Wife-In-Law (15 page)

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Authors: Haywood Smith

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women

BOOK: Wife-In-Law
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“I have some Ambien at home, for trips.”
He put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “I know this has been a really hard day, but don’t take more than ten milligrams. We don’t want anything to depress your respiration.”
“Okay.” I pushed back the sheet. Fortunately, my clothes had dried enough to conceal my underwear. But when I swung my feet over the edge, I looked at my bare toes in consternation.
Shoes. I had no shoes.
The doctor reached into a drawer and handed me one of those pairs of beige socks with white rubber herringbones on both sides. “Here. Take these. A hospital is not a safe place to go barefoot.”
“Thanks.” I put them on, then headed for the waiting room. Kat dropped the tattered magazine she’d been reading and made a beeline for me. “You look a thousand percent better than you did when we came in here.” She put her arm around me. “Come on. Let’s get you home.” We headed outside into the warm dusk. “It’s time for this day to be over, so you can file it away and move on.”
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about what had happened, but I asked anyway. “Did you get Amelia calmed down?”
Kat’s mouth skewed down on the right. “Pretty much.”
Meaning, no. “How much does she know?”
Kat sighed as she got to her hybrid Prius. “Well, she heard me tell the paramedics Greg had left you.” She fished her car keys from her ragbag of a purse. “I’m really sorry about that.”
“You’re forgiven,” I said dully. “She was going to find out, anyway, I guess.” Frankly, I was glad I hadn’t had to be the one to tell her. “Emma,” I thought aloud.
“Don’t worry about Emma. Amelia said she’d tell her.” Kat opened the passenger door for me. “Amelia was pretty upset.”
“Amelia gets ‘pretty upset’ when she runs out of orange juice.” I slid into the seat and laid my head back against the headrest, closing my eyes. “Lord knows how
this
must feel. Poor baby.”
“She’ll get over it, and so will you.” Kat closed my door, then walked around and got into the driver’s seat. She started the engine. “Buckle up.”
“Why? I’d rather throw myself out on the expressway at seventy miles an hour,” I said as I obliged.
Between the asthma and the treatments, the paper-cut sharpness of Greg’s desertion had subsided to a dull, relentless throb. Then a fresh stab of self-pity surfaced abruptly, bringing the threat of tears. “Oh, Kat. What am I going to do without him?”
Kat scowled, gripping the steering wheel. “I read the note. You’re going to take what that cheatin’, sorry-assed husband of yours offered you and have a great life, that’s what you’re gonna do.”
I stared out the window at the lights that shone from the buildings and houses we passed in the darkness. I didn’t want Greg back if he didn’t want me. What I wanted was for things to be the way they had been in the beginning.
But that wasn’t possible. The truth had shattered the illusion I’d created about Greg and my marriage, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
They say the biggest lies we ever tell are the ones we tell ourselves, and I’d done it up brown. Looking back, I finally saw my life for what it was, and it wasn’t anything to be proud of.
Do over, do over, do over, my inner child wailed.
But life doesn’t work that way. I’d been the perfect wife, and what good had it done me? Greg had taken me for granted, then dumped me.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.
Would it have changed anything if I’d been brilliant and dynamic and challenging?
Experience said no.
Men leave. My father had left, but he’d had reason; he couldn’t stand Mama’s hoarding and craziness. So I’d done my best to make sure Greg didn’t have a reason to desert me, but he’d left me anyway.
I wondered how long it would be before Zach left Kat, but felt disloyal just thinking it.
Greg shouldn’t get away with this so easily. “I think he’s hidden a lot of money,” I told Kat. “Georgia has no-fault divorce. Half of everything is legally mine.”
Kat exhaled. “Oh, honey.” By the light of the dashboard, her freckled face mirrored the resignation in her voice. “He probably has millions, but you and I both know Greg’s too smart to hide it where anybody could find it.” She took a left onto Hammond Drive. “Take what you can get. You’ll be sitting pretty. You can go to college, if you want, or start a new business, or just sit on your ass and collect the checks. But you don’t have to figure that out now.” She turned in at our subdivision. “All you have to do now is go home, take a couple of sleeping pills, and go to sleep. I’ll stay with you, in case you need anything.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t want to be alone. “I’ve spent twice as much time at home without Greg than with him,” I mused aloud. “So why does the house suddenly seem so empty?”
