by John Lutz
He knew she was right. Knew she was going.
“I’ve got business in there,” she said. “I’m just gonna walk in, cancel my appointment, then walk back out. No trouble. I’ll simply make my point, then leave.”
There was shouting coming from down the street, in front of Women’s Light. Beth straightened up and turned, and Carver watched through the windshield as a young woman with blond hair got out of a red Jeep with a canvas top and ran the gauntlet of demonstrators. The law prevented them from crossing the street to be close enough to the building to physically block access, but several of them were waving signs angrily and screaming at the woman. A man and a woman in jeans and red T-shirts with black lettering on them ran across the street and tried to stuff some literature into the blond woman’s hand. She tried to avoid them, batting the literature away, then hurried inside through the clinic’s glass double doors. Carver got a glimpse of someone just inside the clinic greeting her. The two demonstrators who’d flaunted the law hurried back to the median. The man was waving his brightly colored, glossy pamphlets in the air as he ran, as if they were the scalps of enemies.
Beth leaned down again so she was looking at Carver, her dark glasses back in place on the bridge of her nose. “I won’t be long, Fred.”
“Don’t rise to their bait,” he cautioned.
“I be cool,” she said jokingly.
He didn’t like that. A bright and educated woman who’d fought her way out of a Chicago ghetto, she slipped into street jargon only when she was angry and determined.
He watched her stride past her parked car, then along the sidewalk in the direction of Women’s Light. A few of the demonstrators had noticed the tall, regal figure heading toward the clinic and were either staring at her or telling others of her approach.
Carver waited a moment, then put the Olds in drive and glided it around the parked LeBaron and back in close to the curb, rolling forward slowly but staying twenty feet behind Beth. He could make out the demonstrators’ signs now, mostly red-lettered anti-abortion slogans on plain white backgrounds. A few of them featured reproductions of color photos of aborted fetuses. Some of the demonstrators were carrying long, white wooden crosses, thin and light enough to march with and wave without getting tired. The red T-shirts were lettered OPERATION ALIVE across their chests.
Carver stopped the car at the curb, turned off the engine, and continued watching Beth and the demonstrators. Several people were jabbing the air with their signs and crosses, their faces masks of rage as they screamed at Beth that babies were being killed inside the building and she shouldn’t be one of the murderers. Several of them shouted verses from scripture, and a tall man with white hair was waving a Bible frantically in his right hand and pointing to it with his left. Two large women wearing shorts and carrying aborted fetus signs screamed insults at Beth in perfect unison, as if they’d practiced in the manner of a singing duet. Unruffled, Beth removed her sunglasses, glanced over at them, and smiled.
When she was ten feet from the building, the man and woman with pamphlets darted across the street toward her. Several other people crossed the street west of the building, staying just outside the legal limit.
Instead of ignoring the pamphleteers or swatting their thrusting hands away, Beth clutched the man’s wrist and squeezed it hard, dragging him for a moment toward the building. He fought to pull back, dropping his pamphlets in the struggle, and she grinned and released him, then pushed inside through the glass doors. As soon as the man scooped up the dropped literature, he and his partner ran back across the street. Carver was aware of several other figures racing back across the street to the legal sanctuary of the median. At the same moment, a Del Moray police car approached from the other direction and parked about a hundred feet west of the demonstrators. Carver was relieved to see it.
Then the blast roared through the hot air and seemed to rock the heavy Olds. Stunned, Carver saw Beth come flying back out through the shower of sun-touched glass that had been the building’s doors and land hard on the sidewalk. She stayed propped up in a sitting position for a few seconds, then fell back. Even from where he sat, he could see her head bounce off the concrete. Black smoke began to roll above the building against the backdrop of bright blue sky.
Carver couldn’t move. Jesus! Is this real? Is this real?
Figures casting stark shadows were running in every direction. As he recovered from his shock and climbed out of the Olds, Carver saw two Del Moray cops pile out of the cruiser and race toward the building, leaving the police car’s doors hanging wide open. Placards and glossy pamphlets littered the street and median.
The stench of ruin was in the air. The feel of death.
Already sirens were screaming as Carver set the tip of his cane on the baked concrete and hobbled as fast as he could toward Beth.
4
Carver followed the ambulance back into the center of Del Moray, his heart pounding as the air was split by emergency sirens and flashing red-and-blue lights that fought the sun.
Beth had been bleeding and unconscious when they laid her on a gurney and got her into the ambulance. Carver told himself the bleeding was only from minor cuts made by flying glass, but he knew he was only hoping.
The ambulance veered to the right lane, then turned into the circular driveway of the emergency entrance to A. A. Aal Memorial Hospital. By the time Carver found a parking slot in the adjacent lot, Beth had already been removed from the ambulance and taken inside.
As he entered through the double-wide pneumatic doors, he found himself in an area of green walls, carpeted cubicles, and beige-curtained partitions. A medicinal scent mingled with the acrid smell of Pine-sol, so cloying that Carver wondered if the air itself could heal minor illnesses, hung in a coolness that chilled like icy water after the warmth of outside. Green-gowned doctors and white-uniformed nurses were roaming the wide corridors, but there was no sign of Beth. Carver’s heart plunged to depths out of proportion to the simple fact of losing sight of her.
