Guilt by Association (6 page)

A man stood at the foot of the bed. He had kind brown eyes, a large hooked nose and a warm smile, and the sun picked bronze highlights out of his thinning hair. His hands were long and slender and his fingernails were neatly trimmed. He looked as if he might play the piano.

“Hello,” the man said. “I’m Dr. Waschkowski.”

Of course, a doctor, not a piano player, Karen thought. She gurgled painfully.

“No, don’t try to talk,” he told her. “Your upper lip is stitched, your jaw is wired and you have a tube in your throat that’s helping you to breathe.”

Karen stared at him.

“I know that sounds pretty frightening, but the truth is, things usually sound worse than they are.” His smile broadened reassuringly.

Karen tried to smile back, but couldn’t.

“No, you can’t smile with your mouth just yet,” the doctor told her, “but I can see it in your eyes. So I’d like you to do something, sort of play a little game with me, okay? I’ll ask you some questions, and you answer me by blinking your eyes.
Once for yes and twice for no. Do you understand?”

Karen blinked once.

“Good,” he said. “Okay, here we go. Is your name Karen Kern?”

Blink. “Are you twenty years old?”

Blink.

“Do you live in Port Washington?”

Blink. Blink.

“Good girl.” Waschkowski smiled and moved around to the side of the bed. “Do you remember being in Central Park?” he asked gently.

Karen’s eyes filled with tears. Blink.

“All right,” he said with an encouraging nod, “you’ve told me everything I need to know for now. As your doctor, I prescribe more rest. We can talk again tomorrow.”

He made a move to go but Karen, using all her strength, raised her right arm in its heavy cast to stop him.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said kindly. “You’re going to be just fine. I’m an excellent doctor and I would never let a slip of a girl like you make a liar out of me.”

Blink. Blink.

“Is the pain very bad?”

Blink.

“Up until now, we couldn’t give you anything for it, because we didn’t want to mask any symptoms. But now that you’re fully awake, I’ll have one of the nurses give you a shot.” He made another move to go, but again she stopped him. “Is there something else?”

Blink.

Waschkowski sighed. “Let me guess. You want to know what all this stuff connected to you is about?”

Blink.

“Why don’t you rest for a while and then we can have a long talk about that later?”

Blink. Blink.

“Okay,” he said with resignation, pulling a chair up to the bed and sitting down on it straddle-style. “I can tell you’re not going to let me get away with anything. Well, let’s see. Do you want to start at the bottom and work up, or start at the top and work down?”

Karen blinked once, then twice, then once again.

“Serves me right,” Waschkowski laughed. “Okay, we’ll start at the top.”

One by one, he cataloged her injuries, mentioning the black eye that would be tender for a time and the broken nose they had set and the split lip they had sutured, and then pointing out each of the tubes and wires, telling her in simple terms what it was and why it was there. The enormity of it might have overwhelmed her had he not been careful to maintain a calm, almost matter-of-fact, attitude.

“You have a fractured jaw,” he began. “We’ve wired it shut and immobilized your head with a splint. It should be as good as new in a month or so, but until then, your ability to talk and eat will be restricted.”

She could remember Bob’s fist crashing into her face.

“Along with that, you have a crushed larynx, which means you
really
can’t talk for a while. Think of it as having a very sore throat. We did a procedure we call a tracheotomy, which is a big word that means we put a little hole in your windpipe to help you breathe more easily.”

She remembered Bob’s hand closing around her throat.

“Moving on,” Waschkowski said, as though he were a do-cent describing masterpieces in a museum, “we have several cracked ribs,
which we simply taped up because modern science hasn’t yet provided us with a better way of mending them.”

She could feel the toe of Bob’s shoe smashing into her over and over again.

He pointed to a tube emerging from the side of her rib cage. “Now this little beauty is what we call a chest tube. We put that in because one of your ribs went and poked a hole in your right lung. Think of your lung as something like a balloon,
and then picture what happens when you stick a pin in that balloon.”

