Willnot (8 page)

Gordie stood. “And Bo Sanders may unravel if I don’t get up there. Wouldn’t put it past the new kid surgeon—the one that looks like, I don’t know, fourteen with a bullet? and so, so eager?—to start cutting on poor Bo without me.”

I went in for one last graze before heading officeward. Bobby remained sedated, but vitals were good and the lab work, given the circumstances, was well within bounds, no cause for concern.

Sheriff Hobbes sat outside the room, covering for a deputy who was seeing to a traffic accident. He stood to poke at the cushion on the chair as I approached. “Damn thing’s got Sam’s buttprint stamped in here for good.” He told me that Agent Ogden had taken herself off to the crime scene (meaningful pause here) again. I called Maryanne to say I’d be in soon and swung over to that side of town.

I knew the house. Seth Addison was likely the oldest person in these parts, around when the town started up. After he died, the house went empty save for frequent break-ins inspired by rural legend that Seth never had any use for banks, that all the money he’d made in his ninety-plus years on earth was hidden there.

Overgrown railroad tracks lead you to a patch of rusted, ancient farm machinery and from there up a rut-bedeviled hill to what’s left of the house, sheets of plywood bowing away from doors and windows over which they had been nailed. Along one side are scars where decades ago a balcony got torn away. One side droops as though the house suffered a stroke.

Theodora Ogden sat at a thirty-degree tilt on the lowest porch step picking splinters out of her butt.

“Old wood,” I said. “Musician friends tell me it’s the best.”

“Sure they do.”

“If that’s evidence …”

“Only of my stupidity. I hope you’re not here because—”

“Bobby’s fine. Should be awake and vocal by early afternoon. What are you looking for? Surely the scene’s been gone over.”

“Inspiration, maybe.”

“And all you found was rotting wood.”

“Well, it is quiet out here.”

“Quiet’s a thing we’ve got our share of.”

“I turned the cell phone off, drove out. No real agenda, and I didn’t think there’d be anything to see. Maybe just needed quiet.”

“Or to be alone.”

“Alone is good.”

“I could leave …”

She motioned to the step beside her and I sat, saying that chances were good we’d have to desplinter one another when we were done, but I was a doctor, after all, so she needn’t be shy.

“Alone scares people,” I said. “A lot of them.”

“My mother always had the TV on, early morning, late at night, during meals. Rarely looked at it, couldn’t have told you what show was on, but there it was, this visitor that never left.”

“People need the space around them filled. It’s the pressure.” A cat came from under the house, looked at us without curiosity, and went on its way. “You know what my father did.”

“Of course.”

“I can’t tell you how many scenes I read as a kid where some guy ruptures his spacesuit or his ship and gets sucked out, horribly but at considerable length and with excellent description, into the vacuum. It’s like that—your mother’s TV, sounds, possessions, the press of others.”

The cat sat at yard’s edge watching us. Maybe we were prospective buyers and soon there’d be companionship, comforting sounds above. Food.

“No one saw the shooter. The round had some distance to it. That and the caliber rule out an amateur. Yet except for blood loss, Sergeant Lowndes is all right. And who around here has any reason to shoot him?”

“Why does the shooter have to be from around here? Though, mind you, pretty much everybody who is, knows guns.”

She stood. “None of it makes any sense.”

“Does it have to?”

“Things usually do.”

“Only if you’re an accountant.” Or paranoid—in which case everything connects. “How are you doing with those splinters?”

“I think I can manage.”

“Then I should be getting back to the office.”

Clouds were gathering as I drove—gathering surreptitiously.
Sky would be clear above a stand of trees, I’d look back and clouds had claimed squatter’s rights.

Her mother’s TV, the visitor who never leaves, and loneliness …

Later in life my hardcore-SF father turned to fantasy. His last novel was
Dying with Grace
, Grace being a two-foot-tall giraffe who wandered up to the protagonist’s side one day on the streets of Brooklyn and never left. From that day he was never alone, even in his final moments. The last thing he saw was Grace’s face bending over him. She had to stand in a chair to do so.

