Cursed Be the Child (7 page)

“Bullshit.”

“No,” Selena said, “the truth, and we both know it.”
Tshatsimo,
she thought; the Romany word meant “truth” and a great deal more than that. Though much was lost in translation,
tshatsimo
meant “that which truly is, the Great Truth to be found even under black lies, white lies, seeming truths and little truths.”

“You don’t know anything about me!” Kristin raged. “What the hell do you think you know, anyway?”

“I know girls who feel good about themselves don’t run away and become prostitutes,” Selena Lazone said.

“I told you I like fucking!”

“And I know girls who feel good about themselves,” Selena continued evenly, “don’t try this.” She reached out, tightly encircled Kristin’s left wrist and turned the girl’s hand over. Kristin’s fingers shot up like the legs of a dying spider. Running along the blue veins on the underside of her wrist were two reddish, puckered scars—a serious suicide attempt.

The child’s face turned white, and a sheen of tears glazed her eyes.

And Selena Lazone froze.

She understood.

But no, not this way, she thought. She was a psychologist, a scientist, not a
cohalyi.
Not an
ababina.
Not a
gule romni!
A psychologist—not a witch or a sorceress.

“You’re…hurting me,” Kristin said in a pinched voice, as she struggled to pull free of Selena’s grip.

Hurting her, Selena thought as she turned loose the girl’s wrist. Nearly all of Kristin Heidmann’s life had been a hurting, and if Kristin were ever to escape that all-encompassing, enveloping pain, then paradoxically there would have to be still more hurting—and it would have to begin now.

But now she could do something for Kristin; she could help her. She had the tool to crack the girl’s emotional and psychic armor, and it didn’t matter how that tool had been placed in her hand.

That’s what Selena tried to tell her herself, but she was still afraid.

Quietly, Selena said, “Tell me about Poppy.”

Kristin’s jaw dropped. Beneath her teary left eye, there was a fluttery tic. “You don’t know. You can’t!” she whispered.

But Selena Lazone did know, of course.
Dukkeripin,
the Gypsies called it—ESP, the sixth sense, psychometry, the terms employed by investigators of psychic phenomena. She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, born with a caul over her face, and so
dukkeripin,
this way of knowing that did not rely on the rational senses, was her birthright, one that she’d rejected, part of a life she had fled. But her powers of
dukkeripin
had been dormant for years and years; a talent not used, not even wanted, is a talent that atrophies and dies. That is what she had believed, what she had so fervently hoped.

“You cannot run faster than your shadow” was what old Pola Janichka had taught her.
Tshatsimo,
Romany truth.

“Poppy,” Selena insisted. “Your grandfather. You loved him.”

Kristin nodded. “He was always making jokes. He kept saying stuff like about how I had to eat mashed potatoes because that would put hair on my chest. He used to take me fishing…”

Kristin fell silent.

“The first time,” Selena said, “you were six years old, staying with Poppy and your grandmother.”

Kris nodded, then she exploded. “No, I promised. I said I would never tell. I promised Poppy.”

“It’s time to break that promise, Kristin. You have to. Your grandfather was wrong, wrong to make you promise that and wrong to do what he did. You were a little girl, Kris, a baby, and you loved him and trusted him and he took advantage of that.”

“Poppy wasn’t a bad man.”

“Maybe not, Kris, but he did bad things to you.”

“But it was my fault. I made him! He told me it was my fault!”

“Wrong, Kris. You were a victim. You were the good little girl who did what her Poppy told her, what he made you do. And until we talk about it, get it out in the open so that you can start seeing it all for what it really was, you’re going to keep on being a victim.”

Head down, Kristin sobbed dryly.

“Kristin,” Selena said gently, “trust me.”

It all came out then, with explosive bursts of tears and gurgled sobs. Kristin’s story of being sexually abused could have been an archetypical case study from a psychology textbook, Selena thought. “Kristin H’s grandfather introduced her to ‘our secret game,’ sexually fondling her, having her fondle him. When she was nine, Kristin H’s grandfather had intercourse with her. She recalls the experience as being painful.” No, Selena thought, nothing unusual about what had happened to Kristin Heidmann, nor about the emotional toll it had taken—not unusual, only terrible.

The hour came to an end with the girl saying, “That’s it, I guess, all of it.” She sniffled, having run out of tears.

No, Selena thought, this was only the beginning, but it was a real beginning.

“So,” Kristin said, “do you think…can you help me?”

“Yes,” Selena said. Kristin Heidmann had to believe that she could be helped, and, for that matter, so did Selena if she were to aid the girl. “I’m sure I can help you,” Selena said, “and I will.”

And she wished she could be so positive that she’d be able to help herself.

A bath and two glasses of chablis had not relaxed her. In a green velour lounging robe, she stood gazing from the picture window at serene Lake Michigan, a view that boosted the Lake Shore Drive apartment’s rent a hundred dollars above those on the opposite side of the building.

