Endgame
       Chapter 17
 

Dante claws at his overturned BMW, trying to get to his wife. Deafening is the rain pounding on the car's underside, the sound of sirens from police cars, an ambulance, fire trucks, Dante's own screaming,

"Help me! Push harder! Harder!"

Probably 20 people are pushing against the car. Their help is worthless. Rain has transformed the ravine into a river of mud-laden quicksand that has devoured the cab of his car. Volunteers back away, giving up.

"Get back here! Help me," Dante screams at them, screams at faces full of pity and knowing.

"Do not look at me like that! Stop looking at me like that! What is wrong with you? Help me get my wife!"

But their looks remain. They stand silent, surreal, strobed in red and blue from the revolving flashes of emergency vehicles. They stand silent unaware that the soul within the half-buried car is not the only one now lost.

"Fine," Dante screams, his eyes raging as he turns around to the car.

No longer able to tell if the water on his face is from the sheets of rain or of his own making, Dante places his hands perpendicular to the support beam between the inverted driver door and back seat, pushing until he can feel his hamstrings ripping.

The car is moving. It is moving up and out of its viscous grave. Dante hears the cheers of onlookers as other hands quickly join his to push.

"Hold it up! Keep it up! Let me go in and pull her out!"

Dante snakes through the shattered, upside-down driver's side window. He can see her.

"Maria," he says with hope. But as he becomes aware, "No," follows as a whispered reflex.

Her body is curled up, lifeless, on the slanted inside roof of the car. She had not worn her seatbelt. Mud covers her. At his wife's face, Dante notices the clay mingling with a shimmering, darker substance.

"No," he screams so loud the car vibrates. 

"Hurry! It's slipping," someone shouts.

Dante grabs his wife's legs, "Ok, pull me out, get me out" he screams. As he bends his head to clear the window rim, a swarm of paramedics, firemen, and volunteers descend to help him pull out his wife before the car escapes the grip of those keeping it above of the ravine.

Finally, they pull her out. They had been pulling on dead weight.

Dante pulls his wife's body into his arms and sinks with her to the ground. Her face is still hidden in a mask of mud and blood. But he does not want to see her face. He cannot bear to look at the face he so loves vacated, hollow. He does not want to see this evidence of his selfishness. 

The sun begins its dive into the horizon, splitting, dissipating the rain clouds. Now the red and blue flashes mingle with blinding white ones; cameras. Photojournalists gawking at the spectacle of love labor, love lost; immortalizing crimson light from a setting sun striking a face streamed with dirt and tears as its owner sits beside the upside down BMW, as its owner gently rocks a rag doll.

How different she feels now, Dante thinks as he opens his eyes.

He takes the end of his shirt and begins gently wiping away the covering over her face. His lips part. Another wipe, his eyes expand. The last cleansing stroke, his stomach turns.

He has wiped clean the face of Michelle.

Dante emerged into reality as a man catapulting from beneath the surface of the ocean; gasping for air, lunging at anything to keep him from returning to below. He jerked upright, knocking the chair he had fallen asleep in several feet behind him. From the nightstand beside Michelle's bed, a glass of water leapt to shatter across the floor.

Dante looked around, his confusion quickly fused with relief. The repetitive beep of the heart monitor slowly brought his mind into focus. His eyes traveled from the monitor to the tubes that connected to her. Michelle laid silent and still, undisturbed.

The dream had visited Dante's sleep with unfortunate frequency but...

not like that, thought Dante. Never like that. Never with her face.

He had to keep looking down at his hands to make sure they were not smeared with mud and blood, her blood. Dragging his hands down his face, Dante discovered tears. Tears had pursued him into reality. He stared at his hands, glistening and wet, horrified at the release of such foreign fluid.

After finishing his third deep breath, Dante turned to pull the chair back in place. There, in the doorway, stood Dr. Raz.

Raz had witnessed it all; from undisturbed slumber signified by the peaceful rise and fall of Dante's chest, to just now. Fifteen minutes earlier, he had returned to check on Michelle's vitals and give Dante the grim news. What he walked in on was a scene belonging of another era; the sparsely equipped "recovery" room of his tiny clinic, the first rays of morning entering from a cracked old window at the top of the east wall, lighting the back of a grieving man exhausted into sleep. Dante's head rested in his crossed arms on the nightstand. If it were not for all of the electronic equipment pulsating and whirring, Raz would have thought he had been thrown back 50 years in time. It was as if he were watching the older husband bow his head in agony over his young wife's suffering, wanting to take her place. But living in an era when medicine held a hopelessly shallow arsenal, the husband knew he was ultimately, utterly helpless.

Bizarre, thought Raz.

He was about to call his friend's name when Dante woke from his nightmare. Incarceration and death are not the only consequences for ruthless actions. Raz wondered if God gave Dante a nightmare for every life he had cut down. There had been plenty of both through the years.

After Dante discovered his observer, an awkward moment of silence was shared between the two; Dante, embarrassed at his obvious display of fright; Dr. Raz, embarrassed at his intrusion upon the scene. Dante quickly shifted his eyes from the doctor to Michelle.

"What is it," he asked in a voice less recognizable than he preferred.

Raz cleared his throat. "I have the test results."

The doctor moved towards Michelle to observe the data streaming from the instruments attached to her.

"And," pressed Dante.

"It's viral."

"Meaning the antibiotics we've been pouring through her have done nothing."

"Nothing," Dr. Raz concurred.

"So, what? We just sit here and hope this pneumonia will not kill her," Dante demanded.

"No, of course not, Dante, but the only medication at my disposal is Ribovirin. The only way to administer it is directly into the lungs through injection. It is painful so I will need to sedate her. But with as much fluid as she has in her lungs, I am afraid the sedative will slow her respiratory system down to a halt."

