A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Before what?”

  “Before I explode. I brought Timmy home from the hospital to a room that was set up like the finest ICU. All his vital signs were monitored by telemetry, he had round-the-clock skilled nursing to give him his chemotherapy, monitor his IVs, draw blood for tests, adjust his respirator.”

  “Why the respirator?” I couldn’t help it—the doctor in me wanted to know.

  “The tumor had spread to his lungs—he couldn’t breathe without it. It’d also spread to many of his bones, even his skull. He was in terrible pain all the time. They radiated him, filled him with poisons that made him sicker, loaded him with dope to ease the pain, and kept telling me he had a fighting chance. He didn’t have a chance. I knew it, and that was why I’d brought him home, so he could be in his own room, and so I could have every minute with him. But worse, Timmy knew it too. I could see it in his eyes when they weren’t glazed with opiates. He was hanging by a thread but no one would let it break. He wanted to go.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking, Oh, no. Don’t tell me this . . . I don’t want to hear this . . .

  “It was the hardest decision of my life. More than anything else in the universe, I wanted my little boy to live, because every second of his life seemed a precious gift to me. But why was I delaying the inevitable? For him, or for me? Certainly not for him, because he was simply existing. He couldn’t read, couldn’t even watch TV, because if he wasn’t in agony, he was in the Demerol zone. That meant I was prolonging his agony for me, because I couldn’t let him go. I had to let him go. As his mother, I had to do what was right for him, not for me.”

  “You don’t have to go on,” I said as she paused. “I can guess the rest.”

  Kim showed me a small, bitter smile. “No, I don’t think you can.” She let out a deep shuddering sigh and bit her upper lip. “So one day, as a thunderstorm came through, I dosed a glass of orange juice with some ipecac and gave it to Timmy’s nurse. Ten minutes later, while she was in the bathroom heaving up her lunch, I sneaked down to the basement and threw the main breaker for the house. Then I rushed back up to the second floor to be with Timmy as he slipped away. But he wasn’t slipping away. He was writhing in the bed, spasming, fighting for air. I . . . I was horrified, I felt as if my blood had turned to ice. I thought he’d go gently. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. I couldn’t bear it.”

  Tears began to stream down her face. The storm was growing around us but I was barely aware. I was focused on Kim.

  “I remember screaming and running back down to the basement, almost killing myself on the way, and resetting the breaker. Then I raced back upstairs. But when I reached him, it was too late. My Timmy was gone, and I hadn’t been there. He died alone. Alone! Because of me! I killed him!”

  And now she was sobbing, deep wracking sounds from the pit of her soul. I took her in my arms and held her tight against me. She virtually radiated pain. At last I understood what was fueling the engine of this mad compulsion. What an appalling burden to carry.

  “It’s all right, Kim,” I whispered. “What you saw were muscle spasms, all involuntary. You did the right thing, a brave thing.”

  “Was it right?” she blurted through her sobs. “I know it wasn’t brave—I mean, I lost my nerve and changed my mind—but was it right? Did Timmy really want to go, or was it me just thinking he did? Was his suffering too much for him to bear, or too much for me? That’s what I’ve got to know. That’s why I have to see him close up and hear what he’s trying to say. If I can do that, just once, I swear I’ll stop all this and run for a basement every time I hear a storm coming.”

  As if on cue, a blast of thunder shook the little tower and I became aware again of the storm. Rain slashed the windows and the darkened sky was alive with flashes. I stared at the steel pole a few feet before me and wanted to run. I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs. This was insane, truly insane. But I forced myself to sit tight and think about something else.

  “It all makes sense now,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Why we’re seeing Beth and Timmy . . . they didn’t give up their lives—life was taken from them.”

  Kim bunched a fist against her mouth. She closed her eyes and moaned softly.

  “Through love in Timmy’s case,” I said quickly. I cupped my hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead. “But not in Beth’s.”

  Kim opened her eyes. “Can’t you tell me about it? Please?”

