Marcia Talley - A Quiet Death

Sitting next to me on the sofa Wednesday evening, Paul scrolled through the channels – WRC, WUSA, WJLA, not to mention CNN, FOX, MSNBC and LYNX. I snatched the remote from his hand, aimed, and turned off the TV.

‘I’m sorry, darling, but I just can’t deal with it. Blah, blah, blah, twenty-four seven. You’d think that absolutely nothing else was going on in the world except for this Metro disaster. They’re running the same footage, over and over again.’

I covered my eyes with my hand, but the images still burned on the inside of my eyelids. The twisted wreckage. The walking wounded. The orange, basket-like stretchers. The yellow body bags.

Indeed, the crash and its aftermath had pushed everything else out of the headlines. So what if fall elections were nearly upon us and the Republicans were likely to take over the House? Who cared if wildfires were burning out of control in the Rockies? A damaged oil rig was still spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico, an intern at Lynx News had gone missing, and widespread flooding continued in Pakistan. Reporting on these events had been relegated to the inside pages of the Post and the Times , or reduced to television crawls, while full-blown coverage of the Metro crash went on and on and on.

One by one, the names of the victims were being released. So far, in addition to the train driver, whose name had been announced almost immediately, the victims had been identified as a sixty-three-year-old rabbi from Alexandria on his way to spend a week with his grandchildren in Lanham, a German couple in their early seventies who were vacationing in the United States for the first time, an elementary school teacher, thirty-two, on her way home after work to Cheverly, a forty-year-old unemployed computer programmer heading to CSC for a job interview, and Tashawn Jackson, sixteen.

When pictures of the victims were published in the Post , I remembered the German couple. They’d been sitting at the front of the car, gray heads together, consulting a Metro map, but I didn’t recall seeing any of the others. Except for Tashawn, the boy who died because he’d been too busy listening to his Nano to give up his seat to me.

Tashawn Jackson, the boy who unknowingly saved my life.

Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while using this medication .

Great. It was either the pain or the pills. Not a choice I was prepared to make.

Caution: May cause drowsiness. Alcohol may intensify this effect .

I carefully considered this warning while standing in front of the medicine cabinet several hours before my usual bedtime. Then I popped a pain pill and headed down to the kitchen to fetch a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the Box-o-Wine we kept on tap in the fridge. The pain was getting easier to deal with, but the nightmares were another story. Over the past two days, even my doctor-prescribed naps had been interrupted by dreams, grotesque variations of the crash that jolted me awake, heart pounding. I chased the pill with half a glass of wine topped off with crushed ice and club soda, then padded back up to bed. For the time being, at least, drowsiness definitely needed to be intensified.

The next morning, I lay awake in bed trying to figure out what day it was – Friday – while communing with a pair of cardinals peeping sweet nothings to one another from the tree outside my open window. The telephone rang, interrupting my reverie. I waited for Paul to pick up, but when he hadn’t by the third ring, I figured he’d already left for work, so I fumbled for the telephone myself.

‘Hannah, it’s Connie. I’ve been wanting to call, but Paul said you needed to rest. How are you doing?’

Connie is Paul’s sister. She lives on the Ives family farm down in Chesapeake County, thirty miles or so south of Annapolis.

‘Battered and bruised,’ I told her. ‘Creeping around like an old lady, but at least I’m creeping. Others weren’t so lucky.’

‘Paul filled us in. It must have been horrible.’

‘Horrible doesn’t begin to describe it, Connie. It’ll be a long time before I get back on the Metro.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Ah, ha! I was hoping you’d say that.’ I explained about the mix-up with the Garfinkel’s bag and asked Connie if she’d be willing to drive me back to the hospital. ‘Paul’s got classes and faculty meetings all day, so I’m on my own. I’m not supposed to drive. Hard to do, even if I wanted to, with this pesky cast on my arm.’

‘No problem,’ Connie said. ‘After lunch, OK?’

‘Super.’

The heatwave had broken at last, ushering in a glorious fall. Connie picked me up in her lime-green Volkswagen bug with the top down.

‘There is nothing that can’t be cured by taking a ride in a convertible,’ I told my sister-in-law as I eased into the passenger seat and tried to strap myself in. The effort brought tears to my eyes.

Connie drew the seatbelt across my lap and snapped it into place. ‘Happy to contribute to the cure.’ She had a scarf tied around her auburn curls and a white swathe of sunscreen across her nose. A lemon-yellow chrysanthemum bobbed cheerfully in the bud vase attached to the VW’s dashboard.

‘How’s Dennis?’ I asked as she waited to make the left turn from Prince George Street on to College Avenue. Dennis was my brother-in-law, a Chesapeake County police lieutenant.

‘He’s got a murder on his hands, I’m afraid. A student at the community college. I wish they’d keep the murders over in P.G. County where they belong.’ She clapped a hand over her mouth, blinked innocently. ‘Oh, my, did I say that?’

‘You did. Bad girl. I should report you to Dennis for insubordination.’

By the time we took the exit out of Annapolis on to Route 50 west, I had told Connie as much as I knew about Skip and explained what I wanted to do.

‘So, let me get this straight. You need to find this man and return his property.’

‘Right.’

‘And the only thing you know about him is that his name is Skip, last name maybe Chaloux.’

‘Uh huh. And that he’s new to the area, because he hadn’t a clue about our weather. And his phone is with Verizon.’

Connie groaned. ‘Well, that’s really going to help us, isn’t it?’ She eased the VW out into the fast lane and passed a school bus as if it were standing still. ‘What’s Skip short for, then?’

‘Skipper?’ I suggested.

Connie grinned. ‘Skipper is Barbie’s little sister, Hannah.’

‘Or a castaway on Gilligan’s Island ,’ I added helpfully.

‘I know a Steve who’s called Skip,’ Connie continued, slipping into the HOV2 lane and pushing the little Bug up to seventy. ‘And isn’t that guy Skip, who fixes your car, really named Wilfred?’

‘Nobody’s named Wilfred.’ I laughed. As Connie sped on, I stared at the cars we passed, silently counting the number of people driving while talking on their cell phones, making the most of the risky practice before Maryland’s ban went into effect in a few weeks’ time.

‘Could he be a third?’ Connie said brightly.

‘A third of what?’ I asked.

‘A third. Like Alfred P. Newman the Third, named after his grandfather Alfred P. Newman the First. In other words, the name skips a generation.’

‘In that case,’ I said sweetly, ‘he’d be a second.’

Connie stuck out her tongue. ‘Picky, picky.’

‘Whether he’s a second, third or even a fourth isn’t going to help us much if we don’t know whether the namesake grandfather was a Charles or a George or, God help him, a Wilfred, is it?’

When we got to the hospital, Connie dropped me off at the main entrance under the portico while she sped off to park. To my left, a row of ambulances stood backed into emergency-room bays, their crews waiting for their ill or injured passengers to be admitted before driving the vehicles back to the firehouses where they normally lived. I stared at the ambulances for a moment, wondering if any of them had delivered me there.