The Last Day Read online

  Natasha Crossingham had just entered her last year of residency at a children's hospital, and Ward had remained in Seattle until she'd completed her term and, as soon as a group of pedi-atric surgeons at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte made her a partnership offer, they'd moved back to North Carolina. Ward had gone to work for his father's company, Raceway Graphics Incorporated, just in time to find out that his father had lung cancer, which despite the best available medical treatment took his life less than two years later. Ward had taken over as the company's president; he'd worked there during the summers for most of his life and he knew the business and the majority of their clients.

  Natasha was in her eighth month of pregnancy when the McCartys moved into the newly completed house and within a month their son, Ward Crossingham McCarty was born and their lives had settled into a sort of perpetual perfection that had lasted right up to the afternoon of the electrocution.

  When Ward sat down on the edge of the couch, Natasha opened her eyes slowly and looked dreamily up at him. As the real world came to her, she pulled the robe around to cover herself as she would if he were someone there to wash the windows.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “ Eight- fifteen,” he told her.

  “When did you get in?”

  “Just now,” he said. “Oh, an hour ago.”

  Frowning, she said, “I should go to bed. I have rounds at six A.M. Have you eaten?”

  “Not hungry,” he said.

  “There's leftover lasagna in the fridge,” she said, sitting up. “I thought you were supposed to be back this morning.”

  “My original flight was canceled. I took a later flight,” he told her, his heart sinking. “I left a message on the machine.”

  “Did you?” she slurred, exhausted. “I didn't check the machine. Sorry. I had a long day at the hospital. Emergency appendectomy last night and I couldn't sleep. I came in from morning rounds and….”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” he said. Ward couldn't mask his disappointment that his calls home had been totally unimportant to the woman he loved more than anybody on earth. He wished he could say that to her, but for some reason the words were stacked away in some mental cubicle he couldn't locate. She had not said “I love you” since Barney's death, and it was possible she no longer did. Perhaps that love was forever gone—a victim of their grief. Perhaps Barney had been such an integral part of their passion for each other that, now that he was gone, there was nothing at all to bind the doctor to the toymaker.

  “I put fresh sheets on your bed yesterday,” she told him.

  “Thank you,” he said, feeling as though someone had turned a rheostat that had increased the gravity in the room. My bed.

  “If it's all right with you, I'm going to order curtains for this room this week.” Natasha stood and looked out the windows into the dark. “I know it's weird, but I feel like I'd like to close them at night.”

  “Whatever you want,” Ward said. Although he hated the idea of curtains covering the windows, if she wanted them, what the hell.

  She yawned and stretched. “I'll see you in the morning.”

  Ward sat back on the couch and watched as Natasha picked up the blister pack containing the sleeping pills and the wine bottle, then bent to retrieve the glass from the floor.

  “I'll get that. Leave the bottle, too,” he told her.

  “You sure?”

  He nodded and watched as his beautiful wife set down the bottle and, moving in a more or less straight line, floated toward the hallway before vanishing into the darkness.

  Like a lone egg in a nest, one of Barney's baseballs sat in the ceramic bowl on the coffee table. He picked it up and turned it in his hand, imagining him and Barney playing pitch with it in the backyard on a spring afternoon. He supposed Natasha had been holding it to better remember Barney He put it back and looked down, spotting, between the sofa's cushions, a flash of white. He came up holding an envelope addressed to Natasha at her office. The return address belonged to the head of pediatric surgery at the Seattle children's hospital where she had done her residency. He lifted the flap, took out the letter, and read an offer to join her surgery professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Dr. Taylor Patten, who practiced at Seattle Children's Medical Center, wanted her as a partner in his practice. Ward's face grew hot as he sucked in a long breath and contemplated the letter's significance.

  Ward had once wondered if the association between his wife and her mentor had been more than the usual student/teacher relationship, because of their familiarity when they were around each other. The idea now revolted and alarmed him. He'd never asked her about their relationship, just as she'd never asked him about his previous girlfriends. What he wondered as he read the letter was whether she had written her mentor first, or if he had sought her out. And his heart pounded because it reinforced his belief that, aside from Natasha's patients, there was nothing of substance holding her in North Carolina. It didn't make him feel any better to discover that the letter was dated two years earlier, because that meant she had kept it. Why had she? She had been born in Seattle, grew up and had friends and family there. She had never mentioned wanting to return, but in keeping the letter she must have been thinking that she might pursue the offer. She must have been thinking of getting out.

  Ward folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and put it back where Natasha had left it.

  Crossing to the wet bar, Ward opened the liquor cabinet and selected a bottle of Laphroaig. He poured three inches of the golden liquid into a crystal glass, clouding it with a little water from a plastic bottle, and, picking up the remote, sat down, put his stocking feet on the coffee table, and started surfing TV channels as his mind grew dull from the pleasant effects of the Scotch.

  FIVE

  After Natasha left the den, she walked down the hallway, the slate cool against the soles of her bare feet. The combination of chilled wine and Ambien was an effective white noise generator. Natasha was confident that she knew enough about her own body and the drugs to ensure that she wasn't in any real danger of overdosing. There was the time, a few weeks earlier, when she had awakened in the tub half filled with cold water, dried vomit in her hair, with no memory of either throwing up or getting into the tub. She mixed the drugs only occasionally, she thought, as she ran her hand along the wall.

