by Thomas Laird
And my life.
I feared death. I respected death. I despised death as a competitor when I was in the War. It was always lurking; its stench was omnipresent. And now I smell that vile reek once more. It followed me all the way home to this city, and now it emanates from the floor of this bedroom. It’s worse than the stench of road kill. Nothing can equal the putrid odor of a dead human being, and that stink has begun to permeate this room.
I try to lift my head and look at Lila for the last time, before he kills her, and then me. I can only get my chin up slightly because I feel like I’m about to black out.
I can only see their feet in front of me. And then I see a mist gathering around their shoes, and I know I’m beginning to hallucinate. The mist develops into a white fog and it begins to rise up Franklin’s and Lila’s legs. I can see up to their kneecaps, and I can’t pull my head up any higher now.
Then I hear Franklin scream, and the two people in front of me are suddenly separated. I’m thinking they’ve shot a tear gas canister into the bedroom, but there was no crash from a broken window. And no one’s kicked in the closed bedroom door.
Franklin screams again, and I hear him crash into the blinds that cover the bedroom window. I’m on my hands and knees, and I reach wildly behind me and grope for the butcher knife taped to the small of my back. And as Franklin Toliver bellows out in terror one more time, I have the ten inch blade firmly gripped, and somehow I’m scrambling to my feet, and as I’m vertical, I can see the look of mortifying fear on his now unhooded face. He’s glaring at something by the closet, but I haven’t got time to see what he’s staring at. So I summon anything I have left, all the hatred I have for Toliver, the man who’d steal Lila and our child. The man who’d rob me of seeing Kelly reach her dreams in medicine. And I hurl myself at him, and I raise the knife, and Franklin tries to aim the Luger at me, but I lunge at him and stick the sharp point of the knife into his throat and the blade sinks all the way through his soft neck, and my momentum slams me into Toliver and we crash through the blinds and the window—
The next thing I sense is the immense impact of our bodies hitting the front lawn outside, and now it is black and silent and nothing more.
Shapes of gray and cobalt and murky white race across the insides of my eyelids. So this is death. This is the underground. This is where I sent all those souls, dispatched all those soldiers that I killed in the War. They’re waiting for me here. They’ve been waiting since 1972. I’m finally with them.
What will I say to them? That I’m sorry I aborted their lives when they were fully grown but still very young men? Will they apologize to the men they’ve slain?
The shapes keep shifting inside my eyes. I know I’m somewhere else. I know I’m not on the grass in front of the Lieutenant Governor’s home anymore, but I wonder if I’m on a slab in the morgue where we took all the stiffs, all the dead bodies whose murders we investigated.
In the War, we stuffed them in body bags, and the ones who were recovered got to take the funeral flight back to the World. At least they went home.
But I’m in some netherworld, some place in between heaven and hell. Perhaps this is the place Catholics call Purgatory. We got rid of Limbo, I think. But that was our version. Who knows where I’ve really landed.
Then I hear her voice, summoning me. Telling me to come back. It’s Lila. I recognize her voice as well as I recognize the voice of my daughter. And I hear Kelly’s voice, next to Lila.
I struggle to open my eyes. It seems as if they’re seared shut. But I finally flap my right eyelid open, and I see two very fuzzy outlines, which appear to be feminine, after the eye begins to focus a little better.
Then I’ve finally got the other eye opened, and slowly, slowly, the fuzziness fades, and I see Lila and my daughter standing next to me. I’m lying in a hospital, not the morgue, and when I see Lila alive, and Kelly standing next to her, I can’t stop myself from weeping.
“Danny?” Lila says, her own voice overcome with emotion.
She comes up next to me and bends over and kisses me, all over my face.
“Ouch,” I groan.
She laughs.
“That’s all you can tell me is ouch?” she laughs again. I hear Kelly joining in with her, and then my daughter kisses me on the left cheek, and that causes a bit of discomfort, also.
