Late in the day, I did end up calling Brooke to let her know I was back from Big Sur and to tell her I wouldn’t be around for dinner, that I was going to be eating with Paul Murphy. She acted nonplussed, but there was satisfaction hidden there. The subtext—that she was happy I was making friends—seemed patronizing to me.
I would not, of course, be dining with Paul Murphy. Dinner ended up being a solo affair at a burger joint close to campus. I took four hours to eat a Canadian-bacon burger at the bar, down a couple of beers, and watch the Giants go to extra innings with the Colorado Rockies. I chatted with a couple other womanless guys—a grad student from the university, an aging hippie who was really into biodiesel. As the tenth inning rolled into the eleventh, my mind drifted back to Brooke. I stabbed a fry into the salt-dusted cardboard tray. To think I could have been downing a salad with a beautiful woman.
I cut my losses while the game was still tied and started the fifteen-minute drive to Woodside. Apartment complexes and streetlamps quickly gave way to a moonless night that obscured horse country, gentleman vineyards, and monstrous Italian-villa knockoffs. I followed the Google directions through back channels shrouded by oaks and redwoods and arrived at a drive marked by two mailboxes. Fifty yards in, the drive split. Two wooden signs with numbers on them were nailed to a tree. Murph’s place was to the left. Not doing too badly for yourself, are you, buddy?
In another two hundred feet, I could make out the house. It was a low building, with dark wood siding that fit in well with the enormous pines surrounding it. A big picture window was brightly lit, scrimmed by a curtain; the porch lights were on. Very Norman Rockwell in a California sort of way.
I pulled my car in front of the house and got out. I shut the door, the sound popping through the silence. There was the same musty organic odor that I’d smelled that morning down in Big Sur. All of it—the sights, the smells—was very pleasant.
I walked to the front door and stopped. It was open.
10
I REMINDED MYSELF I WAS standing in what was probably one of the lowest crime areas in America. I’d be surprised if they ever locked the doors here. Still, it didn’t feel right; it was suddenly so damned quiet.
I knocked twice on the door. “Murph?” I said.
Nothing. I punched my finger on the doorbell, heard it ring in the house. Silence closed in again.
I stepped back to the drive and walked over to the carport. A blue Lexus sedan and the Mercedes SUV filled the spaces. Everyone, it seemed, was home. I went back to the front door, scuffed around the porch a little. I decided not to ring the bell again. Didn’t want to interrupt Goodnight Moon or whatever it was parents were reading to their offspring these days.
I gave it a couple more minutes, my ass parked on the hood of my car. Then I dialed Murph’s cell phone and walked back toward the home.
From inside, I could hear a phone ring, then stop. In the earpiece of my phone, Murph’s voice started: “You’ve reached the voicemail of Paul Murphy…”
“Murph,” I said through the crack in the door. Then, louder: “Hey, Paul.”
No one responded. I pushed open the door and stepped into the house. “Paul!”
To my right was a living room, clad in wood paneling, one wall dominated by the big picture window. I could now see why the window shone so bright from the outside: a stylish halogen floor lamp lay toppled on a thick Oriental rug, blazing up at the curtain like a floorlight on a stage. Somehow the bulb hadn’t broken; somehow it hadn’t started a fire on the rug. I picked up the lamp and set it upright.
Against the wall, a wooden entertainment center spit wires from its empty maw, from where a TV and stereo had once been. A book lay open on the floor. Kid drawings and teacher evaluations were strewn across a leather chair and its ottoman and cascaded to the rug—gold stars and red pen marks with “Good!” all over the pages. Toys and children’s books were scattered around one end of the room. But no children, no parents.
“Hello?” I said. I listened to my voice die out.
The hallway looked straight back to the kitchen. From there, I could see a marble countertop, could hear very faint classical music wafting. I walked forward. The kitchen was decked out with the finest appliances bourgeois culture had to offer: Wolf range, Viking refrigerator, things too big to cart away quickly. Drawers hung open, a few odds and ends of silverware were scattered across the floor. The music—now no longer music, but the soft baritone of some guy talking about Mahler—came from an old, cheap radio on the countertop.
