“We pray for you constantly,” added Mrs. Birch in tones of martyrdom.
Sissy saw a nurse peek in, then hustle away, probably to summon security. Sissy hoped. Although it might be better not to wait. She figured she could handle the old man if Lewinski would subdue the woman. She eyed him. But he seemed too shocked and distressed to take action.
Mrs. Birch stabbed at a vase of roses with her forefinger and demanded, “Who sent you such expensive flowers? What a waste.”
“Flowers, bah!” echoed Mr. Birch. “Perfume the air all you like, Candor, we can still smell the putrefaction of your soul.”
“Dorrie’s injured.” Shaking his head, with his lips pressed into a grim line, Sam grasped his father-in-law by the arm, trying to usher the old man away from the foot of Dorrie’s bed. “And she’s having a severe lupus flare. You’re supposed to be helping her.”
Pulling away from Sam without even looking at him, Mr. Birch intoned, “We have helped her. God saved her unworthy life because of our prayers.”
And while Sam was distracted, Mrs. Birch had advanced to lean over the bed. “Why the private room?” she shrilled almost directly into Dorrie’s ear. “Good money up a puppy’s rectum!”
The nurse reappeared and strode in, speaking to the Birches. “Sir, ma’am, please lower your voices or I will be forced to call security. This is a hospital.”
Neither of them so much as looked at her; a mosquito would have received more attention.
Dorrie’s father thundered, “Candor Verity, you have disobeyed us and disobeyed us unto the gates of Hell, and now you must listen.”
“Listen and repent,” Mrs. Birch exhorted.
Mr. Birch continued, “We absolutely forbid you to go near that illegitimate—the Phillips girl ever again. Not—”
Then it happened.
The drip stands supporting the intravenous tubing clattered and nearly fell, Dorrie sat up so forcefully. With strength she should not possibly have possessed, Dorrie reared forward in her bed and flared at her parents, “You two vultures are not my family anymore. Get out of this room. And get out of my life.” Her voice, so powerful it seemed almost supernatural, made Sissy think of a flaming sword. Dorrie’s puffy eyes opened as wide as they could to blaze. “And stay out! Don’t ever come near me again. Never!”
For a moment of silence so profound it seemed nearly miraculous, Dorrie stared down her startled parents. Sissy watched the old woman’s face go cane-sugar white but far from sweet; the old man’s turned heart-attack red. But Sam moved first, three long steps to sit with Dorrie and support her in his arms. And he spoke first. “I would take great pleasure in throwing you heartless freaks out of here with my own hands,” he said, his voice low and intense, “but I have to ask Officer Chappell and Pastor Lewinski to do it for me.”
“Glad to,” said Lewinski.
“Likewise.” Sissy stepped up to confront Mr. Birch, assuming the authority of a uniform even though she wore none. “You have been ordered to leave these premises at once. I advise you to go now, quietly—”
“Jezebel!” shrieked Mrs. Birch. So much for quiet.
Expertly Sissy seized Mr. Birch, spun him, and, with his arms twisted behind him, propelled him out of the room. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Lewinski was handling Mrs. Birch simply by towing the old woman, his hands gripping her elbow.
Sissy wished she had a slightly more expert assistant, and was relieved when hospital security met them before they reached the first elevator.
“We resign from your church!” Mr. Birch, restrained by a security guard, shouted at Lewinski.
“Good,” said Lewinski.
“Go to hell!” screeched Mrs. Birch. A real-life witch could not have invoked the curse more virulently.
“If that happens, I’ll see you there.”
Sissy did not engage in any repartee. She could not forget the old couple quickly enough. Running, already halfway down the hall, she wanted only to see how Dorrie was doing.
Back in the room, she found Sam still tending to his wife, gently easing her back to lie down in bed, smoothing her hair as he settled her head on the pillow, talking to her, dropping tiny kisses on her anywhere there was some unblistered skin. He kissed her hairline, her ear, her nose. “I’m so proud of you, Dorrie,” he whispered, kissing her. “So very, very proud of you. What a woman.”
