Moth by James Sallis

Author:James Sallis [Sallis, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780802776426
Google: Gy7H_IrP4uEC
Amazon: 1433252759
Barnesnoble: 1433252759
Goodreads: 176383
Publisher: Walker
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

MY SECOND WEEK IN CLARKSVILLE, ON a Tuesday, I got back to the motel midmorning, having left the hospital at five or so and been on the streets since (with a stopover at Mama’s Homestyle for a kickass breakfast), and found two messages waiting. I didn’t look at the second one till later. But Teresa had called to say they were “having some trouble” with Baby Girl McTell and she thought I might want to be there.

A nurse I hadn’t met before, Kristi Scarborough, brought me up to date. Around six that morning, stats had dropped into the seventies and hovered there; ABG’s confirmed a low PO2 and steadily increasing PCO2. It could, of course, be a number of things: cardiac problems, a sign that the lungs were stiffening beyond our capacity to inflate them, infection, pulmonary edema. The baby was back on 100 percent oxygen, and ventilator pressures had been raised. Gases were slowly improving. I stood before an X-ray viewer staring at loops of white in Baby Girl McTell’s belly. Like those ancient maps where the round, unknown world has been cleft in half and laid out flat. Necrosis of the bowel, Nurse Scarborough told me; a further complication. It almost always happens with these tiny ones. But for now she’s holding her own.

Kristi used to work the unit full-time, she told me, but last year had married one of the residents and now put in only the hours necessary to keep her license, a day or two every other week, while husband John oversaw an emergency room just across the Tennessee line, broken bones, agricultural accidents and trauma from the regional penitentiary mostly (once, a hatchet buried in a head), and “they” tried as best they could to “get pregnant.”

I left at three or four, finally, once Baby Girl McTell seemed to be out of immediate danger, and over a cheeseburger and fries at Mama’s looked at the second message.

Call me. Clare.

I went back to my room and did just that. She answered on the third ring, breathing hard.

“Greetings from the great state of Mississippi.”

“Lew! I’ve been worried about you.”

I told her about Baby Girl McTell.

“Hospitals are tough. You haven’t found Alouette yet, I take it?”

“She’s as gone as gone gets. But I will.”

“I know. I’ve missed you, Lew. Any idea when you’ll be back in town?”

“Not really. I don’t know what I’m into here, or how long it may take. I’ll give you a call.”

Outside, a fire truck and police car went screaming by.

“I spent about half of my teenage years waiting for people to call who said they would, Lew.”

“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.

“I know. You really are—that’s what makes it so difficult.” I listened to the sirens fade. Wondered if she could hear them, all those miles away. “But it is good to hear your voice.”

The door slammed in the room next to mine and a woman stalked toward her car, a pearl-gray Tempo. She got in and started it, then sat there with the engine running.

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