A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  Kyle Bowen was with him in the room, standing near the door, watching and telling him not to worry, she was going to be okay. DeMarco asked what time it was and Bowen said, “12:17.” DeMarco asked what time the ambulance had picked up Jayme, and Bowen said, “It must have been about an hour ago.”

  “That doesn’t seem possible,” DeMarco told him. “It seems like it was yesterday some time.”

  Later there was a doctor in the room who asked DeMarco to lie on his stomach while the doctor pressed his fingertips on and around the tailbone. Then the doctor left the room and a nurse came to take his blood pressure and a sample of his blood. The blood on his arms and legs was cleaned away and all the little wounds examined and painted orange-brown with Betadine. Butterfly bandages, gauze patches and tape were applied and a hypodermic needle was pushed into one buttock. Then he was wheeled away for an MRI.

  Afterward DeMarco was in a bed and trying not to fall asleep, with Bowen still watching from inside the door and a man who seemed distantly like Ben Brinker leaning close to tell DeMarco everything was going to be okay. And then some time later he opened his eyes to find himself in an enormous soft bed in an all-white room, with the sunlight pleasantly bright and warm and golden through the open windows, a cool breeze smelling of oranges coming through the windows to blow across his face and arms and hands. There were no bandages on his body and no pain anywhere, and finally the dense black rumbling inside his head was gone, and the heaviness in his chest had lifted, and everything was clear now, everything was fine and soft and sleepy, and there was a boy smiling down at him with a smile and blue eyes he had known for a very long time.

  Eighty-Nine

  It was Ben who told him about the baby. “But she’s going to be all right,” he kept saying, his broad dark face trying to look happy, but his forehead sweaty and his eyes full of concern. “Everything else is okay, man. I promise you she’s okay.”

  Ben kept talking but all of the sound disappeared when DeMarco heard about the baby. He understood in an instant what Jayme must be feeling, a mother and now not one, and he a father without knowing it, and now not one again. He also understood why she hadn’t told him, what a dolt he had been, what an insensitive dolt, and with that knowledge a great black silence descended over him. Ben’s voice went silent, the room went silent, DeMarco’s own heart fell silent. The silence muffled and suffocated everything but grief, everything but pain. The hospital was engulfed and consumed by the silence, as were the earth and heaven and every drop of light the universe held.

  Ninety

  More time passed in a syrupy, meandering kind of way, twisting out and away from him like brown taffy pulled in all directions. Later he was surprised to realize that he was sitting up in a wheelchair with a deep soft pillow beneath him, and the air in the room turning clearer by the second, but then too bright, and every clang and beep and slam from out in the hallway too loud. He was wearing a new knit shirt, butter yellow, but had no idea where it had come from, no recollection of pulling it on over his head. The skin on his face was tight, as if with sunburn, and the tip of his nose was tender when he touched it. There were a half dozen places on his arms still painted with Betadine or bandaged or wrapped in tape, and his right hand felt swollen and his fingers stiff when he tried to flex them. But even those sensations seemed distant to him, not immediate or fully experienced, more like the memory of an experience than the actual present pain.

  Ben was still there, and told him again that Jayme was doing okay. The knife wound did no arterial damage, took twenty-six stitches to close and had put a notch in her fifth rib. Vee had come to the hospital with Ben and was throwing her weight around, Ben said, had handed out the marching orders and didn’t care who liked it or didn’t. DeMarco had a bruised coccyx and had also been treated for several cuts and bruises acquired while scrambling over the pile of metal desks.

  “You couldn’t remember when you had your last tetanus shot,” Ben told him, “so they gave you a booster. They jabbed you with some morphine too. I told them you’d be pissed but they did it anyway. That was maybe seven or eight hours ago. You’re on acetaminophen with codeine now. If you’re feeling a little spacey, that’s why.”

  Connor McBride was in ICU, with Fascetti and Olcott standing by, eager to question him. “The FBI is there too,” Brinker said, “seeing as how he crossed state lines. So the other guy, Khatri, the one we think McBride called Magus in his journal, he’s the feds’ problem now.”

  DeMarco couldn’t remember being told that McBride had a journal or that one belonging to him had been found.

  “You were pretty out of it, I guess,” Ben said. “But yeah, we found it. About fifty yards upriver from the hospital. No idea what it was doing there.”

  “Daksh dumped it,” DeMarco said.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “What does it say?”

  “Most of it is just McBride rambling about how much he hates everybody. But the good parts,” Ben said, “the good parts are all confession.”

  “He confessed to all three?”

  “Tell you what,” Ben said. “I need to take another look at it tonight. Then I’ll get a copy of it made for you and Jayme. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  Only one witness, in addition to the two kids, had come forward so far to report on Daksh’s footrace up the river, probably to his parked car, Ben said. “But don’t think for a second he’s going to get away with this.”

  DeMarco was interested in what Ben was telling him, but more interested in finding Jayme. He kept trying to get up out of his wheelchair, but every time he did, the pain pulled at him like a thick, searing cord, while Ben’s heavy hand on his shoulder pushed down, and the two forces were too much for DeMarco, whose strength seemed to have evaporated.

