The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, page 30
“Fine. I’ll keep it here, but I’m not going to use it.”
“I hope you don’t,” she said.
11
Over the next five days, the practice kept me busy during the day, and I brought paperwork home with me so I wasn’t at the office late. Mickie made a point of coming over for dinner a couple of nights, and she’d called Ernie and asked that he check in with me daily by phone.
“You’re not doing wonders for my manhood,” I said one night over dinner.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Besides,” I said. “I got the big boy here to watch over me.” Bandit had become my most faithful companion, never leaving my side and sleeping in his dog basket in my bedroom.
“He’s never going to leave you now,” Mickie said. “You spoil him.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to move in,” I said.
She didn’t respond.
On the sixth day, Montoya called with the news she’d predicted. Bateman’s lawyer had obtained a continuance of the TRO hearing. In return, David had to agree to stay away from his daughter and his ex-wife until the matter was heard the following week. But that didn’t happen, either. The court again delayed the hearing when the judge got reassigned to handle a murder trial. All of this was incredibly frustrating and nerve-racking for Trina, and for me. Trina would get mentally geared up to fly back for the hearing, only to be told that it had been put off, and she had to wait and worry for another week. I didn’t have to make those kinds of arrangements, but I had to keep my schedule open. Bateman’s lawyer had subpoenaed both me and Dr. LeBaron to the hearing. Apparently, he intended to cross-examine us. There was little doubt in my mind that Bateman and his attorney were delaying the proceedings on purpose, just to screw with his ex-wife, and maybe with me.
When the hearing was set a third time, Montoya told me she’d call only if the hearing was put over.
Another week passed. The night before the rescheduled hearing, Trina Crouch called me to advise that she’d flown home and was staying in a hotel. She was nervous, her voice quavering, and seeking reassurance.
“I’ll be there,” I said. “So will Dr. LeBaron. And Montoya is confident the TRO will be granted and the judge will make it permanent. They didn’t file any doctor’s affidavits to counter our opinions. David’s attorney can cross-examine us all he wants. He can’t win. David can’t win this time, Trina. He can’t.” A part of me was saying this just to calm her, but a part of me truly believed David Bateman could not win, not without some competing doctor’s declaration.
I awoke at six the following morning after a fitful night tossing and turning. I gathered the newspaper from the driveway, my gaze drifting up and down the block, looking for a patrol car or a suspicious car I did not recognize. The hearing was set for 10:00 a.m. I spent the next two hours reading the paper, drinking coffee, and generally trying to keep myself occupied. At 8:00 a.m. I jumped in the shower. As I turned off the water, I heard my phone ringing, wrapped a towel around my waist, and answered the extension in the bedroom.
“Dr. Hill, it’s Merilee Montoya.”
My heart sank. “Please tell me they are not continuing the hearing again. What is wrong with our legal system? He’s manipulating everyone just to cause his ex-wife emotional distress. She’s a wreck. How can this keep happening?”
“The hearing isn’t continued,” Montoya said.
I didn’t sense the same strength and confidence I usually heard in her voice. I sensed something different, something unnerving. Montoya sounded defeated.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s dead,” Montoya said softly.
I felt the floor fall out from under my feet, and my legs buckled. I stumbled to the bed so I didn’t fall.
“We had a meeting scheduled at seven thirty to go over everything. When Trina didn’t show up and I couldn’t raise her on her telephone, I sent a patrol by the hotel where she was staying.” Montoya paused to gather herself. She was, or had been, crying. “He shot her. Then he shot himself.”
12
David Bateman’s murder of his ex-wife and subsequent suicide made headlines in San Mateo County. I did not sleep that night, nor much that week. I feared going to bed and closing my eyes. David Bateman came every night, haunting me, taunting me. Trina and Daniela called out to me, pleaded with me, telling me that I had assured them no harm would come to them.
My insomnia stretched to months.
