Undone

by John Colapinto

  Dez couldn’t resist. “Whose?” he said with smiling interest, as if he had heard rumors of this entity but could not quite place him.

  Deepti, unable to tell if this was impudence, obtuseness or a misplaced effort at humor, could find no reply. She turned, went up the path and entered the house. Dez immediately hied it around the side of the building to the backyard. He found Chloe and Maddy crouching, in the descending dusk, next to a flower bed. Chloe was apparently distracting the little girl by teaching her about flowers. At his approach, Chloe jumped to her feet and rushed over to him. She grimaced and raised her fists as if to batter his chest. But he caught her frail wrists. “Whoa!” he laughed.

  “You said you wouldn’t hurt her!” she hissed.

  “And I didn’t,” Dez said, feeling her cease to struggle in his grip. He released her. “It was his idea to bring her into the session.”

  “His?” she echoed. Then the full horror of the situation dawned on her, and she asked in a stricken voice, “What if she dies?”

  “If she dies,” Dez said, “he will be plunged into existential despair and guilt, and be ready for anything. And if she survives, he’ll be euphoric, and equally at our mercy. Your mercy.”

  Chloe regarded him, incredulous. “So that’s why you—”

  “Like I said,” Dez interrupted, “it was his idea to bring her into our session. I merely seized an opportunity. And don’t forget why we’re doing this.” He turned his gaze to Maddy, who was squatting by the bed of blue impatiens, singing lightly to herself as she delicately fingered a flower petal.

  Chloe studied the girl for a long moment. She turned back to Dez.

  “No more silly wavering?” he said. “No more fantasies about what a wonderful man Ulrickson is? You’ll help that poor child?”

  How could she say no? She nodded.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, moving to take her in his arms. She retreated a step. “As you wish,” he said, lifting his hands.

  There was a movement on the edge of Dez’s vision. Through the patio’s glass doors, he saw the loathsome home care woman. She was inside the house, standing by the kitchen and looking out at them.

  “So, please don’t hesitate to call,” he said to Chloe, at slightly louder than normal volume. “I, or one of my colleagues, will be happy to talk to you. And one of us will be back to check on your progress in a few weeks.” He leaned in and whispered, “Good luck—not that you’ll need it.”

  He patted her shoulder, waved to Deepti, and took his leave.

  8

  The ambulance sped through the twilit streets. Over the sound of the wailing siren, Jasper heard someone in the back of the vehicle say, “Start bagging her.”

  Bagging her?

  He twisted round. But instead of being confronted with the sight of Pauline being zipped into a body bag, he saw one of the ambulance workers attaching an inflated, balloon-like device to the end of the tube in her throat. The man began rhythmically squeezing the bag, forcing air into her lungs. Thank God, he thought.

  The ambulance, barely slowing at the intersections, took just three minutes to get from 10 Cherry Tree Lane to Beckford General. Jasper then sat for an excruciating forty-five minutes in a downstairs waiting area. This was the very hospital where Pauline, while in labor with Maddy, had had her stroke. Sitting now in the molded plastic chair in that dismal emergency waiting area with its floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the ambulance bay, Jasper was visited with harrowing memories of that earlier ordeal. And yet this was worse, so much worse, since this time it was his own actions that had brought about the catastrophe.

  It was close to eight o’clock when a nurse appeared and beckoned for him to follow. She led him through the set of double doors behind which Pauline had earlier vanished and brought him to an elevator that took them up to a hushed area on the third floor where, above a pentagonal reception desk, a sign hung saying Intensive Care Unit. She led him to the right, down a hallway to a private room.

  And there she lay, unconscious, on a bed with incongruous aluminum guardrails on either side, as if she were in danger of rolling off. A tangle of tubes ran from everywhere on her body—nose and mouth and arms and ankles—connecting her to an array of beeping and blinking machines banked around her. A hose from a fridge-sized contraption with a bellows inside ran down her throat and rhythmically forced air into her, causing her body to jerk unnaturally with each forced lungful.

