Clare Obscur - DragonBear



Clare Obscure

Prologue

There was a flicker of flames, red and gold and amber, surrounded by heavy darkness, and the harsh burning heat of smoke in her mouth and deep in her lungs that wasn’t just from a minor flaw in a fireplace flue. She nearly panicked and pulled away, afraid of being caught again in a barbed-wire spider’s web of death, pierced and held by another’s pain and anguish, till a different taste hit her throat: the wood-tinged peatiness of an Islay scotch.

No one would be drinking a single malt as they burned to death, surely? Or, if they were, maybe it was worth sticking around to appreciate them before they left this world entirely. And the smoke seemed... familiar.

“Katie, that smell from your sister’s room. That’s not just cigarette smoke, is it?”

“Mommmm! Like I’d know?” The look of anger on her older daughter’s face. Such resentment and self-disgust, it had made Clare flinch inside, and drop the question. Once again she’d hurt her daughter’s feelings without meaning to, without considering all the connotations of consulting her “un-cool” bookworm teenager on such a topic.

It was that sort of smoke, yes. Probably the combination of the drug and the alcohol was what had let her inside, had left -- him? her? -- open to Clare’s intrusion. A man, she decided, and a careful relaxing of her own barriers to submerse herself more deeply in the host’s awareness confirmed it. And he was someone who seemed very used to these particular mood-enhancements. There wasn’t the slightest touch of tingled excitement over doing something dangerous or illegal. So that’s what had let her in. What had drawn her here in the first place, she wasn’t sure of, not yet at least.

The flames flickered in time with the background music, because they would. She’d noticed before that the physical sensations of sight and sound and touch and taste weren’t always those of the actual body, but filtered and mutated by the host’s mind into an occasionally surreal state. Sometimes they were just more intense than reality had ever been. Sometimes they were lacking entirely if the mind was too distracted by its own interior processes.

“Did you miss me?”

The sultry voice came in as more of a promise than a query, and if, at the first instant, it seemed to have a slightly petulant whine to it, maybe that was just from the mind’s automatic defenses against interruption of such a relaxed state. The internal echo of the fireplace’s flames turned to a more diffuse glow, deepened to crimson intensity with a heady musky scent, and a single line of dark gold, the exact color of the whisky, went soaring through it, looped around something and drew it close, and a warmth enfolded her that had to be an actual embrace.

Uh oh.

Still, it had been a long time. And it wasn’t as if anyone knew she was there. And this would be much, much better than merely watching a movie. Clare smiled to herself and settled in.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“See, she’s smiling! She knows I’m here! Mom, Mom, it’s me! Angie! You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be fine!”

“Please, Mrs. Daley --”

“Angie, just call me Angie. You guys are going to see a lot of me and I can’t handle that ‘Mrs. Daley’ stuff. That’s for my mother-in-law.”

“Um, Angie, then. Didn’t Dr. Reynolds talk with you about your mother’s state?”

“Yeah, yes, of course he did. But he told me that no one really knows what’s going on in her head, right? And that hearing is the one sense that seems to be there most often? Or could be there, which is the same thing.”

“It’s, ah, not quite the same. There are ways to determine the degree of responsiveness, through various scans --”

“Oh I read up on those! Someone who could play tennis in her head, and everyone -thought- she was just a vegetable but they were wrong!”

“Please, Mrs. ... Angie. We don’t consider your mother, or any of our patients, to be vegetables. I was about to say that the results from the latest MRI should be available tomorrow, and I’m sure Dr. Reynolds will contact you as soon as he has a chance to examine them.”

“Yeah, sure he will, if I call him up and ask!”

“Yes. Well. Otherwise, I have to say that it’s more or less a wait to see if your mother can come out of this on her own. She did come out of the coma.”

“I still don’t understand about the coma. She was fine in the ambulance, I’d heard. Talking to everyone! Why would she get worse only at the hospital? People shouldn’t get sicker here. You -were- looking out for her, right?”

“Dr. Reynolds didn’t talk to you about... I see. He really should be the one to explain all the complications in your mother’s case. If he didn’t cover your questions sufficiently, perhaps you’d like to arrange another appointment with him? He is the responsible clinician. I’m only on general coverage for the floor this week.”

“He’s a prick. You know it, too!”

“I... I really can’t comment on that, Mrs. Daley. I’ll have his office get in touch with you.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Angie’s Story

Yes, that’s right, I’m Angie. The full formal name is Angela Amelia Sachs Daley, but who on earth can wrap their tongue around a name like that? So I go by Angie, like Angie Dickinson, but you’re probably too young to remember her. She was great! Really sharp, she didn’t take anything from anybody. Oh, that was in her show, a TV show about cops, what was it? “Police Woman” and she played a character named “Pepper” and she was as feisty as pepper, too. I forget when it was on but it was way before “Law and Order” or “CSI”. Do you watch those? I love those shows! I watch all of them, whenever I can. They’re kind of disappointing sometimes, you know, because the bad guy doesn’t always get caught, or if he’s caught he doesn’t always get convicted, but most of them are great. I mean, I know that sort of thing happens in real life, sure, but you expect fiction to come out better, don’t you? But anyhow, nowadays, I guess most people think my name must be short for Angelina, like Jolie. As if! But I’d love to look like her, even if everyone knows those lips aren’t real.

To go on, I’m married to a great guy and I have three wonderful kids, all boys. And let me tell you, that’s a challenge! I mean, I know I gave Mom some grief sometimes, but that’s nothing to having three teenage boys. You just can’t stop them from going out and drinking and doing God knows what, but as long as they come home safe, then it’s enough of a blessing. I knew there’d be a car crash someday, and an ambulance, and a frantic trip to the hospital. Of course I knew; I had a dream about it. More than one dream, too! But I didn’t expect it to be Mom, never did. She drove faster than some people liked, but she was a very good driver and don’t you let Katie tell you otherwise. And the police report was very clear: it said it was all the other guy’s fault. He’s the one that ran right into the rear end of her car, full speed, like he’d never even noticed the flashing lights. You take your life in your hands going on that highway after dark, let me tell you. People just think that because it’s less crowded, they can go zipping along at 80 or 90 miles an hour, when the speed limit is only 55. I mean, no one does 55, of course. Did you ever hear that song, “I Can’t Drive 55”? That was by that guy that joined Van Halen but his name was something similar. Hagar, that’s right, Sammy Hagar. You know James Taylor had a song like that too, something about driving, but I don’t remember the words right now. I love James Taylor, but God, he looks so damn old these days. He should fix himself up better. It’s not like he doesn’t have the money, you know?

I guess I don’t look so young myself, but that’s what three boys will do to you, and I sure don’t have the money. My husband still doesn’t mind. That’s Rick, but his real name is Richard Daley. Yes, just like the Chicago mayor! His dad loved that man. I know some people say he was a really corrupt politician but if you go and talk to the people in Chicago, they still remember all the good things he did. Sometimes it seems you need to have someone who goes outside the law a little, to really get stuff done. And they never caught him on anything, so there. And all that stuff at the convention? That was -not- his fault. Those people shouldn’t have been there in the first place. No one wanted them, and they were just there to make trouble so what a surprise, that’s exactly what they did, and then other people got blamed for it.

Anyway, I’m married and we’ve been married for nearly 20 years. We were thinking of going off on a second honeymoon to celebrate, but I guess that’s out of the question now. We were going to leave the boys with Mom, after all. Maybe not exactly leave them with her, but ask her to come stay while we were gone? Yeah, I know, they’re teenagers but you still need to have someone around to make sure they get fed and off to school okay, and to call if there’s any trouble. Will’s at college but he lives at home. It’s so much cheaper, you know? And he’s still not sure what he really wants to do, so it makes more sense for him to go to a local school instead of spending a ton of money to send him off to some fancy place elsewhere and then have it turn out that he wants to change majors and so needs another year or more to do it. Or drop out completely, like the Richardson’s girl did. Now I did hear that she might have had other reasons, but I’m not going to say because it might be totally wrong and one shouldn’t spread gossip unless you know it’s true. Because then it’s news and not gossip, right? But George is still a senior in high school, and Danny is just a sophomore, so of course they’d need someone to look after them, and it ought to be a relative, and Rick’s parents live too far away.

Katie? Boy, you really don’t know us yet. Katie would turn me down so quick my ears would be ringing for a day and a half from the slammed receiver. Except, you know, with cell phones you don’t get that. And everyone uses cell phones these days, though you really sometimes have to juggle them quite a bit to get good sound from them. A friend at work lent me her cell phone the other day and I swear I couldn’t hear a damn thing. She tried to show me, but I told her never you mind, I’ll just go and make the call from the pay phone, even though they charge you an arm and a leg for that these days, if you can find one at all.

Don’t get me wrong. She is my sister and I love her dearly, and she loves me, or at least she keeps telling me so. But frankly, I’d be scared to leave her alone for a week with the boys even if she did agree. She’s not a bad person, it’s not like that. She’s not evil. But she’s just too damn particular about things and, at times mind you, she’s not like that all the time, but she can have the absolute worst temper tantrums that I have ever seen. She has issues, that’s for sure. But will she get help? Of course not! She thinks she’s fine. But she’ll go around and tell everyone that Mom is getting too old for this and too forgetful for that, and act as though the poor woman had one foot in the grave when till now she was in better shape than either of us. I mean, I have a weight problem. Well I guess you can see that right off! But Katie has her own problems even if they’re more psychological than physical. And she’s nearly fifty years old now, so don’t tell me that she doesn’t have some physical problems too. She won’t talk to me about any of them, though, even if I am her own sister. She has a couple of close friends, I believe, and I hope she talks to them because everyone, I mean everyone, needs to get things off their chest now and then or it will weight them down till they can barely drag themselves around the house, much less go out to a job. And she has a very good job, that’s certainly true. Though don’t ask me to tell you what, I just know she’s always working late.

Of course, none of those close friends are men friends, if you know what I mean, unless they’re really just friends. There were a couple of men along the way, but like I said, she’s too particular and that’s why she never married. There was one very nice man just about three years ago, a Rob or Bob or something like that, and I thought he was just right for her. He was very particular, too, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud the way they looked at each other when they first caught sight of the mess in my house, when they came over to visit for the family dinner that Easter. Usually those are at Mom’s house, but she’d just had knee surgery -and- there had been a problem with the dishwasher. She’d left it running when she went off to a doctor’s appointment and then to a movie or something like that, and I don’t know what happened but it was as if a whole damn water main had exploded. There was water and soap spread all over the kitchen, and it was there long enough that the whole floor was completely ruined. Of course Katie thought it was a sign that Mom was losing it, and must not have shut the dishwasher door tight, but I think it was just too old and broke all on its own.

We’d just had our own kitchen redone, and I told Mom that the guy we’d used was real cheap and the flooring was just as good as anything I’d seen elsewhere, but she must have been too upset by the way the water had soaked through the seams of the linoleum and she insisted on this really expensive sort of Italian stone tile instead, the kind that’s set in real cement. That’s what it’s in, cement? Whatever it is, it took forever to get it done and of course it wasn’t ready for the holiday, so we had to eat at my place instead because Katie’s little apartment wouldn’t have fit more than half of us. I mean, yes, she keeps it perfectly pristine, but come on! She’s by herself, and not living with four males who think that the floor is just some sort of extra big shelf for dumping their clothes and books and tools and anything else they can’t be bothered to find room for elsewhere. I fought long and hard enough to get them to remember to put down the toilet seat, and they do, most of the time anyway, but I’m not going to waste my breath correcting every little flaw that happens to upset my sister. She can do that at her own place, and I guess she did, because Bob didn’t last much longer. I really am sorry for that, but what it comes down to is that you reap what you sow. You have to treat people with kindness to get them to be kind to you, and I don’t think she ever really learned that.

Where was I? Mom, yes, right! Mom is just amazing. She slowed down a little just when Daddy died, because of course you could tell how much that hurt her. I mean, they were married for, what was it? At least 45 years because last spring would have been their fiftieth anniversary and Daddy died about five years ago. But she didn’t fall apart. She just kept going, and didn’t hide herself away, and after a year or so she was right back doing all the things she used to do, traveling and going to concerts and museums and all the other things she does. She’s always had a ton of interests and her house was never that neat when we were growing up, so I don’t know where Katie got this bug in her ear about a few piles of stuff stacked up in the corners. It’s not like you can’t get through my house at all, you know? But Mom made it through that and she’s going to make it through this, too, just you wait and see. The doctors don’t know everything and there’s plenty of stories around about people who came out of this kind of thing completely unexpectedly and were perfectly fine afterward. You just have to have faith.

* * * * * * * * * *

Out of Body Experiences

The first time, she nearly died.

She hadn’t been fully awake since shortly after the accident. She knew that much. She’d tried to push herself to consciousness and felt for a time that she’d succeeded, but there was still a gray leaden weight over her mind like the radiation protection blanket they still kept insisting be put across her lap when they took dental x-rays, despite her child-bearing years being long gone, and this one she couldn’t budge. The limbs wouldn’t move at her command, the eyelids wouldn’t open, and the only sounds were muffled to incoherent noises that only drove her mad with frustration when she tried to assign structure and content. Sometimes they seemed to mock her, taking shape as small grinning gremlins and she would whack at them with an oversized broom, for if she could tumble them down and hold them with it, she might be able to force them to give up their meanings.

This is insanity, she said, and again, I’m going mad.

When it happened that she was too tired of fighting, she sank down further into her mind, beneath the blanket’s reach. A noise drew her, another noise that made no sense, but this one she knew was all inside and so no sense was needed. That was how she found it, a crack in some sub-basement of her mind. Maybe it was from the accident, but for all she knew, it had always been there, unnoticed and unregarded. A hot-cold sirocco of a wind (wind? in a basement? and yet there was... because obviously my mind -is- cracked, she told herself in bitter jest) blew past the opening with a harsh sibilant whisper, the wind strong enough in force to suction her out if she let herself go with it, and eventually she did, slipping out because she was desperate for anything that would keep her from slipping back into deeper somnambulance. The blanket would keep the rest of her safe. Not knowing, being absent, how the blanket seemed to settle further down, heavier in place, with her absence.

She’d always loved windstorms but this one scared her a little. It buffeted her hard, so she was not just a soaring soul-kite but one that might be ripped and shredded by the abruptly shifting cross-currents, and now, now she became aware of the cord that anchored her, that would lead her back to her own body, and the fear of having that torn became enough for her to seek a respite, a resting place, dipping out of the screamingly strong winds and coming down --

-- to a place where the screaming was even louder.

It was dark and dank and she couldn’t breathe except for the shallowest of gasps because something was too tight at her chest. The air that she did manage to pull in was thick with the smell of spilt fuel and burnt rubber and burning white-hot iron, because there was a forge nearby, there surely had to be, because she could hear the pounding past the screams, a heavy rhythmic echoing clang, and with every clang the taste of iron surged through her mouth. There was a dark water rising around her, ink black in the night. A stabbingly bright crimson light pulsed with the same rhythm of the forge but there was no reflection of it on the surface of that water. She’d have liked to believe the light was from an ambulance, but somehow knew otherwise.

Who... what... where...? She used the beat of the forge herself to shape the thoughts and drive them through the darkness around her, repeating them with increasing urgency because the water was now up to her chest.

“Mom? Mommy! Oh mommymommymommyithurtshurtshurts!”

I’m here, I’m here, I have you, I’m with you, it’s okay, it’s... It wasn’t one of hers. That first spectre of horror slunk away, sank again into the water, but it was -someone’s- child. Or not a child, but this bond was still the most important one, a bond that the mind was desperately grabbing for in its overwhelming agony. Which could mean anyone. She got the impression that it was male, he was male, and not really that old. Whether he’d been the driver or a passenger, that, too, wasn’t clear. She tried to gather herself into a smaller lump, into only a corner of this mind, so that she could see what was happening without being so much a part of it, and suddenly she was given a form not her own, the form of a middle-aged woman with dark blonde hair. The face felt odd, inappropriate, and she hurriedly forced the sneer away, and went down on one knee, holding out her arms as one would, as one must, to a child in pain. I’m here, I love you, I’m sorry for anything I did.

Something filled her arms and she hugged the shadow close, rocking it, and kept murmuring the words that were needed. It was cold and shivering, so cold, but the words and touch seemed to warm and ease it and gradually it stilled. The screaming became weaker, stopped, and the beat of the forge slowed, too. The pulsing light didn’t pulse as much, but grew to a more brilliant and steady glow, red fading away and leaving only a searing white. The black water had risen so far that if she lowered her head just a little she could drink it, could soothe the thickness in her throat, except that it didn’t feel wet. She could sink beneath it instead, and then the bright light would be gone, wouldn’t hurt her eyes so much. The weight in her arms grew lighter, and so did she, and the water was still there but not holding them, and there was a choice. Her borrowed form began to dissolve as the soul in her arms slide away and she gave it one last hug, one last infusion of strength, to carry it wherever it chose, and felt an answering caress that she hoped meant she had been forgiven the deception.

The water stayed, though no longer rising. The light stayed, though seemed farther away. The choice was still there. A wave of weariness washed over her and she started to let herself sink beneath the surface of the non-liquid, but there was something twisted around her that prevented it. The cord. But she could fix that, give it just a little extra tug, and it would break.

An infinity of time passed. Finally she sank, not into the water, but back through the cord. There was no wind, not in this direction. With a sigh, she settled her self again under the heavy blanket and curled into a foetal position as she tried to forget what had almost happened, what still could happen, what certainly one day would happen, and what choice she might make then.

The grey heaviness continued for days, weeks, years, minutes.

Sensory deprivation does odd things to one’s mind, she told herself, and, It might have been all in my own head. And she uncurled enough to extend a mental hand, an imaginary fingertip, to test the crack and see if it was still there. It was.

She kept close this time and looked for brightness instead of dark, for silence instead of screams.

The place had those, certainly. Otherwise, it confused her. It didn’t feel like another mind, for instance, for there was no sense of inner presence, no impact of outside influence, nothing there at all. She even kept her own shape, as if there were no other form to inhabit. There was a blank whiteness at first, and then when she blinked, not sure if she were blind here somehow, or still able to perceive, it shifted slowly to a sere sandy desert under an over-bright colourless sky, the formless white reshaping itself as she watched. No sun, though, and hence no shadows, and even the sand was still too white, a dried salt-flat perhaps instead of true sand. She bent down, easy to do in a merely mental shape, and picked up a handful to let trickle slowly through her fingers. It felt like sand, and flowed like sand, but as it fell it took on a pinker, browner hue, the color of her own skin. When she noticed, she stopped abruptly and shook the rest from her hand, rubbing the hand against her leg after to be sure all of it was gone. It didn’t help. The flesh color spread from the fallen grains through the rest of the sand till the desert matched her own shade, as she stood aghast at the unmeaning effect she had had on the landscape.

Unmeaning…

She paused, and grew more thoughtful. She picked up another handful of the supposed sand, and concentrated, staring hard at it, willing another change as she let it again fall slowly from her hand. The grains darkened and coalesced as they fell and the rich earth that mounded up beneath started to sprout pale green shoots. She stepped back and looked around guiltily, as if someone might appear and chastise her for the changes. But no one came.

It was tempting to keep going, to see what she could make of this world, whosever world this was, but she’d probably interfered enough, more than enough. And she could almost, at the edge of her awareness, start to feel the body that surrounded the mind with which she’d been playing, and that couldn’t be good. The true inhabitant would wake, and God knows what the mind would then become. With a lingering faint regret, she willed herself away, and afterward wondered how many of her own dreams, and which, had been caused by similar intrusions, and if her mind had been so blank a canvas for their work.

* * * * * * * * * *

Reflections

I’ve never believed in the prescience of dreams. It seems to me that dreams are more likely a badly done sort of housekeeping, the mind shifting through elements of what happened during the day, what happened in the past, what is scheduled to happen tomorrow and might happen in the future. Take the pieces, shatter them, combine the shards with random pebbles and bits of broken glass from movies, books, television shows, and mere imagination, and build bizarre mosaic pictures from them, and pretend to look for possibilities, to see if anything new is revealed. But the mosaic isn’t set in any binder material, and when you wake, when you rise, all of the little pieces fall out of place and into the dustbin. And so, the workspace is swept clean, ready to be used for another day’s worth of activities.

Not that examining your dreams isn’t a good idea. It could at least give you some psychological insight, in noticing what sort of mosaics your mind tends to create, and most people are so unaware of their own thought processes that any minor insight would help.

That lack of awareness is no longer a problem for me.

I should have kept a dream journal. It would help tell me if any of this is real, or if it’s just what I’m prone to imagine. Are these all dreams? Can you dream if you never sleep? Or do I sleep? Without the passage of light and dark, without the steady tick tock of daily activities, time has so little meaning. Get up, get dressed, get breakfast, get lunch, get dinner, get undressed, go to bed. Intersperse with work and play and errands and chores, and sprinkle in the variations that distinguish one day from another. That day, I did the grocery shopping and had soup for lunch. The other day, I went to a movie and had popcorn for dinner. Don’t tell the girls that last bit. Kate would say I’m being irresponsible and worry about my nutrition, and Angie would say it sounds like fun and she should do that with her boys, whose nutrition -I- sometimes worry about.

Now, it seems, I have almost no sense of what’s happening outside, to my body. I believe I’m still alive, because there’s a “here” here, a place that seems to be my own. I think, sometimes, that I can tell it’s brighter outside than at other times. I think that the random noises vary in tone and volume and insistence, and sometimes, it seems to be that I feel oddly jerky, like a marionette on a puppet master’s strings, and I wonder if someone is doing some sort of physical therapy on my poor body, trying to keep its muscles from atrophying. But it’s all thoughts and feelings and “seems” and nothing I can grab hold of, nothing that I can say means that the snapped strings are reconnecting, and that someday I’ll become my own puppet master again.

I’m stuck in a dream world, without the luxury of knowing that I’ll wake. Or maybe I’m just stuck in my head, without dreams. Or a swirled mixture of both, unable to distinguish between the two because there is nothing anchoring my mind to my body except this damnably thin cord, and maybe that’s just part of one of the dreams.

Interesting thought. What if the cord is anchoring me to the dreams instead, and breaking it is what would release my mind to contact the outer world? But I only seem to be aware of the cord when I’ve left my body, or rather, to be more precise, when it appears to me that I’ve left my body. And if I’m wrong… what would happen then?

There was that choice. Oblivion, or some sort of continuance, unless that was only a dream, too. But the choice hasn’t always been present when I’ve left, or not as clear. Would cutting the cord reveal it again? Or was that a special circumstance, and would I simply become an unattached spirit, a ghost, until my body died on its own, or maybe even after that unfortunate but eventually necessary occurrence.

Angie believes in ghosts. I don’t. She says openly that she has seen her father’s ghost, in our house one evening, in the upstairs hallway. That makes no sense to me. There’s nothing in the hallway which would demand his presence, which would make him linger there. I would be surprised to find out that he wanted to stay around the house at all. And I certainly haven’t seen anything. I told her so, and she said it must be that I need to let myself become more open to the possibility. If being “open” means to take any chance reflection from a picture frame as an actual ghost, then I’m not prepared to be that way.

Or, that was how I used to feel about the matter.

But now it looks as though I’m quite prepared to be a sort of ghost in other people’s minds. It’s far better than going mad inside my own.

Unless, I’m already mad. There, it’s happened again, it all comes down to the self-referential, the circular problem of how to tell what is really happening or not when I can’t see anything objectively because there -is- no objective way to view this! “Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” Even when I think I’m standing outside myself, I can’t be sure. I’m the earth as well as the mover and the fulcrum, and I can say “it moves” and no one will contradict me, because there is no one else. There are the minds I seem to visit, but there is no proof that any of them really exist.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“Why, hello there! I didn’t expect to see you here!”

“Oh thanks. She is my mother, too.”

“There’s no need to get snotty at me. Please, let’s try to get along, for Mom’s sake? It’s just unexpected, seeing you here, on a work day, you know? I mean, you’re always saying how you have a ton of meetings, all the time. I guess I just understood your work was too important.”

“I arranged to take the morning off. I know I don’t seem to be here as much as you are --”

“Oh please! Of course you can’t! I completely understand! I mean, you did show up really regularly when Mom was first hurt.”

“Yes. Well. Of course I would.”

“And now, you know I’m started to wonder if the doctors have just written her off entirely? And now they want to move her out of here! To a nursing home! But you know they tell terrible stories about those nursing homes, and she can’t even speak! How would we know if they were treating her badly? We wouldn’t! We couldn’t!”

“But, Angie, you know we can’t be sure how they’re treating her here, either?”

“But it’s a hospital. They have standards. They have people watching and double-checking everyone. They have to. A nursing home is just on its own!”

“Angie, please. Nursing homes do have certifications and guidelines they have to meet, too, and I’m sure we can find a reputable one. A trustworthy one. Dr. Reynolds has given me a list and I’ll --”

“You’ve talked with him!”

“He is Mom’s doctor. Of course I’ve talked with him.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“He’s doing the best he can. There just isn’t that much he can do? She came out of the coma, but that doesn’t mean as much as getting out of the state she’s currently in, and you have to face facts, Angie. Not everyone comes out of it.”

“Mom will. You can’t tell me she won’t. She’s a very strong willed old lady and she won’t give up.”

“It’s not a question of her giving up. She may not even be aware of anything at all. Dr. Reynolds said that he did talk to you about the outcome of the scans?”

“It might have been a bad day for her.”

“They showed very minimal activity, Angie.”

“You can’t tell me that she’s just a vegetable!”

“I’m not trying to tell you that! I’m just trying to have you look at this realistically, and not as if it were some inspirational bestseller where everything comes out perfectly for everyone at the end!”

“It’s a better way of looking at things than the way you look at them! I swear, Katie, I almost think you’d have them pull the plug on her!”

“There isn’t any plug. She’s breathing on her own.”

“The tube then, whatever, you’d have them starve her to death!”

“Angie --”

“What?”

“We do need to discuss what the resuscitation orders should be.”

“That’s clear. They should do anything and everything they can. No matter what!”

“I… disagree.”

“That is because you are a pessimistic, narrow-minded, wizened-hearted, mean-spirited dried up shell of a woman, Katie Sachs! And God and Mom both know it! She is damned lucky that I’m here, too! And I will not let you murder her!”

* * * * * * * * *

Kate’s Story

I do not want to murder my mother. Let me at least make that clear, before Angie has everyone else in the world believing it of me.

I love my mother. I even, somewhat, love my sister, though God knows we’re as unalike as any two siblings could ever be. My father used to say that Angie had gotten all the Irish blood and I’d gotten all the German, though the coloring is completely the other way around. She’s blonde and plump and very pink-cheeked, and I’m black Irish, with dark hair and pale, fair skin. But she’s the emotional one, always on a rollercoaster of sky-high hopes and deep dark dreads.

I don’t understand why people like that. They do, they must, for they like her, even the ones that look down at her, that think she’s more or less a fool. She isn’t. But she can come across that way.

For one thing, you can’t reason with her. Logic has no imperative that she will ever recognize. An argument must appeal to her emotionally, it has to “feel” right, otherwise she won’t bend, she’ll keep holding on to her own opinion regardless of what expert knowledge you bring to bear. If you try to convince her otherwise, she’ll turn it into a persecution. And the persecution will be of her, not of you, because obviously she’s the one that’s being badly abused by your insistence on something she’d rather not comply with. With which she’d rather not comply, I should say.