“Give it time, sweetie.” She turned onto Eden Lake Court.
When Zach saw us, he got up from his chair on Kat’s porch and headed over at a lope. He was waiting to let me out when Kat pulled up at my walk.
“I sure am glad you’re okay.” He opened the door and leaned in for a hug. “Come here, sugar. Let me carry you.”
“I can walk,” I grumbled, but he scooped me up into his strong arms anyway, with only a slight stagger as he gained his balance.
“Put me down. I’m fine, really.”
“I know you can walk,” he told me. “I just want to give you something to hold on to for a little bit.”
That did it. I started crying again and curled against him. “Oh, Zach.”
Halfway to the door, he staggered slightly again.
“Put me down,” I said, still crying. “I mean it. I don’t want to give you a hernia.”
“Oh, hush,” he said, holding on tight. “I lift three hundred at the weight room all the time.”
It felt so good to have the reassurance of his arms around me, I gave in. “This is the worst day of my life, right up there with the one when my daddy left. How could I be so blind?” I said into his neck. “Greg must have been sleeping with her for years. All those ‘nights at the office,’ he was with her.”
“You want me to have the son of a bitch arrested?” Zach asked grimly as Kat let us inside. “I can
have
him arrested. Put him in a lockup where they’ll screw him over the way he screwed you. See how he likes
that
.”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Oh, right. What if I said yes?”
Zach lowered me to my hospital sockies and looked me in the eye. “I would do it,” he said, and I believed him, which helped a little.
“He’s too smart to leave any evidence.” I shook my head, thinking of their tennis-only friendship. “What would you charge him with? Felony foot fault?”
Zach hugged me to him, patting my back, and Kat joined in. “I’ve played my last game of tennis with Greg,” he said. “This is a deal breaker.”
It felt good to hear Zach’s loyalty for me, but he was Greg’s only real friend, and vice versa. Greg had ruined that too.
I pulled free. “You two have been friends for so many years.”
“Greg’s a fool,” Zach said. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. Mark my words, he’ll come to his senses one day. Until he does, I don’t want any part of him.”
Kat patted his shoulder. “Good for you, honey. Good for you.”
Suddenly I felt so tired I could hardly stand. “Thanks. On that note, I think I’ll lie down.”
Kat gave Zach a peck. “I’m gonna stay over, if that’s okay with you.” She dropped her voice, but I heard her murmur, “We can finish what we started when I get home.”
Zach pinched her butt, then headed out. “Call me if you need me.” He hollered in my direction, “And call me if you want him locked up. Any time, day or night.”
“Thanks,” I hollered after him, then waited till the door closed to start shucking off my clothes. I never wanted to see them again, especially those wretched socks.
Kat got my gown from its hook on the back of the bathroom door. “Here. I’ll get you some of that eco-wretched bottled water from the kitchen.” She took the disposable bottles personally, in spite of the fact that I recycled them.
I stripped to the skin, tossing my clothes into the trash can, then put on my gown and crawled into bed. The adrenaline had worn off, leaving me deflated, but I decided to take the Ambien, anyway. With any luck, I’d sleep through the next three months.
The pills were in the top drawer of my bedside table, right where I’d left them when I got home from taking the girls to Europe three years before.
Greg had stayed home. With
her
. And I’d thought he was being so sweet, sending us first class, for two weeks.
God, would everything be tarnished by this awful truth?
I poured two pills into my palm, then lay back. The smell of him was still there, on his pillow. I threw it across the room, narrowly missing Kat.
“That’s good, honey. Git it out.” She sat on the edge of the bed and proffered the water. “Here.” Seeing the pill bottle and my closed hand, she narrowed her eyes. “How many of them did you git? Lemme see.”
I sat up and showed her. “Two five-milligrams. Just what the doctor ordered.” I threw them into my mouth, then chased them with a slug of cold, sweet water.
“Just checkin’,” Kat said. “Yer not thinkin’ about doin’ anything
crazy
, are ya? ’Cause trust me, sweetie, this is gonna be hard enough on the girls without you doin’ something crazy.”
“I’m not going to do anything crazy.” I lay back, closing my eyes. “I’m too tired and too miserable to do anything but sleep.”
“Okay, then.”
“Oh, Lord,” I groaned out, freshly horrified. “Mama.”
The thought of dealing with her reaction was more than I could stand.
