Life Expectancy (21 page)

37

W
e arrived on Hawksbill Road twenty feet in front of the parked Hummer. We churned across a recently compacted high curb of snow, onto the southbound lane, which had been scraped almost to the bare blacktop.

Immediately to the south of us, a highway department crew in two vehicles was carving a passage to town through the storm. A road grader on immense knobby tires, fitted with an angled plow, led the way, trailed by a truck spreading salt and cinders in its wake.

I followed the truck at a safe distance. A police escort could have gotten us to town no quicker in this mean weather.

The night sky hid behind the shedding snow, and the wind was revealed only by the white shrouds that it wound about itself and whirled, and flapped, and billowed.

Also unseen but not for long, the baby made known its impatience to be free from nine months of confinement. Lorrie’s contractions had become regular. By her wristwatch, she timed them, and by her groans and louder cries, I knew the intervals and
willed
the road crew to move faster.

Suffering people frequently curse their pain. For some reason we seem to believe that acute agony can be managed by injections of obscenities. Lorrie allowed not one such word to cross her lips that night.

I can testify that in ordinary times she is capable of treating a cut or a contusion with a verbal blue streak more astringent than iodine. Birth night was not an ordinary time.

She said that she didn’t curse the pain because the baby, as it made its entrance, might think it wasn’t wanted in the world.

That our child might be born with advanced language skills had not crossed my mind. I accepted her concern as legitimate—and loved her for it.

When groans and grunts and wordless cries did not satisfy her urge to express the effect of her pangs, she resorted for the baby’s sake to words that described some of the world’s beauty and bounty.

“Strawberries, sunflowers, seashells,” she said, hissing out the sibilants with such vehemence that someone who spoke no English would have been convinced that she had wished pestilence, disease, and damnation on a hated enemy.

By the time that we reached town and then Snow County Hospital, Lorrie’s water had not yet broken, but it seemed instead to be coming out of her through every pore. This labor, as surely as chopping wood or digging a trench, wrung rivers of sweat from her. She unzipped her parka, then stripped it off. She was soaked.

I parked at the emergency entrance, rushed inside, and returned in a minute with an orderly and a wheelchair.

The orderly, a freckled young man named Cory, thought Lorrie had descended into delirium when, trading Explorer for wheelchair, she snarled in rapid succession, “Geraniums, Coca-Cola, kittens, snow geese,
Christmas cakes and cookies,
” with such fervency that she scared him.

On the way inside I explained to him about welcoming the baby to the world by trading curses for words of beauty and bounty, but I think I only succeeded in making him a little afraid of me, too.

I couldn’t accompany Lorrie directly to the maternity ward in part because I had to present our insurance card to the clerk at the admissions desk at the back of the ER waiting lounge. I kissed her, and she squeezed my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles and said, “Maybe not twenty.”

A nurse joined the orderly, and together they wheeled Lorrie toward the elevators.

As they rolled her out of sight, I heard her say with singular intensity,
“Crêpes Suzette, clafouti, gâteau à l’orange, soufflé au chocolat.”

I supposed that if our baby might be born with a command of English, it might also know French and might already anticipate a career as a pastry chef.

While the admissions clerk Xeroxed my insurance card and began to fill out two pounds of registration forms, I used her phone to call Huey Foster. He was my father’s friend from childhood, the failed baker who had become acop.

From Huey, Dad had received the free pass to the circus on the back of which he had written the five terrible days in my life. We didn’t hold that against Huey.

He worked nights, and I caught him at the station house. When I told him about Konrad Beezo, fugitive murderer and would-be baby bandit, shackled to a tree in the woods about three to four hundred yards downhill and west of his parked Hummer, Huey said, “That’s state trooper jurisdiction. I’ll get ’em right on it. I’ll go with ’em. After all these years, I want to personally put the cuffs on that crazy bastard.”

Next I called my folks to tell them only that we were at the hospital and that Lorrie was in labor.

“I’m painting a potbelly pig,” Mom said, “but that can wait. We’ll be there quick as we can.”

“It’s not necessary for you to come in this weather.”

“Sweetie, if it was raining scorpions and cow pies, we’d still come, though we wouldn’t like it much. It’ll take us a while because we first have to get Weena into her snowsuit. You know what an ordeal she’ll make of that, but we’ll be there.”

I was still a relatively young man when the admissions clerk finished filling out forms for me to sign, and from her desk I went up to the maternity ward.

The expectant-fathers’ lounge had been remodeled since the night that I gave my mother such a hard time being born. The flamboyance of cheerful clashing colors had been replaced by gray carpet, pale-gray walls, and black leatherette chairs, as though the hospital directors had reached a consensus that in the intervening twenty-four years, all the joy had gone out of parenthood.

The admissions clerk had phoned ahead to advise that I was en route. A nurse showed me to a lavatory, where I washed up according to instructions and changed into hospital greens; then I was taken to my wife.

Lorrie’s water had not yet broken, but all the signs pointed to an impending birth. Therefore, and because no other pregnant women had been reckless enough to go into labor in a blizzard, she had been prepared quickly in her assigned room and conveyed to Delivery.

