The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I concentrate on knotting the last subcutaneous stitch.

  “You want to ask me a question?” he says. “Go ahead.”

  He’s right that I can’t repeat anything he says; the Tarasoff exception to doctor-patient confidentiality applies only to knowledge of future crimes. I can’t share anything he tells me about the past. So I could ask him the obvious question, Why did you do it, and he could answer me. Even if he told me the truth, though, what answer could possibly matter?

  I lift my eyes to his; I’m jolted by the loathing that boils up.

  “This isn’t your story,” I say. My head feels hollow; my voice sounds loud, as if I’m speaking into a cavern. “It belongs to the people you killed. Just because they aren’t able to tell it”—jaw clenched, I’m biting the words off now—“because you took that away from them—doesn’t make it yours.” His face doesn’t change; expression is not possible with his injury. “Now shut up and let me do my job.”

  The two layers of repair have brought the wound together well. Everything’s tucked inside demurely now, leaving just a thin red river on his skin. All that’s left is to close the small gap between the banks. If this were a child, I might forgo suturing at this point and Steri-Strip the final layer of skin closed. Children heal beautifully. But adult skin is less elastic, it needs the strong pull of nylon in most cases, especially with a large wound like this. So I’ll have to sew the final layer. How many stitches will it take?

  “You know what I enjoyed most?” he says in a pleased, confiding whisper. It’s as if I haven’t spoken at all. “Saving the boy. I liked making him lucky.”

  One, I decide; I clamp the nylon monofilament into the jaws of my needle driver and start whipping in a continuous baseball stitch. Tightly spaced short diagonals, a lot of stitches, but just one knot at the beginning and end. Closing the wound like a zipper, the skin coming together to lie flat under a long seam of black. It’s a good repair. There won’t even be much of a scar.

  “You know what I mean. You know what it’s like to save people.” The needle piercing, then piercing again, unclamp and reclamp, pull the suture through. “I gave that kid a miracle.”

  Done. I clip the knot, drop my instruments onto the Mayo stand, strip the gloves from my hands and drop them also, get up and leave the room. Leaving a mess for the nurse to clean up, the way they complain that those dickhead surgeons do. I can’t care about that. All that matters is that I’m done. Not another stitch or another minute in that room.

  * * *

  IF ANY SHIFT should give me nightmares it would be this one. But when I do fall asleep, I don’t dream about Karen, nor about her murderer. Instead I dream of my mother. I wake up at some point suffused with happiness, and I close my eyes and try to go back into it, but she slips away and I am left awake. I look up at the call room ceiling as the joyful glow ebbs and let my mind drift, trying to find a pleasant thought to lull me back to sleep.

  The café banter with Dave from earlier in the day floats up. He’d been nice, but I recall our pas de deux now with a kind of weary bleakness. Just the thought of having to explain myself, of telling my story to a new person, seems exhausting. I know it’s Death Month and on top of that I’ve just had a terrible shift, but a voice within tells me that part of my life is over. This is how it will be, now and forevermore: navigating a world of strangers, a world without landmarks or history, no one knowing me, not really knowing me, ever again. I miss Joe. I miss my mother. I turn onto my side and cry a little bit. Quietly, although there’s no one nearby to hear.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  Leo

  MAY I TALK TO BEN?” asks Dr. Jellicoe. He asks that every time.

  When I don’t reply, he says, “You’re doing a really good job of protecting Ben. I know Ben had a scary experience. But it’s safe here. Leo, can you let Ben know that it’s safe to talk to me?”

  “Did you find Clare?”

  A sudden sharpening of interest: he looks up from the folder he’s holding.

  “Is Clare here now?” he asks. “May I speak to her?”

  Sometimes he doesn’t make sense at all.

  Disappointed—Confused—Worried.

  Dr. Jellicoe, scrutinizing the charts of my feelings, isn’t listening.

  * * *

  GO BACK TO a good day. Maybe a summer day? Feel the sun on your skin. Blue sky. It’s so bright you have to shade your eyes. Look around you and see what’s there.

