The Night Season

by Chelsea Cain

  The door to Archie’s room was open, so he passed the time listening to the sounds of the hospital. A woman sobbed softly in the room next to him. A frail white-haired man who’d arrived holding a bloody shirt to his head was getting stitches. Orderlies and nurses cracked wise at the desk.

  There’s a rhythm to a hospital. Archie was amazed at how it came back to him. The sound of clogs on linoleum, curtain rings sliding on metal rods, distant TV chatter. Shapes moved by in the hallway at the same pace. It was self-contained—its own ecosystem. There was a labeled compartment for everything; every action was recorded in a chart; life moved at a predictable pace.

  Until it didn’t.

  Archie could feel the shift. The building’s pulse quickened. The tone of conversation outside his door darkened. The ambient hum of unnecessary movement ceased.

  An orderly rushed a crash cart by Archie’s door.

  The boy, Archie thought. He still had no idea how the boy had ended up in the river, how long he’d been in the water, or how he’d even managed to stay afloat. He was barely responsive when Archie had gotten to him. As soon as Archie had hooked his arms under the boy’s, the kid had gone limp. If he’d fought Archie at all they would probably both have drowned out there. Archie had saved that boy’s life, sure. But the boy had also saved Archie.

  They couldn’t let him die.

  Archie pushed the rubber blankets off, sat up, and swung his legs off the bed. He was cocooned in even more blankets, these white flannel, and it took him a minute to unwrap himself. Then he pushed himself off the bed and padded out of his room in his gown and hospital socks.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  A nurse trotted toward him, arm outstretched. “You need to get back in your room, sir,” she said. There was a whooshing sound of hydraulic doors opening and both Archie and the nurse looked to their right as a gurney was rushed in.

  Not the boy.

  The boy was fine.

  This was someone else.

  Someone who was really hurt.

  Even from twenty feet down the hall, Archie could see that they had an oxygen mask on him, and someone was squeezing a bag. An EMT was running beside the gurney doing chest compressions, headed Archie’s way.

  The person on the gurney wasn’t breathing.

  Archie didn’t move.

  The EMTs had been met by two doctors and two nurses, who now joined in resuscitation efforts.

  Archie saw the top of his head as the gurney raced closer. A big head. Shaved.

  He reached behind, found the doorjamb he’d just stepped through, and steadied himself.

  They rolled Henry right by him.

  The medical staff working to save him spoke in clipped, urgent medical jargon, but Archie could make out words he knew. Respiratory arrest. Intubate.

  Archie stumbled from the doorway after them.

  They were moving fast—five feet away, then ten. Archie couldn’t make out what they were saying anymore.

  “Sir,” he heard someone say. “Step back, please.”

  “I need to see his hand,” Archie said. A nurse stepped in front of him, blocking him from continuing down the hall and reaching the corner room directly ahead where they’d parked Henry. Archie tried to get around her, but someone was gently pulling him away from behind.

  “Please,” he said, trying not to sound like a madman, “I’m his partner. He’s a detective. He might have been poisoned. I need to see if there’s a brown spot on his hand.”

  “There is,” said a voice behind him.

  Archie turned to see Susan Ward. “It’s there,” she said. “On his left palm. I told them everything. They’re going to run tox screens.”

  Archie looked back down the hall through the open door a dozen feet away where Henry lay dying. They were jamming a metal shoehorn into his mouth, and then guiding a tube down his throat. The oxygen flowed. Henry’s chest rose and then fell as the machine on the other end of the tube began to breathe for him. It almost made him look like he was alive.

  CHAPTER

  13

  Susan, Claire, Archie, Robbins, and Portland’s chief of police, Robert Eaton, were hunkered down in Archie’s ER room, where Archie had been ordered back under his heating blanket.

  Every time the nurse came in to check on Archie they all had to shift their position to make room.

  Susan was eating a packet of saltines that she’d found in one of the supply drawers under the sink. It was maybe the best food she’d ever had.

