When Darkness Falls

Beyond the Dark

You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

--Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights

Chapter 1:

Heathcliff was a prick.

(The quiet beeping of a monitor. The rhythmic hush of the respirator. White walls, white sheets, white floors… and occasionally a nurse’s flowered scrubs, more blasphemous than cheerful amidst the sterility).

Charis had made up her mind about Heathcliff when she’d been forced to read Wuthering Heights for high school, then again for college. She hadn’t veered from that opinion when her artsy friend Diana insisted on renting the movie. By the time Charis was pushing thirty and joined a reading group at her local bookstore, she had the guts to argue it out loud. Mr. Famous Romantic Hero was a bully and a selfish jerk.

(Tubes. Wires. Numbers and displays. Technology seemed such a cold way to keep a human being alive. Especially this human. Especially when he shouldn’t be.

Alive).

Some idiot named David Fields had been crazy enough to argue back. “Don’t you believe in passion?” he’d asked. “Emotions that push a person beyond reason? A love so powerful that you don’t care whether or not you’re selfish, so necessary that you’d sell your soul—Hell, you’d sell your best friend’s soul—to keep from losing it?”

(Paper-wrapped footsteps beyond the doorway—her face lifted in bleary hope for a doctor. Had something changed? Was there even a chance? But it was someone else, an old man crumpled with despair, being led toward another of the ICU rooms).

Charis had been a never-married and glad of it, back then. From what she saw of friends who’d wed too young and were having trouble with rebellious children or broken marriages, she felt increasingly smart for having resisted that complication. She’d told David-the-idiot exactly that. But as with her opinion on the novel, he took her argument as a challenge.

Two years later, they’d married. Soon, they’d celebrate their four-year anniversary. Charis hadn’t known such happiness existed. True, they had their little problems. Happily ever afters weren’t immune to minor conflict. But David was great, really. Even if she wasn’t as enthusiastic as him. Even if maybe she disappointed him, now and then. Every day, David told her he loved her.

And Wuthering Heights remained their favorite book.

“‘Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or satan could inflict would have parted us,’” Charis read. Her voice rasped, hoarse, but she didn’t dare stop. The familiar scene, in which selfish Heathcliff berated his dying Cathy, felt like a magic charm. If she just kept reading, David might still open his eyes. David might sit up. David might argue with her, once again, like he always had, about ridiculous passions and limitless love. “‘You, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it…’”

Her throat felt like sandpaper. Trying to swallow, she made the mistake of looking up. Her world swooped at the shocking sight of David’s swollen, bandage-wrapped face, the tube down his throat, the screws drilled into his skull. It was too much metal and plastic, too much whiteness, too little man. She squeezed his limp hand around the hard clamp of a pulse-ox monitor. It didn’t feel like his hand; it felt like a thing, a form made of skin and meat and bone, but not him.

She made herself look back down to their book.

The book was safer than the horrible place that reality had become since the phone call… yesterday? Maybe the day before that. She didn’t know or care what time it was, anymore. Her ability to care was dying, on the bed beside her.

…Accident...

…Teenager ran a red light...

…Children in the crosswalk...

…We think your husband pulled into the intersection to protect….

She forced the words in order to keep from weeping, desperate now for the familiarity of Heathcliff’s selfish pleas. “‘So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you…?’”

But the lines had taken on a horrible new familiarity. Always before, Charis could distance herself from the book’s desperation. Heathcliff was, after all, a prick—and so unlike David. David was selfless. Heroic, even. In this day and age, who would guess that there were still heroes?

… Head trauma… CT scans aren’t good… agonally breathing… won’t be long now….

Stupid damned hero. He could have stayed safe, but his selflessness had killed him. The doctors had said as much. All that was left was the wait. Loss had become too real now, a force that didn’t discern between the worthy and the unworthy. Between people who’d chosen wisely, and those who’d chosen poorly. Between people who were kind, and who were selfish—

None of it mattered in this cold, horrible place. Here, loss was loss. Lives could be fragmented no matter their worth.

God, she was tired. Normally the ICU had strict visiting hours, but the nurses and doctors had made an exception for Charis, for her death watch. They’d brought water and snacks and begged her to rest and let her friends or family take over, but Charis refused to give up a minute, a second, a breath with him.

Not if these were the last she’d get.

It had been hours. Or days. Her eyes could hardly focus on the familiar words. Her dry lips moved, but she got no more help from her throat. Desperate, she bowed her head onto her arm across the bed rail, just for a minute. She wished David smelled more like David and less like antiseptic, less like blood. She desperately wished she’d been more of what he’d wanted in life….

But no, she couldn’t go there.

She thought of Wuthering Heights.

‘What kind of living will it be when you—oh God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?’

She startled awake to alarms from the monitors that crowded the tiny, sterile room. Even as she blinked into comprehension, nurses were drawing her away from the bed, making space. The book wasn’t in her hand anymore; she must have dropped it. Doctors bent over David, talking about BP and ICP and dilation like it was algebra homework and not her husband’s life—her life—withering away in front of her.

“No,” rasped Charis, recognizing the truth even as she protested it. She’d been staring at those monitors long enough over the last day or two to recognize what the falling numbers and flattening lines and buzzing alarms meant. No.

“Run the tape,” ordered the older doctor, while a younger doctor squeezed on the IV bag and pinched open David’s eye and shook his head. Machines continued to wail impersonal protests.

No.

A nurse rubbed Charis’s back in mute sympathy. Was that part of her job, too? Charis strained away from her. “David—”

Don’t leave me! Even now, she couldn’t force such dramatic words from her throat. Charis wasn’t the kind of woman who wailed protests in hospital rooms. Charis was discreet. Pragmatic.

At this moment, she hated her pragmatism almost as much as David always had.

“Paddles,” said the younger doctor.

“No,” insisted the older one. “Call it.”

“Is there a DNR?”

Horrified, Charis forced her gaze from David long enough to turn, long enough to recognize the Do Not Resuscitate order that lay, unsigned and forgotten, on her purse in the corner. So much for being the efficient one. She should have handled that; it was the right thing to do. She and David had talked about this, back when it was comfortably abstract. He wanted to donate his organs, the damned hero. He didn’t want to be a vegetable….

She could do it now. Snatch it up. Scribble her signature as her final, brave tribute to the man she’d loved—

But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t sign it. Not yet. He might force her to say goodbye, but she wasn’t about to volunteer it.

Maybe she was as selfish as Heathcliff, after all.

Turning back to the bed, Charis saw that the paperback novel had been kicked underneath.

“Paddles,” repeated the younger doctor, but the older one said, “Don’t be a sadist. I’m calling it. Eleven o’three.”

So that she could always know, to the minute, when her world had ended.

“You can go to him,” whispered the nurse, and Charis numbly did as she was told. The nurse snapped off the alarms, the sudden silence drowning. Echoing. Awful.

Charis took David’s hand, still warm, no more limp than it had been a few minutes ago. She stared into his swollen, battered face, searching for any sign of life, willing him to open his laughing dark eyes, silently pleading, praying….

It didn’t make sense. How could she still be here in this cold, sterile world of machines and strangers, if he wasn’t?

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered at last. He’d wanted emotion? Her words were suddenly thick with tears and desperation, and she couldn’t stop them. “You can’t be that selfish. Don’t leave me, David. Don’t do it. I can’t let you go.”

“It’s better this way,” said the older doctor from the doorway, even as the younger one hovered. “Perhaps Dr. Bennett wasn’t as clear as he should have been about one’s chances after severe head trauma. If your husband had survived….”

But Charis ignored him, bent across the rail, pressed her face into David’s gown-covered shoulder. “I’m not letting you go,” she slurred. Some part of her was aware how ugly this was—her wet words, her cruel insistence. How indiscreet. But her need won out. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. You can’t come into my life and change everything and then leave. Please. Please. Don’t make me stay here alone….”

Which is when the monitor beeped.

Everything in Charis went still. He was alive?

“Yes,” breathed the younger doctor in triumph.

“Oh, God,” muttered the older one. “God forbid.”

“He’s alive?” Charis whispered, gulping back her misery, afraid to hope.

“For all the damned good it will do him,” snarled the older doctor—and left.

Charis stared into the swollen wreckage that had been David’s face… and horror slowly settled across her, turned in her empty stomach, tightened into her throat.

He was still gone.

“Dr. Smit is old school,” murmured the younger man—Bennett? “Not all surgeons are on track with the new guidelines….”

His noises meant less than nothing against a truth that her eyes, her heart could see. David was still breathing, thanks to the tubes. His heart was still pumping, thanks to the fluids the younger doctor had been pushing since the accident. But damn it….

He wasn’t there anymore!

She’d lost him anyway. And worse, she hadn’t let his body go with him. The guilt of it welled up inside her like vomit—she staggered back, stumbled out of the tiny ICU room, slumped against the white wall across the hallway. What had she done?

He was a hero. He always had been. But she was a coward.

She was supposed to have loved him, no matter how rarely she’d been able to say it.

What had she done to him?

Vaguely, she became aware of the open doorway into the next room, of the old man she’d seen before, now pressing his lips to his wife’s blue-veined hand. As if in a dream, she became aware of his weeping. “Kathy,” he said, through desolate tears. “Kathy….”

Like from the book. Charis whispered, “‘How can I live without my heart? How can I live without my soul?’”

But better that kind of fate than what she’d done. She shrank away from the strangers’ pain, from her own cowardice—

--And something cold washed past her.

It felt real, as real as a current of invisible water. Cold, and ugly, and pitiless. She recoiled from it, bumped back against the wall, stared at—

At nothingness.

At linoleum, and glass, and glaring white.

She stretched out her shaking hand—and again, she felt it, like thick, diseased liquid sliding icily past her fingers. It was real… and then it was gone. Rather, it was past. She shuddered, afraid whatever it was might linger for a lot longer than it should.

If that had been David’s ghost, it had been the exact opposite of what she would have expected from him….

But exactly what she deserved.

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