Deathwatch - Final (6 page)

***

Ah Christ.

We were going to amputate her leg.

Take it.

Her leg. Ellie.

But it was that or her life.

***

"Please," he begged, "close it." Saunders coughed deeply, his hand palmed the center of his chest, and although I knew these days had taken a toll on him, what I saw more clearly was that his grey eyes had the desperate burned out look of a man who understood only one thing: there was pain, and that pain could be lost in the bottom of a glass. There were drugs in his closet that would carry out the same chemical command faster and quicker, and we were living in a time when drugs that can't be got now for love or money...heroin, morphine, cocaine...were available, and yet he wanted his alcohol. It was the craving for the smooth liquid brown of brandy I saw on his face, as clearly etched as if he'd said the word. He flapped his hand, the hem of his always proper black frock coat faintly echoed the motion, and he sailed out the door. I heard the cellar door open with a sloppy scraping sound--he wasn't drunk--not yet. But his mind was disordered; his movements, jerky.

"Gabriel," he bellowed. I heard the smash of glass. In my mind's eye I saw ancient green bottles pulled from their diamond-shaped slots in haste, exploding on the hard cement of the cellar floor.

"Gabriel! Christ, come and help me!"

There was broken weeping coming from a distance, but I knew the hired man would answer the summons, uncork the bottle; and though his mental state would essentially be in no way different, now Andrew Saunders would drink. And drink. ’Til the fevered part of his mind let him sleep.

I turned to the job he'd asked me to finish. In essence we were done. Ellie's leg--the whole god-sculpted lovely length of it--from just below her hip was gone. Before he'd decided there was no more a doctor--a father could stand--Andrew had wrapped it in a sheet and placed it on the bed her sister had lain in when we'd done the initial surgery. My eye snagged on the sight of it, a long tubular hump hidden under the drift of white. Dead. Useless. I looked away, concentrated on my work.

I stitched; small neat silken sutures. I did it as carefully as I could because I was blocking the fact from my mind that there would be no prosthesis for Ellie. No wooden leg that could make up the deficit. Andrew was right. The cut was too high.

Beneath my focused, careful fingers I sensed/heard the faintly wet thrip and felt both the tiny poke of the needle, and, as I twisted my wrist, the corresponding minute catch in the living flesh. Ellie was alive. Her father and I had saved her. And her twin might dance and twirl and run in meadows when the autumn grass was waist high, wheat brown. But never....

I glanced down at the oval crossection of her thigh, so like a dark, oozy depression in the rotted hollow of some ancient stricken tree. I was tucking the ugly envelope of skin around her wide stump, closing the wound...but never, I thought. She would never walk.

- 12 -

I
t was a week later; Ellie was drifting in and out of consciousness because Andrew and I were keeping her dosed to the eyeballs on painkillers. I do not think at that point she even knew her leg was gone. But, for a moment, if you will, imagine waking to that knowledge. Remember, if you can, the dreams--both simple and complex--you sheltered in your heart as a child. Did you see yourself magically made pretty? Think you'd be taken into the neighborhood club? Or suddenly liked where you'd been scorned? Getting even? Becoming rich? Famous? The dreams of days of promise. Remembering those moments, imagine being a freak for the brief twelve years you slept in your bed, ate breakfasts, fought with your brothers and sisters, breathed.

Ellie had been afraid of having the surgery, but I know a part of her dreamed of being set free--so imagine her reaction when she woke--and found herself worse off. Yes, worse off. Because when she was tied to Abby she had Abby-- a sister exactly like her self. She had another living human being who shared her life and her pain. But now she was a cripple--crippled and alone.

***

It was nearly midnight, when I looked in on my patient. Ruth was sitting nearby nursing Ellie; alongside the older woman's knee there was a knitting bag disgorging the woolly bulge of a partly completed sweater, and on the doctor's narrow wooden sofa table, a thick black bound Bible.

"She's asleep," Ruth whispered, answering my unspoken question when she heard my footsteps outside the office door. "Poor thing, she doesn't know what she'll wake to."

I nodded somberly, watched Ruth get up to dampen Ellie's brow; she was wringing the sponge, the water tinkled softly in the basin.

