NG: Is there a reason you didn’t mention that before?
FP: I did tell you. They killed us.
NG: According to Dr. Pryce, you took a highly experimental barbiturate.
FP: I’m not a fucking liar.
NG: No one’s saying that. I just wanted to get a better sense of what you’re going through.
FP: They fucking gave us something, all right. They killed us and brought us back.
NG: Francis, can you possibly help me understand the … mechanics of that?
FP: Today I have seen the Dragon …
NG: Can you elaborate on the things you see?
FP: Things … come in my head.
NG: What kinds of things?
FP: Baby in a blood pouch. River glowing red. Dog hatching from a big black egg. Needle the size of a sword. Demon with a crown of light.
NG: This needle—was it some kind of drug?
FP: This is not about goddamn drugs! This is some evil, unnatural shit that has no business happening. You think this is just some junkie bullshit, talk to one of the other guys, see how they’re sleeping. I even got a name for you, saw it on the chart by mine. Varga, H. You talk to H. fucking Varga before you start looking at me like I’m making this shit up.
NG: Francis, please calm down. I’m not jumping to any conclusions.
FP: Yeah. Godfrey’s your fucking name. I bet it’d be real nice for you to come to the fucking
conclusion
this was all just some old nigger junkie bullshit.
NG: Francis, please, I’m here to help you. I’m a doctor, I just want to help … someone.
FP: …
NG: …
FP: Then make it stop.
(
Nurse Kotar enters.
)
NK: Doctor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but you have an urgent phone call.
Wouldn’t You Love to Think So
Olivia was sitting under a tree, wearing her sunglasses, with her legs crossed at the ankles, plucking petals from a dandelion. Shelley diligently standing over her—shade. Olivia looked up and tugged at Shelley’s hand.
“Look at the sour apple pretending he’s not happy to see us,” she said.
“What happened?” said Dr. Godfrey.
“Took a bit of a spill. I’m feeling rather light-headed.”
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance?”
She waved her hand at the idea of such a fuss. “And who would get Shelley home?” she said.
“Why didn’t you call your son?”
“I tried. No luck.”
“I think you should go to the hospital.”
She wrinkled her nose as though he had proposed she wear rhinestones before sunset—the idea of attending to something so precious as your
health
in the horror show of a hospital. “I’ll be as healthy as a horse after a nap,” she said.
Godfrey rubbed his chin, appraising. She plucked the last petal and discarded the stem, regarding him over the top of her Jackie Os.
He turned to Shelley. “Care to give me a hand with the patient, nurse?”
Shelley grinned.
Godfrey drove them home in Olivia’s truck. Olivia inquired into Letha’s health.
“What if we don’t talk about our kids,” said Godfrey.
“Well, that sounds goddamn
divine
,” she said.
She slid off her shoes and put her feet on the dash.
“Objections if I smoke?” she said.
“Yes.”
She depressed the dashboard lighter.
At Godfrey House, once Olivia had been safely installed in bed, Shelley hovered in the doorway but was dismissed for Mummy to restore her energy.
Shelley looked reluctantly from Olivia to Dr. Godfrey, longing for some way for this adventure to continue.
“Mummy’s very tired, darling.”
Shelley turned dejectedly and went upstairs.
Godfrey stood at the foot of the bed, arms akimbo.
“Sleep,” he said. “Eat something. If this happens again, I strongly urge you to consult a physician.”
“Come here,” said Olivia.
“There’s no reason for me to go over there.”
“Norman, please, you can give me a kiss good-bye like a grown person.”
Godfrey hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and gave her his long-perfected shenanigans look.
“Olivia—was this staged?”
She laughed. “Wouldn’t you
love
to think so? No, actually, I would leverage neither my goddamn health nor my daughter’s safekeeping as a snare for
your
attention. I simply needed a hand and it was lovely of you to extend one.”
“Have you been taking the pills?”
“You’ve made your position on that subject clear enough.”
