Nameless Night (3 page)

Helen gasped; it was as if an unseen hand had straight-armed her in the chest, driving the air from her lungs and rocking her a full step backward. What she had presumed to be the bulk of miles of bandages was, in truth, Paul’s head . . . swollen almost beyond belief, the size of a basketball, the seams oozing and oily along the suture lines.

Her dismay penetrated the reinforced glass. The same doctor turned his head and took her in. He said a few words to the other people in the room, pulled off his latex gloves, and deposited them in a trash container. He removed his hood and face mask, said a few more words, and then pulled open the door and stepped out into the hall. A pair of Day-Glo-green Keds were the only thing visible beneath the monogrammed brown surgery gown. jerry, it read in gold.

He was young and blond and handsome. Maybe thirty-five. Built like a swimmer. Kind of long and lean with ropy forearms and thick wrists. Whatever he did for exercise, he did it a lot. He cast a quick sideways glance into the room and then back to Helen. “We forget sometimes,” he said. “We see this stuff so much it’s like we lose track of how alien it all must look to the public.” He stuck out his hand.

“I’m Jerry Donald,” he said.

Turned out he was Dr. Jerry Donald. Head of what he called “the big man’s post-op posse.” Seemed they’d stayed behind for an extra day in order to check the sutures and make the first change of the dressings. They were scheduled to catch up with the big man and rest of the crew tomorrow morning in North Lake Tahoe, for the purpose of performing a complete lift on a personage whose name he deemed to be sufficiently famous as to preclude mentioning. He said he was sure she understood.

He was wrong. “Stop,” Helen said finally. “What in goodness’ name are you talking about?” She pointed in at Paul. The crew was busy wrapping his distended head. “What’s happened to him? Why is . . . why is his head like . . .”

He opened his mouth to speak, but Helen quashed him with a restraining palm. She took a pair of deep breaths and then steepled her fingers. “No . . . no . . . Let’s go back to yesterday.” She gestured toward Paul. “I left this man fighting for his life yesterday evening. I come back to find he’s back in surgery.” She let the statement hang in the air.

“I can’t speak to the specifics of that,” the guy said. “All I know is somebody called Dr. Richard . . . we were down in Portland . . . all we had was an hour to get everything ready.”

“Who’s this Dr. Richard?”

He seemed taken aback by the question. “Dr. Lenville Richard.”

Helen narrowed her eyes. “Where do I know that name from?”

The guy shrugged. “Magazines maybe. He’s on TV quite a bit.”

“What kind of doctor is he?”

“Plastic surgery. He’s—” Helen slapped her side. “Of course . . . the guy who works on the movie stars.”

“That’s the one.”

Helen held her breath and frowned. “I don’t understand,” she stammered. “How can this be? This is impossible. Who authorized this? Paul’s a ward of the state.” She stopped and let her words fall to the floor. “If anybody thinks the state’s going to pay for something like this . . .” She sputtered again. “Well . . . they’ve just got another think coming. I’m certainly not going to be the one who—” “I’m not in the loop on the financial end of things, but—” Helen was rolling. “I cannot and will not be held responsible for—” “—I heard it was the driver.”

Helens brow furrowed. She folded her arms across her chest.

“The guy who hit him,” Dr. Jerry Donald added.

“The driver?”

“That’s what I heard. They said he was a software tycoon or something. Felt so bad about what happened, he started making calls. Found out Mr. Hardy didn’t have the wherewithal to pay for this kind of thing, so he jumped in on his own. Paid for everything.”

Helen looked back into the room. Two men and a woman, same monogrammed hospital gowns and matching surgical accessories. They were wrapping clean gauze round and round Paul’s enormous head. Donald anticipated her next question.

“You’re looking at something like a half a million dollars’ worth of craniofacial surgery in that bed,” he said. Helen’s open mouth and incredulous expression encouraged the young man to continue. “The old injury made it tough,” he said. Helen nodded. “His whole . . . I mean the whole front of his skull was . . . the CT scan didn’t really convey how massively compressed the front of his skull was . . . how the sinuses had been crushed behind the orbits. We spent three hours picking old fragments out of his frontal lobes.”

Helen winced and looked aside.

