Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories Read online

  “You are making me sick.” Her words flew like grapeshot, low and deadly. “If it’s so easy, why don’t you try it?” And then, like a baleful Cassandra: “Look! I see the bones behind your face. Go away, you fool, go away, go away, go away!”

  Angela drew back from the crescendo of hysteria. She felt disoriented, drunken as a ship snagged suddenly on an uncharted rock. She had a sensation of internal puncture, of ominous seepage. She made way for nurses and the doctor, she moved like a sleep-walker down the corridor.

  The cry of Beatrice, a rattling network of panic and malevolent laughter, billowed after her like a vast cobweb, endlessly sticky, grotesquely caressing, wisping away gradually before the blessings of sedation.

  Angela sat trembling behind the wheel of her car, poised at the mouth of the entry ramp, unable to propel herself into the slipstream of the turnpike. Already she was reproaching herself for a moment of professional inadequacy. Never before had she allowed one of her cases to die alone. This, she saw clearly, was the cause of her distress.

  So late at night the traffic was thin but it hurtled by at a menacing speed, headlamps glaring in the dark like burning eye sockets. There seemed to be a fog of hazard, randomness, in the night air. Suddenly she was astonished that she had miraculously survived so many circuits of that urban racetrack.

  Another car purred up the entry ramp behind her and its lights bathed her in gold. She was swamped by a panic compelling as nausea. From out of the heart of the radiance came a rhythm of horns, stern as the trumpets of angels. Beatrice stood on her dark side, mocking.

  Angela felt herself to be ten years old again, teetering at the tip of the highest diving board, not knowing how to dive, distant figures far below calling encouragement, the line of people on the ladder rungs growing impatient, the board swaying precariously, no return possible.

  She put her car suddenly into reverse, swerved crazily around the vehicle behind her, backed off the ramp, and returned to the parking lot at the hospital where she collapsed over her steering wheel, shaking violently.

  The chill air of the parking lot sobered her. But even before she located the night nurse she knew she would be too late.

  “It was very peaceful,” the nurse said. “She never regained consciousness.”

  Of course, Angela thought, it could be explained by malevolence. Revenge against youth, against the living. Statistically it was not significant. All the others, every single one, had gone gently, slipping quietly into beatitude, grateful for her presence.

  There was, she knew from years of experience, a certain amount of choice at the end. As regards timing. Beatrice had chosen to deny her the last peaceful coda. Just this once she had missed out on the epiphany. Yes.

  As she grew calmer she went back to her car, but when she tried to start it the violent trembling returned. She hugged herself, shivering, and waited for the malaise to pass.

  Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful

  What fascinated me most when I woke on the Sunday morning was the deviousness, the sheer cunning of the lower levels of my mind. I had felt the steering wheel under my hands, tightened my fingers around it, shaken it. So much material evidence, tangible, proof that I was not dreaming. And that in itself astonished me – that within the dream I should have suspected I was dreaming and applied tests.

  Having verified that it was not, indisputably not a dream, I drove on down the bumpy country road in the crazy yellow car, passing weathered barns, swerving for a bovine jay-walker or two, gulping the honeysuckle air, exultant. I was exceptional, chosen, blessed. I was possibly the only living being to know what I knew.

  Then I drove into Sunday morning and the smell of slept-in sheets. Glanced urgently backward across the waking. Held the fading euphoric eyes of the car driver watching me through the windshield with the intensity of the Ancient Mariner, sadder, wiser, fading.

  “Remember Quincy?” asked Joey.

  “What’s Quincy?”

  “Our kitten that got run over.”

  “I don’t remember a kitten. Was I borned then?”

  “Yes, but you were too little. I meant Mommy. Remember Quincy, Mommy?”

  I said cautiously: “He went to your Grandfather’s castle.”

  Joey flushed angrily. “That was kid stuff. A car ran over Quincy in the parking lot. All his guts squished out. Daddy and I buried him. There was blood all over. You would have throwed up, Caroline, but you were too little to understand.”

