Victim

by Gary Kinder

  With heavy doses of antibiotics, painkillers, and tranquilizers being pumped into him, Cortney was lethargic and unresponsive. Still, he begged for more pain shots, and would beg again and again only minutes after they were given. He pleaded so frequently for shots to deaden the pain or help him sleep that the nurses had to say no, then try to console him and comfort him until it was time for his scheduled injections. As they spoke to him, Cortney would scream, “I hurt! I hurt all over!”

  Cortney lay in bed, drifting in and out of awareness for five days before the fever finally began to break on August 16. Then his bowel sounds slowly began to return, and the inflammation in his belly appeared at last to be subsiding. By the seventeenth his temperature had dropped to below 100 degrees and he seemed more coherent. On that day Cortney said to a nurse, “What is this illness I have?”

  Two days after he asked about his illness, Cortney wanted to know why he was in the hospital. He continued to be belligerent and uncooperative, but now that his fever was down, he began verbalizing more, having short conversations with the nurses. Prior to his exploratory he had also been speaking more to the nurses, the day before his operation he had even been able to arrange his thought processes well enough to give a simple explanation of the workings of the calculator his father had brought him from home. But awakening from coma is a confused, gradual process, with drugs and high fever adding to the confusion. Despite his signs of increasing consciousness the nurses had never felt that Cortney was truly coherent when he spoke to them. Now, for the first time, they sensed that he sometimes was actually aware of what he was saying. One afternoon he said to one of them, “I wish I could wake up and find this is just a bad dream.”

  Claire had been to southern California for a few days in July and brought Cortney some Mickey Mouse ears and a T-shirt from Disneyland. By then Cortney had been in the ICU so long and had collected so many things while there that his room had begun to take on the comfortable ambience of his bedroom at home. Hanging from the ceiling was an orange, radio-controlled airplane with a six-foot wingspan, given to him by his next-door neighbors. Smaller model airplanes hung from the bar above his bed. He had a portable stereo with headphones in a corner of the room, and on a bedside table sat a terrarium filled with plants and a tiny ceramic deer. The ICU housekeeper had taken Cortney’s poster of a 747 cockpit down to the hospital engineers and had them cut a board to tack it on, so it could be stood up in front of Cortney like a real cockpit with all of the dials and gauges. There were posters on the walls that Claire had hung, puzzles that Cortney now sometimes dawdled with, and his chess set and calculator sitting nearby. Hanging next to his bed was a ribbon of brown-check material with a typed card above it that read:

  CORTNEY NAISBITT—MONDAY, APRIL22, 1974—WOLFGANG LANGE

  Although Cortney was apparently more conscious now, he still paid little attention to what was happening around him. It seemed that the more aware of his surroundings he became, the more depressed and discouraged he felt. When he walked, he had to be reminded to stand up straight and sometimes even to move his right foot forward. He wanted a nurse with him constantly and cried when he was alone even for a few moments. Though he could communicate in simple sentences when he wanted to, most of the time he appeared tired and despondent.

  “He had a little cassette and he played the Kingston Trio,” remembered one of the nurses. “He liked that. And he’d play, I think it was ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ The tape was kind of old and it didn’t sound too good in one part, but he wanted to listen to that over and over. Those and his calculator were about the only things he showed any interest in. His friend Kelly came around when he was here, but a lot of times Cortney would just not visit. I think it was because he was just so sick. And he wasn’t always rational. He was always sort of semiconscious. He’d swear and rebel at everything, but mainly he was just a poor, whimpering, crying individual that still wasn’t with reality a lot of the time.”

  Byron’s office was in the medical building adjacent to the hospital, and with Cortney now becoming more aware, the frequency of his father’s visits was even greater than in the past.

  When he was in the McKay, why I’d run in and see him in the mornings when I’d make rounds, see if everything was all right. Then I’d call him from the office just to see if everything was okay. And if I had to go to the hospital, I’d run in and see him. And at lunch I’d run up and say hi. And after work I’d run in again and say hello. All through the day l‘djust check in every time that I was over there. I’d run in to see him. And if I hadn’t been there for a while I’d get to wondering about him, so I’d call. Just so that he knew that someone was looking after him and he wasn’t alone, that someone was there. That was the whole point. So he wouldn’t feel like he was just dumped in there and left.

  I’d just talk to him, you know, find out how he was doing and what was going on, and what he did through the day. And try to bring new stuff so that he could have something there for him. He had his airplanes in his room and his calculator and things, all this sort of thing for him. Just try to make him comfy. Sometimes he wouldn’t say much, and sometimes I wouldn’t say a great deal. I’d just come into the room and I’d just sit. I don’t think you have to converse. You just have to know that someone is around when you need them is all.

  The doctors who had tipped the balance back in Cortney’s favor with every new complication that arose often wondered if their continuous mending of Cortney’s body would ever be justified by the return of Cortney’s intellect. Over the weeks, as he had awakened gradually from the coma, his behavior had remained that of a child much younger than his chronological age. He would cry and call the nurses names and yell that they were trying to hurt him because they didn’t like him. “But even then,” said one nurse, “there would be flashes of a very bright boy. He might act like a four-year-old, but he could do things on his calculator that were intellectually beyond where he was emotionally.”

