The hum at the base of Scott’s skull pitched up an octave. Invisible ants swarmed over his flesh. He sucked in a breath, but it lodged like a fishbone in his throat. Suddenly the reek of Holley’s pipe threatened to turn his stomach. Fidgeting dizzily, he closed his eyes...
And there was the cartoon Volvo crumpled against a low stone wall, steam issuing from its grille, the car’s interior dark and untelling.
“You mentioned a stone wall,” Scott said, the words tasting like bile.
“Yes.” Holley said. “They hit the stone wall surrounding the Hampton Meadow Cemetery.”
24
ONCE, WHEN SCOTT WAS A boy of six or seven, another boy flung a basketball at him and it struck him in the solar plexus, punching his wind out in a stunning expulsion. His chest froze that way, with the air knocked out of it, and he was unable to take another breath for what seemed like several minutes. By then his mind had fogged over, tiny colored lights had begun to flash inside his eyes and his fingers had begun to tingle.
He felt that way now. Breathless, punched out. As if some cerebral breaker switch had been kicked over by an unexpectedly violent backsurge, and his ability to think, to abstract, had been fried in the process.
Again Caroline failed to notice him when he stepped into Kath’s room in the ICU, and again Scott experienced that drifting sensation of unreality. It occurred to him that this was how a ghost must feel, able to observe and yet desperately unable to make contact, to involve itself in the cycle of life around it.
Then he noticed Caroline’s face—waxy-pale, sweat-sheened, contorted in fear—and the way her fists were dragging at the corners of her mouth; and when she turned and her pallor deepened, when she told him between racking sobs that Kath had spoken only a moment before, Scott felt a vicious spasm in his chest. Because in the next instant he heard it himself, Kath’s voice, welling up as if from a great and hollow depth.
“Dead” was the single word she uttered.
Then the convulsion seized her.
* * *
It began slowly, almost imperceptibly—a slackening of her stricken face; a vague ballooning of her neck; a fine tremor in her limbs—then it spread like a quake along a fault line until her back arched to the point of snapping and her limbs hammered out a driving tattoo against the mattress.
Before Scott moved, before his medical training leaped to the forefront and spelled out the obvious diagnosis of grand mal seizure, he experienced a brief, irrational revulsion for his child. Watching her—jerking and hissing, eyes bugging, mouth foaming, urine staining the front of her gown—he was overwhelmed by a sudden, icy awareness. Something black and pure, potent and ageless, was seeping out of his child in oily beads that he could almost smell.
And that something was evil.
But the feeling passed, and in the instant before Caroline screamed and medical personnel began filing into the room, Scott’s rational voice uttered the simple truth: It’s a convulsion, nothing more. But now he thought he understood why, generations before, God-fearing people had believed Satan himself had visited upon those afflicted with seizures. Apart from a shadowy physical resemblance, there was no sign of his daughter in that twitching thing on the bed.
Scott lurched forward to grab her, but an orderly restrained him, leading him away from the bed where Kath grunted and writhed and soiled herself. He caught a last glimpse of her twisted face before the hideously bright, rainbow-colored curtains were drawn and the bed was lost behind them. The image branded itself on his memory.
* * *
He knew exactly what they would do to arrest Kath’s seizure: a mouth guard would be forced between her teeth; a nurse and perhaps an orderly would restrain her limbs beneath their combined weight; and the intern would inject a few milligrams of Valium into the IV tubing, stopping the convulsion and creating enough sedation to keep Kath quiet for the next several hours.
