Friday, September 18, 1978
Darlene Cassels followed the center line along 56th Avenue, white knuckling it. Tufts of fog brushed against the windscreen like old ladies’ hair: thin and silvery. She smiled. Sometimes she thought the strangest things, coming home from work. “No wonder,” she griped. By the time her shifts at the Rendezvous Pub finished she was a basket case: legs like sandbags, head thumping to the good-old country and western beat, lungs dry as an old man’s wheeze.
For a brief spell, after climbing the hill past 232nd, things cleared and she enjoyed a view of the full moon sailing through the night sky. Then the car lurched. Her grip tightened again and she muttered a curse, descending into the Salmon River gully. Even on clear nights the switchbacks made her nervous; in a heavy fog she had to fly by instruments.
“For Christ’s sake!” she complained, mad at herself, mad at the Rendezvous, mad at the world.
Then it happened.
Actually, the fog saved him… or it… or whatever you wanted to call the skinny waif that appeared out of nowhere. Had the night been clear, she would have been driving faster. As it was, the boy appeared suddenly, a formulation of mist. For years—forever—that ghostly form would haunt Darlene.
In the instant before impact she barely had time to recognize the apparition as something human. She slammed on the brakes and prayed God Almighty would not allow the inevitable to happen. The car slewed left. She released the brakes for a second and it veered into the opposite lane. Maybe, in a half-assed way, God had answered her prayer. She knew she was going to hit the kid, and remembered the sound of his tiny body bumping against the side of her car—like a bird, really… no more of a jolt than that. But because the car had changed direction it struck a glancing blow.
Thank God!
Then everything went deathly silent, except for the scream that tore out of her as the Pinto shuddered to a stop.
~~~
Recollection blurred for a few moments after that, and she had to daub her eyes and hold in a gasp, describing the details to the cop who was interviewing her. She’d scrambled out of the car, run around to the passenger side and stooped over the child’s body lying face up on the road. That much she was able to reconstruct—jigsaw fragments of a ghastly nightmare she was being force to reconstruct.
Her voice quavered and hands shook retelling her version of events.
She had enough first aid to feel for a pulse. the boy’s heart was pumping a mile a minute, but he wasn’t breathing. Mouth to mouth! Now! She’d never done it before, not on a real, live victim. Kneeling beside him, she pinched his nose, yanked open his jaw and sealed her lips against his tiny mouth.
Please!
Again, her prayer was answered. After one or two puffs, he gasped like a creature emerging from the womb, sucking in the life sustaining air. He wasn’t conscious, but he was breathing. It was more than she could have hoped… A reprieve of sorts, because if she’d killed the kid… Darlene Cassels didn’t dare think it.
There was no-one around, no point waiting for help; she levered the boy’s limp body up into a sitting position, slipped her right arm under his knees and cradled him up off the pavement. It was only then she realized he was naked! Stark naked! Somehow she’d blocked that out in the panicked prelude to the accident and her urgent response.
“What the fuck!”
She scrabbled open the passenger side door and placed him onto the seat, buckling him in to keep him from slumping over. Wrestling herself out of her coat, she spread it over him, tucking the sleeves in around his shoulders. Then she hurried back round to the driver’s side, got in, and pulled a frantic u-turn heading back toward Langley Memorial Hospital.
Hang in there buddy! she pleaded, hoping her urging would give his wavering spirit something to fix on, something to keep him present as she sped through the night toward what she prayed would be salvation.
~~~
Angled toward her on the edge of his chair, Corporal Tom Cochran studied her closely, almost in disbelief, she thought. Darlene recognized him from walkthroughs of the Rendezvous, showing the flag. They’d chatted a few times. Shared a few jokes. She liked him. But that was in the past, sealed away in some memory vault out of sight and out of mind. He was all business now, huddled with her in the Langley Memorial waiting room.
She’d willingly told him where she’d been headed from, and where to; described as best she could what had happened out on the Salmon River Bridge; but bridled when he asked if she knew the victim. Then when he asked, “Have you had anything to drink tonight, Miss Cassels?”
“I never drink on the job,” she answered, tartly.
Cst. Cochran allowed himself a quick smile.
“Why am I being treated like a suspect?” she demanded.
“Just procedure, Miss,” he assured. “It’s how these things go.”
“Do these things happen very often?”
He sighed. “Never seen or heard of anything like it, Darlene. Sorry it happened to you.”
“Jeez! I suppose we all have to be the first at something. But this?”
His questions had put her on edge. Could she be a suspect? She’d left work at one-thirty, hit the kid at about one-forty-five, and had him to the hospital by, say, two o’clock. She figured they’d check with her boss and fellow employees, maybe look for skid marks on the Salmon River Bridge that matched her description of events, then rule her out.
That didn’t offload the burden of guilt weighing her down, though. Or lessen the inexplicable connection she now felt between her and the boy. It didn’t answer her own haunting questions… How the fuck did a four or five year-old kid end up stark naked on that bridge, at two in the morning, on a collision course with her Pinto?
That was anybody’s guess. But it wasn’t idle, news-hour speculation for Darlene Cassels. It was heart clenching reality.
~~~
She booked off her next night at the Rendezvous. “The cops were around, asking questions,” her boss said. “We lied and gave you a glowing character reference.”
