Sunday, April 2
1
Washington, D.C.
George Washington University Hospital,
Special Care Unit, 10:10 p.m.
The
slow pound of Nicholas Marten's heart sounded like a drum buried
somewhere inside him. His own breath, as he inhaled and exhaled,
resonated as if it were a movie sound track. So did the sound of
Caroline's labored breathing as she lay on the bed next to him.
For
what seemed the tenth time in half that many minutes he looked at her.
Her eyes were closed, as they had been, her hand resting gently in his.
For all the life in it, it might as well have been a glove. Nothing
more.
How long had he been in Washington? Two
days? Three? Flown there from his home in Manchester, England, almost
immediately after Caroline's call asking him to come. He'd
known the minute he heard her voice something was terribly wrong. It
had been filled with dread and fear and helplessness, and then
she'd told him what it was: She had a very aggressive,
untreatable staph infection and was expected to live only a few days
more.
For all the horror and shock of it,
there had been something more in her voice. Anger. Something had been
done to her, she told him, suddenly whispering as if she were afraid
someone would overhear. No matter what the doctors said or would say,
she was certain that the infection killing her had been caused by
bacteria that had deliberately been given to her. It had been then,
judging from sounds in the background, that someone had come into the
room. Abruptly she'd finished with an urgent plea for him to come
to Washington, then hung up.
He hadn't
known what to think. All he knew was that she was terribly frightened
and that her situation was made all the worse by the very recent deaths
of her husband and twelve-year-old son in the crash of a private plane
off the coast of California. Considering the physical and emotional
toll the combination of these tragic things would have had on her, and
with no other information, Marten found it impossible to know if there
was any basis at all for her suspicion. Still, the reality was that she
was desperately ill and wanted him to be with her. And from everything
he'd heard in her voice he knew he'd better get there as
quickly as he could.
And he had. Within the
day flying from Manchester in the north of England to London and then
on to Washington, D.C., taking a taxi from Dulles International
directly to the hospital, and later getting a room at a hotel nearby.
That Caroline knew who he really was and the risk she dared subject him
to by asking him to come back into the United States had not been
brought up. It wasn't necessary. She would never have asked if
something wasn't terribly wrong.
So he
had come hurriedly back to the country he had fled four years earlier
in fear for his life and that of his sister. Come back after so
many years and the differing paths their lives had taken because
Caroline had been and was still the one true love of his life. He loved
her more deeply than any woman he had ever known and in a way that was
impossible for him to describe. He knew too that even though she was
happily married and had been for a long time, in some unspoken, even
profound way, she felt the same about him.
Marten
looked up sharply as the room door was suddenly flung open. A heavyset
nurse entered followed by two men in dark suits. The first was
broad-shouldered, in his early forties, with dark curly hair.
"You'll have to leave, sir, please," he said
respectfully.
"The president is
coming," the nurse said curtly, her manner abrupt and
authoritative, as if she had suddenly become commander of the suits. A
member of the Secret Service.
At the same instant Marten felt Caroline's hand tighten around
his. He looked down and saw her eyes were open. They were wide and
clear, and looked into his the way they had that first day they met,
when they were both sixteen and in high school.
"I love you," she whispered.
"I love you too," he whispered back.
She looked at him for a half second more, then closed her eyes, and her hand relaxed.
"Please, sir, you have to leave, now," the first suit said.
At that same moment a tall, slim, silver-haired man in a dark blue suit
stepped through the doorway. There was no question who he
was John Henry Harris, president of the United States.
Marten
looked at him directly. "Please," he said softly,
"give me a moment alone with her....She's
just..." the word caught in his throat,
"died."
The men's gaze held
for the briefest moment, "Of course," the president said,
his words hushed and reverent. Then, motioning to his Secret Service
protectors, turned and left the room.
2
Thirty
minutes later, head down against the world, barely aware of the
direction he was going, Nicholas Marten walked the all but deserted
Sunday-night streets of the city.
He tried
not to think of Caroline. Tried not to acknowledge the pain that told
him she was no more. Tried not to think that it had been little more
than three weeks since she had lost both her husband and son. Tried to
put out of his mind the idea that she might have been intentionally
given something that caused her fatal infection.
"Something
has been done to me." Her voice suddenly echoed inside him as if
she had just spoken. It resonated with the same fear and vulnerability
and anger it had had when she had first called him in England.
