Chapter 2 - The Whisper in the Ambulance
Vivian was admitted to Mercy General at ten after six that evening, and they let me ride in the front of the ambulance, which is how I ended up hearing nothing at all for thirty-one minutes except the siren and my own breathing.I sat there with my hands in my lap and her whisper going around and around in my head.
Don't let them change the will.
At the hospital they put her in a room on the third floor and told us she had water in her lungs, that she was stable, that she was eighty-four and would probably be in for two or three nights.
She was awake by eight.
She would not talk about the pool.
When the attending physician asked her how she had ended up in the water, she looked at the window and said, "I slipped," in a voice so even and flat that I knew it was not true before the words were all the way out of her mouth.
When Robert asked her, she said the same thing.
When a young woman from the county came by the next morning to take a statement, Vivian said it a third time, and that was that.
Robert's younger brother Daniel arrived at the hospital around nine that night.
He is the one with the dark wavy hair and the light eyes, the one who came in from the parking garage with his blazer open over an unbuttoned white shirt, like he had been at dinner somewhere and had driven straight over.
I have known Daniel for eleven years.
He kissed his mother on the forehead and held her hand and told her she looked beautiful, and then he walked out into the hallway with Robert, and I stood on the other side of the door and heard him say, quite clearly, "We need to know where the paperwork stands before anything gets signed in this room."
Not how are you feeling, Mother.
Not what happened.
Paperwork.
Marissa came in around ten.
She is Robert's daughter from his first marriage, twenty-six years old and finished with law school that spring, and she has never once in eleven years called me anything but my first name, which I have learned to accept.
She walked past me at the nurses' station like I was furniture and went straight to her grandmother.
It was her father she spoke to, though, when she came back out.
"She's covered in bruises on one arm," Marissa said quietly.
"They're shaped like fingers."
Robert told her it was from the rescue.
He said it fast, before I could open my mouth, and she looked at him for a long moment and then she walked away down the hall.
I did not know until that night what Vivian had been doing for two weeks.
The hospital chaplain, a soft-spoken woman named Mrs. Alvarez, stopped me in the elevator and asked whether I was family.
When I said I was her daughter-in-law, she said something that I have not been able to put down since.
"She called our office on the ninth," Mrs. Alvarez said.
"She wanted to know what documents a person needs if they change their mind about who makes their decisions for them.
I remember her name because she was so specific."
The ninth.
Twelve days before the lunch.
Twelve days before she went into that water.
I went home at midnight because Robert told me there was nothing more I could do, and when I pulled into the driveway there was a car already parked in front of the guest house — Vivian's car, with her chauffeur, a man named Emil, sitting behind the wheel with the engine off and the lights on.
I got out of my car and walked over to him.
He rolled the window down and held out a sealed manila envelope, and his hand was shaking.
"She gave me this on Friday afternoon," he said.
"She said if anything happened to her, I was to bring it to you and to no one else.
I have been sitting here since eight o'clock trying to decide whether she meant it."
I took the envelope from him.
It was heavy, and across the front, in Vivian's small, careful handwriting, was written a single line in blue ink.
For Claire.
Open alone.
I stood in the dark in front of that house with the envelope in both hands and the pool behind me, black and flat under the terrace lights, and I heard her voice in my head one more time.
Don't let them change the will.
May you like
I have read a lot of documents in my life.
But I have never opened one the way I opened that one — standing in the driveway, with my husband's car already in the garage behind me, and the light on in the upstairs window where he was waiting.
