by Regina Doman
The next few letters were business letters—one informing her dad that he had won a scholarship, the next a Christmas letter from an employer that said, “Your bonus check is enclosed.” The next, a note from a publishing office saying, “We’ve accepted your article for publication.” Maybe Dad’s first writing job, she thought. She set the letters aside to take with her.
The next thing was a white lined pad, and on the top line was a sentence reading, “Interviews with Tennille, Nurse at R.G.M.H.”
Rose took a deep breath. Here it was, the material she had given up looking for. Her dad had separated it from his other notes because he must have felt it was significant. Why had he left this behind? Possibly it had gotten mislaid.
Feeling the bumpy surface of the pad with her fingertips, she scanned over it, but quickly got lost. There were too many medical terms for her to follow. It didn’t seem to be much about patient abuse, but there were a lot of references to organ surgery. She turned to the next item and found a single sheet of paper, also in her dad’s handwriting. It was more of the interview, done at a later date.
“Proof of what I saw is the following: there was a man in a coma, a poor man in good health, who had gone into a coma during an accident. I had started to suspect that something was strange about his case...”
Then followed a lot of medical information. Rose’s eyes jumped to this sentence, “I realized that the comatose patient had symptoms similar to withdrawal…” More medical terms. “But he was never left alone.”
There was a margin note scribbled in a tense masculine hand. “Saw doctor administering dose. Only eyewitness?”
More medical terms. “Then the patient’s family was found. They wanted him transferred…Change in his chart…The following drugs were apparently given. I collected them from the trash can. Five vials propofol…”
The barn door slammed in the wind, but Rose ignored it.
There followed another list of drugs with names Rose didn’t recognize. Just then a sound broke into Rose’s consciousness, distracting her. There was a car outside.
Abruptly she closed the folio, swiftly retied the cord, and silently thrust it into the box. She crouched down, listening.
There was no further sound, and she wondered to herself if she had imagined it all.
She waited. The wind rushed over the hill again, and the door of the barn thumped open and shut. Silence. The timbers creaked—or was it footsteps? She didn’t dare to move.
As she listened, she suddenly began to wonder if she had indeed been alone all this time, as she had assumed. Was there someone here? The moaning breeze continued to work its noisy way through the barn, and she found it hard to figure out if there was someone moving through the barn in addition to the invisible hand of the wind.
I’m being silly, she told herself. There’s no one here. Maybe I even imagined that car.
But suppose she hadn’t? Thoughts of Donna and her weird friend flitted through her mind again. More nonsense, she told herself, licking her lips. But the pit in her stomach told her that there actually was some danger—real danger—here.
Steadily and silently, she rose to her feet and peered around the edge of the loft. There was no sign of anyone. Tentatively, she lifted her foot and took a step forward, noiselessly. She had more of a view of the barn below, but still no one.
Another step. Another. She made herself breathe normally, expecting to see Donna’s grinning face hovering below any moment. At last her foot stepped onto the creaking loose boards at the edge of the loft. She stood in silence, looking down. There was still nothing.
On edge, her eyes traveled slowly over the contents of the barn, sensing that something was amiss. The door banged open and shut again, and was still. The old machinery and scattered hay looked the same as before.
Then she saw a brown snake lying coiled up on the barn floor and caught her breath.
No, stop it, she told herself sharply. It wasn’t a snake, it was just a coil of brown hemp rope.
Rope. She stared hard at it, feeling a tremor in her stomach unexpectedly. There was something wrong. When she had just walked past that post about an hour ago, that rope had been hanging from a nail on a post. Someone had taken it down. As if getting ready to use it.
A very real fear came over her as she looked at the coiled twine. It would be very easy, too easy, to come upon someone alone in a barn, and overpower them. Especially if you had mischief in mind... And she was trapped up here, away from her car, away from human help. If she screamed, no one would hear her. Yes, it would be too easy for her to get hurt...
Inundated with mental terrors, she took a hasty step backwards.
The board beneath her feet suddenly cracked and tilted forward, throwing her off balance. She stumbled, fell, and tried to grab the edge of the loft. But instead she grabbed the ladder lying on the edge, which started to slide over the side—
There was someone—standing right behind her—
The ladder toppled, her hands holding uselessly onto it.
She fell, helplessly, into a dark dungeon, whose painful bonds clamped over her abruptly and she was still.
13
… she came to a deserted room she had never been in before, where a woman sat spinning with a spindle...
HIS
Fish paused on the edge of the cliff for a moment, catching his breath as he clambered up the ropes. He felt a sudden coldness pass over him.
Not knowing what to make of it, he prayed briefly and scrambled over the edge of the cliff onto its solid top. He had finished his other class work early, and, feeling tense, had gone rock climbing for an hour or two. But it was high time for him to get back to his paper.
In the car, he pulled up his laptop and read over his new approach to his paper on Keats.