“You’re all beat up,” Lila explains. “They took all kinds of glass out of your cheeks, but you’re lucky you didn’t catch any shards in the throat or the eyes. Toliver broke your fall. He was underneath you, sort of like a cushion. He didn’t do nearly as well as you.”
Lila looks over at Kelly, and then I remembered sticking Toliver with the kitchen knife, and I understand why Lila doesn’t continue the details of Franklin’s demise.
“You suffered a pretty good concussion, and they put about sixteen stitches in your puss and about twenty in your forearms where the glass cut you. You looked like a porcupine when the paramedics got to you, Danny, with glass quills.”
She looks over at Kelly.
“Honey, can I talk to your dad alone for a minute?” Lila asks.
“Sure. I’ll be out in the hall.”
Kelly walks out the door of my hospital room.
“Do you remember what happened, Danny?”
I look at her and watch her bluer than blue eyes.
“I remember hitting the deck in the bedroom, and then I looked up and things got sort of cloudy. But the clouds were on the floor….”
“Do you remember hearing him scream?”
“Vaguely. Why’d he yell out? What happened?”
“I don’t know, Danny. He had the gun pointed at my head, you went down, and I thought we were both dead. And then he turned away from me toward that closet, and he must have thought he saw something, but I didn’t see a damn thing. There was no one in that room with the three of us. But he thought he saw something, and he started backing up toward that window, away from the closet, and then you were charging him, and the two of you went through the window, and then the SWAT team burst inside, just about when I heard the two of you thumping onto the lawn. That was when I let loose with a few howls of my own, because I thought you were dead, down there, Danny. I thought I lost you.”
She bends toward me and kisses my lips gently, once more.
“You didn’t see anything?”
“Nothing,” she answers. “But I know what Franklin saw.”
I lie at St. Mary’s Hospital in Evanston for another week before they’ll let me out. We’re into early December, and every time Lila comes to see me—which is every hour she’s not working a shift—she tells me just how our wedding’s going to go. Kelly has returned to DeKalb to take her final exams, but she’ll be back around the 15th of the month for her Christmas break. Lila and I will get to meet her new young man, Matthew, over break, and it seems as if my daughter has found a keeper, this time.
I know I have. I can’t remember the last time I really celebrated the Holidays, but I have a feeling this will be the year.
A number of vets always told me that they never felt more alive than when they almost caught it, out on the battlefield. The nearness of death somehow seems to revitalize the man who gets close enough to smell the rot of hell itself. When Odysseus emerged out of the underground, he was finally allowed to return to Penelope and to his home of Ithaca. It took him twenty years, but he got there.
It’s been about sixteen years since I returned from Southeast Asia, almost that same time frame that Odysseus/Ulysses wandered the seas, escaping sirens and Cyclops and assorted other baddies.
But in this hospital bed, at the tail end of my recovery, I feel like land is in sight. After seeing the grave sites in the pauper’s cemetery where Cook County buries indigents, after seeing the graves of those six murdered women, it seems finally that I’ve returned to the land of the living.
Anyway, Lila fills my head with the promises of our oncoming wedding and of Christmas, itself. It’ll be our first Chr
istmas as man and wife. I used to have doubts that Lila could settle in with one man or one woman, but I have no such doubts, anymore. I can sense that she has resigned herself to living with another Homicide detective, that we’ll go on looking for more killers like Franklin Toliver or like the drug salesman who slaughtered Bill O’Connor’s wife.
I can see the stitches in my arms, and I saw the ravages that the glass did on my face, and I’m worried I’ll look like Frankenstein’s famous creation at our wedding, in a few weeks.
Lila tells me she can do makeup for me if I feel all that self-conscious, but I responded telling her there was no way I was going up the aisle in pancake. They’d have to take me the way I was.
And she insisted that was the way she always wanted me, anyway.
