Critical Injuries (3 page)

Tied Up, Bound Down

The doctor's name, the younger, dark-haired guy she saw hovering over her, across her bedside from Lyle, is apparently Grant. “Thanks, Dr. Grant,” Isla hears Lyle's ragged voice saying from, it must be, a doorway which, from her angle, she cannot see. “I'd like her children to be able to talk to you tomorrow. What time works best?”

Good Lyle. Knowing that would be important, and then making it happen, forcing it to. She knows, although not very personally, about the rushed lives of doctors, and their reluctance, too, to get very involved with families. They have a point. She isn't sure herself that she wants Jamie and Alix hanging over her, disrupting further what is already an odd and awful disruption. But it's necessary, among family, to bear anything; and maybe they'll rise to the occasion, who knows? Depending, perhaps, on what the occasion actually is. Or on how weary they are of their troublesome parents' distressing events.

Well though, it's her turn, isn't it?

At least she can assume she's not dying. If Jamie and Alix don't need to see Dr. Grant till tomorrow, it implies there will be a tomorrow, and that there's something to talk about. She would like to know what that is. Jamie and Alix aren't the only ones in the dark.

She would like at least not to be scared; not
this
scared.

When she says, “Lyle?” the word comes out plain. So she is making some progress here, unless of course it's only plain in her ears and not in the room. But if it is clear, surely next thing she knows she'll be swinging her legs over the side of the bed, standing up, getting out.

Getting out of where? Hospital, obviously, but which one and what sort? Lyle must have gone off with the doctor. Within the range of her vision, there's only off-whiteness, broken by chrome. A creamy, pitted-tiled ceiling. Something nearby is making slow whuffing sounds, like the breath of a giant. There's also something stuck into her nose, although it doesn't impede breathing, which seems strange. The actual terror, though, lies in this business of feeling nothing, except in her head. She can't figure it out, a circumstance in which there's no sensation, not even pain. If she is lying down, which she obviously is, there should be a feeling of flatness, of her spine, shoulders, legs, and arms actually resting on something. If she is in a bed, she should also be able to feel some weight and pressure, even if it's only of a sheet tucking her in.

Oh please, she wants to be
home
. She wants whatever this is to be undone, so that she can go back with Lyle to their miraculous life. This isn't fair, she has had, in the scheme of things, barely a taste of this reward, this well-earned achievement. She is owed so much more! She wants to go
home
.

Eight years ago, the first time she saw Lyle's farm, or at least the house and the property directly around it on what isn't quite a farm, more a country place, she thought she'd died and gone to heaven. “But this is perfect,” she said as they joggled the final potholed metres in his truck up the laneway. “Perfect.”

Previous to meeting him she would, mistakenly and urbanly, have called the laneway a driveway. She was nervous then, too, about travelling into what as far as she knew was a wilderness, like a movie, like
Deliverance
, something like that, with a man she'd only known a few weeks. Because who knows what can happen in a man's heart when he's removed from influences, controls? There was something good in his features, both kindness and sharpness around his eyes, but who really knew?

So she drove with him up that long driveway, laneway, wondering and slightly fearful. Then was struck in the heart by what she saw. “It's a classic, all right,” he agreed. It was early days. Isla mistrusted the business of getting to know each other, perhaps he did, too, because it would simply, likely, mean moving towards outcomes in which she had no faith and for which she mainly thought, after James, she'd lost heart. “Takes a lot of work, though.” She could feel Lyle's pride as he watched her regarding the place.

“But it must be worth every minute. It's beautiful.” So it was.
Beautiful
was inadequate. Even
perfect
fell short.
Sanctuary
might have come close.

For him, too, he said. He had lived there for three years by the time he and Isla drove up that laneway. He had spent almost all his spare time in those years improving it, tearing down, building up, making it his. If Isla was already inclining, dubiously, in favour of affection for him, she fell in love with his home. As far as she knows he has never been jealous of that, or suspicious of motives. In fact she has thought that if she hadn't fallen in love at first sight with the place he'd cared for and worked on so hard, he would have thought less of her. His home was not exactly a test, but it was still something that could be failed.