  Before the murders Cortney had had a fascination with calculators and computers, and one day near the end of July his father had brought a small calculator to the hospital. Then when his family had visited, they had set up simple problems for him to solve. At first, with the calculator cupped tightly in the rigid fingers of his right hand, Cortney had merely punched at the numbers they told him to. But gradually he had become capable of setting up the problems himself; he learned to use the functions correctly and often arrived at the right answer. As time went on, the problems had become more complex.

  Dr. Johnson walked into Cortney’s room one day to examine him and saw the calculator lying on the bed next to Cortney.

  “I said, ‘What’s that for?’” remembered Johnson. “And one of the nurses said, ‘Well, that’s for Cortney, his father brought it for him.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, Cortney is working some problems.’ And I said, ‘Uh, what kind of problems does Cort do?’ ‘Oh, he’s doing algebra and trigonometry and some kind of advanced stuff. I don’t know, they bring him in problems and he works them on the calculator.’ I thought that was a bit unusual. I had wondered if he was ever going to be able to go to school and participate in things, especially when he went berserk and was acting so childish, pulling out his tubes and giving Rees a karate kick. I thought we might have a kid that just had no control at all over his emotions. But when I saw that calculator and he showed me his work, about that time I thought that he was for sure going to be okay.”

  One of Cortney’s regular visitors was a lively and amiable man of seventy-five, a Catholic priest named Father Louis Kern. Father Kern had met Carol Naisbitt and her children one day years before on the ski slopes and occasionally thereafter had seen them skiing. After the murders he had been one of Cortney’s first visitors, and since then he had looked in on Cortney nearly every day.

  “When I read about the accident and learned it was this lovely lady and her son, well, I went up to the hospital, and I asked the dad, I said: ‘Dr. Byron, you know I’m a Cat
holic priest, but I feel a great interest in this boy in there, and I just love him as a human being. Can I give him a blessing?’ And he said: ‘Father, he needs all the help he can get. You bet your life you can.’ So Cortney was unconscious and I went out to see him every night at St. Benedict’s, and made a little kind of what we call a novena for him, Saint Jude, the Saint of the Impossible. [Chuckle] Because it was pretty hopeless to start out with.

  “Then I had to leave for Europe, and just as soon as I came back, I went out to see him, and they told me that he was at the McKay Hospital. So I went every night to visit him there, and really he was a fitting son of that noble father. I really thought the boy was remarkable, and he [chuckle] he was human. Every now and then he’d use some good old forceful adjectives. I got kind of a kick out of it, because I remember that that was a sign that he was getting well. I don’t know when I’ve had an experience that impressed me so much, actually. When I’d leave, I’d give him a normal Catholic priest good-bye there, and I’d say, ‘Well, God love you now.’ And one day he said, surprised me, first word I ever heard him speak really, he said, ‘God love you too, Father.’”

  Father Kern visited Cortney in the evenings, and the first thing he would do upon entering the room was drop to the floor for ten quick push-ups.

  “If I can do this,” he would say to Cortney, “then so can you.” Then he would stand up and say, “Now come on, give me a good handshake,” and he would grab hold of Cortney’s tightly gnarled right hand, spread the fingers apart, and place them in his.

  “Well now, that’s good, that’s good. Now, I have some problems, Cort, will you help me?” Father Kern taught Spanish and French at a Catholic school in Ogden, and at night he often had to grade papers. “Will you use your machine to help me figure out these grades?”

  “He had a little computer there,” remembered Father Kern, “and he was fooling around with it, and so he’d help me figure my grades. And it was fine. He forgot everything else but helping me.”

  As psychiatrists had expected, Cortney’s memory of the murders appeared to have been erased by amnesia. Now, unable to remember what had happened to him, yet becoming more aware of his surroundings, he would be confused at what he saw and felt, and he would ask questions. And someone at some time would have to tell him why he was in the hospital and how he had been hurt. Someone would have to explain to him why his mother never came to visit. But how would they know when Cortney was ready to hear?

  “It was told to the family,” said Dr. Iverson, “and should have been suggested to the doctors and nurses and everybody else to leave the accident alone for many months until he had a chance to recuperate physically, and integrate in other areas emotionally and intellectually. Then maybe he could be approached. Otherwise, I thought it would be too traumatic to him. I thought that when he had worked through the loss enough, he would start talking about it. And if they brought it up before then, it could possibly cause him to regress emotionally. If he brought it up, it would indicate that he was prepared to talk about it.”

  Cortney had begun asking questions about himself and the hospital often, but he seemed uninterested in the answers. It was as though he would forget his question as soon as he had asked it. While Claire was visiting him one day, Cortney asked her, “Why am I in the hospital?”

  “You’ve had an accident,” said Claire.

  Cortney did not ask how the accident had occurred or what his injuries were. He seemed not to want to know any more.

