The Cartoonist

by Sean Costello

  Understanding that this man, who stood a head taller than he and whose face at this moment bore all the hallmarks of lunacy, would probably knock him to the pavement and steal his car if he refused, Holley agreed.

  They climbed into the Mercedes and spun out of the lot at speed.

  27

  TEN MINUTES LATER THE MERCEDES screeched to a halt in the fire lane fronting the hospital. Scott jumped out, bounded up the steps and jostled his way through the crowded front lobby. A Lady’s Auxiliary volunteer started to ask if she could help, but Scott dashed by her unheeding. He swung left and ran along the hallway to ICU, where he thrust open the doors and darted inside.

  Approving smiles greeted him. Unmindful, he moved quickly past the bank of monitors to Kath’s corner room. The bright-colored curtains were drawn and Scott shouldered his way through them.

  Caroline was sitting cross-legged on the window ledge. And Kath was propped against a mound of pillows, sipping water from a Styrofoam cup through one of those bent-elbow straws. She turned slowly toward Scott, her usually shiny eyes dull, and it seemed to take her a moment to recognize him, a moment which dragged painfully for Scott.

  Then she moaned “Daddy?” and her little arms reached up for him.

  Scott rushed forward, then slowed, sitting gingerly on the bed beside her. Kath wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed weakly.

  “You’re scratchy,” she said, drawing back, brushing a hand across one stubbled cheek. Caroline giggled.

  “How do you feel, kiddo?” Scott said, trying in vain to hold back his tears. He kept her close so she couldn’t see.

  “Drunk, I guess,” Kath said, smiling wanly at Caroline over Scott’s hugging shoulder.

  “Any sore spots?”

  “No, Just thirsty.” She pulled back again, searching her father’s eyes. “Caroline says we were in a wreck. Are you mad about the car?”

  Scott thought of Krista worrying about the car over the phone the day before. She had been alive then. “Forget the dumb old car, okay?” He tried again to pull her close, but Kath resisted.

  “When can I see Mom?”

  He had known this was coming, had thought of nothing else during the endless drive in from the impound, but still the question crushed him.

  Caroline buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. Kath looked only at her father, searching his eyes, and it was all Scott could do to meet her gaze. His mind—the bit that reasoned, rationalized and explained—was suddenly blank. Where were the words? What were the words? How did you tell a child who loved her Cabbage Patch doll and believed in Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald, that her mother was dead? Had he really believed it himself until this moment? He thought not—because now the innocence, the very simplicity of Kath’s question, brought that brutal fact home with all the destructive force of a cannon blast.

  Where are the words?

  But none were needed. Kath drew limply away and huddled against the pillows, shifting her somehow doomed eyes toward the window and the gray world beyond.

  “She’s dead,” Kath said. A statement, flat and irrefutable. “I knew it. I dreamt it.”

  Caroline fled the room in a swell of tears. Scott buried his face in Kath’s pillow and cried more bitterly than he ever had before. After a while Kath pulled him close and they wept together for their lost Krista.

  * * *

  Sometime later Scott left the ICU, spent and blackly depressed. Kath had finally slipped off to sleep. Scott had been alarmed by this initially, afraid she’d relapsed into coma or catatonia or whatever it had been. But he found her easily rousable and decided to let her sleep. For her, at least, there was that escape.

  But then he remembered her saying she’d dreamed her mother’s death and realized there was no escape for any of them. Like one’s own end, it had to be faced.

  Yes, Krista was dead. He understood that now. And in the abandoned quiet of the ICU sitting room, he said it out loud: “Krista’s dead.” Kath’s question had made that truth brutally clear. It had shattered the carapace of denial he’d encased himself in as violently as a ball-peen hammer striking glass. And the naked truth had come raining down in the shards—cutting, wounding, but not killing. Now there were things that had to be done, things requiring rational thought and meticulous planning, all the things Holley had been urging him to do earlier this morning.

  The chores of death.

  He had to bury his wife. God, yes. Bury her. He had to make arrangements with a funeral home in Ottawa, one that handled cremations. That had been Krista’s wish, one she’d expressed to him one late night several years ago, a week or two following his parents’ funeral. Scott had awakened that night to a violent summer storm and found Krista sitting in a chair by the window, staring out blankly into the squall. She told him then about a fear she’d carried with her since her father’s death from cancer, when she was still just a little girl.

  Kneeling before his casket during the wake, Krista had begun to wonder if her father’s essence—his soul—might still be trapped inside his body. “How is it supposed to get out?” she’d asked Scott that night in the bedroom of their Frank Street apartment, as if she had not yet resolved that little-girl’s dilemma. Her eight-year-old imagination had quite naturally decided that her daddy must still be locked inside, aware but unable to tell anyone because his body was dead. And as only a child is capable, she imagined him lying helpless inside his satin-lined coffin after the service was over, hearing the lid click into place as the mortician sealed it for the last time, seeing the pink undersides of his eyelids darken to eternal black. Then would come the jostling ride on the pallbearer’s shoulders, the slow descent into the earth, the muffled intonations of the parish priest, the gradually fading thud of dirt tossed from the sexton’s spade...and finally silence, pure and ceaseless, save for the scarcely audible slither of time and decay.

  As a grown woman Krista had decided she would rather have her soul (if such existed, a question she’d never really gotten off the fence about) freed through the finite agony of fire than through the darker alternative—trusting its release to the slow, oppressive weight of earth and decay. As disturbed as Scott had been by Krista’s unexpected discussion of death—he, too, he realized now, had believed himself and his family invulnerable—he had agreed to her cremation, more to close the discussion than to form a pact. Now he would have to live up to that promise.

  “Is there a phone I can use?” he asked one of the nurses at the console. “I have to make some long-distance calls.”

  The nurse nodded, her face brightening with something which to Scott looked like relief. At first the expression bewildered him, then he thought he understood. He realized from personal experience that his name had probably come up as a topic of concern during nursing rounds at change of shift. These girls were trained to monitor family members for signs of coping and were almost certainly aware that so far Scott had accomplished little in the way of Making the Necessary Arrangements. Phoning home was a good sign.

  She led him to the family room where Caroline had slept the night before. It was like a miniature hotel room, with twin beds, a chest of drawers and a TV set on a revolving pedestal.

  The nurse, whose name tag identified her as Sharon McVee, pointed to the ivory touch-tone on the night table between the beds. “Just dial zero,” she said, “and tell the receptionist you’re at local two-five-zero. She’ll patch you through to an outside line and you’ll be able to dial direct. And don’t worry...it’s free of charge.” She smiled a smile of sympathetic detachment.

  “Thanks,” Scott said, sitting on one of the beds and watching as Sharon McVee, someone he would never have met had his life not taken this violent skew, left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  Suddenly alone, Scott wanted nothing more than to lie back and sleep. In the sane and unnoteworthy surroundings of this room, he realized how close his mind had come to cracking, how frayed reality had become since Caroline’s phone call at the a
irport. Mingled with the raw horror he’d experienced just then, before folding into a boneless heap on the floor, had been a black and pervading kind of warmth, a dark desire to simply end it all, to disconnect the circuits and follow his wife into oblivion. How did that weepy C&W tune go? There goes my reason for living...

  But there were other reasons for living, weren’t there? There must be, because he was still here, still drawing breath, still feeling pain. Kath was one good reason, he thought, caught now in a macabre sort of inventory-taking. What else? My professional life? Ha. Fifteen years and you can’t even use your knowledge to help your family or yourself. He looked at the phone as if it were some sort of alien device. Don’t forget your friends....

  And then he knew, with a swell of relief that made his eyes water, who he would call first. His best friend, the guy he’d grown up with, the only guy in the world Scott knew would take a beating in his place. Gerry St. Georges.

  In a minute, he thought, lying back and closing his eyes. I’ll call Gerry in just a minute.

  And not thinking he would, he slept.

