Innocence: A Novel (16 page)

I slid lower in my seat.

She said, “They won’t harm you.”

“Who are they?”

“They take care of her.”

“Of the girl with no name?”

“Yes. Come on now. I want you to see her.”

“Why?”

She opened her mouth to reply—and had no words. For a moment she stared out at the black limbs of the maples as the wind slowly knitted a white lacework across their bark. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I want you to see her. But I know you must. It’s important that you do. I know it’s important.”

I took a deep breath and let it out as if with it I would also exhale my doubt.

She said, “I called them earlier. They know we’re coming. I told them that you have … issues. Serious issues. They understand me, the way I am. They’ll be respectful, Addison.”

“I guess if you aren’t afraid of them, I shouldn’t be, either.”

In spite of what I said, I dreaded going inside, but I got out and closed the passenger door and waited for her to come around the front of the Land Rover.

Snow at once diamonded her black hair, and the skiff on the sidewalk plumed around her silver shoes.

Just then I realized another similarity between her and the marionette, besides the black diamonds of makeup and the eyes. The puppet wore a black tuxedo with a black shirt and a white tie, and Gwyneth was dressed in black but for her shoes.

I almost turned away from the house, but I loved her, and so I followed her through the gate in a spearpoint iron fence.

“His name is Walter,” Gwyneth said. “He’s a widower with two young children. He was a medic in the military, and he’s a physician assistant now.”

She strode more than stepped, and she seemed to skate more than stride, and I thought that this girl would never lose her footing on treacherous ground or slip on ice, so extraordinary was her poise.

Stepping onto the porch, she said, “His sister, Janet, lives here, too. And an older woman, Cora. Janet and Cora are nurses. The patient is never left alone for more than a few minutes.”

“Isn’t this too many people for you?” I asked.

“They understand my problem. They don’t get too close. They make sure there’s never more than two in the same room with me. You’ll be all right.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” she said. “You’ll be all right.”

The bell press sounded chimes, which we could hear through the wreathed door, there on the Christmas-lighted porch.

Almost at once the door opened, and a man said, “Gwyn, we’ve missed you coming around.”

I couldn’t see him because I kept my head down, afraid that my ski mask was insufficient disguise, that he would know me by my eyes.

She said, “I’m no less like I’ve always been, Walter, so there aren’t a lot of days I go anywhere. But tonight is … special.”

With considerable apprehension, I followed her into a foyer with a plank floor and a round, flowered rug. A solemn voice issued from a television in a nearby room.

When Walter said, “This must be Addison,” I said, “I’m sorry my shoes are wet,” and Walter said, “It’s nothing, just a little snow.”

I liked his voice. He sounded kind. I wondered about his appearance, but I didn’t raise my head to look.

Gwyneth said, “Remember Addison’s rules like I told you,” and Walter said he remembered, and she said, “Where are the children?”

“In the kitchen. They know to stay there.”

“I’d love to see them, I really would, but this is hard on Addison.”

I wondered how neurotic Walter thought I was. He probably thought I was past neurotic and all the way to crazy.

He said, “Janet’s in the kitchen. She was getting dinner when you called, but she’s putting it on hold.”

“I’m sorry I gave you such short notice.”

“You’re like family, Gwyn. We don’t need any notice at all. I’ll go see if she needs help with the kids or something.”

When just the two of us were in the foyer, Gwyneth said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I’m all right. Are you okay?”

She said, “I’ve been better.”

I raised my head and scoped the foyer. An archway on the right led to the living room. Everything was clean and neat and bright and pretty, a place of harmony, absent of conflict. I thought that those who lived here must feel safe, and I was pleased for them, more than pleased, happy that such a life was possible for them and for so many people.

The voice on the television said that the plague in China had actually begun across the border in North Korea.

A woman entered the hallway from the kitchen, and I lowered my head once more. She greeted Gwyneth and introduced herself to me—she was Janet—and I said that I was pleased to meet her, though I looked at nothing but the round, flowered carpet.

