“She’s Dr. LaMarche now. She operated on Rusty last night.”
Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.
Father.
She had not attached that word to Rusty in years.
“You go first,” Charlie told Lenore. Her eagerness to see Rusty had visibly dissipated. She stopped in front of a row of large windows. “Sam and I will go in after.”
Lenore left them in silence.
At first, Charlie let the silence linger. She walked to the windows. She looked down at the parking lot. “Now’s your chance.”
To leave, she meant. Before Rusty had seen her. Before Sam got sucked back into this world again.
Sam asked, “Did you really need me here? Or was that Ben?”
“It was me, and Ben was nice enough to reach out because I couldn’t, or couldn’t bring myself to, but I thought that Dad was going to die.” She leaned her forehead against the glass. “He had a heart attack two years ago. The one before that was mild, but this last one, he needed bypass surgery, and there were complications.”
Sam said nothing. She had been left in the dark about Rusty’s apparent heart condition. He had never missed a phone call. For all Sam knew, he had remained healthy all these years.
“I had to make a decision,” Charlie said. “At one point, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and I had to make the decision whether or not to put him on life support.”
“He doesn’t have a DNR?” Sam asked. The Do Not Resuscitate form, which specified whether or not a person wanted a natural death or CPR and cardiac support, was commonly drawn up alongside a will.
Sam saw the problem before Charlie could answer. “Rusty doesn’t have a will.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Charlie turned around, her back against the window. “I made the right choice, obviously. I mean, it’s obvious now, because he lived and he was fine, but this time, when Melissa came out during surgery and said that they were having trouble getting the bleeding under control, and that his heartbeat was erratic, and that I might have to make the decision whether or not to take life-saving—”
“You wanted me here to kill him.”
Charlie looked alarmed, but not because of Sam’s bluntness. It was her tone, the hint of anger bubbling up around the words. She told Sam, “If you’re going to get mad about this, we should go outside.”
“So the reporters can hear?”
“Sam.” Charlie looked anxious, as if she was watching the clock on a nuclear warhead start to tick down. “Let’s go outside.”
Sam squeezed her hands into fists. She could feel the longforgotten darkness stirring inside of her. She took a deep breath, then another, then another until it folded itself back into a tight ball inside her chest.
She told her sister, “You have no idea, Charlotte, how wrong you are about my willingness or capacity to end someone’s life.”
Sam tilted against her cane as she walked toward the nurses’ station. She glanced at the whiteboard behind the empty desk and located Rusty’s room. She raised her hand to knock on the door, but Lenore opened it before her knuckles touched wood.
Lenore said, “I told him you were here. Wouldn’t want him to have a heart attack.”
“You mean another one,” Sam said. She did not give Lenore time to respond.
Instead, she walked into her father’s hospital room.
The air seemed too thin.
The lights were too bright.
She blinked against the headache that chewed at the back of her eyes.
Rusty’s room in the ICU was a familiar, if more economized version of the private hospital suite in which Anton had died. There was no wood paneling or deep couch or flat-screen television or private desk where Sam could work, but the machines were all the same: the beeping heart monitor, the hissing oxygen supply, the grinding sound that the blood pressure cuff made as it inflated around Rusty’s arm.
He looked much like his photograph, absent any color in his face. The camera had never been able to capture the devil’s glint in his eyes, the dimples in his rubbery cheeks.
“Sammy-Sam!” he bellowed, hacking out a cough at the end. “Come here, gal. Lemme see you up close.”
Sam did not move closer. She felt her nose wrinkle. He reeked of cigarette smoke and Old Spice, two scents that had remained blissfully absent in her everyday life.
“Damn if you don’t look like your mama.” He gave a delighted laugh. “To what does your old pappy owe this pleasure?”
Charlie suddenly appeared on Sam’s right. She knew this was Sam’s blind side. There was no telling how long she had been there. She said, “Dad, we thought that you were going to die.”
“I remain a constant disappointment to the women in my life.” Rusty scratched his chin. Under the covers, his foot tapped out a silent beat. “I am happy to see that no fresh slings and arrows have been exchanged.”
