Sandman

by Sean Costello

  Jenny looked up and saw him standing behind her, a surgical mask dangling under his chin.

  “Remember me? I’ll be taking care of your anesthetic.”

  A black rubber mask muzzled Jenny’s face.

  “Just breathe normally,” Dr. Hardie said, socking the mask more tightly over her nose and mouth; it was smothering her.

  “No,” Jenny said into the mask. She was hyperventilating now, sucking noxious gases into her lungs. “Please. Where’s Jack? Where’s my hus...”

  Then she was gone.

  * * *

  Kim stood outside a set of orange metal doors with the words OPERATING SUITES, RESTRICTED AREA stenciled across them. She’d been part of the mad dash up from the ER, clutching her mother’s hand, watching her lapse more deeply into corpse-like stillness—then she was sheared off, left to languish out here in uncertainty and fear. And of course, guilt. If her mother died it would be her fault, as surely as if she’d held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

  Kim stared at the orange doors. She’d never experienced such raw panic, such numbing fear.

  Mom, I’m sorry...please be okay...

  Down the hall a set of elevator doors rattled open and two men in lab coats stepped out, rolling an empty stretcher between them. Kim watched their approach with dull eyes. They were talking baseball and laughing, but when they saw Kim they fell silent, their faces closed and unreadable now. The word PATHOLOGY was sewn in red on their lab coat pockets. They did not meet her gaze as they passed, pushing through the big orange doors.

  Kim looked at the stretcher. It wasn’t empty after all. There was a black body bag on it, stretched out to its full length, the zipper gaping open.

  The doors closed behind the men.

  And Kim burst through behind them.

  “Mom? Mom?”

  The men with the stretcher had turned right, into the recovery room.

  “Where’s my mother? Where’s—”

  A male nurse caught her in a bear hug at the recovery room doors. “Sweetie, your mother’s fine,” he said. “The stretcher’s for somebody else.” He walked Kim into the unit, turning her to face a lone stretcher bearing a humped shape under a thin blanket. Oxygen hissed through corrugated tubing and dark blood hung in pressurized bags. “She’s still very sleepy, but we’ll be moving her out to her room shortly.”

  Kim clutched the nurse and started to cry.

  * * *

  Jenny was dreaming. It was pleasant at first. Images of breast feeding, cuddling, cooing. Jack was there, fussing and swaggering about; and Kim, busily drawing her moths, holding up sketches for her parents’ approval. In the dream Jack loved them all. He was beaming with pride, looking from one to the other with a caring smile, eyes sparkling...

  Then his face changed. He gaped at the infant at Jenny’s breast and his eyes flashed a baleful, murderous red.

  “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” he bellowed. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY BABEEEEEEEEE...?”

  Jenny looked down and saw a dead thing sucking her nipple, a misshapen abomination with wet blood clots for eyes and talons where there should have been fingers...

  “Mom?”

  Coming half awake, Jenny said, “Kim?” She had no idea where she was.

  “Oh, Mom,” Kim’s head fell against her breast. “I was so afraid. I thought...”

  “Shh,” Jenny said, stroking Kim’s matted hair. Shhhh....”

  “I can’t find Daddy. I’ve been calling home all night...”

  Jenny lifted her head off the pillow. Still groggy, she blinked against the sunlight in this strange room, trying to orient herself.

  Then she saw the bag of blood dripping into her arm and it all came back: the feeling of her unfinished child falling away, as if her heart had slipped its moorings and dropped whole and beating into the toilet; the wet, coppery smell of death...her baby’s, her own; and Jack’s cold eyes, wishing her dead, willing it. It all came swarming back and Jenny slipped smoothly away in the force of it, leaving her daughter behind, leaving the hurt, the fear and the despair behind.

  She remained in the dark for a long time, surfacing only briefly, and then only when they refused to leave her alone.

