Jack’s arms dropped to his sides. “I get the picture.” The short one eased a half-step closer. “But before we get started, I want you boys to understand one thing.”
Jack shin-kicked Shorty hard enough to splinter bone, knuckle-punched Longhair in the throat, then snatched Bodybuilder by the nose ring. While the first two reeled from the sudden punishment, Jack spoke directly to the black man, exerting just enough pressure on the nose ring to ensure his attention.
“The only reason you boys are going to get a lick in this morning is because I’m going to allow it.”
Jack tore the ring out of Bodybuilder’s nose.
Bellowing in fury, the three men fell on him.
* * *
Jenny sat on a plastic contour chair outside the CAT scan suite until they brought Kim out, then followed the convoy of bed, IV poles and nurses back to ICU. As they entered the unit Jenny snatched a ten cc syringe and a Luer-Lock needle from a supply cart. Instead of turning into Kim’s cubicle, crowded now with nurses getting Kim hooked and wired into the equipment again, Jenny slipped into a staff washroom. She locked the door, sat on the toilet seat, and with steady hands fitted the needle to the syringe and drew up the potassium chloride. She sat there for ten minutes, gazing into the clear fluid, giving them time to get Kim organized and go on to other duties. Then she pocketed the syringe, dropped the vial into the tampon disposal and returned to Kim’s cubicle. She couldn’t remember feeling so drained.
She pulled up her chair and began talking to Kim.
* * *
It was the dream.
She was in the cocoon...
Only this time it wasn’t blankets, it was her own cold skin. In the dream she’d always seen herself naked before a smoky mirror, lumpy and sullen, a pale, listless blob incapable of change. But now she saw herself not in images so much as in...words.
Soft, halting words.
Then she understood.
Mom
Something opened inside her and spilled out warm.
“...love you, baby. I’ve always loved you, from the moment I first set eyes on you. God, when that nurse handed you over to me, I couldn’t believe anyone could give up something so precious. You were perfect. I wanted everything for you, honey, including your father’s love. But that was the one thing I couldn’t give you. I could never understand why it had to be so hard. And I watched it eat away at you. I hated him for that. There were nights I stood watching him sleep and imagined myself just bundling you up and running away. How I hated him for not loving you.”
I knew it,
Kim thought.
I knew it.
“But I can’t hate him anymore, sweetheart. It hurts too much. Besides, I understand now. Your father is sick. Sick in the worst way men can be sick. We can’t blame him for not loving us, because he doesn’t know how. I can’t forgive him for the things he’s done, but I can’t blame him, either.”
Jenny inserted the needle into Kim’s IV tubing.
“And I understand why you hurt yourself. Believe me, I do.”
Kim could hear her mother sobbing.
“I love you, Kim. So much...” Jenny cocked her thumb against the plunger. “And I won’t let them turn you into a vegetable. I’m going to let you go to God.”
* * *
Graeme Crowley sat in his idling Beemer in front of the Fallons’ empty house and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Though the air conditioner was running, Graeme was sweating heavily. It was ten o’clock at night.
This whole scene was like a bad dream. Jack was behind bars, no threat to him, and yet here he was, following the man’s instructions to the letter. Jack’s wife had been easy enough to track—shacked up already with a big deal artist in his Sussex Drive studio—as had the shrink, Paul Daw. The Armstrong bitch had been a little tougher, but he’d found her, too, holed up at her sister’s place in Nepean.
Of it all, though, this was the task he looked forward to least. As Jack’s lawyer—and what a joke that was—he had every right to enter the premises, yet he dreaded even being seen here. It was nuts, the whole deal, and he decided at least a dozen times to say to hell with it before he switched off the engine and pocketed his keys. He started to get out, then pulled the door shut and removed a small pouch of cocaine from his suit-vest pocket. He tapped a hit onto a pack of Cigarillos and, using a martini straw he kept handy for the purpose, sucked a stinging cloud of powder into his pipes.
“Fucking crazy,” he said, doing the other nostril. Then he got out and walked up the lane to the garage, creeping along its flank to the locked side entrance.
The key was where the note said it would be. And the fridge, an old Frigidaire with a cramped, frost-encrusted freezer.
