I remember going into surgery, but nothing after that until this very minute. Now suddenly I am awake and aware again. As I lay in recovery, I am staring at four pairs of furious and horrified eyes that mostly only glare back hard in my direction.
There’s a policeman. He looks stern and alert as he hunches in a corner and whispers to my wife Sadie. Sadie’s expression is even more frightening. It’s the look of cold and overwhelming realization as something enormously awful clicks in her mind.
There’s a nurse crying gently in the corner. Her eyes flit over me only occasionally to confirm that I haven’t moved from my place. I’m trapped by IV line and medical sensors all over my body, so it must have been something I said, not something I did.
My surgeon is the fourth person in the room with me. He stares hard and unblinking into my eyes whenever I look at him. He keeps his arms crossed over his chest. This is not the same kindly, old doctor who shook my hand and promised me he’d take good care of me. He radiates disgust for me now. What the hell could I have possibly said while coming out of anesthesia?
I take stock of every secret I’ve been keeping. There were thirty years of cruelty before I decided to stop and live an honest life again. My first kill was a solo hiker. I pressed her head down into the mud until she drowned. After she was dead, I simply walked away as though I’d never even been there. She was the first of many.
After I got comfortable killing, I started doing home invasions. I targeted people I disliked, or women I coveted. This was all before cell phone GPS, DNA evidence, or digital forensics. I’d gotten away clean with it all – the break-ins, assaults, and worse. But it ate at me because it was all true whether anyone else knew it or not. I never forgot the families I’d destroyed and scattered in my wake. In my late sixties, had I really finally let those secrets go?
“I need to take a walk,” I say. “I want to see Hayley.” The officer bristles while my surgeon simply stares. My niece Hayley was the one who gave me a section of her liver. She was always my favorite, and we were as close as an uncle and niece could be while she was growing up. It’s too painful to lift myself out of bed. I understood now why my surgeon didn’t react to what I’d said.
“She doesn’t want to see you!” My wife shouts the words. “Hayley knows what you’ve done. She’s afraid of you! She begged me not to let you see her.”
The doctor’s lip is quivering like he might snarl and spit at me. It’s so different from how it was ten months ago. He looked so kindly at me then, back when he told me I’d only have a year to live without a donor. I remember feeling so blessed to learn Hayley was a match, and that she loved me enough to go through something like this to help me live out the autumn of my life. Now, with decades of life imprisonment ahead of me…
…I wish I’d died ten months ago with my reputation intact.