Jaguar (7 page)

Each time they rang the bells at the front of the church a funny red sign lit up in her mind. It flashed on and off just like the water faucet drip in the plumbing store sign. The number 8 on its side had been in her dreams before, branded onto the backs of some peoples’ hands

Her father woke her this time as the pew emptied for communion.

“C’mon, Muffin,” he said. “I’m taking you out to the car.”

He laid her down on the back seat and fixed his coat for a pillow. Then he sat behind the wheel but turned so that he could put his feet up on the seat and watch her, too. He rolled his window down and smoked, talking with her quietly. She watched, fascinated, at the slow swirl of smoke around his head.

“I could go to school on the army money,” he was saying. “I got a couple of job offers already, but I don’t want to work for somebody else all my life. That’s too much like the army. I want to be my own boss.”

He quit talking and Maryellen didn’t say anything.

“Haven’t you ever seen anybody smoke before?”

“What?”

“The way you’re staring. It’s like you never saw anybody smoke before.”

“Oh,” she said. “No. I’ve seen it.”

The passenger door in the front opened up and her mother leaned her head inside.

“Dr. Trapp is coming,” she said. “He was just a couple of rows in front of us so I asked him to take a look at her.”

Her mother reached over the seat and brushed back Maryellen’s hair.

“How’re you doing, babe?”

“Ok.”

“Do you still have your headache?”

Maryellen nodded.

Dr. Trapp opened the back door and sat on the seat next to her. He felt her head and throat with his pale, skinny fingers. He made her stick out her tongue, and asked her the same things that he always asked her in the office. When he looked into her eyes, he hesitated, then looked again.

“That’s curious,” he said. His angular face wore a puzzled expression as he sat back in the seat beside her.

“What’s curious?”

A hurried tightness squinched her mother’s voice, like she spoke while holding her breath.

Dr. Trapp was staring into Maryellen’s eyes again, going from one eye to another. His eyes were blue, with flecks of gold. He didn’t blink much, but when he blinked she saw the fresh scar where he’d had a mole removed.

“Her pupils . . . open and close at random.”

“Like in a skull fracture?”

Her father’s voice startled her, right above her head. He went on.

“I . . . saw some of that, you know, in the war. . . .”

“Well, Mel, her scalp’s not tender, no signs of an injury. She’d remember anything that hit her
that
hard. I assume that you know of no such injury . . . ?”

“No,” her mother said. “Nothing that other kids don’t get—scraped hands and knees. Lately she babbles in her sleep, but so does Mel. Today she’s been impossible to get to wake up. . . .”

Her mother’s worried face appeared over the seat, then disappeared to talk with the doctor outside the car.

“Has she had any shaking, or tremors, or fits of any kind?”

“No,” her mother said, “not that I’ve ever noticed.”

“Does she fall asleep at strange times, or does this just happen as a result of her normal sleep?”

“No, no,” her mother insisted. “She was just hard to wake up today, that’s all. We were up late last night, but a few times lately she would sleep round the clock if I’d let her. She’s not like that. You can see how hard it is to keep her awake today. And she’s so
quiet
. . . .”

He opened the door again and wiggled her foot.

“Is your neck stiff, honey?”

She shook her head. She had her eyes closed because the light made her headache worse.

“Just the headache?”

“Yes.”

He closed the car door and sent streaks of red shooting through her head.

“She has no fever, although she’s clearly been sweating,” he told her mother. “My greatest concern would be for meningitis, but this doesn’t look like that.”

“What could it be, then?” Again, her mother’s worried voice.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I want to see her tomorrow in the office. Call me tonight if she changes in any way for the worse, but bring her in tomorrow even if she’s all better.”

Maryellen slept most of the day away while relatives came to welcome her father home. The men laughed over their beers and her father brought them into the kitchen one by one to show them the nicks in the linoleum and to tell the story of the rat. Each time, he pushed the curtain aside and looked in to see how she was doing.