  “I need to see Jayme,” he said again, for maybe the thirtieth time, and finally he was wheeled into the room where she lay sedated and sleeping. Vee was sitting in a padded chair on the window side of the bed, holding Jayme’s hand and softly praying. DeMarco was pushed up close to the other side, where he slipped one hand under Jayme’s and gripped her wrist with his other hand. He thought she looked pale in her powder-blue hospital gown, her hand cold, her beautiful hair brushed back and held in place by an elastic white headband—a way she never wore it. All this troubled him, made him shiver despite the hot flush of fear in his chest. He bent forward to press his lips to the back of her hand, and swore to himself that he would not move from that position until she opened her eyes and returned to him.

  Ninety-One

  The only human sense and the only human emotion that grief cannot blunt is grief itself.

  He heard that thought but did not know if it was his own or one of Huston’s. He slept bent over with his head on the edge of Jayme’s mattress, his body motionless but for when a sharp pain made him twitch. At those times his brain lit up in what he thought of as a loud silent noise, and in that instant between when the light winked out and he woke, a brief passage from Huston’s notebooks would whisper to him in his own voice. The first time, he heard:

  The end of days did not come as we expected. All of us were surprised.

  The first sign was a faint arrow of stars. Not everybody could see it, not even on the darkest night. But we did.

  He woke then and lifted his head and saw Jayme sleeping, Vee watching him from across the bed. He smiled at her and laid his head down again. He drifted back into sleep, body still and brain dark. Then another twitch and flare of light, and he heard:

  In the fall the novel was always there, but I did not go to it anymore. The air was cold inside and outside the house, and the sky, no matter how bright was always gray.

  Throughout the rest of that day and night, he remained in the room with Jayme, sometimes slept and sometimes did not. Just before falling asleep, or just before waking, the anomalous snatches of Huston’s words came back to him, disparate fragments
. Each time he woke fully, he marveled at the unpredictable nature of memory, and wondered if it had some secret purpose of its own.

  From time to time Jayme awoke and looked at him, but her eyes were dull, her smile weak. He might speak to her and she might murmur an answer, their voices soft and hoarse, expressions muted. Food was brought, then taken away untouched.

  In the evening when there was no light outside the window but for artificial light, nothing natural and soothing but for the darkness itself, Jayme sat up and sipped from a glass of warm water, DeMarco from a cardboard cup of cold coffee. He told her all that had happened inside St. Margaret’s, but wasn’t sure how much she was absorbing, how much she would retain. His own thoughts were still none too coherent. There seemed an odd thickness to every movement, every word, every look, as if the air had gelled all around them.

  She apologized in a voice that was gravelly and slow. “I don’t know why I trusted him. He played me like a cheap violin.”

  He apologized in a voice that was weak and strained. “I fell for it too. I never once thought about checking out his story. I’m the senior officer, it’s my fault, not yours. I almost got you killed.”

  “I thought he was trustworthy. I’m sorry, babe. So sorry.”

  He shook his head through the gelatinous air. “As trustworthy as a cure for baldness,” he said. But neither of them laughed. There was no laughter anywhere in the room.

  They touched each other’s wounds, gazed helplessly at each other’s tears. Neither of them referred directly to the miscarriage. But he asked her once, when her eyes came open after a brief sleep, “How are you feeling?”

  And she answered, after a long pause for self-assessment, “Empty.” They held hands, embraced, yet each felt alone inside an unassailable misery.

  Sometime around midnight, or what felt like midnight, she asked if the room’s door could be closed and the glass panel covered, and when the nurse said I’m sorry, we can’t do that, DeMarco walked the hallway, grimacing with every step, until he found a bulletin board and removed two thumbtacks. Back in Jayme’s room he covered the glass with a towel, pushed the thumbtacks into the thin wooden frame, closed the door, and took his seat beside her again.

  When she slept, he closed his eyes too. He dreamed of Panama. He was facedown in a muddy pit, at the bottom of a stack of rotting bodies, twisted sideways so that his right arm extended up through the stack, one hand in the fetid air. Standing up there atop the bodies was a barefoot blue-eyed boy in brown shorts, feet and legs covered with blood-reddened mud, his face and arms charred by the flamethrowers. He had taken hold of two fingers on DeMarco’s hand, one finger clutched in each tiny fist, and the boy kept pulling and screaming, pulling and screaming, No respires, señor! Do not breathe! The stink of death will consume you!

  Ninety-Two

  Saturday morning came and slowly passed. They took turns washing up in her hospital room’s little bathroom, and when he finished and came back to her bed, she was fully dressed in a pair of blue scrubs and sitting in the chair by the window. She had her back to the glass, wasn’t looking out, wasn’t looking at anything in particular, eyes cast to the floor. What difference did the weather make, or the world outside?

  She was wearing a pair of pink hospital socks with tiny rubber bumps on the soles and heels. So she won’t slip, he thought, and then realized that his brain still wasn’t working clearly, was still surrounded by a dulling haze, just as hers must have been.

  He said, “I’m sorry. I should have brought you some clean clothes.”

  “This is fine,” she said, and pushed the hair away from her eyes with a slow, heavy swipe. “Do you know where my shoes are?”

