by Wither
So be it. She turns around swiftly, prepared to meet her accuser. Shadows move across the banister-back chair. Someone rising…? It is just her shadow, cast by the now higher flame of the betty lamp. But she has faced down her own accusations. Or so she thinks.
Roland is waiting for her in the basement, lying beside the stone well, flat on his back, head hanging awkwardly to one side, one hand bent over his waist. Such large hands, she thinks. She had seen strength in them once. Now she knows them only as instruments of his brutality. She sets the portable candlestick beside her as she brushes the dust and wood splinters from his clothes. “When you go down the well, know my fate will not follow you,” she whispers.
In a few moments she is ready. She lowers the bucket first, hears water splash against the wood. Daylight will reveal that he fell trying to retrieve the bucket. She lifts him, first to a sitting position, then turning him over, pushing up, her arms under his legs. His arms and shoulders now hang over the pit.
She will throw him in with enough force to crush his skull or break his neck against the side of the well. Otherwise, she must hope that it will appear he simply drowned in an unconscious stupor.
She sucks in her breath, feels her arms and legs trembling with exhaustion and a residue of fear. With a grunt of effort, she heaves him over the edge, her fingernails clawing at his breeches. His body, free from her grasp, spins wildly, his foot nearly kicking her lip, narrowly missing her nose, as he falls. His head strikes the stone with a heavy thud, then she hears him crush the bucket as he lands on it. Water splashes up from the mouth of the well.
The candle flame hisses, then dies. The darkness swallows her whole. She fights the urge to run upstairs, and the equally strong urge to empty her stomach. Instead, she crawls on hands and knees, searching for the candlestick. She feels about blindly, her fingers sweeping across the cold floor, splinters of wood.
His foot! Standing before her…
She screams…but it is only one of his shoes. She flings it into the well after him, then picks up the candleholder and hurries upstairs.
“Now am I truly free, Elizabeth, free to join you and Rebecca.” Her voice is a tremulous whisper of self-reassurance. She knows she can not turn back. Trembling, she curls up in the short jack bed, waiting for the sun to rise, clutching the linen sheets to her chest. “I am finally free…”
Then she is plunged into darkness again.
While Abby dreamed in the PICU, Karen sat shivering four floors below in a paper hospital gown, in a forgotten corner of the ER where she’d spent most of the afternoon suffering the various scans and pricks and indignities of modern medical science. As if the humiliation of convulsing before an entire freshman class wasn’t enough, Karen’s day had included puking on the bumpy ambulance ride over, receiving a pelvic exam from a former student doing his obstetrics rotation in the ER, suffering the claustrophobic treat of MRI and CT scans, the painful impalement of an amniocentesis, and, now, wincing her way through the sixth blood test of the afternoon’s latest trial: a glucose tolerance test.
“Ouch,” she said without much conviction as the kid drawing blood—a third-year med student with shaky hands—missed her vein for the second time. “Sorry,” he explained sheepishly, “this is my first day.” He hit the vein on the third try, capped the vial, and scurried away.
Thirty minutes later, Maria Labajo, Karen’s OB/GYN, appeared with the results of the final blood test in hand. “Well, your pancreas is functioning perfectly. I just want to perform a quick ultrasound as a final precaution, and then I’ll send you home to get something to eat.” She rolled the portable ultrasound and monitor cart through the curtains that had been drawn around Karen’s bed for privacy. Maria was a tiny woman, Filipino by birth, and yet she manhandled the cart with force.
Five minutes later, Maria began expertly maneuvering the transducer across Karen’s jelly-slick abdomen. As always, the image that appeared on the monitor was murky and throbbing, an animate Rorschach test welcoming interpretation. It was possible to lose yourself in the rhythm of that heart-thrumming landscape, to peer so intently at the echoing contours of your own insides that you became mesmerized. So enrapt was Karen in deciphering what she saw that she began to hear the accompanying soundtrack, hallucinating the agitated thrush-thrumping percussion of the baby’s amplified heart. And now she could see the child, her daughter, a grotesque thing suspended in the pixilated gloom…a goblin crouched within her, mouth open in a ravenous yawn—
With a cry, she knocked the transducer free of Maria’s hand. The ultrasound monitor went dark. “Karen! It’s okay—”
“There’s something wrong! Something’s wrong with the baby!”
