Her Loving Husband's Curse (29 page)

The woman looked around as if she were looking for someone to tell her what to do, but no one was there. She gestured for James to follow her down the hall. They took the elevator to the second floor where she showed him a windowless room with two hospital beds.

“You can rest here,” she said.

James shut the door as she walked away. He sighed, pressing the air from his lungs as if he were still being watched by human eyes, and he waited until the woman's footsteps grew fainter. When he felt safe, and alone, he fell asleep.

As soon as he opened his eyes he knew something was wrong. A young nurse in pink scrubs pressed herself against the wall as if the Devil himself requested her presence in Hell. A doctor with salt and pepper hair in a white lab coat sat in the chair next to James, staring at him.

“How is my wife?” James asked. “Is she all right?”

“You weren't breathing,” the nurse said.

Though James cringed inside, outwardly he laughed. “That can't be true if I’m sitting here talking to you.” He laughed again. When the nurse’s eyes narrowed, he shrugged. “Sometimes I get sleep apnea and stop breathing for a while.”

Two men in scrubs appeared in the doorway carrying a gurney between them. When they saw James sitting upright, they stepped back.

“Were you sending me to the morgue?” James asked. He tried to sound light but sounded sickly instead.

“You had no heartbeat,” the woman said. She stepped to the door. “I'm calling the authorities.”

“There's no reason for that,” the doctor said. “Obviously, you were wrong, Nurse Tosh. As you can see, he’s fine.”

The nurse glared at the doctor. “I came in here to tell him his wife was out of surgery, and I called you when he didn't wake up. You're the one who said his heart wasn't beating, Doctor Masters. You're the one who said he had no pulse.”

Doctor Masters’s face became a caricature of silliness. “I was just joking,” he said. “You came running to me saying he had died in his sleep, so I was playing along with you.”

“I'm calling the authorities. He's one of
them
.”

The nurse tried to leave but the doctor closed the door in front of her. He leaned close to her and spoke firmly. “There’s nothing to report. Obviously, the man is fine. He was in a deep sleep and you panicked. That's all. You need to consider if this report is worth your job.”

The nurse shook her head, opened the door, and walked away. The doctor closed the door behind her and stepped close to James.

“Your wife is out of surgery,” the doctor said. “She's still in serious condition, but she's stable. Come with me to my office and we can talk there.”

All eyes were on James. The nurse who found him dead asleep was huddled close to two other nurses, whispering until James stepped into the hall. She stopped speaking, and the entire floor was silent. Everyone there, doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors, stared at James like he was hideously disfigured or naked or unclean somehow. They knew. He could tell by their disgusted faces. They saw his pale white skin, his shallow breaths, his dark eyes, his glasses lost somewhere along the way, and they knew. James wouldn’t look at them as he followed the doctor down the hall.

“She won't say anything,” the doctor said as he opened his office door. “She's a single mother and her ex-husband doesn't pay child support. She can't afford to lose this job. Besides, she has a reputation for making mountains out of molehills. No one will listen to her.”

“How is my wife?” James asked.

“There were some complications during surgery. She lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion. There's still some concern about infection.”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course.” The doctor's hands came together under his chin, and he watched James like a boy who stumbled upon Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. “I just have one question. Are you…?” The doctor shook his head. “I always wondered if it were possible. With all the craziness these days, I thought it had to be nonsense, but here you are, and you don't breathe, and your heart doesn't beat, and yet you're as real as I am.”

James said nothing. The doctor gestured to the photos on the bookshelf behind his desk.

“This is my family,” the doctor said. He handed James a picture of a pretty blond lady and two young boys. “My wife Emily and my sons Joshua and Eric.”

James pulled out his wallet, surprised it was still there, and showed the doctor a picture of Grace. “This is my daughter.”

The doctor pulled the picture close to his face and studied it. “She looks just like you. I didn't know…I didn't think…”

James shook his head. “She's adopted.”

“But she looks just like you.”

“It’s a long story.”

The doctor had his stethoscope around his neck, his hand on the knob on the end, stretching out towards James.

“Can I…?”

“Then can I see my wife?”

“Of course.”

The doctor closed his eyes as he listened to the silence inside James's chest. “Unbelievable,” he said. He sat behind his desk, his fingers forming a triangle under his chin. “What are you going to do? Congress is holding a special session to decide what to do about the Vampire Dawn. Now they're fighting between deportation and internment and…" The doctor grimaced, unable to continue.

“And…”

“It doesn’t matter. The ACLU is fighting it, but a lot of angry people are worried about being attacked by bloodsuckers in the night. Look there.”

He pointed through the open blinds into the corridor where a patient, hospital gown open in the back, pink fluffy slippers on her feet, wore a necklace of garlic coves around her neck. Across from the nurse's station was a silver cross banged crookedly into the wall.

James felt a grip like fingers around his throat. This wasn’t a flash of red-boiling anger. This wasn’t rage-filled frustration or blindly thrashing fury. This was primal, paralyzing fear.

“I need to see my wife,” James said.

The doctor walked James to the Intensive Care Unit. The family before them had to be buzzed past the locked door, but Doctor Masters ran his card through the slot on the wall and the doors opened. They walked into a circular ward with the nurses’s station in the center and eight rooms around, the walls of glass exposing the patients and the monitors inside. The doctor led James to a room around the nurses’s station, and he saw her, Sarah, sweet Sarah, beautiful Sarah, everything he ever needed in this world Sarah, her eyes closed, breathing heavily, well bandaged, her beautiful face lacerated and bruised, a dead-pallid tone to her usual peach-like complexion. He walked to her, carefully, as though the sound of his footsteps would wake her. He bit his lip, determined not to cry.

“Sarah?” he whispered.

