She Wore Mourning

by P. D. Workman

  “You’re not gonna die, sweetie. Not on my shift.”

  She went to the doorway and called for one of the other nurses to fetch her something.

  “Just calm yourself, Mr. Goldman. It will all be all right. Keep breathing. Out with all the bad air. The problem is carbon dioxide, not oxygen.”

  Tears started to track down Zachary’s face, but he was in too much of a panic to be embarrassed by his childish display.

  Another nurse hurried into the room and handed the first a needle and a vial. The Caribbean nurse stood beside Zachary’s bed. It seemed like she was moving at glacial speed, waiting for him to pass out, before she stabbed the needle into the access hole on the vial and drew out a dose.

  “I can give you a sedative, or you can relax and calm yourself down,” she advised him. “Do you really want the needle?”

  Zachary breathed heavily, each intake burning all the way down his throat, chest, and side. Did he have broken ribs from the car accident too? Was that what Spencer felt like when he tried to breathe?

  The nurse injected the contents of the needle into the IV tube that already fed into Zachary’s arm. He hadn’t been aware of it up until then. A coldness started to work its way up Zachary’s arm, and then it spread to the rest of his body. He could feel his muscles start to relax. The soreness in his lungs faded. The machines slowed their beeping. Zachary started to drift.

  “You can’t talk to him any more tonight,” the nurse told the cops firmly. “You will have to come by tomorrow and try again.” She put her hands on her narrow hips. “And next time, try not to upset him.”

  “Happy New Year.”

  Kenzie looked surprised at Zachary’s greeting. She stopped and looked at him for a moment, looking confused. Then she smiled.

  “Happy New Year,” she told him back. Her bruises were starting to fade. Or maybe she was masking them with makeup. Either way, he suspected she looked a lot better than he did.

  “I guess I missed out on that kiss,” Zachary joked.

  “What kiss?”

  “New Year’s. The countdown. The kiss.”

  “Oh.” Kenzie leaned over him and kissed him softly on the lips. Short, fleeting, and gentle. She didn’t linger, but gave him a silly sort of smile, then sat down in the visitor chair, where he couldn’t see her.

  Zachary tried to turn his head to look at her and thought that maybe he made a small movement. The doctor had said that as the swelling went down, he’d be able to do more. Maybe it was starting to heal.

  “You’re in a good mood today,” Kenzie suggested.

  “I’m feeling pretty good. I’d like to get out of here soon…”

  “I don’t think you’re going to be waltzing out of here for a while yet. Let’s wait until you’re mobile.”

  “Soon,” Zachary insisted. “I’m getting better.”

  “Okay, buddy boy. If you say so.”

  Zachary sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “Do you remember the crash?”

  “Vividly. Still a blank for you?”

  “Yeah, mostly. I vaguely remember you being there, talking to me. Being upside down. Cold.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not the actual crash.”

  “It was freaking scary, so be glad you don’t have to. I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified in my life. I was sure we were both going to die.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I know… but I feel responsible. If someone cut the brakes because they wanted me off a case… that comes back to me.”

  “Someone cut your brakes?” Kenzie repeated in disbelief.

  “Didn’t the police tell you?”

  “No! I knew they didn’t work… that you hit the brakes and they didn’t slow us down. I thought… it was a malfunction.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “The letter! Do they think that whoever left the note on the windshield cut your brake lines? Tried to kill us? Or to kill you, at least?”

  “Yeah.”

  She swore softly and was quiet. Zachary couldn’t see her expression. Couldn’t reach his hand out to touch her and comfort her. “Are you okay?” he asked after a few minutes had passed.

  “Sure. I’m fine. No worries.” She swore again, in a hard, flinty tone. “I guess New Year’s can now take the place of Christmas as your least favorite holiday.”

  Zachary closed his eyes. She had no idea. Nothing would ever take the place of Christmas as his least favorite holiday. His least favorite season. His least favorite day every year. He had once thought that he could replace those memories. Supplant the bad ones with new, positive, happy family memories. But that was never going to happen. Even if he did someday get married again and have a family, he was never going to be able to root out the memories of the past.

  “Zachary?” Kenzie persisted. “Maybe Christmas isn’t so bad after all?”

  “No. Christmas is still worse.”

  Kenzie was quiet, considering this. He could see her furled brows in his mind’s eye. Trying to imagine what could be worse than being almost killed and paralyzed, at least temporarily, and spending the special day in the emergency room and ICU.

  “You’re going to have to tell me,” she said. “What exactly happened to make Christmas so awful?”

  Zachary took long, slow breaths. His heart rate didn’t pick up, and the machines stayed quiet and calm beside him.

  “It was a long time ago. When I was ten.”

  “Ten? What happened, you didn’t get the toy or the puppy you wanted?”

  “No. I was ten… my folks were fighting. It was Christmas Eve, and we all had to go to bed early because of a big fight. They wanted us out of the way while they screamed at each other. Like we couldn’t hear them in our bedrooms.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I waited until they went to bed, which wasn’t until hours later. They fought… not just arguing, but physical. I remember hiding under my covers, scared to death and trying to keep my little brother calm, pretending it was really nothing. I just huddled there, holding him, while they screamed up and down the house, hitting and slapping and throwing things. Then… they finally went to bed.”

