Cold Hands (13 page)

Sammy had left the office around eleven thirty for an unscheduled meeting. She may have taken a call on her cellphone that initiated this meeting. Her cellphone had still not been found. Her colleagues assumed she’d headed straight home after lunch somewhere downtown, to beat the storm. Her body was discovered by two city workers on a vacant lot on the eastern outskirts of Regina at six fifteen that evening, her purse and ID nearby.

When had I last seen her? At the party. As she walked away from me, back towards the fireplace and the advertising conversation. Hitching the strap of her gown up.

I let my head drop down, started to cry. Danko looked the other way.

If I had known that would be the last time I would get to talk to her I would have kissed her on the mouth. I would have told her how much I loved her and thanked her for giving us Walt and being such a good mother to him. I’d have told her about all the things I remembered from our years together, all the things we had never spoken
of that were burned into my mind forever. Tiny stupid moments.

Sammy giggling and saying ‘Oh,
right . . .
’ as I clumsily leaned across the bar-room table to kiss her for the first time.

Sammy laughing when she discovered how scared of spiders I was.

Sammy on the hotel bed, looking up at me, across my stomach, her chin slick as she said, ‘Boy, I’ve had my protein today.’

Sammy crying so hard the first time we argued.

Sammy’s guilty expression when I caught her by surprise in a fast-food place downtown, about to bite into a burger.

Sammy lying back after she’d given birth to Walt, woozy from blood loss, pale as a geisha, yet smiling as she watched me holding him.

I remember it all, Sammy. Everything.

IT WAS ABOUT
a week after Banny tried to make the Professor eat the bit of paper that it happened, in Miss Gilchrist’s English class.

It was the last period of the day and everyone was tired and listless in the hot, late-spring classroom. Miss Gilchrist had colourful, kind of funny philosophical posters on her walls: a cartoon child on a stool, fist on chin, thinking, with a bubble above his head saying, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits.’ Four cows in different fields, separated by barbed-wire fencing, each cow poking its head through the fence to eat the other cow’s grass.

We were doing the poem ‘In the Snack Bar’ by Edwin Morgan. I don’t know why she suddenly rounded on Banny that day. Maybe she’d had enough of his staring out the window, blatantly not listening, defacing his jotter, or the desk, never paying attention. Maybe it was the near-ceaseless babbling and sniggering with Tommy sitting next to him. Whatever the reason, she interrupted Jackie Shaw’s endless monotone reading of the poem (‘hiss-of-the-coffee-machine-voices-and-laughter-smell-of-a-cigar-hamburgers-wet-coats-steaming’) and said, ‘Derek Bannerman?’

Banny looked up, breaking off from whatever he was saying to Tommy. ‘Whit?’

‘Excuse me?’

A sigh. ‘Whit,
Miss
?’

‘Why do you think the poet chooses these particular images here?’

A blank stare. Vacant hatred. ‘Ah don’t know, Miss.’

‘Well, I’m asking you to think about it, Derek.’

A long silence. Miss Gilchrist perched on the edge of the desk, her arms folded, poetry book dangling from one hand, as all thirty-odd faces in the class turned towards Banny. Just by asking this question she had broken one of the unspoken rules that surrounded a pupil like Banny, a rule that said, roughly, ‘Leave me alone and I will allow you to teach the rest of the class. Fuck with me at your peril.’ She had breached etiquette and had to expect a reaction. Banny fidgeted for a second, fingering his tattered, defaced copy of
Seven Modern Poets
, waiting for her to sigh and say, ‘Anyone else?’ Waiting for hands to go shooting up and things to move on. But she didn’t, she stared him down, Banny getting agitated under the fluorescent strip lighting. Finally he shrugged and said, ’Cause he’s a fucking bentshot, Miss?’

The class exploded; a fifty–fifty blend of laughter and gasps. Miss Gilchrist let it subside and said, ‘Yes. I do sometimes wonder why you think nearly everyone we study in here is gay, Derek.’

There was a further ripple of laughter, at a teacher using the word ‘gay’, and then, right there in the front row of desks, far away from us at the back, a lone hand went up.

The Professor.

‘Yes, Craig?’ Gilchrist said.

‘Please, Miss, it’s called “denial”. Derek thinks everyone is gay because he’s secretly worried he might be gay himself.’