  She’d shared her darkest secret with me, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I was about to refuse her when a deafening blast of thunder stopped me. I was dancing with death in this tower. What if I didn’t survive? Kim should know. Suddenly I wanted her to know.

  I closed my eyes and opened the gates, allowing the pent-up past to flow free. A mélange of sights, smells, sounds eddied around me, carrying me back five years . . .

  I steeled myself and began: “It was the first time in years I’d allowed myself more than a week away from my practice. Twelve whole days in Italy. We were all so excited . . .”

  Angela was first generation Italian-American and the three of us trooped to the Old Country to visit her grandparents—Beth’s great-grandparents. While Angela stayed in Positano, yakking in Italian to all her relatives, Beth and I dashed off for a quick, two-day jaunt to Venice. Yes, it’s an overpriced tourist trap. Yes, it’s the Italian equivalent of Disney World. But there’s not another place in the world like it, and since the city is supposedly sinking at the rate of two and a half inches per decade, I wanted Beth to experience it without a snorkel.

  From the day she was born, Beth and I shared something special. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone or anything more than that little baby. When I was home, I’d feed her; when I wasn’t on call, I’d get up with her at night. Most parents love their kids, but Beth and I bonded. We were soul mates. She was only eight, but I felt as if I’d known her all my life.

  I wanted her to be rich in spirit and experience, so I never passed up a chance to show her the wonders of the world, the natural and the manmade. Venice was a little of both. We did all the touristy stuff—a gondola ride past Marco Polo’s and Casanova’s houses, shopping on the Rialto Bridge, eating gelato, crossing the Bridge of Sighs from the Doge’s palace into the prison; we took boats to see the glassblowers on Murano and the lace makers on Burano, snagged a table at Harry’s Bar where I treated her to a Shirley Temple while I tried a Bellini. But no matter where we went or what we did, Beth kept dragging me back to Piazza San Marco so she could feed the pigeons. She was bonkers for those pigeons.

  Vendors wheel little carts through the piazza, selling packets of birdseed, two thousand lire a pop. Beth must have gone through a dozen packets during our two-day stay. Pigeons have been called rats with feathers, and that may not be far off, but these have got to be the fattest, tamest feathered rats in the world. Sprinkle a little seed into your palm, hold it out, and they’ll flutter up to perch on your hand and arm to eat it. Beth loved to stand with handfuls stretched out to both sides. The birds would bunch at her feet, engulf her arms, and even perch on her head, transforming her into a giggling mass of feathers.

  I wasn’t crazy about her being that close to so many birds—thoughts of the avian-born diseases like psittacosis that I’d studied in med school kept darting through my head—so I tried to limit her contact. But she got such a kick out of them, how many times could I say no? I even went so far as to let her talk me into doing her two-handed feeding trick. Soon, holding my breath within a sea of fluttering wings, I was inundated with feathers. I couldn’t see Beth but I could hear her distinctive belly laugh. When I finally shook off the pigeons, I found her red-faced and doubled over with laughter.

  What can be better than making a child laugh? The pigeons grossed me out, but so what? I grabbed more seed and did it again.

  Finally it was time to leave Venice. The only flight we could book to Naples left Marco Polo at six thirty the next morning, and the
first public waterbus of the day would make a number of stops along the way and get us to the airport with only a few minutes to spare. Since I didn’t want to risk missing the flight, I had the hotel concierge arrange for a private water taxi. It would pick us up at five a.m. at a little dock just a hundred feet from our hotel.

  At ten of five, Beth and I were standing by our luggage at the end of Calle Larga San Marco. The tide was out and the canal smelled pretty rank. Even at this hour it was warm enough for short sleeves. I was taken with the silence of the city, the haunted emptiness of the dark streets: Venice on the cusp of a new day, when the last revelers had called it quits, and the earliest risers were just starting their morning coffee.

  Beth was her usual bossy little self. As soon as she’d learned to string words together, she began giving directions like a sergeant major. She had no qualms about telling us what to wear, or what to buy in the supermarket or a department store, or setting up seating arrangements—“You sit there, Mommy, and Daddy, you sit there, and I’ll sit right here in the middle.” We called her “the Boss.” And here in Venice, without her mother around, Boss Beth took charge of me. I loved to humor her.

