Discovery of the Moment Ch. 05

Seconds later, two more orderlies pushing a gurney came barrelling down the hallway and shot right past us into the room. We heard a few seconds of commotion in there and then my wife's body was wheeled out of the room so fast that I barely even saw it. The nurse was still squeezing the pump as she ran along with the gurney and the doctor was talking furtively into a cell phone. And, just like that, they were all gone out of sight as they rounded a corner. I continued to try and console my wailing daughter there in the hallway, stroking her hair gently, when the doctor came back to us, looking for all the world like the weight of Atlas's burden was on his own shoulders now.

The doctor, his nametag read "Harper", approached us and waited patiently for us to collect our wits. "Your wife," he started, "seems to have suffered a radical cardiac arrest, but the headache is what's got me bothered. I don't think it was a normal heart attack."

"Well what is it, then?" I asked pointedly. "Is she going to be okay?"

Doctor Harper looked, at that moment, like he was made of granite. "At this point, I can't honestly say for certain, but I believe she threw a blood clot. Gunshot victims sometimes do that. Blood can congeal or clot inside an artery, which blocks off blood supply to the brain. That would explain the headache. When the clot breaks free, though, it can act like a cannon ball inside the brain, if that's where it's headed. The blood vessels in the brain are very small and fragile. If a clot gets up there, it can cause a rupture, what we call an aneurysm. When that happens, the brain starts to automatically shut down systems in the body, as a sort of defense mechanism, first among them, the pulmonary system. The brain literally induces a heart attack in order to lower the blood pressure as quickly as possible."

"So what can be done?" I asked. "Is this... can you fix it?"

Harper shook his head. "I can't, no. But I've sent her to the operating room for an emergency operation and Doctor Turkin is prepping, as we speak, to work on your wife. He is an extremely talented and well-trained neurosurgeon and, with any luck, he'll be able to save your wife's life." Harper glanced down at the floor for a second and then looked back up at me with real pain in his eyes. "Mr. Baker, the chances aren't good. In cases like this, there's almost no warning and treatment doesn't always work. A patient can die within seconds when something like this occurs and there's very little that anyone can do if the damage is too severe. You need to accept the strong possibility that your wife is not going to survive. Doctor Turkin will do everything in his power, but short of turning back the hands of time, there's not much that can be done now. I'm very, very sorry, Mr. Baker. I wish I could tell you better news."

Kelly tightened her grip on me as she mewled like a hurt kitten. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity and then, suddenly, something within me snapped. "NO!" I growled low in my throat. I fixed my eyes on Doctor Harper, a cold hard gaze of outrage and unspoken power. "Where is she?" I demanded flatly.

"Mr. Baker, there really isn't anything that you can-"

I let go of my daughter and rushed towards the doctor, grabbed him by the lapels of his lab coat and snarled as I lifted him up in the air, his back flat against the wall, "If you don't tell me where my wife is RIGHT NOW I will break you in ways that you haven't even begun to imagine. Look in my eyes and tell me I don't mean it."

Harper, completely caught off guard by my sudden move, looked into my eyes as he'd been told. I dare not describe what he might've seen within my gaze, but whatever it was had been enough to make him go pale as a sheet. "Second floor, O.R. 6," he answered without hesitation. I let him go without another word.

I turned to Kelly, grabbed her wrist and went Between right there in the hallway. Kelly immediately gasped, fully aware of what I'd just done. "Dad," she exclaimed as I started to drag her down the hallway, "you just-"

"I know!" I said gruffly. "And, frankly, I don't give a fuck right now. C'mon!" I made a bee-line for the stairs, knowing that the elevators would not work for us, and Kelly was right on my heels. As I kicked the door to the stairwell open, Kelly asked me what I planned on doing. I didn't answer her and just kept moving, my mind focused like an arrow and guiding me forward almost past the limits of my will. When we reached the second floor, I threw the door open and charged down the hallways until, finally, I found Operating Room #6. Kelly, the whole time, followed me, trying to get some sort of verbal response, but I never answered her. When we got to the O.R., I went in and stalked right past the frozen medical staff who were already crowded around my wife's lifeless body. I was gratified to see that Sarah hadn't yet been cut open, nor did she have any medical devices attached to her. I didn't say anything as I grabbed Kelly's wrist again, laid my other hand on Sarah's shoulder and then double-flipped us so that now the whole family was in the Between.

