Bless the Child (45 page)

Y
ou know, Amanda,” Maggie said, the next morning at the shop, pushing papers emphatically into the desk drawer, too agitated to pay attention to them. “Ever since this regressive hypnosis business, I find myself looking under every crack in my life for ancient connections, like a cosmic Inspector Clouseau. I feel bi-located . . . like I’m living life in two time slots.”

Amanda looked up and frowned. “Sounds like what happened to us all when everybody got into therapy. Remember? How we all started checking our motivations, as often as we checked our watches? Why am I doing this to myself? was supposed to be the key to every action of your life. If you walked down the street and a safe fell on your head, you must have placed yourself under there for some reason. If you got sick, you were trying to escape something. If you died, you probably had an old unresolved problem you couldn’t deal with.” She laughed at the foolishness.

“I remember,” Maggie said, shaking her head. Amanda could make her chuckle at the foot of the gallows, she thought with a wry smile. “I remember thinking how confusing it must be for the grim reaper. Before Freud, he could just come get you on a simple time table: your grandparents all died at eighty-six, so he could put you on his receivables schedule for eighty-six. The country declared war, he could beef up his collection efforts. Famine? Pestilence? Get a bigger truck. Then all of a sudden, he had to watch everybody’s motivations all the time to see what old garbage they were carrying around that might do them in.”

Amanda laughed out loud. “The point I was making, dear heart, is that regression or not, you still have to get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. So, who cares what happened five thousand years ago, or whether your motivations are on straight—what matters is what Maggie does
today.
That’s what’s really making you crazy, anyway. You can’t figure out how to help Cody, today.”

Maggie stood up and turned off her desk lamp. “You couldn’t be more right, Amanda. This inaction is killing me. She’s there, I’m here, and all my efforts and anxiety and regressive hypnosis haven’t changed a goddamned thing. And on top of that, now I’m wondering if I may be in love with Peter, and I can’t see how it’ll turn out one whit better in this century, than it did in three thousand B.C.”

Amanda watched Maggie, worriedly, from the door of the shop before she locked up. A month ago, she would have thought anybody talking about past lives was three bricks short of a load, but now she wouldn’t care which millennium help came from for Maggie, just as long as it came.

Maggie
walked down Madison Avenue distractedly, trying to decide if she should tell Devlin about what she’d learned in hypnosis. During the sessions, it had all felt so real, now the whole thing was beginning to seem absurd. The whacked-out fantasy of a distraught brain. But it wasn’t fair, somehow,
not
to let him know . . . and besides, she owed him a phone call. She didn’t want to let herself think she was using him as a bulwark against her feelings for Peter, but there was a distinct possibility that was true.
Shit!
Who knew what was truth anymore.

“
Dev
,” Maggie said uncertainly, when he arrived in answer to her call, “I really need to tell you some of what’s happened to me the past couple of days, but it all sounds so nuts, I’m afraid you’ll throw a net over me.”

He’d been only a little surprised by the call that precipitated this late-night visit. Maggie’d dropped out of sight for a few days after the trip to Greenwich, and hadn’t answered any of his phone calls. He’d intended to check up on her today anyway, but she’d beaten him to the punch.

He sat quietly in Maggie’s living room, while she told him the story of Mim in Egypt. He asked no questions, but it was apparent he was listening intently; his eyes were lowered in concentration, and she couldn’t see his face. By the time her recital was finished, Devlin had removed his jacket and tie, and poured himself a scotch.

“I’ve been trying to figure out if
you
were somewhere in the story, too, Dev,” she said seriously, “and, if so,
who.”

“It’s who I am
now
that matters, Maggie,” he answered definitively. There was some unspoken emotion underlying the words. “I can see what a mind-fuck that whole experience must have been for you, but frankly I don’t think any of it matters a tinker’s dam. In the first place, there’s no way to know if it’s true. In the second, even if it is true, it doesn’t get Cody back. And, in the third, and by far the most important place, if Malachy Devlin was not a major player in that story, the outcome here is going to be a helluva lot different.”

“Dev, get serious!” she said, disappointed by his response. She wasn’t sure how she’d expected him to react, but this wasn’t it.

“I
am
serious, Maggie O’Connor. We’re dealing with real live, flesh and blood villains, here and now, so who gives a rat’s ass what happened five thousand years ago? ‘
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’
Maggie. What I need in order to get your kid back for you is hard evidence that ties Vannier into drugs and murder in 1993.” He paused to regroup.

“The reporter who was an expert on Maa Kheru . . .
that’s
real. The FBI links between Vannier, Sayles and drugs . . .
that’s
real. The tattoo artist . . .
that’s
real. These are things that can get Cody back for you, Maggie. Not past life readings, or tea leaves, or howling at the goddamned moon.”

