Faerie Tale (37 page)

Phil entered the room and came to the bedside; Gabbie stood in the doorway, her expression one of alarm as Phil knelt by the lower bunk. Gloria reached out to touch Sean, but the boy pulled away, as if trying to crawl deeper into the corner. “Sean! What is it, baby?” Her voice rose, as if her disorientation at what she had glimpsed as she entered the room was being compounded by his terror. “Baby, what is it? Please stop screaming. It’s all right.” Her eyes were brimming and her face reflected the pain and the fear she felt within him.

Sean wanted to tell her it wasn’t all right, and he knew his mother understood it wasn’t all right, she was only saying that; he could see that in her face, but he knew he couldn’t stop the scream to tell her. If he stopped, they’d all be trapped by the Shining Man. All he could do was point at the corner, point and scream. He pointed and tried to make them understand. His right hand pointed and his left pounded the wall, to make them understand. He rocked back and forth and shook from side to side, hitting the wall to make them understand. Gloria stood with her hand poised halfway to her son, made helpless by something beyond her ability to comprehend. In her son she saw torment visited upon the innocent and she stood powerless to help him. Sean screamed.

“Oh my God!”
cried Phil, and Gabbie gripped the doorjamb, her knuckles whitening.

“What!” demanded Gloria, almost jumping with fright at his tone.

“Patrick’s unconscious. He’s burning up with fever.

Oh God. Gabbie, call the hospital and tell them we’re coming.” Phil bundled Patrick in a blanket and carried him down the hall.

Gloria forced herself to reach out and touch Sean, and said, “He’s burning up, too.” Spurred by the need to care for her son, she ignored the wet blanket and the soiled condition of his pajamas and swept the still-shrieking boy into her arms, gathering the blanket around him. Letting the urgency of the moment banish from her memory the confusing, frightening sight that had greeted her at the door of the boys’ room, she raced down the hall after her husband.

Gabbie hurried back into her room and grabbed the receiver off the phone by her bed, dialing the operator, asking to be connected to the hospital emergency room. From outside she heard her father’s car starting up, then the tires spraying gravel as he sped down the drive. And into the night, seemingly long after she stopped hearing the car, Gabbie could hear Sean screaming.

The emergency room staff was ready even before Phil’s car had halted before the hospital entrance. Phil held Patrick’s limp form while Gloria carried Sean. He had not stopped screaming the entire way to the hospital, but his throat was worn to the point where he could manage only a faintly scratchy, hoarse sound. The E.R. staffs professional detachment was unexpectedly reassuring to Gloria, as if whatever was wrong with her boys was only an interesting problem to be solved, nothing to get excited about. The boys were placed on examining tables. Each boy had two nurses beside him. The young doctor in charge, a thin man with a slight New York City accent, listened to the nurse reading vital signs while he examined the boys. He ordered a mild sedative to calm
Sean, then became alarmed when the nurse read him Patrick’s temperature. “One hundred six.”

In calm tones he said, “Okay, it’s spiking. Let’s get him monitored and bring that sucker down.”

A nurse wheeled over a digital thermometer and inserted a rectal probe into Patrick while another began rubbing him down with alcohol. The LED readout on the thermometer’s display showed 106.2. After a few minutes it rose to 106.4. “Doctor,” said the nurse in a calm, professional manner. “It’s going up.”

The young doctor glanced at the machine, nodded curtly once and said, “Right; let’s pack him in ice.”

They picked Patrick up and put a rubber sheet under him. A male nurse brought out two large buckets of ice and began putting handfuls around Patrick, while another nurse held the rubber sheet to keep the ice from spilling from the table. When the ice was covering Patrick, she folded the sheet across his body. The doctor turned away from Patrick to examine Sean. Gloria said, “What are you doing to Patrick?”

To Phil the doctor said, “Why don’t you take a seat in the waiting room and I’ll be with you in a minute.” When Gloria seemed ready to argue, he said calmly, “Lady, we’ve got a couple of very sick kids here. Let us take care of them, all right?”

Phil guided his wife from the room and they sat on a vinyl-covered couch. The only sound beside the soft voices of the emergency room staff was the whir of a loud electric clock on the wall. Phil glanced at it and saw it read twelve-twenty in the morning. Phil’s fog of concern was pierced by the realization that Gloria was trembling.

