Specter (9780307823403) (2 page)

Finally he takes a slow breath. “We don’t know your first name,” he tells her.

“Julie.”

“How old are you, Julie?”

“Nine.”

“And where do you live? Can you give us an address?”

“No,” she says. “We just lived in San Antonio a week. It was an apartment house. It’s next to the freeway.”

“How about a former address? Where did you live before?”

“Lots of places. We used to live in a mobile home. We moved a lot.” She is staring at him, and his wrinkle flickers like a bad light bulb.

“It would help us if we could find your relatives. Can you give us some names and addresses?”

“I haven’t got any relatives,” she tells him.

Dr. Paull smooths down her sleeve and gently pats her hand. Maybe Mrs. Cardenas is right about him.

“We don’t know much about you, Julie,” he says. “Can you talk to us about what happened?”

She doesn’t move. I don’t see her even blink.

“You and your parents were traveling in a car, Julie. You were in the backseat, apparently. We’re guessing, from the police report, that there was
some malfunction in the car, that your father in some way lost control of the car.”

“Sikes killed my father.”

How can she say this in such a calm way? I shiver again.

“Julie,” Dr. Paull says quietly, “your father was killed in the accident. Your mother was killed, too. Can you tell us her name?”

“Nancy.” Tears begin to roll from her eyes as she continues to gaze into his face.

I hug my knees with a sense of relief. Tears I can understand. But there is so much I don’t understand, including myself. I wish I could leave this place, with its smells of laundry-soaped sheets and alcohol rubs. Even leave my body, moving out and away, through the walls, through the air ke so much vanishing mist, and never come back.

Dr. Paull takes a clipboard from the nurse and scratches at the paper with an old pocket pen. “We’re going to give you medication to help take away your headache, Julie,” he says. He stands and pats her hand again before gently placing it on the bed.

Mrs. Marsh makes quick movements with a hypo and a bottle; rolls Julie onto her side, pulling back the bedcovers; and zaps a needle into her hip. I wince, but Julie doesn’t seem to notice what is happening.

She slowly closes her eyes. Her shoulders relax, and she sinks a little deeper into the bed. Mrs. Marsh slams the protective rail back into place.

The doctor turns and looks at me. He leafs through some papers, finally looks up, and says, “Dina Harrington.” That’s all.

I had almost begun to like this man when I saw him pat Julie’s hand. But now I’m angry at him. I didn’t used to get so angry at people. Dr. Lynn Manning, the resident psychiatrist, tells me I’m really angry at myself. I try to remember this. It’s not Dr. Paull’s fault that I’m here. But it is partly his fault that I don’t like to be here.

“Shouldn’t something go with the Dina Harrington?” I ask him. “Like, ‘How are you feeling?’ or ‘Any more problems with nausea?’ ”

“According to what I read on the chart, you’re progressing satisfactorily.”

“Not me. The chart.” I try to sound matter-of-fact, but it’s hard to keep the anger out of my voice. “The chart is progressing satisfactorily, but I’m going to die. Didn’t the chart tell you that?”

Mrs. Marsh sniffs and looks upward, as though to say, “She’s being a problem.” The hair in her mole quivers, and I have to wrench my gaze away from it.

Dr. Paull nods and says, “Having a negative attitude won’t help you.”

“Nothing is going to help me,” I answer. “I’d be stupid not to face the facts.”

“Dina, I’m not your doctor,” he says. “I’m not going to go into that with you. What I’d like to do is find out if Julie Kaines gave you any information about her family or herself.”

I glance over at Julie. She’s asleep and breathing
smoothly, her straggly blond hair tangled around her thin face. “She talked about this person Sikes. She thought he was in the room.”

“Aside from that nightmare,” he says.

“Why do you think it was just a nightmare?” I ask him. “I heard the whisper, too. It might have been Julie. It might have been someone else. It felt as though someone was in the room. It was dark in here, and I was scared.”

The wrinkle between his eyebrows is at it again. “You didn’t see anyone?”

“It could be I didn’t see anyone because it was dark and because it took a while to turn on the light. If someone was here, he’d have had time to get out of the room.”

