The X-rays revealed that I had broken two bones in my right hand-the first metacarpal and the radius-in addition to whatever insults I had committed against the ligaments. Because of the intense swelling, the doctor fitted me with the largest splint available, size extra-extra-large. He said that we’d have to wait for the hand to shrink back to near-normal size before they could outfit me with a standard plaster cast. I was told I would have my choice of colors.
“Even green to match your uniform,” the doctor said with a pearlescent smile.
I found my sergeant waiting for me outside the trauma center, arms crossed, snapping her gum.
“What happened to Barter?” I asked.
“I handed him off to the Rockport cops. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I can drive myself.”
She gave me a doubtful sort of smirk. “I’m not sure that’s such a smart idea, Grasshopper. The doc didn’t give you any drugs, did he?”
My parka was draped over my left shoulder, since my right arm was now in a sling. “He wrote me a prescription for Vicodin.”
“That’s heavy-duty stuff.”
It was after midnight now and the waiting room had grown relatively quiet except for the mindless chatter of late-night television.
“How’s the boy?”
“Too soon to tell. I guess the docs want to evacuate him to Boston, but the weather has all the Life Flight choppers grounded. I don’t know if they’ll chance driving him in an ambulance.”
My coat began to slide off my shoulder. Kathy caught it.
“So it looks like I’ll be taking a few sick days,” I said at last.
She studied the bruised fingertips sticking out from my splint. “I’d say that’s a safe bet. You won’t be able to go on patrol as long as you’re wearing a splint or a cast. Maybe we can put you behind a desk in Augusta after you get back from disability leave.”
Well, at least Sarah wouldn’t have to worry about me out on patrol.
Kathy followed me to my truck. The temperature had climbed a degree or two while I was shut up in the hospital, and the precipitation was now drifting down lightly as plain warm rain. Still, the surface of the parking lot remained as slick as a hockey rink. Under the wet and swirling arc light, my sergeant rearranged my drooping parka back onto my shoulder and raised my collar. “I still can’t believe you crashed my fucking ATV.”
Despite my wishes, Kathy followed me most of the way home. The snowplows had salted and sanded the main roads, but the driving conditions were as bad as I’d seen in ages. At the turn off to Sennebec, Kathy blinked her high beams at me and kept going.
The image of that redheaded kid in a hospital bed seemed to float beyond the limits of my headlights.
I stopped my truck beneath the frozen pines at the end of the driveway and tried to puzzle out what I was going to tell Sarah. Why hadn’t I called her from the hospital and told her about my broken hand? It was because this latest accident was further proof how unreliable I was going to be as a father-if I was going to be a father.
The front windows were dark. When I opened the door, I heard her call my name from the bedroom.
“It’s me,” I said.
I struggled to remove my wet parka and hang it on the hook by the door. Then I began fiddling, one-handed, with the ice-coated lacings of my boots. It took me forever to get my soaking feet out of them.
I found Sarah reading in bed. As I limped through the door, she began to smile sleepily until she caught sight of my sling and splint. Then her eyes widened and she sat up so suddenly, her book dropped to the floor.
“Michael, what happened?”
“I crashed Kathy’s ATV chasing Calvin and Travis Barter. I broke two bones in my hand.”
She jumped out of bed. “Are you in pain?”
“No,” I lied.
“Let me see.” She examined my wounded fingers with an expression of deep concern. “Oh Mike, your hand looks awful.”
“It could be a lot worse.” I sat down beside her heavily on the bed, so heavily the springs groaned in protest. “I could have broken my neck.”
She sat beside me and clasped my good hand with both of her small ones. “Why do you keep hurting yourself like this? I worry that there’s something self-destructive in you that makes you take these risks. I’m scared for you all the time.”
“Well, I won’t be going on patrol for a while, so you needn’t worry.”
“What will they have you do?”
“Take sick time at first, disability, and then I really don’t know.” I took a deep breath from my diaphragm. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Travis Barter has a serious head injury. The doctors are evacuating him to Boston.”
She put a hand over her open mouth in horror.