“How the first injury didn’t kill him is a mystery to me,” Donald added.

“They said it was a miracle. Said he should have been dead.”

“They were right.”

She pointed at the glass. “What’s all that around his eyes?” she wanted to know.

“That’s why the big man’s getting the big bucks,” he said with a sardonic grin. “I’m not sure the technique’s ever even been thought about before, let alone performed.” He smiled again. “That’s how Dr. Richard decided to get to the fractures in the upper jaw and in the orbits. It was amazing. Medical-journal material for sure.”

When Helen failed to react, he went on. “He had no forehead left.” He cut the air with his hand. “Nothing.” He paused for effect.

“Dr. Richard had to use a split calvarial graft.” The sound of his own words stopped him. He patted her shoulder. “Okay,” he said.

“It’s like this. The skull has three layers. Essentially, it’s a hard layer on the outside, a soft layer in the middle, and a third . . . sorta hard layer on the inside.” He waggled his hand. “Not as hard as the layer on the outside, but harder than the stuff in the middle.”

When Helen nodded her understanding, he continued. “We split off pieces from the outside of his skull to make him a new forehead. The calvarial graft will give him a lot of protection up there.” He gestured back toward Paul. “Interestingly enough, as I was plating it down, I could see the frontal lobes already expanding back to their normal size. I mean . . . right before my very eyes. Like the brain had just moved into a larger apartment or something.” He shook his big handsome head. “I’ve been in this business nine years and that was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Wow” was all Helen could think to say.

“The new bone has a very different curve compared to whatever he may have looked like before the original injury. Should give him a very strong appearance.” Again he anticipated her next question.

“We were working blind here,” he said. “Usually we have a picture or something, a photo of what the person used to look like, or wants to look like, a picture of his father, or, God forbid, some movie star he wants to resemble . . . you know . . . something, some idea of what the patient’s got in mind.” He waved a hand in the artificial air. “Here . . .” He gestured at Paul. “. . . here we were flying solo. This . . .” He motioned toward Paul with his head. “. . . this is a brand-new person, somebody who never existed before . . . straight off the assembly line.”

He touched the area around his own right eye. “Not only did we move his eye orbits closer together to make up for all the little fragments we had to remove, but he’s got a whole new forehead.” He grinned. “It’s a damn good thing Mr. Hardy here doesn’t have a wife and kiddies or anything.”

“Why do you say that?”

He leaned in closer. His voice took on a conspiratorial edge.

“This surgery . . . this is new ground here. This is where science meets art,” he said. “A few months from now, not even his mother would recognize this guy.”

4

Suzuki Landscaping was the sole holdover from the mansion era of Harmony House. Ken Suzuki reckoned it was thirty-five years this April he’d started doing the yard work, back when the house was still grand and belonged to a family named Bryant, who’d made a fortune in the moving and storage business and who had more kids than even they could count.

Helen watched as Ken finished up washing his hands in the kitchen sink. For a while, early on, Helen had felt certain it was just a matter of time before Ken made a move on her. Dinner and a movie or maybe a walk in the park. It made sense. They were about the same age. Single. They obviously liked each other and enjoyed the time they spent in each other’s company.

She’d considered taking the initiative herself but found that something in her background made anything that forward . . . anything that liberal . . . well . . . they had names for girls like that, didn’t they? . . . and so Ken Suzuki and Helen Willis had settled into the friendly confines of middle-aged kindred spirithood. She handed him a wad of paper towels and watched in veiled amusement as he first straightened and then separated the towels, which he then arranged in a neat pile on the counter, before first drying his palms, then the backs of his hands, and finally each finger separately. Helen had to turn away to avoid seeming impolite. She’d often wondered whether Ken’s ultrafastidious nature was innate or whether it was the reaction of a man born in a Japanese internment camp. She’d wondered whether a proud man like Ken felt a special need for perfection as a result of what happened to his parents. The way they’d never been able to forget the twentysix months they’d spent sweltering on the Gila River, as Ken put it . . . without privacy . . . without hope . . . without honor. And then coming home to find another family living in their house and discovering there was nothing they could do about it and how the experience had somehow tainted the rest of their lives, as if they were cursed or had neglected some detail which had led to losing everything, some subtle oversight of the soul which Ken Suzuki was going to make damn sure he didn’t repeat.

