Sandman

by Sean Costello

  But there was no sign of Peach.

  Richard said maybe Jack let the cat out.

  “But she’s a house cat,” Jenny said. “She’s been declawed.”

  “Why don’t we do a quick tour of the neighborhood, anyway,” Richard said. “Just to be sure.”

  Oh, God, Jenny thought as she followed Richard outside. My poor Peach. What next? What could possibly happen next?

  They spent the next half hour in a fruitless search of the neighborhood, knocking on doors, peering through porch skirts with Richard’s flashlight, squatting to check under parked cars. When it became clear the cat was missing, Richard called the SPCA, but again, no luck. They suggested he try again tomorrow.

  On the way back to the hospital Richard turned the radio on, hoping it would help ease the tension. There was a newscast playing and Jenny heard a familiar name over the airwaves. She listened in disbelief.

  Richard dropped her off at the main entrance, promising to return in a couple of hours. When she got to the unit Jenny found Nina standing by Kim’s bed. Nina had brought in a lush bouquet of flowers and a slick-looking boom box, which she’d placed on the windowsill and tuned to a twenty-four hour classic rock station. The two women embraced fiercely.

  “I just heard about Will on the radio,” Jenny said. “I’ve been so out of touch...”

  “I know. It’s a nightmare. All of it.” She released Jenny and looked at Kim. “How’s she doing?”

  “They can’t say. Or won’t. She’s alive, that’s all I know.”

  “Come on,” Nina said. “Let’s go find a coffee machine and get caught up.”

  * * *

  Nina left at midnight. Seeing her again had been good, their long, tearful talk purging, and when Richard came in later Jenny actually managed a smile. They chatted a while, then Jenny sent him home, telling him her place was with her daughter. Richard said he understood and promised to return first thing in the morning with a fresh change of clothes for her. They embraced tenderly and Jenny thanked him for his support.

  “We go back a long way,” Richard said, “and I know this is the wrong time to talk about feelings, but...I care for you, Jen, and I’m glad to be able to help.”

  Jenny kissed him lightly on the chin and bade him goodnight. And in spite of all that had happened and all that lay coiled and uncertain ahead, Richard’s words left a welcome glow in her heart.

  She pulled up a chair and sat next to Kim’s bed, doing her best to ignore the humming equipment, the ceaseless commotion of the unit, the damnable stillness of her child. She picked up the first of the C. S. Lewis books, The Magician’s Nephew, and began to read it aloud...

  But each time she blinked she saw the faces of those innocent children, lost forever to families that would never recover from their loss. She saw the squandered years and desperate self-delusion of her own life, and the precarious fragility of her daughter’s. It all came crashing in on a comber of exhausted despair and Jenny pressed her forehead against Kim’s arm and wept, vowing that whatever happened from here on in, these were the last tears she would shed over Jack Fallon.

  23

  FOLLOWING HIS ARRAIGNMENT, JACK WAS transferred to the Crane Valley Detention Center on Radar Road. A trio of guards led him barefoot and shackled along the central corridor, a bleak gauntlet of holding tanks painted a flat, institutional gray. As Jack went by, the other inmates spat through the bars at him and shouted him down. Even here, child killers were considered the lowest form of life.

  Jack conducted himself peaceably, entering his six-by-eight cell without protest. When his jailers strode away, he sat on the pallet that served as a bed and gazed serenely at the concrete walls. He remained that way for several hours, unaffected by the shouts and slammings around him. And at four o’clock that afternoon, when a guard told him his lawyer had arrived, Jack got obediently to his feet.

  * * *

  Graeme Crowley waited with nervous impatience in the stuffy consultation room. He had no idea why Jack Fallon had called him. He was a solicitor, for Christ-sake, not a criminal lawyer. The last time he was inside a jail was maybe twenty years ago, when his first-year law class took a day trip to the Kingston Pen. Even then the notion of practicing criminal law had appalled him. Consorting with all manner of reprobate, fretting that every time you put one of them away—or failed to get him off, depending on which side of the game-board you played on—you’d wake up in your bed some night with a knife to your throat. Thanks, but no thanks. Right out of the starting gate Graeme had decided that as a lawyer he’d have but a single concern. Himself. And that meant money, that meant women, that meant power, and that was exactly what almost two decades in the business had provided him with. He hadn’t even noticed when he crossed the line.