A minor example: the name I prefer to go by is “Kate”. Not “Katie”. I decided this back when I was eight years old. Naturally, I didn’t expect my four-year-old sister to understand the difference, and so I allowed her to continue to call me by the nickname she knew. I waited, very patiently, till she was older, and then pointed it out as a simple request. But instead of having her agree, I was turned into the one who was being unreasonable. A blank stare and a “Why are you making such a big deal of it?” was the mildest refusal, followed then by a silly smile. “Oh, lighten up, Katie!”

I tried calling her “Angela” instead of “Angie”, but it didn’t work. She just let it slide off. I tried not answering, but she would roll her eyes, and if she then called me “Kate” it would be in a put upon tone of voice with such exaggerated grievance that it grated far worse than the more childish version of my name. And so, after about ten years, I gave up. She won. And I’d learned, from that and other things, not to ask anything of her, not to rely on her for any understanding, not to share anything at all of myself, if I could help it, with someone who had such little appreciation for my desires or point of view.

So I’m sure that, even now, she feels that all she has to do is wait it out, stubborn and un-moving, seeing only what she wants to see, and the world will turn her way and everything will come out just as she wants it to. I suspect that’s how she manages most of her life. She doesn’t want to believe that her precious sons could possibly have turned out badly, so she doesn’t see how rude and obnoxious they are, how lazy and unmotivated. She loves her husband, so of course he’s worthy to be loved, instead of being an arrogant ass that regularly quarrels with his superiors and, so, rarely stays more than few years in any one job.

She does keep that family going, I’ll grant it. The place she works at seems to like her, and she hasn’t had any trouble working there. She’ll even pick up extra part-time work when their finances require it. That’s why her eldest is going to the local state college, you understand. Yet another company didn’t value her husband’s efforts as fully as he felt they should, and so the more prestigious college, the one that the boy had somehow managed to be admitted to, was deemed too high an expense.

I don’t know how she’s managing to visit Mom so often. I won’t ask. It’s very good of her, and I have no quarrel with that at all. But I don’t care for her assumption that because she’s the one who’s doing the most visiting, then that means that she’ll be the one to make all of the decisions. I have as much right in this as she has.

We need to talk to Mom’s lawyer. I’m sure there’s a will, but since she isn’t actually dead, I doubt that Angie bothered to contact him and I certainly didn’t. Things have been too uncertain this last month. We need to find out if she made any sort of “living will” with any directives in case of this sort of injury. I can say, truly and honestly, that I don’t believe she would want to be kept alive in this condition. My mother was too active and vital a person to want to be bound to a bed without any real awareness of her environment. But if I say that to Angie, she’ll deny it out of hand. If there -are- any recorded directives, it will make it all so much simpler. She won’t be able to deny Mom’s own words. She’d better not!

This isn’t easy for me to face either. Please don’t think that it is. Angie seems to think of me as a cold, uncaring person, but I’m not. I just prefer holding my emotions inside, keeping them to myself, rather than blurting them out for all and sundry to pick over. I do laugh, I do cry, I do -- yes, even that -- fall in love and do silly things. And I do get angry and lose my temper sometimes. That’s the emotion that seems to come out most often when I’m around Angie, and so she thinks I have a problem with anger management. A more objective evaluation might note that if I often get angry around Angie, then maybe Angie herself has some blame in eliciting that particular emotion? But no, of course not, I’m the one with the problem.

I’ve never married. For some reason, she counts that against me, too, as added proof that I’m not an easy person with whom to get along, or as evidence of my supposed self-centeredness, if not outright selfishness. I’ve had lovers, though, and she doesn’t know all of them. I’ve even had two proposals in my life, and she certainly doesn’t know of those, for I’ve never told her. One of them, I didn’t love, and it was easy to gently let him down, to explain that he would be far happier with another. The other -- I did love him. I was madly in love with him. But love isn’t everything, regardless of what people like Angie believe, and I knew he was only asking because he was tired of his life and wanted a change to it. Marriage is rather an appealingly dramatic change, isn’t it? All the fuss and ceremony. But I knew that after a while, he would be tired of marriage, too, and want yet another change, and I wasn’t prepared to enter into such a relationship with the awareness that it would be only a temporary state. Angie, of course, would have denied the possibility of eventual defeat, and maybe if I were more like her, I’d have taken the chance. And maybe, if I could manage the way she holds on to ideals with all her claws dug in, I could have kept him from leaving. But it wouldn’t have been a happy marriage.

But maybe we were both spoiled by the example that our parents set. They were deeply in love, each with the other, during their whole marriage. I’ll tell you a secret thought from the past: that if the house burst into flames during the night, they would first have made sure that the other was safe, and rejoice in the safety, before they remembered that they had children in the house, too. Maybe that’s not very realistic, but it’s how I felt back then. We grew up in a time when children still expected to be spanked for misdeeds, but the only time I was ever afraid of my father was when he caught me back-talking my mother. I can’t recall what had precipitated it, but I wasn’t a happy teenager and for whatever reason, I was being quite sarcastic to her. He grabbed my arm, very tightly, and he didn’t raise his voice at all. He just looked at me very hard and very intently as he told me that I was never, ever, to speak to my mother in that tone of voice again. There was no spanking. There didn’t need to be.

I nodded, I think. I doubt if I could have spoken. I left the room and went off on a long bike ride, and it’s a wonder I didn’t get run over by a car because I was crying too hard to see a thing, and barely able to keep to the road at all. But it was a quiet suburb, and there was less traffic in those days.

I don’t know if anything like that ever happened to Angie. If so, of course, she’s the sort that would have burst into tears immediately, in front of him, and then forgotten about it an hour or two later. But maybe he never spoke to her like that. She was always happy around Mom. The drugs and drinking, she kept private, usually off with friends. Of course it wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on, but apparently it didn’t carry the same weight of opprobrium. He was disgusted with them, true, but I never saw or heard him intervene with anywhere near the same sort of intensity.

It nearly killed Mom when he died, just from having him gone, and it seemed like she’d aged ten years all at once. Angie denies it, as Angie denies anything unpleasant, but I think she never really recovered. At least the circumstances themselves were a blessing. He died in his sleep. The autopsy said it had been a massive coronary and he wouldn’t have suffered at all, no pain, just a sleep from which he didn’t happen to wake. He had retired only about six months before, so there was some business left unfinished but not much. There wasn’t the anguish of a lingering illness, the uncertainty of whether he’d get better or not, the false hopes of temporary improvements, the frustration of renewed deterioration, the constant hospital visits and knowing the discomfort that all their tests and procedures must necessarily involve. A good death, a quick death. I hope that’s how I go, when I do.

Not like Mom.

* * * * * * * * * *

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jerk

They did not have sex. It was extremely disappointing. Clare did keep in mind that it was probably disappointing to those other than her, but still...

They could have had angry sex, after the argument, and that might have been even better because she would have been completely free of any responsibility for the argument. The cause was a little hard to follow through the fog of alcohol, pot, and (she only picked up on this later) physical exhaustion that was her host’s current condition, but it seemed to be connected to a refusal on his part to paint his partner.

At first, when the first few words penetrated, her own mind couldn’t help coming up with the image of a literal painting session, pigment on flesh. Though she immediately realized the meaning was otherwise, she was too enamored of the idea, and held on to her first notion for a while longer, mischievously flipping the internal scenario from finger paints to spray cans to wall-painting rollers.

Alright, maybe there was some blame to her for the evening’s denouement. Her host started snickering, then chuckling, then laughing helplessly.

That’s not from me, is it? But oh, she’s not going to like it, she winced a little in anticipation of the storm, and dropped her playful mood. Too late. The golden bubbles of effervescent laughter erupting around her were being targeted by a futile barrage of white-hot darts, black-tipped with venom, but those grew smaller and started buzzing around like nothing more than a minor fly infestation as the host pushed away any concern for the angry words now being directed at him, though the woman’s emotional state kept rising from pouting pleas to full blown rage.

“Forget it! Yeah, forget you, too, you bastard! You know who’s been asking me to model for him? Jeffrey! How do you like that, huh? And he’s a damn sight better artist than you’ll ever be!”

The name came through loud and clear and the bubbles popped all at once, all on their own, in explosions of fiery sparks that wiped out all the flies. Clare sank deeper into protective darkness, drawing it over and around her like a blanket. She thought of going back through the cord, but this was still too interesting and she stayed there, peering out through a shifting hole in her blanket like a child spying on its parents.

“Jeffrey’s a hack and everyone knows it! He’ll make you look beautiful, doll, sure he will. Just like a doll, doll, all plastic and shiny.”

His sneer was soot over burning coals, pretense that she hadn’t gotten to him, though his self-approval at his own cleverness, in the way he’d played with his pet term for her, added a lilting sweet-scented breeze of satisfaction for a passing instant. Clare shook her head a little at his obtuseness.

“Fine! You think I’m just a doll? Then go buy a blow-up one to replace me because I am so out of here!”

The world turned blacker than her concealing blanket, and the slam of the door had a deep finality that would have made any sound engineer in Hollywood turn puke green with envy, and steal it for the dungeon door of his next horror film.

Ouch.

Clare sighed, and started to dissolve, only to pause as the laughter returned, even though it was strongly tainted with a bitterness that ruined the last lingering traces of whisky. Tentatively, she peeked out from the blanket. The world was still black, but was turning, had turned, a richer, more velvety black, a cut velvet with patterns beginning to emerge from the nap. The laughter subsided to a purposeful humming, and the body must now be moving because there was a sudden starburst of brilliant electric-blue light, a sharp whiff of ozone, with an accompanying violent curse, as he banged his bare foot into the edge of some piece of furniture.

Clare snickered, she couldn’t help herself.

There was a pregnant pause, and the heretofore fading light of the starburst gathered and coalesced into a spotlight that swept across the inner scenery, a searching, if somewhat less focused, intelligence behind it. Clare held her mental breath, and tried to be one with the darkness. The spotlight slowly died, dispersed, separating into dots of light that moved randomly for a moment or two and then attached themselves to the patterns, outlining them in sequin sparkle. The humming resumed.

Good thing he’s still so out of it, she thought, very, very privately.

Something was going on. The black was lifting and she had to keep adjusting her protective coloration to match. Soon the only true blackness left was in the lines of the patterns, but they kept shifting and shimmering so she could never grasp the whole of the design, as if the only echo in his mind were the sections on which he was currently working, and even those were being constantly re-worked. The frustration grew. Slowly she let herself relax out of her small corner, let her perception flow softly, silently, she hoped imperceptibly, through his mind. There, she could feel the subtle undercurrents of concentration and irritation and pleasure when something came out right. There again, and she could start to feel the pull and play of muscles, but she drew back from that, afraid of accidental interference that would reveal her presence. Another tendril in another direction and the humming became clearer. Yet another easing, and there, finally, she could see through his eyes, catching his vision just where the impulses leaped from neurophysical synapses to psychological perception, before they became too warped by mood and memory. And the drugs, she reminded herself, and the drink.

It was a picture of a woman. A beautiful woman, who was still beautiful even though her perfect oval face was surrounded by writhing serpents of all sorts and shapes and lengths. Narrow little twisting asps formed ringlets at her forehead and at her temples, and decorative coral snakes curled beside them. Larger vipers looked at first glance like thickened dreadlocks behind the rest, and the spread hoods of cobras formed an uneven crown around the top of her head. She didn’t seem to notice, though. If anything, the expression was that of someone slightly hurt (in a somewhat petulant fashion, as shown by the protruding bottom lip, though it was still a very beautifully shaped lip) by the obvious terror shown in the posture of the stone statue in front of her, the one whose arm she was trailing her fingertips across as if in supplication that he stop playing such awful games with her, and turn again into his mortal form.

Clare stared in fascination as the artist’s hand drew swift, unerring strokes with the charcoal to shade the sketch. You’re very good! She couldn’t stop herself, forgetting her intent to remain hidden. Is that her?

The charcoal broke in two as the hand clenched on it, leaving a jagged dark streak where subtler tones had been planned. The humming stopped, and the host drew in a slow deep breath that should have been invigorating but only felt to Clare as if she were being encased in a pressurized container, trapped, not daring to try to make a run for it, for fear of making it all worse.

“You know,” he said, staring at the sketch thoughtfully though Clare knew his concentration was elsewhere, she could feel the spotlight searching again. “I think I’m pretty good, too. Sometimes I even tell myself so. But I’ve never had to ask myself which person I’m drawing.”

He reached for one of the erasers that littered the side of the drawing desk, and gently removed the erroneous streak, using light enough pressure that the underlying outline of the drawing wasn’t too badly compromised. Then he carefully corrected the base drawing, and started shading it again. He even started humming.

Clare wasn’t fooled. The spotlight was still searching. Her heart would be beating loudly in her throat, if she had a heart, or a throat, and she squashed the thought quickly before her mental self developed either. She stayed silent and kept quieting her own mind as much as possible, an extra layer of ghostly presence, true, but so thin, so translucent, that surely he wouldn’t find her. He’d think it was just --

“I’ve been way drunker than this. I’ve been way more stoned than this. I’ve been both, together, way more wasted than this. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. And by now, God knows, I’m used to bitches like her walking out on me.” His tone was casually conversational, just a man talking to himself as he worked. “So I gotta ask myself, what’s going on here? I say to myself, self, are you alone in there? Or what?”

Damn. She could feel herself want to start laughing and clamped down on the feeling as hard as she could. This was becoming a game, a game of hide and seek. She’d always been good at those except when it reached the point that it just seemed too silly to continue.

“Now this picture, you’re right. It’s a picture of Michelle. Isn’t she a pretty girl? But if you’ve been hanging around a while, you saw the real thing.” He paused. Clare could feel the searching light dim as he started considering the implications. “Except if you had, you wouldn’t have been asking who it was. But you said, ‘her’.” He puzzled at it a bit longer, then shrugged, and started shading again, putting the final touches on the sketch. “Okay. Let’s say you knew about Michelle without knowing her. Not very omniscient of you. Kinda clueless, really.”

That did it. Clare made a tiny snerking sound as she tried to stifle what was either going to be a snort or a snicker. Enough attachment to his physical awareness remained that she was pretty certain that a corner of his lip tugged to the side in satisfaction. The searchlight turned a warm golden hue, and vanished. But the pressure remained. And the last of the swirling sweet-scented fumes of weed and whisky were going, going, gone.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.” He chanted softly as he put the charcoal down, as he wiped off his hands on the once white piece of cloth that had obviously seen more than a few days of similar use. So she wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking of it as hide and seek. Upon reflection, she decided to keep the tenuous connection she still had, through him, to the outside world. Just in case he started to pick up something to beat his head in. Artists were such a volatile lot. She cleared her throat, and so had one now, since it was needed. Ahem. Don’t panic, please? As the words came cautiously out, she tensed. She had more influence than she’d thought. His throat had involuntarily cleared when she’d only imagined that she was doing her own.

The pressure in her, in -his- head tightened drastically. “Don’t. Do. That.”

I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to. She tried to project additional wordless apology, cinnamon and brown sugar flavored to make it easier to accept, apple pie spiced, something homey and soothing and very much unthreatening. She could swear his nose twitched.

“I’m hungry,” he said abruptly, and shoved the rolling chair back to give himself room enough to stand. “Maybe you’re a hallucination from lack of food. It’s been... hell, I don’t know. Just those stupid snacks.” He sauntered towards what seemed like a very small excuse for a kitchen in so large an apartment and bent his head to peer into the nearly empty refrigerator. She could feel the cold. He kept it turned much too low.

Her curiosity was aroused. Doesn’t the milk get icy?

“Yeah. But it keeps the beer at the right temperature,” he grunted, and pulled out one.

That’s not food.

“What are you? The ghost of my mother?” He grimaced. “Forget that. She’s still alive. I think.” He considered that, and shrugged. “And you don’t sound like her.” He popped open the top of the can and started drinking as he opened a few cabinets, pulling out a jar of peanut butter (extra crunchy) and a half-used loaf of bread that should have been stored elsewhere. Some of the slices were green. He threw those pieces away, picked out the best two of the remaining choices, and then threw the rest away. He rinsed off a knife taken from the sink, without bothering to clean it with soap, and began slathering the peanut butter on top of one slice of bread. “Michelle wasn’t very domestic,” he said succinctly.

And neither, it seems, are you. Do you always eat like this? Surely sane people didn’t really live this way. Well, yes, of course they did, but she’d never expected to inhabit one. She swallowed her astonishment, remembering in time to keep the action from going any further than her own self, and then tried to withdraw even more, pulling back the links to his body before she was forced to taste what couldn’t be good for him. The beer was already annoying enough. She didn’t like beer. How could he follow single malt scotch with beer? Did he have any sense of what he was doing at all?

“No, I don’t!” With a sharp flick of his wrist, he sent the still-laden knife flying back into the metal sink. There was a ringing clang, and the knife promptly bounced out again and flew across the open room, falling eventually to the floor with a more subdued clatter before sliding under an old overstuffed chair whose better days must have been many years past. A spotted trail of peanut butter marked its path.

“Damn.” He stared. “I thought the peanut butter would make it stick.”

The wonderful thing about it was that it wasn’t her problem at all. She couldn’t even retrieve the knife for him, not even if she’d wanted to, not even if she felt any obligation to, not in her current incorporeal state. Clare laughed.

“Okay, you are definitely not my mother,” he grumbled, and turned his back on the mess.

No, I’m not, she agreed cheerfully.

“She would have gone off on a tirade.”

Most mothers would, she agreed again.

He’d crammed half the sandwich into his mouth and was consequently incommunicado for a while, until enough had vanished down his gullet to allow a swallow of beer to chase down the rest. “You started out sounding motherly though.”

A bad habit I picked up somewhere.

He snickered. “Right, sweetcheeks. Stick around and you’ll pick up a lot worse. You’re with a grand master of bad habits, if you haven’t noticed already. And ‘sounding motherly’ doesn’t begin to make the list.”

Clare’s good humor continued enough that she saw his bragging as amusing instead of the annoyance it probably was to others. But maybe it was better to change the topic.

Why wouldn’t you draw her before, when she asked?

His mouth was again blocked with bread and peanut butter as the second half of his dinner went to join the first. The inner vision, though, was of Michelle slamming the door, the whole drawn in heavy strokes of flat color that softened and shifted to a drab olive green grisaille before fading out entirely. It took the rest of the beer to clear his throat. “A superstition. If I draw them, they’ll leave.”

Oh. There didn’t seem to be much else to say that wasn’t incredibly obvious.

He threw the empty beer can in the sink, though she could tell that he’d gone closer to it first, and didn’t throw the can nearly as hard as he’d tossed the knife. It stayed in. He sighed, and rubbed at his face. “I’m beat. Stay if you want, but I gotta crash.”

I hope things turn better for you.

The twist of his lips was a bitter thing, and Clare couldn’t escape it even as far as she’d now withdrawn. “Yeah. Tomorrow is another day, and all that rot.” He fell face first down on the couch in front of the fireplace and, one-handed, without looking, groped for the wool blanket that was across the back cushions, and drew it over him.

Clare stayed a while, silent, as the mind faded to an endless empty grey, and then silently slunk back to her own grey shell.

* * * * * * * * * *

Detailed Patient Assessment Form

Patient is a 76 year old white female who was brought to the ER by ambulance as a result of a motor vehicle accident (rear-end collision). Patient was transported on back-board with neck restraint. Oxygen was applied via face mask but no intubation due to possibility of spinal cord injury. Ancillary injuries were reported to right arm and leg. At the time of transport, the GCS score was determined to be 13-14, with little to no evidence of severe head injury. Due to the patient’s age and the type of accident, a CT was ordered. Before it could be administered, the patient suffered cardiac arrest. Subsequent to resuscitation from the coronary event, evidence was found of subdural hemorrhaging and ischemic stroke, possibly due to blood clots from other injuries. Patient entered coma state and remained comatose for 2.5 weeks before showing signs of recovery and was then reclassified as vegetative state. Final determination of injuries from accident, confirmed by MRI: intercondylar humerus fracture of right elbow, chondral fracture of right patella, cervical herniation at C3,4 and C4,5, lumbar herniation at L4-S1, and lateral wedge lumbar compression fractures of L3 and L4. Fractures of the limbs were treated and stabilized.

Prior general medical conditions:

(1) rheumatoid arthritis: moderate, treated with celecoxib, 200 mg. BID

(2) osteoporosis: moderate, treated with calcium supplements and raloxifene, 60 mg. QD

(3) elevated blood sugar: borderline, treated with dietary changes

(4) hypertension: mild, untreated

Prior neuropsychological conditions:

No evidence of dementia reported by the primary care physician or the patient’s adult daughter. The PCP reports past treatment for depression with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) for a period of eleven months immediately subsequent to the death of the patient’s spouse.

Prior medications other than directed treatment

(information supplied by A. Daley, patient’s daughter):

(1) aspirin: 81 mg., daily

(2) multivitamin tablet: brands varied, daily

(3) vitamin C: 500 mg., daily

Current diagnosis and medical conditions:

Vegetative state due to hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy with cerebral trauma secondary to motor vehicle accident. Patient does not require artificial respiration. Patient does require artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) via percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) tube (changed from nasogastric tube approximately five days prior to release). Patient also requires urinary catheterization.

Current medications: See chart.

Assessments at transfer, administered at initial acute care facility:

EEG: slow wave activity, no higher functioning noted

Glasgow Coma Scale: Score was 8

Eye opening: 4 (patient opens eyes spontaneously)

Verbal response: 2 (patient makes only incomprehensible sounds)

Motor response: 2 (patient reacts to painful stimulus with extension posturing, decerebrate rigidity)

Rancho Los Amigos Scale: Score was at Level 2

Generalized response only. Limited and inconsistent responses to external stimuli regardless of type or location; gross body movement, non-purposeful vocalization, non-focused eye opening, physiological changes of increased or decreased activity; responses may also be significantly delayed. Total assistance required.

Assessments administered upon admission to skilled nursing facility:

Western Neuro Sensory Stimulation Profile (WNSSP): Score was 11

I. AROUSAL/ATTENTION

1. Arousability: 3 (patient is spontaneous awake at times)

2. Wakefulness: 0 (awake state persists for less than10 minutes)

3. Eye Contact: 1 (eyes open but not focused on examiner)

4. Attention to Task: 0 (visual or other attention to task less than 50% of the time)

II. AUDITORY RESPONSE

Localization:

5. Voice: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to introductory remarks)

6. Sound: 1 (undifferentiated response to non-verbal sound of music, bell, clicker, tape recorder, sneeze, door slamming, where objects are outside of visual field)

Comprehension: response to verbal command:

7. “Shake my hand”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

8. “Open [or close] mouth”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

9. “Stick out tongue”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

10. “Close [or open] eyes”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

11. “Raise eyebrows”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

12. “Move [body] part”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

III. EXPRESSIVE COMMUNICATION

13. Vocalization: 1 (best response is non-meaningful vocalization of moaning, sighing, crying, other vocal noises)

14. Facial/Gestural expression for communication: 0 (only random grimaces or reflex or involuntary behaviors)

15. Yes/No response: 0 (neither response observed, either verbal or non-verbal, to three verbal questions)

IV. VISUAL RESPONSE

Tracking, Horizontal:

16. Horizontal mirror: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to mirror moved across visual field)

17. Horizontal individual: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to person walking slowly around bed)

18. Horizontal picture: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to large, brightly colored picture of familiar personality, greeting card, or family member)

19. Horizontal object: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to brightly colored puppet or snow globe with moving parts)

Tracking, Vertical:

20. Vertical mirror: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to mirror moved across visual field)

21. Vertical picture: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to large, brightly colored picture of familiar personality, greeting card, or family member)

22. Vertical object: 0 (no response within 20 seconds to brightly colored puppet or snow globe with moving parts)

Comprehension: response to written commands (examiner may say “read card and do what it says” and point to card, but do not read card)

23. “Open [or close] mouth”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

24. “Stick out tongue”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

25. “Close [or open] eyes”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

26. “Raise eyebrows”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

27. “Move [body] part”: 0 (no response within 20 seconds)

V. TACTILE RESPONSE

Localization:

28. Touch: 1 (undifferentiated response of reflexive posturing, hyperventilation, blinking, or chewing, to non-painful tap on shoulders, or stimulation of body parts with brush, rough towel, or comb)

29. Oral Stimulation: 1 (primitive reflexes of chewing, sucking, phasic bite, or rooting, to stimulation of external surface of upper and lower lips with cotton swab)

Object Manipulation: examiner to give the command “This is a - . Show me how you use it.”

30. Manipulation spoon: 1 (holds and releases object)

31. Manipulation comb: 1 (holds and releases object)

32. Manipulation pencil: 1 (holds and releases object)

(Examiner notes that the holding and releasing were very inconsistent.)

JFK Coma Recovery Scale - Revised (CRS-R): Score was 7

Auditory Function Scale: 1 (auditory startle; eyelids flutter or blink occurs immediately following the stimulus on at least 2 times, but no localization or movement to command)

Visual Function Scale: 1 (visual startle; eyelids flutter or blink occurs immediately following presentation of visual threat on at least 2 trials with either eye; no fixation, pursuit, reaching, or recognition)

Motor Function Scale: 2 (flexion withdrawal of at least one limb under application of noxious stimulation)

OroMotor/Verbal Function Scale: 2 (vocalization/oral movement; at least one episode of non-reflexive oral movement and/or vocalization occurs spontaneously or in response to sensory stimulation)

Communication Scale: 0 (none; no discernible verbal or non-verbal communication responses occur at any time)

Arousal Scale: 1 (eye opening with stimulation; tactile pressure or noxious stimulation must be applied at least once in order for the patient to sustain eye opening during the length of the exam)

Treatment Plan:

Patient assessments were slightly higher at admission to this facility than at the acute care facility, though note that different criteria were applied. Assessments should continue on a weekly basis for the first three months. Physical therapy methods should be re-evaluated and re-started on a schedule of at least three times per week.

* * * * * * * * * *

Reflections

My life was never lived so slovenly, not even as a child.

We were “lace curtain” Irish, in a time when that term was still remembered and still understood. Maybe we didn’t have that much more income than the “shanty” Irish, but we had pretensions of dignity and propriety. And for us, there was enough money, certainly enough for all the necessities if not for much in the way of luxuries. Not that my mother would have allowed luxuries, anyway, not unless she could find some excuse to change that category to “necessity” instead, which I’ll admit now was done more often than it probably should have been. A very Irish way around the problem, when I think of it.

It wasn’t a large family for an Irish Catholic one. There was myself, my two younger brothers, and my sister, the youngest in the family. “Bookends,” my father called us girls, and he always made sure we were posed that way for the family photographs. The term suited even as the boys outgrew us, because bookends don’t have to be as tall as the books they support, and, once my sister had caught up with me, we stayed in matching height, within an inch of each other, throughout our teens and into adulthood. I don’t know if the nomenclature had anything to do with it, but we two turned out to be the most stable in our lives, and my brothers have received more than a little support, financial and otherwise, from their “bookends” through the years.