When I did sleep, it was with the aid of a pill, but even that did not prevent the nightmares, David Bateman shooting Trina Crouch, silver flashes blinding me, the thunder of the gun causing a ringing white noise in my ears that did not abate after I awoke. The persistent ringing prevented me from concentrating at work. I missed appointments. Mickie covered for me. I lost my train of thought in the middle of sentences. Large chunks of my day seemed to vanish, unaccounted for. My inability to sleep brought fatigue, which brought lethargy and a darkness I had never known.
At Mickie’s suggestion, I consulted Dr. Pridemore, who put me in contact with one of his colleagues at the Stanford medical school. The diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder, the illness so many young men brought home from the jungles of Vietnam. The doctor recommended therapy, which only confirmed what I had already concluded—I blamed myself for Trina Crouch’s death. I had been the one pushing her to stand up to her husband, and I couldn’t dismiss the thought that I had used her to do what I had been unable to do—to fight the bully. My counselor explained to me why that wasn’t the case. He told me that I, too, had been willing to stand up to David Bateman in court. He reasoned that even if I hadn’t, Trina still might very well be dead. He explained that David Bateman was psychopathic, so damaged as a child as to be beyond repair. It was all very rational and pragmatic, but it did not change the fact that Trina Crouch was dead and Daniela would be raised by an aunt in Tucson, without her mother or her father. It did nothing to cure my insomnia or my nightmares or to make me feel any less guilty. Now more than ever, David Bateman’s face and voice haunted me. It was as it had been in grammar school, his specter ever present.
Mickie suggested more counseling, but I had grown tired of people asking me how I felt and what I wanted. What did I want? I wanted to understand. I wanted to believe what every person on the planet wants to believe—that God had a plan for me, and that “God’s will” was not just a parent’s answer to silence a child who asked too many questions. I also knew I would not find that answer in Burlingame.
I cannot say I left Burlingame in search of answers. That would be a lie. At that moment, I was not searching for anything. I was running. I was running from Trina’s death, running from the memory of David Bateman, and running from a faith that seemed to solve every problem not with a solution but with an excuse.
“It’s God’s will.”
PART SEVEN
SAYING GOODBYES
1
April 1999
Costa Rica
Nine in the morning and I was already perspiring beneath a loose-fitting blue cotton shirt when my team of ophthalmologists arrived at an eye clinic set up in a concrete masonry building with a metal roof and no air-conditioning. Our visit, part of Orbis’s rural-outreach program, had been advertised on the national radio for a week, and more than five hundred people waited in line for basic eye examinations.
The Orbis communications director walked my team down musty, faded-blue corridors, explaining that two staff ophthalmologists from the Hospital Nacional de Niños in San José, Costa Rica, would test each patient’s sight. If the doctor decided the patient needed further treatment, he would direct the person to one of three examination rooms assigned to me and two of my Orbis colleagues.
It had been nearly ten years since I’d turned my private practice over to Mickie and climbed aboard the refurbished DC-10 owned by Orbis, an organization dedicated to saving sight throughout the world. I intended to take one trip. Then I took another, and another, and just kept getting on the plane. Mickie had refused to buy me out of the practice, or to buy my home, though she agreed to move in and care for it. “Both will be here when you come back from wherever the hell it is you’re going,” she’d said, which was pretty much around the world. I worked in villages in Africa where at night you could hear lions moaning in the tall grass. I conducted eye exams in overpopulated slums in India and in Asia where people lived beneath sheets of metal and cardboard. I sent Mickie a postcard and a letter from every city I visited. She refused to write back. “I’ll talk to you in person, when you come home,” she’d say.
Over the years, with the advent of cell phones, desktop computers, e-mail, and the Internet Mr. Cantwell had predicted, Mickie relented. In fact, we communicated more than when we had worked together. At night, I wrote her long letters about my day. I also called Ernie, who had assumed the mantle as CEO of Cantwell Computers, once a week on average, and we also stayed in touch via e-mail.
My work and travels also gave my mother and me something to talk about when I returned to Burlingame, other than her persistent question, “When are you moving back home?” I’d taken up photography as a hobby, and we would dissect each photograph in detail. My mother’s son, I put them all in scrapbooks and labeled each one.
“Africa looks incredible,” she’d said. “Your father always wanted to take a safari.”
