Captain Quad (9 page)

The climb up from the pit of despondency had been a long and precarious one. On that bitter January evening eight months before, when Kelly roused as if from a nightmare to find herself naked on her bed with a fistful of deadly pharmaceuticals, she had run gagging for the toilet, not because she'd stuffed all that crap down her throat but because she'd even contemplated doing so.

But perhaps "contemplated" was too strong a word. It suggested the persistence of will where for a few critical hours none had existed. She'd been driven to the medicine cabinet by the same sort of blind imperative that compels the salmon to batter itself implacably upstream or the lemming to scrabble to its death during one of its strange but indistractible migrations. And like a dream, parts of that evening were lost to memory. She knew only that she'd left the hospital and, sometime later, gaped down in horror at her unclenching fist. The dye had run from the sweat-softened capsules, the stark pastels staining her palm, and some of the tablets had been crushed to a powder. Moments later, hunched over the toilet, she'd realized with a dull kind of shock that she'd sunk as low as she could without vanishing. And she decided then that it was time to fight her way back. Life was too precious.

But the way things had ended with Peter, as cruel and unexpected as a blizzard in August, had for those few lost hours made life seem unendurable.

It had been cold that day, the raw, glacial sort of cold that penetrated even the heaviest outerwear. Crystalline frost hung in the bracing air, and what little snow there was had been leached to a brittle powder. The bus let her off a hundred yards from the main entrance, and she hustled along the icy walkway, anxious for the well-lit warmth of the hospital. The arctic air jabbed at her eyes, and in the few moments it took to reach the automatic doors, tears formed frozen tracks on her cheeks. As she normally did, she stopped by the Ladies' Auxiliary boutique and scanned the magazine stand, hoping to find something that might spark Peter's interest. When he wasn't watching TV, he read voraciously, using a mouth-held page turner and a specialized book rest. She and Sam could barely keep up with his consumption. She picked up the latest issues of Omni, Time, and People, and a couple of Dairy Milk chocolate bars. Then she boarded the elevator and punched the button for the ninth floor.

The odor up here was distinctive, and it seldom failed to sicken her. It was the smell of human decay—bowels evacuated into lonely beds, urine leaked into baggy pajamas, flesh laid open in the weepy putrescence of bedsores. To Kelly it was the stench of slow defeat, of the toppling bastions of life against death, and it tortured her that Peter was a part of its source.

When she saw him that day, lying with his back to her, his hands arranged in a nerveless cross on his pillow, her immediate instinct was to flee. She came in at the same time every day, had done so for months, and until today Peter had always ensured that the nurses left him facing the door so he could watch her come in.

A dread premonition assailed her.

"Peter?" she whispered from the doorway.

But there was no response, and with a sigh of relief Kelly realized that he was sleeping. She tiptoed into the room, deciding she would sit by the window and read until—

"We have to talk," Peter said in a voice as wintry as the weather outside.

"Oh, you're awake," Kelly said, her mind filling with a hundred childlike evasions. For some time now a part of her had known this was coming, the same way a part of her understood that her eventual death was inevitable, but she rejected the knowledge with the same stubborn vehemence. To deal with it in any other way was to court a creeping insanity.

She plunked her package on the bed table and wriggled out of her coat, the words spilling out of her in a nonstop flood of hopelessness. "I brought you a couple of magazines. No porno, I'm afraid. Catholic hospital and all that. Did you go outside today? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. Like my gramps used to say, it's colder'n a witch's tit out there. I nearly froze mine off getting here—"

"Kelly—"

"Did Sam—"

"Kelly, please." His eyes were like glazed marbles. "Sit down."

"Okay."

She dragged up a chair, the sound of its legs against the tiles like the ratcheting gears of a guillotine, and positioned it next to the bed. Before sitting, she leaned forward to kiss him. It was like kissing a wood carving.

"I've had this conversation with myself a thousand times," Peter said, and Kelly's eyes filled with tears at the emptiness in his voice. "I sure never thought I'd have to say anything like it to you—"

"Then don't," Kelly cut in. "Don't say anything."