“Thanks,” she faked a laugh.
Maybe it would have been better to go in for her shift, though… Keep your mind off things. Keep from looking at the day’s headlines, switching on the TV.
She couldn’t help it, though. Had to find out if the kid had survived, and who was responsible for him being out there at that hour. She tuned in to the evening news. A couple of items into the lineup, the report came on…
“Police in Langley, British Columbia are baffled by the case of a child—estimated to be four or five years old—who was struck by a car in the early morning hours today,” the news anchor said. “The boy was wandering alone, naked, on a rural road. To date, nobody has reported a child missing in the area, and police have not been able to identify him or locate his parents.
“The boy was taken to hospital, where he remains in critical but stable condition.”
The screen switched to a female reporter on the scene.
“It was roughly 2 a.m. when a woman, who has not been identified, drove down this winding road, in a heavy fog, and ran into the boy, who police believe came up from under The Salmon River Bridge, behind me.
“The woman, who was returning home from work, managed to avoid hitting the child straight on, but clipped him, veering into the oncoming lane. She apparently administered first aid on the scene, then rushed him to Langley Memorial Hospital in her car.
“At a news conference this morning RCMP Lower Mainland District Chief Superintendent Bruce McCallum asked for help identifying the child and his parents…”
The picture switched to a news conference, McCallum sitting at a table with a cluster of microphones set up in front of him.
“We are looking for the parents of this child, and ask them to please come forward and identify themselves,” McCallum said, gravely.
“We have no idea who his parents are, or what the child was doing out at that time of night. There is nothing to suggest that the driver of the vehicle that struck the boy had any knowledge of the child in question.
“We don’t know if the boy lives nearby, or if he somehow got out of a vehicle that may have been passing through the area.
“We’re hoping other motorists may have seen something,” McCallum concluded. “We urge anyone who witnessed anything that night to contact us…”
A phone number flashed onto the bottom of the screen.
~~~
Darlene went to bed early but couldn’t sleep, couldn’t help thinking about the boy, feeling the fragile weight of him in her arms. Had she made the right decisions? Taken the right steps to save him? Would she ever see him again? As a healthy child, perhaps, not a bundle of sticks too insubstantial to snag a soul.
She tried closing her eyes, but whenever she did her image of the boy inverted—she found herself inside his prone body, mesmerized by the utter darkness, pressing in on him like a black cocoon
~~~
The boy’s eyes blinked open. What he saw was utterly new and inexplicable. All time had collapsed into that precise moment, his past gone, even the concept of a past non-existent. He sensed vaguely that he must have come from somewhere, that something had been lost, like a shiny object fluttering to the bottom of a very deep well. But it sank into the yielding sediment before he knew it, buried like a clam beneath the sand.
A soft beeping to his right frightened him. Instinctively he tried to turn his head toward the sound, but couldn’t. Something restrained him, so he could only shift his eyes toward the source. He decided it wasn’t threatening, that perhaps it was a creature like himself, calling out for some sort of assurance—a returning signal that proved it wasn’t alone in the world, vulnerable, endangered.
The sound emerged from beyond the periphery of his vision. A soft, reddish light glowed there, too. But he couldn’t make out the shape of the thing emitting it. The thing crouched below his line of sight. Waiting.
For what?
Again, the boy decided the thing was not threatening. Any other belief would have left him terrified and paralyzed all at once—like an insect trapped in a spider’s web, aware of its predator’s vibrations transmitted through the entangling, all-knowing fibers.
Another sound entered the room. Spongy footsteps accompanied by soft rustlings, like a phantom breeze shushing through a forest. The boy tensed, preparing for this new intruder to make itself known to him…
“Oh!”
A face peering down at the boy smiled. He want to shout, but didn’t know how. His cry remained bottled up in his chest, a desperate bird looking for an open window. Frustrated, angry, he frowned.
“Oh my god!” Nurse Caitlin Beskau cried. “You’re awake!”
In other circumstances, he might have questioned her reaction. But he was astounded. She’d spoken, the sounds she made formulating themselves into words… words he understood!
This seemed miraculous to the boy. And he realized that he and this stranger hovering over him were somehow related—that he should have been able to produce meaningful sounds too. That the utter darkness he was emerging from must be populated with shapes, and movements, and beings whose names he would someday have to pronounce.
For now, though, he needed to get out a single word. A small word he could assemble like the first two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Something she would understand. He became desperate; Nurse Beskau studied him closely. He sensed she was going to leave. Pleaded with his eyes for her to stay, while the word took shape in his chest, forced its way up his windpipe, into is larynx…
“Help!” he croaked.
Nurse Beskau smiled assuringly and stroked his hair. He flinched. But a tingle of electricity shot up and down his spine, and for the very first time in his new life he did feel calmed, grateful for her radiance and the sensation of her hand smoothing his fine, brown hair.
After that she left the room to alert the attending physician, and the boy never saw her again.
He knew nothing about climbing out from under the Salmon River bridge; being sideswiped by Darlene Cassels in her Ford Pinto. Nor did he know about the police investigation or the breaking story centered on him. He was in the eye of the hurricane, was the eye of the hurricane.
Next: Evening News