This Thing of Darkness (20 page)

Green came alive. “Call 911!” he screamed at the shocked officer beside him. Not waiting for a response, he raced outside, vaguely aware of Rosenthal at his heels. Neighbours too ran from their houses towards the scene.

Smoke and steam were hissing from the tangled wreckage. The stink of rubber and raw gasoline filled the air. “Stay back, stay back!” Green shouted at the neighbours. “Get pillows and blankets.”

At first Green could see nothing in Sullivan's truck except the ballooning air bag, but as the bag deflated, he could see Sullivan wedged in the driver's side, his head slumped forward on the dash. The truck's powerful front grill was crushed, and the hood was folded like a tent, but the cab looked intact. “Thank God, thank God”, the words raced unbidden through his mind.

In the next instant, he realized the truck's cab was sitting on top of his crushed staff car. He reached the car and peered inside. The entire rear passenger compartment was folded in on itself beneath the cab, and he could just make out the bloodied head and shoulders of the junior patrolman. Of Lindsay, there was no sign. His hopes lifted faintly. Perhaps she had given up the wait.

He tried the doors. Jammed tight. He ran around the car and peered through the shattered window at a carnage of blood and glass. This time he caught a glimpse of a single, blood-soaked frilly purple cuff. Fuck!

“I need help here!” a deep voice bellowed. Green glanced back to see Rosenthal trying to haul Sullivan's inert, two hundred-and-fifty-pound body through the shattered glass window of the driver's door. “There's no pulse!” he snapped, slamming his fist into Sullivan's chest.

Green abandoned the staff car and raced to help him, snagging a hefty young onlooker to help in the rescue. Sullivan's body was eerily limp, his face ashen and his eyes slightly open. Their sightless gaze sent a shaft of horror down Green's spine.

The four men heaved and hauled to wrestle the body free, until finally it flopped like a limp sack onto the pavement. Without a second's hesitation, Rosenthal leaped astride him, performing
CPR
. His focus was absolute as he shouted out commands.

Green felt Sullivan's neck for a pulse, praying to a nameless god. Nothing. He heard the distant sirens. One. Two. Three. Soon the street was awash in red strobe lights and emergency workers swarmed the scene. He left Sullivan's side to speak to the one in charge. Firefighters descended on the crushed car and paramedics took over at Sullivan's side, hooking up their monitors and preparing the defibrillator. More ambulances were called in, along with the jaws of life.

Sullivan was rushed away first, surrounded by tubes, wires and a cluster of very grave, purposeful paramedics. As they left, they gave Green a single curt headshake. As he watched the ambulance scream off with full lights and siren, he fought a lump in his throat. At least Sullivan was alive. They had established a heartbeat. Of sorts.

It took an hour to free the junior patrolman and load him into another ambulance. He was bloodied and unconscious, but at least this time the paramedics had flashed a thumbs up as they drove away.

The jaws of life took a long time to unpeel the metal, wire and blood-soaked upholstery from the broken body of Lindsay Corsin. She had been sitting on the right side of the back seat beside the patrolman, waiting for Green. As he had asked her to. The right side had taken the brunt of Sullivan's truck.

The firefighters and paramedics who had fought to free her stood in a small circle around her, reduced to silence. Green wanted to scream, weep, run for miles in howling abandon. Instead he called the coroner, Superintendent Devine, and the Chief 's office. Then he began the painful job of contacting the university to track down Lindsay Corsin's next of kin.

Thirteen

R
ideau Psychiatric Hospital was a sprawling collection of buildings set helter skelter amid grassy nooks and towering trees which glowed orange and red in the afternoon sun. Sharon's ward was on the sixth floor of one of the main buildings, modern and brightened by large windows that looked out over the grounds. She arrived fifteen minutes early for her evening shift, snatched up Caitlin O'Malley's chart off the cart, and sequestered herself in the back room off the nursing station. The chart was thick, testament to the number of admissions the woman had had.

Sharon wasn't sure what she was looking for. Evidence somewhere of a connection to Dr. Rosenthal, of mistreatment or misdiagnosis on his part. Something to explain why her name was on the list of Rosenthal's beneficiaries in his will.

The resident's history on her admission summary documented a sad but all too familiar struggle. Caitlin's psychiatric problems had begun eight years ago, when she had started hearing voices and come to believe she was the love child of God and Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. She had been picked up by the
RCMP
outside the Prime Minister's residence at 24 Sussex Drive, where she was parading with a placard that read “Dad, let me come home.”

She had been twenty years old at the time and a student of mathematics at the University of Ottawa. She'd been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. A six-week inpatient stint and a prescription for olanzapine had set her back on the right track, and she had completed her degree, snagging a husband in the process. Her husband was a born-again Christian and soon had her attending his church and seeking the healing hands of the visiting evangelical minister. He'd pronounced her cured, she'd thrown away her meds and six months later was outside Stornoway, the home of the Official Opposition, claiming that she'd been misled by Satan. Opposition leader Stephen Harper was her father, and her mother was a siren who had seduced him in the middle of an Alberta canola field. Only Stephen Harper could exorcise the evil in her genes.

Sharon suppressed a rueful laugh. The resident, the wide-eyed rookie Dr. Janic, had recorded all this delusional material in colourful detail, probably uncertain which nuggets of information might be important to her diagnostic profile. This time a couple of other diagnoses were tossed around, including manic episode, and a cocktail of anti-psychotic and mood-stabilizing drugs was prescribed. In the process, she divorced her husband, her father was put in charge, and a community treatment order was issued to force her to take her medications and attend support sessions. Staff shortages and lack of resources doomed that plan before the ink was even dry, and Caitlin spent a few months on the lam on the streets of Toronto before her father found her and brought her back into the family fold.

