Life Blood --III---Page 8

than good." Then her look turned inquisitive. "Did you say he's

providing children for adoption now? That's peculiar. When did he start that?"

Was I hearing some kind of professional jealousy slipping out? Hannah Klein was definitely Old School to the core.
        "He who?" I was trying to remember the name of the doctor
Carly had mentioned. "You mean—"

"He says his name is . . . what? Goddard? Yes, Alex Goddard. He's—"

My pager chirped, interrupting her, and she paused, clearly annoyed. I looked down to see a number I knew well. It had to be Lou Crenshaw, our aforementioned security guard. He'd been off today, but there was only one reason he would page me: some kind of news from Lenox Hill.

Maybe it was good news about Sarah! My hopes soared. Or maybe it was bad. Please, dear God.

"I'm sorry, Dr. Klein. I've got to go. Right now. It could be a medical emergency."

She nodded, then slid open the top drawer of her desk and
handed me a list of adoption agencies. "All right, here, take this
and look it over. I've dealt with some of them, letters of reference
for patients like you." She must have realized the insensitivity of
that last quip, because she took my hand and squeezed it, the
closest we'd ever come to intimacy. "Let me know if I can help
you, Morgan. Really."

Grasping the lifeless paper, I ached for Steve all over again. Times like this, you need some support. I finally glanced down at the list as I headed out. Sure enough, Children of Light was
nowhere to be seen.

Why not? I wondered. They'd found Kevin, a lovely blond

baby boy, for Carly, a single woman, in no time at all. They

sounded like miracle-makers, and if there was ever a moment for
miracles, this was it. Shouldn't they at least have been given a
footnote?

I wanted to stalk right back and demand to know the real
reason she was so upset, but I truly didn't want to waste a
moment.

Lou had paged me from a pay phone—he didn't actually have
a cell phone of his own—and I recognized the number as
belonging to the phone next to the Lenox Hill Hospital's third-floor
nurses' station. When I tried it, however, it was busy, so I decided
to just get in my car and drive there as fast as I could.

And as I battled the traffic down Broadway, I realized that by
diverting my mind from my own trivial misery to the genuine
tragedy of Sarah, I was actually getting my perspective back. That
was one of the many things Sarah had done for me over the
years.

All right. Sarah and Lou, who figure so largely in this, deserve
a full-dress introduction, so obviously I should start by admitting
I'd known them all my life. Lou was my mother's half brother, three
years younger than she was, who came along after my
grandfather widowed my grandmother in a freak tractor rollover
and she remarried a lifelong bachelor neighbor. (I have old
snapshots of them, and I can tell you they all were cheerless,
beady-eyed American Gothics.) I'd arranged for David to hire Lou
eight months earlier, not too long after I came to Applecore. At
that time he'd just taken early retirement from the FBI, because of
an event that shook us all up pretty seriously.

For some time now, Lou's been a rumpled, Willy Loman

figure, like a traveling salesman on the skids, shirts frayed at the
collars, face tinted from a truckload of Early Times. Over the past
fifteen years I'd watched his waist size travel from about thirty-
three inches to thirty-seven, and I'd guess it's been at least a
decade since a barber asked him if he needed any off the top.
Natalie Rose, his spirited, wiry wife of thirty-seven years,
succumbed to ovarian cancer seven years ago last September,
and I know for a fact she was the one who bought his shirts,
provided him with general maintenance.

My first memories of him were when he was a county sheriff
in a little burg called Coleman, smack in the middle of Texas,
some fifty-five long, dusty miles from the ranch where I grew up.
When I was about fourteen, I remember he gave up on that and
moved to Dallas, there to enter training for the FBI. He eventually
ended up in New Orleans, and then, after Natalie Rose passed
away and he more or less fell apart, he got transferred to New
York, considered the elephant graveyard of an FBI career.
        Probably the reason I saw him as much as I did as a kid was
because of my cousin Sarah, his and Rose's only child. She was
six years younger than me, a lot when you're kids, but we were
very special to each other, had a kind of bonding that I've never
really known with anybody since. We spent a lot of time staying at
each other's house, me the almost-grown-up, and truthfully, I
loved her helplessly, like a little sister. I always wanted to think

she needed me, which can be the most affirming feeling in the world. I do know I needed her.

She was now lying in a coma, and the way she got there was
the tragedy of my life, and Lou's. To begin with, though, let me
say Sarah was a pretty blonde from the start, with sunshiny hair
that defined her as perpetually optimistic—and who wouldn't be,
given the heads she always turned. (I was—am—blond too, though
with eyes more gray than her turquoise blues, but for me blond's
always been, on balance, an affliction: Sexist film producers

assume, dammit, that you're a failed showgirl, or worse. I've

actually dyed it brunette from time to time in hopes of being taken
more seriously.) Sarah and I had always had our own special
chemistry, like a composite of opposites to make a complete,
whole human being. Whereas I was the rational, left-brained slave
of the concrete, she was a right-brained dweller in a world of
what-might-be. For years and years, she seemed to live in a
dream universe of her own making, one of imagination and
fanciful states.

Once, when she was five, Lou hid in his woodworking shop

for a month and made an elaborate cutaway dollhouse to give her at Christmas. But when I offered to help her find little dolls that
would fit into it, she declared she only wanted angels to live there. So we spent the rest of the winter—I dropped everything—hunting down Christmas tree ornaments that looked like heavenly
creatures. She'd swathe them in tinsel and sit them in balls of
cotton she said were little clouds.

I always felt that just being around her opened my life to new dimensions, but her dream existence constantly drove Lou and Rose to distraction. I think it was one of the reasons he never got as close to her as he wanted, and his feelings about that were deep frustration, and hurt. He loved her so much, but he could never really find a common wavelength.

Finally she came down to earth enough to start college, and
eventually she graduated from SMU in biology, then enrolled at
Columbia for premed. By then she was interested in the workings
of the brain, in altered states. I didn't know if it was just more
pursuit of fantasy, but at least she was going about it
professionally.

Anyway, when Lou got transferred to New York, he was

actually delighted, since it gave him a chance to be closer to her.
We all managed to get together for family reunions pretty often,
though Lou and Sarah were talking past each other half the time.