She didn’t respond. He pulled a chair to the side of her bed and sat beside her. He tucked the blanket closer around her in case she was cold, she was always cold, Sarah, then he brushed a few matted curls from her cheek. He took her hand and watched her sleep. The doctor backed away, leaving them this time alone. James wished he couldn’t hear what was happening outside. The doctor was talking to the nurse who had first found James asleep.

“I'm calling the authorities.” She sounded defiant, ready to stand up to the doctor, the administration, and anyone else who would tell her she was wrong.

“I examined him in my office,” the doctor said. “There's nothing wrong with him.”

“Then bring him here. Let me listen to his heartbeat.”

James heard the uneasy pause. “No need for that,” the doctor said.

“We're not safe,” another woman's voice said. “How can you let him stay here? What if he attacks someone?”

The doctor laughed. “Did she tell you about her crazy ideas? Really, Maria, I thought you had more sense than that.”

“But they're real,” Maria said. “It's been proven. And that man,” James could feel her pointing through the wall, “is one of them.”

“Does he look like he's going to hurt anyone? He has a daughter. He's worried about his wife. Leave him be.”

The nurse grumbled as she walked away. James knew from the bass in her voice and the thunder in her step that she wasn’t through. She would report him, and report him again, until someone took her seriously. She would tell anyone and everyone. James knew the self-righteous smile without turning around to see it, the leering glance, the turn of the head that said, “I know you’re there and I refuse to see you.”

The end was coming. Life as he knew it, with his wife, with his daughter, would no longer exist. He knew that as well as he knew he was sitting in a hospital room looking at his injured wife. If he hadn’t been turned he never would have attracted Hempel’s attention. If he had never attracted Hempel’s attention, his name would have never been on that list in the cabinet in the dead man’s closet. The hysteria about the Vampire Dawn sweeping the world would be an interesting aside for him, entertaining reports on the news, a reason to watch a You Tube video or two, a reason to say, “That’s too bad” or “How could they do that?” and go on with his day because he would be awake with everyone else. But now Sarah was suffering because of what he was. If he could have found a wooden stake he would have run it through his own heart. At least he couldn’t hurt Sarah any more.

Sarah sighed. “Sarah?” he said. But she didn’t respond. He stroked her arm, stared at her face, looked for the smallest trace that she was in any pain or needed immediate medical attention.

James shook his head, blocking out the whispers coming from outside the room. When a blue-scrubbed nurse opened the door to check Sarah’s monitors, they stopped speaking. They didn’t need to bother, he thought. He could hear them through the wall.

“Is everything all right?” James asked.

The nurse nodded. She checked the numbers on the monitors, checked the IV bags hanging from the rack, checked the connection to Sarah’s arm. She didn’t seem nervous with James in the room. She didn’t hesitate or back away, but he knew there were others who were afraid.

The cell phone in his pocket vibrated and he looked at the number. It was Olivia.

“James, oh thank God. Where are you?”

“I’m at the hospital. Sarah is…she’s been…”

“I knew something was wrong. I felt it around midnight last night.”

“Yes,” James said. “That’s when the accident happened.”

“Oh, James.” Olivia stammered her words. “How badly is she hurt?”

James explained the accident that was even then a high-speed blur in his memory. “It all happened so fast, Olivia. I should have been able to react quickly enough.”

“Don’t you dare blame yourself, James. You saved Sarah’s life.”

“I didn’t help her at all. I’ve been promising her I would protect her, I would never let anything bad happen to her again, and she nearly died because of me.”

“She most certainly would have died if you hadn’t had control of the car as well as you did. You need to stop thinking that way, James, right now. You need to stay strong for Sarah.”

“How is Grace?” he asked.

“She’s fine. Francine said she’s sad, she keeps looking for you, but she’s all right. Theresa called me when you two didn’t come home last night. Where were you during the day?”

James sighed. “I’ll explain later,” he said.

“I’m coming to Maine right away. I’ve closed up the shop, I’m packing my bags, and I’m coming.” She paused, and James heard the sorrow cracking her motherly voice, as though her own children were suffering. “Are you all right, James?”

“I’m hanging in there.”

“All right, dear. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

James sat back against the chair and closed his eyes. He felt a wound of seeping sorrow, imagining his daughter going to sleep every night for the rest of her life without him. He would never tuck her in again, tell her a bedtime story, and, in later years, never help her with her homework. Never give her boy advice. Never walk her down the aisle or hold his grandchildren in his arms. He saw it all slipping away. All those lonely years he knew before he found his wife again were like a lingering dream compared to the shock of the reality he now faced.

When the pain became too much and he had to take his mind off everything or else begin to gnaw his own arm off, he turned on the television hanging high on the wall.

We’ve got a great show for you tonight. To begin, I have some late-breaking news to report. Congress has decided, being the learned, compassionate group they have proven themselves to be time and time again, to round up vampires for no other reason than (whispers) because they can. Here is Congressman John Heckle-Green talking to reporters on the Capitol steps explaining why, by the slimmest of margins, our august leaders decided to bury the undead alive.

(Cut to a dapper middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair, a well-fitted gray Armani suit, and a fixed smile. The dapper middle-aged man says, “These undead creatures take the form of wolves and bats, and they leave their coffins at night and they feed on the blood of the living.”)

So they take the form of wolves and bats and feed on the blood of the living? Ooh, scary. You know where he got that from? The 1931 movie
Dracula
starring Bela Lugosi. That’s right. The Congress of the United States of America has made the decision to imprison people, who happen not to breathe, based on the dialogue in an eighty-one year-old movie. And you know what? The dialogue isn’t even very good. They had a habit of stating the obvious back then. Here’s another example of dialogue from the movie: