Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [70]
As it turned out, Ginnie was the one who couldn’t live with it.
They celebrated her decision with wine and take-out meals from the best Italian restaurant in the world, just down the street. Drunk and laughing, they made love in the living room, progressing in giddy stages from the couch to the rug to the bare hardwood floor in the foyer.
And the next day Timothy Fries had visited the clinic.
Fries was a street person who had spent most of his life shuttling from one psychiatric ward to another. Doctors had variously diagnosed him as acutely psychotic, manic-depressive, paranoid, and schizophrenic. Every pharmaceutical treatment had been tried; none had achieved more than transitory success. He had periods of lucidity, then relapsed into craziness. His family had given up on him. He had no friends, no home, no job, no life.
When his path had crossed Virginia Shepherd’s, Fries had been thirty-two years old, penniless, ragged, and constantly afraid.
Ginnie did clerical work at the clinic, freeing up the staff nurses for more important duties. Part of her job was to interview incoming patients to elicit their medical histories.
On that Wednesday morning two years ago. Fries had entered, complaining of a headache. He had visited the place twice before, but always on weekends, when Ginnie wasn’t around.
Had she been familiar with his case, she would have known that his headaches were psychosomatic, a product of his belief that larval worms had crawled into his skull via his ear canal and were presently feeding on his brain.
As it was, she knew only that the man in the anteroom was emaciated and scared and in pain. She asked him the standard questions, marked down his more intelligible replies.
He was mentally ill—this much was evident from his scattershot thought processes and muted affect—but she didn’t judge him to be either paranoid or dangerous.
And so she made an error, a small error, hardly important.
She turned away from him to put her clipboard in the out basket. That was all.
In that moment Timothy Fries lunged at her, and she felt something sharp and hot burst through the bunched muscles at the base of her spine, and there was a rush of numbness in her legs, a dizzy collapse, an impression of chaos as nurses and doctors filled the anteroom and dragged the shrieking man away.
He had found a knife, a rusty treasure scavenged from the trash, and had concealed it under his coat when he entered the clinic. Apparently he’d become convinced that the clinic itself was responsible for the worms in his brain, and he was determined to take revenge.
Anyone who worked there could have been his target. Ginnie just happened to be convenient.
The blade had severed her spinal cord but hadn’t killed her. She lingered in the hospital for two weeks.
During that time Shepherd left her room only once a day, for an hour, to go home, shower, shave, and change his clothes.
The doctors did what they could. They injected Ginnie with massive doses of methylprednisolone to minimize the swelling that could choke the blood vessels near her spine. They gave her morphine when her legs spasmed. They ordered soft-tissue massages to prevent the loss of muscle tone in her legs, and antibiotics to ward off infection.
Even so, after ten days they knew enough to tell Roy Shepherd that his wife was unlikely ever to walk again. Having suffered a complete transection of her spinal cord, she had neither feeling nor voluntary movement below the waist.
Shepherd remembered the blank stretch of time that followed his conversation with the doctors. Numb, disoriented, he walked blindly out of the hospital and stood on a walkway near a stand of palo verde trees. He blinked at the sun. He tried to think.
Then he saw a hummingbird alight briefly on a green branch before launching itself in hectic motion.
It flew so fast, with such ease, darting from bush to bush in search of nectar, wings strobing in the sun.
Ginnie had been like