Maria put her hands on Karen’s shoulders and held her until the panic had abated. Paul returned then from the cafeteria to find them like this, Karen crying, Maria hushing Karen with calming words in Tagalog, the language of her childhood.
“What’s wrong?” he said, his eyes going stony, preparing himself for the worst.
“She had a fright,” Maria said. “Everything’s okay now.”
Karen clung to Maria’s hand as the obstetrician began to pull away. “What’s wrong with the baby? Tell me.”
“Nothing. The baby’s heartbeat is strong. She’s large for twenty-four weeks. She’s going to be big, like her father.” Maria looked up at Paul, tall and awkward within the little tent of curtains, like a befuddled magician at a child’s party.
“I don’t believe you,” Karen said. Paul kissed her and stroked the hair away from her forehead. She bristled, brushing him away. She didn’t want to be touched. Didn’t want to be consoled like some crazy woman.
Maria said, “You’ll believe me when the results of the amniocentesis come back in a few days.”
“What caused her seizure this morning, doctor?” Paul asked.
“That’s going to remain one of the great unsolved mysteries,” Maria said. “At this point, my money is on old-fashioned exhaustion.”
“She hasn’t been sleeping,” Paul said.
“Bad dreams,” Karen said. It was becoming her mantra.
“Pregnancy demands a lot of a woman’s body,” Maria explained. “You’ve got a lot of hormones surging through you right now. Mix with exhaustion, and you’ve got a pretty potent cocktail” She looked at them both, asked them as a couple: “Have you been under a great deal of stress?”
Karen exchanged a look with Paul. “Paul’s brother was in a serious car accident earlier in the week. They think he’s lost part of the vision in his right eye…”
Maria’s face darkened. “He is in this hospital?” Paul nodded. Karen tried to intercept the rumor before it found another convert.
“What they’re saying about Art and that little girl… It isn’t true.”
Paul said, “The police interviewed me all afternoon yesterday, I tried to tell them…”
Maria nodded and said unconvincingly, “Of course.” Karen could already see her reevaluating them because of their association with Art. She said, “The little girl’s condition is very serious.”
“We’re all praying for her,” Paul said, and Karen frowned. It was such an unlikely thing for him to say that she felt a hot rush of anger at the world, at this community, for forcing him to say it.
Maria nodded, and gestured toward Karen. “She’s had a long day. I’m afraid we’ve worn her out in our efforts to prove she’s suffering exhaustion. You should take her home.” Karen sensed a coolness in Maria’s voice, and resigned herself to it.
She expected to hear a lot of it in the coming days.
Even though it had already been an impossibly long day, Karen and Paul decided to extend it a bit longer and visit Art. Paul had already looked in on his older brother earlier in the day, updating him on Karen’s seizure and learning of the sheriff’s visit. Now, after convincing Art that Karen was all right following the seizure scare, they returned again to the topic of Art’s arrest on suspicion of attempted rape.
; “They think I kidnapped that little girl,” Art said, his voice trembling. “They think that I—”
He began to break down, and Karen went to him, kissing his temple and calming him as she herself had been calmed only a little while earlier.
“I’ve found a lawyer,” Paul said. “Neil Katz. I filled him in on the situation, and he’s agreed to represent you.”
“Why do I need a lawyer?” Art said miserably.
“Because the little girl was found in your car. Because you’ve admitted to being alone with her in a secluded place in the woods. Because you’ve got scratches on your face made by a terrified child fighting for her life. Because she’s paralyzed.”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
“You’re not listening to me. What do the police see when they look at you?—A forty-year-old recluse with a ponytail, no wife and kids, not much of a job, that dope arrest still on your records from college. It isn’t that big a leap for them to start seeing you as a sexual predator.” At that, Art recoiled with a horrified look. Paul didn’t relent. “I’m sorry. But until that little girl starts talking, that’s how they’re going to keep seeing you. We can’t be naive and assume they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt just because you’re a home town boy. We’ve got to start protecting you, and that means no more talking to police without Neil Katz present.”
