Fear Itself

by Duffy Prendergast

  Outside of our room we made our way down the long poorly lit hallway decorated with outdated and dingy red and gold wallpaper and stained and worn royal red carpeting. The light fixtures were the plastic globed sort with the grooved lines through which you could easily make out the pot-bellied outline of the incandescent light-bulb. Sarah pressed the elevator button with the down arrow and I could hear the elevator bellow and grunt from a distant place below us before finally opening. From inside the elevator we could hear long cumbersome groans, very much like a recording of whales under water I’d heard on the nature channel, as we descended to the lobby. The Lobby was the only modern aspect of the building. The carpet was hunter-green near the elevators and the lobby itself had ivory marbled floors and bright white and gold walls with newer crystal sconces and a large brass chandelier which towered before the twin glass exit doors. The beauty of the lobby was basically a lie, foretelling of lavish updated rooms which might well be in the offing but were obviously not. A clerk with a round boyish face and a curly mop of black hair in a hunter-green uniform stood behind a long Corian topped desk with an absent minded look on his face and he seemed almost startled when Sarah rang the little bell on the counter even though he had watched us as we approached.

  I checked out of our room, optimistic that we could return home before nightfall. In television detective shows it seemed that crime scenes were often tied up for days, weeks or months. That couldn’t be the case in real life, I thought. I often worked from home after-all and I was basically out of business without my computer. I needed to work to pay the bills. They couldn’t deny me the provision of income for my family, I thought.

  Sarah and I climbed into my car. We put our seatbelts on and, as usual, she held my hand while I drove. Her face looked tired, but she was smiling a little.

  “Are we going to see mommy now?” “No honey, we’re going home to get some clothes.”

  “When will we get to see mommy?” “Not for a long time.”

  Her upper lip rolled into a pout and she started to cry. I squeezed her little hand.

  “I want to go see mommy in heaven.” Given that she was already crying I didn’t want to upset her further. “We’ll see.”

  “Will she be normal in heaven?” She tried to control the tremor in her voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will she be blue, like she was on the bed?”

  I squeezed her little fingers again, “No, sweetheart, she isn’t blue anymore.”

  Sarah undid her seatbelt and looked up at me to see if I would protest. Normally I would have forced her to buckle it right back up. But her face was begging me to let her crawl under my arm so I lifted my arm and she slid beneath it and up against me. I held her tight. I wanted to make it all better for her, but there was no way to do that. I felt so helpless.

  When I pulled into my driveway there were several police cars camped out along with some vans. I took no notice of the lettering on the vans assuming that they belonged to the police department and held forensic equipment or something of that nature. I got out of the car pulling Sarah with me, and lifted her up into my arms. I carried her up the driveway. Detective Bergant stepped out from behind a van.

  “I don’t think you want to be here right now.” His eyes were sharp and serious.

  “Why not?”

  He pointed to the side of a van. It read “Channel 5 News Team”.

  I’m sure he didn’t care about my wellbeing. After all I was guilty in his eyes. He was looking out for Sarah. Perhaps there was a soul buried deep beneath the badge he kept on his vest pocket. I turned and walked back toward the car but I heard the distinct clip- clop of high-heeled shoes scraping against the concrete walkway that led to our front door, and son the footsteps were racing down the driveway toward me. I opened the driver-side door and slid Sarah into the car in one motion but before I could slip into the drivers’ seat I heard a female voice closing in on me.

  “Did you kill your wife Mr. Derrick?”

  A slender pretty little black woman dressed neatly in a business suit charged at me holding a microphone as though it were a spear. She stopped at my door and shoved the microphone against my face. A clumsy looking long haired Asian man with blue-jeans and a white sport shirt was hastily making his way down the driveway, slipping and sliding on the smattering of wet leaves that speckled the gravel, while trying to balance a camera on his shoulder. I closed my car door to shield Sarah from the vultures.