Gloria kept her eyes upon the emergency room, where strangers worked quickly to save her children, but her mind’s eye kept seeing a remembered image, a strange momentary flicker of darkness in the corner of the boys’ room when she had first entered, and the certainty, for just an instant, that Patrick had been in the corner, surrounded by that darkness. She couldn’t put that image, or the feeling that somehow it was something dimly remembered from her own childhood, from her mind. She
sighed and steeled herself against the doctor’s confirming her worst fears, that somehow her boys were lost to her forever.

Phil reached out and gathered his wife to him, letting her rest her head on his shoulder. He attempted to reassure her with a squeeze, but both knew there was no reassurance for either of them this night. They settled in to wait.

Jack passed coffee around. He and Gabbie had arrived twenty minutes after Phil and Gloria. Gabbie had called over to Aggie’s and he had come at once. He had scouted out a coffee machine and brought a cup for everyone. Gloria’s sat cooling before her as she leaned forward in her seat, motionless, eyes fixed upon the door to the E.R.

A half hour after Jack and Gabbie arrived, the young doctor came from the emergency room, a file under his arm and a mug of coffee in his hand. Gloria almost jumped to her feet. “How are our boys, Dr.…?”

“Murphy, Jim Murphy, Mrs. Hastings.” The doctor sat opposite them in the waiting area. He sipped the coffee, and Gloria suddenly became aware she was the only one standing. She sat as Dr. Murphy opened the file and said, “The boy who was conscious—”

“Sean,” supplied Phil.

“Sean,” continued the doctor, “was pretty agitated. But besides a high fever—with no obvious cause—we’ve found nothing wrong with him. We’ve sedated him and are moving him to the pediatric ward. If nothing turns up in a day, he can come home. The other boy”—he glanced at the file—“Patrick, is another matter. He had a spiking fever, over a hundred six and … well, we’ve got it down, but we need to watch him closely.” Even as he spoke, two orderlies were wheeling Patrick out of the E.R.

Gloria watched the gurney roll out of sight and said, “Where are you taking him?”

There was a note of panic in her voice that made the doctor look at her a long moment before answering. Softly he said, “We need to watch him very closely. We’re moving him to intensive care.”

Immediately panic was apparent in Gloria’s eyes. “Intensive care! My God, what’s wrong!”

The doctor attempted to be reassuring. “Mrs. Hastings, Patrick had a very high fever. We’ve lowered it to around a hundred and one degrees, but we’re keeping it there for a while. With a very high fever, the body often loses its ability to regulate its own temperature. We just want to watch Patrick closely for the rest of the night as a safety measure.” He glanced back at the forms Phil had helped the admitting nurse fill out. “The truth is we don’t have a clue to what is wrong with your boys. We can rule out a lot of things just due to their not having any complaints before bedtime. It might be some odd sort of food poisoning, but the rest of you weren’t affected.”

“Dr. Murphy, the boys were fine at bedtime,” said Phil.

“I know, Mr. Hastings. My guess is we’ve got a pretty rugged virus that hits hard and fast. But until we get some lab work done in the morning, we are only guessing. All we can do now is make the boys comfortable, stay alert, treat them symptomatically, and begin work first thing tomorrow. And the rest of you should take it easy. If it is a virus, something they picked up at school, it may hit you as well in the next few days. If any of you start feeling poorly, at the first sign of a symptom I suggest you check back here at once. If it’s a virus, it’s a nasty customer.”

Gloria seemed unable to move or speak, her eyes wide with an almost panic-stricken look. She seemed to shiver. The doctor said, “Ma’am, we’re doing everything possible.” She didn’t speak, managing only a tiny nod. The doctor said, “I’m going to write out a prescription for a tranquilizer, Mr. Hastings. I think it might be a good idea for you and your wife to each take one tonight. We
won’t even begin to have a picture of what’s going on until tomorrow afternoon.”

Gloria leaned heavily against Phil, who said, “Thank you, Doctor.”

The doctor rose and crossed to the nurses’ station, where he scribbled on a prescription tablet. He handed it to Jack. “You can fill this at the pharmacy in the front lobby. They’re open all night.” Jack hurried off. The doctor said, “You folks really should go home. I’m afraid this may take a long time. You should count on Patrick’s being here for a few days at least.”