"We saved her, though," I said coming into the room, my eyes adjusting to the dim yellow glow of the shaded kerosene lamp. I found myself idling over the open page of Ruth's book.

"Yes, I know that, Stuart." She pointed with her thick chin toward the Bible. "But I just can't seem to get it straight in my heart. Don't understand at all why the Lord would make a child suffer so. An innocent child."

"Yes," I said. I lit a cigarette. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to what had happened.

"I know all about what those Orientals believe, karma and such. And I tried to get my mind around it," she said, softly moving the brown puff of the sponge over the girl's cheeks. "But there's no sense to it. None. Don't care about past lives and all that truck. Even if that stuff's true as dirt, nobody deserves to come round again having to cope with more than Jesus himself up on the cross."

"And did you find the answer here?" I asked, tapping the thin onion skin of the page with my index finger.

"Nope. Maybe I didn't really expect to. My heart was just so full, and I thought to ease it with something I'd grown up with--old words are comforting at times. Or maybe I'm just trying to do what I always done--take care of Ellie and Abby so as to make up for my own past."

She averted her eyes, I wanted to ask her what she meant, but found I didn't have the nerve. I toyed with the thin pages of the book, not wanting to look at her or Ellie.

"Regina never cared a damn for anyone--she only thought of herself, you know," Ruth said. "After she killed herself, I tried to understand that, too."  Her closed fist tapped the center of her bony chest just over the place where her heart lay. "But I couldn't. I'm plain enough--the young men of Poughkeepsie used to joke that my body was all right, but my face could stop the court house clock. But Regina...she was so beautiful...physically beautiful." She sighed, then went on. "Like I told you, I'm not an educated woman. I'm not even a smart woman, but I went out and I bought a copy of that there Frenchman's book,
Emma Bovine
--"

"
Bovary
," I corrected automatically.

Ruth nodded and in the low light, I saw the yellow flare of the kerosene lamp reflecting in her spectacles. Her voice was sad, I thought. "I heard tell on it at the Vassar College library, and I thought that was maybe like her--driven, living with a man she didn't want, so frustrated she'd destroy her own life to get what she thought she needed."

"It's a brilliant book," I said evenly.

"Yes and it's just as real as real. But that kind of knowing--it's just like the Bible, Stuart," she indicated the heavy black bound book. "It changes nothing."

"Ruth," I began, but she cut me off.

"Regina's here in the house!" Her hand went up as if she were taking oath in a courtroom. "I've looked in at the twins many a night, gone in to make tucks and kiss their foreheads, and I've smelled that bitch Regina’s fancy violet bathsalts and seen her face leering out of one of theirs--"

"Ruth!"

"It's the solemn truth. And something else," she said, drawing a deep breath that made her rib cage rise. "There's been times when I've heard the rustle of her dress, or her laugh floating down the stairs--that evil sniggering laugh! God knows I know her voice well enough and that laughter's a living thing that can move around corners or travel on a straight course same as the smell of baking bread rising out of the oven."

Her face had gone dark, her mouth was knit in a tight line, and I knew she never expected me to believe these things. She saw me as a man of science and I think part of her hoped, wished I'd say anything--no matter how harsh or insulting--and pull her away from the thrall of her fancies.

"I've seen her too," I said. But before I could say more, Ellie was beginning to stir uneasily.

"She's coming round," I said. Her eyelids were fluttering, her face, which had been slack and expressionless was beginning to show the discomfort of pain at a low level awareness.

Some part of Ellie seemed to know. And the first thing we saw was her hand dabbling and making passes over the vacant spot that began just below her groin; then from six inches away, her half-sleeping hand traced the carved out space moving up toward her hip—where she had been joined with Abby.

"Unnnnnhhhhh" a deep groan escaped her.

 She began to cough and hack so fiercely my mind jumped immediately to hypostatic pneumonia. She'd been lying on her back too long.  I was afraid her lungs had filled with fluid. She coughed again. Her left hand dove toward her groin and her eyes flew open.

"My leg, my leg," she cried out. Her small cat face was a mask of terror. Ruth's big hand was digging in Ellie's shoulder, and over and over she was mindlessly crooning, soothing, "Sssh, sssh, there now, there now, get a grip, child."

