The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  Krista is deh-ed, Krista is deh-ed, Krista Is Dead...!! KRISTA IS DEAD!!”

  22

  LATER, SCOTT WOULD REMEMBER LITTLE of the hours that followed. He lay on the concourse floor for what seemed a lifetime. When he opened his eyes he saw the receiver, dangling at the end of its coil. No one had seen him fall and now people avoided him as they would a drunk. Fighting a fresh tide of vertigo, Scott gathered himself up, dropped heavily into the contour chair and snared the receiver. He could feel warm blood braiding its way through the hair on the back of his head.

  “Hello?” the receiver squawked repeatedly, the voice now a man’s. “Hello?”

  Hearing a man’s voice, Scott clutched at the slim hope that this had all been some dreadful prank...but when he replied, the voice said it belonged to an officer of the state highway patrol.

  “Are you all right, Doctor Bowman?” Scott could hear sobs in the background...Caroline.

  “No,” he said. “No, I’m not. Is it...?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m afraid it’s true. I regret having to give you this news. I would have called personally, but Miss Patterson here went straight to the phone when I told her about the accident. At the time I had no idea of the circumstances or who she intended to call—”

  “Where...wh...” Scott stammered. Then, nearly shouting,: “What about Kath? What about my daughter?”

  “Your daughter is in the hospital,” the voice said—and Scott sensed a reticence in it that terrified him. “Her condition is listed as critical. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. Can you get yourself to the General Hospital in Danvers? If not, I can have a cruiser by there in about twenty minutes—”

  “No...I’ll find a cab.” He could hear himself saying the words, but had no idea what they meant. “How far?”

  “A half-hour’s drive due north of the airport. The driver will know. Will you be all right?”

  “How is Caroline going to get there? Caroline ought to be there....”

  “I’ll take her in my car.”

  Scott hung up.

  And when he did, he realized that none of this was real. It was a dream, and if it wasn’t a dream then it was a drunken hallucination. But it wasn’t real.

  No. Not real.

  It’s a kind of shock, he could hear himself telling an aggrieved patient only a few days earlier, an elderly gent who had just lost his wife of thirty years. Scott had kept his voice professionally somber: It’s like a concussion, a sort of shell shock, if you will. It clouds the vision, distorts reality. It will pass, he had assured the weeping old man. It will pass and then you will grieve and then you will go on....

  They were words he’d read somewhere. Now they echoed in emptiness.

  With the strap of his TWA flightbag wound tight in his grip, Scott moved away from the phone and shifted into the concourse, where he stood like a buoy in a river of people...determined people, smiling people, people with places to go...yes...he had someplace to go....

  Forgetting his luggage, Scott left the airport concourse, with its brightly colored pennants and busily geometric ceiling, and stepped out under the portico. There, a black man in a burgundy uniform led him to a taxi and helped him inside.

  “The hospital in Danvers,” Scott said.

  The cabby hoisted the meter flag. “The General?”

  Scott nodded and the cab lurched away. In the back seat he gazed out the window at the twinkling city lights.

  So many lights...

  * * *

  The Danvers General Hospital, squat and widely spread out, was a patchwork of new grafted onto old. From the lobby a crusty old security officer led Scott along a series of antiseptic corridors to the Emergency Ward. Here he was met by a graying, tired-looking man in a vested suit who identified himself as Jim Holley, the county coroner. At first Scott expected the man to apologize, to tell him there had been a huge and unforgivable error, a regrettable case of mistaken identity. We are truly sorry, sir, for whatever distress this blunder may have caused you.

  Instead, the hollow-eyed coroner asked him if he felt up to viewing the body for the purposes of identification.

  What body? Scott’s mind bellowed. But he only shook his head. “I want to see my daughter.” He noticed the curtain drawn across a cubicle at the far end of the examining area and wondered if Krista was behind it.

  “I want to see my daughter.”

  Nodding, Holley placed a hand on Scott’s shoulder. “I would, too,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you to her.”