"It's too late for that, Kelly." He looked up at her, and Kelly saw that same emptiness swirling in his eyes. "It's over. That's what we've both got to face. I'm not going to get better, Kelly."

"I know that, Peter. But that doesn't mean we can't—"

"Yes, that's exactly what it means. We can't. I can't." He looked away from her, his voice icy with resolve. "I want you to go now, Kelly. Right now. I want you to leave here and never come back."

Kelly laughed, but it was a harsh sound with no humor in it. "I can't do that, Peter. I love you. I—"

"I'm serious, Kelly. Dead serious." Now it was Peter's turn to laugh. "Dead. Yeah, that's it. I'm dead. Peter Gardner's dead. The guy you fell in love with. The guy who fell in love with you. I'm not him anymore, Kelly. I'm a. . . thing now. A sill plant that needs constant watering, somebody to turn it to the sun every day."

"Please," Kelly said, the tears already spilling. "Stop this."

"I can't." He regarded her again, the planes of his face quivering in an effort to contain his misery. "Christ, Kelly, don't you understand? Every time I see you I'm reminded of the things I can't do, the things I'll never be, and the things we'll never share. I can't take it anymore, and if you don't want to torture me you'll leave and never come back."

The fabric of a thousand heartbroken arguments shredded in the force of this unalterable truth, and Kelly could only sit there and look at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. Months of buried yearning burst to the surface then like shifting folds of bedrock, and she wanted to throw herself on top of him, arouse him so intensely that her love would override the rent in his spine, give him life, make him see how empty the future would be without her. Giving in to it, she stood and leaned over him, her hands reaching down for his face. . .

"Don't," Peter said, turning his head away.

Let's just give it some time, she wanted to beg him. We can work it out.

But she knew he was right.

She stood, pulled on her coat, and left.

"Penny for your thoughts."

Kelly gave a cry of surprise. She'd been sitting by the window, staring out over Lake Ontario, and had not heard Marti come in. Now, turning to face her friend, she scrubbed away the tears and did her best to put on a smile.

"Something in my eye," she mumbled.

"Sure," Marti said, whipping off her headband and unlacing her runners. "And I've got seven tits."

Kelly laughed—not a big one, but a laugh nonetheless. "I bet that makes you a hit on the dance floor."

"Cute," Marti said, shucking her sweat suit and tossing it on her bed. Her creamy complexion was flushed from her run, and her green eyes sparkled with life. "But humor isn't going to get you out of this one." She put on a robe, then pulled up a chair and sat beside Kelly at the window. "I think it's high time you and I had a chat." She brushed Kelly's bangs from her face. "We're friends, Kelly. Best friends. I love you, you silly shit. And besides, we're roomies now, and the rule states there should be no dark secrets untold."

"What rule?" Kelly said, thinking that maybe she should get some of this off her chest. Lance out the poison. What harm could it do? Marti knew most of it. They'd talked for hours on the phone over the course of the previous winter, and Marti had been home to Sudbury for Christmas and the March break. But Kelly had never told anyone about that horrible January afternoon.

"My rule," Marti said, rolling up her sleeve and flashing an impressive, flexed bicep.

Kelly took a stuttering breath. "You asked for it," she said. And for the first time since its sorry inception, she told the story out loud.

"I spent the rest of the winter in a kind of walking coma," Kelly said, lacing her fingers around the steaming cup of tea Marti had fixed for her. "I just sat there, drowning in days, waiting for something to happen."

She'd been talking for almost an hour. Through it all, Marti had remained quietly attentive, her compassion evident in her eyes. Kelly had a true friend in Marti, and she was grateful.

"Why did you wait so long to tell me?"

"Shame," Kelly said, averting her eyes. "And fear. I thought I was losing my mind. I mean, how could life be so. . . bright and wondrous one minute, then black as a mine shaft the next? It was like standing on a high cliff and being unable to come up with a single reason why you shouldn't just fling yourself over the edge."

Marti stood, the mechanical swiftness of the movement indicating a sudden resolve. For Marti, life was reducible to a series of straight forward choices. And she'd just made one of them.

"Get dressed," she said. "We're going out."