I know what Franklin saw, even though I was the only living person in that bedroom who never got to see Mrs. Toliver. Lila saw her, I’m certain, back when we searched the house for Franklin, together. But I never saw her after she passed. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.
And maybe she was just the power of suggestion to Lila and Franklin. Perhaps Dr. Fernandez can explain it all away. Something or someone made Toliver let loose of Lila. Something or someone saved my life. He would’ve killed us both before the cavalry arrived, I’m certain of it. Maybe it’s fate. Maybe it’s earth tremors or static electricity.
But someone else was in that room with the three of us, and I owe her, big time.
49
My daughter has bloomed like Gregor Samsa’s sister in Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis.” She’s thrown off the grays and pale colors, and she’s come alive in ways I couldn’t imagine, only a few months ago.
When they finally let me go from the hospital, it was just ten days until our wedding. The nuptials are on December 22nd. It doesn’t leave me much time to heal, but I’m taking all the days I’ve got accumulated at work, and we’re taking the week after Christmas as our honeymoon. We aren’t going very far from home, just up to the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, area. We’re going to stay in a very expensive hotel called The Abbey. It’s all on Lila’s father’s tab. He’s doing rather well in his legal practice, Lila informs me, and he’ll be running for circuit court judge, next fall. And mommy is a big time pediatrician, so it’s just penny ante stuff for her folks. Which she tells me so I won’t feel like a leech. I could’ve sprung for the hotel, but Lila insisted it was on the bride’s side to take care of it.
Kelly and I have virtually no family except each other. As I said, my parents are dead, and my relatives, such as they are, are scattered on the East and West Coasts. I was never close with any of them, so I don’t see any reason to send out invitations to people who have no intention of showing up. And I really don’t want gifts, just for sending out the invites. I got all the gifts I want, now that Lila is marrying me and Kelly is a full member of the living, again.
I offered to take us to Florida or to the warmer climes somewhere, but Lila likes Wisconsin, and so do I. We’ve already talked about retiring up there, once we’ve done our requisite years on the force. She’ll open an aerobics school, up there, and I’ll catch up on all the Kafka and Tolstoy and Faulkner I never got to read, to this point. I could see sitting on that beach-front property and just reading novel after novel during the summer and early fall. The dogs would be chasing each other on the sand, though they’d both be getting up in age by then. And in the colder parts of the year, late fall and winter, we could both hole up in front of a fireplace, Lila and I.
I know that my life will never go as smoothly as I pictured it above, but it’s a very pretty fantasy.
It doesn’t really matter all that much if we don’t get beach front property or even that we don’t move out of the house we live in now. The “where” doesn’t matter nearly as much as the “with whom.” In other words, as long as my kid lives forever and Lila does, too, I won’t bitch about my fate. She is my Penelope, after all, and it looks like I’m finally going home.
Kelly came home last night from school. She claims she did well on her finals, but she’ll know for sure when they post grades right after Christmas, she says. I’m expecting the best because I know how hard she’s worked, ever since her last semester in high school.
Lila is out looking for the few invitations we’ll need. They’re being sent out on very short notice, obviously, but all she needs is about twenty, for her family’s side here near town. It’s going to be a very small wedding, probably fewer than fifty invitees. The ones she’s inviting are very close to her and her folks, so they’ll likely all show up.
I don’t have many friends, so I ask a guy I know pretty well from Homicide to be my best man. We’ve known each other since I was a patrolman. He’s one of the most respected detectives on the force. His name is Jimmy Parisi, and he’s already established a rep among Homicides. He generously accepted his role at such short notice.
Kelly is going to be Lila’s matron of honor, and that’s the extent of the wedding party. Lila vowed to keep things short and sweet, and she did. We could’ve waited until spring and then launched a bigger affair, but neither of us wanted to wait another week, let alone all those months.
