huh? Sometimes you give yourself away, Pogo.” Murph’s cell phone rang, and he checked the caller ID. Nancy. He said, “What’s up, sugar?”
A chill climbed his spine and found his heart as his wife said, “I’m scared, baby. I’m afraid Bibi’s had a stroke.”
The Frightening Pace of Examination
ON A TUESDAY MORNING, THE ER WASN’T AS BUSY as it would be on the 7:00-P.M.-to-3:00-A.M. shift. The night would bring those injured by drunk drivers, victims of muggers, battered wives, and all manner of aggressive or hallucinating druggies sliding along the razor’s edge of an overdose. When Bibi arrived with her mother, only five people were in the waiting room, none of them bleeding profusely.
At the moment, the triage nurse was actually an emergency-care technician named Manuel Rivera, a short, stocky man in hospital blues. He checked her pulse and took her blood pressure as he listened to her recite her symptoms.
Bibi slurred a few words, but for the most part her speech was clear. She felt better and safer, being in a hospital, until Manuel’s sweet face, almost a Buddha face, darkened with worry and he guided her to a wheelchair. With apparent urgency, he rolled her through a pair of automatic doors into the ER ahead of the other people who were waiting for treatment.
Each emergency-room bay was a cubicle with a gray vinyl-tile floor and three pale-blue walls and one glass wall that faced the hallway. Toward the head of the bed stood a heart monitor and other equipment, awaiting use.
Nancy settled in one of the two chairs for visitors, holding her and Bibi’s purses, hands clutching them as if she anticipated a robbery attempt, though it wasn’t a purse snatcher that she feared.
Manuel lowered the power bed and assisted Bibi to sit on the edge. “Unless you feel dizzy, don’t lie down yet,” he instructed.
He rolled the wheelchair into the hallway, where he met a tall athletic-looking man in scrubs, evidently a physician. The doctor wheeled before him a portable computer station designed to be used while the operator remained standing, into which he entered details regarding the preliminary diagnosis and treatment of each patient he attended.
“Are you all right, baby?” Nancy asked.
“Yes, Mom. I’m okay. I’m going to be fine.”
“Do you need anything? Water? Do you need water?”
Bibi’s mouth kept flooding with saliva, as if she were about to throw up, but she swallowed it and kept her breakfast down. The last thing she wanted was water.
In the hallway, after Manuel spoke with the tall man for a moment, the latter came into the cubicle and introduced himself as Dr. Armand Barsamian. His calm demeanor and confident manner would have reassured Bibi under other circumstances.
While he checked her eyes with an ophthalmoscope, he asked a few questions—her name, date of birth, Social Security number—and she realized that he wanted to ascertain whether or not her memory had been affected by whatever was happening to her.
“We need to get a CT scan of the brain,” Dr. Barsamian said. “If this is a stroke, the quicker we identify the cause—thrombosis, hemorrhage—and determine treatment, the more likely you’ll fully recover.”
Already an orderly with a gurney had appeared in the doorway. The physician helped Bibi lie upon it.
As she was wheeled away, her mother stood in the hall, looking bereft, as though she half expected never to see her daughter again. The orderly turned a corner, and Bibi lost sight of her mom.
On the second floor, the room containing the CT scanner felt chilly. She didn’t ask for a blanket. Superstitiously, she felt that the more stoic she remained, the better the outcome of the test.
She transferred from the gurney to the scanner table.
The orderly stepped out of the room as a nurse appeared with a tray on which were arranged a rubber-tube tourniquet, a foil packet containing a disposable cloth saturated with antibacterial solution, and a hypodermic needle containing a contrast medium that would make blood vessels and abnormalities of the brain show up more clearly.
“Are you okay, dear?”
“Thank you, yes. I’m okay.”
After the nurse departed, the unseen CT technician spoke to Bibi through an intercom from an adjacent chamber, explaining how the procedure would progress. The woman had a gentle girlish voice with the faint trace of a Japanese accent, so that when Bibi closed her eyes, a scene more vivid than the CT room formed around her.…
A flagstone path leads to a red moon gate entwined with dazzling white chrysanthemums. Beyond lies a teahouse sheltered by cherry trees in blossom, a scattering of their pale petals gracing the dark stone underfoot. Inside, geishas in silk kimonos wear their long black hair twisted up in elaborate arrangements held in place by ivory pins carved in the shape of dragonflies.
A sliding cradle in the table moved Bibi backward, headfirst, into the aperture of the scanner, rousing her from that teahouse of the mind. The procedure was completed so quickly that she wondered if it had been done correctly, though she knew that the hospital staff’s competence was the least of her concerns.
She was frightened by the speed with which they had handled her case since she had entered the ER waiting room. She would have no hope of peace until they arrived at a diagnosis. Nevertheless, the faster they worked, the more she felt as though she were sliding down a chute, accelerating, into an abyss.
Twelve Years Earlier
OLAF, THE STRAY GOLDEN RETRIEVER THAT wandered out of the rainstorm, had been with the Blair family for less than a week when he settled into the habit of climbing the stairs to the apartment above the garage. He enjoyed lounging on the small balcony that contained a pair of rocking chairs. He rested his chin on the bottom rail of the white-painted balustrade, peering between the balusters and into the courtyard behind the bungalow, as if he were a prince contentedly surveying his domain.
Each time she discovered him up there, young Bibi called him down, at first in a whisper that she was certain he could hear, because dogs had better hearing than did human beings. Although he watched her as she stood below, Olaf always pretended to be deaf to her entreaties. When she raised her voice to a stage whisper, he still failed to come to her, though the soft thumping of his tail against the balcony floor proved that he understood her commands.
She dared not climb the stairs to take the dog by the collar and escort him down. Once on the balcony, she would be only a few feet from the front door of the apartment. Too close.
Frustrated, Bibi paced the courtyard, glancing up repeatedly at Olaf but never at any of the three windows. The sun made mirrors of those panes of glass, so that she couldn’t see anyone even if he might be standing inside, watching. Nevertheless, she did not rest her gaze directly on any window.
She went into the bungalow and, from a tin in the pantry, took two of the carob cookies that the retriever couldn’t resist. In the courtyard once more, she held a treat in each hand, arms raised above her head, letting Olaf smell his delicious reward for obedience. She knew that he caught the carob scent, for even from the courtyard she could see his wet black nose twitching between the balusters.
The cookies had always worked before, but not this time. After a few minutes,