Deathwatch - Final (2 page)

Abby's dark blue eyes were shining.

"It's the best gift, the best birthday present in the world," she said softly. "After the surgery, we'll be like other girls. We can dream their dreams, we'll be free to dream. We never could do that before, Mr. Granville."

From below, I caught the sharp scent of carbolic acid, the pungency of alcohol and ether. There was a faint clink of steel instruments being laid out in the office the doctor kept here at home, and I willed myself not to look at my hands.           "I'm scared, Abby," Ellie whispered, and I saw the muscles of her jaw tense. "What if we die?"

Abby shook her head, took her twin's right hand between both of hers. "Don't be." Her hands found their way to her sister's forehead, and she smoothed her hair and temples, looking for all the world like a mother comforting a child with the reassurance love brings. "Ellie, when we go downstairs, it's the last time we go as freaks--"

"You're not a freak, Abby. I love you."

It was very true. I felt the same myself. I felt all three of us were sleepwalking over a cliff in some strange dream. All the same, I helped them onto the elevator, lowering the platform, steadying the ropes until Gabriel took over from below. Then I walked slowly down the wide stairway, and met the doctor in his office.

***

He'd wheeled the dining room table in to accommodate their bulk; but two separate iron beds lay pushed against the far wall of the room. It took the three of us--Gabriel, the doctor and myself--to lift the girls onto the sheet-covered makeshift operating table. Overhead, a bright lamp threw its harsh glare on the girls’ pale, upturned faces. Abby put her hand out, and I took it, clumsily patting her shoulder at the same time. Dr. Saunders frowned at me.

"Pull yourself together, Granville. They're my children, after all."

I nodded. Gabriel was looking very white. He kept licking his lips, and I knew he was nearly desperate for a cigarette or a drink--or both. "You don't have to watch the actual surgery," I said, "just hand us what we need, when we need it."

"Right." He nodded, I turned to look at the instruments one last time, the descriptions I'd pored and sweated over the last month rolling through my head. I began to focus, to breathe a little deeper and easier.

"Ready?"

"Yes," I slipped a white gauze mask over my mouth and nose, and used a sterilized ice pick to open the first can of ether. It made a little plock--the sound of air rushing in--then hissed when I opened a second vent. I saturated a thick wad of cloth and pressed it gently against Abby's mouth and nose.

"Just breathe normally."

"We're twins," she giggled, rolling her eyes toward my own white swath of mask.

Saunders had upended the open can, and was likewise giving Ellie anesthesia.

"Fly, Abby, let's fly," she whispered just before her head swiveled bonelessly sideways and she lost consciousness.

I saw Gabriel make the sign of the cross.

***

It was as brilliant a surgery as any I'd seen before--or since. Saunders was in high glee. He'd guessed that the jointure was not profound, and when he opened them up and saw with his own eyes that the pelvic bones were like the bottoms of two tea-cups end to end with a small lumpy bridge between them, he whooped.

"Piece of cake," he said.

They did share one loop of intestine, but we cut and tied it quickly. There were no annoying tiny vessels presenting as bleeders. When I took off a clamp after he sutured, the stitches held.

Gabriel winced and squinched his eyes at the sound of the bone saw; for me it was a miracle. For the first time the girls were separate, two beings unlocked from the grotesquerie of their birth.

"Christ," I whispered under my breath.

"You see," Saunders said, "now they're older, they've got their growth, we can reshape the bone--both of them will walk normally. I've waited all these years for this day, Granville. I've heard of doctors in Europe doing this to younger children. Almost always one of them ends up with a crippling malformation. They can't predict the growth pattern of the bones."

"Someday, I suppose," I said.

"Yes, in fifty or a hundred years if they can re-configure the microscope, otherwise a man's just going in and groping blind." He paused. "You close Abby, I'll do Eleanor," he said, and I found myself sneaking looks and watching to see how he tucked and stretched the skin.

"Mind the scar."

I could see his grin behind the mask; he went on, "I believe our Abby's going to be a vain girl--and well she should--with a face like hers."

It was the first time I thought about the twins that way, and I saw it was not just a father's love, he was right. They had dark blue eyes, fine spun reddish hair. Their mouths were cherub's pouts. They were pretty.

