Vampires in the Lemon Grove (25 page)

“I guess you’re right. But this dream, Bev—it was terrible.” His voice cracks. “I was alone for miles and miles, and I had to keep walking.”

She pictures a dream-small Zeiger retreating after the wire, growing more and more remote from the Derek Zeiger who’s awake. And a part of her thinks,
Good. Let him forget that there ever was an April 14. Let that day disappear even from his nightmares
. If the wire ever comes up again, Beverly decides in that moment, she’ll push it right back under his skin. As many times as it takes for Sergeant Derek Zeiger to heal, she will do this. With sincere apologies to Pfc. Arlo Mackey—whom she suspects she must also be erasing.

Working the dead boy out of Route Roses like a thorn.

She has a sensation like whiskey moving to the top of her brain. It leaves her feeling similarly impaired. Beverly pushes
down and down and down into the muscles under his tattoo to release the knots. Muscle memory, her teacher used to say, that’s what we’re working against.

Off duty, at home, Beverly’s own flashbacks are getting worse. Beverly shuts her eyes on the highway home, sees the mist of blood and matter on the Humvee windscreen, Mackey’s head falling forward with an abominable serenity on the cut stem of his neck. At the diner, her pancake meals are interrupted by strange flashes, snatches of scenery. Fists are pounding on glass; someone’s voice is screaming codes through a radio. Freckles sprinkle across a thin nose. A widow’s peak goes pink with sunburn. Here comes the whole face again, rising up in her mind like a prodigal moon, miraculously restored to life inside the Humvee: the last, lost grin of Pfc. Arlo Mackey. Outside her window, the blue streetlight causes the sidewalk to shine like an empty microscope slide. Her bedroom is a black hole. Wherever she looks now, she sees Arlo’s absence. At night, she sits up in bed and hears Derek’s voice:

“So Belok gets on the radio. Blood is coming out of Mackey like a fucking hydrant …”

Now Beverly is afraid to go to sleep. A moot fear, it turns out: she can’t sleep any longer.

Of course there is always the possibility that she is completely off her rocker. If Zeiger were to bring her a photograph of Mackey in his desert fatigues, would she recognize him as the soldier from her visions? Would he have a receding hairline, brown hair with a cranberry tint, a dimple in his chin? Or would he turn out to be a stranger to Beverly—a boy she doesn’t recognize?

Derek she likes to picture in his new apartment across town, snoring loudly. There is something terribly attractive to Beverly
about the idea that she is remembering this day
for
him, keeping it locked away in the vault of her head, while the sergeant goes on sleeping.

Despite her insomnia, and her growing suspicion that she might be losing her mind, Beverly spends the next month in the best mood of her life. Really, she can’t account for this. She looks terrible—Ed never even yells at her anymore. Her regular patients have started making tentative inquiries about her health. She’s lost twelve pounds; her eyes are still bloodshot at dusk. But so long as she can work with Derek, she feels invulnerable to the headaches and the sleep deprivation, to the bobbing head of Pfc. Mackey and the wire loose in the dirt. So long as only she can see it, and Derek’s amnesia holds, and Derek continues to improve, she knows she can withstand infinite explosions, she can stand inside her mind and trip the red wire of April 14 forever. When Derek comes in for his eighth session, he brings her flowers. She thanks him, embarrassed by her extraordinary happiness, and then presses them immediately when she gets back to her apartment.

She stops wasting her time debating whether she’s harming or helping him. Each time a session ends without any reappearance of the wire, she feels elated. That killing story, she excised from him. Now it’s floating in her, like a tumor in a jar. Like happiness, laid up for the long winter after the boy heals completely and leaves her.

Derek misses three appointments in a row. Doesn’t turn up outside Beverly’s door again until the last day of February. He’s wearing
his unseasonably thin black T-shirt, sitting in a hard orange chair right outside her office. With his skullcap tugged down and his guilty grin he looks like a supersize version of the jug-eared kid waiting for the vice principal.

“Sorry I’m a little late, Bev,” he says, like it’s a joke.

“Your appointment was three weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry. I forgot. Honestly, it just kept slipping my mind.”

“I’ll see you now,” says Beverly through gritted teeth. “Right now. Don’t move a muscle. I have to make some calls.”

Through the crack in the door she watches Zeiger changing out of his shirt. Colors go pouring down his bunched bones. At this distance his tattoo is out of focus and only glorious.

“So, American Hero. Long time no see.” She pauses, struggling to keep her voice controlled. She was so worried. “We called you.”

“Yeah. Sorry. I was feeling too good to come in.”

“The number was disconnected.”

“I’m behind on my bills. Nah, it’s not like that,” he says hurriedly, studying her face. “Nothing serious.” His mouth keeps twitching like an accordion. She realizes that he’s trying to smile for her.