“That’s not the same thing as yes.”
“Yes,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t hold your medical opinion lightly. Even if you’ve got the bedside manner of a mongoloid. Now stop being boorish and give me a kiss good-bye.”
Godfrey looked at his watch without consulting the time. Then he went to the bedroom door and closed it.
* * *
“Your office, this bed. We are making the rounds, aren’t we. Shall we sneak off to the mill some night?”
Godfrey shifted away from her and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his rumpled pants on the floor like shed snakeskin.
“This isn’t then,” he said.
“God knows. Then that goddamn moose head JR was so pleased with himself over would still be over the mantel.”
He said nothing. She hooked like a question mark toward him and laid her head in his lap. She could smell herself on him. She smiled but he looked ahead.
“Norman, look at me.”
He looked ahead.
“Norman, look at me.”
He looked down and met her eyes.
“The institute is one of the most advanced medical centers in the world,” she said. “The only thing that matters is the safety of the baby.”
Out the window, a doe had appeared from the tree line, stopping at a salt lick on a stump. It was as boringly mystical as all deer. He was not sure if he had been watching it for a few moments or a day.
She drew his hand backwards and guided it between her legs.
“You still make me as wet, you always have,” she said.
He stood, feeling a swell of pity. He didn’t know if it was for her for that to prove anything, or for himself because it did.
* * *
Roman walked back up Indian Creek toward his car. He threw Lisa Willoughby’s bunny tail panties into the water and wiped his hands on his pants. There was a discarded beer can in his path and he kicked it, banking off a rock and into the mouth of a drainage pipe.
“Goal!” he said.
He removed his phone from his pocket and turned it back on. There were eleven missed calls.
“Shit,” he said and jogged for his car.
When he arrived home, Dr. Godfrey was sitting at the dining room table with a glass in his hand.
“Your mom’s upstairs sleeping,” he said. “She’s fine.” Then, in response to a question that wasn’t asked, “I’m just waiting for a cab.”
“I can take you home,” said Roman.
Godfrey waved away the suggestion. “Thanks, he’s on his way.”
“It’s no problem. I’m right here.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Roman shrugged and continued to pass through, the foregoing exchange the most words that had passed between them in months. Godfrey sipped and held the drink on his tongue and swallowed.
“After this drink,” he said.
As the Jaguar crept out of the drive, neither noticed the crackling umbrage of the silhouette observing from the attic window.
“How is she doing?” said Godfrey on the road. “Your mother. Overall.”
“Psychotic,” said Roman. “So, more or less status quo.”
Godfrey chuckled and looked out the window. They were passing a strip mall in front of which was a bus stop where a young, overweight black boy in a Ninja Turtles T-shirt riding up the folds of his belly sat with a push-up ice cream that he was not eating, just staring blankly as he pushed the ice cream from the tube and pulled it back in and pushed it back out as though it had been a task assigned him in the underworld.
Roman looked at him. “How are you?” he said.
Godfrey was surprised by the question. But why should he be? The boy shared his blood and his name; why should it be surprising that the offspring of two of the closest people in their own ways in Godfrey’s life was also a human? He was not sure how to respond and realized he cherished the confusion: in this moment he was neither father nor doctor nor in any meaningful way uncle and in fact had no clearly defined role or expectation whatever.
“Do you know who knocked up my daughter?” he said.
“No,” said Roman. “If I did, he’d be at the bottom of the river right now.”
It astounded Godfrey that he had missed what a charming young man his nephew had become.
Roman, wanting as only the mother-raised can to get the most of the older man’s approval, tried to think of something useful to add.
“If I knew more than you did, I’d tell you,” Roman said. “If that’s what you’re asking. But all I can say is that she seems … happy. I don’t know if that’s a red flag or not.”
They passed an open manhole cover with a rope feeding into it that a line of men in hard hats were hauling up from the inner dark.
“Neither do I,” said Godfrey.
