Eddie left the photo counter and headed for aisle lA. But as soon as he rounded the corner he froze.
Clara was at the Cover Girl shelf. For a moment she appeared to be bleeding from the mouth. But as his eyes adjusted, Eddie realized that Clara had smeared her face with lipstick. She was also making awful moaning sounds, and scattered on the floor were shiny tubes and packages of bright-handled scissors—on special this week for $3.39. One big pink one sticking out of a hip pocket, the other, bulging with lipsticks.
“Clara, wha-what the heck you doing? Don’t do that!”
But Clara was lost in smearing herself and groaning, her eyes rolling like she couldn’t get them to focus anywhere.
At the far end of the aisle Eddie spotted a young mother and her two young kids.
“Stop that, Clara!” Eddie shouted, thinking he’d have to page for the aides, get Allison or one of the older sales assistants to deal with her because this was out of hand, and he didn’t want to touch the woman. She was having some kind of loony fit.
Suddenly Clara noticed Eddie. Her eyes saucered and Eddie felt something jagged shoot out from them.
“Donny Doh, tsee-tsee go.”
“What’s that?”
“Donny Doh, tsee-tsee go,” she cawed again and again and again until she was screaming and her huge red face was contorted, and her bright raw mouth kept spitting at him:
The mother at the top of the aisle grabbed her kids and scurried off the other way.
Hearing all the commotion, Audrey, one of the older customer assistants, came hustling down the aisle. “Oh, my god.”
Clara paid no attention to Audrey coming up from behind. Her face was a huge red melon, and her eyes bulged so much Eddie was half certain they’d pop out of her skull. She looked positively possessed. “Clara, stop it!”
But Clara did not stop and began to rub herself, smearing lipstick on her dress and filling the aisle with those awful groans.
“Call 911,” Eddie barked to Audry.
Eddie reached his hand toward Clara in a desperate attempt to calm her down when he heard more shouting behind him—customers, other workers, maybe the nurse and aides, he thought.
As Eddie turned to check, he saw out of the corner of his eye a flash of pink as Clara lunged at him still screaming that refrain—that hideous screechy baby-talk phrase that he would take to his grave as she buried the pointy blade of the scissors in his neck.
There was yelling and commotion, but for a long gurgling moment Eddie tried to process that he had been spiked in the throat with a $3.39 pair of scissors with pink handles by a seventy-something-year-old Alzheimer’s patient with her face smeared with Cover Girl Rose Blush and screaming nonsense syllables at him.
Eddie slipped to his knees while faces swirled in his vision and shouting clogged his head. He pressed his hand to his neck and felt the scissors and sticky warm blood seeping through his fingers—and the last he remembered was being lowered to the floor and the overhead panels of cool fluorescent lights dimming into a soft furry blur as his life pulsed out of his jugular vein.
“Donny Doh, tsee-tsee go.”
4
JACK SLEPT THROUGH THE NEXT TWO nights and days without change.
Beth did not leave the Cape Cod Medical Center until they told her he had been stabilized and that he was ready to be moved to the intensive care unit of Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Because she could not ride in the helicopter, Beth drove, stopping at home in Carleton to change and to update Vince Hammond. Once again he offered to accompany her, but she declined. Jack would not want anyone to see him in such a hideous state.
While they prepped Jack, Beth waited in the lobby of the ICU. Forty hours had passed since that awful call; yet she was still in a state of disbelief. Aimlessly she thumbed through the magazines and newspapers. The headlines of the
“He’s still asleep but stable.” The nurse led Beth to a room down the hall. Jack was suspended in a contraption that looked like a medieval torture device in chrome, his body sandwiched between two platforms that were attached to a large circular frame resembling a giant hamster wheel. One of the two nurses hit a button and the structure—what the nurse later called a Circo-electric bed—rotated Jack a few degrees so he was faceup.
“It’s so we can dress him front and back without moving him.”
Although Beth had last seen him only eighteen hours ago, his appearance this morning was nonetheless shocking—still bloated, lashed with fat red and purple welts, and basted all over his torso and limbs with a thick white ointment. His eyes were still taped and he was hooked up to half a dozen electronic monitors, drip bags, catheters, IVs, and an ICP plug taped to his skull. He was still on a ventilator, which snapped and hissed in persistent rhythm as his chest rose and fell, as if he were playing some strange wind instrument. But in a reverse illusion it appeared as if the machine were playing him—filling the bag of Jack as if he were some kind of inflatable Michelin Man.
“Most of his vital signs are stable,” the nurse said. “His heart is strong. His liver and kidneys are functioning well. We’ve given him medication to keep his blood pressure at an appropriate level.”
A woman in white entered the room and introduced herself as Dr. Vivian Heller, a neurologist. She was tall and lean with thick red hair pulled back and large dark eyes. “Mrs. Koryan, I’m very sorry about your husband’s condition, but we are monitoring him and thus far he’s fairly stable. The Woods Hole people have identified the jellyfish as a creature native to the Caribbean, and they’re on line with specialists in Jamaica. The tox screening is still ongoing, but they haven’t yet fully identified the agents, although they’re reporting unusual peaks on gas chromatography, and the lab is trying to isolate the chemical structure.”
Beth looked at her helplessly. “I don’t know what you’re telling me.”
“Just that there’s an odd neurotropic signature we’ve not seen before. But it’s conceivable that it will be out of his system by the time it’s identified. In the meantime, we’re monitoring his vital organs and assessing any damage.”
“Will he be … Does that mean there’s damage?” She could barely word her questions.
“He was without oxygen for some time, we think, but there’s no way to tell if there are any effects. There was initial cerebral bleeding, but that’s stopped, and the ICP is down to normal.”
All the technical jargon was fuzzing Beth’s mind. She looked down at Jack. “Why doesn’t he wake up?”
