Trauma

CHAPTER 36

Rita Abington lived on a busy street in a ramshackle ranch home with a sagging roof and paint-chipped front stairs. The yard was just a small square, a bit more brown than green with nothing to spruce it up, no landscaping of any kind. Shrubs grew as they wished and a few of the taller trees might have been bent by ice storms, never straightening.

Carrie followed David up the narrow front walk. She noticed that all of the curtains were drawn. The only indication someone might be home was the Chevy Cobalt parked in the narrow driveway, battered-looking as the house.

David pushed the doorbell, but nothing happened. No rings. No chimes. He knocked. Carrie heard footsteps from within, and a moment later the door came open just a crack to reveal part of a woman’s hard-bitten face.

The woman said, “I don’t want to buy nothing, save a whale, or go to heaven, so I figure you’ve got no business being here.”

David laughed.

The woman spoke with a notable Downeast accent. She also had a throaty voice, and Carrie suspected an X-ray of her lungs would reveal at least a pack-a-day habit.

“Are you Rita Abington?” David asked.

“Depends if you’re looking for money.”

“I’m looking for your son, Steve.”

With that, the door came fully open to reveal a tiny woman, thin up top and below, wearing a sleeveless white blouse that showed off moles like archipelagos dotting her arms. Her skin was brown and wrinkled, but it appeared to be from hard living rather than too much sun. She had sunken cheeks and a neck thin enough to give Carrie a good look at the tendons. Rita’s hair came down to her shoulders and was thin like the rest of her, with all the color and luster of what might be found in one of her ashtrays.

Rita said, “You seen Stevie?”

“We were hoping you had,” Carrie said.

Rita stepped aside. Carrie figured this was her way of inviting them in and she went, with David following.

The living room was not much more than a few pieces of Goodwill furniture spread out over a well-worn rug. The stale smell of smoke hovered in the air and taxed Carrie’s breathing some, but she managed to ignore it after a few minutes. Plenty of pictures hung on the walls and stood on tables; apparently Steve was not Rita Abington’s only child.

Carrie and David waited on the plaid sofa while Rita got a pitcher of iced tea from the kitchen. She poured three glasses and took a seat on an armchair covered by a patchwork quilt. She lit up — Benson and Hedges — and took a puff. This was her home, and she saw no reason to ask anybody’s permission.

“Forgive me,” Rita said. “I haven’t had a lot of visitors come around. It’s been quiet here since Winston died.”

“Was Winston your husband?” David asked.

“My dog,” Rita said. “I got more love from that little dog than I ever did my ex, rest his soul.”

With that, Rita rose from her chair, the cigarette dangling in a practiced way between two long fingers, went to the hallway, and removed a picture from the wall. She handed the framed photograph to Carrie and used her hand to fan away the smoke.

“He’s so cute,” Carrie said of the tiny, silky-haired dog with ears reminiscent of furry satellite dishes. “What kind of dog was Winston?”

“I don’t know,” Rita said, as she took a puff. “A good one, that’s enough.”

Carrie showed the picture to David, who acknowledged Winston’s cuteness with a smile. Carrie hung the picture back on the wall and noticed another framed photographed, long and rectangular — this one of a group of soldiers, some wearing shirts and others without. Not all the guys had beards, but everyone had guns.

Carrie pointed at this photo. “Is this Steve?” she asked.

Rita came over, squinting, to take a look. She took the rectangular photo off the wall. “Eyes aren’t so good these days,” she said, almost apologizing. Her expression brightened. “That’s Stevie, right there.” She pointed. “How do you know my Stevie, anyway?”

“I’m his doctor,” Carrie said. “I was treating him and, well, he sort of took off.”

Rita carried the photograph back to her seat. “He’s always taking off,” she said.

“Have you heard from him?” Carrie asked.

Rita spit out a laugh. “That’s a good one. No. No, I haven’t,” she said. “My two other boys haven’t, either. Ben lives over to Orono. Comes to visit from time to time with the grandkids. Ian, well, let’s just say he likes fishing more than he likes people.”

Tough life, hard living, Carrie thought of the Abington clan. Rita would have no idea about Steve’s DBS operation, or his involvement with the DARPA program, and Carrie was not about to violate his privacy by sharing those details. Her vague answer about being Abington’s doctor had seemed to satisfy Rita’s equally vague curiosity. Carrie got the sense all Rita really cared about was hearing Steve’s voice one more time.

“Would you have any idea where he might have gone?” Carrie asked.