  Dr. Carlucci was standing by the bed. He came forward and shook Jasper’s hand. “We don’t yet know if it’s a stroke or a seizure,” he said. “They present in very similar ways. We’ll know more tomorrow, after some scans. But the situation is serious. I don’t want to paint too dark a picture, but I also don’t want to give you false hope. You need to prepare for any eventuality, and that includes further severe impairment, or losing her. Or perhaps she will come out of the coma and be as she was before.”

  “Losing her …” Jasper echoed.

  “Look,” Carlucci said, touching Jasper’s elbow, “we’re going to do everything we can.”

  “Yes,” Jasper said.

  “You’re welcome to sit with her,” the doctor said. “I’m afraid I’ve got to keep on my rounds.”

  “No, of course.”

  “She’s strong. Very strong.” The doctor gave a tight-lipped smile. He turned and left.

  Jasper lowered himself into a chair by Pauline’s bedside. He wept convulsively. When he had finally emptied himself, he lifted one of her hands from the bedsheet, taking care not to dislodge the needle in the back of her wrist. Her hand felt unexpectedly warm, alive. He brought his face close to hers and whispered, “I love you, Paulie. Please, hold on. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Deepti. He hit Talk and told her what the doctor had said: that they could lose her.

  “We must have hope,” Deepti told him. “We must not despair.”

  Over the next hours, nurses came in and out and ministered to her, massaging her extremities, changing tubes, replenishing IV bags. Around ten-thirty, a kindly-looking middle-aged nurse with artificially colored bronze curls looked at him and said gently, “She’s in good hands. You really don’t need to stay—if you’re tired.”

  The thought of climbing into his own bed, of stretching out under the cool sheets, of letting his head sink into a soft pillow filled him with desperate yearning.

  “Nothing is going to happen tonight,” the nurse added. “You can come back first thing.”

  He was wavering, trying to make up his mind, when his cell twitched. Deepti again. She told him that Maddy had asked to sleep with her in the guesthouse. “She said that it ‘smells like Mommy.’ Is it all right with you?”

  “Of course,” Jasper said.

  He mentioned his indecision about whether to stay the night at the hospital. Deepti said that she was sure Maddy would wish for her father to be at home in the morning when she woke up. “To make things as normal as possible,” she said. He thanked her for this wise advice and hung up. He rose and kissed Pauline’s cold, moist forehead. He thanked the nurse, said he would be back in the morning and stumbled out.

  9

  His watch read 11:05 when the cab pulled up in front of the house. The night was pitch-black, and at some point it must have stormed, because the air was charged with a strange electricity and the humid maple overhead was still ticking with droplets from the downpour. He might have had difficulty seeing the flagstone path had not someone left the porch light on for him. An oily gleam lay on the dark stones. The rest of the lights in the house were out.

  He opened the front door with his key. Stepping into the dark foyer, he saw that he was mistaken: the dull glow from a lamp illumined a part of the living room. He called out, “Hello?” No response. He moved across the unlit foyer, arriving at the threshold of the living room just in time to see a fleet, spectral figure—Chloe—rise from the sofa and run off toward the arched door at the end of the room. He called out
to her.

  She stopped and slowly turned. Sniffling, dabbing at her nose with a balled-up tissue, she gazed at him. She was dressed in a pink teddy, its hem grazing the tops of her bare thighs. The low light of the lamp shone through the gauzy fabric and revealed her body within. What he at first mistook for the three white triangles of her undergarments were, he realized with a shock, the tender areas of naked, unbronzed flesh that had been covered by her bikini during her backyard sunbathing sessions. Her hair, damp from a shower, lay in shiny, ribbonlike coils around her shoulders, which were bare but for the thin straps of her nightie. She flushed at the sight of him and said in a small, halting voice, trembly with suppressed tears, “I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about Mom …”

  He took a few steps forward into the room, then stopped. They stared at each other, a long minute of charged eye contact. She said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “I poured you a drink.” She glanced at the coffee table. His gaze followed hers. He saw a stubby glass with an inch of brown liquid in it. A nearly full bottle of Scotch stood beside it. “I thought you might need one,” she said.

