Living Witness (21 page)

Gary Albright was pretty good at surfing the Internet, although he had to surf it at work, since there were so many parental controls on the machines he had at home that he couldn't find anything useful on them. He'd toyed with the idea of getting a single machine just for his
own use and installing it in the master bedroom, but there was just no way to lock that door. Sarah went in and out of there all day, and Lily and Michael were used to being able to use the room at will as long as nobody was asleep in it. Gary had a half-formed but very stubborn idea that children were natural-born computer hackers. If there was something you didn't want them to find, and there was any way to get to it, they'd find it.

Gary had ended up staying late one night. He called up Google and typed in “secular humanist.” That was when he'd discovered that his pastor was not entirely correct. For one thing, atheists didn't always worry that nobody would like them if they were atheists. Some of them came right out and said what they were. They had organizations, like American Atheists and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and pins and badges, too. He'd even found a Web site where you could order bumper stickers and other stuff for your car, like Darwin fish decals and a little plaque that said
GOD IS JUST PRETEND
. So there was that. Then there was something called the Council for Secular Humanism, which was mostly just confusing, and the American Humanist Association, which looked like it belonged back in 1968. The American Humanist Association was the one Henry Wackford belonged to, and the one that was the national to Henry's little local group, so Gary tried to pay attention most closely to that, but he just didn't get it. Mostly, everything on the site seemed to be very, very angry about something, but he was never entirely sure what. He went through four or five articles without being able to figure out the point. It had made him realize, yet again, that he was not very good at figuring out people.

Now he realized that he was halfway out to the hospital, and that he had intended to go all along. Sometimes, he understood that he was not very good at figuring himself out. He pulled in to the large visitor's lot across the asphalt drive from the main doors and turned off his engine. He came out here two or three times a week to double-check on Annie-Vic. He thought he could put this visit down to that and nobody would question it. But that wasn't why he was here. It
didn't even begin to explain why he was here. He wished there was somebody or something that could explain the world to him. It was the kind of thing you could ask God after you were dead, but he wanted an answer a lot sooner than that.

The hospital was not in Snow Hill. There had been a hospital in Snow Hill once, back in the Depression, but there had been more people in town then, and not so much in the way of expensive technology too dear for tiny hospitals to afford. This hospital was big and sprawling and very modern, and Gary was glad it was here. It was a symbol, though, of all these other things—of what had brought this lawsuit, Snow Hill, and Gregor Demarkian, too.

He pocketed his keys and got out of the car. It was his own car, not a town police vehicle, so he didn't bother to lock it up. Nobody locked up much of anything around here, but you did have to worry if you had a police cruiser, because some people took it as a challenge. Gary thought a good half of the minor-league misdemeanor crime in Snow Hill was motivated by a desire to create personal legends, to be able to say to sons and grandsons, “Well, there was the time Bobby and I stole that police cruiser and parked it in the Dairy Queen.” Somebody had parked a police cruiser in the Dairy Queen once and done a lot of damage, too, but Gary had never been able to pin it on the two idiots he'd known all along had done it. If they didn't wait long enough to tell their story, he might be able to get them that way.

He walked across the parking lot and then across the drive. There were lots of parked cars, but no people around. The ambulance entrance was around the corner, so he couldn't see that, but he couldn't hear any sirens, either. It was remarkable how often he came by here when nothing much was going on. He'd gone by a hospital in Philadelphia when he'd been down talking to people, on the trip that led to his securing Gregor Demarkian's help. The emergency room he looked into there had been totally crazy and it had been the middle of the morning, too. It hadn't been a time when you'd have thought there'd be a lot in the way of emergencies.

He went in through the front door and signed the visitor's book.
He told the girl at the desk who he was—she probably already knew—and asked her if she could page Dr. Willard for him. Then he went up in the elevator to the second floor. It was just that he didn't understand it, he really didn't. He supposed that some people might not believe in God just because they didn't, for the same reason some people didn't like the color red. He could see where there might be people like that. What he didn't understand were the people who did it deliberately, who
decided
not to believe in God, and who then always seemed so proud of themselves for doing it. To Gary, a life without God seemed like a lonely thing.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. He got out, made himself known to the nurses at the nursing station, and went on to Annie-Vic's room. Sometimes when he came to see her, there were people in the room visiting. Her grandnieces and nephews kept cycling through. They had jobs and busy lives, but they came anyway and looked in on her. So did her surviving brothers, most of whom were younger than she was. That didn't mean much. They were all in their eighties. From what Gary had heard, Annie-Vic's entire family had been atheists, all the way back to her grandfather. They'd been the Henry Wackfords of their day. Still, you couldn't say that they didn't value family, or that they were dishonest or cruel or given to running wild. If you could say that, Gary was sure he'd have heard about it. Annie-Vic herself was one of the most upright, morally straight women he'd ever known. It never made sense, no matter how much he thought of it. And yet there had to be an answer out there that would bring it all together.

He let himself into Annie-Vic's room. The shades were open, letting in the sun. The plate glass of the windows looked as if it would be cold to the touch. He walked over to the bed and looked down at her. He was glad the family wasn't here this time. He always felt that they didn't trust them. Annie-Vic in her bed looked tiny, so fine-boned she would break if she so much as turned over. Somebody had washed her hair and brushed it back away from her face. Gary wondered yet again if she had seen the person who had attacked her. He
supposed she had, but even if she woke up out of this coma, there was no guarantee that she'd remember. Gary had talked to the doctor about that, and he'd been very firm.

There was a cough from behind him, and Gary turned. Dr. Willard was standing in the doorway, wearing his white coat, a stethoscope around his neck. Gary wondered why doctors were always dressed like that, even in their own offices. It was like a costume that they all felt required to wear, so that if they ever wanted to stop being real doctors they could at least play doctors on TV.