Near the sink, the floor was covered in trampled cookies, a cracked glass jar lying amongst them. “Oh man, oh man,” I said, heart pumping now.
I jogged back to the hallway. “Hello?”
Off to my right ran another hallway. Dirt streaked the hardwood floor; it looked as if a couple of kids had tear-assed through the place with muddy shoes. At least I hoped that’s what happened: crazy kids with mud all over them, hot pursuit through the house, giggling, lamps knocked over, cookies crushed underfoot. Please let it be that, I thought, even though all evidence argued against it.
I eased open the first door I came to, fighting a mounting panic. It was a child’s room. I could make out a crib in the corner, a mobile with fish dangling above it. There was something in the crib. I flipped on the overhead light and saw it was just a crumple of blankets.
There was a bathroom across the hall, another room on the left, which I entered. Another kid’s room. From the decor, a boy’s, a little older. Blue walls with posters from Pixar movies. A blowup of Barry Bonds. An airplane hanging from the ceiling.
There was a mattress on the floor, shadowed from the light in the hallway. Sitting on it, leaning against the wall, was a child. The boy, I thought. Another child was curled across his legs. The boy’s arm was across his sibling. His head was slumped; he was sleeping. Cute. It was all very innocent and I felt myself relax a little.
“Hey, guys—” I said, voice hushed, and turned on the light. “Sorry—”
But they didn’t hear me.
Somewhere—somewhere in that moment between the images flooding into my brain and my realization of what they meant—I felt something in me break down. My gears just froze. All those years of training, all those codes called in the hospital, where you’re sprinting down corridors to the room of someone whose heart just stopped, all those times where you know exactly what you’re supposed to do—get the epinephrine, grab the defibrillator, push the atropine—all that distant experience abruptly failed me. Maybe if I’d been better trained, if I’d been an emergency medicine doc, if I’d been a trauma surgeon, maybe then I would have moved faster. But I was not and I did not.
I stepped across the room and looked down at a towheaded boy and his blond sister. The little girl, eighteen months at most, clutched a stuffed rabbit. Her head was pulled back and her throat sliced open, blood blackening the white fur and pink ears and floppy pink bow of the rabbit. The boy’s eyes were fixed on his sister. A great bib of crimson stained his pajamas, discoloring the footballs, soccer balls, and baseballs that decorated them.
Kneeling, I reached for the little girl’s wrist, hoping for a pulse. Nothing. The wound through her neck was deep enough to have severed most of her windpipe; it was open, gaping at me. I rolled her on her back and pulled down her pants, stuck a hand under her diaper and pushed into her groin, hoping to feel a butterfly beat from the femoral arteries. For thirty seconds I fumbled, first with the left side, then with the right. My fingers felt only cooling, doughy flesh.
Pulling back my hand, sticky now, I reached for the boy’s wrist. No radial pulse. I laid him next to his sister, felt for femorals underneath the gluey red pajamas. Nothing and nothing. I put my ear to the gash in his neck, willing some sort of breath sound, but all I could hear were the faint calls of the tree frogs outside.
So, I gave up, and, slumped on my knees, tried to figure what to do next. My brain wouldn’t work. After breathing deeply a few times, after touching my fin
gers to my thumb and feeling the tack from the blood between them, I stood, sick to my stomach.
“Murph!” I screamed.
I ran from the room. I tore down the hall, realizing too late that what I’d thought was mud on the floor was nothing of the sort. I ran toward a door at the end of the hall.
This room was lit softly by a single bedside lamp. It was a big room, with a bed opposite me, under a long row of windows. A figure sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, facing away from me. Another figure lay on the bed. Neither moved.
Drawers had been ripped from their dressers. A jewelry box lay broken on the hardwood floor.
The figure on the bed was a woman: blond, dressed only in a nightie, lying faceup, each hand bound to a bedpost. Her throat, like her children’s, had been cut. Blood glossed the small breasts and rib cage. Her legs were twisted in front of her, kicked to the side, pulling her body away from her right arm. The bindings on her wrists—nylon cord, it looked like—cut deep into the flesh.