  * * *

  Until two hours later, when a dream-image of Krista, cold and heavy in a refrigerated drawer in the morgue of the Danvers General Hospital, snapped him awake in a mantle of sweat.

  He called Gerry’s home, but there was no answer. When he tried the station, they told him Gerry was off for the next few days. He called Klara next, and when she answered with a drunkenly slurred hello, Scott’s initial impulse was to hang up and say to hell with her. But ginswill or not, she was Krista’s sister, and she had a right to know what had happened.

  “Klara, it’s Scott.” His voice quavered badly. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news.”

  Klara made no reply—but there was an abrupt cessation of her wheezy respirations. In the anticipatory silence that followed, Scott heard his own words reverberate as if in a tunnel, and a sick cackle crawled up inside him at their utter absurdity. Scott Benjamin Bowman, he thought moronically, new Baron of the Understatement.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said into the low hum of silence. “It’s Krista. She’s...dead.”

  There they were again, those words. The ones he had mouthed to himself in the ICU sitting room. They got easier as you repeated them. Already their meaning seemed somehow diluted.

  Klara resumed breathing. A sigh at first, then deep, hissing lungfuls as a bright disbelieving hysteria overswept her. At the phone by the well-used liquor cabinet in her living room at home, her mouth began to move, but only unintelligible grunts came out.

  “Klara,” Scott said, “I need your help on this. I can’t go through this alone.”

  Klara remained mute, but in the background Scott heard Joe’s voice, asking what the trouble was.

  “Give me the phone,” Joe said, sounding closer now, and it struck Scott (oddly considering the circumstances) that this was the first time he’d heard Joe Harper assert himself with his wife. Then Joe was on the line, his voice anxious and high. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Scott, Joe. Listen...”

  Then he said the words again, and this time they came even more easily and sounded even more meaningless. Joe’s shock was genuine, but more controlled than Klara’s had been, and Scott was able to relate the essentials without having to bear the burden of another griever. Joe assured him that he would take care of informing their mother-in-law in Sandy Point, and asked Scott if he wouldn’t mind chipping in on airfare for the old gal so she could attend Krista’s funeral. Scott said that would be fine. To Scott’s relief, Joe offered to arrange the business of Krista’s transport from Danvers to a funeral home in Ottawa.

  Finally, already past simple exhaustion, Scott called Dr. Bateman at the Health Sciences Centre in Ottawa.

  “God, Scott, that’s terrible,” Bateman said, unable to give the sentiment anything more than a professional tone. “I’ll inform everyone here. We won’t expect you until we see you, so don’t worry about a thing.”

  “Thanks, Vince,” Scott said. “Good-bye.”

  “Scott,” Bateman said before the connection was broken. “Was it like in the drawings?”

  Too weary to show his annoyance—had he thought about it before calling, Scott would have expected Bateman’s academic interest to supersede his tact—he said: “Yes, Vince. Right down to the time and place.”

  “What about the cause?”

  Yes, Scott wondered bleakly, what about the cause?

  “Good-bye, Vince,” he said, and hung up.

  28

  THE BALANCE OF THAT LONG and featureless day passed without incident...until darkfall, at least, when the horror flared briefly once more.

  After speaking with Bateman, Scott stepped outside for some air. He found Caroline wandering the grounds and he joined her for a while. Neither of them spoke very much. Later, he returned alone to Kath’s room in ICU. Kath slept soundly until a neurologist named Dr. Franklin came in to examine her at three that afternoon.

  “Curious,” the balding physician said to Scott after rousing Kath, shining a penlight into her eyes and tapping her tendons. “The oddest course of concussion I’ve ever seen—if, in fact, a concussion is what it was.” Franklin’s diagnosis was clearly at odds with Dr. Cunningham’s, the intern who admitted her. “Judging from her initial status, I would have anticipated a much more prolonged convalescence.” Franklin said, this last with what Scott recognized as professional embarrassment. “But your daughter seems completely recovered. In fact, I see no reason to keep her in the unit much past tomorrow. A few more days in a nice quiet room on the Telemetry Ward, and—”

  “Actually,” Scott said, “I was hoping I could get her out of here and home. I appreciate everything you people have done, but we’re pretty far from home, and...I’ve got a funeral to attend to.”