When I entered, a heavyset red-haired nurse was taking Lorrie’s blood pressure, and Dr. Mello Melodeon, our physician, was listening to her heart through a stethoscope.

Mello is as solid as any football fullback, as personable as a popular tavern owner whose charm keeps the bar stools filled, and a mensch. Judging by his fine name, his skin the color of raisins, his relaxed manner, and his mellifluous voice, you might think he had once been a Jamaican Rastafarian who had traded dreadlocks and reggae for a career in medicine. Instead, he’d been born in Atlanta and came from a family of professional gospel singers.

Finished with the stethoscope, he said, “Jimmy, how come when Rachel makes your chocolate apple lattice tart, it doesn’t
taste
like yours?”

Rachel was his wife.

I said, “Where’d she get the recipe?”

“The resort gives it out if you ask. We ate at the restaurant out there last week.”

“She should have asked me. That’s the original resort recipe, but I’ve modified it. Mainly, I’ve added a tablespoon of vanilla and another of nutmeg.”

“The nutmeg I understand, but vanilla in a chocolate tart?”

“That’s the secret,” I guaranteed him.

“Yoo-hoo, I’m here,” Lorrie reminded us.

I took her hand. “And you’re not snarling about
crêpes Suzette
and
clafouti.
”

“Because of an even more beautiful word,” she said. “
Epidural.
Isn’t that a beautiful word?”

“So let me get this straight—you just add vanilla to the filling?” Mello asked.

“It’s not in the filling. It’s in the dough.”

“In the
dough,
” he repeated, nodding sagely.

Lorrie said, “Anybody want a website designed? That’s what
I
do. I design websites. And make babies.”

“Website design is interesting, dear,” Mello Melodeon assured her, “but it’ll never be as interesting as what Jimmy does. You can’t eat a website.”

“You can’t eat a baby, either,” she said, “but I’d rather have one than a chocolate apple lattice tart.”

“I don’t see why you can’t have both,” Mello said, “although not simultaneously.”

Grimacing, clutching two handfuls of the sheet that was draped over her, she said, “I need more epidural.”

“As your doctor, I’ll make that determination. It’s to relieve the pain, not eliminate it entirely.”

To me, she said, “I knew we should have gotten a
real
doctor.”

To me, Mello said, “So do you add the vanilla to the ingredients the same time you add the cocoa?”

“No. That’s too early. Add it right before the egg yolks.”

“Before the egg
yolks,
” he repeated, impressed by this culinary tactic.

And so the conversation went until Lorrie’s water broke. Then she was unquestionably the center of attention.

Lorrie and I had agreed: no video camera. She thought filming the blessed event would be tacky. I thought it would be beyond my mechanical abilities.

Nevertheless, I wanted to be present in part to share the joy and to welcome our firstborn, but also to prove to Grandma Rowena that I would not pass out, fall on my face, and break my nose, as she insisted that I would.

No sooner had Lorrie’s water broken, however, than a nurse in squeaky shoes entered the delivery room as if with a chorus of mice, to announce there was an important telephone call for me. Captain Huey Foster, of the Snow Village Police Department, urgently needed to speak with me.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told Lorrie. “Hold everything.”

“Yeah, right.”

I took the call on the phone at the nurses’ station. “What’s up, Huey?”

“He’s gone.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Beezo.”

“He
can’t
be gone. You haven’t found the right tree.”

“Excuse me, Jimmy, but I’d bet you my left ass cheek there’s not more than one tree out there decorated with a tow cable and a torn-up coat with sheepskin lining.”

Add up all the times my heart had sunk that night, and you were at the depth of the
Titanic.

“He couldn’t use his hands,” I said. “They were behind him. I had him trussed up tight. What the hell did he do—chew his way out of the coat?”

“Almost looks like it.”

The black Hummer had been parked along Hawksbill Road exactly where I had told them to look for it.

“By the way,” Huey said, “we already learned it was stolen twelve days ago in Las Vegas.”

A police search team had descended through the woods, following the Explorer’s original trail. When they discovered that Beezo had escaped, they had considered calling in a bloodhound team; but the weather argued against it.

“He won’t get far in this cold without a coat,” Huey predicted. “After the spring thaw, we’ll find him as dead as the dinosaurs.”

“Not this one,” I said shakily. “This one is…different. He’s like the clown in a jack-in-the-box, he just keeps popping up.”

“He ain’t supernatural.”

“I wouldn’t take that side of the argument,” I said.

Huey sighed. “I’m half of the same conclusion,” he admitted. “I just called up four off-duty men. They’ll be coming around to the hospital just in case.”

“How long till they get here?”

“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Meanwhile, you better watch out for Lorrie. I don’t think it’ll come to that, but it might. She have the baby yet?”

“It’s on the way right now. Huey, listen, he camped out in Nedra Lamm’s house to keep a watch on us.”

“Nedra’s a pill, but she wouldn’t allow that.”

“I don’t think she had a choice. It’s maybe not too far for him to get back to her place. If he thinks the Hummer’s now too hot to drive, she has a car he might want.”

“That hideous old Plymouth Valiant.”