“There are some beautiful areas,” I said, “but also so much poverty. We should go to Africa. And you would love China.”
My mother would not leave my father. “You’re treating God’s children,” she said, tears filling her eyes, hope filling her soul. In my mother’s way of thinking, if not for the “incident”—which was how she referred to the murder-suicide of David Bateman and Trina Crouch—I never would have joined Orbis, and I would not have been helping so many less fortunate. In my mother’s way of thinking, I had become God’s missionary, down to my beard—which showed traces of gray—shoulder-length hair, round tortoiseshell glasses, and baggy clothes. She said it made me look like a disciple.
Mickie was not as kind. “You look like one of the freaking brothers, Hill,” was her frequent greeting, referring to the Franciscans of our youth.
“That’s Brother Hill to you,” I’d say.
I didn’t consider my work as “God’s work,” largely because I didn’t believe in my mother’s God. If anything, I’d classify myself as a Buddhist. I believed that every living thing came from the earth and was to be respected. I meditated and I chanted and I found that it helped me sleep—as did the exhausting schedule I purposefully kept. Intellectually, I recognized that, in some way, this was not my way of helping others as much as it was my penance for the death of Trina Crouch. This was my purgatory, to atone for my sins.
Being a visitor to Burlingame also allowed me unencumbered time to spend with my father, who had learned to speak again, though in a halting, ghostly rasp. We spent many hours together under the shade of that gnarled oak tree at the rehabilitation center. When I took him and my mother on excursions, Mickie would join us. We pushed his wheelchair across the Golden Gate Bridge, around Sausalito, and over to Alcatraz Island. When we had exhausted San Francisco, we went north to the Napa Valley, east to Yosemite and Mendocino, south to Monterey. My mother took great joy in planning these trips to coincide with my visits. These were the cruises and vacations she and my father thought they would take in the twilight of their lives but never got the chance.
Ten hours after my day had started at the makeshift clinic, I was nearing the finish line and dreaming of a cold shower, colder beer, and something more substantial than the light snack I had rushed to eat. Alejandra, one of the clinic assistants, knocked and opened my door.
“That bus has arrived,” she said. “Do you have it in you?”
The bus contained thirty orphans from a rural village outside Atenas, an hour’s drive west of the capital. We’d been getting updates throughout the day of its progress. The bus had been scheduled to arrive first thing in the morning, but heavy spring rains washed out a road and caused them to take a long detour. Then their bus broke down.
“I can hold out,” I said, “if you can find me some sugar.”
Over the next two hours, I examined eight children and three adults while sipping a warm soft drink and chewing almond cookies. I was examining a young girl whose name I do not recall but whose beautiful face would forever be etched in my memory when Alejandra interrupted again.
“Dr. Hill? Sorry to disturb,” she said, sticking her head into my room. “There’s a child here Dr. Rodriguez would like you to see.”
I was tired, with several more patients of my own still waiting. “Is it something in particular?”
“Dr. Rodriguez thinks so.”
I sighed. “Give me a minute.” I had become the most experienced doctor on staff.
I finished my consult and walked down the short hallway, mentally bracing myself for what was likely a complex medical condition. Lynn Rodriguez stood outside the door.
“I know you’re tired,” she said.
“We’re all tired.”
She pushed open the door. The young boy sat on the rolling stool with his back to the door. I guessed from his size that he was six or seven. An older woman, one of the caretakers from the orphanage, sat in a chair along the wall. She spoke to the boy in Spanish, and though I had picked up much of the language, I was not fluent and did not understand everything she said. From what I could surmise, she was trying to get the child to turn around and face me, but the boy would not do so.
“What’s his name?” I asked Lynn.
“Fernando,” she said.
At the sound of his name, the boy spun on the stool. When Fernando looked up at me, it took my breath away.
2
Just as quickly as he had looked at me, Fernando lowered his chin and turned his head. It was a self-defense mechanism to avoid my stare and stunned reaction. His mop of curly brown hair flipped across his forehead, seemingly too thick for his thin, small frame of caramel-colored skin, but long enough to cover his eyes.