The laneway was lined densely and arced over with big, leaning old weeping willows and maples. “It washes out every year,” he said, explaining the potholes and ruts. “Takes a few loads of fill and gravel, late spring.” Then abruptly, what was revealed at the end, around a slight curve, was a two-storey, yellow brick house, solid and plain except for its copper-toned roof and intricate corners designed with extra interlaced bricks. Dark green shutters sheltered spare, rectangular windows, and a deep-green-painted porch wrapped itself around two sides of the house, one side at that moment in full sunshine, the other shaded by another arching maple. Curved wooden and wicker chairs and tables, a roll-up sailcloth blind at one end, also deep green.

This was where he came after his wife Sandra died, of breast cancer, which had led to clusters of other cancers, more than rampant enough to eat her alive, and after he'd shepherded his two nearly grown sons, twins, whom Isla hadn't yet met, through adolescence and grief, and after he'd recovered his own balance and begun looking around, observing what his solitary desires might be, and had gone out in pursuit of them, coming, finally, upon this place.

“What I decided I wanted,” he told her, “after all the years in the city, was space. Just elbow room. Perhaps it's partly longing for something you haven't had, but do you find that in one situation, you sometimes have dreams of another?” Oh yes. Isla nodded, but although he paused, eyebrows raised, she didn't begin saying why, or how, or in what circumstances that had occurred.

“All those years I'd lived with Sandy, and then, very shortly, the boys, and I had no idea what being alone would be like. Frightening, of course, I expected that in a way, trying something that would seriously require some effort, but a challenge. And a kind of triumph if it turned out. I made a couple of real estate agents nuts showing me this, showing me that, when all I knew was that it had to be within driving distance of work and that I'd know when I saw it.

“And then the agent called, said something had just come on the market, an estate sale, she hadn't seen it but it might be a good deal, although she'd heard it was also fairly rundown. I came out on my own, mostly out of guilt by then about wasting her time. Couldn't find the place to begin with, went back and forth past the laneway, because it doesn't look as if it goes anywhere, but finally I gave up and turned in. Hit bottom a couple of times on the laneway, bounced around, got pissed off and then — there it was. Coming around that curve and that was it. I didn't care what it cost, or how much work it was going to take, or what I'd have to do. It was the most amazing thing ever happened to me in my life. Well, except for the boys being born, but that's different. This was mine. It was just me. And it was a surprise, even a shock. The boys were totally right, and so was this, but it was an entirely different thing.” Isla had thought of the births of her own kids: magic, yes. Shocks and surprises, indeed.

So many aspects to be leery of, with a still-unfamiliar man who came with a jam-packed history: a dead wife growing, perhaps, increasingly golden with time; the naturally passionate attachment to offspring, which Isla herself knew something about; even a susceptibility to miraculous places. Isla wondered why he had taken her there, what reason she'd imagined for going there with him. “And now you're here,” he'd said then, “and that seems right, too.”

So it was. And oh, she wants to be there. They should not have left, they should not have stepped from that porch, climbed into that truck, gone off for ice cream. They could have been safe.

But instead, here she is; and now here he is, too, back in this strange off-white room. He is lowering himself beside another hospital bed, leaning carefully over another wife, his features looking pinched, the lines that run from the side of his nose down past his lips deeper than normal. He looks, this man to whom Isla edged closer and closer before finally giving up, giving in, falling into faith, weary now; nearly old. God knows how she looks. “Mirror,” she says.

He is clearly alarmed. “Oh no, not yet. You're still kind of wonky.”
Wonky
: which means distorted and skewed. Which may also mean scary.