I forced my eyes to the figure at the foot of the bed. His wrists were handcuffed together behind the chair, a big leather and oak thing that looked solid and antique. Another set of cuffs bound the first to a thick crosspiece between the chair’s legs. He was slouched, the weight of his body pulling hard at the upper limbs. Both shoulders—it didn’t take a medical degree to figure this out—were dislocated. And it didn’t take his best friend to realize that the figure in the chair was Paul Murphy. I rushed to him.
“Paul?”
I have seen horrible things in my life. I have seen disease dissolve tissues. I have seen people drown in their own blood as tiny capillaries in their lungs fragmented and burst. I have seen a human head split apart from a gunshot. But this…
Both of Murph’s ears had been sliced off. Both his eyes were gouged out, leaving black, caked holes. Blood seeped from his mouth, down the clean-shaven chin. Like the others, his throat had been cut. Between his feet—also cuffed to the chair—lay the two ears. Next to the ears lay his tongue.
Then there was the blood. There was so much goddamned blood.
“Oh, no…” I said.
And then I heard it, a faint rush of air popping through liquid. I yelled Murph’s name, and there was a change in the sound, a kind of clutch. An acknowledgment. A sign of life.
A dry-cleaned shirt hung on a clothes tree next to a dresser. I tore off the plastic bag surrounding it, took it over to Murph. His tongue—what was left of it—was swollen and occluded his airway; air bubbled through the bloody wound in his throat.
As I was about to press the shirt to his neck, I forced myself to calm down. I went through my ABCs: Airway, Breathing, Circulation…
Airway.
I dropped the shirt and ran to the kitchen, to the sink. It had one of those removable nozzles attached to its water supply by a flexible hose. I yanked the nozzle out as far as it could go, grabbed a butcher’s knife from a slotted block holder and cut the hose. I sliced off the nozzle. Not perfect, but nothing at all was perfect about this night.
In the bedroom, I cut the tubing to about a foot long, threw the remainder and the knife onto the bed. I pulled Murph’s head back as far as I could to open the wound in his neck. The trachea opened like a jet-black eye, air sucking through it. I swallowed and eased the hose six inches into his trachea. Murph struggled, then coughed. I pulled back an inch or so. Breath rushed in and out.
Airway, check. Breathing, check. Now circulation.
Blood oozed from the torn jugulars. The carotids were, thank God, still intact, or he’d have been dead. I circled behind him and wrapped the shirt around the back of his neck, pressing the fabric to either side of the trachea stiffened by the flexible hose. I held the fabric tight, felt the cotton sink into cartilage, to muscles, to vessels and other things it should not have been touching.
“Come on,” I urged. I said it like we were going somewhere, like there was some end point to this. But stanching his bleeding was no end point; at best, it would give me a few minutes. I needed help. I needed real help, not the bullshit efforts of someone who dealt in microbes and who is a moron when it comes to trauma.
I looked at his wife—I assumed it was his wife—on the bed, looking for any sign she was alive. “Damn it,” I said.
And then I saw her chest move. It rose and fell slightly, a tiny up-and-down traced by one of her breasts.
Letting go of the shirt, I rushed over to her, put my ear close to her mouth, close to the opening in her throat. The faintest sound.
I looked over at Murph; I could almost see the last of his blood running from his neck.
“Damn it. Goddamn it!”
Back to the foot of the bed, to the remainder of the hose. It went into her trachea, down to the carina, back about an inch. I ripped off a pillowcase and tied it around the wife’s neck. It was a sloppy job, not tight enough to be effective. But it was her neck, for Chrissake. I couldn’t tourniquet her goddamned neck.
Mrs. Murphy lay there, twisting weakly against her bonds, an eighteen-inch piece of kitchen plastic jutting from underneath her chin.