Janet led us to the second floor. We waited at the top of the stairs
while she went along the hallway to a room at the end, where Cora, the older nurse, tended to the nameless girl.

Because I felt that someone of bad intent had quietly ascended the stairs behind us, blocking the way out, I turned to look, but no one followed us.

Janet and Cora came out of the patient’s room, went into another directly across the hall, and closed that door.

“This is important,” Gwyneth said.

“I guess it must be.”

“I know now why I brought you here.”

“Why?”

Instead of answering me, she went down the hallway to the open door, and I went with her. At that threshold, she hesitated. She raised her hands as though to cover her face, but then she closed them into fists, and on the one nearer me, the faux tattoo of a blue lizard flexed as if it might come to life and spring off her skin. Brow furrowed, eyes tight shut, jaws clenched, pulse visible in her temple, she appeared to be in pain or struggling to repress great anger. But then I thought—I don’t know why—that perhaps this was the posture in which she prayed, if she prayed at all.

She opened her eyes and lowered her fists. She went into the room. In consideration of me, she switched off the overhead light and used the dimmer on a reading lamp to soften its glow to the point that, within my hood, my eyes could not easily be seen.

I looked at the closed door behind which Janet and Cora had retreated. I looked back toward the head of the stairs.

Crossing the threshold, I saw upon it the cryptic inscription that I had found at the entrances to Gwyneth’s apartment.

The large room contained two armchairs, side tables, a dresser, nightstands. There were also two beds, the farther one neatly made
and accessorized with decorative pillows, the nearer one a hospital bed.

The upper half of the motorized mattress was elevated, and upon it, reposing in a realm deeper than mere sleep, lay a girl of perhaps six. If she had been an avatar, the incarnation not of a goddess but of a principle, her face would have been befitting for the avatar of peace or charity, or hope, and if she had been capable of expression, her smile might have been miraculous in its effect.

Standing beside the child, looking down at her but speaking to me, Gwyneth said, “If Ryan Telford kills me, if anyone kills me, you have to take care of her. Protect her. At any cost.
Any
cost.”

THE HOMELESS MAN HAD IN THE NIGHT COME TO
the bottom of his current bottle, and subsequently he had awakened repeatedly from dreams of deprivation in which everyone that he had failed during his life returned to thwart his every attempt to acquire even just one more pint of the distiller’s art. He was therefore on the move at first light, which was not his habit, to search the commercial alleyways in his territory, seeking redeemable soda cans and other humble treasures in the set-out trash that had long sustained him.

So it was that in a Dumpster he found the badly beaten, naked body of a girl of about three, which he thought was a corpse until from it issued the thinnest mewl of abject misery, like that of a kitten he had once found run down in traffic, with still a minute or two of this world in it. Most of his life, he had chosen to flee from responsibilities.
But at the core of him remained the dry kernel of the better man that he had once hoped to become, and the child’s muted cry spoke to that remnant. He discovered that he yet had the capacity for pity.

In his worn-thin, patched, and greasy clothes, tangled hair bristling from beneath a stained and half-crushed brown fedora not otherwise seen on the head of a city man in decades, eyes bloodshot blue, nose scrawled over with visible capillaries, he kicked open the door to a popular doughnut shop a block from the Dumpster. With the battered child draped over his long, bony arms, weeping bitterly, shouting “Ambulance, ambulance,” he entered among the incredulous customers waiting to place their orders, two of whom were police officers.

Initially but not for long, he was suspected of being the party responsible for the girl’s condition. But his discovery of her in the viscous mounds of trash had wrenched something askew in his fragile constitution, and when the girl was taken from his arms, he could no longer stand upright or control his shaking hands, which alternately scrabbled at the floor in useless gestures and plucked at his face and chest as though something offensive clung to him that he was desperate to cast off. He ended the morning not in a jail cell but as a patient in the same hospital to which the girl had been rushed.