Lynn whispered, “The children call him el hijo del Diablo.”
The son of the devil.
As I approached, Fernando glanced sideways with distrust and trepidation, a child who had been rejected and bullied and grown wary of the world and everyone in it.
“Hola, Fernando,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. He did not answer. I sat in the patient chair and allowed him to swivel atop the doctor’s stool, swinging his legs. “¿Cuántos años tienes?”
My question was again met with silence. I looked to Lynn Rodriguez. “Supongo veintitrés,” I said. I am guessing twenty-three. I noticed the corners of Fernando’s mouth twitch, but he kept them from inching into a grin.
The woman seated with her back to the wall answered for him. “Seis.”
“¿Seis?” I said. “No es posible.”
“Sí,” the woman said.
“But I understand he is as smart as a twenty-three-year-old,” Alejandra said, continuing to speak Spanish.
“I can tell,” I said, considering a blank sheet in my file. “It says here that this boy is extremely bright and . . . that he is also very strong.” Fernando wore a T-shirt with the green image of the Incredible Hulk on the front. “It says that I do not want to shake his hand because he is as strong as the Incredible Hulk—so strong that he might crush my fingers.”
Now I had Fernando’s attention. He could not hide his grin, which was electric. It lit up his face and the room. I tentatively stuck out my hand. He eyed it with suspicion. Then, willing to play the game, he placed his hand in mine, but so lightly it barely touched my skin. When I squeezed, he also squeezed. I grimaced and flinched. “It is true, Alejandra. It is true,” I said in Spanish. “He is crushing my hand.”
Fernando giggled, a sound as pure and true as the chimes of the bells that rang from the steeple of Our Lady of Mercy.
“Please, do not crush my hand,” I begged. “I have patients I must treat.”
He released his grip.
I sighed and flexed my fingers. “Thank you, Fernando. Thank you. I’m Dr. Sam,” I said. “Alejandra, I’ll bet you that Fernando likes Popsicles; do you think you could find one for him while we talk?”
Alejandra left to find Popsicles. I said, “Fernando, can I share a secret with you?”
His brow furrowed, and his eyes narrowed.
“It is a secret that no one else knows. Tus ojos son extraordinarios,” I said. He lowered his chin. “Muy especial,” I continued. When Fernando retreated into his shell, I said, “You don’t believe me?”
He shook his head. “Ellos son los ojos del Diablo.”
“No,” I said. “They are not the devil’s eyes. You are one of God’s children.”
Again, he shook his head.
“But I can prove it,” I said. Fernando looked skeptical; so did the woman seated in the corner. A gold crucifix dangled from a chain around her neck. “I have been all over the world, Fernando, and I have searched for someone with eyes so extraordinary, but you are the first person I have found to be so blessed. Now, are you ready for my secret?” I asked.
He nodded, becoming curious. The woman, too, leaned forward.
I walked to the sink, washed my hands with soap and water, and slowly removed my brown contact lenses. Fernando watched with fascination, perhaps never having seen anyone do such a thing. I did not bother to put them in a contact case. For the first time since I had started wearing contact lenses at eighteen years of age, I was ashamed of myself. I turned on the tap and allowed the water to wash them down the drain. When I returned to my chair, with my sight slightly blurred, Fernando’s eyes widened. The woman made the sign of the cross, lifted the crucifix to her lips, and kissed it.
“They used to call me the devil boy,” I said. “But you see, I am not the son of the devil, and neither are you. God gave me extraordinary eyes so that I would live an extraordinary life. And I have, Fernando. If God had not given me these eyes, I would never have met you.” Fernando’s lower lip quivered. “God did not make you different, Fernando. He made you special.” I put the tip of my finger to his chest. “But what is most important is not the color of your eyes. What is most important is what is inside.” All my mother’s lessons came pouring out of me, along with the need to console someone who had likely never been consoled. “Now you know that you are not alone. Now you know there is someone like you. And I am going to make you a deal, Fernando. I am never again going to hide the color of my eyes or be ashamed of them. And I want you to promise me that you will also never be ashamed.” I put out my hand. “Is it a deal?”