It is difficult to convey the effect this statement had on the room. A few people laughed – just at the continued repetition of the word ‘gay’ – but most of us just stared open-mouthed at the Professor before slowly turning to Banny to see what his reaction was going to be, the enormity of the situation slowly dawning:
the Professor just called Big Banny a bentshot in front of the whole fucking class.

Banny was slowly going very, very red. He was getting a roaster, a red neck. A fucking beamer. I felt my own face warming, flushing.

At the party, at his dad’s house, the glimpse into the murk of the bedroom. Straightening, buckling up. Banny’s stare, fierce. Defiant. Tommy starting to say something that day, starting to say, ‘Mind that time?’ then tailing off, running off towards those empty ginger bottles. ‘Ah’ve fingered her . . . ah’ve rode her . . . she’s a bike . . . ye don’t look at the mantelpiece when yer poking the fire, wee man . . .’ In the cold tent, the crackle of the dying fire, the pressure on my groin, his breath hot on my neck, the smell of vodka and lager. Pushing against me, hard, urgent. ‘C’mon . . .’

Tommy was the first to speak. He laughed mirthlessly and said, ‘You’re dead, Docherty.’

‘OK, that’s enough,’ Miss Gilchrist cut in. ‘Now, let’s get back to the poem. Jackie, where were you?’

The lesson went on, but no one was listening. Everyone was stealing glances at Banny who, incredibly, had still said nothing. He was staring at the back of the Professor’s head, a fury glittering in his eyes beyond anything I had ever seen before.

He battered the Professor over by the trees after final bell. Docherty just went foetal and took it all as Banny flailed and pummelled into him with feet and fists, a tasselled weejun connecting with his mouth, busting his lip open, a fist smacking again and again off Docherty’s red, swelling ear, and then a couple of teachers were running over and pulling Banny off. Docherty’s parents came into school and saw the headmaster and went mental and Banny got suspended for a week and that was it, over.

But it wasn’t. The battering wasn’t enough for Banny. Not nearly enough. A poofy wee tool like Craig Docherty? You’d batter someone like that for looking at you the wrong way. What did you do to make restitution for calling you a bender in front of the whole class? No, a kicking wasn’t going to cover it. Not even close. We all knew that.

I WAS SITTING
on an orange plastic chair in an office, an anteroom of some kind off the main morgue, down in the basement.

We came down from the rooftop helipad in a freight elevator and then through a series of gently downward-sloping corridors. Hospitals, with their forests of signage –
‘Paediatrics’, ‘Oncology’, ‘X-Ray’
– and their endless bustle. It occurred to me as we came down in the ancient, clanking, brass-gated elevator that the last time I was in Regina General had been nearly nine years ago. When Walt was born. (‘Hostibal,’ Walt used to say when he was tiny. Like ‘bullets’ were always ‘buttels’ to him.)

The pathologist, a Dr Manuel, was sitting next to me, Danko opposite, both of them waiting patiently for an answer to the question Manuel had just asked me. He was balding, bespectacled and tired-looking, not just tired in the sense that he looked like he could use a good night’s sleep, he looked tired of all of it, of what we can do to each other. As I guessed you might when your job involved looking at the worst things nature, accidents and man can serve up on a daily basis. I turned the terrible question over in my mind
for a long time while I stared at a set of silver kidney-shaped bowls on a table next to Danko, the bowls arranged concentrically, in decreasing sizes, like a cross section of a metallic Russian doll (the useless thought:
How many human organs have been placed in those bowls? Will Sam’s . . .
) until finally I answered in a quiet voice.

‘She has a . . . a little strawberry birthmark on her, just at the line of the pubic hair.’

Manuel nodded and sat quietly, staring at the floor, and then asked, ‘Is there anything else?’

I thought for a moment before turning to look at him. ‘Won’t that do?’ I said.

Manuel held my gaze sadly. The enormity of what he was saying hit me and a fresh wave of horror broke upon me.

‘Oh God.’ I said. ‘Oh Jesus.’

‘Mr Miller,’ Manual said gently, ‘I don’t want you to have to view any more of the remains than is strictly necessary. It’s your choice of course, but I really think it would be much better for you to remember your wife as you last saw her.’

Yes, just like you told Walt about Herby.

