The End of Vandalism

by Tom Drury

“He knows the county better than anyone, and he’s very good at stopping fights.”

  “I think he sells pornography.”

  “He doesn’t sell,” said Dan. “He has a collection of his own, but selling, no.”

  “He goes to a club called the Basement, in Morrisville, to watch the strippers.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sheila shrugged. “Word gets around.”

  “The Basement is legal entertainment,” said Dan. “You may not think much of it, but it isn’t grounds for dismissal.”

  “And that poor wife of his, home knitting blankets.”

  “Quilts,” said Dan.

  “I think you kept him around too long,” said Sheila.

  “If what you say is true.”

  “You might check his cruiser.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “I never wished you bad luck.”

  They got up and walked along, with Sheila’s flashlight glancing over sawhorses and garden carts. A cellar window of Westey’s was broken. They went in the back door with guns drawn, but found no one.

  “Children must play,” said Sheila.

  Now Louise was clutching his arm. Jocelyn had started her final dance, in a long dark skirt and white blouse. The skirt traced poignant circles in the air.

  This was the last of five performances, and there were many curtain calls. Jocelyn’s face shone as she lifted the hands of her fellow actors. The lights came up on a gym full of roses and weeping teenagers. Jocelyn was in the middle of a group that would take some time to disperse. Cheryl said she would wait but Louise and Dan should go. Louise smiled uncertainly and started walking up the stairs to the stage.

  “That’s not the way,” said Dan. He took her hand.

  At home they had dried venison and salad, but Louise ate only a few bites. She put her fork down beside her plate and reached for the back of her neck to unhook the red beads.

  “I think I did too much today,” she said.

  Dan looked up from the records he had taken from the trunk of Earl’s cruiser. “What all did you do?” he said.

  “Mom and I went to the Lighthouse to eat,” said Louise. “We got some bumpers for the crib. And then the play.”

  Dan took a drink from a bottle of beer. “Why don’t you go lay down,” he said.

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You have been all night.”

  “I want you to lay down and take care of yourself.”

  Louise pushed her chair back and stood by the stove. She put her hands on her stomach. “You know what I think it is. I think I’ve lightened. The baby feels much lower. This is what happens as birth approaches. The baby moves down into the canal. I was reading about this.”

  “Lightened,” said Dan.

  “Put your hand on my stomach.”

  “It won’t be long, will it?”

  “No, darling. I am going to lay down.”

  “Why don’t you.”

  Dan read for a while and then sat staring at the knobs of the stove. Waves of light seemed to wash over him. How many times he would remember this moment, these waves of light in the kitchen. He went upstairs and massaged Louise’s back.

  “I feel a little sick to my stomach,” she said. “That’s what I get for eating at the Lighthouse.”

  “Maybe a bath would make you feel better.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  The faucet turned with a loud squeak and water thundered into the bathtub. When Louise got in she closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the old claw-foot tub. She smiled faintly, her dark hair veiling the porcelain.

  “Dan, I might be in labor,” she said quietly. “I think I’m contracting, and I’m kind of scared.”

  “Really,” said Dan.

  “It hurts,” said Louise. He helped her gently to her feet and wrapped her in a big green towel, her favorite. But before she was dry she asked him to leave the room, and as he stood outside the door he could hear her throwing up.

  “Louise,” he said.

  “Why did I have to eat that goddamned food.”

  Dan went into the bedroom and called the hospital. A nurse came on the line. She had the low and steady voice of those who make their living reassuring people at night. “Is the pressure rhythmic or would you say it is steady?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dan. “She’s throwing up. She had some food that didn’t agree with her.”

  “Who is her physician?”

  “Beth Pickett,” said Dan.

  “Is Louise close by?” said the nurse. “May I speak to her?” Louise stood in the hallway with the green towel around her shoulders. Dan brought the phone to her. She listened. She touched her stomach with spread fingers.

  “Yes,” she said. “Very much so.”

