Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  The trouble with emotional blackmail was once you let it start, there was no way to make it stop. I knew all about it.

  Lorie had been a seasoned pro.

  Now Holly was in a coma, drool oozing down her face, a pool of it on the sheet next to her.

  I would give anything to deliver her out of this.

  Maybe I’d been wrong to dust her off. Maybe I really was the heartless heel her sister thought I was.

  I couldn’t get over the astonishing coincidence that Joel McCain and Holly Riggs were both bedridden. Two people who’d been close to me. Had Stephanie told me the truth in the cul-de-sac outside Joel’s house, I might have learned of their fate within minutes of each other.

  What were the odds, I wondered, that these two situations would be almost identical?

  It freaked me out.

  9. POOR BABY, TELL AUNT MARGE

  A few minutes later, clad in a svelte navy business suit, Margery DiMaggio swept into the room as if she were about to accept an Oscar from the Academy, which, to the best of my memory, was how she swept into most rooms. DiMaggio was Holly and Stephanie’s aunt, sister to their deceased mother.

  I’d met her twice before, and each time we’d gotten along famously.

  “God, this is all my fault,” she said melodramatically. “If I was a Catholic, I’d confess to a whole roomful of priests. If they could tear themselves away from their little altar boys. Oh, what a detestable thing to say. I’m sorry, Steph. I just get so depressed coming here. I thought she was happier in the hospice. They played that music. I know you didn’t like it, but it was soothing.”

  “I didn’t mind the music, Marge. Or the hospice. We needed to run more tests. This was the place to do it.”

  As they hugged, the remnants of a family standing over its youngest living member, Stephanie looked over the older woman’s shoulder at the ceiling before her eyes lowered to me. I’d been brought here for interrogation and retribution, and now my presence had become offensive. Stephanie had used me the way she’d accused me of using her sister. Worse, for I’d never intentionally set out to hurt anyone. If people got hurt because of my actions, it was strictly on account of my own ignorance, stupidity, or lack of grace or because of their unrealistic expectations. Stephanie, on the other hand, had planned this assault like a four-star general.

  I started for the door.

  “Oh, Jim, honey,” DiMaggio said, speaking as if we’d last seen each other only yesterday. “Good of you to come. You didn’t hear what I said, did you? I hope you’re not Catholic.”

  “I’m not anything. I’m sorry the circumstances have to be so . . .”

  “I feel like it’s all my fault. She came to Washington because of me. This is my fault. Every bit of it.”

  “Aunt Marge, don’t be silly,” said Stephanie, glaring at me. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I feel so bad for you,” Marge said. “At least I can go home. You have to go back to Holly’s little place, where you’re surrounded by her things. Even her cat. This whole experience must be so dreadful for you.”

  “I like being surrounded by Holly’s things. In fact, I’ve been wearing her clothes just to feel closer to her. It’s Holly we have to be concerned for. Getting her back to her old self.”

  “You’re not still hoping for a miracle?”

  “Of course I am.”

  Two months ago when Holly and I had been seeing each other, I’d met Marge DiMaggio at an auction to raise money for muscular dystrophy research, an affair for which I’d had to dig up my tuxedo from the darkest part of my closet. Marge DiMaggio had been thrilled to death to see her niece out on the town with, as she’d put it, “a handsome and eligible fireman,” describing me in terms of marriage, the way so many women described men, as if that was our primary function in life, to be married to them. Marge liked me from the moment she set eyes on me. I guess she thought she was looking at a future nephew-in-law, though you’d better believe she didn’t get the idea from me.

  Even though she was twenty years older than I was, Marge had flirted with me and with every other male that night, a mannerism I attributed at the time to habit and alcohol rather than ambition and inclination; she’d gone on to belie her flirtations with self-deprecating remarks about being too busy to think about a private life. Marge was chic, smart, candid, and seductive in a sophisticated manner that went way over my head. My impression was that she was one of those older women who had always been a coquette and just couldn’t stop.

  DiMaggio was the CEO of an Eastside research company. She’d explained it to me once, but the details were fuzzy. Having resigned a profitable position as an executive in a New York department store chain ten years earlier, Marge had joined her husband’s fledgling research outfit. Then, out of respect for her husband’s memory, she’d stayed on with the company after his death. According to Holly, Canyon View now held patents that aided scientists across the country in gene and DNA research, patents that had enticed megacorporations to pump big bucks into Canyon View’s coffers.

  When Stephanie and Aunt Marge turned to me, I could see the family resemblance. They were both relatively short, the older woman a couple of inches taller than her niece, both with slightly squarish faces, a trace of freckles, light-colored eyes. Marge displayed an openness I found comforting under the circumstances, perhaps because there was already so much guile and manipulation in the room. “Jim . . .” she said.

  “It’s such a shock to see her like this. I—”

  “A shock?” Stephanie said loudly. “You sonofabitch. The only thing Holly ever meant to you was a romp in the hay.”

  “Despite what you may believe, Dr. Riggs, I feel awful. She’s the second friend I’ve seen like this today.”

  “Yes, you’ve already told me how you’re having such a bad day,” Stephanie mocked. “Poor baby.”

  “Okay. Sure. I could have treated your sister better. You probably could have, too. And maybe Aunt Marge could have. Maybe everybody could treat everybody better. But at least I don’t take my guilt out on total strangers.”

  I stalked out the doorway.

  For a moment Stephanie was speechless; then she yelled at my back and her shrieking voice told me how close I’d gotten to the heart of the matter. “Get out! Don’t ever come back! Get out! Get out of here, you stupid bastard!”

  I was halfway down the corridor when I realized Marge DiMaggio was following me.

  “Jim. Don’t listen to her. She’s been out of sorts. She cried for two days when she first got here.”

  DiMaggio stopped in front of me and hugged me, and after a few moments I could feel her heaving against my chest as she wept. She was fashionably New York thin, the flesh of her arms and back stringy and soft. “Jim, I can’t get over how good it is to see you. It was wonderful of you to come. And never mind Steph. You want to see Holly, you come any time.”

  It was hard to see a point in a second visit. Holly hadn’t known I was here tonight and would hardly jump up to greet me if I came again.

  “I’ll come as often as I can. I would have been down here sooner if I’d known.”

  “I know, dear.” Standing close, Marge DiMaggio held my elbows. She was about the same age as my mother, her hair dyed the same stark black as my mother’s, though, as far as I know, my mother hadn’t yet resorted to cosmetic surgery the way DiMaggio obviously had. “I feel so bad about all of this.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “No, it is. I should have done more for Holly. She came up here from California because I was the only family she had on the West Coast. At first I gave her a job with my company, but she didn’t want to work indoors. And she had no skills. So then when this truck-driving idea developed, I treated her to the driver’s school. I even threw work her way. That company she drove for in Seattle? It belongs to an old friend of mine. In fact, you two wouldn’t even have met if it hadn’t been for me.”

  “Really? How do you figure that?”

  “She w
as on her way to Canyon View to drop off a couple of boxes of books we’d ordered from back east. Now tell me. You said you had a friend who was ill?”

  “A firefighter I worked with. Finding out about him was a shock, but then to find out Holly’s in basically the same condition . . . I don’t even know what the odds of that are. I’ve been trying to reconcile this whole—”

  “He tried to commit suicide? Your friend?”

  “Fell off a roof. Marge, I feel so sick about Holly. She had her whole lifetime ahead of her.”

  “Tell me about your friend.”

  “I . . .”

  “I know how this works, Jim, and you need to talk this one out. I know exactly what you’re going through. Tell Aunt Marge all about it. I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

  I told her about our alarm to Joel McCain’s house, about his choking, about the family’s religious objections to medical intervention. At one point I must have mentioned Stan Beebe’s disjointed theories, because she homed in on it. “Syndrome? You say somebody out there thinks there’s some sort of disease going around that all these people are catching? And it’s a syndrome?”

