by Jan Burke
“If they take part of the leg,” he said, “it wasn’t because you did anything wrong. Understand?”
“But—”
“Understand?”
I stared at the amateurish bandage and makeshift splint. “I should have given you all of the Keflex,” I said weakly.
“Listen to me. The bullet did the damage, not you.”
“Maybe they won’t—”
“Don’t,” he said, closing his eyes. “Don’t.”
Not this, I begged God. Nothing more. Hadn’t he already been through enough?
“Do you want us to contact anyone?” Frank asked him. “Someone to meet you at the hospital?”
Ben didn’t answer right away.
“A family member or a friend?” Frank asked.
“No,” he said, not opening his eyes. “No one, thanks.”
This answer to Frank’s question made me worry about Ben as nothing else had. It was one thing to face the loss of a limb, another to face it without the support of family or friends.
Frank had his arm around me; I leaned my head against his shoulder. He felt solid and sturdy and safe. Ben was alive. Bingle was alive. I was alive.
I was alive, and fighting to feel something other than the numbness that kept creeping over me. Numbness and thirst. I kept drinking water, but I couldn’t seem to get enough of it.
As the helicopter had taken off, Ben squeezed my hand. I realized he was trying to say something to me over the roar of the engine and rotors. He looked awful. I loosened my seat belt and bent closer.
“The story.”
I looked at him in confusion.
“The knight.”
So I began shouting my half-assed version of a medieval German poet’s tale to him, but I didn’t get much further in the story before Ben’s grip slackened and his head lolled to one side. I froze mid-shout.
Frank hurriedly moved to Ben’s side, checking his pulse and breathing.
“He’s alive,” he reassured me. “His pulse is okay. He’s just passed out. I’m sure he’s been in a lot of pain. Dalton will get us back to Las Piernas in no time.”
J.C. stared at me as if fearing the next act in my bizarre program of in-flight entertainment. Bingle, Deke, and Dunk looked as if they were hating every moment of this ride, storytelling or no. Jack smiled and shouted, “You remember Parzival!”
Dalton managed to get us out of the meadow before law enforcement or the Forest Service came in. He radioed the ranger station to say that we had a medical emergency and could be met in Las Piernas at St. Anne’s. He supplied a succinct description of the situation in the meadow, and warned that Parrish was heavily armed.
As the helicopter landed at St. Anne’s, we were greeted by a team of doctors and nurses, and Tom Cassidy. Frank had asked him to meet us. Cassidy is a master at staying calm in the midst of high pressure, chaotic situations — he’s in charge of the Las Piernas Police Department’s Critical Incident Team. The big Texan’s work ranges from negotiating a hostage’s freedom to talking a potential jumper off a ledge, and his skills were being put to the test that day.
“Everybody’s mad as hellfire at me,” Cassidy drawled, grinning with pride, “but y’all will have a little time to yourselves and the doctors.”
Jack and Travis and Stinger took a dog each — Stinger the only one who could get Bingle to leave Ben — and met with Travis’s lawyer, who had helped us on previous occasions. Between his efforts and those of Cassidy, it looked as if no one was going to face charges, or receive department reprimands, or lose a job or a pilot’s license.
J.C. and Frank were the first to spend time answering questions from the D.A. and the police. I got my turn, as Cassidy stood unofficial guard over me. I found myself answering as if from a distance, perhaps not always coherently. I tired quickly, and Cassidy shooed the others away.
He had to leave soon after — he was busy coordinating crisis efforts that extended further than I could have imagined at that moment.
I asked the doctor who was looking at my various scrapes and bruises about Ben. He hesitated, then said, “He’s been taken into surgery. The leg is severely damaged and infected. We’re going to give him antibiotics, but—”
“What sort of antibiotics?” I asked.
“A combination of cephalosporin — you might have taken it at one time or another as Keflex—”
“Keflex,” I interrupted, turning pale. “Keflex? That might make a difference?”
“Yes, at a high dosage,” he said, studying me. “Are you feeling faint?”
“A little,” I admitted.
I wanted to go home, but the doctor asked me to stick around for a few hours because I was suffering from dehydration. I was placed in a bed, given an IV and a light meal, and fell quickly asleep.
I awakened a couple of hours later to see Mark Baker and John Walters standing near my bed. Mark is an old friend and the crime reporter for the Express. John’s the managing editor.
A nurse tried to usher them out, but I told her it was all right, that I’d talk to them for a while.
After a few expressions of concern, which for all my exhaustion, I didn’t take too seriously, John said, “You know why we’re here.”
“You want the story.”
“You see?” he said to Mark, “I told you she’s a pro.” He turned back to me. “I figured you wouldn’t mind Mark writing it up — this first one, anyway — you’ll definitely get on the by-line, but Mark’s already been doing a lot of work on it, so—”
“I don’t mind,” I said dully.
“You come in tomorrow — catch up on your sleep, but come in by, say, eleven.”
