Thorns of Truth (33 page)

“Sylvie … you are going to be all right,” he murmured. “Do you hear me?”

Sylvie croaked a noise meant to be “yes” through a mouth that felt numb, like after she’d been to the dentist. Somewhere in the midst of the roaring pain, she was dimly aware of her heart weakly flopping. There was an odd tingling in her arms and legs … and the bed beneath her felt damp.

“Call an ambulance,” she heard Rachel command.

It was like a bucket of icy water dashed over Sylvie. Out of nowhere, she found the strength to grab Rachel’s sleeve. “Please … no.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Rachel’s voice rose. “Mama, if we don’t get you to the hospital, you might …” She broke off, casting a sharp glance at Nikos.

But instead of rushing to the phone, he remained kneeling beside the bed, his broad shoulders bowed as if in prayer. It wasn’t until Rachel started to get up that he rose to his full height, reaching out to grip her shoulders gently.

“No,” he said in his deep rumble of a voice. “Let her be. It’s what she wants.” Tears had found their way into the deep crevices of his face.

. “That’s crazy.” Rachel stared at him in disbelief. “She’ll die!”

“I want to … die …,” Sylvie gasped, “in my own bed.”

Rachel shook her head violently. Sylvie knew it went against everything she believed in. She also knew that, in the end, Rachel would do as her mother wished. For her daughter was brave as well as smart—brave enough to give what was asked of her, rather than insisting on what she felt was needed.

I raised her well.
The thought rolled to a stop somewhere amid her surging agony, smooth and lovely as a perfect ocean shell washed onto a shore.

But what about her other daughter? What about Rose?

Abruptly, the shore turned sharp, full of broken, scattered shells.

I’ll go to my grave leaving her nothing but a legacy of lies.

Suddenly it struck her that Iris wasn’t the only reason she’d hung on until now. It was because of Rose, too. She couldn’t leave this earth without letting go of the burden she’d carried in her heart all these years—the secret buried so deep she’d believed it impossible to unearth.

There was time. Just
thinking
about it was like struggling to turn an ancient faucet that had been rusted shut, but she knew that if she tried hard enough she could open it. She had to. This was her last chance.
Rose’s
last chance.

You’d do that to Rachel?
a voice cried out in protest.

Sylvie’s resolve faltered. Then she reminded herself that there was
never
a good time for the revealing of long-kept secrets. And if she hesitated, it might be too late. Rachel was strong. She would survive. And Iris, Lord help her—her problem went much deeper than anything that was within Sylvie’s power to alter, one way or the other.

It was Rose she had to think of now. Rose, from whom she’d withheld the final measure of her love …

Sylvie, through a swimming haze, looked up at Nikos. In his dear face, hewn, like something for the ages, with anguish, she found the strength to move forward, to do what was right.…

A kind of lightness overtook her, causing the pain to diminish just a little—enough for her to speak clearly.

“Rose,” she whispered. “Please. Ask her to come. There’s something I need to tell her.…”

Chapter 12

T
HE STUFFY, PANELED
anteroom appeared crowded. Four members of opposing counsel huddled at one end, like players in a high-school football team. Rose—accompanied by Christina Overby, house counsel for the insurance company—stood poised in readiness by a frosted-glass door, which opened onto one of the labyrinthine corridors that cross-sectioned the fourth floor of the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street.

Somebody throw the frigging ball.
Rose urged silently, literally tapping her foot with impatience.

The trial of
Esposito
v.
St. Bartholomew’s
had been under way for exactly one week. The jury had heard medical testimony from a lineup of medical personnel—from the attending physician to the orderly assigned to OR-8 on the morning of Mrs. Esposito’s surgery. They’d been taken step by step through the surgical procedure that had allegedly left the elderly woman partially paralyzed. They’d even heard expert witnesses testify as to the high rate of cerebral aneurysms among long-term smokers.

Rose had introduced foamcore-mounted exhibits of Mrs. Esposito’s X-rays and CAT scans both before and after the surgery. As well as blowups of invoices tracing her spending habits, which had escalated sharply in the months she’d supposedly been bedridden and incapacitated. Rose had even found a witness—a former son-in-law of Mrs. Esposito—to refute the plaintiff’s claim that she’d been in perfect health before her stroke.

