The Secret Life of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

  Her breathing.

  He follows the nurse and his father down the hall, blinking against the bright lights and shivering against the cold. Their refrigerator back at home, he thinks, has nothing on the hospital’s rooms and hallways.

  Meat wouldn’t spoil here.

  His mom is sitting with the doctor. Mom looks pale. Hands clasped in her lap. Back military-straight. Hard. Cold. Her lips pressed tight together. He can see the bristle-thin lines along the top and sides of her mouth.

  The doctor doesn’t smile.

  “Mr. Cross, Robbie. Have a seat.” He leans forward.

  “Delia’s suffered from smoke inhalation and there are second and third-degree burns over roughly twenty-five percent of her body. Luckily, they’re mostly second-degree. She’s on high-flow oxygen to keep her breathing passages open. Fluids against the possibility of burn shock. And we’ve got her on antibiotics to prevent infection. It’s a blessing that she was quick enough to cover her eyes. They’re virtually unharmed. But I’ve got to be honest with you, her face is another matter. Face, neck, shoulders, arms? They’re going to take a good deal of grafting.”

  His mom seems to sag, almost to relax. Though he knows that is nowhere near true.

  His dad clears his throat. “Will she be okay?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. We’ll have her on an exposure therapy protocol right away. What happens is, the skin’s allowed to dry so that the burns form a crust, which peels away after a couple of weeks to expose the healthy skin beneath. We use saline gauzes to soften up the dead skin and speed up the process.”

  “The burns . . . they’ll heal though, right?”

  “Yes, they will. But there will be scarring. How much we can’t know as yet. But it’s going to take time and a lot of tender loving care on your part. She’s going to need extensive surgeries. You need to prepare for a pretty long haul here, I’m afraid.”

  He pauses, looks each of them in the eye. To let that sink in, he guesses.

  “She’s also suffered a compound radial fracture to her forearm.”

  “The dog,” his father says. “Caity. She pulled her out of . . . pulled her off the bed.”

  “So I’m told. Well, unfortunately she pulled so hard that she fractured Delia’s arm. But the good news there is that it’s easily treatable. That dog probably saved your little girl’s life, Mr. Cross, Mrs. Cross.”

  His mother gives Robbie a glance. You did this, her glance says. He blinks down the tears and looks away. Something hard coils in his chest. It hurts.

  “So we’ll keep Delia in ICU for now,” the doctor says. “We want her separated for the time being. Infection. But we’ve arranged it so that you can see her. There are observation windows in that wing.”

  “See her?” his father says.

  “Yes. But only if you think you can handle it. Your wife’s already asked to stay as close by as possible.”

  His dad looks from his mom to Dr. Ludlow and then back again.

  “She has? Well, yeah. I think . . . sure. Robbie?”

  “No,” his mother says. “Neither of you.”

  But Robbie reads, no, not Robbie. Not him.

  She’s gone from sitting there stone cold to fierce in an instant. He wouldn’t be surprised if she stood up and hit him right then and there.

  Even the doctor seems uncomfortable.

  And Rob has no defense for it. None. She’d be perfectly right to hit him. To beat him to the ground. So that now he has to really fight back the tears. Shame and sorrow and fear all rolled up tight together. He turns away.

  “You two go home,” she says. “Check on the dog. I’ll stay with Delia.”

  “Hon . . . don’t you think . . . ?”

  “Go. Home.”

  They have their orders.

  In the hallway they’re accosted by a smiling, harried-looking woman in suit and glasses. She holds a clipboard pressed to her ample chest. What did hospitals do before clipboards? Bart wonders. He’s wary immediately.

  She introduces herself as Annie Gilbert and they shake hands.

  “Mr. Cross, may I see you a minute? About the insurance?”

  He tells Robbie to wait for him in the waiting room and follows her.

  Her office is bright and uncluttered, the computer front and center on her desk, with nicked wooden bookshelves and dusty filing cabinets off to one side. A tired-looking plant of some sort perches on the windowsill. The pocked white walls bespeak a certain age and lack of care.