I wish I could talk with her again. We weren’t bosom buddies, but we were fairly close as sisters, sharing some, if not all, of our secrets with each other. So very unlike my two. I have no idea what happened to keep Angie and Kate so far apart. They are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood -- and Gerald’s too, of course. But I’m the one that pushed them out, and once out they became themselves, and two such very different selves. Angie... I’m glad she has enough now in her life to hold onto, enough to anchor her so she doesn’t go floating too far off into the aether (I’m the one doing that now!). Kate... dear Kate. What made her so wary of the world that she keeps herself from fully living in it? Angie acts more childish, but I think Kate is the one that’s never really grown up, that refuses to do so, because she’d need to face all her thoughts and feelings and desires, no matter how petty. People should be allowed a little pettiness in their lives. Kate holds herself to too high a standard, and so sometimes seems to me like a little girl in dress-up clothes, modeling in front of a mirror, only pretending to be the serious businesswoman that everyone thinks she is, because they might not like the little girl inside.

I don’t think that’s from me. I hope not. I love both of them. Even when I know I don’t fully understand, even when I don’t necessarily like certain elements of their personalities, I still can love the whole, and do. But maybe that didn’t come across strongly enough, often enough. We’re only given one chance in our lives for completely unconditional love, unreserved and undeserved, and that is from our parents. Forget romantic love, it comes nowhere close, there’s always the underlying negotiated settlements there, the give and take required to meet the other’s inner needs and still satisfy your own. It’s only parental love that comes, or should come, with no strings attached, no selfishness, hidden or overt. Not every parent can give that, and even those that try might not succeed, but it seems to me that most often it’s in the expression of it, and not the intent, where we screw up. And so we’re left on one side of a glass wall, mouthing “but I do love you!” to those on the other side, who can no longer hear it, who can no longer fully believe it, who read other words from our lips that we never meant to say.

But I tried to let my children know they were loved and to give them the best that I could possibly manage. That’s why I made the agreement with Gerald, that I wouldn’t make a fuss and he wouldn’t provoke any arguments in front of them. Children need to feel secure. They don’t need to see their parents quarrelling. As far as I know, they both still believe that Gerald and I had a wonderful, solid marriage.

We did, too, in a way. He had his long business trips, with his business affairs and his other affairs, and I got to stay at home with only a part-time position elsewhere, and only because I really wanted it, and otherwise spend his and my money however I saw fit. It was a very nicely negotiated settlement once we got past the screaming and crying and shouting and throwing things phase. Luckily, Kate was only three and Angie was still in utero when I found out the depth of his perfidy. Oh, and a little of the depth of his perversity, too, because he’d brought back the wrong damn suitcase, the one that was meant to stay at work or safely in some locker somewhere. Pregnancy always made me feel more domestic, so, helpful me, I opened it to do his dirty laundry, and found... well... his dirty laundry of a different sort. At first I didn’t even understand what I was seeing. Nowadays, of course, those sorts of “toys” are all over the internet, available to anyone, anywhere, but back then I wouldn’t have know where to begin to try to buy them, and I would have assumed that Gerald had the same degree of unawareness, except that obviously he didn’t.

It’s a good thing we didn’t have visitors. I picked up one of the oddities and brought it out to him, to the living room, to where he was reading a storybook to Kate as he always did first thing when he came back from his trips, the two of them curled up on the couch together in such a classic “happy family” pose, to ask what it was. I blush now at my own naïveté. He dumped child and book together from his lap and rushed to grab it from my hand, but for some reason I held on tight, and he snapped a command to let go, in angry, frustrated words. Kate looked at us wide-eyed, with the expression of a child who wanted to cry but was unsure if that would make the grown-ups turn even more scary, and maybe this was just pretending and she was supposed to laugh instead. I let go immediately then, as soon as I read her face, and put on a quick smile as I went over to cuddle her into contentment again. I didn’t look at Gerald. I didn’t need to, for he’d gone quickly to the bedroom to remove the offending articles, the ones that hadn’t really offended but should have. For the rest of the afternoon and evening, till after Kate’s bedtime, we both acted as if the whole scene had never happened at all.

Then, we talked. He told me I shouldn’t have touched -his- things. I asked what they were. He told me I didn’t need to know. Maybe that worked in his family, between his father and mother in their staid German ways even after so many decades here, but it got my Irish up. He hadn’t wanted to tell me, I knew it then and know it now, he’d meant me to live in blissful ignorance, to provide a warm, loving home that he could return to whenever he wished, whenever he wanted to bask in that role of noble husband and father that he loved to play, but that wasn’t enough for him. But I can be very persistent when I want to be. I made him tell me everything. And then, of course, I made him suffer for it.

Well, no, I didn’t. I made a deal. He could have the pretense here at home, as long as we both recognized it was pretense. Now I wonder how much I really loved him, that I was willing to make that sort of deal. But it was important to both of us. His business was a sensitive one, and the appearance of stability mattered a lot to his promotions and raises. The times were only starting to change. For me, I was still enough of a good Catholic that divorce was unthinkable, and my main concern was for the child I’d already had and the one I was carrying, that they have a father and mother who would look after them. Gerald was a good father, even afterward. He loved both girls even if sometimes his temper was a little brittle, especially after we’d been “negotiating” again. We still seemed to be married in fact as well as fiction, and I received numerous compliments from my married friends over how sweet it was that we still couldn’t take our eyes off each other. We didn’t dare. We both kept watching to see if the other were breaking, or somehow subverting, the arrangement.

He never offered to stop. That was what hurt. He could have promised, and failed to keep his promise, and I would have understood. Though, yes, I’d probably have left him then.

We continued to sleep in the same bed. A king-sized bed is very large, you don’t have to touch each other at all. You barely notice anyone else is there. So, when he died, I didn’t notice. I got up on my own side of the bed and went off to make coffee, to make my breakfast, to collect the paper, and it was only after I’d read through the whole of the newspaper that I realized he hadn’t gotten up yet, and went to check if I should put the breakfast things away or not. And he was gone.

I know people would wonder why we’d continued at the sham even after the children were grown and out of the house, even after times changed so very, very much, and divorce was practically expected now from any marriage. But he didn’t really want to leave. He didn’t want another marriage, he just wanted to play around in a variety of ways, and the chance of someone else allowing him that degree of freedom was, he recognized (for he was a very intelligent man), rather slim. We were so used to it by then, so used to each other, and the house, and it was all so very civilized that it would have been a shame to pull back those lace curtains and show the underlying rot to the world.

So if this fellow thinks he can scare me off by claiming to be such a bad, bad boy, he’s very much mistaken. His particular choice of vices may be unknown to me, but I’m well used to living in moral decay.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“Well that’s it, then. It’s quite clear. She didn’t want to stay around in this condition.”

“It says a ‘coma,’ Katie Sachs, and this isn’t a coma anymore!”

“Dear God, Angie, what more do you want? It says ‘in a coma-like state and unable to respond to my environment.’ She can’t respond to her environment! So it’s technically not a coma, but it’s certainly a coma ‘like’ state and it’s still what she wanted to avoid. Don’t you agree, Mr. Hagerman? You were there, you approved the wording.”

“Ah, Miss... that is, Ms. Sachs, to be quite clear I did not ‘approve’ the wording, I only reviewed it. Your mother was the one who made up the wording, and, as you can see, the document is in her handwriting, signed by her, with myself and my secretary, Mrs. Wright, as witnesses.”

“It does not say ‘vegetative state.’ It doesn’t.”

“Angie, leave it. And come now, Mr. Hagerman, as a lawyer, you have a certain responsibility to keep your clients from making unclear statements, don’t you?”

“I am not a dog! Don’t you dare talk to me like that!”

“Alright, sorry! I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I apologize. Satisfied?”

“I do have such a responsibility, of course. Which is why I advised your mother upon her seventy-fifth birthday to put together a formal living will, when I realized she did not have any such document on file with us, and when she said she’d made no such provisions elsewhere.”

“And is this what you advised?”

“No, ma’am! I provided her with copies of three different versions that have been used by our firm or by other reputable firms, and that are in compliance with the general direction of national standards, and that, therefore, should hold up in a court of law, should it come to that.”

“You mean I can fight this?”

“Angie!”

“Oh, really, Katie, I’m just asking!”

“Mrs. Daley, even if your mother had filled out one of the more complete forms, why yes, you could have contested it in the courts. That option always exists. Though I’d like to think that your own lawyer would have cautioned against it, should your mother have assented to my recommendations.”

“She refused? Then what’s this?”

“This is what your mother wrote while sitting in my office. She was apparently quite concerned when I brought up the lack of directives and wished to put something on file immediately. She then claimed she would take the other forms, look them over, and return them to me within two weeks.”

“Which she didn’t do.”

“No, ma’am.”

“She’d changed her mind!”

“I’m afraid I must register a dissent with that conclusion, Mrs. Daley, for if so, then she should have contacted me and asked that I destroy this initial document.”

“Angie, please, you know Mom. She probably put the papers aside and forgot about them completely.”

“You make her sound senile. She wasn’t! She was just busy, with lots of things. Maybe planning another trip.”

“Mrs. Sachs never seemed to have any mental impairment that I’d noticed, I will say. She seemed quite intelligent and focused.”

“Of course you’d say that. Otherwise anything you did at her direction wouldn’t hold up. We should check the house, though. Maybe she’d started filling those other forms out, and just hadn’t finished, or had even finished but hadn’t gotten around to contacting you again. Would those count at all?”

“They might not count in a court case, but they would certainly give you more indication of your mother’s intentions?”

“I’ll look!”

“Probably it would be best if we both looked together, Angie.”

“It still says twelve months, you know? Even if we’re stuck with this one, it still says a full year, Katie, and don’t you forget that part. And it hasn’t been nearly that long!”

“No, it hasn’t.”

* * * * * * * * * *

The Lawyer’s Story

My name is David Hagerman. I’m an attorney at law, and I manage Mrs. Sachs’ accounts, and have for the last five years. Before that, I believe they were held at her late husband’s firm. I’m not sure why she switched them to me. I confess that I was not particularly proud about the occasion of our first contact, and I cannot see that she would have been happy either. In fact, I know she wasn’t, because she took it very badly indeed. This was in regard to certain provisions that Mr. Sachs had made, through various private accounts, which had, it seems, never been brought to her attention.

I do completely understand why those particular affairs – ah, that is to say, those particular arrangements -- of her husband’s had not been handled by his own firm. There would have been no certain way to ensure that lower level associates and clerks wouldn’t have seen, or guessed at, the connection. Here, even given the collegial insularity of the legal profession, it would have been a much safer secret. I didn’t learn of it from its beginnings, myself. But when one of our long-time partners retired, it was necessary for others to take over the management of his accounts and clients, and so this was assigned to me, in recognition, I would like to think, of my general reticence and ability to handle things with the utmost discretion. That these are coming out now is only due to the necessity of the circumstances.

It seems that Mr. Sachs had been engaging in, to be blunt, extramarital encounters. This fact by itself did not appear to shock Mrs. Sachs. Apparently she had known about it for years. I must say, I admired her poise when telling me so, and I appreciated it greatly, for such things are difficult and somewhat embarrassing to bring up to a recent widow, even if they are being discussed strictly as part of a legal matter. The part that she had apparently not been made aware of, was that there had been issue from three of these encounters and that on-going payments were still being made to the offspring of those encounters, or had been made up until the occasion of Mr. Sachs’ demise. One of the three had not yet reached the age of maturity, and so, by law, the support payments were still mandatory. With the other two, it seemed to be a matter of generosity, or guilt, or, perhaps, of ensuring there would be no contact other than that which Mr. Sachs himself would allow.

The great problem, and one that I can’t explain how Mr. Sachs could not have foreseen, given the most excellent reputation he had as a lawyer of the highest standing, is that no mention was made of these offspring in his will. It’s known to quite a large segment of even the general public, that unless explicit mention is made of deliberately disinheriting an acknowledged child, that there could be grounds for that child to seek some share of the estate. The law allows this to cover such eventualities as a child being born after the will has been made, but the parent dies before changes have been made to redistribute assets in accordance with their newly increased family state. You might be surprised to know how long it can take some people to make such changes. I certainly was, when I first became involved with estate planning.

I am not, in fact, an expert in that area. However many clients insist on using the same lawyer for all their legal needs, and so I have had occasion to deal with such things. In this case, though, I made sure to first consult with those in the firm with full experience in the relevant sections of the legal code, before, with their agreement and advice, deciding that Mrs. Sachs should be informed of this unfortunate possibility. It was felt that this took precedence over the directive by Mr. Sachs never to contact his wife, nor his two daughters by marriage, with anything to do with these monetary distributions to his less than legitimate offspring.

Mrs. Sachs did not take the knowledge well. She is, was, a woman of great personal dignity, at least as far as I have ever observed, and therefore, of course, did not make a scene. We are prepared to deal with scenes. Mrs. Wright, my secretary, is quite adept at providing tissues and smelling salts and even minor or not-so-minor first aid (she is qualified in CPR), and can, surprisingly quickly, arrange for cleaning services or office repairs on little or no notice. I have reason to believe that she even keeps an extra woman’s dress of stylish but somewhat smock-like nature, with belt, as well as a man’s dress shirt, with jacket and tie, of largish size, around in case of need, ever since one couple got into an argument just before a court appearance and threw their still very full coffee cups at each other. Those who care about gender distinctions may be interested to hear that it was the man who threw first. In any case, Mrs. Sachs did not require tissues, nor smelling salts, nor did she throw her coffee at anyone or anything. But she did seem rather pale and, truly it was only to be expected, angry.

There followed a series of meetings over the next few months involving Mrs. Sachs, myself, additional lawyers from both this firm and her late husband’s firm, and, eventually, those representing the interests of the aforementioned unprovided-for offspring. It was generally agreed by all that the systematic disbursements set up during Mr. Sachs’ lifetime constituted a legal acknowledgement of parentage, however it was also noted that the fact that he had gone beyond the minimum of what was required by law might prejudice a court, especially should it go to jury trial, by the appearance of unwarranted greed by said offspring if they should file actions seeking additional compensation. In the end, settlements were arranged that were mutually acceptable to all concerned.

By the end of it, Mrs. Sachs was looking rather tired and worn. She told me once, though she did not ask me to hold it in confidence, so I will assume it is not a breach of either etiquette or professional ethics to pass it along, that others had noticed, but of course had assumed it was merely (merely!) due to her husband’s recent death, and she did not dissuade them. The irony in her tone of voice was very evident. I will tell you without qualm that it precipitated quite a change in my own attitudes towards marriage, and I vowed to ensure that I did not leave my wife in such a fashion that there was ever any other reason for her appearance of mourning on the occasion of my death, than that she truly missed me.

I would not have been surprised if, at the ending of this debacle, or what might have been so without entirely too much intervention, Mrs. Sachs had chosen never to see me again. Instead, she moved the management of her own funds and those she had inherited from her husband, to my firm and my care. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was a desire to end all ties with her husband’s associates? Or it might have been the excellent Mrs. Wright, who has a most marvelous memory, and not only manages to remember the way in which each of my clients, individually, prefer their coffee or tea, but also, I’ve noticed, provides additional cream and sugar, and in actual containers bearing real cream and real sugar, for the surreptitious alteration of the supplied beverage into what some people might feel inhibited to order directly. Mrs. Sachs, for instance, turns her coffee in what some might say was more accurately called a coffee-flavored beverage consisting in the main of over-sweetened creamery products.

It was with great regret that I learned of her current condition. There is not even the normally natural outlet of seeking recompense, of suing for damages, from the gentleman responsible for her state, since he died in the crash and a minor amount of investigation showed that his estate was such that, had any degree of reasonable damages been awarded, which surely would be expected given the totality of blame on his side, one would be extremely unlikely to collect even a fractional amount. Her daughters have little recourse except to be content with the pitiful amount of mandated accident coverage required by the automobile insurance codes of this state. I am, of course, helping to arrange funding from Mrs. Sachs own assets, for the skilled nursing care facility to which she has been transferred, for anything above and beyond what her medical insurance will cover. I am sure her daughters bless the fact that their mother was wise enough to invest in long-term medical coverage. I recommend it to all my clients, regardless of age. Otherwise, should the funds have needed to come solely from her estate and should they have, given that, still decided to wait out the full twelve months, I must say it would have reduced the accounts significantly, though possibly not have wiped them out entirely.

We will, of course, hope that a full recovery occurs, regardless of how it is funded.

* * * * * * * * * *

Going Mental

There was an itch. It was terribly distracting. She supposed that she ought to be somewhat happy about it, that it was some sort of positive sign of some sort of possible recovery, a marvel that she could once again register an external sensation. It was, after all, the first time since the accident that she’d felt any connection with her body at all. But she couldn’t scratch. The arms, the hands, still didn’t move, or not when and where she wanted them to go. There wasn’t even any damn way of letting other people know that she itched so that they could scratch it for her, or remove whatever was causing the infernal annoyance.

And there was a side effect to it that was even more maddening. Its insistent hold kept her in her body, jerking at her consciousness much like a nervous owner tugging on a dog’s leash, when by now what she most wanted to do was to go off and explore all those fascinating scents outside the too-known, too-boring, too-restrictive confines of her own head.

There had been several such explorations by now, and she’d begun to learn both the possibilities and the limitations of this unusual back-door travel. She’d tried more than once to see if she could get to her daughter’s mind, either of them, in the hopes of making one of them aware of her, too. But there was no way to search them out, or not that she’d discovered so far. The winds carried her away and wouldn’t bend to her direction. The most she’d done is find out that certain currents and eddies seemed to have their own stability despite the general gusting, and when she identified one, she could follow it more than once to the same ending place.

That’s how she’d found herself back in the empty desert, by managing to recall the particular shifting patterns that had brought her there before. It was a shock to see it so much the same, and when she thought about it later she realized she’d expected the host mind to have eradicated the scene, replacing it with something of its own. But instead, it had remained a desert. It had not reverted to the white blankness of its original state, but nothing had advanced further and there were some signs of retreat. The sands were paler, bleached out by the harsh bright light to remain somewhat the color of her skin but now of her skin at the end of winter instead of what she still thought of as its current color, its warmer autumn hue. What caught at her most, though, was the sad little pile of dark brown earth she’d played at creating, at the end of her visit. No better than fecal droppings now, in use as well as appearance, for all the small green shoots had withered to dull dry deadness, shriveled and barely noticeable. The guilt overwhelmed her, the guilt for bringing into this world what she hadn’t stayed to see, or help, survive, and she did not linger.

She had found a truck driver’s mind, instead, down a different set of winds. Dirty brown and grey swirls of diesel fumes and the smoke of a cigarette that wanted to be a cigar. It would have given her a headache if she’d faced it in reality. But there in a part, still part of the rest, was cleaner air and a more golden glow with a tourmaline sort of iridescence to it, dappled with shadings of purple and green and a pinkish rose.

“… rose, toes, goes, flows, doze, hose…”

An insistent beat made the glow pulse a little and when she noticed it at the beginning she’d thought it was yet another indicator of the host’s own heartbeat, as before, until she also noticed that there were long pauses in the rhythm. When she let herself connect more with the mind, it was still very strange.

“… strange, mange… mange… range!”

Very strange indeed! The connection let her feel the rumble of the road as the eighteen wheeler roared along the highway, and gave her the background awareness of what the rumble meant at all. Her first guess was that he was trying to keep himself from falling asleep.

“… asleep, leap, creep, deep… Bo Peep…?”

This -was- starting to get a little creepy. Nursery rhymes? Surely he wasn’t trying to come up with ways to entice a child?

“… child, mild, wild… uh…”

Dialed. Riled. Defiled. Her mind chimed in, not quite as silently as perhaps it ought to have done, but soft and low and she hoped with enough ambiguity in tone to be mistaken for a voice of his own, from his own mind. She was just too curious and maybe playing along with the word game would give her further clues as to its purpose.

“… yeah… dialed, riled, defiled… tiled… smiled!”

He’d picked it up and continued, without any questioning of the source, so maybe this time she was still safely hidden and anonymous despite her intrusion. He didn’t seem a bad sort. The mind wasn’t decorated with blood spatters or torture devices or weird scary toys. Clare paused and gave herself a mental tongue-lashing, the only sort of torture in which she normally indulged. Very much to herself, she chided, Stop it! You have absolutely no reason to think anything wrong of him!

Now and then there was a sort of sparkle inside the glow, and an increase in the cozy warmth of it, but now and then there was also an anti-sparkle, a darkening, and a feeling of something being rejected, tossed away. She pushed further into the connection. That was the only sure way of finding out what was going on. With the added closeness came new clarity. The glow became a spiraling golden sweep of words and phrases, and with each pulsing beat, new words appeared in the center column. Some flew to the end of the Christmas tree string of lights with an added sparkle as they were bound to the others, though most were left to languish in the center till they faded out on their own. Every so often, one of the new words would fly to what already seemed a filled in section of lights, but one of the existing ones there would blink out, leaving a dark hole for only an instant till the new light filled the space. Sometimes, and this was obviously more of a problem to the continuing growth of the column, the sparkle of appreciation for one of the newly formed words seemed intense enough to cause an entire section of the previously created pattern to go black, as if blowing a fuse, and the whole column would falter in its motion, its top-like spinning slowed and turning cockeyed and lopsided, till enough of the missing lights in the string had been filled in, evened out, so that it could regain its balance.

A poem, she realized. He’s making up a poem, in his head, that’s what this is! She felt oddly stupid at not having guessed beforehand. There was an underlying suspicion that it was rest, the dirt and grime and (she admitted the use of the term because it was the most true to what she saw as her assessment of him, and therefore the key to her failing) the low-class nature of the rest of his mind, which put the idea of poetry so far removed from her expectations that it hadn’t been considered at all.

“You know I love you, that’s what you say,

But I want to show it more each day.

There’s too much time we are apart,

In miles and days, but not in heart.

I wish I could send you a bright red rose,

All fancied up with ribbons and bows,

But you might think it very strange,

Because it’s way outside my range,

Not the kind of thing I’d usually do,

But I’m that much in love with you.

I would put it on your pillow as you sleep,

While you are off in dreams so deep,

Looking like a little child,

And I could watch you as you smiled,

And then I’d lean and kiss your cheek,

Because I’d be too happy to speak.

If I was there, but I’m far away,

But I still love you more each day.”

Alright, it wasn’t exactly a Shakespearian sonnet. More like a greeting card and not a “hall of fame” one at that, but the verse did have an honest sweet sentiment. Still, she couldn’t help prodding a little at it. ’Yet’, she murmured with soft intensity, eyeing the first word of the last line as it came spinning around again, to see if it would have any effect on the overly repetitive phrasing. There was a brief twinkle of the light.

“’Yet I still love you more each day.’ Yeah, that sounds better.”

A collaboration! Now, what else could she -- Clare stopped herself in time. This was -his- poem, not hers, and collaboration was not likely to be wanted on something so obviously personal. Besides, if the woman in question knew him well at all, and it certainly sounded as though she did, or should, she might wonder more about the inspiration and source of a finely crafted and polished literary offering, than she would wonder at a mere prettied-up rose.

Instead, Clare went looking for other glowing places in his mind, searching to see if he had any other poems completed or underway, curious to see if this was an aberration or his usual practice on the long distance runs. Something with a silver shimmer over sea-green drew her attention to where it lay beneath the smoke and grit. This swirl was stagnant, flattened down to the slow useless spin of a record on a turntable without the needled tone arm in place. And that dates me, she thought ruefully, though she still considered her analogy an accurate one. The “tone arm” would be his attention, his concentration, which would bring the words to active life. She examined what was there, giving it more of her own concentration. Gradually more understanding sunk in. The spin of it, slow as it was, did mark the work as something not complete, that some part of his mind remembered as something that needed to be looked at again somewhere along the way, he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He might even choose to discard it entirely, in which case presumably it would stop spinning and disappear. Was it worth keeping? She poked a mental finger into the mass of words and let it run along the spiral.

“The moon is very big and bright,

Even though it’s not quite night.

The grass still looks very green,

The shadows still are not seen.

Except if the moon is really bright

Why aren’t there shadows? This isn’t right.

And grass doesn’t look green under the moon,

It’s a lot greener more like noon.

At night it’s just a sick sort of gray.

I should put this off till another day.

‘Cause right now it’s coming out pretty stupid,

And nothing rhymes with that but ‘Cupid.’”

Her eyes, should she have had any, would have sparkled with suppressed laughter. Now here was a fellow with a good sense of humor and the rare edibility to turn it on himself, too. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to play with this one. After all, she’d had the experience herself of setting some sort of thought aside and coming back to it later to find it much more complete than she’d remembered leaving it. Where to start? Well, what was he trying to say? She concentrated on the general color and taste of the words instead of the glint of the individual lights. Okay, it was all about the way the moon, the full moon, looks when it’s floating over a sea of grass in the twilight gloaming of a summer day. This guy was pretty damn sensitive under the gray coating of cigarette ash. He was too caught up in rhymes, though. What if she tried turning it into a haiku?

White ship of the moon

Sails over a green grass sea;

Trees toss it higher.

She silently whispered the words into the spin of the disk, letting them drop down through her finger as if through the same sort of intravenous tube that probably lived in her real arm, and listened again to the poem, watched the effect. The poem gained a sheen of alien glitter which rose to the surface and spun off into the darkness. The words barely changed.

“The moon is very big and white,

Even though it’s not quite night.

The sea of grass looks very green,

The shadows of the trees are seen.”

Doggerel still, damn it. But, okay, she conceded, a little bit better doggerel, at least in her opinion, and further conceded, Maybe haiku is too much of a change all at once. But that “quite night” needed to go. She stirred the word pool again, trying to catch that particular, and particularly elusive, fish, and the other words shifted and twisted to get out of her way, one of them managing to slip back to its earlier form.

“The moon is very big and bright,

Shining on the edge of night,

The sea of grass still has some green,

Where shadows of the trees aren’t seen.”

Stilted, very stilted, but acceptable enough to leave it for now. As she evaluated the changes, she couldn’t help but notice, with a small amount of trepidation, that the swirl had increased in speed, the words starting to glow a little more strongly with a bit more sparkle. It looked as though her meddling had stirred up attention from the host, though it seemed still unfocused, below his active consciousness. I wonder what he’ll think of the changes when he notices? Clare smiled to herself, but, discretion being the better part of valor, she didn’t stay to find out.

She’d meant to go back in a day or so to see what had happened to the poem, if anything. That was with the assumption that she could find her way to his mind again, of course. But the itching kept its hold on her for more than a week before it finally subsided.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“Hey, Janey, how ya doing?”

“Mike! You made it in okay?”

“Yeah, love, no problem making the time. Traffic was real good.”

“So you’ll be heading back... when?”

“They’re setting up my schedule now. I’ll let ya know soon as I get it. Oh, I got something for ya too.”

“You do? You’re so sweet!”

“Hey, come on! You’ll make me blush and I can’t do that in front of the guys, ya know?”

“Will it come with another of your poems?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. ‘Cause you’re probably sick of ‘em by now, right?”

“Don’t you think that! I love your poems! No one else’s girl gets anything like that!”

“Ah, geez, you’re not showing them to anyone, are you?”

“Just Angie? You know I tell her everything. Okay, not EVERYTHING, but you know what I mean.”

“She probably thinks they’re pretty stupid.”

