Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala Page 4

  Look, I was young at the time, but I was a “city girl.” I’d been around. I knew the score. But—damn! My heart did skip a few beats. I wish I could stop resorting to these clichés, but—really—that’s how he made me feel. Look, I said I was young!

  At first Dr. Jacobs—Tom—and I would sit together now and then in the break room (the one with that cute little sign reading: “BEWARE OF STAFF INFECTIONS!”) and shoot the breeze. He told me right up front he was married, and I didn’t miss the gold band he wore. He told me how he hadn’t started med school until several years after college, with a stint as a medic during the Gulf War—the first one—in between, so he was quite a bit older, almost twelve years older than I was.

  Okay. I did the math. Twelve years, three months, and fifteen days.

  But like I said, I was a “city girl,” so I thought that more or less evened things up. What started out as just a doctor and a nurse co-workers—chatting over a cup of coffee now and then turned a bit more serious— after a while, a lot more serious. Long hours working double shifts—the usual pressures of the job, especially in those rare instances when “complications” do occur—all of that more or less brought us together. It happens. And after a while—hell, I won’t mince words here—Tom and I started sleeping together. Never at work, mind you ... although every now and then an empty bed in an unoccupied room got mighty tempting. Just a couple of times at my apartment on Montrose Ave after work ... and once out behind the hospital in the parking lot one hot summer night. Steve Blodgett, one of the janitors, came close to catching us that time. I teased Tom about that, telling him I was the “kid,” and he should have known better. And we laughed a lot … I remember that.

  Then ... well, of course, we heard about that baby in Oklahoma City like everyone else did.

  Just the idea of a baby with no fingerprints or footprints was pretty freaky, to say the least. But when we got more of the details, what was at first interesting or weird started to get downright creepy. Rumors travel fast in the medical field, and we started hearing things that didn’t get into the media right away, like about how the baby in Oklahoma City was ... different.

  I know this sounds like something out of a cheap paperback horror novel, but word got around that the baby boy supposedly “looked” … dead. His eyes, so the rumor mill informed us, looked like the eyes of a dead person. No life. Oh, he was alive, all right. Make no mistake. He ate and slept and filled his pants like any normal baby. But the way some folks described him, he looked like he had no soul ... like he was empty ... the husk of a human being, but not the contents.

  Then reports started coming in from all around the country. Soon, within a couple of weeks, the news reported nearly fifty cases of babies—both boys and girls—being born with no fingerprints … no footprints ... no souls!

  Six weeks after the first one was born in Oklahoma City, we had one right here in Portland. Believe me, all the grist from the rumor mill and the sensationalism in the media didn’t prepare me for that baby.

  It was...cold.

  Now, back-stepping a bit here, I don’t intend to analyze what brought Tom and me together. Chemistry? Pressure at work? Fate? Sure. And the problems he was having with Becky, his wife, certainly didn’t help. So it might have been all of these ... some of them ... or something else.

  Who cares?

  I do know what broke us up, though. It was when Tom found out that, after three years of trying, Becky was pregnant. Once that happened, he dropped me like a bad habit, let me tell you.

  It hurt.

  Oh, yeah.

  You might say I was crushed, but—hey! Be realistic, I kept telling myself. You don’t have an affair with a married man and honestly expect him to dump it all—lay his marriage, his life, and his career on the line for ... for what, truthfully, had been just a couple of nights of fun.

  There’s this thing I’ve noticed about life, you see. You have to pay for your fun.

  Always!

  Like I said earlier, parents-to-be have all sorts of worries. Most of them, I know from experience, are absolutely groundless. But with everything that had been happening lately, and news reports of more instances coming up daily ... well, Tom got pretty upset.

  No, that’s putting it mildly.

  He was in a state of near constant dread that his baby would be born with no fingerprints.