“But you
know
there’s more to reality than what we can see, Dev,” she protested, shocked by his anger. “You know all of this may be true!”

“I don’t give a damn if it is true, Maggie. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false or six shades of anything in between. What matters to me is that I find something big enough to blow the lid off Eric Vannier and his dirty little band. I can’t let myself get distracted by irrelevancies. I have to keep my feet planted firmly in reality, because there’s more than enough shit in this time slot to keep me busy, without worrying about shit from some other century.”

“Malachy Devlin!” she said, reality suddenly dawning, “you’re just angry because you weren’t in the story. My God, you’re jealous!”

“Damned right I am!” he exploded. “I don’t want you fucking around with anybody, anywhere, in any millennium, Maggie, except me.”

He took a deep breath and let it out hard.

“Look. I’ve got to go,” he said in a husky voice. “I’m just acting like a horse’s ass and I’d better get out of here before I make a complete fool of myself . . .” Devlin’s moods could shift in an instant.

“I brought you something,” he said, gruffly, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a small leather-bound book with a ribbon bookmark in it.

“I thought someone who learned about sex from the
Rubáiyát
might have learned about courage from another poet.”

Wonderingly, Maggie took the proffered gift from his hand. As she did so, Devlin reached over suddenly and pulled her into his arms, the book pressed between their two bodies. One hand was in her hair, and the other around her waist . . . and he was kissing her with all the explosive love and longing that had been driving him crazy. She felt the wildness, the desperation in the kiss.
Should we not all be loved desperately?
She thought madly, caught up in the frenzy. And she was kissing back because it seemed the only thing to do. And because she really
wanted
to. She could feel the love and strength in him, that radiated like a current, energizing, electrifying.
Give all to love,
it said in the poem.
Obey thy heart. Friends, kindred, days, estate, good fame, plans, credit and the muse—nothing refuse!
Oh sweet Jesus, it was good to
feel
and not to
think
anymore! If she could only give and take and not have to think about the consequences . . .

Devlin released his hold on her, abruptly, and they stood staring into each other’s eyes, neither knowing what to say or do next.

Without a word, he reached for his coat, shrugged it on, and headed for the door. When he got there, he spoke without looking back.

“I can love you
now,
Maggie,” he said fiercely. “To hell with anything else.”

Maggie’s heart pounded out her confusions like a triphammer, after the door closed behind him. She saw that the little book had landed at her feet and she picked it up. It had fallen open to the bookmarked page:

Out of the dark that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever Gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

How on earth did he know to choose Henley? Oh Lord, how did he know so many things? Memories flooded her, pried free by the tiny book of verse. She had never gone to bed one night in childhood, without memorizing a poem. Her father had given her that gift.

Yours forever, Margaret, he had said. What you memorize is yours forever. How many other treasures are permanent in this life? How much else is there that cannot ever be taken from you?

She was adrift in a sea of memories . . . her father so respectful of poetry he only recited it to those who loved it. Never using his great repertoire as others did, to bludgeon unsuspecting listeners with the weight of a classical education. For him it was a private grace, too cherished to be bandied with fools.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
she murmured the words of the poem to herself, grateful for their comfort, loving Dev for knowing her need . . .
I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed.

The poem reminded her that she was not alone—
that’s
what he’d meant her to know. Fate had not singled her out for punishment.
Why me, God asks Job, in the old joke. I don’t know, Job, says God. There’s just something about you that pisses Me off.

Maggie laughed a little, despite the moisture on her cheeks; he’d done it again, he’d made her feel alive and a little hopeful. For once, she decided not to try to figure out where Malachy Devlin fit into the complex puzzle of her life.

When she went upstairs to bed, Maggie put the small volume of poems on the night table, next to Jack’s picture. It was absurd, of course, but she kept thinking if Jack were alive right now he would help her figure out the imponderables about these two strange men who had come into her life. He’d been her friend as well as her husband . . . she wondered if either Peter or Dev had the capacity to fill that most important of all loving roles.

G
hania gripped the child’s hand in her own, so she could not flee. Cody blinked hard at the scene before her . . .

The little goat stood tethered to a pole in the center of the stone enclosure in the basement. The huge snake stalked it, watching, waiting, almost lazily, its forked tongue flicking in and out, in anticipation. It struck, a movement so fast it blurred, then it became languorous again, coiling its sinuous body around the bleating, helpless goat . . . tightening its coils inexorably, until all the fight for life had been spent and only terror remained.

Cody watched in wordless horror as the python’s immense jaws unhinged themselves to accommodate the still living meal. It was swallowing the little goat
whole—
Cody could see the outline of its body, head and shoulders, even hooves protruding under the snake’s skin, as it was pushed along inexorably toward the snake’s belly.