“You think someone was in the room?”

“Yes.” I sigh. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Did Julie talk about what happened? About any relatives who might come for her?”

“She said she didn’t have any relatives.”

“No one? That’s hard to believe.”

“Believe it. I’m proof that it’s possible.”

He looks embarrassed. That’s a step in the right direction. But he turns away from me and talks to Mrs. Marsh. “Maybe the patient will be more communicative in the morning.”

“She’s not a patient. She’s a person!” I say. “And she’s scared. Can’t you see that she’s scared of this guy Sikes? She said he killed her father.”

“Her mother and father were killed this morning in an automobile accident.”

“But what if Sikes tampered with the car? I saw that once in a movie on television. The brake line was cut, and the car went out of control. Couldn’t that have happened?”

“It’s up to the police to investigate things like that,” he says. “What we need to find out is who can take responsibility for Julie.”

As he walks toward the door, he pauses. “If she talks to you tomorrow, Dina, and tells you about any relatives or friends, please let one of the nurses know.”

For the first time he smiles at me. Maybe he’s trying to be friendly. Maybe he’s just wanting me to do things his way. Maybe he’s remembering what he learned in medical school about how to be nice to patients—if they teach anything like that.

I don’t want to sort it out. I just wiggle down under the blanket and sheet and pull them up around my ears, curling into a ball. I snake one hand out and pull the string attached to the light chain, snapping the room into darkness. I squeeze my eyes shut and listen to them leave.

I’m not going to make any promises to him. Julie’s life is her own, not mine. What she wants to tell people is up to her.

The anger I feel toward the doctor and the nurse, the anger for being pushed into someone else’s life, meets my old, familiar anger head-on, leaving me uncomfortable and confused.

And so I retreat. I have learned to move out and away from the pain and the illness, becoming a
separate being from my body. I pull away from these feelings now, away from my body, away from the hospital room; and my mind slips through the moonlit rooms of the place where I grew up, the church-run foster home for girls like me, whose absent parents clung legally until their children were unadoptable. People want babies to adopt, they told me over and over, as I wrapped gangly legs around chair rungs and ached to be small and petted and loved.

Now I am far from my body, and I glide through the living room of the central building, stroking the smooth oak tabletops and the sturdy upholstered chairs. I had once thought them ugly, and they were. They are. But they are an anchor to my other world, and I need to touch them.

The moon shimmers through windows without drapes, open to the fields and the woods of gnarled elm and mesquite, and I can see beyond to the vegetable garden where I once helped to hoe fat clumps of weeds from between rows of pole beans and corn, whacking the weed roots with a vengeance in the hot summer sun, clods of dark soil flying into the air, sweat running down my face and back.

Softly, I am now in the kitchen, slipping into one of the wooden chairs, remembering old Carlotta, who does the baking and who hands out cookies like love tokens. Even in the aloneness of night the kitchen is memory-fragrant with cinnamon and chocolate and the warm breasts of Carlotta,
who knows when a child needs a hug in order to survive.

And here is the room in which I cried at night when I was very young, wishing someone would want me, wondering how anyone would find me in this hill country place. Here I grew older, no longer caring about the childhood I had once wanted, focusing all my energies on a future I would build for myself.

Holley Jo, my best friend, has been at the home almost as long as I have, and our lives are so intertwined that we would sit cross-legged on our beds after lights out and talk about the years we would plan and how great they would be, until someone would come in from the next room and threaten us with all sorts of dire things unless we let them get to sleep.

As I move through the closed doorway, I am no more opaque than the moonlight that spills over the windowsill. The room is vibrant with rhythmic breathing and sleep murmurs and tiny night noises. Holley Jo’s long, brown hair is spidery across the pillow, and I finger it wistfully, thinking of the short, thin curls that are all I have left of the dark hair that once whipped through the air as I ran.

