“No, no. Oh, no.”
“So there was very strong feeling from that end.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“And maybe, who knows, from your end too.”
“Well—”
“Well what?”
“Well, I was pretty young.”
“Are you trying to wriggle out of this?”
“Not at all!”
“What I’m leading up to is, is there anything to all this stuff I’m hearing? Isn’t that why you asked me to come here?”
“I’m not sure what you’ve been hearing, Deanne.”
“That you did away with Tessa on your operating table.”
“They’re looking into that.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t you have an opinion?”
“I do but — yes, I do.”
“Want to share it?” she asked. Clearly she could make no sense of me at all.
“No, Deanne, I do not,” I said but thought, Maybe afterwards.
“Well, I have no clue why you wanted to talk to me, then. I thought you knew Tessa and I were friends. I thought you might come clean. In fact, I told somebody, ‘I’ll bet that quack is gonna spill the beans to the only friend Tessa had in this town.’ ”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“You got a light?”
She had a cigarette in her mouth. I slapped my pockets futilely. She was plainly agitated; looking right and left, she said, “If you come on to me I’m going to scream my lungs out.” I’d seen two men strolling down the diagonal toward the First World War monument and I ran them down, two startled older men, and got a match for Deanne. She bent over my cupped hands to light the cigarette but kept wary eyes on me.
“Look, Deanne, Clarice was my patient. I took care of her after a lot of bad beatings—” She blew the smoke off to one side, then seemed to look where it went. “I could have just treated her, left it at that, but it kept on and I got involved.”
“What d’you mean, you got involved?”
“I got caught up in what I thought was heading for tragedy.”
“Oh.”
“So, there at the end I was in that house, and she was, well, she was — I couldn’t really do anything for her.”
“I know the story.”
“I’m afraid you don’t, Deanne.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, I’m afraid you don’t know the story. Not all of it. Not about Cody.”
“I wonder if I need to hear any more of your story,” she said levelly. “I live with a man who said ‘good riddance’ when my son died. I don’t have a knack for a lot more of this.”
I was afraid she’d jump up and leave, but I had to finish. “Just one more thing, Deanne. You see, Cody wasn’t really going to do away with himself.”
It was time for me to take a stand. I just wasn’t sure I could.
“Oh?”
“No, I really don’t think so.”
“So what happened?” I was, in a way, frightened by the quiet way she asked because I knew it was the end of the line. “Are you going to tell me something?”
“He was there with, uh, with the gun, and I could see that the whole thing had dawned on him—”
That was true. Cody had been in a rage for a long time and now it was gone and he couldn’t get it back. He was alone, kind of weightless. There was in his face a bleak sort of amazement. He was mine and I knew it. I was his god. In the long years I’d had to think about it, that was what I had come up with: that I was the cold unblinking god of Cody.
“I felt very strongly that I knew what had to happen and that Cody didn’t and that Cody was waiting to hear it from me.”
“And what?”
I made myself look straight in her eyes. “I told him to kill himself.”
“You did.”
“I thought that was right.”
“And so he did.”
“Yes.”
She froze for a moment, then screamed and tried to put the cigarette out in my eye. I felt her claw down both sides of my face as she cried and screamed at once. She was not very strong, and I was able to get my arms around her and subdue her until she gasped that she would stop, she would calm down, and she would stop. I released her carefully. Her makeup was smeared crazily across her face, and in her expression I beheld such forlornness, such despair, that I felt as vacant as Cody had looked when he saw what he had done.
“Okay,” she said, “okay. Let me just get a grip here—” She pulled back on the bench and took a heavy breath. Then she fished underneath for her purse, which she put in her lap. “Let me just pull myself together here—” She started to get something from her purse, then covered her face and sobbed, the tears running out between her fingers. I could only think what a terrible price I was exacting for my own cheap absolution. She uncovered her eyes and said, “Okay, okay,” and got a Kleenex from the purse and dabbed and wiped her face carefully. She folded the Kleenex and tucked it back into the purse, pulling it open to look inside.
I didn’t realize what she was doing until she had stabbed me. I moaned and fell off the bench grasping the knife handle at my chest with both hands. Deanne stood over me and said she hoped I didn’t make it. I honestly didn’t know how much time I might have; whatever it might have been, I used it to tell her that I was innocent. She said that I had picked a bad time to lie, and walked away.
There must not have been time for my diagnostic skills to offer perspective on my plight except to say that a very comprehensive debility was creeping over me almost as if a heavy rug were being pulled onto my body from several directions at once, everything going soft or limp with weight, except the astonishing rigidity of the knife. I recall thinking that this generalized enfeeblement and draining of life must be death with the peculiarity of the mind imagining even to the last minute that it was somehow exempt from this process. That was either adaptive protection to avert suffering and struggle or the very fragile thing that supported convictions about the imperishability of the spirit. I had always thought religious assertions as to the latter were a form of hysteria, but for the moment I was prepared to keep an open mind. I had often observed in my work, especially in those days in the ER, that there is an unreliable floor to American life and if you find yourself going through it, life is quite dangerous. What I hadn’t learned was that it could apply to me.
But in that immortal phrase, I lived “to tell the tale.” A man on a bicycle came by (I was not entirely conscious) and found me squirting blood onto the walkway, and called for help. I had such a riveting view of my savior, whom I’ve never seen, that the picture stays with me stilclass="underline" one foot extended to hold himself up on the bicycle, he flips open his cell phone and looks at the sky as he calls for help; there is a pause, after which he cranes around urgently looking for ways to describe our location. He is a Good Samaritan, etc. I have no idea who he is. He has not chosen to “come forward either.” We would be together forever, my phantom and I.
I learned later on that Alan had been called in to Emergency for some arterial repair and that quite a lot of blood replacement had been necessary as a result of, I guess, near-fatal hemorrhaging and hypovolemic shock. I later saw Alan’s vital signs documentation and was moved by its obsessive notations. I had benefited from spontaneous closure of a small breach of the left ventricle, and was surprised by the irrational if faint horror occasioned by a description of one’s own injuries. I was relieved to learn there was negligible fluid retention in the pericardium, wherein pumping volume might have been reduced to the point of my returning to my life with a greatly impaired brain. There was a relatively small transfer of kinetic energy in a stab wound, as compared to say, a gunshot wound. So any emergency treatment provider was spared from having to worry too much about collateral injury. In other words, I was grateful that Deanne hadn’t shot me. Sweet!