Loe raamatut: «Guilt By Silence»

2

As she passed through the front doors, Mariah noticed that she was holding her breath. Sooner or later, though, you have to breathe. She made it past the receptionist and almost as far as the east-wing nursing station before drawing her first breath, hoping the delay would help—but it was futile, of course. Little sensors in her nose had been at work even as she nodded to the woman at the front desk, an early warning system for the incoming olfactory assault. And when she finally inhaled, her stomach plunged as always at the smell of medicine and antiseptic, starched linen and slowly dying flesh.

The young nurse at the station smiled brightly as she saw Mariah approach. “Hi, Mrs. Tardiff,” she said.

The nurses knew her well by now—knew she normally used Bolt, her own surname, not David’s, but she had told them she had no objection to being called Mrs. Tardiff, if they preferred. Most, especially the older nurses, seemed more comfortable with that, likely suspicious of her disregard for the proper order of things. David would have been more insistent than Mariah herself on her right to use her own name, but he was in no position to argue with anyone—on points of principle or anything else.

“He’s been looking forward to seeing you,” the nurse said. “The orderly rolled him into the hallway an hour ago.”

Mariah nodded and forced a smile. This nurse had a sweet disposition and meant no reproach, she knew, but she gave herself a mental lashing anyway. “Traffic,” she said. “It’s awful tonight.” The nurse smiled sympathetically.

Mariah turned the corner and headed down the hall. David’s was the last room on the right and she could see his wheelchair outside the door, past all the other lonely souls—ancients, most of them, waiting and watching with futile hope in their eyes each time a visitor entered the corridor. Mariah smiled at some of the old-timers as she walked by, pausing briefly to squeeze the hand of the old lady who always called her Thelma and asked about the boys.

“They’re fine, Mrs. Lake, just fine,” she answered, as she always did, now that she had given up trying to explain that she wasn’t Thelma—wondering, as she always did, who the real Thelma was and whether the boys were really fine

She turned once more toward David. She could see him clearly now, watching her every step—those deep brown eyes with irises so dark that the pupils were invisible. Large, innocent eyes that looked right into your soul. Who could resist them? Certainly she had never been able to.

She had met him in the mid-seventies, the year before the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited her. She was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, a political science major specializing in the Soviet-American arms race. When her liberal arts background left her bogged down in the complexities of nuclear weapons, her thesis adviser sent her to the head of the physics department. He, in turn, introduced her to David Tardiff, one of the department’s youngest and brightest doctoral candidates.

But if physics brought Mariah and David together in the first place, biology took over pretty quickly thereafter. Mariah was taken by surprise. Her mother’s life had been ruined by Mariah’s father, a poet and novelist still lionized in literary circles, long after his death. He was no hero to Mariah. How could he be, after abandoning his young child and pregnant wife to pursue his own self-absorbed whims?

Buffeted by a cascade of losses that began with her father’s betrayal, Mariah had grown up determined to chart an independent course for her life—one that certainly didn’t include falling under the sway of some boy wonder from New Hampshire. David Tardiff was on the short side, barely five-eight. Compared to the strapping, blond, too-cool-for-words beach boys she had grown up with in southern California, Mariah found him a bit on the homely side, his nose a little too large, his mop of black curls a little too unruly. And he was cocky, she told herself—funny and bright, but awfully sure of himself.

Still, as she had listened to him wax enthusiastic about physics and hockey—his other driving passion—her longstanding defenses against emotional involvement crumbled. Within three months, they were living together in a tiny Berkeley apartment, making plans for the future. But then things changed—that was the first time she lost David.

The University of California ran a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on behalf of the federal government, and Berkeley’s physics department supplied many of the lab’s research staff. It came as no real surprise, then, when six months after they moved in together, David was offered a job at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

Mariah followed him into the desert to work in earnest on her graduate thesis. But if New Mexico provided a good working environment for the thesis, it was no place to nurture their relationship. The split finally came the day Mariah watched a military truck towing a canvas-draped missile through the center of town. She confronted David late that night when he came in from the lab.

“David, this isn’t the place for us.”