All of the coats were piled on her parents’ bed, and Maryellen’s mom kissed her forehead each time somebody came or left. When everybody was gone and her parents sat in the kitchen alone, swirling the ice in their glasses, Maryellen felt a sudden, intense hunger. She padded out to the kitchen and wolfed down a huge plate of spaghetti while her parents joked with each other and ruffled her hair.

“Better, huh?” her dad said.

“Yes.”

“Probably just some kid thing,” he said. “She got over it pretty fast.”

“We can borrow my parents’ car again tomorrow to take her in.”

“She’s better,” her dad said, “she said so herself. We can’t afford to pay him to tell us what we already know. Kids get these things, they get over them. . . .” He waved his hand to dismiss the whole thing.

“But, he said. . . .”

“Right. He said to bring her in. He didn’t say it would be free. It’s going to take everything we’ve got to get out of this dump, and the sooner the better. If she gets sick again tonight, we’ll take her. How’s that?”

Her father’s voice snapped the words out and his tone bordered on a growl.

Her mother rubbed her eyes the way she did when she was tired or when she just wanted everything to go away.

“All right,” she said. “I’m tired and don’t want to think about it right now. She’s been like this off and on since the earthquake, maybe it’s just . . . nerves or something.”

“Yeah,” her dad said. “Nerves. So we’ll see how she is in the morning. You ate a good dinner and got plenty of sleep, Muffin. That’s all you needed, right?”

“I guess so,” she said.

She felt like she was taking a side against her mother, and she didn’t like that feeling.

The dream-work . . . does not think, calculate, or judge in any
way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form.

—Sigmund Freud

Dr. Mark White approached the last summer of his two-year psychiatric residency on The Hill with relief. Most of his colleagues from medical school had chosen private hospitals for their residencies, grooming themselves into a lucrative network of suburban practice. Mark’s appearance did not lend itself to suburban practice—executives and their wives did not want to trust their psyches to someone who looked like an Eagle Scout too young to shave. His bright blue eyes and unmanageable brown hair furthered the naive adolescent image. During his ER rotation he’d been mistaken for a high school volunteer and for the lab tech’s (high school) son.

Mark decided to continue with public medicine in the fall, but he kept that decision to himself. He was going to treat himself to some fishing first. This morning he bought his first fishing license in six years as a commitment to relaxation.

He had offers, all places like The Hill, but he had no plans beyond his residency. These not very attractive offers all came from overworked, understaffed state agencies. He had ignored his advisor’s warnings about a residency at the state institution, and now he reaped the consequences.

“Rich people get as crazy as the poor,” Dr. Bidet had advised him. “Psychiatric care takes time, it’s not like a gallbladder that’s wrapped up in a couple of hours.” He tapped his desktop timer that ticked away Mark’s allotment of six hundred seconds. “Time costs money—if it’s
your
time, then it’s either your money or somebody else’s.” He rubbed his fat neck and sighed just as the timer
ding
ed. “I think you’re an excellent physician, Mark. I’ll recommend you wherever you choose to go.”

Mark had never admired his advisor, a corpulent teaching psychiatrist with a very limited, very lucrative private practice. In therapy Mark had faced his distaste for the rich and fat, a “reverse snobbery,” as Mindy once put it.

The new Dr. Mark White had chose The Hill for unprofessional reasons. The hospital grounds, parklike and peaceful, perched a wooded ridgetop overlooking the valley. On a clear evening, standing on the helipad atop the fifth-floor roof, he watched sunset trickling down the Olympic Mountains as it pinked up the watery spaces between the San Juan Islands. Even the rain was a pleasure up there. Rather than washing the landscape gray is it did in the city, rain simply brightened the evergreen vista and freshened the air. If The Hill was not therapeutic for others, its location was pure therapy for Mark White.

His name tag read: “Dr. Mark,” and he seldom wore white. He worked in one of three corduroy sports coats: brown, gray or beige. By the time he started his tenure at The Hill he had already made his only tie, a black clip-on, last four and a half years. The tie was a going-away present from his younger brother, who inherited Mark’s room over the garage.

His tie was the last straw with Mindy, who made the issue of a state institution an ultimatum.