  * * *

  “UGH, I GOT a mushy one,” says Bedrick, spitting.

  “They’re all mushy,” says Austin.

  The berries are warm from the sun. You can tell the overripe from the sweet by both look and feel. I pull a handful from a branch, sort through them, drop the bad ones to the ground.

  Bedrick spits a new mouthful at me. I haven’t spoken, but I moved and that reminded him I am here.

  “It’s hot,” says Jimmy.

  “Hotter in the laundry,” Bedrick says. “You wanna go back? Go on then.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” says Jimmy.

  I saw them sneaking away and followed them up the hill. The others didn’t say anything when they first saw me, for fear of making noise as we walked by the outbuildings, which might get all of us caught. Once we were a good distance away from school they ignored me, except for the occasional tossed handful of dirt in my direction. They didn’t run me off, though. I think Bedrick likes having me around to torment.

  “Look at the lady,” taunts Austin, mimicking the way I am poking through the berries and pushing the bad ones out of my hand. “Afraid you’ll swallow a bug?”

  “No,” I say, but of course I shouldn’t have said anything at all. They are all on me in a minute, Austin with his knees on my chest and Jimmy cramming his hand against my mouth. Something with legs squirms against my tongue and I shake my head back and forth, spitting.

  “He bit me,” says Jimmy.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I say, but he doubles up the bitten hand and punches my stomach.

  “Let’s see if he’s really a lady,” suggests Bedrick.

  I writhe and struggle but they have me pinned.

  “Stop,” I say.

  “Stop,” mimics Austin in a falsetto.

  Jimmy yanks my trousers down to my ankles, and then suddenly the game is done. They release me and I lie panting, the sun hot on my face; the places where their fingernails scratched make stinging trails across my skin.

  “You gonna cry?” says Bedrick.

  “Crybaby,” says Austin.

  I pull up my pants and sit up.

  “I’m hungry,” says Bedrick. “Gimme the stuff.”

  Austin hands him the bag he has been carrying. We’ve all missed lunch, but they prepared for that. Bedrick rummages through the things in the bag and brings out something wrapped in a napkin. Biscuits, from breakfast. He hands them around to the other boys. Another bundle is a soft wedge of cheese, which he slices up with a penknife and distributes. They sit down a little distance away from me to eat.

  Bedrick makes himself a sandwich of the cheese and biscuit. I know he is enjoying my hunger, my envy, as he draws the knife through the cheese and then carefully scrapes the blade clean between his teeth. The bush nearest to me has a crop of healthy berries on it. I want to reach out to them, but I don’t. Instead I put a hand in my pocket and finger the box of matches I stole from the chapel, when Brother Patrick left them unattended after lighting some candles. I don’t know why I took them; I think I just wanted something in my pocket, something of my own.

  I take the box out and slide the little drawer open. It’s full, the matches packed in tight. I bring it to my nose: the clean sulfur whiff has an unexpected cooling effect, like a tiny breeze. I extract a match and roll it between my fingers. The other boys are lying on their backs now, ignoring me.

  Such a perfect thing, this match. The slender wooden stick, the red head like a hardened teardrop of blood. You can’t tell by looking the p
ower that it contains, or its potential for transformation. I put the match head against the striking patch on the bottom of the box and draw it slowly along. Not pressing at all, but the match blooms with a soft crack and there is fire in my hand. I hold the flame under the cluster of berries; the shiny surface of the largest one clouds up but it doesn’t burst. I want it to burst, I want something to happen. I move the flame under the branch; it darkens and rolls out a small amount of smoke. I hold the match there until it burns down to my fingers.

  “Jesus Christ.” Bedrick has sat up and is staring past me. I look where he is looking, and see that the bush is on fire. Real fire, licking orange and hot, leaping up in points, running like liquid along one branch, setting the next one alight.

  Bedrick stamps the fire with his feet, scoops earth from the ground and shovels it onto the flame. The other boys jump up and join him, and in a minute or two the fire is out.