  “No! I did not kill my wife!” I felt my face tighten into a scowl as I stared into the woman’s eyes trying my best to withhold the torrent of anger that was building inside of me.

  She looked back at her cameraman giving him a wave. I knew instantly that what she wanted most was to capture my scowl on the camera; the scowl of a guilty murderer. I took the opportunity to open my door and climb into my car. I started the car and backed down the driveway with the two of them chasing after me.

  “What do they want daddy?”

  “Nothing honey. They just wanted to ask me some questions.” I pulled her to me so that she wouldn’t slide off of the seat as I turned out of the driveway and onto the street. I accelerated down Erie road and just drove. I had nowhere to go so I just cruised down Lakeshore Boulevard trying to figure out my next move.

  * * *

  At seven in the evening, with Sarah asleep in the passenger seat, I turned off my headlights and parked my car at the foot of my neighbor’s driveway and crept through the patch of woods that divided our yards and into my own driveway with the stealth of ninja. I darted from tree to bush to bumper to garage like a clumsy middle-aged giraffe. I was jittery, as usual, when alone in the dark nearly crapping myself when I mistook a two headed chrysanthemum for the eyes of an ogre. I made my way through the once pink-flowered Peonies bushes which lined the front of our house and over to the front door. The crime scene ribbon which had earlier guarded the entry was still in place. I slid across the left side of the house, hugging the vinyl siding, and tripped over some dead potted plants which

  Catherine had not gotten planted before the Lake Erie gales began to blow and the planting season had passed. I managed to catch the ground with my hands narrowly missing a head-butt with a thorny flowerless rose bush which doubled as a short green gremlin after dark. For all the noise I was making I might as well have pulled into my own driveway and waltzed through the front door. Instead I removed my muddied tennis-shoes on the black plastic mat at the rear sliding door and I slipped into my house; my house! Why did I feel like such a delinquent?

  I found the laundry room in the dark but switched the light on once I was inside with the door closed. There were no windows to betray the light (or the thick musty odor of soiled sweat-socks) so I knew it was safe to illuminate the room. I grabbed a laundry basket and filled it with jeans and shirts and socks and underwear for both Sarah and myself. I turned off the light and slipped back through the sliding doors and back to the driveway. I froze with fear when I got to the bumper of Catherine’s car. At the foot of the driveway I could see the soft orange glow of a Cyclops’s single eye…or, as my brain nullified the illogical probability of the former, a cigarette being drawn upon in the pitch of a moonless night. I was busted. It had to be detective Bergant puffing on one of his Marlboro’s. I stood up and walked boldly down the middle of the driveway and right toward the glowing cigarette. I was nervous and shaking on the outside but I smiled and did my best to exude a calm and innocent façade.

  “I’m sorry, I needed some clothes.” I sat the basket on the ground in front of me.

  “What?”

  The voice was female. It was not the good detective smoking but rather my neighbor Millie.

  “Millie, it’s you. I thought it was that damned detective.”

  “Oh god! Don’t hurt me!” Millie dropped her newly lit cigarette on the ground and started to back away from me and towards the edge of the street.

  “Millie, it’s me. Matt.”

  “But y
ou…you killed Catherine.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I drew a long breath, “And it’s getting a little tiresome having to defend myself from those ridiculous accusations.” I raised my hands in exasperation and was surprised when Millie flinched. “Millie, we’ve known each other for almost ten years. Have you ever known me to be the least bit violent?”

  “But it said on the news…and that detective. He asked me about you. He asked me if I knew…” Her eyes grew wide and she just stared at me.

  “Millie…he asked if you knew what?” “If I knew if you and Catherine had been fighting.”

  “What else?” I was getting angry. She had obviously done some blabbing. Catherine and I bickered occasionally, like any couple, but we weren’t particularly loud and certainly not physical. It dawned on me that Millie wouldn’t have been so scared of me if she hadn’t exaggerated her story to the detective.

  “He wanted to know if either of you were having an…affair.” She cringed as if to defend herself from a blow. “And you said…?”

