There’s loneliness for sale
And the people here are all buying
All been dipping in the till
Now the whole damn world is dying....
Robert turned off the stereo. No one but Denise had ever known how much that song meant to him, all the lonely hours he’d spent listening to it when he was in high school, headphones practically fused to his skull to drown out the sound of Dad’s shouting, listening to Nitzinger’s melancholy growl of a voice grow ever sadder with each verse yet still, seemingly with gritted teeth, admit that there might be some hope; and seventeen-year-old Robert Londrigan would lose himself in the music because there was no love in his life, no romance yet, definitely no hope...and he so wanted there to be. Any one or all three, just...something more.
Only Denise had ever known about that.
Whoever had programmed the CD player had not picked this song at random.
He tore the hammer from his pocket, strode back into the kitchen, and opened the basement door.
“Olly, olly, oxen-free,” he whispered, and started down.
To his left, the dryer was running, busy fluffing the load of laundry from the washing machine. The clothes that had been in the dryer were neatly folded and stacked inside their wicker basket, ready to be put away.
To his right, the Debra Jamison matryoshka doll had been taken apart and a fourth doll sat beside it.
As Robert approached Denise’s work area, his gaze locked on her filing cabinet to the right of her table. It had been moved, unlocked, and both drawers pulled open. The key was still in the lock.
Denise kept that key hidden, and would never tell him where.
It was a privacy thing, and he respected that.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
One thing at a time, pal; one thing at a time.
Okay. First the filing cabinet.
Two files had been pulled out and were lying atop the others. Robert’s intention was to put them back, then close and lock the drawers. He had sworn to Denise that he’d never invade her privacy again, and he intended to keep that promise, even now. After that, he would get the hell out of here, call Bill Emerson, and tell the detective everything that had happened up until now and deal with the consequences.
He grabbed the files.
A photograph fell out of the topmost, thickest file.
Robert picked up the photo, fully intending to slip it back inside the file, but sometimes the eyes unconsciously commit acts the mind wishes it had the nerve to do.
He saw the photograph.
My brothers and sisters, Willy. Do you despair?
The child had only one eye socket, directly in the center of its forehead where two eyes struggled to stay in place. It had no nose; instead, there was a proboscis-like appendage that looked like an uncircumcised penis growing from the center of its shrunken forehead.
Me Ian.
He was holding the same photograph that Rael had shown to him in the morgue.
He sat down and opened the file. The first thing he saw was a neatly-typed sheet of paper with a paper clip in the upper-right corner.
Ian Henry Akerman, age 3 weeks, 2 days, 11 hours
CYCLOPIA
Head: microcephaly
Eyes: a single eye with a diamond-shaped orbital cavity present in the middle of the face where the nose is usually located. Eyes are in the same orbit with a single optic nerve. Eyelids are so short as to be functionally absent.
Ears: low set and malpositioned.
Nose: cylindrical-shaped appendage covered by skin and located above the eye on the lower part of the forehead. There is no nasal cavity or philtrum.
Mouth: triangular with small upper cleft lip and cleft palate.
Skeletal: polydactyl and talipes equinovarus
CNS: holoprosencephaly, spina bifida, encephalocele and acrania.
Other Findings: missing facial bones, hypoplasia of the adrenals, congenital heart disease.
Treatment: none.
Prognosis: patient will not survive more than 24 hours.
At the very bottom of the page, Denise had written: You sure showed them, didn’t you, Ian?
Switching to automatic pilot, Robert slid the photograph of Ian as an infant back under the paper clip and turned to the next case description.
Marie Alice Simpkins, age 9 years, 6 months
MUCOPOLYSACCHARIDOSIS (Scheie’s Syndrome)
Broad mouth, hazy corneas, clawed hands, scaly skin.
He flipped through the cases and photographs— Jenny, 4, Progeria; Ralphie, 2, Gangliosidosis; Michael, 5, Kernicterus; Theresa, 11, Lipogranulomatosis; Humberto, 12, Nuerofibromatosis—and saw the misshapen heads, the too-big mouths, the skin that looked more amphibian or reptilian than human, the stumpy arms and legs, the willowy feet or hands, the elongated necks; and his heart began to break for these children—not just the ones who were deformed, but all of them: Albert, 6, beaten with an iron, blinded in left eye, deafened in left ear; Kylie, 3, sexually assaulted with cucumber, burned with cigarettes; Jerry, 5, left hand crushed with hammer; Laurie, 2, Down’s Syndrome, face held under scalding water...the list of afflictions and atrocities went on and on, a gallery of violence and brutality that sometimes existed only on the genetic level as the children were maimed by their own cell structure before they were even born, and at other times had the horror inflicted on them by parents or other so-called loved ones who hadn’t the guts to deal with their own shortcomings or disappointments or broken dreams and so chose the coward’s therapy—abusing those who could not defend themselves.
And at the bottom of each page Denise had written some comment:
You’ll be able to play an instrument if you want to, Jerry!
Your skin is looking so much better now, Laurie; you’ll be an absolute heartbreaker!
