Frightened, she glanced once last time at the Exacto knife on the floor.
No. This is better. I can do this.
She closed her eyes and imagined Jack bursting into the room. He would be the only one strong enough to lift her up. The only one strong enough to save her.
Kim leaned on the shower arm and drove her heel into the tiled wall, producing a hollow boom. She did it five more times in rapid succession then paused, listening...
But the house remained silent. Her parents’ bedroom door, ten feet down the hall, did not open.
She hoofed the wall again, more powerfully this time, the belt tightening against the fierce strain of tendons in her neck.
Come on come on come—
There was a sudden dry
crack
and the shower arm popped an inch out of its bed of plaster, just enough to make Kim lose her balance and slip. Her feet went airborne and the belt took her full weight, tightening around her neck with suffocating force. Within seconds her head felt on the brink of exploding. She kicked her legs in flashfire panic, trying to reach the edge of the tub, trying to backpedal through space to safety. She clawed at the belt with both hands, but her weight drew the loop impossibly tight. She tried to scream but all that came out was a froggy croak.
I’m hanging. Oh God I’M HANGING.
Her toes touched the edge of the tub, found purchase—and slipped off. The arch of her right foot found the cold water knob, pushed, and she was
up
, clutching the chrome shower arm, digging at the choking band of leather with the fingers of her free hand. She loosened it a fraction, took a great whooping breath—
And the faucet knob spun, spilling her off, forcing a jet of cold water through the shower head. The spray was needle-sharp and it soaked Kim’s bucking body like a frigid cloudburst.
Her thrashing heels hammered the wall. Lurid red dots capered in her vision and hot urine streamed down her legs, mixing with the icy water. For one wild moment she thought she was saved. The heel of her left foot came down on the spout and supported her weight...but the spout gave way and Kim slipped off.
The belt tightened and the water rattled down. Blind with terror, Kim twisted and felt something snap in her neck, some small bone in her neck. She swiveled the other way and something else splintered.
Daddy, why won’t you come?
The shower arm jerked again, popping another half inch out of the wall, and the tips of Kim’s toes brushed the bottom of the tub...
But it wasn’t enough. It was a lover’s teasing caress, a phantom’s evil kiss.
The red dots, scintillating, growing dark, began to coalesce.
please...
Kim’s bowels let go. Her heels beat a manic tattoo, but the action was no longer voluntary. She had begun to convulse from asphyxiation.
* * *
Jenny shook Jack awake. “Jack, I think there’s someone in the house.”
Jack came up on one elbow, instantly alert, listening to the muffled, spastic drumbeat that seemed to emanate from the very walls.
“Jack, what is that?”
He took a snub-nose .38 revolver out of the bedside table drawer and checked the load. Then, agile as a cat, he was off the bed and across the room, weapon aimed at the ceiling. He eased the door open and peered into the hallway.
Jenny came up behind him. “Hurry. We’ve got to see if Kim’s all right.” The thudding impacts were trailing off, diminishing in frequency and force.
Light and silent, Jack glided down the hallway to Kim’s room—and heard a single weak impact beyond the closed bathroom door behind him.
Jenny peered into Kim’s darkened room and saw her empty bed.
sleeping like a baby
Jack flung the bathroom door open and froze, filling the gap with his body. Frantic, Jenny stood on tiptoes to look over his shoulder.
“Oh-my-GOD.”
Kim’s body hung twitching from the shower arm, plum-colored tongue protruding, face an engorged, leering monstrosity. A rope of bloody mucus dangled from her nose and her red eyes bulged shockingly. Cold water sizzled down on her head, which rested on her shoulder in a posture of repose. The flesh of her neck had all but swallowed the belt. Only the buckle still showed, winking eerily beneath her left ear. A single strangled syllable issued from her throat.
“kk...kk...kk...”
In that first, spun-out instant of disbelief, as Jenny stood rigid behind Jack, Kim’s hands came up from her sides and beckoned.
“Jack,” Jenny said, squeezing past him into the bathroom, “she’s still alive.” She grabbed Kim around the thighs and tried to lift her up, but Kim was slippery and wet, too heavy. Jenny skidded on the puddled tiles, striking her knee painfully against the edge of the tub. She screamed at Jack, “Please, Jack,
help
me. She’s still alive.”