  His association with Jack had been both brief and unsettling, and as today’s consultation clearly illustrated, his instincts about the man had been dead-on. As the years had passed since his last contact with Jack, an encounter that had drenched him with humiliation and fear, Graeme had come to believe he would never see the man again. But it didn’t work that way with people like Jack Fallon. Their memories were long and they always came back.

  Graeme liked to think of himself as a man’s man. He hunted big game, took expensive weekend junkets to Vegas to watch professional fights from ringside, and until he met Jack, had considered himself an excellent martial artist. After earning his black belt during his first year of solo practice, he’d heard through the grapevine of a new sensei trained by the Okinawan masters. Ever the opportunist, Graeme had decided to look the man up. When they spoke of Jack around the local circuit it was in the whispered tones reserved for legends. Rumor had it that in the few short years since his return from Japan, Jack had distinguished himself both in the legitimate arena and in the brutal, full-contact underground, which Graeme knew existed but had not yet had the opportunity to participate in. Graeme viewed these illicit contests as the ultimate proving ground and often imagined himself at center ring, standing victorious over his opponent. Of the many possibilities he envisioned from an association with Jack Fallon, this figured most prominently among them.

  In the end that opportunity came, almost a year to the day after he joined the Elgin Street dojo in which Jack was the senior instructor. Graeme defeated two men that night, before facing Jack, two vicious street fighters who fell under Graeme’s lightning foot-work. Now, as he waited in this airless consultation room, he remembered being totally pumped for the match, thirsty for Fallon’s blood. During their year-long association Jack had treated him like an underling, shouting him down for the slightest infraction while refusing to acknowledge his identity as an up-and-coming barrister. When he began to court Jack, Graeme had imagined them as partners, equals in a money-making string of up-scale dojos, maybe; but Jack refused to even discuss the matter. Graeme hated the way he swept in and out of the dojo like royalty, rarely participating anymore. Graeme was sure he’d gone soft.

  When Jack stepped into the ring that night the crowd in the smoky Quonset hut had lost its collective mind. Rich men, publicly known and distinguished men, crowded the steep bleachers that encircled the ring and raved like lunatics. Graeme had never seen anything like it, the raw excitement, the ancient sense of arena, and it inflamed him for the battle ahead. There were no rules, no referees, no rounds. The match was over when only one man remained standing.

  Jack approached him in that light-footed way that he had, a chummy grin on his face. Ever cautious, Graeme adopted a combat stance and when Jack was in range, let fly with a pulverizing right jab. Jack deflected the blow and Graeme felt a powerful hand encircle his neck, sucking his head into an upsurging elbow that detonated a huge and blinding pain in his face. Graeme felt his nose shatter and stumbled back, stunned and infuriated. He retaliated wildly and Jack repeated the maneuver, adding humiliation to the glassy pain. Graeme blinked through blood and tears and saw that Jack was still grinning and it incensed him, numbing his agony, focusing his sk
ill, and he glided toward Jack like doom itself, pivoting abruptly on his left heel and bringing his right foot around in a killing arc, aiming for Jack’s temple.

  Then he was on the mat with the wind knocked out of him and Jack was kneeling above him, clutching his windpipe, fist cocked back like a pile-driver. The crowd was on its feet shouting, “Do him. Do him.”

  Jack’s eyes were cold bullets. “They want your life,” he said, his voice cutting cleanly through the mayhem. “It means nothing to me. Do you believe me, Graeme?” Graeme nodded; in that moment, it was the only thing he did believe. “I own you now,” Jack said, then released him, walking away, the crowd booing his back as he stepped out of the ring and vanished into the change room—

  “Reliving old times, friend?”

  Graeme’s eyes snapped up and there was Jack, unchanged after almost twenty years. Graeme had trouble meeting his gaze. He sat across from Graeme, handcuffs braceleting his wrists.

