Then Sings My Soul (9 page)

1994

South Haven, Michigan

CHAPTER 14

“Coming!” Nel hollered at the ringing phone, sure she'd hear the sound of the nurse or Jakob's physician on the other end of the line.

“How are you, Nel?”

“Oh, Sam. Hi.” She tried to catch her breath.

“Were you out running?” he asked.

“No, no, just running to get to the phone. I thought it might be the hospital. I talked to the nurse earlier, but I thought you might be the doctor. Dad's not doing well at all.” Did he sound annoyed with her? They'd only spoken a couple of times between the funeral and the day Jakob fell, but that couldn't be helped. She tried to ignore the hurt in his voice. “I'm so glad you called. I was wondering if you might help Matthew send some of my supplies out here.”

“So you need your
supplies
but not me?” His emphasis of the word hurt. He knew about her deadlines. More than that, he knew all she'd lost, and now with her dad in such bad shape … was he really that self-centered? Or had she simply not realized that about him before?

He had actually offered to come out there and be with her the day Jakob fell, to find a partner to cover his cases for a few days, but she'd refused, telling him she was too stressed and needed to handle it on her own. She was glad now that she'd declined. She didn't have the energy or patience to assuage whatever insecurities or needs he had at the moment.

She paused, trying to maintain her composure. “Never mind about the supplies. I'll have Matthew send them. It's just that Sandra's on my back about these deadlines, and the doctor said yesterday that Dad has a long road of recovery ahead of him. I don't even know if he'll make it out of the hospital at this point. But I've got to at least finish the bracelets for Anna Wilds and get those necklace prototypes to Sandra before the end of the week.”

Sandra was Nel's tireless but demanding agent. And Anna Wilds was a Hollywood producer who'd paid a hefty advance for Nel to make a set of six matching bracelets personalized with inlaid birthstones and unique engravings representing each of the six members of her family.

Sam sighed on the other end of the line. “So you don't know when you're coming back?”

A part of Nel wondered if she would be coming back, but she didn't dare tell him that. “No. I'm sorry—I just don't know. Dr. Weiss said recovery could take a long time. Regardless, I can't wait to work on my orders.”

Sam was silent.

Nel couldn't contain her impatience. “What is it, Sam? Just tell me. Just say it.” She knew he was still frustrated with what she'd said during the argument they'd had the night before she left for South Haven. That night she'd thought perhaps she could calm herself down by meeting Sam for a couple of drinks before having to face the reality of flying home the next day for her mom's funeral.

“The usual?” Sam had asked Nel when the waiter came to the table.

“Yes, the usual, thanks.”

“I'll have the same. Thanks, Stu.” Sam, on a first-name basis with the staff, unfolded his napkin with a flip of his wrist and laid it on his lap. On the Half Shell was the nicest seafood restaurant in Santa Fe and had been the site of their first date. Sam's cordial pleasantry faded, and he had looked at Nel in a hard way that caught her breath. “This might not be the best time to bring this up, but I need to talk to you.”

Stu set a plate of raw oysters, condiments, and two martinis on the table.

Sam poured a generous amount of Tabasco on one of the jiggly creatures and let it slide off the shell onto his tongue before he swallowed, then followed it with a soda cracker. “It feels like you run from me every time I try to get close, Nel. And you're running more and more. Now you're going home for the first time in how long? Two years? And I guess before you leave, I feel like I need to be sure of you.”

“Sure of me, how? You have me most every night, Sam.” She unfolded her napkin, spread it over her knees, and smoothed it down.

“In case you haven't noticed, I care about you.”

She nodded, sipping her martini.

“I don't know if I can do this whole ‘without strings' thing anymore. We're not getting any younger.”

“What am I not giving you? What's not enough?”

He leaned toward her, reaching under the table to grab one of her hands. “A lifetime.”

Nel sat back and crossed her arms. “That's not something I feel like I can give.”

“Why? What's really keeping you from diving in?”

“Sam, as much as I enjoy our time together, you'll get tired of me and you know it. If you're asking me for honesty, at least be honest with yourself.” He'd had as many, or more, short-term relationships as she had over the years, his reputation for wooing nurses widely known, even outside the hospital community.

“My point exactly.” He sat back, crossed his arms as well, and smiled provocatively at her.

