Deal to Die For by Les Standiford Page B

feeling disoriented again. What was this place she had come to, anyway? Hollywood without mountains, drag races on the freeway, no one answering the phones at the hospitals…maybe she
was
in a dream.
    They were turning again, looping toward the east, it seemed, toward the water. The freeway rose up, giving her a brief view of the broad Intracoastal Waterway, red and green buoy lights, the glitter of Miami Beach beyond.
    She found herself in memory, suddenly, one happy Sunday from her childhood, or at least it
seemed
happy: her father appeared in his normal form then, at the wheel of some ungainly houseboat, chugging down that same broad channel of water, she and her sister tossing bread off the stern to a crowd of wheeling gulls, her mother asleep in a chaise lounge in the sun. One shining moment when they were still pretending to be a regular family, she thought with a pang…and then her mother was awake and shouting, at them for the noise they were making, at their father for permitting it, or maybe at them all, just for just being alive…and the image fell apart.
    “Is over there,” the driver’s voice crackled at her ear. Paige blinked out of her reverie to see the massive hospital complex looming up on their left. The limo wound through a series of turns, past another long line of traffic barricades, ended up on a broad entryway to the main building.
    The driver stopped under a brightly lit awning, turned to her as the compartment window slid down. “I am waiting for you here,” he said.
    “It’s not necessary,” Paige said.
    “Here,” the driver repeated, his voice firm.
    “You can go on,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll get a taxi.”
    The driver shook his head, his face twisted in concern. “Is all taken care of,” he insisted. “All the time while you are here.” He smiled at her and tapped a picture ID on the visor above his head. “I am Florentino. At your service.”
    Paige sighed. “All right, Florentino,” she said finally. “Right here.” Then she turned, gathering herself for more important things, and stepped out into the humid night.
    ***
    She should have prepared herself, she was thinking. She should have tried to picture the worst. But even then, how could she have conjured up anything like what lay before her now?
    “Just for a moment,” the ICU nurse at her side was saying.
    Paige nodded, her mind numb. If the nurse had not led her to this bed, she would not have recognized her mother. The person who lay there inert, hair fallen away in patches, innumerable lines and tubes trailing from her body into the darkness, was a stranger, a wraith. Her mouth was open as if she’d been felled by a stunning blow, her yellowed, nearly transparent skin stretched tightly across her cheekbones, like some ghoulish decoration for a death’s head.
    Paige felt her legs give, had to steady herself against the foot of the bed. Machines sounded out the shallow rhythms of her mother’s breath; another electronic thrum kept erratic time with her heart. A heavy line snaked out from beneath the sheets, draped itself across her mother’s exposed feet like some power cord left behind by workers at a building site.
    Paige reached out, gently moved the cord aside, the urge to scream vying inside her with an equally powerful impulse to weep. Her fingers carefully found her mother’s feet. There seemed no hope of finding her way further around the bedside, past all those lines and tubes, past the pulsing machines and printouts that tumbled like failed streamers to the floor. Her mother’s feet were like cool, featherless birds in her hands. The bones were hollow flutes, the skin the thinnest of membranes.
    “Oh, Mother,” she said, forgiving everything in that moment, feeling a flood of guilt for all the years she’d kept herself away. She could have come back long ago, when there was still time, when they might have set things right, or at least made a stab at it. But