She opened her eyes slightly and answered him with an exhausted smile. She whispered, “Give those cookies to the nurses, would you, sweetie?”
* * *
I drifted back into myself over a period of days. I don’t remember a thing about the ambulance or the helicopter or the emergency room. I don’t recall any climactic moment of waking up to find myself alive with Sam by my side. I think it happens like that only in movies. For me, it was more like a series of dreams and vignettes, and I couldn’t always tell the vignettes from the dreams.
Sometimes it was Juliet in a ballet tutu or a clown wig with a sapphire blue flasher stuck in her nose, Juliet saying, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”
Sometimes it was a man or a woman in a white coat bending over me, murmuring, extracting fruit punch from one arm as they added milk to the other.
Sometimes it was a soft female voice asking questions. What had I seen at the mall? How had I followed the van? What had happened to my Kia? What had happened in the gravel parking lot?
“I broke the van and the alarm went off,” I explained not very lucidly.
“Did you put anything up the tailpipe?”
“Oh. Yes. Kleenex. I forgot.” I opened my eyes. She was a youthful black woman with such ineffably sweet concern in her caramel face that I did not think of her as an ordinary human being. Instead, I thought of her as God taking notes. “I killed Blake,” I said.
“With the knife?”
I nodded. “I threw all my strength into slashing his throat. I couldn’t risk letting him live.”
“Yes.”
“It is terrible to kill like that, blood spurting and his eyes so surprised and hurt.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I will go to hell for killing him?”
“No. I think you can be proud. You saved the world from a rapist, a murderer.”
“I killed Blake with the mother of all scary castrating bitches,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes. Her name was Pandora.”
“Oh.”
“So if I could do that,” I added, closing my eyes again, “I guess I can get over being afraid of knives.”
“How did you get the knife away from Blake?”
“Pandora? He handed her to me.”
“Excuse me?”
“We had a suicide pact. I was supposed to slash his wrist. The way he did to his parents.”
“His parents?”
“He murdered them.” I had not known this until the moment I said it, yet I had known it back then in my adolescence too. Every time I had wanted to kill my own parents, I had known, then repressed, what Blake had done to his. I told the gentle being who was questioning me, “They made him crazy and he killed them. Or he killed them and then he went crazy. Whatever.” Humbly I asked, “God, do you think I’m going to go crazy from killing him?”
She said gently, “I think you need to go back to sleep and I’ll talk with you again tomorrow.”
I slept, sometimes with my eyes open, amid limpid whiteness. The white-light presence abided with me, drifting into oneness with me as I drifted back into myself, meanwhile engaging me in important conversations. About the meaning of my name. Candor Verity: honest truth. Ironic, considering the life I had lived so far.
Sam stayed with me almost as constantly as the presence. Mostly silent, holding my hand in both of his. So warm, his hands. I remember once waking up to ask
him in genuine surprise, “You’re still here? Why aren’t you slaving away at the machine shop?”
His reply was vehement and remarkable. “Screw the machine shop. I love you.”
Remarkable because I had never heard him use the verb “to screw” in any sense except its most literal one.
And even more remarkable because he hardly ever said “I love you” except on Valentine’s Day or our wedding anniversary.
Which meant he too knew this was more important. I told him, “Sam, when I decided to live, it was for you. To give us another chance.”
“Decided to live?” he repeated blankly. Typical Sam, stuck on a detail while the gist sailed right past him. “You decided?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, because it hurt, remembering how I could have floated forever at peace on the wide horizon of eternity, and I had elected to return to the painful straits of time instead. When I opened my eyes, Sam was still there, still staring at me.
“I married too young, maybe. Up till now I haven’t given you the love you deserve,” I told him, watching his face. How had I ever thought he was just an average-looking man? He was strong, rugged, handsome in his quiet way.