The jury, which at the outset had seemed sympathetic to the elderly woman slumped in her wheelchair, was slowly bending Rose’s way. She could feel it the way a sudden rise in temperature affected her sinuses. Nothing she could put her finger on—the odd wince here and there, the disapproving little head-shake, their refusal to make eye contact with the plaintiff.

For one thing, Mrs. Esposito, when she took the stand, had appeared anything but helpless—swatting at the bailiff when he attempted to push her wheelchair to the front of the courtroom, snapping defensively when Rose questioned her about certain inconsistencies between her testimony and her sworn deposition.

Not to mention a paucity of real evidence—which, during pretrial discovery, had prompted numerous fishing expeditions on Cannizzaro’s part. And which now, in the second day of the plaintiff’s attorneys’ presentation, was becoming obvious to the jury as well.

Certainly, the huge compensatory award for Mrs. Esposito that had seemed in the bag was rapidly dwindling to Las Vegas odds. And now Mark Cannizzaro was ready to talk settlement.

Yet Rose knew it would be a mistake for her to get too cocky. After all, she’d been wrong before. Who could have predicted the jury’s decision in
Maxwell
v.
CoreTech Industries
? The plaintiff had claimed severe damage from exposure to asbestos, but suffered from nothing other than what was described as “debilitating migraines.” The jury had awarded him damages of eight million.

It’s not over till it’s over,
she could hear Max say. She felt her armpits grow damp, and shifted her leather portfolio to one hip.

She watched Mark pull away from the pack, his forehead below his bushy hairline shiny with sweat. “A million two,” he growled at Rose.

Was it her imagination, or had he shrunk in the past five days? Or maybe, she thought, he was simply reverting to his simian roots—a reverse of those diagrams charting the evolution of man from apes.

Rose steeled herself before setting foot on what might prove to be nothing more than quicksand. “Four fifty,” she shot back. “Plus, you drop the suit against Diagnostics.” Diagnostics, Inc., the largest shareholder of which happened to be her client, St. Bart’s, was the independent laboratory that had run the plaintiffs tests—erroneously, according to the Esposito home team.

Mark shot her a stagey grimace. “That’s highway robbery, and you know it. Nine fifty, that’s as far as we’ll go. Consider it cheap at the price.”

“Robbery? Mark, may I remind you that
my
client isn’t the one holding a gun to anyone’s head,” Rose responded coolly.

Beside her, Rose felt her co-counsel, Christina, grow as tense as a terrier straining at its leash. Rose accidentally on purpose bumped her elbow to distract her before Christina could blurt something that would screw this deal. Christina, thirtyish, yet prematurely gray since her teens, was often mistaken for Rose’s elder—a fact she didn’t appreciate. And she was in no mood now to sit back and let Rose steal the show.

“Mr. Cannizzaro, I don’t think you fully appreciate the negative impact of what—” Christina began, chin raised, chest up, vowels rounded—a white-glove Vassar girl to the hilt.

“Five hundred,” Rose interrupted her.

She understood the Mark Cannizzaros of the world; she’d grown up with them on Avenue K, watched them playing games of pickup in their raggedy shorts and line-dried T-shirts. She’d learned to negotiate with them long before law school—helping them with their homework for the price of a homemade cannoli; haggling over baseball cards; getting them to pony up their lunch money in exchange for the mimeographed copies of the “shit” list Sister Perpetua kept in her office: the titles of all the books banned by the Church.

The rules of the game? You could rob them blind, you could even trick them. But you must never, ever make them look foolish.

Cannizzaro laughed—a hard, gritty sound, like shoes scuffing over gravel. “You drive a hard bargain, Griffin. Seven fifty, and we ditch Diagnostics. That’s it. Final. I swear on my mama’s grave, I can’t go any lower than that.”

Rose fixed him with a look that said,
We’re paisanos, you can’t pull that shit with me.
“Face it, the jury isn’t buying. Six fifty, take it or leave it. This offer expires in exactly one minute.”