  She had been lucky so far that her hands hadn't started shaking during surgery. The duration of the tremors so far was short—usually a few seconds—but they seemed to be coming more often. She would have to have tests run to see what was causing this, but there was no explanation for the tremors that was good. If she had a nervous system disorder, like MS, she was screwed—her career would be over. With the diagnosis of any degenerative disease, she would have no choice but to quit performing surgery. She knew she would have to seek a diagnosis soon.

  Walking by Barney's bedroom, Natasha reached out to brush the knuckles of her left hand gently across the smooth wooden door. For nine years of nights she rarely walked past this door without pausing to visit with her son or to open the door quietly take a peek in, check on her sleeping child. The room had not changed in a year. Six months earlier, when she had men tioned to Ward that it might be time to begin thinking about boxing up just the clothes in their son's closet and few drawers, he'd started screaming at her like a lunatic. It was as though Ward expected Barney might return as long as his room wasn't altered. As often as not Ward didn't remember discussions they had, to the point that often she wondered why she bothered to talk to him at all.

  The one thing she was sure of was that Ward hadn't loved their son any more than she had, and he couldn't possibly miss him any more than she did. If he wanted to think he had a corner on that, fine, but it would never be the truth. If it were possible for her to trade her life to bring Barney back, she'd die in the next second with a smile on her lips. But he couldn't come back, so she was determined to live the rest of her life. If Ward decided t
o live his, then they could do so together. If not, he'd have to make his own way to its end.

  She went into her bedroom, closed the door, dropped her robe on the floor, flopped down across the bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

  Natasha picked up a small stuffed bear that she'd had made for her son while he was still inside her womb, and still lying on the bed, pressed his hand. The recorder inside the animal said in her voice, “Little guy, Mama loves you so very much.” Her own voice brought tears to her eyes, and she hugged the bear to her chest.

  She reached over to Ward's side of the bed and felt his absence. She put her hand under his pillow and a dreamless sleep overtook her.

  SIX

  Watcher sat in his hide in the woods, sipping a sports drink to stay hydrated. When he heard the tone, he opened his pack and saw on his GPS receiver that the black BMW was leaving the airport lot in Charlotte. Thirty- seven minutes later, it pulled into the garage. Two months earlier, Watcher had duct- taped a GPS transmitter to the big car's frame near the gas tanks, and had placed a second unit inside the engine compartment in the Lexus SUV Dr. McCarty drove. He could see at a glance where the pair was at any given time.

  Watcher was a shadow, a bad situation that would grow and grow until Ward and Natasha McCarty were as doomed as hooked fish cast up onto a grassy, sun- baked slope. Watcher was a reckoning. Watcher's patience was a rapidly emptying hourglass.

  Toy Boy—a fitting, albeit whimsical, nickname he had selected for his quarry—was a man hanging onto his life by a rope that had been fraying steadily since the day his son died. In three days the McCartys would endure the first anniversary of their son's death, and, Watcher would ensure, their last day on earth.

  SEVEN

  Alice Palmer had called her boyfriend twenty times and had left five increasingly angry messages from the time she arrived back home from the flight from Las Vegas until eleven that night. Either Earl was high, his phone's battery was dead, he'd left it somewhere, or he was punishing her for visiting her dad. “Fuck you,” was the final message she left, but added, “It's your baby doll. I love you. Call me as soon as you get this…. asshole.”

  She and her mother had argued all the way from the airport. Upon arriving at their home in Dillworth, her mother had come into the house with her, tossed her keys on the kitchen counter, and said, “Put your dirty laundry in the chute, and make your own dinner when you get hungry. I'm going to lie down. I have a splitting headache and I have to show four houses to some damned impossible- to- please Yankee couple in the morning. And clean up your room. The maid's off this week. And brush your teeth. Your breath smells like shit.” After saying that, she'd gone into her bedroom and closed the door. Only the sound of her TV filtering under her door evidenced her presence in the house. Alice knew her mother was never going to be up for Mother of the Year.

  Alice opened her carry bag to take out her Game Boy and saw the blue toy car she'd taken. She studied the portrait the man drew against her mirror. It wasn't at all bad, and she wished she could draw people as well as he did. The name embossed on the card was Ward McCarty RGI, Inc. The address was one she wasn't familiar with. It wasn't close to school or home.

  She pushed the model car around on her sheets, making motor noises. She'd lied about her mother being a race fan. Earl often talked about NASCAR drivers, and the obscene amounts of money they made. Her mother didn't like anything but the “look at all the pretty houses” channel on TV which she watched religiously in high-def like a cult member. Alice and her mother's relationship was based on mutual animosity and their conversations were hardly ever more than a swapping of sharp barbs and insults punctuated by long silences.

  The remarkably heavy toy was maybe six inches long and three wide, and the rubber wheels rolled easily. Growing bored, she placed the car on her dresser beside the large pickle jar filled to the rim with pennies.