I leaned over my wife's body, looking for any sign of life no matter how insignificant, and said, "C'mon, Sarah. C'mon..."

"Dad?" Kelly said cautiously, not sure of herself right then or what I was trying to accomplish. "Dad? What're you doing?"

I glanced at my daughter, who looked for all the world like a deer caught in headlights, and simply said, "My shoulder. Remember my shoulder? How it healed so quickly here, in the Between? Maybe the same thing will happen for Sarah. Maybe I can bring her back." I turned around to look at my empty shell of a wife again. "Come ON, Sarah! Come ON!"

Kelly carefully approached me and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Dad," she began, "Dad, I... I don't think..."

"Shut up!" I snarled without looking at her and shrugged off her hand unceremoniously. "Shut up and don't you say it! She can heal, dammit. She can HEAL!"

"Dad..." Kelly said again, this time in a small, gentle voice, "she's gone."

"NO!" I shouted. "No! She... it'll fix her," I cried desperately. "It'll fix her like it fixed me! COME ON, SARAH, GODDAMN YOU! DON'T YOU DARE FUCKING LEAVE US ALONE! HEAL!"

"Don't do this, Daddy," Kelly sobbed. "Please don't. Please! Just... just let her go, Dad. She's... oh, God, she's gone."

I spun around to glare at my daughter angrily and unthinkingly said, "You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

The words had such a powerful effect on my daughter that it had been like slap to her face. She physically winced at my accusation and just stared at me in total, dumbfounded silence. She brought her hands to her tear-streaked face as she sobbed even harder and turned on her heels to leave. On her way out of the O.R., she stopped long enough to say, "I loved her, too."

I watched my daughter go, crying her eyes out and felt utterly ruined. What had I been thinking? How could I have said such a terrible, hateful thing? I turned to regard my wife once more. Nothing about her had changed in the slightest. Her face was still a pale, blank slate, locked in a grimace of agony with blood drying at the corners of her mouth. I looked at her for a long, long time, praying that the Between would do for her what it did for me. After almost ten minutes, however, I finally had to accept the Truth: my wife was good and truly gone and nothing, not even the Between, could bring her back. Gone forever, never to return.

I lovingly, reverently held her hand and cried there, in a frozen world, until I could do nothing but sob with dry tear ducts. My heart was completely and totally broken and I felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life. I never heard her come back in, but I felt Kelly's hand once again on my shoulder. I looked up at her with red, swollen eyes. "I'm sorry, Kelly. I'm so, so sorry. I never should have said that."

My daughter offered me a wan, pained smile of reassurance and placed a loving palm on my cheek. "It's okay, Dad," she said quietly. "It's okay. I understand."

"She's gone," I bleakly said, finally accepting it.

Kelly nodded slowly and choked on her own sorrow. "Yes, Dad. She is."

I grabbed her in a tight hug and held on as we both cried next to my wife's body for an unknown amount of time. Finally, when we were both completely cried out, we left the room, walked into the hallway and I took us both back to Normal Time.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

We held the funeral for my wife four days later. Dozens of family members and friends were there to say their goodbyes to Sarah and to offer their condolences to Kelly and me. For those four days, and most especially on the day of the funeral, I felt like I was walking through a thick fog of unreality. Kelly, my poor and stricken daughter, was unconsolable the entire time and I, when I had my few moments of clarity, was simply dazed and numb. Sarah's sister Katherine, who lived just an hour away and was easily as emotionally strong as my wife, was an immense help during those four terrible days and somehow managed to pull me along while we put the burial plans into motion. It all seemed like a blur to me. To this day, I can't really account for everything that happened or was said, but when my lovely, dear wife's body was finally laid to rest, a strange sort of calm swept over me. When I finally faced the reality that she was gone, my spine straightened out and, suddenly, my only real concern was for my grieving daughter.

