The Euthanist (34 page)

I panicked, as much for myself as for Walter Gretsch. Minutes from now I’d feel the same drug in my blood. If my body couldn’t handle it, these three might hold me down the same way, praying my seizure would pass. With their refusal to help Walter, I understood they wouldn’t help me either.

After the tight coiling of his muscles, Walter’s body went slack. His jaw unclenched. Walter seemed to have a moment of clarity, and whispered to the air, “
Girls
.” The next moment his body stiffened as if an electrical current ran through it. His back bowed as much as the straps would allow. I could have run my arm under his shoulder blades. “
Girls
,” he gasped. He shook fiercely, and I could feel the floor tremor.

I’d seen this before. “This man’s going into arrest.” Moments later, he did just that. “No, no, no,” I stammered. Walter’s body seized then went limp. I felt his neck and found no heartbeat. I began CPR, and his rubber barrel of ribs gave only slightly. Royce knew CPR and breathed into Walter’s mouth at intervals. Kearns undid the restraints. I pumped the man’s chest for about ten minutes, until my arms were hot. Until I felt some of the first swells in my brain that told me the drug was taking hold.

When I stopped, Walter Gretsch didn’t twitch a pinky.

Chapter 15

I knew that chemicals were behind the illusion in my head. But I couldn’t deny that Gordon Ostrowski was sitting right there across the kitchen table, real as anything.

I was mute at first. I didn’t have the brass I had in the real world. Dream or not, seeing Gordon Ostrowski made me regress to the level of confidence I had as a teen.

Gordon wore his red jumpsuit; the same one Walter Gretsch wore. He was handsome, pink-cheeked, and healthy. I never visited him in prison, so he might have looked like a scarecrow now. The drugs were showing me the Gordon I knew, top of the world again, teeth white as crushed seashells. His preppy hair was slicked back and clear lacquer coated his fingernails.

My palms felt the wood grain on the tabletop, even the familiar scratches I made from playing “surgeon” with potatoes and a paring knife. Our kitchen was spacious, white cabinets and granite countertops. There was a rack over the kitchen island where all the pots hung. The windows looked out onto a long, rolling lawn that ended at a wall of trees. My dad had bought and planted maples out there, so in the fall we’d get a hint of New England foliage. On that day, the leaves had turned orange and red. I could smell a hint of smoke from someone’s fireplace.

“Made you breakfast.” He slid a bowl of dry Cheerios across the table, which he had done many times. Gordon’s generosity was always an opportunity for petty torment. Cereal without milk was his way of getting me to eat dog kibble.

“You never eat anymore,” said my mother. Mom must have been next to him all along, but I only noticed her now. She didn’t look like my mom. She was naked, burned head to toe. With her hair singed off, her head was a charcoal orb laced with a network of cracks, and the cracks glowed like embers. Like a human volcano in mideruption. This wasn’t how I remember her after the arson, but my imagination haunted me with the worst possible vision of my mother, assembled from stray memories of people I’d pulled out of houses and into the back of the ambulance. Part of me understood that this was my brain short-circuiting, but it didn’t matter. My mother smelled like smoked meat. Faulty brain or not, it smelled real, sounded and felt real.

“That’s right, Skinny. Eat up,” Gordon said. Suddenly, I wondered if I was naked like my mom. It was some relief that I wasn’t. I had on jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt, things I would have worn when I was sixteen. Specifically, the clothing I had worn the day I fled my home. The body inhabiting those clothes was bigger, bulkier from the muscle—my adult body. But my mother and Gordon saw me as a sixteen-year-old.

“I don’t have a spoon.”

“Use this.” Gordon produced a fork instead of a spoon. One of the forks Leland Moon kept in his desk drawer. Too fast for me to react, he plunged it into the back of my hand, pinning it to the table. The prongs sank into the table as a knife would into a butcher block’s sugar maple. The pain was excruciating, and I screamed soundlessly. Gordon’s mouth lifted into his sinister smile as he watched me pluck the fork out of my own hand.

