Broken Hope, page 14
A loud grunt of protest from Michael drowns out my response.
“Please, Michael.”
“Sheee kiii errr.”
Although his words are forced out in wheezy rasps, I understand what he’s trying to say.
“If you knew Kim,” I reply, “you’d understand how bizarre it is to think she’s capable of something like that, not on purpose anyway. She’s too…well, she’s…”
She’s what? Too dull? Too bland? Too common?
I picture the Kim Lombardi I know. Toffee-blond hair, turned-up nose, heart-shaped face. Cute but plain, nice figure but never shows it, competent but not exceptional, able to hold up her end of a conversation but not a riveting orator. Flat expression, except when someone praises her accomplished siblings and parents. Then her nose twinges in irritation or her jaw muscles contract.
Michael starts rasping out words again. “Heppp meee prooo,” or something to that effect.
I’m pretty sure I understand. “Help you prove it?”
He grunts once for yes.
“I promise you I’ll look into it.”
The irony of me helping the man who clobbered my coworker, drugged and abducted me, and tied me to a chair almost knocks me over with its absurdity.
“I’ll check out some of her other patient complications.” Even as I say it I’m wondering how in the world I will be able to do that. “But it’s mostly to reassure you. No doubt we’re both overreacting.”
Are we? If that’s the case, then why am I calling him? Why does my gut tell me he shouldn’t be alone in the hospital?
I replay Michael’s phone call to me two days ago. I remember how Kim intercepted his call but didn’t offer to help him communicate. In retrospect, it’s good she didn’t, since he was trying to warn me about her, but isn’t it odd she didn’t offer her assistance? Attempt to speak to the caller for him? Then again, Kim’s bedside manner has always been lukewarm. Tepid even.
Still…
I try to sound casual. “Do you have someone who could stay with you while you’re in the hospital?” I already know the answer. If Michael had a supportive network, his grief probably wouldn’t have led him to stalking and abducting me. “Maybe it’s best you’re not alone.”
He grunts twice. A loud and clear no.
Like me, he has no one. Maybe he is me, at least me in the future. The ghost of Hope Yet to Come. We hold it together until suddenly…we don’t. Will I be him in six months? Six weeks? Six days? After all, look what I did to the barista.
Before I can stop myself, I blurt out, “I’m coming to stay with you.”
No response beyond his breathing. Whether that is agreement or surprise, I don’t know, but clearly, he no longer sees me as a threat.
“I’ll make up an excuse to the staff,” I add. “I’ll stay until you’re discharged.” What the living shit am I saying? “Then together we’ll look into Dr. Lombardi. I’ll help you, I promise. We’ll make sure—”
I silence myself. Michael’s breathing has grown distant, as if he’s no longer the one holding the phone. If so, how much of what I said was overheard?
Before I can say anything else, a muffled shuffling occurs. It’s as if the receiver has been dropped onto the bedding and Michael is fumbling to retrieve it.
Or… struggling to retrieve it.
The call cuts off. I wait for a call back but don’t get one. In that dead air, in that strange disconnection, my imagination runs wild. Someone purposely ended our conversation.
Maybe Michael’s doctor, Kim Lombardi, formerly Kimberly Baker.
Michael recognized Kim as the doctor who took care of his wife. What if Kim, too, has made that connection? If she did have something to do with Jasmine’s death, whether out of simple medical negligence or cold-blooded murder, then recognizing the woman’s husband could put that husband at risk.
High risk.
I hurry to my bedroom and tug on jeans, a form-fitting tee, and a hoodie, well aware that it’s three thirty in the morning. Then I stuff an overnight bag with a change of clothes and basic toiletries.
When I finish, I fill three bowls to the brim with dry cat food and six bowls with water. Diva may snub her nose at the dry stuff, but she’ll eat it if that’s her only option. I’ll lavish her with an apology of treats and catnip later. These provisions will hold her over should I need to be gone a couple of days, and I can always call Nathan to check in on her. He can come to the hospital to pick up my key. I think he would do that for me.
