The Bog (36 page)

“We took some blood to test for hepatitis from the bog water,” Dr. Grosley was saying, when one of the nurses suddenly interrupted.

“His eyes!” she said excitedly.

David directed his attention to Tuck’s eyes and saw that his lids had also started to quiver. Like a robot exploring long-dead circuits, the unseen energy shot through Tuck’s still limp body, here causing a facial spasm, and there a twitch in his leg, until finally a rapturous cry rose from everyone in the room as Tuck’s eyes slowly opened and he apparently struggled to focus on the faces around him.

David rushed forward and grasped his son’s hand. “Tuck!” he exclaimed. “It’s Daddy. Daddy’s here.” He looked hopefully down into his son’s face, but Tuck just continued to squint confusedly, his gaze examining David, and then moving away and looking at Dr. Grosley, and then each of the nurses in turn.

“Tuck!” David repeated, but still Tuck paid him no special mind. He looked at David with neither fear nor recognition, as if he saw no more that was familiar to him in David’s countenance than he saw in any of the other faces present.

David looked fearfully at Dr. Grosley.

“He may still be confused,” the older man returned. “Keep trying. See if you can get him to say something.”

David turned again to his son. “Tuck,” he murmured softly. “Can you remember me? Do you know your name? Your name is Tuck. Can you say that? Can you say
Tuck?’

Still Tuck only blinked perplexedly.

“Please,” David begged. “Please can you say something? Anything?”

For the first time Tuck seemed to register that he was being asked to do something, and he looked at David slightly more penetratingly than before.

“
Tuck,
” David said, mouthing the words more slowly. “Can you say
Tuck
?”

He paused and everyone watched Tuck with silent anticipation, and then finally the child opened his mouth. For a moment nothing came out, as he apparently experienced anew the feeling of having vocal cords, and then at last a slow and faltering cascade of syllables crept forth. But everyone in the room remained tensely silent, for the sounds that came out had been unintelligible and more like the slurred and impenetrable stammerings of a stroke victim than coherent human speech.

David’s face fell and Dr. Grosley quickly grasped his arm comfortingly.

“Sometimes, if the speech centers of the brain have been damaged, many other functions still remain intact. Has your son learned to read yet?”

David nodded.

“Are there any written words, perhaps his name or something, that he would display a more than normal recognition of?”

David thought about it for a moment. “Yes, I believe so,” he replied.

Dr. Grosley withdrew a felt-tip pen from his pocket and took a piece of paper from a tablet near the bed. “Write the word here in large, bold letters.”

David did as requested. With slow and measured strokes he spelled out the word MOXIE. Dr. Grosley took the paper back from him and looked at the word, blinking several times and then smiling faintly.

“Now let’s see,” he said. He held the paper up a foot or two in front of Tuck’s face and Tuck focused on the marking on the paper.

“Watch his lips to see if he tries to mouth the word silently,” he instructed.

Again everyone in the room went silent, and for several seconds Tuck continued to scrutinize the word on the paper, the black against the white. But his lips did not move, nor did he register even the faintest hint of recognition. He looked up blankly at the people around him, still paying no more mind to David’s face than he did to any of the others present. A pall fell over the room.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Macauley,” one of the nurses said, and David turned to Dr. Grosley anxiously.

“What does it mean?” he asked, whatever hope he had so recently fostered now rapidly slipping away.

Dr. Grosley’s gaze became evasive and downcast. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It appears that your son’s brain damage is more extensive than we had expected.

“What does that mean?” David repeated.

Dr. Grosley looked at him grimly. “It’s difficult to say. At the very least it means that your son as you knew him is no longer there. There may be remnants of his memories of who he once was somewhere deep in his mind, but the fact that he displays absolutely no recognition of you, or his name, or the word that we have just shown him indicates that this information is pretty much absent from his mind.”

“And at the very worst?” David asked, detecting in the way that Dr. Grosley had couched his remark that there were darker tidings to come.