  “I said I didn’t know. I said it was possible.” Once again she cringed as if she was about to be stricken.

  “What?” I could hear myself yelling now. “Why would you say something like that?” I stepped over the laundry basket and backed her further down the driveway until her posterior was pressed against the back of my mailbox post. “How could you tell them that I might be having an affair? I’ve never cheated on Catherine in my life.”

  “No…no…that’s not what I meant.” She was crying now. She was genuinely scared of me; and why not? I was a murder and a philanderer. I might rape her and kill her too!

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Millie, her tall skinny mop-headed frame almost skeleton-like in the dark, turned and ran down Erie road, past my car and up her driveway and into her house, and all the while she was waving her hands about like a panicked school-girl, stumbling and staggering as though she were running from Freddy Kruger. I picked up my laundry basket and walked back toward my car. I got to her driveway just in time to see the light of her foyer disappear as Millie’s front door closed behind her. That explained it, I thought. That explained why detective Bergant interrogated me over my phone-friend Amber. My car was still running. I opened the rear driver-side door and I shoved the basket of clothes into my back seat and I climbed into the car and I drove back to the hotel which I realized Sarah and I would have to call home for days to come.

  4

  Because our house was considered a crime scene the hotel was our home for several more nights. For Sarah this was a treat. On Monday morning she went swimming in the Olympic sized indoor swimming pool with its warm water which looked as though it had been dyed with a mixture of blue and green food coloring. The building that housed the pool was actually an enormous greenhouse, attached to the hotel structure as it was, with clear glass panels from floor to gabled ceiling and humid tropical air, with potted palm trees, beautiful blooming white Bamboo Orchids, green and red Ti plants and colorful Bird of Paradise. I sat and watched Sarah do what she considered dives but were actually belly-flops and half summersaults. The weather was unusually sunny, if not warm, so inside the faux tropic we lost ourselves for a few hours.

  After Sarah’s morning swim we returned to our room by way of the stainless steel walls and the low hum of the creaky lobby elevator. I sat on the edge of the bed and I lifted the receiver of the lime-green push- button telephone which rested on the night- stand and I spent my day phoning: phoning Sarah’s school to let her teachers know the reason for her absence (The principle, Mrs. Tercek, who had of course watched the news and was already aware of Catherine’s death, was too polite and too understanding, her nasally voice pryingly); phoning my employer to keep abreast of my work and to keep my supervisor informed of my status; phoning a lawyer named Jack Nicholson—no joke…Jack Nicholson—who my boss insisted was “the best criminal lawyer in Ohio”; phoning the coroner to find out when Catherine’s body would be released for the funeral arrangements (no clear answer was given, of course); phoning the funeral parlor to inquire as to the costs involved and the payment arrangements available to me for the whole funeral process from pick-up to interment; phoning Amber (temporarily out of service); and finally, phoning the police station to find out if they had determined the cause of Catherine’s death, inquiring as to whether or not we could return to our abode (we could not), and whether or not they planned to incarcerate me any time soon (the answer was deliberately vague). All the while Sarah quietly but cheerfully watched cartoons and colored the pages of a coloring book almost the thickness of a phone book and paid no attention to my labors.

  Sarah’s youth and innocence, I supposed, had spared her from the constant quotient of the pain of our loss. I, on the other hand, was fatigued to the point that I yawned long open-mouthed yawps on a continuous basis, sometimes in mid-sentence, and my body felt like a bag of sand my mind was condemned to drag from chair to bedside to bathroom and back again in a solemn attempt to maintain my focus on my various tasks. The only benefit I derived from my day, aside from the little fruit of my labor, was that I was so distracted that I hardly thought about how much I missed Catherine.

  To be honest, though, I was a bit disturbed by the fact that Sarah was so easily able to remove herself from Catherine’s departure; but I was also relieved that she was not burdened as I was with the crushing weight of our rapidly collapsing universe. Besides, I thought, who was I to judge her? She would grieve in her own way and time, and if God saw fit to soften the blow to this beautiful flower of mine, who was I to scrutinize?