"Something
has been done to me." Caroline's words came again. As if
she were still trying to reach him, trying to make him believe without
doubt that she had not been merely ill, but murdered.
What
that "something" was, or at least what she thought it was
and how it had begun, she'd told him during the first of the only
two lucid moments she'd had since he arrived.
It had happened following the twin funerals of her husband, Mike
Parsons, a well-respected forty-two-year-old congressman from
California in his second term in office, and their son, Charlie.
Certain she was strong enough to see it all through, she had invited
numerous friends to their home to join her in a celebration of their
lives; but the shock of what had happened, coupled with the almost
unbearable strain of the funerals and the crush of well-meaning people,
had overwhelmed her, and she'd broken down, retreating in tears
and near-hysteria to lock herself in her bedroom, screaming for people
to go away and refusing even to answer the door.
Congressional
chaplain and pastor of their church, Reverend Rufus Beck, had been
among the mourners and immediately sent for Caroline's personal
physician, Lorraine Stephenson. Dr. Stephenson had come quickly and
with the pastor's help convinced Caroline to open the bedroom
door. Within minutes she had injected her, as Caroline said,
"with a sedative of some kind." When she woke up she was in
a room in a private clinic where Stephenson had prescribed several
days' rest and where "I never felt the same again."
Marten
turned down one darkened street and then another, replaying the hours
he had spent with her in the hospital. With the exception of the other
instance when Caroline had been awake and talked to him, she had simply
slept, and he had stayed by her side keeping vigil. Throughout those
long hours health care personnel monitoring her condition had come and
gone and there had been brief visits by friends during which Marten
simply introduced himself and then quietly left the room.
There
had been two other visitors as well, the people who had been
immediately involved when Caroline had broken down at home. The first
had been an early-morning call by the woman who had given her the
"sedative" and prescribed her stay in the clinic, her
personal physician, Dr. Lorraine Stephenson: a tall, handsome woman in
her mid-fifties. Stephenson had exchanged a brief pleasantry with him,
then read Caroline's chart, listened to her heart and lungs
through a stethoscope, and left.
The second
had been congressional chaplain Rufus Beck, who visited later in the
day. A large, gentle, soft-spoken African-American, Beck had been
accompanied by a young and attractive dark-haired Caucasian woman with
a camera bag slung over one shoulder who'd stayed pretty much in
the background. Like Stephenson, Reverend Beck had introduced himself
to Marten, and they'd had a brief exchange. Afterward he'd
spent a few moments in prayer as Caroline slept before telling Marten
good-bye and leaving with the young woman.
A
light rain began to fall and Marten stopped to turn up the collar of
his jacket against it. In the distance he could see the tall spire that
was the Washington Monument. For the first time he had some concrete
sense of where he was. Washington was not just the inside of an
intensive-care hospital room but a large metropolitan city that just
happened to be the capital of the United States of America. It was a
place he'd never been, even though he'd lived all of his
life in California before fleeing to England and could easily have
visited. For some reason just being here gave him a deep sense of
belonging, to one's country, to one's native land. It was a
feeling he'd never had before, and he wondered if there would
ever be a time when he could return from the exiled life he lived in
Manchester.
Marten moved on. As he did he
noticed a car coming slowly down the street toward him. That the
streets were all but empty made the vehicle's pace seem odd. It
was late Sunday night and raining wouldn't the driver of
one of the very few vehicles on the street be anxious to get to
wherever he or she was going? The car came abreast of him and he
glanced at it as it passed. The driver was male and nondescript,
middle-aged with dark hair. The car passed and Marten watched it
continue down the street, its speed never changing. Maybe the guy was
drunk or drugged out or suddenly the reflection became
personal maybe he was somebody who had just lost someone
extraordinarily dear to him and had no idea where he was or what he was
doing other than just moving.
3
Marten's
thoughts went back to Caroline. She had been the wife of a
well-respected congressman who had become an increasingly popular
figure in Washington and one who just happened to have been a close
boyhood friend of the president, and the sudden, tragic deaths of both
her husband and son had seen the political community embrace her with
everything it had. It made him wonder why she would think
"something had been done to her." Why she would think she
had deliberately been injected with a disease that would kill her.
