Sandman

by Sean Costello

  Every face in the room was blank.

  They’re giving up, Rob thought, sick to the depths of his soul. The next step was a drastic one, a last ditch maneuver, and everyone was waiting for his signal.

  “Rob,” Ward urged.

  “I know,” Rob said, verging on tears. He was reaching the outer marker of control. He took a deep breath and gave the order. “Okay. Open her chest. There’s no other way.”

  “Knife,” the surgeon said, and the scrub nurse snapped a scalpel into his palm.

  Bill Ward was not a religious man; he had no time for it. But as he pressed the scalpel into the innocent flesh of Julie’s chest he recited a silent prayer.

  The blood that leaked from the incision was the color of plum juice, almost black. It seeped into the wound without vigor.

  Rob looked away.

  “Bone cutters,” Ward said.

  The nurse handed him a bulky instrument that looked like a felon’s bolt cutter. He used it to snap through the struts of Julie’s ribs to the left of her sternum. Then he exchanged the cutters for a retractor, which he fitted to the margins of the incision. He cranked a lever and the chest cavity yawned open.

  Ward took Julie’s exposed heart in his hands and squeezed. It was like squeezing a small dead animal, baked by a desert sun. He took his hands back out.

  Rob said, “Why are you stopping?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bill said, his soft eyes fixed on Rob’s. “But it’s over.”

  The temperature monitor had joined the chorus of alarms. It read a hundred and eight point six degrees now. Julie’s body was hot to the touch.

  “No,” Rob said. “She’s just a kid. I promised her...”

  The surgeon only shook his head.

  Tears flooded Rob’s eyes. His shock was total.

  One by one the staff members left the room. Bill Ward was the last to go before Rob. He peeled off his bloody gloves and placed a hand on Rob’s shoulder. Rob flinched under his touch.

  “Come on, chum,” Ward said, “let’s get out of here.”

  Rob shook his head. He was in a daze. “I can’t leave her like this.” He turned to his drug cart and began arranging the syringes. “It’s a mess in here...”

  “Come on,” Bill said. “We have to leave everything as it is. It’s a coroner’s case now. Let it go, Rob. You did all you could.”

  Rob’s promise to Julie came whirling back at him: If you trust me, you will not die. “Liar,” he said, weeping openly now. “Liar...”

  “Please, Rob. Come on.”

  Rob shook his head. “You go ahead. I’ll be right out.”

  Bill nodded and turned away. He did not look back. What he was leaving behind was the saddest sight in medicine, one he’d seen too often before.

  Alone in the room, Rob touched Julie’s cheek. Her complexion was still flushed, giving the impression of high summer color. If you ignored the blood that had spattered her face from the mutilating bone cutters, you could almost imagine she was sleeping.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Rob whispered, dabbing the blood from her cheeks with a square of gauze. “So sorry...”

  He turned the ventilator off and left the room by the back door. He wanted to avoid the central corridor, where he knew they would all be waiting. He wanted to avoid their eyes.

  He crossed the hallway to the anesthesia staff office and locked himself inside.

  * * *

  In the darkened observation booth above suite 5, Julie’s killer looked down on her savaged corpse through the sloping Plexiglas panels, his gaze impassive and unblinking.

  It was Friday, June 6, 2007.

  1

  JENNY FALLON PRESSED A SELECTION button on the old Wurlitzer jukebox. Assorted clicks and whirs followed, then a tray popped out of the vertical stack and the turntable rose to meet it, lifting the vintage 78 from its aluminum ring. The tone arm settled on the record’s edge and Little Richard’s voice came belting out of the speaker. Jenny and her adopted daughter, Kim, sang along.

  “Long tall Sally, she’s—built for speed, she got—everything that Uncle John need...”

  Laughing and singing, the girls began to jive in Jenny’s plant-ringed solarium. Peach, Jenny’s cat, lounging in an oblong of sunlight, observed them with lidded indifference.

  “That’s it, kiddo,” Jenny said. “Let it all hang out.”

  Kim smiled happily, for the moment unaware of her mouthful of braces, her chunky figure or her painful shyness, all the things that made her life so difficult outside the circle of her mother’s love. Jenny cherished these moments and often wished her husband, Jack, could share in them, too.

