Free Mountain Song by Ruby Laska

with a heavy thud. “I understand you
spent some time with Bea today.”
    “Yes. I was there for
most of the afternoon and through her dinner. She, um, dropped off for the last
half hour or so.”
    Andy nodded, shuffling
some pamphlets at the top of the stack. He cleared his throat and drummed his
fingers lightly on the papers, but still didn’t meet her eyes.
    “She...didn’t look
very good,” Claudia added. It felt awkward, talking to him like this, but he
was Bea’s doctor. The rest of it—whatever it was between them—was
unimportant. Ridiculous to focus on it at all, when she would soon be gone,
Lake Tahoe relegated for a second time to her history.
    “How so?”
    “Oh, tired, I suppose,
and thinner, more lines than I remember around her eyes. And she was so quiet. I
kept trying to come up with conversation but I couldn’t seem to keep her
interest. In fact I was still talking when she fell asleep.”
    Claudia felt a catch
in her voice and cleared her throat. She stood and busied herself scraping out
the untouched meal, then rinsing her utensils in the sink.
    “She was tired,” Andy
said. “I’m sure it cost her quite a bit to keep up appearances yesterday for
you.”
    Claudia stilled,
holding a fork in the running water.
    “What do you mean,
appearances? Yesterday Bea was herself, every bit as witty and wonderful as she’s
always been.”
    “Yes.” His tone was
patient, professional. “I noticed. It was nice to have her back with us, even
if she was directing her sharp tongue in my direction. Look, this is what I’ve
been trying to tell you. Yesterday was an aberration. Her affect in the last
couple of months has been flat, even before her injury. The pain is always on
her mind. I think that to pull it together for your benefit drained her.”
    Claudia slowly set the
fork down and turned off the water, then leaned against the sink with her back
to the table where Andy sat, patiently tearing holes in her heart.
    “You sound
so...clinical.”
    “Well, I am a
physician, Claudia. I’m trained to diagnose, to look at things critically—”
    “But we’re talking
about Bea here! About my grandmother. Do you have any idea—”
    She bit her lip rather
than let the catch in her voice turn into tears. “When I was four,” she said at
last, “Bea sent me a bug collecting kit. There was a glass jar and these
special tweezers and a magnifying glass and a net. Everyone else bought me
dolls and fancy dresses and ballet slippers.
    “I loved that net,”
she added. “I brought it out here when I came to stay with her and Grandpa Bud
for a few weeks in the summer. Every night we filled that jar up with
fireflies. They let me stay up as late as I wanted, and we’d sit out there
thinking up names for every one of those bugs. And then we always let them go.”
    Andy was silent. She
hadn’t talked about these memories, even thought of them, for years. Life had
gotten so complicated; it was all she could do to get through each day. Today,
though, after seeing Bea, the memories were jogged loose in her mind, and now,
even with Andy sitting a few feet away, she suddenly wanted—needed—to
talk about them.
    “And I remember when
Daddy and I had a big fight about whether I could get my ears pierced. I think
I was thirteen and I thought I would just die if he didn’t let me. Bea got on
the phone and called him up and wore him down until he agreed, and then she
sent me my first pair of earrings, silver with turquoise beads. I still have
them.”
    “Have you always
called her Bea?” Andy asked after a moment.
    Claudia managed a
small smile. “Yeah. She never liked the ‘Grandma’ bit. Said it reminded her of
old ladies who wore plastic rain bonnets and played bridge. Who sat around all
day letting life pass them by. She was never one to sit still.”
    Until now. Not only
was she confined to one place, she had barely been able to find the strength to
sit up today in her hospital bed. Claudia had been unable