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He kept calm and refused to hurry through the door and into the apartment to find the note—it would be there, next to Lucky or whatever that bird’s name was.
Except it wasn’t. It wasn’t next to the birdcage, under the birdcage or even in the birdcage. Karl threw his tie over his shoulder and got down on his hands and knees to look on the floor. The note wasn’t under the bar stools. He went around into the kitchen. It wasn’t on the kitchen floor, either.
He was exhaling trepidation—still no need to panic yet—when his cell phone rang. “Vivian,” he said, not bothering to check the number on the screen. “Why did you leave me the bird?”
“Karl Milek?”
Karl vaguely recognized the male voice on the other end of the line. “Who is this?”
“It’s Jan. You know…”
“Officer Czaja, what can I do for you?” An image of a ten-year-old boy following his sister Tilly around the neighborhood flashed in Karl’s mind. Until he’d run into Jan’s mother at Healthy Food proudly showing off a picture of her son in his police uniform, Karl hadn’t known the boy existed anywhere other than within spitting distance of his youngest sister.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew, but Makowski heard it on the radio. Your mother’s in the hospital.”
* * *
TILLY, DAN, MILES and Renia got to the hospital at almost the same instant Karl did. They all stopped short in the hospital waiting room as none of them had expected to see Vivian sitting in a chair, her head in her hands.
“What are you doing here?” Karl asked.
She looked up at him, the normally warm undertone of skin a deathly white. “I came to the hospital after your mom left in the ambulance.”
“That’s not what…” Karl stumbled to a halt. He normally asked the exact question he wanted an answer to. “How did you know she was in an ambulance?” Only that wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, either.
Nothing about this scene made sense. Karl wanted to go back to this morning when he and Vivian were riding a wave of happy family over rice porridge. “You disappeared.”
“What Karl means to say—” his sister Renia shot Karl a dirty look before continuing “—is that we are wondering how Mom is doing.”
“I don’t know very much.” Vivian’s gaze traveled over the group before settling on Karl. “I called 911 because I thought she was having a heart attack. I don’t know how long she’d been in the bathroom. The coffee on the floor was still warm.”
Karl couldn’t parse that statement in any way that made sense, his confusion overriding any feelings of fear for his mother. And being confused was easier than worrying about his mother.
“The doctors told me it was a heart attack, but they should be out soon with more details.” That sentence made sense. Karl’s heart clenched.
As if on cue, a doctor came into the waiting room and headed directly for Vivian. “Mrs. Milek?”
Hearing his wife called by his mother’s title while she lay in an unknown state somewhere in this gargantuan hospital made the situation seem even worse. The doctor could be coming out to tell him he was an orphan. His child might never know his—her?—grandmother or get the chance to make a lamb cake at Easter.
Karl might be parentless. The University of Chicago Hospitals were supposed to be the best in the city for cardiac care, but even the best doctors made mistakes sometimes. His anger rang through his ears at that thought. If one of the doctors made a mistake with his mother, he’d make sure they paid for their error.
He was still too young to go to a parent’s funeral, even if he’d already been to his father’s.
Vivian’s talking broke through the fog. “I’m just the daughter-in-law. Her kids are here now.”
The doctor blinked a few times before shifting to include the rest of the family without excluding Vivian. “Your mother had a heart attack. We’ve done an angioplasty and inserted a stent. She’ll need to stay in the hospital tonight for observation, but she can go home tomorrow, Thursday at the latest. She’ll also start receiving some lifestyle instruction about weight loss and exercise, and it’s important that she follow those instructions after discharge.”
