by Ronald Malfi
“What’s going on?” she asked on Doctor Cavanaugh’s second visit. He looked up at her, neither startled nor expectedly, his eyes immense and swimming behind the lenses of his glasses. He stared at her with the curiosity of a caged bird. Her parents turned toward her as well, her mother’s lips pressed whitely together, her father practically staring straight through her.
“I’m sorry?” Cavanaugh said.
“What’s going on here?” she repeated. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Ma’am,” Cavanaugh began.
“This is Kelly, our other daughter,” her mother said, as if in apology.
“She’s still not awake,” Kelly said. “Why isn’t my sister awake yet?”
“Your sister’s in a coma,” Cavanaugh said.
“So what do we do?”
“We do nothing,” Cavanaugh said. “There’s nothing. We wait. She’ll awake when she’s ready.”
But that wasn’t good enough. Just looking at the girl lying there, her body so unreceptive, Kelly wanted to burst into tears. “What else do you know?”
“What else?” Cavanaugh repeated. “Ma’am, your sister is unconscious. She needs rest. That’s all we can give her—rest.”
“And why does everyone seem so damned satisfied with that?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and stormed out into the hallway.
I’m sorry, Becky. I can’t help but feel that I deserted you. And it’s true—I hadn’t really even thought of you in so long, and that’s not fair. Maybe I dreamed about you, but what good did that do? Look at you now.
Not for the first time, she tried to understand why her parents had ever bothered to have children. The gap between their ages could suggest that they’d both been unplanned (or at least Becky could have been, she supposed), but still…did it make any sense? She tried to summon the image of her parents making love and found it impossible to do. Their reservations were too great, their personal walls too high. It would be like two robots simulating copulation.
She rushed through the downstairs foyer and through the front door, stepping into several inches of snow. The icy wind attacked her out of nowhere. In an instant, her eyes watered and blurred. It took her several seconds before she realized she was sobbing.
It was something about this place—this house, this compound—that weakened her, drained her. She’d suspected this as a child or, rather, sensed it (it was something too great and too aesthetic to mold into linear thought at such a young age), and knew it all the more as an adult. There was that lingering suffocation about her—the sensation of tight arms wrapping themselves around her body and slowly squeezing out her life. And despite her fear of the institution, there had been some relief there as well when she’d gone away as a child, as if a small part of her had actually realized that she’d finally been pulled from the nightmare.
The loneliness and despair that had consumed her childhood suddenly rushed back to her in one thick, frozen wave, nearly knocking her to the ground. Sobbing, she skirted around the side of the house and traversed along the frozen ridge. From this standpoint, she could see clear across the snow-covered valley and straight out above the town of Spires in the distance. It’s snowing in autumn, she thought absently. It’s the middle of fall.
Again, the childhood image of her father sobbing in the darkened stairwell returned to her, clear as ever. She could see him perfectly in her mind’s eye—the way his massive shoulders hitched, the way he covered his face with one large, square hand. His other hand hung off his left knee where it trembled in midair. His back was toward her, enormous like God’s, like an expanse of blank canvas. She could even make out the swirls and corkscrews of his hair at the back of his head, peppered with gray and thinning at the crown. His cries were silent, which made them somehow more wretched, as if he were desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity even in the midst of such great despair. And what had happened, anyway? What had made him cry like that? She’d stood in the darkened stairwell watching him for so long, waves of emotion passing through her like colors in a spectrum. Confused. Frightened. Angry. Sad. She’d felt the need to console her father—the most basic human reaction—but she didn’t know how and didn’t even understand if such a thing were appropriate. Her parents hadn’t taught her love, hadn’t taught her kindness and compassion. Likewise, she’d never received it. Not from them, anyway.
She turned away from the view of the snow-covered valley, shivering. Arms wrapped tightly around her body, she turned back around the side of the house. She could feel her tears freezing to her cheeks. Her face burned. Falling snow gathered in her lashes.
Suddenly, she thought of blood. Specifically, of blood flowing down a tiny wooded brook.
Her body seemed to shut down and she couldn’t take another step. She turned her head sideways and stared at the woods.
“We almost killed that fucking dog,” she whispered, the words meaningless and hardly registering in her brain.
Droplets of blood pooling into the icy brook waters, swirling, changing colors, flowing downstream…
A conversation between strangers in her head:
—What did you do?
—I did it for you. Do you like it?
—You can’t do this.
—Do you like it?
—It’s bad! You have to stop!
—I did this all for you, Kelly. I made them this way. This is our own special little world here. This is like that story where the kids never grow up. This is your Never-Never Land, Kelly.
Her entire body began to tremble. She felt her knees give out, sending her body crashing to the snowy earth. The cold was tremendous. Her bladder suddenly moaned then exploded in a gush of burning urine; she faintly sensed its heat spilling from the crescent of her crotch and tracing down the legs of her jeans. It was like death, she thought, like dying, like suffering and dying in the cold.
