Deathwatch - Final (8 page)

"Yes," Ruth said. "It's just the kind of thing a girl spins out in her mind. Scared the hell out of you, I bet." The rocker snapped forward.

"I felt like there was a chain around my throat." I laced my fingers together. "The more she wrote, the worse it got, the worse I felt. At the end there--just before I wrote her--she was sending sometimes two letters a day. All that love and good will and sweetness--it pulled on me. The nicer she was the more obligated I felt, and I didn't want to write her more than once a week maybe, or have her write so much. But she did." I paused, drawing my cigarettes from the flap of my white linen jacket. "I didn't answer for a long time. The mail was like a drift of white in my letterbox. My roommate used to joke me about it. ‘Must be a relief to see a bill from Klegg's Department Store or The Blue Angel Cafe,’ he'd laugh handing me the pile."

"Finally you wrote and told her," Ruth prompted.

"I didn't want to be engaged anymore--didn't think I wanted to get married. Not when I finished medical school, maybe not ever."  I lit the cigarette; the air was so still it stayed in a thick cloud around my head, and the thought crossed my mind, that Ruth and I were alike: our faces shrouded by the mix of shadow and white.

"How'd she do it," Ruth said.

"Livvy--she jumped from the Tide Basin bridge. Drowned."

"Was your letter in her pocket?"

I nodded, sucking in the smoke, feeling half-drowned, myself. "Everyone knew," I whispered. The flush of guilt and shame washed over me all over again. There's no more terrible feeling in the world, really.

"You drank to kill the guilt," Ruth said. "And I guess, like Andrew, you found out pretty quick it doesn't work."

Abby's high laughter bounced toward us from the garden. I heard the thin scratch of gravel: the wheel chair on the paths, her footsteps. We could hear the girls moving toward us.

Ruth leaned forward now, quickening her speech, lowering her soft voice even more. I had to strain to hear her. "Did you know that when Regina was pregnant with the girls, she had bad trouble with her heart--the beats, too fast."

"Palpitations," I said.

"Just so.  Andrew gave her some kind of drug--not once, but every day to slow it—”

"Barbiturates," I guessed.

"When the girls were born like they were, they blamed each other. This house was hell a long, long time."

"Of course it's ready," Abby's voice came to us from the side yard. She stopped pushing her sister's chair briefly, and we could hear her take a long deep breath. "Phew, hard work, I think you've gotten fatter, Ellie," she laughed.

"You want to watch out Stuart," Ruth whispered. "Your guilt helps conjure Regina. Needing her to take the sting out of being with a child."

"No more, Ruth," I warned. They were maybe forty feet away--the length of the porch. I could see the white shapes of their dresses just beyond the shrubbery.

"She loves you, too." Ruth ignored me, bearing down on the
too
.

"Regina?" my voice was a strangled caw.

"Ellie," she answered. "Don't let the same lesson get by you again."  She tugged my sleeve, forcing me to look at the matte of veiling. "Some people--the ones that are weak and too wounded--they aren't strong enough to live with love that's not returned."

Abby bounded up the steps. "Let's just eat it right here." She waved a set of spoons she'd snatched from the table. "Right out of the freezer, Stuart."

I went to get Ellie, heard Ruth telling Abby to hold on and wait for her sister. "Go call your father, Ab," Ruth said.

Andrew staggered drunkenly onto the porch, moving haphazardly through the long shadows; he was collarless, in his shirt sleeves.

There was a metallic thump.

We all jumped at the noise.

"Shitspells," he cried. The ice cream freezer clunked and rattled, rolling onto its side under his feet. He skidded unsteadily in a puddle of water.

I heard Abby's sharp intake of breath.

"It's just ice cream," he announced soddenly. "For Christ's sake, shut up."

I thought he might kick at the freezer, but he turned and went back inside, weaving away from us, the wooden screen door banging shut.

I moved quickly in the silence, righting the can, moving it out of the wet, rapidly turning the crank handle a few times, saying nonsense things like, "It's okay, we'll have it now, it's done for sure."

Then, we were in a small cluster--me and the girls--Ellie leaning over the edge of the chair. "Readysetgo," Abby said, the enthusiasm gone from her voice.

Three long handled spoons dove into the round tin, salty water sloshed at the edge.