  “Zachary… I’m so sorry.” Her voice was much more tender than it had been. He wished he could see her. That she would hold his hand and look at him while he told the story, so he didn’t have to see it all in his mind, to feel that terror and anxiety again. But his heart stayed calm. Whatever meds they had started running into his IV were obviously doing their job, keeping him from feeling the worst of the emotions of that day.

  “I got up when they finally went to bed. I waited until I was sure they were down and asleep and weren’t going to get up again.”

  “Why? To call for help?”

  “No. I cleaned up… picked up everything they had thrown. Straightened all the furniture. I got out the ornaments for the tree. They had gotten a tree, but kept fighting whenever we were supposed to decorate it, so it was just standing there in the corner of the living room, all bare branches. I spent hours decorating it. I needed a chair to get the upper branches, had to keep moving it around the tree to put the garlands on. I untangled and tested the lights, picked out all the best ornaments. The ones with happy memories and special occasions associated with them. Baby’s first Christmas. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. All the silly ornaments that we made for school projects. Everything. I spent all night getting it all perfect.”

  “What a sweet thing to do. I’m sure they appreciated it, even if it didn’t make things better.”

  “I got out the special Christmas candles. Beeswax ones that my grandma had brought back from Germany. Set them out. Lit them. Laid down on the couch to stare at all the beautiful Christmas decorations and imagine how everyone would feel when they came out in the morning, and Christmas had arrived. It would be magical. It would bring them all back together. We’d have Christmas together without any fighting.”

  “But t
hat didn’t happen,” Kenzie guessed.

  “I woke up to a room full of smoke. I couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get out of the room. We didn’t have any smoke alarms. Not any that were working, anyway. I was screaming, trying to wake everyone up and get them out of the house, but I couldn’t even walk across the living room to find the bedrooms, I was so disoriented.”

  Despite whatever they were putting in his IV, Zachary choked up. He couldn’t help reliving it. The acrid smoke burned his lungs. The terror. Knowing that everybody in the house was going to die and it would be his fault.

  “A neighbor’s son who had come home for Christmas in the early morning saw the smoke and called 9-1-1. They got my parents and my brothers and sisters out of their bedrooms through the windows. The firemen had to break down the door and search the house for me. Room by room, because no one knew where I was.”

  “Thank goodness they saved you.”

  Zachary swore. “No. I wish I’d died. I wish they saved everyone else, and let the house burn down around me. That would have been better.”

  “You can’t say that. No. It’s not true.”

  “You don’t know! You have no idea!”

  “You must feel terribly guilty,” Kenzie said. “But you were only a little boy, trying to do something nice for your family. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was my fault.”

  “You can’t say that.”

  “They split the family up.”

  Kenzie’s voice was hesitant. “What…?”

  “My parents separated. They put all the kids into foster care. They said we could never be a family again. We didn’t deserve to be a family.”

  “Who said that?” Kenzie was horrified. She stood and leaned over the bed, grasping for Zachary’s hand. “What a horrible thing to say! You can’t believe it.”

  “My mother. My parents. They said I was incorrigible. A criminal. They didn’t want Social Services to put me into foster care; they wanted to put me in prison. I spent a lot of my teenage years in institutions. All kinds of ‘secure’ facilities for kids with behavioral problems. Prisons for kids who had never been convicted of anything.”

  Kenzie stroked Zachary’s hair, tears in her eyes. “No. How could they do that? You weren’t being bad.”

  “I did awful things. Not as bad as some of the kids. Some of those kids… they should have been in prisons. Or insane asylums. Sadistic, psychotic kids. The kind of adults they could get to work places like that… most of them just as eager to torture you as any of the psychotic little—”

  “Shh,” Kenzie tried to stem the flow of Zachary’s rising rage. He normally did better at controlling himself. The medications must have lowered his inhibitions. Made it easier for him to flap his gums about things he should just keep quiet about. A girl didn’t want to hear that kind of thing. Nobody wanted to hear that kind of thing. They would rather deny such places even existed.

  “You had to be really bad to be put in a place like that,” Zachary asserted feeling hollow and empty.

  “You weren’t bad,” Kenzie whispered, still trying to calm and quiet him. “You were hurt and traumatized. What a horrible thing to do to a child.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hi there.”

  Zachary turned his eyes toward the door and saw Bridget hovering there. Her glance darted around the room, and then back to him. Kenzie was still at work, Bridget didn’t need to worry that they would run into each other at Zachary’s bedside.

  “Come on in,” Zachary invited.

  She entered the room, walking up to him, but staying just out of arm’s reach of the bed. Like he might reach out and shake her hand or something equally as threatening.

  “You’re looking better,” she observed.

  He was finally able to sit up instead of lying flat on his back. Able to turn his head and make use of his arms. In a day or two, they would start him on physio for his legs, getting him up onto his feet for the first time since the accident.

  “Yeah, glad to be able to move again,” Zachary agreed, rolling his shoulders.