Methodically
Marten tried to assess her mental state over the last two days of her
life. In particular he thought of the second instance when she had been
awake. That time she'd taken hold of his hand and looked into his
eyes.
"Nicholas," she'd said
weakly. "I " Her mouth had been dry and her breathing
labored. Just speaking took enormous effort. "I was
to...have...been ...on that plane with...my husband
and my...son. There was a...last-minute change...of
plans...and I...came back to...Washington
a...day...earlier." She had stared at him intently.
"They...murdered my...husband and...son...and
now they have...killed...me."
"Who
are you talking about? Who is 'they'?" he'd
pressed gently, trying to get something more tangible from her.
"The...ca
..." she'd said. She'd tried to say more but it
had been as much as she could do. Her strength gone, she just lay back
and fell asleep. And she had slept right up until those last moments of
her life when she'd opened her eyes and stared into his and told
him she loved him.
Thinking about it now he
realized the little she had told him had come in two sections, one
quite separate from the other. The first had come in snippets: that she
was originally to have been on the ill-fated plane with her husband and
son but a last-minute change of plans brought her back to Washington a
day earlier; what had happened at her home after the funerals; and
finally what she had told him when she'd called him in England,
saying she was dying from a staph infection caused by a strain of
untreatable bacteria that she was certain had been given to her
deliberately. "The...ca" what she'd
started to say when he'd asked her to explain it, and who the
"they" were she was referring to, he had no idea.
The
second section had come from utterances she'd made in her sleep.
Most had been everyday things, calling out the names of her husband,
"Mike," or her son, "Charlie," or her sister
"Katy," or saying things like "Charlie, please turn
down the TV" or "The class is Tuesday." But
she'd said other things too. These had seemingly been aimed at
her husband and were filled with alarm or fear or both. "Mike,
what is it?" Or "You're frightened. I can see
it!" Or "Why won't you tell me what it is?" Or
"It's the others, isn't it?" And then later, a
sudden fearful blurting "I don't like the
white-haired man."
That part he
was familiar with because it was a piece of the story she had told him
when she'd called him in Manchester and asked him to come.
"The
fever came less than a day after I woke up in the clinic,"
she'd said. "It got worse and they did tests. A
white-haired man came, they said he was a specialist but I didn't
like him. Everything about him frightened me. The way he stared at me.
The way he touched my face and my legs with his long, hideous fingers;
and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross. I asked him why he
was there and what he was doing but he never answered. Later they
discovered I had some kind of staph infection in the bone of my right
leg. They tried to treat it with antibiotics. But they didn't
work. Nothing worked."
Marten walked on.
The rain came down harder but he barely noticed. His entire focus was
Caroline. They had met in high school and entered the same college
certain they would marry and have children and be together for the rest
of their lives. And then she had gone away for the summer and met a
young lawyer named Mike Parsons. After that, his life and hers changed
forever. But as deep as his hurt, as badly as he had been wounded, his
love for her never diminished. In time he and Mike became friends, and
he told Mike what Caroline and only a few others knew who he
really was and why he had been forced to leave his job as a homicide
detective in the Los Angeles Police Department and move to the north of
England to live under an assumed identity as a landscape architect.
He
wished now he had gone to the funeral of her husband and son as
he'd wanted to. Because if he had he would have been there when
she'd broken down and when Dr. Stephenson had come. But he
hadn't, and that had been Caroline's doing. She had told
him she was surrounded by friends and that her sister and husband were
coming from their home in Hawaii, and that, considering the danger
surrounding his own situation, it was better he stayed where he was.
They would get together later, she'd told him. Later, when things
had quieted down. She'd sounded alright then. Shaken maybe, but
alright, and with the inner strength to carry on that she'd
always had. And then all this had happened.
God how he had loved her. How he still loved her. How he would always love her.
He
walked on thinking only that. Finally, he became aware of the rain and
realized he was nearly soaked through. He knew he had to find his way
back to his hotel and looked around trying to get his bearings. That
was when he saw it. A lighted edifice in the distance. A structure
embedded in his memory from childhood, from history, from newspapers,
from television, from movies, from everything. The White House.
At
that same moment the tragic loss of Caroline caught up with him. And
against the rain and the dark, and with no shame whatsoever, he wept.
Copyright © 2006 by Allan Folsom.
All rights reserved.