Final Stroke Read online

  “Fuckin’-A!” said Flat Nose, grabbing Steve’s collar. “I’ll use you for a crazy bag!”

  “You’re a dumb fuck!” said Tyrone, grabbing Steve’s right wrist and twisting.

  It was a spontaneous reaction. His left hand was his only good hand and before he knew what he was doing he made a fist and punched Flat Nose in the face.

  Brooms and mops and buckets bounced off the walls as Flat Nose fell and then slipped trying to get up. Tyrone twisted Steve’s left wrist harder and at the same time tried to hold Flat Nose back with his other hand. Flat Nose slipped again on broom and mop handles, fell flat out, sending the brooms and mops and buckets into further disarray. When the buckets and brooms and mops finally stopped flying, Flat Nose sat looking up, a kind of sneer on his face, a look that triggered a reaction in Steve. He’d seen guys look like this before, the calm before the storm, a momentary quiet before the guy shows the true extent of his anger.

  “Don’t anybody move!” shouted Tyrone, as he seemed to expand to three times his size in the confined closet.

  “Flat Nose! Stay down for the count! This ain’t the time for it and this ain’t what it seems! He’s got a brain like a baby!” Then to him, Tyrone shouted, “And you! Mother-fuckin’ brain-like-a-baby resident, you go back to your mother-fuckin’ room and never do any thing like this again! You forget you were ever here or I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

  Tyrone put his face right up to Steve’s face and spoke in a harsh whisper. “And I won’t do it like this, twistin’ your arm. You’re under our control in this place. You know it and I know it. If you say any thing to anybody about us bein’ here tonight, I’ll find out. Then, when you least expect it, some bad food might accidentally come your way, or someone might sneak into your room one night, or maybe there’ll be a freak accident when you’re sittin’ on the crapper. But all of those unfortunate eventualities can be avoided if you simply keep your fuckin’ mouth shut! You understand?”

  At this point Steve decided not to take any chances because he wasn’t sure what would come out if he tried to say yes. So he nodded his head and did his best not to smile. Not smiling was not easy, espe cially because Tyrone had eased off on his arm and because Flat Nose was back, adding his ugly face to Tyrone’s. Even though they really did look like they’d just as soon kill him as spit, the pair of old guys on Smith Brothers Cough Drops came to mind. But Steve managed a se rious look by thinking of other threats from the past, threats he’d been told had been made against Jan. He imagined these two roughing up Jan and nodded and nodded and, finally, Tyrone let go of his wrist and the two of them backed off and de-uglied their faces.

  For a while longer Tyrone whispered soothing things to Flat Nose about people with strokes and how most of what they said didn’t make sense and how no one paid any attention to them anyhow. Then, although he kept glancing back toward Steve with that sneer of po tential vengeance on his face, Flat Nose stayed behind straightening the brooms and mops and buckets in the closet as Tyrone pushed Steve out into the hallway. Then Tyrone came around the front of the wheelchair, giving Steve a serious look as he put the foot supports into place.

  “Remember, man,” he said in a low voice. “Not a word or you won’t have to worry no more about your stroke ‘cause that mother fucker back there, he’s like on a leash, and if that leash breaks …”

  Steve nodded again, trying his best to put on an equally serious face.

  Back down the long hallway, as Tyrone pushed Steve past the nurses’ station on the way out of the nursing home wing, he said in a singsong voice, “Look who I found wandering all the way down here from the third floor, ladies. I think they just might have to put an ankle alarm on this one.”

  From a nearby doorway Steve saw So-long Sue peek out and squint into the brightly lit hall. But there was another Sue. And now the name Sue flew in from somewhere in the past and he panicked. My God! Someone’s killed Sue! Someone’s killed Sue!

  Then the overly bright lights in the nursing home wing went even brighter and Steve felt the muscles in his body give a heave and before he blacked-out he saw his legs shoot out in front of him and was aware of sliding down and out of the wheelchair and saw the pretty face of one of the nurses hovering over him and thought to himself, Sue sure is pretty. She sure is. She sure … Seizure.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Although the doctor insisted Steve’s seizure was minor, Jan couldn’t help worrying that when he came around this time, he wouldn’t recognize her. Perhaps he would smile at her and hold her hand, and even say her name, but would he really know her? Or would he, as he did when his mother and sister visited from Cleveland, fake it?

  It was quiet on the third floor because most residents had gone to second floor rehab. A while ago two newly arrived stroke patients named Linda and Frank had come by to wish Steve luck, then left when they saw he was asleep. Both were right-brain stroke victims with something in common. Instead of having difficulty coming up with the right word, they talked incessantly about nothing at all. Now that they were gone, Jan could not remember what they had said.

  Steve’s rehab had been canceled for the day so he could rest. Ear lier in her vigil a nurse had tried to cheer Jan by joking that stroke victims in this place had seizures to avoid rehab. Jan sat in the chair beside Steve’s bed staring alternately at his face and at the three-ring binder on his nightstand that contained the goals diary she’d been keeping for him.

