Deathwatch - Final (4 page)

"All right," Ruth said, nodding.

When I looked back, Abby seemed to have fallen asleep, and her face was round again, her skin had taken on the clear translucence of childhood. The smell of violets was gone.

I stared at the small brass circlet of the housekeeping keys at Ruth's waist, they jingled softly while she moved around Abby and the noise sent wave after wave of vertigo through me. I left quickly, shaking.

Gabriel Wickstrom had told me if I wanted a drink I should hunt him up. I wanted one quite badly--certainly more than I'd ever wanted one in my drinking days at school.

- 6 -

"
I
t's the clothes," Ellie giggled. "Her clothes. It makes it easier for her to come through."

Abby nodded. She plucked at the frill of cotton lace disappearing in a froth under the quilt.

The twins were in the nursery, lying side by side and propped on their canopied bed. Now of course, they were no longer one, no longer joined. It was a week after the surgery, they were still bedridden, and Ruth had dressed them--once again--in clean nightgowns that had been worn by Regina.

"Not just worn--
owned
," Abby said, and I wondered if she read my mind.

"Can you tell us apart," Ellie added, and they both began to laugh.

"I only looked in to say goodnight," I said, still standing in the doorway, one hand resting on the jamb. I was aware that my palm was wet, the painted wood a little slick where I touched it. I took my hand away, folded my arms. I would not go in.

"Scaredy cat," Ellie said. Her eyes, even in the fireglow, were very bright.

I swallowed nervously. I'd avoided doctoring either of them since that day, but now in the semi-dark of the room, the image of Abby's churning hips floated on the edges of my brain, the sound of her cries were ringing in my ears. Not Abby, I told myself, Regina, Regina, Regina!

It was Saunders who rescued me. I heard his step, then a second later he was at my side.

"Go to sleep now," he told the girls, leaning inside the room. "Big day tomorrow, we're going to get you up and walking. I want you to get your rest."

The lamp was already out. He shut their door abruptly, and I felt relief wash over me as I moved down the hallway toward my own bed.

***

"I can't, I can't, it hurts!"

Tears streamed down Ellie's cheeks. Her small hands were firmly clasped inside her father's blocky palms. He was trying to lead her step by step across the nursery. Abby had just made the same trip successfully. I'd noticed her balance was slightly off, but then, she'd spent 12 years walking in tandem with her sister. She was seated now on the low hassock, her legs straight, her bare feet peeping out from under the hem of Regina's old nightdress.

"Do it, Ellie," she urged her sister.

Ellie closed her eyes, shook her head. Her face was a study in misery. Her left leg was drawn inwards, the foot lagging behind her right heel.

"I think she's more frightened than anything," I said to Saunders.

"No," she wailed, "it hurts." She dropped one hand, rubbing it gingerly alongside her flank, and with the motion, she swayed, her knees buckled and she was one faltering step away from collapsing onto the floor.

Saunders leaped forward and caught her.

Ellie shrieked, and this time, her left knee did give way. Saunders managed to get his arms under her slight body, and he laid her gently on the bed.

In an instant, he had her nightgown lifted and he was examining her. I took a step toward the bed, but hung back, half afraid to look at the child's body.

"Perhaps it's just a temporary weakness in the adductors," I said, closing my eyes, reciting from memory. "I've seen scissor gait treated with leg braces, passive exercises--then when she's strong enough and the muscles have been built up, she can move to a series of active--"

"Are you really that dense?" Saunders turned, hissing at me. "Look at this--"

I took a step nearer, and followed the line of his gaze. It was what the old timers called "hot flesh." Ellie had an infection brewing underneath the incision. The skin had gone red, there was swelling. There was no suppuration yet, no smell, no yellowish dribble of pus where Saunders gently pressed the girl's hip. We'd caught it in the early stages. "Wound gangrene," I began--

"It's osteomyelitis, you jackass," he snapped at me. "An infection in her bone."

"I know what it is," I said.

Saunders gave a snort. "Then you know what we have to do," he said.