“
Think,
my little one,” Ghania said in a smooth, warm voice. “
Think
how dark it is for the goat inside the belly of a snake. It is screaming in there, you know, but no one can hear.

“Think on this, when next you refuse to do what Ghania tells you.”

Cody pushed the scary words, and Ghania, and the snake away . . . far, far away, where they couldn’t hurt her anymore. She turned her face toward the wall, and sought within herself for the comfort of the Light.

“Mim! Mim! Mim!”
Cody’s screams seared their way through Maggie’s soul, in the dream.
“Don’t let them hurt me. Mim! Help me . . .”

“I’m here, baby!” she screamed back, arms and hands splayed white against some invisible glass wall that separated them from each other. Other arms and hands dragged her back and back into swirling blackness. Nightmare. Falling. Screaming. Help me, Mim! Echoes. Darkness.

Black water rising all around her . . . where is Cody? She could hear her screams, but where were they coming from?
Something slithered by her legs in the inky, swirling pit. Serpent! Snake . . . Horrible, writhing, lethal snake, under the water where it can’t be seen. It was there to kill Cody. Frantically, Maggie swam against the murky nightmare tide, as thick as molasses, dark and rank.

“Mother, help me!” she heard a voice distinctly, and knew, even in the dream, that it was her own voice. Her mother had never let herself be called Mom, or Mommy, for these were too inelegant.
But, Mother is so distant, cold.
A designation, not a name of love. Help me, Mother, help me!

A stairway rose up from the deadly water and Maggie’s mother, unperturbed, was on the stair.

“Don’t shout, it’s unladylike,” she admonished her daughter. She was holding Cody’s hand.

“Cody is dying,”
Maggie thought in terror.
“My mother’s come to get her.”
The thought made her renew her useless struggles against the viscous water, but her arms were aching beyond endurance, and she felt herself dragged down beneath the surface, where the serpent lay. She saw her mother’s hand reach down, to touch the coiling creature as it tensed to spring. The serpent shuddered once, then settled quietly to the bottom of the sea. She’d back her mother in a one-on-one with a sea serpent any day, but where had she come from? She had died so long ago . . .

The dream scene changed abruptly, and she was back on land. Maggie felt the world close in suffocatingly around her. A scorching sun, in a desert landscape. She felt powerless, weakened. A hideous sense of futility seemed to have drained all life-force from her body through a hidden spigot.
I cannot march against the dark much longer.

“What will I do?” she cried into the hot desert wind, that seared the plain she stood on.

“You will fight against Fate and the Devil and the world and God and everybody, if you must!” a voice replied. Was it her own? “That’s where the dignity lies, Maggie! You can’t control what they do to you. Only what you do in return.” Where was the voice coming from?

“This is no fair game we’ve been sent to play here, Margaret,” said a woman’s disembodied voice from somewhere. “Hateful things happen. People die. People suffer. People are born with no limbs, no sight, no hearing. Courage, Margaret.
That’s all there is.”

She couldn’t tell who the woman was. Her Mother? Ellie. Could it have been the voice of God?

Maggie awoke, the dream still vivid, real, inside her. She lay very still. There had been truth in the dream, she had to sort it through, quickly, before it faded.
The snake!
That was it. There was a snake now in every nightmare. The snake had some kind of meaning. But what? Oh God, tell me what it is I’m supposed to know!

“
These
dreams are scaring me to death, Ellie,” Maggie said, distraught, after she’d recounted the latest one.

“You know what Jung said about dreams, Mags?” Ellie answered. “He said , ‘The dream is a small hidden door in the deepest most intricate sanctum of the soul . . .’ These dreams are important pieces of the puzzle—even if they’re hard to live with, your soul is telling you things you need to focus on.”

“I don’t know, Ellie,” she said despairingly. “I’m getting crazy . . . even my prayers are crazy, now. Please don’t do this, God, I say over and over. She’s only a little girl and has done nothing bad.
I’m
the one You’re after. If you’ll save her, I’ll give You anything You want. Do You hear me? Anything! Do anything. Be anything. Just name your price.”

Ellie looked at her friend with genuine compassion. “A teacher of mine . . .” she said, “a very wise man, he was . . . once said to me, ‘The Gods laugh at us sometimes, Ellie. It’s a tribute to our bravery.’ I thought he was mad and said so. ‘They do not pity us,’ he told me. ‘They must think us very courageous. Perhaps they give us great honor in this.’ I was too young to understand.”

“I don’t understand either,” Maggie said bitterly.

“You will, Mags,” said Ellie, her voice inordinately tender. “I believe you will.”