I lost a patient that afternoon. I’d barely got back to the office and was looking over the first chart when Maryanne came into the examining room to tell me they needed me at the hospital. I arrived to find Gordie, two nurses and his teenage surgeon bent over a gurney like birds at a watering hole. When one straightened and stepped away for a moment, I saw who the patient was. Burt Feldman.

Fifty-three years old, at least forty of those years given over to fighting or, more correctly, surrendering to diabetes. He’d gone blind long ago, had such severe neuropathy that he hadn’t walked more than a dozen steps at a time in a decade, his legs were half-and-half sores and necrotic tissue.

And now, from all appearances, he was in DIC, covered with bruises and hemorrhaging from mouth, nose, ears, eyes.

“Sepsis, we figure,” Gordie said without looking up. He had Burt on a vent, had his jaw pulled down peering into his mouth. “Clots everywhere. Lucky I was able to get the tube in. Looks like black granola in here.”

“Kidneys are gone,” the surgeon said.

Janet, one of the new nurses, looked up from the chart. “There’s no DNR.”

“He’s Doctor Hale’s patient,” Gordie said.

“Sorry. Didn’t know.”

“How long?”

Janet glanced at the clock. “Forty-six minutes. A deliveryman saw him lying in his front yard, called it in. Unconscious and unresponsive to pain but still breathing when he got there, Andrew says.”

I looked up at the skittery, slowing EKG.

“Mostly just the drugs,” Gordie said.

“Is there anyone we should notify?” Janet asked.

“He doesn’t have family.” I looked down at the bruised chest, taped lines, distended stomach. “If it’s okay with everyone, I’m going to ask that we leave Burt in peace now. I’ll sit here with him.”

They filed out, pulling the curtain around us for privacy.

It didn’t take long. Twelve minutes maybe. Holding his hand, purposefully not watching the monitors whose alarms I had shut off, I could feel when the moment came. I remembered how much Burt loved
Gunsmoke
, and I was talking to him about that, trying to recall bits and pieces I’d seen of the show over the years, when he died.

Upstairs, Bobby was adamantly stable, his room museum-quiet, though anesthesia and sedation had to have been flushed from his system hours before. Clayton was there changing a dressing and hanging a fresh IV. A Gulf War vet, Clay stands five feet six inches and weighs in at 160, the bulk of it hard flesh and muscle. A trucker in ER once made some smart-ass comment about male nurses and suddenly found one’s face looming like a thundercloud four inches above his own.

Clay looked up as I came in. “Man’s been in country.”

“More than a few times, from what I hear.”

“So he comes home and gets shot here in Willnot? That’s not even irony, that’s some other kind of horse entirely.”

I nodded.

“We had this platoon leader back on the sand who was always telling us the cards get dealt facedown, you don’t ever know what they are till you turn them over. He said that again right before he got shot clean through the head from damn near two thousand yards by a sniper. I’m done here, Doc. You need anything?”

“Just dropped by to check on Bobby.”

“I heard you took care of him when he was a kid.”

“That was a long time back. Different lives now.”

“For all of us.”

Clay left and I stood by Bobby. Where was he? Dreaming of rice fields, acres of sand, bright tropical birds shifting on their perches, the smell of hot metal, the burn of mescal on his tongue? I took a last look at the monitors and started out, hearing behind me:

“It appears I’ve been sleeping again.”

As I turned back, Bobby sat up. Heart rate and blood pressure rose when he did so. For moments then he was quiet, breathing slowly, deeply. I watched heart rate and BP fall on the monitors.

“You’ve been awake.”

“A while.” He blinked. “Vision’s blurry.”

“And?”

“Back on familiar ground. Getting shot, losing a chunk of time. Kind of where I live.”

He swung his legs experimentally off the side of the bed.

“Need help?”

He shook his head. “Wanted to tell you. I read one of your old man’s books. In Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Cities, towns,
America—everything we knew—couldn’t have been farther away. Like we’d been set down on another world and would never get back there, or maybe
there
was gone. Your father’s book was about a planet of sand and phantoms. He was writing about someplace else exactly the way we were living it. That book got passed from hand to hand till it fell apart. And then it got taped back together.

“A guy from Earth, Mack or Rutger, some manly name, has just arrived on this world he knows nothing about to fix everything for those who live there. Witnessing what appears to be a senseless, purposeless suicide, he says ‘We do not speak ill of the dead.’