  It’s a business office badly in need of a makeover. As though business doesn’t matter all that much here.

  Somehow he doubts that.

  She gets right to the point.

  “I’ve already called Blue Cross Blue Shield,” she says. “Your policy’s lapsed, I’m afraid. Two months ago.”

  “Well, we were . . . we’re close to getting an upgraded health benefit status with SAG, so I . . .”

  “SAG?”

  “The Screen Actors Guild.”

  “Oh. You’re an actor, then?”

  “No. My . . . our daughter is.”

  “I see. I’m sorry, Mr. Cross, and I know this is likely the last thing you want to concern yourself with right now, but . . .”

  “No. It’s okay. It’s okay.” It fucking isn’t. Not at all. “Can you bill me?”

  “Certainly. But we’re going to need some assurance that all of these procedures can and will be paid for. You understand.”

  “Of course they’ll be paid for.”

  He pulls out his Platinum card and hands it over. Not without certain a tinge of trepidation.

  He needs to be sure of this.

  “Where are we now?” he asks. “I mean right now. With the treatments, the expenses? I’d like to pay that much right away. Whatever it takes, you know? For Delia. For my daughter.”

  She holds up a finger. Give me a moment. Turns to the computer and types.

  Then turns the screen toward him.

  He reads it. Holy shit, he thinks.

  Robbie dials the animal hospital and watches his father pull out into traffic. His father looks tired. Almost as bad as his mom did when he left her, her face sagging and exhausted. This is all on him. Of course it is. On his stupid, stupid prank. He’d told his sister a hundred times now that he was sorry. But there was nobody there to hear him.

  “We’re on our way,” he tells the receptionist. “We’re . . . how long till we get there, dad?”

  “I don’t know. Half an hour? Forty minutes?”

  “Thirty minutes. How is she? Is she . . . ?”

  The woman tells him she’s transferring him to a nurse and puts him on hold. He waits. The nurse’s bright voice assures him that Caity’s sleeping peacefully, that her upper airway had swollen, that they’d had to punch a hole in her trachea. Trachea was her throat. Caity couldn’t breathe. Jesus. But that the bottom line is, she’s all right. She’s going to be fine. They can visit.

  “Can we take her home?”

  “No. I’m afraid not. We’re going to want to keep her overnight. For observation. She’s had quite a time of it, hasn’t she. Quite a night.”

  She sure as hell has.

  He remembers the rich thick smell of burning hair. The wheezing as the emergency driver lifted her into the van to drive her away to the animal hospital. But mostly he recalls her eyes as the guy closed the door on her. The eyes so sad, so confused. As though she couldn’t remember what had happened, where she was.

  And that was on him too.

  He says goodbye and closes the phone. “The nurse said she’ll be okay, dad,” he says.

  “That’s good,” his dad says. “That’s very good.”

  But it’s like his dad isn’t really there either.

  Robbie is alone.

  Roman hands her the paper cup of steaming black coffee and takes a tentative sip of his own. Chock full o’Nuts it isn’t.

  “I’m tired, Roman. Very tired.”

  “I know. I know, darlin’.”


  She damn well looks it. But she’s a whole lot more than just tired too. Her reflection in the observation window is ghostly white. Overnight her entire life has changed in ways none of them could have expected. Life could do that to you, he knows, he’d seen it before. Build you up, shoot you down, and spit on your shoes. But what in hell are they going to do now? Pat and her family. Roman’s got other clients. He’ll get by. Delia isn’t the only one paying the bills by a long shot. But this one has been looking big. Damn big. He hates to have to let it go. He’s put off calling the producers for that very reason—figured he’d wait until the docs had laid out the entire deck for them, assay the situation.

  He’s talked to the docs. The situation’s grim.

  He’ll have to call this afternoon.

  He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes and feels her lean into him, a gentle pressure.

  “I can’t stand this,” she says. “Take me home, will you?”

  He extends his arm over her shoulder and pulls her close. Her hair smells of smoke. He doesn’t mind.

  “Get me the hell out of here.”

  “Sure I will,” he says. “Sure.”

  She lies in a crate. More bars, new bars. Her paws are bandaged, and her chin and underbelly. A small tube depends from her throat. It whistles as she breathes. This confuses her. There is no pain, instead a great lethargy that causes her eyes to droop, her mouth to drool. Her tongue sluices the length of her mouth, over and back again.

  In a cage across from her lies an ancient cat, a male tabby with long hind legs and a broad round head and no tail. The cat regards her through a single eye. The other eye is covered with a bandage. The cat smells of old age and medicines similar to her own. The cat yawns. His breath smells of low tide. He closes his eye and sleeps.

  Caity closes her eyes too.

  Miles away from her Delia is a prisoner of machines. Machines which click, drip, contract, and expand. Her bandaged arm twitches, an involuntary jerk, which Caity can feel in her own right front leg, shooting up from her paw. A needled tube which connects to her arm falls loose. A machine beeps, flashes.

  A woman whose lower face is covered by a mask goes directly to the machine. Picks up the fallen tube and reinserts it into Delia’s flesh, a pinprick. The beeping stops. Delia sleeps.

  Caity lies down on her side and settles in.

  She sees fire and smoke coming from Delia’s window.

  She sees the fire rain down, Delia’s hands flung over her eyes, sees inside those hands, the yellow of skin and muscle, the blue-white of bone.

  She sees herself vault from the tree, her legs pumping, sees herself burst through the window onto the flaming bed. Smells smoke and burning flesh and hair.

  Delia’s set broken arm moves inside its pale white shell. Her body goes rigid, fists clench, heart races, the scent of fear pouring off her body.

  Caity bites down hard on the arm and hears the splinter of bone inside. No matter. She drags her from the flames.

  Sees her own eyes wild.

  Then black. A moment of black.

  A murmur. “Caity?”

  There is the sound of lapping water. A sparkling river. The feel of a light breeze across our back. A fish rises from the water, tail slapping water across our face. Our face is dripping wet. We’re on a small fishing boat floating downriver. Behind us Robbie and Bart sit beside a quiet motor, laughing as Bart flips the fish up into the boat, the fish depending from hook and line and wood flapping at our feet. It’s a beautiful spring day.

  We see a turtle drop off a log, a blue heron cleaning its wings on an old wooden dock, a cave on a bluff, an eagle’s nest, a frog jumping from rock to rock. We hear Bart’s and Robbie’s and our own laughter, smell earth and water and tall river grass. Our body relaxes into the rhythm of the slow drift of water all around us which is the rhythm of our breathing.

  We sit and lie in the sun.

  Lie forever in the sun.

  She types in the security system code on the touch pad. Roman follows her inside. They’ve said nothing in the car getting here and she is grateful for that.

  Inside the phone’s ringing. She sets down her purse and checks the caller ID. Her mother. New Hampshire.

  She’d made the obligatory call about Delia last night. Her mother was drunk when she picked up the phone and more so by the time the call was over. It’s what time now? Five o’clock EST or thereabouts? That means she’ll be drunk by now too. She’d been pounding it back hard for going on seven years, ever since her father had hit a patch of black ice on his way home from work at the accounting firm one gray February evening and skidded into a particularly sturdy, particularly lethal low-hanging branch of an elm tree, which took out the windshield, his glasses, and most of the top of her father’s head.

  The accident had occurred at four P.M. on a Friday. Four P.M. daily was the hour her mother started boozing.

  She’s not answering. Let it ring. She’s got the machine.

  “How about I pour you a drink, girl?” Roman says.

  “Good god, yes.”

  The irony of her musings just now doesn’t escape her. But she is not her mother.

  He disappears into the kitchen.

  She stands gazing up at the staircase, listening. For what? Something alive and moving. Some echo maybe. The house has never seemed so empty. She feels she doesn’t belong here, in this place. That it is not hers to inhabit. Strangers live here now.

  “Here you go.”

  He hands her the drink. Corn whisky. His favorite. Not her own. It doesn’t matter.

  “Take me to bed, Roman,” she says. “They’re at the vet’s. We’ve got time.”