  “Did you do that?” says Bedrick, panting. The bush is charred and smoking. He clouts me hard across my ear. “The whole hillside could have gone up.”

  “We better go,” says Jimmy. “Before someone sees the smoke.”

  “No one lives around here,” says Bedrick. He gives me a kick. “I don’t want to go back yet.”

  “We could go see the witch,” says Austin. “Maybe we’ll see her naked. I almost did once.”

  “You did not,” says Bedrick, but I can see that the idea has caught his fancy.

  They head down the hill and I get up, tousle the dirt and dry bits of grass out of my hair, and follow. We reach the forest and walk through it. Its shade is a relief. Things live here, not like on the baked top of the hill: there are chipmunks and squirrels and birds. A snake slithers over a root, and this provokes a discussion of how to tell if it’s poisonous; Bedrick dares the others to pick it up. When they don’t, he bends toward it. I am afraid he will throw it at me, so I am glad when the thing eludes him, sliding away under some leaves.

  “There she is,” says Austin as we come out of the woods. He points to the middle of the cemetery.

  You can tell she’s a woman, although she has her back to us and she’s dressed in overalls like a man. I am walking automatically, thinking about how women move differently from men, when Bedrick pushes me and I crash to the ground.

  “Get down, stupid,” he says.

  The stone wall is twenty feet away; we crawl toward it. I can hear the ring of metal against rock as we approach.

  “She’s digging up dead bodies,” whispers Jimmy. “She makes soup from the bones.”

  We all know this must be a lie, but it is exciting, more exciting than anything else we have done today. Maybe we’ll see her pulling human bones from the grave. And what if it’s not a lie? What else is there to dig for in a graveyard?

  “Give me the bag,” says Bedrick when we reach the wall.

  Austin hands him the bag again, the one that held their lunch, and Bedrick upends it and shakes out some small apples, puckered and spotted with brown.

  “Each of us gets two tries,” he says. We’re all sitting with our backs to the wall. He rolls one of the apples toward me. “You first.”

  I take the apple and slowly rise to my knees, peek over the wall. The woman is about ten feet away; as I watch she swings the shovel and drops some soil into the wheelbarrow. She’s wearing a wide hat and her hair is piled up into it; there are curls on the back of her neck.

  I drop again, flatten myself against the ground.

  “She nearly saw me,” I say.

  “I’ll do it,” says Austin, and he gets up on his knees, throws the apple hard, then falls onto his belly again. “I got her,” he says.

  “You did not,” says Bedrick.

  We scramble to a new place, and this time Bedrick looks over the wall.

  “She’s gone,” he says.

  We all rise to our knees to look. Just the wheelbarrow and the shovel leaning against it, no lady.

  “That’s because I got her,” says Austin. “Got her right in the head.”

  “She’s coming back,” says Jimmy. We drop down again and listen for the ring of the shovel, but it doesn’t come.

  “What’s she doing?” says Jimmy.

  “Leo, you look.”

  I peek over the wall. “She’s washing the stone with a brush.”

  “Is she facing this way?” asks Bedrick. “Or does she have her back to us?”

  “This way,” I say, although she isn’t. She’s in profile. Her face is really pretty, actually. Delicate; it doesn’t go with the drooping overalls.

  When we hear the shovel again, Jimmy rises and throws his apple as hard as he can. The sound of the shovel stops abruptly.

  “I got her,” says Jimmy. He didn’t have to say this; we all heard the thud. We scuttle along the wall and sit again, pressing our backs against the stone. “What’s she doing now?”

  “It’s your turn, Leo,” says Bedrick.

  “You didn’t throw yet,” I say.

  “Saving the best for last. Go on.”

  I rise slowly into a crouch and twist, one hand on the ground for balance, and my heart nearly stops when I see her so close. She is poised with the bucket lifted, right above Bedrick’s head. I could say something, I could cry out a warning. But she looks straight at me and her eyes are clear blue, and even if she is wearing overalls and a witch and older than my mama, she is beautiful.

  “What’s she doing?” hisses Bedrick.