  Kim swooped into a dip and Jenny almost dropped her. Laughing, Kim said, “C’mon, Mom. Gotta stay alert.”

  Jenny countered with a dip of her own and the two of them went down in a giggling heap. Jenny’s hands went to her pregnant abdomen, but her landing was soft, Kim’s stout legs cushioning her fall.

  The Little Richard tune ended and the solarium was quiet again.

  “Another one,” Kim said. “Jerry Lee this time.”

  Jenny got up and studied the selection windows. The jukebox, a beautifully restored model 1015, was one of numerous treasures Jenny had discovered in the basement after buying the house. Before his death the previous owner had been in the amusements business—pinball machines, jukeboxes, slot machines—and had stored all sorts of relics from the forties and fifties in a dusty corner of what was originally intended as a bomb shelter. Jack now used the area as a target range for his extensive collection of handguns. The man’s widow told Jenny to keep whatever she wanted from down there and have a yard sale with the rest. Jenny had done exactly that, hanging onto the Wurlitzer and about three hundred 78 rpm records and selling the rest. She’d made enough to have the 1015 professionally restored.

  Jenny selected Jerry Lee’s “High School Confidential”. As the needle hit the record the telephone rang. Jenny noted Kim’s complete lack of reaction and was dismayed by it, aware that with most fourteen year old girls you ran the risk of losing an arm trying to get to a ringing phone ahead of them. She picked it up in the adjacent living room. It was her husband.

  She said, “Hi, Jack, can you hold on a sec?” and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. To Kim she said, “It’s your father,” and waited for her to turn down the music.

  Kim rushed to the jukebox and hit the reject button, her happy, be-bopping smile dissolving so abruptly Jenny wanted to cry. She could actually see her little girl withdrawing into a thick, dull shell. Her face was a careful blank and she stood rigid by the silenced Wurlitzer, fearful of her father’s disapproval even over the phone.

  “Listen,” Jack said, all business. “Will and I are running late. Rob Hardie had an MH death this afternoon and I’ve got to stick around until the coroner gets through with her preliminaries.” As head of the anesthesia department it was Jack’s job to coordinate all such investigations.

  “Oh, no,” Jenny said. “How’s Rob taking it?”

  “Not well. The patient was only seventeen.”

  “That’s awful,” Jenny said. “Is there anything we can do? Should we invite him up to the cottage for the weekend?”

  “I already talked to him,” Jack said. “He wants to just lay low for a couple days. He had a talk with the kid’s parents and I understand it was a pretty bad scene. The girl’s mother slapped him, bloodied his nose. I suggested he avoid spending the weekend alone and he agreed. Said he already had plans to spend it with his girlfriend.”

  “Okay, then. How long do you think you’ll be?”

  “Couple hours, tops. All packed and ready?”

  Jenny knew she was, but the question induced a brief, fretful uncertainty. “Yep, we’re all set,” she said. “Kim’s heading for the Goodmans’ at six.” The plan was for Kim to spend the weekend with her friend, Tracy Goodman. “She was hoping to see you before we left—”

  “Jen, I’ve got to go. Please be ready.”

 
; “Okay, Jack. ’Bye.”

  Jenny returned to the solarium, hoping to recapture the mood with her daughter; but Kim was slumped in a rattan chair with the cat in her lap, staring out sullenly at the yard, her iPod headphones socked into her ears.

  * * *

  At five-thirty that afternoon Dr. Jack Fallon spoke with the coroner, Dr. Ellen Kolb, over the phone. Kolb said she’d completed her preliminaries and suggested that she and Jack meet with Rob Hardie to hear his version of the afternoon’s tragic events. Jack agreed, setting the meeting for a quarter to six in his office.

  He’d just hung up when the department’s deputy chief, Will Armstrong, came into the office. Will was a big man of thirty-eight with a thick crop of prematurely silver hair. Jack offered him a seat, but Will waved him off.

  “So,” Will said, “are we getting out of here on time?” The men had plans to spend the weekend at the Fallons’ Gatineau Hills cottage with their wives and a few other guests, one of whom was a potential new recruit, a top gun intensivist from Atlanta.