  11

  WHEN FRANK VOUGIS MET JACK Fallon at the Pierce-Vougis Funeral Home on Saturday morning, he decided to handle the situation personally. In all his years in the funeral business, nothing quite like this had ever landed on his plate. A man walking through the main doors with an eighteen-week fetus wrapped in a towel, demanding an immediate burial—a man whose demeanor suggested he was used to getting his own way. There would be problems with the red tape, Frank knew. In legal terms, for the purposes of the registration of death, a fetus didn’t even exist until the twentieth week of gestation. But Frank had been around long enough to know all the loopholes. It could be arranged. The burial permit would be another stumbling block, but the funeral director believed he could slip that one by, too. The bereaved said he had no preference regarding the burial site, as long as it was consecrated ground. Joel Packard at Sacred Heart owed Frank a favor, and today Frank would be calling it in.

  He had one of his embalmers come up and receive the body, then led his client to the casket room. In this, at least, there was no obstacle. All baby caskets were the same: hardwood finished in white veneer, the pristine surface symbolizing the purity of the infant. Jack picked one, then Frank led him to a private family room.

  When he left Jack to his grief Frank shuddered a little, thinking he’d never been so relieved to be away from a person in mourning.

  * * *

  “She’s profoundly depressed,” Paul Daw told Craig Walsh. “It’s a situational thing, transient I’m sure, but it’s hit her very hard. At times she’s almost catatonic. I’d give it a couple of days, see if we can get away without medicating her, but...”

  “What’s the worst case scenario?” Walsh said. They stood down the hall from Jenny’s room, out of earshot of Jenny and her daughter.

  Paul cleared his throat. “I’ve seen cases like this where the depression drags on for weeks, even months. I know Jenny very well, Craig, and the thing is, she had everything hooked into this pregnancy. Her self-esteem, her happiness, her whole reason for being.” He stabbed his fingers through his hair. “That bastard, Jack. Where the hell is he?”

  Walsh shook his head. “Yeah, well, on any level but a professional one, I’m staying out of this. If you were smart, Paul, you’d do the same.”

  * * *

  At two-thirty on that overcast Saturday afternoon, Kim stepped off an OC Transpo bus at the corner of Bank Street and Riverdale and walked the half block back to the Dairy Queen. She ordered a banana split, two cherry-flavored Blizzards, a large order of fries, a double DQ burger with the works and a Dilly bar. She carried her order to a corner booth, sat with her head down and ate it. Every last bite. Then she ran to the ladies’ room and threw up.

  There was chocolate on her face when she came out to the payphone and dialed Tracy’s number. Tracy answered on the third ring.

  “Kim, is that you?” She giggled and lowered her voice. “Holy shitfit. Like, are you still alive? What a scene. Charlie’s arm’s in a cast and he practically wants to kill your old man. He was totally insane last night. Did you see your lawn? I couldn’t believe it.”

  Kim said, “Tracy, can I come over?”

  “What, like, right now?”

  “Yes, if it’s okay. My mom’s in the hospital. I just left her. She lost the baby, she’s out of it. I don’t know where my dad is and I...”

  Need a friend.

  “Jeez, Kimeroo, can’t do it. My mom’s on the rag, you know.”

  Kim’s shoulders slumped. “Okay. Maybe—”

  “Can you believe those guys? No way Charlie can play his guitar. Jeep’s nose is all taped up. He looks like a raccoon. Did you see your lawn?”

  “Trace, I gotta go.”

  “Cool. Catchya.”

  Kim cradled the receiver. Before leaving t
he DQ she bought another Dilly bar, eating it as she walked up Bank Street toward the bridge, barely noticing when the first spats of summer rain struck the pavement around her.

  * * *

  Frank Vougis watched his client from the front seat of his funeral hack. He wondered where the rest of the family was, but decided against inquiring. If you learned anything in the funeral business it was discretion. Where death was concerned there were always questions, but sometimes, like today, you didn’t want to know the answers.

  It was raining now, really coming down, but the bereaved seemed unbothered. He stood alone by the gravesite, a tiny rectangular hole in the grass near a tall maple, with his head bowed and his eyes closed, letting the rain soak him to the skin.

  Frank checked his watch, thinking, I’ll give him a half hour, then I’m out of here. He tuned the radio to the FM band and settled back in his seat.

  Twenty minutes later Jack strode wraithlike out of the rain. Startled by the sight of him, Frank started the car, but his client walked past the limo into the depths of the graveyard. Frank opened his window and called after him once, then shrugged and drove away.

