Mendocino and Other Stories by Ann Packer Read Free Book Online Page A

he'd ever known.
At least you have your legs, young friend.
It was true: if it hadn't been for them, he'd probably still be at home in bed, destined to a slow and painful death.
    He'd woken up in agony that morning—the day after helping Linda move her stuff to Kiro's, so at first he'd been a bit skeptical:
nerves, pure and simple.
But he couldn't turn his head, couldn't move his arms without unbearable pain; the only way he'd finally been able to get out of bed was to swing his legs up and then usethem as a lever to bring his body upright. Picking up the receiver and dialing were excruciating, but he'd finally reached Dr. Price at the hospital, and she'd agreed to see him there, and now it turned out that he had something new wrong: a winging scapula. It sounded like a kind of sailboat, but it was his shoulder blade, unleashed from its mooring.
    “That would definitely be uncomfortable,” Dr. Price had said.
    A winging scapula was also unusual, and while it was probably a fluke (a coincidence that half his upper body was malfunctioning!), some possibilities had to be ruled out. In a little while he was going to go to Radiology for an MRI, and then later he was going to go somewhere else for an EEG. He was making his way through the alphabet.
    Dr. Price reappeared and sat on the chair next to his. “Radiology is going to squeeze you in in just a few more minutes,” she said.
    “That sounds painful.”
    She laughed. “After that I've arranged to have you admitted—just for one night. When you're done there just come back down to Admitting and they'll have a bed for you, OK?”
    “I guess so,” Charlie said. At least maybe they would give him some morphine; he'd taken some codeine about an hour before, but it didn't seem to be helping much.
    “We'll wait and do the EEG tomorrow,” she said. “You'll be feeling a lot better by then.”
    “What exactly are we looking for?” The word in Charlie's mind was “tumor.”
    Dr. Price was silent for a moment. “Nothing we're going to find,” she said, “how's that? I really think it was just moving that new dresser in.”
    “Right,” Charlie said. “The dresser.” He hadn't wanted to tell her what he'd really been doing yesterday: carrying twelve boxesof art books down three flights of stairs. He'd strapped together two at a time and carried them over his shoulder, the way the movers had done in New York. “Still,” he said, “it's hard to believe this has nothing to do with my arm. What's really wrong with my arm?”
    “It hurts,” she said.
    Thanks a lot, he thought, but then he turned, painfully, to look at her—pretty Dr. Price, whose job it was to know when to say “Don't worry”—and he thought: Well, yes.
    She glanced at her watch and stood up. “Listen,” she said. “You know who get winging scapulae? Soldiers, from carrying their guns. So you're in good company, huh?” Charlie watched her hurry away, toward people with problems way beyond unusual. Good company? he thought. He'd rather be alone.
    Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. He had a quarter in his pocket—he'd had the foresight to make sure of this before he left home—and now, walking gingerly to minimize the pain of each step, he started toward a cluster of pay phones. He told himself that what he was about to do wasn't so much calling for help as giving information: she would want to know, she had a right to know—she was his wife. And this time, Charlie had some hard information: he'd already known what an EEG was, and he'd asked and discovered exactly what an MRI was. It was Magnetic Resonance Imaging—formerly, Dr. Price had confided, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, NMR, but they'd changed the name because people hadn't liked the word “nuclear.” It was like a CAT scan, that big washing machine, except they could look at any part of you, and it wasn't invasive. Charlie was all for noninvasive.
    He reached the phones. She would say: “Charlie, oh my God, no.” Or maybe: