Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “You have a fractured jaw,” he began. “We’ve wired it shut and immobilized your head with a splint. It should be as good as new in a month or so, but until then, your ability to talk and eat will be restricted.”

  She could remember Bob’s fist crashing into her face.

  “Along with that, you have a crushed larynx, which means you really can’t talk for a while. Think of it as having a very sore throat. We did a procedure we call a tracheotomy, which is a big word that means we put a little hole in your windpipe to help you breathe more easily.”

  She remembered Bob’s hand closing around her throat.

  “Moving on,” Waschkowski said, as though he were a do-cent describing masterpieces in a museum, “we have several cracked ribs, which we simply taped up because modern science hasn’t yet provided us with a better way of mending them.”

  She could feel the toe of Bob’s shoe smashing into her over and over again.

  He pointed to a tube emerging from the side of her rib cage. “Now this little beauty is what we call a chest tube. We put that in because one of your ribs went and poked a hole in your right lung. Think of your lung as something like a balloon, and then picture what happens when you stick a pin in that balloon.”

  Waschkowski saw her eyes widen. “Fortunately, a hole in a lung isn’t something to worry about these days,” he went on smoothly. “The tube will drain the fluid out of your chest cavity and then your lung will reinflate, just like that balloon again, and most likely heal all by itself.”

  He was so casual about it that Karen supposed having a hole in a lung wasn’t such a big deal, after all.

  “I bet you can pretty much figure out what the cast on your arm is for.”

  Blink.

  “I thought so. It was a clean fracture, easy to set. You’ll probably have signatures from the entire staff on that cast by the time it comes off.”

  She remembered falling out of a big maple tree and breaking her arm when she was eight. She had worn a cast for six weeks. “I told you so,” her mother’s voice echoed.

  “Next,” Waschkowski continued, “we have some discomfort in the abdomen, right?”

  Blink.

  “That’s because we had to open you up inside and fix a few things. Do you know what a spleen is?”

  There was a pause before Karen blinked once, then twice.

  “Yes and no,” Waschkowski interpreted. “Well, that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter, because you don’t have one anymore. It was ruptured, so we took it out. Luckily, you can live to a very ripe old age without it.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her about the uterus, about how torn it was, about how they had tried to repair it, but failed.

  “You also lost a fair share of blood along the way,” he said instead. There would be time enough later, when she was stronger, physically and emotionally, to tell her she would never have children. “So we gave you a couple of pints of healthy new A positive to fill up those veins again. And last, but not least, we have a smashed kneecap. Now I happen to like the symmetry of it,” he joked, “seeing as it’s your right arm that’s busted and your left kneecap that’s smashed. But you might prefer to be lopsided.”

  Blink. Blink.

  “Ah, good,” he said with a grin. “You obviously share my sense of artistic proportion. We put a splint on the leg, which will immobilize it until we can operate. There’s an orthopedic specialist waiting in the wings who’ll tackle the job when you’re a bit stronger.”

  He told her about the pneumonia next, again as though it were an everyday occurrence rather than a potential killer, and about the IV dripping nourishment and antibiotics into her system, and about the sinister-looking machine that monitored her heartbeat and the cuff on her arm that allowed the nurses to take her blood pressure.

  Finally, he told her about Margaret Westfield and her dog Brandy.

  “Animals have excellent instincts,” he said.

  When she was four years old, Karen was bitten by a neighbor’s Rottweiler and had since been somewhat wary of dogs. How ironic, she thought, that she might now owe her life to one.

  “Your parents are here,” Waschkowski said at the conclusion of his monologue. “They’ve been here right from the start, of course, and they’ve really been keeping us on our toes for the past eight days.”

  Karen had listened to the recitation of her injuries with relative calm, but now her eyes opened so wide they threatened to engulf her entire face. Eight days? She had lost eight days? How was that possible? And much worse, in that time, how many strangers had looked at her, examined her, and discovered the awful things that Bob had done to her? It was humiliating to realize what they had seen.

  She began to agonize over what they must have thought of her as she lay unconscious and unable to explain. They must have thought her stupid, at best, to get herself in such a situation. At worst, cheap and common. Tears welled up in her eyes again. Even her mother and father knew, before she had a chance to prepare them. Above all, Karen prayed she wasn’t pregnant. Anything but that, she silently begged a God she didn’t know if she still believed in.

  At that moment, all she wanted was to rip the tubes and wires from her body and crawl, if she had to, into a hot shower bath, to burn off the layers of skin that the monster in the night had touched, to scrub away all evidence of his existence. Even as she struggled to get her mind around the enormity of her ordeal, she knew that she would never be completely clean again. The tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Waschkowski’s heart turned over. “Look,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you that you haven’t had a rough deal here. You have. Rougher than anyone deserves. But you’re a strong young woman. The fact that you’ve made it this far proves that, and you’re going to make it the rest of the way. It may take a little time, but you’re going to be just fine. In all the weeks and months ahead, you remember that I told you so— and that I’m never wrong.”

  He had a sincere face and kind eyes and Karen wanted so much to believe him.

