Farthest House (24 page)

30

Willow paced in the surgery waiting room, while Prairie slept in her arms and Red stared straight ahead. All around her, she heard the voices of sickness and death, urine and blood, speaking as they gurgled down drains. Death, cleaned up by staff who never saw the deceased, who only rolled up sheets that would go on other beds, and sent antiseptics washing over floors. Spirits rose up out of bodies and lifted away, while carts with defibrillators crashed into rooms minutes too late.

Later, a doctor used so many terms Willow struggled under their weight. “Second-degree burns over twenty percent of his body, third-degree burns over forty percent, unstable blood pressure, severe smoke inhalation, plasma leakage, airway edema, organ shut down …” If Julian survived, “There have been unlikely miracles,” the doctor said without conviction, recovery would mean years of surgeries, severe disfiguration, skin grafts, and amputations.

Red stood and crossed the room, his outstretched hands bracing shoulder-level against the wall, his head dropped between them. “How long?”

There was a slight hesitation, and then the doctor looked at Willow. “My guess is two, three days. It’s impossible to say. We’re doing what we can to keep him comfortable.”

Willow sat in shock and was still that way when hours later she stood in a baggy gown at the door of Julian’s IC unit. A nurse stood beside her. “You won’t recognize him. You should prepare yourself.”

“Is that possible?” she whispered. “To prepare?”

She stepped inside a small room made even smaller by the large pieces of medical equipment. The smell of burned flesh hit her so hard her stomach lurched. She covered her nose and mouth. She couldn’t look at the form on the bed. Only peripherally, a white shape bandaged and sheeted. It wasn’t Papa yet, not until she said so.

Monitors, beeping screens, and tubes ran to and from the bed. The whole of it was terrible machinery. Her gaze inched upward, and she saw the shape of Papa’s feet and calves under a swath of white bandages—only white cloth, she could handle that. Higher, a sheet was draped modestly across his groin. His hands were wrapped to his elbows, and the skin of his upper arms and the shoulder nearest her were crimson with large weeping splotches of open flesh. His chest was bandaged. A face?

She slumped into the chair, willing herself to keep hold of her screams. Tubes up a black nose, another tube, garden-hose width, disappearing into what had to be a mouth, but couldn’t be Papa’s mouth, wasn’t any man’s mouth. Swelling, blistering, red and purple putty rather than flesh, indentations in dough rather than eyes. Maybe not a man at all, a kill, bear-mauled.

She wanted to run out of the room and take her screams up and down the halls. This wasn’t Papa, couldn’t be, but she’d stood in the sleet as smoke rolled from his roof, gold flame lapped his windows, and a fireman carried out his body.

Over the next few hours the world seemed to come at Willow in fragments, and she struggled to process the commotion. Red stood outside the room, Prairie asleep on his shoulder, his uniform dark on the stomach from holding her with her soaked-through diaper. He told Willow he’d take Prairie to his house and be sure she was kept safe, and, yes, his gun was always at hand. A flux of doctors, nurses, chaplains, techs, social workers, administrators with thick pads of paper and questions about health insurance, and religious affiliations and did she want Julian to receive the last rites? There were scraps of new information about Papa’s condition. They’d cut his legs and opened a long seam, from his groin to the arches of his feet, to relieve swelling. A seam on his chest eased the pressure on his heart and lungs.

“Damn pirates,” she imagined Papa saying, “couldn’t save Jeannie, couldn’t fix you, and they can’t save me.”

Hours later, I sensed Red coming down the hall before he tapped on the room’s window. Willow, her eyes puffy from crying, hurried out to him, “Where’s Prairie?”

“She’s with my wife. She’s fine.”

“Mary Wolfe did this.”

Red’s brows narrowed. He held a vase of spring tulips, and a long blue ribbon trailed over his freckled hands. His clothes were clean, and he looked as though he’d gotten a couple of hours of sleep.

“She threatened him,” Willow continued, “and yesterday Derrick’s mom tried to warn me.”

He set the flowers on a table to his right and pulled a small spiral notebook from his chest pocket. “From the initial investigation, and it is just preliminary, it appears the fire started on the sofa with a cigarette. Another was left beside the sink in the bathroom. It burned down and dropped onto towels.”

“Those weren’t cigarettes he lit.” She gasped a deep breath and tried again. “I know how it looks, but my ex-mother-in-law visited yesterday. She warned me about Mary, said Mary was threatening something,” she nodded to the room behind her and Papa, “something like this.”

“What exactly did she say?”

“I know she was warning me. Mary’s threatened Papa before.”