Ornery as ever, Humberto—I love it!
What became clear to Robert as he read the file was, in every instance, either that the child should not have survived beyond a few hours after birth or that there was no hope of healing their physical and emotional wounds.
Yet something in Denise’s comments led him to believe—to know with a certainty most dare not hope for—that each of these children had survived; not only survived, but somehow, through some sort of near-miraculous intervention, begun to heal, to shake off the effects of their abuse or undergo treatment that, if not outright curing them of their affliction, at least allowed them to live and become a functioning adult, one who knew love and acceptance and friendship and Home.
He closed the file and saw the words Denise had written across the front with a black marker:
The Indifference of Heaven Contained Within
And below those words, this:
do you really like this movie? do you watch it in your dreams? Can you tell its story dissected without its meaning in the magazines? can you sit in the dark again and again with the veins of light bleeding down onto the suicide screen?
do you really like this movie or is it just something to talk about years afterward when your children come across it on late-night television?
are you a part of this movie? are you walking through the big crowd scene, the one where you are Third Man on the Right?
are you in the ordinary background of the hero’s tragic life?
or could you rise up like a phoenix from the cutting room floor and say not this time not again
I will not be ignored?
He laid this first file on the table and looked at the second, so used now to the sensation of tears running down his cheeks that it seemed to him they had always been there, a part of his flesh that only now was coming to full life. He wiped his eyes as best he could and looked at the cover of the other file. There only thing written on it was a date: July 10, 1969.
Three days before the child Robert had once been turned nine years old.
He’d been in the hospital then, had been there, in fact, for almost two weeks recovering from the splenectomy
. He recalled the way his father had finally come to visit him on his birthday, bearing gifts and kisses and tears and apologies. It seemed like someone else’s past now. Robert preferred to think of it that way most of the time.
He opened the file.
And it was at this moment that his undoing began in earnest.
It contained only one yellowed newspaper clipping and blue-smudged carbon copies of three statements given to police investigators.
He began with the newspaper clipping:
Cedar Hill, Ohio
Newborn found in hospital
bathroom in critical condition
A newborn found abandoned in a restroom at Cedar Hill Memorial Hospital was still listed in critical condition this morning as the search for its mother and/or father continued.
A nurse from the neonatal unit discovered the baby about 2:45 yesterday morning, said police Sgt. Raymond Vecchio. The exact age of the 3-pound baby girl has yet to be determined. Hospital officials refused comment on rumors that the infant had been physically abused prior to its abandonment.
The newborn is in the neonatal intensive-care unit. Doctors would not speculate on the baby’s prognosis.
Robert was suddenly eight years old again, standing outside the glass with Nurse Claus and looking at the newborns, then catching sight of the other doors, the other glass wall where the “sick” babies were kept. Jesus H. Christ-in-a-Chrysler, he’d been there at the same as this poor child!
...and again some nagging memory, still hiding in half-shadows and haze, whispered secrets to him from its safe, clean, unlighted place.
He put the clipping aside and read the first statement. Some of the words were smudged and hard to make out, forcing him to squint, and by the time he finished reading the last of the three statements he would be in the grips of an oncoming migraine, but for the moment there was something compelling him to read on; it seemed important. Vital. Absolutely necessary.
He began reading:
Alice Rutledge, July 16
I’ve been a pediatrics nurse for going on...oh, I guess it’s close enough to twenty years now to call it. I don’t usually work the graveyard shift, understand, but Tammy Cramer’s car developed another one of its problems and she couldn’t make it in—she lives way out past Hebron—so she called and asked me if I’d switch with her.
You know, I’d take her midnight-to-nine and she’d get in the next morning for my nine-to-six. We all keep telling that girl she ought to get rid of that lemon she drives, but the poor girl just can’t afford it, what with two kids and her husband gettin’ laid off from the plant and everything. Anyway, I’d just finished making the rounds, I guess it was two-thirty or a bit after, and I stopped into the restroom to wash up on account of one of the patients—that little boy who calls me “Nurse Claus”—all the gals up here got a real kick out of that; it’s sort of a new nickname for me now. Anyway, he’d woke up from a real bad nightmare about his daddy and I was trying to get him back to sleep when all of a sudden he throws up, real violent, right? It’s a terrible thing to see a child vomit like that.
Poor boy just had his spleen bust on him and it ain’t good for a child who’s recovering from that kind of trauma to be vomiting like that. Okay, so me and Janet, we get him all cleaned up and settled down, and I call Doctor Waggoner and he tells me it’s okay to give this poor little guy his pain medication a little early, so I did, and he fell asleep but now I’ve got dried vomit on my uniform and such. So I go into the restroom to clean up as best I can. I spent five minutes or so scrubbing my hands and uniform and I was just about to head back to the nurses’ station when I see this bunch of stained towels all heaped together under one of the sinks. Well, we can’t have that in a public restroom, especially up here where all the kids are. I figured that someone had maybe overloaded their laundry cart or something but even as I leaned down and pulled the mess out I knew that wasn’t right—I mean, it was a lot heavier than it ought to have been. I started to pick it up to toss it in the laundry hamper and it...it moved. I almost dropped it, it scared me so bad. So I laid it on the counter by the sink and I unwrapped it and...oh, dear, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to turn on the waterworks like this but...good Lord. That baby wasn’t more than ten, twelve hours old. Its umbilical cord was still attached. It makes me sad, it makes me sick. It wasn’t enough of a burden that the poor little thing had to be born looking like it did, but then to have someone do something like...that...to it...it makes me sick and sad.