  Robbins and Archie had just briefed the chief on their theory, which, when said aloud, didn’t amount to much, and created more questions than answers.

  Susan liked Chief Eaton. He was small, maybe five-four, but didn’t seem that bothered by it. And he’d let Archie go back to work after his two-month stay at the psych ward, which must have required cutting through some red tape.

  He rubbed his face with his hand. Looked at Archie. Looked at Robbins. And then rubbed his face again.

  “Six houses just slid down the West Hills,” he said. “Eleven dead. The river is still rising. I-5 is closed at Chehalis. Oregon City and Tillamook are flooding. You do not breathe a word of this. You get your team on it. Bring in whomever you need. But try to do it quietly. And keep me posted.”

  He started for the door and stopped in front of Claire, who was sitting in a plastic chair next to Susan.

  “I’m sorry about Henry,” he said to her.

  “He’s a good cop,” Claire said.

  “Cut the crap, Claire,” Eaton said. “Everyone knows about you two.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He put his hat on. It was covered with clear plastic to protect it from the rain. “Take care of yourself, everyone,” he said, and went out the door.

  Claire brought her hands to her face. “Shit,” she said through her fingers. “I left that guy handcuffed to the bench.” She dropped her hands and stood up. “I need to make a call,” she announced, stepping out of the room.

  Archie raised his eyebrows at Susan.

  She knew when to change the subject. “How long will Henry’s tox screen take?” she asked Robbins.

  “Depends. They have to run a lot of tests. I brought them a sample from Stephanie Towner. That might help.” He took a step toward Archie and clapped his hand on Archie’s shoulder. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got to get back to the morgue. We’ve got a lot we still need to get out of there. I’ll check in later.”

  “Thanks,” Archie said.

  As Robbins passed Susan, he glanced down at her feet. “You’ve washed those boots since you were at the morgue, right? Before you came to a hospital and tracked biohazards all over the ER?”

  She hadn’t washed them. “Absolutely,” she said.

  When he was gone, it was just Archie and Susan. She didn’t know what to say to him. He and Henry had been partners for fifteen years. They’d worked the Beauty Killer case together. Henry had been there for Archie’s wife and children the ten days he was missing, and then sat vigil with her all those weeks in the hospital after Gretchen had let Archie go, barely alive. When Archie had gone off the rails, it had been Henry who’d protected him, and who’d finally convinced him to get help.

  Archie had only recently begun resembling a sane person. He was eight months clean of painkillers. Six months out of inpatient treatment. Susan had no idea what would happen to him if Henry died.

  “I’m okay,” Archie said.

  Susan looked up. She could feel tears on her cheeks.

  “Really,” Archie said.

  Susan wiped the tears away and smiled. “Why does one of us always end up in the hospital?” she said.

  The door opened and one of the nurses popped her head in.

  Susan’s heart dropped. Henry.

  But the nurse wasn’t bringing news about their friend. “Where’s Robbins?” she asked.

  Susan let out the breath she’d been holding. “He just left,” she said.

  The nurse was carrying a
long piece of Tupperware sealed with a blue lid. “I have his ulna,” she said.

  “His what?” Archie asked.

  “His ulna.” She indicated her forearm. “Arm bone,” she explained. “Apparently he sent some bodies to our morgue, and they found this ulna on one of the cadaver trays tucked next to a corpse. Robbins was supposed to pick it up.”

  Through the milky plastic, Susan could make out the bone, brown and cracked from so many years underground.

  Ralph, she thought.

  “Give it to me,” Susan said. “I’ll catch up with him.”

  The nurse hesitated for only a second. She had work to do, and Susan knew it. Susan grabbed the Tupperware out of her hands and took off out of the ER.

  She knew Emanuel Hospital. Her father had died there. Like all hospitals, it was a labyrinth of hallways and exits and entrances. She headed for an interior arterial corridor in the hopes of catching sight of Robbins. Ralph’s ulna rattled in the Tupperware as she ran.

