Willnot (17 page)

Richard has come up and watched over my shoulder as I wrote the last few lines. “That’s one I’d like to read,” he says. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen.” I listen to him walk away, and in my mind hear his gait not as it is now that he’s made so much progress, but as it was before—still, though, that heavy fall, the brushlike sound of the other foot dragged forward, not quite parting from ground, then the lighter footfall.
Cretic
in Latin poetics, one short, two long. I blink back tears.

Days later, a storm moved in and claimed us, the sort that brings old pans out from cabinets to catch the water breaching roofs and sends people out to their garages to check on boats, just in case. Windows went worthless, fingers drummed away at the boxes we live in, and newscasts from the capital fed repetitive footage of cars and pickup trucks with a foot or so of windshield showing above water, like the heads and eyes of alligators. Meanwhile, offstage, armies of mosquitoes waited, dreaming of glory days to come.

Schools shut down, and while the sheriff’s department and hospital staff were on alert, mostly people stayed home and Willnot stayed quiet. A suspected break-in at May’s Collectables proved to be the result of a door left unlocked and blown open by wind, triggering the alarm. Per custom the high school gym remained open to provide shelter.

Midafternoon, as standing water began to drain and the sun pushed its way through spongy clouds (Willnot ever avoiding the usual—having such occur, for instance,
during
the storm), we had a blackout. Could be down for hours, the power company
announced. The hospital was on generators and had the situation in hand, vents up and running, auxiliary lights, batteries stockpiled for IVs and pumps, Ambu bags shucked from sealed bags and handily at bedside with respiratory, nurses and aides all prepared to bag dependent patients.

I’d sent Maryanne home and was standing at the window watching water recede, scarcely a thought in my head, adrift. I’d made coffee before the power cut out and was doing my best to drink it before it went dead cold. Light in the office reminded me of grainy old B movies, those where people’s faces are a blur and that object in the background might as easily be a refrigerator, window frame or shape-shifting monster. I heard the outer door open. Moments later she stepped to the other side of my doorway and stopped, as though it were an imperceptible barrier. I half expected her to put up a hand to confirm.

“Dr. Hale?”

She wore newish jeans, a fitted blouse under a gray windbreaker, a baseball cap with hair in a ponytail pulled through the back. Midthirties? She was soaked, and her shoes squished mightily as she stepped in. Surely I imagined that, first, she took a deep breath.

“And you?”

“Ginny Farrell. I hear you’re good with animals.”

“Oh?”

“From kids at the park. I spend a lot of time there. I hear them talking. Can you help me?”

“With what, Ms. Farrell?”

She was quiet. Had that look of running it through one’s head like a script. How to get so many connections and crossovers in the right order, down to what might make sense.

“Here.” Against her body she cradled a small bundle wrapped
in a towel, which she held out and quickly brought back. “I had three miscarriages, when I was married. I was told I wouldn’t be able to bear children. But now—”

It was a
very
small bundle.

Briefly the lights flickered on and off. We waited. That seemed to be it.

“—now I’ve given birth. This morning. As the storm was coming in.” She walked to the desk, put the bundle on it, and started folding back the towel. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

I looked down, then back up at her. At her eyes.

What she had, so meticulously enswathed, was a lizard the size of a chipmunk, alive but immobile with fear.

“But I can’t keep her. I’m not married. And she needs a good home. I thought you could help find one for her.”

I asked her to sit. She did so, rewrapping the towel and holding the bundle carefully in her lap. I said that I’d do what I could, but first we needed to get both her and the baby to the hospital to have them checked out. Went on a bit, though gently, about birth trauma, loss of blood, potential infection. She seemed to be considering it but, once I stopped talking, shook her head, saying that she had changed her mind and was going to keep the baby.

Tucking the towel more securely in place, she stood and walked to the doorway before turning back.

“They’ll say I’m crazy, Dr. Hale.”

Immediately I called the sheriff’s department. Roy answered and, when he heard why I was calling, passed me on to Sam. Ginny Farrell lived out on the old feeder highway, Sam said. He’d been by there twice, domestic disputes. He’d head right out.