Graeme opened the freezer door and saw what the note described, a single object the width of the compartment, tightly duct-taped into a green garbage bag. The thing was wedged in there pretty good; Graeme had to yank with both hands to free it up. Curious, he examined it in the cool glow of the appliance bulb. It was angular and fairly heavy, frozen solid, with a tennis ball-sized roundness at one end....
Graeme stifled his curiosity. The note warned against tampering with it. He closed the fridge and started away, his initial unease stirring again. He didn’t like the frosted, greasy feel of the object in his hands, its dead weight.
When he reached the car he opened the trunk and dropped the package into a Coleman cooler packed with ice. The note said to keep it frozen until the drop-off date, which Jack had said he would specify in due course.
Shivering a little, Graeme closed the trunk, climbed into the car and sped away.
* * *
Jenny stopped breathing. Her thumb relaxed against the plunger and her gaze shifted to Kim’s torso. For days now she’d been numbly aware of the mechanical rise and fall of Kim’s chest, each breath fed into her lungs by the almost silent ventilator. It was just another reminder of Kim’s passive state. But, just then, hadn’t...?
Yes, there it was again. A shallow, hitching breath, tucked in between the cycles of the respirator. A spontaneous breath...
“Kim? Kim, can you hear me, honey?”
But there was no response, no further attempts at breathing. Jenny shook her head.
Seeing things
, she thought.
God help me, I’m so tired—
Kim’s eyes blinked open.
Jenny leaned over her daughter’s head, trying to catch her dazed, wavering focus. “Kim. Kim, honey, can you hear me? it’s me. It’s your mom.”
A nurse came in. She saw the syringe dangling from Kim’s IV and removed it. Without a word she dropped it into the sharps disposal. Then she began examining Kim. Jenny watched her hopefully.
“I’ll call Doctor Sanders,” the nurse said when she was done. She smiled. “But it looks to me like your daughter is back.”
Jenny gazed into Kim’s blinking eyes. Then, in a spasm of guilt, she remembered the syringe and what she’d been about to do with it. She took an abrupt step back from the bed, as if repulsed, her eyes searching for the syringe.
“I disposed of it,” the nurse said. At the door she paused and said, “I would have done the same thing.” Then she went out.
Remarkably, Jenny’s guilt fell away. There’d be time enough later to worry about what might have happened. Or maybe, God help her, she’d be able to just let it go.
When a spark of recognition flickered in Kim’s eyes, Jenny knew that she could.
* * *
Jack spent the next two weeks in the infirmary, ostensibly recovering from the beating he’d taken in the day room. That stubby fucker with the spade jaw had dinged a couple of his ribs with a lucky kick, but apart from that they hadn’t really hurt him. Cuts and bruises, mostly. Just enough to debunk the rumors about his martial arts abilities and make his jailers relax a little, perhaps even sympathize. After all, was a man not innocent until proven guilty?
Gradually, as summer gave way to autumn and the preliminary hearing—tentatively set for the end of September—approached, certain members of the staff succumbed to Jack’s subtle charm. Small privileges were extended, the unexpected connections that make the world small were discovered—most of them relating to Jack’s hospital practice—and slowly, doubts were insinuated into the minds of the guards. Before long Jack was on a first-name basis with many of them, having animated chats with them about their families, doling out free medical advice and sharing his considerable knowledge of firearms. He could actually see them going to sleep.
There were many kinds of anesthesia, and Jack was a master of all of them.
* * *
Richard sat on a blunt hill overlooking the manor, the same one he’d sat on a lifetime ago, daydreaming about one day owning the place. The odd thing was, now that it was his, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. What mattered now, what made it special, was the fact that Jenny had agreed to share it with him.
“My life’s in a whirl right now, Richard,” she told him when he made the invitation. That had been two weeks ago, July 5, the day following Kim’s emergence from coma. “There’s still so much unsettled. The police told me I don’t have to be involved in Jack’s trial, but I’d like it behind me before I start thinking about the future. And Kim. I don’t know how it’s going to go for her yet. It’s too soon...but, if you don’t mind taking it one day at a time, I’d be delighted to stay with you.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” Richard said.
He stood now, stretching the kinks out, and started down the hill. The movers would be arriving soon with Jenny and Kim’s stuff and he didn’t want to miss them.