Something moved behind the trees to her right and she just barely brought her head around in time to see it. Blurred through fresh tears, she could only make out a fleeting white form. She sensed a memory nearing the surface of her consciousness, almost there, almost there, yet still lost. In her throat, she could feel her breath coming in great whooping gasps and she suddenly feared she was near hyperventilation.
She felt herself roll over on her side, then onto her stomach, her face momentarily pressed into the snow. Her head filled with an image of blood pooling in a clear, running brook. She felt her arms extend themselves, her hands grope at the snow, at the frozen earth below. She dragged herself toward the slope of the hillside until she managed to regain control of her body and rise shakily to her feet. Unthinking, she propelled herself toward the sloping hillside and the dense forest below, her eyes fixed on the tangle of darkness between the branches of trees. Again, she caught the momentary flutter of movement beyond those branches, half eclipsed by protective shade, and her legs pumped her forward through the snow. Her wet crotch froze in the wind.
This is your Never-Never Land, Kelly, she thought.
Then, like a beacon, she saw it: a dull, throbbing red light deep inside the woods, partially inhibited by the tangled network of tree branches. Again, as she walked, her groin convulsed and her knees went weak. Fresh urine soaked her thighs.
“God,” she moaned, her voice impossibly alien. What was happening to her?
That pulsing red light up ahead—she could almost feel its warmth through the freezing air.
She stumbled down the hillside and crashed against a hedgerow at the crest of the forest. Her head rattled. Dazedly, she brought her hands up to touch the bark of the closest tree…and it felt like a dream, malleable and illusory.
Just a few feet ahead of her in the woods stood the dog with the injured front paw. It stood unmoving, its piercing blue eyes staring at her through the thicket. Its pelt was speckled with dried mud and frozen with clumps of snow. Some of the snow on the ground beneath it was stained a bright pink. It watched her unflinchingly, and there was thoug
ht behind its eyes, Kelly saw, genuine contemplation that was so human it was almost frightening.
She was not surprised when the image of the wounded dog faded before her eyes. Somehow, she’d known it was only a ghost, a phantom, a vapor. The blood-pink snow returned to white. Yet there was something else, something—
The red light had vanished. And on the heels of this realization came a harsh sense of rejection, of refusal, that she could not even begin to comprehend.
Still—something was moving in the woods.
“Help me…” she managed. Her voice was weak, hardly a whisper.
Something was in the woods. Something was coming for her.
Her mind—reeling with nonsense:
(dead animals line the walkway and there is blood trickling into the stream I have a cut on my forehead and the blood stings my eyes there are tiny skeletons on the staircase and where did the staircase come from and there is a pile of garbage hidden in the corner and a pile of old food wrappers that smell like grease and broken plastic forks some of them covered in blood and there is a smell here a smell like dead things and some blood so much blood)
She managed to stumble backward along the wooded slope, her eyes still intent on catching a glimpse of whomever or whatever was quickly approaching. Desperately, she tried to get up, but her legs felt like pipe cleaners and her knees refused to lock. In one unavailing attempt at salvation, she pitched herself backward, arms pin-wheeling wildly, and felt herself slam into the ground, causing her teeth to rattle in her head.
(a glowing red light and trickling blood and oh my god we almost killed that fucking dog and white white white hands coming around me and COLD—)
What’s happening to me? What the hell is going on?
She promised herself that this wasn’t really happening, that it was all some elaborate hallucination.
The snow between her splayed legs was stained yellow.
Kelly’s breath seized in her throat, her vision dispersed into a multitude of sand-like granules, and an unforgiving darkness quickly claimed her.
She never felt her head hit the ground.
Chapter Sixteen
A sudden and ferocious ice storm assaulted Manhattan one evening, coinciding with the arrival of the season’s first full moon. The storm lasted nearly two hours. It struck with unpredictable solemnity, like a fist striking a hard surface, and slowly diminished to a wet rush of sleet and freezing rain once night had completely claimed the city. Unprepared, most pedestrians gathered inside the closest places of refuge. Others attempted to summon cabs to no avail.
Seconds after the storm hit, a throng of soaked people rushed at the main entranceway of Macy’s department store. In the commotion, it would later be discovered that a young girl with a heart condition collapsed and died, her body carried along on a wave of frantic civilians for several yards before someone acknowledged her lifelessness.
At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, two suited businessmen accidentally slammed their cars into one another. In a fit of rage hardly lessened by the violent storm, both men hopped from their vehicles, their faces as red as twin stoplights, their eyes large and disbelieving.
“What is it with you friggin’ maniacs?” one of the men shouted.
“You goddamn—” began the second, the rest of his words muffled by a sharp right hook thrown by the first man. Before the brawl was over, both men would be bumped and bruised, their cars still just as dented.
Carlos Mendes watched the storm die down from his office window at the hospital. He’d been off the floor for over an hour now, yet he’d procrastinated leaving. At one point during the night, one of the duty nurses had spotted him in the hallway and shook her head.
