by Scott Pratt
Caroline walked over and took my face in her hands. “I won’t try to stop you,” she said. “If you want to know the truth, I feel the same way you do. But you’re not going alone.”
“I don’t want you to go, baby,” I said. “You’re sick, and besides, I don’t want you to see what I’m going to do to him. I don’t want you to see me that way.”
“You need to take someone,” she said. “I want somebody looking out for you.”
“I’ll call Fraley.”
Just before eleven, Fraley and I rolled off the I-40 exit into Crossville. Before I left home, I looked in my Rolodex for the telephone number of the man who had been Robert Godsey’s boss at the local probation department. I reached him at home, and yes, Godsey had left a forwarding address. It would just take him a minute to get on the office database on his computer. Yes, he’d be glad to give it to me. Was I going down to visit, or was I working on a case?
Fraley had been home watching television. He was up for a road trip, he said, and after I told him why I was going, he became even more enthusiastic. I picked him up at his house, just a couple of blocks from the hospital in Johnson City.
The ride down had been largely silent as the debate raged within me about whether I was doing the right thing. I finally decided I didn’t give a damn whether it was right. It was what I was going to do. As we turned onto Live Oak Road about a half mile from Sarah’s apartment, Fraley spoke up.
“ ‘It was self-defense, Your Honor,’ ” he said. “ ‘Mr. Dillard went to confront Mr. Godsey about assaulting his sister, and Mr. Godsey attacked him. Mr. Dillard merely defended himself. I swear it on a stack of Bibles.’ ”
I turned and looked at him. He had a smile on his face.
“I appreciate this,” I said. “I’ll make it up to you sometime.”
The house Sarah rented sat atop a small knoll about fifty yards off Live Oak Road. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw her car, the used red Mustang she bought with some of the money Ma left her. The house was on a good-size lot, maybe three-quarters of an acre, surrounded by a fifteen-foot-high hemlock hedge.
“No way the neighbors would have heard anything with that hedge,” Fraley said.
“Sometimes there’s such a thing as too much privacy,” I said.
“You want me to come in with you?” Fraley said.
“Yeah. I want someone besides me to see her.”
We walked down a brick path and up a set of concrete steps, and I knocked on Sarah’s door. A brisk wind was blowing; it cut through the light nylon jacket I was wearing and I felt myself shiver. I heard footsteps beyond the door, then a rubbing sound as she leaned up against the peephole inside. There was a long silence.
“Sarah,” I said, knocking again. “Open the door.”
“What are you doing here, Joe?” she said from the other side.
“Somebody called me. Are you all right?”
“Who’s that with you?”
“A friend. He’s a police officer.”
“I don’t want any police around.”
“He’s not here to arrest anyone. He just rode along to keep me company.”
“Go away, Joe. I don’t want to talk to you right now,” she said.
“I’m not leaving, Sarah. If you don’t open the door, I swear to God I’ll kick it in.”
We stood there for a couple more minutes, until finally I heard the dead bolt slide and the doorknob turn. The door opened slightly, and I pushed my way in. Sarah had already turned and started through the house. She walked into the kitchen and stood at the sink looking out the window with her back to me, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe with her shiny black hair hanging over the collar. I followed, stopping at a tiled counter. Fraley stayed a few steps back in the den.
“What happened?” I said softly.
“It was stupid,” she said. “We got into an argument. I don’t even remember what it was over. We both said some things we shouldn’t have said, and then …”
I noticed there was a buzzing sound to her words, a form of pronunciation I’d never heard from her, as though she wasn’t opening her mouth all the way.
“Turn around,” I said.
Her head fell forward and her shoulders slumped.
“What are you going to do, Joe?”
“Turn around. Please.”
She turned slowly, her chin on her chest.
“Look at me,” I said.