“Exactly what?”

“Your sass. You're making me fall in love with you.”

Nel, incredulous, studied him. His perfectly shaved face. His strong, handsome features. His forehead, wrinkled with sincerity. “Did you say what I think you said?”

“And what would that be?” He reached across the table and offered her his hand. But she stayed where she was.

“Love. You said love.”

“I did. And?”

Nel was speechless. Disappointed, more than anything. She cared about him, yes, but she didn't want to marry him.

He sat back, looking resigned. “I'm sorry, Nel. Really. This was too much to put on you, especially with your mom's funeral. I'll get the tab and we can go.”

Frustrated, Nel didn't argue. She pushed the chair away from the table and headed out to the restaurant's patio, which backed up to the black desert, the mountains barely visible as looming shadows in the moonless, starless night. She felt Sam behind her and turned.

“Go take care of things with the funeral and with your dad. We can figure this out later.” Sam leaned in to kiss her forehead.

Nel stepped past him and headed toward her car in the parking lot.

“Good night, Sam,” she called over her shoulder. Her breath turned to mist in the air that had chilled considerably.

Now, on the phone hundreds of miles away, Sam's voice held an air of entitlement. “I've thought a lot since you left. About me. About you. About us. About the best decision of my life.”

“Which is?” Nel was glad he couldn't see her cringe on the other end of the line.

“Deciding I want to marry you.”

The phone line crackled faintly as Nel twisted and twirled the cord around her fingers.

“Don't you get tired of it, Nel? The one-night stands? The loneliness? The thought of never having children or a legacy to leave behind? Life's got to be more than that.”

“Yes. I mean, no, I'm not tired of it. I don't think about it. I haven't had time. Why are you pushing for this so much right now? I can't even think straight with everything that's happened in the past month—” She stopped, the realization hitting her like a ton of bricks. “Who is she, Sam?”

“What?” He sounded incredulous.

“You're giving me an ultimatum because you want out. There's someone else, and you want out, right?”

He was silent for a moment too long. “Look, Nel, it's not that simple.”

Unbelievable. “Sure it is. You knew I would say no, and you need out, but you don't want to be the bad guy.”

“Come back to Santa Fe, Nel. There's nursing homes and home health services in South Haven, people you can hire out there to take care of your dad. Just come back and let me love you.”

“You essentially admit to me there's another woman, and in the same breath you tell me to come back? When Dad's near death in the hospital? Not to mention Mom dying?” Outside the window above the kitchen sink, she watched David as he stood alongside a couple of sawhorses he'd fashioned into a workbench in Mattie's side yard. He sliced through a long piece of trim.

“I didn't admit anything. When you get back, we'll start new from where we left off. It's like I said before you left. I need to be sure of you,” Sam said, his voice rough and sensuous. For a fleeting moment, the anger left her gut, until she looked back out the window at David.

“I don't believe you.” She hesitated. “Besides, something new has started, Sam. Just not something with you.”

CHAPTER 15

The plastic mattress of the bed in his new room at Lakeview Meadows Nursing Home did nothing to cushion the metal frame beneath it, but Jakob had to admit it was better than the hospital bed, which had felt like lying on a medieval rack. Neither bed did anything to ease Jakob's muscle and hip pain, which were so intense he needed help turning from side to side. Throughout the night Jakob's aides would turn him over every couple of hours and replace his urine-soaked pads at the same time.

“Hurry up, now. Don't you know I have to get back to the office?” Jakob blurted, then grimaced in pain.

“You're in the nursing home. Been here nearly a week already, don't you know that? Ain't no office for you to go to anymore,” the nursing aide huffed as she rolled him on his side toward the window.

Jakob watched a crease of yellow stretch wider at the horizon, the cockcrow ushering in a shade of blue—the “welkin blush,” as Shakespeare had called it—that reminded him of the blue of the lost stone, of Catherine's eyes.

“Catherine?”

“I'm Joan,” the aide barked. “Ain't no Catherine here.” Joan was rougher than some of the staff. She didn't speak a word—neither a kind nor a rude one—as she used the sheets to turn Jakob like a drenched log floating in a river. His eyes watered from the smell of her drugstore perfume, which was nothing like the gentle scent of White Shoulders he used to buy for Catherine.

“Don't be so rough,” he pleaded.