“Mary Wolfe.” He wrote the name slowly, writing it down for Willow’s sake. “When exactly did she threaten Julian and why?”

“You have to believe me.”

“How long ago did she threaten him? Were there any witnesses?”

“Derrick, but he was drunk or stoned.” The truth shamed her: her husband in bed with someone else while she was having a baby. She tucked her hands under her arms. “The day Prairie was born.”

Red closed his notebook. Prairie was already crawling. “Nothing since?”

Having sat so many hours in hard chairs, Willow’s legs and back ached, but the fatigue that leaned her against the wall came from not being believed. Again. “It’s like trying to convince Papa.”

He reopened his notebook, read the name. “Mary Wolfe. And what’s her connection to Julian?”

“Mary had, is having,” she couldn’t push herself from the wall, “I don’t know, an affair with my ex. She killed my dog.”

He squinted, “Your dog?”

She closed her eyes, dropped her head back. “What’s the use? I need to get back. Please go home and stay with Prairie.”

“Why don’t you find a cot or couch somewhere and get some sleep? The nurses will find you if he changes.”

“I’m all right.”

“He has a sister. You want me to give her a call?”

For the first time since hearing the whine of sirens in the distance, Willow felt hope. “Tory.” The name didn’t summon great relief, but it called up others that did, and her mind went over the round, soothing sounds:
Mable, Jonah, Farthest House.
Farthest House, where surely Mémé’s ghost still walked the garden and tended Damask roses. “Yes, please call her.”

By late afternoon, Tory and Mable stood at the window of Julian’s room. Seeing Tory, I felt my energies spiral yet again. Would I soon appear sitting in some strange chair, having taken on such weight that people looked and wondered what world I belonged in? Tory, my grandniece, my daughter, how much I still loved her.

Willow’s heart also leapt at seeing the pair. She hurried out to them. She’d not expected Tory until the following morning or afternoon, if Tory decided to come at all. She’d not imagined Mable.

Tory held a potted Easter lily with several yellow-throated blooms. Willow thought her chin and nose had sharpened in the ten years since Mémé’s funeral. Her hair held streaks of gray now, but she still wore it the same strict way, wrapped tightly and pinned in a chignon, low on the back of her neck. For all the ways age made her more austere, Willow saw no change in her intense gaze. Still piercing, Willow felt seen-through. There was nothing to explain. What didn’t those eyes already know?

Mable wore a smoky-blue shawl over her round shoulders, and like Tory’s light-weight trench, it proved a warm front had moved in behind the freezing rain. Mable looked more the peach, flushed and soft in a creamy caftan. Unlike Tory’s long, pointed shoes, Mable paddled in wide, sturdy shoes beneath thick ankles. “It’s terrible,” Mable said before she could draw a handkerchief from a pocket in her shawl and catch the two tears that rolled down her round cheeks.

Both women glanced at the window, but Willow felt protective of Papa. He wouldn’t want to be seen. “They don’t want you in there. You’d have to suit up.”

Tory insisted. Changed into scrubs, she stood dry-eyed, staring mutely at her brother, though the muscles around her mouth looked full of the unspoken. When she was six and Julian four, she often dressed him in her clothes, an act she believed made him more fully hers. She liked him in polka dots, red or blue. She liked him in pink. She told him, “No, you mustn’t,” when he wanted too many cookies. She found his mittens on winter mornings before she found her own. She tasted his cocoa to be sure it wasn’t too hot. She huffed at Luessy, or me, when we carried him to his own bed or replaced her little dresses with small navy sweater vests and clip-on bow ties.

When she emerged from Julian’s room, she surprised Willow. “Mable will stay for as long as you need her. Who has your baby now?”

Willow hesitated, Prairie wouldn’t be as safe with Mable as she was with Red. “She’s with a friend.”

Tory nodded, then pinned Willow with a commanding look. “We’re family.”

Willow wanted to protest:
Red has a gun.
Taking advantage of him wasn’t fair, though, and at any rate, he’d already left Prairie with his wife. Prairie wasn’t riding around in the safety of his police car, Red’s wife most likely did not carry a gun, and who knew how caring or resentful she was of having to babysit Prairie. And poor Prairie probably wanted the bed and toys and surroundings she knew.

“It’s all right,” Mable said at Willow’s hesitation. “I don’t mind staying. Taking care of a little one will be a nice change of pace.”

“It’s not you,” Willow said. She looked away and down the long hall, trying to think. Mable
was
almost family; Red wasn’t. His boys, redheaded monsters when she was a kid, would be teenagers now. Probably demons that would as soon run over Prairie as step around her.

Willow sighed, “Okay.”