“Don’t you fret one minnit about yer mama. I’ll call and tell her, first thing in the morning.” Thank God. “We’ll have a little ‘come to Jesus’ meetin’ about her leavin’ you alone fer a while. Where’s yer cell phone?”
“In my purse.”
“I’ll answer it fer you till you git ready to deal with things.” She started to get up.
I grabbed her forearm. “Thanks. I don’t know how I could get through this without you.”
“I’m here, as long as you need me.” Kat stroked my hair with one hand, palming the pills with her other. “Yer gonna be okay, sweetie. Okay. Just give it time.”
I pretended I didn’t see her take the pills. “Thanks.”
She turned off my bedside light, then went into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard her quietly cleaning up, then blessed oblivion overtook me.
Kat was right.
I took what I could get, and I survived. And she was with me all the way.
I don’t remember how long it was before I first woke up without thinking about what had happened, but the day did come. Followed by a whole day without thinking about it. And best of all, the day when my dreams were finally free of the past.
Thanks to Kat, a year later I was whole and healthier than I had ever been.
Which was a good thing, because Kat needed me to get her through something far worse than what Greg had done to me. Zach was leaving her, but not for another woman.
 
 
It started so gradually. A stumble. Dropping little things. A hesitation with his words. We lost Zach by such small degrees that he wouldn’t admit there was a problem till his leg stopped working in the middle of the night.
He got up to go take a whizz and fell flat on his face, waking Kat and scaring her so bad, she called 911 before she called me.
The first thing I heard was the chug of the fire department ambulance in the street, which roused me in an instant. Looking up the hall, I saw the orange and white lights cycling through the sidelights in the foyer.
I grabbed my robe and threw it on as I ran to see what had happened. Immediately, I thought of Kat. We had other neighbors on the cul-de-sac, but they were private people we only saw at the annual homeowners’ meetings.
It was an ambulance, and the paramedics were headed for Kat’s front door. Oh, God.
I raced outside without disarming the alarm, so it started howling behind me just as I reached Kat’s walkway, but I didn’t care. Heart pounding, I followed the paramedics to find Kat holding Zach on their bedroom floor, surrounded by all four of their dogs and three cats, who set up a cacophony of barks and distressed meows when the paramedics descended.
In the corner, Kat’s nasty parrot shrieked at intervals, its feathers flared in alarm.
“Hush,” Kat hollered at the menagerie. She swatted their fat golden retriever. “Butterball, shut up.” Their three-legged rescue Dalmatian growled at the paramedics, while the wiener dog and the shaggy little white mop of a whatzit yapped away. “Betsy, help. Lock these fools in the bathroom before they bite somebody.”
Like me? Animals can sense when you’re afraid of them, but Kat needed help, so I didn’t hesitate. I took the Dalmatian’s collar, but she growled at me, straining to remain at Kat’s side, so Kat told her, “It’s okay, girl. Go on. It’s okay.”
“Spot, go,” Zach ordered, and the dog immediately obeyed. What was it about a man’s voice?
“Okay, girl,” I said, grabbing the Dalmatian’s collar with a cheerful little summoning whistle. “Come on, baby. Would you like a treat?” The magic words. She stopped growling and jumped up on me, tail wagging and a huge, wet tongue across my lips. Sputtering dog spit, I pulled her back down and led her toward the bathroom, lying with conviction. “C’mon. Let’s get a treat.” Once inside, I almost choked on the stink of cat boxes but closed the door behind me, then let go of the dog. Backing up, I grabbed the doorknob and readied my escape. “You wanta play catch?” I threw a washcloth toward the Jacuzzi. “Catch!”
The distraction gave me time to escape.
The same method worked on the others, but the wiener dog bit my ankle when I tried to squeeze through a narrow opening of the door to get away. “No!” I scolded, hopping back to close the door.
I turned to see that the paramedics had Zach hooked up with all kinds of wires on his head and chest.
Panting slightly from wrestling the dogs out of the way, I asked Kat, “Do you want me to put the cats somewhere?”
One of them arched its back and hissed as I went by.
“No, the cats are okay,” Kat said, which prompted the two paramedics to exchange brief glances that said they weren’t.