The doctors determined that she had been not merely beaten but also tortured, and not once but often, perhaps for half or more of her estimated three years. The authorities were not able to locate her parents. The wide circulation of a pencil portrait of her did not lead to any useful tips from the public, and a photo of her, taken after the bruising on her face faded, likewise brought no leads. They reached the conclusion that she had been imprisoned for most of her short life, hidden away, and in such cases it was with rare exception the
mother and father, or one of them, if both were not present in the home, who committed the abuse.

The girl became a ward of the court during her recuperation. In a month, she healed but didn’t wake. Sixty days after she was found, the prognosis for her recovery from coma was dismal. An advisory committee of doctors arrived at the unanimous opinion that, although the girl might not be technically brain-dead, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state. The current wisdom of medical ethicists held that a person in such a condition could feel no discomfort from being denied food and fluids. The court ordered the removal of the feeding tube by which sustenance was introduced to her stomach and a cessation of all extraordinary attempts to keep her alive, although the order was stayed for fifteen days to allow any patient-advocacy groups time to file an appeal.

All this Gwyneth told me as we stood on opposite sides of the nameless girl’s bed in the yellow-brick house, while outside snow and cold wind slanted through the city, a quiet reminder to its people that the shapen world had the power to erase their mightiest works, though few of them would see it as such. She surprised me when, part of the way through her story, she reached down to take one of the child’s hands in hers. Other than her beloved father, when he lived, this was the one person whose touch she did not fear.

Walter worked at the hospital where the girl was given care. He had called Gwyneth to say that the doctors on the advisory panel were certain the judge, who shared their bias against extraordinary care for the comatose, would deny any appeals regardless of their merit and would do so with such timing that the child would be either severely damaged by dehydration or dead before an advocacy group could find a sympathetic judge in a higher court to issue a stay.

“How did you know Walter?” I asked.

“My father once spent a few days in the hospital for a bleeding ulcer. Walter’s wife was his day nurse. She was very kind to him. I stayed in touch with her after he was released. When she died so young, two years after Daddy, I convinced my guardian to use some of my inheritance to set up a trust for the education of her and Walter’s children.”

“And Walter hoped you’d take on the expense of this girl?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t really know what he wanted when he called me. He just said he didn’t think she was vegetative.”

“He’s not a doctor.”

“No. A physician assistant. But he also said there was something special about this girl, he couldn’t define exactly what, but he felt it. He asked me to see her. He sneaked me into her room past midnight when there were few enough people around so I wouldn’t go nuts.”

“You don’t go nuts.”

“I have my moments,” she assured me.

Indicating the child’s limp hand, which Gwyneth held, I said, “Did you touch her that night, too?”

“Yes. I don’t know why I had the courage, but I did.”

“And you think she’s special?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She bent to kiss the girl’s hand. “I’m not sure what I believe about her. But I’m certain I should protect her until she wakes and tells us her name.”

“You’re so certain she’ll revive.”

“I am certain, yes. I’m certain even in spite of this.… ” Gently she pulled the flaxen hair back from the left side of the girl’s face, revealing
an indentation where temple curved to brow, the mark of some beast whose signature was made not with a pen but with an object stone-hard and blunt.

“How did she get here?”

“I’ll tell you over dinner. I don’t want to inconvenience Walter and his family any longer. Wait for me on the front porch while I have a word with Janet and Cora.”

I went down to the foyer. Someone had turned off the television. Alone, I stood in the warm silence, in the wide archway to the living room, still nervous about being here but nevertheless taking a moment to enjoy the domestic charm.

To the left of the archway, on a console, a candle burned in a clear-glass container with a vented lid designed to keep the candle and its flame contained if it should be accidentally knocked to the floor. The luminary served a shrine, brightening a porcelain of the Holy Mother.

When I stepped into the living room for a closer look at the two framed photographs that flanked the sacred statuette, I saw a woman of whom the camera had captured not only her beauty but also the suggestion of kindness and intelligence. Reflections of the honoring flame unfurled in the chased-silver frames into which the silversmith had worked a pattern of roses.