  The Intensive Care Unit was located on the same floor as the ER. At the unit’s entrance, Holley left Scott with the nurse who met them there. The nurse took Scott’s hand and led him into the ICU, a twelve-bed facility arranged in a polygonal pattern around an L-shaped console. At the console itself, lights flashed, monitors beeped, feeble lifesigns were recorded. A young physician sat bent over a chart, a stethoscope looped in his labcoat pocket. He glanced up briefly as Scott drifted by, then resumed his charting. Somewhere a ventilator hissed.

  The nurse stopped outside a corner room, nodded, then turned silently away. Scott started to enter the room, then paused in the doorway. Beyond the edge of an encircling, rainbow-colored curtain he could see the foot of a single bed. And beyond that, Caroline, Krista’s half sister.

  Motionless, the middle-aged college professor sat hunched over the bed, her hands gathered in a despairing knot between her breasts. She had not yet twigged to Scott’s presence, and for a dreadful instant Scott experienced a sensation of total nonexistence.

  Then he inched forward into the room.

  When he caught sight of one small arm lying limp on the bed, he stopped again, his mind reeling back to the night before, to another doorway in another hospital and a different kind of dread disconnecting his will.

  He drew a loud, stuttering breath. Caroline heard it and turned toward the sound. When she saw Scott, her face collapsed in anguish.

  “Oh, dear God,” she murmured, pushing unsteadily to her feet. “Krista...” Her hands came up to her face and concealed it.

  Still frozen in the doorway, Scott looked again at the arm on the bed. There was an intravenous taped to the back of the hand...Kath’s hand?

  Unbelieving, he dropped his flight bag and took another step.

  Then he saw the silver bracelet.

  Verging on tears, Scott folded his fingers around the edge of the curtain and drew it back.

  Kath lay propped against a pillow, still as glass, pale beneath her summer tan. Her arms, limp and somehow diminished, flanked her sheet-covered body like rolls of half-baked dough. A gauze bandage similar to the one around Scott’s leg covered the upper third of her right arm. Beneath the sheet her chest rose and fell. Apart from her arm, her body looked okay.

  But her face...Scott would not soon forget the horrid mask of his little girl’s face.

  Kath’s mouth was open, but not in the healthy, slumbering oval it had been when he’d peeked in on her the morning of his birthday. Her lips were drawn into down-curving lines, as if encircling a silent scream, and the tiny white pearls of her teeth were revealed. Her forehead, usually so shiny and smooth, was creased in the middle—Kath’s worry-cleft, only deeper and badly twisted. Dried blood caked the flaring opening of one nostril, and two or three minor lacerations on her neck and right cheek were dressed with ordinary Band-Aids. Her eyes...

  Oh, God, her eyes...

  Suddenly woozy, Scott settled his weight on the edge of the bed. He took the hand with the IV into both of his and shuddered, partly because of the boneless cool of Kath’s hand...but mostly because of her eyes.

  Kath’s eyes were open, so widely open it seemed she was making a deliberate effort to force them from their sockets. Like doll’s eyes, they focused on nothing.

  Her expression was not one of shock or pain, Scott realized with black astonishment—it was an ivory sculpture of terror. His hand itched to reach out and close Kath’s eyes...but a thought like a bullet entered his head and remin
ded him that was reserved for the dead (for Krista), and the itch went away.

  “Kath,” he whispered. “Kath, it’s me...it’s Daddy. Please...”

  “Scott...”

  It was Caroline. So small, so stricken. Scott willed his head to turn, but the command was ignored.

  Those eyes...

  “Dr. Bowman?”

  Scott dropped Kath’s hand and turned toward the source of the new voice—the young doctor who’d been poring over a chart when Scott came into the unit. He gave the man a barely perceptible nod, then turned back to Kath.

  “I’m Dr. Cunningham,” the young man said, his accent thickly Irish. “I admitted your girl to the unit.”

  Scott’s brain muttered “thank you,” but his lips remained still.

  Cunningham pressed on. “Apart from a nasty cut on her arm, which got sewn up in the ER, she’s sustained no other injury we’ve been able to pinpoint. We CAT-scanned her the minute she arrived, but found nothing of significance. There’s been no skull fracture or hematoma. Could be a concussion she’s got, but I’m not so sure. She’s lost a fair bit of blood from that cut arm, but not enough to require transfusion.” He indicated the monitoring equipment mounted over the bed. Keeping silent time, a green blip squiggled out the electrical activity of Kath’s heartbeat. “Her vital signs are stable.”