I might as well have been the gardener for all the good I was doing. So I did what the gardener would do, which was probably the most effective thing I’d done all evening. I dialed 911. My hands were slick with blood and trembled and it took me three attempts to get it.
Finally, the dispatcher picked up. I screeched, pathetically, “I need help!” I tried to cradle the phone on my shoulder so I could continue to push the pillowcase to Mrs. Murphy’s neck. The cell dropped to the bed, then to the floor.
I picked it up.
“There are dying people here!”
“Sir, what’s your address?” The voice was businesslike.
“I don’t know. There’s someone alive here. Two people. Two dead kids. I’m a doctor. I’m trying to keep them alive.”
“What’s your address?”
“I don’t know! Laurel Road, I think.” I tried to remember the number, and failed. I got the phone between ear and shoulder and pressed down on the pillowcase into Mrs. Murphy. She struggled weakly. “3299, I think. I don’t know! Get someone here now! Get them now!” And the phone dropped to the floor.
The tinny voice of the dispatcher squawked. I let her chatter away.
Murph stirred.
“I can’t believe this. I cannot believe this!”
I looked down at the woman on the bed, at my hands compressing her neck. As pathetic as my efforts were, they might keep her alive until EMS arrived.
While Murph died.
I screamed, loud, unintelligible.
How do we make these decisions? To decide who will die? I felt rage, rage at the impossible choice, rage at my own impotence, rage at being so alone. Rage at both of them, if you can believe it, for being so barely alive and making me choose. I screamed again. Under my fingers, Mrs. Murphy stirred.
I chose. Whether it was because we had some history, whether it was because I thought Murph might be able to better tell me who did this, I don’t know. What I do know is that removing my hands from his wife’s neck was harder than anything I’d done in my life. What I do know is, in that moment, I killed her.
I circled behind Murph and put my hands to his neck again. He tensed and thrashed against his restraints, against me. I could feel the muscles in his neck tighten, could almost feel the blood pumping harder. “Murph, it’s me. It’s Nate. Just…” My voice broke apart. “…Just hold on, okay? Just calm down, buddy, okay?”
And he did.
I looked at the woman on the bed. “Mrs. Murphy, do not die. You will not die, you hear me? Do not die.”
Everything was still except for the sound of the tree frogs drifting in through the open window, the tiny sucks of air from Murph and his wife, my sporadic yelling.
“You will not die.”
But, of course, she did. There was a shudder through her body, then the chest stopped moving. My hands were locked down on Murph’s neck. I did nothing to help he
r, except spew out useless words.
“You breathe goddamn it!”
My head dropped between my arms, and that’s when I realized I was crying. “Please breathe,” I said quietly.
To get my mind off my own ineptitude, I began to talk to Murph. I told him we were going to find whoever had done this. And I said to him over and over again, “I’m sorry. I’m not made for this. I’m not trained for this.” By the time I heard the sirens, all I was saying was: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Murph was dead. He’d been dead for five minutes, I guessed. His life slipped away quietly, without fanfare: no shudder, no death rattle, just something, then…nothing. No breath moving through the gash in the trachea. I didn’t even bother to find a pulse, since I didn’t want to take the shirt away. I didn’t want to give that up.
Light—blue, red, white—skated across the trees outside. Moments later, footsteps, shouting.
“Police!”
I called out. More shouting. I heard, “Two children!” Then, from down the hall: “This is the police!”
“I believe you!” I screamed. “Get in here!” I was losing it. Hell, I’d been losing it since I stepped into this house, but things were really falling apart now. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?”
“I don’t know!”
In the hallway, a cop was shouting, securing the scene, I supposed, for the crime lab folks who would descend like locusts. I felt the house filling up with people.
“In here!” I yelled.
Feet shuffled along hardwood floors. “The sides!” someone yelled. “Keep off the footprints.”
Suddenly, I heard someone breathe, “Oh my God…” There was a lull in the action; I pictured the scene through their eyes: two blood-drenched bodies, drooping plastic hoses sticking out of their necks, like freaks from a sci-fi film.
Someone said, “Sir? Are you okay?”
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