I-25. She chewed the polish off two more fingernails, found a rhythm in the traffic, set the cruise control for eighty, and tore the annoyingly efficient sticker and cellophane off a Susana Baca CD. She slid it into the player, heard the chime of the Dolby calibration tone, then cranked up the volume. All it took for the singer’s heart to be filled with longing after her man left was a simple rainstorm. Tres had come back to Lily in the rain. What a song that would make. She drove on, pon- dering the questions of
ritmo y nostalgia
, praying she’d make it to the hospital in time to say good-bye to Shep.

Out the driver’s-side window of the Expedition, she charted her home state’s famous blue sky, which had not taken the winter off. No amount of scientific explanation would ever convince Lily that those blues songs she loved, heard constantly playing in her head, felt moving through her veins, charging her forward, were not the exact same shade as northern New Mexico’s upper atmosphere.

“Okay, what are we dealing with?” Lily said as she pushed open the door to Shep’s room, a pitifully equipped private room, one of five, in a dinky part of the hospital they designated the ICU. Rose and Pop wore the pinched faces of an already grieving family. “Where’s Mami?”

Rose spoke first. “She went home to feed the horses.”

Yeah, it was about feeding time. The horses at El Rancho Costa Plente were fed three times a day, rarely off schedule. Neighbors would be more than happy to lend a hand, but Lily knew her father was too proud to ask for help. “What’s Shep’s condition?”

“Twice we thought we’d lost him,” her father said, “but his heart started beating again. I guess he’s stronger than he looks.”

“Has he been conscious?”

“Not in the last couple of hours. I swear, Lily, he was talking to horses been dead twenty years. Didn’t forget a single one of their names. Talking to them like they were right here in the room. I guess that doesn’t mean anything to you girls, but it gives me the shivers.” Rose put her arm around his shoulders. “We understand, Pop.

There isn’t a day that goes by that either of us don’t think of Spar- row.”

“That old mouse-colored pony? I clean forgot her name.” “Sparrow rivaled Black Beauty as far as we were concerned.”

Lily eyeballed the various machines Shep was attached to: cardiac monitor, spitting out his heart rate, steady as a metronome, and the thermal paper lead for the EKG. He had an IV with a push-button morphine drip, utterly ridiculous, since the man was incapable of regulating his needs. Hopefully the nurse came in every couple hours and injected painkiller into the tubing. A Foley catheter snaked from beneath his sheets and emptied into a bag containing urine the color of a cheap Bordeaux. Taped above his bed were the letters
DNR
in black marking pen across a sheet of notebook paper. The handwritten scrawl of the “do not resuscitate” order brought Lily close to tears. Then Shep groaned, an ocean-deep sound coming to the people standing in the room from so far away that they might as well have been on another planet. Pop grimaced. “I know it’s selfish of me, but I don’t see how much more of this I can take.”

Lily pressed the morphine pump trigger six times. Still the man’s face remained twisted into a rictus of pain. “Excuse me a minute,” she said.

At the nurses’ station she plucked Shep’s chart from the rack and flipped through the pages, reading quickly, committing the important information to memory. Two nurses stood behind the desk and, sitting in a swivel chair, a bearded man she supposed was a doctor.

“You can’t do that,” the younger nurse told her.

Lily gave her a look that could level a building. “Appears like I already did.”

“Charts are for doctors only.”

Lily handed the chart to her. “Fine, get the doctor for me. I have some questions I’d like answered.”

“I’m not sure where Mr. Hallford’s physician is at the moment.” “Find out. I doubt very much he’d like his patient moved without notification, but I’m telling you if he doesn’t get his ass over here in

about two and a half seconds, I’m calling a damn ambulance and hauling Mr. Hallford home so he can die in peace.”

It always amazed Lily how easy it was to send the medical help into panic mode. The unhappy nurse dialed, and the page for Dr. Simons echoed in the hallway. “Thank you,” Lily said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your cooperation.”

The nurse kept her distance. “Are you family? He’s not going to tell you anything if you’re not family.”

Lily mustered up every bit of restraint she possessed. “I’m
so

family you cannot imagine.”

A few minutes later the doctor showed up and lazily picked up Shep’s chart. Chin thrust forward, he stared at Lily. Calmly she in- troduced herself and shook his hand. “Mr. Hallford’s condition is ominous,” he told her.

Which basically told her nothing. Lily didn’t falter. “I noticed on his chart you have him listed as preop for a double amputation of the legs. Surely that’s mistake. There’s a signed directive to die right here in the admit papers.”

“The blood supply to his legs is so diminished that we can’t manage his pain unless we operate.”

“Why would you cut his legs off when he’s going to die anyway?

He doesn’t want or need surgery.”

The doctor’s face remained unruffled, but Lily had dealt with enough of them that she sensed the palpable rage lurking behind it. “Perhaps you don’t realize how intractable this kind of pain can

be,” he said.

“If it hurts so much, up his morphine.” “Only so much morphine is allowed.”

“Oh, horseshit!” she exploded. “He’s going to die. We both know that. Quit trying to do a mind trip on me and up the dose. You’re not cutting on him and that’s final.” Lily took a breath. If it was going to take hardball, this white coat was about to learn how well she could pitch.