He was nuzzling her neck and missed the point. “How about the dining-room table?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “Don’t you just love all this space? So many options!”

Mariah poked him in the ribs with her elbow, laughing in spite of herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about! ” Her smile faded. “I mean Los Alamos.”

He held her at arm’s length, his twinkling dark eyes betraying the clever comeback he was formulating—but her own expression must have squelched the urge. “What’s wrong with it? You’ve got teaching prospects here. And it’s a clean, safe place to make babies and raise a family,” he added, pulling her close again.

“Safe? It’s a nuclear bomb factory! Don’t you ever think about what it is you do over at that lab?”

“We do science—good science, with equipment that any university researcher would kill to get his hands on.”

“Yeah, well, kill is definitely the operative word here. You guys design nuclear weapons.”

“We unlock the secrets of the atom. Come on, Mariah, lighten up. The lab does nonmilitary work, too, you know that. And this work is exciting. The atom holds the key to unlimited energy—not to mention incredible biomedical and industrial advances. Weapons are the least interesting part of it.”

“That’s just a cop-out. If there’s one thing this lab stands for, it’s the creation of the bomb.”

“You can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn frown forming on his forehead. “We can’t be responsible for the ethics of the whole nation. The weapons work could be stopped, if people had the guts to say ‘no more.”’

“Oh, dammit, David,” Mariah said sadly. “I’m not stupid—or naïve. I know we won’t get rid of nuclear weapons tomorrow, now that the genie’s out of the bottle. But we design a new bomb, and then the Russians build one bigger than ours, and then we make ours even more deadly, and on and on and on. I just can’t watch you waste your talents by helping these guys develop the ultimate doomsday machine. Because that’s the real reason you’re all here, and you know it.”

They’d had the same argument a dozen times since David had accepted the Los Alamos job. The silence between them as they pulled away from each other that night had simply concluded the debate once and for all with a permanent agreement to disagree. In the end, she had left David and New Mexico and taken a job as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Virginia—telling herself that whatever she might do to help restrain the Soviet nuclear threat could also make the work of David and his Los Alamos colleagues superfluous.

For two years, their only contact was a diminishing trickle of letters and phone calls. Then one day, out of the blue, David had shown up on her doorstep, gaunt and distraught after an accident in the lab had claimed the life of one of his colleagues—a young technician who had died a gruesome, lingering death after accidental exposure to radioactive materials. David had become thoroughly disillusioned with weapons work and said he wanted only to build a career in teaching and to marry her.

They were never separated again. Lindsay was born nine months later and their lives had seemed charmed—until a careening truck in Vienna had brought it all crashing down.

As he watched her approach along the long hallway, David’s mouth lifted lopsidedly, the paralyzed left side drooping while the right struggled upward. Mariah smiled back at this man she had loved for so long—still loved, she reminded herself. Still loved but missed horribly even as she sat beside him during the few short hours she managed to snatch with him each week.

“Hi,” she said warmly, putting a hand around his neck and touching her forehead to his. She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to notice that faint aroma of decay that clung to his atrophied body, despite all the toiletries she brought in for him.

“How are you, lover?” She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, giving the curls an encouraging nudge toward the frothy chaos that had once been their preferred arrangement. “Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic.”

He blinked. She dropped in his lap the paper sack she had brought in from the car, then moved behind the chair. “Let’s go sit. I’m beat.” She wheeled him into his room, where she kicked off her shoes and shrugged out of her trench coat, tossing it on the bed and pushing up the sleeves of her suit jacket. Then she moved him over to the computer table in the corner.

“Headstick?” she asked. One brown eye closed, opened, then closed—the signal for no. He seemed alert and Mariah berated herself again for having made him wait.

She put aside the headband with the attached stick that he used to tap the keyboard when his faltering right hand became exhausted. The left hand was useless, drawn into itself and held tightly against his chest by the constricted arm, perpetually reverted to a fetal position except when he was deeply asleep and his muscles finally relaxed.

