Chapter 2 - THE DOCTOR WHO NEVER CALLED ME
Natalie put the tray down slowly.
“Your mother had another episode.”
Mom tightened her grip on my sleeve.
“She locked herself down here,” Natalie continued.
I looked at the deadbolt.
Outside.
Natalie followed my eyes.
“We had to install it because she wanders.”
“Into a basement?”
“She hides.”
“Why is there a mattress?”
Natalie stopped answering.
I called 911.
She tried to stop me without touching me.
“Ethan, please. She has a psychiatric evaluation tomorrow. If you bring police into this, you’ll frighten her.”
Mom whispered, “Don’t let them take me.”
That decided it.
Paramedics documented dehydration, bruising, medication levels and mild hypothermia from hours in the basement.
At Suburban Hospital, a physician asked Ruth questions with Natalie outside.
Mom knew the date.
The president.
Her address.
My birthday.
She knew how much she paid in property tax the previous year.
She remembered the names of her medications.
She was frightened.
She was exhausted.
She was not obviously delirious.
The emergency physician told me something else.
“There’s a sedative in her system.”
“What kind?”
“A benzodiazepine.”
Mom had no current prescription for one.
Natalie said the psychiatrist prescribed it.
“What psychiatrist?”
“Dr. Adrian Vale.”
I already knew the name.
For months, the same man had appeared in phone records I had quietly been reviewing after Natalie began making late-night calls she claimed were to her sister.
Adrian Vale.
Forty-six.
Private psychiatrist.
Office in Rockville.
Married once.
Divorced.
And, according to two photographs sent to me by a private investigator three weeks earlier, sleeping with my wife.
I had hired the investigator because I suspected an affair.
I had not imagined my mother was part of it.
“Why didn’t this doctor ever contact me?” I asked.
Natalie folded her arms.
“Because your mother is his patient.”
“She gave permission for me to be involved in her medical care years ago.”
“She revoked that.”
“When?”
Natalie looked at me.
“Recently.”
That word would become important.
The next morning Adult Protective Services opened an emergency investigation because Mom was considered a vulnerable adult.
Police photographed the basement.
The mattress.
The external lock.
The medication tray.
The bruises.
Natalie called it a misunderstanding.
Then she did something that almost convinced me she still believed she controlled the situation.
She smiled.
“We already have an appointment with Dr. Vale at ten tomorrow.”
“For what?”
“A competency assessment.”
Mom began shaking beside me.
Natalie lowered her voice.
“Ethan, your mother needs help.”
Then she touched my arm.
“Twelve hours from now, this can all be handled legally.”
That was when I understood.
May you like
Whatever they were planning had a deadline.
And they still believed I had come home too late to stop it.