  “I bet you cried. I bet you were a big cry-baby,” chanted Caroline, humiliated not to have participated in the frightful mystery of Quincy’s spilled guts.

  “So what? He was just a baby kitten. And who cried last night, eh? Who threw up last night?”

  Joey left the room abruptly. Caroline clung to my arm as though it might disappear and began to weep again.

  So Joey’s Grandfather was already jettisoned, withering before the cynical scrutiny of the second grade. Omnipotent and benevolent, he had once loomed far larger than the shadowy absent grandfather who lived across the ocean. This one, always accessible to Joey, lived in a castle, host to a fluid and fabulous assortment of guests, possessor of all desired objects – real jewelled swords, a canoe, a rocket ship, and a Saint Bernard, among other things. On the day after Quincy’s death, Joey had asked for permission to disinter the kitten. It was necessary to take it to the castle, where his Grandfather had a set of magic band-aids that healed all wounds. Desolate for two days after the refusal of his request, contemptuous and furious toward well-meaning explanations, he came down to breakfast on the third morning in a cloud of beatitude. He had visited his Grandfather, and whom did we suppose he had seen skittering playfully across the castle courtyard?

  On Monday the children wanted reassurances. Even Joey, who affected to be a little embarrassed by them these days, clung to the goodbye hug. Caroline asked: “Will you be here when we come home from school?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m taking my special ruby-coloured glass to school. That piece I found in the garden. I’m going to give it to Lissa.”

  “I don’t expect Melissa will be at school today,” I told them.

  Only Saturday, after the circus, we had trailed along the border of the city park, Cassandra and I in front, the children in a sticky bliss of cotton candy, giggles, and communal reminiscence strung out behind us.

  “Remember the clown trying to start up the old car?” Joey was calling back over his shoulder to Caroline and Laura. They were walking arm in arm. I remember that, grateful. They might have been quarrelling as they often do. Did. Arm in arm, Laura’s cheek pink and wet where Caroline’s cotton candy grazed it.

  We stopped in the park to let the children play. Cassandra’s voice came lazily from deep in the grass. “Winter seems an impossibility now.”

  “Like a bad dream,” I said, still tasting its aftermath, but breathing in the smell of crushed clover.

  “I won’t go into a decline like that next winter,” she said. “I mean really. I’ve climbed up to somewhere and I won’t fall back again. Freedom. It’s like the clover. In February you can’t believe it will ever come. But it does. It’s real.”

  She grasped a handful of tall grass and clover, caressing it as one might the phallus of a husband or lover. “Look at Laura,” she said. Our eyes zigzagged with the unsynchronised swinging of Laura and Caroline. “She’ll be in school next year. There’ll never be another winter like this last one. I won’t need to dream of a lover. I’ll have myself again, and a job, next winter.”

  I smiled sourly, jealous of her confidence. I’d had myself ad nauseam that winter, but neither job nor lover had dropped into my questing life. Still, summer had come for us all indiscriminately, winners and losers.

  “I suppose we’ll look back on our journals some day and laugh. Or cringe.”

  “Oh, the journals,” she sai
d disdainfully. We were both embarrassed to have been embroiled in such a predictable crisis, such a stock-in-trade of the women’s magazines, the death-wish apathy of the snowed-in mother-knotted months.

  “I can positively say right now that I intend to cram a lot into the rest of my life.”

  “Me too,” I said lamely, willing myself to believe it.

  “In fact,” she expatiated to the clover and the summer, “I would be furious, absolutely furious, if I died now.”

  Big deal, I thought. All this energy of rage and ambition. If I could tap just a fraction of it.

  Later, in the middle of the welter of bubble bath and sticky bodies, the phone rang.

  “Can you get that?”I called downstairs and went on lathering Caroline’s hair. Joey complained that she was taking up too much room, splashed water at her. Caroline screamed that she had soap in her eyes.

  “Remember the clown in the old car?” I said. It worked. Laughter.

