Hank Vogel had a few years on Sam. He was a stocky kind of big, not super bright, but friendly enough. Sam would never say Hank was graceful, but he wasn’t usually as stiff as this, either.
He was stopping every few feet along the central corridor, standing at the end of each cot and looking at the occupants. The stare lasted eight or ten seconds, it seemed.
“Holy crap, I bet he’s sleepwalking,” Dill said.
“Could be.”
Hank’s eyes were definitely open. It was hard to tell if he was awake behind them.
“What should we do?”
“Maybe leave him be, I’m sure he’ll go back to bed soon enough.”
“Hank!” Dill whispered.
“C’mon, leave him alone.”
“No this is too good. Hank!”
Vogel turned at the sound, and sleep-wandered his way to the base of the bed.
“How you doin’, Hank?” Dill asked, waving his hand in front of Vogel’s face.
Hank didn’t respond. It was just about the creepiest non-response ever. Sam was beginning to dislike this. Dill felt no similar qualms.
“You in there, Corporal Vogel?”
Hank opened his mouth.
“Dill…” Sam said.
“Shh. What is it, Hank?”
“Are… you…?”
Hank spoke like he had a mouthful of food and didn’t know where his tongue was supposed to be.
“What’s that?” Dill asked. He hopped off the bunk. Hank—who was taller than both of them—towered above.
“Are you,” Hank repeated.
“Sam, should we wake him?”
Sam remembered being told to never awaken a sleepwalker. He thought it was probably just one of those things people said that wasn’t actually true, but Hank wasn’t hurting anybody, so why risk it?
“No, leave him be.”
“Are you,” Hank said again.
“Am I? No. I don’t think I am.”
“Dill…”
“Well I don’t know how else to answer.”
Hank lowered his gaze from Dill and turned to head down the aisle, and then Dill did something dumb. It was, in all fairness, something that only came off as really stupid in hindsight, but still.
When Vogel turned, Dill put his hand on the sleeping man’s shoulder.
“Hold on, Hank, let’s talk this…”
Corporal Vogel’s reaction was sudden and alarming. His left hand lashed out and clamped around Dill’s throat.
Dill emitted a gurgling shout, with both his hands around the larger man’s arm.
“Choking…” he cried. “Choking me…”
“Hank!” Sam exclaimed.
He was up in a second, his arm around Vogel’s, trying to peel the fingers loose. Dill was beet-red already. Vogel was going to kill him.
“HELP!” Sam shouted. “HELP US!”
Four men from neighboring bunks stirred, realized what was wrong, and jumped in, but Vogel’s grip was like iron, and efforts to tackle him were proving strangely impossible.
“Wake up Hank!” Sam said. “Come on, you’re killing him!”
Arms and legs and bodies pulling and shouting, but Vogel was like a rock. A rock that wanted to crush Dill Louboutin’s windpipe.
Finally, someone had the idea to slap Hank Vogel across the face.
He trembled, his eyes blinked, and he released Dill, who fell gasping to the floor.
It was said later that in this moment, it looked as if Corporal Vogel became aware of himself and his surroundings. Like he’d been away for a while and just returned to discover himself in entirely the wrong place. Then the moment passed, and Hank started to convulse.
“Hold him, hold him,” Sam said. Vogel was falling backwards, arms flailing madly. His eyes, still open, had rolled back in his skull and there was foam coming out of his mouth.
They got him to the floor, where he continued to seize.
“Get him something to bite down on!” somebody shouted. Sam was on top of the larger man, trying to hold his body still before he broke himself or something else.
“Like what?” someone else said. Half the barracks were awake now.
“I don’t know!”
Sam said, “get the medics in here, for Chrissake!”
Then, quite dramatically, Hank Vogel seized up, held his entire body stiff in a huge inhale, and then stopped and collapsed. His arms and legs fell limp and his eyelids fell shut.
Sam put his finger on Vogel’s neck and listened to his lungs.
What the hell just happened?
“I don’t think he’s breathing!” Sam said. “Where’s the medic?”
11
MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN
The phone call that was supposed to come from the hospital the next morning—the one notifying Annie that her mother was being released momentarily—didn’t come. Not that there was no phone call, only that the one she received involved a very different conversation.
Annie didn’t realize exactly how much she failed to pay attention to the information being recited over the phone until it came time to repeat it to others. Ed, and later Violet, and after that her father, all received partial bits of things that didn’t entirely add up to a comprehensive whole. It didn’t fit into her head that way neither, so that was only fair.
The short version was that Carol wasn’t coming home and she wasn’t staying at Harbridge. She was being transported to Boston, where a medical facility with first-class oncology support was located. There, she would be tested and an approach would be devised, and the question of chemo came up, and phrases like as comfortable as possible and managing the condition were bandied about, and just about all of it made Annie’s eyes burn.
As she explained to the doctor—his name was either “doctor Benson” or “doctor Ben Song”, she couldn’t tell—Carol did a round of chemo before, when she was first diagnosed, and it nearly killed her. It was Annie’s understanding that there would be no more chemotherapy. Her mother would rather die on her own terms than live on theirs, and that was that. She asked the doctor if Carol repeated this declaration.
She had, but doctor Bensomething had a lot to say on that point, along the lines of therapeutic changes and options and the importance of thorough diagnoses, and Annie gave up trying to figure out how it all ended up playing out because at the end of the call her mother was still heading off to the city, whether she wanted to or not.
Annie was tacitly not going to Boston.
She could have. Even though she was only sixteen and had neither the money nor the wherewithal to get a hotel room, and even though she had no relatives in the Boston area, there were options. She’d done this before, the last time Carol ended up in the city for a chemo session. The hospital had a program in place that could put her up short-term in something like a halfway house that was a cross section of people going through outpatient cancer screenings and their family members. When she did it, a guardian was appointed to keep an eye on her, and she hated every second of the experience.
It was terrible to admit, but when her mother exited chemo and swore she would never go back, Annie was glad to hear it. Carol was essentially saying she’d rather die at home sooner than in a hospital later, but all Annie could think was that she’d never have to go back to that halfway house again.
She was being incredibly selfish, and she knew it. If she had a therapist, that therapist would undoubtedly be all over her. Nonetheless, the reality was unchanged: Annie had no intention of going to Boston. In the event she had to get to the city—for instance if Carol took a “turn for the worst” (this was her least-favorite euphemism for dying) Annie could always reach out to Desmond Hollis, who would probably send her into town by helicopter if he had to.