Jack didn’t move.
“For God’s sake,
JACK
.”
Then Jenny saw the Exacto knife on the floor. Seizing it, she stepped into the tub and hacked at the taut leather band. The blade was sharp and in a single quick stroke she had it.
Kim’s dead weight came down with brutal suddenness, the back of her head striking the broken faucet, blood staining the swirling water pink. Jenny crouched over her and dug at the belt, freeing it, pitching it aside.
Then Jack was there, helping her lift Kim out of the tub, and a part of Jenny’s nature her mother had always told her would be her undoing spoke up on Jack’s behalf, trying to convince her that his cold inaction had been the simple paralysis of shock.
“She’s got a pulse,” he said, standing, heading for the door. “You breathe for her, I’ll call an ambulance.”
Jenny knelt at Kim’s head and began mouth to mouth, murmuring frantic prayers between each forced breath. “Come on, baby, please, oh, Jesus, God, please...”
Jack came back into the bathroom saying, “They’re on their way. I left the front door open for them.” He checked Kim’s pulse again. Jenny looked into his eyes and read volumes there.
She’s going to be a vegetable, you know that, don’t you.
“No pulse,” he said. He put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder. “Jen, maybe we should—”
“Jack, you
help
me.”
Jenny resumed breathing for her daughter. After a moment, Jack began closed chest massage.
Five minutes later Jenny heard the ambulance attendants stamping briskly up the stairs.
* * *
Storm clouds rode the wind into the city that night, bringing a bitter rain that turned the avenues into slick black stream beds. Traffic was light, the trip to the Children’s Hospital taking only eight minutes, but to Jenny it seemed an eternity. Though Kim’s color had improved since the paramedic began ventilating her lungs with oxygen, she lay utterly still on the stretcher, not responding to Jenny’s attempts to get through to her, not even flinching when the paramedic first intubated her, then stuck an IV needle into her arm.
Yet worse than her unresponsiveness was the frightfully placid expression on her face. Or lack of expression, Jenny thought as the ambulance swerved into the side road leading to the ER. Her face was a smooth white blank, devoid of the timid tucks and faint worry lines that had characterized Kim’s face since early childhood. She was wearing a death mask.
Oh, Jack, why didn’t you come with us?
The ambulance jounced up the ramp and came to an abrupt halt. The rear doors swung open and now someone was helping Jenny out, guiding her through swirls of exhaust into the ER, the stretcher bearing Kim’s body following close behind. Jenny tried to stay with Kim, but they wheeled her into a treatment room and a woman in a blue jacket led Jenny into the busy waiting area.
“I have to stay with my daughter...”
“I understand, but we must leave her to the doctors now.”
The woman was pulling on her arm. “But I...”
“Please, ma’am, come with me.”
Jenny wrenched her arm free and whirled toward the treatment room. One of her feet skidded on the damp floor and she fell, landing on her knees in front of a wheelchair occupied by a boy of about Kim’s age with Down’s syndrome. The boy, whose name was Andrew, had a laceration above his left eye he was waiting to have stitched. His father had been pushing him around the waiting area in calming circles, singing his favorite song. The child’s father saw Jenny stumble and managed to stop the wheelchair in time to avoid a serious collision. When Jenny’s head snapped forward it landed in Andrew’s lap, and the boy placed a stubby hand on her cheek and began stroking it. Spent, Jenny left her head there and surrendered to a vast, breathless despondency. It enveloped her totally.
As he stroked her face, Andrew sang in a toneless, slurring voice around his overlarge tongue. It was the song his father had been singing to him.
“They’re gonna put me in the movies, they’re gonna make a big star outta me...”
* * *
The next few hours had a strung-out, sludgy quality that mocked the terrible urgency Jenny felt. She couldn’t find anyone who would give her a straight answer.
“It’s too early to even guess at an outcome,” the neurosurgeon, Dr. Blackwell, told her in the ER waiting area. “She’s having a CAT scan right now. Depending on what that shows, I may have to take her to the OR to insert an ICP monitor—a pressure sensitive device that will tell us how much swelling has occurred in her brain. In any case, we’re looking at a period of time here—anywhere from days to weeks—during which no meaningful prognosis can be made. I’m sorry to be so guarded, Mrs. Fallon...”
