Right To Die - Jeremiah Healy by Jeremiah Healy Read Free Book Online

the
press or tack them to your office door. As I understand it, two were
mailed to you here, and one was in your mailbox on Beacon Hill. For
your eyes only, so to speak."
    "How do those facts fit your theory?"
    "They fit if we have a nut who wants to scare
you."
    "And if we have a 'nut' who wants to scare me
and kill me?"
    "It's a possibility, but that brings us back to
the psychiatrists, Ms. Andrus."
    "I wonder, could we drop the 'Ms. Andrus"?"
It makes me feel like Our Miss Brooks."
    "Professor, then?"
    "I call my students by their last names, and I
expect the same from them, because I'm preparing them for a world in
which formality, especially in the courtroom, is necessary to avoid
the appearance of favoritism or sexism. I call my secretary Inés,
but even after six months on the job, she can't get over using
Professor for me. Something from the respect someone her age in the
old Cuba was supposed to show for university teachers. So be it. For
us, how about Maisy and John?"
    "It's still your nickel."
    The face hardened a little. "Yes. Yes, it is.
Tell me, John, what do you think of my position?"
    "Your position."
    Andrus dropped the pencil and all of the smile. "What
do you think of my position on the right to die?"
    "You think that's relevant to my working for
you?"
    "No, I don't. But I am curious."
    I cleared my throat. "You know about my wife."
    "Alec told me that she died of cancer."
    "Brain tumor. She lingered for a long time,
months. In and out of awareness, a lot of pain. We didn't end it, the
doctors and I."
    I had the feeling that I'd stopped too soon, that
Andrus was hanging on my starting again.
    I said, "That's it. We waited, and she died."
    "What did you . . . feel about that?"
    "About her dying?"
    "Yes."
    None of your business. "I think I'd still like
to keep my own counsel on that."
    Andrus smiled sympathetically, but in a practiced
way. "Then let me tell you about my spouse, John." She
squared the chair around, elbows on the desk.
    "Working for a large law firm in Washington,
D.C. , I represented hospitals, among other clients. I met Enrique at
an interdisciplinary conference in London. Medical-legal issues, that
sort of thing. Enrique was fifty, a respected doctor in northern
Spain. I was barely thirty, only fifteen years older than his son. I
had no Spanish, no ear for languages at all. Enrique's English was
wonderful, and if I'd still been a virgin, the romance novels would
say he carried me away on a wave of passion. But that really was how
it felt. I left the firm for a teaching position at a law school in a
D.C. suburb, just to have summers off to be with him."
    "You and he were married but didn't live
together?"
    "During the school year. At Christmas and
summers I'd fly to him, or he'd somehow make time to fly over to me.
Anyway, we'd been married for two years, doing this transatlantic
shuttle — money was no object, we were both quite comfortable —
when Enrique had a stroke. Now, you have to understand, he had been a
saint to the poor people of his area, noblesse oblige, during much of
Franco's dictatorship. Manolo is a good example."
    "The guy in the anteroom?"
    "Yes. Manolo was born deaf. His parents cast him
out. Literally. Enrique took him in, taught him rudimentary signing,
and made him a sort of houseman/orderly to help with the patients he
saw. In any case, Enrique had the stroke. Incapacitating. He was
paralyzed, could barely sign to Manolo, seemed to forget his Spanish,
and only I could understand him, in terribly garbled English."
    "Where was his son?"
    A muscle jumped in her jaw. "His son, Ramon, was
over here, in the States. Studying. I told him he should come back,
it was his duty. But he didn't, not until almost the end. And then .
. ."
    I gave Andrus time.
    "Sorry. Enrique was deteriorating, horribly.
Bodily functions . . . as a doctor, he knew exactly what was
happening to him. He knew he couldn't get any better, and he had too
much pride, too much respect for the human spirit,