He called back within the hour. No one home, no one around. Spoke to the neighbors, who couldn’t remember seeing Ginny for some time, then returned to the house and found the back
door unlocked. Looked like the lock hadn’t worked for years. Inside, everything was tip-top. Clean and orderly and no clutter anywhere, not a chair or dish or piece of clothing out of kilter. Spooky, Sam said. Like being on a movie set or in a model home, a place conjured up whole in someone’s mind but never lived in.

He went back repeatedly over the following days. The house remained as it was. Ginny Farrell didn’t return. We never heard from or of her again.

Why do I tell you this, and why here? Because I’ve relived that visit so many times; I’ve not been able to put it to rest. And because of what I’m about to tell you. Because it brought to mind then, and brings to mind ever more forcefully in light of subsequent events, how little we sometimes can do to help.

I’d been kept late at the hospital that day with a routine bladder tuck that step by step became anything but. Unwarranted bleeding, careening BP, a node of cancer tucked away so stealthily behind bone that it never showed on X-rays.

I parked, caught my breath and, walking in, heard voices from the kitchen. Richard and Bobby Lowndes looked up from the table.

“We saved you some tea,” Richard said. He got up, took the pot and a cup already set out on the counter, and poured. A thimbleful splashed into the cup. “Woops, I guess we didn’t. I can make more.”

“This may be a Scotch evening.”

“She okay?”

I’d had the circulating nurse call to let Richard know about the protracted surgery.

“Will be, yes. Bobby. Heard rumors you were still around.”

“So he is. Finger on the pulse of.” Richard went out to the front room to get the Scotch.

“Didn’t mean to be,” Bobby said. “Kept having reasons not to
go. Finding them, I guess is the truth of the thing. But today I came to say good-byes. Already said them to Nathan.”

“I won’t ask where you’re going.”

“I know.”

Richard came in with the bottle and a glass for me, set it on the table and, going back around, behind Bobby, lost his footing. He reached out to grab at Bobby’s chair and I thought had caught himself, but then crashed down. It took a moment for me to register that I’d heard, just before he fell, a high-pitched whistle and crack.

Bobby was up and out the door almost before Richard hit the floor. Around the hole in the window glass I watched him disappear into the trees, understanding then what had happened.

Richard’s eyes were wide, already shock-y looking, and there was, for so small an entry wound, far too much blood.

Much of it’s a blur. I remember pushing against his chest and diaphragm, breathing into his slack mouth. Yellow dish towels going red with blood. Like peasants with pitchforks up against armies, I fought with what I had. I remember pulling down the cutlery drawer for a good knife, then pulling out the drawer where we stored cheesecloth and trussing twine and dumping its contents on the floor. My fingers on bleeders. Lurching for the phone and punching numbers with one hand as the other went on doing what I’ve done all these years.

So much of it was automatic.

So much of it was, or seemed at the time, in vain.

At some point Bobby is there saying It’s taken care of, I should never have come here, brought all this, good luck to you both, Dr. Hale. Then a flash, a darkness, he’s gone, and Andrew stands above me in his dark suit and cuff links with the ambulance outside in the driveway, the front door open, the sheriff and Sam walking through it.

I’m in the ambulance. Bagging Richard. Starting an IV.

Andrew and I pushing the stretcher through the ER door, people parting left and right, faces stark in the sudden light, pages sounding overhead.

I’m outside OR. Gordie’s telling me that it was touch and go at first but all is going well now, he’s stable. I notice that Gordie doesn’t take his eyes off mine. I notice that he’s wearing his lucky scrub cap—with the plaid of his clan.

I came awake sitting by Richard’s bed in intensive care. Eyes at half-mast, he was watching me. The room dark, a wash of light from outside, from the nurses’ station and unit proper, that lost force before it reached us. Steady tick of his QRS on the monitor. “They tell me you saved my life,” he said. “If I say thank you, will you go home and get some rest?” Later, I wondered if I dreamed that.

Later also, Roy and Sam came to tell me they’d found the shooter just yards into the woods behind the house. His throat had been slit, one swift, expert strike. He’d died instantly. The killer took care to arrange the body on its back, straight, as though at rest, rifle tucked alongside. Perfect right shoulder arms, Roy said.