“No, she doesn’t! She thinks you’re very talented, and so do I.”

“Yeah, well, this is okay, I guess. It’s how I feel about you. Maybe don’t show her this one, okay? It’s kinda sappy.”

“I love sappy. But if you say not to share it, then I won’t. I won’t even mention it to her, how’s that? It’ll just be private, between the two of us.”

“Aw, thanks, love! Um, I’m kinda working on another one, too, but I don’t know. Kinda coming out fancier. Maybe you can show her that one, when it gets done?”

“Oh, Mike, that’s great! What did I tell you, I told you they were getting better! You should send them in to some magazine or something.”

“Come on, Janey, don’t talk like that! It’s just for fun, ya know? And really, I kinda do them just for you, ‘cause you like ‘em so much.”

“Oh I do love them! And I love you for wanting to give them to me! I just don’t think it’s that wrong to want to let other people know how smart you really are? But, okay, okay, I won’t push it on you, sweetie.”

“Thanks, babe! As long as ya, ya know, keep willing to push other stuff on me, hey?”

“Mike!! Now -I’m- blushing! But you just wait till you get home and I’ll show you how much I love you, in any way you want, what do you think of that?”

“I think they better get me home damn soon!”

“I’ll be waiting, love.”

“Let ya know, soon as I hear. See ya soon as I can, hun!”

* * * * * * * * * *

Angie’s Story, Continued

I tell you, that Janey Stubbs is the sweetest person you’d ever want to meet, and that’s no lie. Do you know what she did the other day? She brought over a homemade apple pie, just because she thought I could do with a bit of pie, with all the stress I’m under. And I’ll swear, what did me better than anything was just sitting and talking with her for a couple of hours, over pie and coffee. The pie was still warm, too, and we had it with some vanilla ice cream on top. Now that’s just heaven, warm apple pie á la mode. You know what that means, right? It means “in the fashion,” which is kind of funny, really, as if that’s some special, fancy, Fifth Avenue way of eating pie. But I guess once upon a time, it was! The boys each had a big slice, too, and I think one or more of them must have snuck back into the kitchen for more after I went off to visit the nursing home, because there wasn’t a morsel of it left for Rick when he came back to the house, which didn’t please him much, but I could hardly have saved any for him if I didn’t know they were taking it, now could I?

I think Mom is better, I really do. She smiles more, and sometimes I can see her muscles twitching like she’s just about to be ready to move them on her own. I know they say she’s still not focusing on anything when she has her eyes open, but I’m just about sure that they’re wrong, that there are some times when she does see me directly and knows it’s me, too. And even the nurses admit that those noises she makes, the little sounds and murmurs and such, why, they’re right on the edge of speech and you can practically make sense out of some of them. Katie says no, but Katie doesn’t seem to know a damn thing these days. I don’t understand why I was ever intimidated by her. So what if she has this big fancy high powered, high paying job? That doesn’t make you generally smarter than other people, it just means you know more about one particular and, really, pretty damn unimportant, thing, which just certain people happen to want to pay you for knowing.

I mean, take Rick, for instance. He is a very smart man. You’d think that people would be falling over themselves to hire him, wouldn’t you? But no, they claim they need people who know all about this thing or all about that thing, and there’s no room at their company for someone who is clever enough to be able to do anything at all they wanted if they gave him just a little bit of extra training to get him started off right. And someone like Rick could help them in a whole bunch of other ways, too, instead of only the narrow little piece of work that they’d be hiring him for, but these people probably wouldn’t even appreciate that, because they obviously haven’t got an ounce of brains in their bodies and so he has to keep slogging from one interview to another till someone comes to their senses. It’s enough to make you scream. Not that he or I ever would, of course, but I certainly don’t blame him for spending a little time at the pub with his friends come evening so that he can relax and forget about how badly he’s being treated by all these supposedly high-class businesses.

Janey says that her husband, Mike. could get him some work, but Rich would need a new sort of driver’s license. I can’t see why, just to push a truck down a highway. I know how often Mike is away, too, and I’d rather not have a marriage like that, thank you very much. I like someone in bed with me, not off on the road with who knows who. Not that I think Mike is cheating on her, but you never do know, do you? Though that would be a real shame, because Janey is such a nice girl that I can’t think anyone in the world would want to hurt her that badly. But not every marriage is like Rick’s and mine, and every time I hear about yet another couple getting divorced, I count my blessings and say a thank you prayer to God that we get along so very well, just like my mom and dad did, and may it always be that way, amen.

I’m doing a lot of praying these days, that’s for sure. For Mom, of course, but, and this is probably going to surprise you, but also for Katie, that she comes to a more peaceful place and just accepts that we are never going to know exactly when Mom is going to get better. We just have to trust that she will. It’s not like there isn’t money to keep her, you know? I mean, that would be awful, if we had to make a choice between some god-awful sinkhole of a nursing home and... no, I won’t even say it. But this place seems real nice, and they do take good care of Mom, I’ve seen it. In fact I made damn sure to be there watching them as much as possible those first few days, just to be sure we’d found the right sort of place.

But Katie is still going on and on about directives and living wills and Mom’s wishes and finding those damn forms, when really you can’t be sure exactly what anyone would say when it came right down to it, could you? I mean, it’s real easy to say “oh I wouldn’t want to live like that” but it’s not the same as saying to someone standing right there “yes, you go ahead and pull that plug and take out these tubes.” There are a hell of a lot of people who would say “I’d never, ever want to live in a wheelchair” but how many of them go ahead and kill themselves if they end up that way? Damn few! And I’ll tell you why, too. Because life is a gift that we are not supposed to throw away just because we don’t like the way it comes wrapped at the moment. Every living creature on earth knows this. It’s only people who get confused, because they think too much and expect too much. Have you ever heard of any animal committing suicide? Of course you haven’t, because it never happens. If we could just learn that we should handle whatever God gives us, if we trust in Him that He will never forsake us, then we can leave it in His hands with a quiet spirit and a clear conscience, because we know it will get better in another world if not in this one.

I read somewhere, in some book where the author was talking with people who’ve died a little and came near to judgment themselves, that they somehow felt like the only sins that were too black to be washed away were suicide and murder, because those deny the right of God to any intervention in the life that was destroyed. It’s like saying that you know better than God about who should live and who should die, and when it should happen. Now, I’m not sure I agree about those two being the only sins that are so horribly bad, or the only ones that God won’t ever forgive, because I do think God could forgive anyone anything if He so chose, but they’re sure up there with the absolute worst things possible that anyone could do on this earth. And Katie wants us to be a part of that? I don’t think so!

She doesn’t go to church any more, you know. Oh, it’s not because of what happened to Mom. She just hasn’t been to church in years, probably since she went away to college, except for the times when she came home to visit and the whole family was going. I mean Mom and me, because Daddy rarely went to church and that’s only fair because he never did convert. He was raised Lutheran, and Mom was raised Catholic and raised the two of us as Catholics, too. Well I guess she had to, because that’s certainly what the priest told me and Rick when we married, that if I wanted to be married in the Catholic Church then I had to promise to make sure the kids stayed in the Church, too. I did exactly that, but let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. I mean, you try getting three growing boys up and dressed and out to Mass early on a Sunday morning? At least we didn’t have to bother with the CCD classes, because even Rick agreed that the Catholic schools were better than the local public ones.

Anyhow, Mom and Daddy were married in the faith, I know, I’ve seen the pictures from the wedding, and she looked gorgeous, too. She always looked good in white with her dark hair and blue eyes, and still looks good in it even if her hair’s gone all grey now. Katie’s got about the same coloring, but her hair has a more reddish tone, at least it does these days, but come to think of it, I bet she colors it and that’s why it’s changed. I can’t wear white, it washes me right out, though of course I wore it for my wedding because you have to, or people will start all sorts of silly rumors.

I never had any problem staying Catholic myself, not like Katie. Now, I’ll admit I don’t follow everything they say you have to believe, but come on! There isn’t any Catholic in the country that really, truly, believes that birth control is wrong, or if you find one that does, it’ll probably turn out that they’re crazy on other issues, too. And I suppose that, yes, there are some cases where I might believe that it’s okay to get an abortion. But I do not like the way that people are getting them these days, without hardly thinking about it at all, just because it’s not convenient for them to have a child and because they were too careless or stupid to use those birth control devices in the first place. It’s just too easy, and that’s wrong.

Mom thinks the same way I do. She doesn’t agree with everything the Church teaches, but she’s not like Katie, who thinks that means you have to stop being Catholic entirely. It’s true that I don’t think Mom goes to Mass as often as I do, but she does go. She probably goes on Saturdays, but I wouldn’t see her there because we’re in different sections of the city now and go to different churches. Saturdays are when I go, too, now that I’ve given up trying to get the boys to go with me, because it’s real convenient that way. Afterwards I just go and do my grocery shopping for the week, and it leaves the house free for the boys to watch all those Saturday afternoon sports games they like so much. But I don’t know when she last went to confession. I mean, the priest has been to visit at least three times now, and I guess that counts as good enough, but it’s not like she could confess anything to him.

She can’t have much to confess, though. I always have something minor, like envying someone’s new car, or getting mad at one of the kids and yelling too much at them, but Mom has such a quiet life these days. Oh, God, that sounds awful, I can’t believe I said that, but I didn’t mean right now! I meant -before- the accident. After the two of us girls were gone, well, that would be after Rick and I finally moved out to a place of our own, she was all by herself most of the time, because Daddy still had his business trips till he retired, and that wasn’t until just before he died. And then, of course, she really was all alone in the house. I offered to have her move in with us, but she said no. We’d have had to get a bigger house, of course, but we could use a bigger house anyway, and I would have done it just to make sure she was taken care of. She did have a cleaning lady start coming in, once a week, to do the kitchen and bathrooms and some dusting and vacuuming, so she didn’t have to worry about that part of it. She never did like housework. I guess you can tell I really take after her in that! But she did a lot of reading, and by “a lot” I mean a ton of reading. She could go through three or four books in a week, if she got going. She didn’t watch much television, which I couldn’t understand. I’d love to be home all day to catch up on those soap operas. Every now and then I get a chance to see them, and they will just blow your mind away with how much they cram into those stories these days. Abortions and babies switched at birth and marriages and murders and mistaken identities and, good Lord, the number of affairs! And the details! I tell you, those are the absolute raunchiest shows on television these days, and I’m including all those cable channels except maybe the ones you have to pay a lot extra for and that we won’t get while the boys are still in the house.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that she didn’t watch television at all. She had some favorite shows, I know, but those were nighttime ones. She did some knitting and crocheting, which she tried to teach me once but my hands just aren’t clever at that sort of thing, not like hers. She used to take some classes at the community center, I remember that, in drawing and painting and photography, and some other stuff. She even took some of the photographs and had them enlarged and framed, and they’re hanging in the front hall now. They look real nice, just like professional work, though she’d taken other pictures that I wish she’d picked instead. She’d taken some very pretty pictures of summertime flowers and trees in the fall, with gorgeous colors, but the ones she chose to hang up are these kind of odd ones of broken toys and empty lots full of trash. Katie pretends to like them. I guess they’re pretty artsy, but I know what I like and I liked the other pictures better. Mom likes artsy stuff though, and she used to go to museums and galleries a lot. She’d even get a bunch of these invitations to special gatherings, because she’d sprung for the annual membership, and she’d go out to those, too. The mail is still full of invitations of that sort. And requests for money, from the museums and from other charities, because apparently she’d given to some of them, and, you know, once you give to anyone then they sell your name to a bunch of other lists and then, forget it, you’re on a ton of mailing lists for absolutely forever. But I keep the greeting cards and address stickers, because you never know when those will come in handy, and that’s legal, too, even if you don’t send the organization anything, because if someone sends you something in the mail that you haven’t asked for, then it’s yours for free.

We’re trying to deal with the mail the way we think Mom would want us to. The bills, Katie takes those to the lawyer and he arranges to pay them. The junk mail we can just throw away. The museums and such, I guess at some point we should contact them and let them know to get her off their mailing lists. There’s only been one or two personal notes, because no one writes these days, they just phone or e-mail, and the ones that came were from relatives (we could tell by the names and return addresses) and so we just called them to tell them about Mom in case they hadn’t yet heard. And of course it turned out that they’d heard right after they mailed the card, because that’s the way things always seems to happen. Both of the notes, and one was a baby announcement and the other was a thank-you card, were from those on Daddy’s side of the family. Mom’s side has better communication. Katie calls them the “Irish Mafia” because of how much everyone knows and talks to everyone else, which is not very nice at all, but Katie always thought they were too pushy, and of course, they always thought she was too stand-offish, which is true. I get along fine with them and I don’t know why she can’t. They’re on the other side of the country, after all, so it’s not like anyone’s going to show up on her doorstep and demand a hug and a kiss and overnight stay. Or help in dumping a body!

But now all the relatives should know what’s going on, and I’ll keep in touch with them enough to update them on any changes. I wish I could report more good news. I do think I’ve seen some progress, like I said, but it’s been five months now and it’s still so sad to see her just lying there. Of course five months isn’t really that long. when you think about it in broader terms. Heck, a baby takes nine months to be born, right? So maybe, it could, it will still get better. Relatives keep saying I should tell them if there’s anything they can do, but of course there isn’t, not from so far away, except to keep praying for her. I do keep asking them for that. I know Katie won’t, but even if she doesn’t believe in the power of prayer, you never know what might help and it sure won’t hurt.

Katie did do something nice for Mom the other day, though. She brought in one of those little tiny music players and a small speaker setup that the player fits into, and it turns out she’d gone and put a bunch of Mom’s old CDs on it, the ones by the stereo at home that were out and looked like they might have been played the most. I thought that was a very clever and kind thing she’d done, and told her so, and you know what? I swear it seemed like she was angry at me for giving her the compliment. I just don’t understand that woman, even if she is my own sister. But it was still a very nice thing to do.

* * * * * * * * * *

Smiles of a Whatever Night

When the itching started to die down, she was still suspicious of a recurrence, and didn’t want to be caught half-way through a literary critique or, more likely, intervention. So, no visit to the truck driver, not quite yet. Instead, she continued the test her memory of streams and currents by seeking out the artist again.

There was a more selfish reason for finding him, too. So far, he was the only one (the only one still alive, she reminded herself) to whom she’d dared display her presence, and he’d accepted it fairly well. Somehow she thought the truck driver would not react with nearly as much equanimity. He’d probably run the rig right off the road, she grumbled privately, with mixed feelings of sympathy and annoyance. Instead of just snapping a piece of charcoal. Well, the equivalent of that.

The gusts seemed to be blowing harder today. Maybe it was the enforced idleness that had softened her mind, weakened her mental musculature, and so made the gusts harder to withstand. She fought to slip into what she thought was the right stream, to use that sudden dip right there, giving it a little extra impetus to drop even further, down into the next flow, and then there was that twist, with a bit of a corkscrew sort of turn at the end... but the wind roared and spun her sideways from the final turn, and she was someplace else.

“Just give me my damn stuff!”

It was not a happy mind. Clare had to bend herself into a sort of very advanced yoga position to avoid the spikes. Luckily, her mind was a lot more flexible than her body. There were definite advantages to leaving the aged flesh and bones and creaking joints behind.

“Hey, it’s out of here. I called you, I told you, I put it all outside this morning just like I said I would, and, if you’ll remember, I even told you that you’d better come by between 9 and 10 to get it.”

“You fucking liar! Yeah, you told me all that, but there was nothing here!”

“Before 10? You came by before 10?”

“I was here at nine-fucking-thirty! Maybe a couple minutes later but no more than that! And there were NO boxes, NO suitcases, NOTHING!”

And there was definitely no need for hearing aids. The woman was not only yelling on the outside (she had to be) but she was yelling it inside her head, too, so absolutely clear and certain was she in her words and their truth. And she was being so picky about the guy’s words, poring over them to look for hidden insult, that all of those were coming through loud and clear, too. Clare had a perfect seat, if not an exceptionally comfortable one.

“Oh, now, sweetcheeks, I didn’t say the stuff would be in boxes, did I?”

“So what the hell was it in?! And don’t think your stupid retro endearments are going to get you out of this! If my stuff got stolen because you put it out too early, you owe me for every fucking thing that went!”

“I left the loft at five minutes to 10 and it was still out there, darling. So who’s the liar now?”

“THERE WAS NOTHING THERE!!!”

Clare yipped and flattened herself to paper thinness, origami folded, as a new flurry of spikes jutted out of the surrounding mindscape, with a poisonous yellow cloud, sulfurous in both color and odor, suffusing the area around them. She held herself ready to bolt, but the inadvertent sound she’d made was drowned out by the screaming.

“They were there. Three bags full. Baa, baa, black sheep. Hey, they were black, too. How’s that for appropriateness, little lambkins?”

“I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! Or maybe even SUE!”

“Michelle, ma belle, you wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court, lovely as your legs are. I told you the stuff was going out, I told you the time, you came by, the stuff was right there in plain sight and what happens? You. Did. Not. Pick. It. Up. It’s not my fault if the garbage men then carted it off.”

“GARBAGE MEN?!?!”

“Three black plastic bags. Right there on the sidewalk, sitting in my garbage cans. Garbage day. Such a pity they made that mistake, but, heck, mistakes happen, right? Like you and me.”

“YOU THREW OUT MY STUFF IN THE GARBAGE!”

“Ah, no. I put your stuff in nice clean plastic bags, to protect them from rain and dirt. I put the bags in the cans to keep the canines and rodentia from worrying at them. I made sure to tell you where the stuff would be, and to tell you to come by before collection time. If you couldn’t figure out what and where it was, you could have rung the bell and asked, now couldn’t you?”

“I TOLD YOU I NEVER WANTED TO TALK TO YOU AGAIN!”

“And yet, here you are! Isn’t it odd how things work out?”

Clare felt a wave of laughter building inside that she was hard pressed to keep there. The man was so totally evil! But it was still so funny. She wished she could see the expression on poor Michelle’s face. From the blinding flashes inside, the woman must be about to -- well, she was already screaming. Throw something, maybe? If she couldn’t see Michelle’s face, maybe she could still tell more from the face of the other. She let her inner sense of self, the boundaries that defined her apartness, dissolve and dissipate so as to sink further into the other’s consciousness, as she’d been able to do before, in order to pick up the sensory perceptions directly.

He wasn’t openly smirking. That sort of surprised her. Yes, it’s true, a half-smile played on his lips, hop-scotching from one side to the other, but his face was otherwise calm and his eyebrows were slightly raised and the overall expression was very close to gently sympathetic with a touch of mild concern. Until one looked more closely at the eyes and the hard glint in them, wariness there, too, being coldly self-critical of how far to push it, not because of any care for the woman but because of the mess it might be to clean up afterward. It was hard to watch those eyes. Well, it was literally hard to watch those eyes, because Michelle was being very foolish and not paying nearly as much attention to them as she should have been, and Clare didn’t dare interfere enough to force her. The woman was severely out-matched.

“YOU THREW IT ALL OUT!”

There was a gentle sigh. She admired the lovely delicate balance of it: just loud enough to be quite noticeable, but soft enough that no one could in any honesty call it theatrical. It rubbed like garnet sandpaper along Michelle’s already raw nerves.

“Darling, we agreed, the both of us, and it’s done. If it went wrong, too bad, but I only did exactly as I said I’d do. Just like always.”

“You are such a SHIT, you bastard!”

Clare felt herself, Michelle that is, starting to sob. That wasn’t good. She ran a quick assessment through her host’s mind and her heart sank under even worse news. There they were, the little pins pricking out of the corners, sharp glitters of focused light, sure signs of calculated effort and effect. Michelle thought a crying fit would soften him. The girl wanted to cry anyway, from anger and frustration, but Clare had serious reservations about the likely results. From where she sat, from her point of view, the woman was only going to get very, very hurt if she tried this gambit.

“You never really cared for me at all, did you?”

And there it was, the little heart-breaking catch of breath at the end of the words, an utter cliché in the timing of it. Clare was tempted, and fell, letting herself sink down into even more a part of her host, wanting to get the full experience of the coming drama. Oh, perfect! Her, their, bottom lip was trembling now, and the large doe-like eyes (if she remembered them correctly from the drawing) were downcast and blinking hard to hold back the expected tears. Though, more precisely, from Clare’s intimate knowledge, they were blinking hard to try to generate tears that were a little too reluctant to appear on their own. Clare sympathized with them.

“Something in your eye? Do you need a tissue?”

He sounded dryly amused as he supplied the standard dialogue, knowing exactly what he was doing.

“No, no... I’m... I’ll be fine. I just... Please, could you answer the question? I need to know if... if there was really nothing there... ever at all... ?”

Her words were coming out in tiny broken phrasings, as if Michelle were trying very hard now to be brave, to hold back her hurt. It was a pity that the real cause was the effort needed to keep from dissolving, not into a puddle of emotional pain and despair, but into another screaming fit.

“Hmmm... No. No, I don’t think I will answer. If I say ‘no, I never loved you’ then you’ll let yourself feel completely victimized, which is a damn lie but you’ll have all your friends believing you. But if I say ‘yes, I did love you’ then, my dear little ex-girlfriend who is even now playing with idea that it may not have to be all ‘ex’, then you’ll try something stupid.”

He grinned slowly, a smile without any mirth but with a great deal of venom.

“In fact, given that, I’ve got to go with the ‘no’ answer. That way I spare myself the pathos, excuse me, bathos, of your play-acting and enjoy the idea you’re making those asshole friends of yours suffer it instead. You know, it’s really pretty dreadful, babycakes.”

Her host froze. Oh dear. Apparently this girl was supposed to be some sort of actress? Clare couldn’t quite figure out the background, but it was clear he knew exactly the right place to slip in the knife. She, they, took a deep breath.

Oh, no, not again! This was ridiculous. Without thinking, Clare clamped down on the vocal cords before the torrent of screamed abuse could pour out. Michelle gagged as if choking on a lump of meat. She grabbed for her throat, the color draining from her face and her eyes widening in shock. Clare let go immediately, a little scared by what she’d done, and Michelle gave a shuddering gasp with a small mewling sound tangled into it like that of a kitten caught in a sudden downpour, drenched and stunned.

The artist stood watching her, unmoving and apparently unmoved, his whole expression shut down and only the wary eyes looking on, assessing the degree of duplicity involved. Manipulative as Michelle had been, there was no call for that now. The girl was legitimately terrified. Clare took over again to glare at the man, and had the satisfaction of seeing the gaze flicker and falter before she dropped back to a spectator role, chiding herself for having elicited another set of whimpers from the girl that broke into a wail of “Look what you’re doing to me!!” once she had full control of her own body again.

This, of course, wasn’t fair either. But any more meddling would be bound to make it worse.

The girl was now too upset to be thinking clearly at all, and without closer connection to the physical senses, Clare was stuck in the same thundering fog that clogged the rest of the mind. It seemed as if it took several tries for the words to penetrate, dropping like mottled stones, the ripples eventually reaching a part of the brain that was still able to make sense of them and echo them back to Clare.

“Here. Take it. It’s half. Half of what’s in the account. I need the rest. There won’t be anything from the show for at least a month.”

The fog cleared surprisingly fast. Not all of it, true, but it was amazing how quickly the one piece of paper fanned away enough of the fear and confusion for her to see the large tarry bubble of muck rising in the middle of Michele’s consciousness, one that popped reluctantly when he continued, “And don’t think you’re getting anything from that!”

Despite the popping, the bubble took its time dying down. “Why not? I helped!” Clare prayed that the girl wasn’t pouting, but she didn’t have high hopes of it.

“By getting underfoot the whole time? Okay, don’t start looking like that, no more scenes, please! Michelle, it’s over. We both know it. Take the check and let the rest of it go.”

It was damn hard not to try to see what things looked like more accurately than the interpretation she was getting. She could see the words, but they kept swirling around, recoated in a new color each time, since the girl couldn’t decide if she preferred to think of him as talking to her with regret and remorse, or cruelty and sarcasm, or just inhuman unfeelingness. Clare pleaded silently for the girl to leave, but only to herself.

“We could have something, you know. Something really great.” If you weren’t such an asshole. The internalized added insult was loud enough to make Clare think it external, for a moment, and then breathe a sigh of relief when she realized it wasn’t. They might just make it out of here without one of these two killing the other.

“Yeah, sure, doll. But that’s the way the fortune cookie crumbles. Have a nice life. With Jeffrey, or whoever.”

Not helpful. But apparently, luckily, not something Michelle wanted to get into discussing. There was a sense of movement, of shifting environment, a brief physical warmth that sent a chilly wind blowing through the mind to clear out the last of the cobwebs, and then a silence. On the edges of the silence, Clare started to pick up the faint noises of traffic as the girl took absent notice of her surroundings before crossing the streets, and in the center of the silence there began a faint hum of calculations as the amount of the check was divided and sub-divided into all the things that were wanted. Clare left her to it.

* * * * * * * * * *

Reflections

Those two very nearly deserve each other. But I suppose many would have said the same about my husband and me, would have said we deserved whatever unhappiness came from our marriage because we never took any steps to change it.

I don’t know how unhappy Gerald was because I never asked him and he never spoke to me about such things. We talked daily, but it was all minor chit-chat about news and weather and friends and family, with occasional deep intense conversations about something to do with the girls. Angie was the subject of many of those. Her “rebellious” period, which in retrospect had rather little to do with rebellion and more to do with her native inclination to rationalize anything she wants as something she absolutely ought to have or do, and anything she doesn’t want anymore as something utterly evil and beyond the pale. We told her not to smoke cigarettes (though her father continued to smoke now and then) or drink alcohol (which I certainly did), but it was meaningless parental noises because her high school friends trumpeted it as a badge of freedom, and so it became that for her, too. Until a girlfriend became heavily involved in the “tobacco companies lied to us” backlash and drew Angie into it, and then suddenly anyone who smoked was a victim of corporate greed and intentionally planned addiction and should throw off those shackles. Gerald somehow resisted her attempts at educating him, and eventually she gave up.

The drugs, again, weren’t really rebellion. They were “enlightenment.” We were most earnestly informed, often rather patronizingly informed, of how many other cultures in both the past and present have used mind-altering substances to reach a deeper understanding of reality. The reality that it was still damn illegal here didn’t seem to be a strong enough argument against it. Neither was grounding her, lecturing her, punishing her by taking away privileges and even items (Gerald’s idea, not mine), or bribing her (my idea, not Gerald’s, I’ll admit that). She went off most of it when she started going out with Rick, which to my mind was one of the few points in his favor, even if the reason he didn’t indulge was that he was sufficiently satisfied, i.e., wasted, by a case of beer. But I honestly don’t think she stopped completely till she was pregnant, and that’s when she stopped drinking, too. If true, that would be yet another reason she blames herself for that first miscarriage. And of course, once she decided not to drink, she stopped to the degree that she will never touch any alcohol, not a sip of wine, even now. I have to remember not to add anything to the eggnog ahead of time, and I soon learned never to tell her the full ingredient list for most of my special dishes unless I could claim all the alcohol had evaporated during the cooking time. And it ruined the fruitcakes, though I continued to give her one each Christmas and only made the rum and brandy versions for others.