“Dedication only goes so far, Doctor,” she told him. “Beyond that, some people are just crazy.”
After a while, the ice pounding against the window turned to sleet and Mendes knew he couldn’t stay in the hospital for the rest of his life.
Home.
No—home was not necessary. He took the subway to Times Square, his mind occupied with a number of abstract thoughts. And with Nellie Worthridge.
Keep walking the streets. I can be like a vagrant—a doctor doubling as a homeless person.
For some reason he felt he couldn’t go home, couldn’t face Marie. His anxiety was wearing her out, he knew, and he hated himself for that. Home. The brownstone was too small and silent, too conducive to lengthy bouts of rumination. And that was the last thing he wanted. His thoughts frightened him. And the longer he sat and pondered the old woman’s words, he understood, the more he believed them.
Or perhaps he was just slowly losing his mind.
Strong winds whipped sleet at him and he walked with his head down, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat. Disinterestedly, he paused beneath a glowing street lamp to consider the peculiarity of the weather—the brutal winds and freezing precipitation. It was bizarre, something out of one of those fact or fiction television programs he’d enjoyed as a child. He shook his head and shivered. Moving down Broadway, his eyelashes accumulating sleet, he paused again: this time beneath a theater sign. He considered seeing a late show. Maybe it would help get his mind off things.
You’re a coward, a voice whispered in his head. You’re running away from ghosts, Carlito. That’s all they are: just ghosts. It was Marie’s voice.
Disgusted with himself, he shook his head, icy water running into his eyes. What was he doing to Marie? Spending longer hours at the hospital and then disappearing into the din of the city—anything to keep him out of the house…and keep his mind off his unborn son. But was that fair to Marie? Sweet, pregnant Marie? About-to-become-a-mother Marie? His wife, for the love of God? No—he hated himself, hated his inability to overcome such cowardice.
Ghosts, he thought.
He walked a few blocks over, leaving the confusion of the theater lights behind, and dipped down a darkened alleyway. A chill passed through his body.
These things happen, sweetheart, he thought. Sometimes these things happen. But I still love you and it’ll be all right. I promise.
It was a scenario he’d already started to consider: Marie, pumped full of sedatives, staring blankly from her hospital bed in the delivery room, a drying stain of blood on the sheets. Her eyes unfocused and nearly sightless, staring at—or through—the far wall. He’d go to her, console her, try and touch her. Powerless, he would feel like a child. He’d say words—just stupid, meaningless words—and place an awkward and shaking hand on her small shoulder. And she wouldn’t look at him, her eyes still so distant and void of life, and he’d know she was thinking about the baby they’d lost, the baby that she had been carrying inside her for so long now. Dead things. He’d know because he’d be thinking about that, too. And what else was there? That stillborn creature was supposed to be the rest of their lives and now it was gone. And he’d try to say more words—These things happen—but he’d find himself slipping away too, his throat beginning to constrict, his eyes—like Marie’s—steadily losing focus and sailing off into some painless oblivion. And what was to happen from there? They’d return to a house that never seemed emptier, and his mother would be there sobbing silently in her bedroom behind a closed door, and there’d be cold soup on the stove and cold coffee in a pot. Marie would disappear into the bathroom for twenty minutes at a time and he’d most likely step out onto the back porch to smoke, his eyes grazing lazily over the cornucopia of blacktop graffiti down below: EAT YOUR YOUNG and SATAN’Z PLAYGROUND and BE LIKE VEAL. And then there’d be sleep…and maybe—blessedly—the dreams would have run themselves out, perhaps because his subconscious could no longer handle the anxiety of them, or perhaps the object of those dreams had been delivered stillborn and such foreboding dreams no longer served the dreamer any purpose. Then there would be several weeks of uncomfortable noncommunication, which included his arbitrary attempts at stimulating his wife’s return to normalcy through banal conversation, followed by his zealous
immersion into his work, keeping longer hours than he’d ever known—once again, anything to keep away from the house. As if there were a disease within the walls, slowly blackening his lungs and killing him with each breath he took.
That’s how it would be, he knew. He could imagine it so clearly.
He suddenly found himself standing outside Nellie Worthridge’s apartment building in the dark, his shoulders soaked with sleet. He stared at the crossword of illuminated windows with bitter resolve.
The old woman lives somewhere inside that building, he thought. I should stop being such a coward and finally go speak with her.
But what could he say without sounding insane?
He felt eyes on his back, heard dull footsteps on the wet concrete. Turning, he saw a figure emerge from the darkness of a street corner and move towards him. The neon lights of the all-night diner across the street played circus colors across the approaching figure’s face. Mendes only stared. It was a young man. And to his amazement, the man stopped directly in front of him, causing Mendes to pull reflexively back against the face of the building.
“Doctor?”
Startled, Mendes uttered a jumble of nonsense.
“It’s Joshua Cavey,” the figure said. “We met at the hospital, remember? I was the one who—”