“I’m not sure—”
“I am,” John said forcefully. “You don’t need me to tell you how big this story is — and you were right in the middle of it. Your buddy Cassidy has already cordoned off your street, which hasn’t stopped five big TV crews setting up their trailers at the end of the block. Your neighbors are complaining about helicopter news crews buzzing the area. You will come in tomorrow.”
I didn’t bother arguing with him. I understood that nothing — my sanity least of all — was more important to him than that story. That’s the problem with the news. It won’t wait.
So Mark wrote notes and asked questions, but soon my mind was wandering. Mark kept glancing at John.
“You aren’t making a hell of a lot of sense,” John finally complained.
“No. Shouldn’t Morry be here?” I asked. Morry was acting news editor.
“While you were gone, he left the paper. So I’m wearing both hats for the moment.”
Under other circumstances, this announcement would have startled me, and led to dozens of questions of my own. But I just yawned and said, “Oh.”
The two men exchanged looks again.
Mark started to ask about the men who had died. But every time I said much more than their names, I seemed to forget what I was talking about. Again and again, I heard the explosion, saw bits of flesh and bone scattered everywhere, smelled blood and smoke and earth.
As vivid as these images were to me, I couldn’t speak of them to Mark and John. It was as if there were some blockade between my mind and my mouth simply could not form the words to carry such things. And soon, my mind learned to jump from the image Mark wanted to talk about to something else, such as what the sky had looked like when I sat among the boulders, how my homemade spear had felt in my hand, how cool the water in the stream was.
Mark asked, “How did Parrish get the gun away from his guards?”
“Merrick and Manton,” I said.
“Yes, did you see him shoot them?”
There was a silence.
“Do you think I’ll get giardia?” I asked.
“This isn’t like you, Kelly,” John said, disapproving.
“No,” I agreed. “I’m usually very careful about filtering the water.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re not yourself.”
I was s
ilent for a while, then I said, “I know. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ‘myself’ again.”
“Of course not,” he said gruffly. “You’ve been through a terrible experience. But you’ve got to move on.”
Mark shook his head in disbelief.
“She does!” John protested.
“Give her twenty-four hours to wallow in self-pity,” Mark chided him. “I’m sure she’ll be recovered in time to save Sunday’s A-one. You know — up by the bootstraps and all that. She’ll be bubbling over with the need to tell somebody all her deepest darkests by dawn tomorrow.”
“I can’t — I don’t ever want talk about it,” I said. “I think he wants me to, so I won’t.”
“Well, of course Mark wants you to talk about it!” John said. “But why should you—”
“Not Mark. Parrish.”
The answer startled him.
He studied me, looked at his watch and said, “Get some sleep. That’s all you need. A little sleep. I’ve got enough from you now to take care of tomorrow’s paper. We’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.” He studied me a little longer and said, “I’ll ask Lydia to come in, too.”
I’ve known Lydia Ames, who works on the city desk, since grade school.
“Thanks,” I said, and burst into tears.
“Oh, Christ!” John said.
Frank came into the room just then, and saw me crying. At his look of rage, both Mark and John held up their hands in surrender. It was enough to make me dry up.
“She’s all yours,” John grumbled, and they left.
Frank came close to the bed, and took my hand, the right one, which was IV-free. He gently brushed his thumb over my knuckles. But I could feel a tension in him that kept it from being a lover’s gesture. And those gray-green eyes were troubled.
“What is it?” I said, sitting up. “What’s wrong?”
He blew out a breath and said, “Ben. They had to amputate.”
“No . . . oh Jesus, no.”
“They said he came through the surgery fine.”
“I don’t want to hear about the fucking surgery!” I shouted.
He put his arms around me, which started the tears again. He let me cry hard and loud, listened to me berating God, and myself.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do, how to help him—”
“You saved his life.”
I wondered if Ben felt very grateful to me for that right now. Aloud I said, “I have to see him.”
“He’s sleeping. He probably won’t be allowed to have visitors before tomorrow.”
I lay back against the pillows, miserable. Frank started talking to me about Cody and the dogs and everyday things, and I calmed down. Exhaustion began to conquer me again. “Don’t leave me alone in here,” I said sleepily.
He turned out the overhead light, stretched out on the other bed, and continued to talk to me for about another minute and a half before he fell asleep — too far away from me, but I didn’t begrudge him the rest.
Over the next two hours, I drifted back and forth across the borders of sleep. I was dreaming of marching bloody boots when the phone rang. Frank awakened, and was up on his feet and at my bedside before I had turned the light on and found the right end of the receiver.
“Irene? It’s Gillian.”
“Hello, Gillian,” I said, around a hard knot in my throat.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No, no, it’s okay.” And for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what to say next.
“I wondered if I could talk to you — not tonight, but maybe tomorrow? Will you still be there?”
“No, I won’t be here. I’m going home in a little while,” I said, suddenly knowing that I wouldn’t be able to spend the night in that hospital bed, that I needed familiar surroundings. “But I’ll be going into the office tomorrow afternoon. Do you want to meet me there?”
“Sure. What time?”
“About four?”
“Okay.”
A silence stretched, and I said, “I’m sorry, Gillian.”