Waschkowski saw her eyes widen. “Fortunately, a hole in a lung isn’t something to worry about these days,” he went on smoothly.
“The tube will drain the fluid out of your chest cavity and then your lung will reinflate, just like that balloon again, and most likely heal all by itself.”

He was so casual about it that Karen supposed having a hole in a lung wasn’t such a big deal, after all.

“I bet you can pretty much figure out what the cast on your arm is for.”

Blink.

“I thought so. It was a clean fracture, easy to set. You’ll probably have signatures from the entire staff on that cast by the time it comes off.”

She remembered falling out of a big maple tree and breaking her arm when she was eight. She had worn a cast for six weeks.
“I told you so,” her mother’s voice echoed.

“Next,” Waschkowski continued, “we have some discomfort in the abdomen, right?”

Blink.

“That’s because we had to open you up inside and fix a few things. Do you know what a spleen is?”

There was a pause before Karen blinked once, then twice.

“Yes and no,” Waschkowski interpreted. “Well, that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter, because you don’t have one anymore. It was ruptured, so we took it out. Luckily, you can live to a very ripe old age without it.”

He opened his mouth to tell her about the uterus, about how torn it was, about how they had tried to repair it, but failed.

“You also lost a fair share of blood along the way,” he said instead. There would be time enough later, when she was
stronger, physically and emotionally, to tell her she would never have children. “So we gave you a couple of pints of healthy new A positive to fill up those veins again. And last, but not least, we have a smashed kneecap. Now I happen to like the symmetry of it,” he joked, “seeing as it’s your right arm that’s busted and your left kneecap that’s smashed. But you might prefer to be lopsided.”

Blink. Blink.

“Ah, good,” he said with a grin. “You obviously share my sense of artistic proportion. We put a splint on the leg, which will immobilize it until we can operate. There’s an orthopedic specialist waiting in the wings who’ll tackle the job when you’re a bit stronger.”

He told her about the pneumonia next, again as though it were an everyday occurrence rather than a potential killer, and about the IV dripping nourishment and antibiotics into her system, and about the sinister-looking machine that monitored her heartbeat and the cuff on her arm that allowed the nurses to take her blood pressure.

Finally, he told her about Margaret Westfield and her dog Brandy.

“Animals have excellent instincts,” he said.

When she was four years old, Karen was bitten by a neighbor’s Rottweiler and had since been somewhat wary of dogs. How ironic,
she thought, that she might now owe her life to one.

“Your parents are here,” Waschkowski said at the conclusion of his monologue. “They’ve been here right from the start, of course, and they’ve really been keeping us on our toes for the past eight days.”

Karen had listened to the recitation of her injuries with relative calm, but now her eyes opened so wide they threatened to engulf her entire face. Eight days? She had lost eight days? How was that possible? And much worse, in that time, how many strangers had looked at her, examined her, and discovered the awful things that Bob had done to her? It was humiliating to realize what they had seen.

She began to agonize over what they must have thought of
her as she lay unconscious and unable to explain. They must have thought her stupid, at best, to get herself in such a situation.
At worst, cheap and common. Tears welled up in her eyes again. Even her mother and father knew, before she had a chance to prepare them. Above all, Karen prayed she wasn’t pregnant.
Anything but that,
she silently begged a God she didn’t know if she still believed in.

At that moment, all she wanted was to rip the tubes and wires from her body and crawl, if she had to, into a hot shower bath,
to burn off the layers of skin that the monster in the night had touched, to scrub away all evidence of his existence. Even as she struggled to get her mind around the enormity of her ordeal, she knew that she would never be completely clean again.
The tears rolled down her cheeks.

Waschkowski’s heart turned over. “Look,” he said, “I’m not going to tell you that you haven’t had a rough deal here. You have.
Rougher than anyone deserves. But you’re a strong young woman. The fact that you’ve made it this far proves that, and you’re going to make it the rest of the way. It may take a little time, but you’re going to be just fine. In all the weeks and months ahead, you remember that I told you so— and that I’m never wrong.”

He had a sincere face and kind eyes and Karen wanted so much to believe him.