Outside the kitchen window, Paul Hardy wiped his brow with his sleeve, shoveled the last of the remaining soil into the hole he’d dug earlier this morning, and set the shovel aside. They watched as he got down on his knees. The newly planted Japanese maple basked in the spring sunshine as Paul lovingly worked the soil with his hands now, pushing here and patting there, making sure the dirt was tight enough to keep it upright in the winter winds but not so tight as to cramp the development of roots.

“He’s way different than he used to be,” Ken Suzuki said.

“He still spends most of his time downstairs on the exercise machines.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Helen’s heart quivered. “What then?”

“You don’t have to show him things more than once anymore.”

Ken sensed her discomfort and looked her way. “You noticed?”

“I’ve noticed,” Helen said, averting her eyes and hoping Ken would let it go at that. The change in Paul Hardy was not something with which she was at all comfortable, probably because she couldn’t come up with a suitable explanation. Any notion of miracles had been forever thwarted by having gotten to know the miracle makers. Over the past several months, Jerry Donald and his “post-op posse” team had stopped by Harmony House three times to check on Paul, to adjust this and to rearrange that. Last time, a month or so ago, they’d removed the final bandages and then layered away the last of the suture lines, revealing a rugged-looking, blue-eyed . . . stranger.

“He’s funny about it, though,” Ken Suzuki added.

“How’s that?”

“If he sees you noticed . . . he tries to cover it up.”

“Goes back to acting stupid.”

“Yeah.” Ken finished with his hands and deposited the damp towels in the recyclable container under the sink. “I asked him if he was ready to come back to work. Maybe make a little cash.”

Helen cocked an eyebrow at him. “And?”

“And he pretended he didn’t understand.”

Helen made a doubtful face. “He’s been through a lot . . .” she began.

Ken Suzuki was having none of it. “He understood me. I could see it in his eyes. There’s a flicker in him . . . something that was never there before.”

“He’s still the same old Paul,” Helen soothed. “Mrs. Dahlberg knew who it was the minute he walked in the room and that old woman’s stone blind.”

Ken Suzuki started to speak but Helen beat him to it. “He and Shirley are tight as ever,” she scoffed. “He’s still the only one understands what she’s saying.”

“I’m not saying he’s a different guy or anything, Helen. He’s still the only human being I’ve ever met who can walk around with a ninety-pound bag of concrete in each hand. I’m just saying he’s not completely out of it like he used to be. There’s something back there now. And—” He stopped, seemed to have a brief conversation with himself, then pulled out his invoice book and started to write up the pruning job.

“And what?” Helen elbowed him gently in the ribs. Ken Suzuki pretended not to notice; he kept writing.

“And what?” she said, louder this time, bumping him with her shoulder.

Ken stopped. He let his hands fall to his sides. “And whatever’s back there . . . for whatever reason . . . he doesn’t want anybody to see it.”

A silence settled over the kitchen. Ken finished his invoice. Helen promised to submit it for payment that afternoon. They shared a humorless laugh about how long it would take the state to pay up. Out back, Paul was watering the maple. A pair of Ken’s workers suddenly appeared, their forest-green coveralls covered with wood chips. One still wore his ear protection. The other had dropped them down to neck level. The pair had been working out front, feeding the pruned limbs into the steel jaws of a chipper. Neck level used his hands to simulate turning a steering wheel.

“Looks like we’re ready to go,” Ken said. “I’ll come by middle of next week and see how it looks. Maybe ask Paul if he wants to work.”

Helen patted him on the shoulder. “He just needs to get settled in again.”

Helen said it, but she didn’t believe it. Ken was right. Some fundamental aspect of Paul had changed. How could it not? she asked herself. How could someone who’s been through what he’s been through not be changed by the experience? It was one of those situations where her intellect told her one thing but her instincts told her another.

She followed Ken Suzuki down the steps and out into the backyard. Paul was wrapping the hose around the green metal holder mounted on the back of the house. He didn’t look up as they passed. His aura seemed to press in upon them as they walked along the back of the house.