Kelly took it so terribly hard. All of the joy and strength seemed to have just evaporated out of her, leaving her for that time in a state which only barely resembled her true self. But during all of it, she never was too far from me. I tried my best to be strong, for her sake, and not suffer another break down. When I needed a few moments alone to myself, I could always sense that Kelly was never far away, just on the other side of the wall and quietly watching over me, ready to give me support if I needed it. I gather that she was worried that I might go away, too, and leave her all alone. There were times when I caught her standing in a room, just standing there and staring off into space, and I would go to her, hug her tightly and try my best to assure her that we'd get through this, that we'd somehow manage to get along by ourselves. She didn't talk much, but she said ever so much with her actions. She felt alone, scared and, most touchingly of all, worried about how I was doing. Sometimes she came to me and would just hold me tight, telling me that she loved me. And in those moments when she would embrace me, those fleeting moments, I sometimes felt okay, like losing my best friend, lover and wife wasn't really the end of the world.

Slowly, over time, Kelly and I learned how to move forward in life without Sarah there. For a while we both met regularly with a psychologist, who had been provided to us by Sarah's mother, and we were able to get past our feelings of loss. Eventually, we succumbed to the fact that, despite the pain of losing someone we love, Life does indeed go on. And, not surprisingly, we became each others' bedrock of support, always there to help the other up when depression seemed like it would overtake us.

A week before school started back up, Kelly decided that she wanted to finish out her Senior year at home, with home schooling. The psychologist we met with actually supported this idea and explained that it was perfectly normal, that Kelly was, in some way, trying to compensate for the loss of her mother by actively trying to take on some of her mother's duties as the woman of the house. In order to do that, she would have to stay home and doing home schooling was the best way to achieve both goals of finishing her education AND assuming her mother's role as lady of the house. Little did the good mental doctor know, but Kelly had also taken to sleeping in the bed with me every night since the funeral. We never made love or had anything close to sexual contact of any kind, but she had taken up her mother's place in my life in more ways than one. My daughter, in her own need to never lose the memory of her mother, had defaulted to being my companion in Life as well as in my bed.

----------------------------------

I, too, made some significant changes in my life once I had finally gotten back to it. I quit my job. It wasn't exactly the hardest decision for me to make, really. I'd become disenchanted with the job years ago and had only stuck with it for the sake of my family. It offered a good benefits package and, as a family man, I couldn't have turned that down in good conscience. But now that Sarah was gone and Kelly seemed to be well on her way towards independence, I decided that I just didn't want to do it anymore. My soul had been drained enough with the loss of my wife and I just couldn't bear to work another day in that dreary radio station ever again. The station manager, naturally, wasn't too pleased with my sudden announcement, but it wasn't like he could keep me there against my will. They gave me an extremely generous severance package even though they didn't need to and offered to rehire me in a hot second if I ever changed my mind. Even though I knew I never would go back, I was at least gracious enough to say that I'd keep it in mind.

But I had made my decision and it was final. Kelly and I both needed to move on, to take our lives in a different direction. We couldn't continue to stay in this holding pattern of depression, constantly being reminded of our loss, so I set my mind to figuring out a way for us to make a change without growing apart. A Plan had begun to form in my mind, one that I felt I could live with and possibly even enjoy. Working at the radio station, however, didn't fit into that plan at all. Working ANY normal job, actually, would simply get in the way. On the way home, I thought long and hard about what I was going to do and how I was going to it. I even made a stop on the way to see if I could actually do what I had in mind and make it work. I wasn't surprised to find out that, yes, my Plan was definitely worth pursuing. The biggest challenge, though, would be getting Kelly to accept and understand it.

I got home from my last day at work and found Kelly sitting in the living room, watching TV. When I told her the news, she seemed even less enthused than my boss had been. She shut the TV off and looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "WHY would you do that, Dad?" she asked. "With Mom gone and you jobless, how in the hell are we going to pay the bills? For crying out loud, Dad, you're thirty-eight years old. Finding another job like that is just... it's crazy!"

I knew that she would say something like that and was ready for it. "Kelly, I'm not going to look for another job. I'm retiring early. Look, if you're worried about money, don't be. First, there's the money we're getting from Sarah's life insurance policy. That's five-hundred thousand dollars, which can easily carry us for quite a few years. Also, there's money all over the place, just waiting for me to simply pick it up whenever I want it."

