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checked the phone book for Dalbeck. Hank’s name. There
were three of them in Southbridge. They must all have been related.
I wrote down the numbers and addresses. What if he had a
long-distance girlfriend that I didn’t know about?
    Finally I buckled down to keep my promise of
finishing Hank’s project. I’d taken notes when he talked about the
other cases. Now I checked each of them, going as far back as Karen
Ann Quinlan, who’d lived and died before I was born. At age 21 she
collapsed from a combination of alcohol and Valium. Just like Paula
Welbourne, the girl from Lakeside, although Paula was only 16.
Karen was hospitalized and kept alive by artificial breathing.
After several months with no improvement, her parents asked the
hospital to remove her from the ventilator and allow her die. The
hospital refused. That led to a legal battle, which the New Jersey
Supreme Court settled by ruling for the parents. In 1976 she was
taken off the ventilator. She never woke up but lived another ten
years breathing on her own. In 1985 she died of pneumonia.
    Paula Welbourne was almost an exact parallel,
except for the timing. She spent three years on the machine and
lived five more years breathing on her own. She, too, died of
pneumonia. It was not hard to catch an infection in a hospital.
With all those sick people, infections were everywhere.
    I read about Sunny von Bulow, whose husband
was accused and acquitted of trying to kill her with insulin.
Instead all it did was put her in a vegetative state. And Terri
Schiavo of Florida, whose case was a real hornets’ nest, with her
parents on one side and her husband on the other. It all seemed to
hinge on how disabled she was. Everybody got in the act. There were
doctors, lawyers, and lies all over the place.
    That was almost the same as Maisie Halloran,
the Georgia case that had caught Hank’s interest. Maisie’s husband
claimed she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept alive by artificial
means. Her mother accused him of wanting her gone so he could marry
his pregnant girlfriend. People all over the country, maybe even
the world, took sides, the crux of the issue being the right to
life versus the right to die. To me it seemed an individual matter,
case by case. Who knew what the person wanted, unless they’d made
it clear ahead of time with some sort of living will. Or advance
directive, as Hank called it. It was something most people didn’t
want to think about.
    But it had started Hank thinking. He was so
brilliant. How could that mind be locked away forever?
    He was the one who brought up the subject at
our meeting. I wondered if he himself had an advance directive. Who
would ever have thought he’d need it? Especially so soon.
    To keep my promise, I would have to go around
to each Tiger’s Roar staff person and tell him or her there
would be a meeting next week. What if they didn’t want me taking
over? I was new at Southbridge High. They might resent me.
    I could only hope Hank would wake up by
then.
    “Hank,” I said to the empty air. “Why did it
have to be you?”
    I had just started to look up hypoxic
brain injury, or brain damage due to a cut-off of oxygen, a
situation that can lead to coma, when the dogs starting barking.
Someone wrestled with the front door.
    I went cold all over. I’d locked the dead
bolt, which mostly we didn’t do, so I had to go downstairs and look
through the peephole. Thank God, it was my mother.
    After getting over the shock and relief of
having her home, I asked about the flowers. She told me they had
been delivered just as she was leaving for work. “Who are they
from?” she asked.
    “Nobody,” I said. “The card is blank. I
called them and they told me the sender must have wanted to be
anonymous.”
    “It might have something to do with what
happened yesterday.”
    I thought that over. “What for? It wasn’t me
who got shot.”
    “Wasn’t I. But you certainly were
affected by it.”
    “Wasn’t I! Rhoda, nobody talks