The Caller

by Dan Krzyzkowski

  I was here in the church basement, yes … but I forced myself out of these surroundings, squeezing everything into the phone world, into that claustrophobic counter space, and listening intently.

  The sound paused, then resumed. And now I heard a low, rhythmic clicking embedded within the sound.

  “Justin, are you okay? What’s happening? What is that noise?”

  Answer me, dammit. Answer me.

  “Justin, please—”

  “My elbow hit it again. It was my elbow.”

  “What, Justin, what? Tell me what you—”

  But then the sound came again, low and clicking and rhythmic, and I suddenly recognized he was turning some sort of a dial … and then there was a silence between us, and I think we both knew what he had found.

  CHAPTER 11

  HELPING LATCHKEY CHILDREN IS something I’ve wanted to do for years. Only now, with Richard four years dead and Patrick in first grade, am I able to volunteer some of my time. I’m back at my accounting firm working five hours a day while Patrick is in school. The firm is the only plausible reason for us having remained in Sheldon following Richard’s death. They agreed to reopen their doors to me once Patrick started school, and during the hours I requested. Thus, I can be home during the afternoon when Patrick gets off the bus. I am able to put in three nights a week here, which is fantastic. Tammy Culberson babysits regularly, and things work out just fine.

  My interest in helping latchkey kids was sparked when I was a teenager. It was my childhood friend Becky who sparked it. Becky was worse than latchkey. The more time I spent with her, the more I learned that she was flat-out neglected.

  Becky occupied my house, I think, more frequently than her own. She once told me she enjoyed my place because good things happened there and people smiled. I never went to her house much but, based on her words, gradually garnered a feel for it. She had two older sisters who were incessant drug users and parents who, according to her, were constantly feuding. They divorced eight months following her accident.

  Becky and I were friends, but she may have had the lowest self-esteem of anyone I’d ever met. She’d often mumble things instead of saying them outright and with any confidence. When asked to repeat something, she seldom would, more often than not discarding it. She was overly apologetic and devoid of ambition. I became slowly convinced that Becky didn’t believe in herself and that it was her parents’ fault.

  My method of helping her was simply being with her and being her friend. I assured myself it was the best I could do at my age, owing to the fact that the real problem was in her home, not in her. I couldn’t waltz into her house, wave a magic wand, and make things better.

  Becky and I often sat on the bridge above the train tracks not far from where we lived … and that’s where it happened, and that’s how I came to regret my passive approach in helping her. Earlier tonight, I had told Justin that Becky’s sandal had slipped off her foot one night when she and I had been sitting on the bridge. But that really wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t Becky’s sandal that had slipped off her foot. It was Becky who had slipped off the bridge. Dusk was fast falling, and we were lifting ourselves up to stand—to stand, then turn around and grab hold of the iron girder and traverse the concrete ledge back to solid ground. And then return home.

  But then disaster struck. We were halfway to our feet when suddenly Becky’s hands slid out from underneath her. She kicked once and went feet first over the edge, screaming.

  I have replayed that scene a thousand times over in my memory, as seen through my peripheral vision. Becky on my right: slipping, falling, screaming. Slipping, falling, screaming.

  Slipping, falling …

  She still screams today, seventeen years later. Like an instant replay camera, I can slow down the film in my memory and analyze each successive movement, from the second she lost her grip to the moment she disappeared over the edge. It took years for me to realize that Becky slid off that overhang herself. She meant for her hands to lose their purchase while we were standing up. She didn’t accidentally lose her grip, but forfeited it. From the corner of my eye, I can still see Becky propping herself partway up and then letting herself fall. What scares me the most in hindsight is that we sat there talking the entire evening, and it was me doing most of the talking. I know now that Becky probably wasn’t listening. As I prattled on about boys and music videos, my friend sat silently beside me, lost in her own head as she planned out her suicide.

  I watched in horror as she plunged to the bottom, arms and legs wheeling, screaming. She landed between the rails with a smacking thud that echoed up and down the railway gorge. I heard bones breaking. In the silence thereafter, I became aware of myself sitting again, looking down, agape, as a ribbon of drool crept down my chin. Becky had landed at a severe angle, with her torso and upper body contorted upward, facing the sky. Her mangled legs were twisted to one side, away from her body. Her mouth and eyes were open. And for one dark and terrible moment in the descending gloom, we seemed to be staring at each other.

  I remember climbing to my feet and scrambling lengthwise along the ledge without holding onto the girder. The steep embankments on both sides of the railroad gorge were festooned with brush and briar bushes, and suddenly I was battling my way through them, thrashing and clawing and kicking and waving. When I emerged onto the tracks moments later, my skin had been laced open in multiple places on my legs, arms, hands, face, head, and neck. The scratches hadn’t yet begun to sting. I approached Becky’s disfigured body and felt my gorge rise in my throat. Both of her legs were broken. I could see one of the fractures in her left thigh, where the stump of her broken femur was making a grotesque bulge in the skin. One of her arms lay across the rocks in an impossibly crooked position, her forearm bent the wrong way from the elbow. The fingertips of that hand were jittering with some sort of postmortem reflex. Blood was running from her nose and mouth, forming crimson rivulets that trickled down her cheeks and past her neck. Another pool of blood was spreading around the rocks beneath her head, and although that side of her skull was against the ground, it was dreadfully apparent that it had cracked open.

