The Cartoonist (20 page)

It was his car, all right.

Like a sleepwalker, Scott returned to the driver’s side of the car and tugged on the battered door. It screamed on ruined hinges. The spring adjustment groaned as he sat down, and the seat shifted back a notch before it locked.

He put his hands on the steering wheel and saw that it was bent.

Then he was sniffing the air, peering down beneath the dash, beside him, into the back seat. There was an odor in here, behind the still-new smells of the car—a musty, wet reek that reminded him of the time he found a dead mouse behind the washing machine in the basement at home. Rot or mold mingled with dampness and age. It was...was it?...the same smell he’d noticed around his wife’s corpse on the stretcher in the Emergency Room? That whiff of death?

Then he saw the lid of the Coleman cooler, jolted loose by the impact, and reaching back, shifted it all the way open. Inside, a half-eaten submarine sandwich floated in a pool of milky water. It was rank.

Scott pressed the lid shut and climbed out of the car. The Volvo was repairable, but he knew he could never drive it again. After today this was the last he wanted to see of it. He would tell the mechanic to have it towed away or let him sell it for parts or scrap.

He turned back toward Holley, who leaned patiently against his Mercedes. Then something occurred to him and he leaned in through the open door to confirm it.

There were jewels of shattered glass in the back seat.

Scott bumped his head on the doorframe as he jerked it out of the car. How could there be glass in the back seat? Holley had said the Volvo spun out of control and struck a stone wall. If that was the case, the windshield—if it shattered at all, Scott thought—would have shattered outward, not inward.

Unless they hit something movable
, he thought, and his fingers went to the scar on his chin again.
Unless something came through the windshield from the outside.

Holley’s pager sounded. The static-ridden voice was faint, but Scott was certain he heard a message to call the hospital. The coroner excused himself and hurried back into the garage.

A knot of fear constricted Scott’s stomach. Was it about Kath? Had she taken a turn?

Nearly sick with anxiety, he stumbled into the garage after Holley. The gaunt physician was standing inside a small, ill-lit office using the phone. After a moment he handed the receiver to Scott.

“It’s for you,” he said.

Scott inched forward on rubber legs, unable to read a thing in Holley’s eyes. Accepting the receiver, he beat back a pessimistic voice in his mind. But as he brought the receiver to his ear, that inner voice refused to be silenced.

I’m sorry,
it said,
but she’s convulsing again, and it’s not so good.. .not so good at all.

“Hello?”

Silence. A muffled sob.

“What is it?” Scott said, his scalp crawling. “What’s happened?”

Again a pause, more brief this time, then Caroline was on the line. She was crying, and Scott felt his knees begin to buckle.

she’s convulsing again...

“Scott?” Caroline said, her sobs turning to rich, hysterical laughter. “She’s awake. She’s awake and asking for you. Please come, Scott, come quickly. I...I can’t bear to tell her.”

A relief so profound, so gigantic, welled in Scott that he turned to face Holley and let his own tears come without shame. “Give me ten minutes,” he said. “Oh, God...she’s awake?”

“Yes, and she seems okay...only a little groggy.”

“Ten minutes,” Scott said, and hung up. “Can you drive me back?” he said to Holley, almost shouting.

Understanding that this man, who stood a head taller than he and whose face at this moment bore all the hallmarks of lunacy, would probably knock him to the pavement and steal his car if he refused, Holley agreed.

They climbed into the Mercedes and spun out of the lot at speed.

TEN MINUTES LATER THE MERCEDES screeched to a halt in the fire lane fronting the hospital. Scott jumped out, bounded up the steps and jostled his way through the crowded front lobby. A Lady’s Auxiliary volunteer started to ask if she could help, but Scott dashed by her unheeding. He swung left and ran along the hallway to ICU, where he thrust open the doors and darted inside.

Approving smiles greeted him. Unmindful, he moved quickly past the bank of monitors to Kath’s corner room. The bright-colored curtains were drawn and Scott shouldered his way through them.