  Bridget looked over at the visitor chair, considering. What was there to think about? Did she plan to just stand there beside him, exchange a few words, and then leave again?

  “Sit, relax,” Zachary encouraged.

  She lowered herself to the seat. She held her purse in her lap, clutching it like she might have to leave suddenly and had to have it in her grasp.

  “Did you have a nice Christmas?” Zachary inquired politely. “New Year’s?”

  “Better than yours, apparently.”

  “You visit what’s-his-name’s family?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You knew Gordon’s name at Christmas, so there’s no point in playing games with me now.”

  Zachary shrugged.

  “Yes, we went to see his family for Christmas. They live on a little farm that’s been in their family for generations. White board house. Red barn. Very picturesque in the snow.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “It was very nice. Get away from the rat race. From all the stresses. Just enjoy a Christmas dinner with the family…”

  “I hope I didn’t make you too late for it.”

  Bridget’s mouth quirked. “We did have to rearrange things a little, but it all worked out in the end.”

  “Thanks for… looking out for me.”

  She got a little bit pink. Zachary didn’t like things being awkward between them, but it was better than being yelled at. At least there was some sign that they might be able to have a normal, amicable relationship someday. She still had bitter feelings, he knew. Feelings that she had never shared with him, but had shared with Kenzie about how he had tried to force the pregnancy upon her. The word force still made him furious at the implications. That somehow, he had done something violent or dishonest, when all he had done was express an opinion.

  “I still care about what happens to you, Zachary,” Bridget said carefully. “Even though we’re not together anymore, I don’t want you to…” she chickened out and didn’t say, ‘commit suicide’ or any euphemism, but, “be unhappy.”

  She yelled at him for being at a restaurant and called his date to warn her off, but she didn’t want him to be unhappy? Her words and her actions didn’t correlate.

  She had called him at Christmas and gone to his apartment to make sure he hadn’t done himself harm.

  “I care about you too. I never wanted you to be unhappy,” Zachary told her. “I just wanted us to be happy together.”

  “Don’t go over that old ground. We were never compatible.”

  Never. Getting married had been a mistake. It wasn’t that they had been compatible and then he had screwed everything up. They had never been compatible in the first place.

  She meant it as a consolation, but if anything, it made him feel worse. How would he ever know if someone was compatible? He’d thought they had fit together well. He’d thought she was someone he could spend the rest of his life with. Start a family with. But she’d never been compatible.

  Was anyone? Was there some secret combination? Some code that he had to recognize when he dated? This one fits, but this one doesn’t…

  He had a feeling that nobody would fit Bridget’s definition of compatibility. No one would ever be compatible with Zachary. He didn’t know of anyone else who shared the kind of background he had come from.

  “How are you feeling,” Zachary asked Bridget, moving away from the dangerous ground, “now that you are finished your chemo?”

  “So much better. Still tired, but I’m gradually getting my energy back. Knowing I have more than a few months to live… that’s a comfort.”

  “I’m glad too.”

  She touched her wig self-consciously. She didn’t need to be embarrassed about it. It looked perfectly natural. Just as soft and shining as her own hair. “And I’ll be able to grow my hair back.”

  “You look amazing.”

  “All thin
gs considered,” she temporized for him.

  “No. You just look amazing. For anything.”

  “Oh.” She played with the fringe of her hair with the very tips of her fingers. “Well, thank you, Zachary.” She looked him over. “When do you think you’ll be back out of here?”

  “It depends on how long it takes to get back on my feet. How long it takes for the inflammation to go down. I hope… not too long.”

  “You gave us all quite a scare.”

  “It wasn’t intentional, trust me.” Zachary attempted a smile.

  “You need to be more careful. Had you been drinking?”

  Zachary opened his mouth, and at first, no words came out. He just stared at her. She should have known better. Even if no one had told her it was attempted murder, she should know that he didn’t drink and drive. He didn’t drink irresponsibly. In all the time she had known him, he had never once been drunk.

  He found his voice. “No. I wasn’t drunk. Somebody cut my brake lines.”

  “Cut your brake lines?” her voice was derisive. “What makes you think that? Somebody’s been watching too many Phillip Marlowe movies.”

  “I’m not imagining things. I’m not being paranoid—”

  “You’re always paranoid. Your distrust is what drove us apart.”

  Not the way he remembered it. Yes, he had sometimes had occasion to question her about her activities, but what did she expect from someone who spent half his time trailing unfaithful spouses?

  “The police told me my brake lines were cut,” he informed her, instead of attacking her faulty memory. “They wanted to know who would have motive to kill me.”

  She stared back at him. “That obviously wouldn’t be me, since I was trying to save your life just days earlier!”

  Zachary felt an uncomfortable chill. He hadn’t accused her of being the one trying to kill him. Was her defensiveness evidence that her anger toward him ran much deeper than he wanted to admit? She claimed she still had friendly feelings toward him but had she already regretted reaching out to him at Christmas? Or had her presence in his bathroom, messing around with his meds, been more sinister than it appeared? It was easy to cover it up with the explanation that she was just trying to keep him from killing himself. But maybe she had been looking for a way to conveniently get rid of him, knowing how he handled the Christmas season.