  “Stan Beebe. One of our full-time department employees. He’s a good firefighter, but every once in a while he comes up with something a little wacky.”

  During our chat I watched the door to Holly’s room down the hallway, lest Stephanie come sprinting out to rip me a new asshole. I’d been an idiot to drive all the way down here.

  Maybe it was the way she listened or the way her gray-blue eyes stared up at me so relentlessly, but talking to Marge DiMaggio made me feel much better. Strange how tragedies can unite comparative strangers.

  10. TAKING IN THE BIG PICTURE

  It was not quite dark when I got onto I-5 and began driving north. Beyond the water park I took Highway 18 and headed east by northeast, the Douglas firs on either side of the narrow highway opening up to an occasional view of a housing development or shopping mall.

  It occurred to me that had Holly been considering suicide, she would have used the threat during our last phone conversation to lever concessions from me.

  But she hadn’t.

  At least not while I was awake.

  I’d made the mistake of telling someone at the firehouse I’d drifted off during that last phone call, and now whenever I got a call at work Click or Clack would announce over the station intercom, “Telephone for Jim Swope. Lieutenant Swope? Nap time.”

  I felt enough guilt over that call without finding out I was the last person Holly spoke to.

  She deserved better than me. Better than that bed in the hospital. Better than her angry sister even. When you thought about it, most of the women I’d been seeing in the past couple of years deserved better than me. Maybe Stephanie Riggs was right. Maybe her sister tried to kill herself because of the way I’d treated her.

  It was mind-boggling, because underneath I was basically a pretty decent guy.

  Today had been a double whammy. Joel’s predicament had been a jolt for us all. Joel and I, at fifteen years and twelve years of time in the department respectively, had known each other longer than any of the other full-timers. Having made lieutenant a year before I did, he often joked that he was my superior, though in fact we’d worked as equals until he was obligated to take over the department’s administrative duties following Newcastle’s death.

  Never one to volunteer for extra paperwork or meetings, Joel hadn’t been happy holding the reins of the fire department. When he fell off his roof, I’d made a bad joke that he’d done it on purpose in order to get out of running the department.

  Now the whole enchilada rested on my shoulders.

  After our call to Joel’s house, Karrie had wept openly. Stan Beebe had gone home sick. I might have done either or both, but at the time I was too upset about my meeting with the cannibal to think straight. You meet a man-eater like that, it disturbs you.

  What happened to Joel and Holly was the type of thing you could put off thinking about if you were thirty-four like I was. You could tell yourself you didn’t need to think about it for another forty years. I didn’t even have a corner of my brain where I kept problems like that.

  Three years earlier when my father had a stroke, I’d calculated that I had forty-six years before I needed to worry about it myself. Now I faced the inescapable fact that people my age were not exempt—were, in fact, dropping like flies.

  I was not exempt.

  It was something you always knew but tried not to face, in the same way teenagers knew they could die if they drove recklessly but, nonetheless, still drove as if they were invincible, which of course was why so many teenagers died in automobile accidents.

  None of us knew for certain whether Joel McCain’s brain was still functioning. Or Holly’s. To be able to think but not speak. To be able to itch but not scratch.

  You got like that, it had to be hell on earth.

  Stan Beebe had told me he’d rather be dead.

  I would rather be dead.

  Life was such a simple thing when you sat down and thought about it. You were conceived, born, lived for a few years, mated, had children, grew old, and then you died and fed the worms. Afterward, your offspring duplicated the process.

  Same as any animal.

  Same as a kernel of corn.