“You don’t look too good,” she says bluntly.

“Well, I’m still sleeping,” he says, scratching his neck. “But some of the pain is back.”

He climbs onto the table, smoothing his new cap of hair. It’s grown and grown. Beverly is surprised the former soldier can tolerate it at this length. The black tuft of hair at his nape is clearly scheming to become a mullet.

“Is the pressure too much?”

“Yes. But no, it’s fine. I mean, do what you gotta do back there to fix it, Bev.” He takes a sharp breath. “Did I tell you what’s happening to Jilly?”

Beverly swallows, immediately alarmed. Jilly Mackey, she remembers. Arlo’s sister. Her first thought is that the girl must be seeing the pictures of April 14 herself now. “I don’t think so …”

In Lifa, Texas, it turns out, Jilly has been having some trouble. Zeiger found out about this when he spoke on the phone with the Mackey women last night; he’d called for Arlo’s birthday. “A respect call,” he says, as if this is a generally understood term. She’ll have to ask one of the other veterans if it’s a military thing.

“Her mother’s upset because I guess Jilly’s been ‘acting out,’ whatever the fuck that means, and the teachers seem to think that somehow the tattoo is to blame—that she should have it removed. Laser removal, you know, they can do that now.”

“I see. And what does Jilly say?”

“Of course she’s not going to. That’s her brother on the tattoo. She’s starting at some new school in the fall. But the whole thing makes me sad, really sad, Beverly. I’m not even sure exactly why. I mean, I can see to where it would be hard for her—emotionally, or whatever—to have him back there …”

Beverly squeezes his shoulders. A minor-key melody has been looping through her head since he began talking, and she realizes that it’s a song from one of her father’s records that she’d loved as a child, a mysterious and slightly frightening one with wild trumpets and horns that sounded like they’d been recorded in a forest miles away, accidentally caught in the song’s net: “The Frozen Chameleon.”

“It’s probably a weird thing to explain in the girls’ locker room, you know? But on the other hand I almost can’t believe the teachers would suggest that. It doesn’t feel right, Bev. You want a tattoo to be, ah, ah …”

“Permanent?”

“Exactly. Like I said, it’s a memorial for Arlo.”

Grief freezing the picture onto him. Grief turning the sergeant into a frozen chameleon. Once a month Beverly leaves
flowers in front of her parents’ stones at St. Stephen’s. Her sister got out twenty-five years ago, but she’s still weeding for them, sprucing daffodils.

“You don’t think the day might come when you want to erase it?”

“No! No way. Jesus, Beverly, weren’t you listening? Just the thought makes me sick.”

She smooths the sky between his shoulder blades. The picture book of Fedaliyah, stuck on that page he can’t turn. After an instant, his shoulders flatten.

“I was listening. Relax.” She shifts the pressure a few vertebrae lower. “There. That’s better, isn’t it?”

By March 10, she estimates she’s survived hundreds of explosions. Alone in her apartment, she’s watched Pfc. Mackey die and reincarnate with her eyes shut, massaging her own jaw.

From dusk until three or four a.m., in lieu of sleeping, she’s started sitting through hundreds of hours of cable news, waiting for coverage of the wars. Of course Zeiger and Mackey won’t be mentioned, they are ancient history, but she still catches herself listening nightly for their names. One night, spinning through the news roulette, she happens to stop on a photo still of a face that she recognizes: Representative Eule Wolly, the blue-eyed advocate of massage therapy for the new veterans.

Who, she learns, never served abroad during the Vietnam War. First Lieutenant Eule Wolly was honorably discharged from the navy while still stationed in San Francisco Bay. He lied about receiving a purple heart. The freckled news anchor reading these allegations sounds positively gleeful, as if he’s barely suppressing a smile. Next comes footage of Representative Wolly himself, apologizing on a windy podium for misleading his constituents
through his poor choice of wording and the “perhaps confusing” presentation of certain facts. Such as, to give one for instance, his alleged presence in the nation of Vietnam from 1969 to 1971. Currently he is being prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act.

Beverly switches off the TV uneasily. Just that name, the “Stolen Valor Act,” gets under her skin. She pushes down the thought that she’s no better than the congressman, or the rest of the pack of liars and manipulators who parade across the television. In a way his crime is not so dissimilar to what she’s been doing, is it? Encouraging Derek to twist his facts around as she loosens his muscles; trying to rub out his memories of the berm. Thinking she can live the boy’s worst day for him.

“He’s doing amazingly well,” Beverly hears herself telling her sister, Janet, during their weekly telephone call. Bragging, really, but she can’t help herself—Zeiger is making huge strides. His life is settling into an extraordinarily ordinary routine, she tells Jan, who by now has heard all about him.