When she lifted her chin, it was all I could do to keep from grabbing Fraley’s gun and heading straight to Robert Godsey’s house. Her left eye was swollen completely shut, an angry purple bruise spreading out like the wake from a raindrop on a pond. Both of her lips were swollen; her bottom lip had been split wide open. It looked like a puffy pink grub worm that had been chopped in half. As I moved towards her, I could see bruises on her throat. She’d obviously been choked.
“Come here,” I said, and opened my arms. She leaned against my chest and I held her close.
“It was my fault,” she said, her voice breaking. “It was my fault. You know how I get sometimes. I just don’t know when to shut up.”
I waited for her to calm down and took a step back. I reached out and lightly touched her cheek.
“I’m so sorry this happened,” I said. Rage was slowly building in me, constricting arteries, causing me to tremble slightly and my field of vision to narrow. I could feel my heart beating inside my chest. “Are you all right? Don’t you think you should go get checked out by a doctor?”
She must have sensed my anger, because she looked directly into my eyes and said, “Don’t hurt him, Joe. It isn’t worth it. I’ll be fine.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’m going to go talk to him. I can’t just let this go.”
“Promise you won’t hurt him. He has problems. He didn’t mean to do it.”
“I’ll be back in a little while. In the meantime, put some things in a suitcase. You’re coming home with me.”
“No. I don’t want—”
I squeezed her shoulders tightly.
“No discussion, Sarah. He beat you, and I don’t care what you said, you didn’t deserve it. I’m going to go talk to him, and then I’m going to come back here and pick you up. You need to think this through for a few days, and you don’t need him around while you’re doing it.”
She let out a sigh and nodded her head. I leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek. “Get ready to go. I’ll be back.”
“One second,” Fraley said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a digital camera. He handed the camera to me. “Take some pictures of her,” he said. “You never know when it might come in handy.”
I’d seen Godsey use his size and his belligerent demeanor to intimidate his probationers dozens of times. I guess he thought he could do the same to me, because he opened the door immediately when I knocked. He was shirtless, barrel-chested and hairy. I could see the hair on his shoulders backlit by a lamp in the den behind him as he loomed in the doorway.
“What do you want?” he said as he opened the storm door and glared at me.
I clocked him without saying a word. I had a picture of Sarah, battered and bruised, in my mind, and I hit him in the nose so hard that blood shot out like a red geyser. He staggered backwards into the house, his eyes wide with surprise, and I bull-rushed him. I got my shoulder into his chest, grabbed the backs of his thighs with both hands, lifted his feet off the ground, and drove him into the floor with a loud thud just inside the doorway. I heard at least one rib crack, and he let out a pathetic groan as the air rushed out of his lungs. I could hear myself talking, yelling, cursing, but I wasn’t conscious of what I was saying. As soon as I got him on the ground I pinned his hips with my knees and got my left forearm under his chin and against his jawbone. I turned his head and pinned it sideways against the floor and started hammering him with my right fist and elbow. I hit him in the temple, in the side of the face. My forearm slipped once and he turned his head towards me, so I hit hi
m square in the mouth. I hit him until he went limp.
Something in my brain told me to stop, but I couldn’t. I just kept on hitting him, over and over. My knuckles were smashing into the hard bones in his face and skull, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Suddenly, I was lifted off his body and dragged backwards, my butt skidding along the hardwood floor. A voice was saying, “Enough! Enough!” Strong hands lifted me to my feet and pulled me through the doorway into the night air.
A familiar voice said, “Jesus Christ, Dillard …”
I stood there gasping for breath, temporarily unable to recognize the face in front of me. It slowly came into focus, like a ship emerging from a thick fog, and I realized it was Fraley. I turned and looked inside the house. Godsey was lying on his back, his legs spread. I walked back in and stood over him. He was breathing, but he wasn’t moving, his eyes staring up at the ceiling.
“I didn’t know you were going to go ballistic on me,” Fraley said. “Were you trying to kill him?”
“Can you hear me?” I said loudly to Godsey. He blinked. Both of his eyes were swelling, and his nose was smashed sideways onto his cheek. He was bleeding from the mouth, nose, and a cut above his left eye. I shoved his shoulder with my foot and he groaned.
