The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Does anything hurt?” I ask. He blinks but says nothing. So much for history. “I’m just going to check you over, okay?” as I unloop the stethoscope from around my neck and stand up.

  He doesn’t resist as I listen to his heart, and when I put my hand on his shoulder he leans forward without being told, to let me listen to his lungs. I run the circular glow of my penlight over his back. A small healing bruise there, green already so maybe five days old, not an unexpected finding for a typically active boy; otherwise nothing.

  “I had a dog when I was your age,” I say, putting a hand on his shoulder while ratcheting the back of the table down to lay him flat. “I’m going to check your tummy, okay?”

  His lack of response is as good as consent. Small children are not polite; they’ll tell you they hate you if they feel it. They’ll kick you, bite you, whatever it takes to make you and your hurty nasty self go away. Which makes their occasional expressions of trust so moving: a small hand put out to take mine on the way to X ray, or both toddler arms, one dragging an IV, upraised in the universal signal for pick me up.

  I lift his shirt. His narrow chest has a short scabbed scratch on it, nothing worrisome, nothing fresh. “My dog was the color of straw,” I say. “Do you know what straw is? Like in a barn, what the horses eat.” Or is that hay? No matter, keep things going, a river of story can break up a shy-child logjam. “His coat was really fluffy.” When I palpate his abdomen (soft, normal), he doesn’t squirm or giggle, even at the end, when I try to make it ticklish. “Unless he was dirty. He was dirty a lot of the time.” No change in the boy’s expression, but are his eyes focusing on me now? “He loved to swim—in the creek, in a lake, in a swimming pool—but he hated baths. Isn’t that silly?”

  When I pull back the sheet to look at his legs and feet I am stopped for a moment. His feet are washed in brown, up to the ankles on both sides, and up one calf and thigh to his buttocks, where the side of his little-boy underwear is dark and stiff. The sour-penny smell of blood is unmistakable.

  I’ve presumed taken from the scene of a homicide meant he’d been found in a house where a domestic dispute had ended in gunshots—that he’d been hiding in his bedroom or ensconced terrified in a closet. Not close enough to the action to be soaked in blood. So much blood—what must the scene have been like? A twinge of guilt at my judgment of the young cop outside. I drop the sheet again and stand, glove up from the box on the counter, then examine the feet more carefully. No cuts or abrasions there, nor any on his legs. I run a gloved finger under his waistband and pull the fabric away. No signs of injury under the crusted cotton.

  He opens his mouth to my say ahhh; I train the penlight beam briefly onto his pink tongue and the arch of his palate, then move it upward, over his face. As I’ve begun to suspect, the spikes in his hair aren’t a hairstyle. His hair is molded with coagulated blood, pushed up on one side and lacquered down against the skull on the other. He must have been lying in a pool of blood. I push my gloved fingers over his scalp, chasing them with the light beam, seeking a gap or a clot that might signify a laceration. Nothing: this is not his blood.

  I strip the blood-smeared gloves off, hold them drooping inside-out in one hand, and go to the drawer under the counter that holds the evidence bags. Where is Social Work? He shouldn’t have been left alone in here.

  “What was his name?” The whisper from behind me sets the hair up along my arms.

  “Whose name?”

  “Your dog.”

  “His name was Moses.” Very casual. I keep my back to him, drop the inside-out gloves into the bag and seal it, sign the label, put the bag into my pocket, and turn around. “I called him Moze. My best friend called him Gross.”

  “Was he fat?”

  I take the chart from the counter and reseat myself on the rolling stool. “Fat? No. She called him Gross because he was stinky.” Success; the tiniest smile.

  “Gross means fat in French.”

  “So it does.” What little kid knows French nowadays? I’d loved studying it, but often I wish I’d learned Spanish in school instead—my ER Spanish barely meets my needs. “Tu as un chien?”

  “Un chat.”

  “Lucky. I always wanted a cat. Does he have stripes?”

  “He’s orange.”

  “Orange cats are the best.”

  He gives me a long, estimating look. I hear my idiotic words. Orange cats are the best. Really? I’m so tired; I left my house sixteen hours ago.

