“Jesus Christ, Hazel, what time is it?”

“Eight in the morning. I have to go in.”

“Fine. Go in. Have a blast. Leave me alone.”

“You’re breathing funny.”

“Honestly, Hazel,” she said, and her intake of breath was accompanied by a small whooping sound.

“Let me see you,” her daughter said, but Emily just settled back under the covers. Hazel sat on the bed and reached for her, and started pulling, and to her surprise, her mother shot up in bed with an unbuttoned look of rage on her face.

“JUST GO TO WORK!” she shouted, but Hazel wasn’t paying attention to her mother’s words. Her skin was almost yellow and her eyes were lividly bright. She was in the grip of a high fever. Hazel thought she saw a tinge of madness in her mother’s eyes.

“Oh my god, Mum. You’re sick.”

“I know I’m sick –”

“No, you have to get up. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Get me a couple of aspirins and stop meddling. Where is your father? I work all week, I expect to sleep in!”

“Mother, get up!”

Emily shook her head in exasperation and threw the covers back. “Get out of the way.”

Hazel got up off the bed, and her mother stood, surprisingly steady. She walked to the bathroom in the hallway. Hazel heard her peeing and flushing, then the water in the sink ran. When she came back in, it was clear the little journey had taken all of her strength. Emily sat heavily on the edge of the bed.

“What day is it?” she said querulously. Then she pitched forward and Hazel had to lunge to keep her from falling off the bed.

There was no choice about how to spend the morning, even though, at this moment, Forbes and Wingate were meeting Greene at the station house. Hazel was already forty minutes late for the meeting when she was able to call in from the ER. They’d told her to take her time, but that was the very thing it felt they’d already run out of.

“Ketones,” Gary Pass had said. “That’s the sweet smell.”

“What does it mean? What’s happening to her?”

He explained that she hadn’t been getting enough nutrition, that her body had been cannibalizing itself. She’d come very close to being gravely ill, but they were pumping her full of fluids, and she would recover.

Had she missed all of the signs? Her mother had been tired, depressed, she wasn’t eating much, but she’d been present, more or less. Hadn’t she? Or, Hazel wondered, was I too distracted with the case? The diagnosis of myeloma had come in Saturday morning. Pass had called her with the news, and it was only two days later. How could she have declined that much in forty-eight hours? Pass reappeared in the hallway mid-morning and beckoned to her quietly.

“She’s more alert now,” he said.

“Is she happy about it?”

“Ecstatic.”

He held the doors open to the ICU, and Hazel went in before him. He came around and led the way to Emily’s curtained space. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her head turned away. Dr. Pass left Hazel there and drew the curtain.

She called to her, but there was no response, so Hazel took the seat beside the bed and looked at the nape of her neck where the hospital gown drooped. Her mother had always had a strong neck, a neck to support her bullheadedness, and from where Hazel sat, it looked like a tiny machine shot through with cables. Small hairs stood up on it. Hazel had wrapped her little arms around that neck, she’d smelled her mother’s cascading hair as she clung to her with her legs circling her waist. It was hard to imagine that body capitulating to anything. It had withstood so many insults, so many setbacks.

She leaned forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Mum? Are you awake?”

Emily shrugged the hand off her shoulder and Hazel withdrew it into mid-air.

“Don’t be upset with me. What did you expect me to do? Let you die in bed?”

Silence. Hazel let her have it. She slumped back in the chair and waited. “I don’t want you to die,” she said, almost under her breath. “I could take … twenty more years of your mulishness, your forked tongue, your shitty cooking, your game shows, your wattled friends … I could take a lot more of it, Mother. All you have to do is sign on. Gary says the myeloma will move so slowly you could live to a hundred with it.”

Emily sighed deeply. “I’m not a shitty cook.”

“You burn tea, Mother.”

Emily turned over onto her back, a compromise between ignoring her daughter and looking at her. “Your speeches must rally your troops to joyful insubordination.”

In profile, her mother’s face was like a broken half of something. Her nose was thinner and sharper, her cheekbones stuck out of her face like tiny elbows. “Are you feeling a little better?”

“They’re pumping me full of chocolate malts.”

“Something like that.” She got out of the chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Her mother’s eyes tracked over to her. “You’re going to be eighty-eight in a week and a half –”

“Is this the pep talk continuing?”

“Let’s have a party. Drinks and everything, screw Dr. Pass’s injunctions. We’ll get everyone together.”

“A party of scarecrows.”

“We’ll change the mood in the house, Mother. Say yes. It’ll be good for both of us.”

Her mother shook her head slowly. “I don’t want any bloody parties. Save it for the wake.”

______

While her mother napped, Hazel waited for Greene, Forbes, and Wingate to arrive at the hospital, where she had arranged to use an empty chapel as a meeting place. Greene arrived with a large bouquet of flowers for Emily and left them at the nursing station, unaware that Hazel could see him from the window in the door. She wanted to hate him for trying so hard to seem like a good man. Then she remembered that he’d always been a good man. She was the one who had driven him out and only her shame and her pride prevented her from seeing him now the way she’d once seen him. This thought arrived whole, slipping in alongside her worries.

She opened the door to the chapel. “In here,” she called to them.

“How is she?” Wingate inquired when the door was closed behind them. There were four pews inside the small room with an aisle running down the middle, a podium with a cloth draped over it, and a stained-glass window that was actually a glass box with a few lightbulbs in it. They arranged themselves at the ends of pews like four priests having a convocation.

“She’s stable,” Hazel said. She found she couldn’t look any of them in the eye. “I stopped seeing her. I stopped noticing.”

“It’s not your fault,” Wingate said.

“She doesn’t want to live. How do you make a person want to live?”

The three men nodded, acknowledging her difficulties, but, like most people, they didn’t know what to say. Wingate said, “Cherry gave a name. She said Kitty would kill a man named Sugar. I’ve already looked through six Westmuir directories. There are, like, eighty people with that name in the county.”

“Mr. Sugar.”

“If that’s his real name. I’m René Arsenault now.” He dug into the inner pocket of his jacket and removed the laminated ID card in Arsenault’s name. He handed it to Hazel.

“He gave you this?” she asked.

“Someone in that place could make a fake ID in less than three minutes. It looks real, too. There’s even a hologram in it.”

She held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth. “So they have a way of assigning memberships to false names and they generate their own ID. That’s how they know who’s getting into the cabs. They take reservations or something. Or there’s something on the ID that confirms membership.” She ran her hand along the surface, feeling a difference in textures, and held it against the light again. “You were lucky this Ronnie didn’t run your own fake ID. Christ. He figured you got in legitimately, and he didn’t check. Now you’re in for real.”

“But I have to reserve. Or arrange a time, or something like that. I don’t think you can just swan in …”