“Well certainly we now know that at least some brain damage has occurred. However, given that we still don’t know the extent of the damage, or what learning disabilities it has brought with it, it will still be quite some time before we can predict how much, if at all, Tuck might recover from his current condition. In the worst scenario he may remain like this forever, a perpetual infant. However, if the damage is not too severe, through therapy and a great deal of love and patience, in a few years we may be able to instill in him a few new memories, we may even, in time, be able to teach him to speak and read once again.”

In the next several days it was discovered that Tuck’s motor functions had remained unimpaired, and although he was wobbly he could still manipulate objects and walk by himself. However, he still continued to display no more than what had become a familiar and trusting acceptance of David’s presence, and, in fact, displayed more excitement at the presence of a nurse that he had taken a liking to than he did toward his own father. Occasionally, he also persevered in his attempts at human speech, but these remained garbled and indecipherable, and Tuck seemed almost puzzled by this fact, as if something deep inside him recalled communicating with people in this manner, and was now baffled and frustrated at the process no longer working.

Learning the truth about Tuck’s condition had also pretty much brought David to his knees. When he was with his son, or what was left of his son, he forced himself to be cheerful and encouraging, but when he was alone he was desolate. The loss of Tuck as he had known and loved him, combined with the unrelenting awareness of Grenville’s stranglehold on his family, had left David a broken man. He didn’t sleep much and he seldom ate, and by the time Dr. Grosley said it would be all right to take Tuck home and continue nursing him back to health there, David was like a man deranged, his hair tousled, his gaze blank and frightening, and his clothing unkempt. It was as he was out in the parking lot ready to bring the car around to pick up Tuck that he saw a figure approaching him in the darkness.

He looked up agitatedly, primed to run at a moment’s notice, and then he realized it was Brad.

“Dr. Macauley...
David,
” the younger man called out.

“Brad, what are you doing here?”

Brad stepped into the circle of one of the parking-lot lights and stood about four feet from David.

“I was so worried about you,” he returned. “And Mrs. Macauley. I hadn’t heard from you and then a friend of mine who’s an intern here called me and told me what happened to Tuck. I’m so sorry.”

David looked at his graduate assistant nervously. He was happy to see him, indeed, thrilled at the sight of a familiar and comforting face. But he was also afraid, for he knew that he was still bound by Grenville’s command of silence.

“How is Mrs. Macauley... ah,
Melanie
doing?”

“Not well, I’m afraid,” David stammered in return. Brad’s forehead furrowed as he shook his head sympathetically. “God, I’m sorry to hear about all of this. Listen, I don’t want to pressure you about the digs because I know that’s got to be the last thing on your mind, but is there anything I can do to help you out? Anything at all?”

David felt a wave of affection for the younger man flow through him and he yearned desperately to be able to open up to him, to let everything that was happening to him just come flooding forth, but he knew that he could not. “No,” he said as the evening wind blew up gustily around them.

“Do you think I could maybe visit, come around some day this week to see how things are going?”

“No,” David repeated quickly, fearing the consequences. He looked at the younger man and saw that his feelings appeared to be hurt by the brusqueness of his refusal. “I’m sorry, Brad,” he said in a more amicable tone. “It’s just that... well, you’ve got to understand Melanie’s in pretty bad shape, and I appreciate your offer. I appreciate it more than you may even imagine, but I just don’t want to chance setting Melanie off. I hope you’ll be patient with me on this.”

“Sure, whatever you say,” Brad said softly.

David looked at his watch and then back at the younger man, his eyes filled with conflicting emotion. “I’m sorry, Brad. I really have to be going.”

Brad looked bewilderedly at him as David fidgeted and prepared to leave.

“Dr. Macauley... ah, I mean, David?”

“Yes?”

“Are you sure everything’s all right? I mean, I know you must be going through hell, but I get a strange feeling there’s more to it than that, there’s something else going on that you’re not telling me.” Brad reached out and took David by the arm and David looked down, realizing that such a bold gesture of affection probably took every ounce of nerve that the younger man possessed.