  The neurologist averted his eyes. “I see. Yes, you’re quite right, of course.” He glanced at Kath, who met his gaze expressionlessly. “Will you be flying back home?”

  “Yes,” Scott said. “As soon as we can.”

  “Then perhaps that would be best. I’ll arrange for your daughter’s discharge and medications. I’ll be leaving her on anticonvulsants to prevent any further seizuring...but of course,” Franklin said,“you’re a physician yourself. Nothing to worry about, then.” And with a nod he was gone.

  An awkward silence ensued in Kath’s undersized room. Scott was unable to think of anything to say to his daughter, only chatter and weak platitudes coming to mind. It was a foreign and dreadfully helpless feeling, and soon his gut twisted itself into anguished knots. Kath lay with her arm around Jinnie, fussing with the doll’s dress, whispering softly into its cauliflower ear. Scott recognized the symptoms of regression in his daughter, but was undisturbed by them. It was a means of coping, one he thought be might employ himself before this nightmare faded into healing time.

  It was Kath who broke the silence, sitting abruptly erect and fixing Scott with an expression of sheer bewilderment.

  “Daddy,” she murmured. “What are we going to do?”

  Scott was quiet a moment, thoughtful. Then he said: “Go on, pet. We’re going to go on.”

  “But I miss her. I don’t know what to do now, Daddy. What can I do?”

  Scott leaned over and picked Kath up, dully surprised by her apparent weightlessness. Clutching Jinnie under one arm, Kath guided her IV tubing along with her. They sat together in the fold-out chair and Scott rocked his little girl as he had done when she was still in diapers. They stayed that way until Caroline returned about an hour later and a nurse came in with dinner trays.

  * * *

  All three ate ravenously. Caroline and Scott hadn’t had a bite in twenty-four hours, and for Kath it had been even longer. Unlike typical hospital fare, the meal was quite good—a healthy slice of roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes, a helping of broccoli and for dessert, the inevitable yellow Jell-O.

  After they’d eaten, Scott led Caroline back to the family roo
m.

  “Sleep,” he said, and kissed her forehead, which felt feverish against his lips. Caroline was taking it hard, bottling it all up, making herself ill. Scott hoped he could help her soon. “We’ve got to get together on this,” he said in a whisper. “Help each other through.”

  Caroline nodded, lay down in bed, and was asleep, just like that.

  Night fell, transforming shape into shadow.

  Kath lay on her side facing her dad, who sat slouched in a chair by the bed. Kath’s blue eyes were cloudy with approaching sleep.

  “Thanks for bringing Jinnie,” she said, stroking the doll’s bloated cheek. Scott smiled a little. “But when I woke up in the car and she wasn’t there, I didn’t really mind.” She hugged Jinnie to her chest. “I’m glad she’s here now, though. Really glad.”

  Scott rubbed the old scar on his chin. For some reason it had begun to bother him, a dull sort of burning sensation.

  “Can you remember the accident?” he said, the words out before he’d considered their potential consequences. “Can you remember what happened?”

  Kath’s body jerked as if struck and Scott knew immediately that he’d made a serious blunder. What little color she’d had drained from her face and her mouth turned down at the corners. Her eyes, frightened and round, seemed to stare through Scott’s chest, at some mental replay, perhaps, and her fingers gouged into Jinnie’s torso, making Scott recall vividly the illusion he’d experienced at home during the storm—the doll on the counter in front of him, grinning in a lightning flash, its stuffing protruding in ugly gray wads.

  “Try to remember,” he heard himself saying when he knew he should drop it forever. “Try to think, hon. It’s important.”

  Kath squeezed her eyes shut, forcing out a single glistening tear. “I can’t,” she said almost inaudibly. “I can’t remember.”

  There was a dry popping sound, and Scott saw that Kath’s clawed fingers had poked through the fabric of her doll’s dress.