Henry Franks Read online

  Frank Franks?

  “Henry Franks.” He spoke so softly the words were nothing more than a breath of sound, but neither of the names sounded familiar.

  Sleep fought him off for a long time, his numb hand resting uselessly on his chest. Just as he thought he might be about to fall asleep, he jerked awake. A quiet hissing sound, high-pitched and frustrated, cut through the hum of the air-conditioning. Henry rolled over, pulling the pillow over his head to drown out the noise.

  Elizabeth is there, waiting for me. Her smile, meant for me alone, brings out the sun from behind the low clouds racing across the sky. In my arms, she’s light as a feather, floating free and away and I can only watch as the shadows return. Still, she smiles, always smiling, and in return, I smile back. It’s the least I can do.

  The park is filled with kids, strollers sailing down the riverbanks into the sunset until Elizabeth and I are almost alone. A knife-edge of lightning slices through the clouds, down and down until there is nothing between the energy and the earth but me.

  “Daddy, no!” Elizabeth screams as I burn alive.

  She is there, waiting for me with a smile. A balloon pops in the distance. Shreds of red latex flutter to the ground in the hazy sunshine. Another. Scraps wrap around my skin.

  Pop!

  I swallow the balloons, the colors mixing and merging into blackness.

  “Daddy, no!”

  She is there. I run to her but can’t reach her side. She smiles, but not for me. Laughs, at me, but I can’t hear a sound. Water bubbles out of my mouth as I try to call her name. Between us, fish swim in and out of view with long tails and each of them smiles at me as they float by. The hook catches the edge of my lips, tugging upwards until I am finally smiling with them.

  “Daddy, no!” Elizabeth screams as I drown.

  She is nowhere to be found. I search an empty park on a day with no sun and a night with no moon in a sky with no clouds. In the distance, I hear her scream ‘Daddy!’ but I can’t find her. I run so fast I barely touch the ground, until I forget how to run at all and trip over feet I no longer recognize and no longer feel.

  Someone’s there, helping me up, but it’s not my daughter. Too old, and I can’t see her face in the shadows and I can’t focus on her. She’s there, keeping secrets from me and hiding Elizabeth away and I can’t stop myself from hating her even as she tries to help me.

  “Daddy, no!” Elizabeth screams in the distance as I wrap someone else’s fingers around the stranger’s throat.

  “Daddy, no!” until the woman dies in my arms and the screams are finally silent and I am alone in an empty park on a night with no moon.

  NOAA Alert: Tropical Storm

  Erika Aiming for United States

  Miami, FL—August 22, 2009: Tropical Storm Erika is gaining strength and could become a hurricane by tomorrow or Monday afternoon, according to the latest National Hurricane Center reports.

  Data from an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter airplane revealed that Erika’s wind speed has increased to 70 mph, with gusts even stronger.

  The storm system, recently formed off the coast of Africa, is projected to reach landfall in the Caribbean within the week at its present speed.

  Local Resident Survives Beating

  Brunswick, GA—August 22, 2009: Brunswick Police Department spokesperson Carmella Rawls has confirmed that Elijah Suarez, 27, of Blythe Island, GA, was evacuated by helicopter to Memorial Hospital in Savannah late Friday evening. Suarez, co-owner of SSI Landscaping, was found on the St. Simons Island beach at low tide. Initial reports are that he suffered severe trauma and was unresponsive when emergency personnel arrived at the scene.

  “At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that this is related to any previous or ongoing investigations,” Rawls said. “We encourage anyone with any information as to Mr. Suarez’s activities Friday to contact the Brunswick PD.”

  Major Daniel Johnson, of the joint task force covering the string of gruesome attacks that have terrorized Glynn County this summer, was unavailable for comment.

  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?”
<
br />   “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.

  sixteen

  On Sunday morning, Henry stood in the shower, bitter cold water running over him. He shivered, once, and then stuck his head under the flow. When his teeth started chattering, he stepped back and let the water beat against his legs. Each scar on his thighs trapped the sting, easing the itch, until the skin was numb enough not to hurt. Better that than the phantom itching and spreading death that inhabited so much of the rest of him.

  Toweled dry, he felt clean only until rubbing the new ointment his father had left for him into his skin. A fingernail caught a corner of a scar but he couldn’t feel the pain. He pulled his jeans on, the sensation of the lotion gluing itself to the denim in the heat even less pleasant than usual. A pair of scissors rested on his desk and he picked them up, judging where the best place would be to cut in order to turn the pants into shorts. He put the scissors down unused, pressing his palms into his legs in a futile struggle to dull the itch.

  He ate cereal alone, sat in his room alone, then, hours later, ate lunch alone. He knocked once on his father’s door but there was no response, and when he turned the knob it was locked. Outside, he heard kids playing in the street. A car drove past a few times and a dog barked in the distance. Somewhere else on the island, a church bell pealed.

  Henry stared out his window, watching Justine’s brother playing with his friends. From the shade of her porch, Justine turned toward his house as though she sensed his presence and he ducked to the side. When he looked back out she was gone. A knock at the door called him away from the window.

  Barefoot, she stood on his porch, wearing blue shorts with a big daisy on one leg and a white tank top with a matching flower. She smiled when he opened the door.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  Henry nodded his head and opened the door wider.

  “Still too dark in here, you know?” She flipped a switc
h on the wall but nothing happened. “Well, that was helpful.”

  “You turned on the outside light.”

  She flipped it off and tried the next one. There was a yellow flash as the bulb blew out on the wall above them. “Even more helpful.” She smiled. “I give up.”

  “And you wonder why I wear black?”

  “You are what you eat, not where you live.”

  “I ate cereal for breakfast and lunch. What does that make me?”

  She looked at him as they walked up the stairs. “Wheat?”

  “I was thinking corn.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I thought you wanted to see the scrapbook.” Henry stopped in the short hallway and looked at her. Hot summer sunlight leaked out from the open doors on both sides of them. One room was empty save for a fine coating of dust, and the other was his bedroom. The bathroom door at the end of the hall was closed.

  They stood toe to toe with little space to move apart.

  “This your room?” she asked as she pointed into the empty one.

  “I suppose I could sleep in the closet over there on a hanger.”

  “That would explain the wardrobe.”

  “Now see, that was kinda funny.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re learning.”

  He opened the door to his room but she stayed in the hall.

  “Henry,” she said with an indrawn breath, her hand coming to rest on his arm as she stopped short in the doorway.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “You live here?” She didn’t move, only studied the room.

  Sunlight cut it in half, leaving shadows dancing along the walls where the branches of the trees outside shifted in the weak breeze. A twin bed took up most of the room. His desk, with the corners of the laminate peeling up, sat near the window with his laptop docked beneath it. Pushpins poked out of the bare white walls but didn’t hold up any pictures.

  “The only boy’s room I’ve been in is my brother’s, and even he has stuff on his walls. Where are the posters? Sports teams? I’d even be okay with swimsuit models.” She took a single step into his room and leaned against the wall. “Well, maybe not ‘okay,’ but, really, anything would have to be better than this, right?”