The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,98

as she walked back toward them. “He’s lucid, at least for Rusty. They say only two visitors at a time.”

Charlie stood up quickly. She offered her arm to Sam.

Sam leaned heavily on her cane and pushed herself up. She was not going to let these people treat her like an invalid. “When will we be able to speak with his doctors?”

“They make their rounds in another hour,” Lenore said. “Do you remember Melissa LaMarche from Mr. Pendleton’s class?”

“Yes,” Sam said, though she didn’t know why Lenore remembered the names of one of Sam’s friends and a teacher from high school.

“She’s Dr. LaMarche now. She operated on Rusty last night.”

Sam thought about Melissa, the way she had cried every time she scored less than perfect on a test. That was probably the kind of person you wanted operating on your father.

Father.

She had not attached that word to Rusty in years.

“You go first,” Charlie told Lenore. Her eagerness to see Rusty had visibly dissipated. She stopped in front of a row of large windows. “Sam and I will go in after.”

Lenore left them in silence.

At first, Charlie let the silence linger. She walked to the windows. She looked down at the parking lot. “Now’s your chance.”

To leave, she meant. Before Rusty had seen her. Before Sam got sucked back into this world again.

Sam asked, “Did you really need me here? Or was that Ben?”

“It was me, and Ben was nice enough to reach out because I couldn’t, or couldn’t bring myself to, but I thought that Dad was going to die.” She leaned her forehead against the glass. “He had a heart attack two years ago. The one before that was mild, but this last one, he needed bypass surgery, and there were complications.”

Sam said nothing. She had been left in the dark about Rusty’s apparent heart condition. He had never missed a phone call. For all Sam knew, he had remained healthy all these years.

“I had to make a decision,” Charlie said. “At one point, he couldn’t breathe on his own, and I had to make the decision whether or not to put him on life support.”

“He doesn’t have a DNR?” Sam asked. The Do Not Resuscitate form, which specified whether or not a person wanted a natural death or CPR and cardiac support, was commonly drawn up alongside a will.

Sam saw the problem before Charlie could answer. “Rusty doesn’t have a will.”

“No, he doesn’t.” Charlie turned around, her back against the window. “I made the right choice, obviously. I mean, it’s obvious now, because he lived and he was fine, but this time, when Melissa came out during surgery and said that they were having trouble getting the bleeding under control, and that his heartbeat was erratic, and that I might have to make the decision whether or not to take life-saving—”

“You wanted me here to kill him.”

Charlie looked alarmed, but not because of Sam’s bluntness. It was her tone, the hint of anger bubbling up around the words. She told Sam, “If you’re going to get mad about this, we should go outside.”

“So the reporters can hear?”

“Sam.” Charlie looked anxious, as if she was watching the clock on a nuclear warhead start to tick down. “Let’s go outside.”

Sam squeezed her hands into fists. She could feel the longforgotten darkness stirring inside of her. She took a deep breath, then another, then another until it folded itself back into a tight ball inside her chest.

She told her sister, “You have no idea, Charlotte, how wrong you are about my willingness or capacity to end someone’s life.”

Sam tilted against her cane as she walked toward the nurses’ station. She glanced at the whiteboard behind the empty desk and located Rusty’s room. She raised her hand to knock on the door, but Lenore opened it before her knuckles touched wood.

Lenore said, “I told him you were here. Wouldn’t want him to have a heart attack.”

“You mean another one,” Sam said. She did not give Lenore time to respond.

Instead, she walked into her father’s hospital room.

The air seemed too thin.

The lights were too bright.

She blinked against the headache that chewed at the back of her eyes.

Rusty’s room in the ICU was a familiar, if more economized version of the private hospital suite in which Anton had died. There was no wood paneling or deep couch or flat-screen television or private desk where Sam could work, but the machines were all the same: the beeping heart monitor, the hissing oxygen supply, the grinding sound