Left for Alive

by Tom Hogan

  Stepping lightly onto the porch, he stopped for a moment before the door and put an ear to it. Then he tapped lightly on the door. Then a little louder. He waited, then eased the door open.

  Donna was back in the rocking chair. The belt from Harry’s robe was tight around her left forearm. Two long, deep gashes ran from the belt to the ridge of her palm, the same on the unbound arm. The blood had caked on her hands and was dripping only slightly into the large puddle beneath the still chair.

  Another hour, the doctors said, and the shock and blood loss would have been too deep. As it was, she hovered in the death zone for the next two days. Finally, with no help from Donna, modern medicine took over and brought her back. The wrists took their time healing—a bad sign, the doctors said. And Donna’s eyes retreated to their vacancy. She either slept or sat upright in the bed and stared past the TV to the far wall.

  Chastising himself for leaving her alone that night, Josh took the bulk of the shifts. Daytime he held her hand and read to her, sometimes talking to her in a low voice that the nurses couldn’t make out. Evenings he often slept in the camp bed that the hospital allowed, rotating with Alexis and Carol. Paul, who had been in the Seychelles on a shoot when Josh’s telegram arrived, returned and worked into the rotation as well.

  Donna was in the hospital for two weeks, losing fourteen pounds even with the intravenous feeding. She shriveled into herself and her color began to take on the dull white of the hospital walls.

  At the end of the second week Josh called an after-dinner meeting. The Gimp took Alexis’s shift at the hospital so that she could join the others. “I talked to the doctors today,” he began, “and we’re going to bring Donna home tomorrow.”

  “Is that wise?” Carol asked. “She’s still pretty sick.”

  “Maybe, but the hospital isn’t doing her any good. It’s leaching a little bit out of her every day. And there’s not much of her left.”

  “I wish she could talk,” Lucky said. “Tell us what she needs.”

  “She can,” Josh said. “Just not with us, it seems. She talks a little with Sonya, the night nurse, but only when we’re not there to hear. And today with one of the doctors. He came in and told her they were going to transfer her up to the sixth floor, where they could keep a better eye on her, but that they needed her permission to do so. He said that she quit staring at the far wall and looked him dead-on. ‘If you put me in there, I’ll die.’ He didn’t know if it was a threat or just a statement of fact. But they didn’t move her, and they think the only shot is for her to come back here.”

  The table stayed quiet. Paul stood up and cleared the dinner dishes. He returned with a pot of coffee, refilled their cups and sat back down.

  “She said one more thing,” Josh said. “When the doctor told her they were releasing her tomorrow to come back here. She smiled, he said, but it was a smile that scared the hell out of him. He asked her if she was coming back here to live or die. She told him that was her business.” He turned his hands palms-up. “So we pick her up at ten tomorrow morning.”

  Clark scrawled something on his pad and handed it to William. “How do we treat her?” William read to the group.

  Everyone looked somewhere other than at each other. Finally, William cleared his throat. “I know what we don’t do. We don’t act like a bunch of cheerleaders, telling her how good she looks, how much life is worth living. We just be ourselves. That’s what brought her here in the first place.”

  “Should we stay up with her, take shifts?” Carol asked.

  This time it was Lucky who broke the silence. “I don’t think so. But I’d take that goddam rockin chair out of there.”

  “What if she just stays in bed?” Paul asked. “What do we do then?”

  “Then we let her die,” William said firmly.

  “William,” Carol said softly.

  “Will’s right,” Josh said. “I think Donna’s in better shape than we think. She’s just trying to make up her mind, and this is where she wants to do it.”

  “You don’t think she’s going to make it, do you?” Alexis looked over at Josh as they left the camp for the hospital the next morning. She drove leisurely—Donna wasn’t due to be released for an hour—keeping Haydn on a low volume.

  “I honestly don’t now. I’m out of my depth on this one.”

  “Once your parents were gone, did you ever worry about Paul? That he might die and you’d be on your own?”