I wonder what it would take to get that artist off the drugs and booze. Michelle certainly wouldn’t have been the one to do it. She struck me as the sort more likely to encourage him, in order to make him more compliant to whatever she wanted him to agree to do for her. But that’s right, it didn’t work. He didn’t sketch her, not till she’d already left. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to help with, if I’m supposed to help with anything. I still haven’t figured out if there’s some higher purpose to this traveling, if that’s the reason I can only get to certain minds, or if it’s simply a matter of compatibility or openness or just completely random. Kate would say random, and Angie would say purposeful, but I’m not either of my daughters and I don’t know. In general I prefer being helpful to others instead of hurtful, so I’ll probably do good by default even if not under deific orders to do so. Besides, I wouldn’t get him off the single malt scotch, just the cheap beer.

For a while, I drank rather too much, myself. I slowed down after, well, after the affair. When that ended, I was afraid I might turn into a complete lush, drowning all my sorrows in drink, and I didn’t want to be so utterly pathetic. I’m talking about my affair, of course, not one of Gerald’s. His hardly counted as affairs. They were more like encounters or, frankly, business transactions, even if there turned out to be aftereffects from some of them. Aftershocks.

I’d thought I was immune from sexual attraction by then, both from provoking it and from feeling it. It had been years. My daughters were in their teens and I was of respectable matronly age. Gerald’s long absences had first been filled with attention to the children, and then as they developed their own interests and activities outside the need for my supervision, I’d found the perfect outlet of volunteer work at a couple of the local museums. It was very suitable work for the wife of such an influential and prominent lawyer. The people were interesting and generally intelligent, the work had the marvelous touch of being both complex and easy, the surroundings were fascinating, and there were even social gatherings at which our attendance was encouraged, and which I could attend alone, without Gerald, even when he was in town, without anyone batting an eye. A spouse was allowed to prefer to remain at home instead of attending the opening of an exhibit of esoteric ethnic art or a newly interactive dinosaur display, no matter how highly touted the occasions might be by the critics and press. Everyone understood that.

So I developed a network of friendships outside of those we’d formed during our marriage, those where we still kept up the pretense of being happily married. Naturally the new friendships were much less of a strain and maybe I was too openly enjoying of them, but maybe it would have happened anyway. And it wasn’t enjoyment that precipitated the affair. There had been another argument with Gerald about how to handle Angie, earlier that evening, and I was on edge because of it, and generally tired from a long day, and then during the reception someone made some catty little remark about the food, which I’d had the responsibility of selecting and ordering. I felt my shell start to crack and quickly excused myself. I went to one of the little courtyards that were accessible only from the side halls, which were well away from the party, and collapsed on a bench there to weep out the frustration, till I could get my emotions under control. He found me there. He must have seen, and followed. Of course I pretended at first that nothing was wrong, but the evidence was too clear to deny it for long, and he talked me into talking to him. So foolish, at such an age I thought it safe, a minor childish wickedness, to go with him as he suggested, to have a drink and talk more, somewhere far away from the madding crowd. We’d been friends, working together, for over a year by then, so what harm could it do? We did talk. And there were more drinks on top of the champagne we’d already had, or at least, that I’d already had. And still we talked, of so many things, and none of them in the least romantic. But when we left, when we got into his car, when we were both sitting there in the darkness, in the coolness of the very late evening, he looked at me and asked, quite simply, where I would like to go. I was too far gone to be anything but honest. I said, “Not home. Anywhere but home.”

That’s how it started. It ended two years later, when Kate broke her leg on a skiing trip and no one could find me, and out of guilt I said terrible, horrible, unforgivable things. It wasn’t because I’d put all the blame on him, either. It was that I’d blamed myself with words that made it sound as though it had meant nothing to me, that he meant nothing to me, that this was just some sort of cheap lark, an idiotic daydream to avoid the wake-up reality of our marriages, two fumbling middle-aged bodies playing at grand passion and only enacting a derisible parody of it. And similar words. I was always very good at coming up with words. I have much poorer judgment as to when to use them.

The affair didn’t survive that. We did meet again, once, to talk, to give it the chance for me to apologize, the chance for him to forgive, the chance for us to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. But it was gone; I’d killed it by shining too bright a light on what we both knew could only live in shadows. We parted friends. Each of us would probably claim that was so, a minor point of honor, a ribbon to pin on the corpse of what we never quite called love. But we never spoke again.

A different ending than these two. I hope he was right about the amount on the check. If it bounces, there’ll be hell to pay.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“All of it?”

“All of it! Can you believe that jerk? And he had the fucking nerve to say I should have KNOWN it was in the garbage cans!”

“God, kid, that really sucks!”

“Tell me about it. I’m NEVER gonna find boots that fit that perfectly again, ever! I am so sick. I did get sick, too, can you believe it? I had some kind of freaking attack, right there in front of him! Scared the shit out of me.”

“What happened? Did you faint? Oh, oh, oh, I know, I know! Tell me you threw up right on one of his paintings!”

“Damn, I should have. That would have rocked! But no, it was nothing like that. I just got, I don’t know, it was so weird. I couldn’t talk! I tried to talk and nothing, just nothing came out! Like something was grabbing at my throat!”

“Shit, that sounds scary.”

“It was, totally! And you know what he did?”

“What, what?”

“Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. He just stared at me! I could have choked to death and he’d have stood there watching it all!”

“You’re kidding!”

“Nope, absolute truth. And that just shows, you know, what a fucking liar he was. I mean, if you love someone and they start choking to death right in front of you, you’d do something, right?”

“Sure you would!”

“But he didn’t, so it was all just for the sex. If I wasn’t going to put out any more, I could just drop dead.”

“That bastard!”

“He even tried to pay me off! As if money were all that mattered to me!”

“What a dick! I bet you threw it in his face!”

“Shit, no, I mean, he HAD thrown away my stuff, you know? But he ought to pay some other way for all he did to me.”

“He should! I bet he didn’t give you nearly enough money!”

“I should list everything he threw away and add up how much it cost me. And if the check doesn’t cover it, then I’ll march right back and make him give me the rest. I mean, hell, those boots were close to two hundred dollars! And that silver bag was nearly as much, even if I did get it on sale. But the sale price wouldn’t count, would it?”

“Naw, I think you should go for the full value. But, Michelle? You loaned me that bag, remember?”

“I did?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. Hey, but still, that means it’s not out in some landfill. I want it back.”

“But I -- damn. Okay. But I shouldn’t have reminded you.”

“Yeah, you should have kept your mouth shut and made him pay for it!”

“Ooooh that’s so evil! You really rock, girl! He should never have let you go!”

“Tell me about it! But, look, though, that attack thing --”

“He attacked you?!”

“No, no! The not being able to talk thing! You don’t think that’s gonna happen again, do you?”

“Has it happened before?”

“No. He just made me so fucking mad at him --”

“Then that’s it. Probably just stress.”

“Yeah. You don’t think it would happen on stage?”

“Do you get stage fright?”

“No! Well... sometimes. A little.”

“I still think you’ll be fine!”

“I sure hope so. But if he’s given me some sort of complex, he’s damn well gonna pay for that, too!”

“Ooooh awesome!”

* * * * * * * * * *

Kate’s Story, Continued

We couldn’t find the forms. Not blank ones, not filled out ones, we couldn’t find any of the legal forms, anywhere in the house. Which drives me up the wall, but Angie, of course, is perfectly happy because it means she can continue to believe just what she wants to believe, that Mom changed her mind about how long we’re supposed to try to keep her alive.

Everything always goes her way and nothing goes right for me. I know, that sounds exceptionally juvenile of me, a prime sample of sibling rivalry, but I swear it seems to be so. Take what happened with Rick, for instance, with their wedding. They were just going out together for several months, back when Angie was still supposed to be trying to make her way through college, but then Angie got pregnant. She claims the rubber broke, but I’ll bet Rick wasn’t willing to wear one, or maybe just told her that, oops, he didn’t happen to have one with him right then, and Angie was too nice, and too careless, to insist on it. With both families being Catholic, there wasn’t any question of abortion, and there wasn’t much talk of adoption either. They were going to get married and, you will not believe this, but Angie insisted on it being a proper fancy wedding, in church, with bridesmaids and a flower girl and the whole nine yards of train on a, get this, white dress! Even if she’d be six months along by the time all of that could be gotten together! She asked me to be the maid of honor and I just gaped at her. I still can’t believe Mom and Dad went along with it. Rick’s family are just like him, all trash, so I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t see the disgrace in putting on this sort of circus.

It should have been a disgrace. But two months before the wedding, Angie had a miscarriage. Again, you’d think that they would have cancelled the whole affair, or at least have postponed it, and taken the given opportunity to look at things more sensibly? No baby meant no one had to get married right away? Of course not. Angie was in tears but, wonder of wonders, Rick told her that he still loved her and still wanted to marry her, and, with a few more, and much more appropriate, alterations to the wedding gown, it took place just as planned. Everyone said it was such a beautiful wedding, with such a beautiful bride, on such a beautiful day. Oh, yes, that too. The rainiest spring in years, and yet there were sunny blue skies on Angie’s special day.

If it had been my wedding, there would have been a hailstorm. Or a blizzard. Or both together.

Don’t get me wrong, I can deal with bad weather and I even enjoy snow, except for the idiots that forget each year how to drive in it. I don’t go skiing though, not since my first attempt. I am not what most would call particularly athletic, but I’m fairly well-coordinated and I’ve kept myself in good shape and back then I was even more adept at picking up new sports. After a few hours on the bunny slope, my friends took me up on one of the regular runs, though still a very gentle one. I was taking it slowly and managing quite well, if I do say so myself, when this hulking teenage boy rammed into me at full speed, totally out of control, and sent us both crashing off the trail. He picked himself up and apologized. I was still lying there with my left leg broken in three places. If it had happened to Angie instead of to me, I swear it would have been the other way around. She’d have been the one who was perfectly fine, and would even have been apologizing for the accident, for happening to be in the boy’s way.

That’s one of the uniquely maddening things about her. She makes totally sincere, totally “nice” gestures, that are enormously irritating because they are so completely unsuited to the occasion, and it often seems that I’m the only one who understands how unsuitable they are. Take the CDs, for instance. My mother has always had an eclectic taste in music, some of which I also appreciate. I recorded them and brought in a player to provide the sort of background music that Mom might enjoy, something certainly more preferable to me, at least, during these interminable visits, than the insipid Muzak that the nursing facility chooses to play, that seemed to make the visits last even longer. I understand their need to make the most inoffensive choices possible, but really, I’ve heard a better selection at the DMV. Angie made a great production over thanking me for what I’d done, how sweet, how kind, how considerate I was being! Which, of course, made it look as though no one would normally have expected any such kindness out of me. You don’t make a big deal of thanking someone for what is generally done, only for something out of the ordinary, that they went out of their way to do. I felt totally insulted. And she obviously didn’t understand, not in the least. She’s never understood me.

I’m not sure my parents ever understood me, either. I loved my father very much. In many ways, he was like a best friend to me. We enjoyed the same books and movies and could spend hours together talking about them with each other, or discussing the latest nonsense on the political scene, nationally or internationally. But as soon as my mother walked into the room, he’d stop and look at her and check first that there was nothing she wanted of him and nothing solicitous that he could do for her, before he’d notice that I was still there, and resume our conversation. I hated that but there was really nothing that could be done about it. They loved each other that much. No one has ever been that concerned with my happiness, and really, one shouldn’t expect it. A marriage like theirs is very rare. In any case, he never seemed to notice how hurt I was by his inattention, and I, of course, would never have admitted it to him, for I wouldn’t have wanted to be that demanding. Angie was the one who insisted on being the sort of person, getting into the sorts of scrapes, that required everyone to drop everything to attend to her, so I made sure to spare my parents from any further drama in their lives. I thought at one time or other that my mother noticed my efforts, because she would say something kind about my work or ask me about what was going on in my life, as if to draw me out, but usually before I’d said a sentence or two, something else would distract her and once again I’d be left hanging.

Maybe that’s why I thought for a while about going to law school. After all, when you’re arguing a case, people will pay attention to you. And at least some are required by law to do so. I did take a few pre-law courses, but I was very much put off by the general run of students who were in those courses with me. Half of them seemed to be there only because of their interest in the most superficial aspects of law, their idea of being a lawyer formed from reading too many crime novels and watching too many television shows. The other half seemed only interested in how much money they could make at it, and how soon they could jump from being a lawyer to being a state representative or senator, and then to higher positions in government. Those were the worst, because when they found out who my father was, they pretended to befriend me, only to pester me for introductions and plead with me to put in a good word for them when they applied for internships at his firm. I never did, of course. People should be hired based on their own merits and not on whom they know.

I found a much better class of people in the mathematics courses, people so incompetent at interpersonal skills that they made me seem quite the social butterfly in comparison. That’s a joke, you know. But they had several great advantages over the other college cliques. They weren’t planning on imposing their views on the world either by demolishing the current government or by buying into it. They weren’t focused on making a million dollars before they turned thirty (though some of them did, the ones that drifted into association with the engineering students who were starting their own computer companies). They weren’t romantics who were going to sail through life on the strength of an undergraduate degree in art history or avant-garde poetry. They didn’t have any falsehood or pretension about them, and that was very refreshing. Of course, a simple degree in mathematics itself wasn’t very realistic, either. I graduated in accounting, summa cum laude. Not that the honors really mean anything once past your first few years of employment, but it did please my parents.

It would also have pleased them if I’d ever married, I think. But that’s too personal to leave to the desires of others, and, as I’ve explained before, it just didn’t work out. I might even have liked having children, for I must admit that watching Angie and her burgeoning brood of rambunctious offspring as they careened through the years, leads me to believe that I would have done a much better job of raising them properly than she, had the task fallen my way. I will say, though, that I have never treated any of my pets as substitute children. That’s an appalling stereotype into which I will never fall. My cats have always been treated as cats, as feline predators that are expected to act that way even though I keep them quite well fed, and I do not whine or whimper over a dead songbird or a partially consumed mouse, though admittedly I do not appreciate the remains being left in the toe of one of my slippers, which, yes, has happened.

My mother should have had a cat, or a dog, to keep her company once my father had passed on. I’m somewhat surprised she didn’t. She claimed she never knew when she would have the urge to travel, and wouldn’t want the fuss of trying to arrange for boarding or for someone to come in regularly to care for them while she was gone, even though I’m sure Angie would have been happy to do so, and I might have found the time. She did enjoy traveling, and always had, often wanting us to take family trips to rather unusual destinations instead of to the same family beach house that my father preferred returning to each summer. I suppose those days are at an end. I’ve talked to some people, to make sure that I understood all the connotations of her condition, and the consensus is that even should she come out of this state, even if she should regain full consciousness, it’s very unlikely that she’ll be able to return to anything like a normal life. Her memory and other mental processes will probably be severely impaired, her physical control of limbs and bodily functions is likely to be weakened or non-existent, and she may need to stay in a nursing facility or, at the least, resort to private nursing care in her home.

I know, by her own hand, that my mother does not want to live in a non-aware state. I don’t think my mother would want to live in that severely impaired a state, either. But I certainly don’t think Angie sees that it may be best for our mother’s quality of life, if it ends here. And I don’t see how I can explain it to her.

* * * * * * * * * *

Beyond the Pale

She needed to check on the truck driver first. She told herself that was her highest interest, and made it so by her conviction of her belief. The poem had percolated nicely into a full bodied brew that, though Clare wasn’t sure she’d have wanted to attach her name to it, still wasn’t at all bad compared to standard quality imbibed in this sort of neighborhood.

“The moon is very big and bright,

Shining on the edge of night,

The sea of grass still has some green,

Where shadows of the trees aren’t seen.

There is no noise, there is no sound,

There are no people seen around.

Nothing keeps me from thoughts of you,

And how I wish you were here, too.

It is so empty in this place,

I might as well be out in space.

But soon I must be on the road,

And in my truck a heavy load.

But my heart is heavy, too,

Carrying all my love for you.”

There was enough lazy spin to it to indicate that he was still musing over some of the words, which meant that Clare was again tempted to play Muse. Okay, she thought, Maybe it could use just a little bit of minor modification? Clare prodded at the word-lights. It was hard to restrain herself, this really could be so much better, but the thought of what might happen should he start to wonder at the changes did keep her under some small degree of control.

“The moon is…”

… too plain, too childish, let’s find another way of… there we go!...

“… beautiful and bright,

Shining on the edge of night,

The sea of grass still has some green,

Where shadows of the trees aren’t seen.

There is no noise, there is no sound,

There are no people seen around.”

… nursery rhyme sing-song again, but I can’t see right off how to change it…

“Nothing keeps me from thoughts of you,

And how I wish you were here, too.”

… this won’t do, it’s horribly forced scansion, and it’s exactly the same rhyme as at the end!...

“Nothing keeps you from my mind,

I wish that you I would here find.”

… no… no, that’s terrible and he’d never phrase it that way…

“Nothing keeps my mind away

From thoughts of you, in every way.”

… oh I give up… that will have to do…

“It is so empty in this place,

I might as well be out in space.

But soon I must be on the road,”

… YET! you can use ‘yet’ instead of all your ‘buts’... must be the effect of all that cigarette smoking...

“Yet soon I must be on the road,

And in my truck a heavy load.”

… isn’t there something vaguely scatological about that? but she probably won’t notice… we’ll hope not…

“But my heart is heavy, too,

Carrying all my love for you.”

There. Definitely better, to her mind at least, and yet it still blended fairly well with the substance of his own mind. She hoped whoever it was meant for, would think that, too. But if she stayed longer, she knew she was bound to meddle more with it and so best to leave it there, and leave.

It was interesting how succumbing to one temptation made it so much easier to succumb to the next. Back to the beginning, because you had to start from there or the cord might stretch too far and snap, and then off into the winds again, with a soar and a swoop and a drop and a twist around and around at the end, a little dust devil tail to the whirlwind. He’d probably feel insulted by that description, but it fit.

Something smelled delicious.

The light was amber and mottled gold, olive green shot with red, and an brilliant orange-pink sunset, all in swirling streams of silk and music blending into each other against deeper, more intricate backdrops, like an exotic dancer in a Bedouin’s tent. Clare held up her hands in wonder to let the flowing edges of light trail over them, and laughed quietly as her mind filled with the tastes of saffron, of garlic, of a salt-sea taste that wasn’t salmon, oh, yes, shrimp! Apparently he was right about stale bread and peanut butter not being his only sort of meal. And that ribbon of forest green was a very nice wine indeed, which didn’t taste exceptionally green but somehow threw echoes of that shade of light. Much better than beer. With a smile of satisfaction at her choice of timing, she let herself sink more deeply into his perception.

It was take-out. She blinked at the white box with the fork balanced precariously across the top. He hadn’t even bothered to put it on a plate! The glass of wine paused halfway to their lips as some of her astonishment leaked through. Clare felt like sticking out her tongue at herself, at him, in her frustration. The damn searchlight was back, cutting through the streamers of softer warmer light. She could feel it inside her, his, mind, looking for her. Oh what the hell. Yes, I’m here again.

“Christ!” Now that was a shame. It wasn’t just the glass that toppled, but the whole wine bottle, as he jarred the edge of the table in jumping to his feet. The fork fell too, but that was a minor clang and clatter lost in the mental scream of the other catastrophe. Clare automatically tried to grab for the bottle, but her, his, arm flailed wildly as he tried to grab for it, too, their timing just enough off from each other’s to ruin his coordination completely. When she realized what was happening, she drew herself quickly back, far back, into a tight tense ball that tried to touch as little as possible, and so bounced bizarrely for a time before it managed to stay suspended. He cursed loudly and fluently as he chased the emptying wine bottle across the wide table with an alacrity that he certainly hadn’t shown in following the peanut-butter laden knife. She tensed further, hiding her eyes from the explosion that would come when it crashed to the floor.

It didn’t come. He must have caught the bottle in time. She cautiously uncurled a tendril of awareness from the ball and looked around. The Bedouin’s tent had become a prison yard after a mass escape. Barriers of massive stone or mere rubble or barbed wire were thrown up haphazardly wherever she looked, and the searchlight had added a dozen of its fellows to sweep the smallest corner with blinding light. Luckily her ball was hanging in midair and not in a corner, and the mirrored surface had apparently confused things by confusion with the other searchlights. She could hear a heavy rushing sound that she supposed was respiration, and felt confirmed in her guess when the sound eased, because only then did the strongly articulated words come through and they still kept pattern with the breathing.

“Okay. You. Whoever the fuck you are. You owe me one damn expensive bottle of wine!”

Really, he was as bad as Michelle. Clare sighed and uncurled further. I’m sorry. I’d thought you’d remember me better.

It was odd as she realized the frantically focusing searchlights couldn’t tell where she was after all, even as she took more of her natural shape. I’m here, she offered, and pulled the light towards her.

“Damn.” He sat heavily, the respiration pattern catching before it continued at a somewhat unsteady pace. “Okay. Ah. What do you want with me?”

I don’t want anything! She felt like wailing it; he was taking this entirely the wrong way. What had happened to his ease with it, before?

“You’re not here to bargain for my soul? Or show me what the world would have been like if I hadn’t been born? Or grant me... no, that’s a bottle, and the bottle’s empty, damn it all, thanks to you.”

She imagined him looking at it with exasperation, in the same way she felt his mind looking at her, or trying to look. Apparently she was still too amorphous. Maybe it was the uncertainty she was feeling that kept her from projecting a clear image. I’m not a demon, I’m not an angel, I’m not a genie. I’m just... Alright, how did she want to describe herself? I’m just a visitor? Lamely, it seemed. She pushed on, trying to make it sound less strange even though she knew that was pretty much impossible. I was here before. You talked with me. When you were drawing Michelle as Medusa, do you remember? Now she sounded like someone trying to presume on someone’s time based on a passing introduction at a party. I was there, remember me, so-and-so’s friend, we talked about this and that, but of course you might not remember because you were... Drunk. And stoned. No wonder he’d been more accepting then. She should have waited till the bottle was emptied in the proper way.

“Medusa...! You’re the mommy muse!”

The what? Clare couldn’t speak for the shock, but that wasn’t a bad thing. It gave time for the internal world to readjust around her, for the barriers to split apart and disappear, curling into nothingness from the edges inward in an oddly two-dimensional fashion, as if paper put to a match.

“The one that told me I should eat better. My conscience, given words, except my conscience was never that picky.” Both words and tone were full of dry humor now, and she relaxed a little, but only a little, for the characteristic sharpness lurked beneath. The humor continued into a deliberately mournful complaint, “You didn’t approve of the beer. And now I find out you don’t approve of wine, either? That’s harsh, mommy dearest.”

I’m not your mother! I thought we’d established that? And I didn’t mean to make you spill the wine, I’m very, very sorry about it. It was a good wine. It was probably a good beer, too, except I don’t like beer.

“Snob! Only snobbish people don’t like beer!”

Clare thought that in her case it had something to do with how she grew up, with seeing, and smelling, the amounts overindulged in by her Irish relatives, but this wasn’t the time to bring that up. Then, yes, I suppose I’m a snob.

“So am I. I hate beer. But it’s cheap, and if you keep it cold enough, you can’t taste it.”

You’re an alcoholic. Oh well. The accusation had just come out baldly, without thinking, and the label he’d given her now seemed all too accurate. It was harder to keep one’s mouth shut when one didn’t have a physical mouth.

“Probably,” he agreed without the least mental change of color or texture or mood. But then there was the sense of physical motion, and the mood did change, rich colors starting to rise in velvety drifts, and the scent of oak and apple and grapes. “But, life is good. We do not have to resort to beer, not tonight. Though if you knock over this bottle, you poltergeist, I’ll have you exorcised.”

I didn’t knock over the other bottle. You did, when you jumped up.

He snickered, she could tell that he did. “Yes, mommy. All my fault, and finding you in my head had nothing to do with it, right?”

This was getting damn annoying. Almost annoying enough for her not to realize that he -was- being at ease with her again, however that had happened. Probably it was just the anticipation of more alcohol. Could you call me something else? Anything else? Like, oh... She could choose whatever name she wanted, which stopped her as she tried to pick one.

“How about ‘Angelique’? I’ve always wanted to know an ‘Angelique.’”

That wasn’t so bad, even if it was awfully close to her daughter’s name. But she wouldn’t have called her ‘Angela’ if she hadn’t liked the sound, and it was definitely better than ‘mommy.’ That’s a beautiful name, thank you. That will do quite nicely.

“Angelique, Angelica, Angel, why are you here, angel?”

Because her own body was dying. Clare shivered. She didn’t know from where that sudden conviction had popped up, and she didn’t want to examine its origins more closely, certainly not right now. A visitor, as I said. A sort of ghost, but not of anyone dead, you’re not being haunted. But does it matter? Would you just prefer I go?

The colors grew more prominent, the Bedouin tent returning, the mind quite relaxed again. “That is what you are, and not why you’re here. Why are you here, sweetcheeks?”

Maybe this was a case where honesty really was the best policy. B-Because of your art. Maybe it wasn’t, at least not total honesty. ‘Boredom’ had seemed a very bad choice of wording at the last minute, and she’d twisted the word as it came out to form something more palatable.

“My art. You’ve seen my art?”

Yes. She had. Only the Medusa sketch, but surely that counted.

“Where?”

Here. When you were working on it. Again, not a lie.

“You’ve seen the new piece?” A crystalline filter slid over the tent, edges coming into hyper focus, awaiting her reply.

Not that one, not yet.

“Come on.” He jumped up again, more control and purpose to it and without jarring the table this time. Not that it would have mattered, for the bottle and wineglass were in his hands to come along, too, and he finished one glass and poured himself another even as he strode over to the studio section of the loft apartment, pausing only to flick on a few light switches with the rim of the glass to illuminate the area. To Clare, there was only the movement and sense of purpose, and the infusion of warmth from the wine, and then a pause.

“There. What do you think of it?”

There was an image, but it was jumbled. He was thinking too much about particular spots that might need changes, and not looking at the work as a whole. Could she explain without scaring him again? But he seemed fairly intelligent, despite his volatility.

Right now, I can only see it as, well… as parts of your mind are seeing it? If you want me to see it clearly, I need to... to be more a part of you.

The chill draft let her know he wasn’t happy about that, but he picked up on the meaning. “Like when you jerked my arm?”

I was trying to grab the bottle. I’m sorry. It seemed she was apologizing a lot, but it also seemed necessary, especially given that she shouldn’t be in his mind in the first place.

“At least I could hear you better then. Sounded like you were talking in my damn ear.”

Clare hadn’t considered that before. No wonder he’d jumped! But if that was how she sounded then, she was curious enough to ask further. How do I sound now?

He considered a moment, using the time to finish off the rest of the current glass of wine. “I don’t hear you, not as such. I can tell what you’re saying, but not as words, so I might be getting some of it wrong. It’s a multimedia sort of thing, like having images flash at me while I’m licking Braille. If I knew Braille.” He shrugged and poured yet another glassful, and then turned with a flicker of impatience towards the painting again. “So, are you seeing it yet or not?”

She let herself go shapeless again, an amorphous mist that seemed to be the self-image best suited for this deeper merging with her host, letting the mist spread and sink into her surroundings. And then there was light and a clear view of the work in question.

