Frank De Felitta: For Love of Audrey Rose

Suddenly his eyes darted around the room. He stared at the nurse.

“Where’s Ivy?” Bill whispered.

The nurse hesitated. “There’s been an autopsy.”

Bill’s face slowly transformed into a dolorous mask, the kind that is sold hanging on sticks for Chinese New Year, a human face distended into curved lines of grief.

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said quietly.

Bill tried to move his limbs but all that happened was that his chest rose and his back arched away from the bed. The nurse mopped his forehead with a soft cloth.

Bill stared into the soft brown eyes. He had the wild, distraught face of a madman.

“I didn’t mean to,” he hissed. “The test was supposed to — to— Oh, God—” Bill fell back and began to weep.

The nurse discreetly pressed a small plastic button by the bed. After several minutes, a physician walked into the room. His eyes were red and he needed a shave. He had a barrel chest and short, beefy arms with white hair and a thick gold wrist watch.

The physician put a comforting hand on the nurse’s shoulder. She made room for him, and he sat down next to Bill.

“Listen to me, Mr. Templeton. Your wife waited here almost seven hours before we insisted that she get some rest. She was in a state of near-collapse.”

Bill’s mumbling ceased. Then his eyes narrowed. He faced the wall as though angry or afraid of the physician.

“Where’s Hoover?” Bill asked.

“Who?”

“Hoover, God damn it!”

The physician leaned forward and gently eased Bill back to face him.

“It was all my fault. My fault— !”

There was an awkward silence. Both the physician and the nurse felt a tremendous need to find something to say, not to let the accusatory silence mount up over the patient like an imprisoning wall. Bill’s eyes darted from one to the other guiltily. But neither could think of anything, though their minds raced, and suddenly the music became audible from the corridors, a ballad about love burning in one’s heart.

“Shut that damn thing off,” growled the physician.

The nurse left.

“Look, Mr. Templeton,” the physician said, licking his lips, “the court — er, ordered the test, legally. There is a mechanism of law that works through the judge and jury and the court officers. The hospital only acted as a tool of that legal apparatus.”

Bill realized the doctor was trying to exonerate the hospital.

“It was my idea,” he moaned. “I fed it to Velie. I helped him come up with it. Oh, my God…”

The nurse came back. Now the silence was complete. She had closed the doors and the air was still, smelling faintly of clean linens and antiseptic.

“I don’t like the way he’s responding,” she whispered.

“Some clown gave him fifteen cc’s. His system’s all junked up.”

“Is there somebody he could talk to?”

“Just the psychologist. Lipscomb. I sure wouldn’t bring him in here.”

Bill heard their words, discussing him as though he were not there. The words did not reach down into his brain. Nothing reached down. Several sheets of steel separated his brain from his body, or at least it felt that way. There were no connections anymore. The body parts had retreated as though to survive on their own as best they could. Brain in one place. Feelings in another. Eyesight registering. And grief. Grief and guilt, like a whole universe, radiated through him, flowed like electricity along every nerve fiber, obliterating each and every memory, each and every hope.

“I… meant…to save…to save…her….”

“You did everything you could, Mr. Templeton,” the physician said, squeezing Bill’s shoulder.

The physician conferred with the nurse, and then was gone. After a few minutes, the nurse left for other patients. Bill staggered to the closet, found his clothes, and dressed. Wobbly, he peered out into the corridor. When the desk nurse answered an emergency light, he walked, reeling, down the receding floor to the elevator, then heard steps, turned, and ran stumbling down the stairway.

Tears flowing from his eyes, he ran across the icy parking lot, clutching his thin coat around his chest. Overhead a dim break showed pale gray between the night clouds.

Suddenly he came upon the Darien Central Hotel. He recoiled. Had he escaped from the hospital to be with Janice? Or had he escaped to avoid seeing her later? Bill ducked into an alley. His shoes filled with icy slush, his socks were soaked, and he wandered among the garbage cans and parked buses of the Greyhound Bus depot.

Inside, people milled about the terminal, staring at him. Surely they knew that he had killed his own daughter. He was a figure of ridicule, pathetic and morbid, a creature of the hospital, morally deformed, who had concocted a wild scheme.

In the distance, the tall, dark silhouette of the hospital loomed. A few lurid yellow lights gleamed in long rows at the top floor. Bill wondered if that was where they stored the bodies.

His reflection in the dirty window looked abnormal. He looked like a murderer.

Behind his reflection, he saw a small, humpbacked clerk turn on a light. On the wall were arrival and departure schedules. Bill whirled around, saw two elderly women staring at him, and then he went quickly inside.

The two elderly women still looked at him through the window. They were certainly discussing him.

“May I help you?” said the clerk.

Startled, Bill turned. The clerk was a round-faced woman, her eyes squinty, with freckles over a tiny nose.

“You want to buy a ticket?”

“Yes — a ticket.”

“Where to?”

“What’s the next bus?”

“Southbound,” the clerk said. “Interstate to Baltimore.”

“When?”

“Should leave in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Depending on the roads.”

“I’ll take it.”

“One way?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-five fifty, please.”

“Will you take a check?”

“Sorry. Not allowed to.”

“Credit card?”

“What kind?”

Bill showed her. The clerk frowned but retrieved a banged-up roller from under the shelf and filled out the credit card slips. Bill signed.

“No baggage?”

Bill shook his head. “I’ll wait outside by the buses.”

“It’s your frostbite.”

Outside, several giant buses stood in the blue shadows under a corrugated roof. Beyond the alleys and telephone poles, the west wing of the hospital rose high, cream colored, its windows reflecting the pale blankness of the snow.

Bill watched several cars pull up to the hospital parking lot by the wide revolving doors. A van without a rear window drove around to the back. A choking gasp coughed out of his lungs.

A bus driver looked up from a clipboard at Bill. “You okay, mister?”

“Which is the bus to Baltimore?”

“You’re leaning against it.”

“Mind if I get in?”

“No, go ahead. But we don’t leave till three.”

Bill stepped up into the cold bus, walked to the rear seat, and huddled for warmth. He saw the humpbacked clerk making conversation with the driver. Another light went on inside the station. Bill shivered and could not stop shivering. All he knew was that he had to get away from Darien.

At 2:59 the driver stepped in, turned on the engine, and then the passengers, dressed in heavy overcoats, got in. The baggage compartment slammed shut like a coffin lid and the bus drove away. Darien slid by on both sides, wet roads and dirty stores, cars smeared with heavy, muddy slush underneath, a general air of downtown poverty. The only modern edifice was the hospital.

Bill started to cry. When he stopped, they were rolling onto the broad Interstate, past flat white fields, in a thick, gentle snowstorm.