“I can’t stand the thought of you working in an
asylum
,” she said. Her nose wrinkled up in that way he’d thought cute, but now he thought officious. After all, he was the only one in the room with her at the time—not his patients, not the
asylum.
She was not wrinkling her nose at them but at him and at his pitiful prospects, a pungent substitute for what his medical degree had implied.

Mark White had a firm confidence in the skills of his head and his hands. The year of psychotherapy required for his matriculation in psychiatry had not gone wasted. He looked forward to The Hill, not down on it, and every time he saw Mindy picking imaginary lint off the arm of her chair he felt the gulf between them widen. She was digging a hole between them by the bucketful. He knew that nothing short of continental drift could save them.

Mindy had been his only intimate relationship, and he regretted his inexperience, particularly his inexperience in ending it. Even the best therapy only reached so far.

In the end, he didn’t have to worry. She took charge of the ending as she had taken charge of their meals or their selection of movies that she preferred to call “films.”

“I respect your social conscience,” she told him. “But I believe that money saves more people than good intentions. You should be an example for them to aspire to, not grubbing around among them.”

He had simply smiled and taken her hand.

“You’re being understanding,” she said. Again, that wrinkle of the well-tanned nose. “
Being
understanding is not the same as understanding. You’ll see what I mean. Someday, you’ll need something or someone and nothing will quite bring it off like money. That’s why I’m going to Houston.”

She flew to Houston as the first vice-president of the BankWest International Investments division and married her Chief Executive Officer a year later. Mark circled the date on his calendar after he received the invitation, but by the time the wedding rolled around he had already met Eddie Reyes.

In dreams begin responsibilities.

—W. B. Yeats

The boy Rafferty dragged stones to the uncle’s grave to prop up the lid of an old toolbox that he’d inscribed with “Uncle Hungry” in neat black letters. Above and below the name, and to either side of it, four clusters of translucent wings caught the rising March sun and licked the bleached backdrop of wood like cold flame. Rafferty dropped the young sack of his body down on the gravetop and watched a finger of sun pry apart the iron lips of the sky.

Wind whipped around the corner of the barn, last of the night wind running for cover. Rafferty was tired, sweaty from the night’s digging. The wind that had teeth in it last night passed him this morning without a snap. Along this side of the barn, the morning-sun side, a scatter of crocuses nodded their lavender heads. The uncle saved those bulbs an extra year before planting, just to be safe.

“Quiet as a grave,” the older man might have said. Rafferty said it for him and added the quick snort that his uncle used for a laugh. Wind-sighs, the raspy rattle of loose dust off the stone-tops, his crow on the barn roof stretching his right wing out—everything was waiting for Uncle to show up so they could get on with things.

Right after the hatch, inside the still, things were much quieter than this. Those quiet days dragged into months, a year, two years thick with fear, with knives in the night and the heavy stink of rotting flesh from the barn and from the spring. Visits from the Roam had been their only relief.

Rafferty fingered one of the bronze flutterings tacked to the box lid—a clump of brittle, translucent wings. Inside the barn, bushels of these wings filled bins along one wall. His uncle, or the man he called uncle, saved them from those first terrifying months of the hatch.

Nothing like it since
, the boy thought.

The voice in his head was older than he remembered. Those bright buzzing things crawled out of the ground that day and they took wing after a spring shower. He remembered the sun during that shower, and a rainbow. He remembered that glimpse of the boy, Eddie, whose blue eyes stared back at Rafferty from the crack in the world.

Later, the blue-eyed man unrolled him from the blanket and laid him on the slope outside the car. One of the hands had that same design of the “8” on its side that Rafferty saw on Mrs. Gratzer.

Until uncle got him out of that car, Rafferty had had no idea how bad he smelled. The hillside around him was not the seething mass of bugs that he had heard a few days before, but plenty still crawled around.

The air outside the car made him feel dirty at first, then clean again. The places that stopped hurting in the car throbbed now that he was free. Even though the breeze had a chill to it, he lay still and bathed in the luxury of clean air. He sucked at the water-bottle that the stranger offered him, and lay still.