Chapter 11 - The White Ward and the Weight of Living
The ceiling of the clinic in Grand Marais was painted the sterile white of crushed chalk.
A single fluorescent tube hummed directly above my cot, its vibration vibrating through the metal frame into my teeth.
I woke to the rhythmic, pneumatic hiss of an oxygen machine and the pungent tang of iodine drying on skin.
My right thigh was wrapped in thick surgical gauze, a deep, throbbing ache radiating through the bone every time my heart contracted.
Beside my narrow mattress sat a metal pole holding a saline drip that emptied droplet by droplet into the vein on the back of my hand.
For a few terrifying seconds, the room spun with the shadows of the bluff: the sound of shattering porch timber, Frank Moroni’s chrome pistol, the splash of burning green plastic in the cast-iron stove.
My hand shot out, grasping at the empty air beside the sheets.
“Clara,” the name tore from my throat like dry grit.
“Lie back down before you tear the arterial stitches, Arthur.”
The voice came from the foot of the bed, calm, measured, and familiar.
Gregory sat on a plastic bucket chair wedged into the corner of the small room, his jacket resting across his lap, revealing the dark shoulder holster beneath.
His hands were bandaged around the knuckles where frostbite had begun to blister, but his eyes were clear, steady, and watchful.
“Where is she?” I pushed my elbows into the mattress, ignoring the blinding spike of agony that tore through my torn quad muscle.
“Across the hall in room four,” Gregory answered without moving.
“The country doctor here doesn't ask questions when you hand him five thousand dollars in cash and tell him a deer rifle discharged accidentally in a hunting blind.”
“He spent three hours picking lead fragments out of your leg while Clara sat on the gurney next to you holding a light.”
“How bad is she, Gregory?”
My underboss looked down at his boots, the leather scuffed and stained with road salt and dried snow.
“She had a seizure about twenty minutes after we pulled away from the bluff.”
“Her right side went completely limp for almost an hour.”
“She couldn't speak, Arthur.”
“She just looked out the window of the truck with tears running down her cheeks while her jaw locked up.”
A heavy, suffocating weight settled onto my chest, far worse than any bullet wound.
I swung my legs over the side of the narrow examination cot, my bare feet hitting the freezing linoleum floor.
The room tilted violently, nausea surging into my throat as blood rushed down into my damaged limb.
“Boss, don't,” Gregory stood up, his broad hands bracing my shoulders before I could hit the floor.
“You lost two pints of blood on that ice.”
“You can't walk across that corridor without pulling the muscle apart.”
“Get out of my way, Gregory,” I gritted out through clenched teeth, my forehead breaking into a cold, greasy sweat.
He looked into my face, saw the desperate, unhinged resolve in my eyes, and slowly released his grip on my arms.
He stepped back, reached into the corner, and offered me an old wooden crutch with a worn rubber tip that had probably sat in the clinic’s closet for twenty years.
I took the crutch, tucked the wooden pad beneath my left armpit, and dragged my right leg across the floor.
Every inch felt like driving a rusty spike through my knee, but the pain was an anchor that kept me from drifting into blackness.
The clinic hallway was completely empty, silent except for the wind rattling the outer storm windows against the wooden siding.
The clock above the nurse’s station read ten minutes past noon.
The sun was pouring through the frost-crusted transom windows, casting brilliant, pale rectangles of light across the linoleum.
I pushed open the door to room four with the palm of my free hand.
Clara lay on a narrow bed beneath a heavy, home-spun wool quilt that had probably belonged to the doctor’s family.
Her hair was combed back, tucked behind her ears, revealing the pale, translucent contour of her face.
An IV line was taped to the inside of her left wrist, feeding her anti-seizure medication through a slow plastic drip.
Her eyes were open, staring at the patch of pale blue sky visible through the high window above the headboard.
When she heard the dull thud of my crutch against the floor, her head turned slowly toward the door.
The right side of her mouth was slightly slack, the muscle tone sluggish, but the light in her hazel eyes was pure, sharp, and incandescent.