He turned his head. Not looking at me, he said as if we were dealing with a forgotten grocery item, “Don’t worry about it, Dorrie. You do okay. I mean, shoot, look what you grew up with. Look at the parents who raised you.”
“Oh.” The mention of my parents distracted me from the odd way Sam was acting. I lay thinking. “I remember . . . am I dreaming, or did I really tell them to go jump in a lake?”
“Indeed you did, although not in those exact words.” Sam leaned over me and kissed me gingerly on one of the few places not encrusted with an ulcerating rash: my forehead. “You told them to get out of your life and stay out. They had to be physically removed from this hospital and they’re not allowed back in.” He watched my eyes. “Are you okay with that?”
“Okay?” My heart felt like a winged thing, a once-caged bird free at last, ready to sing. All my beepy machines began to chorus like spring peepers, and I popped some lupus blisters by grinning. “I’m better than okay. I could dance, or fly. I’m free. I’m out from under all that black. Do you think we can make the old killjoys stay away from the house when I get home?”
A nurse rushed in to check my machines before Sam could answer, but I could tell by the warm feel of his hand on my forehead and hair that his answer was yes. Yes.
* * *
Later, Sam told himself, much later when Dorrie was much stronger, he would tell her what her parents had done. The same day Dorrie had ordered them out of her life, they had put their narrow brown-shingled house and its contents up for sale, loaded some personal items into their old green sedan, and left Fulcrum without telling anyone where they were going and without leaving a forwarding address.
Sam did not think Dorrie would be very hurt by their final gesture of rejection. He himself hoped never again to see them. But it was hard to tell what Dorrie might feel deep down. Parents were parents.
Even though Dorrie was looking better every day, Sam still kept reminding himself not to question her, not to mention Appletree or anything that might upset her. His own feelings, which were pretty well mixed up between wonder and hurt and awe and shock and love and jealousy and fear, were going to have to wait. First things first: Dorrie needed time to recuperate. Even Sissy’s questioning had been limited to five minutes a day. Now, more than a week after it had all happened, Dorrie was conscious, talking some, and the doctors said she was in stable condition, but Sam had decided that any discussion of Juliet Phillips, or more specifically how Juliet Phillips had come to be born, was out of the question unless or until Dorrie raised the subject herself.
Dorrie was peacefully napping and Sam was in his customary bedside chair, thinking along these lines, when the door of the private hospital room opened. “Mr. White,” called a nurse, “there’s a gentleman out here who would like to speak with you.”
Sam got up from his chair, glancing back at Dorrie over his shoulder as he went out. Who would want to talk with him? Any doctor would have come into the room. If Dad was in perplexities trying to run the machine shop, he would have called, and if Mom wanted to discuss dinner plans, she would have just popped in. So who—
He saw the man, although it took him a moment to place him.
Oh. Don Phillips.
Don Phillips?
This was odd, the district attorney and gubernatorial hopeful, three-piece suit and briefcase and all, a man with lots of things to do, waiting in the hospital hallway.
“Sam.” Don Phillips took Sam’s hand and grasped it more than shook it. Sam could have sworn it wasn’t the gesture of a politician. The man seemed off his stride, poise in abeyance for some reason.
But then, the district attorney seemed to be studying him with similar sympathy. “You look like hell,” Don Phillips said.
“I’m fine. Things are getting back to normal.” Somewhat. Mostly thanks to parents who insisted that their son eat, shower, change clothes, sleep. “Dorrie’s resting comfortably.”
“Your wife deserves a medal for what she did. I intend to nominate her for the Carnegie Heroism Award.” Don Phillips steered Sam down the hospital corridor toward one of those little closed-off lounges the hospital provided for families to confer in—crying rooms, Sam called them. Following him in there, Sam tried to think what might be on the guy’s mind. Juliet Phillips’s statement had cleared Dorrie of any wrongdoing. The police and FBI were busy with the artifacts in Blake Roman’s shoe box, which had already enabled them to link that unspeakable punk to the rapes and/or murders of seven young women in California, Wyoming, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. They were also happily preoccupied with the guy’s customized knife, which featured remote control panels in the hilt. They surmised that either Juliet or Dorrie had pressed the one that had opened the green metal door, probably without even knowing it.