"The pail leaked, the pail leaked when he kicked it," Abby wailed.

Ellie's spoon fell from her hand at the taste, a red stain bloomed, ran from her dress front to her lap. She began to cry. "Aren't we ever going to have good times like other girls?"

Salt bitter; I spat over the side of the porch, trying to clear the taste from my own mouth, thinking it was no worse than the taste of Ruth's words.

"Ruined," Abby mourned, "every time I plan something, it ends up ruined." She hurled the spoon, it clattered across the porch.

"Plans are like that sometimes, honey," Ruth said.

Abby ran to me, her head burrowing against my chest. I knew she wanted no more than a moment's comfort. I held her close.

 I watched Ruth reach out to dab Ellie's soiled dress gently with a handkerchief. She folded the cloth in a pad and touched the clean part to Ellie's cheeks, blotting tears.

Ellie's sad eyes followed me. I read in them the thought that she loved me but it didn't matter, saw the knowledge she was not chosen, never would be.

I couldn't look at her. I soothed Abby, shushed her, knowing Ellie was aware the tears silvering my own eyes, stinging my throat were all for the summer night gone sour and her twin.

Shortly after that, Regina came among us.

- 16 -

"
I
could send you to New York, Ruth. There's good surgeons there," I said. It was just past lunch and we were sitting side by side in the library; on the low table in front of us was a half empty coffee pot, the crusts from two sandwiches, an open surgical text. The photographs were obscure and cloudy, but the illustrations were crystal clear.

"Will the New York specialists fix me up so that people will look me face on?" She stared at me, and I caught the wet glimmer of her good eye under her veil.

"No," I shook my head. "But they can contour the shape of your jaw...." There was no real cosmetic skin repair in those days; we just grafted what we could from healthy tissue to cover injuries and wounds. "Give you areas of scar-free flesh...."

"So, instead of looking like the rusty broken-through bottom of a blackened skillet--"

"Ruth!" She was right, but it didn't stop my shock.

"I'll be like something the tinker left too long on the fire and then tried to mend. Lots of copper-red seams and lumps."

"They have more experience with this kind of thing than Andrew--"

One of her hands had contracted, and she laid its shrunken monkey foot shape on my arm. "I don't want Andrew to do it--I want you to." She paused. "You say the infection's not healing the way it ought, that taking good skin," she touched her left buttock briefly, "will stop the endless oozing and weeping and dressings with picric acid."  Her lips stretched in a grimace I knew was a grin. "Stuart," she leaned in confidentially patting my knee, "you can't make me look any worse."

She was wrong of course; and we both knew it. But I thought it brave of her to say so.

***

It was while Ruth was under the anesthesia--the first time for skin graft, the second to remove the mortified flesh from the failed surgery--that Regina appeared.

It was seven o'clock in the morning, and I'd just excised the first of the long rectangular strips I planned to use to cover Ruth's seared face and throat with healthy tissue. Andrew was working with me--I understood she wanted me to do the surgery--but I needed assistance.

"I keep hearing the word flay banging away inside my head," he said, looking at me over the brim of his mask. His hands were unsteady, he looked hungover, but I thought he was sober.

"Yes, it's like that," I sighed looking at the bloody furrow I'd just carved in Ruth's buttocks. I lifted the skin strip with the point of my surgical knife, and Andrew laid it onto a shallow metal tray filled with saline solution. I started cutting the next section, my mind focused on the details of the delicate operation; Andrew hissed, and I looked up, squinting into the comparative shadows of the room. Regina stood just inside the threshold, the door flapping wide behind her.

"Here! What are you doing!" Andrew shouted.

I'd stopped, the scalpel hung in mid-air, a rill of unchecked blood welled up in the pit of the wound then spilled over the white slope of Ruth's left hip.

Was he seeing her? Shouting at me?

"Doing here," I echoed in a strangled voice.

"Taking care of unfinished business--same as you," Regina said.

I felt my heart clench in a painful spasm, the blood ringing in my ears.

"By the way, Andrew doesn't see me. I won't let him--not yet, anyway," she said. She moved towards the table, hands gripping the padded edge, peering down. "He's only reminded of me--a fleeting thought, a psychic whiff of....violets...."

