by Paul Doiron
At the hospital, I parked in a surprisingly crowded lot and dragged myself through the automatic doors of the emergency room.
The white-haired woman behind the admissions desk looked up from her computer screen with a tentative smile, as if she recognized my face but couldn’t quite place where we’d met. “Can I help you?”
“An ambulance brought in a boy just now. The name’s Barter. He was in an ATV accident. I need to know how he’s doing.”
She pursed her cracked lips. “I’m not supposed to disclose the status of any patients—even to law-enforcement officers.”
“Can I speak to the nurse supervisor or a security guard?”
With a sweep of her hand, she motioned me to a row of chairs. “Please have a seat, and someone will be with you shortly.”
The ER waiting room was peopled with the usual motley crew of injured, ill, and intoxicated persons. Some were casualties of the storm—people who had fallen on the ice or careened their vehicles into snowbanks. But others were just poor folk for whom the emergency room was the only means of getting medical care. A single television set provided the official entertainment, but the remote control was in the hands of a chunky girl with a pierced nose and attention deficit disorder. She would linger on a channel for five seconds and then move on, unsatisfied, to the next.
The security guard arrived first. He emerged through the sliding doors with an expression of alarm. He was a heavyset guy, but he looked strong in the way that some fat men are, impressively muscled beneath the blubber.
“What’s the problem, Warden?”
With my functioning hand, I pointed to an unpeopled corner of the room, beyond the Coke machine. “Can we talk over there?”
When we were out of earshot of the other patients, I explained. “An ambulance just brought in a boy named Travis Barter, who was injured in an ATV crash down in Seal Cove. He’s here with his father, a guy named Calvin Barter. I need to arrest the old man on a bunch of charges, but the boy is in bad shape, and I don’t want to drag his father from his bedside. On the other hand, this Barter guy is potentially dangerous, so I need you to call the Rockport police and get an officer over here. I want to wait for the mother to show up before we bust the father.”
“What did the guy do?”
“Endangering a minor, failure to stop for an officer, driving to endanger, felony vandalism—it’s a long list. Tell the responding officer to meet me in the waiting room. You might want to hang out in the ER in the meantime. Take my word for it. Barter’s trouble.”
The guard had been listening attentively to me the whole time, and I had the impression that he was good at his job. “Ten-four,” he said.
I returned to my place between the ADD girl with the remote control and a drunk-looking guy pressing a bloody ice pack to the side of his head. The television stations flashed by overhead—infomercial, black-and-white movie, basketball game. The drunk guy stared at the screen, spellbound by the kaleidoscopic effect.
Frayed magazines and yellowed newspapers were fanned out across the table in front of me. I glanced absently at the covers, trying to keep my mind off the pulsing sensation in my hand. A headline from the Boston Globe brought me up short:
BAY STATE WOMAN FOUND MURDERED IN MAINE
The picture of Ashley Kim that accompanied the article showed a face I barely recognized, a cute young woman with intelligent eyes and a wry smile—as if the photographer had captured her enjoying a private joke.
The story said that Ashley Kim was twenty-three years old, a native of San Jose, California, now a resident of Cambridge, and a graduate student at the Harvard Business School. She had told friends that she was going cross-country skiing in Maine, which was unusual, since no one knew she skied.
The article reported, accurately, that she had called the rental company about hitting a deer shortly before she vanished. It named Trooper Curtis Hutchins as the responding officer and questioned why he hadn’t gone to greater lengths to search for her. In response, there was a quote from the spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, who said that it was Trooper Hutchins’s understanding that Ashley was uninjured and that she had left the scene of the accident willingly. The spokesman also noted that an internal investigation would review the actions the trooper had taken or failed to take. The choice of those particular words doesn’t bode well for Hutchins, I thought.
The article said that Kim’s body had been found at the summer home of one of her Harvard Business School professors, Hans Westergaard, of Cambridge. According to investigators, Westergaard was “a person of interest,” and the public was asked to report any information they might have about his whereabouts. His wife, Jill, hadn’t responded to phone calls.
“You wanted to see me?”
I looked up from the paper at a strong-looking woman in blue-green scrubs standing over me. She had wiry black hair, thin lips, and dark circles under her eyes.
“You’re the head nurse?” I asked.
“I’m the ER supervisor, and I’m extremely busy. We’ve got a packed house tonight. What can I do for you, Warden?”
Both the ADD girl and Mr. Ice Pack were gawking at us. I hobbled over to my familiar corner behind the Coke machine. “You admitted a boy a while ago named Travis Barter,” I said. “He was seriously injured in an ATV crash. How’s he doing?”
“You know that’s privileged information.”
“Look, I was chasing him at the time. The ATV he and his father were riding was struck by a snowplow because they were trying to get away from me.”
The taut line of her mouth relaxed and the small muscles around her eyes softened. “The kid was thrown pretty hard,” she said. “That’s really all I can say.”
“I understand.” I removed my right hand from the inside of my warden’s parka. The knobby fingers had started turning black. “I think I hurt my hand.”
“Jesus Christ!” she said.