He can't realize it's not just about seeing her face, it's seeing that she has one; that she's still real at all. “Mirror,” she repeats, and he sighs and stands and moves out of her line of vision.

In a few moments he's beside her again, holding a round green-plastic-framed mirror to his chest, arms folded across it. “Listen,” he says, “it'll probably look worse to you than to anyone else. It's too soon, you're still puffy and bruised. Partly because of the tubes. So don't be shocked, okay? You're going to be fine.” If she could, she would gesture impatiently. He sighs and steps forward, turns the mirror away from himself, aims it directly above her.

Oh. He should have warned her. Somebody should have said.

This is a gargoyle. Grey-skinned, except for some bruising near her nostrils. Tubes, a nasty yellowish colour, holding those nostrils wide above a plastic span joining them. Eyes, her wide blue eyes diminished to slitty, peering things in a bed of charcoal flesh. Her skin is stretched thin over cheeks, chin, jowls — she has jowls! — that have bloated, look full to bursting. Her curly, cropped auburn hair, discernibly grey at the roots from this angle, is spiked and dirty. And clamping the whole thing, a metal frame, curved and padded. Which accounts for why her head doesn't move, and why she has to look straight up into this mirror or slant her eyes as best she can sideways.

Oh. This is the horror Lyle's been looking at. For how long? If she could do one thing, one single thing, she would put her hands over this face.

“Tell me,” she says, and watches Lyle's lips turn briefly inward, as he takes a difficult breath. She is relieved that she can see and hear even minor events exceptionally clearly, and wonders if that's supposed to be some sort of compensation for loss, for what she can't put her fingers on.

For what, if she could put her fingers on it, she wouldn't be able to feel.

Where are her fingers? What are they doing? Lyle's hands are down there somewhere, around where hers should probably be, his clever deft hands she would like to be holding. When they were in court, in the moments before Jamie's verdict was announced, Lyle's hand was the strongest, most comforting, sturdiest and most reliable set of bones and flesh in the world. She wondered right then how she would have managed to sit there without that hand, and what on earth she'd hung onto before it came along. She squeezed it, he said later, numb. Maybe now he's squeezing hers numb.

She not only looks grotesque, it seems she exists now only in her head. This is like an old horror movie: a laboratory run by a mad, wild-haired scientist, with a disembodied head in a jar, a battle between the proud but horrified scientist and the furiously calculating, raging brain. The scientist is a victim of his own sacrilegious ambition to create. The head, reliant on wits and ruthlessness, is also a victim of that sacrilegious ambition. Nobody wins. Everything is destroyed, for the error of hubris, the mistake of going too far.

They were only going for ice cream, not far at all.

“Tell me!” Because terror does not improve for its causes being unknown.

Vertebrae. Surgery. Bullet.

In bitter moments James used to look at her, narrow-eyed, narrow-lipped, threateningly low-voiced, and say, “Don't ask anything you're not ready to hear the answer to.” It eventually became obvious what he must have meant. Isla would say there are some questions for whose answers there's no such thing as being prepared, but which there's also, as with the mirror, no option about asking. She also thinks that her outlook always was more complex and interesting than James's, who turned out to be disappointingly simple-minded, really.

“Do you remember any of it?” Lyle's voice is low, slightly trembling, determinedly gentle. And oh, of course, he'd have no way to know what she knows and what she does not. He has no idea where gaps begin and end, and where he should start filling them in. Funny how she must have assumed he would know. Funny how much she has come to imagine he understands.

Perhaps his deepest desire at the moment is to run out of the room. Or to rage, or to weep. At any rate, likely his deepest desire is not to sit here regarding her, looking old and speaking further words she's pretty sure she's not keen to hear, but must. “I'm sorry,” she says, meaning in a general sort of way, sorry for imposing, taking his energy, time, generosity of spirit, for looking hideous and for being a burden in a way she doesn't yet understand, and which she has to rely on him to make clear. Even that, the explanation, is something he signed up for, marrying her.