Lynn Bulock - To Trust a Stranger

That day Jessie got gum in her hair and Laura had somehow known what to do. She always knew stuff like that, the things you couldn’t learn from books.

While Jessie haunted the library, Laura’s favorite reading was Mrs. Dinkins’s glossy magazines. If they went to the drugstore Laura always went to the magazine counter to read the ones with models or movie stars on the front.

Usually Laura’s knowledge served her better than Jessie’s book learning. That day she’d gotten the gum out of Jessie’s hair in a flash, working in egg white like shampoo while their foster mother was upstairs soothing a fussy toddler.

Jessie could still picture her sister in the kitchen that afternoon squirting green dish soap in the sink, bubbles rising around her hands. That was Laura’s favorite thing, getting everything all clean and in a row.

If her sister had problems, she hadn’t thought to ask about them. Then, as now, Jessie just dumped her own problems on her sister instead. The memory of the incident probably lasted longer than the reality that afternoon. Jessie looked down at the figure on the bed, not seeing her through the blur of tears. “Those really good times never lasted long,” she whispered. And now she knew those times were over for good.

At ten that morning the deputy insisted on taking Jessie home. “I don’t care if you come back in an hour, but you need to get a shower, some different clothes and have your own car here.” His expression said he didn’t want any arguments and Jessie couldn’t think of any good ones anyway. She couldn’t remember being this tired and worn-out before.

“Will you go back to the hospital?” she asked on the ride back to the condo. It seemed longer going home, but then they paid attention to speed limits and traffic laws this time.

“Not right away,” Steve said. He sounded as tired as she felt. “I have about six cases I’m actively working right now and several need my attention. Plus I need to talk to the fire investigators and verify that this was arson. And we need to make sure there wasn’t anyone else hurt or killed in the fire. Most of the apartments in the complex were empty, it being the middle of the day, but there are always exceptions.”

Jessie shivered, thinking that some other family might be going through this the way she and Laura were. Her thoughts took her to a dark place and the deputy had to put a hand on her shoulder to let her know they had stopped in her driveway. It took a moment to come back to full alertness. It took even longer to make sure she had her key and thank the man for all he had done so far.

“I’d say I do this for all my cases, but that isn’t quite true,” he said. He was close enough to her, standing on her front porch, that she could see things about Stephen Gardner that she hadn’t noticed before. His dark eyes had little green flecks in them, and he had tiny, thin lines that could have been smile lines starting to crinkle just a bit at the corners of his warm eyes.

Right now he didn’t look as if he’d smiled in quite some time. “If you don’t give most people this kind of attention, why are you doing it now?” Jessie didn’t know why she asked the question, but suddenly the answer was important.

“Something about your sister…and you…has me deeply involved. So involved that I should probably turn the case over to somebody else, but I can’t.” He straightened his shoulders and looked back toward the car. “Right now I need to go work on this, and the other cases I’m investigating. I’ll see you soon.”

Jessie nodded. She didn’t know what to say. Stephen stood on her doorstep long enough to watch her put the key in the lock, open the door and verify that everything was all right. Then he left and she came into the condo past the front hall and sat on the sofa.

Jessie figured she would spend about half an hour at home and head back to the hospital. The rooms echoed with loneliness without Laura around. Would she ever come back here?

Looking over to the living room bookcase Jessie saw the photo album between two college textbooks on the bottom shelf. Getting up, she pulled it out and opened it to the first page and got a shock. The picture of the two of them on their picnic was right there in the album. But how could that be? Surely Laura would have told her if she had a copy made. This didn’t make sense. The print didn’t look as if it had been removed from the album and replaced any time recently, either.

She felt so tired she didn’t know whether she could trust her own senses. Maybe there really was a logical explanation for this. Jessie just couldn’t think of one now. Instead she went into her bedroom and pulled out clean clothes. After a hot shower she pushed away the temptation to crawl into the beckoning bed and went to the kitchen instead. She packed a bag full of the kind of snacks she usually took to school when she had long office hours and added a couple of peanut butter sandwiches. Now that she knew the gravity of her sister’s condition, she planned her stay at the hospital to be a longer one.

Hunting for the car charger to her cell phone, she remembered she’d given it to Laura last week. No sense in trying to find that. She made a mental note to ask Deputy Gardner about Laura’s car. Somewhere in an apartment complex parking lot there was a sporty blue compact unless it had been destroyed by the fire, as well.

Jessie checked the contents of her bag and picked up her address book. By tonight she would need to call the department chair and a few others so that she could arrange for somebody to cover her classes for a while. She drove back to the hospital on automatic pilot, thankful that no traffic cop caught sight of her on the way.

“Dr. Anderson? I don’t recognize you. Can I help you with something?” The sharp-eyed nurse’s comment almost made Cassidy drop the medical chart. Why did the woman have to show up now, in this small window of time?

