The Fall of Never(22)

Closing Becky’s bedroom door and moving quietly down the hallway, Kelly Rich thought she would do just that.





Chapter Seven


Josh Cavey spent the morning working at the bookstore in the Village, and when he finally got home around midafternoon, there were five messages on his answering machine. He listened to all five, and all five were from the same person—some doctor named Mendes from NYU Downtown calling about the patient he’d admitted yesterday, an old woman named Nellie Worthridge. Mendes left his office number, which Josh called only to get his voicemail. Though Mendes did not go into any detail beyond the fact that he had “some questions about Miss Worthridge,” there was an urgency in his voice that made Josh both concerned and a little bit curious. He changed his clothes and grabbed a cab to the hospital.

There, a young nurse directed him out back to a shady little courtyard where Carlos Mendes sat on a weathered bench, smoking a Lucky Strike.

“Doctor Mendes?”

The doctor looked up. He was ageless. There were dark rings around his eyes and his lips were pressed tightly together, almost crushing the cigarette that poked out from between them. Between his knees, he rubbed his hands together nervously, like a child seated outside the principal’s office.

“Yes?”

“I’m Joshua Cavey. Apparently you’ve been calling my apartment all morning…”

“Mr. Cavey.” Mendes was quick to stand, shake his hand. He looked about on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There was a dark coffee stain on the light blue Oxford shirt he wore beneath his white lab coat. Josh could imagine Mendes filling his coffee cup this morning, shaking so badly that he’d spilled roughly half the cup down the front of his shirt. “You didn’t need to come down here, I’m sorry, I just needed to speak with you.”

“It’s all right, I wasn’t busy.” Also, that urgent tone in Mendes’s voice on the machine. Looking at him now, Josh thought that tone fit the man perfectly. “Is something wrong with Nellie?”

Carlos Mendes motioned for Josh to sit down, and they both did. He offered Josh a cigarette, which he declined, and Mendes hurriedly crushed out his old stick and lit a fresh one.

“You are a relative of Miss Worthridge?”

“No.”

“You signed her admittance form?”

“Well, yes. I found her unconscious in her apartment yesterday.”

“So you’re a friend then?”

Josh nodded. “Yeah, I guess you can call me a friend. Is something wrong? Something must be wrong…”

“Miss Worthridge is stable, Josh,” said Mendes. His eyes darted around the courtyard, refusing to lock a gaze on anything for longer than a millisecond. “She’ll be all right, which is…well, it’s good. The type of stroke she suffered is the most common there is, and although we can’t really do anything to treat it or prevent any more, she should almost fully recover.”

“Almost?”

“Well, for one, there’s the aphasia, the slurred speech. I’ve managed to speak with her a few times, and she does try to communicate, but not without some difficulty. There has also been some paralysis of her left side, particularly her left arm. It’s not total, but it’s severe enough to sufficiently impede her day to day, and I would think she…” He trailed off. Mendes hadn’t called him to discuss Nellie’s recovery, Josh realized. There was something else, something that was nearly driving the poor doctor over the edge.

“What is it?” Josh said. “What’s this about?”

Carefully choosing his words, Mendes said, “The extent of her paralysis wasn’t examined until this morning, before I even arrived. When I saw the chart, the diagnosis was hemiplegia, which is basically the paralysis of one side of the body, and when I later examined her I saw that was true, that her left side—her left arm was…”

“Hold on,” Josh said, “I don’t understand.”

“Me, neither,” said Mendes, and for the first time, the doctor brought his dark brown eyes up to Josh’s, held them there, studied Josh’s face. “Before leaving the hospital last night, I stopped in to check on her and she…it’s bizarre, I know, but she sat straight up in bed, grabbed a can of diced pear cubes from the table beside her, and broke the plastic fork that was in it. She used both hands, Josh. Are you following me? I questioned the staff whether she had another stroke after I’d left for the evening but she hadn’t, there was no medical record of it, and she’s been hooked up to monitors since her admittance. So there’s that. And yes, it’s damn strange, but that’s not the strangest part, not the part that prompted me to call you and leave those messages on your machine.”

He smoked his second Lucky Strike down to the filter, examined the butt, then tossed it on the ground and stomped out the cherry with the heel of his shoe.

“There was a word she continued to say over and over again, mostly in her sleep,” Mendes continued. “At first I thought it was a color she was saying—the color yellow. It’s difficult to make out, what with the slurred speech. When she awoke I asked about it and she didn’t know what I was talking about, but while she napped she began saying it over and over again. In her sleep, she pronounced it repeatedly, almost like a chant, and I thought—yellow? Hello? Jell-O? I didn’t understand. While she slept, I brought in a hand-held tape recorder and recorded it, then brought it around to show some of the nurses. Most of them agreed, after some scrutiny of the tape, that it was actually a name she was saying—‘Kellow.’ Just talking in her sleep, right? So when she awoke later this afternoon I asked her what Kellow meant, who was Kellow…”