* * *
Letha informed Peter he was just in time to escort her to get frozen yogurt, so they went to the Twist and she brought him up-to-date on the other half of the reconnaissance she had done with her father.
“So Aunt Olivia isn’t one of his favorite subjects, but I did learn a little. Still not sure where she’s from; I guess JR just fell for her when he saw her onstage. Which, I mean, of course he did. (Man, I don’t know how many goats you have to slaughter for your butt to look like that at her age…) But when she was Dad’s patient I got the sense she had some pretty serious problems, before Roman was born. But it was JR who totally lost his grip in the end. Apparently he made some pretty wild accusations about her.”
Peter picked up a straw and flattened it.
“Like what?” he said casually.
“He wouldn’t tell me anything specific, but it must have been some serious crazy person stuff; Dad was still pretty obviously upset by it. And it turns out there was a suicide letter that came in the mail … the day after. He never showed it to anyone. I was going to ask him what it said, but I could see in his face it was time to change the subject.”
He folded one end of the straw and fitted it into the other, forming a quadrangle.
“What exactly is it you’re looking for?” she said.
He smoothed out the edges and made of the straw a window through which he looked out at her.
“What are you going to do if you find it?” she said.
He took a bite of pie and chewed thoughtfully, trying to give the appearance that he had an answer of too great consequence and sensitivity to share rather than the truth that he had none.
Suddenly she leaned forward. “Do you know them?”
He followed her sight line. The twin tarantulas in little-girl suits that hung around Christina were at another table across the food court with several other freshmen, staring.
“Oh, they just think I’m a werewolf,” said Peter.
Letha glared at their table. “Who wants to be seconds!” she said.
The twins turned away and there was hushed twittering.
“People suck,” said Letha.
“People are just people,” said Peter, enjoying the feeling of being simultaneously wronged and magnanimous.
“Little whores,” said Letha.
Peter smiled; he got a special charge out of flares of female rivalry.
Letha wanted to wipe that jerk smile off his face with a sandblaster; she wanted to paper her walls with it so she could feel it with her eyes closed.
The Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off
It was uncanny. Not only was the spot they had dyed yesterday as white as it had been previously but also the number of infected strands had doubled.
Alexa frowned. “That’s really annoying,” she said.
“I mean, it’s not your fault,” said Alyssa, eyeing Christina accusingly.
They were helping Christina prepare for her date, because it had been decided between them—Christina had not been consulted—that there was nothing to help her get over the trauma of discovering half a dead girl than the trauma of a first date with a whole live boy.
“We’ll just have to make do,” said Alexa wearily. “Have you thought about an outfit?”
Christina showed them what she had planned to wear and received a simultaneous and emphatic no.
“The jeans aren’t too … frightening,” said Alexa consolingly.
“But the shirt is way more sort of church picnic than wild sex goddess,” said Alyssa.
“I don’t know if wild sex goddess is my sort of look,” said Christina.
But they ignored her; she had only really asked in the first place for sociological purposes—they had brought what she was to wear.
“I like these jeans,” said Christina.
“Totally. For something to look cute painting in,” said Alyssa.
Alexa laid the shirt they had furnished on the bed. The shirt was the color of pink frosting and had a pattern on it to imitate sprinkles.
“I … I can’t wear that,” said Christina.
“Christina, don’t be difficult,” said Alexa.
“I can’t wear that,” said Christina.
“Christina, we’re only …
bitch
!”
Alyssa had sharply pinched the skin above Alexa’s elbow between her fingernails and indicated Christina with her eyes. The pallor in her face.
“Okay,” said Alexa. “It’s okay, sweetie.”
They selected a cream sweater that after some discussion they decided was acceptable as long as she was sort of bitchy the first half hour, and proceeded with their combined efforts to squeeze Christina into the jeans they had furnished. Then they turned to the situation of the hair. The process was foreign and mysterious to Christina. She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine. But it worked—they were always so, so pretty.