  There followed another extended moment of unbearable eye contact. Then they moved toward each other, like combatants in a gladiatorial ring clashing for battle, but when they met in the center of the room, it was to cling to one another as if for solace, in their shared grief.

  “Poor Mommy,” Chloe said, in a hot rush of moist breath, into his ear. “Poor Mommy.”

  “I know, I know,” he said.

  He pulled back his head and looked into her face. She drew her lower lip under her two front teeth, biting a little at the tender flesh, pulling its delicate vertical creases smooth. She lowered her eyes. Then raised them again and stared searchingly into his. Her gaze, for all its softness, cut into him, into his soul, which, in his grief and guilt over Pauline, felt like a howling vacuum. She tilted her face back, allowing her mouth to fall open and her eyes to swoon closed. Suddenly he was kissing her, feverishly, hungrily. He greedily sucked her tongue into his mouth. He could taste the salt of her tears along with the toothpaste flavor of her saliva. With his hands, he molded her back, her tapering waist, sweeping his palms down over the sliding fabric of her nightie and cupping her buttocks. He felt one of her nimble hands snake down his flank, then slide between their bodies, over his twitching lower belly, her cool, tickling fingers blindly groping their way into his waistband, then finding and closing around his flaming member. She squeezed and he shouted “Oh God,” his legs nearly giving way beneath him.

  Her hand quickly withdrew. He opened his eyes. She had retreated a few steps across the carpet, and she was looking at him with wide eyes. “No!” she said. “No—we shouldn’t.”

  He tried to say something but could produce only a garbled, guttural growl.

  She turned and, legs flashing, ran off and disappeared through the arched doorway. He heard her bedroom door slam shut.

  He stood panting, his chest heaving. “Oh, thank God,” he gasped. “Thank God!”

  He had been on the point of doing something that he would regret forever. She had brought him back to himself just in time. The wild momentum of insane desire had been arrested at the very point where it would have been impossible to turn back. But his body was still in a state of riot, his blood on fire, his tumescence agonizing, and he could smell and taste her saliva cooling on his mouth, feel the sliding sensation of the flimsy fabric on his palms, the smooth, firm muscles of her back, and the silken texture of her naked buttocks.

  He stumbled across to the coffee table and snatched up the drink she had poured for him. He took a cautious sip—he was not a spirits drinker—and felt the liquid burn a scorching path down his esophagus to his stomach. It rebounded, rose in his bloodstream and blossomed in his head, an anesthetic as effective as morphine. He took another sip. Yes—she had saved them both, pulled them back from the brink.

  He drank off the glass. Trembling, still panting lightly, he poured another, which he sipped slowly. He began to pace the living room carpet. Of course, Dr. Geld had told him that, according to Freud, his feelings for Chloe, and hers for him, were not criminal. Were not even unusual! With that thought, a new and wholly unfamiliar emotion awoke in him, an angry defiance—aimed at whom or what, he would not have been able to articulate. His thoughts were rushing around now, undirected, in circles, as if prodded by his thundering, wildly pumping heart.

  He drained his glass, then went back to the coffee table. He picked up the bottle and poured another half glass. He drank, and the liquid coursed down his throat like water.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. He had a sudden urge to apologize to Chloe, to tell her that he should not have kissed her that way, should not have groped at her body. Yes! He must do just that. And right away. Before another moment passed.

  Setting out for her room, he stumbled into the coffee table, barking his shins painfully. He cursed. He set off again. He could hear his own breathing—thick, oddly rasping—as he moved his slow thighs and entered the short hallway that led to her closed bedroom door. The sight of that bland wooden rectangle awoke in him a thrill of terror and excitement. At some point he had put down his glass, but he still held the bottle. This he tipped to his lips and took a courage-inducing pull. He grasped the doorknob, turned it and pushed the door open.

  Her room was lit only by the pink-shaded bedside lamp. She was in bed, and lay on her side, bent in a Z-shape, as if asleep.

  “Chloe …?” he said, with a tongue that he now realized felt oddly uncooperative, slowed and thickened. “Naw sleep yet?”

  He walked to the side of her bed and stood over her.