  “Do I need a shot?” he asks.

  “Nope. No shots today.” I hold up my empty hands, the open chart balanced on my knees. “I just want to ask you a couple of things. First, what’s your name?” I uncap my pen, poise it over the name field. He says nothing. So much for matter-of-fact. I try an appeal to fairness, which can be a strong instinct in kids: “You know my name. I even told you the name of my dog.” Nothing.

  Sigh. With an adult you’d just ask, they’d just answer. They might lie, but they’d say something. With children, obstacles rise up unexpectedly; you have to presume that even kids old enough to talk might not say one word.

  “Should I guess?” Not even a blink. “Is it . . . Geronimo? Nostradamus? SpongeBob?” He just stares, not a trace of humor in his expression. “All right, I give up. What is it?”

  He presses his lips together so that the skin around them goes white and shakes his head, hard. It’s such exaggerated obstinacy that it would be comical if the situation were different.

  “You don’t know your own name?” A direct challenge, maybe difficult for a little boy to resist.

  Not this boy.

  “Hm,” I say. “What am I going to do? I don’t know what to call you.” And wait. A child strong on empathy might want to solve the problem for me.

  He’s staring down at his hand, where it’s flat on the stretcher.

  “If I tell you,” he says, pleating the fabric of the sheet between two fingers, “you might send me back.” Pleat, unpleat.

  “Back where?”

  He looks up, stricken.

  “I don’t know,” he says with an edge of panic.

  I put the chart on the counter behind me and scoot the wheeled stool close to the bed.

  “We just want to get you home,” I tell him, looking him right in the eyes. “We need your name to get you home.”

  His eyes move over my face as if reading a message there.

  “Leo,” he whispers finally.

  “Great!” I scoot back, retrieve the chart and pen from the counter. “Leo what?”

  But that’s all he’ll say. I wait him out for minutes this time, leaning my back against the counter, my legs extended and toes braced against the bottom of the pelvic table, arms crossed. The silence stretches out between us until my head suddenly jerks down and then up and I realize that I’ve fallen asleep. He’s asleep too, his little spiky head against the pillow and his mouth slightly open. I get up as quietly as possible and go out into the corridor.

  “Well, I got a first name,” I tell the detectives. “Leo.”

  “We can work with that,” says the older cop. “Thanks.” He takes his phone out, taps on the screen, and a minute later, without preamble, “Check the class roster for a Leo. Try second and fourth too.”

  “We know what school the kids went to,” explains the younger detective, accepting the bag of bloody gloves from me. He takes the pen I offer and signs the label below my name. He looks a little less dazed now. “We’re guessing third grade, from the number of candles on the cake.”

  I begin documenting the physical exam, backslash backslash backslash on the template.

  “He’s pretty scared,” I say. Scribbling a small X on the child-shaped outline for the old bruise, another for the small scab, shading the dried blood. So much blood. “Do you think he saw anything?” Anything: a limp stand-in, but he knows what I mean.

  “I hope so,” he says. “But I also hope not.”

  His words have the fervent quality of a prayer: may this
child be quickly returned to the tight embrace of his worried, living mother; may this terrible day become a bad memory shrinking smaller over the years as he grows up.

  “Look again,” the older cop barks into the phone. “Leo. It’s three fucking letters.” I know that impatience, that harshness. He doesn’t have the luxury of sorrow right now, he can’t indulge in dewy eyes or prayer; this boy is depending on him. He can’t make the dead children alive again, but he can locate this one child’s family and get him back home. I hear his voice as if it is my own, and I recognize: he’s doing what he can do.

  I sign the chart and give it to Grace, who has come back down the hall. “He needs a serious scrubdown,” I tell her. “He’s medically clear, though.”

  “I’ll send him up,” she says.

  * * *

  BACK IN TRAUMA 2, Crystal’s cervical collar is off and the back of the stretcher has been raised. Her eyes are closed.

  I put a hand on her forearm and she opens her eyes, pupils springing tight under the overhead light. Tiny cubes of windshield glass sparkle from the dark mass of her hair. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay,” she says. A throwaway answer to a throwaway question.

