Henry Franks A Novel

fifteen





Henry woke with a headache and rubbed his eyes in a vain attempt to relieve the pressure. Distant images from his nightmare danced away from his memory as he looked around his room. The sun lanced through his window, low, hot, and far too bright to face this early in the morning. He sighed, swung his legs off the bed, and stood, bracing himself with his arms against the wall to keep from falling when he stumbled. The scars running down his thighs were puckered, raw, and in spots painful.

The skin on his legs changed tone and consistency from patch to patch, and some sections had long since lost anything more than an odd pins-and-needles sensation. His ankles, circled by a thin white diamond pattern of scars like his left wrist, itched, and he lifted first one foot then the other to rub what remained of the ointment his father made for him into the skin.

He carried the empty tub with him to the kitchen for his father to refill.

“That lasted less than a month, Henry.”

“I know.”

“Want me to make it stronger this time?”

Henry slouched down in his chair and took furtive bites of his toast. “Yes,” he said.

“Itching’s worse?”

Henry nodded, not looking up.

“Having nightmares again?” his father asked.

Henry swallowed the last of his breakfast, then pulled his hair down in front of his face.

“Henry?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“I’m fine.”

His father walked to the window, taking another look around the backyard. “Almost ready to go?” he asked when he turned around.

“Whenever,” Henry said.

“Remember, this isn’t an official visit. It’ll just be you and me.”

“Fine.”

“I thought Dr. Saville was working with you about that,” his father said with a half-frown on his face.

Henry followed behind as they walked out of the house, dressed far too warmly for the late August sun. Across the yard, in front of her house, Justine was setting up the sprinkler with her younger brother. Dressed as usual in cut-offs and a bikini top, she waved before jumping into the water.

“Henry?” his father called from the car.

With the door open in his hand, he stood watching her jump in and out of the spray.

“Henry!”

Shaking his head, sending a wave of hair into his eyes, he looked at his father, and then got in the car. They drove off in silence down Sea Island Road toward the Causeway and Brunswick.

Southeast Georgia Regional Medical Center was the largest hospital complex between Jacksonville to the south and Savannah to the north. Constantly under renovation, it boasted a state-of-the-art maternity ward and a turn-of-the-last-century morgue.

They pulled into the staff parking lot and Henry followed his father through a series of tunnels and freight elevators to the sub-basement of the Medical Examiner’s offices. One of every three fluorescents was turned off to save money on the weekend, and, of those that remained lit, most were flickering and yellow.

The hallway was made of concrete blocks that had once been painted a calming green, but most had faded to bland. FORENSICS was stenciled on the window to their immediate left, and Henry’s father had to swipe a card to enter the room.

Despite the ancient setting, the equipment was fairly contemporary and fully functional, a result both of FLETC’s overwhelming government presence in the neighborhood and a brief modernization whirlwind when Sea Island had hosted the G8 summit in 2004. Lining the walls were a bank of heavily latched metal doors. In the middle of the room, two autopsy tables, surrounded by light trees, stood empty.

“Lovely office you have,” Henry said, trying not to touch anything as he stopped in the door.

“I’m not the Medical Examiner,” his father said, pushing a gurney over to Henry. “Here, hop on.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just a gurney. The equipment in a morgue is slightly different than most since the subject can’t exactly get up on the table by themselves.”

“‘Subject,’ lovely,” Henry said as he sat on the bare metal. “Cold, too.”

“Next time I’ll bring a sheet for you.”

“There’s gonna be a next time?”

“I’d like to take a look every year or so, make sure everything’s all right, even though you say you feel fine.”

His father pushed open the doors and wheeled Henry down the hall. The room they entered was dark, and the lights started to flicker to life automatically as the doors opened.

“That’s helpful,” Henry said as the fluorescent glow finally brightened.

“Ready?” his father asked.

He was about to answer when the door swung back open.

“William?” an older man asked, poking his head into the room. “What are you doing here?”

“Morning, Dr. Sanderson,” his father said, after a moment of silence that seemed to last far too long. “My son, Henry, has a school project and I was just showing him around to give him a feel for the hospital. I hope that’s not a problem?”