  “Not really. You know Paul. There could be a nuclear holocaust and he’d find the only open bar and order a scotch, neat.” He looked over. “What about when you were married? Did you ever think about what it would be like if your husband died?”

  “Only all the time. He traveled a lot. Whenever the phone rang, I just knew it was the police. Knew it in my bones. But it never was”

  They brought Donna home to Number Three. The floor had been bleached of her blood and the rocking chair, at Lucky’s insistence, had been removed. If Donna noticed its absence, she gave no indication. She was no longer totally silent, but she never initiated a conversation and responded to most questions with a gesture or a word or two.

  Still, it was clear that she was trying. She got up every morning before eight, made her bed and walked out onto the porch. Josh, attuned to her new schedule, watched from his cabin. Most mornings she stood on the porch and looked over at the L, her eyes blinking. Then she turned and went back inside, sometimes back to bed, sometimes to her desk, where she sat, pencil poised, sometimes for hours on end.

  On the rare occasions when she went for a walk, William would hasten to join her. But his attempts at conversation turned into hollow monologues, dry recaps of the national news or the local gossip. At the end of the walk Donna always touched his hand briefly and thanked him in a small voice for the company. Then she went back to her cabin.

  She slept in snatches, if at all. But most times sleep brought with it the same image—of the van disappearing through the gate, the strong arm extended from the driver’s side and the small blonde head from the other. Eating-wise, all that stayed down was soup and oatmeal, so she took those in her cabin, coming up to the L once dinner was done. She sat at the table or in the living room, hands in her lap, smiling mightily at the stories and jokes, a smile that scraped the life from the room.

  Her bones, already showing, were now sharp, both at her wrist and in her cheeks. Her eyes sank deeper into their raccoon-like caverns. Her movements were deliberate, as if nothing came naturally anymore. She began drinking her coffee with two hands.

  One evening at the end of her second week back Josh skipped dinner and walked down to her cabin. He returned an hour later, his face drawn. “I talked to her as plainly as I could,” he said, sitting down at the table. “I told her she was dying, that she’d be dead within the week. She listened. I mean, really listened. I was encouraged at first. But when she answered me, the tone and the words—they were what she thought I wanted her to say. It was like I’d interrupted her death and she had to get rid of me so that she could get back to it.”

  Late that night, after everyone had gone to sleep, Clark whistled up Zeke and went for a walk. He walked for miles into the blackened green, down trails he knew by heart. He stopped at a large flat rock that he often took his lunch to, enjoying the view that went to the coast and beyond. Zeke sat down heavily and placed his chin on Clark’s thigh. Clark slipped his fingers under Zeke’s chin and scritched him as he stared at the line between the top of the forest and the bottom of the stars.

  His pace back to the camp was slow, deliberate. Zeke, unaccustomed to the pace, kept trotting ahead, then returning to Clark’s side. Clark walked on, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The sky was beginning to release the darkness when he got back to camp.

  He walked to Donna’s cabin, where a thin line of light slipped under the door. He moved to her window noiselessly, cupped his hand ov
er his eyes, and looked at her through the space between the shade and frame. The bedside lamp was on. Donna was sitting straight up in bed, a face-down book across the thin lines of her legs. Her eyes didn’t blink for the five minutes that he watched her.

  He returned to the door and ran his fingers over its wood for a moment before knocking. Without waiting for a response, he opened and the door and stepped in. Her eyes slowly swung to him, seemed to swallow him for a moment, then moved on.

  He walked over to the bed and knelt down next to her. He took one of her hands and interlocked his fingers with hers; his other hand settled lightly on her scarred wrist.

  “You’re dying,” he said, his voice low but clear. “And I don’t think you want to. You just don’t know how to go on living.” He swallowed drily. “I know. I was there once.”