“Maybe I’ll just get them out of the way.” I crept up on the closest cat—a white one with big black splotches that was lolling on the bed behind Kat—and gently took it into my arms. “There, kitty. That’s a sweet kitty.” It didn’t seem to mind till I got to the second bathroom in the hall, then it shot from my arms, gaining traction with its claws. “Ow! Damn.” Thing must have read my mind.
When I got back to the bedroom, it was just where I’d picked it up, with a “na-na-na-boo-boo” gleam in its green eyes.
“What’s wrong with my husband?” Kat asked the paramedic. “Is it a stroke?”
“My leg won’t work,” Zach snapped with uncharacteristic annoyance. “That’s what’s wrong.”
“We can’t be sure just yet,” the paramedic said in a soothing tone, then halted when a blast of gobbledygook blared from the microphone pinned to his shoulder. “Roger that,” he said into the microphone, then turned back to Zach. “There are some abnormalities in your EEG, so the hospital has alerted a neurologist. They’ll be ready for you when we get there.”
I circled behind Kat to give her shoulders a brief hug, whispering in her ear, “It’s going to be okay. He’s going to be okay.” Please, God, let it be true.
“’Scuse me, ma’am,” the paramedic told me. “Could you please step back a bit? We need room to work on Mr. Rutledge.”
Chastened, I backed away and started for the door.
“Don’t go,” Kat said, her eyes telegraphing panic that only I could recognize.
“I’ll just run get some clothes on,” I told her. And call the alarm company. “I’ll be right back.” I touched the second paramedic’s arm. “Where are you taking him?”
He looked to Kat. “Ma’am, do you have a preference as to where we take y’all?”
Kat and Zach both said, “St. Joe’s,” which was right across the street from Northside Hospital.
“St. Joe’s it is.” He radioed the information to their dispatcher.
I ran outside to find lights on in all the surrounding houses, and the alarm blaring
whoop, whoop, whoop,
across the whole neighborhood.
Shoot!
By the subtle gas streetlights, I saw my neighbor from two doors down walking up the sidewalk in his robe and slippers, a long gun carried casually in one arm, barrel down. Recognizing me, he called out, “Is everything okay, Betsy?”
“Sorry!” I called back as I raced to shut the siren off. “False alarm. So sorry! But thank you for coming to help.”
He stopped, his posture communicating disappointment, then turned back toward home, grumbling all the way.
Breathless when I reached the control panel, I punched the code, and the racket fell blessedly silent. Then I called the alarm company and explained what had happened, giving my password: Amelia.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the alarm person said, “but the Sandy Springs Police Department has already dispatched a patrol car to respond.”
Thank goodness, they didn’t charge for false alarms. “Thanks. Bye.”
I threw on clothes as fast as I could and was on my way out when the police car came up the drive, its spotlight scanning the front of my house.
The patrolman got out and approached me, shining his flashlight in my face as I hurried toward him. “Ma’am, we received a break-in alert for this address,” he said tersely, his right hand dropping to hover at his gun. “Is there an intruder inside?”
A logical assumption to make, with me fleeing the scene.
“No, no. No intruder. This is my house.” I placed my hand on my heaving chest. I didn’t have time for this. “Thank you so much for coming so quickly, but it’s just a false alarm.”
Across the street, the paramedics opened the door and started wheeling Zach out. Hurry, hurry. “My best friend’s husband across the street had a medical emergency, and I was in such a hurry to go help that I forgot to disarm the alarm.”
The policeman didn’t seem convinced. “May I please see your driver’s license or photo ID?” he asked, keeping the flashlight on me. I groped for my wallet, then opened it to my license and handed him the whole thing.
The officer stepped back as if I’d just proffered a bomb. “Please remove the license and hand it to me,” he ordered.
Lord. But then again, it could have been a bomb, I guess. These days, who knew?
After struggling to liberate the license from its plastic sleeve, I pulled it out with a jerk that made him flinch, then handed it over. “Here. Could we please hurry?” I pointed to the stretcher. “They’re taking my friend to the hospital, and I promised to go with them.”
He turned to confirm what I’d said, then handed me back my license. “Your name matches the one for the call, so everything’s squared away.” He turned off his flashlight. “Would you like a police escort to the hospital?”
“Thank you so much, but that won’t be necessary. We’re just going over to St. Joe’s.”
The paramedics were closing up the ambulance.
He touched the brim of his cap. “Drive safely, ma’am. Hope everything works out okay.”