She isn’t dead, he reassured himself; she’s only in one of the diagnosis and treatment rooms. But I don’t know that for sure.
A heavyset nurse with pale lips and wild red hair sat behind a long counter with a gray computer on it. When Carver approached her, she looked up from writing on a yellow form and smiled. For some reason the perfunctory smile angered him. He wasn’t here to make small talk or return a toaster; someone he loved might be dying, and this woman was smiling!
She seemed to read and understand his anger, and the smile faded. “Yes, sir?” she said. She had round, flesh-padded cheeks that made her eyes seem small, but there was a pleasant quality to her features that would exaggerate expressions of cheer. He realized that she hadn’t really given him the kind of smile he’d assumed.
“Beth Jackson,” Carver said. “She was just brought in here from the explosion on de Leon.”
“Explosion?”
“Where is she? Can I see her?”
“You a relative?” the nurse asked.
“Closer than that.”
“You’re assuming responsibility for payment?”
“Of course!”
She turned away from him and picked up a phone with a curved shoulder rest on its receiver, then talked for a minute in tones too low for him to overhear.
The wide doors to outside hissed open and a blond woman on a gurney was wheeled in by two somber attendants. Beyond them Carver could see the back end of the ambulance with its doors open. The woman was covered to her chin with a white sheet and had an oxygen mask over her face. Her entire body seemed to be trembling beneath the sheet. As the gurney was wheeled past, Carver saw that most of the hair on the left side of her head was singed black. He remembered the young blond woman who had walked into the clinic ahead of Beth.
Standing and watching the attendants wheel the woman down the hall and into one of the curtained cubicles, he hadn’t heard the nurse behind the counter.
“… will come out and talk t
o you in a little while.” He turned. “What?”
She was sitting on a stool and working at the computer now. “Beth Jackson’s being examined in room seven. A doctor will come out and tell you her status as soon as possible.”
“Where’s room seven?”
“It’s not a regular hospital room.” She motioned toward the wide hall. “One of those curtained diagnostic rooms.” She played the keyboard, smiled, and said, “Ah, there we go. I have a few forms for you to fill out, Mr… .?”
“Carver. Fred Carver.”
She stretched far to the side and lifted some pink and yellow forms from a nearby metal tray, then set them on the counter. “It will probably be a little while before the doctor talks to you. Do you want to take care of these now?”
Carver stared at the forms. In the midst of life, in the midst of death, there are forms. “Sure,” he said. Maybe it would occupy his mind, hold at bay the dread that would double him over if he gave it a chance.
“I need you to answer a few questions first,” the nurse said. “Is Ms. Jackson covered by insurance?”
He patiently fielded her questions while she fed his answers into the computer.
Ten minutes later, when he was finished with the questions and the forms, the nurse directed him to the emergency waiting room.
It was a square room divided from the corridor by a low bank of potted ferns. The walls were green, like the rest of the walls in emergency, and the carpet was dark brown. An even darker brown vinyl sofa sat with its back to the ferns, and along two of the walls were alternatingly red and gray molded plastic chairs, somehow fastened together so they stayed neatly aligned. In a corner sat a table holding a Mr. Coffee and stacks of foam cups. Some of the cups were sitting upright and held packets of sugar and artificial sweetener and powdered cream. There was also an opened box of tea bags, though Carver didn’t see any hot water. Directly above the coffee brewer was a TV mounted on a steel arm that elbowed out from the wall. The TV was tilted down slightly and aimed so that its screen was visible from most of the chairs in the room. A talk show was on without sound. A grim-looking woman wearing dark glasses and an obvious black wig was seated in a chair directly facing the camera. Beneath her a caption read “Slept with her mother’s boyfriend.” Carver poured coffee into one of the foam cups, then sat down in one of the plastic chairs facing the corridor. On the wall adjacent to the TV was a square clock that read 9:45. The coffee was bitter. He was alone in the room except for the woman who’d slept with her mother’s boyfriend.
At a few minutes before ten, a woman even more grim than the one on TV walked into the waiting room and slumped on the vinyl sofa. She didn’t look at the TV or at Carver. He thought she was about forty. She had dark hair that was mussed and hanging over one eye, and she would have been attractive if it weren’t for the fact that she’d obviously been crying and was under a strain that seemed to clutch at her face from the inside. She folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head, and stared at them, moving one finger then the other, as if testing to make sure they still worked. Her jaw was set. He could see the play of muscles in front of her ears as she rhythmically clenched and unclenched her teeth.
Ten minutes later a tall man in his early twenties, still with the gangly build of his teen years, shuffled into the waiting room. He was wearing Levi’s and a gray T-shirt and seemed upset. As he sat down in one of the plastic chairs, he glanced at the TV, then promptly stood up. He paced, sat down again in another chair. He bent forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor, digging the toes of his dirty white jogging shoes into the carpet and jiggling his legs. He acted as if he were the only one in the room. Carver realized that everyone was acting that way, himself included. Waiting room etiquette. This kind of trouble didn’t like company.