"We're pioneers," I said. This was slow, careful work, but not more difficult than what a good seamstress could do.

"There've not been more than a handful of successful separations. Course, it's not like they were buried one inside the other's chest, like some I've seen. Or those cases where the children lie head to head--like human pinwheels."

I twitched at the words, the needle caught in the girl's scant flesh. Abby moaned in her sleep.

"Give her just a touch more ether," Saunders said casually--one colleague to another--and I marveled at this second miracle: if the girls were separate, he and I, by virtue of our work were joined.

- 4 -

S
aunders had left me to go dose himself with the first drink he'd taken in a week; so I sat alone waiting in the cool of the darkened room, keeping vigil while the girls slept off the anesthesia. There wasn't much to do; I checked their pulses often, watched the color slowly returning to their waxy faces. Twice Abby moaned lightly, and Eleanor's hands twitched in a dry rasp against the coverlet, startling me briefly while I brooded on the peculiar life I'd led during the past month.

I'd expected to do a sort of penance to make up for being expelled--had, in fact, exiled myself to a low status job in a place that was far from home and friends. But I hadn't been prepared for the sheer isolation that made me feel I was living in a sort of ghost house--a microcosmic Brigadoon--that appeared or vanished at will.

The doctor had no patients--or none that I ever saw. Each morning as we were finishing breakfast and the hall clock chimed nine, he consulted his pocket watch, replaced it in his black wool vest, then clumped down the hallway to his office. I don't know what he did there. Occasionally he left the house, his medical bag in hand and said he was going out on a house call. But there were none of the flurried knocks in the middle of the night, anxious voices asking for care, or medicines; no sickly wailing babies soothed by worried mothers, none of the constant activity I associated with a doctor's busy practice.

Apart from delivery boys, there were no visitors either. The first week, I assumed the heavy brooding weather kept the doctor's friends from dropping by. But by the end of the month, no one had come. When I looked out the window at the frozen landscape, the fantastically whittled drifts and blowing snow, I felt as if the rest of the world outside the house had suddenly come to a stop.

That was outside; inside I felt something that was equally stifling. Routines are often soothing, they allow life to mesh neatly. But in Saunders's house, they were like the strong silky threads of a spider web:  nearly invisible, but capable of holding a man mute, fast.

Mornings, I tried to teach Abby and Ellie the rudiments. They were bright enough; but their deformity got in the way. They sat on a bench, like those in any country schoolroom, but forced to use one hand, their papers flew from the desktop.

"Stuart," one or the other would announce, after I'd set them to writing compositions or doing a raft of sums. I'd look up from Saunders's grimy anatomy book and meet two pairs of eyes.

It was easier for me to get up and retrieve the yellow lined paper than it was for them.  I thought I'd solved the problem by fixing the pages down with small balls of wax. But there would be a brief silence followed by the tapping sound of pencils bouncing on the floor, and once, a gasp when Abby upset a jar of ink over both of them.

We tried oral lessons and reading aloud. I took to using a blackboard.

"Now, repeat after me," I'd say, hearing Ruth's scrape outside the door, or the doctor's cough.

They wouldn't though. They only peered up at me, small wry smiles on their faces. Sometimes one or the other asked a question:

"Were you ever in love?"

"Do you like us?"

I ignored these questions, but the sound of my own voice droning geography lessons and Latin verbs made me feel like I was living in a vacuum. I guessed the school work bored them--they made so many slow halting trips to the bathroom--and of course, if one went to squat over the double seated box of a ‘toilet’ Gabriel had built, her twin had no choice but to sit dangling her legs over the other chamber pot concealed in the cabinet.

In the evenings I sat in the library poring over surgical literature and looking at sketches and drawings and reading the doctor's notes. Overhead, I'd hear the sound of the wheels of their toy sheep turning hollowly against the floor boards. Saunders had forbidden them to cry out while I studied, and their unnatural silence made it all the eerier. And that thin noise began to haunt my sleep and invade the quiet time with my books. My head would jerk up from my work at the sound of the metal wheels ratcheting along, the small bump when the stuffed animal tipped against the windowseat which had been covered in a strip of old carpeting. Stifled giggles, whispers. Then at eight o'clock, Ruth would ready them for bed. The sameness of it all grated on me, and from downstairs I could have set my watch by the little sounds from the nursery. Ruth drawing the drapes and bringing the girls cups of chocolate, the spoons clinking against the china. The final trip to the bathroom, and then my name called lightly on the chill air of the house.