It was larger than she’d expected. The canvas was about six feet high and propped at least two feet up off the floor, so he must need to stretch to reach the top edge. The width was much narrower, about three and a half feet. Much of it seemed black at first, till she adjusted to his eyes and could pick out the tones within the darkness. The window, though, and the light from it, stood out at once. A stained glass window in deep intense reds, all sorts of reds, panes separated by the lead into the seeds of a bloody pomegranate, leaking, dripping, blood and juice down the wall and across the floor beneath. Her, his, eyes widened and she breathed out an “ohhhh!” of appreciation, in his own breath, before she realized and let go quickly of that part of him.

He took over again with a snort of harsh laughter, “I guess I like it!” He gulped the wine. It burned her, his, throat when taken this way but she had an inkling of the control he was exerting to keep calm under this sort of invasion and didn’t begrudge it to him. “It’s not mine.” The touch of bitterness wasn’t from the wine. “The idea, I mean. It’s from a book. But I wanted to -see- it. And so...” He gave a dismissive wave to the painting. “It’s mostly done.” He looked at the work critically again. “Mostly. Tell me what you think.”

She was careful to keep the words away from his lips, his vocal cords. I think it’s beautiful, of course, with the light, the pattern. You’ve made it glow, astonishingly so.

“That’s an easy trick. White underneath it, and gray beneath the rest, it works even when most of it’s so dark. But you’re being facile. Tell me more.”

It, ah, looks dangerous. Deadly. Like it’s bleeding.

“It is. More.”

I like the way you’ve kept the roughness of the brushstrokes in the darkness, but the pools of light are so smooth, polished even.

He made a frustrated growling sound deep in his throat. “Not the technique! Tell me about the scene, tell me about the place, tell me what it says to you. Put yourself there.”

Clare looked again. It wasn’t difficult, he was staring fiercely enough at the painting himself. I suppose I would want to photograph it? To record how the light changes as the sun sets. If the camera didn’t explode. There was something very, very intense about that light. Blood calling to blood.

His lip curled as the frustration died to disgust. “Bland, boring, insipid little angel. You can’t stay if you’re going to be like that. I had hopes. You caught the danger, but you’ve shoved it away again. Coward.”

She wasn’t a coward. She’d faced more in her life than he probably had, or would, and if he too blind to see what he himself had painted, then, alright, she’d tell him, and the anger fueled the rush of words. It’s not a place I’d want to be! It -is- too dangerous, there’s too much need there. It calls out for someone to come and feed it. Where do you think it gets the blood? A victim, a priestess, must come and dance to it, dance naked in front of it while the light burns on her, and there’ll be music, some sort of music, driving music, with a beat no faster than the human heart, but with enough insistence to it that by the end she must fall before the window, panting and spent and broken, her skin so wet with sweat and perfumed oil that the last light shines off her body like rubies, like red tears, like her own blood, but the blood is gone, sucked out of her, as it all goes dark, all deathly still, all dead, and she’ll never move again!

Clare stopped with a catch in her mind’s voice that was almost a sob, aghast at what had come out. Where the hell had that come from?

His eyes closed tightly, but the painting was burning in his mind and she couldn’t escape it. “What scent?”

What...?

The insistence was low but rough. “The perfumed oil. What scent?”

What does it matter?! You can’t paint a scent.

She jerked internally as his arm jerked and sent the glass smashing madly against a wall, as he shouted, eyes open in blazing affronted anger, “Of course I can paint a scent, you little idiot!”

Maybe Michelle was well rid of him, instead of what she’d thought was the other way around.

I... I don’t know! Something dark, dense, heady. Ambergris and musk, that sort of scent. Or, who knows, the opposite if she wasn’t told what was going to happen? Something clean and innocent. Or something narcotic, an opiate, if they were kind? But they wouldn’t be, would they?

He’d gone to the drawing table to grab a sketchpad and charcoal, erasers and the soiled cloth, but then he went to the wider table to do the sketches, furious lines that showed the collapsed dancer in a number of different poses, and, damn, but he was right, even from the lines alone Clare could see which sort of perfume would, must, go with each.

“Alright, here, what if...” The ripped out sketches piled up around the table as they talked, and they talked all night as he prodded her for opinions and ideas, though arguing against her interpretations half the time or more. It was glorious.

But before she left, she made him clean up the broken glass.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“Can’t you give her some sort of sedative?”

“I’m sorry, but the doctor has left strict orders.”

“But she’s in pain! She must be, she keeps moaning and muttering. And you saw how her arm jerked?”

“I can have the physical therapist come in and give her an extra session, if you’d like? It’s probably just muscle tension.”

“Yes, please do that! And excuse me, but isn’t muscle tension often a sign of pain? People don’t relax their muscles when they’re hurting.”

“Well, yes, it can be.”

“How kind of you to admit it. How the hell are we supposed to know if she’s in pain, then, if you dismiss the only signs she can give?”

“Ms. Sachs, I really don’t have the authority to issue meds, in any case. You should talk with her doctor.”

“I have! He doesn’t want to do anything. It’s still ‘wait and see.’”

“I know it must be very difficult for you and your sister, but it is the usual recommendation.”

“You have no idea how difficult.”

“If it will help, I’ve been here for a number of years now, and from what I’ve seen of Mrs. Sachs, I would say that she’s not experiencing any significant pain? The sounds are not in that range? At least not in the range usually used by those who’ve been able to say they’re in pain?”

“But she’s not them, and you can’t say for certain. You can’t extrapolate that far.”

“No, no of course not. But you understand that a sedative would depress her respiration? And therefore it’s considered rather more dangerous for someone in her condition?”

“It wouldn’t matter. The important thing is that she should not be suffering. I don’t want her to suffer.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Ms. Sachs, I understand that there is a DNR on the chart. As a nurse, that is all I’m required to understand, and I assure you I will follow the clinical orders.”

“Do you think they’re wrong?”

“That’s not for me to say. I’m sure that you and your sister have gone over this in great depth with Dr. Reynolds, and he would not have put that order on the chart otherwise, or if he himself believed that it was wrong to do so.”

“Yes. Yes, I talked with him a great deal about it, and it’s the wisest course.”

“And he talked with your sister, too, yes?”

“Of course! But she’s taking it harder than I am, much harder. Not that I’m not devastated by the need for it! But Angie keeps hoping Mom will just wake up and smile and everything will be fine again. The DNR order... that was very difficult for her to accept and she’s still hoping it won’t need to be invoked, even if she’s resigned herself to the possibility. Please don’t bring it up with her, don’t rub it in?”

“Oh, Ms. Sachs, of course not! Once it’s on the chart, there’s really no need to discuss it further.”

“Thank you.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Reflections

I feel like I should have known more about the perfumes. I’ve gotten enough through the years, God knows, but I only knew them by name. It’s embarrassing to realize that I never bothered to find out what ingredients made up the scents. Gerald always brought me some sort of gift on his return from his business trips, at least at the beginning of our marriage he did, and it was often perfume. Shalimar, Chanel No.5, Hypnotique… expensive perfumes. He stopped after I discovered his little adventures, when after the next trip he brought home another bottle, another gift, as if nothing had happened, and got to watch a hundred dollars or so of exotic scent gurgle down the drain of the kitchen sink.

But there were still birthdays and Christmas and it would have looked wrong, would have made the girls question it, if he hadn’t gotten me gifts for those occasions. And then as they got older, the girls themselves would sometimes give me perfumes, the drug-store ones that were easier on smaller purses and with the fresher scents popular then, the ones they might want to borrow, or else the old-fashioned ones they imagined were suitable for a mother, and so the bottles piled up: Charlie, Wind Song, the ubiquitous White Shoulders, and the rest. They never seemed to notice how little I wore it. I never found a scent that spoke to me, that said it was mine. They all seemed to belong to someone else and it was like wearing borrowed clothes that didn’t fit.

The grandchildren seem to avoid perfume, thank heavens, but maybe that’s because they’re boys. They give me bath powders and candles, but that’s all, and what they give has the simple flower or food scents of violets or vanilla, pine or pineapple, honeysuckle or honey, lilacs or lemons.

Claude never gave me perfume. Odd, maybe, for a Frenchman (well, a Quebecois) but he was ever discreet. In the two years we were seeing each other, he only gave me one gift and that was from his gallery. He was holding a show for an artist that made the most amusing works. They were jeweled icons, but where one would expect to see the stiff flat face of a saint, instead there was an animal dressed in the same medieval style. She’d made them in a variety of sizes and shapes and there was a tiny round one, barely a hand’s breadth across, decorated with heavily burnished gold and with sapphires and emeralds and rubies (all fake, of course, though the price might have led one to believe otherwise), and showing an ermine in a Madonna’s robes of azure blue and soft rose red, against a forest backdrop. I loved it at first sight, though I pretended not to when he noticed. But he also noticed that my eyes kept returning to it, and he bought it for me. He said it was me, with my pale fair skin and dark hair streaked with white (I was blessed in how I went gray), so reserved, so restrained, so elegant. And then he winked and murmured in my ear about the randy little weasel soul within, to make me blush, but only because he’d made sure no one was around to watch. It was easy to claim I’d purchased it for myself, to claim it cost much less than the true sum, to claim it was perfect for the room even if it didn’t fit at all with the clean, crisp style in which I’d decorated the house. But I sat it in a antique stand on my dressing table where I could see it every morning and evening, and I suppose it still sits there, even though no one’s around to appreciate it. I don’t know what will happen to it. It meant too much to me to mention in my will, to deliberately give to anyone else. It’s the only memento I have of him. They won’t find any letters between the two of us, no cards, no photographs. They’ll never know it happened.

There’ll be enough other things to clear out. There are all those perfumes and bath salts and the other little gifts from children and grandchildren that have an emotional weight that you must respect even if you never intend to put the gift to use. I meant this year to get rid of some of them. I meant to donate the ones that were still unopened to the church fair, and to quietly dispose of the rest. The boys are older than they were, they wouldn’t look or ask for what happened to their gifts and even if somehow they found out, it’s not likely to have bothered them. With the gifts from Kate and Angie, I’d have had to be more careful. Daughters are more fragile. Which is why it’s going to be extremely awkward for some of what they’ll find, when it comes time to empty the drawers, to go through my things and dispose of them. Oh, there will be no evidence of an affair, not mine, not Gerald’s, but, well, Gerald had his toys, and I eventually found the need for some, too. Only the simplest of toys and given the way they talk about them these days on the cable channels, as if every woman has one as a matter of course, maybe it won’t come as that much of a shock to whoever discovers them.

I’m fooling myself. That’s a vain hope. It’s one thing to hear about them in the abstract and quite another to find a number of them residing in your mother’s bedside drawer. Not that I had a need for so many! But, honestly, I was curious about different styles, and what do you do with them after? You certainly can’t donate -those- to the church fair! And throwing them out in the trash seemed wasteful. It’s a shame I didn’t have anyone to consult about which to buy. I thought a couple of times of confiding in Kate, but really, I’ve no idea what she does in between relationships and I don’t dare ask. If she were a different sort of daughter, I could have broken the ice by buying her one as a gift, and giving it to her while out to luncheon some day. When she opened it, she’d have said “Mother?!” in a scandalized tone of voice, and thrown the napkin over it quickly before the waiter noticed, and looked at me, somewhat shocked but with a fond exasperation. And I’d have laughed, though apologizing for the laughter, and said something revealing about the sort I use, and we could have fallen into whispering about such things over our salads. And when the waiter came by to fill up our water glasses, we’d switch to talking quite openly but still about the same topic, just with words that didn’t give it away except to each other, and we’d try not to giggle at our naughtiness. But Kate isn’t that sort of daughter. If I’d given her such a gift, done that to her, she’d have turned pale white or beet red, and hidden it quickly with only a strangled, “thank you” that wasn’t true at all, that really meant “how could you, how dare you!” because she would only have taken it as a cruel or callous jest, a caustic comment from me on her apparent inability to acquire a permanent companion. She hurts so easily. And when she was past the initial hurt, she’d probably rephrase it in her mind to be that I didn’t really know what I was doing, and mark it down as yet another example of how I’m going senile.

I wonder if she uses them. They’re not so wrong. They give a quick, clinical release that sometimes the body seems to need. I’ve read articles that say the wrongness is that they’re too good, that they make it too easy to obtain what should come through mutual passion and caring. But sources of mutual passion and caring are not always available, certainly can’t be kept in a bedside drawer. And it’s not as if anyone who’s had such love would ever mistake a mechanical device for an adequate replacement. I know that Kate’s had at least one lover that she seemed to care for. She must miss him. She can’t help but miss him. I wonder if she ever falls asleep as I have done, in longing and loneliness, with my hand cupped around my face as if the hand belonged to someone else, to a lover, the thumb stroking my cheek gently and wiping away the tears. I would ask, and if so, I would try to say something to comfort her. But I can’t ask.

* * * * * * * * * *

Angie’s Story, Continued

I swear I am going to kill that woman, even if she is my own sister. “DNR” indeed! Do you know what that means? I didn’t, not until that wonderful nurse pointed it out to me, just to be sure I understood, and God bless her for doing so. It means “Do Not Resuscitate” and what it really means is that if the patient has an attack of any sort, then you’re supposed to just sit around and watch and LET THEM DIE. Right there in the hospital! Well, right there in the nursing home. But it’s almost like a hospital. This is the sort of place that does have all the fancy equipment and the people with the training to use them and we’re paying an arm and a leg to keep her here for that very damn reason. I mean, her insurance and such are paying for it, not us directly, God knows that would be impossible no matter how much we might want to do it. But the point is, that since the whole point of this is to get her the best care we can, then what the hell is that order all about, anyway?

Okay, I’ve talked with Dr. Reynolds. I haven’t talked with Katie, I’m too damn mad at her. He says I agreed to it. He’s a lying snake is what he is. I would never have agreed to anything of the sort, to anything like that, if they’d explained it properly instead of all their waffling around their big words and their beating around the bush about how we should make her as comfortable as possible (which of course I agreed with, totally!) and we should not cause her any unnecessary trauma (and who the hell would argue with that, I ask you?) and that we should give her all the best supportive standard care that we could (which they’d better! that’s what we’re paying for!) but that in the end it was really in God’s hands and we should recognize and allow that. Well, I tell you, I misunderstood completely and is it any wonder? I thought only that he and Katie were finally coming to their senses and realizing that modern medicine, no matter how good it’s become, just doesn’t have all the answers to everything.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s become pretty damn good at amazing things that no one would ever have believed possible a couple of decades ago. You must have heard the stories about how they can take an arm that’s been cut off the body, I mean just totally cut off, just lying there on the ground, and they can sew that thing back on and it works! Right down to being able to wiggle your fingers. That just blows me away. Do you know how many nerves and muscles and blood vessels must be running through a person’s arm? I sure don’t, but I know there’s a ton of them. And they can connect them all up again, one to the other, plugging everything together again. It’s like a true miracle, and I suppose it is one, that God could have given us the brains to figure out how to do something like that.

I know they can’t do that inside a person’s head, not yet at least. I mean, in there it must look just like a bowl of spaghetti, with all the neurons and nerve cells tangled up in each other, and hardly any way to figure out which is which. If they tried to mess with that, they might get something screwed up and there you’d be, going to lift your right arm and kicking out with your left foot instead, and wouldn’t that look silly! Except, I guess it would have to be your right foot, because they do know which side of the brain controls which side of the body, don’t they? It’s all backwards, the way I remember it. The right side controls the left side, and the other way around, which doesn’t make any sense when you really think about it. I mean, why should that be so? Why on earth would the brain develop that way? It’s like once upon a time someone took hold of some prehistoric animal’s head, back before they really had heads at all, and twisted it halfway around for the fun of it, and just left it like that. And ever since, everything’s been crossways.

I’ve asked them about taking that order away. Dr. Reynolds says I should think about it more, and discuss it with my sister and then come to him together with what we’ve decided both, together, because of course Mom never registered anyone with the power of attorney to make those decisions all on their own, for which I’m very grateful. Because it would probably have been Katie, and at least this way I get -some- say in the matter. She always seemed to think Katie was the more sensible one, and I guess she is when it comes to things like numbers and plans and bills and money, but that isn’t everything in life, not by a long shot. There’s getting along with people and understanding them and, you know, caring about what the hell happens to them instead of looking down your nose at anyone who has a little trouble in their life as if they should have seen it coming a mile away and just stepped out of the way, when it’s a lot more like finding yourself in a subway tunnel instead of on train tracks, and there is no out of the way to step, so there. Maybe train tracks on a bridge over a rushing river, maybe that’s more like how it is. But if Mom had given anyone that much charge over her life, yeah, it probably would have been Katie.

Daddy got along with Katie better, too. They could be in a room laughing and joking and talking intently about something, and I’d come in, and I swear the temperature would drop like twenty degrees and I’d be looked at like “what the hell do -you- want?” Okay, maybe not a lot of laughing, because they probably would have thought laughing was too raucous and too low class for them. Mom, at least, was better than that with me. I know she gave me a lot of benefit of the doubt back during the time I was having trouble with maybe a little too much the wrong sort of friends. I think that disappointed her a lot, but they were my friends, and you know, friends have to stick up for each other and maybe I did go a little too far with them, but I was just a kid and Lord knows kids don’t always make the best decisions. At least I had friends, unlike Katie. And ever since Daddy died, I know that Mom loves it when I come over and talk with her, and we go out to movies and such, sometimes, and we’ve been much better friends. I mean, I also know, deep inside, no matter how much she tries to hide it for my sake, she really does not care for Rick. But that’s okay. She does put up with him for my sake. I just wish she liked him better. I know he’s not much to look at, and he’s had a lot of problems in his life with things not going well, but it’s mostly just been a string of bad luck and nothing, really nothing, on his side, because I know him, and I know he’s not like that. He’s a good man. Daddy was a good man, too, but if I have to admit it I’d have to say he was rather, well, cold. Not to Mom, of course, he loved her! And not so much to Katie, either, because they were two of a kind. Like Katie, he did not have a lot of close friends, mostly just business associates, and you know how that’s really all just pretending and nothing of honest friendship in it. Mom was more like me, because she had all her museum friends.

A lot of her friends have been asking about her, too, which I think is wonderful and Katie thinks is none of their business, which shows the difference between the two of us yet again. I don’t know what the will says, because that lawyer won’t tell us till it’s time, but if Mom does leave any sum of money to either the art museum or the science museum, then I really think they ought to name something after her, like an exhibit hall or a scholarship or something, because she gave so much of herself there. But they probably have some sort of stupid system where it all boils down to cold hard cash, where you have to give X number of dollars to get your name on Y type of stuff, and so forth and so on, when it oughtn’t to be that way at all. But that’s all anyone seems to care about these days, just the money, even when it’s supposed to be a non-profit organization. I mean, look at the way they charge money just to get into the damn art museum, and let me tell you, it’s not cheap, it’s not just a buck or two, and that’s a pity and a shame because art ought to be free for anyone to come and see, even a person without any money or someone right off the streets. Now there’s something. I wonder how much money someone would have to give them to make them stop charging people to get in? Okay, maybe not for all the time, but just like for one day a week? Or even half a day? Because it’s not like there’s an enormous crowd always clamoring at the door to get in, let’s be frank about it. No matter when you go, it’s very clear that there are a hell of a lot more paintings in that museum than visitors, unless they bring in one of those fancy foreign exhibits that are only going to be there a real short time, and those they charge extra for anyway.

We could look into that. I think even Katie would go along with it. It would be a really great way to remember Mom when she… oh hell. I’m talking like she’s already gone, or about to be, aren’t I? That’s the damn doctor’s fault, him and Katie both! She still could recover, you know? You can’t give up hope, because despair is like the worst sin of all. It’s just that she does look so small and tired and pale, lying there. She’s getting so thin that you can see all her bones sticking out at the joints. I tell them they aren’t feeding her enough, but they tell me I’m wrong, that they’re giving her as much as she’s supposed to get, but it’s all through that awful little tube in her stomach and of course that’s not the way that people were really meant to be fed, so who knows how much nutrition is being missed? I wish she could swallow. I mean, she does swallow sometimes, or look like she’s trying to, but her mouth must be so dry and they say she’s not aware enough, that she’d choke if you gave her anything because she’d forget she was supposed to be swallowing and maybe just breathe it in, instead. But if she could swallow for real, then I could help feed her, and maybe feed her something better for her than the stuff that goes through the tube, like some good rich chicken broth. Rick’s mother makes the best chicken soup. Now, I couldn’t give her that, because of all the vegetables and noodles, but I could give her just the broth and I’ll bet it would help a lot. She needs something to help. She moves around a little and she sometimes makes noises that still sound almost like talking, but there are never really any words. I don’t admit that to Katie, but I guess I’ve admitted it to myself by now. And it’s been getting weaker and fainter, like she’s going farther and farther away from us. Just slipping away. I have to keep hope, and not let the others discourage me, or they’ll just let her go. I don’t want her to go.

* * * * * * * * * *

Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends

Clare had developed her own small circuit by now. There was the truck driver, Mike, who let the more creative portion of his mind wander off and play earnestly at poetry, like a studious child building sturdy office buildings with his blocks instead of fairy tale castles, while the rest of his mind was concentrating on the road, and the wandering Clare was quite happy to help add a little extra imagination to the imaginative process. There was Joel. She still hadn’t figured out what Joel did for a living, or if he did anything at all. He might be homeless. There was an impression of screaming within his head without any screaming going on, just whispers, but a cacophonous kaleidoscope of whispers of all sorts of voices, all ages, all genders, all degrees of sanity. At least, some sounded sane in their discussions and directions, but it was impossible to tell without deeper orientation into Joel’s condition and body state, and that was something to which she had been so far reluctant to commit herself. She knew his name was Joel, however, for all the voices called him so. What kept her coming there was the nagging suspicion that one or more of the voices might be someone like her, and not mere creations of his own damaged psyche, shattered fragments of mirror each reflecting a warped vision of himself back to himself. So far though, she hadn’t found the certainty of it. The voices shifted under her scrutiny, vanished and reappeared in a different direction, twisted slightly so that it might not be the same voice at all, and it was only the way that sometimes one seemed to laugh at her, to share a secret smirk, that made it still possible that it another such soul playing the same sort of game. Worse, maybe, but still something to investigate, was the possibility that it was an alien spirit of a different sort than Clare. Demons and angels were beginning to seem more real, or something that could be mistaken for such. Maybe not all spirits had a body to anchor their wanderings. She’d already proven that she could control another’s body, even if only temporarily, even if only when they were drunk or distraught enough to let her. Maybe demonic possession wasn’t just a figment of misdiagnosed psychosis.

Stephanie was a safer target. A more depressing one, though, because the girl was so depressed that Clare couldn’t help coming away feeling drained and discouraged, herself. She was much too young to have two children, and both still in diapers, too young as in she wasn’t legally entitled to the beer that she and her not-much-older husband shared every night. She ought to be going out to parties, to movies, gossiping over a boy who might or might not like her, or whining over how much homework the teachers had given this week, instead of fixing bottles and cleaning away the spit-up of rejected strained peas. Her husband helped, a little, till the kids were in bed, and then would take off to meet his buddies, “back in a while, don’t stay up, you get some sleep.” Stephanie was sure he was seeing another girl, that he resented being stuck with a family, and that he was really thinking, “get some sleep because you look like crap.” Clare wasn’t sure that she was wrong in any of her estimations and so, didn’t try to change them. What she did try to gently change was Stephanie’s habit of then crying herself into a stupor as she stayed up too late, huddled on the cheap sofa and watching bad movies on the cheap television. At least she didn’t keep drinking the beer, not when her husband wasn’t around. There was a suspicion of more to her restraint than good sense, that the man wouldn’t be happy to find too many cans missing from the case, but a plus was a plus and something to keep hold of when there were so many other ticks in the minus column.

Sometimes things like this worked out, Clare told herself, when her first inclination was to write the girl off as a hopeless cause. She did have the experience of Angie, her own daughter, but Angie had been 21 and even if she hadn’t finished college, she’d at least had a couple of years of it before deciding on marriage instead. Clare was uncertain if Stephanie had even finished high school. That became part of her agenda, to find out as subtly as possible, and if it wasn’t the case, to start hinting around at an eventual attempt at a G.E.D. Not right now, it couldn’t be now, not with the two babies in tow, but maybe social services could help with that, could find some day care arrangement. Unfortunately the means of communication were limited. Stephanie seemed the sort to go off the deep end if she started hearing voices in her head, and the girl was already barely keeping her head above water. The best Clare could figure out was to concentrate on the television, to echo and enhance any lines of a program or advert that might provide a little extra buoyancy to the girl’s life, and then help ease the girl to sleep on them. She kept to positive messages only, for the mind was draped with black and blue shrouds, in shreds and tatters, enough. But so far, there was little to show for it other than the fact that the girl had not yet killed herself or her infants in the abjectness of her misery.

After visiting with Stephanie, Clare felt she deserved the treat of dropping in on the one she had started to think of as “her” artist until she caught herself thinking that way once, and ever after made sure to expand it to “her artist friend” even in her own mind. He hardly belonged to her. He wasn’t the sort to belong to anyone. And that, she told herself, is going to make him a very lonely man someday. He seemed to have very few friends. She’d never caught him with any. He was almost always in his studio, alone, working. This had made it harder to find out his actual name, because he wasn’t the sort to talk to himself in the third person, but eventually she was talking with him, and watching through his eyes, when he started going through his mail, which led to yet another discovery.

You do business with them?

“What? With Boucher Galleries? Yeah.” He snorted dryly as he started scanning the communication from the business in question. “You know you don’t have to sound so surprised, angel. Did you think I sold on street corners? Or maybe rented a table at the weekly flea market?”

Just… they’re good, aren’t they?

He nodded absently, still reading. “Yeah. Take half, right off the top, but they’re good. People pay attention to what shows up there. And they’d take more except Edouard thinks he owes me still.”

Owes you what? Money?

“No, no!” His laughter was quick and brilliant as a crystal prism shattering light into rainbows. “God, no! He’d probably love it if it were just money! No, dollface, it’s his reputation he owes me, that it didn’t get spattered with nasty mud. And, look, don’t accuse me of any blackmail, because I’ve told him again and again, every bloody time he hints at it, that it was nothing, and nothing I’d ever talk about. Besides, his dear papa is dead as a doornail, now, and that’s the one he was hiding it from, so he ought to be able to forget the whole mess. Christ, it was years and years ago now.”

Claude was dead, she knew that, she’d known that. He’d died six years ago, a year before Gerald had died, so she’d had to hide her mourning, reduce it to a level appropriate merely to a valued colleague who’d often advised the museum on displays and artists, because in all the years after the affair she’d still never given Gerald the satisfaction of knowing that she had strayed, too. She didn’t like being reminded of his death, though, and hearing it with that sort of flippancy grated on her nerves and in retaliation her reply became snappish. If it’s a secret, then just keep it so, and stop hinting at it with me!

The papers were slapped down on the table and a whiff of sulfur assaulted her inner awareness. “Have it your way, sweetheart. Come along for the ride or not, as you choose.” He grabbed his jacket, a battered brown leather one (which was a surprise, she would have thought it ought to be black), and circled back long enough to stuff the papers into a pocket. She recognized the mood by now. Sullen and somewhat offended, as he got when a sketch that looked good on paper refused to translate itself to canvas with the same degree of rightness, and. yes, that seemed to be considered a personal offense, that his talent should fail him in that way. Apparently she was now expected to be similarly supportive.