  The media didn’t help. It rarely does. They’d picked up the stories from around the world and were running them for all they were worth. Radio and TV talk shows, and newspapers at the grocery checkout counters were the worst. Aren’t they always? They started in with explanations ranging from terrorist plots (after nine-eleven, people could believe anything) to pre-invasion tactics of the interstellar aliens to astrology and reincarnation.

  It was the reincarnation angle that got to Tom, and after listening to him, I have to admit that it kind of got me worried, too. We had stopped having sex altogether by then, but we were still friends. Many a slow night in the staff room, we’d talk ... and talk ...

  Tom admitted that he was convinced the reincarnation angle was the right one. That’s what I meant as the start about the “scales tipping.” The basic idea is that, with all the improvements in medicine and with life expectancy being extended well into people’s eighties and nineties, the Universe was running out of souls to be born. Babies, so the theory went, were still being born within the normal course of biology, but there simply weren’t enough souls left over to fill all these new bodies.

  “NO BODY IN THE BODY,” as one banner headline put it.

  Fingerprints were like the souls’ identification card number, the cosmic bar code, if you will. There was no way to stop the babies from being born, so the cosmos or whatever just kept churning them out, but it had to leave out the spiritual contents.

  Does any of this make sense?

  Well, to me—as a nurse trained in the sciences—of course it didn’t. But if you read and believe those sleazy newspapers, it might make sense. No worse, anyway, than “Amazonian Frog Boys” or the B-52 that was supposedly found in a crater on the moon. What truly amazed me was that Tom, an educated medical man—a doctor, for Christ’s sake!—would embrace such a cockamamie idea.

  And I’ll be damned if, after spending several nights talking with him, he almost had me convinced, too. He certainly said enough to make me worry.

  Tom wrapped himself around the idea like Ahab embracing Moby Dick just before he goes under. He clung to that idea and took it so much to heart that … well, this is what finally happened.

  Tom got in touch with a supposed expert on this theory and, after much admittedly hazy philosophical discussion, became thoroughly convinced the “problem” began at birth, not at conception. Never mind that an embryo’s fingerprints are formed much earlier in fetal development. The “soul,” so Tom was told—and believed—didn’t actually enter the baby until the instant of birth. I know that idea doesn’t sit well with the Right-to-Lifers, but—hey, you believe what you want to believe. It’s a free country.

  Becky carried the baby well. Tom told me often enough that she was “textbook perfect.” That set a few pangs of jealousy tingling, I will admit.

  “Great! Good for her!” I’d say I don’t remember how many times, but beneath it all, I knew he was worried to his core that when Becky finally delivered, the baby—his baby—would have no fingerprints.

  No footprints.

  No soul.

  I had no idea what he was planning to do about it. If I had, I certainly would have tried to stop him. But he planned it with all the skill and finesse of a murderer, and that’s exactly what he was, except in his case, it was self-murder.

  Tom was in the ob. the night Becky went into labor and, textbook perfect or not, she—like any woman—went through some things that night that the childbirth lessons didn’t prepare her for. For more than twenty hours, the labor was intense and basically unproductive. It lasted all night, then into the next morning and on into the aft
ernoon.

  Tom—the “textbook perfect” husband and father-to-be—stayed by her side the entire time, doing whatever he could to make her labor easier. I admired him all the more but, truth to tell, I think he might have known a wee bit too much. Certainly, he was much too involved with the situation to be effective as a doctor. Sometime around six o’clock that next evening, he suggested giving Becky a little squirt of Petosin to see if they could make the labor more productive. By this time, Becky was an exhausted, sweating, shaking wreck. There’s nothing like childbirth to strip you to the core of your humanity.

  Tom gave his wife the shot of Petosin, and it seemed to help. Nobody—at least at the time—saw what he did with the empty hypo. He must have pocketed it then. Anyway, once the drug kicked in, and Becky’s labor was finally getting productive, once she entered transition, Tom backed away from the delivery bed. He asked the intern there to take over for him. He excused himself, saying he was absolutely exhausted.