  After his first shallow probing with questions about his surroundings, Cortney finally asked about his mother, as he awakened one morning the latter part of August.

  “I just told him his mother couldn’t be there right at that time,” remembered the nurse, “and he said, ‘Why?’ His dad had said that if he asked just to tell him his mother was sick. Because he wanted to tell Cortney.”

  When the nurses would tell him his mother was sick, Cortney wouldn’t pursue the matter. Even his family’s noncommittal replies, such as, “Mother loves you, but she can’t be here,” brought no response from him.

  In August, Claire’s wedding announcement appeared in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.

  You know how you have your little picture in the paper? And they tell about your engagement and when you’re going to get married and all this stuff? Well, that was in the paper, and I brought the paper clipping to the hospital. And it said, you know, “daughter of the late Carol Naisbitt,” or something like that. And I didn’t know whether Dad wanted him to read it or not. But he said, “Yeah, give it to him to read.” So Cortney read it, and he just said, “Oh, that’s really nice.” And he was really excited about Scott, and all that. And he wanted to see my ring and the whole bit. But he didn’t say anything. He read it a couple of times very carefully. A couple or three times, very carefully. But he didn’t say anything. We were hoping he would ask about it, because the trials were coming up before too long, and he had been watching TV. He watched TV all the time, and he knew all about what was going on, on TV, you know. So here he is, it’s going to be flashed across television, and Dad didn’t want him to learn from the TV. But he didn’t want to just tell him, either. Because he wanted him to face it. Dr. Iverson was the one that kind of advised Dad. He said: “Until he asks about his mother specifically, we’re not gonna say anything about it. Because he knows that he might not be ready to face it. When he asks about it, he’ll be ready.” So we were all just going, Oh, please ask us about it.

  Nearly two weeks had passed since Cortney’s fever had subsided after the exploratory. His condition, though still fragile, had continued to improve, and he was stronger than he had been since he had arrived at McKay-Dee two months earlier. On occasional afternoons toward the end of August, Byron began taking him out of the hospital for short visits home.

  The first time we took him out of the McKay, the one I recollect, we put him in the car and took him home, and he had all his bottles and tubes and stuff still in him. It took him a while to get in and out of the car. You gotta remember he was so damn weak he couldn’t do anything at this point. Just to get in the house was a major effort. And to get out of the car, or do anything at all, you know, just to move, was an effort.

  At first we would have to take him in in a chair, and then pretty soon he got so he could just walk just a little bit and he’d walk in from the car. He’d go up the front walk, through the front door and then he just lay there on the couch. I’m not sure if he was aware he was home. But it was nice for us to have him home, and he gradually got more and more used to that, and it was great for everybody. I don’t know if it was really great for him, but it was great for us. It was a feeling that he was making some progress. After being in the condition that he was in for such a long time, it was great to see him move around a little bit. Made me feel like he was getting better quicker. I knew basically that he wasn’t getting better quicker, but it made me feel like he was.

  Then we started taking him up to the fish hatchery up here in the valley. He used to like to go up there and fish when he was a little kid. So we would haul him up there in a wheelchair and push him down to the creek, dangle him a pole. He would have trouble throwing the pole out. He hadn’t practiced a lot using his left hand, and his right hand wasn’t worth a pinch. But he’d catch a few fish. Kind of. If it looked like he was losing them, why we’d help him a little bit. So, I don’t know. We would just talk a lot. Claire went up a couple of times and Gary went up once. We would go up and sit there and fish for a while. He wasn’t … I’m not sure he was right with the program even at that point. He didn’t, you know, notice the surroundings much, but he did seem to enjoy just sitting there and fishing.

  Up Ogden Canyon and north into Nordic valley is an old dairy farm backed up against the mountains. Behind the dairy barns in a meadow of short green grass meanders a deep, slow stretch of creek stocked with hatchery trout. The farmers once allowed people to fish there and charged them a small fee for the fish they caught.

/>   Labor Day morning, the second of September, Byron, Gary, and Claire picked Cortney up at the hospital at eleven o’clock. After maneuvering Cortney into the front seat of the car and hanging his IV bottle from the clothes hook, Gary and Claire climbed into the backseat and Byron drove up Ogden Canyon to the fish hatchery. As early as it was, leaves on some of the trees in the surrounding Wasatch mountains already were beginning to turn.

  Cortney’s blond hair had darkened during his long stay in the hospital. He was pale, his complexion marred by patches of tiny reddish bumps. On his chin was a bit of a goatee, a thin moustache on his upper lip, and soft, wispy hair covering both cheeks. That day he was wearing a yellow Windbreaker and a white tennis hat.

  When the Naisbitts arrived at the hatchery, Byron and Gary got Cortney out of the car and put him in his wheelchair, while Claire unhooked his IV bottle and hung it on the stainless steel rod rising behind him. With Cortney settled in the chair, they wheeled him down to the creek and Cortney took hold of a cane pole with his left hand, using his tightly cupped right hand as a fulcrum. Gary baited his hook and helped him swing the line out into the creek.