‘I . . . there . . .’ I flailed around, trying to remember Sammy’s body, ashamed of myself for not being able to recall every inch of her, nausea within me again, my hand covering my face. ‘On her right arm, there’s a brown birthmark on the inside of the forearm. Like a map of Italy.’

Manuel nodded and stood up. ‘If you’re ready then.’

The morgue itself: a large room, cold, as it must be, with a bitter chemical smell. Manuel led the way and Danko walked behind me, almost as though they were guarding me, as though I might crack and make a run for it and for
a second the thought crossed my mind: sprint out of here, get to the airport, get on a plane, disappear.

But, once you become a parent, these options are removed from the menu. I thought of my son – at home, hopefully sleeping now – and this actually made me calmer.
At the very least you must be stronger than Walt.
There was someone who would be even closer to the vortex of pain than I was. (Sam’s parents’ too. That call would have to be made soon. They’d have just arrived. I pictured them unpacking in their suite, or maybe already out by the pool or on the beach when the call that would destroy their lives arrived.)

There were three stainless-steel autopsy tables in the middle of the room. On the furthest away one lay a black rubber body bag. Manuel turned to me and said, ‘If you’d just wait here, Mr Miller.’ He turned back to the table and I heard the
riiiip
of a zipper being pulled along.

This could all still be a mistake.

I allowed the thought I had been quietly nurturing to have a brief final flourish in my mind before Manuel stood aside and I saw he was gently holding a forearm out of the bag, the hand flopping out, the fingers curled inwards, towards the palm.

The coral-pink nail varnish.

I nodded. ‘That’s Sammy.’

Before I knew what I was doing I reached out and took her hand – it was already cold, the fingers stiff and clutching – and I found myself thinking of the last time I had held her hand on a hospital table, somewhere above us, in this very building:
all your attention focused on Sammy, because you are not good with gore, saying ‘Push, baby, push, c’mon, you’re doing good’ and not looking the other way at all until you heard
the crying and the midwife was nudging you and holding out a bloody green towel with a tuft of black hair jutting up from it. There were supposed to be more kids but it didn’t seem to happen and then Sam was complaining of stomach pains. After the operation as she wiped away a single tear and smiled, she said, ‘Walt’s perfect. He’s enough.’ ‘Walt’s enough,’ you agreed.

Lost in this, Danko and Manuel respectfully silent, my eyes travelled upwards, across her wrist and onto the faint, coffee-coloured map of Italy. Then I was doubling up, folded in half by an agonising, dry rush of vomit. Because, unable to help myself, I had peered upward, beyond the birthmark, further up Sammy’s arm and into the dark space of the body bag. I saw something smooth and white at the top of the arm and I knew it was bone, that the skin had been flayed off her upper arm.

Then I was on my knees, Danko steadying me as I convulsed, Manuel quickly sliding a plastic bucket in front of me as it all came up: a torrent of duck, spinach and rice, all in a stinging, acidic broth of bloody wine, pumping into the bucket, the agonised sound of my vomiting reverberating around the large, cold room.

BACK IN THE
anteroom I carefully sipped the paper cupful of water they’d produced from somewhere, my hands still trembling. After what felt like a long time I spoke quietly. ‘I need to call Sammy’s parents. They’re in Hawaii.’

‘We can do that if you’d rather,’ Danko said. I looked up, realising that it was just the two of us in here now, and shook my head. Old Sam. The media. This would be huge news. Walt.

‘Mr Miller,’ Danko began, ‘I need to ask, do you and your wife have any enemies?’

‘Enemies? I, well, Sammy was a newspaper editor. You piss a few people off sometimes but . . .’

‘It’s just, the nature of this attack, the severity, it seems almost . . . personal.’

He let it hang for a moment. I looked at him and said, ‘Sergeant, just tell me. If there’s anything else I should hear, just tell me.’

‘This won’t be easy to hear.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We found needle marks and bruising in the crook of the left elbow, consistent with the recent insertion of an IV drip. There were also ligature marks on both legs and the right
arm, suggesting attempts had been made to staunch the bleeding.’

I was just looking at him at this point.

‘The blood work confirmed that high levels of saline and sodium thiopental – an anaesthetic – had been administered in the hours before her death.’

‘I don’t under—’

But I knew. I knew where he was going. But I just kept looking at him, making him say it.

‘It seems like someone kept her alive while they tortured her for some time.’