September 30
KIM ROUSTED THEM AT DAWN, first Richard, then her mom. “Come
on
, you guys, get up. We’re going fishing.”
So far September had been a series of drab days marked by slate skies and an incessant cold drizzle; but this morning, the last of the month, broke like a sack of gems. The sun came up in a ball of fire, setting the autumn forest ablaze, and the cobalt sky rose high and unblemished. By eight o’clock, as the trio completed the first leg of the half mile trek through the woods to the lake, it was already too warm for the light windbreakers they were wearing.
Kim led the way, trudging boldly along the overgrown path, her backpack flopping with her uneven stride. Her left side was still uncoordinated, much like that of a stroke victim, but she was quickly learning to compensate, her gait sort of broad-based and rolling, allowing her to slog along at a solid, if unsteady clip. She stumbled occasionally, her draggy left foot catching on hillocks or protruding roots, but generally managed to keep her balance. If she did fall, Jenny and Richard knew enough to let her get up on her own. There had been some displays of anger over this in the early days of her recovery, anger that was abrupt and startlingly fierce. They’d been warned to expect this sort of thing, and witnessed it for themselves later on, as Kim plugged doggedly through her physio sessions.
“She’s the same person,” Dr. Sanders told Jenny the first time she saw Kim lose her temper. Kim was hauling herself along the parallel bars and lost her grip, pitching to the floor in a red-faced heap. When the physiotherapist tried to help her up Kim bit the woman on the arm, cursing her so furiously Jenny thought her possessed. “But she’s a different person, too. Uninhibited in many ways. We often see this sort of behavior following global brain injury, the habitual restraints stripped away. It can be quite alarming. But there can be a bright side, too. I’ve seen folks who’ve spent their entire lives all bottled up inside suddenly able to show their emotions. Exactly how changed an individual will be and in what ways...it’s a wait-and-see proposition.”
As she hiked along the path, Kim yakked over her shoulder to Richard, constantly teasing, and Richard gave it right back. Jenny was amazed at how naturally they’d taken to one another. It was tense at first: Kim wondering why this stranger was there instead of her father, Jenny trying to evade the question in the hope of delaying any further trauma. But again Kim surprised her. In the middle of her second week out of intensive care, unable to defeat the insomnia that plagued her even now, Kim had wheeled herself into the TV lounge. She spent only an hour there, in front of the small, ceiling-mounted screen, but it was enough.
“I...saw ’im,” she told Jenny the next morning. Her language abilities were somewhat deranged in the early weeks, and if she spoke at all it was in halting, abbreviated bursts.
“Saw who, sweetheart?”
“Dad. On...TV.”
Jenny had thought,
Oh, no
. It hadn’t occurred to her that Kim might find out about Jack in this way. “I’m sorry, honey. I wanted to tell you myself, but the doctors said I should wait.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I cried, but...it’s okay.”
Jenny held her for a long time that morning, giving her all the details. After that, they hadn’t spoken of Jack again until just recently, when Kim asked her why she and Richard slept in different rooms.
“It’s too soon,” Jenny told her. “I care very much for Richard, but it’s...complicated.”
Kim smiled openly. She’d lost almost fifty pounds on what she called her coma diet, and the smile, minus the braces, removed during her stay in ICU, made her look quite pretty.
“No it’s not, Mom,” she said. “He loves you, that’s plain. More than Dad ever did. I just hope you’re not stalling ’cause of me. I think he’s great. In fact,” —she winked lecherously at this point— “if you don’t sleep with him soon, maybe I will.”
Jenny was stunned by this conversation, half wishing Dr. Sanders could have been there to see just how ‘changed’ her little girl was. This had to be one for the textbooks.
They began to see hints of the lake through the trees now, deep, sun-dappled patches of blue. Kim picked up her pace a little. “Almost there,” she said. “I can see the shack.”
A few days following Kim’s August first discharge from the hospital, Richard had hired a local carpenter to build a storage shed by the lake. He’d stocked it with all sorts of camping, boating and fishing supplies.
“Shack,” Richard said now, as they broke out of the bush onto a grassy rise overlooking the lake; the surface was dead calm, reflecting the explosion of color ringing its banks with mirror-like precision. “Damn thing cost me almost as much as the house.”