"That is all you have to offer?"

"That is all there is to offer, Dante. I do not do miracles."

"I do not have the patience for your sarcas-

"Danny?"

The name, uttered so softly and weakly against raised voices, acted as a hand over the mouth of each man. Dante could see the glint of sunlight against a sliver of Michelle's iris.

"Danny. I'm so sorry," she voiced thickly, trying to smile. A smile of relief.

Stop it! Stop it, Dante wanted to scream. Instead, he turned to Raz and said grimly,

"Sedate her. Do it."

"Danny, I knew...I knew you'd know I wasn't dead," Michelle struggled out, her eyes half-closed but aimed directly at this older version of her husband.

Dante would not meet her stare, choosing instead to look at the doctor.

"It may kill her, Dante," Raz whispered.

"Danny, take me out of here. I don't want to be here anymore."

Dante walked away from Michelle's bed and motioned the doctor to do the same. Raz looked into his friend's eyes and saw in them what he had never seen before - pleading.

"How can she be talking like this? She should not be able to talk at all. Why is she talking like this? She is looking straight at me," he spoke to the doctor in a quieted tone, not for Michelle's benefit but for his own.

"Why? 'Why,' you ask me," Raz whispered to Dante. It was all Raz could do to not grab Dante by the collar and throw him across the room. "Oh, I do not know, 'comrade,' she has viral pneumonia the severity of which must have taken days or weeks to achieve, her fever is approaching 105, and she looks as if you have put her through a concentration camp. She is not even 100 pounds."

Dante's eyes finally carried over to the skin and bones that was Michelle's body as if he were having an awakening born of the doctor's words. His eyes enlarged as the blindfold of his single-mindedness was removed and he saw this evidence of his selfishness.

"She would not eat. I could not get her to eat," was all he could offer as explanation.

"Dante, I read the newspaper. I know who she is. She is supposed to be dead, but instead, you have held her prisoner, no? Can you not see why she would not want to take what you would give her to eat?" The doctor paused waiting for a response. Receiving none, he pursued, "How is this supposed to win you back your son?"

The reference to Danny had the opposite effect Raz had hoped. The doctor could literally see the glare resurface in Dante's stare, the vulnerability in Dante's expression vanish. Raz was witnessing the singular, driving purpose return to the throne of Dante's mind.

"She is the key to winning back my son. The key. Do you understand? Why do you think I am so concerned that she keep breathing?"

"I have never seen you act this way, Dante. Never. Not even when you talk of your son. Which leads me to believe she means more to you than you will admit," Raz braved.

Dante brought his eyes directly onto the doctor's and froze. His voice stabbing, his eyes narrowed and unblinking, he ordered, "You do the job I pay you for. No more. No less."

"Then you do yours," was the doctor's unhesitating retort.

"What?"

"You better become the man she thinks you are, my friend. Look at her. The medication I will be giving her over the next 48 hours should, logically, start her recovery. But the body does not act logically, Dante. She must want to live. If she realizes that she is in the same hands that put her here, do you think she will want to fight?"

Dante looked over at Michelle's face, her eyes now closed.

"Go to her, Dante, as your son. While you explain that she needs to rest, I will be putting the sedative into her IV. Go."

Dante walked to beside Michelle's bed as timidly as he had approached Maria's doorstep for their first date 25 years ago. Kneeling, he reached for Michelle's hand. Her eyelids parted at his grasp. Dante had listened over and over to tapes he had made of his son's tapped phone conversations from Casa Santos. He now played the cadence of his son's voice in his head; how his son always softened the end of nearly every word to the point that it was often difficult to tell where one word ended and the next began; how his son's voice was completely altered by the presence of Michelle. And that was the hardest part. For Dante had not softened his voice for anyone since he had held Maria's lifeless body in his arms. The hardest part was knowing that he wanted to soften his voice for Michelle, not so he could be a convincing Danny, but simply because this girl made him want to.

"Honey," Dante finally whispered at Michelle. Did he call her that? He did or did he? What Americanized man would not call his wife that, Dante tried to reason with himself.

Dante could feel Michelle's tiny fingers press into his own in response. Her eyes, clouded, opened to him.

"Listen to me, baby. You need to rest now. When you wake up, I promise we'll be out of here. Ok? I promise."

Dante's eyes darted to Dr. Raz as he inserted the syringe into the IV bag.

"I need to tell you so much, Danny. I've got to tell you," Michelle slowly got out, her speech slurred.

"I know you do. You can tell me everything after you've rested. Come back and tell me everything, Ok."

"I need to tell you now, but I can't...I can't..."

"Michelle, don't fight it. You're so sick and the only way you're going to get better is if you rest. Do that for me. Don't fight it. I'll be waiting right here. I need you. When you wake up, we'll be home."

Dante felt her fingers loosening from his hand as he watched her eyes drop back behind their lids; open, close.....open, close.............open, close....................gone.

He looked up to the doctor. They both knew Dante had lied very little in his conversation with Michelle, unfortunately, very little indeed.

Carmen sat at her desk with Ben sitting across from her.

"I'm actually scared for my life, Ben. If you had seen the look in his eyes the day he left the hospital. I haven't seen or heard from him since and that's what scares me most."

"Carmen........ what did you expect? It was right after the explosion. He had just lost 'the love of his life.' Some time has passed now. Besides, Danny-boy has always been attached to your apron-strings, no?"

"Ben, I'm serious. He's dangerous to himself, let alone, to me. To be honest, I thought I knew my son, but don't think I did. And I know I don't now. I have no idea what he's truly capable of."

Carmen and Ben both flinched at the noise that blasted from the foyer. It was the sound of the door being slammed open.

"Mother D-e-a-r-e-s-t, I'm home," Danny bellowed with an eerie glee matched only by the twisted smile forced across his face.