  As soon as she got to the corridor, she spotted Robbins’s dreadlocks swinging down the hallway to the main entrance.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Robbins!”

  He stopped and turned.

  A woman pushing a kid in a wheelchair gave her a dirty look.

  Robbins walked toward Susan. The hallway was entirely glass on one side, looking out onto the children’s garden. It was still raining.

  Susan lifted the Tupperware. “You forgot Ralph’s ulna,” she said.

  Robbins dropped his head. “Shit.”

  “Crack team you’ve got there,” Susan said.

  He reached her and took the plastic tub. “It’s a sixty-year-old skeleton,” he said. “Not a top priority. Want to know what’s going to happen to Ralph? He’s going to end up in a box somewhere. Until someone accidentally throws him away.” He said it matter-of-factly, and not without regret.

  Susan, deflated, left Robbins and started trudging back to the ER. She hadn’t made it far when her phone rang.

  She recognized the ringtone and her stomach clenched—it was Ian, her editor.

  She picked it up anyway. “Yeah?” she answered.

  “Tell me you’re in the building,” he said.

  She was pretty sure she wasn’t in the building he hoped she was. “I’m at Emanuel,” she said.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? Channel Six had a photograph of you standing next to Archie Sheridan on a gurney, and I just read a wire report that you were one of the two people who found Henry Sobol.”

  “I was going to report it,” Susan said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Are you dead? Are you mentally incapacitated?”

  “No.”

  “Then get your ass into the office.”

  He hung up on her.

  “I don’t have a car here,” she said to no one in particular. She had ridden to the hospital in Henry’s ambulance. Ian hadn’t even asked how Henry was, how Archie was. Nothing. He didn’t care.

  She dropped the phone back in her purse.

  She could call a taxi. If she could get one in this weather.

  Then she gave it some thought. Rain slid in sheets down the huge glass windows.

  Screw Ian.

  It wasn’t even ten P.M. He could hold the presses for hours on the next day’s edition.

  Let him stew a little.

  She turned a corner and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. The elevator opened onto a hallway overlooking the atrium. Susan took a right turn and headed down a hallway that led to the physicians’ offices.

  The photographs were still there, framed and hung on the light blue wall, one every third door. The black-and-white images were part of a permanent exhibit sponsored by the Oregon Historical Society. A black man in a fedora carrying a blond little boy through waist-deep water, past cars flooded to their roofs. An aerial view of dozens of apartment buildings that had been lifted off their foundations and clumped together, water up to the top floor. Rescuers holding hands, forming a chain, reaching out to save people.

  She’d first seen the photographs when she was a teenager with a dying father and a lot of time to kill in the hospital. That was the first she’d heard of Vanport. You could grow up in Portland and never hear the name. It had been wiped out. Not a trace left behind. Even her teachers didn’t know much. The death toll was murky. The official count was fifteen. Some said thousands. There were rumors of a conspiracy to cover up the real numbers.

  Maybe she’d stretched it in her column, looking for connections where there weren’t any. Ralph probably hadn’t died at Vanport. But other people had.

  Susan had visited those photographs again and again that year when she was fourteen.

  It was something to do, when she wasn’t sneaking cigarettes in the children’s cancer garden.

  An announcement crackled over the intercom, pulling Susan back to the present.

  Emergency room. Code Blue.

  Henry.

  Susan ran for the elevator.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Crash carts, up close, looked like Craftsman auto supply tool chests. Take away the IV pole, the green oxygen tank, and that’s what you were left with—a sturdy, waist-high red metal chest of drawers, each drawer tidily labeled. But instead of SOCKET WRENCHES and HEX BOLTS, these drawers were labeled BREATHING and CIRCULATION.

  Susan wasn’t crying. It surprised her. She would probably cry later. But right now she just felt a shattering sense of dread.