Later, she saw Kim briefly as they wheeled her out of the X-ray department into a waiting elevator. A nurse broke off from the circle of attendants and came over to Jenny.
“Your daughter’s going to the OR, Mrs. Fallon,” the nurse said. “Dr. Blackwell has decided to insert the ICP monitor. We’ll need you to sign a consent.”
Jenny signed the consent and asked where she could wait.
“You can wait right here,” the nurse said. “The cafeteria’s not open yet, but you can get coffee and snacks from the vending machines down the hall. There’s a payphone there, too.”
“Will someone let me know?”
“The procedure takes about an hour. Dr. Blackwell will come down and talk to you immediately afterward.”
Jenny got herself a coffee and returned to her seat in the waiting area. It was almost seven AM. Jack had said he would follow in the car, but that had been over an hour ago. Jenny had already called the house and got the answering machine; it was Kim’s voice, shy, subdued, halting: “I’m sorry we can’t get to the phone right now...” Jenny practically had to twist her arm to get her to recite that simple message.
Now Andrew and his father came out of a treatment room. Andrew’s laceration had been stitched and a bandanna-like dressing applied to his head. On his way to the exit he spotted Jenny and pointed at her in sudden agitation. His father rolled him to Jenny’s seat and the boy handed her a round gray rock, warm from his enfolding hands. He did this with a reverence that both moved Jenny and broke her aching heart. A mentally challenged boy, a complete stranger, had just given her what Jenny guessed was his most prized possession—his father’s startled expression confirmed her impression—and Jenny’s own husband had left her to face this time of shock and uncertainty alone.
Andrew eyed the stone longingly for a beat, then looked at Jenny and smiled. “Rambo,” he said through gapped teeth, one blocky hand patting his bandanna. Jenny returned his smile and thanked him. “I hope everything turns out okay,” the father said.
Then Andrew was gone and Jenny was alone again. She stroked the smooth rock with her palm, feeling its warmth.
* * *
An hour later, still waiting for Dr. Blackwell’s return, Jenny went to a nearby payphone and called home. When Jack hadn’t answered by the fourth ring she cut the connection. She didn’t think she could bear to hear Kim’s recorded voice over those dead wires again. She tried Nina’s number next, then Paul’s, but no one picked up. Paul’s answering machine was on and Jenny left a distraught message, the details of Kim’s unexpected suicide attempt spilling out of her until the machine cut her off. Adding to her loneliness was the realization that she could think of no one else to call. Her parents were dead, her mother less than a year ago, and Jenny felt their loss now, fresh and heavy in her heart, heaping itself on her shock and dread.
She sat alone in front of a wall of glass and sipped tepid coffee, watching the rain taper off and the sun slowly break through.
* * *
It was midday before Jenny was allowed to visit Kim in the ICU. The nurse left her at the cubicle door.
Jenny’s gaze touched the foot of the bed first, skipping over the cranks and levers, rising to the blanketed steeples of Kim’s feet. Her misting eyes fell next on her daughter’s arm, plastered with tape and sprouting IVs, then lifted to her head.
They’d shaved off her hair and Jenny saw wires snaking out of the surgical dressing. They’d bandaged her neck, too, where the belt dug into her, and attached the tube in her throat to a ventilator. Perhaps it was just the bandages, but Kim’s face looked swollen to Jenny, her closed eyelids puffy, and Jenny had the fleeting, irrational hope that she’d been led to the wrong room. There was no way in the few short hours that had passed her sweet baby girl had been reduced to this lifeless, moon-faced creature...
The name tag on the wall removed any trace of doubt.
Jenny went to the bedside and pressed her lips to Kim’s cheek. Her flesh was dry and cold. “I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. “So sorry. But I’m here with you now, and I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
She pulled up a chair and sat down.
Paul Daw came in after lunch and sat with her a while, not saying much, then excused himself and crept quietly away. There were no other visitors.
WILL SAID, “BINGO,” WATCHING NINA and the twins hustle into the lawyers’ building across the street. She was wearing snug jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt, and as he watched her he felt a vexing mix of gladness, longing and fury. The twins looked scrubbed and tidy in matching red T-shirts, plaid shorts and suspenders.