  As a doctor, Stanley Waschkowski knew, perhaps better than most, how badly a body could be ravaged by an unexpected injury or a debilitating disease. He had learned how to set bones and treat infections with a reasonable expectation of success. But he had never, in all his years of schooling and practice, been called upon to treat a damaged soul.

  five

  Karen slept a great deal after that. Deep, dark, pain-free slumber that blotted out reality and hastened the healing. It was so much easier not to have to think and not to have to feel and not to have to remember. She wished it might go on forever.

  She would lie in oblivion until the nightmares came to jolt her back into consciousness, and then she would stare up at the reassuring pocked ceiling and around at her cocoon of white night curtains and listen to the soft noises of the special care nurses at work until the panic ebbed and her heart stopped its erratic pounding and she could close her eyes and float back into forgetfulness. She had no concept of hours or days. Her only indicator was that sometimes it was light outside the window when she awakened and sometimes it was dark.

  Once, when she opened her eyes, her parents were there. She wanted to smile and tell them not to worry about her, but her wired jaw wouldn’t cooperate, and nothing more than the now familiar gurgle made its way past her throat.

  “Hello, darling,” Beverly cooed. “Daddy and I are right here and we’re making sure you get the best possible care.”

  Gurgle.

  “Don’t try to talk, sweetheart. You just rest. That nice Dr. Waschkowski says the more you rest, the quicker you’ll be all well again.”

  Karen needed no encouragement. She drifted off, almost immediately, eager to return to nonexistence. Another time she awakened, Peter was sitting in a chair beside the bed.

  “Hi, honey,” he said gently. “Happy 1963.”

  Dimly, she remembered that he was coming down from Maine to spend New Year’s with her and that they were going to live happily ever af
ter. But she had slept through New Year’s and there was no happily ever after in her nightmares.

  By the end of a month, she had been moved out of the special care unit and into a private room at the other end of the third floor.

  Here, the walls were painted a surprising pastel-peach color with a broad band, the exact shade of ripe raspberries, circling the room just above eye level. Curtains striped in peach, raspberry, forest green and gray framed the window. Two upholstered chairs, which stood like bedside sentinels, matched the curtains. Except for one swath from the door to the bed, the institutional linoleum that covered most of the hospital’s floors had been replaced by a dove-gray carpet. A framed Monet print hung over the bed, a Renoir accented the opposite wall.

  “This whole wing was redecorated last year,” Julie van der Meer, the aide, told her. “The designer convinced the administrator that recovering patients would recover faster if they were surrounded by cheerful colors and a touch of class.”

  The special care unit was located in the relatively quiet rear of the building, but this room looked right out onto busy First Avenue. Now, Karen was treated to the drone of traffic, night and day, and the indiscriminate intrusions of squealing brakes and honking horns and angry voices.

  Sometimes in the late hours of the night, as she waited for sleep, she would think about the people in those cars and buses and taxis and trucks and wonder where their lives were taking them. It was her first reconnection with the outside world.

  The day Karen was able to take her first real food—a chocolate milk shake, from a flexible straw inserted in the corner of her mouth—everyone celebrated. It tasted delicious and she drank almost all of it. She had lost fifteen pounds since entering the hospital, and the doctors were anxious to get some of that weight back on her slender frame.

  Now that she was no longer attached to all the tubes and wires, the staff began to fuss over her, bringing nourishing drinks at all hours, sponge-bathing her sometimes twice a day, combing her hair before her parents arrived, giving her muscle-stimulating massages. Karen could see how proud they were of their handiwork, having put the bits and pieces of her back together again. But she was so totally unfamiliar to herself that it was as though they had worked without a pattern and gotten it all wrong. She wished they would stop fussing and go away.

  Her parents came to see her almost every day, her father unutterably sad, her mother artificially cheerful. They encouraged her to finish all her liquids and to exercise her arms and legs as though they actually believed that was all that was necessary to make her whole again. Occasionally her younger sister Laura came with them and tried her best not to stare.

  And, of course, there was Peter, who sat beside her for hours on end, holding her hand and telling her funny little stories and smiling at her with his warm brown eyes, until the winter recess was over and he had to return to Cornell.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “You get someone to hold the phone for you and then tell me that you’re hearing what I’m saying. Of course, you’d better not let anyone else hear what I say,” he added with an impish grin. “That might be very embarrassing.”

  Karen wondered what could possibly be embarrassing to a staff of professionals who had seen and heard every single thing there was to see and hear about her since the moment she had been brought in out of the Central Park bushes.

  On her thirty-fourth day in the hospital, she said her first word.

  It was early afternoon and her mother sat in one of the striped chairs beside the bed, knitting. She was wearing a black suit over her matronly figure, and had on too much rouge.

  “To cover my hospital pallor,” she said with a chuckle.

  Her hair was swept stylishly up on top of her head and her eyelashes were coated with an extra layer of black mascara. It occurred to Karen that her mother had been wearing a lot of black lately and it was not a particularly becoming color.