I found that I couldn’t meet Sarah’s eyes as I recounted the evening’s events, but kept staring down at my grotesque hand in its ridiculously oversized splint. She didn’t ask any questions or interrupt me, but I could feel her emotions rising in the way her grip tightened.
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to that boy,” she said after I’d finally lapsed into silence.
“I don’t blame myself.” I used my good hand to push myself off the bed and onto my wobbly feet. “I blame his goddamned father for driving on the goddamned road.”
“Don’t you want to talk about what happened?” Sarah said.
“I’m too tired,” I said, and went into the bathroom to take a Vicodin.
Power was out all along the midcoast. We were among the few fortunate households to have electricity. We heard on the radio that linesmen were assembling from all over New England to assist with the emergency. We spent the day after the storm with Sarah shielding me from phone calls while I slept in the darkened bedroom, knocked out on Vicodin.
Except for alcohol and some extra-strength Tylenol prescribed for previous broken bones and stitched wounds, I had never taken drugs before. Somehow I had negotiated my adolescence without ever smoking a joint. Having a crazed drunk for a father is a pretty good advertisement for sobriety in that respect.
So the spell that the Vicodin cast over me was profound. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to tell wakefulness from the hallucinations of my sleeping mind, feeling as if I were submerged at the bottom of a lake, watching lights and shadows dart across the ceiling like quick-moving fish. It was not an unpleasant experience. The pills made the pain in my hand vanish, and I would stare at my splint as if it belonged to some unfortunate person sitting on the bed beside me. Poor fellow, I thought.
Sometime during that first long, drugged afternoon, Sarah appeared with a bowl of minestrone and a plate of crackers. The brightness of the overhead light stabbed into my brain.
“How are you doing, honey?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Maybe you should get up for a while and walk around.”
“No thanks.” I was impatient to return to my languorous existence at the bottom of the lake.
“You should at least eat something.”
She plumped up the pillow behind my shoulders so that I could eat off the tray. I obliged her while she told me of the events that had taken place in the world outside my bedroom.
“The phone’s been ringing nonstop,” she said.
“Haven’t heard it.”
“You got calls from Lieutenant Malcomb and Kathy Frost, both wanting to know how you’re doing. Charley, too. That chaplain, Deb Davies, also called. I guess word travels fast through the Warden Service. You got this weird call from some guy named Oswald Bell earlier. He had this thick Long Island accent. He wanted to know if you’d read the files he gave you. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. There were a bunch of hang-ups, too.”
“The Barters.”
“God, do you think? Are they going to come over here? What should I do?”
“They won’t come over. They know I’d shoot their whole fucking family.”
She removed the tray from my lap and set it on the bedside table. Her eyes seemed a different color from what I remembered-I felt like I’d never truly seen them before.
“How many of those pills did you take?”
“Just what the bottle said.”
“Your voice is slurred. I don’t think you should take any more.”
“OK.”
She put a hand on my forehead and then ran her fingers through my crew cut. “I’m worried about you, honey.”
Her concern struck me as misplaced but very sweet. I felt a sudden desire to share some of the insights I’d recently experienced. “Do you remember your First Communion? There was all this big buildup to it in the Catholic Church. We had these CCD classes-I don’t know what CCD stands for-it was like Sunday school, except it wasn’t on Sundays. The idea of eating the body of Christ-what’s a kid supposed to make of that?”
“Mike…”
“The wafer was just this dusty round piece of paper. I don’t know what I thought would happen-maybe that I’d see a vision of God with beams of sunlight and angels. But instead, there was nothing. So which church should we raise our kids in? Catholic or Episcopal? I guess you’d be the one to take them, so you should decide.”
She got up from the bed and lifted the tray. She seemed to be swaying dreamily herself, uncertain on her feet. “Get some rest.”
After she’d left the room, I stared at the shimmering light beneath the bedroom door. It seemed to ripple like waves of heat rising off hot desert sands. Sarah hadn’t understood what I was getting at. These revelations were peculiar to me. No one else could understand them.