Covet - Eve Vaughn Page 0,65
definitive truth, there would be no closing that Pandora’s Box. And I could no longer deny my own culpability. “What do you know about Dr. Laski, and how long have you known?”
Frankie clenched her hands her lap tighter than before, head still bowed. “I had my suspicions about the Doctor when I started spending more time at your mother’s house and observing Kenny.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’d told me he had Cerebral Palsy before we even met, so I pretty much knew what to expect when I met your family. I didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary when I met him, but he was wheelchair bound.”
“So? What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’ve always been very proud of your brother, and you would share stories about him when you were growing up that he had stood up to a bully and beat him over the head with one of his crutches. From that I assumed he, at one point, used to walk. Then I observed some symptoms in him that I quite possibly could have been imagining, and I casually mentioned it to your mother since she’s his caretaker. She immediately got defensive and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that my nursing degree was garbage. But there was something else she said that didn’t sit well with me.” She paused as if she was trying to gather her thoughts.
“What did she say?”
“She said if I knew what I was talking about, then I would know Kenny’s condition was degenerative. Cerebral Palsy is not a degenerative disease, and anyone who had been taking care of him for as long as your mother had would have known that. The only reason I couldn’t be sure about the symptoms I believed he had was because they could have very well been his Cerebral Palsy. So I observed him. By then Kenny and I had become friends, and he’d come out with us sometimes. Remember that time when he got that really bad headache when we’d gone to the art gallery. He said that he had some pills for the headaches. I got the pill bottle out of his bag and noticed the drug he was taking. It was seizure medication.”
“Kenny did suffer seizures,” I interjected.
“Right, but he specifically said it was for the headaches, and the type of medicine he was taking if he wasn’t truly a sufferer could cause seizures. In fact, most doctors are hesitant to prescribe that particular medication because too many patients were experiencing severe side effects. I saw the name on the prescriber and got very concerned. No one could really prove it, but there had been rumors about Dr. Laski for years. Anyway, I took my concerns to your mother again, and she completely went off on me. Called me everything but a child of God and told me that you would eventually get tired of me because I’m trash who is trying to make trouble.”
I frowned. This was the first time I was hearing this. “When did this happen, and why did you never say anything?”
“About what your mother said? Would it have made any difference? I had stopped by her house to speak with her because I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t aware about what was going on. I knew if I told you about the conversation, you would either take her side or mine. If you would have taken hers, I would have, of course, been crushed; but if you had taken mine, that would have caused a rift between you and your mother. If nothing else, at the time I believe she loved her children. So, I kept my peace. I started asking Kenny questions, and that’s the reason we started talking about how he’d suspected for a while that something was wrong with him. To clarify, he felt different, not the regular struggle he was suffering. That’s when I went to you. You got angry with me. I tried another time, and you completely lost it. So I didn’t really know how I was going to get Kenny the help he needed if you weren’t willing to listen, and Kenny didn’t want me to get social services involved to get his mother in trouble.”
My chest got tighter like someone had put their hand around my heart and squeezed as I listened to Frankie’s explanation. Everything was starting to come back to me. I’d refused to listen