  The last syllable is a glug; he has his face turned up toward me, and the stream from the bucket catches him full in the mouth. It gets Austin and Jimmy too, but just on the tops of their heads and their arms. They are all on their feet spitting and cursing. They run toward the trees, but I don’t move. The lady hasn’t said a word; we’re still staring at each other. I think of a story I read once to Sally from a library book, about a princess who smeared mud on her face and dressed in animal skins and went among the commoners. The prince was the only one who recognized her, royalty calling to royalty through the disguise. Finally the spell breaks, and I drop my apple and run after the others.

  When we get back we are punished for sneaking away from work, made to kneel before the prior himself in evening chapel and pray for forgiveness, then sent to bed without supper. After lights-out, the other boys hiss promises of retribution at me from their beds in different corners of the room. No matter what they choose to do to me tomorrow, no matter the empty hole of hunger in my stomach, I am not sorry for any of it. Today brought me two new precious things: the princess, and the knowledge that there is something in the world under my control. Fire is powerful; it frightens even Bedrick, who doesn’t seem afraid of anything.

  * * *

  WHERE ARE YOU? says Dr. Jellicoe, the voice dropping to me in the dark. And the word breathes through me, before I even think: Roscommon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  Lucy

  THE SOCIAL WORKER IS BRISK, professional to professional, just the facts.

  “You know how the world is,” she tells me. “A normal white six-year-old could have trouble finding a healthy foster placement. A six-year-old with mental illness? From a murder house?” Her mouth is a grim line. “He’s going to be tough to sell. Add in possible Axis I, and he’ll be landing in one of the marginal homes. That’s if he gets a placement at all.”

  Axis I: thought disorder. So they’re holding on to the dissociative identity disorder diagnosis, or something like it.

  “He can’t just stay in the hospital forever,” I say. Ben’s already been an inpatient for two weeks. Hospital wards are under enormous pressure to discharge patients before insurance stops paying for the bed. Maybe it’s different, though, when the head of the department has taken the case. “How about Clare? Has anyone found her?”

  “The no-last-name babysitter who lives on a hill? That lead went exactly nowhere.” She signs the note she’s been writing and snaps the chart closed. “Maybe he’ll be put with one of those batshit martyr
types; they come out of the woodwork for kids like Ben. A story like his is crazybait. I guess he could do worse.”

  Have I ever sounded that callous? I wonder, knowing beyond doubt that I have.

  She flicks a look of interest over me. “You married?”

  When that answer was easy, it seemed like no one ever asked that question. I shake my head.

  The spark snuffs out.

  “Too bad. He likes you.”

  “Let me know what happens to him, okay?”

  “Sure.” She walks away without a good-bye, having dismissed me for what I am: a looky-loo, a bystander. I won’t save Ben and she’s too overworked to spare even the effort of judging me for it. She’s moved on, and the message is clear: I should too.

  “Are you consulting on Ben?” A young Indian woman has come up behind me. Her badge identifies her as Preeti Chaudhary, medical student; she must be a third-year doing her required psych rotation.

  “I admitted him through the ER,” I say. “I sort of knew his mom.”

  “I did his intake.” That’s what they call an admission on Psych, intake, as if they’re swallowing the patient whole. “What happened to him was tragic.”

  “Yes.” That’s going to be Ben’s life from here, isn’t it, his first six years replaced by one terrible day. No one will mention him from now on without thinking or saying tragic.

  “You know about Dr. Jellicoe’s diagnosis?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Is the hypnotherapy working?”

  “He’s remembering some things,” she says.

  She teeters on the brink of her next sentence. There’s something she wants to say. I can guess at her internal calculations: I’m a resident, but I’m not visiting Ben in a professional capacity. Also, I’ve said I knew his mom, which might color me as family in medical-speak.

  “Dr. Jellicoe thinks that Ben created Leo as a new personality to protect himself from what he saw,” she begins.

  “But you don’t agree?” A medical student contradicting the chairman of the department; stunning in its audacity.