The night before, sitting on the grass in Bell Park on Ramsey Lake, she'd discussed her plans with Marti Stone, who'd been her closest friend since the third grade. Though disappointed—both girls had dreamed of becoming teachers for as long as either could remember—Marti had encouraged her to go with her heart. And if that meant putting off her education for a while, even indefinitely, then so be it. If she didn't at least try to work things out with Peter, she might regret it for the rest of her life.
Marti left the park ahead of Kelly that night, and Kelly spent a long time just lying on the grass, gazing at the moon. There were tears, and a heartache so intense it had a physical quality, but it felt good to have talked it all out.
Later, before leaving, she stripped off her shoes and waded into the lake, relishing the cool caress of the water around her ankles. Moonlight tracked down from a clear sky and twinkled on the surface like a million silver pixies. Recalling a rhyme she'd heard as a child—a tale of a sorrowful princess who drank down the moon and its magic restored her lover from the dead—Kelly dipped her cupped hands into the shimmering water. . . but when she brought them up to her lips, there was nothing in the bowl of her hands but cold black liquid. Thirst unquenched, she let it drizzle untasted through her fingers.
She dried her hands on her jeans, picked up her shoes, and made her way back to the road.
Peter spent six full weeks in the ICU—all of July and the first two weeks of August—before his transfer to the rehab unit on the seventh floor. During this interval, when he wasn't sedated, he and Kelly discussed little of any consequence—like their future together and how it had changed, or Peter's injuries, and in particular his chances for recovery—opting instead for mundane exchanges of small talk or simply silence. Sam was there almost constantly, darting in and out, as if pulled by other, unknowable duties. And Leona, whose meddlesome nature Kelly became fast unable to tolerate, sat there around the clock, stinking of booze, her very presence disallowing anything meaningful to pass between Kelly and her crippled son. She lied to him still, promising a full recovery, and sometimes Kelly had to bite her lip to stop herself from slapping the woman silly. It was a cruel and malicious lie. . . but as time wore on, Kelly thought she saw the truth twisting slowly into focus behind Peter's eyes.
"I'm going to get a job," she told her mother, hot on the heels of her confession about Kingston. "I'm going to get a job and find an apartment, and when Peter is feeling well enough I'm going to move him in with me."
Irene Wheeler, whose only sister had wasted her life on a man with no future, spun on Kelly like a jackal. "You most certainly are not!" she roared, making Kelly's father, Charles, avert his eyes. "No way! It's over for Peter, Kelly, and the sooner you face up to that fact the better it'll be for all concerned."
"It's terrible what happened to Peter," Kelly's father put in, trying to soften his wife's well-meaning but rather harsh approach. "But your mother is right. It simply cannot work out, and with time you'll see that. He needs full-time nursing ca—"
"Then I'll hire a nurse," Kelly shot back. "I'll . . . I'll. . .”
The tears were very close now.
"You'll call the registrar's office back right this minute, that's what you'll do," Irene barked. She loved her daughter dearly, but there was no way she was going to sit by and watch her throw away a perfectly bright future over a dead man. And really, that was what Peter Gardner had become. Before the accident, she'd liked Peter very much, had even been secretly pleased with the idea that he might someday marry her baby girl. They were good together: smart, clean, honest kids. But now all that had changed.
Irene's expression softened, and she snugged an arm around Kelly's waist. "Listen, honey. You'll get over him." Kelly buried her face in her mother's neck and cried. "You'll get over him and then you'll go on. Just wait and see."
Moved, Chuck Wheeler stood up to join in the embrace—
And Kelly bolted into the stairwell. "No!" she balked like an angry child. "I'll never get over him, and I'll never leave him!" Her stamping footfalls rattled the plates in the cupboards. "I love him!"