Christina started to open her mouth again, while Cannizzaro’s boys—all graduates of the Academy of Wannabe Yuppies—simply stared.

Mark Cannizzaro shifted from one navy Capezio loafer to the other before grunting, “Make it seven hundred and you’ve got a deal.”

Rose shook her head, and folded her arms over her chest.

“Six fifty won’t even cover my expenses!” Mark protested.

“That’s your problem.” He might not like it, but he would respect her for hanging tough.

“Ahhh, Griffin, come on.…”

“It’s that, or nothing,” she told him. “You won’t be able to get a shoe shine with what
that
jury is going to award your client, trust me.”

“We’ll appeal.”

“Be my guest. Do you know the percentage of overturned decisions in cases presided over by Judge Delehanty? Less than two—and that’s in the past ten years.”

After what seemed like an eternity, in which she could have sworn she actually felt steam rising from her armpits, Mark hunched his shoulders defensively and muttered, “I’ll run it by my client.”

Translation:
I’ll make it happen, one way or another.

Rose allowed herself a tiny smile of triumph. She wasn’t quite there yet; Mark could change his mind, or his client could refuse to play ball. But Rose doubted either of those things would happen. In court, you took your chances, and you cut your losses. Everybody knew that.

Forty minutes later, Rose was sailing through the courthouse’s Corinthian-columned portico, and down the wide marble steps, with a bona-fide accepted offer in hand. The jury had been thanked and dismissed. Though there were still a million details to be negotiated, the matter of
Esposito
v.
St. Bartholomew’s
had, for all intents and purposes, been put to bed.

Which was where Rose wished she could be right now.

It was just past eleven, and already she felt as if she’d put in a full twelve-hour day. Tense, her mind racing. Neck and shoulders steely enough to set off a metal detector.

She grabbed a taxi on Worth Street, gave the driver her office cross streets, and sank into the back seat. She was meeting Eric at one, but she could get a few things cleared off her desk before then.

Rose closed her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. She knew she ought to feel triumphant. Instead, she felt merely restless—a restlessness she suspected had nothing to do with the trial.

Eric. She couldn’t stop thinking about him: the things they’d talked about, the faint raspiness of his voice late at night over the phone, the light pressure of his hand against the small of her back when ushering her through a door or bending close to kiss her.

In bed, too. The tip of his tongue circling her navel, the practiced motions of his hand between her legs. And making love, dear God, his almost supernatural ability to hold back, minute after minute, until she’d had her fill.

But more than all that, the thing she’d longed for and, at the same time, dreaded had come true.

She was in love.

When had she discovered this to be true—without a shadow of doubt? Oddly enough, it wasn’t in Eric’s bed, or even in his arms. Her revelation had come on a day, two weeks ago, when shed been at her wit’s end with Jay. Her youngest son had been sulking over the fact that she was going out again—the third evening that week—and when Eric arrived to pick Rose up for the concert to which he’d scored free tickets, she’d feared his being there would only make things worse.

But after darting into the kitchen for some cold drinks, she’d returned to find Eric and Jay deeply absorbed in a conversation about blues artists. Turned out they were both big B. B. King and Muddy Waters fans. They were discussing the finer points of various recordings, their heads bent over a handful of CDs from Jay’s collection. Instantly, Rose had been struck by the age-old picture they formed. In that unguarded moment, so at ease with one another that they might have been father and son.

She’d felt a hard lump of ice inside her start to dissolve, and it was further melted when Eric suggested that Jay join them. He’d snag an extra ticket at the door, he said; besides, he’d added with a wink, it might be time for Jay to expand his repertoire to include a little Beethoven and Brahms.

No fireworks. No bells. But with that one gesture, Rose had been shown the gateway to a path that, she sensed, could lead to something rich and wonderful.

Even so, she continued to hold back in some ways, careful to maintain certain limits. She had yet to spend a whole night with Eric, for instance.

The official excuse was Jay, but her teenaged son wasn’t the only reason. Deep down, she feared it was too risky—like crimes that become federal once a state line is crossed. She wasn’t prepared for that level of intimacy. It would feel too much like …

…
being married.

And that would be cheating somehow. Because she was already married. To Max.