  I stood over her, webbed in a medley of shock, disbelief, and horror. I remember thinking, This is my friend. She’s right here on the tracks at my feet, and she’s dead, and I saw it happen, I saw her fall, I saw the whole thing—

  That’s when I heard the wheezing sound. All thought processes halted inside me. I stood frozen above her, listening. Right away, I knew what I didn’t want that sound to be … and I knew that that was exactly what the sound was. I knelt down, my pulse a drumbeat in my neck as blood from the countless scratch marks began streaming down my legs … and I saw that Becky was breathing. Thin, raspy breaths were escaping her just-parted lips, and her chest was barely moving up and down. She seemed not to acknowledge my presence. She stared past me into the deepening sky with an animal fear in her eyes.

  This girl is alive, I remember thinking. After all that, she’s still alive. Not by much and maybe not for long … but God and Jesus, she’s breathing. That scared me the most because I suddenly had to act, and act fast. I had to do something, anything, because every passing second was now a grain of sand sliding through the hourglass.

  The next moment I was charging through the prickers again, only going uphill this time, oblivious to the thorns slashing at my face and neck and knees and wrists. And suddenly I was in the middle of the interstate. Not on the shoulder, mind you—in the middle. I was jumping up and down and waving my bloody arms like a crazy person, inciting a bedlam of car horns, screeching tires, and irate faces. Several drivers never stopped but maneuvered past me instead, shouting and showing me their middle fingers. It was a woman in a pink maternity dress who got out of her Volkswagen first and peered over the chipped concrete railing as per my pointing and panicked babbling. A slew of vehicles amassed behind her, and soon the interstate was clogged all thre
e lanes across, people screaming out their windows and blaring their horns. A burly, beard-ridden truck driver clambered up to the scene next to me and the woman in the maternity dress, his face sweaty and grimy. He bent over the railing next to us, and two toneless words escaped his lips: “Holy shit.” And then he was gone, swashbuckling back to his truck, where I knew he had a radio. I heard sirens minutes later, zeroing in from all points of the earth.

  It’s amazing how quickly a crowd will gather around another’s misfortune. Before I knew it, ten, twenty, then thirty-some onlookers were clustered atop the concrete bridge, peering over the edge in fascinated horror. The interstate was chaotic, with cars everywhere and people yelling and pointing. Strobes and flashing lights appeared from all directions. Emergency vehicles were forced to access the scene from the other side of the highway because of the tremendous jam. Soon they were crossing the median in waves. It was nearly dark by that time, but the night was turned red.

  All was a blur for me from that point on. The shock really set in, and the maelstrom of stimuli around me began to numb my senses. For this I am grateful.

  Becky was medivacked to Fairview Memorial Hospital, and I was escorted to police headquarters for extensive questioning. Based on my description of Becky’s fall and from many answers I provided to countless questions that essentially asked the same thing in different ways, it was concluded that Becky’s fall was a tragic accident. Only years later, having reseen the event time and again have I arrived at what I’m sure is the truth.

  Is there an opposite of a “miracle”? Does such a word exist in our terminology, much less the spectrum of our understanding? We often define a miracle as an event of extraordinarily low possibility that is good, so very good—perhaps even God sent. It is the goodness of the happening that makes a miracle what it is.

  But how about this identical scenario with horribly bad consequences? We can’t call it a tragedy, really, because tragedies happen every day, all over the world. We see them on the news and read them in the paper. Some say there is a miracle to offset every tragedy in the world, but I’m a disbeliever of this sentiment for reasons that I won’t divulge here.

  Whatever the case, Becky’s “accident” was the stark opposite of a miracle because she survived. Her survival may have been a medical and bodily miracle. But surviving never meant much to Becky, before or after the accident. All it meant, when you got down to it, was that she breathed, ate, and slept. Becky had tried to end her life that night on the concrete bridge, and she failed. It was extraordinary that she failed given a fall like that, and anything but a miracle.

  Becky broke her one arm that I described and both of her legs—one of the legs in two places. It was her legs that partially broke her fall, which somehow prevented her spine from snapping and most probably killing her.

  The skull breakage I thought I had seen was, indeed, just that. She cracked her skull along her left temple, just above the ear, which resulted in a rare and complicated head wound. The fracture severed her middle cerebral artery, which led to an epidural hemorrhage. The hemorrhage, little different than a tumor, exerted damaging pressure to the left side of her brain. The hemorrhage was repaired surgically, but Becky was left with a permanent hemiplegia: she was paralyzed on the right side of her body. Because the nerves in the brain cross over via the corpus callosum, the left side of the brain essentially controls the right side of the body and vice versa.

  From Fairview Memorial, Becky was admitted to the Goldrise Clinic, a facility for the mentally and bodily impaired, forty miles from her home. The clinic was state funded despite its fancy title. There Becky remained for the rest of her life.