  They had to drive three miles on gravel roads to get to the hospital; there was no getting around this. They could pick up the blacktop in Chesley. Louise felt sick and took the ride badly. She wore the dress she had worn to the play. A cooking pot rested on her knees in case she had to vomit. The pot had black marks in the bottom from times they had burned popcorn. Dan flashed the blue lights but went very slowly to keep Louise out of pain. Even so, she leaned heavily on the armrest of the cruiser and sometimes asked him to slow down.

  Due to a construction project, the logic of which was not readily apparent, the Mercy Hospital emergency room entrance had been moved since the last time Dan had been there. They followed a makeshift sign, winding up at a pair of dark doors; Louise sat in the car while Dan tried them. One would not open and the other would, but the area beyond was empty and Dan turned away. Then the door opened again and a security man appeared. He was in silhouette and Dan could not make out his features. “This is right,” the man said. Dan helped Louise into the hospital and down a corridor until they found the emergency room. Louise slumped in a small chair at the admissions counter, and a man with drowsy eyes looked at her and then into a computer screen. “Are you in labor?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said Louise.

  “Who’s your insurance carrier?”

  “Danny, I’m going to be sick,” said Louise.

  “What’s going on?” said Dan. “Blue Cross—for Christ’s sake, don’t make her wait because of paperwork.”

  “We’re not,” said the man. “When they are ready to take her, she will go.”

  Soon a tall pale nurse with platinum hair and red lipstick helped Louise into a wheelchair, and guided the chair to a large treatment room curtained into sections. The lights were low. Someone moaned softly in a corner. The nurse helped Louise onto a gurney, took her blood pressure, listened to her account of what had been happening.

  “Is the pressure cyclical, like a rhythm?” the nurse asked.

  “I don’t know anymore,” said Louise. She lay on her back, looking at the ceiling. “I don’t think so.”

  “All right,” said the nurse. “Let’s listen to the baby.” She touched a stethoscope to Louise’s stomach. The heartbeat often took a moment to locate. “How far along?” she asked.

  “Thirty-six weeks,” said Louise.

  “Hmm.” The nurse moved the head of the stethoscope. Her dark brows knit and a dazed little smile appeared on her face. “This baby’s hiding from us.” Her voice was musical, forlorn. “This baby is hiding from us.”

  The pale nurse left and came back with a stout, swift nurse who said nothing to Louise or Dan. She took a stethoscope from the pocket of her coat and listened for the heartbeat.

  Dan stood on the other side of the gurney. “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. Turning to the pale nurse, she said, “Get a monitor.” She folded her stethoscope and put it away. The nurse rolled a fetal monitor in. Then Dr. Pickett arrived.

  “Beth, we’re glad to see you,” said Dan. “They’re saying something about the baby hiding.”

  “Shh,” said Dr. Pickett. She fastened
the belt of the monitor around Louise’s stomach and stared into the green and black pattern of the monitor screen. Then she said, “There is no heartbeat.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while to find,” said Dan.

  “The baby… is not alive.”

  “No,” cried Louise.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Bring her back,” said Louise, her voice full and breaking, like the peal of a bell.

  “Louise …”

  “Ah, Jesus,” said Dan. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Dr. Pickett. “There are things that go wrong. We will find out before this is over.”

  Louise sat up, pulled the black dress over her head, and threw it fiercely across the room. “You’re not even trying!”

  “I’m going to try very hard,” said Dr. Pickett. “Please settle yourself now.”

  “How can this be,” said Dan. “What will happen?”

  “Louise will go into labor and deliver the baby,” said Dr. Pickett.

  “I can’t go through labor,” said Louise. “I can’t go through labor with a dead baby.”

  “And I’m not going to operate for a dead baby,” said Dr. Pickett. “I’m not going to endanger you more than you already are.”

  Louise pressed her hands against her eyes. “It hurts,” she said. “Oh, how it hurts me.”

  “We’re going upstairs, Louise,” said Dr. Pickett. “We’ll make it hurt less.”