But that was only a fraction of what streaked through Scott’s mind as he stood outside Kath’s room in the ICU, Caroline clutching him, the bank of monitors beeping chaotically behind him. There was a demon rearing up inside of him, a capering, cloven-hoofed thing with Dr. Holley’s face, and it was claiming that the woman Scott had seen lying stiff and broken on the stretcher in the ER belonged to him. It was trying to convince him that the dead thing on that stretcher had only hours before been his wife, the warm island of flesh and blood he had married ten years before. But he would have none of its hectoring proclamations, and in his mind he clawed at the demon’s throat, tore out its greasy workings and choked off its lies in a glut of cartilage and blood. He saw himself do this, and then he saw the three of them together, he and Krista and Kath, arm in arm and smiling, posing before a pair of umbrella-like floods for the family portrait he kept on the shelf behind his desk at work, the one that had gone missing a thousand years ago, when life was still something he believed he understood. His mind skittered next to the dock, to Krista and Kath kneeling over his heaving chest as he choked lake water from his lungs, to the comfort he had felt through his terror just knowing they were close and that they loved him. Full circle, it came back to Holley (they hit the old wall surrounding the Hampton Meadow Cemetery) and the drawings which had told it all.
Gradually he became aware of Caroline, her sobs, her confused and desperate need, and he tightened his grip around her. Together, they waited for the curtains to be drawn aside.
The intern, looking dazed and weary, came out first. He told Scott that Kath’s seizure had subsided and that now she was sleeping peacefully. He said he was going to call the senior physician in charge and that Kath would be seen by a neurologist first thing in the morning. Then he offered to show Scott and Caroline to a nearby family room, where they could lie down and perhaps sleep.
Scott declined, but urged Caroline to go ahead. She went reluctantly, looking hollow-eyed and beaten.
Scott returned to Kath’s bedside. A nurse showed him how to fold out the large sleeper chair by the window, and after a while he stretched out on that. He tried to rest, but his eyes kept popping open, searching Kath’s face for signs of awareness. Mercifully, because of the Valium, Scott guessed, her staring expression had softened and her eyes had finally closed. She did appear, as the intern had said, to be sleeping peacefully.
At some point Scott remembered Jinnie, and he got up off the chair to retrieve her. As he dug the doll out of his flight bag, his fingers snagged the drawings and pulled them out, too. He set the doll on Kath’s pillow, then reclined again on the sleeper.
In the pale-orange glow of the exterior arc lamps, Scott unfolded the drawings and went over them frame by frame...until a chill crept into his heart and he could look at them no longer. Tears doubling his vision, he refolded the sketches and tucked them into his shirt pocket.
And just when he thought that he would never sleep again, that he would lie awake with the images of his convulsing daughter and his ruined wife capering eternally before his tired eyes, the accumulated exhaustion and shock of the preceding four days struck him like a barbiturate overdose, and he tumbled into a nightmarish slumber, where dead men walked and pain was his only companion.
25
WHEN DR. HOLLEY CAME INTO the ICU on Wednesday morning, he found Scott curled on the fold-out chair, staring blankly at his unconscious child. It was apparent that he hadn’t slept much at all. As gently as he was able, the coroner encouraged Scott to get on with the ugly business at hand.
“You’ll have to make arrangements for the disposition of the body,” he said in a tone Scott recognized, the one reserved by the profession for those lost souls known as the “Bereaved.” “Customarily, the funeral home manages all of the details—pickup, transfer, all of that. You only have to call and let them know. There are a number of forms which require your attention, both for your wife and for your daughter. And your car has to be moved. As I understand it, there’s been a fair bit of damage, but the car is far from being a write-off.” Holley gave a sigh. “Have you c
alled any of your relatives yet?”
Scott shook his head. It hadn’t even occurred to him to call. He would have to tell Klara first, then Krista’s mother...or perhaps he could leave that to Klara...yes, that would be best. He should call Gerry, too, and a few of their other close friends, but that could wait.
Holley stood. “The nurses have the necessary forms,” he said, indicating the computerized console beyond the room’s Plexiglas sidewall. “You can tackle those as soon as you feel up to it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “I have another hour or so of work to do around here, then I have to go into town. If you’d like, I can take you by the impound where your car is being stored. By now they should be able to tell us if there were any mechanical problems which might have caused the accident. And you’ll be able to decide with them how best to deal with the car.”
