House of Mercy (39 page)

Rose was calling him. She was standing outside the sliding glass door, the one with the broken latch, the perpetually failing broken latch that would lock at the slightest vibration no matter how many times he attempted to fix it. When the trash truck rumbled past on the street, when the dog barked, when Rose jumped rope on the deck—
thwap-thud, thwap-thud, thwap-thud—
the door would lock and she would cry out,
Daddy Daddy!
and if he didn’t hear her right away or was at too great a distance to come in the short seconds before her panic set in, she would resort to calling as her mother did:
Garner! Garner!
and pounding on the door, pounding until the latch became stuck for sure. But he would rescue his Rose, always rescue Rose, would never fail to pull her out of the waking nightmare in which she was forgotten and starved and carried off in the talons of hungry eagles to feed their babies.

Garner! Garner!
And the pounding. He would need the right tool to pry up that latch this time. An ice pick . . . pick, pick, prick, poke. The pricking, the piercing! The agony of cold and hot raced along his every nerve, arms and legs and head aflame with a thousand red-hot stabs of the poker, the pricking, picking, relentless jaws of fire ants eating him alive.

Eating him up, gobbling him up, savoring his skin and masticating his muscles and burrowing into his bones, leaving each super-sensory nerve fiber for dessert, until he had been whittled away into a ham hock for a soup base, and his predators were bursting, and the eagle would swoop to the locked balcony like an open field and pluck his Rose and steal her away to the nest of ravenous eaglets.

He could not let it happen, not to Rose, who needed rescue in spite of her piercing, pricking thorns.

Garner! Daddy! Garner!

“I am coming!” he shouted, and he fought the fire ants, he sloughed them off his body with his bare hands, he beat them to the ground and then rolled atop them, their fragile exoskeletons cracking and crunching under the weight of his will.

He felt their pain. It was his, and he feared he would not survive it. If it had not been Rose calling, if it had been anyone but his daughter, he knew he could not have survived.

The shudder of a terrible chill passed through him, the shadow of death.
I am coming, Rose
. How he hoped she was not already dead!

In the depths of the cold shadow he opened his eyes. He had forgotten his eyes entirely, so overwhelmed was his brain by the sensations of fire and ice. But they opened and freed a flood of water, a dam of pain, released. And in the liquid blur he saw Rose on the floor within arm’s reach, her back arched like that jump rope on the upswing, her lovely black hair chopped off and splayed around her pale head, her beautiful head . . .

She breathed like a fish on dry land.
Garner! Listen to me!
But the command didn’t come from her lips, stretched wide like a shark’s jaw to swallow all the air in the room. He reached out to touch her, and the tears washed away his vision finally, and he could see that this was not his Rose. This was his daughter who was not his daughter, whom he loved anyway.

He couldn’t remember her name.

Rose would know it. Rose, crying at the glass door. It rattled and shook and cracked under her pleading fists.

Somehow, Garner stood. Somehow, he went to her.

35

T
he feet clad in red shoes moved. Beth saw them turn to the side, and a few moments later, white fingers gripped the edge of the door frame. The ball peen hammer in Trey’s grip made a hesitant bounce on the glass as if he had seen it too.

“That’s him, right?” she asked Trey.

“Those are his shoes,” he said.

Soon the rest of the man appeared, limb by limb, extracting himself from the room by turning over and then pulling his knees up under him, still holding the frame. He came out the way an adult backs out of a tunnel for children, stiff from confinement and unsure of the space behind him. He pushed back into the hallway with his head close to the ground.

Beth pressed herself up to the glass as if her desire to help him would be enough to get him off the floor. She had never been so glad to see a man alive, this complete stranger, nor so afraid that he would die when she was so close to reaching him. She pounded a fist on the window, and he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, then turned his face in her direction, but the morning light from her window glanced off his glasses and she couldn’t see his eyes. She wasn’t sure that she was anything more to him than a shadow beating on the glass.

“Garner!” Trey shouted.

“Where’s Dr. Ransom?” Beth asked.

“Garner!” he repeated. “Can you unlock the door?”

Beth doubted the man could see straight, let alone crawl the marathon that stretched out between them.

“Call 9-1-1,” Beth ordered.

“Cat Ransom
is
our 9-1-1,” Trey said. “But the sheriff will bring someone.”

“You called the sheriff ? Of course you called the sheriff. That’s exactly what a thinking person would have done.”

Garner put one hand on the wall for balance and straightened up, got his opposite foot out from under him and planted it on the ground, and then froze in this position for long seconds.

“We have to break the glass,” Beth said. “We have to get to him.” She reached for the hammer dangling from Trey’s fingers at his side.

“He’s getting up.”

He was. His muscles found the coordination to push off the wall and floor together. The strength of legs, hips, torso, and arms worked together for a brief and beautiful moment, as Garner slowly, slowly rose to his feet. He was nearly erect when his head came forward, as if it thought his feet were already on the move, and then his chin went to his chest, and his entire body fell into the wall and slid down the face of it. Garner landed hard on his shoulder before rolling onto his back, where he lay still.

It seemed that shock had frozen Trey. Beth grabbed the hammer out of his hands and started beating on the window rather than the door. The vibration of the strikes buzzed like electricity down the hammer’s shaft and caused the bones of her fingers to hum. She wrapped the little hammer in both hands and raised it over her head, bringing it down on the window with all her weight, again and again. She closed her eyes and was overcome by the memory of Herriot leaping through that screen window when she went after Mercy. She saw her dog’s black paws and thick claws cutting through the mesh like butter, and then scrambling over the wall with no command or leash or common sense to stop her. Beth went after her grandfather with the same recklessness.

