The First Time I Died

by Joanne Macgregor

  “I understand he has Alzheimer’s Disease, yes.”

  “It’s far advanced, I’m afraid. I’m not sure he’ll even know you’re there. His mind slipped away long since, but his heart keeps on pumping. Sad!”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus!” she yelled.

  It took me a moment to realize she was summoning an orderly, not cursing her patient’s tenacious heart.

  “Take Ms.” — she checked the register where I’d entered my details — “McGee to the memory care unit. Visitor for Mr. Turner.”

  I followed the orderly down long hallways, past private and shared rooms, a dining hall, and a large, sunny room labeled “Recreation,” where a bunch of old biddies were moving slowly, and completely out of time, to a song that enthusiastically urged them to touch their hands, shoulders, knees and toes. I remembered the ditty from Kindergarten, but back then we’d gyrated wildly to the music. The old ladies of Roseacres moved with the deliberate caution that accompanies an ever-present fear of slipped disks and broken hips.

  The memory care unit was located at the far end of the home. Jesús keyed a series of numbers into a security keypad on the wall, and the closed door popped open. We entered the ward, stepping into a soft cacophony of off-key singing, disconnected murmurings, and moans from the patients inside. Some, like the woman singing that the hills were alive, were bed-bound, but several sat in a row of wheelchairs facing a long window which overlooked the snow-blanketed gardens beyond.

  I swallowed hard, unnerved by the horror of the room. It was clean, warm, bright, and the patients had been given objects to hold for play or comfort — soft toys, small photograph albums, activity pillows with zippers, tied bows, and movable buttons threaded on a string. They seemed well treated, and their attendant walked amongst them, soothing, picking up dropped objects, holding plastic cups to drooling mouths to give sips of water. But still, it was a prison. They were trapped by their disintegrating brains as surely as by the ward’s locked door.

  Jesús wheeled one of the patients around and pushed him to a quiet corner of the ward where a few visitors’ chairs sat waiting forlornly. I took one of the seats and examined Pitchford’s old police chief. Frank Turner, shockingly thin, stared down at his right hand, where his fingers continuously worked a fidget spinner. From a tank mounted to the rear of his chair, oxygen whispered through a thin tube into his nose.

  “Mr. Turner? You have a visitor.”

  Jesús gently lifted his patient’s chin so he could look at me, but the effort was wasted; Turner’s gaze was blank. His eyes moved over me as impassively as if I was another piece of furniture. As soon as the orderly removed the support of his hand, Turner’s head sank again, as inexorably as a setting sun, to rest on his chest. His thumb and forefinger squeezed the central button of the spinner, and he gave an incoherent moan as the twirling blur resumed.

  Whatever the one-time chief of police may once have known, it was now sealed in the impenetrable maze of his brain.

  “The hills are alive. The hills are alive,” the woman sang behind me.

  “Would you like to stay and visit for a while?” Jesús asked me.

  “No,” I said, embarrassed at how emphatic my voice sounded. “I’m sorry, I guess I didn’t realize he’d be this … out of it.”

  Jesús nodded. Clearly it wasn’t the first time he’d seen relatives and friends enter this room all fired with good intentions, but after mere minutes of visiting, become eager only to get the hell away.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It freaks everyone out.”

  Understandably so, but I was training to become a psychologist; I should be more okay with this. I should be able to face pathology with patience and equanimity. Was my reaction of distress — and even, I thought guiltily, revulsion — just a normal consequence of being confronted with something shocking and wholly unfamiliar? Or was it another indication that I was not suited to being in a care profession?

  Back in the hallway, I asked Jesús if he could take me to visit Dr. Armstrong. “He’s my best friend’s father, and I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “Sure, I’ll take you to him. He’s in the nursing care section because he’s sick, but there’s nothing wrong with his mind, and it’ll be good for him to have a visitor for a change.”

  For a change?

  Doc Armstrong’s brain might still have been sharp as a tack, but his body, slumped against a pile of pillows, was wasted by age and illness. Like all of the Armstrongs, he’d been tall, but now he looked shriveled. His eyes and skin were jaundiced — no doubt due to liver failure — and his hands trembled. The only vital things about him were his eyebrows, which bristled with white hairs growing in every direction.

  The orderly said he’d be back later to check on his charge, and when he left, I closed the door behind him.

  “Excuse me, my dear, but do I know you?” Dr. Armstrong asked.

  “It’s me, Garnet McGee. Jessica’s old friend from school?”

  “Garnet McGee … Ah, yes, I remember.”

  “How are you doing, Dr. Armstrong?”

  “How does it look like I’m doing? I’m knocking on death’s door. Or perhaps he’s knocking on mine.”

  I tried to think of a comforting response to that, but came up with nothing.

  “May I?” I indicated the visitor’s chair beside the bed.

  “Couldn’t stop you even if I wanted to, which I don’t. There’s a chess set in here,” he said, indicating a bedside cabinet topped with several varieties of medication and a glass of water. “If you get it out, we can play a game.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, extracting the set and placing it on the tray table above his bed. “But I should warn you I’m not very good at chess.”

  “Then maybe you’ll learn something.”

  I fully intended to, but not about chess.

  He helped me set up the pieces in their proper places and then said, “You can be white. That means you begin.”

  I moved a pawn two spaces forward. That much I remembered.

  “Are you in town to visit Jessica, then?” Doc Armstrong asked.

  “To catch up with everybody,” I said untruthfully. “But mostly to spend some time with my parents.”

  I explained about my mother’s fall and the plan to pack up her shop, while Doc Armstrong made a matching move with his pawn, so that our two pieces stared blindly at each other. Trying to remember anything from the handful of times I’d ever played chess in my life, I settled for moving another pawn.

  “I don’t know if you remember, but I dated Colby Beaumont back when I was in high school here.”

  He nodded. “That does ring a bell.”

  “It’s been ten years since his death. And still nobody knows what really happened to him.”

  Doc Armstrong captured my pawn with one of his and moved it to the side of the board, staying silent.

  “I wondered if you could shed any light on it?” I asked.

  He raised his untamed eyebrows at me, and I hurriedly added, “I mean, I guess the town doctor knows a fair few of the town secrets?”

  “Your turn.” He jerked his chin at the board.

  I grabbed a knight, which I vaguely remembered was allowed to move two blocks in one direction and one block in another — or was it vice versa? — and plonked it on a new spot. “Can I put it there?”

  “You can,” he said, and promptly captured the piece with another of his pawns.

  At this rate, the game would be over before I got a single question answered. I stared at the board as if considering the consequences of a variety of possible moves, and said, “You were called to the scene when they found Colby. His body, I mean.”

  “Yes, I pronounced death. But I didn’t do the autopsy — that was the state’s chief medical examiner.”

  This being Vermont, there hadn’t been an inquest, and while the main findings and conclusion of the Medical Examiner had been covered by the media, the full autopsy report hadn’t been
reprinted verbatim. Perhaps there had been something in it that I’d never known. Truthfully, until now, I hadn’t wanted to know details.

  I picked up my other knight and toyed with placing it on different blocks, playing for time. “Colby and the Beaumont family — they were your patients. So, were you copied on the autopsy report?”

  “I was.”

  “And?”

  “Are you going to play that piece or just wave it about?”

  I replaced the knight in its original spot and inched a pawn forward one block. “What did the report say?”

  Doc Armstrong shifted position, as if to ease his aching bones, and surveyed me with tired eyes. “Can I ask exactly what all this is about?”

  “Being here, in town — it’s bringing things up for me. Old memories and unresolved issues. A few days ago, I fell into Plover Pond and nearly drowned. In fact, I did drown. They resuscitated me.”

  “Goodness me! Is that how you injured yourself?” he asked, looking at the fingers that still sported Band-Aids.

  “Yeah, but I’m fine now, more or less,” I said, watching as he moved a slender piece with a pointed hat out diagonally across the board. A priest? Bishop? “But it’s brought that whole time of Colby’s death back for me, and I feel like I won’t have any peace unless I find out what really happened that night.”

  “So, you’re investigating his death?”

  “I guess so. I mean, nothing formal. Chief Jackson seems to think it’s a cold case, that there are no new leads to pursue, and no old ones that haven’t been fully investigated.”

  “Yet you think you can do better?”

  Heat rose in my cheeks. I looked away from his assessing gaze and randomly moved a piece shaped like a castle turret.

  “You can’t do that,” Armstrong said.

  “Who’s going to stop me?” I retorted.

  He pointed at my castle. “The rook can’t move diagonally.”

  “Oh.” I returned it to its spot and edged my queen out a few blocks. She could move in any direction, right? “The thing is, I knew Colby better than most. Maybe that gives me an edge.”

  He nodded as if conceding a point.

  “So, about his body? The injuries?”

  “Don’t you know all this? From your father?”

  I straightened in surprise. “My father? What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He requested a copy of the autopsy report back then.”

  “He did? Why on earth would he do that?”

  “He said it was for you. That you needed to know what happened.” Armstrong took another of my men and added it to the steadily growing line of white pieces on the side of the board. “He didn’t share it with you?”

  “He– No. He must’ve changed his mind. I never saw any report.”

  “Could you not do that, please?” Doc Armstrong frowned down at my hands. Following his gaze, I saw I had one of my dead pawns in my hand and was scratching at the edge of the underfelt with a nail.

  “Sorry.” I replaced the piece on the board and pulled the sleeves of my sweater down over my fingers. “Can you remember the autopsy findings?”

  “I think so — the main points, at least. Death was due to drowning. The examiner found water in his lungs and stomach, which means he was still alive when he went under. The water was so cold that the soft tissues had largely been protected against deterioration. He’d been badly beaten shortly before his death, and he’d bled from both internal and external injuries.”

  The memory of Colby, lying bleached and broken beside the pond, reared up in my mind, kicking my heart into a rapid rhythm. I inhaled through my nose, deliberately trying to slow and deepen my breaths, and stared hard at the chessboard, burning the checkered pattern onto my vision to drive out the old images.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “They did a basic tox screen and found no drugs or alcohol in his system. He had lacerations consistent with being beaten by fists. No wounds due to a knife or other weapon. And there were cracked ribs — a good couple, I think.”

