"Straub, Peter - Mr X (1999)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Straub Peter)
"I love you, too," I said. She nodded and sank back onto the pillow.
Little sounds and signals kept on announcing themselves with a discreet stridency that seemed on the verge of falling into a melodic pattern. The light on the blanket, the rises and falls of the moving graph, the descending curves of the tubes were more present to me than my own feelings. It was as though I, too, were in a sort of coma, moving and walking on autopilot.
My hand rose from the guardrail and touched my mother's cheek. It was yielding and slightly chill. Star opened her eyes and smiled up with the working half of her face.
"Do you know where you are?"
"Eee spitl."
"Right. I'm going to stay here until you get better."
Her right eye clamped shut, and the left side of her mouth opened and closed. She tried again. "Whaa . . . mmmdd . . . kkk . . . kkmm . . . rrr?"
"I thought you were in trouble," I said.
A tear spilled from her right eye and trailed down her cheek. "Pur Unnd."
"Don't worry about me," I said, but she was asleep again.
• 17
• A white-haired Irish politician introduced himself as Dr. Muldoon, the heart specialist assigned to my mother's case, and described Star's condition as "touch and go." His confidential whiskey baritone made it sound like an invitation to a cruise. Shortly after Muldoon's campaign stop, the muscular guy with the ponytail who bad been talking to May went into the cubicle, and I followed him.
He was taking notes on the readouts of a machine that would have looked at home in the cockpit of a 747. When he saw me, he stood up, nearly filling the entire space between the equipment and the side of the bed. The tag on his chest said his name was Vincent Hardtke, and he looked like an old high school football player who put away a lot of beer on the weekends.
I asked him how long he had been working at St. Ann's.
"Six years. This is a great staff, in case you have any doubts. Lawn-dale gets the fancy Ellendale clientele, but if I got sick, this is where I'd come. Straight up. Hey, if it was my mom, I'd want to know she was getting good care, too."
"You've seen other patients like my mother. How did they do?"
"I've seen people worse off come through fine. Your mom's pretty steady right now." Hardtke stepped back. "That old lady with the cane, she's a piece of work." He pushed the curtain aside and grinned at Aunt May. She snubbed him with the authority of a duchess.
By late morning, visitors had gathered in the passages between the nurses' station and the two rows of cubicles. Stretching my legs, I walked all the way around the nurses' station a couple of times and remembered something Nettie had said.
Nurse Zwick ignored me until I had come to a full stop directly in front of her. "Nurse," I said, indicating my duffel bag and knapsack against the wall, "if you think my bags are in the way, I'd be happy to move them anywhere you might suggest."
"Thank you." I moved away, then approached her again.
"Yes?"
"Dr. Barnhill told me that you spoke to my mother this morning."
She began looking prickly, and a trace of pink came into her cheeks. "Your mother came in while we were having the first patient summaries."
I nodded.
"She was confused, which is normal for a stroke person, but when she saw my uniform, she got hold of my arm and tried to say something."
"Could you make it out?"
Anger heightened the color in her cheeks. “I didn't make her say anything, Mr. Dunstan, she wanted to talk to me. Afterwards, I came up here and made a note. If my report to Dr. Barnhill displeased your aunts, I'm sorry, but I was just doing my job. Stroke victims are often disordered in their cognition."
"She must have been grateful for your attention," I said.
Most of her anger went into temporary hiding. “It's nice to deal with a gentleman."
"My mother used to say, No point in not being friendly." This was not strictly truthful. Now and again my mother had used to say, You have to give some to get some. "Could you tell me what you reported to the doctor?"
Zwick frowned at a stack of papers. "At first I couldn't make out her words. Then we transferred her to the bed, and she pulled me in close and said, 'They stole my babies.' "
• 18
• As regal as a pair of queens in a poker hand, Nettie and May surveyed their realm from chairs brazenly appropriated from the nurses' station. Somehow they had managed to learn the names, occupations, and conditions of almost everyone else in the ICU.
Number 3 was a combination gunshot wound and heart attack named Clyde Prentiss, a trashy lowlife who had broken his mother's heart. 5, Mr. Temple, had been handsome as a movie star until his horrible industrial accident. Mrs. Helen Loome, the cleaning woman in 9, had been operated on for colon cancer. Four feet of intestine had been removed from Mr. Bargeron in number 8, a professional accordionist in a polka band. Mr. Bargeron drank so much that he saw ghosts flitting through his cubicle.
“It's the alcohol leaving his system," said Nettie. "Those ghosts are named Jim Beam and Johnnie Walker."
May said, "Mr. Temple will look like a jigsaw puzzle all the rest of his life."
Their real subject, my mother, floated beneath the surface of the gossip. What they saw as her heedlessness had brought them pain and disappointment. Nettie and May loved her, but they could not help feeling that she had more in common with the drunken accordionist and Clyde Prentiss than with Mr. Temple.
Technically, Nettie and May had ceased to be Dunstans when they got married, but their husbands had been absorbed into the self-protective world of Cherry Street as if born to it. Queenie's marriage to Toby Kraft and her desertion to his pawnshop had taken place late in her life and only minimally separated her from her sisters.
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