"Surgery," I nodded uneasily, because I also knew what the treatment of choice was for clearing up infections in bone and bone marrow, and it wasn't something Abby or Ellie should even guess at. My eyes met Saunders's grey ones, and I knew he'd read my unease.

"I'm going to try and inject gentian violet first, and mercurochrome," he said softly.

The gaudy colors of both solutions--brilliant purple and sunset red--swirled in my mind. Both worked sometimes, I knew, but it was that other treatment, the one Ellie would wake to, that made me faintly queasy.

"No more operations," Ellie said. "Please." I saw she was not only frightened, but her eyes were dilated with fever as well. "I'm afraid by myself," she whispered.

"I'll stay with you," Abby soothed. "I'll be there when you wake up--"

"No!" Saunders and I shouted at the same time.

Both girls’ eyes had gone round, they knew something was amiss, but they didn't know what. We did.

"Let's get her prepped." Saunders's voice was dead, dry.

I nodded, not wanting to picture what would come next: The treatment of choice for bone infections was simple and chilling. You inserted maggots deep inside the dark red marrow…and you let them eat.

- 7 -

I
f it had been high summer I suppose we might have kept the secret from the girls. Gabriel or myself could've scouted the nearby fields for a rotting woodchuck or raided the local butcher's garbage tin for guts and offal. But it was mid-February, and although every ten years or so there'll be a wild extravaganza of nearly hot, sunny days before winter returns, it was still cold, with a thin snow-cover crusting the lawns and roadsides.

I don't know how she found out; but every day saw Abby more mobile, so perhaps she read the text of the Western Union Saunders sent to the Medical Supply House in New York City asking for meat maggots. Or maybe she was watching when Gabriel left empty-handed for the train station and returned with the large brown-wrapped package, his nose wrinkling at the thin smell coming up from inside the layers of paper and glass.

Or maybe she was peering through the keyhole when Saunders barked orders at me to hurry and I clawed at the layers of paper insulation to expose the large bell-shaped bottle. Inside was a huge greenish lump of rotting flesh shot through with holes like aged cheese. Winding and burrowing through the narrow tunnels--covering it in places like clots of moving string--were the pale bloodless maggots.

I know my stomach heaved at the sight. And it was a thousand times worse when I uncorked the wide mouth of the jar and placed the foul meat on a white enamel tray, then watched as Saunders picked the worms up one by one with a forceps and inserted them deep in the bony pocket where Ellie's hip and thigh joined.

I watched them dive, wriggling, beneath her soft skin that was a bruise of nacreous flesh and mottled trails of gentian violet, mercurochrome; and even if I knew that now we were fighting to save her life, that whether she walked without a limp was not the issue, I looked at the squirming mass and the gorge rose in my throat.

Perhaps Abby heard the sound of my running feet when I dashed for the sink, or the thick ragged noises I made when I bent, vomiting, over and over and over again.

In any case Abby knew, and she told her sister.

***

"Please. You've got to take them out." Ellie's eyes--normally china blue--had gone the dark of a starless night with fear. "I can feel them gnawing at me," she whispered. "I close my eyes and I hear it...." She swallowed, and now I saw thin tears spilling over the crest of her cheek.

"Do you want to lose your leg?" Andrew said. "If that infection spreads, it means an amputation."

"I don't care, I don't care," she moaned. "I'm not dead, I'm not dead, yet!" Her neck muscles strained, she tried to sit up. Andrew eased her back down, no one spoke for a moment. Then Ellie said softly: "Every time I shut my eyes I hear that hideous song, ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in your nostrils and out your mouth....’" Her voice, high and sweet, suddenly trailed off.

I stared at her, her face tight and hollow with terror, her small freckled hands clenching and unclenching the hem of the white sheet, and I thought,
it's not a healing, it's torture. We're going to drive this poor child mad--

"It's so dark in my head," Ellie said. "Just as if I were dead."

Andrew went to his medical cabinet. I watched him upend a vial of sodium veronal, plunge the needle inside the stopper and draw the liquid down into the glass syrette. "This will make you sleep, Ellie." He went to her side, took her arm lightly.

She pulled away. "I don't want to sleep. Take them out or let me die," she wailed.

"Hold her," he said to me.