I’ll come.

He wasn’t going to lose her that easily, wherever he was going. And if he were going to the gallery-- well, it had been quite a while. She’d like to see how it changed, how Edouard might have altered it when he took sole charge.

In fact, it hadn’t changed at all. The only shock was Edouard himself. She’d caught sight of him once or twice at the museum, but not up close. After the end of the affair, she had made sure to shift her volunteer work to other areas of the museum than those that Claude was likely to be consulted on, and she’d kept away from that sort of work even after Claude’s death, though she heard enough to know that Edouard had continued in his father’s stead. Up close, and with age, the resemblance to Claude was striking.

“Alex! You bastard, what are you doing here?” The elegant manner and open smile belied the roughness of the words and turned them into a lilting melody, the same way the outstretched hand was only feinting at commonness, and instead drew the artist into a Gallic embrace. “Didn’t you get the note? We’re not boxing them till Monday, and don’t worry, your darlings will be safe, I assure you!”

“You’re the bastard! I thought you swore you were going to sell them all!” Well, that was a relief. The sullenness was gone, replaced by an affable, if still low-key, sparkle of friendship and purpose. The only remaining ill temper was sublimated in dry jest. “I ought to make you keep to that, and buy them yourself!”

“You’d bankrupt me! You know how little I take out of this place, my dear boy!” The lugubrious fall of Edouard’s face was obviously only for comic effect, and it switched quickly to a grin as he tapped at Alex’s shoulder. “Besides, we did very well for you. You’ll get back three, only, and it will not surprise me at all should you get a call from someone about one of them, for a certain lady has been back more than once to look at it, though, to be fair, she’s been looking at other works, too. In fact, I believe she’s here now. Do remember the contract though, should she try to talk to you directly?”

The artist grinned back, just as casually on the surface and with just as much celerity beneath. “Edouard, would I try to cheat you? Never crossed my mind!”

Clare wasn’t sure she was willing to attest to that, but couldn’t deny it either. There had been a flicker of something crossing the mind, but what it meant wasn’t at all clear.

“Why don’t you show me to the little lady and maybe I can talk her into buying it straightway, and that’ll put your mind, and your stomach, at ease again.”

“You’re too good to me, Alex! Remembering my ulcers when even my wife forgets, but why should she be kind in that way when she isn’t in any other?” Edouard heaved the long-suffering sigh of a long-married man, and led the artist towards the galleries proper. Clare, still in place, caught sight of the sign as they passed it on the way to another room. “Alexandre Evans: Blanc et Noir.”

The lady was not so little. Maybe it was the stiletto heels, but she looked a good six feet. A very good six feet, that being her only flaw in scale, with the rest, if anything, a bit overly slender in proportion, at least to Clare’s taste. She also looked like a spider. There were problems in seeing through another person’s eyes and some of it involved perspective and being able to separate background and foreground and some of it involved the internal connotations of images, because when you were just a mind, the mental processes had more than mere priority, and the woman happened to be standing in front of what looked to be an enormous dream-catcher in rusted steel and wire, and then she also had her rounded-lens sunglasses pushed up on top of her very black hair as she turned to look at them with eyes nearly as large and dark as the glasses, the presumably intended effect of a great deal of expertly applied make-up.

She dyes her hair. Maybe it was a bit catty, but Clare just wanted that noted. Though as far as she could tell, the information was completely ignored.

“My dear lady, may I present the artist, Alexandre Evans, who told me that he simply must meet someone so appreciative of his work!”

She smiled, slowly, and her eyes were only on Alex. “Such an honor to meet you. Theresa Peters.” The woman held out a slim hand, and Clare had to grant grudging approval over the fact that she’d taken her gloves off first. She was not as approving over the quick glance of the eyes, the ones she was currently watching from, toward the ring-less left hand as the right one was shaken. Thank God, at least he hadn’t kissed it.

The smile seemed only a casual one, but Clare knew the focus behind it. “You’re too kind. So, would you like any more information about the pieces?”

“From the artist, himself?” She laughed softly and melodiously. “How could I possibly say no? And I do have questions, so please, lead on. Would it be rude to start with you? Alexandre is French, but Evans is not?”

Edouard made his excuses and returned to the front while the other two strolled towards the exhibit. The query was accepted as not being rude. “It’s ‘Alexander’ when it isn’t art, but my mother is French-Canadian and calls me her version of it. Edouard says it’s better for sales, though, and I’d be a fool not to take his advice on the business side of things. The ‘Evans’ is Welsh.”

Now here, I’d thought you were Irish. And if your mother is Quebecois then there’s no excuse for mistaking me for her.

He smiled lightly at the woman, answering the voice in his head. “The Welsh are to the Irish as the Irish are to the Scots. Twice as fae, and ten times the artistry. So I come by my talent legitimately, no matter how often people call me a bastard.”

Hmmph.

When they entered the room and Clare caught her first sight of the works in question, more information suddenly snapped into place. That’s why you call people those pet names!

He snickered before he could stop it, and then grinned at Theresa, covering it smoothly. “Sorry, just remembering the amount of research I did for these, to put me in the mood. Enough hard-boiled detective novels and films to make me start dreaming in Chandleresque dialogue.” He waved a hand at the paintings, “Sometimes I wonder if anyone will get them, a hundred years or so from now. But that’s their problem.”

“Oh I shouldn’t think it would be a problem! They’re wonderful just on their own.” The woman moved to one that already had a discreet little card attached to the label to say it had been sold. “I love the woman in this. Was she based on anyone in particular?”

“No, no, none of them are real people, and not from any given film either. Just based on the whole film noir genre. Shadowed walls, alleyways, the tipped down hat to cover your face, the hand cupped around a cigarette to light it, the spotlight from a police car that just misses the target, the…”

“The blood.”

“Oh that. Well, yeah, you have to have some blood.”

The blood was just like the light from the stained glass window. No, of course, not exactly alike. It was much darker, almost black, but it had the same polish to it, the same still-liquid feel, as if touching it would leave a mark, doubly marked, both the canvas and one’s finger. The rest of the scenes were in rougher blacks and a white that Clare would have called a pale grayish tan instead of a pure white, but both with the texture of the canvas coming through in a way that was perfectly evocative of a grainy movie print run through too many projectors. The scenes were abstract though, patterns of shapes and forms and not a direct copy, as he’d been telling the woman.

Who was now asking about something else entirely. “Mr. Boucher said that you painted on raw canvas? I thought I’d heard somewhere that such works wouldn’t last your hundred years or so.”

Clare twitched, made uncomfortable under the internal glower, the ozone scent of an incipient thunderstorm. “Ms. Peters, Monsieur Boucher is, and he’d be the first to admit it, a gallery owner and not an artist. But I also know that he knows the difference between raw and sized, and if he’s been telling people the wrong thing then it’s a damn miracle that any of them have sold at all.”

The woman became distinctly chillier under the admonition, even if it hadn’t been directed at her. “Perhaps I’m the one mistaken.” Mixed news: the chill seemed to cool Alex’s temper, and Clare sighed, keeping it quite to herself. He was definitely interested. It hadn’t been that long since Michelle, had it? Maybe it had been, for time was hard to keep track of these days.

“I’ll talk to him, just to be sure they know what they’re getting, but, yeah, to people not involved directly it’s an easy mistake. Raw canvas gets sized, then primed with gesso to whiten and smooth it. I sized it, so there’s the glue layer to strengthen the canvas and keep the paint from actually sinking into the fibers. But no gesso, I wanted it rough and not too white, and it may even discolor some over time, so it looks, well, like old film should.” He shrugged, generous in granting a little control to the new owners. “There are ways to stop the color change, if they want. But raw canvas, that’s just asking for trouble down the road, because the paint becomes too much a part of it, and when the canvas goes, so does the painting.”

“Thank you for explaining. That makes a great deal more sense. You care about your work, I see, and not just as a sale. That’s very admirable, and I do admire you for it, Mr. Evans, as well as for your more noticeable talents.”

Now that was rather obvious, but it still went over well. Clare could tell from the rising heat that had nothing to do with anger. This was becoming uncomfortable and a little annoying. She’d rather talk about the paintings, but the conversation was becoming too layered with other nuances. “Some high-powered artists use raw canvas. Jackson Pollack, some others. But yes, I do care. About a great many things.”

Why don’t you invite her back to your place to show off your etchings? Now that was catty.

He coughed in a way that almost sounded like he was choking on something. Theresa was all concern. “Is something the matter? Can I get you anything?”

He waved her off, recovering his voice, “No, no, I’m fine. Just went down the wrong way.” The explanation was given with a grimace of rueful apology, and without trying to explain exactly what went wrong where, and was followed with a warm “But thank you!” in response to the woman’s relieved smile. Inside, however, the storm had reformed and broken directly over Clare with an initial lightning strike and thunderclap that forced her back from his surface perceptions. When her virtual ears had stopped ringing she was able to pick out the message attached, and it was also more than clear enough in the continuing threatening rumbles. Enough. Good-bye. Leave. Go. Go, now!

Alright, yes, going!

How very annoying. But at least she’d gotten a chance to see more of his work, though she would have liked the chance to talk to him about them in greater depth, alone. And that must be the only reason for her depression.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“You’re here.”

“I can leave, if you like.”

“Oh, that’s okay, don’t bother, I can come back another time.”

“I wouldn’t want to put you to that trouble. You’re here, now. I’ve been here a while. I should be leaving anyway. Get home, feed the cats, things like that.”

“Okay. How is she?”

“The same. Always the same.”

“She looked at me the other day. She did. I’m sure of it.”

“Angie-- Sure. If you say so.”

“You don’t believe me. You never believe me.”

“I’m not going to argue with you about it anymore. Won’t that do?”

“No, it won’t ‘do’! You and that doctor, you think you know everything, and now you’re just humoring me because you think she’s.... She’s not dying.”

“She’s stable, medically. That’s what they claim.”

“She doesn’t look well. I’ll admit that.”

“I know.”

“Do you think her breathing has gone funny?”

“What do you mean, ‘funny’?”

“Like, oh, I don’t know. Like, maybe, she isn’t trying as hard.”

“We could ask them to check.”

“Would you do that? He listens to you. He’s decided I’m just a nutcase.”

“You’re not a nutcase. But, Angie, what if there is something wrong? They might say that the only way to help would be to put her on a respirator. Do you want that?”

“Of course!”

“I see.”

“And you don’t want it. I know. But Katie, it’s Mom! We need to do everything, don’t we? Don’t you see that?”

“I wish Daddy hadn’t died so quickly.”

“Katie Sachs!”

“No, no, I mean, that if he’d had something like this, we could have seen what Mom wanted for him. And that would help, now.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I’m sorry we don’t agree, Angie. We ought to be together in this.”

“Yeah. But we aren’t, are we?”

“We’re too different. We always have been.”

“But we’re still sisters. I love you, you know?”

“I know, yes. And, I love you, too, Angie. I do.”

“Then it’ll all work out. You’ll see.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Reflections

I’m back in my own body again. I don’t like it here and I won’t stay for long. I still can’t move anything, I still can’t talk to anyone. There are flashes of light and dark but I still can’t see what’s going on, I can’t make sense of it. There are noises that sound like talking and noises that sound like music, but they’ve gotten fainter and they’re still so indistinct that I don’t know if I’m even mistaking one for the other. Maybe the music is voices. Maybe the voices are music. The weighty gray blanket is still there, coming down close over all the bumps and protrusions of my mind, softening the form beneath to a even smooth stillness, only it’s grown tattered. No, not tatters, for that would imply it was shredding and disintegrating and that would be a good thing. It’s grown stalactites, downward drifts that leave even less room for me to be here, not yet hardened into spikes to pierce me but that’s coming, I can feel it. It stinks, too. It reeks of disinfectant, and worse, for there’s an increasing whiff of corruption, of mold, of decay, like the underside of a rotting log. Except it’s myself that’s rotting. My mind will liquefy under the pressure. The blanket will stiffen into a concrete shroud and there will just be a bit of me left, a blackened stinking goo sloshing back and forth unheard, till it’s absorbed into the concrete itself.

Or I could go, and not come back.

I think that is possible, but I’m not certain. If I do try to stay away, if I break the cord, I’ll be stuck in whomever’s head I chose and that’s a heavy, cruel thing to do to them. But I’ve tried to slide from one mind directly to another and it just doesn’t work. As soon as I make the effort to leave, I’m drawn back, retracted along the cord, to end up in my own body again, and the winds simply aren’t there to carry me elsewhere. If the cord breaks, if the cord is broken, then I doubt I could leave at all, not unless I found a similar hole in their mind to catch the winds again. I’ve thought of that, too, and looked for it, but I haven’t seen another such crack in anyone else’s consciousness. Maybe it’s only available for them, and not for visitors? Or maybe it was the accident that opened it for me, and not something that people have by right.

I don’t have the right to another person’s mind. The only way that would be acceptable is if they allowed it, if they knew what it entailed and freely granted me squatter’s rights. But I haven’t dared talk directly to anyone but my artist friend, and he wouldn’t, I know he wouldn’t, and I’m too proud to ask. It wouldn’t work anyway. No one would be happy to know that someone else was in their head, constantly seeing their thoughts, reading their mind! Sooner or later they would want me gone, and going would destroy me. And they would know it, and so that, too, would become a burden to them, that if they give in to their dissatisfaction with the arrangement and tell me it can’t work any longer, that they would be responsible for ending my existence.

Or I could die.

Honestly, openly, because there’s no use in hiding it at this point, I’m afraid of death. Yes, I’ve been a Catholic all my life. Yes, I’ve been a moderately good Catholic, or by my understanding and beliefs, I have. If it turns out that we were really supposed to believe and strictly follow all that nonsense about fast days and birth control and being at Mass each and every single weekend, then I’m sorry and I’ll do my assigned punishment (since I’ll have little choice!) but I still will say it wasn’t reasonable to expect people to follow it. After all, take fast days. First, one wasn’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays, in memory of the day of Christ’s crucifixion. Now, it’s fine, except one isn’t supposed to eat meat on Fridays in Lent. But back in the Middle Ages, one wasn’t supposed to eat meat during the entirety of Lent. So what has changed? Why was something that used to be a sin then, not be a sin now? Because the Church bowed to the changing times, to modern lives and modern sensibilities, that’s why. If they gave in on that, they ought to be sensible and give in on the rest, too, but they’re too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. The Ten Commandments should be followed as best as one can, and the Beatitudes should be an inspiration on how to live one’s life. But Jesus himself said it all came down to two things, to love God with your whole heart and soul and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Honoring and loving your God doesn’t necessarily mean the avoidance of eating meat at certain times. If that’s how you choose to honor God, then so be it, but the Church doesn’t have to say that’s the only way. Loving your neighbor means understanding their circumstances, that they’re people and not perfect angels. Sex is something people do, that they’re driven to do, and it’s far, far better that they be careful about the consequences of it than to stick your head in the sand and say “just don’t do it.” Loving your neighbor as yourself means understanding that you will sometimes fail in your best efforts and so will they, and you should give them every forgiveness possible, as you’d want for yourself.

I don’t know if Angie feels exactly the same on this or not, but I suspect she’s made a similar compromise between her religion and her beliefs. Kate, my dear Kate, who hasn’t a compromising bone in her body, simply left the Church. I don’t fault her for it. A merciful God, which is the only sort I want to have any dealings with, will forgive her, for she still does the best she can to help others. I don’t know how He’ll treat me.

If the afterlife exists at all, it’s probably something far beyond our comprehension, so I shouldn’t be afraid of it. The conventional view doesn’t attract me. I know they say there’s no marriage in heaven, but so many look forward to being reunited with their departed loved ones. I’d want to avoid Gerald entirely. My parents, I loved, but I’m sure they’re quite fine on their own and don’t need me to check in on them. Claude... now that could be an embarrassment. He did have a wife, after all. I wouldn’t want him to have to choose between the two of us. And now that I think about it, I strongly suspect that I wasn’t his first or only affair outside of marriage. Yes, much, much too likely an embarrassment to try to find him again!

There’s the convention of turning into some sort of guardian angel, to look out for those still alive. I’m afraid there’s little that I could do in such circumstances, though, because I really can’t imagine a covey of dead spirits jostling around and arguing over whose descendents deserve to win any given lottery, and I can’t see how that wouldn’t be bound to happen if they were allowed to interfere. But to be there without the ability to change things, to help, would be so frustrating that they should be assigning that as a punishment instead of a privilege. I’ve already done what I can to make their lives better after I’m gone, and I hope I’ve done the right things, too, but one can never be sure. There’s money, quite a lot thanks to Gerald’s family and his business and some luck of my own. No matter how sentimental one might get about the value of other things, money usually helps make life easier. And I’ve made some other arrangements, which may complicate some matters, but ought to simply a very important one.

I think it all comes down to the terribly obvious: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to disappear, even if there’s the possibility of reappearing as something else. I’ve even had the awful, evil idea of finding some newborn infant’s mind and seeing if it’s a mere blank slate that I could inhabit without guilt, or, and this is the evil part, would my presence inhibit the development of the child’s own mind and personality? What would happen if I’d made myself at home and then found some other sense of self coalescing? Could I be noble enough to leave, or would I try to keep hold and suppress the other, or could, possibly, we end up sharing the mind without anger or regret, because the child wouldn’t realize that this was anything different from how life was usually lived? But there’s evil in that, too, in letting them make that assumption.

This is so hard. And to think of it, if I hadn’t found out how to escape, there would be no escape, and no choice but to sink to nothingness in my own head. It’s selfishness to want to keep going, it really is. I should be happy with my life as lived because it wasn’t a bad one, and even if not happy, I should be reconciled to the fact that very few people would probably be happy with the final summation of their lives. There’s always those things you wish you’d done differently, that you regret doing, or, and oddly more likely, that you regret not having done. I wish I could stop feeling so strongly that there are still things I need to do, need to learn, need to accomplish, before I can rest, before I should rest.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kate’s Story, Continued

She’s still in denial. Isn’t there a joke about that? It’s not just a river in Egypt, or it’s beautiful this time of year, or something like that.

I’m making jokes and my mother is dying.

Dear God, can’t you slap Angie across the face and make her stop being so stupid? Because I want to, and I can’t. If I did, we’d never, ever talk to each other again, and I don’t want the guilt of that on my conscience, too. But I want a sister who understands what’s happening so that we could comfort each other, so that we could commiserate together about the awfulness of it all, and so, please God, we could share the burden of doing what needs to be done, when it comes time to do it. But I can tell it’s all going to be on my head, the certainty and the uncertainty both, the certainty of the necessity of it and the uncertainty of the timing, and Angie’s hands will stay lily white and clean, and forever after she’ll be able to say that -she- wanted to keep Mom alive and I’m the one that killed her.

I’ll bet she hasn’t made a living will for herself either. She’ll leave her sons and husband to make that decision and once again she’ll be free of any responsibility. I told her that I love her, and I do, I really do, because she is my sister and I ought to, but it’s just so frustrating. My will is made. I made one as soon as we’d given up looking for those forms that Mom had supposedly filled out, when I realized that unless things change drastically in my life, it will be Angie who decides for me, who would undoubtedly decide to keep me “alive” in pain and misery long after I’d want to be free. She can’t do that to me now. It’s quite clearly on file that no special measures, not even the least of them, are to be taken to keep the shell of my body alive if there’s any question about whether or not I’m still inhabiting it. And if I can’t communicate, they’re to assume I’m gone. In the event, in any event that I can foresee, I would much rather euthanasia came too soon than too late, and if I could, I would have specified that directly, too, that they should just inject me with something to end my life if it’s that damaged, but Mr. Hagerman recommended against it because he said there might be some overly religious judge who could be persuaded that such a directive was essentially a request for assisted suicide and that might prove me to be of unsound mind, overly traumatized by my mother’s condition, at the time of formulating the directives.

He is quite a clever man to have considered that, and I was very grateful for such good advice, and told him so, which seemed to embarrass him. He’s working with me on the rest of my will, too, the actual bequests. It’s awkward when you have pets. I won’t do the silliness of leaving money directly to my cats, but I’m not sure what other arrangements to make. David-- Mr. Hagerman, I mean-- is researching that for me, looking up what other people have done and how well it’s worked, so that I can compare actual cases and decide rationally and not from sentimental assumptions such that my friends would step forward to care for the little beasts. My friends have their own lives and I wouldn’t want to impose on them, but God knows I don’t want them to wind up in an animal shelter either. Adult cats are so rarely adopted. People don’t realize how loving they can be; they only see how long it might take to gain the animal’s trust and so they aren’t willing to put in that much effort despite what might be significant reward.

Some people have said that when they die, they would like their pets put to sleep, and I can see their point. When you take on a pet, you take on the responsibility for providing them with a safe and secure life, and when you die, you can no longer be sure of keeping that promise. Mind you, sometimes I think it’s a pity the law doesn’t allow that sort of disposition for children. If Angie dies, those boys of hers are going to run wild and, to say the least, are very unlikely to become useful and contributory members of society. Rick certainly isn’t going to control them. To treat them as unwanted nuisances that might go feral and develop diseases themselves and perhaps spread them to others, isn’t too far from what’s likely to happen, and it would be much safer for everyone to simply put them to sleep. Yes, yes, I’m joking again, of course I don’t mean it seriously. One can’t do that with children.

Angie told me about her idea to honor mother by setting up free admissions with the art museum. I tried to be supportive, while also pointing out that she had no idea of how much money it would take to influence them in that regard, but that it would probably take much more than we could give. My sister has lovely ideas but hardly realistic ones, and if you don’t stop her she’ll get too enthused about flying a project that can simply never get off the ground from its own weight. I told her I would look into other options, though, and the other night after work I visited the museum. They’re open late on Wednesdays, which made it convenient. It had been years since I’d last seen the main part of the museum, and it was, frankly, larger and rather more impressive than I’d remembered. My other visits had been either school trips, from very long ago, or to see a particular exhibit. Those sorts of exhibits are usually overcrowded, overpriced, noisy, rushed, and of less interest than all the publicity implies, but at a certain level of corporate management one is expected to keep up with the cultural life of the city, or at least keep in touch. Besides, it’s a useful ice-breaker for talking with business associates visiting from other areas.

It was quite different to wander through the halls on my own, and not be jammed into a roped-off queue of gawkers or surrounded by a pack of yammering schoolmates. There were very few others around, and I was able to look at whichever pieces I wished, for as long as I wished, without feeling impelled to get out of the way to let others have a turn. It’s only then that you discover a strange serendipity to the displays. You go to each glass case in turn, and look first at the main piece, because it’s set up to make you do so, and if you’re rushed, you tick that case off in your head as viewed and move on to the next. It’s only when you can linger that you really look at the smaller objects and sometimes find a delicate gem of an object so much more beautiful and appealing to you than the highlighted one. With the paintings, too, it’s only when you really look that you can appreciate the expressions of faces in the background of crowd scenes, or the subtle addition of an unexpected object in the corner of a landscape. I supposed one could pick up this degree of appreciation with the abstracts, too, but I tend to prefer representational art.

About an hour into my visit, and I hadn’t realized it had been a full hour till I looked at my watch, so I must have indeed been deeply engaged in the art, I discovered one reason for the sparse attendance in the exhibit halls. I heard music that seemed to be coming from a particular direction rather than from the general distribution of hidden speakers, and I followed the sounds. Eventually I found myself in atrium sort of area, the original entrance to the museum, a large open space with a wide sweeping staircase leading up to the second floor galleries. The space however was not currently open, being instead dotted with those appallingly uncomfortable little metal folding chairs, most of which were occupied, set up for the occasion of listening to a string quartet. A placard on the side noted what I had apparently missed before, that this was part of a series of chamber music concerts given on the third Wednesday of each month. It immediately occurred to me that this type of arrangement would be very well suited to subsidize in memory of my mother. The music was also quite good, even if the acoustics were somewhat unsuited for that particular instrumentation. I will be making sure to attend other such concerts, even if the memorial plans don’t work out, and I’m sorry that I didn’t know about them earlier.

I don’t travel much. It’s hard, with cats. They don’t board well, and although I do have friends, quite a few friends no matter what Angie seems to think, none of them live nearby and it would be hard for them to stop in and care for the cats. Finding the concerts at the museum struck me though as an indication of how little I’ve been involved in what’s going on in my own city despite any pretense with outsiders. I’ve also hit a certain age that, in this case, has its advantages. It would be considered odd for a younger woman to attend outings such as this by herself. Well, not exactly odd. People would think they had a very good idea of why she was by herself, which would be that she was hoping to end up not by herself. A more mature woman can go places and only be seen as enjoying the music or food or art or whatever is being offered, and if she happens to talk to others, it’s clearly only a casual acquaintanceship and nothing on which to build further hopes. It would not be a bad thing to extend the range of my friendships, or, mostly, to get out a little more, to try a few new things. Not too many. My life is really quite fine as it is. But I am getting older. It’s hopefully-- I should say, I hope that it’s a long time before I end up in a nursing home, even if in the standard decline of abilities and faculties that generally lead to such an event, rather than my mother’s trauma, but it will happen someday. I suppose I should try to get a little more out of life meanwhile.

But I must remember to talk to Angie about the concerts. She likes music, too, even if our tastes are very different. I will, however, point out that the sort of bands she prefers would not really be suitable for the limited confines of the museum’s space. Even if those groups do occasionally play in very cramped venues, the museum is unlikely to be able to set up the requisite strobe lighting, the folding chairs are not compatible with a “mosh pit”, and the smoke-filled room effect would be damaging to the art works, no matter the type of smoke. Still, I do believe she would like the general idea of it, and I will try to present it as just a suggestion and not as a superior sort of put-down and correction of her own idea, even if mine is better. I might run the idea past Mr. Hagerman, too. He might be interested in attending one of the existing series of concerts, if he doesn’t already know of them.

* * * * * * * * * *

Falling Apart

She kept away from the artist as long as she could. There were the other minds, luckily, because she couldn’t stand being in her own head any longer than the minimal amount of time necessary to regroup and reassess its condition and then to leave it to its own continued deterioration. But even in other minds, things weren’t going well.

For some reason, Mike’s poems were becoming more and more resistant to her changes. She’d poke a smallish sparkle of light out of the way and replace it with a more glittery word, but a look around just a bit later would show the new word dead, the light out of it, and after a short while the original little sparkle would return in its stead. It didn’t really annoy her, she told herself, but there was a more than a tinge of exasperation to her actions when she decided to test what was happening by replacing several lines at once. Like the first attempt at major changes, so long ago, she expected the lights to be thrown off in a spray of rejected inspiration, but it wasn’t the same. The spin of the word play faltered, slowed, as the balance and shifting patterns of the words were tested and found strange to the native dance of lights. And then all of it went dark and dead, collapsing and flattening and sinking into oblivion as the entire poem was rejected, a baby bird handled by another species and so thrown from the nest, no longer his own. Clare was stunned.

It must not have been that important to him in the first place, she told herself, to hide the hurt and guilt. There were other poems still lingering. To prove it was a fluke, she turned to one of the more lazily spinning ones, which she’d learned meant he wasn’t really paying attention to them.

The cold sunset looks warm to me,

Because I’m heading home,

And soon it will be your face I see.