Rita let her gaze travel to the floor. “I haven’t seen him in years. I couldn’t tell you.”

“So he had no contact with his family?”

“None,” Rita said. “He came back from that war broken. No other way to put it. Stevie used to be my sweetie pie. Light of my life. He was the example for his brothers. But when he came back, it was just a ghost of that boy. Not the kid I raised. He took to the drink and the drugs, for sure, but there was more. He left something back in that desert.”

“What’s that?” Carrie asked.

A shadow crossed Rita’s face. “His soul,” she said.

Carrie stood, crossed the room, and put her hand on Rita’s shoulder. The woman gazed up, clutched Carrie’s hand, and batted back some tears.

“He was a good boy,” Rita said, looking at the framed picture in her lap. “The sweetest.”

Carrie stooped and pointed to the thin, muscular man in the photograph who had his arm around Steve. “Who is that?” she asked.

A sad smile of some memory deepened the wrinkles on Rita’s face.

“Why, that’s Roach,” Rita said. “Stevie’s best buddy. They called him Roach on account that nothing ever could kill him. Nothing. Then he died in Stevie’s arms. Honestly, I think that’s when it all began to go bad for him.”

Roach.

The name meant a lot to Carrie, but she kept quiet about the terrifying ordeal during which Steve had asked for his departed friend. Carrie’s eyes fell on another man in the photograph, this one taller than most, with broad shoulders and a handsome face. He had the neck of a football player, but without the asymmetry of the stimulating wires she had observed during her examination. Ramón Hernandez’s dazzling smile contradicted the photograph’s harsh setting.

Carrie’s thoughts reeled. How was it two people who’d had contact with each other over in Afghanistan ended up in the same DARPA DBS program? Did Hernandez refer Abington, or was their involvement coincidental?

“Did Steve know this man?” Carrie said, pointing to Hernandez.

Rita shook her head. “If he did, he didn’t mention it to me.”

As Carrie studied the photograph one more time she noticed a figure in the background, tall and lean, shirtless and rippling with muscles, his face partly obscured by shadows. She could not make out the visage, but the man called to mind Lee Taggart, the nurse working the neuro recovery floor the night Eric Fasciani disappeared.

The Green Garden Inn was just off the highway, and was the kind of roadside motel Carrie’s father seemed always drawn to on long family drives. It was nothing special: green vinyl siding, black shutters, and landscaping that looked like a PGA golf course compared to Rita’s place. Night had fallen and Carrie was ready to let go of the day, the endless, fruitless search — put on some bad television and drift off into oblivion. David brought in the plastic bag with two toothbrushes, some sweatpants, and T-shirts they had bought at Walmart, and the paper bag with takeout Chinese food.

Though she was ravenous, Carrie took a fifteen-minute shower. She thought about Ramón Hernandez. She’d told David about seeing him in the photo and he thought it could be a coincidence. If she’d been sure the other man was Lee Taggart, she wouldn’t have let David convince her.

Out of the shower, Carrie put on her new sweats. Her hair was tangled and stringy, and a quick check in the bathroom mirror confirmed she looked as exhausted as she felt. Not the impression she had wanted to make. Not even close. When she emerged from the bathroom, David was slurping noodles from a paper carton and drinking Heineken from a glass bottle, lying on one of the two twin beds and watching ESPN.

“Your dinner is on the table,” he said. “Happy to change the channel if you want.”

Carrie scooped up a bowl of chicken and broccoli, grabbed a Heineken David had opened and set on ice, and climbed onto the empty bed, feeling better than she had all day.

“Do you want me to change it?” David asked.

Carrie looked up at the television and shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve been watching a lot of ESPN with Adam since I moved back home.”

“You know, I was going to ask you about that.”

“About why I’m twenty-nine and living with my parents?”

“You forgot brain surgeon.”

“You really want the whole story?”

David gave Carrie a sidelong glance. “I’m a reporter. I may write the CliffsNotes version, but I don’t ever ask for it.” He shut off the TV.

For the next twenty minutes Carrie provided a detailed accounting of everything that had happened at BCH, starting with Beth Stillwell and ending with her resignation. She could not fathom why it felt so comfortable, so natural to share with him, but it did. Once she started to open up, she could not stop.

David sat on the bed facing Carrie, with his feet on the floor and his food going cold. On occasion, he’d sip from his beer, but mostly his eyes were on her the entire time, and Carrie thought that was just fine. When she finished, Carrie gave a little shrug because she had nothing more to say.