I suppose we’re behaving like a couple of twenty year olds instead of the almost-middle aged couple that we are. And then there’s the baby. He or she has to have legitimate parents—Lila’s words, not mine. But I agree with her. Kelly has my name, and the new kid will have a name, too. Lila wants to go by her married name, but I never insisted. She is, after all, a feminist in basic philosophy, but she doesn’t buy everything from the party line.
“I can think for myself,” she tells me.
I’m sitting in the living room watching nothing in particular on the tube. Kelly is sitting next to me. When all this started with Toliver, we never used to occupy the same room, let alone sit this closely. Shit happens, as the bumper stickers proclaim. Things really do change. But she’s sitting on the seater next to me on the three-seat sectional.
“Do they hurt?” she asks me.
“Does what hurt?” I reply.
She nods toward the remaining stitches on my forearms.
“They itch, once in a while, but they’ll be coming out soon.”
“What about all those bruises on your ribs?”
“They only tug at me rarely. I’m lucky I didn’t bust any. But then Franklin served one last good purpose. He cushioned my fall real nice.”
Kelly doesn’t smile.
“You could’ve been killed, Dad.”
“Anybody could be walking into that bus, kid. It’s part of the job description.”
“You could do something else.”
“Could you do something besides medicine, someday?” I ask her.
She smiles and smells the trap.
“They don’t throw you out of windows or shoot at you or tie you up and kidnap you like they did Lila.”
“That’s true. Different sports, different rules. This kind of thing rarely happens, Kelly.”
She burrows her head against my left side, and I want to wince, but I don’t. I put my arm over her shoulder and I hold her tightly. Then she sits back up, straight.
“I never hated you, you know,” she says. “I was just a little bitch wrapped up in her own melodrama.”
“You had reason to be pissed. Your mother took off and I wasn’t there like I should have been.”
“You were there. I just wouldn’t let you close. It was my fault.”
“Don’t play the fault game, Kelly. It goes round and round and eventually it goes no damn place at all. You’re here. I’m still here. Let’s start from today and screw what’s already behind us. It almost seems like it never happened, right now.”
She leans back into me, and once again I refrain from groaning. She’s tickling my ribs, but this kind of pain never felt so good.
“Do you still love Momma?”
She’s talking about Mary, of course.
I look over at her and engage her eyes with mine.
“It’s no flaw. Maybe a weakness.”
“Maybe you’re right. You miss your mother, still?”
“Sometimes I do. I tried hating her, at first, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have the energy or the concentration to hate her. I should have. She left me—and you, too. I sometimes think I wouldn’t have done what I did if she’d stuck around, but that’s bogus, too. I’m the one who purged, and I’m the one who scarfed all that stuff into me. Nobody else.”
I look at her again, and I hug her.
“What’s that for?” she smiles.
“Just for the hell of it,” I tell her.
She settles back against the couch.
“How’s Matthew?”
We still haven’t met her significant other.
“He’s coming over in a half hour.”
“Jesus Christ! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You’ve got time to get dressed. Lila said she’d be back in ten minutes,” she says as she looks at the battery clock on the wall over the TV.
I struggle to get up, but I make it, and then I aim myself for the bathroom.
“Why the hell didn’t either of you tell me?” I gripe as I head toward our bedroom.
“Just so you wouldn’t stress out, just like you are, right now,” she laughs.
We go to Marco’s in Oak Lawn for a late dinner. I suppose I should’ve wondered why Lila didn’t make dinner before she left, about 4:00 P.M. Now I know. Lila drives the four of us to the restaurant. I can handle the wheel, but she babies me no matter what I say or how I remonstrate.
Matthew is a tall young man, maybe six three. He looks like he might have played basketball, but Kelly has not volunteered all that much information about him, just yet. He’s very polite, but he seems natural in his manner, not forced. I’m sure Lila has noticed how good-looking he is, but she never informed me what a stallion my daughter seems to have landed. There’s no telling how far these two will go in their college romance, but I’m hoping it works out, if it’s really meant to.