Kelly swept her bedroom door shut with a crack! and flung herself onto the bed, sending an arrow of pain through her healing arm. In spite of her violent denial, a deep part of her knew that her mother was right. Lying there sobbing, she felt the way she had as a third grader, when she'd climbed off the bus one day to find Snowball, her very first kitten, all bloodied and broken in the gutter, hit by a car and left there to die. Sick with fear, she had rushed him inside and begged her parents to drive him to the vet's. Her folks had complied, but the vet had only shaken his head. "We'll have to put him to sleep. I'm sorry, sweetie, but there's no other way." Kelly had objected vehemently, unable to comprehend why they didn't just patch him up. And when it was done, when Snowball was finally dead, she had cried and cried and felt exactly like this, a vanquished warrior in a lost battle of truth who stubbornly refused to give up.
But that had been only a kitten, not her lover, and she was by God going to do it! She and Peter would get along fine on their own. Things were bad, horrible even, but their love would see them through.
With that resolve Kelly picked herself up and returned to the hospital, each thud of her footfalls crushing her mother's cruel words. She told Peter of her intentions, and it took some coaxing before he agreed. He, too, was concerned for her future.
But, as so often happens, things did not work out the way Kelly had planned.
Peter still believed he was going to get better.
During the long months that followed, Peter allowed himself to acknowledge only the signs of his progress, scant as they were. The slightest breath of encouragement from the staff took on the deceptive dimensions of promise in his mind, and he learned to endure the humiliations of his treatment with the stoicism of a man who is yet unable to see the true shape of the beast he must face. Time became a sluggish smear, highlighted by visits from Sam, his mother, and Kelly. . . and increasingly fewer visits from anyone else. In the first few weeks there had been cards and flowers and a lot of well-wishing, but this had tapered off quickly, almost shamefully so. He began to feel forgotten, and this feeling sometimes made him question his very existence. The sedation heightened this sense of unreality—they told him he must rest through the healing process, which was ongoing in spite of his inability to perceive it—and he sometimes slept up to fifteen hours a day. When not sleeping or gawking at his visitors—for, with time, he came to realize that he had less and less of any consequence to say to them—Peter found himself floating in a chlorine-reeking pool or having his dead limbs cranked by some nameless physiotherapist. Without the continual encouragement of his mother, he might have despaired a lot sooner. But when they were alone in his room and the night outside was black and uncaring, she promised him a full and speedy recovery. And no one told him any different.
"We're going to have to tell him," Sam mumbled. It was November 4. Outside the house, the first hard flakes of a brutal winter whirled on the gray pavement.
Remembering the clout she'd given him the last time, Sam stood well back from his mother as he spoke. It was Friday night, and she was really flying. . . but flying low. She had the tape player on and the photo albums out. The bottle in her lap was empty, and Sam was afraid that if she kept this up she was going to drink herself into oblivion.
"Tell who what?" Leona said, her rheumy eyes rolling his way.
"Tell Peter." He cleared his throat. "Tell him the truth."
"And what might that be, Mr. Smarty Pants?"
Sam's Adam's apple bobbed apprehensively. "He's not going to get better, Mom," he blurted, flinching as he said it, expecting her to pitch an album at him or to lunge up swinging her fists.
Instead, Leona's eyes moistened with tears. As if in shame, she hid her face from her son. A shuddering intake of breath seemed to overinflate her, and suddenly she appeared on the verge of facing the truth.
But just as quickly that look be
came a leer, and she returned to leafing through the albums, making Sam feel as if he'd never existed.
He turned and slouched back to his room.
And later, when the flap of the tape joined the bovine snores of his mother, he crept into his brother's room and lay down on his empty bed.
SEVEN
Christmas had come and gone, and now January encased the world in its icy mantle. Sleet pecked noisily at the thermal panes, and an incessant wind hammered the high tower of the hospital, whining through hairline cracks. Inside, the wards slept fitfully, dreaming uneasy dreams.
Peter lay on his side in his private room, not asleep, his back to the sleet-streaked window. He was listening to the wind and something else, something deep in his unfelt guts. Two things, really: one a grotesque and unwanted truth, the other a burbling, gaseous storm, brewing toward breaking point. He'd already tried calling the nurse with his chin-operated call button, but tonight it was that haughty bitch Louise Larue, who spent more time preening herself than she did looking out for her charges.