  My life was no different from anybody else’s. My days passed pretty much like everybody else’s. I got up in the morning and looked in the cupboard for a box of cereal. Thought about the fact that I needed to take the girls shopping for school clothes, that I’d forgotten to write a check for the phone bill. That the car needed gas. I found my wallet empty and went to the cash machine. Like those around me, I was consumed with the minutiae of daily life, by the fact that the driver in the next lane cut me off, by how much of a raise the fire department might expect from the city next year. Crap, all of it. Absolute crap.

  Rarely did anything that mattered touch my thoughts.

  The downpour of daily trifles was so constant and so steady I rarely had time to look up at the sky.

  It sounds foolish to say it, but the feeling of my own impending death seemed to fill the pickup truck. Some philosopher said that when we feel sad for somebody else’s death, we are actually mourning our own. He might have been writing about me.

  When I rolled down the window, the cool night air tossed around some papers on the seat beside me right before it brought tears to my eyes.

  DAY TWO

  11. WEAK LEGS, MILD HEADACHE,

  THE HANDS TAKE ON A WAXY APPEARANCE

  I woke up unable to breathe.

  When I opened my eyes, a seven-year-old was sitting on my chest, a nine-year-old alongside straddling my pillow as if it were a horse. Britney was skinny as a pencil. She’d been bugging me to cut her hair, which was the same shade of red her mother’s had been as a child. Her older sister, Allyson, had black hair that fell just beyond her shoulders, almost the same color as mine; she thought she wanted to keep hers long. Or short. Alternating opinions by the hour. Allyson was already beginning to stretch out into the elegant young woman she would become.

  Even though I discouraged it, Allyson had taken up the unofficial mantle of mother in the family, striving to be the voice of reason in any familial endeavor or discussion. Allyson had become the sober one, taking after my father and myself, Britney the free spirit, as Lorie had been, as my mother had been in her youth and now was again.

  The three of us had stayed up late playing Monopoly and listening to a Britney Spears CD. “Come on, Dad,” Britney said. “Your alarm’s been going off for hours. You have to wake up. Time to go to work.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I’d slept like a rock, which was unusual because I was generally a light sleeper, especially after a day as fraught with emotional scenes as yesterday. Now I had a headache. I wondered if I’d picked up a bug at Tacoma General. But then, I doubted a bug I’d picked up last night could strike so quickly.

  “It�
��s ten after seven,” Britney said. “You’re not going to have time for breakfast.”

  “The alarm go off? I didn’t hear it.”

  “Been buzzing for hours,” said Allyson, as if already bored with the day, rearranging my hair with one hand.

  “Your alarm woke us up, and we were all the way in the other room,” said Britney. “We’re just little. We’re supposed to sleep through anything.”

  “Know what else?” Allyson asked.

  “What?”

  “If you’re going to find a really good stepmother for us, you’re going to have to stop wasting your time on bimbos.”

  “What makes you think I was with a bimbo last night?”

  “You said yourself she was foxy.”

  “I meant foxlike. As in sharp teeth.” I gnashed my teeth. They laughed.

  “You always say we’d sleep through a nuclear saster,” said Britney.

  “Nuclear disaster, honey. And I didn’t hear my alarm.”

  “Buzzing for hours,” said Allyson.

  “Yup,” confirmed Britney, sighing. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about breakfast.”

  “I’ll grab a bite at the station.”

  “Dad, what happened to your hands?” Allyson picked up my right hand and showed it Britney.

  “Oh, ick,” said Britney as the front doorbell rang. “Looks like you got into the Elmer’s Glue.” She rolled off the bed and sprinted for the front door. “That’s Morgan.”

  “Don’t open up to strangers,” I said.

  “You know who it is, Dad,” Allyson said.

  Morgan was sixteen and lived next door. Baby-sitting for me was an easy-money summer job for her and a pleasant experience for my girls, partly because she looked on them as contemporaries and shared her secrets about boys and high school, partly because she brought over makeup and showed them how to apply it. Seven and nine, going on seventeen and nineteen, my girls shared a thousand little confidences with Morgan that I wasn’t supposed to know about, including the fact that Morgan had a crush on me.