Water from Stone - a Novel (4 page)

***

Later, a nurse, looking exhausted and tense, pushes into the room. “Mr. Westfield?” she calls.

“Yes?” Jack rushes to her, with Amanda, Stan and Naomi on his heels.

“Dr. Harding asked me to tell you that the baby is stable. You have a daughter, Mr. Westfield.”

“What about my wife? How’s Lindsey?”

“Why isn’t Sara here?” Amanda asks. “Why isn’t she telling us?”

“After Dr. Harding closed up the section, Dr. Gahuri, the surgeon, asked her to stay and assist. There was some mild hemorrhaging during the delivery and he wanted her nearby.”

“But the baby’s fine? My granddaughter is fine?”

“She is. She weighs 6 pounds, eight ounces and is 19 inches long. Her lungs are clear, everything’s fine.”

“Where is she now?” Stan’s voice, usually so mellow, is edged with fear.

“She’s been sent up to the neo-natal unit, but you won’t be able to see her for several more hours. She’s under observation.”

Naomi, closer than a sister to Lindsey, forces her way forward. “I thought you said she’s fine.”

“She is, but because of the accident, Dr. Harding wants to keep an eye on her, that’s all.”

“And my wife?” Jack repeats, “Is she going to be all right?”

The nurse looks up at him and there is no mistaking the pity in her eyes. “They’re working on her now, sir. That’s all I know.”

***

Five hours later, Jack is ready to tear the building from its foundations. They have received bits of news about Lindsey’s progress from the nurse. Dr. Gahuri located the source of the bleeding in her brain and was going after it. The C-section began to hemorrhage and Dr. Harding opened her up again and was able to stop it. Her broken bones have been set, but the verdict is still out as to whether they can save her arm, which had been crushed in the accident. Jack hears her words and interprets their underlying message, the verdict is out as to whether it is even worth trying to save the arm of someone who will be dead soon anyway. He barely manages to keep from punching the nurse. Instead, he scarcely feels it as his fist smashes into the wall beside her head. He refuses to leave the waiting room to have the bones set.

***

Two hours and countless cups of bad coffee later, Jack is beyond exhaustion. Stress has burned through the caffeine in his system and the throbbing in his hand has spread to his shoulder. He concentrates on the pain, thinking that somehow it brings him closer to Lindsey. When the door opens and a doctor enters, Jack hurries over to him but, after a few brief words, the doctor turns to the taxi driver’s family. A collective scream rises from the group and Jack knows the driver must be dead. He squeezes his damaged hand.

Some time later, the nurse returns. They are closing Lindsey up and the doctor will be out to speak with them shortly. When Amanda asks about the baby, the nurse won’t meet her eyes and, while she allows that as far as she knows the baby is fine, she adds that they’ll have to speak with Dr. Harding if they want to know more.

“Jack, don’t,” Stan’s hand falls heavily onto his shoulder, keeping Jack from racing after the departing nurse and forcing more answers from her. Jack watches her disappear before pulling out of Stan’s grip and returning to his pacing.

***

“Sara,” Jack is the first to see the doctor. With his good hand, he takes hold of Sara’s arm and searches her fatigue-bruised eyes for answers it is obvious they don’t want to reveal. “How is she?”

Sara’s sigh is deep. She glances around the waiting room and rakes a hand through her graying hair that has been plastered beneath a cap for the better part of ten hours. “Let’s step outside,” she says.

Jack’s hyped up nerves, his desire for action, leave him wanting to shake her. Just spit it out, he wants to yell, but he leads her to a somewhat private alcove down the hall before demanding, “Tell me.”

Sara leans against a windowsill and closes her eyes.

“Sara?” Jack prods.

Dr. Harding nods once, as if gathering strength, and then meets Jack’s eyes. “In the accident,” she says, her voice reluctant, “Lindsey’s head was hit very hard. As you know, there was hemorrhaging. Dr. Gahuri, who is an excellent surgeon, drained the area and tried to stop it before further damage occurred. Unfortunately, quite a lot of damage had already been done. At the same time, there were problems with the delivery. Her body had been knocked around quite a bit and though we were able to save the baby, we found some internal bleeding. I had to go in a second time to stop it, and I did. Stop the bleeding. But, ah, she’d been through so much by that point and her heart went into arrest. We got her heart beating again, but she arrested two more times.” Sara closes her eyes and she bites her lip.

“Is she...did she…?” Amanda’s voice is a strangled whisper.

Sara looks at each of them in turn, her eyes finally returning to Jack’s. “No, she’s not, she hasn’t. Died. Yet. But, she is dying. She’s in a coma and the chances are slim to none that she’ll be able to pull out of it. I don’t know how much longer she’ll hang on, but it won’t be long.”