“His guide starts to respond, stops to thump on the fritzing translator box to get it to work, then says ‘Here, we do not speak of the dead at all, else they believe you are calling them back, and return.’”

“Missed that one.”

He twisted in a hard spiral right, then left. “Feels like someone took a sledgehammer to my shoulder—which pales beside the screaming headache. But most of all, I’m just fucking thirsty.”

I poured water for him, told him to take it slow.

“In combat, you get hit, you go down. Wait to see what’s coming next. Same thing.” He drank the full cup. “There wasn’t a second shot. Everything still works. And here I am talking to you. Fully confident that the local cop stationed outside my door is there only to protect me from further harm.”

“State police, actually.”

“Let me guess. Per request of our buoyant friend from the FBI.”

“Buoyant?”

“She keeps bouncing up.”

“Get some rest, we’ll talk later. Pain meds are ordered.”

“Won’t need them.”

“You can refuse.”

“That’s how I got here in the first place, refusing.”

I waited but he added no more.

“Doc?”

I turned back at the door.

“No worries. That shot? Just an old friend’s way of saying hello.”

Head down, eyes up: a classic gleek from Maryanne as I came in the door. “Two walked, two waiting, one pledged to come back later.”

Not a bad tally, considering.

“I thought about holding his driver’s license, tell him he could redeem it when he returned.”

“Are we that desperate?”

“Not yet. Freda Malone’s in your office.”

“Is Michael—”

“With her.”

And his head was already turning toward my voice when I walked in. Freda held him up.

“See how much weight he’s put on!”

Michael had become my occasional patient at age eleven months, having begun life four months early at just over a pound. Now he was three. He’d spent five months in the NICU at University Hospital and still went there for major problems or checkups; between times, he came to see me.
See
being a metaphor only, since he’d lost his eyesight to oxygen toxicity. But he knew my voice, always turned toward me when he heard it.

I said hello to Freda and asked if Michael was all right. She said again “See how much weight he’s put on!” and started crying. I sat down in the chair by her and took the boy.

“He’s fine,” she sputtered.

“And you’re not.”

She held her breath a moment to still the tears. “Michael’s daddy, he left us, been two weeks ago Tuesday.”

Michael’s daddy
. Not Preston, or Pres.

It’s something you see a lot with chronically ill children. No matter how close the couple is, how devoted, the demands eat away at families. So much of the caretaker’s time and energy is spent on the child that there’s little left over for husband or wife, other kids, any pretense of a normal life. Ties wither. Affection fades. Tamped-down anger on every side.

“What did Preston say?” I asked.

“You know him, three words would be a speech.”

And communication’s the first thing to go. Not that Preston was much of a talker to start with. More a nod-for-hello, grunt-to-indicate-he-was-listening kind of guy.

“He left a bunch of money, said he’d send more.”

“Have you talked to your social worker about this? Cathy, is it?”

“You mean Candy up at the hospital, that’s been following Michael? No.”

“Do. She can talk you through this. Ask her to call me if there’s anything I can help with.”

Michael had to be among the quietest babies ever, always attentive, always reactive, but rarely emitting sounds. As though his beginnings, as he lay intubated and unable to cry or vocalize, subject to continuous pain and discomfort, had set silence indelibly at the center of his world.

I held out a finger, he nibbled at it, I handed him back to his mother.

“You know you can call me anytime, right?”

“Thank you. I’m … I’m really scared. Not like before, not even all those times Michael was doing so poorly. This is different.”

I walked Freda to the door and asked Maryanne to give me a minute before sending anyone in. I’d almost told Freda “You’ll be fine” but stopped myself. All those phrases that sprout so easily on the tongue, the dross of bad movies and hospital corridors:
It will get better, It’s for the best, Everything will be okay, You’ll be fine.
I had promised myself during residency to delete them from my vocabulary. Yet another promise I hadn’t kept, perhaps couldn’t keep, but I hung close.

It wouldn’t get better for Freda, or would do so by tiny, invisible increments. She would never be fine. She would never
see
fine, never so much as catch sight of it on a hilltop far away, beckoning.