  Finally, Becky was fully dilated, and the stand-in doctor told her she could start pushing. Infused with blood, her face turned a bright beet-purple. The only sounds in the delivery room were her heavy panting and the steady beep-beep-beep of the fetal monitor.

  As I remember it now, there suddenly were two new sounds—the sudden, mewling cry of a baby and the soft thump of a body hitting the floor.

  I had been in the delivery room for the entire labor and birth. I wanted to be there, too, and not just out of some vindictive desire to see the woman Tom wouldn’t dump for me reduced to a sweating, screaming harridan.

  No. I wanted to be there if nothing else than to help Tom see it through. I still felt something for him. Maybe it was love, but—yes, I’ll admit it. I was curious to see if his and Becky’s baby was born with or without fingerprints!

  When I heard the soft thump, I turned and saw that Tom had dropped to the floor. I thought at first that maybe he had fainted, exhausted, but even with the quantity of blood involved with a delivery, I was shocked to see a thin ribbon of blood lacing down the inside of his forearm and dripping off his smock’s cuff onto the linoleum floor.

  Even before I reached him, I knew he was dead ... and I knew why he had done it.Using the empty hypodermic, he had injected a bubble of air into the artery in his arm. He knew exactly where to hit and when, and it didn’t take long for the embolism to kill him. I’m convinced he killed himself at the exact moment his daughter was born so there would be a soul available for her.

  Sounds crazy, I know, but who’s to say it didn’t work?

  Elizabeth Marie Jacobs was born with a full complement of fingerprints and footprints.

  Of course, the shock of a suicide—a doctor’s suicide, no less—in the delivery room put the whole hospital into an uproar that lasted for weeks—months. It didn’t do much for Becky Jacob’s mental health, either, but she, at least, had baby Elizabeth—a part of Tom—for herself. In time, I knew that would help her heal the wounds.

  What did I have?

  Nothing but memories.

  The next day, Char Walls, one of the hospital orderlies, and I were looking at Tom’s baby through the nursery window. I’d lifted some pretty heavy medication from the pharmacy to help me deal with the shock of what had happened. I had also resigned that morning, even though I didn’t have another job and couldn’t hold onto my apartment for long without one. I remember Chad commenting on how baby Elizabeth had her father’s eyes.

  I remember saying to him, “More than you realize...”

  I didn’t tell him ... at least I don’t think I told him or anyone else, until now ... that just three weeks before Becky delivered, Tom and I had made use of one of those empty beds during a particularly slow night. “For old time’s sake,” he had joked with me afterwards, and I honestly didn’t mind because I missed him.

  I mind now, though, because I wonder if, when our baby is born, there will be another soul available. I wonder if our baby will have finger- and footprints.

  I wonder ...

  Goblin Boy

  It had been quite a night already, and Jimmy Foster was smiling inside his Halloween mask as he slung his plastic trick-or-treat bag up onto the kitchen table. When he upended it, a cascade of candy, assorted fruits, and—as usual—a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste from his dentist, Doc Wilen, spilled out across the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth tablecloth.

  “Wow! Looks like you got quite the haul there, Jimbo,” his mother said. She smiled as she leaned back against the sink, her meaty arms folded across her chest. “Go on upstairs ‘n put your pjs on. Then we’ll sort through everything, ‘kay?”

  Jimmy nodded his agreement, but he didn’t move.

  “’N take off that mask … It gives me the creeps.”

  But Jimmy didn’t remove his “goblin” mask with its lumpy warts and deep wrinkles. He just stood, admiring his pile of treats. He was glad to see a fair amount of Milky Ways and Three Musketeers—his favorites—mixed in amongst the Charlestown Chews, Oh Henrys, and Good ’n Plenty candies. The real Halloween trick this year—like every year—was going to be keeping Ben, his older brother, away from his candy. His father’s sweet tooth seemed to get worse every year around this time, too.

  “You didn’t have any trouble with the older boys, did you?”