“But if I stop talking, it’s like admitting I’m guilty: He turned from Paul’s unrelenting gaze and searched out Karen. She gave his hand a squeeze.
“Paul’s right, sweetheart. They’ll help you make your own noose if you let them.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Art said, giving his head a violent shake. “Shit!” He put a hand to his bandages as he felt a searing white bolt of pain lance through his injured eye.
“Do you want me to get a nurse?” Karen said. “Do you need more pain medication?”
“I’m okay. It does this sometimes,” Art said.
“Antibiotics,” Art said, already beginning to absorb some of the jargon. “Pharmaceutical equivalent of an A-bomb. So far this infection is resistant to everything they throw at it”
“A staff infection?”
Art shook his bandaged head. “They don’t know what it is. But it came from under the little girl’s fingernails.” He cast a sidelong glance toward the nurses’ station, and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I’ve been bribing an orderly to sneak me information on her status. He said the little girl’s infected with it, too. It’s all through her.” He tried a weak smile to cover how frightened he was. “Who knows where that kid’s hands have been.”
Karen felt Paul tugging on her sleeve, trying to draw her away from Art’s bedside.
“Hon, maybe you shouldn’t sit so close…the baby…”
Art said, “Don’t worry. Apparently, you can only contract it through direct blood contact.”
He fell silent. Paul paced to the window. “What happened out there, Art? Do you have any idea?”
“She was running away,” Art said quietly. “The graveyard she found was her hiding place, she felt safe there. That might sound creepy to you or me, but she’s just a kid, she hasn’t learned to be afraid of death yet. Hell, she probably saw the word witch on those headstones and the first thing that came to mind was Tabitha, not Margaret Hamilton—”
“What do you mean, ”witch“?” Karen said, feeling discomfort at the mention of the word.
Art looked surprised. “Didn’t Paul tell you?” He turned to the bedside table, where a photo lab envelope rested among magazines. He shuffled through the five-by-seven glossies, singling out several for Karen. “The police let me keep them after they saw there were no kiddie porn shots in the roll. Of course, they kept the negatives.”
As Karen flipped through the close-ups of the gravestones, Art explained, “I always assumed they were buried in an unmarked grave somewhere. But here they are—the infamous Windale Three. Elizabeth Wither, Sarah Hutchins, and—”
Rebecca Cole, Karen’s thought blotted out Art’s words, the name resonating in her mind as she held the gravestone bearing that name in trembling fingers. Her eyes grew distant, and for a moment she seemed to drop sideways out of the flow of time. Her expression—blank, unseeing—was enough to alarm Paul, but by the time he reached for her she was back, the world’s unspooling ribbon of film finding its sprocket again with a sharp snap into sync. She shivered, fighting a wave of nausea.
“I’m sorry,I—”
“Are you okay?” Paul said. “Are you going to be sick?”
“No, no, I’m fine now,” Karen said, lying for his sake. “Just lightheaded for a moment.”
Art was watching her curiously. Something in her reaction puzzled him, and he wondered if it had anything to do with her colonial dreams. “Karen?”
“Saying their names just makes them seem so real.” Karen said. The room seemed to have gotten darker, and airless.
Later that night, as the night float nursing staff began hanging paper Halloween decorations all along the pediatric wards, and the ER’s on-call residents dealt with a violent addict convinced he’d seen monsters in the moonlit skies above Windale, Art’s doctors met over their sleeping patient’s bed to discuss his prognosis.
The infection in his right eye was proving stubbornly resilient to the broad-spectrum antibiotics they’d ordered; the fear among the surgeons was that the microbe would begin to spread from the eye to surrounding structures and even the brain.
