All for One (31 page)

“Are you with us again?” Dr. Cleary asked spryly. Mary tried to sit up, but a gentle hand on her shoulder guided her back down. “No, no. You just lay there for a minute and get your wits back.”

Mary looked at the doctor for a moment, then around the room. It wasn’t the examining room she remembered. “Where am I?”

Dr. Cleary’s mouth curved into a big smile. “A question. You’re thinking; that’s a good sign.”

“Where...”

“My office, Mary,” Dr. Cleary explained. “Those examining room tables are far too high for me to lift someone to. Maybe when you were a youngin, but...” His head shook pleasantly. “...you’re not a youngin anymore.”

“I don’t remember...”

“I don’t think you would. You passed out almost onto my feet, and I got you in here and onto my couch.” He tossed the capped vial a few times in his palm. “This always did the trick.”

Mary started up again.

“You should—”

“I feel better,” she said quickly, and continued until she was sitting on the couch, turning so her legs were over the edge, feet on the floor again. On good solid ground. “I really am sorry.”

Dr. Cleary nodded and stepped close. Mary instinctively tipped her head back a bit as his hand came to her cheek, his thumb pulling her lower eyelid down. He examined one eye, then the other, using his penlight to check the pupils’ reactivity. “It doesn’t look like you did any damage on the way down...”

...way down...

“...sweety.”

Mary nodded and brushed her hair back with both hands. She suddenly felt very stupid for doing this, for coming thousands of miles to an old worn out town to see a frail country doctor. It wasn’t right that she was here. The urge to flee rose like a sailor’s wind within, pushing her. She should just go.

rrrrrriiiiiight

The pleased purr came from inside, low and sweet. Happy at her doubt. At her...
concurrence?

Mary knew right then that she would not leave. That coming had been the right thing to do. That being here meant she was safe.

She thought she heard an angry little laugh, but decided that it was just the good doctor, who was coughing against the back of his hand.

“Pardon me,” Dr. Cleary said. He backed to a chair that faced the couch and eased himself unsteadily into it, his hands grabbing at the arms for balance.

“Are you all right?”

Dr. Cleary chuckle/coughed at her. “I’m the doctor, young lady.”

She smiled at him. A false smile barely hiding worry.

He saw this and waved off her concern. “I’m old, Mary. This is how old people are, all hacking and aches. Now, forget about me and tell me about you.”

Mary hesitated and glanced out the office door to the waiting room’s empty counter. “Nurse Angela isn’t with you anymore?”

Cleary shook his head. “No, no. She left me ten, eleven years ago. Moved down to Florida to live with her granddaughter. I get a Christmas card from her every year. Ugliest damn things you’ve ever seen, with palm trees on ‘em and Santa in cutoffs.”

“Really,” Mary said, nodding, avoiding the doctor’s gaze, which had become pointed and fixed on her.

“You said the headaches have come back,” Cleary said. “That’s what you said just before you passed out.”

Mary did look at him now. A rancid taste rose in her throat. Her eyes floated hollow in her head. “Yes.”

“Bad?”

She nodded, her eyes bobbing against the motion as if disconnected from who she was.

It had been a long time. Longer than it took for the specific maladies of most patients to be forgotten. Sure, he could look the old gashes and breaks and fevers up in a yellowed file if need be. But here that wasn’t necessary. He remembered Mary Austin quite well, and her headaches. And when they had started. And why.

He would have liked to have forgotten the latter.

“They’re just like the ones I got after my father died, with—”

“After your father died?” Cleary asked, leaning forward.

“Yeah,” Mary confirmed, puzzled at first but understanding coming as she grasped how much the man across from her had changed. How could she expect a man this old, a man who’d had thousands of patients, to recall every detail of their lives? “Remember? He died when a garbage truck ran the stop sign at Crowley and Trask?”

Cleary edged farther forward in his seat, his head cocking quizzically. “Mary, how much do you remember about your father’s death?”

“Some,” Mary answered. “I mean, I remember that it happened. And when. It’s all kind of foggy. I just get snippets of it.”