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Jack said. “I still have to meet with Ellen and Rob and go over the details of the case. You might as well sit in.”

  Will checked his watch. “Did you call home to let them know we’d be running late?”

  “Just before I talked to Ellen.”

  “Was my wife there yet?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Will picked up the phone, his meaty finger stabbing out Jack’s home number. Jenny answered on the fourth ring.

  “Jen, it’s Will. Is Nina there yet?”

  “Just walked in.”

  “Put her on, would you?” Behind Will, Dr. Kolb entered the room.

  Nina came on the line and said hello.

  Will said, “I’ve been trying to reach you since three o’clock.”

  “Hi, hon,” Nina said. “I missed you, too.”

  “I don’t need that shit, Nina. Not right now. Are you going to answer me?”

  Jack got to his feet. “Will, can we put that off for now? Ellen’s here.”

  “I’m waiting,” Will said into the phone.

  Huffing, Nina said, “I dropped the twins off at Claudia’s. They didn’t want me to go and kicked up a fuss. Then I went to the grocery store to pick up steaks and corn on the cob. The lineups were horrendous. After that I got caught in traffic on the Queensway. There was an accident just before the Bronson exit. When I got through that I drove straight here. That about sums it up.”

  “And that took two and a half hours?”

  Jack touched Will’s arm. “Will, please.”

  Will turned and glared at him and for an instant Jack thought the man was actually going to take a swing at him. At forty-two, Jack stood six-four and held black belts in three martial arts disciplines, but he didn’t take the possibility lightly. Will stood two inches taller than Jack and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

  Jack held his gaze and Will seemed to snap out of it. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, “Sure, Jack. Sorry. I’ll just say goodbye.”

  While Will signed off, Jack invited Dr. Kolb to sit down. Kolb, a fit, eccentric woman of fifty-three, glanced uncertainly at Will and offered to come back later, but Jack insisted. After Will hung up, the three physicians sat in embarrassed silence.

  A few minutes later Rob Hardie entered the room and the grim business of post mortem investigation continued.

  * * *

  “What’s up with Will?” Jenny said as Nina cradled the receiver.

  “Oh, nothing special,” Nina said. “Things are just a bit tense in the Armstrong camp these days.” She smiled gamely, but Jenny wasn’t buying it. “He’s not all that nuts about me starting back to work.”

  Jenny understood the syndrome. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m gonna go for it,” Nina said. Her five-year-old boys would be going to school full time in the fall and Nina had an offer to manage a new fitness franchise, something she’d dreamed about doing for a very long time.

  “I wish I had your nerve,” Jenny said.

  Nina patted the low, firm swelling of Jenny’s belly; at four months along, she was just beginning to show. “Have your papoose,” she said. “Enjoy that. Then, when it feels right, tell Jack you’re going to do something for yourself. Photography, whatever you decide. Believe me, he’ll adapt.”

  “You don’t know Jack.”

  “Sure I do,” Nina said. She was a tiny woman with a dynamite figure and a wholesome, ready smile. “They’re all the same. Get the right rhythm going on the workbench—” she ground her hips like a pole dancer “—they’re putty in your hands.”

  Jenny laughed and gave Nina a poke.

  Grinning, Nina scanned the room with her sea-green eyes. “Now,” she said, “where’s that teenager of yours? I want her to show me some moves.”

  Kim was where Jenny had left her, staring out at the yard through the solarium windows. Nina crept up behind her and plucked off her headphones, startling her.

  “Hey, kid. Who shit in your Corn Flakes?”

  “Nina,” Kim said, instantly brightening. That was one of Nina’s great gifts; her arrival in any room lit it up like a sunburst.

  “I heard you can out-jive Jackie Wilson,” Nina said.

  “You heard right,” Kim said, playing along.

  “Care to prove it?”

  Kim stood, her beaming smile like the grille on a ’53 Buick. She pointed at the Wurlitzer. “Choose your weapon, plebe.”

  Nina strode over and punched in Bobby Day’s “Rock-in Robin”.