“You are supposed to be sleeping, Arthur,” she said, her voice slightly slurred, the consonants softening at the edges.
“The doctor said the bullet grazed your femoral artery by less than an inch.”
I dragged myself to the edge of her bed, dropped the wooden crutch onto the floor with a loud clatter, and collapsed into the metal folding chair beside her mattress.
I reached out with both hands, picking up her limp right hand from the quilt, and pressed it against my chest, right over my thumping heart.
Her skin was warm now, but terrifyingly fragile, the small bones feeling as delicate as the wing of a sparrow beneath my calloused fingers.
“I don't care about the artery, Clara,” I said, resting my chin against the rough wool of the blanket.
“I only care about what happens to you tomorrow.”
Clara looked down at our joined hands, her thumb twitching slightly against my knuckles as her brain fought to send the signal through damaged nerves.
“Tomorrow doesn't belong to us, Arthur,” she whispered, her eyes meeting mine without flinching.
“We burned thirty-two million dollars in that stove.”
“The federal government has seized every asset bearing your family name from Chicago to Wilmington.”
“Frank Moroni is dead in a snowbank, and his crew will tear the state of Illinois apart trying to find out who killed him.”
“We have no kingdom, Arthur.”
“We have no office, no luxury penthouses, no drivers, and no private jets.”
“We are two broken people sitting in a county clinic sixty miles from the border of Canada with nothing to our names except a four-wheel-drive truck and three duffel bags of clothes.”
I leaned closer until my forehead rested against the edge of her mattress, my eyes stinging with tears that I no longer had the arrogance to hold back.
“Then we have everything I ever wanted,” I said against the cloth.
“For five years, I sat in a palace made of lies and violence, Clara.”
“I thought I was a prince because men trembled when I spoke and politicians took my checks.”
“I was a ghost living inside an empty suit.”
“I didn't start living until I watched that money burn in the stove and realized that the only thing in the universe that mattered was making sure you took your next breath.”
Clara’s left hand, the strong one, reached up and slowly tangled its fingers into my disheveled hair, pulling my face upward until our eyes were inches apart.
“There is an experimental oncology unit at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,” she murmured, her voice steadying as the medication cleared the haze from her speech.
“Dr. Vance mentioned it in his final consultation notes before I packed my bags in Chicago.”
“They are testing a targeted immunotherapy protocol for aggressive glioblastomas.”
“The survival rate is low, Arthur.”
“Less than fifteen percent over two years.”
“And the cost of the treatment would drain three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket because no insurance company will touch an unapproved protocol.”
I raised my head, a fierce, burning light entering my eyes that had nothing to do with syndicate wars or boardroom politics.
“We have forty-five thousand dollars of untraceable travel cash in Gregory’s duffel bag,” I said, my voice rising with absolute certainty.
“I have a collection of antique pocket watches locked in a private safe-deposit box in Milwaukee that no federal warrant can touch.”
“I will sell the watches.”
“I will sell my grandmother’s wedding ring that I kept in the pocket of my overcoat.”
“I will wash dishes in the hospital cafeteria, I will shovel coal, I will pave roads in forty-degree weather with a broken leg.”
“You are not going to die in a forgotten cabin, Clara.”
“You are going to Rochester, and you are going to fight for that fifteen percent.”
“And I will be sitting on the plastic chair beside your bed every single second until you do.”
Clara stared at me, the corners of her eyes crinkling as tears spilled over her lashes, pooling in the hollows of her collarbone.
For five years, she had been my protector, my buffer against the violence of the world, carrying the weight of my sins while keeping her own pain locked in the dark.
Now, for the first time since I had hired her out of an administrative temp agency on a rainy morning half a decade ago, she let the wall collapse completely.
She buried her face in the curve of my shoulder, her body shaking with deep, silent sobs as the terror she had carried alone for months finally found a place to rest.
I wrapped my arms around her narrow shoulders, holding her against my chest as the winter sun climbed higher in the Minnesota sky.
The empire was dead.
May you like
The king was gone.
And in the quiet room on the edge of the northern wilderness, the man who was left behind began to learn how to love.
