Chapter 10
When John first told Pam that her father was dead, she refused to believe him. She had been waiting, frightened, for hours and now stood in the front hall regarding him mutinously. “You’re lying; He can’t be dead.”
“The medical examiner certified it.”
“He wouldn’t die.”
“He didn’t have any say in it. None of us do when it comes to that.”
“But he wouldn’t have driven through a light. He was a good driver.”
“We don’t know whether he drove through or lost control, but he was at that intersection at the wrong time.”
Pam struggled to make sense of what John was doing. “You’re saying that because you hate him.”
“I’m saying it because that’s what the witnesses said. The truck had the green.”
“It couldn’t have!” she cried, but the most convincing argument was right before her.
John was acting strangely, more subdued than usual.
He was looking strange, too, tired and pale.
And he was putting up with her protests without yelling at her, without telling her what a spoiled little pest she was.
That was the strangest thing of all. For once in her life, she wished he were behaving like a rat.
Now he pushed his hand through hair that looked like it had been ruffled a lot. “Pam, he’s dead. He’s gone. There was nothing they could do to save him.”
She shook her head and began to back away. “Where’s my mother? She was with him. I know she was.”
“She’s at the hospital. She’s been badly hurt, but she’ll live.”
“I want to see her.”
“Tomorrow. They just brought her out of surgery. She won’t be back in her room till morning.”
Pam didn’t ask what was wrong with her. She didn’t want to think anything was, didn’t want to know. “Can I see her then?”
He nodded, and he was true to his word. Not that it did much good.
At the hospital the next morning, Patricia couldn’t talk with her.
She couldn’t say that everything was going to be all right.
She couldn’t tell her that John was wrong, that Eugene was up in Maine and would be back in a few days.
She was too doped up with painkillers and sedatives.
So Pam returned home with little reassurance to cling to.
Then the phone calls started coming, and the visitors, and the evidence seemed to mount in John’s favor.
Various people from the office dropped by, as did some of those in Patricia’s circle.
There were calls from Timiny Cove, even calls from the mothers of Pam’s friends.
John handled the calls and the visits with a somberness that Pam found hateful.
But he wasn’t the only somber one in the house.
Late that afternoon, when she went into the kitchen and found Marcy in tears, she knew that Eugene truly was gone.
The funeral was held on a Monday, an affair that John kept deliberately small, as he explained to Pam, because of Patricia’s precarious condition.
Pam suspected that he was only using that as an excuse.
She suspected that he didn’t want a crowd because it would be too much of a tribute to the man he hated.
He couldn’t control the crowds at the burial in Timiny Cove, though.
The entire town plus carloads of people from surrounding areas and as far as the state capital came to pay tribute to Eugene.
These were the people who might have been a comfort to Pam, but John hustled her off in a black limousine immediately after the graveside service and had her back in Boston that night.
She was too unsettled to cry or to protest. Her mind told her that Eugene was dead, but her heart kept waiting for him to call or walk in the door or laugh his wonderfully robust laugh.
Second to that, she waited for Patricia to call her from the hospital and say that she was feeling better and would be home soon.
But Eugene didn’t laugh, and Patricia didn’t call. She remained in a somnolent state that wasn’t quite a coma but what the doctors called a severe depression. Pam visited every day, but not once did Patricia acknowledge her presence.
So she asked endless questions of John, but with the funeral over, he was deeply involved in the business.
“Picking up the pieces” was the expression he used, and Pam took it for the insult it was.
She also knew it wasn’t true. The business was solid.
John was just going ahead with all the things Eugene had resisted. He had little time for Pam.
The doctors were the ones who answered her questions. From them she learned that her mother had suffered a spinal injury and had no feeling from the waist down. “She’s paralyzed?”
“That’s right.” It was a female doctor who told her, sitting with her in the easy chairs at the end of the corridor.