  “Nope,” Jimmy said. When he shook his head, the rubber edge of his mask scraped against his bare neck. “We never even went downtown. We just circled around the block.”

  “You didn’t use the shortcut through the woods, I hope.”

  “No way. I never go that way after dark … I hardly even use it during the day.”

  “Good thing, too,” his mother said.

  Jimmy couldn’t help but shiver inwardly whenever he thought about the path through the woods. He usually only took it when he was with one or—better yet—several of his friends. The kids scared each other—and themselves—with stories about something—a troll or some kind of horrible creature who lived under the wooden bridge that crossed the stream deep in the woods.

  “So the Hopkins twins didn’t bother you or your friends?”

  “Nope,” Jimmy said. “Never even saw ‘em.”

  He couldn’t help but be surprised by the odd tone in his voice. It sounded muffled inside his mask and had an odd, echoing resonance that he hadn’t noticed when he was out trick-or-treating with his friends.

  “Well, go ‘n get your pjs on before you even think about having any candy tonight. I’m sure you had enough while you were out.”

  “Not really,” Jimmy said as he reached up with both hands to take off his mask. His fingers hooked the wrinkled green rubber just below the eyeholes, but when he tightened his grip and lifted up, a sharp, sudden pain pulled at both of his cheeks. He let out a tiny yelp that drew his mother’s attention.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Jimmy looked down at his hands, suddenly feeling an odd distance from them. They looked too far away … like they belonged to someone else, and he was seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope. When he flexed his fingers, he had the unnerving sense that he wasn’t actually controlling them. Someone else was.

  “No … uhh … nothing,” he said, but the peculiar hollowness in his voice sounded more intense now. A wild shiver swept through him like a chilly breeze on an October night.

  His hands started to tingle with pins-’n’-needles as he raised them and, tilting his head back, slid them under the edge of his chin. When he tried once again to lift up the edge of the mask, the stinging, tugging sensation was even worse. It was like pulling a Band-Aid off an old wound and taking most of the fresh scab with it. He let out another louder yelp as tears welled up in his eyes.

  “Honey? … What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t get … My mask’s stuck.”

  He had to fight back numbing waves of panic even as the strangled, hollow sound of his own voice frightened him all the more. It reminded him more of a growling dog than a person. Trembling inside, he
looked at his mother, positive he could see confusion and maybe even a hint of fear reflected in her wide-eyed expression.

  “Here … Lemme help you with it,” she said, coming over to him and kneeling down on one knee so she was level with him.

  Framed by the black eyeholes of the mask, her face loomed frighteningly close. The harsh brilliance of the kitchen’s overhead light made the careworn lines in her face and the tiny red capillaries that twined like red threads across her nose stand out in frighteningly sharp detail. Her blue eyes glistened like wet marbles as she reached out to take hold of both sides of the mask. The veins and tendons in her hands stood out in sharp relief, casting shadows like dark pencil marks on her skin.

  Jimmy couldn’t stop feeling strangely detached from himself as he watched her hands move toward his face in weird, flickering slow motion. When she touched the mask, he didn’t want to believe he could actually feel her touch, but it was like she was running her hands over the bare skin of his face.

  “Hmm,” his mother said, frowning as she slipped her fingers under the mask to get a good grip and tugged it back and forth. “It’s on kinda tight.”

  When that didn’t work, she slid her hands around the back of his neck and tried to peel up the edge, but the burning slice of pain that shot up his scalp made him yelp again. He jerked away from her violently, throwing her off balance.

  “It’s really stuck,” he said, trying—and failing—to control the panic in his voice.

  Tears sprang from his eyes. The air inside the mask was suddenly stiflingly hot, too hot to breathe. He tried to suppress the sudden conviction that he was suffocating to death. His mother must have done something because the mask felt like it was on even tighter now. Then he noticed something else … something that, even through his panic, struck him as remarkable. He was crying, and he could actually feel his tears, hot and scalding, running down the outside of his mask.