On top of all that, they had old Bert Roman’s ravings to sift through. Appletree PD had dropped all charges except such as were necessary to keep Bert in the psychiatric wing of the local hospital, because he had been acting mighty strange since he had shown himself to be a possible danger to himself and others by discharging his gun. But the coroner said Blake Roman’s body had already been dead when Bert Roman had plugged a bullet into it.
That had been a doozy of a surprise, finding out that the serial killer had been the old guy’s grandson.
Not the scariest surprise, though, to Sam.
“You sure you’re okay?” Don Phillips asked, closing the door of the crying room behind Sam and him.
Sam clenched his teeth. What the heck did this guy want from him? “I’m not sure of anything.”
“I know the feeling.” Don Phillips reached into his suit jacket pocket and produced a cell phone Sam vaguely recognized. “Juliet thanks you very, very much for the loan of this,” the DA told him, handing it over, “and asked me to return it to you.”
“She’s very welcome. How is she doing?”
“Wonderfully.” Don Phillips sat down on an unlovely tan vinyl sofa, his facial expression not reflecting what he had just said. Yet he repeated it. “Wonderfully. She’s just tired and a little confused. Barely traumatized at all.” Don Phillips raised a haunted gaze to Sam’s face. “I can’t stop thinking what would have happened to her if it weren’t for your amazing wife. I can’t get over it.”
Sam sat down on a tan vinyl chair facing the matching sofa. He didn’t lean back; he perched on the edge of the stiff square cushion, elbows on his knees and his big hands dangling, waiting to see what this was really about.
Don Phillips sighed and met his eyes. “Have you talked with your wife at all about Juliet?”
Oh. That was what this was about. Whether Dorrie got to be a mother.
Which, by
God, she deserved after all she’d been through for that girl’s sake.
“No. Not yet,” Sam replied levelly. “Have you talked with Juliet at all about Dorrie?”
“No. But I know Juliet wants to see her just as soon as the doctor will permit it. I wish—I truly wish I could just let nature take its course, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because the adoption . . .” Don Phillips continued to study the soiled beige carpeting. “Morally I don’t think Pearl and I have done anything wrong, but legally, um, the adoption agreement is, um, somewhat questionable. . . .”
“I don’t blame you,” Sam said. “I know what it is to pray for a child.”
“Thank you.” The DA met his eyes with visible relief. “But not everyone is going to be so understanding. Your wife’s parents have threatened to ruin me if anything is made public.”
Sam sagged back into his chair. He felt his mouth hanging open and struggled to close it. “That’s just the sort of thing they would do,” he said when he could speak. “Old buzzards. But they’ve left town in a snit, did you know that?”
“No. But it doesn’t really matter. They can still get me into a lot of trouble.”
“All right. So we want to keep you out of trouble. So how many people know about Dorrie and Juliet?”
“Quite a few, actually, but they are police or FBI, and they’re with me on this.”
I bet they are, Sam thought. This guy had clout.
“Angstrom told his people it was all a mistake, the idea that there was anything suspicious about Dorrie’s involvement. They’ll forget about it. End of story.”
“Which leaves me and Dorrie,” Sam said. And Sissy Chappell, but he felt no need to mention her. Sissy wanted only the best for Dorrie.
Don Phillips nodded. “Did you personally tell anybody?”
Sam gave the question some thought. He hadn’t told his parents a thing except what they could read in the newspaper: A heroic woman named Dorrie White had seen a teenage girl being abducted, had followed and confronted the abductor, and had ultimately gotten his knife away from him and killed him in self-defense, then freed the girl, and was now recovering from her injuries.
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 25