Her hammer seemed to freeze in the glass, and when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that the head had gone through it and become trapped in a web of fine cracks.

Trey shed his flannel shirt and shoved his hands back into the sleeves, wrapping the cuffs around his knuckles like makeshift gloves. He stripped her hands off the handle and wrenched the hammer head out of the window, then went after the breach. He was taller than Beth and able to come down on the weakness more forcefully. Beth jerked her face away as chips of glass flew.

Trey got them both into Cat Ransom’s office through the shattered window. There was glass under the window inside the waiting room, and Beth’s cowboy boots ground it deep into the chair cushions as she climbed over them, one hand in Trey’s sturdy grip. A shard bit into her shoulder as he helped her over the sill. But her eyes were on Garner, who looked like another dying man she wouldn’t be able to save.

Somehow she reached him before Trey did, at the precise moment when his entire body shuddered and he vomited against the wall.

Trey turned his head away. “Whoa.”

“It’s good, it’s good,” Beth said, grabbing his shoulder to roll him away from the choking hazard and into fresh air. She got him onto his other side. “Throwing up is almost always a good sign, right? His body’s getting rid of toxins. We have to find out what it is.”

Trey shook his head and talked through his fingers. “The ergot was days ago. Would it keep doing this now?”

Beth didn’t know.

Trey continued, “She could have given him anything. An overdose of something. Or drain cleaner.”

Garner’s heartbeat was slow but even, his airways were clear. Beth used her own sleeves to clean off Garner’s mouth and nose. The physical elements of illness had never bothered her. She’d seen worse in animals—calves wasted by Johne’s disease, cows with prolapsed uteri that had to be reinserted by hand, bulls made lame by foot rot more rank than any manure, horses trapped by barbed wire. It was the helplessness, not the earthiness, that punched her in the gut every time. The desire to help was so easily overwhelmed by ignorance of what to do.

Crouching over Garner now seemed so much like that moment in the crowded, suffocating cab of her father’s truck, while Beth did what her father’s heart couldn’t. But Garner’s heart and lungs were doing their own work, and her hands needed a task. They skimmed over his pallid face and shuddering chest without finding a place to land.

“His breathing is really shallow,” Beth said to Trey. “See what you can find in that room he came out of. If we can find out what the poison is, maybe we can treat it.”

Casting a worried glance at Garner, Trey stepped over him to get to the exam room.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“Cat’s in here.”

“Make her tell you what she’s done.”

“I think she’s . . . it looks like she’s unconscious.”

“Stay with her,” Beth said. “Do you know CPR?”

A drumming sound drew Beth’s attention toward the window she and Trey had just broken. Five square panes stood at attention before the rising sun. At left, on the bottom, the shattered sixth pane gaped. The others were glaringly bright against the dark contrast of the interior, barely blue in the intensifying light. She squinted. There was nothing else to see from her position on the floor except the underside of the balcony and the roofline of an old building across the street.

She realized she had expected to see a person, a savior announcing that he was an EMT with epinephrine in the trunk of his car, and IVs and activated charcoal and heart monitors and anything else needed to reverse what she—no, what Cat Ransom had done. But there was no one. Only her, and death, and knowledge that she could apply to animals, not human beings in the throes of unknown poisons.

The head of the wolf rose before the pane of glass in the center of the row. His front paws struck it as he came up and repeated the thumping sound that had first caught Beth’s attention.

The sight of the beast filled her with peace. She was deeply comforted by the possibility that God had sent the wolf—an endangered species unwanted in his native habitat—to her for a specific purpose.

I will heal him
. Beth felt certain the voice that wrapped itself around her was from God, inaudible to Trey or Garner or the doctor. It was not the wolf speaking, like a creature from a fairy tale, though the wild animal was probably closer to God than she was.
I will heal him through you
.

How? I can’t control this gift
.

The answer was whispered into her heart with a voice so full of love that it could do no wounding.
My mercy doesn’t exist because of who you are, but because of who I am
.

Then why do you need me to do it?

She asked sincerely, without disrespect, and the moment the words passed through her mind she realized that the question was backward. Of course God could heal this dying man without her; God didn’t need her to accomplish his miracles.
She
was the one who needed him to do it through her.
She
needed his mercy, his redemption, his reversal of her sin and the consequence that had followed.

“You are about to show me mercy,” she whispered.

I am
.

“You didn’t heal my father.” She was putting the puzzle together, not questioning the truth.

Not all death is death, child. I promised him long ago that I would heal this family. The promise is also for you
.

She would hold on to that promise tightly.

“What should I do?” she said. Her restless hands finally alighted on her grandfather’s cold fingers. She took one of his hands in both of hers.

Believe me
.

“I do.”

As she sat on her knees, Beth clutched her grandfather’s hand and pressed it to her cheek. His palm caught her tears while her forearms entwined his like a vine. His baby-soft skin smelled like fresh soil, like a garden about to sprout new life. Beth’s prayer over him was wordless and open. Hope yielded to trust, doubt converted to belief, fear gave way to anticipation. She clung to Garner’s hand and waited for God to do what he said he would do. She would not leave until he did.

She didn’t notice time. She didn’t notice whether she was comfortable or stiff, or hot or cold, or uttering her emotions aloud. She didn’t pay attention to the room or anything else in the world. Eventually, words from a psalm memorized long ago formed in her mind:
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever
.