Scott shifted into a sitting position on the edge of the sleeper. Scrubbing his face with listless hands, he peeked through his fingers at Kath, whose eyes were half open and hopelessly blank. Dimly, Scott recognized what Holley was doing: gently but firmly, the coroner was attempting to keep Scott mindful of the realities, perhaps recognizing how easily he could be tipped over the edge.
“I don’t know if I should leave her alone,” Scott said. His head had taken up a throbbing ache that seemed to be worsening now that he was upright. “Maybe I should stay here for a while.” He rubbed his temples. His mouth was dry and tasted foul, and for a moment he thought his stomach might turn. But the feeling passed.
“Not to worry,” Holley said, tapping the pager clipped to his belt. “I carry a long-range beeper. I’ll make certain they call us if there’s any change in your daughter’s condition.” Holley’s urgings were taking on the texture of gentle commands. “Why don’t you get cleaned up a little, take a shower, have some coffee maybe. I’ll be back inside of an hour. Then you can start getting some of this stuff behind you. All right?”
Nodding uncertainly, Scott turned back to Kath.
“She’ll be fine,” Holley said, and for this he adopted another of the Medical Man’s repertoire of speech tones. “You’ll see.” Then he left.
Scott didn’t bother getting cleaned up (though he hadn’t shaved or bathed, and had been wearing the same clothes for more than twenty-four hours), and he refused the coffee one of the nurses offered him. Instead, he remained by Kath’s small, motionless frame, his body disconnected and his brain on hold.
Before leaving with Holley an hour later, he checked in on Caroline. She was still asleep, muttering and tossing restlessly.
26
THE POLICE IMPOUND TURNED OUT to be a double-bay Texaco station in the city’s south end. The Volvo, which from the back appeared undamaged, sat to one side of the station next to a wrecked Duster. Holley parked his silver Mercedes by the cluttered front entrance. As he climbed out, he hailed a mechanic who was working beneath a yellow Honda on a hoist. Scott waited in the car, deliberately avoiding the Volvo, looking instead at Holley and the mechanic. The mechanic squinted toward Scott, said something brief, then shrugged. Finally the two men moved deeper into the garage.
As if to do so was forbidden, Scott stole a glance at the Volvo. From this angle he could see that the front end was badly staved in, and he looked away again.
How did this happen? his mind demanded. Had there been some mechanical malfunction? Caroline had told him over the phone that Krista had had some kind of car trouble. Had the mechanic at the station Holley mentioned done something wrong? The Volvo was a foreign car, and with the turbo booster its engine would be Greek to all but a specially trained mechanic. Had that bastard tampered with something technically beyond him? Made some grievous mistake?
Scott started to get out of the car. He would ask these people himself if Holley was going to take all day....
Then the coroner was coming out of the garage, moving briskly toward the Mercedes. He came to the passenger’s side and opened the door. Scott climbed out and followed him to the Volvo.
As he approached the car Scott became dimly aware of Holley’s voice. He was telling Scott that although the mechanics had gone meticulously over the car, they had found no evidence of any causal malfunction. But the noise in Scott’s head—the high-pitched hum that had begun in the ER cubicle and had since been slowly driving him mad—pitched suddenly higher, filling his mind with white noise as he strode reluctantly toward the Volvo.
Biting his lip, Scott urged himself to regard the evidence of his family’s destruction. His eyes fought desperately to turn away, but he forced them to look. He began at the rear. There was no damage back here, and for the moment it was safe to pretend that none of this had happened.
Then he saw that the door on the driver’s side had been punched in and he hesitated, thinking: This isn’t so bad...a person could have survived this....
He took another step forward and stopped again, next to the undamaged side mirror. From here he could see that the hood was sprung and that the windshield had been shattered. That explained the small cuts on Kath’s face and neck.
Unconsciously, Scott rubbed the old scar on his chin.
Then he noticed a pool of congealed blood on the dash in front of the steering wheel, and that made him glance sharply away, his breath catching like an ice pick in his throat.
Stumbling on a loose chunk of asphalt, he trudged unsteadily toward the front of the car, where the bulk of the damage could be seen.
The Volvo’s plastic grille had been reduced to splinters, the fenders accordioned back at least two feet. Through the yawning mouth of the hood Scott saw that the engine had snapped its mounts and dropped beneath the chassis. He remembered the salesman crowing about this special safety feature (“In a head-on collision the engine doesn’t wind up in your lap.”) and thinking: Neat, but I’ll never need that. Not me...not us.
Still struggling to deny the whole thing, Scott grasped at the false hope that the car belonged to someone else...but then he leaned in through the open side window and spotted one of Kath’s plastic shoes (Jelly-shoes, she called them) lying on its side on the floor mat. And there was the V-shaped rip Krista had made in the upholstery with a shelving bracket she bought at Canadian Tire. God, how she’d fretted over that....
It was his car, all right.
Like a sleepwalker, Scott returned to the driver’s side of the car and tugged on the battered door. It screamed on ruined hinges. The spring adjustment groaned as he sat down, and the seat shifted back a notch before it locked.
He put his hands on the steering wheel and saw that it was bent.
Then he was sniffing the air, peering down beneath the dash, beside him, into the back seat. There was an odor in here, behind the still-new smells of the car—a musty, wet reek that reminded him of the time he found a dead mouse behind the washing machine in the basement at home. Rot or mold mingled with dampness and age. It was...was it?...the same smell he’d noticed around his wife’s corpse on the stretcher in the Emergency Room? That whiff of death?
Then he saw the lid of the Coleman cooler, jolted loose by the impact, and reaching back, shifted it all the way open. Inside, a half-eaten submarine sandwich floated in a pool of milky water. It was rank.
Scott pressed the lid shut and climbed out of the car. The Volvo was repairable, but he knew he could never drive it again. After today this was the last he wanted to see of it. He would tell the mechanic to have it towed away or let him sell it for parts or scrap.
He turned back toward Holley, who leaned patiently against his Mercedes. Then something occurred to him and he leaned in through the open door to confirm it.
There were jewels of shattered glass in the back seat.
Scott bumped his head on the doorframe as he jerked it out of the car. How could there be glass in the back seat? Holley had said the Volvo spun out of control and struck a stone wall. If that was the case, the windshield—if it shattered at all, Scott thought—would have shattered outward, not inward.
Unless they hit somet
hing movable, he thought, and his fingers went to the scar on his chin again. Unless something came through the windshield from the outside.
Holley’s pager sounded. The static-ridden voice was faint, but Scott was certain he heard a message to call the hospital. The coroner excused himself and hurried back into the garage.
A knot of fear constricted Scott’s stomach. Was it about Kath? Had she taken a turn?
Nearly sick with anxiety, he stumbled into the garage after Holley. The gaunt physician was standing inside a small, ill-lit office using the phone. After a moment he handed the receiver to Scott.
“It’s for you,” he said.
Scott inched forward on rubber legs, unable to read a thing in Holley’s eyes. Accepting the receiver, he beat back a pessimistic voice in his mind. But as he brought the receiver to his ear, that inner voice refused to be silenced.
I’m sorry, it said, but she’s convulsing again, and it’s not so good.. .not so good at all.
“Hello?”
Silence. A muffled sob.
“What is it?” Scott said, his scalp crawling. “What’s happened?”
Again a pause, more brief this time, then Caroline was on the line. She was crying, and Scott felt his knees begin to buckle.
she’s convulsing again...
“Scott?” Caroline said, her sobs turning to rich, hysterical laughter. “She’s awake. She’s awake and asking for you. Please come, Scott, come quickly. I...I can’t bear to tell her.”
A relief so profound, so gigantic, welled in Scott that he turned to face Holley and let his own tears come without shame. “Give me ten minutes,” he said. “Oh, God...she’s awake?”
“Yes, and she seems okay...only a little groggy.”
“Ten minutes,” Scott said, and hung up. “Can you drive me back?” he said to Holley, almost shouting.
The Cartoonist Page 15