  Her parents divorced eight months following her fall, and her family just seemed to blow away like leaves on a street corner. Her mother and one of her sisters—one who did, in fact, eventually seek recovery from addiction—went to see her occasionally, but their visits, to the best of my knowledge, tapered off to almost none once two years had passed. Becky’s only real supporter was a great uncle who went to see her every month or so, a man I never met. Three or four years after the fall, however, this lone, caring relative died in his sleep one night, and then she had no one.

  I visited her several times, three or four occasions perhaps, but eventually I stopped going as well. Becky degenerated through her five- to six-year stint at Goldrise. I tried my best to smile and, in turn, elicit one from her, to let her know I was still her friend. But it never worked. Becky couldn’t smile back. The right side of her face was useless, and that side of her mouth seemed to sag. Beads of saliva were constantly dribbling off the paralyzed corner of her lips, and she used an old rag that she held to wipe her face every so often with her good arm. The optic muscles of her right eye had been impaired as well. When she looked at you, or anywhere else in her white clinic room, only her left eye moved, and that was borderline frightening. I was chilled, watching her good eye rotate robotically in her socket while the other, dilated and useless, stared straight ahead and down. This resulted in massive sight problems for Becky because now she was looking in two separate directions nearly at all times.

  Becky’s bad arm and leg were also withered. Her forearm, in fact, eventually crinkled up to a thirty- or forty-degree angle to her upper arm. One of the aides told me this was a flexion contracture. Paralyzed and useless, the muscles had retracted and pulled the forearm with it. I later learned that other private clinics with more resources kept the limb stretched to prevent the contracture. But Goldrise was a state job, where fewer nurses, of quantity and quality, were available. In such an institution, Becky was a lost cause.

  Sitting there and trying to talk to her and trying to smile was a lie. All a lie, because it was an abhorrent experience. I cried my eyes out the first time I went to see her, ran into the ladies’ room and sobbed. Seeing one of your friends bedridden like that, in such a miserable condition, will crack any living soul in the world. We’d been sitting on the bridge several months before … and now this. It hits you hard, really goddamned hard, and then burns in you for a long time.

  Becky could hardly speak. The right side of her mouth was useless, and everything she said was slurred and pathetic. The first time I visited her, she pronounced my name Lethy. There were bits and pieces of herself she never remembered. And for some reason, not once did I bring up the accident, which I knew was a suicide attempt. I always meant to ask what her intentions had been, but I never did. For some dark and painful reason that I can’t explain and that I’ll never understand within myself, I never did ask her.

  After those three of four trips to the clinic spread over several years, I stopped going completely, and of this I am ashamed the most. It was a catch-twenty-two situation if I ever knew one. I felt indebted to her, the fact that I was her friend and that I’d been with her the night of the fall. But going to see Becky was a horror. It has taken me years to admit that. Going to see her stirred inside me every depressing and miserable emotion I have ever known—more so than Richard’s death years later, even—and left me scarred and anguished for weeks to follow. Becky Finstead, once my friend, was now lost and pathetic and useless. Going to see her didn’t help me or her. It was best to let her go, and that’s precisely the worst of it. I’ve accepted that today but never forgiven myself for it.

  Becky died in the Goldrise Clinic sixty-four months following her admission. I received word through the clinic itself and was inwardly relieved. It was best for Becky, better than her living hell, her suspended nothingness. She developed a cold that moved to her chest and grew to pneumonia. In her weakened state, she was unable to cough up her secretions, which dripped down and flooded her lungs. She essentially drowned in her own fluids, but her death was mercifully painless. She slipped into a coma and died quietly.

  I was one of nine people at her funeral. My parents were two of them, as was Becky’s mother and one of her sisters—the one who had sought rehab, I think. I never got it u
p to ask where the father or other sister was or what had happened to them.

  The funeral was quick, and no one in the world heard a word about it. It was a gorgeous, sunlit morning. I didn’t cry, not a tear, for there was little for me to be sad about.

  I didn’t hear what the tired, disheveled priest said as he read tonelessly from a tattered Bible and went through the funeral motions. I was a teenager, sixteen or seventeen, and I eyed the small gathering and looked long and hard at the casket that contained Becky’s body, suspended above her grave by a network of poles and straps. I remembered our nights on the bridge and other times and felt that old regret creeping back again. I remembered my passive approach to Becky’s neglected life before the fall, my halfhearted commitment to help. I remembered thinking that there’d been little more I could do, and I felt sure of this knowledge all over again, six or seven years later. But I watched her casket and thought long and hard and deeply … and then stared into the sun for a while and wondered if I could have done something more. It’s these types of things that take the many ropes of life and tie them into vicious knots. You can spend years trying to unravel them.

  I believe my life turned during her funeral in a way I wouldn’t realize until years later. I gazed into the sun that bright and beautiful morning and allowed much of my nagging regret to slip away. I left it behind, there on the funeral grounds at the foot of Becky’s grave. I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. I won’t let it happen again, baby doll. That’s a promise. I’d been just a kid when Becky had plunged, ultimately, to her death in the railroad gorge by our house. Given my age and inexperience at the time, I was unequipped to help anyone.

  But things are different now. I’m twenty-eight years old, and now I can.