One of her fingernails, painted bright red and embedded with cheap, fake rhinestones on the squared-off tips, scratched at the skin around his privates as she cleaned him with cold baby wipes. She rolled her eyes and mumbled something about drinking wine when she got home, and never mind that it was morning; it was five o'clock somewhere.

Jakob remembered little from his three-week stay at the hospital, except that the doctor—Weiss, he thought his name was—said he couldn't tell which came first, the fall or the fracture. When he was lucid, Jakob tried to explain he heard his hip
pop
before he fell. But like so many others lately, Dr. Weiss had nodded his head but essentially dismissed what Jakob had been trying to say. A ninety-four-year-old man can't be playing with a full deck after all, especially a man who recently lost his wife and required rehabilitation, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and physical therapists pushing him with exercise and recovery techniques just to get him to function.

“The old elevator's skipped a few floors,” he'd heard staff cackling outside his door. Jakob wanted to yell at them, but he didn't have the energy. And for all he knew, they were right. Scenes from his past got all mixed up in his head. Sometimes he realized this. And events of the past few weeks were entirely blank. But memories he hadn't thought of in decades resurfaced, terrifying him and reigniting a shame he'd stuffed away for years. He remembered burying Catherine one moment, and the next, he expected her to walk into the room, which on occasion looked an awful lot like his bedroom until one of the nurses or aides came in and turned him again. When he was aware, he felt like he might as well be dead, the way staff talked about him as if he weren't in the room. Nursing aides laughed and sniggered about their sex lives like he couldn't hear them while they changed his soiled briefs. They wiped his hind end with the door wide open as if he didn't care about his privacy anymore. He wished he had the wherewithal to tell them how well he and Catherine had put his parts to good use back in the day.

“Time for your meds, Mr. Jake.” Nyesha, one of the day aides who doubled as the medication nurse, set a pleated paper medicine cup full of pills on the table beside his bed as the night aide left the room.

“Are you wantin' to eat in here this morning, or can I take you to the dining room?”

“Catherine will be here soon. I'll eat with her.”

Nyesha cocked her head to the side and forced a grin. “Now Mr. Jake, do you know where you are?”

He looked around the room. “Home.”

She frowned.

He looked around the room again, his brow furrowing as he frowned.

“You're at Lakeview. And it's a Tuesday morning. It's November already. Thanksgiving'll be here before we know it.”

“Morning?” Jakob could've sworn by
The Andy Griffith Show
on the TV that he'd just had dinner. He rubbed the stubble on the jowly skin around his chin.

“Yes, sir, it's morning. So would you like me to get you cleaned up a bit and take you to the dining room for breakfast?”

“Nah.”

“You sure? Old Ms. Biernacki'll miss you at her table out there.” Nyesha winked. “Besides, do you good to wake up a bit, socialize. Nel's coming before lunch, remember?”

“Nel?”

“Yes, your daughter. You love when she comes and reads to you.”

A bit of the fog lifted from his head then as he thought about Nel. “That's right. I'll eat and clean up in here if it's all the same.”

“Sounds good.” Nyesha smiled.

Jakob admired the small gap between her two front teeth. The shapely girl couldn't have been more than twenty, but he was no good at estimating a person's age anymore. Everybody looks like a baby when you're ninety-four years old. Her skin was the shade of milk chocolate. She wore her hair cropped, which showed off the curvy features of her face. Jakob caught himself wishing he could reach out and run his fingers along the smoothness of her cheek, even her hand. But he was an old man. He might have to be reminded of the day and where he was, but he knew better than to have the nursing-home staff think he was a pervert.

Nyesha pulled the rolling table over the top of his bed, then set a washbasin of soapy warm water and a stack of white washcloths on it. To this she added a cup of cold water, his toothbrush, dentures, and a plastic spit pan. She plugged in his electric razor and set it on the nightstand next to him so he could reach it. “Did I forget anything, young man?”

“Pshaw.”

“If you're sure, then.” She turned the channel to a morning news program then turned back to face Jakob. “Wash your face and get your teeth in as best you can. I'll come back before your breakfast arrives to help you get at the rest of your body and set you up in a chair. We'll get you looking all spiffed up for your daughter.” The silver cross around her neck glinted against the first rays of sunlight coming through the window.