  “On his left side?” I said, rubbing mine, feeling an echo of the sharp pain where I’d been kicked.

  No, not me. Him. Where he’d been kicked.

  “I don’t remember,” Armstrong replied. “There was considerable bruising with, if I remember correctly, a concentration of contusions on the torso and shoulders.”

  Hands pushing me down. Holding me under the water. Can’t see who.

  “Could those bruises on his shoulders have been made by someone holding him under the water?” I asked.

  More than one.

  “They could have, yes, but the examiner couldn't be sure about that. They might have been a consequence of someone holding him in position while he was assaulted by a second attacker.”

  “On your knees, asshole!”

  Hands holding me down, pinning my arms behind my back. Pain. Blood.

  I struggled to stay present, to focus on what Armstrong was saying, even as a part of me wanted to slip into the past, to glean new details.

  Cracking, shearing pain in my ribs. The agony of drawing breath. Dark faces.

  “Enough, man, you’ll kill him!”

  I caught the tail end of whatever Armstrong was saying. “—could simply be where the blows landed. He’d been given a thorough going over.”

  “You just keep your distance. You hear me, dickhead? Keep your fucking nose out of other people’s business.”

  “Let’s go, man. Enough.”

  “No! I’m not done.”

  “He even had ruptured testicles.” Armstrong’s voice came from far off.

  I shook my head, fighting the darkness that fluttered like moth wings at the edges of my vision, blotting out the light.

  “Say again?” I asked, my voice hoarse with strain.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, this must be hard for you to hear. Are you sure you want—”

  “Tell me!”

  “He’d been kicked in the testicles. One — or both perhaps, I can’t remember — had ruptured.”

  An explosion of unbearable pain.

  Darkness closes in, and I’m gone.

  29

  NOW

  Wednesday December 20, 2017

  “Garnet? Are you alright?” Doc Armstrong said, sounding alarmed.

  I opened my eyes and found myself doubled over a dreadful pain I no longer felt.

  “Sorry,” I croaked, rubbing a hand across my face, trying to clear the lingering dizziness. “May I?” I indicated the glass of water on his bedside cabinet.

  “I think you may need something stronger, you’ve gone as pale as old bones. Here,” he said, tugging open a drawer in the cabinet and extracting a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and two shot glasses which clinked together in his trembling hand. “Would you do the honors? I’m likely to spill more than I get in the glass.”

  With hands that weren’t much steadier than his, I poured a scant inch into each glass and handed him one. “They allow you to drink in here?”

  “I’ve found that you can usually have, and do, the forbidden — as long as you have money. Or power,” he added, looking thoughtful. “Slàinte!” He chinked his glass against mine, slugged back the shot, and held out the glass for a refill.

  “Should you be drinking, though?” I asked as I complied.

  “You want to protect my health from the ill effects of alcohol? Very kind of you, Garnet, but you’re thirty years too late. I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference now.” He took a sip and rolled it over his tongue, clearly savoring the taste. “And I’d truly rather drink the whiskey than the water.”

  I swallowed a sip, welcoming the burn which grounded me in the present and woke me up a little. Every time I had one of the episodes, I was left feeling drained.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It’s mighty fine.” I finished it and poured myself another measure. Then I topped his up and returned the bottle to the drawer, which
, I saw, was also filled with blister packs and bottles of pills. Feeling more alert, I asked, “Was there anything to suggest who attacked and murdered Colby?”

  “In the autopsy report? No.”

  That seemed like a curiously specific answer.

  “And based on anything else, perhaps on what you knew of the Beaumonts or other folks in town, any guesses who did it?”

  He stayed silent for a few moments, making a meal of inhaling the bouquet of his dram. Eventually he said, “Aren’t the nearest and dearest usually the main suspects?”

  His tone was casual, almost flippant, but I locked my gaze on his. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t we inevitably hate the ones we love? Aren’t families the petri dishes of secrets and loathing?”

  Was he talking about Colby’s family, or his own? Or mine?

  “Do you know something?” I asked.

  “Know is a big word.”

  “Suspect, then.”

  He made a complicated move with his castle and king.

  “Sir, isn’t it time the truth came out?”

  “Truth. Ah, now, that’s an even bigger word. Whose truth? And what might happen if we all went about speaking the truth, possibly hurting others and doing more harm than good. And would it help anything at all — even if there was a hidden truth. And I haven’t said there is, mind you.”

  He hadn’t said there wasn’t, either. He knew something for sure.

  “Because the past cannot be changed one single iota,” he said. “It’s your turn, my dear.”

  I had my bishop retreat the few blocks it had previously advanced. “But we can change the future, if we expose the truth.”

  Armstrong glowered at me, his eyebrows knitting into a single white line above his nose. “Maybe that’s what got Colby killed — his nosiness. Now you’re going around waking sleeping dogs instead of letting them lie. It would be safer to let the past be.”

  What the heck did that mean?

  “Are you threatening me?” I demanded.

  “Not at all.” He looked like he regretted saying anything.

  “Tell me what you know!” I almost yelled the words in my frustration.