“It’s bad, then?”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “When an ER nurse says ‘Jesus Christ,’ it usually means it’s bad. We need to get a doctor to look at you. Have you filled out an admissions form?”
“No.”
“You need to do that first.”
I hobbled back to the admissions desk and my girlfriend behind the counter.
“I told you you’d have to wait your turn,” she said triumphantly.
* * *
After I had been formally processed at the admissions desk, I returned to my perch beside the guy with the ice pack. The ADD girl had vanished. By coincidence, she had left the TV tuned to a show about real-life cops. On the screen, a documentary crew was riding in a squad car through the mean streets of Denver. The shaky camera followed two officers as they arrested a series of belligerent, moronic, and inebriated lowlifes who resembled, in many ways, the people seated around me.
I was entranced with the show by the time the outside doors slid open and Wanda Barter and her red-haired clan blew in on a cold and damp gust of air. There were six of them, from the freckled teenager with the freckled baby down to the little girl who had greeted me the first day I visited their farm. I recognized the twins, the boy and girl Sarah had mentioned were students in her class. Despite the storm, not a single one of the children was wearing a winter coat.
“Where’s my baby?” Wanda wailed at the admissions clerk. “Where’s Travis?”
I considered approaching Mrs. Barter to convey my sadness about the tragic turn of events but then thought better of becoming the outlet for her considerable anger. After a few minutes of Wanda’s shouting and wailing, a nurse appeared from the trauma center to take the Barter family into the ICU to see the injured boy.
Instead of the Rockport cop I was expecting, I was surprised to see Kathy Frost appear at the hospital door. She stepped in out of the rain and pushed back her wet hair from her streaming face. She spotted me within seconds and came striding across the room, boots squeaking, with the scowl of an irate mother. “Where’s my ATV?”
“I crashed it.”
“You what?”
“I crashed it while pursuing Calvin Barter. It’s in the woods near Hank Varnum’s house. How did you know to look for me here?”
“I called Sarah, and she told me about Barter’s boy. How is he?”
“They won’t say.”
Water was dripping down her forehead into her eyes, causing her to blink. “Goddamn it, Mike. How could you crash my ATV?”
“I rolled it on an icy hill.” I held up my mangled paw. “I think I broke my hand.”
Her lips pulled away from her teeth. “Yeah, I’d say you did. Jesus, that’s disgusting. But it doesn’t get you off the hook.”
What happened next was so abrupt, it caught me entirely off guard. One of the Barter kids must have noticed me sitting in the waiting room, because suddenly Calvin Barter came rushing out of the trauma center, shouting obscenities. Kathy scarcely had time to dodge to one side before the bearded ogre threw himself at me.
“Fuck you! Motherfucker!”
I put up my good hand to defend my face from the punches he was hurling at my head, but I ended up falling backward onto my injured wrist. A burst of pain from my hand turned my vision bloodred. Then a punch connected with my temple, knocking me against the seat back.
I kicked hard at Barter’s knee while Kathy sprung on him from behind, wrapping her forearm around his windpipe. The fat security guard was suddenly there, too, pulling at one of my assailant’s forearms. All three of them went down with a crash, breaking the legs of the magazine table.
By the time my vision had cleared, I saw Kathy cuffing Barter’s hands behind his back while the overweight guard sat on his head.
* * *
An hour or so later, I was sitting on a high table waiting for a doctor to examine me. My hand had swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt.
At last, the ER doctor popped around the curtain. He was the same little blond guy who’d stitched up my arm a few nights earlier.
“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked.
23
The X-rays revealed that I had broken two bones in my right hand—the first metacarpal and the radius—in addition to whatever insults I had committed against the ligaments. Because of the intense swelling, the doctor fitted me with the largest splint available, size extra-extra-large. He said that we’d have to wait for the hand to shrink back to near-normal size before they could outfit me with a standard plaster cast. I was told I would have my choice of colors.
“Even green to match your uniform,” the doctor said with a pearlescent smile.
I found my sergeant waiting for me outside the trauma center, arms crossed, snapping her gum.
“What happened to Barter?” I asked.
“I handed him off to the Rockport cops. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can drive myself.”
She gave me a doubtful sort of smirk. “I’m not sure that’s such a smart idea, Grasshopper. The doc didn’t give you any drugs, did he?”
My parka was draped over my left shoulder, since my right arm was now in a sling. “He wrote me a prescription for Vicodin.”
“That’s heavy-duty stuff.”
It was after midnight now and the waiting room had grown relatively quiet except for the mindless chatter of late-night television.
“How’s the boy?”
“Too soon to tell. I guess the docs want to evacuate him to Boston, but the weather has all the Life Flight choppers grounded. I don’t know if they’ll chance driving him in an ambulance.”
My coat began to slide off my shoulder. Kathy caught it.
“So it looks like I’ll be taking a few sick days,” I said at last.
She studied the bruised fingertips sticking out from my splint. “I’d say that’s a safe bet. You won’t be able to go on patrol as long as you’re wearing a splint or a cast. Maybe we can put you behind a desk in Augusta after you get back from disability leave.”