Overnight bag in hand, I flee my loft and race to Boston General.
26
Him
In the dimly lit hospital room, Michael sees Dr. Lombardi watching him, her mask lowered around her neck, her mouth a flat line of unreadability. A sterile scent wafts from her rumpled white coat, as if she’s just finished performing a procedure on another patient. The phone receiver is back on its cradle. They wrestled for it after she snatched it away and put it to her ear. In his weakened state, she won the battle.
“That sounded like Hope Sullivan,” the doctor says. “Why would you be talking to Dr. Sullivan?”
Michael doesn’t say anything. Can’t say anything, both because of his damaged vocal cords and his growing fear. He wonders how much of the conversation Dr. Lombardi heard, a doctor he is now one hundred percent sure killed his wife. The last thing Michael caught Hope Sullivan say was that she was coming to stay with him. That must mean she fears he’s in danger.
Am I?
That Hope would help him, after what he did to her, after he assaulted her colleague and drugged and restrained her, fills him with a flurry of emotions. Shock. Gratitude. Anxiety. Shame.
Dr. Lombardi crosses the room to the chair near the window, on top of which sit Michael’s clothes in a paper bag. She digs through his pockets and finds the cell phone that hasn’t left his pants since the paramedics picked him up at his place. She moves to his bedside, and when he reaches up to grab his cell phone, wondering why she is giving it to him, she uses his face to open it and steps back again.
She begins scrolling. Taps the screen a few times and then plays a video.
He grinds his teeth and tries to sit up so he can snatch his phone away, but the motion makes his head spin. He’s too weak to stand let alone walk. He still requires the plastic urine bottle. His face heats in embarrassment every time the nurse comes to empty it.
He makes a raspy, incoherent attempt of telling Dr. Lombardi to get off his phone, but she ignores him. Instead, she approaches the bed again. The light from the hallway reveals a rare flicker of animation on her face.
“This is quite the video you’ve recorded here.”
She lifts her own phone next to his. Seconds later the tone of an AirDrop swishes.
“Who would’ve thought Hope capable of such a thing?” The doctor stares at Michael, lips parted, eyebrows raised, as if she can’t quite believe what she has watched. “At first, I didn’t know who the woman was, but then I recognized her voice. That wig too. She used it for a faculty roast back in residency.”
Michael remains quiet.
Dr. Lombardi must take his silence as confirmation that it’s Hope Sullivan in the video. “Are you blackmailing her? Is that what this is all about?” She shakes her head, as if she still can’t believe what she has discovered. “Forcing her to help you look into me? That’s what I heard her say on the phone. That the two of you were going to look into me.”
Michael’s gaze travels from Dr. Lombardi to the plastic remote hanging over his guard rail, the one with the red call button.
“What, exactly, is it you think I’ve done?” She tosses his phone back on the vinyl-cushioned chair and sits on the edge of his bed.
Once again Michael finds her nearness unnerving. So, too, is her newfound buoyancy. Until now she has shown no personality in her interactions with him. No humor or anecdotes. Just stale rounds that offer simple progress updates.
“Hmm?” she asks. “Do you think I’m guilty of something?”
He rasps nothing in reply, unsure if it’s a trap or not. Wonders, too, if he has it all wrong. He was wrong about Dr. Sullivan. What if he’s wrong about this doctor too? What if his wife’s death really was unpreventable? What if his obsessive quest to right an injustice stems only from his inability to accept the fact that Jasmine is gone?
“You recognized me, didn’t you?” Dr. Lombardi says. “I saw it in your eyes the other night when you woke up from your coma. You think I killed your wife.”
Michael startles at her bluntness. His doubts from a second ago vanish. Now he is convinced she’s a killer because no innocent person would say such a thing.
His face ignites, and he croaks out a definitive yesss but then immediately realizes his mistake. He should have appeared shocked. Now she knows he’s on to her. He’s never been good at controlling his emotions. They dance off his face and body like imps.