“But you remember the garbage truck running the stop sign?” Cleary said.

“That’s about all I remember,” Mary said apologetically, embarrassed that such a watershed event in her life was escaping her. Had escaped her already. “And it was after that that the headaches started. The bad ones. You gave me some pills that my mother mashed up in applesauce because I had trouble...”

...swallow...

“...swallowing pills.” Snippets, she thought. Like clips of old movies flicking on and off, a word here, an image there.
I had trouble swallowing pills. So what? I remember that. So what? It means just that.

rrrrriiiiight

The purr left a chill drooling down the back of her throat.

Cleary settled back in his chair. She didn’t remember. She really didn’t remember. Was that a curse, or a blessing?

“I didn’t know who else to come to.”

Cleary nodded slowly. “Are there flashes of light?”

“Yes. Just like back then.” Well, not
just
like back then. Then the light hadn’t been as bright, as threatening, and it certainly hadn’t come in the form of two glaring animal eyes inside her head. But they were still lights. That’s all he’d asked. He didn’t need to know more.

yourenotgoingcrazyMARYyourenotItellyou

“And the sounds?”

“Them too.” Again, not the same. Something like grinding gears it had been then. Now...
What? Are you going to tell him you’re hearing voices? One really mean voice, one like an animal might have if an animal (hound?) could speak. And another quieter, quickspeaker that could be me just talking to myself in my head...

rememberme
?

...but I’m not even sure of that. I mean, is this me talking now? Me talking to me?

“Are you losing any time, Mary?”

“Excuse me?”

“Are you coming up with missing time?” Cleary said again. “Like you’re one place, and then suddenly you find yourself someplace else, and you have no idea how you got there?”

Mary started to shake her head, because that had most certainly never happened to her. She was having headaches. Bad ones with bright lights (eyes) and sounds (voices). And sometimes, like now, the voices (a voice) came without the bright throb behind her eyes, spitting small and rapid thoughts at her. That was all. It was enough, but it was not ‘losing time’. So she went full into the gesture of denial and...

...it stopped cold dead as the memory of the lesson plans sprang out of nowhere. Her eyes flared as the moment came back, her mother’s phone call the Sunday before last, and looking to the lesson plans on her lap, only they were no longer on her lap. They were on the coffee table. And the time. (
Losing time?
) It had been light outside, then dark when the phone rang.
Losing time?
Was that losing time? Was that losing time?

Is that losing time? Oh my God is that losing time? Am I losing time?

And then, more frighteningly, Mary began to ask herself, to contemplate,
What happens during time that is lost?

you’renotlosingtimeMARYnotattallwhatasillynotionthatyouwouldlosetimeMARYwhywhatasillythingMARYandabadthingandasillythingandaverybadthingandyouknowwhattodowithbadthingsyouforgetthemandmoveonyouforgetthemyouforgetthemyou
FORGET THEM

“I...”

theydontletCRAZYpeopleteachMARYrememberthattheydontletCRAZYpeopleteach

“I sometimes doze off.”

Damn you, Jean Louise. I told you to take her to Chicago. I told you she needed a different kind of doctor.
The old doctor’s head wanted to shake with disgust. Twenty years. Good Lord, it’d been twenty years. He was terrified by thoughts of what twenty years inattention might have done. Being a doctor, Cleary knew what happened if you let an open wound sit without proper care. Without being dressed.
My good Lord...
It festered. And things grew in a festering wound. Tiny, dangerous things grew.

“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Cleary pressed her gently. “Just dozing off?”

ofcoursethatsallitisMARYofcourse

“Of course,” Mary told him, but there was no conviction in her words.

Cleary scratched at the pocket of his white coat, the one over his heart. “Mary, I want to ask you something.” There was great care in his words. As much care as he would have used wielding a scalpel in years gone by. A cut was a cut, he knew, by blade or otherwise. It exposed what lay underneath. “The headaches, they started up again just recently?”

She nodded.

“Did something happen around that time?” Cleary watched her struggle with the question for a moment. “Anything traumatic?”

shhhhhhhh

“I’m...a teacher,” she said, other words dancing atop those that passed her lips.
They don’t let crazy people teach.
“And, about two weeks ago, one of my students was...killed.”