  “Your husband’s in surgery.”

  “He’s not dead?” Her voice is sharp with surprise.

  “He has internal bleeding. They’re doing what they can.”

  Is it my place to tell her what the paramedic deduced? If the husband dies, would Crystal want her memories of him clouded by the knowledge that he tried to kill them both? If he lives, she’ll eventually find out. Does she need to know right now?

  “You may not get your memory back for a while,” I tell her. “You may never get it all back.”

  I could say, I know what it’s like to have the rug pulled out from under you. But do I? Divorce—even infidelity and divorce—are relatively bland horrors. My husband cheated on me is anybody’s story. Murder-suicide is on a whole other level. But it’s all loss, isn’t it? Loss and betrayal.

  “Is everyone okay in the other car?”

  “There wasn’t another car,” I say. “Your car hit a tree.”

  To my surprise, she bursts into tears.

  “Oh thank God,” she says on a ragged exhale. “Thank God.”

  And somehow I know that there isn’t any need to tell her about the paramedic’s photographs or about what her husband had tried to do. She’d been part of it. She had dressed up in her purple dress and best shoes; she was ready. The driver had been drunk as hell, but Crystal’s blood alcohol was zero; her urine tox screen was negative. She’d faced the act clearheaded. Does that count as courage?

  Then I remember: chocolate-chip pancakes this morning.

  “Who’s got your kids?” I ask.

  “My mother.”

  She really begins to weep now, in long, tearing sobs. I know she wants comfort, but the doctor who could have comforted her is on a distant shore now, on the other side of the six-year-old with his spiky bloody hair and his Jesus feet, who’d possibly watched his whole family die.

  “Someone will take you upstairs to the surgical waiting room.” I can hear the change in my own voice; it’s brisker, less kind. “We’ll get you a phone so you can call your mom.”

  I dial down the overhead light, pull the curtain closed, and leave the room.

  It’ll be an eighteen-hour shift by the time I get to sleep, but I’ve done longer before without feeling this spent. Age isn’t the culprit. The culprit is the why. I didn’t sign up for the why. I specialized in emergency medicine to deal with the what, and the how, and the how do I fix it. I’ll sic Psych on poor Crystal and Child Protective Services on her kids; I’ll leave Leo to Social Services and pedi-Psych and the cops. Let them cope with the why. I’ve had enough of it for today.

  * * *

  PATIENTS ASK DOCTORS, How’s he doing? Meaning, Is he going to die? They say, What did the tests show? Meaning, Am I going to die? They say, I don’t remember, meaning, I can’t live with what I know.

  And doctors tell patients, Just a little pinch. Meaning, This is going to hurt like hell. They say, It won’t take too long. Meaning, You’ll be waiting for hours. They say, She didn’t suffer. Meaning, I know that’s what you need to hear.

  People say to each other, Tell me the truth.

  Which can mean anything.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  Clare

  THE VISIT FROM THE MAN in the cardigan breaks the afternoon wide, a thunderclap on a sunny day. Not that he is loud, or tall, or commanding. He is none of those things. He is meek and mumbly, and diminutive enough that the whole shape of him is obscured by the aide who precedes him through the corridors of Oak Haven, coming toward me where I sit in the east sunroom with my large print biography of Cleopatra.

  “Well here she is,” cries the aide (Wendy? Linda?), appearing in the doorway. “Miss Clare, we have a wonderful surprise for you.”

  No, this is Margaret or Melanie, something like that. One of the big ones, tall and wide. Always a source of wonder—people didn’t used to come in that size. As I look up, she seems to double, pulling apart like a cell dividing. A blink abolishes that magic, and I see that a short man has stepped out from behind her. From the raveling blue cardigan (not dark enough to be navy, not light enough to be periwinkle), to every scant hair on his head, to his eyes obscured behind round gold-framed lenses, his whole affect is an apology.

  “Well, now,” he says, holding up a finger, his smudgy spectacles flashing in the sun from the window. “Well. We can’t say that yet.”