Earlier that day Dr. Lowe had changed Peter's medication, substituting a stronger laxative to relieve his chronic constipation. But whatever that medication was, it was working too well, and Peter knew that any minute now he was going to shit in his bed.
Uttering an angry oath, he chinned his call button again. He remembered only too well the last time he'd dirtied his bed. It had been back in August, when the last of his "friends" had shown their faces for the last time. Mike Gore, Rhett Kiley, and Jerry Jeter. They'd slunk into his room like convicts, full of guilty knowledge. Gore had brought along a box of pistachios, Peter's favorite, and had made the mistake of holding the box out for Peter to take. Following that blunder, a silence as impenetrable as a steel vault had enclosed them.
Peter had never felt so unmanned as he did on that day, the three of them poking into his room, guys he'd hung out with for years, guys into whose waiting paws he'd so easily lobbed hundred-yard passes, guys he'd gobbled Harvey burgers with or taken punches for in the after-game brawls that sometimes broke out, the three of them gawking at him like total strangers—or worse, like reluctant acquaintances who'd come to a funeral to view the remains only to find that the deceased had the uncommonly bad taste to still be alive.
It had happened then. Seeing his buddies ambling in like that, so damned easily, and understanding that life was like simple economics—even if you had been a millionaire, the game was over once you lost all your wealth—had soured something in his guts. Suddenly he was out of the race, no longer in possession of the essential currency of camaraderie. . . and this same sick thunder had growled in his belly then.
Suddenly, explosively, he had shit in his bed.
"Come on," Peter hissed in the stormy silence. "Come on!"
But no one came.
He broke wet wind, the stink of it immediately unbearable; nothing like it had ever come from inside him before. It was an old man's stink. The stink of an open grave.
Tears scalded his cheeks.
"Come on!" he pleaded, shouting now. "Come on, you lazy bitch! Come on!"
That voice. That voice in his head.
This is it, man. This is what you are. All that physio and occupational therapy they've been putting you through is not intended to help you get better. Its only purpose is to curb the decay.
"No!" It was a roar, so huge it made his ears ring.
He broke wind again. Or was it. . . ?
"Get in here!" His head shot up like the head of a cobra, his neck muscles flaring in a hood. "Get the fuck in here!"
It was leaking out of him now. He couldn't feel it, but he knew that it was.
(oh the stink)
Peter's shouts fused together into a furious unbroken bellow, like that of an air horn. He could hear footfalls in the hallway now, quick and staccato.
Come ahead in, Larue, he thought bitterly. Got a sweet-smelling surprise for you.
(this is what you are)
"No!" he cried again, as the night nurse poked her pretty face into the room.
"What—" she started to say.
Then the smell hit her, and she knew. It was all over her face—the revulsion, the disgust—and suddenly Peter wanted her out of his sight. He wanted to lie here in the stink of his own shit and die, because the voice in his head was right; it had always been right. His mother had lied.
This was what he was.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he cried, spittle spraying from his mouth.
"Tell you what?" the nurse asked. But she knew that, too.
"Why?" Peter wailed.
Filled with pity and compassion, Louise approached Peter's bed, doing her best to ignore the smell of him. She'd seen this before with some of the other quads, this sudden savage awareness, coming so long after most people assumed they'd figured things out for themselves. The strength of denial was brute. Louise felt bad that she hadn't heard him calling before now. She'd been in the john, not preening but changing a tampon, and her partner was downstairs on break. Nights were usually so quiet up here, she hadn't thought she'd be missed for the few minutes her business would take. As it was, she'd barely avoided soiling her uniform. . .
Oh, Christ, why didn't they involve a psychiatrist in these cases earlier? Someone who could level with these poor bastards and know when it was best to do so?
She reached out to touch Peter's cheek, to comfort him—and Peter spat in her face.