  Jenny picked up her cat and leaned in the solarium doorway, a vague unease coloring her contentment. The reason for this contradictory blend of feelings occurred to her as she watched her daughter and her best friend dance.

  Her house was only this happy when her husband wasn’t in it.

  * * *

  Kim left for Tracy’s house at six-thirty, Jenny watching her through the front window as she trudged down the street, tote bag slung over one round shoulder. Though Tracy wasn’t the kind of kid Jenny would have chosen for Kim to chum around with, she was the only friend Kim had. The two were about as much alike as linen and railway spikes, Kim shy and withdrawn, Tracy bold and provocative. But if Jenny remembered anything from her own early teens it was that friendships defied all attempts at logic. Kids got together for their own arcane reasons, and any efforts on the part of their parents to interfere were met almost uniformly with defiance. Perhaps that was the nub right there, the inevitable pulling away.

  Jack and Will arrived at the Fallons’ canal-side home at seven o’clock. Will came inside with Jack, paced around in the front hall for a minute, then went back out to his Suburban. He leaned on the horn twice while Nina gathered her things from her car, then drove off with her in stony silence.

  After loading the trunk with supplies, the Fallons followed in Jack’s Mercedes. Jack drove while Jenny reclined in the passenger seat, hands resting over her growing abdomen.

  How precious this life is, she thought as they made their way through downtown traffic. And how fragile. In the early years of their marriage she’d been pregnant four times and had lost each of them late in the first trimester. She’d bled heavily each time, on the last occasion requiring a transfusion and earning a strict warning from her obstetrician to practice birth control and adopt. “One more of these could kill you, Jenny.” That had been fourteen years ago, just weeks before she begged Jack to let her adopt the infant girl her obstetrician had found for her, the adorable baby girl she’d christened Kimberly Anne. And now, at thirty-four, she was carrying again. A happy accident. A miracle. But fear was never very far from the surface. She didn’t think she could bear to lose this one, too. All life was a gift, but this one was a special gift. It made her feel whole again, a feeling she’d gotten so far removed from over the years she hadn’t even realized it until the pregnancy test came back positive.

  “How’s our little man?” Jack
said, resting a hand on top of Jenny’s. They were crossing the bridge into the neighboring province of Quebec, the pungent reek of the E. B. Eddy paper plant eeling in through the air vents.

  “Sleeping peacefully,” Jenny said. “Could be a girl, you know.”

  Jack smiled, his tan face the color of cherrywood in the glow of the westering sun. “No, honey,” he said, “it’s a boy. I can feel it.”

  * * *

  Two of their guests were already there, seated in deck chairs by the lake: Paul Daw, a psychiatrist who’d done part of his early training with Jack, and his date, another in a seemingly endless supply of giddy young women. When Jenny caught Paul’s eye she shook her head at him and grinned. Paul just shrugged. Apart from Nina, Paul was the closest friend Jenny had. He was a great listener, a professional listener, and Jenny had spent countless hours with him over the years just talking. It was one of an increasing number of things she couldn’t seem to do comfortably with her husband any more. The girl’s name was Cerise. “French for Cherry,” Paul said as they climbed the hill to the cottage. He’d met her at the University of Ottawa pool, where she worked as a lifeguard and taught grade schoolers to swim.

  The guest of honor, Al Sutton, arrived a few minutes later in a rented car. Jenny got the inside poop on him from Jack during the drive up. He was single, thirty-two, and had trained in some of the most prestigious medical centers in America. “A prime catch,” Jack had said. Looking at him now, Jenny was inclined to agree, albeit for different reasons. He had that glow some people had. Like Nina. You took one look at him and you just knew he was somebody special. He had a quick smile, boyish dimples and shining blue eyes. Jenny liked him right away and hoped he would join the department.

  Will and Nina, who’d stopped off en route for gas, arrived as the others were climbing the steps to the Fallons’ Pan Abode. Will was still surly, but Nina seemed her usual cheerful self. Jenny introduced Al to the Armstrongs, then helped them unload their gear.

  “Okay,” Jack said from the porch. He’d donned a ridiculous looking chef’s hat. “All present and accounted for. Let’s get the barbecue fired up.”