It was September, and the season was starting to wind down, but there was no way for Jeremy to get away long enough to come up to Seattle for a visit, no matter how brief, and with Kayla and Kyle, my grandkids, back in school, in fourth and first grade, respectively, it didn’t seem like a good time for Kelly to come gallivanting to Seattle with or without them in tow just to hover at my sickbed.
In other words, I was both surprised and not surprised to see Kelly there; but then, gradually, a few other details began to sink into my drug-stupefied consciousness. Kelly would never in a million years show up wearing a WSU shirt. No way! She is a University of Oregon Duck, green and yellow all the way. Woe betide anyone who tries to tell her differently, and she has every right to insist on that!
To my everlasting amazement and with only the barest of financial aid from yours truly, this once marginal student got her BA in psychology from Southern Oregon University, and she’s now finishing up with a distance-learning master’s in business administration from the U of O in Eugene. She’s done all this, on her own and without any parental prompting, while running an at-home day care center and looking after her own two kids. When Kelly turned into a rabid Ducks fan along the way, she got no complaints from me, even though I’m a University of Washington Husky from the get-go.
But the very idea of Kelly Beaumont Cartwright wearing a Cougars sweatshirt? Nope. Believe me, it’s not gonna happen.
Then there was the puzzling matter of the very long hair. Kelly’s hair used to be about that same length—which is to say more than shoulder length—but it isn’t anymore. A year or so ago, she cut it off and donated her shorn locks to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients. (Karen, Kelly’s mother and my ex-wife, died after a long battle with breast cancer, and Kelly remains a dedicated part of the cancer-fighting community. In addition to donating her hair, she sponsors a Relay for Life team and makes certain that both her father and stepfather step up to the plate with cash donations to the cause on a yearly basis.)
As my visitor continued to file her nails with single-minded focus, the polish struck me as odd. In my experience, mothers of young children in general—and my daughter in particular—don’t wear nail polish of any kind. Nail enamel and motherhood don’t seem to go together, and on the rare occasions when Kelly had indulged in a manicure she had opted for something in the pale pink realm, not this amazingly vivid scarlet, the kind of color Mel seems to favor.
Between the cascade of long blond hair and the bright red nail polish, I was pretty sure my silent visitor wasn’t Kelly. If not her, then, I asked myself, who else was likely to show up at my hospital bedside to visit?
Cherisse, maybe?
Cherisse is my daughter-in-law. She has long hair and she does wear nail polish. She and my son, Scott, don’t have kids so far, but Cherisse is not a blonde—at least she wasn’t the last time I saw her. Besides, if anyone was going to show up unannounced at my hospital bedside, it would be my son, not his wife.
I finally managed to find a semblance of my voice, but what came out of my mouth sounded croaky, like the throaty grumblings of an overage frog.
“Who are you?” I asked.
In answer, she simply shook her head, causing the cascade of silvery blond hair to ripple across her shoulder. I was starting to feel tired—sleepy. I must have blinked. In that moment, the shimmering blond hair and crimson sweatshirt vanished. In their place I saw a woman who was clearly a nurse.
“Mr. Beaumont. Mr. Beaumont,” she said, in a concerned voice that was far too loud. “How are you doing, Mr. Beaumont? It’s time to wake up now.”
“I’ve already been awake,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, looking up into a worried face topping a set of colorful scrubs, I wondered when it was that nurses stopped wearing white uniforms and white caps and started doing their jobs wearing clothes that looked more like crazed flower gardens than anything else.
“Okay,” I managed, only now my voice was more of a whisper than a croak. “My wife?”
“Right here,” Mel answered, appearing in the background, just over the nurse’s shoulder. “I’m right here.”
She looked haggard and weary. I had spent a long time sleeping; she had spent the same amount of time worrying. Unfortunately, it showed.
“Where did she go?” I asked the nurse, who was busy taking my blood pressure reading.
“Where did who go?” she asked.
“The girl in the sweatshirt.”
“What girl?” she asked. “What sweatshirt?”
Taking a cue from me, Mel looked around the recovery room, which consisted of a perimeter of several curtained-off patient cubicles surrounding a central nurses’ station. The whole place was a beehive of activity.
“I see nurses and patients,” Mel said. “I don’t see anyone in a sweatshirt.”
“But she was right here,” I argued. “A blonde with bright red nail polish a lot like yours. She was wearing a WSU sweatshirt, and she was filing her nails with one of those pointy little nail files.”
“A metal one?” Mel asked, frowning. “Those are bad for your nails. I haven’t used one of those in years. Do they even still sell them?”
That question was directed at the nurse, who, busy taking my temperature, simply shrugged. “Beats me,” she said. “I’m not big on manicures. Never have been.”
That’s when I got the message. I was under the influence of powerful drugs. The girl in the sweatshirt didn’t exist. I had made her up.
“How’re you doing, Mr. B.?” Mel asked. Sidling up to the other side of the bed, she called me by her currently favored pet name and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I talked to the doctor. He said you did great. They’ll keep you here in the recovery room for an hour or two, until they’re sure you’re stable, and then they’ll transfer you to your room. I called the kids, by the way, and let everybody know that you came through surgery like a champ.”
This was all good news, but I didn’t feel like a champ. I felt more like a chump.
“Can I get you something to drink?” the nurse asked. “Some water? Some juice?”
I didn’t want anything to drink right then because part of me was still looking for the girl. Part of me was still convinced she had been there, but I couldn’t imagine who else she might have been. One of Ron Peters’s girls, maybe? Heather and Tracy had both gone to WSU. Of the two, I’d always had a special connection with the younger one, Heather. As a kid she was a cute little blond-haired beauty whose blue-eyed grin had kept me in my place, properly wrapped around her little finger. At fifteen, a barely recognizable Heather, one with hennaed hair and numerous piercings, had gone into full-fledged off-the-rails teenage rebellion, complete with your basic bad-to-the-bone boyfriend.
In the aftermath of said boyfriend’s death, unlamented by anyone but Heather, her father and stepmother had managed to get the grieving girl on track. She had reenrolled in school, graduated from high school, and gone on to a successful college experience. One thing I did know clearly—this was September. That meant that, as far as I knew, Heather was off at school, too, working on a Ph.D. somewhere in the wilds of New Mexico. So, no, my mysterious visitor couldn’t very well be Heather Peters, either.
Not taking my disinterested answer about wanting something to drink for a real no, the nurse handed me a glass with water and a straw bent in my direction. “Drink,” she said. I took a reluctant sip, but I was still looking around the room; still searching.
Mel is nothing if not observant. “Beau,” she said. “Believe