I shouted, “NO! What happened? Both of them? That’s crazy.” Her mouth moved, but she didn’t speak.
I pictured a car accident and immediately thought, Karl and Tre will be all right. The car was big. It had seat belts and air bags and a kiddie seat in back. I ducked into the exam room, grabbed my bag, and ran toward the exit, with Mary Maillet following me.
“Wait. Brigid.”
I stopped running and half-turned to face her.
She had clasped her hands under her chin and looked absolutely stricken when she said, “Karl is dead. It may have been cardiac arrest. I’m so sorry. He had Tre with him in a Baby Bj?rn when he fell down the stairs.”
“What stairs? What are you talking about? Where are they?”
“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Maillet said.
During that frantic, frustrating, stop-and-go drive to Charité, Maillet told me that Karl had been found at the foot of a long flight of stone stairs in Volkspark. The baby had been strapped across his chest and had hit her head on the treads when he fell on top of her.
“She’s in the ICU,” Maillet told me.
That, I remember.
I was screaming inside my head, seeing ahead to the hospital, to the ICU, to shoving people aside to get to my child. I begged God, Please, please, let her be all right.
I got out of the car before it stopped. I bulled my way through reception and onto the ICU floor, crashing into orderlies and gurneys, knocking chairs over. I entered the glass-enclosed ward, medical personnel staring at me as I shouted, “Lenz! Her name is Theresa Lenz! Where is she?”
By the time I found her small pod, the vital-signs monitor was flatlining.
I screamed out loud to God, “No, no, take me! Damn You, take me instead!”
The only answer was the high-pitched squeal of the machine.
God’s gift was gone.
Chapter 57
I FORCED my eyes open, hoping that Karl was still asleep. I would wake him and tell him that I’d had the most horrible dream. I would say, “Karl. See a cardiologist, today.”
Tori was sitting by the side of my hospital bed.
“I’m here, darling,” she said. “I’m here.”
“How?”
“Dr. Maillet called me. My number was in your wallet.”
I saw it all in her face. I hadn’t been dreaming. My husband. My child. They were dead. And the future I’d imagined, of seeing Tre grow up, of becoming even closer to Karl—all of that was dead, too. Tori reached for me, and I let my hysteria have its way. When I pulled away, after I had dried my face on the sleeve of my gown, I said, “Tori. I want to see them.”
Tori grabbed my hands. “Are you sure?”
I nodded and sobbed again.
“I’ll be right back.”
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and soon, Tori returned with a nurse. The nurse put slippers on my feet, then brought us to the morgue, where a pathologist was waiting for us in the stainless-steel, ice-cold storage room.
I stood in my cotton gown and leaned on Tori as the assistant slid out a drawer and folded the sheet down from my dear husband’s face.
The tears streamed down my cheeks as I saw Karl lying there, gray faced and inanimate. The bridge of his nose had been sliced through where his glasses had cut into his flesh in the fall. His forehead and chin were abraded, but not the palms of his hands. He hadn’t tried to break his fall, which told me that he’d been dead before he dropped, crushing our three-month-old between his body and the hard stone treads of the staircase.
Had he had heart problems before this attack?
I thought not. He would have told me.
Was his consciousness still alive somewhere, perhaps in the corner of the ceiling? I did not feel his presence at all.
Where was God? I didn’t feel His presence, either.
But I called to Him, silently speaking to Him through our private conduit in my mind.
You’re a monster, I said to the Almighty God of Moses and Solomon, the Father of Christ and all of humanity.
I’m taking this personally. You gave to me, only to take it all away, and You’ve done this to me before. I don’t care why. You’ve lost me. You can never make this up to me, and You can never get me back. You’re diabolical. Go to hell. Or go back to hell. And don’t give me any shit about millions of birds.
A stool appeared beside me. I sat beside Karl’s body and told him that I didn’t hold Tre’s death against him.
“I love you. I will always love you. You and Tre are part of me, now and forever.”
I kissed his forehead. I straightened his hair.
I apologized to the pathologist for any outbursts or rudeness and asked to see my baby. He didn’t want to show her to me, but, reluctantly, he opened her drawer.
I folded down Tre’s thin cotton blanket, and I saw what had been done to her while surgeons had tried to save her life. I counted four incisions where tubes and drains had been inserted through her pale skin and into her organs. I saw the horrible violation of her skull, where it had been opened and bone plates removed.