Dr. Masutu moved closer, a model of crisp efficiency. “You’d best leave, Mrs. Wells. We can’t risk an additional sedative with his respiratory system so stressed.”
Jacob clutched her hand, muscles tight with desperation. Sweat broke loose on his face. “Where is she?”
Renee stepped away and the ointment caused Jacob to lose his grip. He stared at the back of his hand, at the white blisters, at the pink skin peeling away. His wedding ring was gone. Everything was gone. Joshua had taken it.
“She’s here,” Renee said.
He sat up and dizziness swarmed in. The room tilted, Dr. Masutu’s face grew alternately larger and smaller, Renee bobbed like a ship moving away toward the horizon.
Jacob tried to move his legs, but they were mutinous. He lunged for the edge of the bed and collapsed on the railing. His IV bag fell over and spattered open against the cold tiles. Dr. Masutu gripped him by the shoulders and tried to ease him back onto the bed.
“Easy, Mr. Wells,” the doctor said. His breath smelled of disinfectant, the first odor Jacob had noticed since awakening.
“I want to see her. Where is she?” he screamed at Renee. He didn’t care if she lied. He just needed an answer, any answer, or the hard concrete in his chest would let no more air pass.
Renee stopped at the door, hunched and shivering. She cupped her hands and leaned against the wall, slowly sliding down its surface like the victim of a firing squad.
“Mr. Wells,” the doctor said, pulling him against the pillow. “Don’t make me have to call for assistance.”
“Fuck you,” Jacob said, yanking free and pulling himself onto the rail. He caught a fleeting glimpse of himself in the mirror, a wild-eyed lab animal breaking free of a cruel experiment, its flesh mottled red. Then he went over. The respirator tube must have become disconnected, because oxygen escaped with a snakelike hiss. The loose tube protruded from Jacob’s mouth as his torso struck the floor, one leg tangled in the bed rails, the other twisted in the sheets. He kicked free, ignoring the pain that chopped him with its hundred dull axes.
He scrabbled across the floor like a paraplegic crab, Dr. Masutu in a hurry somewhere across the room, Renee shaking. The tiles were cool against his skin, and the thin hospital gown had come undone. The strings dangled down the backs of his legs, lit firecracker fuses. His whole body was heating up, swollen dynamite, a bilious volcano about to erupt.
He reached Renee and pulled her hands from her face. Her green eyes were drowned with red, her face twenty years older than he remembered it. She was a stranger, he was a stranger, and neither belonged to this world. Not where things like this happened.
Jacob grabbed the respirator tube with one hand and pulled it from his throat. A piece of skin broke free from his lip and clung to the clear plastic. If only he could tear himself away a piece at a time, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse, and undo his own existence. But even if he vanished, Joshua would still be there, and then Joshua would have everything.
“Tell . . . me . . .,” he said. “Where?”
She turned away and sobbed some words against the white surface of the wall.
He touched her hair, fought an urge to clamp his fingers around the strands and slam the truth out of her.
Her words were invisible bullets: “You said it wouldn’t happen again.”
Dr. Masutu moved somewhere above them, and someone else had entered the room. They may as well have been shadows on the wall, for all Jacob noticed or cared. Dr. Masutu shouted some sort of command, but Jacob obeyed only one master now and that was his naked need to know.
“Where is she?” He grabbed Renee’s chin, forced her to face him. Hands grabbed at him, plowing new furrows of agony on his shoulders.
“Where do you think?” Renee’s lips trembled, bitten through in spots, cheeks shiny with tears. She appeared to have escaped the fire without injury. At least any visible, physical hurt.
“She’s in the hospital, isn’t she?”
“You said nothing would ever happen to her.”
“Please, Mr. Wells,” came Dr. Masutu’s voice as if from another land, one where reason prevailed and patients were expected to will themselves back to health.
Jacob elbowed the doctor away and climbed onto Renee, his left leg skewed limp and useless. Half of him wanted to crawl inside her and hide, to seek those soft places that had always offered him sanctuary. The other half wanted her to bleed, to suffer, to choke on her words. And that half was taking over.
He drew back his hand to slap her. Dr. Masutu tried to grab his wrist, but he squirmed free, losing another piece of skin in the process. He swept his hand toward her face and her eyes locked on his, not blinking against the blow. Inviting him. Daring him.
And he stopped.
She couldn’t win. Not like this.
He collapsed into a fetal position, the ointment sticky against the tiles. The floor smelled of pine cleanser and bleach. Dr. Masutu gave directions to the nurse, and someone was mopping up fluid. Dr. Masutu knelt and took Jacob’s arm. This time, Jacob didn’t resist as the needle entered the inner crook of his elbow.
“Mattie is in the hospital, Jakie,” Renee said.
Numbness crept up his arm, rushed into his head, and the drug massaged his brain with its icy fingers.
“On the bottom floor,” Renee said, as Jacob slipped back into the grotto, surrendered once more to the black soothing liquid of unconsciousness.
He drowned at Renee’s last words: “In the morgue.”
CHAPTER THREE
Renee didn’t know what was more terrible, burying an older child or burying an infant.
Mothers should not outlast their children. Mothers should go first, by any rule of the universe, under any decree of a caring God.
She wiped her eyes and the dishwater stung. She only had three plates, and they were all clean, but she washed them again anyway. Same with the coffee cup. She had scrubbed it until no hint of brown remained. If she rubbed the cup any harder, she would wear through its ceramic skin.
The apartment was devoid of any personality. Beige couch, matching armchair, solid oak table in the kitchenette with matching benches. Bare walls of antique white, a drab sea of gray carpet. Perfectly lifeless.
She was afraid she would never feel alive again. Sure, her lungs inflated and her heart pumped blood, her fingers and toes moved, her eyes blinked. But life was more than the sum of working parts.
Once, while making love to Jacob in their first year of marriage, she had the sensation of floating outside her body. She saw the two of them below, Jacob on his back, her with blonde hair dangling as they moved in a smooth and careless rhythm of hips.
“How happy and alive they look,” the disembodied part of herself had thought. Even without her glasses, she could see with great clarity from her ethereal vantage point. A voyeuristic guilt tugged her back into her flesh and the sensation had passed, but not the notion that she was totally and absurdly right where God had wanted her to be.
She experienced that same discorporate sensation last year when the tractor was lowering Christine’s coffin into the rectangular, red hollow of the Earth. There had been no pleasure in the sensation that time, only an aloof split, and then she rose like a polluted balloon. She swept over the scene on a September wind, cold, brittle, bound for the dead of winter. The cemetery stones jutted like broken icebergs, the greater part of their mystery unseen beneath the surface. The ancient maple by the steel gate had already lost its leaves and stood as helpless as the priest while the tractor’s engine whined. Jacob stood in a dark wool coat, holding Mattie against him. Mattie wore black mittens, and their ends were damp because she had wiped her nose with them.
The tractor stripped a gear in its winch box and the coffin jerked, the chain from which it was suspended digging into the well-shined surface. Lawrence McMasters, the funeral director, kept his lips pursed in practiced, stoic sorrow as he tried to usher the grieving family away.
The Renee she’d left behind on the ground couldn’t take her eyes from the coffin, which began to spin awkwardly two feet deep into its final resting place, knocking against the earthen sides of the grave and raining dirt. The tractor operator cursed and Father Rose crossed himself. Jacob called Renee’s name and then Christine’s, and Renee was grateful that the main service had been at St. Mary’s and that the graveside service was restricted to immediate family.