Caroline was sitting cross-legged on the window ledge. And Kath was propped against a mound of pillows, sipping water from a Styrofoam cup through one of those bent-elbow straws. She turned slowly toward Scott, her usually shiny eyes dull, and it seemed to take her a moment to recognize him, a moment which dragged painfully for Scott.

Then she moaned “Daddy?” and her little arms reached up for him.

Scott rushed forward, then slowed, sitting gingerly on the bed beside her. Kath wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed weakly.

“You’re scratchy,” she said, drawing back, brushing a hand across one stubbled cheek. Caroline giggled.

“How do you feel, kiddo?” Scott said, trying in vain to hold back his tears. He kept her close so she couldn’t see.

“Drunk, I guess,” Kath said, smiling wanly at Caroline over Scott’s hugging shoulder.

“Any sore spots?”

“No, Just thirsty.” She pulled back again, searching her father’s eyes. “Caroline says we were in a wreck. Are you mad about the car?”

Scott thought of Krista worrying about the car over the phone the day before. She had been alive then. “Forget the dumb old car, okay?” He tried again to pull her close, but Kath resisted.

“When can I see Mom?”

He had known this was coming, had thought of nothing else during the endless drive in from the impound, but still the question crushed him.

Caroline buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. Kath looked only at her father, searching his eyes, and it was all Scott could do to meet her gaze. His mind—the bit that reasoned, rationalized and explained—was suddenly blank. Where were the words?
What
were the words? How did you tell a child who loved her Cabbage Patch doll and believed in Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald, that her mother was dead? Had he really believed it himself until this moment? He thought not—because now the innocence, the very simplicity of Kath’s question, brought that brutal fact home with all the destructive force of a cannon blast.

Where are the words?

But none were needed. Kath drew limply away and huddled against the pillows, shifting her somehow doomed eyes toward the window and the gray world beyond.

“She’s dead,” Kath said. A statement, flat and irrefutable. “I knew it. I dreamt it.”

Caroline fled the room in a swell of tears. Scott buried his face in Kath’s pillow and cried more bitterly than he ever had before. After a while Kath pulled him close and they wept together for their lost Krista.

* * *

Sometime later Scott left the ICU, spent and blackly depressed. Kath had finally slipped off to sleep. Scott had been alarmed by this initially, afraid she’d relapsed into coma or catatonia or whatever it had been. But he found her easily rousable and decided to let her sleep. For her, at least, there was that escape.

But then he remembered her saying she’d dreamed her mother’s death and realized there was no escape for any of them. Like one’s own end, it had to be faced.

Yes, Krista was dead. He understood that now. And in the abandoned quiet of the ICU sitting room, he said it out loud: “Krista’s dead.” Kath’s question had made that truth brutally clear. It had shattered the carapace of denial he’d encased himself in as violently as a ball-peen hammer striking glass. And the naked truth had come raining down in the shards—cutting, wounding, but not killing. Now there were things that had to be done, things requiring rational thought and meticulous planning, all the things Holley had been urging him to do earlier this morning.

The chores of death.

He had to bury his wife. God, yes. Bury her. He had to make arrangements with a funeral home in Ottawa, one that handled cremations. That had been Krista’s wish, one she’d expressed to him one late night several years ago, a week or two following his parents’ funeral. Scott had awakened that night to a violent summer storm and found Krista sitting in a chair by the window, staring out blankly into the squall. She told him then about a fear she’d carried with her since her father’s death from cancer, when she was still just a little girl.

Kneeling before his casket during the wake, Krista had begun to wonder if her father’s essence—his soul—might still be trapped inside his body. “How is it supposed to get out?” she’d asked Scott that night in the bedroom of their Frank Street apartment, as if she had not yet resolved that little-girl’s dilemma. Her eight-year-old imagination had quite naturally decided that her daddy must still be locked inside, aware but unable to tell anyone because his body was dead. And as only a child is capable, she imagined him lying helpless inside his satin-lined coffin after the service was over, hearing the lid click into place as the mortician sealed it for the last time, seeing the pink undersides of his eyelids darken to eternal black. Then would come the jostling ride on the pallbearer’s shoulders, the slow descent into the earth, the muffled intonations of the parish priest, the gradually fading thud of dirt tossed from the sexton’s spade...and finally silence, pure and ceaseless, save for the scarcely audible slither of time and decay.

