No Harm Can Come to a Good Man. James Smythe
not at all serious. They have let him go already, this was a false alarm. Instead, there are people with bloody noses and hands wrapped in bags of frozen vegetables, and one woman whose skin is almost green, her eyes rolling back in her head, froth around her mouth. There’s a television above them, tuned to the news. They’re talking about Laurence, running a special later on, about his political career so far. She hopes that she isn’t still waiting here to see it.
‘Miss?’ the woman at the desk says. Deanna doesn’t hear her. She’s somewhere else: imagining Sean in the water, imagining how he took his dive from the dock, and how he arced through the air; and why he didn’t come up again. She can picture it, as if she is there. She doesn’t know how. She is trying to imagine what was going through his mind. How lost he was, and how he needed her. Maybe he called her name through the water …‘Miss? Can you hear me?’ Deanna turns. The woman behind the counter is impatient already.
‘My son’s here,’ Deanna says. ‘I don’t know where he is. My husband brought him here in in an ambulance. He drowned.’ Such finality in that phrase.
‘Name?’
‘His name? It’s Sean. Sean Walker.’ The woman types and stares at her screen. Deanna imagines the notes shared on these computers: even down to letting the front desk staff know how to treat the situations. The patient is fine. The patient is in stable condition. The patient is dead. Morgan – Deanna reads her name badge – doesn’t say anything for a while. Instead she follows the notes on her screen, and then she sighs. It’s almost imperceptible, but Deanna is watching for it. She’s so focused now on this moment and nothing more. No point in dwelling on what happened before. This is all about what happens from this moment on.
‘Okay,’ Morgan eventually says, ‘so you’re going to come with me through here now.’ She stands up from her desk and lifts the entry flap, and she puts her hand on Deanna’s elbow to lead her through.
‘Is Sean okay? Can I see him?’ Deanna asks.
‘Your husband is through here,’ Morgan says, ‘and the doctor will bring news as soon as she’s got some.’ They pass bays of beds where doctors fix the damaged and then reach the room. It doesn’t have anything printed on the door: there’s a darkened glass window in it and nothing more. There are three more of them adjacent, Deanna sees, but she can’t see if they’re vacant or not. The door creaks on the swing, and Laurence is there and he rushes to her. He’s still damp, wet from having dredged Sean out of the water, but he’s got his suit jacket back on. He shakes, a towel wrapped around him, and she holds him. It’s not his fault, she tells herself. It’s not. He sits down, and she does, and they don’t talk.
The room is pale and bare. There are six chairs arranged as if for dinner, one at the head of the table, one at the foot, two on either side; and the table in the middle is low, cheap wood, covered in coffee stains. There’s a green plastic box in the center filled with tissues. The box, Deanna notices, is glued to the table. There are no magazines, no television, no water cooler: this is like no waiting room Deanna has ever been in before. The chairs are covered in a fading red woolen fabric, but the arms have started to be unpicked, the strands pulled out and played with; worried. The carpet has, around the table, been worn into a path, like a running track. The ceiling tiles are yellowed with cigarette smoke. It’s been decades since you were allowed to smoke in buildings like this, and nearly twenty years since Deanna last had a cigarette; but now she looks at that and she misses it, because if ever there was an occasion it is now.
‘I have to see if there’s news,’ Laurence says. ‘I’ve spoken with Amit, asked him to come.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. He stands up and leaves, padding into the hallway – she watches him, sheet draped over his shoulders, looking for all the world like any other patient of this place – and she takes out her phone. She texts Lane – No news xxx – and then opens the ClearVista app. Predict anything with our groundbreaking algorithm, it reads. The numbers don’t lie. She logs in and selects Sean’s name from the drop-down list of her dependents, and then starts to type what she’s looking for. Predict how long you can survive, she types, and it fills out the rest for her, guessing at her request. Without breathing, the second most requested search beginning with that phrase. She clicks the completed sentence. The little icon spins around (While you are waiting, did you know that ClearVista can help you predict your chances of love with a new partner to a ninety-three percent accuracy?) and then it gives her its answer.
We predict that Sean Walker can survive for 102 seconds without breathing, it says. She turns the Internet browser off and puts the phone back into her pocket. She fingers one of the tissues from the box, and she feels how thin it is, and somehow that’s what sets her off.
Deanna looks out of the window. There’s only one, and it looks out onto the gray concrete rear of the buildings. The fans from the air vents, the delivery area for medical supplies, a chain-link fence. There’s nobody walking past, gawking in, which is a relief. The afternoon sun, briefly, shining through the window and onto her face. She’s looking out when the door to the room opens and she sees the doctor’s face reflected in the glass. She turns. The doctor takes her glasses off before saying anything, and she shakes Laurence’s hand, and Deanna’s, and Deanna thinks how warm her hands are. She keeps thinking about that warmth all the way through the explanation of what happened: that there were two sets of injuries to deal with: because when he stopped breathing it caused an embolism; and then his lungs were flooded as well, because before he stopped he tried desperately to breathe, taking water in where it should only have been air. The doctor is amazed that Laurence managed to get him breathing at the scene. She says something about Sean being artificially alive; or how he was. She doesn’t say the words about what exactly happened after was, which makes it worse for Deanna, somehow. Everything sounds as if she is at altitude and her ears have popped, fading off into a fog of words that carry no meaning.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor says. That’s all they need. Laurence holds Deanna, and he cries into her shoulder, and he falls to his knees and he screams but it comes out like he’s gasping for air; but Deanna cannot soothe him. She is still picturing Sean stuck under the water, looking up at her, calling his father’s name, desperately clawing at the surface of it, unable to break out; knowing what is coming as he drowns.
The next year is the worst of their lives.
The funeral happens a week to the day after his death. Sean’s skin was a shade of gray when they looked at it in the hospital. The make-up artist tells them he is one of the best and Laurence wonders what scale that’s on: town, or state, or country, or even the world. He asks, bitterly, if there are competitions to decide such a thing: a parade of bodies lined up to be perfumed and preened? When they finally see Sean, his skin is the abnormal pink of a child’s doll. They refuse an open casket, then, because this isn’t their son any more. Laurence can’t stand to look at him, or even at the casket as it lies on the table. They invite anybody who wants to come to the funeral, and pretty much the whole town does. They all bring trays of pies and pasta and salads, and they leave them piled up in the kitchen, shake Laurence’s hand and kiss Deanna’s cheek, say how sorry they are. Everybody in the town knows them; most remember Deanna from when she was a child. And they all knew Sean, and they all want to say goodbye to him. Everybody steps up to the closed box on the table and stands over it; they tell Sean whatever it is that they have to say. Alyx doesn’t come, because Deanna doesn’t know if that’s right. Deanna explains it to her.
‘Sean’s gone to heaven,’ she says, almost without thinking, and that starts a conversation that she then feels pitiably unable to deal with, but she tries. She buys a Bible for the express purpose of giving Alyx the story about how it works. She argues with Laurence that grief needs an outlet and that this might be a good one for Alyx. Laurence doesn’t like it – he’s practical about religion, pragmatic, as badly as that plays with the South; and now he’s more stubborn. Any shot at belief that he maybe once had is devastated by the loss of their son – but,