While modern critics have tended to see in the ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ troubling issues in the poet’s soul, the poem can still be read in an attitude of presumed innocence. The difficulty is that Keats tends to be read beside his fellow romantics, such as Byron, who took a more cynical view of human nature and man/woman relationships. (see Jose Mendelez, Byron, p. 453)
He had found a new angle on his subject. Sitting in his car with the windows open, feeling the breeze, Fish typed from his note cards for another hour, defending Keats from the charges of bad character. Not that it was going to make much of a difference in the world, but it was good to attempt to bring some justice to this literary question.
Finished, he read over his work as the afternoon dimmed into evening. Despite the heavy footnotes and line-by-line dissection, he had a feeling it was a paper that Rose might enjoy reading, particularly since she had been an inspiration for his new approach. When he went out to Mercy College to see Rose tonight, he would bring it along with him. She would agree with him on the “Eve of St. Agnes” interpretation.
A beep from his cell phone shattered the air as he started driving back to Pittsburgh. He answered the phone. “Hello.”
It was Jean. “Fish, do you know where Rose is?”
He didn’t, and felt a resurgence of that strange coldness. “No. Why?”
“I just got a call from one of her friends at school. She borrowed his car this morning and hasn’t come back with it. She was supposed to be back by three o’clock.”
Fish glanced at the clock in his car. It was almost six o’clock. He flipped on his turn signal and exited the highway. “Where was she going with his car?”
“She was going out to do some interviews for her paper. Do you want to call the student and see if you can help him out? He wanted to start looking for her, but he doesn’t have a car now that she’s gone.”
“Give me the number,” Fish said. “I’ll drive over there now.”
Jean gave it to him, and he memorized it briefly. “Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?” she asked.
“Of course it’s not.” He didn’t mention his bad feelings to an already-worried mother. “Thanks for calling. I’ll call back when w
e find her.”
He dialed the number and a somewhat familiar voice answered anxiously, “Hello?”
“Hi, this is Ben Denniston.”
“Hey, it’s me, Paul Fester. Rose had my car today, but she never came back with it. Usually she’s a little late, but she’s never been this late. I had her mom’s number from an interview I did with her for class and so I called her to try to get a hold of you.”
“Where did Rose go?”
“She went to do some interviews with doctors and nurses for her paper down towards Meyerstown. I think she might be out at her family’s old barn, but I have no way to reach her.”
“Do you know where that is?”
“Yes, I drove her there once.”
“All right. Paul, I’m driving towards Mercy College now. I’ll pick you up and you can show me the way to the barn.”
“Sounds good.”
“Good. See you soon.”
Fish hung up the phone and upped the acceleration on his car as fast as he dared without attracting police attention. In a short time he reached Mercy College, found Paul, and they headed out towards the barn.
When Fish pulled in the driveway of the old barn and they saw Paul’s car parked there, they both knew that something was wrong.
It was one of the moments of Fish’s life that impressed itself upon him with the force of a sledge hammer—he and Paul Fester getting out of the car, going into the barn, opening the door, and seeing Rose lying on the floor, the ladder askew over her leg, her red hair falling over her face, which was unnaturally calm.
Hers
Rose sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, looking up and seeing herself reaching down for herself, unable to grasp her. It was as if she had split in two, and the body and the soul were no longer completely fused, but disjointed into two separate and competing entities. Her spirit flailed, trying to reach the light. Her body sank down, senseless, motionless, almost dead.
But not quite. Not yet.
HIS
The ambulance took her to Robert Graves Memorial Hospital, which was closest to the accident. Fish had taken upon himself the task of calling Jean.
“So she’s alive, but not conscious,” she repeated after he finished telling her what they had found.
“Yes. The doctors say she fell on her head. There’s possibly damage to the spinal cord. The brain just went into shock.”
“Understandably,” Jean said.
“I took the liberty of calling Bear first. He and Blanche are coming over to see you now,” Fish said.
“That’s very kind of you, Fish,” she said, her voice breaking. And she added quietly, “Thanks for going to look for her.”
“You’re welcome. I’m glad you called me when you did. It was fortunate.”
Paul was still with him, sitting in the waiting room, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, a rosary in his hand. When Fish finished making his phone calls, he thought of telling Paul he didn’t have to stay. But Paul probably realized that.
Paul looked up at him. “You want to pray a rosary together?”
“Sure,” Fish said. He had mainly experienced the rosary as a private prayer, but in this situation, he could see that some kind of prayer with someone else would be helpful.
Paul made the Sign of the Cross in Latin and began. Fish sat next to him, a bit self-conscious, and murmured his halves of the prayers quietly, counting off on his fingers. He tried hard to focus his prayers on the meditation of the mysteries, and not on the girl being examined in the other room.
It had been an accident. A freak, tragic accident. They could easily see how it happened. Rose had been up in the loft, and had started to get down the ladder, and the board at the edge had broken off, split right down the middle, and she had fallen, with the ladder on top of her.
Fish seldom cried, but unexpectedly, he found himself tearing up as he prayed. He was fighting dully with the idea that it had been a callous cruel act on the part of God, or simply a random tragedy in a godless universe. Another kind of fundamental doubt.