Jack feels his knees begin to buckle and he reaches out to grab at the wall. Tears fall unchecked down his cheeks and it costs him the last of his strength to ask, “Can you take me to her? Please?”

Sara’s look makes it obvious she has more to say, but Jack shakes his head. He doesn’t want more, he doesn’t need to hear any more of the details. He needs to be with Lindsey and that is all. Nodding, Sara pushes herself off the windowsill.

Naomi’s ragged voice stops her, “What about Mia? Is she OK? The nurse wouldn’t tell us.”

“Please,” Jack repeats. The baby can wait.

Sara holds up her hand, forcing Jack to stop. “You need to hear this,” she says.

Jack feels Lindsey’s pull. He thinks she must be scared and he needs to be with her. “Please.”

“Jack,” Sara clears her throat. “Jack,” she begins again.

Jack watches Sara square her shoulders and he thinks that somehow he should brace himself for more, though he can think of nothing more devastating than the news she has already given him.

“The baby,” Sara says, “your baby, is missing.”

Three

Mar.

They say that Sail Rock is where the hammerhead sharks live. They say it is where they go to breed. Its massive south face slopes downward, tucking in where solid meets liquid, just as a cloth sail would when billowing in a stiff breeze.  The rock rises out of the water rather than simply sitting in it, solid. There. Its base, a mammoth mast that anchors the sail to the ocean floor, descends into the depths without so much as an incline to grant it grace.

It is about this pillar that the hammerheads swarm, swirling in a maelstrom of savage lust, monster bodies pushing, shoving at the scent of blood. And, just as it begins, it is over, the meal shredded, torn, devoured. Only now, there is a slight change, a heightened sensibility, maybe even a nervous excitement as goggle eyes search to and fro for the next victim, the next flesh to rip and tear from sinew, from bone. Distances are now maintained, as it would take almost nothing, a slight flick of the tail to the left or maybe to the right, almost nothing for them to turn on each other, mother against daughter, father devouring son, blood lust and greed filling their meager brains where affection and nurture might have been.

Divers go to Sail Rock. Actually pay money for the chance to watch the beasts, to suck up a few thousand pounds of compressed air, all the while pretending to themselves that they themselves look like nothing more than another piece of coral, made of something hard and inedible, not at all like something so sad, so pathetic, as flesh and blood. Wanting to believe, but not quite getting there, that they are safe, that these monsters won’t turn, not on a tourist. Not on the source of livelihood for these islands. Finance, after all, rules the world. The dive must be safe or it wouldn’t be allowed. Commerce would be threatened by a tourist getting hurt, the dive company would not have brought them here if it wasn’t safe. Hoping that thinking it will make it so, but wanting more than anything for the dive to be over, to be in a bar somewhere, able ever after to drop a line, start a conversation with ‘yeah, I dove with hammerheads, big motherfuckers, too.’ This 30 minutes of water time giving you a story, marking you as somehow different, superior.

But then, you’re young, you’re on your honeymoon, you got the girl and now the story would be the cap of ten days of sex and sunshine. The part you can talk about. Only, she has sinus problems and the dive company won’t take her, won’t risk having to bail at the wrong moment. And so she sits by the pool all morning, admires how when the light hits it at just the right angle, the ring throws off thousands of sparks of light. Thinks about babies and baseball games, makes plans of how to be a great, no, a fantastic, wife, a spectacular one, a model soccer mom. Drifts off as the heat of the sun loosens every last muscle, numbs the mind. Gives in to the sensuous heat of the day.
Mmmmmmm
…

And later, when the boat comes back, she’s asleep in the liquid light, unaware there’s a fuss, the hotel’s general manager coming to get her, to wake her up, dazed from languid hours of sleeping in the sun, to lead her away, back to her room, past all the people who are staring at her, talking about her, pointing at her, making the confusion and sudden fear in her belly grow and expand upon itself until it claws and strangles at her throat.

And then it is not she, it is you and your room is cold and dark, air-conditioning and curtains beating back the day. And there is someone else in the room, you don’t know it, but he’s a doctor, the hotel’s on-call doctor, come with drugs, drugs you don’t even know yet you’re going to need, but he’s there, waiting, waiting for that precise moment when your mind explodes in horror, when the silent scream that has been building in your belly finds an outlet, finds its way out your mouth, not silent now, unending.