  “This is the way he walked,” chuckled Joey, bouncing from buttock to buttock, slithering in the soapy tub. Then Caroline was spluttering: “Daddy! Daddy! There was this clown – let me tell, Joey – this clown with an old car – Mommy, make Joey be quiet. I’m telling Daddy …”

  “Want to take over?” I glanced back at the doorway where he stood, ashen. “What’s wrong?”

  Cacophony of splashing, competitive shrieking, high-pitched laughter.

  “Shut up!” he bellowed.

  It was like an obscenity, so unexpected. His words plummeted into the sudden hush.

  “There’s been an accident. A car. Driver drunk or something. Cassandra. Laura’s in hospital, critically injured. Melissa’s okay. I’d better go to John. He was calling from the hospital.”

  “Cassandra? What about Cassandra?”

  “Killed.”

  A space. Nothing. Something lurching.

  Then a quick flurry to get Caroline to throw up into the toilet, not the bathtub.

  On the late news I saw witnesses interviewed. Fifteen minutes, I figured. Fifteen minutes after we left the playground it had happened. We had walked south, away from the park. They had walked east along the park boundary for several blocks.

  “Oh my god, it was horrible. Horrible!” a woman was saying. “Suddenly this car gunned out of nowhere. From somewhere behind me … I don’t know. One second I saw the woman and the little girls – then I could only see one little girl … And the car wrapped around a tree.”

  A grotesque death, the announcer explained. Cassandra’s body had been dragged fifty yards to be mashed between car and tree. Melissa, evidently, had received only a glancing blow. Laura’s body had ricocheted off the car and crumpled into the grass.

  * * *

  The children had wanted to sleep in the same room, had required crooning and lullabies till they fell asleep. Caroline’s body shuddered in the grip of dreams. The glaring eye of the nightlight watched, unwinking.

  There had been another phone call from the hospital where they were waiting out the hours of Laura’s surgery. There were ruptured organs. She would probably die.

  I sat in the rocker in the children’s room, afraid to leave them. It seemed very cold, I kept shivering. I thought about the clover that might still be visibly crushed from Cassandra’s hands. I thought about the fifty yards. Then I remembered something else. That party, a month ago, where someone had been discussing Kübler-Ross – the cases of people who had been clinically dead for a number of minutes, who later knew how many electrocardiac shocks their “dead” bodies had received, who recalled being outside their bodies, watching, having a sense of urgency about getting back.

  It was exciting grist for discussion, more enthralling than chess, until suddenly Cassandra spoke with the intensity of someone who has managed to rip off a gag in the last second before suffocation. Staccato rushes of sound.

  “What is the point of this conversation? Is it to make us all terrified of death? To make us sweat for the rest of our lives, wondering what will happen after? What we will know?”

  There were murmurs, coughing, disavowals. That fluid instinct that fills up social abysses, blurs their edges. Moments later, drained and trembling slightly, Cassandra was blushing, apologetic, embarrassed by her outburst.

  I would be furious, absolutely furious, if I died now. Those fifty yards. Were they intense with knowledge, recognising death, seeing the distorted bundle of Laura, reaching for the bereft Melissa? Knowing, knowing, raging. Yes, that is what I fear, that is what claws at my gut, crams my throat with vomit. She died angry. She is still angry.

  I shiver. I think of Laura’s bedside. She is there, angry, impotent, anguished. This is irrational. I am gagging on something, the acrid taste of guilt, responsibility. No, this is not coherent, not a time for clear perspectives. But if we had lain in the clover another five minutes. Or five minutes less. If I had invited them back to our house. If I had only tilted time a few minutes to one side or the other. This is shock. Of course I am not responsible. Life is random, brutally indifferent. The clover. Fifteen minutes. Fifty yards.

  How can I not be responsible?

  I was lying in a large hospital ward. It was segregated, no visitors allowed. Only the terminally ill came there. They permitted us our last little pleasures, our self-indulgences.