  In the bedroom she fucks him. They do not make love. She climbs on top of him and takes him down with her into sharp broken crystal, bloody shards of glass, shearing knives, and blunt tenpenny nails. She thrusts him through stone.

  When it is over she spreads her body over him in damp cooling heat as though to smother him.

  “Smoke,” he says.

  “What?”

  “It’s gonna be a while I guess before that goes away.”

  “If ever. I may smell that stink forever.”

  “Can I open a window?”

  She nods. He rises off the bed and pads to the window nearest them and slides it open and the thin sweet-scented breeze of springtime makes her want to scream. The world outside wants in. The world outside is sick with normalcy.

  “Finish your drink,” she says. “And then I think you need to go. Bart and Robbie’ll be back soon.”

  He sits beside her. His upper body is practically hairless, like a child’s. “Whatever you say. Sure. You should rest.”

  “Rest. Yes.”

  Who is this man to her now? she wonders. How does he fit into what’s left of her life? How does he matter? And when he speaks it’s as though he’s questioning that too.

  “I’m so damn sorry, Pat. So sorry, darlin’. Wish there was something I could do.”

  “There was. And you did. I needed to . . . to not think for a while, you know?” She reaches over and touches his hand. “Thank you, Roman. Now go, hon. Go. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  When he is gone she sits naked on the bed for what seems a very long while. Then at some inner alarm gets up and performs a quiet whore’s bath in the sink, crotch and armpits soaped and splashed and patted dry, slips into her nightgown and lies back again as moments later the car pulls in and doors slam shut and in the hollow aftermath someone’s life resumes, with or without her.

  EIGHT

  He watches his dad toss the box of burn cream and the pet-cone—a plastic lampshade kind of thing—on the passenger seat of the car as the veterinary assistant wheels her out in the crate. She looks so pathetic in there, bandages on all four paws and chest, wobbling around, all woozy-looking, blinking in the bright morning sun.

  He wonders how she’d slept last night. Caity knows the vet’s office. They’ve been coming to Dr. Marder since she was a pu
p. But upstairs, where they do the boarding, would be all new to her. He wonders if she’d been hearing barking and whining and cat-cries and fear-sounds and sounds of pain all night. Maybe that was why she’s still wobbly. Or maybe it’s the drugs.

  He’d slept badly himself. He’d have bet everybody did. Though mom and dad have their own drugs.

  He’d sat awake reading Rachel Rising for the umpteenth time, figuring he knew every panel pretty much by heart by now so it would naturally put him asleep. It hadn’t. It was too good, Rachel and Jet and Lilith and the rest were just way too off-the-chain a bunch of characters. What he needed was something really dull to knock him out. He needed Staring at Your Shoes and Other Stories or something.

  And then there was that smell to remind him. Faint, but there. And what he’d heard. And what he’d seen.

  Instant replay of the worst game highlights ever.

  He’d managed a couple hours after the voices coming from mom and dad’s bedroom died away.

  The assistant who looks like a college kid maybe, not much older, opens the cage, unbuckles the side fasteners, and lifts off the top half of the crate.

  “Sometimes they don’t want to come out,” he says, smiling. “It’s easier just to take it apart. Do you have one of these for her in the car?”

  “No,” Robbie says. “Can I . . . is it okay if I carry her?”

  “If you think you can lift her, absolutely.”

  “I can lift her.”

  The guy steps aside for him and Robbie leans down, slides one arm under her front legs and the other under her butt, lifting slightly, judging the weight of her.

  “Watch her chest. Lean her on her side.”

  He does. Takes a breath and holds it and lifts. Not too bad. He can manage. Barely, he has to admit. But manage.

  She looks up at him sleepily and he pulls her closer. She shifts, hurting. He adjusts his arm beneath her hips. That’s better.

  “It’s okay, girl. C’mon. We’re gonna go home.”

  His dad has the rear door open. He pushes the front seat forward, giving him room.

  “I’m staying with her, dad.”

  “Sure. Good idea.”

  His father takes his arm supporting him as he backs up and carefully sits. He turns and gets his legs up and inside and adjusts her on his lap.