He stared at the freckles on Karin’s thin, straight nose. He couldn’t admit the possibility that it was already too late. He had to look away—anywhere—at the studs of the unfinished basement wall opposite. He noted distractedly that the window in the upper part of that wall was broken. It sounded as if the operator was following a script, not trying to be an insensitive jerk. It was hard, though, and slow. Every second felt like five.
“What happened to her?”
“I think she’s been assaulted,” said Ted. “There’s been a break-in.”
“Assaulted with a weapon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you see a weapon?”
“No. Send the paramedics, please.”
“How many assailants were there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are any of them still in the house?”
“No.” Ted didn’t know this for sure, but was afraid no paramedics would come into a house where they ran a risk of attack. The word assaulted—which Ted had believed potent to speed help to Karin—was instead inducing caution.
“How many assailants did you see?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“What makes you think she was attacked?”
“Stuff has been stolen. She—I think she may have interrupted a burglary in progress.”
“Does she have any injuries?”
“I can’t see, but I’ve already told you I don’t think she’s breathing.”
“So you can’t—”
“Look, I need an ambulance here for my wife. And she’s carrying a child.”
Until this instant, Ted would never have called an embryo a child. And if Karin hadn’t been pregnant? He’d have been no less desperate to save her. At the same time, he felt he had to throw anything he could at this disembodied functionary, anything to raise the stakes enough above the routine to engage her energies.
The operator said the ambulance was on its way. Ted dashed upstairs to unlock the front door as she requested, then returned to Karin.
“Stay on the line now while I transfer you to the police.”
He had to answer all the same questions again. Mercifully, a kind of automatic pilot kicked in. Worse by far was seeing Karin lying there on the floor and believing that, if he took her in his arms as nature prompted, he might be injuring her spinal cord. A cocoon—so it seemed to him—protected him from thoughts that it might no longer matter. He touched the back of his fingers to Karin’s cheek as gently as he could. He could do so little. The paramedics would between them be able to lift her without twisting her neck, to immobilize her on a stretcher, and to get her safely to hospital.
And then—but then what would become of the evidence? Maybe there was something he could do for her after all. He used his cellphone to take pictures of the way she was lying in case the police photographers didn’t show up in time. He zeroed in particularly on the way her hair stood straight out, not tousled as it would have been if she had fallen. It was as if someone had grabbed her by the hair.
Uniformed officers of the Peel Regional Police arrived at the same time as the ambulance. Or, though Ted didn’t like to think so, perhaps the ambulance had been parked and waiting for the police cruisers. The ambulance service would have a duty to protect their personnel, the personnel a right to safe working conditions.
The paramedics found that Karin had sustained blunt trauma to the back of her head. They pronounced her vital signs absent. Ted told them Karin was two weeks pregnant. They said they’d pass that information on to the doctors at Credit Valley Hospital, which was where they now had to take her. Ted wanted to go with her. The paramedics discouraged this impulse and so, more emphatically, did the police. Someone from the hospital would be in touch later. Ted made sure the paramedics had his cellphone number.
“Her name is Karin Gustafson,” he said. He had to keep spelling it out. “No, mine is Boudreau.”
Karin’s sassy little summer purse lay on the basement floor a metre or so from where he’d found her. He handed her health insurance card to the paramedics and her driver’s licence to the police to copy from.
Meanwhile, police constables called in police sergeants, who gave orders to establish a perimeter with yellow tape and to secure the crime scene. The entire house and yard, in effect. Was there a neighbour’s house Ted could go to? The only neighbours Ted knew weren’t answering their phones, so he was asked to wait in the back of one of the cruisers.
He hunched forward on the bench seat, hugging himself for warmth. Alone with his sensations for the first time since placing the 911 call, he found he was cold in his short-sleeved shirt, actually shivering—although nothing he could see, nothing in the way officers and onlookers were standing around on either side of the yellow tape, suggested that the temperature had dropped. Ted’s slacks beneath his thighs felt clammy with sweat, none of it absorbed by the synthetic leather upholstery. The back seats of police cruisers, he reflected, had to be moisture-proof, easy to wipe clean.
He wished he had not asked for the police. They were only doing their job, but they were keeping him from Karin, separating what ought to be together. Ought to be, even if in fact Karin were dead.
There, he’d admitted it. That proved he wasn’t in denial, didn’t it? And yet he couldn’t imagine that tonight’s facts would still be true tomorrow and all the tomorrows for the rest of his life. He didn’t picture the two of them back at the Bouquet Bistro next Thursday or Friday evening, preparing for a night of love. But he wasn’t yet able to picture a future weekend when that wasn’t going to happen.
While waiting in the back of the police car, Ted listened to Markus’s message on his cellphone: “My little girl hasn’t shown up. Do you know what’s going on? It’s after eleven, by the way.” Markus had to be called. Ted watched his fingers select COTTAGE on his phone’s speed-dial menu. He didn’t know what he was going to say. He didn’t plan how to say it. My little girl. The news would hit Karin’s father hard, but he’d have to take it the way it came out.
Markus picked up on the first ring. “Yes, Ted.”
Ted summarized flatly how he’d found Karin and what the paramedics had said before taking her away.
“Is she going to pull through?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
Markus cursed, at length. He used the pronoun it, not you. Still . . . Ted picked up the implication that he himself was in some way at fault, as he believed he was, although Markus didn’t know the real reason, was just expressing a father’s distress.
Ted let him finish.
“Which hospital?” said Markus, regaining control. His breathing, deep and measured, could be heard now over the phone. He wasn’t going to let himself fall apart while he was alone in Muskoka and his only child was in lying in an ER two hundred klicks away.
Ted felt neither in control nor falling apart—more like an automaton.
“Credit Valley,” he said.
Markus got Ted to give him the nearest intersection and told Ted to call his cell if he heard anything in the next couple of hours.
“I suggest you wait till morning to drive down,” said Ted.
“I’ll come now,” said Markus and hung up.
Plainclothes investigators were called in from the local police division. Thinking he was at last in the presence of someone with real authority, Ted made