Then he pushed the sleeve of her nightgown up, quickly swabbed the skin. I saw the needle sink into the thin flesh of her arm, and she cried out briefly.

A few seconds later, she was asleep.

"I'll stay with her a while," Saunders said, rubbing his brow. "You go," he paused. "Go and talk to Abby, find out what she said to her sister. She--" He stopped, his gray eyes met mine. "She won't tell me--she won't even look at me," he finished.

He sat heavily in a narrow straight chair next to his daughter's bed, his face tight with anxiety.

I was nearly at the door when I heard him ask softly, "Stuart, do you think we can still save her leg?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"The cut," he said, his eyes going far away. "We would have to cut so high up." He rolled the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. "It will be worse for her than if I'd never attempted the separation. She'll never walk. She might die. Oh, Ellie," he said, and his eyes went to her sleeping form, the soft rise and fall of her narrow chest. "Ellie. Never. I never meant it to be like this." Then he sank forward, lowering his face into both hands, and behind the veil of his palms and fingers, I heard him weep.

There was nothing I could say to ease him; I knew that. I left the office, the sound of his soft crying--as haunting as the ceaseless rush of a dark millrace--in my head.

- 8 -

T
he nursery was empty, the room itself heavily shadowed between the dark velveteen drapes and the waning light outside. I'd expected to find Abby reading or playing quietly and now I stood on the threshold, briefly puzzled.

Where was she?

I peered, squinting, into the dim recesses; at the same time I heard a low humming. It came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It was like the sound I imagined the old sailors described when they spoke of singing sands.

Aaaahhhhhhaaahhhh-
-

It was thin, rising and falling, a thready tune that drew one along its length, now dipping now falling--

Aaahhhhhhahahhhh--

There was such a beach I'd read about in Massachusetts in an old whaling village on Cape Ann. I thought of ships wrecked on jagged rocks, of siren songs and the smell of salt....

I strained, listening. The humming grew louder, and now in and around the vibrating note I heard soft music. I smelled brine--the sharp tang of sweat and body fluids.

I felt mesmerized, and I blinked to clear my mind, my head pivoting in a slow circle.  I opened my eyes, and now in the semi-dark of the room, I saw a woman seated before the banked fire, brushing her long auburn hair, the sound a crackling whisper as she stroked and stroked. She was humming the strains of some ancient ballad. I smelled salt. And violets.

She broke off suddenly and turned to me, smiling. She stood up, and I saw she was a tall woman. I guessed the crown of her head would fit neatly just below the cup of my chin.

I felt my heart skip a beat. There was nothing--nothing at all--of Abby in Regina Cahill.

***

"Where's Abby?" I asked, stupidly.

"Did you ever hear the expression, ‘Be what you want to become,’ Mr. Granville?" She paused while I shook my head, stunned by what I was seeing but could not really believe. "No? Well it's more popularly known among actors, I suppose, than medical students." She laughed lightly. I saw the red tip of her tongue protrude; she was wearing a set of small rice-sized freshwater pearls, and then, very delicately, she plucked the loop from her throat and absently put the necklace between her teeth to lightly suck and bite on. I felt my heart speed in my chest, then caught the drift of her words.

"...I suppose there are moments when even a student sees himself as a full-fledged surgeon, but actors--those who live--truly come to life--on the stage, they become what they must be. Have you heard, Mr. Granville, of those who live the parts they play, who eat and drink and fuck inside those minds?"

I was startled, and I flinched. This was 1893 and it was the first time I'd ever heard a woman say that word, and if you must know, to this day, even in this place where I am confined, where I've routinely seen women handle themselves--plunge their own fingers up the bloody tunnels of their raw and aching vaginas, I've never heard any woman say it out loud.

She went on. "Yes, to emotionally understand the part, those actors simply
be
what they must become. So even the simplest action...walking, or say, eating a meal in character--handling two dessert spoons primly or gaily tossing popcorn from the striped pasteboard box to their flung back mouths--becomes an exercise in being." There was a faraway look in the green eyes as if she were seeing deep into some other life. "But whether I have become Abby or she has become me, I don't know...."