They Buried My Mother Quietly, So I Married the Son She Saved novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Gran's Tea

Megan moves in, finds Gran drugged into confusion and stops it in front of the family, and Gran asks her to keep quiet until the wedding.

By Wednesday I had a room on the second floor and a closet full of other people's linens.

I also had a daily pill organizer with Gran's name on it.

It was a good organizer, with seven rows and four compartments each.

I read every label.

The morning slot held haloperidol and quetiapine.

The noon slot held lorazepam.

The night slot held all three again, plus a sleeping pill.

Her tea tray carried a fourth drug in a pink sugar packet that wasn't sugar.

"Who writes these?" I asked the housekeeper.

"Dr. Osgood. Mrs. Corliss brings them from the pharmacy."

"For what?" I asked.

"Confusion. She's been getting worse for a year."

I looked at the woman in the wheelchair by the window.

Gran sat with her braid undone and a cup of tea going cold in her lap, staring at the lawn.

She had been getting worse for a year because someone had been giving her enough sedative to flatten a man her size twice over.

Lunch was at one.

Adelaide Corliss sat at the head of the table with her pearls on and her pink nails folded.

Dr. Osgood sat to her right, his hand in his pocket.

I carried the pill organizer in and set it in front of her plate.

"I'm stopping all of these," I said.

Adelaide looked at it and did not touch it.

"Excuse me?"

"Gran is on four sedatives. Two of them are antipsychotics. She has no diagnosis that needs either one."

"The sitter," Dr. Osgood said, in a long, bored voice, "is giving medical opinions."

"I'm giving a pharmacology opinion. Haloperidol with quetiapine in an eighty-four-year-old will long-QT her heart. One more fall and she goes into a rhythm you can't shock."

"I prescribed those," Osgood said.

"Then you should have checked her EKG first. Did you?"

His jaw tightened.

"I have thirty years of surgery," he said. "You have a certificate from an agency."

"Then you know what four sedatives does to an old woman's brain, Dr. Osgood. It makes her look like she's losing it."

Adelaide put her fork down.

"You're fired," she said.

"You can't," said a voice from the doorway.

Rafe stood there in a gray sweatshirt with his arm tight against his ribs and the chest tube gone.

He was pale and his hair stuck up on one side.

A hospital orderly hovered behind him with a wheelchair he clearly refused to sit in.

"Rafael, you're supposed to be in bed."

"I was discharged an hour ago, against advice." He walked to the table slowly. "Which of you had Gran drugged?"

"Nobody drugged her," Adelaide said. "She's ill."

"Then it will be easy to stop," Rafe said, and looked at me. "Megan?"

"All of it. Today. No taper."

"No taper?" Rafe asked.

"The antipsychotics, I'd taper. But if I do, Adelaide is the one who handles the tray. She gets nothing from my hands but water."

Adelaide's smile didn't change.

It stayed on her face and went hard around the edges.

"This is a household decision, not a nurse's."

"Not anymore," Rafe said. "By Friday she's family. Stop them."

Osgood stood.

"I will not be lectured on pharmacology by a girl who stabs patients with ballpoints."

"That girl kept your patient breathing," Rafe said. His voice stayed very quiet. "You stood there with your hand in your pocket."

The room was silent.

Osgood's hand shifted in the pocket and stayed hidden.

"I'll be in the car," he said to Adelaide, and went.

She followed him out without looking at anyone.

My knees were shaking, and Rafe lowered himself into a chair.

"That was my fault," he said. "I should have looked at the tray a year ago."

"Nobody looks at the tray."

"You did, in an hour," he said.

"It's my job."

"Is it?" he said, mildly. "You told me you were a nurse."

"I am."

He looked at my hands.

"They don't cut like a nurse's."

"Term three," I said.

"Right." He leaned back with a wince. "Term three. How's my grandmother?"

I took him to her.

Gran hadn't moved from the window.

That night I gave her water, soup and a blanket, and she slept without a single drug.

On Thursday I came into her room at seven with a glass of water.

She was sitting upright in the chair with her braid tied and her eyes clear.

"A year," she said.

Her voice was dry and low, with a rasp in it.

"A year of fog. I knew something was wrong. I just couldn't reach it."

"Gran, how do you feel?"

"Hungry. I want eggs." She looked at me, long and hard. "Megan Dell. Sit."

I sat.

"You're not a nurse," she said.

"I am."

"You're a lot more than that. You read the label before you asked my name." She waved a thin hand. "I don't care. I'm not asking. You took the poison out of me, and that's worth a month of questions."

"Adelaide did this," I said carefully.

"Adelaide has fed me that rubbish in my tea since last spring. I know exactly who." Her eyes glittered. "Now listen. You will not say a word to her, or to Anselm, or to the police."

"Why not?"

Gran smiled for the first time, and it was thin and fierce.

"Because I want her to find out I know in front of everyone. At your wedding."

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