The father had obviously tried to keep her stable, because he had hooked her up with a respected private psychiatrist, and her next admission was not until two years later. This time, she had abandoned her meds and was living on the streets of Montreal with a dog and a crack addict twice her age. Renewed contact with her father's psychiatrist friend, a prescription for a more powerful drug, and Caitlin was back at home enrolled in graduate school.

The new drug had dangerous side effects and would have required much closer medical monitoring, but there were no further notations in the chart until her admission three days ago. Things had obviously deteriorated, however. She'd been picked up by the police, who originally thought she was a regular prostitute until they had her in the cellblock. She curled up in the corner by the toilet, wrapped her arms over her head, and started to rock. Silent, unresponsive, but terrified the moment anyone approached. It had taken six officers, an ambulance, and a shot of halperidol to get her to the emergency room at the Ottawa Hospital.

Sharon leafed through the file again more carefully, but there was no mention of Dr. Rosenthal. He had never been her treating psychiatrist, nor had she ever given his name to emergency room staff.

The door opened, and the head nurse stuck her head in. Show time. Sharon arranged to have Caitlin O'Malley assigned to her. The young woman was much more settled now, the day nurse was happy to report, and it appeared the powerful anti-psychotic medications were beginning to take effect. She was no longer pacing and agitated, and she was able to communicate simple needs.

After the shift handover was complete, Sharon ventured onto the ward and walked down the long hall, which was painted a cheerful apple green and tiled in a warm beige linoleum. She stopped to talk to a group of patients in the sunroom, but Caitlin was not among them. Sharon found her in the room she shared with another woman. Caitlin's bed was nearest the window, which looked out through safety bars at a glorious orange maple. Caitlin, however, was curled up against the wall in the corner of her bed, her sheet pulled up to her chin and her eyes pressed shut.

She was a tall, slender woman with a heart-shaped face and pallid skin that showed the ravages of poor diet. Her hair had been freshly washed, and it fluffed about her face in wispy strands, but it was a long time since it had seen a stylist. The Gothic black was growing out, revealing two inches of chestnut brown roots.

Sharon tapped on the open door and called her name softly. Caitlin didn't move, but her eyes pressed more tightly shut. As Sharon approached, she saw tears leaking from the corners of the lids. She sat down gently on the bed.

“Caitlin? Remember me? I'm Sharon, your nurse this evening. How are you feeling?”

Caitlin moved her head back and forth.

“Sad? Something you want to talk about?”

“I feel dead.” It was a mere whisper through dry, cracked lips.

“The meds?”

This time a faint shake of the head.

Sharon reached for the plastic water glass on the night table by her bed. “Do you want a drink?”

Caitlin opened her eyes and focussed slowly on the room. She looked across at her roommate's empty bed, her gaze taking in the photos and the vase of flowers on the night table, then her own empty table, before settling on Sharon. Her eyes were bleary, the pallid grey of a cloudy day, but there was a glimmer of knowledge in them. She allowed Sharon to hold the glass to her lips, then sank down on the pillow again. Slowly fresh tears welled.

“I don't want to live like this.”

It was a statement Sharon heard often, and sometimes her pat words of encouragement felt inadequate. Even flippant. She had never walked in a schizophrenic's shoes, never felt the terror of their shifting, unreal world nor the mind-numbing half-life of the cure. Never faced the social rejection nor the uncertain future of broken hopes and lost dreams. Never lived under the spectre of an illness that lurked inside ready to spin their minds and lives out of control once again.

Caitlin was a highly intelligent woman. In her lucid times, she would know that every relapse could lead her further down the road of no return.

“Why am I here?” Caitlin asked.

Sharon hesitated. It was a question with layers of meaning, and she wasn't sure which one Caitlin intended. She chose the wisest response. “You're here to make you well again. You can be well, Caitlin.”

Caitlin frowned. “No, I can't. I am who I am. Crazy.”

“But you can also be well. You have been before.”

“It's all pretend. Would you have made Joan of Arc well, so she wouldn't hear the messages she was put on earth to hear?”

The reasoning brain was returning, Sharon observed. Not only the ability to form coherent sentences but to apply logic. She sidestepped the challenge. “Did you see your doctor today?”

“My doctor? No, not mine, but my father's choice for me. My father, who can't see and therefore can't believe. Just as lesser minds can't see the warping of the universe or the relativity of time. My father's doctor would have shot Einstein full of chlorpromazine, and there would be no atomic bomb. Just a math retard playing with blocks on the floor.”

Sharon hesitated. The woman's mental state was still very fragile, and she had no right to shove her back over the brink with the wrong question. She tried to frame it harmlessly.

“Doctors do good things too. You must have met some who helped.”

Caitlin blinked rapidly, as if Sharon had shocked her. “Met? Yes, walking mercies. But they don't teach that at shrink school. Only the brain, not the mind. Not the soul.”

Sharon ventured further. “It's nice to meet a doctor who treats you like a whole person.”

Caitlin sat up at the far edge of her bed. “No one can know the whole. Even angels can't know, but can only walk with you on the journey.”

“Have you met anyone who walked with you?”

She recoiled, her grey eyes darkening as if prelude to a storm. “Why?”

“Well...” Why indeed, Sharon thought, still feeling her way along her tightrope. “Maybe they could still help.”

“Still. All still.” The woman pressed her eyes shut, and a small moan escaped her lips.

Sharon began a mental retreat. “Do you want—?”

“No!” Caitlin's hand shot out and knocked the water glass out of Sharon's hand, drenching the wall and Sharon's clothes. “Don't trick me! Gone, gone, go, go, out, out, spots and all!”

One question too many, Sharon thought as she backed away to stand at the door, watching carefully to see whether her retreat would be enough or whether another shot of meds was in order.