  “Put the suitcases right there, Daddy. Yours on the inside and mine on the outside so that when the boat gets here we can put them right on. Now you stand right over here by me.”

  I did exactly as she told me. She wanted me close and I was glad to comply. Her voice trailed off after that and I could see her glancing around uneasily. I wasn’t fully comfortable myself, but I talked about seeing Mommy in a few hours to take her mind off our isolation.

  And then finally we heard it—the sputtering gurgle of an approaching taxi acquei. The driver, painfully thin, a cigarette drooping from his lips, pulled into the dock—little more than a concrete step-down—and asked in bad English if we were the ones going to the airport. We were, and as I handed him our two suitcases, I noticed the heavy droop of his left eyelid. My first thought was Bell’s palsy, but then I noticed the scar that parted his eyebrow and ridged the lid below it.

  I also noticed that he wasn’t one to make contact with his good eye, and that his taxi didn’t look to be in the best shape. A warning bell sounded in my head—not a full-scale alarm, just a troubled chime—but I knew if I went looking now for another taxi, we’d almost certainly miss the plane.

  If only I’d heeded my instincts.

  Beth and I sat together in the narrow, low-ceilinged cabin amidships as the driver wound his way into the wider, better-lit Grand Canal where we were the only craft moving. We followed that for a while, then turned off into a narrower passage. After numerous twists and turns I was completely disoriented. Somewhere along the way the canal-front homes had been replaced by warehouses. My apprehension was rising, and when the engine began to sputter, it soared.

  As the taxi bumped against the side of the canal, the driver stuck his head into the cabin and managed to convey that he was having motor trouble and needed us to come up front so he could open the engine hatch.

  I emerged to find him standing in front of me with his arm raised. I saw something flash dimly in his hand as he swung it at me, and I managed to get my left arm up in time to deflect it. I felt a blade slice deep into my forearm and I cried out with the pain as I fell to the side. Beth started screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” but that was all she managed before her voice died in a choking gurgle. I didn’t know what he’d done to Beth, I just knew he’d hurt her and no way in hell was he going to hurt her again. Bloody arm and all, I launched myself at him with an animal roar. He was light and thin, and not in good shape. I took him by surprise and drove him back against the boat’s console. Hard. He grunted and I swear I heard ribs crack. In blind fury I pinned him there and kept ramming my right forearm against his face and neck and kneeing him in the groin until he went limp, then I threw him to the deck and jumped on him a few times, driving my heels into his back to make sure he wouldn’t be getting up.

  Then I leaped to Beth and found her drenched in blood and just about gone. He’d slit her throat! Oh Lord, oh God, to keep her from screaming he’d cut my little girl open, severing one of her carotid arteries in the process. The wound gaped dark and wet, blood was everywhere. Whimpering like a lost, frightened child, I felt around in the wound and found the feebly pumping carotid stump, tried to squeeze it shut but it was too late, too late. Her mouth was slack, her eyes wide and staring. I was losing her, my Beth was dying and I couldn’t do a thing to save her. I started shouting for help, I screamed until my throat was raw and my voice reduced to a ragged hiss, but the only replies were my own cries echoing off the warehouse walls.

  And then the blood stopped pulsing against my fingers and I knew her little heart had stopped. CPR was no use because she had no blood left inside, it was all out here, soaking the deck and the two of us.

  I held her and wept, rocking her back and forth, pleading with God to give her back to me. But instead of Beth stirring, the driver moved, groaning in pain from his broken bones. In a haze of rage as red as the sun just beginning to crawl over the horizon, I rose and began kicking and stomping him, reveling in the wonderful crunch of his bones beneath my soles. I shattered his limbs and hands and feet, crushed his rib cage, pulped the back of his skull, and I relished every blow. When I was satisfied he was dead, I returned to Beth. I cradled her in my arms and sobbed until the first warehouse workers arrived and found us.