I wish I didn’t roam.

That wasn’t so bad. He’d definitely improved under her tutelage. The third line stumbled a bit, though, on its extra syllable, and surely it didn’t really need that opening “And”. Clare reached out mentally to push the extraneous word aside. It wouldn’t move. She couldn’t touch it. There was a barrier in place, and when she pushed a little harder, the barrier sparked at her and sizzled with a warning hiss of more dangerous reaction should she keep trying. She pulled back into a ball of thoughtfulness. Apparently Mike was taking charge of his own imagination now, and she wasn’t welcome. This was a good sign, of course it was. It meant he cared even more about the poems, that he had a vested interest in keeping them his. Clare sighed. If only they were good enough to keep -her- interest. But without the ability to meddle... well, she’d probably stop by now and then to see what further progress was being made. But that would be it.

The voices in Joel’s head just laughed at her.

She slipped into Stephanie’s mind already depressed, and knowing that wasn’t a good idea. Something had changed, though. The slowly waving curtains of blue and black, the ones that now and then seemed to reach out as if to strangle her, or anything else going by, were utterly still, their darkling hues turned lurid, streaked orange and red and purple by reflection. The scented baby powder that used to fill the air, so that it was hard to breathe without gagging, had precipitated into sparse snowdrifts melting under the heat, the source being the throbbing mass taking up the center of Stephanie’s psyche, a crusted chunk of living lava, the black splitting apart and rejoining as it tried unsuccessfully to bind the molten core.

Oh God. Oh no, oh no, oh no. Clare drew herself into the slimmest, most unobtrusive shape she could think of, an extra curve in one of the curtains, as she tried to sense the cause of the disruption, even while dreading what the cause might be. Not the children. Please, God, not the children. Surely she didn’t do anything to the children. She wouldn’t. She loved them, she did love them. But love wasn’t always enough.

There were tears, too, she realized. It was hard to think of them as tears when on the inside they were so black, and sizzled a hole in anything they touched as they fell. The throbbing, that was the pain. Mental anguish or physical, it was impossible at first to decide, because in the mind they were so much the same. She had to know. Clare let herself merge further into the curtain and the mind that had generated it.

Stephanie was curled up on the old couch. The TV wasn’t on and the reason was likely the large hole through the screen. Empty beer cans littered the floor, and the dark spots in the rug showed how little care had been taken to be sure that they’d been completely emptied. The girl was crying but without sobbing, a disturbing effect, her eyes fixed open and staring at the hole in her world as she slowly rocked back and forth, her breath going in and out in tight gasps and gulps. Clare was scared now, but she had to find out, had to help if she could, and the only way was to sink deeper into this fractured mind. The chanting started low, a male voice put on endless loop, “...stupid... stupid... stupid...” over and over again, in time with the throbbing.

You’re not stupid. Clare whispered it, breathed it. You’re hurt though. You need to fix the hurt.

Stephanie’s eyes flew open wider and she screamed, “STOP IT!” A wailing cry started in another room and a second cry joined it a moment later.

Clare felt a knot loosen in her soul. The children were safe. Well, if not safe, still alive.

“Now look what you’ve done! I hate you, I HATE YOU!” The girl stumbled to her feet and kicked the rolling cans to the side as she fought her way to the nursery. Making incoherent, desperately controlled hushing sounds and promises of future treats, she tried to soothe the two back to sleep, the baby and the toddler. She didn’t turn on the main light and the soft nightlight was apparently too dim to let the children see her condition. Clare could feel it now, though. The nose might be broken but probably not; there wasn’t any indication of leaking blood, and on second consideration the pain was mostly from the neighboring cheekbone. There would certainly be a black eye come morning. Her stomach hurt. Stephanie’s stomach hurt. He must have punched her there, as well as the general slapping around.

He shouldn’t have done that! You need to leave him. Clare waited till the girl was out of the room, on her way to get milk to complete the soothing, but it was impossible not to say something about this mess.

The girl’s reply came in the animalistic snarl of a repressed shout, kept low only to keep from scaring the children again, “You don’t know my life! Without him, I’m nowhere! I’m nothing! They NEED him! I’ll do ANYTHING for them! I’m going crazy. I don’t care. Conscience, God, whoever you are, get the HELL AWAY FROM ME!”

Clare went silent. There wasn’t anything else to do. The girl continued her muttering as she warmed the milk. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have talked to him about needing someone to watch the kids. Stupid idea. I can’t go back. My fault. Stupid, stupid, stupid…” Her fault, not Stephanie’s, if she read it right. Another mistake. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She stayed long enough to be with the girl as she brought the milk back, as she put aside the sippy cup for a toddler who had already fallen back asleep, as she fed the still fussy baby. Clare stayed with her as she held the baby in trembling arms that slowly relaxed under the comforting weight, as the girl looked with pride and passion on the offspring of her own body, of what had been love, her pain dwindling to insignificance in relation to what truly mattered in her life. Only when the baby had fallen asleep in the mother’s arms, when the mother had gently set the baby back in the makeshift crib and then, tired, too tired to care, sat down again and fallen asleep in turn, only then did Clare leave.

But she couldn’t stay, not where the cord brought her. There was nothing there for her anymore except an anchor point she wasn’t quite willing to give up. And after only a short interval, still fragile from Stephanie, she went again to the artist. By now, it should be good again. Surely it would. His temper was a shifting one; he couldn’t have stayed mad at her for that long.

There was a soft deep-rose and golden glow to the mind that wasn’t what she’d usually found, and the scent of honey and cinnamon and cloves. She moved very tentatively into the glow, keeping herself misty and amorphous as if she might be hit by something elsewise. The temptation was to sink into his awareness and find out his current state that way, but, Clare told herself, Politeness is knocking. And if he sends me away again, I’ll go, and not come back. She cleared her non-existent throat, remembering to keep the motion of it only to herself. Hello?

There was a lazy sort of twist to the consciousness and the glow intensified around her, though it lost most of its warm color. “Why, it’s the angel again, isn’t it?” He kept the words below full vocalization, below even a mutter or whisper, and by now, for he was too aware of it and so she couldn’t help picking it up too, she caught the sense of the other body beside him.

Her self blushed with the instant capability of pure mind. Yes. I’m sorry. Bad timing.

“No, stay. Something, something I need to show you, sweetcheeks. Something you ought to see, oh yeah.” He yawned partway through the speech, but still roused enough to slip out of bed. The female form made a soft unfocused murmur of complaint and changed position, grabbing more of the blanket to compensate for the missing warmth, before drifting into unconsciousness again. He stalked quietly towards the studio on bare feet, not even bothering to don a robe, though she suspected he wasn’t the sort to keep one nearby anyway. He did take a detour to the kitchen to grab a beer.

You’re not serious. Beer at this hour?

He chuckled darkly as he popped the top. “And the angel spake unto him and said, ‘Ewww, beer?!’”

That’s not what I said!

“Close enough.” He swallowed half the can, gulping it down as if steeling himself for something he expected to be unpleasant, before he spoke again, and by then they were in front of a new painting that seemed to match the theme of the previous one. “There you go. Come tell me what you see, darling Angelique.”

It was a challenge, not an invitation. Clare sighed to herself, but complied, making sure she could tell exactly what was there before she dared to speak.

It’s another stained glass window, but different. There’s a figure in the glass. A face, smiling, and hands held out in blessing, like an angel, or a saint. It looks kind but, but not kind, all at the same time. As if it were beyond such concepts as kindness. I would have said at first that it was female, but maybe it’s beyond that, too. The light. The other was a setting sun, this one is maybe rising? Or noon. All golden light, and it doesn’t pour out of the window like the blood red light, it doesn’t drip, it’s in rays and spikes instead. Piercing. The figure, the dancer below, it’s not...

She looked more closely, and fought down the nausea in order to continue, though softer. There’s nothing there anymore. No mind. It’s a puppet, isn’t it? Yes. I see them now, the lines coming down in the light, the lines of light from the hands. That’s... I don’t know what’s worse, the dancer bled to death, or this one, so controlled.

He smiled, and she felt nauseous again at all the inner connotations of that smile, and his voice was as soft as hers. “It’s you, angel.”

The puppet? She knew that wasn’t so, but it was easier to ask it that way.

He snorted. “Yeah, right. No, dollface, not the doll. The angel in the window. The puppet master. You.” The rest of the beer went down in a few rapid swallows.

She looked at the face again, at the aureole of white-gold hair, the pale skin, the golden eyes with something odd about them. There it was. No pupil. The iris darkened to a deeper gold in the center but there was no actual pupil. That was part of what made the face seem so abstracted, so inhuman. It didn’t need an opening to let light in. It, itself, was the light. But it wasn’t a light that anyone would welcome once they knew it.

She tried to keep the tone light, You’ve made me prettier than I am, if so. But why so cruel?

“Aren’t you? Possessive, too. Pushing me away from Theresa.” He gave a slow grin and she could feel the mental caress directed back towards the bedroom. “But guess what, surprise, surprise, angel, it didn’t work, not this time. No strings on me, darling.”

I just thought she wasn’t exactly right for you. But I didn’t mean to push.

“Oh, she’s very right for me. Much, much better than Michelle. You didn’t fail there, though, did you? Maybe I should even thank you for that.” There was a growing viciousness that she didn’t care for at all, but she tried to keep calm. Someone had to.

I sorry, but I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about?

“You broke us up. I saw you, there in her head, when she was screaming at me. Don’t bother to deny it, it won’t fly, angel.”

Oh, God. At this rate, she was going to throw up, and being enough a part of him to feel the weight of the beer in her, his, stomach wasn’t helping. How could she explain?

I-I was there. But I wasn’t making her scream at you! I was trying to stop her, really I was!

It was stifling. It was stifling her, and hurting too, the hurtful words coming with narrow bands of heated metal that snapped out like sprung hoops, like metal whips, leaving welted burns. “Sure you were. Bad, bad angel, trying to claim the strings weren’t there, that she couldn’t control her little puppet. She stopped when you really wanted to stop her, didn’t she? Scared, terrified, she was. I saw her face. Did you feel it? Did you enjoy it? Did you think, just a little bit more and you could paralyze her entirely? Stop her breath? Stop her heart?”

I can’t do that. Clare could only whisper it past the pain. It had no conviction behind it, either. She hadn’t though of that, she hadn’t tried it. Maybe she could.

“Sure, angel. And kinda stupid of me to say so, right? With you in my head right now and all.”

I wouldn’t hurt you. I don’t... I don’t want to hurt anyone.

The disgust was palpable. “Right, right, you just want to hang out in other people’s heads. It amuses you. But you’d never, ever touch anything, never move anything around. Make me believe that. Or do you claim you can’t do that, either?”

She’d done that. She’d played with other people’s minds as if she had a right to it. How could she have done that?

“I don’t hear you, angel.”

I-1 should go. I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t be here.

He looked at the painting, at the window and the warm/cold face in it, at the piercing, binding streams of light, at the broken-bone pose of the figure beneath. “No. You shouldn’t. Go home, angel.”

She fled, with a sob that she kept to herself till she was back, and then found she couldn’t let out. Her own head was too stuffed with blanket, there wasn’t any room to let out anything at all. Stifled, stifling, she couldn’t breathe from the pain that had stayed with her, the heartache in her soul. and there was only one place left that she dared reach.

The desert had bleached out to an off, off white. The dirt was nothing but a slightly darker patch of sand. Nothing else was there but the pain, still following her, still part of her. She wasn’t going to escape it. She couldn’t go back, she couldn’t go anywhere else. Clare threw herself down on the sand, in the vast emptiness, and started to cry.

The sky darkened. She sobbed in loud moans, as Stephanie should have sobbed but couldn’t for fear of waking the children, and when that reason finally occurred to her, she stopped sobbing and screamed instead.

Lightning flashed with her scream and that felt so right that she screamed again and a ring of bolts came down around her, not touching her, but fusing the sand into blackened glass.

This was right. This was her place, her purgatory, her hell. She couldn’t hurt anyone here but herself. She screamed a third time, a despairing desperate wail that drew on all the guilt and anguish, fighting to focus it, and it came back at her, a single bolt larger than any of the others and she threw the cord into its path.

It broke. The snap and recoil of the piece still attached shattered her form into an infinity of fragments that she didn’t have the will to draw together. She let herself dissolve in the downpour, weeping again as the world around her wept, blinded by the darkness, deafened by the rain, the desert disappearing in the storm.

There were voices in the rain, the rain fading into the shouting voices. Someone else to shout at her? Clare tried to huddle into a ball again, hugging herself, as the tears still leaked down her face, but her arms wouldn’t move. That’s right, she didn’t have any. Except she did, she could feel them, and she tried to move them again and this time they came when she called, stiff and sore and something trailing behind them, but they came. And then other arms were hugging her, voices calling to her, and they didn’t sound angry, true, though they didn’t sound very calm either.

She tried to see what was happening, and that worked, too. Eyelids that opened, and beyond was light, and in the light were faces and the voices were coming from the faces, and the faces were crying and the voices were tight with tears, but it wasn’t bad, because they were telling her how wonderful everything was, how wonderful she was, and that everything, everything would be fine now and nothing would go wrong, ever again.

That didn’t sound likely but it wasn’t as if things could have gotten much worse. She felt weakened, so weak, but she reached though her mind to see if she could sense it. No cord. She was here then for good. She relaxed into the hugs, tried to smile at the faces, and hoped they were right.

* * * * * * * * * *

Interlude

“Oh my God. Oh God, oh God, oh GOD! She’s not breathing! Somebody, someone HELP!”

* * * * * * * * * *

The Lawyer’s Story, Continued

“I, Clare O’Rourke Sachs, being of sound mind and body...”

The reading of the will went very well. There were no surprises, and to ensure that, I follow the most excellent advice of a colleague, which is to talk with each of the main beneficiaries separately, ahead of time, to give a preview of what is to come and discuss what might be seen as any irregularities or biases or what might cause strained feelings. The important part of this is to keep to the pretense that it is the other beneficiaries whose strained feelings might cause disruption.

It is only a slightly unusual will, and all the legalities are in place. The estate is not an insignificant one, mostly, of course, due to her husband’s prior demise and her subsequent inheritance of the bulk of his own estate, comprised of his earnings and investments as well as funds devolved upon him from his family. I believe her parents left fairly little, and that was split among several siblings. Her husband’s will was unusual in its own way, in that it gave Mrs. Sachs the full control of all assets left to her use, put fully in her name, instead of the more common practice of setting up a trust fund to provide for her during her lifetime but the residue to pass on to his children after her death. Allowing the spouse to receive all monies directly is generally reserved for those with little to grant; people of substantial property prefer that it go to their own children and not be shared with the children of subsequent marriages or splurged on the upkeep of a second husband or wife. Nevertheless, and possibly due to negotiations to which I was not a party, Mr. Sachs left Mrs. Sachs a significant fortune to do with as she would.

Given the circumstances, I believe she did very well. Her choice of investments during the period after Mr. Sachs’ death were quite wise and the value of the estate increased accordingly. Her choices for disbursement upon her death were also made with great care. There are the usual allotments for charities, including the museums to which she devoted so much of her time. There are some bequests of personal items and token gestures to certain friends and relations. I am very pleased to say that Mrs. Sachs, unlike so many others, even those of her advanced years who should be most aware of the passage of time, reviewed these bequests annually and made the necessary adjustments due to prior demises and loss of friendships or general falling out of touch. You would be surprised, or perhaps not, at the degree of awkwardness that can result from failure to keep these sorts of things up to date.

Most of the funds, of course, were left to her immediate family. In this, she showed a touch of genius to which I must only bow my head in admiration, for it was all of her idea and I can claim no credit, much as I would like to do so. To wit, as follows:

The sum of ninety thousand dollars is left in trust to be given to Mrs. Daley’s issue, to be divided at the time of first disbursement, and the actual term of disbursement is that the amount should be given upon the occasion of the child’s graduation from a fully accredited four-year college or university, or upon the child’s twenty-fifth birthday, whichever comes first. It is, you will note, a very clever sum, for it can be divided among the three children currently in existence, or among four or five, should Mrs. Daley have a very late pregnancy (which I believe is more subject to having twins), or between two, should anything unfortunate happen to reduce the number rather than augment it.

An equal sum of ninety thousand dollars is set aside for Miss Sachs’ issue, should she ever decide to conceive or adopt. I know most might see this as being very unlikely, but Mrs. Sachs wished to be considered quite fair in her treatment of her daughters by allowing for any such possibility. If Miss Sachs has acquired no such issue by the time of her death, the trust will reallocate the funds to Mrs. Daley’s issue.

The rest of the estate is to be split into thirds. One third will be given to Miss Sachs and one third to Mrs. Daley, and those funds will be given into their full control. I should say that although this is, in fact, the case, I’ve been asked by Mrs. Daley to avoid stating so except in strictest confidence. As far as her husband and children are to be made aware, that money is also in trust and she must apply for any use of it and I am now working with her in order to turn this subterfuge into something closer to legal fact before “the cat is out of the bag” so to speak. It really is a most interesting maneuver and not one that I would have expected from her. Apparently her confidence in her spouse does not extend to his ability to handle such a windfall, even one in her name.

The final third of the funds will be kept in trust and either Miss Sachs or Mrs. Daley can apply for addition disbursements from the trust based on severe financial need. This also applies to the trusts set up for the children, that in the case of severe need, they can apply for earlier disbursement than the conditions set up initially.

There is a very clear purpose to this arrangement, should one know all the details behind it, as I am pleased to say that I do. Mrs. Sachs does not, or rather did not, wish her daughters to think badly of their father and did not wish to share the knowledge of his other issue with them, as he himself had not wanted to share it. Yet, Mrs. Sachs was also fully aware that there are certain medical circumstances where being able to contact half-siblings might prove the difference between life and death. Such circumstances would, though, by their nature, be likely to provoke financial hardship and so the trusts are authorized that should knowledge of such conditions come to them, they may reveal the existence of these heretofore unknown relations. I believe this is the most clever solution I have yet seen to the conundrum of keeping a memory sacred while allowing for practical reasons why such a path might not be lead in the best direction for those left behind.

All in all, I shall miss having Mrs. Sachs as a client. It seems, however, that both of her daughters have found our services of such high professional quality, with such attention to all proper courtesies and respect, that they will continue to be working with us. Miss Sachs has already done the kindness of asking me to handle certain matters totally unrelated to the disposition of the estate. She seems a most intelligent woman, much in her mother’s mold, and

I look forward to our association lasting for a long number of years. In fact, I do believe I look forward to it greatly.

* * * * * * * * * *

Epilogue

They were fighting. It was glorious. In a completely childish “I was right and you were wrong” sort of way, but that was appropriate.

“Alex, really, I don’t see why you can’t trust them to get it right!”

“Darling, dearest, light of my life...” He was not speaking kindly. “You are free to leave any bloody time you please. But I’m staying till everything’s up.”

“We have reservations at six! And don’t look at me like that, you made them.”

“You, demonic being of pure pleasure that you are, are the one who wanted to go to such a fucking trendy place that six was the only time available. To celebrate the new show, as I recall. Well it’s not a new show yet, my sweet, and it won’t be till every picture is hung.”

“Your part is done! They’re finished, and finally so! Can’t you leave them now?”

“No.”

It was pure serendipity that she’d managed to sneak off to the gallery just at this time. Well, not completely so. She’d called and asked about works by Alexandre Evans, and lo and behold, a new show was about to open. Though, interestingly enough, the relationship between the artist and Theresa seemed about to close. Clare grinned cheekily as she leaned against the wall to watch.

Edouard, blast him, had other ideas that involved suavely steering away any audience. “Ah, a visitor! Forgive me for not greeting you earlier, but as you can see, we’re in the midst of opening a new exhibit. May I show you some of the other rooms? Or are you, perhaps, looking for someone?”

The twinkle in his eye said that it was obviously the last. Why else would she be there? Certainly not to make a purchase. Clare straightened up and smiled at him with all the wide-eyed innocence she could stand to project. “I just like art. A lot. And you have the best here, I’ve been told, other than what’s at the museum. Is it wrong to come by just to look at the pieces?”

She had the enormous satisfaction of seeing him blink. Following up on her advantage, she offered her hand, “I’m Jeanna Wheatley. You must be the gallery owner, Monsieur Boucher, is that right?” She pronounced the French impeccably. After all, she was now in the honors program. Her teachers were quite pleased, and probably secretly astonished, that she’d lost so little ground in schoolwork during her coma.

Jeanna had drowned. Her family said “almost drowned” but Clare knew that nothing of Jeanna had been left behind except her body. The doctors had tried to tell them that, too, but they kept hoping. Like Clare’s body, Jeanna’s body had been breathing on its own, all of the automatic processes still working, so it looked as if she was only sleeping. How could she be dead? The doctors told them there was no higher brain function at all, but it made no sense to the family, because they were also told that there was little indication of physical damage to the brain. If it was all there, it ought to work. It would work. Just give it time.

They were ecstatically happy to be so dramatically vindicated, and the happiness more than covered any dismay over Jeanna’s amnesia, her loss of the memory of any personal history prior to the reawakening. Some of the memories even seemed to be coming back. (Clare thought it very lucky that so many families had much the same sort of experiences.) And otherwise, Jeanna was a very normal girl again. Clare didn’t tell them about the holdover from her mind-trips because it was so mild. If the number four seemed green now, and the letter D was dark blue, and the songs of Nickelback smelled like curry, it didn’t slow her in math or in reading or in her appreciation of the music.

“Indeed, yes, I am the owner! And a great pleasure to meet such a discerning young lady as yourself, Mademoiselle Wheatley.” Edouard bowed over her hand with a warm engaging smile, sure that his elegant gesture would impress, and Clare tried not to laugh, because the laugh was bound to come out as a giggle. Some things came too naturally to this body to suppress.

Meanwhile, Theresa still glared at Alex, who was now completely ignoring her as he got in the way of the gallery staff. Clare motioned to one of the pictures that was already up. “I really like this one. The angel’s face looks so kind. Like she doesn’t realize she’s pulling on him. What’s it called?”

Alex picked up on the query and twisted quickly to the two. “Angelique. And she’s not kind.”

Clare smiled back despite the sting. “I guess you’d know.”

Something in her tone or choice of words made his eyes sharpen. A wicked mischief bubbled up inside when she saw, and she turned deliberately to Edouard again with a light comment. “That’s a really pretty name, though. Angelique. I always wanted to know an ‘Angelique’.” Daggers couldn’t have dug deeper holes into her back.

Luckily, distraction came from someone not too bored to notice when another female was getting more attention than she. “Alex! If you have time to talk to that child, then maybe you have time to go to dinner?” Nectar couldn’t have been sweeter, or venom more poisonous.

He looked over at Theresa and studied her carefully for a long moment, as if planning a sketch. Finally he sighed and pulled out his wallet. He started to open it, and then just tossed the whole thing at the woman. “There. My treat. Enjoy.”

The wallet missed by a good three feet. Artist, not ballplayer. Theresa stared at it in shock, then snapped at him, “And just what is that supposed to mean?” At least she wasn’t a screamer like Michelle. Edouard was now too fascinated himself to usher Clare away, and Clare was careful to do nothing to remind him.

“It means goodbye, my perfect pet piranha, my sadistic succubus, my tantalizing tarantula, my most beloved millstone.” Alex shrugged and walked over to a just breached crate to inspect the contents, continuing with off-hand casualness as if this happened every day. “Buy yourself dinner, I owe you that. Buy yourself a treat if you like. Leave the rest in the studio on your way out.”

Edouard coughed, and murmured, “License?” Alex shot him a dirty look for ruining the performance, but sighed and went to retrieve said item, offering the rest of the wallet directly now to Theresa with a sarcastic bow that mimicked Edouard’s one to Clare. The woman drew herself up to her full height, eyes blazing with righteous anger from the multiple offenses.

“Keep your wallet and your money! You’ll be lucky to sell anything! You’re a shallow, pitiful, talentless flop! In bed and here!” She waved sharply at the gallery walls, turned on a heel so narrow that Clare was amazed it didn’t snap under the stress, and stalked out.

Edouard let out his breath in a silent whoof of appreciation for the dramatic exit. Alex started laughing, softly at first and more loudly after the slam of the door. The two gallery minions looked at their boss, and then at each other, and rightly decided to pretend they hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, and continued on with their work.

Clare felt like applauding but that might be going too far. She smiled instead, happy at the truth of her prediction, and started to slip past the others. A hand on her arm stopped her. “Not so fast, angel!” The sharp eyes belied his own smile. “Are you an angel?”

Clare dropped her gaze quickly to look at the hand and not the face, and pushed the words out rapidly, as a nervous schoolgirl might. “I-I’m just me? Jeanna. Jeanna Wheatley. I’m fourteen, nearly fifteen. I go to St. Bridget’s. I want to study art someday, maybe, I’m not sure yet. I’m sorry about your girlfriend. Please let go.”

He let go. She risked a glance up and could tell that she’d confused him, that he wasn’t as certain. Edouard coughed again, and Alex spun to face him. The older man said gently, “You are distraught, my friend, and no wonder. So much activity! But here, let us allow this lady to leave in a more usual manner than the other, and then you and I can share a bottle I’ve been meaning to open for some time now, but only with someone who I’m sure would appreciate it as much as it deserves.”

Clare gave a small grateful smile toward Edouard. “Thank you, sir.” She looked at Alex, and said softly, “I really am sorry. And, you know, she’s wrong. You’re very talented.” She picked the words to be as bland and nondescript as she could, but she had to say something of the sort.

He still looked at her back at her with wary suspicion. “Yeah, thanks. Like you’d know.” Clare bit her lip and even Edouard raised an eyebrow. Definitely time to go. She turned to do so and the hand was suddenly on her arm again. “Wait. Will you come back? When the show’s fully open?” Edouard’s other eyebrow raised. The artist continued, intently, “You say you’re interested in art. I could tell you more about the paintings. How I did them. The techniques.”

She wasn’t sure how to answer, whether to take the obvious bait or not. What would Jeanna have done? That was obvious, too, and so what if it matched her own desires? Clare turned to smile happily at the artist, letting her face light up with surprised pleasure. “You’d do that? That would be great! Thank you! I’ll call or something? And I’ll need to let my parents know. But I’m sure they’ll say it’s okay, so yes, definitely, I’ll come back.” Yes, that fit. She ought to get one of those bracelets: WWJD?

The flicker of confusion returned as he let go again, and she should go, now, before it changed further. She smiled at Edouard for a last time and then slipped out. She would have skipped but her legs weren’t up to that yet, not after so long a stay in a hospital bed, and besides, it might have been overdoing the childlike image.

This might be fun. He was too old for her, of course, he had to be twice her age! But there was Susan, her physical therapist. Such a nice girl, with a good sense of humor, and clever, too, and not the sort to scream or snap at people. And he could use a good massage. Maybe it would improve his temper.

She’d been able to find him easily enough. The others, the other minds and their owners, she didn’t know where to begin and she wasn’t sure she should go looking. Eventually she’d arrange to meet Kate and Angie, or at least she’d learn how to follow their lives from a distance. There was time. She had her whole life ahead of her again, though this one would go differently. Much differently. Life really ought to be much more fun.

Jeanna smiled, and kept smiling, all the way home.

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