Well, at least Sarah wouldn’t have to worry about me out on patrol.
Kathy followed me to my truck. The temperature had climbed a degree or two while I was shut up in the hospital, and the precipitation was now drifting down lightly as plain warm rain. Still, the surface of the parking lot remained as slick as a hockey rink. Under the wet and swirling arc light, my sergeant rearranged my drooping parka back onto my shoulder and raised my collar. “I still can’t believe you crashed my fucking ATV.”
* * *
Despite my wishes, Kathy followed me most of the way home. The snowplows had salted and sanded the main roads, but the driving conditions were as bad as I’d seen in ages. At the turn off to Sennebec, Kathy blinked her high beams at me and kept going.
The image of that redheaded kid in a hospital bed seemed to float beyond the limits of my headlights.
I stopped my truck beneath the frozen pines at the end of the driveway and tried to puzzle out what I was going to tell Sarah. Why hadn’t I called her from the hospital and told her about my broken hand? It was because this latest accident was further proof how unreliable I was going to be as a father—if I was going to be a father.
The front windows were dark. When I opened the door, I heard her call my name from the bedroom.
“It’s me,” I said.
I struggled to remove my wet parka and hang it on the hook by the door. Then I began fiddling, one-handed, with the ice-coated lacings of my boots. It took me forever to get my soaking feet out of them.
I found Sarah reading in bed. As I limped through the door, she began to smile sleepily until she caught sight of my sling and splint. Then her eyes widened and she sat up so suddenly, her book dropped to the floor.
“Michael, what happened?”
“I crashed Kathy’s ATV chasing Calvin and Travis Barter. I broke two bones in my hand.”
She jumped out of bed. “Are you in pain?”
“No,” I lied.
“Let me see.” She examined my wounded fingers with an expression of deep concern. “Oh Mike, your hand looks awful.”
“It could be a lot worse.” I sat down beside her heavily on the bed, so heavily the springs groaned in protest. “I could have broken my neck.”
She sat beside me and clasped my good hand with both of her small ones. “Why do you keep hurting yourself like this? I worry that there’s something self-destructive in you that makes you take these risks. I’m scared for you all the time.”
“Well, I won’t be going on patrol for a while, so you needn’t worry.”
“What will they have you do?”
“Take sick time at first, disability, and then I really don’t know.” I took a deep breath from my diaphragm. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Travis Barter has a serious head injury. The doctors are evacuating him to Boston.”
She put a hand over her open mouth in horror.
I found that I couldn’t meet Sarah’s eyes as I recounted the evening’s events, but kept staring down at my grotesque hand in its ridiculously oversized splint. She didn’t ask any questions or interrupt me, but I could feel her emotions rising in the way her grip tightened.
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to that boy,” she said after I’d finally lapsed into silence.
“I don’t blame myself.” I used my good hand to push myself off the bed and onto my wobbly feet. “I blame his goddamned father for driving on the goddamned road.”
“Don’t you want to talk about what happened?” Sarah said.
“I’m too tired,” I said, and went into the bathroom to take a Vicodin.
* * *
Power was out all along the midcoast. We were among the few fortunate households to have electricity. We heard on the radio that linesmen were assembling from all over New England to assist with the emergency. We spent the day after the storm with Sarah shielding me from phone calls while I slept in the darkened bedroom, knocked out on Vicodin.
Except for alcohol and
some extra-strength Tylenol prescribed for previous broken bones and stitched wounds, I had never taken drugs before. Somehow I had negotiated my adolescence without ever smoking a joint. Having a crazed drunk for a father is a pretty good advertisement for sobriety in that respect.
So the spell that the Vicodin cast over me was profound. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to tell wakefulness from the hallucinations of my sleeping mind, feeling as if I were submerged at the bottom of a lake, watching lights and shadows dart across the ceiling like quick-moving fish. It was not an unpleasant experience. The pills made the pain in my hand vanish, and I would stare at my splint as if it belonged to some unfortunate person sitting on the bed beside me. Poor fellow, I thought.
Sometime during that first long, drugged afternoon, Sarah appeared with a bowl of minestrone and a plate of crackers. The brightness of the overhead light stabbed into my brain.
“How are you doing, honey?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Maybe you should get up for a while and walk around.”
“No thanks.” I was impatient to return to my languorous existence at the bottom of the lake.
“You should at least eat something.”
She plumped up the pillow behind my shoulders so that I could eat off the tray. I obliged her while she told me of the events that had taken place in the world outside my bedroom.
“The phone’s been ringing nonstop,” she said.
“Haven’t heard it.”
“You got calls from Lieutenant Malcomb and Kathy Frost, both wanting to know how you’re doing. Charley, too. That chaplain, Deb Davies, also called. I guess word travels fast through the Warden Service. You got this weird call from some guy named Oswald Bell earlier. He had this thick Long Island accent. He wanted to know if you’d read the files he gave you. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. There were a bunch of hang-ups, too.”
“The Barters.”
“God, do you think? Are they going to come over here? What should I do?”