  “Excellent plastic surgery, Graeme. Amazing what money can buy.”

  Graeme’s nose had required four operations spanning a five year period to get it back to looking halfway normal. He still snored like a bull.

  “Yes, well, listen, Jack, I don’t—”

  Jack said, “You’re looking well-fed and prosperous.”

  Graeme twisted his neck against the clutch of his eighty dollar tie. It seemed to be strangling him. He was acutely aware of his paunch. He said, “Listen, Jack, I’ve got a full slate today. I came down here as a courtesy. What did you...?”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “How rude of me.” He leaned forward, joining his hands in an attitude of prayer. “I’d like you to represent me.”

  “It would be an honor,” Graeme said, his usual smooth, lawyerly inflections failing him. “But I’m not a criminal lawyer.”

  “You’ll do fine. Trust me. This will never get past the preliminary.”

  “But, Jack, from what I understand, they’ve got some pretty damning evidence.”

  “Please, Graeme, pay attention. I said this will never get to trial because I’m going to walk out of here.” Graeme looked up at him in surprise. “Do you doubt it?” The lawyer shook his head. “Good. Now listen carefully.” Jack passed him a folded slip of paper. “There are some items listed there. I want you to gather them for me and conceal them as instructed. There are also some names. I want you to locate the people they belong to.” Jack smiled. “I’ll be making some visits.” Graeme opened the list and glanced at it. His own name was on it. “You do this right, old friend, and I’ll scratch you off my itinerary.” Jack stood. “Stay in touch,” he said.

  Then the guard led him away.

  * * *

  Four days later, on the last day of June, an intensivist by the name of Dr. Vince Sanders asked Jenny to join him in a conference room off the unit. He sat across from her at a round table and said, “It’s been ten days, Mrs. Fallon, and unfortunately Kim has shown no signs of improvement.”

  “I’m not going to let you turn off the machines or take her organs,” Jenny said. She was worn out from sitting in that chair and worrying, from eating overcooked hospital food and sleeping only fitfully on a cot in the ICU family room. “Not yet. No way.”

  “That’s not what I was going to suggest, Mrs. Fallon.”

  “Please, don’t call me that. My name is Jenny.”

  “Jenny, then.” The doctor adjusted his glasses. “We’re a long way from that, Jenny. What I was going to say is, given the amount of time that’s gone by, we have to start looking at the long term considerations.”

  “Which are?”

  “Well, we can’t keep her intubated indefinitely. Unless things change, and soon, she’s going to need a tracheostomy. After that she’ll have to be weaned off the ventilator and transferred to the chronic floor—”

  “No. Absolutely not, Doctor Sanders. It’s only been ten days.” Jenny closed her eyes and thought: Ten days? It felt like ten weeks. “When we came in the neurosurgeon said it could take weeks before...” A sob came up and Jenny swallowed it. “Before we could tell if she would recover enough to...”

  “Listen,” Sanders said. “I’m not talking about rushing into anything here. We can probably go another five or six days before the tracheostomy becomes urgent. I just wanted us to consider these things early, to avoid any unpleasant surprises down the road.”

  “I appreciate that,” Jenny said, standing. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my daughter.”

  * * *

  Richard came in every day, coaxing her out of the unit for lunch and a walk around the grounds. She looked fragile and pale and that worried him, but he could see a new toughness in Jenny that seemed to harden with each passing day. She was being forced by cataclysmic circumstances to either wither or grow, and she was choosing to grow. It was almost frightening to behold. What concerned Richard most was how the whole thing seemed rooted in Jenny’s almost defiant belief that Kim would recover. He couldn’t imagine what might happen should Kim die or remain in a vegetative state. He refused to imagine it.

  He tried to paint during the long evenings away from her, but the only image he could summon was one of that pale, helpless girl in ICU. He hadn’t even met her, knew almost nothing about her. Only that she’d decided death was preferable to whatever pit of isolation her father had abandoned her to. Richard’s hatred for Jack grew like a malignancy, seeming gradually to possess him, to suck the joy from him. Finally, to free his mind in the only way he knew how, he set up a canvas and began to paint Kim from memory, deleting the life-support systems, depicting her instead as one darkly enchanted.