"My leg!" She burst into a terrible spate of weeping that made her cough harder and gasp for breath. Her red hair clung to her forehead in sweaty strings. She could not stop crying, and I believe the truth of the matter was so awful, she could not, would not, did not want to accept it. She tried to sit up. Her hand was clutched against the heavy wad of dressing, the dead end of what had been the very top of her thigh—and more. "No," she screamed. "No! No! Not my
whole
leg!"

Ruth tried to hold her back, but Ellie catapulted forward sitting up and instantly all three sets of our eyes were riveted on the thick, heavy dressing rising vertically in place of where her leg had been.

"I want my mother," she shouted. "I hate you—I hate you! And I want my mother!"

"Ellie!" Ruth's eyes went wide, her voice was a strangled plea. "No--don't say it! Take it back, take it back quick!"

"Mother!" Ellie screamed again.

Not three seconds went by that I did not see a dead calm steal into Ellie's eyes and then, Regina's hard, crueler features moving over the child's face. Her hair went the darker shade of mahogany. Her form filled out; there were breasts pushing up the broad white hem of the sheet.

My eyes went wide, and I'm certain I gasped, called out, "Ruth, Ruth do you see that?" My own breathing filled the well of my ears with an alien sound. I don't know what she said in reply. My gaze was fixed.

Because most unbelievably of all, beneath the thin film of the bleached cotton sheet, a long shapely woman's leg--a true phantom limb--filled out the sad void that was the missing space of Ellie's stump.

***

"Get out, Ruth," Regina hissed through bared teeth, a clenched jaw. "Get out, now."  Her voice had a thick timbre, it rumbled deep in her throat, the hideous bubbling sound of someone speaking through a clot of mucous—as if she had to learn to use Ellie’s voice box. But Regina's dark jade eyes were very bright with malice.

I watched her swing her legs sideways. I felt my heart starting in my chest. Regina’s bare feet flapped against the floor. Then she began to move woodenly away from the bed, as if she were not quite used to manipulating this surgically impaired body, this child’s form. Her arms were held out stiffly, her legs gave way to a lurching gait.

Ruth wasn’t fooled. "Where's Ellie now, Regina?" she said.  Her voice was as stern and uncompromising as I'd ever heard it.

Regina’s laugh was hollow. "Inside me. Thrilling to the movement."

"Let her go," Ruth said. "She's just a child!"

"
My
child. And therefore mine to do with, just as I please."

"No one owns anyone else, Regina."

"I owned you, Ruth. Didn't I?" Her eyes narrowed, her mouth narrowed to a red slash--a terrifying imitation of a smile. "Why don't you tell Stuart about it, hmmm?" She flung out one hand limply.

Ruth winced. Her face went the color of old brick. She cringed, her shoulders turning in on themselves. "No," she gave out a soft gasp.

"No, you won't tell--or no, you don't believe I owned you?" Regina was very calm now--as if she might begin doing nothing more important than filing her nails or sipping tea. " ‘A plain woman, whose body was all right but the young men of Poughkeepsie said my face could stop the court house clock,’" she mocked. "Oh yes," Regina went on. "Ellie might have been unconscious, but
I
  heard every word you said."

Ruth shook her head, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

"
Tell
him, Ruth," Regina brayed, throwing her head back. "Tell him where I found you and what you were doing!" She turned to me. "And to think you were worried about her finding stains on the nursery sheets," she tssked. "Ruth knows all about such stains, don't you?"

"That's enough, Regina!" the older woman shouted. "Shut your filthy mouth!"

"I daresay your mouth is just as dirty--dirtier, in fact." Her eyes went the harsh green of glittering emeralds. "Know where I found her? In the county jail. Know why dear, Bible-reading Ruth was there? Because she was running a young Christian girl's Sunday School. Only the real agenda wasn't studying what Jesus and Mary did. The real learning took place in Ruth's bed! A cot in the alcove behind the curtain. Young men, indeed! It was girls
you
liked the taste of, wasn't it, Ruthie? Gabriel didn't know. He was my hired man, and he married her--then he found out though, didn't he? Didn't his pals tell him, ‘Gabe you've married the female whore of Red Hook.' Maybe that's why you never had children of your own--Gabriel certainly liked fucking me!"