Slowly time, or memory, congeals. Richard on his back, face locked in concentration as he wills his leg to bend, to slide his foot toward him, and it begins, very slightly, to move. At the end of the hall tottering in his walker as he turns. He reaches out to the wall to steady himself and misjudges, almost goes down. Holding hard to the bars on either side as he attempts to walk again for the first time. Leg lifts and squats and stair steps that leave him all but breathless and shiny with sweat. All too well I remember what it was like.

Richard saying they tell me I’m out of the woods and the other guy never got out of them. Gordie coming out from OR to say
Richard was in Recovery and everything looked good. Hypoxia’s the monkey in the gears though, he says, and we don’t know the extent of it. Metabolic encephalopathy for sure. Permanent damage or loss, we don’t know, we’ll just have to wait. And Kate Cross at University Hospital: It’s going to be a long haul, Lamar, you know that. But he’s going to be okay. Conservatively? Eighty percent recovery.

So, refusing to tune ahead in our minds, we wrestle the hour, hour after hour, and days fall away. Then weeks. We work his butt ragged, we make arrangements to continue rehab with home visits and half days at University in the capital, then one day we’re home.

For the first two weeks Dickens scarcely left Richard’s side. He moved onto the bed, stayed beside him, and would not budge or be budged, even to eat. I took in food for him on the same tray as Richard’s meals and set up a litter box at bedside. Richard, of course, asked if the litter box was for him.

A year later, Richard went back to teaching. It wasn’t easy for him, but then nothing in the last year and a half had been. And it’s still not. The limp got better but it’s there and always will be, and I still listen for it, even when he’s two rooms away. There are days when his hand won’t do as bid, when he drops or crushes what he tries to hold, days when words, mostly proper nouns but sometimes
shirt
or
schedule
or
sandwich
, flee him. They walk the plank of my tongue and leap off the side to oblivion, Richard says. And: Each day is a gift—in tacky wrapping paper.

So each day I’m reminded of what we can do, and the limits of it. And the hours surprise me with reminders of how close Richard and I have become, for it’s as though, physically and emotionally, I was with him through every moment of pain, of fear, of disability.

Half days worked so well for Richard at University Hospital that I decided they’d suit me too, so when I went back to work, I cut my patient load and time in the office, and scheduled OR only on Mondays. One of the new arrivals had taken care of my patients while I was away. Some stayed with her, some returned,
some strayed to other physicians. Maryanne was kept busy for a while forwarding medical records, after which she decided she liked the new hours too, worked when I did, and had the rest of her time free.

After one semester of audit and two of provisional classwork, Nathan was offered early admission to the university and a scholarship. His mother moved the family there, where she landed a job as hostess at one of the best restaurants in town.

During convalescence, Richard wrote a novel,
Deadline
—with, he said, no agenda or motive save to keep himself occupied and on focus. It began with a writer much like my father standing on his ragged porch reading a letter from, he had supposed, a fan.

Dear Paul Bleating,

Recently I have been commissioned by the New York Times to write your obituary. I have of course done my homework, as it were, and fully plan on discussing your early development as a romance writer under numerous bylines, the importance of the nonfiction you contributed to
Popular Mechanics,
the origin and creation of your much-neglected novel
Whatsit
—among much else.

I have one question for you.

Can you tell me when you plan to die? I work much better with a deadline.

Sincerely,

Simon Rapaport

P.S. Also, I need the money.

I read it one late afternoon sitting at the kitchen table where so much had happened. I had no idea this was what he had been
doing with his time. Every word and page was unmistakably, indelibly Richard. It went from weird to funny to funny weird. Don Westlake would have loved it.

Scattered throughout were misread signs, and caricatures of people we knew: the anonymous driver of Big Orange the VW, Sheriff Roy (who came off a lot like Jim Thompson’s sheriffs from
The Killer Inside Me
and
Pop. 1280
without the cruelty and psychosis), a couple of our recent mayors, a mysterious female federal agent named Bobbie, a tap-dancing doctor who for hundreds of years had appeared from nowhere whenever need was great, saved and repaired lives, then vanished.