“So, how far can the spaceship travel?”
“Um. To the moon, I think. No, to the sun.”
“Really? You know it’s going to be very hot there.”
Hosiah thought about that for a moment. “I’ll put something on it so it doesn’t burn.”
Dawson watched as Hosiah constructed a “heat shield,” his little round head bent in concentration. Dawson rubbed it gently. His son was seven now, suffering from congenital heart disease, yet full of a spirit that uplifted Dawson’s every day.
Christine appeared at the door. “Are we still going to the park?”
Dawson looked at his watch. They would have gone earlier had he not been called out. “Yes, we can still go. Hosiah, tidy your room and then we’ll go, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy.”
Back in the sitting room, Dawson asked Christine, “How was he today?”
“Actually, he’s done very well,” she said.
“Good. So we’ll play a little ball at the park but we’ll take it easy.”
“Right. What was it you were going to ask me?”
He told Christine about Sly and his uncle. “I want to get the boy into school.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, “but you realize, even if we get him registered, he might never go.”
“I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
She smiled slightly.
“What’s that look?” Dawson asked.
“You can’t stand Uncle Gamel getting away with not sending the boy to school.”
“You’re right. I can’t.”
That night Dawson, a confirmed insomniac, lay on his back, with the blackness pressing against his eyes as he thought about their earlier excursion to the Efua Sutherland Park. It hadn’t been too bad. He and Christine had played catch with Hosiah, throwing the ball as directly to his waiting hands as possible. That was better than playing soccer, where dribbling and running after the ball was more strenuous. They were walking a fine line between letting Hosiah be as active as a boy his age should be and limiting his exertions to what his heart, with its ventricular septal defect, could handle. His symptoms varied from day to day. He rationalized it as the defect changing in size. “The hole in my heart is small today, Daddy,” he would say.
So far, Hosiah had never given an indication that he felt something was wrong with him as a whole. That was a relief for Christine and Dawson, but they knew their son’s healthy adaptations, both physical and psychological, might not last forever.
His prescribed medications only patched the problem. The real solution, cardiac surgery, was staggeringly expensive. There was now a National Health Insurance Scheme, NHIS, but the very basic medical care it covered most certainly did not include heart surgery. For years, Dawson and Christine had been saving up, adding a generous contribution from an uncle of Christine’s, but the target was still practically unattainable. They had applied for a personal loan at Standard Bank, Ecobank, and Barclays, but hadn’t qualified at any of them. Besides, the interest rate was a horrible 21 percent.
Then, nine months ago, wonderful news had arrived. The GPS announced an official policy that it would pay all medical and surgical fees for its employees and their dependents. For a moment, Dawson’s and Christine’s hearts soared with the fantasy of submitting Hosiah’s medical report to the police service employee financial office, which would approve the surgery. But then reality struck like a sledgehammer.
It turned out that the GPS would not prepay employees’ medical or surgical expenses under any circumstances of illness, major or minor. All payments would be strictly on a reimbursement basis. That put Dawson and Christine right back at square one: they would have to finance Hosiah’s operation at the Korle Bu Hospital Cardiothoracic Center and then present the receipt to the GPS. After that, there would be a long process of validating, cross-checking, and obtaining successive levels of approval, including the director general of GPS. And then, if they were lucky, they would receive the reimbursement after several months.
Another idea had come along about half a year ago. Edith Kingson, a senior clerk in the financial office at Korle Bu, had met Hosiah when Dawson once took him along to render a payment for a hospital visit. So delighted was she with the boy that she took Dawson aside and suggested he fill out a special “financial clemency petition” with an attached letter detailing Hosiah’s circumstances. She would personally try to push it through, but Edith was at pains to warn Dawson she could not guarantee that anything would come of it.
She was right to have tried to keep Dawson’s expectations low. In the six months since submitting the petition, he had periodically called Edith, but she had had no news for him.
Beside him, Christine normally slept so heavily that a thunderstorm would not wake her, but Dawson could tell from her breathing pattern that she wasn’t in deep sleep right now. She stirred and turned over.
“Dark?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t sleep either.”
“Surprising. For you.”
Christine moved in closer, tucking her head into the hollow of his shoulder. Her skin smelled of sweet and spice. He felt the tension in her body slowly dissipate, and she drifted back to sleep long before he did.
He woke at five-thirty. Christine would surface soon. He showered and was getting dressed when his mobile rang from the bed stand. He went out to the sitting room to take the call. He knew who it was from the caller ID.
“Dr. Biney, good morning!”
“Good morning, Inspector Dawson! How are you?”
“I’m doing well. And yourself?”
“No complaints, my good man. Forgive me for calling this early, but I wanted to catch you before you start your day.”
“No problem at all.”
Asum Biney was a superb doctor and now one of the best of the very few forensic pathologists in the country. He was the director of the Volta River Authority Hospital in the Eastern Region, where Dawson had first met him. He gave several days of his time every month to hospitals in Accra and elsewhere, routinely starting at dawn and heading home late at night.
“To what do I owe the honor, Doctor?”
“I’m doing a few days at the Police Hospital Mortuary because one of the docs is out on sick leave. I noticed this new case you have-the fellow discovered in the Korle Lagoon?”
“Yes. It’s very bad.”
“Indeed, and even with refrigeration, the decay will continue. We should get to it today as soon as possible.”
“Bless you, Dr. Biney. I was preparing for a nasty fight to get the case on before the end of this week, never mind today.”
“Well, I’m glad I could save you the agony. I’ll have the staff put it on for eight this morning.”
“I’ll be there.”
Dawson went to Hosiah’s room, where Christine was getting him up.
“I have to go.” He kissed them both. “See you tonight.”
“Bye, Daddy.”
“Careful, Dark.” Christine said that every day. She meant it.
“I will be.”
4
The phlegmatic Sergeant Baidoo, a man of few words and Dawson’s favorite CID driver, steered the made-in-India Tata police jeep over the rough, unpaved road that led to the Police Hospital Mortuary (PHM). It was a depressing gray stucco building browned off with decades of dust. It needed to be either remodeled and expanded or razed and rebuilt. Dawson liked the second alternative.
Baidoo parked under the flowering flame tree that lent a welcome patch of color to all that dreariness. Reception was to Dawson’s left as he went in. Straight ahead against the far wall were two old coffins piled one on top of the other. They had been there for years, part of the furniture now. He turned left to reception, where there was a sign on the wall that read JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS. On seeing Dawson, the young lance corporal at the desk behind the counter sprang to his feet.