The Phoenix's Rebirth for Revenge novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: The Second Dose

"Ambrose, call nine-one-one," I said. "Tell them a suspected digoxin overdose, eighty years old, heart rate thirty-eight."

He already had the phone at his ear.

I eased Gran out of the wingback and onto the carpet, flat, her head on a sofa cushion.

She swore at me the whole way down.

That was good.

Swearing meant she was still there.

"Mother," my father said, standing over us. "Mother, can you hear me?"

"I'm on the floor, Quentin, not deaf."

Her lips were grey.

Behind him my mother had started gathering the bowls onto a tray.

Quick, neat, the way she cleared a table at a fundraiser.

Her hand went to Gran's blue-and-white bowl.

"Leave that," I said.

She stopped.

"Darling, I'm just making room for the paramedics."

"Leave her bowl where it is."

Ambrose crossed the room, still on the phone, and picked the bowl up off the floor by Gran's chair.

He held it level in both hands, half full, a spoon of cold soup still in it.

My mother looked at him.

He looked back.

"Front sitting room, ground floor," he said into the phone. "The door will be open."

The paramedics took ten minutes.

I counted Gran's pulse the whole time.

Thirty-eight, thirty-six, forty.

In the ambulance she squeezed my fingers and told the paramedic he had kind eyes and terrible tattoos.

The emergency room was bright and loud, and every curtain was full.

They put Gran in a bay by the nurses' station and wired her to a monitor.

The line on it crawled.

A young doctor came in reading her chart.

"Eighty, atrial fibrillation, on digoxin," he said. "Bradycardia's probably her conduction system. At her age we see it all the time."

"Run a digoxin level," I said.

He glanced at me. "Are you family?"

"I'm her granddaughter. I'm a nurse. She's seeing yellow halos and her heart rate's in the thirties, and somebody put digoxin in her tea for a month. There's a lab report."

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