She trailed off, but I thought she might be about to say which one of the girls she was manipulating.

"Ruth," she tsked under her breath. "Such an ugly state to be in." Her index finger rode the ruined mound of flesh, and she sucked at the reddened tip.

"Stuart, she's bleeding!" Andrew shrieked at me.

I started working fast, but my fingers were slipping in the gore.
Nerve, keep your
nerve,
I shouted at myself inwardly, forcing the hemostat against the spurting vein. Acrid yellow sweat dripped from my temples, stung my eyes.

"Clamp it, Andrew! Clamp it, I can't see!" I turned away from the table, quickly mopping my brow with a sterile swab.

"How much did you drink last night?" she asked, coming close and sniffing the air around me. "Your eyes are bloodshot. You're not more than a binge away from becoming Andrew," she said, grinning up at me.

"I won't let you destroy me," I hissed under my breath.

"I won't have to," she said. "It's inside you, you'll do it to yourself." She laughed lightly, then turned shimmying toward the hallway, beige high heeled boots clicking on the bare floor, a tuft of frilled petticoat bubbling from the olive line of her hem like white froth foaming on the sea. She turned, and I was suddenly aware of her pale arms, the swell of her breasts at the wide neckline.

I shut her out of my mind, went back to the table; Andrew had already staunched the bleeding and turned my patient over. The red swamp of Ruth's face lay under my shaking hands.  I was trying to force myself to concentrate, to think.

"Ruth can hear me. Deep inside herself," Regina whispered from the doorway.

I glanced up.

"She's crying with it," Regina made a fist and struck her chest. "But her tears aren't enough." Regina shook her head. "She was a worm using my shame against me to burrow inside my daughters, to usurp my place, make them her own. What if I did hate the sight of them? Freaks squeezed from my body. ‘Poor Regina,’ they said. ‘Look what she gave birth to.’ Ask yourself how many mothers can look on monsters with love? Oh but Ruth loved them, did she? She is suffering, and I will make her suffer more." Her smile was a shark's grin. "I will see her dead, Doctor."

Was it Abby or Ellie? I peered harder looking for a clue--the now-familiar habit Abby had of pushing her hair back from her damp forehead with the inside of her wrist; a slight sway in the walk, the psychic residue of Ellie's amputated limb.

But she was already gone, the door vibrating in her wake, shutting her from my sight--but not my thudding heart.

Andrew had prepared the graft site, and we laid the first strip, fat-side down along the length of Ruth's sunken cheek and jaw. My hands still trembling, my mind seething, I stitched as neatly as I could.

It was long and messy and, with a sinking heart I knew-- less than half way through--it was a botched, miserable job.

- 17 -

S
eptember first, a week after her surgery, the large black mortified patches on Ruth's cheeks, forehead and throat told the tale. The newly grafted skin was dying, it had to come off.

"Now what?" she asked, lying groggily against the pillows. The faint odor of decay overlaid with bactericide clung to her.

"Debridement--"

"Meaning--"

"Meaning, I have to scrape the rotting tissue, or there'll be an infection and it will kill you."

"No anesthesia," she said wearily, her good eye hunting mine.

"No," I said, getting up to pace the length of her bedside. "No. The pain--it's impossible." I paused looking at her directly. "It wouldn't be surgery, Ruth, it would be torture--"

"Listen to me,
Doctor
Granville," she interrupted. "Every time she comes out, Regina gets stronger. We both know I can't hold her back if I'm unconscious. You shoot me full of morphine, or whatever drug will deaden the pain, and then you give me a local--or whatever you call it, and you operate."

"Very few people can stand being awake and cut with the scalpel in such a personal delicate area," I said quietly. "It's the intimacy, our faces are us."

"And what is my face now?"

I couldn't answer that.

"Regina can't have it all, Stuart," she said. "She can't keep winning. You shilly-shallied around and look, here it is September, and I'd hoped the girls would be off somewhere at school." Her voice trailed away.

"I was taking care of you," I put in.

She made a snorting noise. "You're like the Dutchboy runnin’ here and there plugging endless holes in the dam." She held up two bandaged fingers, lightly stabbing them in a random pattern. "But let's not forget it was Regina who sprung those leaks. Give me what you can to take away the pain--but no general anesthesia," she said.