Lord's Fall (39 page)
Mary felt the urge to scream. Instead she blew air between her teeth, like steam escaping from a pressure cooker. She poured herself a cup of coffee and took it to the table. She shifted a stack of magazines and mail off a chair, which was when she discovered the cordless phone.
She clicked it on and listened. No dial tone. The battery had gone dead. She had a cell phone but she only used it for work, and Justin didn’t have the number. She hung the phone to recharge and sat to put her elbows on the table, resting her forehead on the heels of her hands as she hunched over her coffee.
Her mind arrowed back to the dream. She was dreaming with more frequency and they were getting more vivid. This time the bodies of the seven in the circle were translucent. Ribbons of colored light had streamed from them, flowing and moving in the air as if the creatures were some kind of strange anemone. The poison had tasted bittersweet and smelled like cloves.
She had dreamed in color several times but she had never before dreamed a smell or a taste. Was that somehow connected to hearing voices and seeing impossible things?
She flinched as panic tried to grab hold again. Nope, don’t go there right now. She pulled her hands down, stretched them in front of her and stared at her fingers. Slender and dexterous, they were an advantage in the OR, but they looked strange, as if they belonged to someone else.
Justin walked back into the kitchen with a brisk stride. He poured himself some coffee then came over to pat her on the back as he gulped hot liquid. “Tony moved some things around. He can see you this afternoon at three. And,” he added, “I don’t trust you to go on your own so I’m leaving the office early to take you myself.”
“I was such a needy rabbit when I married you,” she said. “But hey, pre-med plus law school equals the American Dream, right? Thank god those days are gone.”
“What are you talking about, doctor girl?” Justin said. “What needy rabbit? You’re the original Marlboro Man. Except for the cigarettes, the ten-gallon hat and the penis.”
She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Well okay, you’re quite a bit not like the Marlboro Man.” He grinned. “But you’ve got this brooding silent hero thing going on, with a hint of something tragic in your past, except I know your past and it’s as ordinary as dirt. It’s very sexy. I’d always wanted to marry a doctor—and if you’d only had that penis . . .”
“Therapy has made you too cocky,” she said.
“Which Tony appreciates,” he told her.
She rolled her eyes. “Get out.”
He sobered. “I’ll be back this afternoon at two to pick you up. Be ready or I’ll do the he-man thing and throw you over my shoulder.”
“Quit being so damn patronizing. I’m not going.” Her mug was empty. She stood and headed for the coffeepot.
“Whatever,” Justin said, eyeing her. “I guess Tony isn’t going to care if you haven’t shaved your legs.”
“For god’s sake!” she exploded, turning on him. He scowled at her, looking as mutinous and adorable as a two-year-old. She tried to rein in her impatience. “Look, I appreciate your concern. It’s sweet of you.”
“Sweet.” He snorted.
Her expression hardened. “But I’m warning you, I’m not putting up with your stubbornness and interference, and I am not going to go see Tony, of all people.”
“But why not?”
“Because he’s your partner and I socialize with him, dimwit! And today is my first day off in forever and I don’t want to spend it in a doctor’s waiting room,” she snapped. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
The lie reverberated in her throbbing head. She was cracked down to the middle to her foundation. Whatever her mysterious internal ailment was, it was getting worse. If she didn’t figure out what was wrong she was going to break into pieces, deep inside where nobody could see but where the most vital part of her lived.
He ran a hand through his hair and glanced at his watch, looking hassled. “I don’t have time to argue with you.”
“Good,” she retorted. A belated curiosity struck. “Why did you come over this morning anyway?”
“Oh. Yeah. I wanted to know if you could dog-sit Baxter again. I needed to know and you weren’t answering your phone.” He paused and she listened to nuances shift in the silence. “Tony and I got invited away for the weekend, but we don’t have to go.”
“I didn’t answer my phone because the battery is dead. It didn’t ring.” She repeated it with as much patience as she could muster.
She remembered what she was doing and poured herself a second cup of coffee. She held it to her nose, closed her eyes and let the steam warm her chilled skin. Somehow Justin, Tony and that dog had become her entire social circle.
She would have to add that to her to-do list. Fix toilet. Fix lamp. Fix self.
She said, “Of course I’ll watch Baxter for you. I love that dog.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got a deposition and I really have to run. But I’m coming back and we’re going to duke this out later. I’ll see you at two.”
She felt the bones in her body compress with the urge to smack him over the head. She gritted her teeth instead. The quicker she stopped arguing with him, the quicker he would be out the door. “Hurry or you’ll be late for work.”