  The door to Henry’s room was wide open, but Claire wasn’t looking. She was outside the door, in the hallway, her back against the wall, turned away from Henry, both hands over her mouth. Why did people do that? Susan wondered. Were they trying to keep their emotions in, or keep the world out?

  Archie was in the hall, next to Claire. He had his hand on her upper arm. He was just standing there with her, in his blue-and-white gown and white robe, his bare calves and hospital slippers. Susan envied their closeness. They looked like they were holding each other up. She hugged her own arms across her chest.

  Claire. Henry. Archie. They had known each other so long, been through so much. Susan felt like an interloper, like maybe she should go. Who was she to them, anyway? She still couldn’t figure out exactly what Archie thought of her.

  But while Claire didn’t seem to be able to bring herself to look, Susan couldn’t bring herself to look away.

  There were things that Susan wished she didn’t know. Details she’d picked up through the years of writing stories that haunted her still. The ingredients in movie theater popcorn butter, for instance. The amounts of fecal matter that can be found in most bowling ball finger holes. And how long a bedbug can live between feedings (one year).

  Right now Susan was wishing that she hadn’t done the story about defibrillation. Because she knew that patients rarely survived if they needed more than three shocks.

  And Henry had already had two.

  She looked over at Archie and Claire again. They were sharing some private moment, heads close. Were they praying? Susan had never asked Archie about religion. She figured that if he had any, he’d given it up in that basement with Gretchen Lowell.

  Susan didn’t know how to pray. She couldn’t think of a single prayer. She wondered, if she Googled one on her phone, if it would count. Probably not. She should have taken that theology class in college. Most of her religious education came from playing Mary Magdalene in a high school production of Jesus Christ Superstar. That’s where growing up with hippies got you.

  When her father died, her mother read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead:

  Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest.

  Susan still didn’t know what it meant.

  Henry’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish gasping for water on dry land. His tongue pushed past his lips, then re
tracted. His elbows were bent and his arms writhed slowly at his sides.

  But he wasn’t alive.

  It was muscle spasms, from the first two shocks.

  It was better that Claire and Archie didn’t see this.

  “Stand clear,” the automated external defibrillator said. “Do not touch the patient. Analyzing rhythm.” The computerized female voice sounded like one of those GPS navigation ladies. Calm. Competent. Bossy.

  Defibrillators had come a long way since they’d tried to revive Susan’s father with panels that looked like a pair of travel irons.

  Henry’s hospital gown was open and his gray-haired chest was bare except for two white adhesive pads, one on his right shoulder above the nipple, the other on his left flank at the bottom of his rib cage. White wires stretched from the pads to the machine on the crash cart. He looked ashen and sunken, like an old man.

  They’d used a dummy the day that Susan had seen the new AEDs demonstrated. The machines saved time. In the old days, there’d been crash teams—someone from cardiology, respiration. It took a village to read the ECG, interpret it, and operate the machine. With the AEDs, the nearest medical staff could begin defib immediately.

  This was what they’d said at the press conference when the hospital had switched to the new technology.

  “Stand clear,” the AED said again. “Do not touch the patient. Analyzing rhythm.”

  It was so quiet then that Susan could hear her pulse beating in her ears. Her throat swelled.

  The five medical personnel in the room stood in suspended animation around Henry’s bed, waiting for the shock.

  People didn’t arch their backs and jerk off the table the way they did on hospital shows. They just sort of flinched. No one had talked about that at the press conference.

  “Come on,” one of the doctors said, like he was in his car and the engine wouldn’t turn over.

  Susan felt Archie looking at her and glanced over at him. She knew that he could hear the quiet, too. He was watching her, waiting for the slump of her shoulders, the tremble of her jaw—some clue that it was over. Claire had sunk down to the floor and was resting her head on her knees. It had been too long. You didn’t need a press conference on defibrillation to know that.