"Get out, cunt! Get out!"
Biting back her own abrupt anger, Louise snatched a tissue from Peter's bedside dispenser and wiped the saliva away.
"Peter, I—"
"Out!"
Louise backed away, suddenly afraid. Her fear was irrational—there was no way he could harm her—but she felt it nonetheless, deep, solid, and cold.
"I'll be right back," she said as she left.
"Don't you dare!" Peter shouted after her. "Don't you dare come back in here!"
Her footfalls faded in the dark.
"He's in a rage," Louise told Dr. Lowe over the phone. "He spat in my face. . .”
Lowe sighed heavily. It was four in the morning. He lived twenty minutes from the hospital when the roads were bare, and they'd been issuing storm warnings all night. Still, he'd have to go in.
"Give me half an hour," he said, and hung up the phone.
Had it been possible to wish death to happen, to conjure it out of a hat, then Peter would have done so willingly on this bleak winter's night. He was a quad, a human head grafted to a nerveless garbage heap that shit itself and pissed itself and would eventually wither and die. He would never move more than his head for as long as he lived. He would never walk again, play the piano again, make love again. . . and he would never fly.
Peter's mind reeled like a toddler fresh off a carnival ride. Even parading before him as it was, the truth seemed incomprehensible. Maybe he had died and this was hell, punishment for sins unrecognized. Surely it couldn't be real?
Hell. . . that was it. He'd died beneath those huge rubber wheels, the same wheels that tramped over him anew each night in his dreams; he'd died and gone straight to hell. This was Lucifer's style, wasn't it? Let you stew for a few decades before popping up and bleating, "Guess what, motherfucker?"
The door creaked open.
"Who's there?"
The pale light of the corridor crept in, printing a stoop-shouldered shadow on the wall.
"It's me, Peter. Dr. Lowe."
"Don't you come in here," Peter warned. But a lot of the rage had drained out of him. Now he only felt stunned, concussed by the immutable truth.
Lowe came ahead in. The reek of excrement was still there, but the doctor showed no sign that he noticed. He stood at the end of the bed, hands on the foot rail, eyes unreadable in the dark.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Peter said.
Lowe sighed tiredly. "Because it wouldn't have registered."
Fury and shame battled for dominance in Peter's mind. Shame because he was
lying here satcheled in his own shit, screaming at people who were only doing their jobs in the best way they knew how. And fury, not because the doctor was wrong, but because of the rehearsed smugness of his reply, as if he saved this line for all the new quads—"Because it wouldn't have registered"—waiting like a stage actor for that single elusive moment of purest dramatic effect.
Finally the shame won out. He apologized to Louise and the doctor and allowed the nurse to clean him up and then jab a sedative into his arm. Seeing the needle, he flinched in anticipation of the pain that never came.
But as the dope took effect and the door shut him in, the fury swirled up again, stewing like lava, waiting to erupt.
The next morning Kelly Wheeler left Peter's ninth-floor hospital room for the last time. She walked outside into the cruel January air with her coat half buttoned and her bare hands dangling at her sides. To the security guard stamping his feet by the parking booth, she looked like someone who'd just been clobbered with a nightstick.
The day was windy and brutally cold, the sun a high white blank in the sky. Powdery snow swirled in the gunfire gusts, and frost snapped like a wolverine at whatever exposed flesh it could find.
Kelly didn't notice. What had just transpired between her and Peter had erased the final chapters of her life. Now she was blank, like the sun. Empty and cold. She went to the bus stop, but let her bus drone past. After a while she began to walk.
She sat naked in the middle of her bed, lotus style, her head aching miserably, her face and hands smarting with chilblains. In the triangular enclosure between her legs lay a pastel assortment of pills: tranquilizers, analgesics, a dozen Demerol tablets her dad had left over from his disk surgery, others. Ranged about her on the quilt lay the tangible remnants of her past, treasured keepsakes transformed into pockets of pain by a sadistic whim of fate.
Captain Quad Page 5