  She stirred as if waking, then looked at him, pretending to be startled. She drew the duvet and sheet up over her breasts. “Daddy?” she said in a trembling whisper.

  He took a slug from the bottle to steady himself, then tried to place it carefully on her nearby dresser, but he misjudged and banged it down hard. He turned back to her. “Were you a-sleeping?” he said. He corrected himself. “Asleep?”

  She gazed up at him, and then slowly drew the covers up over her nose, hiding all but her huge, depthless eyes. “What are you doing in here, Daddy?” she said.

  Something about the look of submission in her gaze, the coy way she had drawn up the sheet, the softness of her voice … the infantile use of the word Daddy and even the slight tremble of apparent fear in her tone … He felt something huge creak and teeter within him, then begin to give way, to dislodge or cleave off—like a great wall of ice from a calving glacier—something he had been holding up, holding together, for so long. He tried to fight the ecstatic, catastrophic plunge, to step away from the bed, to pull himself away. But at that moment, her body stirred languorously under the covers and he heard a comfortable moan come from the back of her throat. Her eyes seemed to twinkle up at him with a glint of mischief and challenge and smiling invitation. He gaped at her. An appalled apprehension filled him. Rage, as much as desire, seized him, and in a spasm of fury and lust he tore away his shirt. He bent and wrenched off his pants and underwear, liberating the smarting prong, which stood out from his body at an almost upright angle not achieved since he was, himself, Chloe’s age.

  “Daddy!” she cried.

  With an animal bellow that combined plangent mourning and savage desire, he collapsed upon her.

  10

  He was curled in a fetal position, hugging Pauline.

  He opened his eyes. The room was dark. He searched for the digital clock. Could not find it. He turned to the opposite side of the bed and, strangely, found the clock there: 6:17 a.m. He turned back to see if Pauline too had awakened.

  It was not Pauline he was embracing, but a pillow. Alarmed, he raised himself on one elbow and felt an ax blade drop through his skull. A peal of pain in his head met a swirl of nausea in his stomach and he sagged back with a whimper onto the pillow. His brain made a sloshing movement within the bowl of his skull. His tongue was pasted to his d
ry, achingly dry, palate. Almost blinded by the steady tom-tom pulse behind his eyes, he squinted into the mottled darkness.

  Through a misplaced window (why was it, too, on the wrong side of the bed?), a predawn grayness dully shone. He looked down at the bed—not his and Pauline’s king-size, but a narrow single bed, the covers and sheets in disarray, pulled loose from the mattress’s corners and wrapped around him like a serpent. Groping for a lamp, he became aware of a sensation of bruising and chafing in his groin. He gingerly pulled away the winding sheet. In the half-light, he saw his member lying curled, abashedly shriveled like a dead snail, against his thigh.

  Then it came back. In strobe-like memory flashes. Chloe, eyes closed, mouth in a rictus of pleasurable agony as she tossed her head from side to side beneath him. His hands, curled into claws, roughly flipping her over. Chloe on all fours, her cello-shaped back and inverted-heart buttocks as if sprouting from his midsection, which pistoned back and forth, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips while she whipped her hair like a horse trying to throw off flies. Chloe kneeling, facing him. Peering up, batting her lashes like a scolded child, his hands grasping either side of her head as she engulfed him.

  He stifled a cry of horror and disbelief.

  Another nightmare?

  Ignoring the pain, he reared up and turned on the bedside lamp. The bottle of Scotch, empty, lay on its side on the floor. Stains, some dried, some still drying, covered the exposed satin of the mattress. A pink nightie, torn, hung from the edge of a framed poster askew on the wall. His clothes lay in separate corners of the room.

  “My God,” he said.

  He crawled from the bed and, wrapping the sheet around his naked body, stumbled out into the living room calling Chloe’s name, his voice like the barking of a dog: raw, rasped, guttural. Silence. He moved down the hall past Maddy’s bedroom—and recalled (thank God!) that she and Deepti were sleeping in the guesthouse. He doubled back and pushed open Maddy’s door. No one. He moved down the hall and shouldered his way into his bedroom. Empty. Sheets undisturbed.