Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Keep moving. Caffeine and go .

Anna grabs a Diet Coke from the kitchen fridge, grabs her backpack from the hall, and plunges out the front door into the black-and-blue pre-dawn. The dark outside is moving, alive, trees bending sinuously in the dry wind, which is always strongest just before sunrise.

She runs, and makes it to the corner just in time to catch her bus.

Inside, she rides in rumbling darkness, alone with the bus driver and two Latina housekeepers, over potholed streets, under the towering silhouettes of palms and old-growth trees, through sleeping San Gorgonio.

San G. is a base town, or was until the base was shut down in the closures of the nineties, plunging the city into economic depression. The war in Iraq did not revive the base. The dying town sprawls in a semi-desert ringed by mountains, pocketed in a valley which traps heat and smog for the entirety of the summer, only somewhat relieved in fall by the winds Anna once read described as “those hot, dry Santa Anas that come through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” And bring asthma and arson and devastating wildfires, Anna knows all that.

Santa Anas make people crazy.

But …

But. The winds also signal change and excitement, and sometimes even magic…

Like that fall in first grade when she’d brought an umbrella to school even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and walking home from school she opened the umbrella and the wind picked her up and she could fly, actually fly off the ground like Mary Poppins, flying.

And for one day, she was magical—

The memory gives way to another and she sits up on the cracked vinyl bus seat with a gasp.

Tyler.

I dreamed about Tyler Marsh last night.

Definitely. Definitely something about Tyler .

She focuses, concentrating with all her mind, but the dream is elusive, just out of reach. Still, the feeling is so intimate it makes her stomach flutter and her cheeks warm.

I knew him. He knew me. There was something between us …

But the dream hadn’t been good. That much she does remember.

Not good at all .

Her chest tightens with anticipation and unease as the bus shudders to a stop in front of the high school.

Dead of winter, and snow falls like stars from a black dome of sky. All sound is swallowed by the swirling white chaos.

No human life out there on this night. The city of Boston sleeps in the storm….

But underneath the ice beats a great heart that is never still.

Beneath the falling snow, a vast complex sprawls like a frozen spider buried in the white drifts—-the architectural wonder of Briarwood Medical Center: six state-of-the-art hospitals symbiotically entwined. Labyrinthine underground tunnels and high glass bridges above the snow-swept streets mate the white marble, Doric buildings of the old Massachusetts Bay Medical College, the dark brick buttresses of Mercy, the sleek curves of Briarwood Children’s Medical. Torturously twisting corridors wind through Gothic arches and classic Colonials and angular modern structures, creating a bewildering, futuristic maze.

Inside, the hospital has a peculiar vacuum quality of silence. In the fluorescent halls, medical personnel walk in measured paces; dazed, dreamy patients in robes drift past the open doors of darkened rooms. Snow flies outside the windows, beating soundlessly against the glass.

Deep within the labyrinth, a man moves in the endless halls: tall and dark, a graceful shadow against the white of the walls.

He is at home here, his movements fluid and unhurried, his angular face thoughtful and intent.

The corridors twist and turn, drawing the man deeper into the hospital, past vast wards with the injured and terminally ill moored in their beds. There is a throbbing pulse around the man, the heartbeat of the hospital: life-support machines augmenting labored breathing, soft moans of pain, quiet sobbing… and a whispering, barely audible at first, but increasing…

The man cocks his head slightly, listening.

The sound builds around him, the prayers of relatives keeping vigil. Pleas in all languages… overlapping… rising and falling in waves… through anger, through tears:

Please, God… please help her.… Don’t let him die… Dear Lord… Signora, aiutami… Hear me, Jesus ….

The dark man closes his eyes, listening to the music of the voices. Then his face sharpens, eyes opening and focusing to pinpoints, at the sound of one fierce, stark vow:

I’ll do anything .

Deep in the heart of Briarwood Children’s Hospital—or perhaps it was Carver Women’s, the boundaries between the separate hospitals having so merged by now it was at times impossible to tell the difference—stretched a long corridor rarely traveled in the winter months.

A glass wall ran along one whole side of the corridor, looking out on the hospital garden, in mid-February now an Arctic wasteland, the shapes of statues and trees frozen and drifted in snow. On the other side of the hall, arched wooden doors led to the hospital chapel. The doors were not immediately apparent or even easy to access, but not a few people found themselves there almost by magic, in the course of desperate midnight wanderings through the hospital maze.

Inside, the chapel was small and dim, with four rows of wooden pews and a low platform serving as a dais, and cold, as if the oppressive overheating of the hospital had not been able to penetrate here. In a center pew, Will Sullivan sat alone in the enveloping silence. Handsome in the most well-bred of ways, a classic, uniquely American combination of movie-star elegance and frontier ruggedness, he currently looked ten years older than his forty-two years. His six-foot-plus frame seemed as stooped as an old man’s, his gray-blue eyes sunken, his face haggard with worry.

Will clasped his too-dry hands as if in prayer and tried to sit up straight, but it was a great effort; he felt scraped raw, nearly dead with exhaustion. In fact, for days, or weeks, or even months, he had not been entirely sure if he was awake or asleep.

Behind the podium at the front of the chapel, a tall stained glass window portrayed a slightly cubistic Christ as the Shepherd, watching over lambs. Against another wall, a wooden wheel depicting symbols from the world religions was mounted above a bookshelf lined with religious texts in various languages. Votive candles in red glass flickered on a side altar.

Will gazed up through bleary eyes at the patterned glass before him. Black words were scattered almost randomly in the panels like code, and for a moment Will lost himself, puzzling over the sentence.

THE LORD

IS THE STRENGTH OF

MY LIFE A VERY

PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE

OF WHOM SHALL I

BE AFRAID?

Will stared harder, caught by the final phrase, the last words set apart from the others, black and grim.

BE AFRAID

He shivered in the unheated chapel.

A shadow moved to the side of him. Will twisted in his seat, startled.

A round-cheeked, salt-and-pepper-haired chaplain stood in a side doorway, looking at Will inquiringly.

“May I help you?”

Will briefly took in the chaplain’s ruddy, eager face, the wrinkled suit, the too-tight collar around the clergyman’s substantial neck. Without thinking, Will shook his head. “No. Thank you.”

The chaplain hesitated, but when Will turned back to face the dais, the clergyman disappeared back through the side door.