As a grown woman Krista had decided she would rather have her soul (if such existed, a question she’d never really gotten off the fence about) freed through the finite agony of fire than through the darker alternative—trusting its release to the slow, oppressive weight of earth and decay. As disturbed as Scott had been by Krista’s unexpected discussion of death—he, too, he realized now, had believed himself and his family invulnerable—he had agreed to her cremation, more to close the discussion than to form a pact. Now he would have to live up to that promise.

“Is there a phone I can use?” he asked one of the nurses at the console. “I have to make some long-distance calls.”

The nurse nodded, her face brightening with something which to Scott looked like relief. At first the expression bewildered him, then he thought he understood. He realized from personal experience that his name had probably come up as a topic of concern during nursing rounds at change of shift. These girls were trained to monitor family members for signs of coping and were almost certainly aware that so far Scott had accomplished little in the way of Making the Necessary Arrangements. Phoning home was a good sign.

She led him to the family room where Caroline had slept the night before. It was like a miniature hotel room, with twin beds, a chest of drawers and a TV set on a revolving pedestal.

The nurse, whose name tag identified her as Sharon McVee, pointed to the ivory touch-tone on the night table between the beds. “Just dial zero,” she said, “and tell the receptionist you’re at local two-five-zero. She’ll patch you through to an outside line and you’ll be able to dial direct. And don’t worry...it’s free of charge.” She smiled a smile of sympathetic detachment.

“Thanks,” Scott said, sitting on one of the beds and watching as Sharon McVee, someone he would never have met had his life not taken this violent skew, left the room, shutting the door behind her.

Suddenly alone, Scott wanted nothing more than to lie back and sleep. In the sane and unnoteworthy surroundings of this room, he realized how close his mind had come to cracking, how frayed reality had become since Caroline’s phone call at the airport. Mingled with the raw horror he’d experienced just then, before folding into a boneless heap on the floor, had been a black and pervading kind of warmth, a dark desire to simply end it all, to disconnect the circuits and follow his wife into oblivion. How did that weepy C&W tune go?
There goes my reason for living...

But there were other reasons for living, weren’t there? There must be, because he was still here, still drawing breath, still feeling pain. Kath was one good reason, he thought, caught now in a macabre sort of inventory-taking.
What else? My professional life? Ha. Fifteen years and you can’t even use your knowledge to help your family or yourself.
He looked at the phone as if it were some sort of alien device.
Don’t forget your friends....

And then he knew, with a swell of relief that made his eyes water, who he would call first. His best friend, the guy he’d grown up with, the only guy in the world Scott knew would take a beating in his place. Gerry St. Georges.

In a minute
, he thought, lying back and closing his eyes.
I’ll call Gerry in just a minute.

And not thinking he would, he slept.

* * *

Until two hours later, when a dream-image of Krista, cold and heavy in a refrigerated drawer in the morgue of the Danvers General Hospital, snapped him awake in a mantle of sweat.

He called Gerry’s home, but there was no answer. When he tried the station, they told him Gerry was off for the next few days. He called Klara next, and when she answered with a drunkenly slurred hello, Scott’s initial impulse was to hang up and say to hell with her. But ginswill or not, she was Krista’s sister, and she had a right to know what had happened.

“Klara, it’s Scott.” His voice quavered badly. “I’m afraid I have some terrible news.”

Klara made no reply—but there was an abrupt cessation of her wheezy respirations. In the anticipatory silence that followed, Scott heard his own words reverberate as if in a tunnel, and a sick cackle crawled up inside him at their utter absurdity. Scott Benjamin Bowman, he thought moronically, new Baron of the Understatement.

“There’s been an accident,” he said into the low hum of silence. “It’s Krista. She’s...dead.”

There they were again, those words. The ones he had mouthed to himself in the ICU sitting room. They got easier as you repeated them. Already their meaning seemed somehow diluted.