And so you’re told. The honeymoon is over. But how? But how but how but how, you ask, not comprehending. It was safe, it was supposed to be safe, they take tourists there, for god’s sake. No no no, this is our honeymoon, this can’t happen, not on our honeymoon. They’re confused, it was someone else, someone else’s husband. Someone who was unhappy, someone who has been married for too many years, someone old, the Dive Master. It was him, not my husband they chose.

But they tell you, a long monologue of backpedaling, of making excuses, of trying to redirect blame. As if blame mattered. At that moment. As if it mattered that he wasn’t even the one with the bloody nose, the one who first drew their attention, the one who defined herself as a target. As if it mattered that he is a hero. In death there are no heroes, only death. And so he pushes the lady out of the way, actually believes you can punch a shark in the nose and scare it away. Or, at least, tries, maybe doesn’t even think, maybe just reacts, putting his body in front of another man’s wife, as he would want someone to put his body in front of his own wife’s, and so to try to save her.

And they go for it. What do they care? A free meal’s a free meal. And so it begins. The nudging, the pushing, the hitting the diver away from the massive coral face against which he and the woman now cringe. And the woman’s husband reaches down and grasps her hair. She is now grabbing her nose, squeezing it through her mask, trying to stop the blood from seeping out and her husband is dragging her up by her hair, screw the bends, forget ascending slower than your smallest bubbles. The fucking sharks aren’t watching your bubbles.

Now the diver, though, the hero, has been batted out into the open sea and in one of the passings, his hand has been scraped raw against the leather side of a hammerhead shark, causing a small amount of blood to escape, not much, but more than the one drop per billion that a shark can sense, and so, finally, as is their wont to do, call it instinct, call it nature, call it fate, one of the monsters lunges and almost casually rips off an arm, the one with a ring on its hand, the one that just that morning lay happily pinned beneath his wife’s sleeping head. And so it goes, but quicker, faster and faster as more of the beasts get into it. The frenzy begins with vicious teeth gnashing, tearing and ripping until all that is left is a bit of a torso, the part that is spit out again and again as it stubbornly remains wedged inside the buoyancy compensator that remains attached to a tank. And for some god-awful reason, the b.c. doesn’t fully pop, but rises, slowly, to the surface, where it is fished out by the Dive Master, a grim token of a man who once was, who just 10 minutes before had had a life.

And what, they wonder, as they stare at you and wait for answers, do you want to be done with his remains? With the small piece of chest against which you used to lay your head to hear his heart beat so furiously after making love? Covered in hair through which you used to run your fingers and which you used to clutch at in the ecstasy of release? Would you prefer a burial or a cremation?

And then, finally, you scream.

Four

Mar.

The alarm clock screams, or is it the phone? Whatever it is, the noise wraps itself nicely into Mar’s nightmare. A shrill scrape of sound as she claws her way to the surface, much as a drowning woman would struggle for air. Much as she has imagined the woman with the bloody nose had struggled to the surface, yanking at her flippers, ripping them off and thrusting herself up and into the boat moments before collapsing with the bends.

And just as that woman must have gasped for breath, Mar lies in bed sucking air, her heart thumping loudly in her ears, her body soaked in sweat, her vision blurred to a dull Payne’s-Gray, shot through with painful, migraine bursts of Cadmium-Red-Medium-Hue. Her stomach twists with nausea as bits of the dream gnash at her, urging her to return to its depths.
They say they say they say
, and her mind sobs back,
it’s true it’s true it’s true.

Mar presses her arm across swollen, tired eyes and focuses on the drone of the heater.
Tha-tha-thump
,
tha-tha-thump
. She draws a ragged breath and her racing heart hitches, as if changing gears, downshifting to a more reasonable speed. She draws another breath.
Tha-tha-thump
. As her mind empties of the memories, Mar gradually becomes aware of the tension about her legs, a confining, suffocating weight twining its way up her body, as if her bed has become part of the dream. She kicks out viscously, or at least tries to, but her legs are pinned in the wound-up sheet. Just like that, fury overtakes her. “No! No! No! Aaaaaargh!!!” Mar yanks at the sheets to free herself. The more frantically she struggles, the tighter the sheets seem to grab at her, until she is fighting wildly for her life. Across the bed and up on the other side, one leg trapped, sending her flying, knocking the breath out of her as she lands flat on the floor, blood erupting in her mouth as her teeth bite her tongue, cheek scraped raw when she connects with the rough carpet pile. And then she is clawing and scrambling, yanking and fighting her leg free and pushing herself up and away. And only when she is standing beside the bed, her chest heaving, the bedclothes flung across the floor, her pillow resting among the knocked-over photos on the dresser where it landed, does true clarity of thought come to her and she realizes that it was The Dream. Just The Dream again.