Kelly's eyebrows knit in complete confusion. "What in the hell are you talking about?"

"The Between," I said calmly. "With my ability to go Between, the world is my personal ATM, don't you realize that? A hundred bucks here and there, in places that aren't even related to each other... I could literally pick up ten thousand dollars a day, in cash, and no one would hardly notice. Hell, Kelly, I could knock over a bank and not even trip the alarms." I, of course, wouldn't actually rob a bank, but the delivery of the line and the smug look on my face when I said it felt amazingly good.

My daughter's mouth dropped into a perfect "O" of shock and disbelief. "Have you lost your fucking MIND!?" she cried as she stood up from the sofa. "Dad, you're... that's STEALING!"

"So what?" I said with an indifferent shrug, knowing that I had Kelly completely turned around now. "Businesses do it all the time. So does the government. The mafia's been doing it for centuries. The key to making money is to exploit your talents and put them to work for you. We both know what my only real talent is and, frankly, this is the best way I think I can make it work for me. For us."

"But, Dad, it's... it's wrong!" Kelly said with disgust.

"Wrong?" I retorted. "Wrong!? Coming from the woman who asked her FATHER to fill her pussy with his cum, the notion of right and wrong... well, not to put too fine a point on it, Kelly, but it rings a little hollow."

"I don't believe I'm hearing this from you!" she cried in exasperation. "Who the hell ARE you?"

"I'm the same guy I've always been, Kelly. And I'm tired. I'm tired of the rat-race. I'm tired of chasing my own tail, just to keep us afloat. I'm tired of waking up every morning to go to a job that I hate. I'm tired of feeling like I've always got to catch up. I'm tired of mourning my wife. And I'm tired of feeling helpless to do any good in this world while some boring fucking job takes up all of my time."

"So this is your solution?" my daughter challenged. "Just give it all up and become a total crook?" She threw her hands up in the air. "Well why not? Why the fuck not, Dad? Sure. Okay. I guess this is just the next natural step, isn't it? You killed those guys, threatened a doctor to force him to work on Mom, threatened ANOTHER doctor just because he had the temerity to tell you something you didn't like... sure, okay, Dad. Fine. You go out there and take whatever you want. It's not like I can stop you, is it?"

"Now you hold on right there, young lady!" I said hotly, pointing a finger at her. "Killing those men was... that was necessary. And I might have threatened to do all kinds of things, but I never did them, did I? Kelly, listen carefully: I will NOT use my ability just to be some low-life crook, okay? I'll only take money from the people who don't deserve it, like drug dealers and real criminals who intend to harm others. Would that put your concerns to rest?"

Kelly actually let that one sink in and gave it some serious consideration. "You'd do that?" she asked cautiously.

"Sure, I'd do that!" I replied. "I'd do it in a hot second. Listen, honey, I'm not talking about stealing simply for the sake of it, okay? I have absolutely no problems with stealing from cruel people who would only use money to cause more trouble. Hell, I could probably get MORE money out of them than I could from any other source anyway. And if some drug dealer gets killed over having lost a bank roll, well... good riddence. Justice served. If I can make a positive difference in the world AND make us rich, I'd do it every day with a smile on my face."

"So, let me get this straight," Kelly began slowly. "You're not talking about walking up to regular, hard-working people and just taking their money?"

"Hell no," I said. I reached into my pocket and withdrew a VERY thick roll of hundred-dollar bills. I'd already counted how much was there and it totalled up to sixteen thousand dollars. I held the immense roll of money in the air and explained, "I went down to the docks today, on the way home, and strolled around in the Between until I saw some very nice-looking cars all alone next to a pier. I literally stumbled into a drug deal and, frankly, it wasn't very difficult. These guys were LOADED, too. Very sharply dressed, very discreet, very nasty. Every one of 'em had a gun, which I disposed of. I tell you, Kelly, it was EASIER than taking candy from a baby. By the time I was done with them, they were stark naked, unarmed and broke. And the drugs? I tossed that into the water."

Kelly's eyes focused on the large roll of money and her mouth again fell open in total shock and surprise. "Holy fucking shit!" she gasped. "How... how much is there?"