  We could go downstairs, below ground level, to the library. It was a mezzanine floor, with thick opaque glass catwalks threading between the stacks. Just like the library I worked in once. I spent most of my time down there, it was so peaceful, every conceivable book available.

  Readers milled around, brushed one another silently, smiled, all rather indistinguishable in loose white hospital gowns. The other ones, the grey ones, never took their own books from the shelves. Someone placed them open and waiting on their carrels.

  The grey ones moved lightly and gracefully. When they looked up, someone, one of us, would turn the page.

  “Why do you never fetch your own books, or turn your own pages?” I asked one.

  “We are from downstairs,” the grey one answered.

  “Downstairs?”

  “After you leave the ward you go downstairs, below the library.”

  “After you leave the ward?” I repeated it slowly. I reached out to touch.

  There was nothing. Just so, I recalled, had Dante tried to clasp Virgil. “What is it like, downstairs?”

  “It is … a little cold, but very peaceful. You will like it. We can come up here to the library any time we want. Only we have to depend on one of you to take down the books.”

  “Do you know many people down there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know … ? Is there someone named Cassandra?”

  “Ah yes, Cassandra. She just arrived. She will be sleeping. It will be a few days before she can come up here and talk to you. But you can visit her now.”

  The grey one led me down a narrow iron staircase. Downstairs it was chilly, like a wine cellar. There were neat rows of stacks, with large file drawers instead of books. The grey one pulled out a drawer and I saw Cassandra, in repose, not at all damaged, an ice princess of a beauty to make princes rash with thorn thickets.

  At a party once someone had said to me: “You two are unnerving, you know. I mean, one expects philosophers’ wives to be dowdy, somehow. But look at you! And Cassandra! My god!”

  “I’ll tell you that one later, in the library,” I said to the sleeping Cassandra.

  But I never saw her in the library. The impossible happened, I got better. It was a problem. No one had ever been released from the ward before, except to go downstairs. They made me promise not to tell.

  I drove away in a little yellow sports car, delirious with life. Nothing to be scared about ever. Books, peace, no pain, no terror. God, what luck, to be perhaps the only human being who actually knew … But if it should be
only a dream? It wasn’t a dream. I could smell lilacs and honeysuckle, I could feel the wheel, solid and smooth, under my hands. The leather upholstery had an embossed textured grain, tactile.

  “Melissa was at school,” Caroline told me.

  Joey was running a fever at bedtime.

  “Do you think Cassandra was maybe wicked?” he asked me privately.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you think maybe she was a robber? Or maybe killed someone? Or maybe did dreadful things no one knew about, only Melissa?”

  “Joey! Of course not! Cassandra was killed by a crazy car driver. Did you think she was being punished for something?”

  “No.” Blankly. “But Melissa doesn’t love her. I think she must have hated her. I think she’s glad she’s dead.”

  “Did Melissa tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “What makes you think such a thing?”

  He burst into tears, burrowing into my arms.

  “She was playing at recess. She was laughing. Like nothing happened.”

  The words became tangled and lost in body-shaking sobs.

  On Monday night, John told us about her will. All the specifics. She had set them down legally, years ago. No embalming, no open casket, a plain pine coffin. Does everyone do that, make arrangements? At our age? It had never occurred to me. No viewing – my god, in the circumstances …

  There were too many imponderables. I would be furious … Fifteen minutes. Perhaps after any death it happens, retrospective significance. If I died tomorrow, would they say: she read Plath and Sexton – strange! But the outburst at the party? The will? Did she know? Did she make it happen? What is a coincidence?

  On Tuesday the funeral was some sort of catharsis, of exhaustion if nothing else.

  “Mommy, why are you shaking?” Caroline asked me at the cemetery.

  I held a hand of each child, their faces were red and swollen, they shivered. But they had chosen to come, yes, they belonged, had a right.

  “I’m not. I’m just sad. I’m missing her. I’m worrying about Laura and Melissa and John,” I whispered, trembling, smelling clover, tasting earth.