Mariah removed the paper bag from his lap and pulled a rolling table over his thin legs. She lifted his right hand, bringing it to rest on the computer keyboard. His bony index finger reached out shakily and landed on a key. Mariah looked at the screen and saw the letter L—Lindsay.

“She’s at the swimming pool,” she said. “I’m picking her up on the way home.” Mariah leaned back against the windowsill and smiled. “She’s doing great in the water. The coach says she may even make the team next year. She’s such a fighter, David.”

His eyes regarded her intently.

“And the doctor says it’s doing wonders for her leg,” she went on. “It’s definitely growing and he thinks there’s a chance it might eventually catch up to the other one.” Mariah reached into the paper bag she had brought. “Lindsay couldn’t come, but she did bake cookies for you—chocolate chip.”

Slow, lopsided grin.

“She does this to irritate me, you know, just because I’m allergic to chocolate. I hope it gives you both zits.”

David watched her pull out one of the cookies. She put it in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. The tendons on the back of his hand stretched taut like puppet strings as he lifted the cookie to his mouth with agonizing slowness. Mariah took some shirts out of the bag and walked over to the small wardrobe next to the bed. David’s eyes followed her every step as his jaw slowly worked on the cookie.

“I washed your flannel shirts for you. It’s getting frosty out there.” He didn’t go out much, of course, except when she and Lindsay took him for walks on the weekend or, once a month or so, home overnight. But it was a recognition that he was alive and the seasons were still turning.

Mariah came back and pulled up a chair next to him, wiping a line of chocolate drool that ran down from the corner of his mouth, then stroking his arm absently as she spoke to him. She talked about Lindsay and her new school, their evenings, office gossip, inconsequential stories of people, some of them old friends, some people he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, as long as she could make him feel that he was still part of their world.

As she rambled on, David’s eyes watched her and smiled. It was the only part of him that was recognizable anymore, Mariah thought. The orderlies always managed to do something peculiar with his curly black hair. Not their fault, really—they hadn’t spent years watching him step from the shower and give his head a distracted shake until each curl found its own equilibrium, had they? Now, the way they combed it, the curls were straightened and flattened, parted at the side, giving him a strangely organized air that he had never possessed when he was in charge of his own grooming. And he was getting grayer. In the ten months since the accident, he seemed to have aged a decade or more beyond his forty-one years. His frame, slight to begin with, had withered to a wispy frailty.

Only the eyes held the essence of the man David had once been. They were also the only part of him capable anymore of reflecting a familiar emotion. The emotions she saw there these days were fleeting and elemental—pleasure at her coming, sadness at her leaving, frustration during his rare attempts to communicate.

Once though, in Vienna, when he had fully emerged from the coma into which he had been plunged for several weeks after the accident, Mariah had seen in those eyes the terror of realization.

For several days previous, there had been times when he seemed to recognize her. In those moments of brief lucidity, he had struggled to reach out to her, but his body had become permanently contorted, twisted into an unnatural stiffness by the misfiring synapses in his brain. The effort exhausted him and he would lapse again into catatonia. One morning, however, Mariah had stepped off the hospital elevator to the sound of unearthly shrieks coming from the direction of his room. Heart pounding, she had raced down the corridor, the cries growing louder as she approached his door.

It was what she had most dreaded—the one thing she had prayed would never come. Multiple skull fractures from the accident had left irreversible brain damage. She had seen the X-rays and CAT scans herself, had had the damage explained in detail, and she knew that his life was over, even if his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath. The only thing the Viennese doctors hadn’t been able to tell Mariah with any degree of certainty was what portion of his cognitive abilities would be left when—and if—he ever regained consciousness. She had found herself, incredibly, beginning to pray that he would die rather than understand what he had become.

But when she stepped into the room that morning, she knew that her worst fear had come true. David was screaming in inarticulate anguish, having awakened to discover that his body had become a tomb—and that he was buried alive.

Mariah shuddered now at the memory of his cries, guttural and incoherent, and of the terror in his eyes as he searched hers for a sign of hope that this was only a passing nightmare. She had sat next to him for hours, rubbing his back and stroking his hair and holding his twisted body until his screams had subsided to choking sobs and then faded altogether.