“I’m doing a neuro consult for Dr. Peterson on another case and this woman caught my eye,” Cassidy said with conviction. A firm voice could get one through almost any situation.

The nurse’s eyes narrowed. “Surely you don’t think anybody’s going to ask you to do a neurological exam on my patient?”

“Not a full exam, no. But I’m working on a paper on the neuropathology of specific trauma survivors and wondered if your patient might fit as part of my study. Once I looked at her chart more closely, I could see that won’t be the case.” Cassidy handed the chart back to the nurse. “I won’t disturb her.”

The nurse’s silent glare said that no one would be disturbing her patient while she was around. Cassidy walked away quickly, the way any busy specialist in a large hospital would. No one followed. Into the stairwell and down a flight quickly, Cassidy made it onto the staff parking lot before anyone could notice. The close call had been worth it; one look showed that the patient wasn’t going to cause any problems for anyone.

Laura didn’t show any more signs of being alert. “She’s not in terrible pain,” the nurse assured Jessie. “With third-degree burns the nerve endings are numbed enough that things aren’t as painful. We’re almost glad to hear that someone’s in a fair amount of pain because it usually means they’ve got more second-degree burns than third. Pain is easier to treat than the more severe burns.”

So what sounded like good news at first didn’t look like good news at all. Jessie asked about getting her sister off the breathing tube again, but that request was turned down. “She sounds like she could be developing pneumonia. We can’t risk it” was the doctor’s terse reply. After that he whisked Jessie out of Laura’s cubicle for a while for treatment. She went back to the family waiting room, which seemed quiet for a change.

“Ms. Barker? Jessie?” She knew she needed rest when she startled awake stiffly from her position on the couchlike vinyl bench attached to the wall. Even sitting straight up with the television high on the wall droning through news headlines, she’d fallen asleep. And judging from the urgent tone in the nurse’s voice it must have been for a while. “You need to come back with us now.”

Somewhere during Jessie’s last vigil at her sister’s bedside, it got dark outside. Laura didn’t ever look her way again with any kind of understanding in her eyes or say anything even when they switched the oxygen tube for one that would have let her talk. When they asked Jessie if there was anyone they should call, at first she shook her head. Then she called the nurse back and gave her Deputy Gardner’s business card.

He was there in a very short time. He looked as if he’d dressed hurriedly when he was called, no tie and a shirt that hadn’t been pressed. “You came,” Jessie said. “Thank you. I didn’t want to be alone right now.”

“You aren’t alone. You won’t be alone,” he said simply.

“Do you want to sit down?” It seemed odd to be talking about such mundane things while her sister lay dying.

“No, I’ll stand.” He looked at the figure on the bed. “It always seems more respectful somehow.” The way he said it made Jessie wonder how many people Steve Gardner had seen die. Personally she hoped she would never have to do this again. She felt ripped apart by grief as she watched Laura.

“Do you want me to call someone else? One of the chaplains or somebody from my church?”

Jessie shook her head, watching her sister’s struggle to breathe. “I don’t want anybody else, especially not some stranger.”

“All right.” It was the last thing he said out loud for quite a while. So when the end came, Jessie wasn’t alone there by the bedside. The deputy didn’t say anything but his presence seemed to lend a strength Jessie needed. She didn’t even comment when he stood there with a firm but gentle hand on her shoulder, obviously in prayer. In Jessie’s eyes Laura was far beyond most human help, and if he thought prayer might do something he was welcome to it. Nothing could hurt Laura now anyway.

After it was all over, hospital personnel led Jessie into the family waiting room where she sat again on one of the couches feeling numb and brittle as an ice carving. After a few minutes one of the nurses asked if she wanted to have a moment with Laura now that they’d taken out all the tubes and needles. Jessie almost said no, but something made her change her mind. Maybe it would hurt less some time down the line if she had a different last memory of Laura than the one she had now.

Jessie passed the deputy, writing something on a piece of paper at the nurses’ station. She hadn’t thought about all the paperwork that must have to get done at a time like this. It pained her that her sister’s life was reduced to paperwork for a sheriff’s deputy. Saying nothing, she went in to see Laura. The form on the bed looked as peaceful as possible. It was good to think that she was done with the horrible suffering of the last three days. Jessie reached out to touch a cool leg where the sheet had slipped. Her sister’s unburned flesh looked like pale marble in contrast to the bandages higher up on her body.

In that act of reaching out, her fingers froze and her brain refused to process what she was seeing. Perhaps she was even more confused than she thought. She went to the other side of the bed and looked down at the still body. Anger and bewilderment welled up in her. “Deputy Gardner?” When he didn’t answer, she said it louder.

He came into the cubicle still holding his papers. “What is it?”

“This isn’t Laura. I don’t know who this was, but it isn’t my sister.”