  Kim clutched both my hands; tears streamed down her cheeks. Her mouth moved as she tried to speak, but she made no sound.

  “The rest is something of a blur. An official inquiry into the incident—two people were dead, so I couldn’t blame the Venice authorities for that—revealed that the killer had overheard the hotel arranging our water-taxi ride. He borrowed a friend’s boat and beat the scheduled taxi to the pickup spot. The court determined that he was going to kill us, steal whatever valuables we’d bought or brought, and dump our bodies in the Adriatic. They suspected that we weren’t his first victims.

  “I was released, but then came the nightmare of red tape trying to return Beth’s body to the States. Finally we brought her home and buried her, but my life was changed forever by then. The world was never the same without Beth. Neither was my marriage. Angela never said so, but I know she secretly blamed me for Beth’s death. So did I. Angela and I split a year later. She couldn’t live with me. Who could blame her? I could barely live with myself. Still can’t.”

  “But you’re not to blame.”

  “I had a chance to back off before we stepped onto that water taxi, but I didn’t take it. And Beth paid for it.”

  We sat in silence then, each mired in our pools of private guilt. Gradually I realized that the flashes outside were less frequent, the thunder not quite so loud.

  “I think it’s passed us by,” I said.

  Kim glanced around, frowning in disappointment. “Damn. We’ll have to wait for another storm. That could be next week or next month around here.” She pointed to the steel pole. “Oh, look. It’s wet.”

  Fine rivulets of water were coursing down the surface of the steel.

  “So much for my caulking skills. I’ll see what I can do tomorrow.”

  Kim got on her knees and leaned forward to touch the wet surface and—

  —the tower seemed to explode. I had an instant’s impression of a deafening buzz accompanied by a rainbow shower of sparks within a wall of blazing light; boiling water exploded from the galvanized bucket as multiple arcs of blue-white energy converged from the pole onto Kim’s outstretched arm. Her mouth opened wide in a silent scream while her body arched like a bow and shuddered violently, and then a searing bolt flashed from her opposite shoulder into me . . .

  . . . the whiteout fades, as do the walls of the tower, leaving ghostly translucent afterimages, and I know which way to turn. I spot the tiny figure immediately, still in her yellow dress, standing so far away, suspended above the treetops. Beth! I call her name but there is no sound in this place. I try
to move toward her but I’m frozen in space. I need to be closer, I need to see her throat . . . and then her hand goes to her mouth, and her eyes widen as she points to me. What? What’s the matter?

  I realize she’s pointing behind me. I turn and see Kim’s ghostly figure on the floor . . . so still . . . too still . . .

  I came to and crawled to Kim. Her right arm was a smoking ruin, charred to the elbow, and she wasn’t breathing. Panicked, I struggled upright and kneeled over her. I forced my rubbery arms to pound my fists on her chest to jolt her heart back to life—once, twice—then I started CPR, compressing her sternum and blowing into her mouth, five thrusts, one breath . . . five thrusts, one breath . . .

  “Come on, Kim!” I shouted. I was so slick with sweat that my hands kept slipping off her chest. “Breathe! You can do it! Breathe, damn it!”

  I saw her eyelids flutter. Her blue irises had lost their luster, but I sensed an exquisite joy in their depths as they fixed on me for a beseeching instant . . . the tiniest shake of her head, and then she was gone again.

  I realized what she’d just tried to tell me: Don’t . . . please don’t.

  But it wasn’t in me to kneel here and watch the life seep out of her. I lurched again into CPR but she resisted my best efforts to bring her back. Finally, I stopped. Her skin was cooling beneath my palms. Kim was gone.

  I stared at her pale, peaceful face. What was happening in that other place? Had she found her Timmy and the forgiveness she craved? Was she with him now and preferring to stay there?

  I felt an explosive pressure building in my chest, mostly grief, but part envy. I let out an agonized groan and gathered her into my arms. I ached for her bright eyes, her crooked-toothed smile.

  “Poor lost Kim,” I whispered, stroking her limp hair. “I hope to God you found what you were looking for.”

  Just as with Beth, I held Kim until her body was cold.