Dr. Willard came into the room. He wasn't local, and he was very young. Gary could never remember his first name.

“She's comfortable,” he said. “And I look in on her at least twice a day. But there hasn't been any change. I'd call you if there had been.”

“I know. I just like to check.”

“I think it's a very good thing that you check,” Dr. Willard said. “I think she knows when people visit. I think she knows when people talk to her. I don't think she knows it the way you or I would know something, but I do think she knows.”

“Does she have brain damage?” Gary asked. “I understand that she's in a coma, so that means she doesn't wake up or respond to people in the normal way. I just don't understand why she's in a coma.”

“Nobody understands why anybody is in a coma,” Dr. Willard said. “We do know that comas tend to happen when there's been trauma to the brain, but that's not saying very much. Lots of people have trauma to the brain without ending up in comas, and lots of people in comas don't seem to have sustained that much trauma to the brain. And trauma is not the same thing as damage. So—”

“So you still can't answer my question about whether she's going to remember anything if she comes round.”

“Sorry,” Dr. Willard said. “I really would like to help you. It's not much fun, thinking that there's somebody out there who was willing to bash in the head of an old woman just for kicks. I do hope you find him.”

“I do, too. We've brought in a consultant—”

“Gregor Demarkian,” Dr. Willard said. “I heard about it. Somebody who's been on
American Justice
. We've all been impressed.”

“Yeah,” Gary said. He looked down at Annie-Vic again. She hadn't moved. There was no change of expression on her face. He turned away. “Well,” he said. “I'd better be getting back. Call me if there's any change.”

“Oh, I will,” Dr. Willard said. “But it's like I told that Miss Marbledale this morning. There are always changes in coma patients, they just don't mean much.”

 

Coming back down from the schools complex, Alice McGuffie thought she was going to explode. Who did any of those people think they were, anyway? She wasn't some tenth grader with missing homework. She wasn't a fool, either. Schools complex, for God's sake. She'd liked it better when the schools had been the way they were when she attended them, right there in the middle of town, and made out of red brick with big windows. They were built in the thirties, those schools, and they were good enough. It was a crock, all this talk about education and how important it was. It was important for people to be able to read and write, yes, and to speak English, which a lot of them couldn't do, at least down in places like Philadelphia, but all the rest of it was just stupid. History, for instance. Who the Hell cared about what happened in history? There was the American Revolution and the Pilgrims and all that, and it made sense to teach it especially to immigrant children who weren't real Americans, but what difference did it make in the end? She hadn't been alive when any of that happened. She didn't know why anybody should expect her to know about it, and she didn't see why anybody should expect Barbie to know about it, either. Barbie had a right to a real American high school experience, with cheerleading and football and proms and all the rest of it, and pretending that people like that Mallory Cornish were important in any way was, well, just stupid.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, Alice thought. Then she thought of Judy Cornish's smug little face—Judy Cornish and that other woman, Niederman. God, Alice hated all those people, all the people from the development, making fistfuls of cash for doing what? Not for working, that was for sure. Not for getting their hands dirty and their legs tired. Most of them had never done a day's work in their lives. They went to offices, or they were like Judy Cornish and didn't go anywhere at all. They just drove SUVs no decent person could afford the gas for and stuck their noses in the air because they were
educated people
.

“Educated people,” Judy Cornish had said, sitting in Miss Marbledale's big outer office, “haven't taken Creationism seriously for eighty years. You may not care whether or not your daughter can get into a good college, but I do care about mine.”

Good college
. Oh, that was something. Of course, as far as Judy Cornish was concerned, the University of Pittsburgh was not a “good college.” Nothing was a “good college” except those fancy Ivy League places. Alice wasn't sure which schools were in the Ivy League, although she knew about Yale and Harvard, because everybody had heard of them. She thought they were all in New England or someplace. She wasn't sure. It didn't matter. God, these people were all so, they were all—they had been just like that even back in high school, the one or two who were going to go away to “good colleges,” but it hadn't mattered then, because nobody had to take them seriously then. They didn't play sports, those people, or if they did they played fag sports like tennis, and nobody liked them.

“I think a club devoted to expanding investigations into serious academic topics would be a good thing for a school like this,” Judy Cornish had said. “There isn't enough civic education in our schools, not even at the best of times. That's why we end up with silly lawsuits like the one we have.”

God, Alice thought again, and then. Who would join a club like that? They'd be laughed at, and rightly. It wasn't natural. Sitting in that room, she had been so angry she had had a hard time getting herself to speak, and it hadn't helped that Miss Marbledale had been off
somewhere when she got there. Nobody had any idea where Miss Marbledale had gone, and by the time she got back Judy Cornish was in full swing, with that Niederman woman standing right behind her, outlining the whole “agenda” for the vice principal.

“Agenda.” Alice hated big words. Alice hated people who used big words.

“I'm fairly sure that if enough parents chip in, we could bring some fairly important speakers to town to address the club,” Judy Cornish was saying. “We could get somebody from the National Center for Science Education, for instance, to clear up some of these misunderstandings about evolution. We could get somebody from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and maybe at least someone from one of the local chapters of the ACLU. The club could sponsor the talks and we could hold them in the evening and open them up to the entire town—”

That was when Alice had first noticed that Miss Marbledale was back. She must have come in while Judy Cornish was talking. Judy Cornish went on talking. She was talking and talking.

“Nobody would go to see those people,” Alice had said. “Nobody would. We don't want Communists here. Communists and, you know, liberals. Secular humanists. I don't care what you call them. We don't want them here, and we don't need them to confuse the Hell out of everybody when any fool knows what's true and it isn't what they say.”