David took a final swig of his beer. “You didn’t have to quit,” he said. “Dr. Metcalf was in charge. You were just a resident.”

“It was my fault,” Carrie said.

“But you’re a damn good doc.”

“You can’t say that for sure. I’ve never operated on your brain.”

“But if I needed brain surgery, I would totally want you to do it. I have a really good gut instinct for this sort of thing.”

Carrie chuckled. “Yeah, well, talent isn’t everything. You were good at your job and look where that got you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you were a great stringer, if that’s the right term, putting yourself at risk, doing more than the others, always pushing the boundaries. And because of that, you were taken captive, held hostage, and suddenly your maverick ways turned you from an asset to a liability. Our stories aren’t so dissimilar, if you think about it.”

David gave this some serious thought. “We both pushed ourselves out of the jobs we loved.”

“And now here we are in a motel room in the middle of Maine.”

“Yeah, here we are,” David said.

A lengthy silence followed. David swung his feet back on the bed and turned up the volume on the TV a couple clicks to hear a report on how the Pacers had outlasted the Celtics in a grueling overtime match. The scrollbar along the bottom of the screen was nothing but a string of abstract letters and numbers. Carrie had no focus, and her thoughts became fuzzy as her arms and legs seemed to melt into the bed. Her eyelids were shutting, voluntarily or not. They snapped back open when David spoke up.

“Goodwin,” he said.

“What?”

“Why doesn’t she want you to see the patients post-op?”

Carrie shook her head and dislodged a few of the cobwebs.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s her policy. She’s a control freak, I guess.”

“What if she’s not,” David suggested.

“What do you mean?”

David returned to his earlier position, feet on the floor, eyes on Carrie.

“I guess what I’m getting at is what if the palino — you know.”

“Palinacousis,” Carrie said.

“Yeah, that. What if it only happens in a few patients, not all of them? And that’s why Goodwin doesn’t want you or Dr. Finley to look after her charges. She doesn’t want you to know.”

Carrie mulled this over. “But there’s been a lot of patients, David. Somebody would have found out by now.”

“Not if it’s temporary,” he said. “She makes sure nobody knows about it. Or if they do, it gets reported to her or Navarro, and that information doesn’t get back to you.”

“But why?” Carrie asked.

Here David shrugged. “That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

“So why did Abington and Fasciani check out AMA?”

“Maybe something was different with those two, and Abington and Fasciani had to disappear. Something about their symptoms wasn’t going to be temporary.”

“Then explain to me how she got them to leave?” Carrie asked.

“She could have paid them off. Or maybe she took them.”

“Kidnapping?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Goodness, you’re a conspiracy theorist, David. Who knew?”

David held up his hands, evidently pleased to embrace the label.

“I think there’s a reason Goodwin wants to keep you from looking at those patients, and that it goes beyond protocol. That’s all I’m saying.”

“We would need a motive. Why would Goodwin want to hide a potential side effect, and then purposefully work to remove patients not only from the program, but the hospital?”

“I know a way we could find out,” David said.

“How? By asking her?”

“As a reporter I’ve had to learn things about people they wouldn’t say directly to my face,” David said almost apologetically. “So, let’s just say I have access to some devices that could aid our effort.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“If you want to know Goodwin’s private conversations, you’ve got to listen to them.”

“You want to bug Goodwin’s office?”

“Think about everything you’ve experienced so far. It all points back to Goodwin. She’s up to something, Carrie. The question is, what?”

“I’ll think about it,” Carrie said.

“You can help get me inside, and I can set it up. The offer is on the table.”

“I appreciate it,” Carrie said, and she meant it.

David went back to watching television. Carrie turned her gaze to the ceiling. She was not thinking about bugging Goodwin, or any possible motive for hiding the patients. She was thinking about David. Part of it, she knew, was driven by loneliness. While Carrie did not regret putting her career first and foremost in her life priorities, she was also a woman with needs. But she was not ready to act on the impulse — not yet, anyway. The focus had to be on Abington and Fasciani. It had to be on saving her career.

Mind reading, Carrie knew, was nothing but a parlor trick; even so she caught David looking at her and sensed he was having similar thoughts. Carrie held his gaze a moment, then said, “Well, it’s late and I’m pretty tired. I’ll see you in the morning. Thanks for being there for me, David. It means a lot.”

Carrie shut off her bedside lamp and turned her back to David.

David said, “You know, I would have helped you even without getting the story.”

In the darkness, Carrie smiled.