Right down to the ground.
Not allowing himself to think about it too much, Robert exhaled and moved on to the next statement:
Janet Tyler, July 16
Until the day I die I’ll never forget the look on Alice’s face when she came running out of that restroom. I followed her back inside—and let me tell you, one thing I never do unless there’s a damned good reason is leave that station unattended—and she shows me this heap of dirty, bloody towels with a baby inside. I have to be honest with you...at first I wasn’t sure it was a baby, I thought maybe it was some kind of animal...‘course, I only saw part of its face until Alice opens the towels and there’s its body. I couldn’t look at it for too long—not because it turned my stomach or anything like that, understand—it was just too damned sad—and I say this to you as one who’s seen more than her share of retarded and deformed children. I don’t mind saying that there’s no pit in Hell deep enough or hot enough for the person who cut up that baby like that. We called Dr. Cummins—he was the Attending that night—and he came up and called Security. No one passed the nurses’ station that I saw. Dr. Cummins examined the baby, then stitched it up. We put it in the IC unit up here and pulled a nurse from the ER to keep an eye on it. The odd thing is, Alice kept going on about how that baby was just born and...and I’m not trying to cast doubt on Alice’s abilities as a pediatrics nurse—hell, no, the woman helped train me!—but I’ve been at it for about eight years and would like to think I can tell the difference between a baby right out of the chute and one that’s a bit older.
I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles that that baby she found was at least six days old. Do you guys have any idea who took it? I’d sure as hell like to know how they managed to get past us and the security guard.
The last statement was as brief as it was unnerving:
Regina Bautista, MD, July 16
Dr. Cummins made a mistake, that’s all. Perfectly understandable, under the circumstances—the lateness of the hour, the condition the child was in, all the confusion with security and police, the nurses being shorthanded that night. Perfectly understandable.
I examined the baby later that morning—I think it was around ten-thirty—and I found an infant that was at least two weeks old. It was as alert as possible, considering the medication it was on, and its eyes were surprisingly alert for a child...of its condition. In fact, its eyes tracked extremely well. Its umbilical cord had dropped off and its naval was almost fully healed.
The onslaught of the migraine was nearly instantaneous. Robert put the file in his lap, pulled out the bottle of painkillers, and popped one into his mouth. It took three tries, but he at last managed to swallow it.
He couldn’t remember if he’d taken one earlier or not.
Leaning back in the chair, he closed his eyes and tried to absorb everything he’d just read and seen.
***
As the man I once was sits there still as death, we need to talk about madness.
It’s probably wrong to assume that madness is something born on a note of epiphany; sanity rarely ends amidst a glorious, cataclysmic, earth-shattering moment of Götterdämmerung. No, when a human mind can no longer maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting grasp on reason, when it begins to buckle, when it’s been confronted with too much horror, or grief, or confusion, or pressure, or fear, or a quietly crystalized combination of all five, sanity slowly grinds to a halt in a series of sputtering little agonies, flaking away in bits and pieces, flotsam of a refugee column
casting off sad little remnants—a hope here, a fond memory there—on a road of defeat as a deeper and deeper darkness falls. And perhaps this why so many madmen are found laughing in locked cells; at some point the only thing left them is their sense of humor, and it all becomes rather funny.
Sitting there with his eyes closed, almost—not quite, but almost unaware of it, the man I once was laughed. Very softly. Just for a moment.
Because something in his mind had just sputtered.
Shhh, quiet now; he’s opening his eyes.
***
From the kitchen came the busy noises of dishes and bowls being moved, an egg being cracked, then the electric buzz-whirrrrrrr of the mixer starting up and getting down to the serious business of making cookies.
Robert knew he should run upstairs and catch Rael, or whoever it was, in the act—he wanted to do this, more than anything else, run up there and grab them and confront them, tell them to get the hell out of his life and his head and give back to him the safe, dull, consensual reality that he’d known for most of his life, at least until these last several days—but the center of his chest was heavy and, as it was that night in the park when all this began, everywhere in his body there was sudden, extravagant pain, more pain than he thought he could ever endure without succumbing to death or unconsciousness, rendering his limbs all but useless, and his vision was blurred, and his throat was tight, and he almost no longer cared. Let them have at it.
He dropped the files onto the table and saw that the new matryoshka had been set with its back to him. He reached out, with great effort, his arms like led weights, and began to turn it around.
There was another sound, then: crinkling.
In Silent Graves Page 17