“It’s in showroom shape, and she keeps snow chains on it.”

“We’ll check it out,” Huey promised. “Now you better get back to that special girl of yours and don’t let anything happen to her till my men arrive.”

I hung up. My palms were slick with sweat. I blotted them on my hospital greens.

Beezo was coming. I knew it in my bones. More than twenty-four years after his first visit, he was returning to the Snow County Hospital maternity ward. This time, the baby he wanted was ours.

38

I
didn’t want Lorrie to learn about the situation. As it was, she had her hands full. Well, not her
hands
, but she was otherwise fully occupied, and it couldn’t be good for her to know that Beezo was loose.

If I returned to the delivery room, no matter how distracted Lorrie was, she would at first glance read the fear in me. I would not be able to lie to her even for her own good. I would be butter to her hot knife, and she would spread me on toast in six seconds flat.

Besides, Dr. Mello Melodeon would have more questions about my chocolate apple lattice tart, and I didn’t have time for that.

I hurried to the expectant-fathers’ lounge where, in different decor, Dr. Ferris MacDonald had been shot to death. From this room, Beezo had burst into the maternity ward, shooting Nurse Hanson.

If criminals really did like to return to the scenes of their crimes, he might come after our baby by this route.

Might.

I wasn’t willing to hang the fate of my wife and baby on a
might
or a
maybe.

Blotting my hands on my greens again, I stepped into the main corridor that served the second floor.

The place was unnaturally quiet, hushed, even for a hospital, as though the heavy snowfall exerted a muffling influence through the walls.

Farther to my right, on this side of the hall, were four doors that evidently led into various departments of the maternity ward. Beyond the doors lay the long window that provided a view into the neonatal care unit where newborns were cradled in bassinets.

At the end of the hall, a lighted red
EXIT
sign marked the door to the emergency stairs.

Beezo could come up the stairs and choose any entrance to the ward. I wouldn’t see him from the expectant-fathers’ lounge, so I’d have to stand guard here in the corridor.

Ding!
Soft but instantly identifiable, the chime issued from the elevator alcove that branched off the midpoint of this main corridor. Someone had arrived on the second floor.

Lately I’d gotten so much practice holding my breath that I would soon be ready for a career in pearl diving.

A doctor in a white lab coat came out of the alcove, carrying a clipboard, chatting with a nurse who was too small and too female to be Konrad Beezo. They headed toward the farther end of the hall.

I thought I should go to the emergency stairwell and listen for ascending footsteps, but I didn’t want to turn my back on the hallway.

Where were Huey Foster’s men? Surely they should have arrived by now.

Consulting my watch, I discovered that only two minutes had passed since I’d hung up the phone. Huey’s men were still putting on their shoes.

Time doesn’t pass a fraction as fast when you’re waiting for a killer as it does when you’re having fun in the kitchen.

The hospital had a single security guard stationed in the lobby on the ground floor. I considered calling him up here to help cover the territory.

His name was Vernon Tibbit. Sixty-eight years old, potbellied, nearsighted, Vernon didn’t have a gun. Basically his job entailed giving directions to visitors, assisting patients in wheelchairs, getting coffee for the lady at the information desk, and polishing his badge.

I didn’t want to get Vernon killed and leave the info lady with no one to fetch her java.

If Konrad Beezo didn’t actually drive a tank through the walls of the hospital, he would at least arrive with a formidable weapon. I had the distinct impression that he didn’t go anywhere without heat.

I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t have a club. I didn’t have a spitball.

When I remembered the assault rifle that I had taken from Beezo and that now lay in the back of the Explorer, a thrill coursed up my spine. He had changed the magazine in the woods, and surely he hadn’t emptied the second one. I succumbed to a spasm of macho stupidity, envisioning myself as Rambo, except markedly more buff than Sylvester Stallone.

Then I realized I couldn’t charge through a hospital, blithely firing an assault rifle. I wasn’t a staff member, and visiting hours were over.

In fear of being shot, worried about Lorrie in labor, worried about my unborn child, worried that my aching left leg—having taken so much punishment—would fail me at a crucial moment, I was further distracted by the hospital greens. I wasn’t comfortable in them.

After taking off the elasticized cloth booties that covered my shoes, I didn’t feel much better. I felt as though I were decked out for a masquerade party.

Halloween had arrived nine months early this year. At any moment, a maniac clown would come trick-or-treating, out of costume but scary as hell nonetheless.

Ding!

I swallowed my Adam’s apple, which bounced around inside my stomach.

Following the chime, the second floor seemed more hushed than ever. This was the high-noon stillness of a dusty street in a small Western town, with every citizen gone to ground and the gunfighters about to appear.

Instead of a gunfighter, out of the elevator alcove came Dad, Mom, and Grandma Rowena.

I was stunned that they had gotten here so soon, half an hour before I expected them. Their presence lifted my heart and renewed my courage.

As they started toward me, waving, I moved to meet them, eager to have a hug fest.

Then I realized that everyone I most loved—Mom, Dad, Grandma, Lorrie, and my baby—were gathered in the same place. Beezo could kill all of them in one bloody spree.