A teacher? My dear Lord, why that?
“I’m sorry. How did it happen?”

shhhhhhh

“He was beaten to death outside my classroom at recess,” Mary explained, her eyes floating again, the pre-vomit taste slithering up from her stomach like a venomous snake. She swallowed, making it go down, forcing it back. “And the police think that one of my other students did it.”

Her voice was thin, mostly breath now, as if her strength was leaving her with every word. Cleary looked hard into her eyes. He had the unsettling impression that no one was looking back. “Did one of them do it, Mary?”

quietnow

“I... I don’t know.” From rock-solid certainty in the negative to this.
How? Why?

But Cleary was receiving quite another message, both from the trepidation in her voice and manner, and from echoes that were more than twenty years old now. Echoes that should have faded, but that he feared had simply been rattling around in this poor girl’s head for that long, like a bell sounding perpetually in its tower. “Do you know who did it, Mary?”

Her head swung precisely back and forth.

“Mary.”

“Yes, Dr. Cleary?”

Cleary mustered his strength and, with his hard rubber heels, scooted his chair close enough to Mary that he could hold her hands. He took them in his, massaging the soft skin with his tired old thumbs. Caressing, seeking a connection as he searched her eyes. “Mary, I want you to listen carefully to me.”

shhhhhhh

enoughnowenoughnowshhhhhhh

shhhhhhh

“I’m listening.”

Twenty years
, Cleary thought, and squeezed her hands firmly.

“Mary, do you remember...”

enoughnowshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

“...someone named Bannister?”

shhhhhhhhhhh

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

—

Mary’s head snapped toward the thunder.

“What?!” The singular question left her as a frightened breath.
Where... Where..
.

The engine in her chest began to throb mercilessly as her eyes seized the familiarity of her surroundings, darting from place to place.

To the mismatched curtain, a fresh bolt of lightning burning it briefly white.

To the door. The front door, and the coat closet behind. You could only open one at a time because the doors blocked each other.

To the wall behind her, and the pictures on the wall. The pictures.

To the chair in which she sat.

And the clothes she wore, sweats and her TOTY top.

Meeoww.

Her eyes snapped to the sound. To Chester, sitting in the half-light of the hall.

I’m at home. Oh my God, I’m at home.

Mary stood slowly from her chair, afraid that any sudden motion might send her spiraling into nothingness. She felt faint. Not on the verge of passing out, but
faint
. Like her limbs were hardly there. Like her whole being was hardly there. Not all together. Scattered.

But she was there. Home. And on her feet now. She could feel the rug under her bare feet, her toes testing for the solid hardwood beneath that. It was there.

She took a few tentative steps, one leg bumping against the coffee table as she went around it to kneel on the couch. Her hand reached out and pulled the curtain aside.

Outside it was dark, and raining, and past the vaporous reflection of herself in the glass she could see the lidded trashcans waiting at the curb. Her trash was out. And the neighbors’ cans were out. The garbage man came on Friday mornings. She always put her trash out the night before.

It was Thursday. Thursday night sometime.

Mary let the curtain sway shut and felt for the watch on her wrist before looking, afraid that it might not be there. But it was and she looked.
Six fifty-five. Almost seven o’clock. And I’m home. I’m here in my home and not in... Not in...

Where was I? Or was I even anywhere?
She got up and walked more steadily now to the piano, her fingers lacing back through her hair.
Where was I thinking I was? I was thinking I was somewhere. Where?

“I didn’t go to work today,” Mary said aloud, pulling a deep breath in and leaning against the graceful bulk of the instrument. “I called in yesterday.”

Was I sick?
A weak chuckle escaped her.
I don’t feel so hot now.

She moved along the curve of the piano, her hands walking its top, and sat easily down on the bench. One hand lifted the cover from the keys. The black and white keys.

Black and white. Right and wrong.

But what does that have to do with...

Mary felt the spit gather in her mouth and swallowed it down. “I was sick. That’s all. I called in because I was sick.”