  The sturdy, reticent nurse put an IV needle in Louise’s arm. Then both nurses, Dr. Pickett, and Dan hurried Louise to the elevator. Dan rolled the IV stand along as they ran down the hall.

  A big stainless-steel elevator took them to the fourth floor. Louise’s room was the last one in a long, wide corridor with rooms on the left and tall windows on the right. Louise was placed in the bed.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  “We can’t for a while,” said Dan.

  They gave her a drug to induce labor, and when labor came it was more than she could take. The pains tore at her lower back and she called out for relief. Dan had read of something called back labor, and he supposed this was back labor. How strange, how misguided, that the body would go ahead trying to give birth when the baby was dead. An anesthesiologist gave her morphine, which did nothing. Later he came back to give her a shot in the spine called an epidural.

  “Don’t knock her out,” said Dan. “She doesn’t want to be knocked out.”

  “She may sleep because the pain has stopped,” said the anesthesiologist. “But she won’t be knocked out. Now please go while I give the shot. Please go.”

  “She wants me here,” said Dan.

  “Dan, get out, it’s all right,” said Dr. Pickett.

  Dan left the room, and the door clicked behind him. He stood in the corridor looking down at the parking lot. Trees moved darkly and rain spattered the glass. A car turned slowly on the asphalt. There was a row of lights on the grass beside the street, and as the car went by, the lights went out one by one by one.

  • • •

  The epidural did its job, and Louise drifted into sleep. Now they had to wait just as anyone who is in labor must wait. A yellow chair stood in the corner, and Dan pulled it over by the bed. It was heavy and cumbersome as if a reclining chair were a wonder of heavy-gauge mechanics. Dan put his feet on the rail of the bed and tried to sink into a dream but the medical people kept coming and going in their soft shoes and whispering clothes. They used a door on the opposite side of the room from the corridor in which he had watched the lights going out. Dan dreamed that he was carrying the yellow chair along an empty highway. He went into a gas station, where a man with white hair said, “I make sculptures of pipe, which everyone likes.” But Dan knew this was a dream and knew that the hospital was not a dream, so he awoke more tired than if he had really been carrying the chair, and the lights of the room seemed to drain his heart.

  Louise was asleep, but he knew if he spoke her name she would answer. At four-thirty they gave her something to bring her blood pressure down. Dr. Pickett came in and taped one plastic bag to the wall and another to the frame of the bed. She said the bags contained antiseizure medicine. She told Dan that Louise was suffering from preeclampsia; the placenta had evidently separated from the wall of the uterus, and the baby must have died immediately.

  “She is very sick,” said Dr. Pickett. Her face glowed and her eyes were light blue. “The only cure is to deliver the baby.”

  It took two more hours for Louise’s cervix to dilate sufficiently. Dan went into the corridor from time to time. The light was coming up over Stone City. The delivery room filled with doctors, nurses, carts of gleaming instruments.

  “All right, Louise,” said Dr. Pickett. She said it loud. “I know this is not easy, not what we had planned. Is it, Louise? Is it?”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “That’s for sure,” said the doctor. “But we have a job to do, and for that to happen you must help. We have talked about breathing and pushing and resting. I want you to do what you can. We need you to push, not now but soon. Do you think you can?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “All right. Then here we go.”

  Dan held her hand so tightly he could not feel where his hand stopped and hers began. She bore down when told to, her lips and eyes pressed shut, and then gulped air as if rising from a dive. Her green eyes were alive, her brown hair matted on her temples. “Stay with me,” said Dan. He washed her face with a cloth. After a while she could not push anymore. Dr. Pickett used suction to help bring the baby out. Dan was afraid she would come out in pieces but she didn’t. She fell into the doctor’s wiry arms, and only after she had been carried away and some minutes had passed did Dan stop hoping that somehow the heart had been beating and they had missed it all along.

  “Is it a girl?” said Louise.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Pickett. “A beautiful girl.”