  * * *

  Jenny awoke briefly that night to a raging summer storm. There was a warm hand linked with hers and the weight of someone’s head against her breast, which had already lost the fullness of the life she had so recently carried. At first she thought it was Kim, but in a flare of lightning she saw that it was Jack. He was sobbing.

  “I’m sorry, Jen, he said. “I lost my temper. I killed our baby...”

  “Shh,” Jenny said, stroking his stubbled cheek. She felt drugged, unreal, half dead.

  He said, “I’ve been out of my mind. Such horrible thoughts. I need you, Jenny. I need you to forgive me...”

  “I forgive you,” Jenny said, her fingers finding the tangled thickness of his hair. “We can have another baby. We can...”

  Jack, where’s Kim?

  But she sank into darkness again before the thought crossed the bridge into words.

  * * *

  Kim was afraid of the storm. There were a lot of windows in the house, and though she’d drawn the curtains on as many as she could, the lightning still found its way in. And there was no way to keep out the thunder. She watched TV for a while, then sat with her headphones on and listened to one of her mother’s fifties CDs. But the storm still reached her.

  Jumping at shadows, she crept downstairs to the basement. There were fewer windows down here and the thick foundation blunted the ferocity of the thunder. It was better down here.

  Knowing it was prohibited, Kim tried the door to her father’s target range, expecting to find it locked...but it was open, the room beyond it brightly lit, at once forbidden and alluring. She stood at the threshold, looking in.

  How she’d embellished this stark enclosure in her mind. What strange power she’d ascribed to it. Even on the few occasions she’d stepped inside to give him a message or to call him upstairs for supper, it had seemed a place of dark enchantment.

  And now, here it was.

  Kim stepped inside, timidly at first, then more boldly, examining the high shelves stocked with books about guns and the martial arts, the framed targets with neat round holes grouped in the ten ring, the glass-fronted gun cabinet, the long, cement-walled corridor that was the range itself.

  And it was nothing. Without her father in it, it was just a tidy hole in the ground.

  Kim tried the door to the gun cabinet and found it unlocked, another surprise. She selected a pistol at random, a stainless steel Colt .357 revolver with a four-inch barrel. She was startled by its heft and almost dropped it. Her heart sprinted in her chest. The grip was made of wood, the metal parts slick with a light film of oil. Kim recognized the smell. She’d noticed it often on her father’s clothes.

  After a minute of fiddling she got the cylinder open. The six smooth chambers were empty.

  Kim replaced the gun on its shelf and started looking for bullets. She found them in neatly stacked trays in a separate cabinet. There was a remarkable array, all shapes and sizes, but with a little trial and error she found the right ones, copper-jacketed .357 magnums. She plucked out two and rolled them in her palm, like worry stones, enjoying their smooth, deadly feel.

  The thrill of this trespass was indescribable, and every few minutes Kim stopped breathing and listened, wondering if the blunted thumps of thunder, marching away to the south now, were her father’s footsteps coming in from the garage. She kept glancing at the doorway, expecting to see him there, his expression malicious and calm.

  She got the Colt out again and chambered a bullet. It dropped into its slot with lethal precision. Like coming home, Kim thought. She started to load a second chamber and stopped, a memory coming to her. She snapped the cylinder shut and spun it briskly, then closed her eyes, playing the memory out in detail.

  It was the previous summer, the first time her parents had trusted her to look after herself while they went out to an R-rated movie. Excited and a little afraid, she’d poured herself a glass of pop and settled in front of the TV, scanning the Pay channels until she found her own R-rated movie, The Deer Hunter. This she watched with patient interest, curious to see why it had an R rating.

  Then, near the middle of the film, the mundane urban setting was torn away to reveal the war-charred jungles of Vietnam. In a stilted hut on the bank of a muddy river the Viet Cong forced exhausted POWs to play a deadly variant of Russian roulette, slotting a single cartridge into a revolver and spinning the cylinder, then making the men hold the gun to their temples and pull the trigger. The tension of this scene was unbearable and Kim felt it now, a tightening vice in her chest.