“Don’t ever come near her again,” I said. “Don’t call, don’t write, nothing. She’s gone. She’s out of your life. Do you understand?”
“Let’s go,” Fraley said.
“Do you understand me, you piece of shit?”
“He understands,” Fraley said as he pulled me out the door and towards the truck. “I promise you he understands.”
Later, as we drove east on I-40 towards home, I heard Sarah stir in the passenger seat. I was driving her Mustang while Fraley followed in my truck. She hadn’t said a word since I loaded her suitcase in the trunk and we started towards home. I turned to look at her, and in the dim light from the dashboard, I could see the ugly purple lump where her left eye should have been.
“Joe?” she said in a soft voice. “Did you hurt him?”
“Not too bad.”
“Seriously, what did you do to him? Tell me.”
“The truth?”
“Please.”
“I don’t know, maybe a broken nose, a couple of fractured ribs, maybe a fractured jaw or something, maybe a concussion. He’ll probably live.”
She was silent for a couple of minutes. I saw her chest rise and fall as she let out a long, slow breath.
“Thank you,” she said, and she leaned her head back and went to sleep.
Thursday, October 30
It was after two in the morning when I finally crawled into bed next to Caroline. I could see the outline of her face in the soft glow of the night-light. She looked beautiful sleeping so peacefully, and once again I found it difficult to believe that she’d been afflicted by such a horrible disease.
In the week leading up to her first chemotherapy treatment, she’d seemed distant and resigned. The night before she was scheduled to go to the cancer center, she bought a bottle of wine and drank it in less than an hour. While I didn’t think it was the healthiest thing she could do, it was at least good to hear her laugh for a little while. Unfortunately, the laughter soon gave way to tears of fear and frustration. She fell asleep on the couch with her head in my lap. I sat there stroking her hair and wondering what the next few months would bring until I finally drifted off to sleep sometime early in the morning.
I drove her to the cancer center early that Friday, just under two weeks after her first surgery revealed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and had invaded the skin above the tumor. The stitches had been removed from her breast and underarm only the day before, but the cancer was aggressive and quickly advancing, the doctors said. They didn’t want to waste time getting started.
As we walked into the room where the chemotherapy was to be administered, I looked around and was immediately struck by the atmosphere. The place was set up like a beauty salon. Five reclining chairs were aligned in a space no more than thirty feet long and ten feet wide, all facing a television perched on a shelf high on the wall. The floor was shiny white linoleum, the walls gray. Frosted plastic sheets in the drop ceiling concealed banks of fluorescent lights. To the right was a long counter, behind which sat three nurses in colorful smocks. One of the nurses, a gray-haired woman with a gentle face, took Caroline into the hallway and directed her to a set of scales. After recording her weight, the nurse led Caroline to a room where another nurse stuck a needle in her arm and withdrew blood. They would use the blood sample for a variety of things, she said, but of primary importance were Caroline’s white and red blood cell counts.
An hour later, after she’d been returned to the beauty parlor and her blood had been analyzed, another nurse wheeled an IV tower up behind Caroline. The surgeon who had removed part of the tumor and the sentinel lymph node had installed a port just beneath the skin next to her collarbone. Into the port the nurse stuck an oversized, hook-shaped needle, and I saw Caroline cringe. A plastic bag containing clear fluid was suspended from the tower. A tube ran from the end of the bag and was hooked into another tube that was attached to the hook-shaped needle. For the first thirty minutes, the medicine that flowed through the tube into Caroline’s port was to prevent the nausea that the chemicals were sure to cause. Once the bag was empty, the nurse switched to a drug called Adriamycin, a cytotoxin designed to kill fast-multiplying cells. The doctor had explained that cancer cells multiply quickly, as do many other cells in the body. Adriamycin would kill the cancer cells, he said, but in the process, it would also kill other fast-multiplying cells, including those that grow hair and fight infection. After the Adriamycin finished dripping into Caroline’s vein, the nurse switched to another drug, cyclophosphamide, which was supposed to attach itself to the cancer cells’ DNA to keep them from reproducing.