A hand touched his shoulder, and he glanced over at Paul. The tall guy seemed to recognize what was going on. He rested his hand on Fish’s shoulder, gave him a reassuring smile, and continued praying. There was something comforting in his manner, and Fish refocused his prayer, grateful.
The hospital staff couldn’t do much for Rose except make her comfortable. She was put on a ventilator, fitted with tubes and IVs, and settled into a hospital bed in the ICU. A tired Paul finally went back to the college only after Fish insisted. Fish sat up in a chair by Rose’s bed, fingering her still hand and waiting. Her family should be here soon. At least within an hour.
Weary, he was too troubled to sleep, and merely sat, staring at the wall and thinking. The serpent had stung after all, and what was odd was that both he and Rose had seen it coming. But for all their uncanny foresight, they had been helpless to do anything about it in the end. It had only been an accident, after all.
He got up and paced the room restlessly, wishing there was something he could do, and regretting. Both that he hadn’t said more to Rose, and that he had said the little that he had.
The doctors had not been particularly encouraging, and he could foresee it would be a long haul. The mental adjustment to Rose’s injury was difficult, and he didn’t want to make it. He was just praying, for Rose’s sake, for her family’s sake, for everyone’s sake, that she came out of the coma within forty-eight hours, as the doctors had given a slim chance of her doing.
He stood by the hospital window, looking out at the darkness outside, the city streets of Meyerstown. What a bleak little backwater place. Amazing that they have such a well-equipped hospital here. He was thankful.
Then, with a sigh that hid a few tears, he turned and stood with his back to the corner, looking at the prone form of the girl he wondered if he loved. High irony. All these years of carefully avoiding romance with her, and pushing her away whenever she attempted to cross into that territory with him, and just when it seemed his heart was actually beginning to thaw, she becomes frozen in a coma. What poetic justice, he thought.
Someone stepped into the room, a thin tall shadow. With long hair. He started out of his musings and took a step forward. “Hello?”
The figure froze beside the bed, and saw him. Then abruptly she turned and fled from the room. He swiftly ran to intercept her, but she was out the door and sprinting down the hall before he could touch her. Out in the hallway, he called her name angrily, but she turned a corner and was gone.
He had recognized her. It was Donna.
If he hadn’t been expecting Rose’s family at any moment, he would have followed her. The chill coldness had come over him again, and he stepped back into the room and looked at the unconscious girl.
How had Donna known that Rose was here? Was it possible that Paul had spread the word on the campus, and she had heard? He told himself it was possibly a mere coincidence.
But then again, it might not have been an accident after all.
Hers
Who am I now? Am I still Rose?
Perhaps I’m like Cordelia, after I was hanged. I saw a rope. Did I hang from that rope? There was a rope, and wooden boards beneath my feet, and I fell. Like a prisoner being hanged, I fell, not wanting to fall. Have I broken my neck? Is that why there’s such pain?
She felt her body for a moment, suspended, pain smarting up her skull, and for a moment, she believed she was right. Then her body floated away from her again.
If that’s true, then I must be dead. But no. If I were dead, it wouldn’t feel like a dream. It would feel like waking up. This mustn’t really be what it is like to be dead.
So I must still be alive.
And I mustn’t have been hung. No one survives hanging. Not that I know of...I don’t think I’ll keep thinking about this...rather morbid…
There must be a way out of this…somehow…
HIS
“You found her right her
e?” the police investigator asked Fish, squatting on the dirt floor of the barn and pointing at a certain spot on the floor.
Fish nodded. He and Bear stood mutely in the old barn, waiting for the necessary investigation by the police to be completed. There was one police detective looking around in the loft, and another taking notes.
It was almost noon, and he still hadn’t slept yet. Now truly exhausted, Fish kicked at the straw and glared at the rusting machinery around the barn.
“Glad she didn’t fall onto any of that,” Bear remarked, and Fish admitted his brother had a point. It could have been much worse, he supposed.
“Is there any way you could tell if another person was here in the barn with her?” Fish asked the detective.
“Do you have any reason to suspect that? You mean, that someone pushed her or she was assaulted?”
“I don’t have any proof, but I’d like to know if you can tell.”
The detective looked around. “I don’t think so. But we’ll have another look over the place.”
Fish took a step forward and stumbled on something. He picked up a heavy coil of rope that had been lying in his path, unseen. What was that doing on the ground?
He looked around to see if anyone thought it important that he not move it, and seeing no sign, tossed it into a corner of the barn, out of the path of traffic.
Hers
She was still floating somewhere, in dim, dark water, and she couldn’t see anything. For a long time she sought after her limbs—her hands, legs, shoulders, even her fingertips. Now there was no sign that she ever had a body.
Eventually, she settled down to concentrate on trying to find her mouth. She told herself that she must be still swallowing, moving her tongue, or at least breathing. That is, assuming she was still alive. And Rose knew she was alive, somehow. Yes, alive, but having somehow mislaid her body.