Fearful now, he slides his hand over the starched sheets and up toward the plastic guardrail, the tubing from his IV line dangling from the crook of his elbow. He reaches for the nurse call button, but before he can press it, Dr. Lombardi snatches the remote away. She holds it behind her, the cord stretched taut over the blanket.
Michael manages a hoarse cry, but it’s too muted for anyone at the central desk to hear. He tugs at the cord and tries to grab the remote back from the doctor. Then she says something that stops him cold. An ugly, vicious thing.
“Whaaa diii uuu saaay?” he croaks out, the effort stabbing his throat. He swallows and tastes the metallic tang of blood.
“I said the babies weren’t yours.”
Her voice is low, barely registering above the hum of his pump, but Michael heard her all the same. He is stunned into silence.
“Your wife told me so,” the doctor adds.
Michael lays rigid on the hospital mattress, the bedding damp from perspiration. Dr. Lombardi stays perched on the edge of the bed. The hallway light illuminates her body, but her face remains shadowy.
“I told your wife—Jasmine, wasn’t it?—that we’d be checking her blood type in case she needed a transfusion. Just a standard precaution. That worried her though. You know why?”
Michael glances at the open doorway and wonders how he can get to it. Dr. Lombardi must read his mind because she rises, places the remote with the nurse call button on the floor far from Michael’s reach, and closes the door.
She returns to his bed and flips on the recessed lighting behind it. Then she winds the remote’s cord around the infusion pump. He tugs the cord anyway, trying to get the call button back within reach. The IV machine tilts precariously. Dr. Lombardi rights it before it falls and then pushes the button on Michael’s PCA pump. A dose of morphine he didn’t ask for slips into his blood.
Dr. Lombardi sits back down on the bed, her features stony. Michael is aware she is going to kill him, but he’s too paralyzed by her words to process it. Not his babies? Impossible.
“See, when I told your wife we’d check her blood type in the rare event we would need to transfuse her, she got worried. She confided in me that she was pregnant and wanted to know if a transfusion would hurt her twin babies. To better answer her question, I asked about your blood type. She became even more upset and confessed to me the babies she was carrying weren’t yours. Of course, I never mentioned any of this in the chart, and I was the only one who knew she was pregnant until the autopsy.”
Michael feels as if he’s been kicked in the throat all over again.
Of course the babies were mine.
His anger returns, and he opens his mouth to grunt something, but Dr. Lombardi answers for him. “Bullshit? Is that what you want to say?”
When Michael nods, the doctor drones on. “I’m not lying, Mr. Yerli. Why would I?”
Her words hang in the sterile air. Deep inside them lies the subtext that she has no reason to lie—because she is going to kill him.
“She told me you two tried something fierce to get pregnant, but nothing took root. She worried she was too old. Then she went out of town, some sort of legal conference, I think.”
Michael remembers the week his wife went to Washington, DC, for a law meeting because it was a few weeks later she told him she thought she was pregnant.
“She met up with some guy there. An old law school buddy of hers.”
No. Michael doesn’t want to hear it. Can’t hear it. He and Jasmine had sex the night she returned, so he never questioned the twins might not be his. Why would he? She would never cheat on him.
“And, well, you know how it is, one drink led to another, and your wife started to think, ‘Maybe it’s not me who can’t make babies. Maybe it’s Michael.’” Dr. Lombardi holds up her hands. “I’m paraphrasing, of course, but you get the gist. I guess one encounter was all it took, because a short time later she realized she was pregnant.”
Wetness trickles down Michael’s face. Crying isn’t a new thing for him. Over the past six years his grief has taken him from sobbing, to shattering the china he and Jasmine once owned, to stalking the doctor he thought killed his wife. But tonight, in the hospital room with Dr. Lombardi, his body drugged and weakened, the knowledge that his wife cheated on him turns the tears to acid.
“So see?” Dr. Lombardi’s voice is the warmest Michael has heard from her, childlike almost. “I did you a favor. Your wife had everything. A successful career, awards in her field, a husband who adored her. I remember how you sat rooted to her side that night in the hospital, stroking her hand, promising her everything would be okay. And yet she threw it all away. Do you know what people would give to be in her shoes?”
