Is there anything else you need to tell me, Martha—didn’t I say that? Didn’t I ask her? Anything else about your husband, your marriage? I try to peer from this distance into Martha’s secret heart: She must have felt that it didn’t matter, whatever she had done and with whom. She must have thought it irrelevant to the task at hand: her husband had gone, it didn’t matter why, and she just wanted him back.
But Martha, oh Martha, he’s not coming back.
I see Brett’s face again, the empty cratered space and the sharp sickly clean odor is all around me now. I sniff gingerly, my eyes still closed, like a newborn bunny rabbit, tasting air with the dew of the womb still drying on my nose. Bleach? Cleaning fluid?
More murmuring, more quiet voices.
And then suddenly a giant has got hold of my right side and is squeezing, huge brutal fingers digging into my flesh, trying to yank my arm off my torso like a flower petal. I writhe, remembering my injury. I feel like a broken toy, like I’ve been hurled from a height down onto cobblestones.
“Hank.” One of the voices, clear and loud. “Hank.”
I’ve never noticed before how sharp and clinical that name sounds, HANK, how curt and cold, HANK, onomatopoetic for the clink of a metal chain on a metal desk. My mind is moving, fast and strange. “Hank,” says the voice again, and it’s real; there’s a voice in the room. I’m in a room and there’s a voice in it, a person in it, standing close by me, saying my name.
I decide to go one eye at a time. I crack the right eye, and the light floods in. Silhouetted in the glare is a face I recognize. Two eyes, each encased in a glass circle, peering down at me like an amoeba on a slide. Above the pair of glasses a slash of bangs, a skeptical irritated face.
“Dr. Fenton?” I whisper. I open the other eye.
“What happened to you?” asks Alice Fenton.
“I was shot.”
“Thanks,” she says. “That’s literally the only part of the story I already know.”
“You’re upstairs,” I tell her.
“Yes. I quit the morgue,” she says. “Not enough doctors. Too many people who need help. Plenty of idiots getting themselves shot.”
I try to banter back at her but our conversation thus far has already exhausted me. I let my eyes drift closed again. Alice Fenton is a legend. She is or was the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire, and for a long time I idolized her from afar, her technical mastery and perspicacity. A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with her for the first time, and her forensic skill helped me figure out who it was that killed some people. Naomi Eddes, for example, whom I loved. She is—Fenton is a legend.
“Dr. Fenton,” I say. “You’re a legend.”
“That’s great,” she says. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk later.”
“Wait. Hold. Wait.”
“What?”
“Just one second.”
I inhale. I get my eyes to open. I prop myself on my elbows and look around. The bedsheets and blankets are yellow-green in the pale light of the room. I’m in a flimsy powder-blue gown. I’m home. There’s an iron arm that once held an in-room television, now angling uselessly out of the wall like a metal tree branch. I need to go to Albin Street. I have to check in with my client. Hey, Martha? I’ve got a couple questions for you.
Dr. Fenton stands at the side of the bed, a stack of clipboards under one arm, her short compact form quivering with impatience.
“What?” she says again.
“I have to get going.”
“Sure,” she says. “Nice to see you.”
“Oh,” I say. “Great.”
She waits as I shift my legs toward the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves and thickens inside my body. Visions roll across my brainpan, double time: Martha crying; Brett staring; Nico smoking; Rocky in his office with his feet up. Naomi Eddes unmoving in the darkness where they found her. I stop moving my legs and tuck my chin down into my neck and manage not to vomit.
“Ether,” says Dr. Fenton with the barest trace of merriment. “You’re coming down out of a cloud of ether. My colleagues and I are down to the dregs of our pain meds. The DOJ promised a shipment of morphine and MS Contin by Friday, along with new fuel for the generators. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, ether. Everything that’s old is new again.”
I nod. I focus on not being sick. My arm feels like one big tender bruise. I try to move it, to see if that would hurt it more or less, and I discover that it won’t move at all.
“I should say, Hank,” says Dr. Fenton, and I note that there is no remaining amusement in her voice, “it is very much within the realm of possibility that you are going to lose that limb.”
I listen, numb. Lose the limb. Sure. Of course. My pillow smells like dust, like other men’s blood.
Fenton is still talking. “I repaired the blood vessels in the ruptured brachial artery by excising the injured segment and performing a graft. But I—” She stops, gives a quick shake of her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I was cutting up corpses for the past twenty-five years, and now I’ve been doing general surgeries for approximately two weeks. Plus, you probably haven’t noticed, but it’s fucking dark in here.”
“Dr. Fenton,” I say. “I’m sure you did your best.” I reach laboriously across the bed with my good hand and pat her on the arm.
“I’m sure I did, too,” she says. “But you still might lose the limb.”
I try again to move my legs, and this time I get them a little closer to the edge of the bed. I’m visualizing my swiftest route from here, Concord Hospital at Pleasant Street and Langley Parkway, all the way to Albin Street in North Concord. I’m not cross with you, Martha. I just want to know the truth. The machines around us beep dully, their blinking lights dim and pale, feeble back-up-generator lights. My legs refuse to go any farther for the time being. My arm throbs and my body aches. The world swells up and gently spins around me. I feel myself slipping down, not unpleasantly, back into my cloud of ether. Naomi is standing where Fenton just was, gazing sweetly down at me, and my heart shivers in my chest. Naomi was bald, in life; apparently in the world to come she’s growing out her hair and it looks beautiful, like soft moss on a sea-washed stone.
I let my head fall back onto the pillow and the helicopter roars into view, Nico hollering from the hatchway, and then I’m in it, on it, feverish and confused, the wind rushing in and around us, Nico’s choppy hair fluttering like a field of black grass. The pilot is nervous and unsure—and young, so terribly young, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing aviator glasses and jerking the levers uncertainly.
Nico and I fought for the whole trip: forty-five minutes of arguing, voices raised, screaming to be heard over the clatter of the copter blades and the deafening wind, telling each other not to be stupid. I told her she had to get out with me in Concord and stay with me at the farmhouse on Little Pond Road until the end, like we’d discussed. Nico refused, urged me instead to stay with her, went on and on about the asteroid, the bombs, hydrodynamic simulations and necessary changes in velocity. And through all of this we’re jerking back and forth in the skies over New Hampshire and my fever is climbing and then suddenly were descending haphazardly toward the landing pad atop Concord Hospital.
And as I was clambering out Nico said—what did she say? Something insane. As I stepped uncertainly onto the landing pad and turned around and pleaded with my sister through my haze of fever and pain to remain under my protection until the end—she told me not to worry.