  “This is Mr. Barclay,” says the aide, beaming, as proud as if she’d birthed him right there, sweater and spectacles and all.

  They don’t really expect me to speak. I am just delicate furniture to most people now, something to be moved from one place to another, put into the sun, taken out of the sun. Like a plant. I consider Mr. Barclay, deciding whether or not to reply. Silence can be a powerful weapon. Keep quiet and others will rush in to fill the empty spaces.

  “What is it?” calls Mrs. Donovan from across the room. “Who is that?”

  “Miss Clare is getting the Cup!” the aide (Molly? Polly?) cries in answer.

  The effect is galvanic. Or what passes for galvanic in Oak Haven—something like a shot of electricity worming through a vat of honey. The knitters look up from the fleecy clouds in their laps; the card players collapse the fans in their hands to slim bricks; the reader-nappers jolt awake from their dozing. A low querulous rumbling starts up: What is it, who is that, what did she say?

  “What’s happening?” That is Mr. Simonetti, deaf as a stone, from one of the card tables.

  “The Cup!” repeats the aide, ignoring Mr. Barclay’s protestations, which to be fair are easy to overlook, consisting as they do of a soundless slow head shaking and that still-upraised finger, now quivering.

  “They still do that?” says Mrs. Burgess, one of the knitters, sounding cranky. No doubt annoyed to have her stitch-counting interrupted.

  “What?” Mr. Simonetti again.

  “The Cup!” in a chorus from around the room.

  Mr. Barclay is still shaking his head; he begins folding and unfolding his lips as if preparing to speak, and raises his index finger higher as if trying to catch someone’s attention, but no one is looking at him except me, through my half-shuttered lids.

  “That can’t be right,” yells Mr. Simonetti after the news has been shouted to him a few more times. “I’m older than her.”

  “You’re not, Mr. S,” says the aide. “You’re only ninety-two.” She turns to Mr. Barclay. “We heard about Maude Nummly over at Gardens, of course, rest her soul. But she was one hundred and four. Clare’s not that old.” She looks at me, her eyes squinted, as if looking me over for a mint mark.

  “Well,” says Mr. Barclay. “That’s just the thing.” But the babble has begun again; it surges up around his next words and swallows them, a dozen monologues rippling out from the subject l
ike water in a pond, in widening, increasingly irrelevant circles. Clare’s a hundred? She doesn’t even use a walker; oh that fellow looks just like the man who lived in that big red house on Prospect Street; who, that television person?; no, you know, that one with the little dog; is it banana pudding for dessert today?

  “Shhhh,” says the aide, with no effect.

  We never have banana pudding; you always say that; well we never do; you mean the one who did the weather?; now I’ve lost my place, I’ll have to rip out two rows; the one with the little dog, you remember; is it four o’clock already?

  Suddenly, one voice cuts across the bedlam.

  “Everyone hush.”

  It isn’t terribly loud, but something about it, some quality of pitch or timbre, allows it to penetrate the din. Everyone seems to hear it, even Mr. Simonetti. They all turn toward the speaker, who sits in the doorway in her wheelchair with a grabber stick across her lap.

  Gloria Esperança Pereira. She arrived just a week ago. I’d heard her name loud and clear as she spelled it out carefully the first day for her doorplate. She is a youngster by Oak Haven standards, only seventy; her hair is still partially dark, worn bunned at the back of her head. She has the room next to mine (once Ellie Schlosser’s room, before that Marjorie Beam’s room, and back and back, a dozen or more ghost neighbors breathing that air on the other side of my bedroom wall during the time I’ve been here), but what with the fuss and flurry of settling in—there’s a lot involved in cramming a whole long life into a two-room suite with attached bath—we haven’t formally met.

  She nudges her wheelchair forward with an electric rrrr.

  “What is all this commotion?” she demands.

  That voice. Mr. Barclay stands a little taller as he answers.

  “I’m Wallace Barclay, president of the Barclay Foundation,” he says. “We handle the Barclay Cup of Winfield.”

  “The Barclay Cup of what now?” says Gloria.

  “Winfield,” says the aide. “That’s the town we’re in. Oak Haven’s in Winfield.”