  He found them in the little closet, slipped them on her feet and tied the laces. So far they had spoken of the baby only in a few hushed whispers. Did Ben tell you yet? Yes, my love, he did. I’m so very, very sorry. He resolved to say no more about it until she wanted to talk. If she wanted to talk. He knew very well the wall of isolation that grief builds around a person. What he did not know was how to breach that wall. Or even if he could, buried as he was under his own mountain of dead.

  A few minutes before nine, Vee and Ben showed up with fresh coffee and croissant breakfast sandwiches in a white paper bag. “Did you have breakfast yet?” Ben asked.

  “I’m sorry, Ben,” Jayme said. “The smell of food makes me nauseated.”

  He held the bag toward DeMarco. “You?” he asked, and DeMarco, though he was starving, hadn’t eaten anything since the morning of the attack, shook his head no.

  Ben removed the cups of coffee from the bag, set them on the tray table beside the bed, then took the sandwiches out to the nurses’ station. When he returned, DeMarco was sipping from one of the cups. Ben asked, “When do you get sprung?”

  “After the doctor stops by,” she said.

  Ben nodded. Turned to DeMarco. Said, “You guys want an update, or…?”

  DeMarco looked to Jayme. She said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “We got a little more out of McBride this morning. He’s still groggy but stabilized, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to flip like a shiny penny. I mean we have his journal, which is as good as a confession already. Plus, those FBI boys painted a pretty picture for him of his cell in Chillicothe. Told him how it took Dennis McGuire twenty-five minutes to die back in 2014. You should’ve seen the look on the kid’s face.”

  DeMarco asked, “Any sign of Daksh?”

  “Every two-, four-, and one-lane road in three states is being watched. Turns out there’s no vehicle registered in his name. But he didn’t walk to Pennsylvania, that’s for certain.”

  Jayme asked, “You think he had some help getting away?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “Either that or he did the Indian rope trick and disappeared into the clouds.” Then he looked to his wife, who had her head cocked and was frowning. “What?” he asked. “Was that racist of me?”

  She clicked her tongue, shook her head. Jayme and DeMarco shared the smallest of smiles.

  Vee said, “How about you boys go bring the car around. Give me a couple minutes with Jayme before the doctor comes. We’ll catch up with you in the lobby.”

  Ninety-Three

  Going down in the elevator, DeMarco had to put a hand to the shiny wall. Moments of dizziness came and went; moments of confusion. A minute later, walking out through the lobby, he asked, “How’d you get my car here?”

  “You gave me the key yesterday,” Ben said.

  “Oh. Yeah,” DeMarco said, though he had no recollection of the transaction.

  Ben took the car key from his pocket, held it out. “You okay to drive?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks.” DeMarco palmed the key. “Thanks for everything, Ben.”

  “I’ve got something else for you too,” he said, and reached back to his right hip pocket, pulled forth a roll of printer paper held together with a rubber band. He clutched it like a runner’s baton, ready to pass it off. “You listen to my phone message yet? The one I left you last night?”

  “Phone’s still off,” DeMarco told him. “I haven’t thought to turn it on yet.”

  “Okay, well,” Ben said, and tapped the edge of the roll against his left palm, “you should maybe listen to it before you look at these papers. Photocopies from Connor’s journal. It’s only six pages or so, just the relevant parts. But some of it, I think, is going to surprise you.”

  “How so?” DeMarco asked, but there was a flatness in his voice, a lack of interest.

  “Don’t worry about it for now.” Ben extended the papers to him. “Whenever you guys want to take a look.”

  DeMarco waited until he had unlocked the car and opened the door, then he took the papers and climbed inside and tossed the roll of papers up against the windshield.

  Ben followed him to the edge of the car door, stood there with his hand on the doorframe
, holding it open. “One other thing,” he said, but then looked back toward the hospital, over the roofs of a field of parked cars. DeMarco waited.

  Ben’s gaze came back to him. “Jayme was talking to Vee, and Vee thought you should know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Jayme’s afraid you’re going to think she tricked you somehow. That she did it on purpose.”

  DeMarco slid sideways on the seat, his knees toward the sheriff. “What are you talking about, Ben?”

  “Back in Kentucky. She was worried crazy about you when you took off in the RV by yourself. Angry as hell too, yeah, but mostly worried sick about you. And then not a word from you in what, three days?”

  “My phone was dead.”

  “I know, I know. And you were shot at, injured, everything else that happened to you. Jayme told Vee all about it…and Vee told me. Thing is, Jayme didn’t know any of that until you got back. She said she was a zombie the whole time you were gone. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight. You know what it’s like, man. You’ve been there, I know.”

  DeMarco nodded. “You’re saying she forgot to take her pills.”

  “It wasn’t deliberate, that’s the thing. People make mistakes. Especially when they love somebody, and that somebody’s gone. You can’t hold it against her.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She already blames herself. Both for getting pregnant, and then losing it.”

  DeMarco’s eyes were on the dirty pavement now, his head going back and forth, his throat thick.

  “She’s afraid you’re going to hate her for it,” Ben said.