My mother wrapped her black arm around him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “It’s just a pinch, sweetie. You’ll shake it off.” Gordon kissed her on the forehead. Slowly, I wrenched the prongs from between my metatarsals. The fork clattered on the table.

My ankle hit something under the table, and I saw the stuffed gym bag I packed when I ran away. My eyes teared at the evidence of my disloyalty. I was ashamed of myself, and also grateful to see my mother, even this horrible vision of her. “I wasn’t gone long.”

Gordon flashed his eyebrows and answered, “Long enough though.”

I implored her, “Why didn’t you leave with me?”

“Because he’s my husband.” She’d given me that excuse the night before I left.

I said, “You never saw it, did you?” My mom didn’t answer. She smiled at me, and Gordon protectively clung to her burnt arm.

The smell of smoke in the air grew strong, and the room warmed. Around us, flames suddenly crawled up the kitchen walls. The orange foliage through the windows was now obscured by a vibrant curtain of fire. My heart pounded. The fire covered the cabinets, even the hanging pots and pans. My skin roasted, but the fire didn’t touch us. A circle around the kitchen table protected us from the flames, if not the heat. I touched my forehead to wipe off sweat and only succeeded in smearing blood on my face.

I waited for my mother to give me an answer, but she kept her head nestled against her husband’s arm. She finally said, “He didn’t leave me.”

“That much is true, Skinny,” said Gordon. “I didn’t go anywhere, did I?”

“Where did you go?” my mother asked.

“To a friend’s.” This is what I told other people.

“Don’t lie. You know I can tell,” said Gordon.

“To the Y,” I corrected.

“When did you make it back?”

“The place had already burned.”

“You knew I was alive.”

My eyes watered more, and I nodded. “I knew you were at the hospital.”

“But you didn’t come.”

“I was waiting for you to get better.” This was partly true. I didn’t think she would actually die on me. Gordon’s crime was still fresh, and I was mad and confused. But the real truth, and I choked on every word of it, was, “I was ashamed.”

“I was alone.”

I had never spoken this thought, or heard it spoken from my mother. She passed in her hospital bed by herself, without a visit from me. She’d been drifting in and out for a few days. She might have been awake when she died, but the doctors didn’t know for sure. The police hadn’t arrested Gordon yet, and wouldn’t for another week. I was afraid of him. I’d been too afraid of him to stay and protect my mother, and then I was too afraid of him to risk running into him at my mother’s bedside.

What a crushing feeling it must be to die alone. I was terrified of it then and now. I hope my mother wasn’t awake, but I always imagined her waiting for me in a blanched room, suffering until her heart finally gave out.

I wept. “I’m sorry.”

“Must feel good to admit that,” Gordon said. He picked a Cheerio and popped it in his mouth.

“I wanted to kill you so badly,” I told him.

“Then do it.” He pushed something across the table. I expected another utensil, specifically a knife. Instead, it was a hypodermic. “You know what’s in there, don’t you?” I knew, because my brain conjured it. This needle had a steep dose of thiopental. Put enough of that in someone and they don’t need the pancuronium bromide. They would go straight and deep into a coma.

Gordon rolled up a sleeve and gave me a bare forearm to work with. His arm was miraculously hairless, except for some blond wisps along the back.

“It’ll make you feel good.”

“No it won’t.”

My mother said, “It will make you feel like you’re taking back some control over your life.”

“No it won’t.” I protested. “I thought it would, but it won’t.” The fire around us remained outside a perimeter about the diameter of a sumo’s dohyō, but my skin cooked. All the times I’d been surrounded by fire, none of it felt this dangerous. The flames crackled even louder, and leapt off the walls, almost licking us. Smoke thickened and coughed and pulled my shoulders tight to my body. Gordon and my mother remained unconcerned, but rhythmic swells of blood surged through my fingers against the cool barrel of the syringe.

