Greg Iles: Sleep No More

Evie really gets around, Lily had said. Maybe a blown kiss was part of Eve Sumner’s come-on. Maybe a dozen guys in town had gotten the same smile, the same blown kiss. Waters suddenly felt sheepish, even stupid. That something so casual had sent him out to the cemetery in search of ghosts from his past…maybe the pressure of the EPA investigation was getting to him.

Yet he was not a man prone to misunderstandings. He trusted his eyes and his instincts. As he reflected on Eve’s actions, a long mournful note echoed across the cemetery. He ignored it, but the sound came again, as though a bugler were warming up for “Taps” at day’s end. All at once the sky went dark, and Waters realized the bugle call was a car horn. The woman at the gate was emptying the graveyard.

He got to his feet and wiped the seat of his pants, in his mind already walking back toward Jewish Hill. But he wasn’t walking. He could not leave Mallory’s grave without…doing something. With a hollow feeling in his chest, he turned toward the black stone.

“I’ve never come here before,” he said, his voice awkward in the silent dark. “And you know I don’t believe you can hear me. But…it shouldn’t have ended like this for you.” He raised a hand as if it could somehow help communicate the ineffable sorrow welling within him, but nothing could, and he let it fall. “You deserved better than this. That’s all. You deserved better.”

He felt he should continue, but his voice had failed him, so he turned away from the stone and marched up through the oaks toward Jewish Hill and his Land Cruiser, the horn blowing from the cemetery gate like a clarion call back to the present.

Waters stopped at his office to pick up his maps and briefcase on his way home from the cemetery, and he said nothing to Lily about his side trip when he arrived. He sat at the kitchen table with Annelise, studying the maps that he hoped described the underlying structure around the well he would log tonight. While he rechecked every step of his geology, Annelise did second-grade math problems across the table. Now and then she would laugh at his “serious face,” and he would laugh with her. The two shared an original turn of mind, and also a conspiratorial sense of humor that sometimes excluded Lily. Waters wondered if these similarities were attributable to genetics or socialization. Lily had been trained as an accountant, and her math skills were formidable, but Annelise’s mind seemed to run along its own quirky track, as her father’s did, and Lily herself often pointed this out.

While Waters and Annelise worked, Lily sat in the alcove where she paid the household bills, typing a letter to the Department of the Interior, yet another skirmish in her campaign to add Linton Hill to the National Register. Waters admired her tenacity, but he didn’t much care whether they got a brass plaque to mount beside the front door or not. He’d bought Linton Hill because he liked it, not as a badge of the quasi-feudal status that much of the moneyed class in Natchez seemed to cherish.

At 8:30 they went upstairs to put Annelise to bed. Waters walked back down first, but he waited for Lily at the foot of the steps, as was his custom. He had no illusions about what would happen next. She gave him a stiff hug-without eye contact-then headed back to the alcove to finish her letter.

He stood alone in the foyer as he had countless nights before, wondering what to do next. Most nights he would go out to the old slave quarters that was his home office and work at his computer, pressing down the frustration that had been building in him for more years than he wanted to think about. Frustration had been a profitable motivator for him. Using it, he had in his spare time developed geological mapping software that earned him seventy thousand dollars a year in royalties. This brought him a sense of accomplishment, but it did nothing to resolve his basic problem.

Tonight he did not feel like writing computer code. Nor did he want to telephone any investors, as he had promised his partner he would do. Seeing Eve Sumner that afternoon had deeply aroused him, even if he’d been mistaken about what she said. The energy humming in him now was almost impossible to contain, and he wanted to release it with his wife. Not the best motivation for marital sex, perhaps, but it was reality. Yet he knew there would be no release tonight. Not in any satisfactory way. There hadn’t been for the past four years. And suddenly-without emotional fanfare of any kind-Waters knew that he could no longer endure that situation. The wall of forbearance he had so painstakingly constructed was finally giving way.

He left the foyer and walked through the back door to the patio, but he did not go to the slave quarters. He stood in the cool of the night, looking at the old cistern pump and reflecting how he and Lily had come to this impasse. Looking back, the sequence of events seemed to have the weight of inevitability. Annelise had been born in 1995, after a normal pregnancy and delivery. The next year, they tried again, and Lily immediately got pregnant. Then, in her fourth month, she miscarried. It happened at a party, and the night at the hospital was a long and difficult one. The fetus had been male, and this hit Lily hard, as she’d been set on naming the child after her father, who was gravely ill at the time. Three months after the miscarriage, her father died. Depression set in with a melancholy vengeance, and Lily went on Zoloft. They continued to have occasional sex, but the passion had gone out of her. Waters told himself this was a side effect of the drug, and Lily’s doctor agreed. After two difficult years, she announced she was ready to try again. She got off the drug, began to exercise and eat well, and they started making love every night. Three weeks later, she was pregnant.

All seemed fine until a lab test revealed that Lily’s blood had developed antibodies to the fetus’s blood. Lily was Rh-negative, the baby Rh-positive, and because of the severity of their incompatibility, Lily’s blood would soon begin destroying the baby’s blood at a dangerously rapid rate. Carrying Annelise had sensitized Lily to Rh-positive blood, but it was in subsequent pregnancies that the disease blossomed to its destructive potential, growing worse each time. An injection of a drug called RhoGAM was supposed to prevent Rh disease in later pregnancies, but for some unknown reason, it had not.

Waters and Lily began commuting a hundred miles to University Hospital in Jackson to treat mother and fetus, with an exhausting round of amniocentesis and finally an intrauterine transfusion to get fresh blood into the struggling baby. This miraculous procedure worked, but it bought them only weeks. More transfusions would be required, possibly as many as five if the baby was to survive to term. The next time Lily climbed onto the table for an ultrasound exam, the doctor looked at the computer screen, listened to the baby’s heartbeat, then put down the ultrasound wand and met Waters’s eyes with somber significance. Waters’s heart stuttered in his chest.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked. “What’s the matter?”

The doctor took her upper arm and squeezed, then spoke in the most compassionate voice John Waters had ever heard from the mouth of a man. “Lily, you’re going to lose the baby.”

She went rigid on the examination table. The doctor looked stricken. He knew how much emotion she had invested in that child. Another pregnancy was medically out of the question.

“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “How do you know?” Then her face drained of color. “You mean…he’s dead now? Now? ”

The doctor looked at Waters as though for help, but Waters had no idea what emergency procedures might exist. He did know they were in one of those situations for which physicians are not adequately trained in medical school.