  His fingers tightened on hers. She looked at him, her eyes clearing, a puzzled look on her face. “I’ll tell you about it. But if I do, you’ve got to listen.” His eyes were not gentle. “I mean, really listen. Okay?”

  She started to look past him, but he placed a hardened finger along her jaw and gently moved her face back so that her eyes fixed on his.

  She looked at him for a long moment, her face confused and slack. “Okay,” she said finally in a voice that was far from certain.

  CHAPTER 36

  He had always worked wood. During grade school, his father introduced him to tools and nails the way other men played sports with their kids. Clark took to it quickly, learning to read the grains, to plane, lathe, saw and carve. By his graduation from high school he knew wood in the same way a sommelier knows wine.

  He was not much of a student: the two lines beneath his name in the yearbook read: “Crafts Club: II-IV” and Auto Shop: I-IV.” Though a fair athlete, he had no interest in organized sports. Besides shop, the only subject that he excelled in was math, with its diagrams, measurements and angles. The friends he had were good ones who stayed a major part of his life after high school.

  He married Katy when he was twenty-two. She was two years older, a potter who had just opened her own studio. Clark had finished his cabinet-maker’s apprenticeship and was working steadily in construction. A year after their marriage, at Katy’s urging, they added a second room to her studio and Clark opened up a small woodworking business on the side. His work with intricate frames and carvings gave him relief from the broad scale of his daily work and extra income for their future.

  It took them four years to build their house—the land had been a wedding gift from Katy’s parents. For six months they pored over different plans, taking bits from each, combining them into the house where they would live for the next twenty years, where they would raise their family. They spent vacations and weekends on the vacant lot, until it was no longer vacant. They moved in on their fifth anniversary. A year later, Katy was pregnant.

  She was in her sixth month when the pickup ran her down. It was four in the afternoon and she was out for a walk. The truck turned the corner too sharply, jumped the curb and dragged her for over a hundred yards. She was dead before the truck came to a stop. The driver tried to flee the scene, but he stumbled as he ran, allowing two onlookers to catch up to him and hold him until the cops came.

  Clark had trouble believing that the twisted, raw body on the morgue table was Katy. Or had been Katy. Fingerprints and dental records told his mind it was Katy, but his heart needed to see her face—and the asphalt and gravel had taken that away. The only clear evidence was that she wasn’t in her studio, or in their bed.

  Clark took a leave from his job for the week of the trial, attending it every day. At night he went home, heated a frozen dinner, then went into Katy’s studio. Each night he would slice off a slab of clay, wet it and place it on the wheel. Then he would let his fingers float over the dampened, spinning clay, shaping nothing, digging grooves into the clay until his fingers wore through to the wheel.

  The trial should have been a slam-dunk, but the driver’s father was connected and rich. And the first officer on the scene was a rookie, two weeks out of the academy. Jarred by the state of his first corpse, his procedures and tests were all open to the defense’s efficient probing. The jury debated three days before declaring itself hung. The public was outraged and the DA began immediate plans for a retrial, reassuring Clark that, now that they knew their weaknesses, the outcome would be different next time. In the meantime, Benny Taylor, the driver, would remain out on bail. And Clark went back to work.

  “The trial was good for me,” he told Donna, his voice growing hoarse. “Up until the trial I wasn’t eating. Slept twenty hours a day or not at all for a week. The trial was what told me she was really dead.” The last few words came out roughened, cracked. “That many people don’t spend all that time on someone who’s still alive.”

  Donna had watched him the whole time he talked, her eyes solemn. Silently she shifted, making room on the bed for him to sit down. At first he didn’t notice, his eyes out in the darkness. Then he blinked twice, looked down at her, and sat down on the bed. The two of them sat stiffly in the same posture, backs hard against the wall, legs straight out in front of them.

  “I worked a lot, didn’t talk much to anyone. Put the house up for sale, had Katy’s folks clean all her stuff out one weekend while I was camping.” He shrugged. “Didn’t help. Nothing helped. When the house sold, I decided to move. If I stayed there, I knew I’d die. So I got ready to leave.”