  Yesterday afternoon she had been here with more magazines from the back seat of her car, and Steve had made more entries in the ten-year chart. The chart was stored in the closet, leaned into a corner behind hanging clothing. As she glanced toward the closet door, Jan wondered if the notes Steve had made on the rolled-up chart were be ginning to fade.

  Steve continued sleeping soundly as Jan moved close. She stared at this man who had come into her life a decade earlier at a time when her marriage to a man she hardly knew ended in tragedy. And now she recalled vividly the night she realized she loved him.

  She had been kidnapped. She had been riding her ten-speed, and the van had blocked the exit of the bike path from the woods. The men wore rubber masks and dragged her into the van. The men blind folded her, gagged her, and tied her outstretched in the back of the van. She was to drop the investigation of the fire that destroyed her husband’s adult book and video store, the fire that killed her husband and a detective named Sam Pike who turned out to be a friend of Steve’s. They said her husband’s business was evil and he was an evil man who deserved to die. They kept her in the van that afternoon and into the evening, fondling her as they spoke of God and justice and death.

  As she stared down at Steve she could feel the warmth from his face. He was a beautiful man. Of course she’d never told him this. Handsome, yes, but she’d never told him he was beautiful.

  His cheeks were rosy, his hair bushy and disheveled like the hair on a stuffed bear. His skin looked perpetually tanned, perhaps be cause of Gypsy blood from centuries earlier. She reached out and touched his nose. Even though he’d always said it was too large, she liked it. She studied his face. He had a few more lines and his hair had gone more toward gray, but he didn’t look much different than he had the night she realized she loved him.

  The men in the van had let her go, careful not to leave marks on her. They tied her loosely with her own shoelaces, blindfolded her with a spare inner tube from her bike bag, and left her on a dark road. It was obvious they had tied her loosely so she would escape. It was obvious they left nothing behind that would point to them. Because of lack of evidence and the nature of the business her husband was in, it was obvious the police did not believe her story.

  But Steve believed her story. He stayed with her after the po lice were gone. He questioned her in detail, but also cheered her up by telling stories about himself. One of those stories was of a bomb that had been thrown through the window of his one-man detective agency office.

  Despite what had h
appened to her that afternoon, when Steve ani mated the circumstances of the explosion in his office, she found her self laughing. He went into detail about how he was sleeping at his desk and how he’d gotten hit by glass through the cutout in the back of his cheap office chair. He told about the ordeal at the hospital dur ing which an emergency room resident picked glass from his buttocks while several nurses and a Catholic priest who happened to be pass ing by looked on. Then he told about how he once studied for the priesthood.

  “My mother’s greatest dream was that one day I’d give her Communion.”

  “And your father?”

  “He died after the first tuition payment.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. He died of a heart attack shortly after we received the first bill from the seminary. Of course everyone says it had nothing to do with the tuition. But I’ve always wondered.”

  “What brought you to Chicago?”

  “A girl.”

  “Did she jilt you?”

  “Sue was killed in a robbery attempt at the drugstore where she worked. We’d been engaged a few months. Obviously I’d aban doned the priesthood by then. I came to Chicago to get away. But the thought that someone could simply walk into a drugstore and shoot a clerk worked on me. I met Sam Pike after I got to Chicago. He was going to the police academy and one day I joined him. After we’d been on the force together for over ten years, Sam Pike went private, then lured me into it, painting a rosy picture of freedom and big bucks.

  “Sam Pike saved my life while we were in the force. We were in the projects tracking down armed robbery suspects when shooters opened up from the third floor while a uniformed cop and me were on the lawn on our way in. The uniformed cop was killed. I was saved when Sam rammed the car through the chain-link fence and took hits in the shoulder and arm saving me. I’ll never forget how mad Sam was in the hospital when he found out the captain was upset about the damage to the car. Besides the damage caused by the fence and the bullets, Sam had opened the passenger door for me and busted it clean off the hinges while slamming on the brakes to pick me up.”

  “You’re a strange guy,” she had said. “First you try to cheer me up, then you depress the hell out of me.”

  “I want to make sure you still want to go through with the investi gation. Telling you about my past is my way of saying nothing is cer tain and no one can guarantee success.”

  “I want to go through with it. I’m tired of being pushed around.”

  Steve had stood and held out his hand. “I wanted to be sure.”

  When he shook her hand that night ten years earlier he held it longer than necessary, smiling and looking sad at the same time. Even though she had known him only one day, she knew then that she loved him and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.

  An aide came into the room and she sat up straight. A bed table had been brought in because the doctor said Steve would probably take his breakfast in bed, and the aide replaced the water glass and pitcher. The aide paused, glancing down at Steve then smiling at her. He was a tall black man she’d seen before. As he paused she noticed his large hand almost wrapped completely around the water pitcher.

  “He’ll be all right, ma’am. Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ve seen this before. Sometimes when they come out of it they don’t make much sense. It’s like they been dreamin’ and they’re still in the dream. But eventually they come out of it and go back to therapy and every thing’s fine.”

  When the aide turned to leave, she said, “Thank you,” and watched as he paused to smile back at her before disappearing into the hall.