“That’s fine,” Dr. Sanderson said, waving at Henry. “Your father’s a great asset to the team here. Wouldn’t know what to do without him.”

“Thank you, sir,” his father replied.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your tour. It’s not as gruesome as you’d think from what you see on television, Henry.”

Dr. Sanderson turned to leave, his hand on the knob, then looked back over his shoulder. “Make sure I’m set up early Monday morning, William. I have a presentation for the task force on the serial before noon. It’ll be doctors only, so you’ll need to make yourself scarce.”

“Yes, sir.”

The doors swung shut behind him as he left and his shoes echoed down the hall long after he was gone.

Henry stared at the floor and ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it down over his face. “I thought—” he said, but he couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Henry,” his father said. “I can explain.” He took a long time to walk around the gurney to sit next to his son.

“I thought you were a doctor,” Henry said, still not looking at him.

“I am. Or I guess, I was. It’s a long story. After your mother died … ” He stood up and the gurney rolled a couple feet until it bumped into the wall.

Henry braced himself and watched his father pace the room.

“There was an accident,” he said. “She was gone; you were … well, you were sleeping.”

“I know.”

“You remember?”

“No, but you’ve told me that part before.”

His father shook his head, “Yes, I suppose I have. I try to forget some things.”

“I try to remember,” Henry said, but his father had paced to the far end of the room and didn’t seem to hear.

“I chose to stay home and take care of you, Henry. I needed to, for me. Can you understand that?” His father came up to him and took his hand. “I need you to understand. Everything I did was for you. And for her. Always for her.”

Henry looked at his hand, unable even to feel his father’s touch, and pulled away. Too many questions tumbled end over end in his mind, and it was suddenly far too difficult to breathe. He blinked but his father was still there, towering over him, when he opened his eyes.

What did you do? Henry tried to withdraw even farther from the stranger standing in front of him.

“Henry?”

“What does that mean? ‘Everything you did’?”

His father walked back to the far wall, facing the tiling. He straightened his shoulders and turned back around. “I did what I had to do, to save you. To save both of you. Do you understand that?”

Henry nodded, unable to find the strength to say no, and went back to staring at the floor. The cement was slightly concave, leading to drainage pipes. He closed his eyes, trying not to see imaginary traces of blood swirling away down the drain. Somewhere, a far distance away, his father continued talking, but he wasn’t sure he still understood the language. It sounded like English but the words were meaningless.

“I stopped practicing, and then you woke up and were well enough to go back to school. I needed a job.” He shrugged, then looked away. “And here we are.”

“Here we are,” Henry repeated after the silence began to stretch once more. Even so, the words were limp and lifeless. He counted to ten, holding his breath the entire time. “Do they know you’re a doctor?” he asked.

“No.” His father walked back to him, a smile plastered to his face. “It’s better this way.”

“This is better?”

His father paced back across the room. “No questions. No chitchat with co-workers. I keep to myself and take care of you. To me, that’s better.”

The silence stretched out, with his father just standing there, staring at him.

“Your mother would be very proud of you, Henry.”

Henry shrugged and then looked away. “I wouldn’t even recognize her.”

Even from the other side of the morgue, he heard his father choke off a sob, but he didn’t look up.

“What was her name?” Henry asked, the question whisper-silent.

“Christine,” his father said, barely more than a breath of sound. “Her name was Christine.”

The name settled in his memories like a long-lost friend, without the alien strangeness that ‘Frank’ and ‘Victor’ always carried. Henry closed his eyes, reveling in the comfort of her name.

“Christine Franks,” his father whispered.

Henry’s eyes flew open. The sense of the long-lost friend was gone, replaced, once again, by a stranger where his mother, for just a moment, had lived within him.

“Christine,” Henry said, soft as a whisper. The name, familiar and safe, was a balm and he repeated it. “Christine Franks.” He pulled the hair down over his face so his father couldn’t see him and mouthed her name again.

Only the first name, he thought, was real.