Edward looked up and saw bulbs and fluted glass arms on a cable. He took a step and a crunching sound beneath his feet made him stop in his tracks.
It all happened at once. There wasn’t one realization after the other, but an amalgamation, a fusion of images, his mind tumbling like collapsing blocks. On the ground in front of him, a jumble of limbs, of legs and arms, broken crystals, blood. More blood. How much more blood could he take?
The bodies seemed staged, Penelope perfectly underneath her mother, almost disappearing. He ran to Penelope. Her eyes were open and broken and he could tell, he could just tell. The fact that three times in one day, outside of an OR, he had frantically searched for a pulse, struck him as fated. Out of all the options he had weighed since he found Penelope in her car earlier, this hadn’t been on his radar at all. The house might as well have been blown over by a storm while he was gone.
A voice in his head. Detach. His hands no longer shook. He placed his index and middle fingers on Donna’s wrist. There was a heartbeat. A faint quiver, not a strong pressing outward. He wanted to snap, wanted to scream, wanted to perform CPR but he was afraid he’d just start pounding Donna’s chest with a force that bordered on violence. And how was he going to explain that? He didn’t render aid, he didn’t check airways or wounds. He had the blood of three people on his hands not including his own. There’d be no sorting this one out. By then his hands were cut up by sharp pieces of glass and crystal, his blood and Penelope’s blood and the woman’s blood and Donna’s blood all mingling into a concoction of guilt. What would they make of it: the police, the crime scene investigators, whoever else was going to be involved?
The chandelier chain above rocked back and forth, at least what was left of it.
It caught his attention, the way Donna was wrapped around Penelope, the way she was holding on to her. He wanted to think she had tried to keep her from jumping but his mind went to another place.
Detach. Death is the consequence of a disease, not your care.
He ran upstairs to Penelope’s room. Holes in the walls gaped like wounds. The bed was stripped, the window nailed shut, covered with a board. Nails jutted, half in, half out, crooked, in a desperate attempt to shut out the world. It dawned on him, the strange scene he was looking at—something that hadn’t occurred to him thus far—wasn’t so strange at all. He had never understood his daughter, never understood the dynamic between her and her mother, but this room, this room in its chaotic state was the manifestation of their relationship: boarded-up windows and iron nails with pointed ends and crushed heads.
Edward rushed to the edge of the stairs and looked down. The railing was intact, the spindles were in place—and why wouldn’t they be; this wasn’t a dilapidated back porch where people tumble over and fall to their deaths, this was a solid staircase—and he didn’t know what to make of that. Was there a logical explanation? There must be but he couldn’t think of one, he couldn’t explain it and he wasn’t going to try. He shut the door to Penelope’s room behind him.
He never even thought about covering this up, had been in over his head when he found Penelope in the garage. There was nothing he could do to remedy this.
He dialed 911.
Q: 911. What’s your emergency?
A: Yes, yes.
Q: Sir, is this an emergency?
A: Yes.
Q: What’s the address of the emergency?
A: The banister. They fell over the banister. Hurry up. 2011 Hawthorne Court.
Q: What is your name? Explain to me what is going on. Who fell?
A: Edward Pryor. My wife and daughter. They fell over the banister.
Q: Are they breathing?
A: My wife is. She’s breathing. I’m a doctor. Please hurry.
Q: What about your daughter?
A: She’s not breathing.
Q: Can you perform CPR?
A: I’m a doctor. My wife needs an ambulance. My daughter . . . there’s no need for CPR.
Q: Sir? Please stay on the line. Are you there? Tell me what—
A: Hurry.
Q: Sir, please don’t hang—
How was he going to explain this? And it dawned on him then that he didn’t know what to say about his whereabouts, his alibi. Such an ugly word. What would he say to the police about where he was when this happened? Don’t they play these recorded calls in court, ask the operator what they thought when they took the call, and if the person calling in the emergency sounded genuine? Normal on account of all the circumstances? Too calm? Too hysterical?
Edward didn’t hear the ambulance coming. He didn’t know why but there must have been sirens, there always are. The sun was up and, so he imagined, the neighborhood was rubbernecking. The phone in his pocket didn’t vibrate. There were no calls, no voice mails, no texts. No one came over to check on them—they were friends but not that close.
He knew the paramedics needed free rein of the scene but his body wouldn’t move. A pair of strong hands pulled Edward to the side. The medics wore black uniforms with neon stripes across their chests. They worked quickly, one pumped the manual ventilation bag and the other placed a central line in Donna’s forearm. She looked pale and limp.
Three men in police uniforms. They didn’t ask many questions but when they did, the words just bounced right off him. All he said, and kept repeating over and over, was I don’t know and I found them this way and how did this happen.
He caught sight of Penelope. Gloved hands placed her on top of white plastic that reminded him of Donna’s garment bags. She lay with arms stiff by her sides, head turned away from him. No one was rendering aid, no one was pumping her chest or administering fluids. White material bunched up by her sides. The blood drained from his face, and his forehead and cheeks and chin went slack as his pragmatic mind stumbled into reality; this was a body bag. One of the officers stepped in front of him and shielded his eyes from the unfolding scene but Edward knew that they were zipping up the plastic and placing his daughter’s body on a stretcher. Outside, an ambulance took off, hurriedly with aggressive speed.
Edward stepped into an alcove and the foyer no longer was in his line of vision—detach detach detach—but something was knotted around his foot, attached to a bloody mess of leather. He yanked at it, flexed his calf muscle, but it didn’t budge. It wasn’t until he recognized the woman’s bloody tote bag, which he had dropped in the foyer earlier among the shards and blood, that he began to panic. His heart clenched like a fist in his chest. He bent down and slipped the strap off his foot. When he tried to straighten his body, pain set in. Pain so searing he remained hunched over. A tightening had been building up for the past hour or so but he had dismissed it. I’m having a panic attack, he thought, there’s nothing wrong with my heart.
Edward watched the dead woman’s tote getting dragged across crystal shards and bloody beaded chains and shattered glass arms. The medics dragged their boots through it all, one tripped over a brass finial, then his foot got caught up in the tote but he kicked it loose.