Arguments clanked in Kelly's mind like coins in a one-armed bandit. She knew what Marti wanted. She wanted to drag her out to a loud, smoky pub and get her bombed. In Marti's mind there was no better salve for a broken heart than a righteous, mind-curdling piss-up. Get so bent out of shape that you have to drag out your wallet just to introduce yourself. . . and then later, when you're sicking it all up, you sick up the hurt, too. Replace the heartache with simple physical pain—and then set about the business of healing.

"What the hell," Kelly said, surprising them both. "Let's do it."

If there was any single moment at which Kelly Wheeler began her new life, it was then.

ELEVEN

But for Peter there would be no new life. His mother's last visit had taught him that; the refusal of his body to respond reinforced it. And he tried, God knew he tried. In the withering reaches of the night, alone in his private room, he whipped his brain into a frenzy of concentration, focusing every buzzing synapse onto a single distant muscle, willing his finger or his knee or his baby toe to move! But of course it never did, and the frustration riddled him like a burst from an Uzi, bringing hot tears and hopeless, bellowed cries. For a while the nurses attempted to console him, creeping in with their flashlights like cat burglars and mouthing placatory phrases from the foot of his bed. But eventually even these reluctant ministrations were withdrawn, to be replaced by the pharmaceutical nightstick. Oh, yeah. His old buddy Lowe had an answer for everything.

"If he won't shut up, then we'll shut him up," Peter heard the good doctor say one sleepless night to a nurse outside his door. "He's not the only quad on the ward. Keep him quiet."

That had been his first lesson in getting along. There would be others.

At first, spending the hours in a warm narcotic haze didn't seem all that bad, measured against the razor-edged awareness his condition seemed to impose on him—since his mind was the only thing still alive, it remained almost painfully alert. The drugs brought dreams, and in his dreams he was whole again. Maybe even better than whole. In his dreams he could fly. But gradually he began to cherish his awareness, even if for little more than to follow the daily soaps. And the cost was merely compliance. Don't balk, don't shout, don't complain. Just do as you're told.

Just lie there.

And lie there he did. He lay there and read. Lay there and listened to music. Lay there and watched the tube. He did get around some, mostly at the insistence of his captors—and as the months droned past, that was precisely how he came to view them, as state-employed jailers who resented his dependence upon them. They bundled him into his motorized wheelchair—a technological marvel that he controlled with his chin, allowing him a good deal more mobility than he would have thought possible—and parked him in the common room or the lobby or, weather permitting on the rooftop patio overlooking Ramsey Lake.

For a while Peter lost what the other quads referred to as his patio privileges. In that black month following his mother's last visit, he'd racked his brains for a means to end his life. He even contemplated asking Sam for assistance, but he knew that Sam could never do it; the mere mention of such a thing would haunt the kid for the rest of his days.

The solution came in a flash of black inspiration, on a balmy, mid-September weekday, the last of a fleeting Indian summer. In spite of Peter's objections, his keepers had wheeled him up to the patio that day. . . and what a day it was. Unmuddied by the late summer haze, the air was clear to the point of unreality, seeming more like crystalline tropical water than dry, breathable gas. On the rocky hills bordering the lake, bonfires blazed in the scattered maples, while the rest, a tenacious mixture of poplar and birch, smoldered a cool and shimmering yellow. Stationed by the low frost fence that enclosed the patio, Peter felt unexpectedly at peace for the first time since his accident.

It was only later that he understood why.

Most of the other gimps had been out that day, too, their insectile limbs sheathed in flannel blankets—the Quad Squad, as Peter had come to think of them. The supervising nurse had been standing with her back to him, chatting with a workman—part of a three-man crew whose task it was to repair and repaint the rusted frost fence—when Peter unraveled the source of his calm.

He was going to end his life—if you could call it a life—on this autumn day, and had in some way known that since they'd rolled him out on the deck. He'd noticed the missing section of fence, but its significance had not immediately registered, at least not consciously. Located at the back of the building, the open section was just wide enough for a motorized wheelchair—and the drop was a sheer twelve stories to the paved parking lot below.