Gordon’s arm was a phantom, but I believed it was real. His skin was warm. Once I touched him, he unlaced his arm from my mother’s so I could focus on him alone. My mother tried to coach me through it. “Go ahead,” she said. She stroked my hand with hers, and it was the first time I’d felt my mother in years. Her charred skin flaked like phyllo dough, but the structure of her fingers was still so familiar. I took her hand, careful not to crush it. The needle hovered over Gordon’s arm. He was ready for it and pumped his fist to give me a good vein.

I took a breath and moved quickly.

I pushed away Gordon’s arm, and, holding my mother’s hand, inserted the needle into her forearm instead.

As the chemicals fed into my mother, the flames around us died down to hibachi height, and then extinguished. Within seconds, Gordon’s skin browned and blackened deeper than my mom’s. His body withered, as if the contents under his skin were siphoned out, and he wilted off the chair, the husk of his skin dark and shapeless as a rotten banana peel.

My mother and I remained at our quiet kitchen table, alone but together. The room was cool, although I sweated from the heat. The fire had blackened the room, but the windows still offered an unmarred view of the yard and the trees. She gazed out and admired the nature, patting my hand while her eyes drowsily fluttered. After my dad and before Gordon, we had plenty of mornings like this, quiet breakfasts with the two of us, where she closed her eyes and basked in the sunlight. Smiling blissfully, she’d savored those moments with a few deep inhales through her nostrils. As the sun gently toasted our skin, she would reach out and hold my hand the way she was now, and say, “I could take a moment like this forever.”

Both of her hands wrapped around mine now, and as the serum took hold, she gradually lowered her head to the table. My mother nestled her face against my hands, breathed deeply into her nose, and fluttered her eyes as she rested.

Chapter 16

I didn’t wake up so much as I came to an awareness that I was lucid again. I stretched out on the bed in Leland’s office, back in Berkeley. Cobwebs clustered above me in the eaves.

The room was dark, and the house quiet. With the streetlamps glowing outside, it wasn’t even close to dawn. Several bottles of water had been left for me at the bedside with a note reading: “Drink.” I drained them. My throat was so dry it felt sore.

A stack of clean clothes, taken from my apartment in Bernal, had been left on a chair next to the bed. On a pile of folded towels, another note read: “You’ll need these. We’ll throw them away.”

If the previous night were New Year’s Eve, the vision of my mother would have been the celebratory midnight toast. The rest of my night felt more like the remainder of a debauched holiday evening, especially the bathroom sickness. I remembered hugging a commode, maybe the one downstairs. My ass ached from the runs, and my stomach felt tender from incessant purging. After I drank the water, I drifted off again from exhaustion.

Some chittery bird outside the window woke me up in the morning. My joints hurt. My thigh was knotty and tender where the needle had stuck me. I shambled downstairs to pee and stumbled into the hallway bathroom. The Moons weren’t up yet, and the toilet rim was smeared with my stomach dross. I polished it clean with one of the towels.

My hair frizzed in the mirror, as much as my capellini locks could. Someone had washed the paint off my face, although blue crusts shadowed under my ears. I was wearing a loose FBI T-shirt and track pants that I had to cinch so they wouldn’t fall. When I stripped down, I found that most of my body was still covered in blue paint. No one had scrubbed my body while I was out. I was happy about that.

The paint came off fairly easily in the shower, but it still took a while before I felt I’d cleaned all the blue off my body. When I was finished, I put on the T-shirt and jeans they had brought from Bernal.

Leland waited in the kitchen for me. He sat on a stool where a counter divided the kitchen and dining room, blowing steam off coffee in faded FBI sweats. I sat on the other side of the counter.

“Made you breakfast.” He slid a bowl full of dry cereal across the counter. My heart forgot to beat. “It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got this morning. Skim milk all right?”
Milk in my cereal
. I breathed again. I nodded, and he poured from the carton and slid a spoon and napkin in place. “You a coffee person?”

“Today I am.” He poured a cup for me in a Cal mug, and I stirred it with milk and sugar. “How long was I out?”

“Most of a day.”

“So only a day.”

I could have wolfed down the cereal, but restrained myself. I began to recall everything that happened the day before. “We killed a man, didn’t we?”