I sat by Caroline’s side for three hours that first morning. We talked, played cards, watched television. As I tried to distract her, I watched the nurses go about their duties in a starkly efficient manner. All of the chairs were filled, and I’d discovered there were private rooms off the hall. Those too were full. Ninety percent of the patients were women, all in varying stages of treatment. Most wore caps, some nylon, some knitted, one crocheted, to hide their baldness. There were dark circles under their eyes, and their faces were sullen and seemed to be deflating. I was shocked by how many there were. One would finish the treatment and leave, and another would immediately take her place. The business of cancer was booming.
After an hour, I noticed a distinct change in the smell of Caroline’s breath. It was a mixture of metal and almonds, different from the one caused by the anesthesia a few weeks earlier. It reminded me of the smell of cyanide. The irony was undeniable: in order to save her, they had to poison her.
We drove home in the afternoon and waited for her to turn purple, to faint, to vomit. Nothing happened. She felt fine Friday night and most of Saturday, and we began to tell each other that maybe she was one of those special people we’d heard of; maybe she would remain immune to the side effects of the powerful drugs.
Saturday evening, she began to complain of fatigue. Her bones ached, she said. She slept fitfully, tossing and turning and moaning. On Sunday morning, she got out of bed and I fixed her a hard-boiled egg. She ate it slowly, almost cautiously, as though she knew what was about to happen. Fifteen minutes later, she was vomiting in the bathroom. I knelt beside her as her body lurched and heaved. I put a cold compress on her forehead, wiped the dribble from her chin and cheeks, the sweat from her temples, the tears from her eyes.
She stayed in bed for the next thirty-six hours, barely able to lift her head. All I could do was help her back and forth to the bathroom and make sure she took in water. I’d never felt so helpless.
Now, almost three weeks later, I’d just fallen off to sleep and was dreaming about fighting with Robert Godsey when I was awakened by an unfamiliar sound. I lifted my head from the pillow and
looked around. Caroline was sitting up on the other side of the bed with her back to me. She’d pulled a sheet over her head. I reached over and touched her back.
“Are you all right?” I said.
Her response was a stifled sob.
“What’s wrong?” I said. “What hurts? What can I do?”
She continued to cry, so I pulled my feet up under me and slid over to sit beside her on the bed. I put my arm around her and pulled her towards me. As I did so, I reached up with my right hand to stroke her hair, but she’d pulled the sheet tightly across her scalp. I touched her cheek and could feel the wetness of tears.
“What is it, baby? What’s wrong?” I said.
Slowly, she lifted the sheet, and as I ran my fingers beneath it, I realized what was going on. She dropped her head onto my shoulder and continued to sob.
“It’s all right, Caroline,” I said, trying unsuccessfully to comfort her. “It’s all right. We knew this was going to happen.”
“It isn’t happening to you,” she whispered.
“I know, baby,” I said. “I wish it were. I wish it were me instead of you.”
I held her in the darkened room, listening alternately to the sounds of her sorrow and the wind whistling outside the window. After several minutes, she loosened her grip on my shoulders, took a deep breath, and lifted her head. “I have to use the bathroom,” she said. “Would you take care of it for me and then come back and help me?”
“I’ll be right there.”
She rose and shuffled slowly out of the room like a ghost, still shrouded in the sheet. As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I stood up, turned on the light, and walked back and stood over the bed. There, on her pillow, fanned out in the shape of a halo, was her beautiful auburn hair. It had apparently freed itself all at once while she slept.
I went into the kitchen and found a plastic bag, returned to the bedroom, and gathered the long strands. She and her mother had discussed what she should do with her hair if it fell out, and they’d decided to donate it to Locks of Love, a company that made wigs for children with cancer. My job was to preserve it, package it, and deliver it to her mother.