  Who will be your prince? Richard thought as night shrank before dawn and Kim’s sleeping shape materialized with striking accuracy on the canvas. Who will it be?

  * * *

  On the night of July 3 Jenny finished reading aloud the seventh and last of the Narnia books, The Last Battle. She’d been averaging a book a day, sometimes reading through the night and the seemingly constant intrusions of the staff. Dr. Sanders had been in again this afternoon, warning that the tracheostomy would have to be done by the fifth at the latest. Jenny listened politely and nodded, but refused to sign the consent. “Talk to me on the fifth,” she said. “If nothing’s changed by then, I’ll sign.”

  But she had no intention of signing anything. During these recent long days in the unit, an idea had insinuated itself into her mind with a disturbing persistence, an idea which was quickly becoming a decision. It sprang from a magazine article she’d read one afternoon while waiting for a therapist to finish working on Kim’s chest. The piece detailed the plight of a man who’d chosen to bring an end to his disabled daughter’s life-long suffering. Reading it was akin to a light going on in Jenny’s mind, a light which, once sparked, could never be extinguished. To his detriment, the man had chosen a method of termination which was detectable at autopsy, and a jury found him guilty of murder.

  Jenny reached into the pocket of the cardigan she was wearing, her hand closing around the vial of potassium chloride she’d lifted from a drug cart this morning. To the touch it felt cool and benign. But injected into a vein, the drug would freeze the heart in mid beat, providing a quick and painless death. And it was untraceable at autopsy. Jack had told her about it five or six years ago, following the death of a resident who’d used the drug on himself.

  “I won’t let you suffer, sweetie,” Jenny whispered to Kim’s unmoving form, knuckling a tear from one sunken eye. “I will not let you suffer...”

  * * *

  A pinpoint of light, flickering and diamond-hard, appeared in the seamless landscape of black. It hung there a time, star like, until it was joined by another, each point throwing off threads of illumination, like distant searchlights. Soon, two others appeared, creating the precise geometry of a constellation. Now four others poked holes in the dark and in a matter of seconds the process went exponential, the previously impenetrable blackness shredding before a hail of searing whi
te bullets of light.

  Then the darkness was gone and the flash of a nuclear epicenter filled Kim’s brain. In the hurricane force of it, her body jerked.

  * * *

  Jenny jumped off her chair, slopping coffee onto her jeans. “She moved. She moved.”

  A nurse rushed into the room as a second spasm seized Kim’s body, spiking her hands up in a warding-off gesture.

  Jenny clutched the nurse’s arm. “Did you see it?”

  The nurse nodded, smiling guardedly.

  “Is it a good sign? Is she waking up?”

  “I don’t think it’s a bad sign,” the nurse said. “I’ll call Doctor Sanders.”

  “Okay, good,” Jenny said, watching as the nurse left the room. Then she was leaning over Kim, murmuring into her ear. “Can you hear me, baby? It’s your mom. Can you hear me?” She had to restrain herself against trying to shake Kim awake. “Please, baby, can you hear me?”

  But Kim lay utterly still. Jenny took her limp hand. The despair loomed up again, huge and inexhaustible, but this time she refused to submit to it.

  Sanders came in, smiled tentatively at Jenny and began examining Kim, shining a pen light in her eyes, testing various reflexes. When he was done he turned to Jenny.

  “I don’t want to create any false hope here,” he said, “but I think she’s beginning to lighten up.”

  * * *

  Paul showed up a few hours later. Jenny hadn’t seen him in days and was startled by the change in him. He was skittish and gaunt, hunted looking. His bright eyes stared out of purple-rimmed sockets and his thin frame seemed to float inside his rumpled clothes. He wavered in the doorway, as if unsure of what to do.

  “Paul,” Jenny said. “Are you all right?”

  He glanced behind him, then stepped into the room. “Jen. About Jack...”

  Jenny took him into her arms. “God, Paul, is that what’s bothering you?” She could feel him trembling against her. “You had no other choice. I would have done the same thing.”