Get out of my way! You’re blocking my car! “Thank you so much.” I hit the garage-door opener on my key chain.
Taking the hint, the patrol car zoomed back down the driveway, lights flashing, then shifted into forward and took off with a squeal of rubber.
I got behind the ambulance, turned on my flashers, and followed them to the hospital.
Talk about hurry up and wait. Kat kept me apprised, but they didn’t have room for me in the cubicle, so I got a cup of coffee and a paper, then settled into a corner of the waiting room. The longer it took, the better it looked. Really sick people got treated right away, and Zach was taking hours and hours. Maybe it was just a pinched nerve. Halfway through the crossword puzzle, I realized it had been a year ago, almost to the date, when Kat had come with me to the ER when Greg left me. In a way, it seemed like just yesterday, but then again, it seemed like eons since I’d lived that other life in blissful ignorance.
Adjusting hadn’t been easy, but reality was a far better place to be in the end, so I offered up a brief prayer of gratitude. Mama still hadn’t gotten over it, but I had. Closing my eyes, I said another brief prayer for Zach.
Kat came out at five-thirty, on the verge of tears. She collapsed into the chair beside me, placing her face in her hands, elbows on her knees. “The weird thing is, the MRI of his brain was normal, so they did his spine, and that was normal. So were the Dopplers. So were the angiograms. No blood clots. No pinched nerves. No tumors, no strokes.”
“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”
She shoved her fingers through the gray and amber curls at her scalp. “I guess so. But his deep reflexes aren’t normal. And he’s been having trouble swallowing.”
That didn’t sound good. “How long?”
She exhaled heavily. “Months. He never said a word to me. I guess this scared it out of him.”
“Maybe it’s something obscure, but minor,” I told her. “Something they just have to find to fix.”
Kat leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “They sure don’t act like it’s minor.”
“What are they doing now?”
“An electromyography.” Her mouth quivered. “They have to stick needles in his muscles and run current through them.” A tear escaped the corner of her eye. “It’s not supposed to hurt, except for the pricks, but Zach freaked out about the needles, so they had to sedate him.”
Poor Zach. He could stand down the most heinous of criminals without a blink, but he really was phobic about needles. “He’ll be all right,” I said, for lack of anything better. “Maybe it won’t take long.” I shifted the subject. “What’s the neurologist like?”
“Very nice, but he’s from India,” Kat said, “so it’s kinda hard to understand him.” A sad smile eased her face a bit. “He couldn’t understand me fer beans. Zach had to translate.”
“How long will the test take?”
“I didn’t ask. I was so upset about Zach, I just had to leave, or I might have come out swingin’ when they stuck him.”
“Want me to go back and check?”
Relief washed over her expression. “Would ya? I wanta git some coffee and go to the bathroom.”
I stood. “You do that, and take your time. The coffee’s down that hall. Just follow the signs. Might be a good idea to get a bite, while you’re there.”
She rose with obvious effort. Sitting in those ER chairs was hard on the bones. “I don’t wanta leave him fer too long.”
“He’s not going anywhere. Take a break. I’ll send for you right away if anything comes up.”
She gave me a brief hug. “Thanks.” Then she was off.
The nurse told me where to find him, then let me back into the ER. As I approached, a short, brown-skinned doctor in a white coat stood in a murmured huddle with several other doctors, some of them in white jackets instead of coats. Interns?
Pretending that I was on my way somewhere beyond Zach’s cubicle, I walked slowly past and heard “Freidrich’s ataxia?” “No. That presents earlier.” “Parkinson’s?”
Please, not Parkinson’s.
Dr. Longcoat shook his head and said in an Indian accent, “We’ll have to follow up over time, but this looks like ALS to me.”
My heart skipped three beats, halting me in my tracks. I turned so they couldn’t see my reaction. Lou Gehrig’s! Please, God, no.
Alerted to my presence, the medical huddle moved farther down the hall.
Doctors don’t know everything. He said it
looks like
ALS. He wasn’t positive.
Wishing I’d never heard it, I forced a calm mask over my alarm, then peeked in to see Zach trembling on the table, eyes shut tight, his fists gripping the sides of the narrow mattress as the technician removed the leads from his body. He’d sweated through the sheets, which covered his necessaries, but I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I waited till the technician finished and replaced his gown, then covered him back up before I said a conspicuous, “Thanks so much for showing me where he is.”

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