“Not so you can see.” Charlie walked around to the other side of the bed. Her arms were crossed. She did not take his hand. “Are you okay?”
“Well.” Rusty seemed to think about it. “I was stabbed. Or, in the vernacular of the streets, cut.”
“The unkindest kind.”
“Thrice in the belly, once in the leg.”
“You don’t say.”
Sam tuned out their banter. She had always been a reluctant spectator of the Rusty and Charlie show. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to eat it up. He clearly still delighted in Charlie, a literal twinkle flashing in his eye when she engaged him.
Sam looked at her watch. She could not believe only sixteen minutes had passed since she had gotten out of the car. She raised her voice over the din, asking, “Rusty, what happened?”
“What do you mean what—” He looked at his stomach. Surgical drains hung from either side of his torso. He looked back at Sam, feigning shock. “‘Oh, I am slain!’”
For once, Charlie didn’t egg him on. “Daddy, Sam has a flight back this afternoon.”
Sam was startled by the reminder. Somehow, she had momentarily let herself forget that she could leave.
Charlie said, “Come on, Dad. Tell us what happened.”
“All right, all right.” Rusty let out a low groan as he tried to sit up in bed. Sam realized that this was the first sign her father had given that he had been wounded.
“Well—” He coughed, a wet rattle shaking inside his chest. He winced from the exertion, then coughed again, then winced again, then waited to make sure it had passed.
When he was finally able, he directed his words toward Charlie, his most receptive audience. “After you dropped me at ye olde homestead, I had a bite to eat, maybe a little to drink, and then I realized that I hadn’t checked the mail.”
Sam could not think of the last time she had received mail at her home. It seemed like a ritual from another century.
Rusty continued, “I put on my walkin’ shoes and headed out. Beautiful night, last night. Partly cloudy, chance of rain this morning. Oh—” he seemed to remember that morning had passed. “Did it rain?”
“Yes.” Charlie made a rolling motion with her hand, indicating he should speed up the story. “Did you see who did it?”
Rusty coughed again. “That is a complicated questi
on with an equally complicated answer.”
Charlie waited. They both waited.
Rusty said, “All right, so, I walked to the mailbox to check my mail. Beautiful night. Moon high up in the sky. The driveway was giving off warmth saved up from the sun. Paints a picture, don’t it?”
Sam felt herself nodding along with Charlie, as if thirty years had not passed and they were both little girls listening to one of their father’s stories.
He seemed to relish the attention. Some color came back into his cheeks. “I came around the bend, and I heard something up above me, so I was looking up for that bird. Remember I told you about the hawk, Charlotte?”
Charlie nodded.
“Thought the old fella got himself a chipmunk again, but then—Shazam!” He clapped together his hands. “I feel this hot pain in my leg.”
Sam felt her cheeks redden. Like Charlie, she had jumped at the clap.
Rusty said, “I look down, and I have to twist around to see what’s wrong, and that’s when I spot it. There’s a big ol’ hunting knife sticking out of the back of my thigh.”
Sam put her hand to her mouth.
Rusty said, “So there’s me hitting the ground like a rock dropping into the water, because it hurts to have a knife stuck in the back of your thigh. And then I see this fella comes up, and he starts kicking me. Just kicking me and kicking me—in the arm, the ribs, the head. And mail is everywhere, but the point is, I’m trying to stand up, and I still got this knife in the back of my thigh. So the fella, he makes this one last kick at my head and I grab onto his leg with both arms and punch him in the hokey-pokey.”
Sam felt her heart pounding in her throat. She knew what it was like to fight for your life.
“Then we struggle a little bit more, him hopping around ’cause I’ve got his leg, me trying to stay upright, and the fella seems to remember that knife’s in my leg. So he grabs it, just yanks it out, and starts stabbing me in my belly.” Rusty made a stabbing, twisting motion with his hand. “We’re both tired out after this. Plumb tuckered. I’m limping away from him, holding in my own guts. He’s standing there. I’m wondering can I make it back to the house, call the police, and then I see him pull out a gun.”