  (all a mistake not really here not really happening)

  Scott’s hand found the big tender goose egg on the back of his head. Deliberately, he pressed his fingers into the bogginess of it, causing pain to blossom brightly. That, at least, was real.

  It’s like a concussion....

  “A clear case of a life saved by a seat belt,” the doctor said. “Although, I suppose it was the fellow who found them that really saved her. He dressed that wound on her arm. Otherwise, I’m afraid she might have bled enough to do herself some real harm.”

  “What’s wrong with her now?” Scott asked helplessly, his face twisted into a bewildered question mark. “Why is she...like this?”

  “I think it’s some kind of catatonic reaction. It would explain the dulled but normal neurological findings, and her present state of detachment.” He indicated Caroline with an open palm. “Caroline here tells me you’re a psychiatrist. Does catatonia seem a reasonable diagnosis to you?”

  And for the tiniest moment Scott was a psychiatrist again (although an instant later he would have been hard put to define the word, let alone make a diagnosis), and that part of him agreed with this bright-eyed intern. It was exactly the sort of explanation he would have offered for the child of a stranger. As a professional, he knew that traumatic situations quite commonly produced states of temporary detachment, and that these could vary in severity from a deliberate switching-off to a completely involuntary and far-reaching shutdown.

  But then he wondered, and his wondering grew dark and fearful. Again his fingers itched. Why did her eyes have to stay open like that, blinking only half-shut over glassy orbs that were more like a taxidermist’s props than living eyes? Why didn’t they close so that he could pretend she was only sleeping?

  “We’ll be keeping her here for observation,” Cunningham was saying in the somber tones of an undertaker. “At least overnight. Easier that way to rule out any hidden injury.”

  Why is this guy talking to me as if I’m only a colleague? Why doesn’t he leave us alone?

  As if the thought had reached him telepathically, the intern edged toward the open door. “I’ll be right outside, Doctor...when you’re ready to go back to the ER.” Then he was gone, the tail of his labcoat belling out behind him.

  Caroline’s hand found Scott’s and squeezed it. After a moment Scott stood and drew her into his arms. Shoulders hitching, Caroline pressed her face against Scott’s chest and wept. In the emotionless void of disbelief, Scott’s eyes remained dry. He tried to swallow but had no spit. Something fluttered precariously in the pit of his stomach, and a terrible restlessness stirred inside of him.

  23

  HE WAS WITH DR. HOLLEY again, the coroner, walking beside and slightly behind him, like a heeling dog. Their footfalls echoed in the late-night silence of the hospital corridor. To Scott the sound seemed too loud, amplified somehow. When they turned the corner into the Emergency Ward and Holley drew the cubicle curtain aside, Scott remembered his first and only anesthetic, the way sounds as he free-fell into limbo had seemed louder: the voices of the staff, the clink and clatter of surgical instruments, the hiss of condensed gases. This was like that, an exaggeration of perceptions, real and yet not real.

  Overhead shone a bar of fluorescent lights, one tube flickering on the brink of extinction. There was a BP cuff mounted on the near wall, an adjustable stool in one corner and a stretcher in the middle of the rectangular floor. A body, draped in a sheet, lay dead on the stretcher. Only its feet, waxen and still, were visible.

  Scott, or some primitive part of Scott, knew the body was Krista’s. Who else would wear Sparkling Grape nail polish? He would know that slender shape anywhere, under a hundred blinding sheets. He had seen it so many times before, beneath a silk counterpane, waiting warmly for him to join her...

  In fact, he thought, and the thought danced away, she was probably there right now, at home in bed, sleeping soundly beside him, peacefully unaware of this dark and terrible nightmare.

  Scott approached the stretcher, fighting and barely suppressing the urge to flee. The floor was a cloud beneath his feet.

  That smell...what is that smell?

  Holley drew back the sheet. Beneath it lay Krista’s fractured body.

  Death?