  On the day Karen was moved to the private room, flowers had begun to arrive. They came from friends and relatives all over the country, from neighbors, and even from her father’s patients, until the combined fragrances of roses, chrysanthemums, tulips, gladiolas and delphinium almost succeeded in disguising the acrid smell of disinfectant. As soon as one bouquet began to wilt, another appeared to take its place. When there was no space left, Beverly would pluck the sender’s card from the arrangement and direct an aide to take it down to the charity wards.

  In addition to the flowers, dozens of cards came in the mail. Beverly would perch her eyeglasses on the end of her nose and read some of the clever ones aloud. Later, she would reply to all of them, thanking each one, in Karen’s name, for the good wishes. She had also sent a heartfelt note of thanks to Margaret Westfield.

  On this day, Beverly had just finished with the mail when Julie van der Meer brought in a huge vase of roses.

  “I believe this is the third bouquet from Jill and Andy,” Beverly said after a quick glance at the card. “I beg your pardon,” she amended, scanning the whole message. “This one is from Jill and Andy—and Rebecca Karen, born January twenty-third, seven pounds, two ounces, twenty-one inches, ten fingers, ten toes, all perfect.” Beverly put the card on top of the pile and resumed her knitting. “A girl. How nice. How sweet to name her after you.”

  Jill wanted to come to the hospital to see Karen, but Beverly put her off, as she put off everyone else except Peter, and that was only out of necessity. She explained that just the immediate family was allowed to visit, which was true—Bev- erly had issued those instructions herself. So the cards and flowers had come instead.

  “Shall I take these down to the ward?” Julie asked, the roses still in her hands.

  “No, not these, dear,” Beverly replied. “I think we’ll find a place for them here.”

  Beverly knit two and purled one. Julie looked for a place to set the vase. Karen looked from one to the other.

  “Ba-by,” she said.

  It was a half whisper, half groan, hoarse and wheezy, but it was most definitely a word, not a gurgle.

  Beverly dropped a whole row of stitches. “Did you hear that?” she asked, turning to Julie. “She spoke. I think she said baby. Did you hear?”

  “I heard,” Julie replied with a broad grin and hurried off to spread the news.

  Beverly jumped out of her chair and leaned over the bed. “That’s right, darling,” she encouraged, speaking slowly and distinctly as though her daughter might be hard of hearing or mentally retarded. “Ba-by. Jill’s had her ba-by. Can you say it a-gain?”

  “No,” Karen wheezed with an inward smile, wondering whether her mother actually thought she had lost her mind along with her voice.

  But Beverly missed the sarcasm. She was much too busy laughing and crying and jumping up and down all at the same time. Her little girl had spoken. In all the weeks of having to sit by and watch the mending process inch its way along, this was what she had been waiting for, praying for—proof that the damage to Karen’s body had not affected her brain. Broken bones could be explained, but what could be said about a broken mind?

  She had spent countless sleepless nights listening to Leo’s staccato snoring and contemplating the possibility of her daughter’s emerging from this disaster little more than a vegetable, unable to think or do for herself. Injury aside, minds had been known to crack under a lot less stress than Karen had endured.

  It didn’t matter that both Dr. Waschkowski and the neurologist had told her, over and over again, that there were no indications of any brain damage. What did doctors know anyway? As long as there was even the slightest chance that they could be wrong, Beverly would wait, hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

  There would be no question of keeping Karen at home, if it came to that, she was quick to realize. The town gossips would have a never-ending field day with it, and there was Leo’s dental practice to consider, not to mention Laura. And now, with one little word, Karen had erased all her mother’s fears.

  “Sw
eetheart, it’s so good to hear your voice again,” she cried, the tears of joy running down her over-rouged cheeks, tracking her mascara with them. “I was beginning to think I never would.”

  “No-such-luck,” Karen rasped.

  “Now, don’t overdo it,” Beverly instructed. “We can’t have you wearing out your vocal cords the very first time.”

  “I-want-to-tell-you…” Karen croaked, letting the sentence dangle.

  “I know, dear, but not now,” her mother said hastily.

  The last thing Beverly wanted to hear from her sweet, innocent daughter, she realized, were the gory details of what a madman had done to her. It would be so much easier to believe there really had been an accident.

  “You need your rest,” she said. “We’ve waited this long, we can wait a little longer. Right now, I’m going to go call your father and tell him the wonderful news.” She gathered up her knitting and prepared to flee. “When you’re a little stronger, the three of us will sit down and have a nice chat.”

  A nice chat, Karen thought. How like her mother to put a Hans Christian Andersen face on an Edgar Allan Poe tale. She didn’t know anyone who could do it better.

  “What do you say, darling? Isn’t that the best plan?”

  It was difficult enough to challenge Beverly when Karen was well. Now it was impossible. She blinked once, out of habit.

  six

  The word spread like a brushfire, whipping down the hospital corridors. “She spoke,” one joyfully told another.

  “That’s wonderful,” came the response.

  Doctors, nurses, technicians and aides whom Karen hardly knew were suddenly stopping by to exchange greetings. People she didn’t know at all were pausing at her door to give her a friendly smile and a thumbs-up sign. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be a part of her success.

  “I understand you had something to say today,” Dr. Waschkowski said that evening, a big grin covering his dear homely face.