As a doctor, Stanley Waschkowski knew, perhaps better than most, how badly a body could be ravaged by an unexpected injury or a debilitating disease. He had learned how to set bones and treat infections with a reasonable expectation of success.
But he had never, in all his years of schooling and practice, been called upon to treat a damaged soul.

K
aren slept a great deal after that. Deep, dark, pain-free slumber that blotted out reality and hastened the healing. It was so much easier not to have to think and not to have to feel and not to have to remember. She wished it might go on forever.

She would lie in oblivion until the nightmares came to jolt her back into consciousness, and then she would stare up at the reassuring pocked ceiling and around at her cocoon of white night curtains and listen to the soft noises of the special care nurses at work until the panic ebbed and her heart stopped its erratic pounding and she could close her eyes and float back into forgetfulness. She had no concept of hours or days. Her only indicator was that sometimes it was light outside the window when she awakened and sometimes it was dark.

Once, when she opened her eyes, her parents were there. She wanted to smile and tell them not to worry about her, but her wired jaw wouldn’t cooperate, and nothing more than the now familiar gurgle made its way past her throat.

“Hello, darling,” Beverly cooed. “Daddy and I are right here and we’re making sure you get the best possible care.”

Gurgle.

“Don’t try to talk, sweetheart. You just rest. That nice Dr. Waschkowski says the more you rest, the quicker you’ll be all well again.”

Karen needed no encouragement. She drifted off, almost immediately, eager to return to nonexistence. Another time she awakened,
Peter was sitting in a chair beside the bed.

“Hi, honey,” he said gently. “Happy 1963.”

Dimly, she remembered that he was coming down from Maine to spend New Year’s with her and that they were going to live happily ever after. But she had slept through New Year’s and there was no happily ever after in her nightmares.

By the end of a month, she had been moved out of the special care unit and into a private room at the other end of the third floor.

Here, the walls were painted a surprising pastel-peach color with a broad band, the exact shade of ripe raspberries, circling the room just above eye level. Curtains striped in peach, raspberry, forest green and gray framed the window. Two upholstered chairs, which stood like bedside sentinels, matched the curtains. Except for one swath from the door to the bed, the institutional linoleum that covered most of the hospital’s floors had been replaced by a dove-gray carpet. A framed Monet print hung over the bed, a Renoir accented the opposite wall.

“This whole wing was redecorated last year,” Julie van der Meer, the aide, told her. “The designer convinced the administrator that recovering patients would recover faster if they were surrounded by cheerful colors and a touch of class.”

The special care unit was located in the relatively quiet rear of the building, but this room looked right out onto busy First Avenue. Now, Karen was treated to the drone of traffic, night and day, and the indiscriminate intrusions of squealing brakes and honking horns and angry voices.

Sometimes in the late hours of the night, as she waited for sleep, she would think about the people in those cars and buses and taxis and trucks and wonder where their lives were taking them. It was her first reconnection with the outside world.

The day Karen was able to take her first real food—a chocolate milk shake, from a flexible straw inserted in the corner of her mouth—everyone celebrated. It tasted delicious and she drank almost all of it. She had lost fifteen pounds since entering the hospital, and the doctors were anxious to get some of that weight back on her slender frame.

Now that she was no longer attached to all the tubes and wires, the staff began to fuss over her, bringing nourishing drinks at all hours, sponge-bathing her sometimes twice a day, combing her hair before her parents arrived, giving her muscle-stimulating massages. Karen could see how proud they were of their handiwork, having put the bits and pieces of her back together again.
But she was so totally unfamiliar to herself that it was as though they had worked without a pattern and gotten it all wrong.
She wished they would stop fussing and go away.

Her parents came to see her almost every day, her father unutterably sad, her mother artificially cheerful. They encouraged her to finish all her liquids and to exercise her arms and legs as though they actually believed that was all that was necessary to make her whole again. Occasionally her younger sister Laura came with them and tried her best not to stare.

And, of course, there was Peter, who sat beside her for hours on end, holding her hand and telling her funny little stories and smiling at her with his warm brown eyes, until the winter recess was over and he had to return to Cornell.