  Scott’s eyes focused on an invisible point halfway between himself and the corpse on the stretcher. The sounds around him, still exaggerated, began to coalesce into a hum at the base of his skull, the pitch of high-tension wires in a wicked wind.

  Slowly, like a mountaineer taking up slack in a rope, he pulled the image into focus. It came, blurred, then came again.

  Scott Bowman looked down at his wife’s dead body—forehead mortally dented; face swollen and raddled; nose and lidded eyes streaked with blood; teeth fractured; lips drawn thin in the death snarl of a roadside animal—but perceived only a specimen in a forensic pathology lab.

  Just like in med school, he thought, and knew the thought was insane.

  Preventing Holley from covering her again, Scott took the sheet and drew it down farther.

  There were her breasts, oddly deflated, reddened in an arc where the steering wheel had struck her. And the bruised, tense, melon-sized swelling of her belly. Her entire blood supply lay clotting in there, Scott knew. Ruptured spleen. Yes, it would have been her spleen.

  But her hands...her hands were perfect.

  Krista’s hands.

  And, oh, God, how pale they were.

  Letting the sheet fall, Scott took Krista’s left hand in his own (with this ring I thee wed) and kissed its icy knuckles.

  Why won’t her elbow bend?

  He held her hand. Enfolded it. Tried to warm it. His blurring eyes found her rings. Here was the small diamond he’d eased onto her finger that night on the jetty. And next to it, the gold band he’d given her in the office of the justice of the peace.

  “Is this her?” Holley’s voice, a faraway rasp. “Is this your wife?”

  But no...her hands were not perfect. Her fingers were swollen. Scott knew this because when he tried to remove the rings he was unable to get them over the first knuckle. As he tugged he became aware of a repetitive hissing sound, his own breathing, he realized, straining in and out between his clenched teeth. The cold of Krista’s flesh seemed to be forcing its way into him, flooding toward his living core like ice water pumped into open veins.

  When the rings came away, Scott dropped Krista’s hand. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard a faint creak of tendons. He reached for the sheet to cover her again, but Dr. Holley did it for him.

  Like a rusted windup toy, Scott exited the cubicle and wandered off in the
direction of an ER storage room. After a moment Holley caught up to him and led him away.

  * * *

  They were in a small, ill-lit office, Holley behind a paper-stacked desk, Scott sitting head-in-hand across from him. Holley lit his pipe, took a lingering pull and exhaled a column of blue smoke. He leaned forward, his sharp face freakishly underlit by the low-wattage desk lamp, and uttered a comfortless condolence.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Bowman. It’s a terrible shock. A terrible shock.”

  Scott didn’t hear the coroner, or if he did, he gave no hint of comprehension. He was aware only of an ache inside his fist where Krista’s rings dug into the flesh (there was hot moisture in there: sweat, or perhaps blood), and that maddening, unwavering hum in his head. His mind was a series of crazily intersecting tracks, chaos in a busy railyard, thoughts like locomotives steaming furiously through, threatening to careen out of control. His mind was on that stretcher in the ER. It was on Kath’s terror-stricken face. And it was on those drawings, and that creepy little man strapped to a wheelchair a thousand miles away.

  His mind was on fire.

  “How did it happen?” he whispered, clasping the rings.

  Holley shifted back from the glow of the desk lamp and was nearly lost in shadow. He had left the room deliberately dim. He thought it eased the mind a little, helped to mute the shock of sudden loss. Regrettably, it was a scenario he had played out often before. Too often. He took another puff of Amphora before answering.

  “The car was found against a stone fence about twenty miles north of the city. A farmer called the accident in. As far as a cause is concerned, I can only speculate. Apparently there were no other vehicles involved. My guess is that your wife lost control of the car for some reason. Maybe she was overtired or speeding. Those rural roads are narrow and winding and they’re often poorly marked. It’s quite possible th—”

  “Rural road?” Scott said, lifting his haggard face.

  “Yes, one of several off-roads linking smaller settlements to the Interstate. The investigating officer reported finding a receipt above the visor from a service Station near Bayfield. Radiator trouble, I think he said. She was headed back to the highway when it happened.”