He looked up into the younger man’s eyes and was swept again with the urge to confide in him. After all, what more could happen to him? What terrible blow could fate or Grenville deliver him that would make him any more miserable? The wind blew again, and he looked around nervously as he realized that even if Julia had taken the form of an insect, if they strode together full face into the wind she might never be able to flutter close enough to them to hear, to know that he was betraying any secrets.

His heart began to pound. “There is something I’m not telling you, Brad, but we’ve got to walk.” He looked around again. “I don’t want to be overheard.”

“But there’s no one else in the parking lot,” Brad countered, looking even more concerned.

“It doesn’t matter!” David snapped. “Follow me.” He turned around and started walking into the wind.

They strode out into an open space in the parking lot and David continued to look fearfully about.

“Well, what is it?” Brad prodded.

David looked at the younger man once more and was about to tell him when suddenly he was swept with a constricting fear. Was he doing the right thing? Or was Grenville listening somehow, through some artifice that he didn’t even know about?

He struggled to force the words out. “It’s more fantastic than anything you’ve ever encountered before in your life. Brad, I don’t expect for you to believe me, but certainly you know I’m not the sort of man to make something like this up. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever been up against. It’s—”

And then he froze in midword as the shadow moved about them. And he screamed.

“Dr. Macauley!” Brad called after him, but it was of no use. David just kept running until he reached the Volvo and got in, leaving the younger man standing in the halo of a parking-lot light and watching the lazy flutterings of an errant moth.

Melanie took her first sight of her son as well as anyone might have expected her to, and it broke her heart when he looked at her with the same vacant stare that he had first offered David. Tuck was still quite weak from his accident and slept a great deal, but over the course of the next several days his motor skills improved with such remarkable rapidity that he was feeding himself and walking around as if nothing had happened. His mental condition, however, did not improve, and he would occasionally scrutinize his favorite toys as if they were the most cryptic objects he had ever seen. He also continued to attempt to speak, and when he did so, would stammer incoherently with such a desperate longing to be understood that it never failed to unnerve them and send them from the room to conceal their tears. Try as they might to maintain an optimistic facade in front of Tuck, their own grief and disappointment soon seemed to become apparent to him, and he himself sunk into despair as if he too were tortured by the disabled brain that now entrapped him.

To assist them in their fight against the unrelenting gloom that now encompassed them, nature saw fit to batter the valley with a torrential rain, and it was after two days of this, when David could not fathom what else could possibly befall them, that they received a telephone call. Katy answered it, and after the caller had apparently identified himself, she laid the phone down and started up the stairs.

“Katy,” David called after her. “Who is it?”

“It’s Dr. Grosley,” she returned.

“Well, let your mother sleep. I’ll take the call,” David said, starting toward the telephone.

“No,” Katy returned. “Dr. Grosley asked especially to speak to her. He said it was important.”

David hesitated, still wondering if it would be best if he took the call, but then gave in. “All right,” he said, motioning his daughter on.

Katy roused her mother and a minute later Melanie came groggily down the steps in her nightgown. “Hello? Oh, hello, Dr. Grosley... Yes. Well, I suppose so.” David stood in the doorway listening in to the call and watching Melanie’s expression with interest.

Suddenly Melanie went deathly white. “No!” she gasped. And then she fainted, the phone tumbling out of her hand and rattling against the floor.

“Hello? Hello?” came Dr. Grosley’s muted voice from the receiver as David quickly knelt down by his wife to check her. He picked up the dangling telephone.

“Dr. Grosley, this is Mr. Macauley. It appears that my wife has passed out.”

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Grosley returned. “I do hope she wasn’t hurt?”

David continued to examine his wife as he spoke. “No, I don’t think so. I think she just fainted.”

“I see. Perhaps she was just overcome by the news I gave her.”

“Why?” David said worriedly. “What did you tell her?”

There was a pause before Dr. Grosley’s voice once again sounded at the other end of the line. “Well, good news, I hope. Some of the results of the tests I ran on her just came back. It appears that she’s pregnant. The two of you are going to have another baby.”