  A week before the second trial was to begin, Clark stopped in at a bar on his way home from work. He took a booth in the back and nursed his beer, in no hurry to get back to the house with the “SOLD” sign out front. It was as he was leaving a tip and getting to his feet, he noticed Benny Taylor at the far end of the bar. A beefy man in a plaid shirt and chinos, he was leaning against the bar trying to pick up a redheaded giggler. Clark sat back down. While Clark watched, Benny had two Scotches—the bartender later said these were his fourth and fifth—and his voice grew louder, his movements more exaggerated.

  “I couldn’t believe what I saw seeing,” Clark told Donna. “I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t want this guy to ever have a life again. But here he was, trying to get laid, and Katy was barely in the ground. While I’m watching, he gets a little too grabby with the girl and she shuts him down. The group around him starts giving him grief, so he picks his money off the bar and leaves. Bumping his way down the bar as he goes, steadying himself in the doorway.” Clark got up from his seat and followed Benny outside.

  He pursed his lips. “I couldn’t believe he was going to drive. Not after…But he pulls out his keys as he’s weaving across the lot and stops in front of a pickup. The same pickup.”

  Witnesses said that Clark approached the man and started talking to him. At one point Clark made a move—unsuccessfully—to take the keys away from Taylor, who said something to him and started to climb into the truck. As Clark grabbed at him, Taylor whirled and swung at him. The punch had leverage and accuracy, catching Clark just above his left ear. He went down, his eyes watering badly. He lurched to his feet and balled both hands into a single fist. The punch caught Taylor at the base of his neck as he was climbing into the cab. He staggered backwards and fell onto Clark.

  The two men rolled onto the parking lot gravel. Taylor dug his fingers into Clark’s mouth and ripped, tearing his cheek into a flapping wound. Blood filling his mouth, Clark whipped a forearm into Taylor’s throat. As Taylor’s hands flew up to belatedly protect his throat, Clark grabbed his head and slammed it into the pavement. Then again. This time Taylor’s head made a soft, crushing sound and went limp. Clark kept pushing the motionless head into the gravel and asphalt, working it like he had the clay on Katy’s wheel.

  It was the weariness in his arms, rather than the onlooking crowd, that stopped him. All he could think of, as he waited for the police, was how much Benny Taylor looked like his last image of Katy.

  �
�There had to be a trial. I knew that. But once they understood the circumstances…” His attorney let him take the stand and testify. And he made a good witness, calm and in control as he narrated the evening’s events, including how he had pleaded with Taylor. The district attorney had the same sympathetic expression as the judge and jury as he walked Clark through the attack, including Taylor’s head going slack and his activities after that.

  He was convicted of second-degree murder. Seven to ten. Stunned, Clark looked back and forth from the judge to the jury; the compassion was still there.

  His mouth shut at that moment and stayed shut thereafter. Born of disbelief, fueled by outrage and confusion, it became a matter of habit, then comfort, keeping him aloof from prison alliances and battles. Finally, it was just mental rust: his lips and tongue forgot that they had any purpose other than to eat and drink.

  The prison had no problem with his silence: they’d seen stranger cases. Every so often a well-meaning social worker or psychologist would try to bring him out, but none of them lasted a month. During his fourth year, though, a new counselor came to San Tomas. This one didn’t ingratiate himself with the inmates or ask intrusive questions: in fact, for his first month there, he was almost as quiet as Clark.

  After Josh had been there for six months, he sat down with Clark and asked him, “Do you want to be here?” Clark stared back at him for a moment, then shook his head. “Do you think you deserve to be here?” Another shake, this one more definite.

  The next day Clark gave him a thick spiral-bound notebook. “Use this. Take your time. Write about yourself, who you were before, what you’ve learned here—if anything. What you’d do if you were out.” It took Clark three months to fill it up. The next one he completed in less than a month.