For the thousandth time, she wished David were here, but he wouldn’t be in until late. He was working hard, taking pictures for the new collection that would be published as
The Blues In Black and White.

Selena didn’t want to be alone with the past that threatened to enfold her, to become the present.

Her stomach rumbled. She realized that she had not eaten since breakfast, and it was now nearly eight o’clock.

She’d fix something light, an omelet, and then sip wine until she could fall asleep.

In the kitchen, she cracked an egg into a mixing bowl, then another.

The yolk of the second egg plopped into the bowl and staining its center was blood, a blob of deep red the size of the nail on the little finger, a clotty, mucusy mass that was a face, a face with a piglike snout and demonic, close-set, tiny eyes, and a twisted mouth.

It was a miniature face from hell, and it was an omen.

“Diakka!
” Selena screamed.

— | — | —

Six

Invisible steel arrows, the notes from King Pemberton’s Gibson electric guitar shot through the smoke and alcohol redolent fog, each arrow aimed straight at your soul, each a bulls-eye. On the small stage, King Pemberton leaned away from the microphone, as though he needed no electronic amplification. He was a gut-shouter, a huge black block of a man, and maybe he was 65, or maybe 75, or maybe a few years younger than Methuselah (he’d recorded 87 albums and never offered the same year of birth for the liner notes on any two of them!), but he hadn’t lost a thing. Just the same as when he cut his first sides in the mid-thirties, King Pemberton could still wail and moan and holler and come at you full force.

It was one in the morning, the final set at Big Red’s Stony Island Lounge and Nightclub.

At the table directly in front of the bandstand, a man raised his Nikon and sighted through the view finder. He was the only white person in the club, likely the only one within ten square blocks. He had no sense of not belonging here because he had no sense of belonging anywhere.

It was a strange thing. When he had his eye to the camera, he often thought of himself as invisible. He disappeared, ceased to be. There was only the camera, of itself impersonally recording reality without even the most subtle comment or imposition of viewpoint from the man behind the lens.

When he was taking pictures, he often felt he did not exist. No less often, he felt that when he was not taking pictures.

He zoomed in tight on King Pemberton’s face to catch the glittering beads of sweat rolling down that black skin. He triggered the shutter, the auto-advance, tick-tick, zipping the film along at two frames a second.

Not yet, not yet, but we’re coming up to it, he thought, his photographer’s gift of seeing becoming more acute by the moment. There were preliminaries, of course; you had to shoot frame after frame, and all those pictures would go from developing tank to wastebasket, but they were an essential part of the ritual leading up to the picture.

Tick-tick, tick-tick, two frames a second. The glint of light off King Pemberton’s gold tooth. The moment when an eyelid began its descent in a “let’s share the secret” wink. The brief self-satisfied nod at an explosive flurry of treble notes.

And there it was, there it was. He had it! King Pemberton, the Blues Man, no sham, no pretense, nothing of the self-willed mask people create and wear to protect their most secret selves from the hurts of the world, tiny and great. This was a nakedly honest face, the face of a man who could boldly declare, “I know who I am.”

That face was The Blues in Black and White, and it would probably be the cover photograph for the collection of pictures.

The man with the camera had no doubt. He had a photo that was
tshatsimo,
the truth.

Selena Lazone had tried to drink wine until she passed out, but long before that, she hit the stage in which her choking tears erupted, and for five straight minutes she had lain on the sofa, sobbing and moaning and hugging herself. After that came an attack of the hiccups, then a staggering rush to the bathroom to vomit her way back to near-sobriety.

It was after three in the morning, and she felt like hell and terribly alone. All the living room lights were on, as though she could defy darkness and any of its manifestations merely by flipping a switch. On the stereo, WFMT, Chicago’s fine arts station, played a Bach fugue for string quartet. She’d hoped the precise, eminently rational Baroque music would offer subtle comfort, a promise that the universe was structured and meticulously arranged, a puzzle, perhaps, but a puzzle with pieces you could identify and fit together until a sensible pattern could be discerned.

But the universe was mad and malign and never before had she felt so alone in it.

Where was David? She needed him.

Selena went to the window and for the thousandth time gazed out. The sliver of the moon scattered pinpoints of light that rode the peaks of Lake Michigan’s waves.

Where was he? She loved him.

Not that she wanted to. She had promised David Greenfield she would not love him. That would tip the delicate balances of their sensible relationship; after all, he did not love her, could not.

But David Greenfield understood her, perhaps even better than she understood herself He knew Gypsies and had been raised by them, growing up among the people of
tacho rat,
true blood—with them, but not one of them. His first major collection of photographs was the prizewinning study of Gypsies entitled
Rom.
David knew who she had been, what she had been, knew why she had split herself off from that person and her people to recreate herself as an entirely new individual, one who had a meaningful place in the
Gaje
world.