"Stuart...we're ready."

At the sound, the doctor, half drunk, would pop like a jack in the box out of his office, his face red, his collar hanging like a tiny flag, and eye me up and down.

"They're calling you, Granville. Go on up. Why else am I paying you?" And he would reel away toward the cellar--or if he was too unsteady, bellow for Gabriel to fetch him another bottle.

Saunders had conceived the idea that I should be the one to read them a bedtime story, so I would tuck a book under my arm and go up to that room, the fire sunk down to a pale strip of orange light on the hearth, the shadowy faces of the girls lying on their bed, propped with pillows. What Saunders never knew was that my book was window-dressing. When I climbed the stairs each night, it was the girls who spun the tales; Ruth banished, their voices a dark whisper.

"Mother is here again, you know," Ellie said. I'd been there just a little more than a week. Outside, the January snow spat against the windows, closing us all in.

"Her name is Regina," Abby added.  "Regina Cahill, before she became Saunders."

"She comes in our dreams."

I was sitting on a low, red leather hassock alongside the bed, my hands limp between my upraised knees. The girls peered down at me, and suddenly I felt absurdly small.

"Do you have the same dream?" I asked.

"Not at all," Ellie shook her head. "It's better that way, don't you think?" She paused, picking at the coverlet. "She likes you. She wants the surgery soon--"

"Ssh," Abby punched her sister lightly. "She killed herself, and now we know why. I dreamed it." Her blue eyes were very bright. Then she closed them as if she'd gone back inside her dream and was searching for the details.

"After we were born, Father didn't want her. No he didn't," she said. Her voice was sad, mournful. "Mother understood. He was afraid there'd be more babies like us or worse."

I jumped. This was nothing a twelve year old--a completely sheltered twelve year old--could know, I thought.

"It was a long time, years and years, and her heart was full, but there was no one to love."

Her voice had the sound of a recitation, and it unnerved me. I stared at her, and for a second she seemed so much older than the ringleted child lying on the pillow, her ballerina doll with dripping, flesh-pink cloth legs cuddled in her arm.

"It was one of our teachers," Ellie put in, excitedly. "John Price--he was older than you--nearer our Mama's age. Almost thirty-five. He was good looking. but not as handsome as you."

"He found out," Abby said, her eyes remote, hazy as a sleepwalker's in the dim lamplight.

"Andrew," I breathed. "He killed her...."

"No. She was quick with John's child," Ellie said. "It was a terrible time, a time of confusion. Part of her singing to the sleeping child within, most of her terrified, knowing the doctor's eye was sharp. She meant to go away to have it, and to keep it safe. She told herself knowing it lived--somewhere--would be enough."

Abby clutched the doll more tightly, her voice tinged with the same unearthly tone. "A drug in the tea...he knew, you see. He noticed she'd stopped taking wine with dinner. Mother felt his arms around her, lifting her while she slept heavy-headed as an opium eater. She felt him carrying her bulk down and down and into the office. One light glowed.

" ‘No Regina,’ he whispered, ‘No more monsters.’ And then Mother felt the hard metal of the curette inserting itself like a cold snake between her legs. It was gone. He cut the baby out, limb by limb and bit by bit."

"Dear god," I said. Was this the source of the man's desperation?

Abby went on, her whispery voice overriding mine. "He sent John away. After that there were only lady teachers. He said he forgave Mother's infidelity, and yet, there it was between them. Always. It was in his eyes, and he wouldn't touch her. He drank more and more. He went to one of those low women, someone in an alley. She was drunk, too, when he put it up her, banging her against some broken down alley fence. He taunted Mother with it, ‘I had a whore’ he shrieked." Abby paused, and I saw her tongue creep out to lick her lips.