  Sarah was a unique child. At home she was in her comfort zone. She would talk as though she were a little adult about the strangest things. But at school her teachers complained that Sarah was shy and reluctant to be called upon to answer questions in class. Sarah was so afraid to draw any attention to herself that she once peed in her pants while squirming at her desk hoping for the bell to ring so that she could rush to the bathroom. A boy sitting next to her stood up and laughed at her and yelled out to the teacher that Sarah had peed on the floor. Sarah cried in embarrassment as her classmates chuckled and jeered. The teacher did her best to comfort Sarah and she telephoned me on my cell phone to bring Sarah a change of clothes. Later that day, despite her shy demeanor, Sarah walked up to that boy in the playground and kneed him in the testicles and asked him, while he was wreathing in pain on the pavement, if he still felt like laughing. Sarah’s teacher called me again and asked me to come pick Sarah up at school for the obvious disciplinary purpose.

  And when I say that Sarah needed me, you must understand the bond we’d shared since her harrowed birth to truly understand how much she needed me and I her. She was born blue, with a broken heart. Her heart was underdeveloped. The lower two chambers of her heart were undersized and the natural opening between the chambers that should have allowed blood to flow did not exist in her heart. When the doctor lifted her from between

  Catherine’s parted legs Sarah was the color of a blueberry. The doctor didn’t say a word. She didn’t say “It’s a girl!” or “Congratulations!”

  She just went to work on Sarah to get her breathing. She held her up in the air by her ankles and smacked her little bare bottom, then she walked over to a side table and laid Sarah down on a blanket and she started to gently pump Sarah’s chest with her palm. She blew breaths into her tiny mouth while she pinched her nose. A nuclear war could have occurred in the time it took for Sarah to howl her first cry and I wouldn’t have known about it. Everything happened in slow motion. The delivery room went silent, as if someone had hit the mute button on the remote. I mean I couldn’t hear a sound until Sarah began to wail.

  The last time I had had that feeling was during the first of Sarah’s surgeries to repair her damaged heart. Just as the doctor held the mask over her face to put her under Sarah screamed “No!” and then begged me “Please daddy, no, please daddy no.”

  “It’ll be alright honey. I’ll be righ
t here with you.” I said as they forced the anesthetic mask over her face and her eyes opened wide in sincere terror. Sarah was four years old at the time. If she had died during surgery I would have died along with her.

  Catherine often complained because I would let Sarah fall asleep in our bed. I would, of course, carry her to her own bed soon after she had drifted off to sleep, but Sarah would slip back into our bed in the morning. You can imagine how this affected our love-life, and I knew that it wasn’t the healthiest thing for Sarah’s emotional growth either, for Sarah to spend so much time with me, but I had come so close to losing her at birth and during the ensuing surgeries that I just wanted to hold her whenever I had the chance. Catherine’s rants only served to make Sarah jealous.

  Okay, so my marriage wasn’t perfect, but whose marriage is? That was the only real problem Catherine and I had ever had.

  * * *

  Time passed amazingly fast during my phone-fest and before I could begin to relax it was dark outside.

  Sarah and I could have gone out and eaten fast food, but by that time it was, after all, dark outside, and I wasn’t sure if Sarah’s companionship would stave off the demons; and besides I had more credit at my disposal than cash, so we ordered room service: a simple feast of grilled American cheese on white toasted bread and chicken soup. A stainless steel serving cart was wheeled into our room by a lanky pimple faced teenage boy in a hunter- green uniform, including a dink, with orange- red hair and a rash of freckles sprinkled over his arms, neck and cheeks. He waited impatiently, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, removing his cap and running his fingers through his spiked hair, while I surveyed our meal, signed the receipt and applied a reasonable tip to the bill. Sarah cowered shyly behind me while the boy bellman playfully peeked around me and smiled.