thirty

“There wasn’t time to find a donor,” his father said, still kneeling in a pool of blood.

“So you killed someone,” Justine said, her voice flat and quiet.

“Her name was Sheila. I didn’t even know if she was the right blood type.”

“What went wrong?” Henry asked, taking the last step that separated him from his father. His feet squished in the blood as he knelt beside him.

“I rushed the transplant,” his father said, “I was crying. I loved her; no, I love her. I cut her vocal cords with the scalpel. There was too much blood, and she’d already lost so much.”

Henry rested his hand on his father’s arm and William stared at the contact.

He took a deep breath, then looked up at his son and Justine. “For you, I’d stockpiled blood. I didn’t have any for your mom except my own. I was so weak, and she was dying.”

“You saved her,” Henry said.

“She’s not human anymore, Henry.” His father closed his eyes. “I don’t know what she is now. I’m sorry.”

Henry pulled his hand away, breaking the fragile connection with his father. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came out. Lightning illuminated the room and he saw tears mixed with the blood on his father’s face. Henry swallowed, struggling to remember the stranger standing next to him. “How did we end up here?” he asked in the silence after the thunder.

William opened his eyes, the faint memory of a smile crossing his face. “Dr. Saville grew up in this house, married some guy named Richard, but it didn’t work out and she moved to Birmingham. When I needed a place to go, she gave me the keys.” The smile grew enough to be seen for just a moment before fading away. “I moved us—the three of us. You were both in comas, unresponsive. I didn’t know if the surgeries had worked, but you were both alive and too many people knew us in Birmingham. So we moved.”

Faint sunlight filtered into the room through thick curtains drawn tight. The ceiling fan was still and the sound of the air-conditioning was drowned out by the hum of the machinery in the room. On the beds, Henry and Chrissy slept on.

The outside light faded as Frank’s eyes fell closed, his last view that of his wife, sleeping peacefully.

The hiss was all around him. Air deflating a balloon, escaping a tire, moaning like wind scratching branches against a window trying to enter the room.

In his dream, a single hand reached off the bed to touch him, to hurt him. To pay back in kind.

Frank blinked. On the bed, Chrissy slept on, the monitors undisturbed. Her left arm, connected to the IV, rested at her side. Her right stretched out toward him. He stared, unable to move, afraid to breathe.

The fingers had uncurled, the entire arm hanging off the bed, the tip of her index finger almost, but not quite, touching his knee. Drawing in a breath, he stretched his hand out, preparing to move her arm back to the bed from where it had fallen. At his touch, her eyes screamed open, wide, frightened.

She hissed, the sound rough, forced through broken vocal cords. Her tongue slid out of her mouth as she rolled her head to the side and a strand of drool fell to the pillow.

“Chrissy!” He scrambled to the side of the bed, checking the monitors, but when he went to touch her, she hissed again. “Shhh,” he said, raising his hand to caress her cheek.

She twisted off the thin mattress, crashing her teeth together hard enough to chip the enamel, straining to bite his fingers.

She thrashed on the bed, threatening to pull the IV out of her arm. Early morning sunlight poured into the room through cracks where the curtains met, a shaft of sunlight illuminating dust motes and falling on Henry’s face. Frank tried to grab hold of Chrissy’s arms, to keep her still, to keep her safe. She struggled against his touch, trying to reach her mouth around to bite him, and she kept attacking him each time she managed to free a hand.

He grabbed hold of her shoulders, his fingers sliding over the scar tissue on her neck, and she bent her head to try to bite him, twisting around. Then she was still, frigid and cold in his grasp, her muscles tight in his grip as she stared at her son.

She hissed, the sound somewhere between a moan and a name: “Henry.” Though it was unrecognizable, Frank heard the name.

“Chrissy?” he asked, releasing the death grip he had on her arms.

With a spasm of her arm she smacked Frank across the chin, following up by biting his shoulder where it drifted too close to her mouth, the teeth puncturing the skin, drawing blood.

Dazed, he stumbled to the IV still taped into her arm and opened wide the morphine drip until her body slumped to the gurney. His blood dripped from her lips and gray hair was clenched in her fists where she’d pulled it out of his head.

“Henry,” she whispered one final time, her eyelids fluttering, exposing crazed eyes. He placed her arms back on the bed before ransacking a closet of odds and ends in order to find leather cuffs to use as restraints.

Searching through his dwindling supplies, he mixed a cocktail of anesthesia, morphine, and benzodiazepine and hooked it up to her IV, sending her into a drug-induced coma.

Frank fell back into his chair, his shoulder bleeding through his shirt, thin trickles of blood sliding down from his scalp. More blood from his arms where her fingernails had raked through his skin.

It failed.

No.

I failed.

He couldn’t kill her, not Chrissy, not the woman he’d fallen in love with, raised a son with. Not the woman he’d die for, that he’d killed for.

In a cabinet, he found another set of restraints and placed them on Henry’s arms. He sighed, a tear sliding though one of the cuts on his face. The hospital bed scraped the door frame as Frank wheeled it out of the room, the equipment piled high on either side of Henry.

Through the empty kitchen there was a small laundry room, the windows looking out over a large backyard filled with trees. Frank pushed the bed up to the window, tilting Henry’s face so that the sun landed on his skin.

“Welcome to Georgia, Henry,” Frank said, squeezing the limp fingers in his hand. “Saint Simons Island. We live on an island, like we used to talk about, remember?” He wiped his sleeve across his eyes then looked at his son. “There’s a big backyard. You’d have really loved it here, Henry.”

Frank let go of his son’s hand, pulled out a tissue, then blew his nose. “Hey, there’s a squirrel out there too. And a bird feeder. Big trees. Magnolias, I think, big white flowers, and oak trees, draped in moss like in those pictures we used to look at.”

Tears slid down his face and his nose was all stuffed up. “I’m sorry, Henry, I thought it would work.” He sighed. “It should have, I guess. But, it didn’t, not even close. All my fault. I failed. Twice.”

He swallowed, trying to breathe, his eyes so raw it was difficult to focus as the sun warmed the small laundry room.

“I love you, Henry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Frank closed off the IV—cutting the nutrients, ending the morphine drip—and clicked the machines off. Not quite as dramatic as pulling the plug, but the end result would be the same. “I’m sorry,” he said again, watching through his tears as the sun moved across the sky, leaving Henry’s face in shadows.

In the semi-darkness it was difficult to see, the poor light playing tricks on his mind.

Henry drew in a deep breath, letting it out in a sigh.

He blinked. Again, and then turned his face away from the window. Machinery was piled up, surrounding him.

“Breathe, Henry,” someone whispered. “Breathe.”

“Who,” he coughed again, his throat rough and raw, “is Henry?”

He fought to breathe, struggling to raise his hands. Someone pushed a button and the bed inclined, elevating him. Machinery slid down to the foot of the bed.

“Henry,” the person said from the shadows at the foot of his bed. “Son, there was an accident.”

NOAA Alert:
Hurricane Erika Category 4;
Landfall in Saint Mary, GA

Miami, FL—August 29, 2009, 12:43 AM: FOR EMERGENCY RELEASE:

At 12:17 a.m. EDT, Hurricane Erika made landfall in St. Mary’s, Georgia; 31 miles north of Jacksonville, Florida, as a Category Four on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph extending outward to sixty miles from the center and tropical storm force winds extending outward almost 150 miles.

Officials have reported successful evacuations of Amelia Island in Florida as well as Cumberland, Jekyll, St. Simons, and Sea Islands in Georgia.

St. Mary’s, Georgia, in Camden County, population 14,000, is home to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine base.