  She undressed, and gazed at her body in the mirror. The raised but faded scars that crisscrossed her thighs were the result of cuts she'd made. A single- edge razor blade when she was younger and solidly in her Goth period had left the marks. On her stomach, the tattoo of a butterfly with its wings removed and lying beside its bleeding body was another reminder of that period. She hated it, and couldn't wait to have it removed. Her mother had offered to pay to have it taken off, but Alice had refused on principle.

  She fought an urge to get into her car, a beater Toyota, and go find Earl. He'd come around in a day or two, with his head up his ass, give her excuses, and she'd forgive him. He depended on the money her mother gave her, or she stole, for his subsistence. She doled it out as she saw fit. It was the only control she exerted on him, and was a very effective rein.

  Her mother was like some kind of parrot, cawing the same words constantly about Earl being dirty, unattractive, stupid, worthless, and a bad influence on her daughter. Okay, Earl had his faults, but he alone needed, understood, and cared about her. She took out a picture of herself and Earl taken in a dollar photo booth at the mall and smiled at his image. In the shot he was wearing a T-shirt with “Fuck you very much” on it. His eyes were crossed comically and his long fingers were making a gang sign, funny because what gang would want Earl?

  Alice thought about the man she'd sat beside on the flight and wondered if he could draw Earl from a picture. She took up her Game Boy, smiling as she imagined him opening his little briefcase and discovering the toy was gone.

  EIGHT

  At six A.M. on Monday Natasha was at the hospital in her scrubs. She had just finished ster ilizing her hands for a hernia operation on a nine- year-old girl. As her surgical nurse was slipping on Dr. McCarty's left glove, Natasha's hands began to tremble gently almost imperceptibly. Panic filled her as her nurse, Gloria Ready, fixed her with a look of concern.

  “Are you all right, Dr. McCarty?” Gloria asked her.

  Natasha managed to smile reassuringly. “I'm fine, Gloria.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  “ Pre- op jitters,” Natasha told her.

  Natasha heard something behind her and turned to see that Dr. George Walls, the senior partner in her practice, had entered the room. There was a snap as he pulled off his glove. “Hello, Natasha, Nurse Ready.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Walls,” Gloria said, looking down.

  Walls stared at Natasha, scrutinizing her. She dropped her hands to her sides.

  “I'll be in the OR,” Gloria said, leaving.

  “Natasha, is everything all right?” George asked, frowning with concern.

  “Fine, George.”

  “Hold out your hands for me.”

  “My hands are fine,” Natasha said, feeling fear and embarrassment well up inside her.

  “Please, humor an old friend,” he insisted.

  She held out her hands and her fingers trembled slightly.

  “Your hands are uncertain,” he said firmly.

  “I don't know what this is about,” she said, on the verge of tears.

  “I'm sure you are perfectly fine, but not to perform surgery.”

  Natasha said, weakly, “It's probably nothing but pre- op jitters. I didn't sleep very well last night.”

  Walls smiled reassuringly. “Let's do this as a precaution, Natasha. Let me take this one and you can assist. If that's all right?”

  “Of course. Thank you.” Natasha could have argued the point. She was sure the trembling would pass as it always had. During the last operation her hands had been certain. Being replaced was humiliating.

  “Has this happened before?” he asked. “These tremors?”

  “No. Well, not during surgery. And it passed in a few minutes. I would never….” She exhaled loudly. “I should see someone. I'm sure….I've been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Why don't you schedule something with Walter Edmonds? It never hurts to be certain.”

  Dr. Edmonds was a neurologist.

  A neurologist can diagnose neurological diseases.

  A neurologist ca
n end a career with the truth.

  “I will do that today,” Natasha said weakly.

  “I don't see where it could hurt a thing,” Dr. Walls said, smiling kindly. He turned to the sink and began to wash his hands meticulously.

  NINE

  For the past month or so, Ward had been able to remember his dreams only in piecemeal. While he'd been in Vegas he had dreamed, and his dreams had included a recurring nightmare, that he was lying in warm water as thick as motor oil. There was pressure on his chest like someone sitting on top of him. Above him, moving into view like a cloud, was Natasha's face, abnormally white—bleached of its normal color— and there was a bright red line on her neck behind her collarbone. Ward could feel her hands on either side of his face, and he could see that she was crying. And over her shoulder he saw Barney materializing. Barney's face was illuminated a golden hue. And his son reached over his mother's shoulder and Ward reached up and took his hand, and he felt a remarkable lightness, and was floating up, up….

  Ward McCarty awoke slowly to slits of bright sunlight being fractioned across the landscape of the guest bedroom wall like the stripes of a loping zebra. He heard the dull bumping as the hard- cloth vertical blinds swayed against each other, powered by the cold air rushing silently from the register below them. He closed his eyes and knew he hadn't dreamed at all.

  Slowly Ward drew his strength together, sat up, moved his legs so his feet were on the hardwood floor, and yawned. The large red numbers on the alarm clock read 7:32. A white- coated Natasha was by now working her way through the hospital rooms. Or maybe she was already in a suite operating on some parents’ child, those perfect hands moving deliberately to open and remove some part gone bad, to make a repair, to heal, to fix.