  Eyes closed, she stood in her father’s most private space and pressed the cold muzzle to her temple. Experimentally, she applied pressure to the trigger. The hammer creaked.

  Just a simple squeeze...

  Kim lowered the gun and opened her eyes. As in a dream she carried the weapon to the range, raised it with both hands—and pulled the trigger.

  The explosion deafened her, the recoil almost snapping her wrists. Kim looked at the smoking barrel in shock, then down-range to the man-shaped silhouette twenty feet away. It was backlit and she could see a ragged hole in its neck.

  I did it, she thought in astonishment. I did it.

  Then it struck her. If she’d pulled the trigger before...

  Kim sat on the cold cement floor and the shakes came. She hung her head and gulped for air, certain she was going to be sick...but the feeling passed quickly and she got back to her feet. The gun was still in her hand, reeking of cordite, the barrel as warm as a friendly palm. Numb, Kim replaced it on its shelf...and noticed a narrow drawer at her feet. She sat on her haunches and slid it open.

  Inside on a bed of green felt lay an assortment of tiny handguns: derringers, belly guns, ankle guns. Compared to the heavy artillery on the shelves above, these looked like toys. One in particular caught Kim’s eye, a pearl handled semi-auto, also a Colt. She brought it out and found it fit neatly into her hand. Holding it made her feel...safe.

  It took her awhile to find the right bullets and even longer to figure out how to release the clip and thumb in the tiny cartridges. But when the gun was loaded and perceptibly heavier in her hand, it gave her an entirely new feeling.

  Now she felt dangerous.

  Kim took the gun up to her room and hid it in a secret shoebox in the back of her closet, where she was sure no one would ever look.

  Outside, the storm laid waste to the night, but Kim was no longer afraid.

  12

  AT TEN TO TWO ON Sunday morning, when the waitress came around for last call, Will Armstrong ordered another double scotch. He had to shout to be heard over the plaintive, bass-heavy music. He downed the scotch while the bimbo on stage did her bump and grind. He hadn’t been to a strip joint in at least ten years and was mildly shocked when the evening’s first ‘exotic dancer’ strutted onto the runway and started fingering he
rself like a porn queen. The rules of shithouse etiquette had obviously changed in a decade.

  He scanned the smoky barroom, eyeing the other patrons, itching for a fight. He’d spent the past thirty-six hours in a futile search for Nina and the boys, and the frustration tortured him like a relentless cramp, knotting his shoulders, curling his fists into bludgeons.

  After feigning illness at work on Friday, he’d set out on a series of unannounced visits, dropping in on anyone he thought might harbor his wife and kids: friends of the family, relatives on both sides, including Nina’s bitch sister, Claudia. He’d even gone to the boys’ school, walked right into their classroom. But the twins weren’t there. “Your wife called to say they’d be out of school for a couple of days,” the teacher told him. “Is everything all right?”

  “Nothing’s all right,” Will said to the stripper’s ass as she left the stage and the house lights came up. “It’s all fucked up.”

  He got to his feet and swayed toward the exit, hoping some greaser would cross his path or eyeball him the wrong way. But no one did. It made him feel invisible, of no consequence, and when the night air struck him, he sobbed. The single thing he’d feared most since the day he met Nina was losing her...and now here he was, without her. Without his boys. He needed his family. She had no right to tear them apart like this. She’d violated a sacred trust, one which for Will ran much deeper than the vows they’d exchanged on their wedding day. Nina was his. She belonged to him, body and soul.

  When he caught up to her, he’d have to remind her of that.

  He continued down the stairs to the parking lot in the rain. By the time he climbed into the Suburban his petulance had swollen to fury.

  “Where are you?” he shouted, socking the steering wheel with his fist, cracking the padded vinyl. “Where are you?”

  Then it came to him. A snatch of conversation he’d had with Nina years ago, huddled next to her by a crackling fire in Algonquin Park, the two of them full of the urgent passion of youth. They’d slept together for the first time that night, a pair of virgins groping each other in a pup tent, and Nina had told him things afterward that moved him deeply, secret things that for Will completed the circle of their love. The part of her disclosure he remembered now lead to a second, more tender session of lovemaking.