Michael shakes his head, wants to say that the doctor doesn’t understand, that Jasmine had lots of struggles too. How could she not? But he only manages nonsensical rasping, his shock over his wife’s infidelity too great.
The doctor is lying. She has to be.
Then he remembers Jasmine’s distraction when she returned from her conference. Remembers her excitement over the news of the babies but her hesitation too. He assumed her hesitancy was because they learned they were having twins, but now he understands it could just as easily have been from the weight of her secret.
Dr. Lombardi reaches for the PCA pump and releases another dose of morphine into Michael’s line. She lowers the head of the bed from its angled position and strokes his hair. He jerks his head back, but it has nowhere to go but deeper into his pillow.
“Some of us never get the chance to shine.” Her fingertips now trace his thick eyebrows. “Some of us work hard to be noticed, to be respected, even become doctors and professors and engineers, and yet we never rise above mediocre. There is always somebody better, somebody who steals the spotlight, people like my parents and my siblings, me nothing but an underachieving afterthought.”
She offers a sad smile, her cold fingers still on Michael’s forehead, and for a morphine-confused moment, he thinks she’s the Grim Reaper in the flesh. He’s so tired now. Has to fight to keep his eyelids open.
“So when people who have everything don’t appreciate their good fortune,” she continues, “I have to teach them a final lesson. Show them how quickly it can be taken away.” Dr. Lombardi’s icy fingertips slide down to Michael’s wet cheeks. She makes a clucking sound that’s probably meant to be soothing but is anything but. “I suspect you’re like me, Michael. One of those adequate but forgettable people who disappear into the room, no matter how hard we try to be important. You were lucky to get someone like Jasmine, weren’t you? She was too good for you.”
Michael nods. He blinks his tired eyes. Hot tears bite his cheeks.
“You and I are alike,” the doctor whispers. “Too bad it has to end like this.”
Michael knows he needs to fight. As much as he is ready to die, he refuses to let it be at this woman’s hands. Dr. Sullivan will be here soon. She’ll help him.
He flexes his weakened muscles. A week in a coma and veins full of morphine keep them sluggish, but he forces them to move. He reaches for the doctor. Tries to scratch at her face, her neck, anything to keep her from doing what she’s about to do.
His efforts are nothing but a puff of air in the wind. She stands up from the bed, her hand in her white coat’s pocket. Outside the closed door, the only sound is a distant beeping from another patient’s room.
“I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t figured out what happened to your wife. You don’t deserve this, but I can’t have you working with Dr. Sullivan to ‘look into’ me, can I?”
Hope. Hope is my only hope now. In Michael’s drugged-up fog, he almost smiles at both the pun and the irony.
Dr. Lombardi’s hand reappears from her coat pocket. In it lies a syringe.
Fight for me, he says in his mind to Hope Sullivan. A doctor who throat kicks is a doctor who can stop this sociopath. Fight for my Jasmine.
Dr. Lombardi approaches Michael’s PICC-line port. “I’ve been carrying this around for a while now.” She raises the syringe. “Ever since you recognized me, I’ve been hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, but I kept it close just in case. Funny how our paths crossed again, isn’t it? What a small world.” She sighs, as if pained. “I’m not happy it’s come to this, though.”
She raises her surgical mask back over her mouth and nose.
Michael fights to keep his eyes open. So tired. The syringe’s needle pokes into his access port. A sob bubbles in his throat. He feels it more than he hears it.
Can’t fight back, Jasmine. Too weak.
He wishes he believed in God. Maybe he would see his wife again if he did. He still loves her. He forgives her. They could live in a heaven free of pain. Free of cruel people and grief.
Is it too late to believe?
A sudden pain cinches his heart, a pain the morphine doesn’t touch. His eyes snap open in agony. He can’t breathe. Can’t get any air. Can’t swallow.