It was the opinion of the chief surgeon, Dr. Phelan, that if the spread of the infection could not be checked within the next forty-eight hours, the patient should again undergo surgery to have the damaged eye and infected tissues entirely excised. The gathering of serious men disbanded, satisfied that an appropriate course of action had been determined. The patient would lose his right eye but would keep his life. And for that, frankly, he should be grateful, as it was the unspoken opinion of Dr. Phelan and his colleagues that this particular patient deserved no better.
In this they were unanimous; but then, all four doctors were the fathers of young daughters.
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
Paul woke suddenly in the predawn darkness. He’d always been an early riser, and by five was usually wading in from the deep, fathomless waters of dream to the shallows that broke on the shores of morning. Now he came awake with a start and lay still on his back, wondering what had woken him.
He listened and heard nothing out of the ordinary, only the smotheringly heavy quiet of the early morning in a rural town. He heard Karen breathing from the cocoon of blankets beside him, heard the slow mechanical turn of gears as the backlit numerals on the old bedside clock tumbled one moment forward in time.
His heart was skipping along rapidly, an adrenalized flutter, his senses becoming oversensitized to the expectant silence. He listened, motionless, and was finally rewarded…
There. A sound, tiny and warbling, from within the bedroom itself. He froze, and heard it again, coming from Karen. From Within Karen.
From the baby.
He knew now that he must be dreaming. He rolled onto his side facing Karen, studying the outline of her face in the dark. He put his face close to hers and smelled each sour exhalation. He shimmied lower in the bed, in the blood-warm dark beneath the down comforter, to the place where Karen’s belly swelled beneath her nightshirt. As gently as he could he brought his ear to her stomach. He heard the liquid sounds of her insides, the muffled thump of her heartbeat (or maybe it was his own heartbeat, smothered in his ear), and beneath them the distant creaking sounds that lived in the mattress.
And then he heard it again, that warbling coo. It was a faraway sound, a growl, distinct from the peristalsis of her digestion, as much a feeling sensed on the taught surface of the skin—a tremor— as it was a sound.
Certain that he was dreaming, he spoke a single clumsy greeting. “Hello?”
Instantly the warbling stopped. As if the child within Karen had heard h
im and stopped its feral cooing. And was now listening to him…
Overhead, the pitched ceiling of the third-floor bedroom creaked as something heavy shifted. Paul looked up, tracking the scrabble of claws across the ceiling. The scrabbling ceased and he heard a thud, the house shuddering slightly, as it did in winter when the old boiler kicked in.
He looked at the clock: 5:35. He swung his legs free of the comforter and stood in his socks, stretching. Outside the blowing curtains of the bedroom windows, he saw the first light, a blush of morning. He went downstairs to make coffee, fetch the paper, and have a breakfast cigarette. In another hour he’d swing by the YMCA to pick up the hitchhiker bed hired as cheap temporary labor. (He paid $7.50 an hour, all under the table, for cleaning up work sites, hauling lumber scraps to the Dumpster, light demolition, etc.).
Downstairs, Paul stood barefoot on the cold kitchen linoleum listening to the coffeemaker burbling away cheerfully, and found his thoughts drifting to the tension that had thickened the air of late between him and Karen. Was this simply first-time motherhood jitters, or something more serious, tremors from a deeper fault line in their relationship? When he was feeling surly and irritable, he allowed the thought to surface that she was ashamed of him, ashamed of the fact that he’d never gone to college and made his living as a contractor. When he was in this mood he took her suggestions—a book he should read, a movie he might like—as condescending recommendations for self-improvement, as if she wanted to play Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle. Once, she’d recommended A farewell to Arms to him, thinking he would respond to the stark sentences and romantic fatalism; but when bed preferred Light in August she seemed surprised, as if she’d thought Faulkner beyond him.
He poured himself a mug of coffee and slurped a scalding mouthful. He opened the front door and walked out onto the front porch. The smooth boards underfoot were damp with dew. The kid who delivered Karen’s Windale Gazette had horrendous aim, and Paul was just fishing the newspaper out of the forsythia bushes when he suddenly froze midstretch …