“It’s all right,” she said, although she didn’t sound as if that were true. “Thanks for going up there. I — I heard about what happened on the news. Is the man — Ben Sheridan, is that his name?”
“Yes.” The knot froze solid.
“Is he going to be okay?”
No, he’s not. But I thought of her four-year wait ending as it had, and said, “Yes, he’ll be okay.”
After another silence, she said, “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
I had signed all the papers for my release and was changing into some clean clothes that Travis had thoughtfully brought by, when I remembered something. I got my maps out and showed Frank where the too-clean cave was located. “It might be nothing,” I said, but somehow the act of giving him this information soothed me a little.
He thanked me, then said, “I talked to a nurse while you were filling out paperwork. It didn’t seem likely to me that you’d be able to leave here without looking in on Ben. He’s asleep, but she said if you kept it brief and promised not to disturb him, it would be okay.”
I looked up at him, wondering how it was that he so often seemed to anticipate what my needs might be.
“You didn’t abandon him in the mountains,” he said. “We won’t abandon him now.”
“Thank you,” I said. When I was fairly sure I could speak again without crying, I added, “Where would you like to celebrate our one-hundredth anniversary?”
My first shock came when, expecting a flat place under the blanket, I saw what appeared to be two feet at the end of Ben’s bed. “A temporary prosthesis,” the nurse whispered, reading my look.
I discovered that the only things that mattered to me at that moment were that he was still alive, that he was sleeping peacefully, that his face was not drawn tight with pain, that he was safe and in more capable hands than my own — but mainly, that he was still real in a world that seemed less and less so. I thanked the nurse and left quietly. I asked Frank to take me home, where, despite all the commotion above and around us, I slept dreamlessly in his arms.
30
SATURDAY MORNING, MAY 20
Newsroom of the Las Piernas News Express
Our ill-fated expedition into the mountains supplied most of the material for Saturday’s A section, which read largely like a giant obit page.
Most Saturday mornings, the newsroom would be fairly quiet, but when I came in at nine-thirty, there was more activity than usual. By then, members of the public who owned televisions or radios, or who purchased newspapers, knew that despite an extensive search effort, Nick Parrish was still at large and that no one could find Phil Newly. The public knew that after recovering Julia Sayre’s remains, unauthorized (a word used often by people who had been safely at home) efforts to recover another set of remains led to a trap set by Parrish and tragically resulted in the deaths of six members of the Las Piernas Police Department and an instructor of anthropology at Las Piernas College.
Oh, David.
An associate professor of anthropology was in critical condition at St. Anne’s Hospital. A reporter for the Express had sustained minor injuries. Others with the group, including a search dog, were unharmed.
I thought of Bingle — staying with us until other arrangements could be made — lying listlessly near David’s sweater. I thought of the look I had seen on J.C.’s face. I hadn’t seen Andy yet, but I was fairly sure he wasn’t doing much better. “Unharmed.”
Frank was sitting a few feet away from me, reading a paperback. He’d look up every so often, I’d smile at him, and look back at the blank computer screen. Or down at my fingers. My hands kept shaking, but I kept my fingers on the keyboard, hoping for a miracle.
John hadn’t been happy about allowing Frank to hang out in the newsroom, but with Parrish on the loose and my nerves shot to hell, I wasn’t quite ready to go anywhere without Frank yet. Besides, we were currently down to one car, so if he wanted
me to come in, Frank was going to bring me anyway.
Lydia was there, giving up her Saturday plans with her boyfriend, but you would think sitting in the newsroom for the sixth day in a row — spending time with an uncommunicative friend — was just about as good as it could get for her. When I complained that she shouldn’t have let John bully her, she told me he hadn’t, and I couldn’t bully her, either.
By eleven o’clock, I had been sitting at my keyboard for over an hour. I had come in early because, I told Frank, I wanted to get this part over with. But I wasn’t getting anything over with at all — ninety minutes and all I had to show for it was a blinking cursor on an empty screen.
Lydia walked over to me. Frank watched, then went back to his book.
She made a gesture, moving her hand back and forth, indicating me, then herself. Lydia’s parents were Italian immigrants. I’ve seen her mother make the same gesture. There’s no need for pretense between us, the gesture says.
“We’ve known each other since third grade, right?” Lydia said.
“Right. But you only say that to me if you’re about to be brutally honest.”
She laughed, I didn’t.
“I can’t take any brutality right now, Lydia. Even in the name of honesty.”
“Okay, I’ll try to be gentle.”
That time, I did laugh. Frank was watching us now.
“You were in this situation,” she said, “in which everything went out of control.”
I heard a soft rattling sound, looked down at my trembling hands, and lifted my fingers from the keyboard.
“You did everything you could,” Lydia went on, “and things still went bad.”
“Straight to hell,” I agreed.
“If you don’t want to write about what happened,” she said, “I’ll stick up for you with John. We’ll both walk out of here, if that’s what it takes.”
“Because newspaper jobs are in such plentiful supply right now,” I said.
“Because nothing is worth that much.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“You don’t want to write about it, because you think Nick Parrish was seeking attention all along.”