Robert Masello - The Medusa Amulet

Little cyclones of snow were whipping across the highway, and the wind was battering at the windows. Automated signs warned of delays up ahead and a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. A Hummer, its warning lights flashing, had slid right into a traffic divider.

“Get off at Dempster,” David said. “It’ll be faster.”

Zach did as he was told, and David steered him toward several shortcuts to get to the hospital complex more directly. But every time Zach tried to engage him in conversation, David shut him down. He didn’t want him talking, he wanted him driving.

At the hospital complex on Central Street, David quickly scanned the various driveway signs and arrows for the one leading to the Hospice Care Unit. It turned out to be a separate one-story building, with a broad, covered driveway in front.

“Good luck, man,” Zach said, as David charged out of the limo, his backpack hanging from one hand, and into the revolving door; it was one of those doors that turned at its own speed, but David was shoving at the bar, anyway.

A nurse behind the counter looked up as he arrived, panting, and said, “Whoa there, partner. Slow down. This is a hospital zone.”

David dropped the backpack, and said, “Sarah Franco.”

The nurse looked uncertain.

“Sorry. I mean Sarah Henderson.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice now taking on a more solicitous tone. “She’s down the hall, in Room 3. And you are?”

“Her brother,” David said, already moving on.

“Hold on,” the nurse said, as one hand reached for the phone. “I have to notify her caregiver. She might be sleeping.”

What difference did that make? He was here to wake her up.

Outside her door, he saw Gary, in a flannel shirt and jeans, pacing the hall.

“Thank God,” Gary said. “I had my phone on vibrate, and just picked up your message.”

“How is she?” David said.

“One of the nurses is in with her now.” He looked at David with enormous relief, tempered with a bit of reproach. “She’s been waiting for you. I told you she would.”

“I was counting on it,” he said, even as he swiftly circumvented Gary-who looked startled-and headed straight into Room 3.

“David, you might want to wait a minute!”

But that was the last thing he wanted to do.

The nurse, an African-American man with gray hair and a gentle face, was just adjusting an IV line. He turned and said, “You must be her brother. She’s been waiting for you. I’m Walter.”

But David’s eyes were fixed on Sarah, or what was left of her. In the time he’d been gone, she had changed from a woman hanging on to life, however weakly, to a woman already in the embrace of death. Her hands on the blanket were mottled and blue, her cracked lips were slick with Vaseline, and her face was a hollow mask. Even on seeing him, she showed none of the joy he had expected; her expression, instead, was querulous and uncertain. He wasn’t even sure she recognized him.

“We just upped her Halperidol,” Walter said, sotto voce. “In a few minutes, she may be more lucid.”

David had thought he’d been prepared for anything… but now he knew that he hadn’t.

“Can we be alone?”

“Sure,” the nurse said. “I’m here if you need me.”

David dragged a chair to the bedside and took her hand in his. The skin was cold and the fingers felt like twigs.

“Sarah, it’s David. I’m here.”

But she didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy and staring off into space, her bare skull covered by a paisley silk scarf.

He waited, wondering what to do next.

“Remember that day at the skating rink?” he finally said. “When you told me you’d give anything, anything at all, for the chance to see Emme grow up?”

A humidifier hummed quietly in the corner.

“I’m going to give you that chance.”

Whether he was imagining it or not, her fingers seemed to stir in his grasp.

But how, he wondered, was he going to get this done?

The wind howled at the window, and it was then that he noticed the birch trees outside, in the little garden, and the frozen pond… glimmering dully in the moonlight.

He jumped from his chair. A wheelchair was folded up in the corner of the room, and he quickly opened it. He had to move fast, because he knew that if Gary or the nurse came in, they would surely intervene. He pushed the chair to the side of the bed, and tucking the blanket all around her, he lifted Sarah into it. She weighed so little, it was like lifting a bundle of rags.

Glancing out her bedroom door, he was glad to see that Gary and Walter had moved down the hall, toward the reception desk and its big silver coffee urn. In one swift motion, he steered the chair out her door and then out of sight down the hall. Now he just had to find his way into that garden.

In his haste, the first door he tried turned out to be a utility closet, the second one a dispensary. But the third, with a metal crossbar across it, looked more promising, and turning the chair so that he could press on the bar with his own back, he felt a rush of cold air. While he was dragging the wheels over the bump of the threshold, a corner of the blanket got caught in the closing door, threatening for a second to pull Sarah out of the chair altogether. David had to stop, bend down, and wrench it free.

When he looked up at her face, he thought he saw a glimmer of recognition.

“David? Are you… really here?” she said, her voice murky and slow.

“Sure looks that way,” he said, tucking the blanket back around her.

“Where are we?”

“We’re getting some fresh air,” he said, his breath clouding, as he pushed the chair out into the garden.

“Cold,” she said. “It’s cold.”

“I know that,” he said, his fingers scrabbling under his shirt to retrieve the Medusa. A gust of wind plucked the scarf off her head and blew it onto the frozen pond. “I just need you to do something for me,” he said, as he lifted the amulet over his own head, and brushed aside the black silk backing that concealed the mirror.

“Are we in the backyard?” she asked. “I bet Emme’s waiting for you upstairs-you should go and surprise her.”

“I will,” he promised, “I will.” He put the Medusa into her palm and helped her to raise her hand. “But right now I want you to look at yourself in this mirror.”

She seemed confused, and irritated. “No, I don’t do that anymore. I don’t look at myself in mirrors anymore.”

“You have to, just this once.” He glanced over his shoulder, past the roof of the hospice, to gauge where the moon was in the sky. A dark cloud was just drifting past it.

He angled the mirror to be sure to catch the emerging rays.

“The mirror,” he repeated. “Look in the mirror.”

Frowning, she did what he asked. “I can’t see a thing,” she said.

“You will in a minute,” he said, humoring her, as he bent low to see if the mirror was being held in the right spot. Its convex surface gleamed, like a shiny dark scarab, in the moonlight. He could see his sister’s reflection, hovering in the glass as if it were staring out rather than in, and he braced her hand so that the pose would be held. The waters of eternity, captured behind the glass, were receiving their blessing from the radiant moon.

But how long did it take?

He was startled by a thumping sound-a palm flatly smacking against a window-and he glanced back into Sarah’s lighted bedroom where he could see Gary, his shocked face pressed close to the glass, banging again and again.

“Keep looking,” David urged his sister, “just keep looking.” Any moment, he expected Walter to come barreling outside to rescue her.

But the hand holding the mirror suddenly dropped into Sarah’s lap and her head snapped back against the wheelchair, as if she’d suffered a seizure.