  When she turned back to Steve, his eyes were open. She bent close and kissed him.

  “Shave,” he said.

  This simple word made her want to hug him and weep, but she controlled herself. “Yes, you do need a shave.”

  “He gone?”

  “Who?”

  He motioned with his head toward the door.

  “That aide?”

  He nodded, pulled his good hand from beneath the cover and held his finger to his lips. “Later. Tell me aide later.” Then he held her hand, closed his eyes, and rested.

  By that afternoon, with lunch in him, Steve seemed physically recov ered from the seizure. While he took a prescribed walk in the hall way, Jan stood at the nurses’ station talking to the LPN on duty about Marjorie Gianetti and the circumstances surrounding her death. The reason Jan did this was because after lunch Steve kept repeating Mar jorie’s name along with the phrase, “Fly in the ointment,” and the phrase, “Investigate now.” When he said these things, he held Jan’s hand the way he always did when they spoke seriously.

  After Steve’s stroke, Jan had discovered that, along with shakes of his head, she could tell a lot about his reactions to questions, or exactly how he felt about something, by holding his good hand. The world of words had become a secondary world for Steve, with time needed to interpret what he was trying to say. The subtle squeezes and move ments of his hand filled in the blanks, especially at a time like this when he was excited. Coming out of the sleep following the seizure had left him more excited than she’d seen him in a long time. She wanted Steve to concentrate on physical recovery as suggested by the head physical therapist, but Steve wanted desperately to communicate something and was having a hell of a time doing it. And, significantly, he was not smiling the way he usually did.

  Jan tried to convince Steve they already had a very important mys tery to solve, and that it would be better to let the system handle Mar jorie’s death. But he was persistent, squeezing her hand harder than usual. Perhaps because of his agitation, the words came out in a jum ble. And when she alluded again to them having a more important mystery to solve, he squeezed her hand very hard and shouted at her.

  “What goddamn mystery?”

  And she shouted back.

  “You, Steve! Remember? We were trying to find out who the hell you were! Or have you given up on that?”

  The result of this outburst, one of the rare ones they’d had, was a long embrace, a bunch of sobs, looking into one another’s eyes for a while, and an unspoken agreement to resume their patience and resolution in trying to communicate around the roadblock set up by the stroke.

  And so, as Steve did a slow march up and down the hallway regain ing his strength by using his walker, as prescribed by the head physical therapist, Jan spoke on his behalf. Jan knew the reason he kept up the pace in his walker instead of joining in was because he might interrupt with an inappropriate word or phrase and keep the questions from being answered as they were asked. But he did manage to hear part of the conversation, nodding toward them each time he passed while Jan questioned the LPN about Marjorie Gianetti’s death.

  She was told the night LPN named Betty had found Steve down on the first floor staring at the puddle that had caused Marjorie to slip and fall. Jan knew something about Marjorie’s death was bothering Steve. But more importantly, she knew he wanted her to find out ev erything she could about the circumstances of the death. She smiled and nodded to Steve when he passed to let him know she understood the assignment and would do the best she could.

  According to the LPN—a thick-bodied woman who wore no makeup and, whenever Jan dealt with her, seemed all-business—Mar jorie’s death had been an unfortunate accident that resulted from the fact there weren’t enough staff to watch each and every nursing wing resident when a thought from out of the blue hits them and they go off on a tangent.

  Apparently, Marjorie had walked out of her room and down the hall to the end of the nursing home wing near the kitchen and activ ity room in the evening when all of the staff were helping other nurs ing home residents get ready for bed. Apparently, she slipped and fell when she rounded a corner and stepped into a puddle that had been made by another resident earlier in the day, the puddle not having been discovered so it could be cleaned up. Apparently, Marjorie had not been her usual self because she normally dressed whenever she left her room and alwa
ys took her wheelchair. Even if she wanted to walk she took her wheelchair and walked behind it. Because of these cir cumstances, the staff concluded that Marjorie might have had a dream combined with an ischemic spell or even a mini-stroke.

  “I sometimes work in the nursing wing to fill in for summer vaca tions,” said the LPN, “and I’ve seen how stroke can affect the elderly. I’ve seen people who I didn’t think could get around without assis tance jump up and start running. It’s like when you hear about some one lifting a car to save another’s life. I’ve still got the remains of a bruise here on my arm where one of them squeezed me. I’m sure they don’t do these things on purpose, but it does happen. In a way, that’s why I’m happier on this floor. Younger people who’ve had strokes seem to have better control of themselves.”

  Steve passed when the LPN said this and she smiled toward him, but Steve did not smile.

  “What kind of injury did Mrs. Gianetti sustain?” asked Jan.

  “They say she hit her head quite hard and apparently had a hem orrhage. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The paramedics left in a hurry and cleaned up where she bled, but I guess because nobody else was around down there that time of night, and because someone was always at the nurses’ station to make sure no body else went down there, the puddle was still there when your hus band decided to investigate. For all I know the puddle stayed there for the morning cleaning crew. I don’t hold it against your husband that he went down there. I know he was a detective and it’s common for stroke victims to act out things they used to do.”