Holley Jo stirs, and I pull my hand away. Hush. Sleep. I’m not here to disturb. I’m here because I’m clinging to something it’s hard to give up. My bed is still empty, and I curl up at the end, my cheek against the fuzzy chenille spread. For so many years this bed has been my refuge, my planning
place. Here is where I had decided that the whole world ahead was open to me, and what I wanted to work for could be mine. I would aim for a scholarship, and knew I had a darned good chance of getting one. I would go to the University of Texas, and work part time, and live in a dorm, and come out clutching a degree in economics and an acceptance to law school. That’s when my real life would begin. I was going to win. I could be patient with the promise of what my life was going to be.

Then that dream was ripped apart and smashed. When the doctor sent me to the hospital in San Antonio and they told me there that the chills and weight loss and that stupid lump on the side of my neck meant Hodgkin’s disease, I cried out that it wasn’t fair! I couldn’t be a winner because they had snatched away the race. And I wasn’t ready to die.

“What am I doing here?” I whisper.

Jarringly I am back in the hospital room with its medicine smells and the brisk footsteps following the jangle of a cart in the hallway past my door. The words I had whispered hang in the air, reminding me of another whisper, and I shiver, clutching the blanket to my chin for comfort.

Who are you, Sikes?

Lying there in the dark room, I hold my breath, terrified that I will hear an answer.

Hospital mornings break the day into clatters and rattles with a background of voices, even before the sun is up. There’s not much privacy in a hospital. We can’t keep from hearing what goes on in the rooms around us.

There’s an old lady across the hall who sometimes cries like a little kid and keeps calling, “Eddie! Eddie!” Mrs. Cardenas said the old lady is ninety-six, and she wants Eddie to come and take her home, except there isn’t an Eddie anymore.

One night I sneaked across the hall and sat in the chair by her bed. I thought if she had someone to talk to, she might feel better. She was like a little skeleton, with transparent skin stretched over her bones; and her fingers kept poking out the top of
the blanket, wiggling like spider legs. She stopped crying and stared at me, but she didn’t talk; so I told her about Rob, whose tortoiseshell glasses match his hair and slip down his nose when he leans over to write, and about the terrific poetry he writes in English class, and about the special poems he wrote just for me. I told her he had promised to give me his senior ring next year, but since I came to the hospital, I haven’t heard from him.

And I told her about the place I lived before I came here, and how my friend, Holley Jo, keeps sending me get-well letters that make me homesick for the low hills and the brown grass in the fall and the wild flowers in the spring, and even for the dust smell of the garden and the rattling bus to school.

And I told her they said I couldn’t go back there to live again because they had no facilities for taking the right kind of care of me. And I told her I was going to die.

She just kept staring at me, and all of a sudden she made noises and began to smell awful. So I ran back to my own bed and scrunched down under the blanket and cried.

This morning—the day after Julie had come—is just like every other morning, with all the bustle of trays and face washings that have to take place before anyone is really awake. My doctor won’t come by until ten, so there’s going to be a long wait after the breakfast trays are picked up. I take a shower, then decide to paint my toenails. Holley
Jo sent me the nail polish in my favorite shade of pink.

I glance over at Julie. “You didn’t eat much breakfast.”

“I don’t like that stuff,” she answers.

I can see they’ve given her a liquid diet. They probably have to until they find out if everything is all right.

My knee is tucked under my chin, and I take a smooth stroke with the brush, thinking at the same time how pale and spindly my legs look. I need the sun.

“That’s pretty,” Julie says.

I hold out my foot, stretching my toes, and smile at her. “Would you like me to paint your toenails, too?”

She nods, so I pull the sheet and blanket away from the end of the bed, put her feet on my lap, and paint away.

I am just finishing when a nurse’s aide comes in and watches us, shaking her head. “She’s not supposed to move around,” she tells me.

“Only her feet got moved,” I answer, “and the concussion isn’t in her toes.”

Julie actually smiles, and she lifts her feet to examine her toes. It’s funny how a little thing like nail polish can make you feel better about yourself—even if the feeling lasts for only a few moments.

“Julie, I’ve brought you a comb and hair brush and toothpaste and the other things you’ll need,”
the aide says. She pulls the curtain between our beds and tells me to scoot. Julie’s got to have one of those chilly bed baths that make you feel like dried soap for hours.