  Thinking back, Dan was never sure how soon it was after this that Beth Pickett presented him with a form to sign allowing the transfusion of blood. “She has lost too much,” said the doctor. “You see, she was hemorrhaging and it was dammed up behind the placenta. That’s why her tummy was so hard, because of this bleeding.”

  “You said delivery would end it,” said Dan.

  “She lost a lot in the course of delivery, and what she has left is not clotting,” said Dr. Pickett.

  “What are you saying? Is she bleeding to death?”

  “It is a serious situation. I think she will be all right if we do what we must. But, as I say, it’s quite serious.”

  “Well, Christ,” said Dan.

  “Don’t despair,” said Dr. Pickett. “I’ve dealt with preeclampsia before, and I know we can bring Louise around. But right now she needs good blood and plasma, so please, Dan, let’s go.”

  He signed the transfusion form and turned to the bed. There was dark blood all over the floor. People had tracked it around the room. He could see their footprints, the zigzag serrations of hospital shoes. Louise was pale and still. He went over and whispered about the transfusions.

  “All right, Dan,” she said. Her eyes were badly swollen. He kissed her, and she smiled sadly, and he sat down in the yellow chair.

  She kept bleeding. The first transfusion was followed by more. Envelopes of blood hung from the IV hook and drained into Louise’s arm. They had rigged a catheter to collect her urine, but the collection bag remained empty, and different doctors came in to observe the strange emptiness of the catheter bag. Dan saw Dr. Pickett leaning against the wall, saying something no one could hear.

  Louise knew they were pumping blood through her. There didn’t seem to be any secret about that. Her heart raced to keep up but it could not. And her vision was failing. There was a big gray spot in front of her eyes. The spot was dense and uneven, like the nest of a paper wasp, and she could not see around it. She pulled Dan to her.

  “
I love you,” she said. “But my eyes hurt and I am closing them.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m right here.”

  She touched his face, which was very hot. Closing her eyes, she imagined or saw a red light glowing under her pale gown. She knew this light so well that she could have laughed. It was the safe light from Kleeborg’s, which enabled her to see what she was doing without damaging the prints. Now the light rose from her chest and it was as if she were inside it. Being in this light was as natural as going to a window to learn the weather. She could see the doctors, the nurses, and Dan from a place slightly above them. Dan gripped the rail of the bed and stared blankly at a bloodpressure monitor. He looked like hell, bathed in the warm red light but not knowing it. Louise drifted up. The ceiling would not hold her. She felt powerful and free from pain. She could go or she could stay, and the decision was hers. It did not scare her to go. It made her curious. She had lost the baby, and nothing would hurt. She saw a house on a road. It was dark, guarded by trees. She knew the house, had dreamed of it the night before she and Dan were married. The lane went up from the road, cushioned with pine needles. There was a plank porch and a brass knocker shaped like a deer. Whatever was in the house hummed. She could go in or not, her choice, but once through the door she could not return. She looked away from the house. The lights of the doctors cast a ragged glow in the darkness. Dan was holding her hand. The house hummed louder and the boards trembled beneath her feet. But she didn’t want to go without him, without knowing him.

  So she would always believe that it had been her choice to come back. And her body did regain its balance slowly over the next three or four hours. Her kidneys began to work, her blood to clot. The shift changed, and a woman in fresh green clothes mopped the floor. Louise had received twelve units of blood and plasma in all. Dr. Pickett smoked a cigarette in the cafeteria. Dan stared at the dust that floated in the corridor. Louise’s voice was low and hoarse, her eyelids swollen. In the late morning nurses brought the baby into the room. They had washed her, wrapped her in a blanket, placed a white cap on her head. Dan held her. Her features were delicate, her eyes closed. She did not seem to have been in pain. Her hands would have been strong. Dan cradled the baby on the bed beside Louise, but with the tubes in her arms and with the blood-pressure cuff Louise could not hold her. Dan sat with the baby in the yellow chair for a long time. “Tell her what’s happening,” said Louise. Dan held her some more. He did not know what to do. He gave her back to the nurses.