The wall clock acted as if time didn’t exist and it was pretending to be a painting. Carver tried not to look at it.
Only a few minutes had passed after the gangly man’s arrival when a doctor in a wrinkled and stained green gown appeared and rested a hand on the woman’s shoulder. Without a word, she stood up slowly and followed him into the corridor and out of sight, like a sleepwalker half awake with dread.
The young man in the chair stared briefly at Carver, then let out a long, loud breath and stood up. He turned up the volume on the TV and sat back down. “I don’t care about other people’s morality,” shouted a gray-haired man sitting next to the woman who’d slept with her mother’s boyfriend. He was wearing a suit and tie and had on dark glasses like the woman. He smiled as the audience applauded. A black woman in the audience stood up, leaned close to the microphone extended to her by the bald black man who apparently was the show’s host, and shook her finger at one of the guests on stage as she said, “You’re hurting other people besides your own self!” The gangly young guy got back up and turned the volume down too low to hear again. Carver was glad.
Another doctor in a green gown appeared, this one a slight young woman who appeared to be of Indian descent. Carver tensed his body and gripped the crook of his cane to stand up, but the woman crossed the room and said something to the gangly man. He looked stricken as he rose from his chair and followed her from the waiting room and down the corridor in the direction the woman and the other doctor had gone.
Carver didn’t at all like the way this was going.
A long time passed, even according to the clock on the wall. Two nurses entered the waiting room, sat side by side in plastic chairs, and exchanged copies of papers from folders they were carrying, then left. Later an elderly man wearing work clothes came into the room, glanced at the TV, then at Carver, and sat down on the sofa. He leaned sideways as if reaching for his wallet but instead pulled a paperback book from his hip pocket, crossed his legs, and began reading intently. Carver got only a glimpse of the title: something about angels.
“Mr. Carver?”
Carver looked up to see the surgeon, the one with the badly wrinkled green gown who’d left earlier with the woman, standing near him. He was a weary-looking, fiftyish man who would soon be as bald on top as Carver but for now combed his hair sideways in a pathetic attempt to camouflage his gleaming scalp.
As he parted his lips to ask Carver’s identity again, Carver nodded. There was a lump in his throat that made him afraid to try his voice.
The doctor, whose name was Galt, according to the plastic tag pinned to his gown, understood and smiled.
“Beth’s going to be okay,” he said.
Something heavy and dark seemed to shift from Carver. He leaned back in the chair with relief and wiped at his eyes with his knuckles.
Dr. Galt looked around, then at the cane leaning against Carver’s chair. “Want to come with me?”
Carver nodded and stood up.
He followed the doctor down the corridor to a small, neat office with a desk, an extra chair, and a small, round table with a vase with artificial flowers in it sitting precisely in its center. There was no sign of the woman or the young man from the waiting room. Carver sat down in the chair in front of the desk. Dr. Galt sat on the edge of the desk and crossed his arms. There was a window behind the desk. Carver could see numerous birds fluttering in a tree on a patch of grassy ground near the parking lot. It was a happy scene, another world.
“How seriously is she hurt?” Carver asked.
“Concussion, and we picked some broken glass out of her.” Dr. Galt paused. “And a badly bruised hip and abdomen.” He stared at Carver uneasily, with a tired compassion.
It took a second for what he’d heard to hit Carver full force. Hip and abdomen! “The baby?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver. She lost the baby.”
“You’re sure?” He knew it was a stupid question even as he spoke; the words had simply slid out from between his lips.
Dr. Galt treated it like any other question. “Yes. We’ve already done a D and C. We had no choice.”
Carver listened to his own breathing for a while. “Does she know?”
“Because of the anesthetic?”
“No, we used locals on her. She hasn’t yet regained consciousness from the blow on the back of her head and the trauma from whatever struck her pelvic area. We surmise a heavy object or piece of debris propelled by the force of the explosion hit her there. That might have been the impact that sent her out through the glass doors, where the paramedics said they found her. All her cuts are superficial, needing only a few stitches to close some of them.” Dr. Galt studied Carver for a moment, then forced a smile. “The thing is, Mr. Carver, she’s alive. You might have lost them both.”
Carver swallowed. Beth was alive. But the baby … again, like her first pregnancy.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carver. I can tell you it’s still possible for her to bear children. That’s something.”
“Something,” Carver agreed. He was sweating. The room was cool but he could feel his clothes sticking to his flesh.
The doctor straightened up from where he was perched on the edge of the desk. “I’d better get back to my patients. You going to be okay?”
Carver nodded and stood up, leaning on his cane.
“I’ll have the duty nurse tell you what room Beth’s going to be in. Check back in a few hours and you can go up and see her.”
“Have they found out anything about the explosion at the clinic?” Carver asked.
Dr. Galt shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it other than that it was lethal. Two dead, two injured. We’re going to have to amputate the other injured woman’s lower right leg. She’ll lose her foot and most of her ankle.”
“We should count our blessings, is that the message?”
“We really should do that, Mr. Carver. Every day.”
“Beth didn’t even have to be in that clinic.”
Dr. Galt held the door open for him. “Usually none of us really has to be anywhere.” He shook his head sadly. “Still, things happen to us.”