“Oh hell.” He bent forward, kissed the air by her cheek and dashed out of the house.
Mary moved to the large living room window to watch with narrowed eyes as he drove away. She tapped a fingernail against the glass. “You can come,” she whispered to his retreating car. “But I’m not going to be here.”
• • •
S
he folded her laundry, put it away and straightened her bed. There was another load of colorful cloth scraps in the laundry room. She put the scraps in the washing machine and tidied the living room.
Since she lived alone and the two-bedroom house was more than big enough to suit her modest needs, she used the living room as one of her workrooms. She had four quilts in varying stages of completion. By far the most colorful was the patchwork crazy quilt. She fingered the cloth but the piece wasn’t speaking to her. It seemed a lifeless fact, separate from her existence as though some stranger had left it in her house.
She moved down the hall to the second bedroom, which she had turned into a studio. There she spent two hours trying to capture on canvas something of the imagery from her dream, but it was hopeless.
Those creatures had shone from within. The colors that had shifted within their bodies and flowed outward in whorls of light were too delicate and strange for her to capture on paper. The colors seemed indicative of emotion or personality, as if the creatures had senses so different from humans, they could actually see the pheromones their bodies released. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t convey the impression with paint or pencils, and she didn’t have the illustrative skill of a commercial artist.
She had been plagued with strange dreams for as long as she could remember. The one she had labeled “the sacred poison dream” was only one of the ones that recurred on a regular basis. Sometimes the details of the sacred poison dream were vague, or just different. Several details remained constant. There were the seven people, or creatures, three pairs of whom were mates; an escaped criminal; the poison that they drank; and the terror and sense of appalling loss when she awakened.
She shook her head. Some people believed each person had a soul mate, but she didn’t. The concept was too convenient, too romantic without real substance. People met other like-minded people because they shared things in common and engaged in similar activities. Birds of a feather really did flock together. Either that or they met by accident. She could never understand why that was a major recurring theme in her dreams.
At least she could be grateful that, no matter how violent or overwhelming the loss might feel in the dream’s aftermath, it held her in its grip for only a brief time before fading away. No one could endure that kind of raw anguish for long, at least not that Mary had witnessed. People seemed to suffer intense grief in waves.
The dreams had not been so intense or vivid when she had been a child but they had always been unsettling. They had gained in color, detail and emotion as she had grown older. As a med student at Notre Dame University, she’d taken advantage of the counseling offered through the university in an attempt to put whatever demons existed inside her mind to rest. For over a year she and her counselor had explored her childhood and the possible symbolism involved in the dream imagery.
Justin was right. She had lived an almost entirely normal childhood. She had fallen out of trees, tripped and misspoke in school plays, made cupcakes for bake sales and had sleepovers with friends. She remembered her childhood with detailed clarity. There was simply nothing for her to be haunted about, other than the death of her parents when she was fourteen. Even then she had gone to live with a loving aunt who had been attentive to the needs of a grief-stricken child.
When she had graduated, she terminated the counseling sessions, and married and divorced Justin. Now she lived in her ivory tower. As far as she could tell the attempt at counseling had been a complete failure.
The painting she was trying to work on was a failure as well. She lifted it from the easel and set it against one wall to dry. Then she took up her sketchpad and pencils, hoping that the change in medium might help her convey some of the delicacy that she could see so clearly with her mind’s eye.
As she worked, an old memory shook itself out of a dark recess in her mind. She paused to let it unfurl. She had always drawn as a child. As soon as her fingers were big enough to clutch a crayon she would draw, over and over again, people in cages. It had become an elaborate secret project over the years. The people acquired names and personalities. They had rooms in their prisons. She would draw crude beds, chairs, bookcases, kitchens, all behind bars. They were her people, and she would never let them go.
Over time, she had stopped with that obsession but she had never spoken of it to anyone, and she’d always destroyed the pictures with a hot sense of shame. What kind of monster was she to daydream about caged people?
Seven. Her breathing hitched. She had always drawn seven people. How could she have forgotten that?
She sketched, her movements slow as she struggled past the adult’s acquired finesse to approximate something of the child’s crudity as she worked to recapture the details from years ago. A simple triangle of an ankle-length dress, the long sleeves, the curl of hair . . . She hesitated at the hem of the dress and her forehead wrinkled. If she remembered right, she had never drawn hands or feet.
Her college counselor would have had a field day with
that
imagery. She shut the sketchbook with a sharp slap.
• • •
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LORD’S FALL
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