“For how long?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“But you will soon?” Pam asked, not caring that she sounded frightened. Of all the doctors, she liked this one the best. She was young and softspoken, more approachable than some of the men, and she was very gentle with Patricia.
“Once the swelling goes down and the injury itself heals, we’ll be better able to evaluate your mother’s condition.”
“Will she be able to walk when all that happens?”
“We don’t know.”
“She will. She has to. When she feels better, will she start talking, too?”
“Probably.” The doctor paused, tilted her head, and asked, “Has she said anything to you yet?”
“No. She isn’t sleeping. She just stares at the wall.”
“She’s upset.”
“At me?”
“No. At herself, maybe.”
“But why? She didn’t cause the accident.”
“Sometimes when people suffer traumas like your mother has, they don’t think as clearly as you or I.”
“Will that change, too?”
“We hope so.”
“When?”
The doctor shrugged, smiled sadly, shook her head. “We just don’t know, Pam.”
Pam hated answers like that. So had Eugene. “There has to be something we can do to help her.”
“There is. You can visit her like you have been and talk to her. Tell her about what you’ve been doing in school. Tell her that you miss her and want her home. Ask if you can bring her anything. She’ll hear you, even if she doesn’t answer.”
Trusting that to be the case, Pam did talk. She told Patricia what she’d done that day and what she was planning to do the following one. She told her that she missed her and wanted her to come home. She told her about all the things they could do together when Patricia was feeling better.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell her the things she really wanted to, for fear they’d only upset her more.
She couldn’t tell her about the funeral and how many people had come out in Timiny Cove.
She couldn’t tell her how much she missed Eugene.
She couldn’t tell her that she was afraid that her whole life was changing, that she’d never get to Maine again, that she’d never have the fun she used to have.
She couldn’t tell her how awful the house was, how quiet and grim, or how John seemed to go out of his way to annoy her during the rare times he was at home.
He didn’t talk with her, he talked to her.
He wasn’t interested in what she was thinking or doing. He had no patience with her fears.
But day after day Pam went to the hospital, a comfortable walk from the house, and day after day she talked until she ran out of things to say.
Then she sat in a chair by her mother’s bed, doing homework sometimes, or watching television, wishing sometimes that she could curl up next to Patricia on that hard white bed and cry thé way she ached to do.
Most often, she simply watched Patricia, waiting for a sign that she knew she was there.
It came after a month. Patricia looked at her, gave her a small, sad smile, and Pam felt happier than she had in days and days. But the news that came at about the same time wasn’t good. The spinal damage was permanent. Patricia would never walk again.
Whether because of that news or because of the depression she’d been in since the accident, Patricia didn’t show any significant improvement after that.
Pam was sure she’d given up, and nothing she said by way of encouragement had any effect.
From time to time Patricia looked at her, offered a fleeting smile, but otherwise she remained in the silent shell into which she’d withdrawn following the accident.
After two months, the doctors recommended that she be moved.
“Why can’t she come home?” Pam asked John, when he told her their decision.
They were eating dinner, just the two of them in the large dining room where John always insisted on taking his meals.
He thought it was elegant. Pam thought it was empty.
“Because she isn’t well.”
“She’s not on any machines,” Pam argued.
She felt she’d seen enough in the past few months to deserve a more substantial answer.
“Some patients are hooked up to so many that you can hardly see them through the wires. Not Mom. There are no machines, and she isn’t in a body cast or anything. She doesn’t even take much medicine.”
“Still, she’s not well.”
“Then let her come home and we’ll get a nurse for her here.”
“She needs more than just a nurse.”
“Then we’ll hire whoever she does need.”
“Pam,” he put down his fork to stare at her as though she were a half-wit, “this house isn’t designed for a paraplegic.”
Pam resented his tone. She resented the way he talked down to her—and she resented the way he could eat as though everything were normal, when there’d just been another turn for the worse in a tragedy that seemed to go on and on. “Don’t call her that.”
“It’s what she is. Isn’t it time you were honest with yourself? Your mother is paralyzed.”