Gloria leaned against Phil, her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes a moment and again saw the image of the darkness in the corner of the boys’ room. A faint memory of a sound, like wind chimes in the distance, and a vague spicy smell of flowers were recalled, and for an instant she felt a stab of panic.

Gloria stood disoriented, as if trying to focus her vision. Phil saw the panic in her eyes. He held tight to her hand and said, “It’ll be all right, honey. They’re doing everything possible.”

Gloria seemed not to hear her husband. She looked wildly around the room. Suddenly she let out an anguished cry. “Patrick!” She moved forward, as if to run toward the ICU. Gabbie and Phil restrained her, and her voice held a hysterical note as it rose in pitch.

The doctor yelled to the nurses’ station for a sedative, which a nurse quickly produced. He injected the frantic Gloria, and within a minute she lapsed into a half-dazed state. Jack returned with the prescription and took in at once what had occurred. The doctor said, “I think you should all get home and salvage whatever’s left of a night’s sleep. And before you come back, you might do well to take one of those pills I prescribed, but have someone else drive you.”

“Thank you,” said Phil. He said to Jack, “See Gloria and Gabbie get home, will you?”

Gabbie put her hand upon her father’s arm. “Dad?”

“I’m staying.”

The doctor was about to protest, but something in
Phil’s eyes caused him to relent. “All right, I’ll pass word to the nurses on the Peds floor that you’re allowed to spend the night in Sean’s room. But the ICU’s off limits.” Phil looked as if he was going to object, but the doctor said, “That’s not negotiable. No visitors in the ICU longer than ten minutes and then only during visiting hours. No exceptions, Mr. Hastings.”

Phil agreed and sent Gabbie and Jack off with his wife. He thanked the doctor and took the elevator up to Pediatrics, noticing from the directory on the elevator wall that the ICU was two floors below. He checked at the nurses’ station and was told that Sean was in room 512. He went there and found Sean asleep in a semiprivate room. The other bed stood empty.

Phil leaned against the railing of the bed. He looked down at his little boy’s face, and in Sean’s face he saw Patrick’s. He hid his eyes and began to weep. Throughout his life Philip Hastings considered himself a rational man, one who had had to deal with the craziness of a first wife with a capricious nature and a career in a field where abrupt and unpredictable changes were the norm. He had thought himself a man able to cope with the unexpected. But this was bringing him to his knees.

Never comfortable with displays of strong emotion, Phil struggled to pull himself together. He considered the empty bed for a moment, then decided against it. Something about using a hospital bed repulsed him. He crossed to the large chair next to Sean’s bed and settled in. Within a few minutes the late hour and emotional fatigue took its toll and he drifted off to an uneasy doze.

Phil felt himself adrift in a grey landscape, a place of half-light dotted by lightning-shattered black trees, a murky and lifeless forest where shadowy figures moved just outside the range of his vision. Odd-sounding whispers, almost understandable, tantalized with their near familiarity, but comprehension eluded him. Then a distant voice called to him. It was Patrick! He could hear him calling, “Daddy!”

Phil sat bolt upright, heart racing, as the calm voice on the hospital’s public address system repeated its mes
sage. He blinked, found himself bathed in a cold sweat, and shook his head to clear his foggy brain. The voice again repeated its message. “Code Blue, ICU. Dr. Murphy to ICU, stat.”

Phil was moving past the nurses’ station before the duty nurse could speak to him. He passed the elevator and took the stairway down, two steps at a time. Two floors below Sean’s room he pushed on the crash bar of the large door and entered a lobby. Double doors proclaimed he stood before the ICU and that admittance was restricted. He pushed through and found himself next to a nurses’ station composed of six sets of monitors, opposite a glass wall through which he could see six beds. Over one a group of doctors worked furiously, while a nurse charged out to intercept Phil.

Without apology, she roughly grabbed him. “Sir, you cannot stay here.”

Phil, half-numb, allowed himself to be pushed back through the doors by the small woman. Outside he said, “What …?”

“The doctor will speak to you as soon as he’s able.” She hurried back through the doors and left Phil alone in the waiting area.

An hour later Dr. Murphy came out and sat down before Phil. “Mr. Hastings.…” He paused. “Look, I’ve never been good with bedside manners, so I’ll just come out and say it. Patrick’s had what we call a cardiac episode.”