Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (34 page)

She heard again that rustling sound of dry skin on skin, and his agonized whisper came,
You will never understand. I cannot tell you, nothing I say affects you. I don’t even know you. Who are you, who are these people, what is this place?
The voice trembled with such anguished terror that she felt afraid herself.
Why am I here? What has happened to me? Who are you?

She managed at last to turn far enough in her chair, and she saw him hovering beside her, the translucent shape of his body, his hands clasped together and winding and wringing each other, eloquent of agitation.

Like Ricky, his descendant.

No. Not like Ricky, not at all — this was not his gesture. Electrified by memory, she stared at the writhing hands. Ricky rubs at the back of his neck. But she knew this gesture, she knew it in her muscles and the deep-grained memory of her nerves.

She had to see the face. With a convulsive effort that made her gasp, she reached up and caught his wrists, her fingers closing on phantom flesh. She pulled.

He stumbled forward with a startled grunt, and she saw his face (and, through it, a rippling distortion of the wall beyond), a pale face gaping with panic.

A familiar face, but not what she had expected: not like some forebear of Ricky’s, nothing like Ricky. Whose face was this, broad at the brow and narrowing neatly to the jaw, thin lips curled at the corners and bracketed with folds, the nose aquiline and the eyes large and dark? Who was this, his white hair curled damply at the blue-veined hollows of his temples?

He stared wildly back at her, his lips parted. “You are not my son! I do not know you — who are you?”

Recognition, a soundless explosion, took her breath and her voice. Fascinated and horrified, she leaned closer to see him better — her former self, her dead self turned tortured revenant.

He recoiled, trying to twist away from her. “Who are you?” he cried. “Are you a spirit? A demon? For the love of God, tell me who you are!”

This is me, she thought into the huge, ringing darkness that seemed to enclose them alone together. This is who I
was.
This is my ghost, the ghost of myself in that other, long ago life of peril and upheaval and a desperate scramble for security.

You are me.

My life that was.

My frightened soul, my cast-off shell, the fearful dreamer of my nightmares.

“Let me go, let me go!” he panted, craning his face away from her. She saw the tears of his distress, and without warning pity overwhelmed her. She tried to offer comfort.

“I’m you,” she said. “I’m the student of your cowardice. I’m your second chance.”

He was sinking toward her now, weeping and struggling, but without strength. As weak as a ghost, a mere breath of a long-finished life.

Someone was calling her, a distraction that she ignored.

“Thank you,” she said, and lightly kissed his cheek.

With a fading wail, he fell downward, into her, like an arctic breeze drawn into her tissues through the contact of their hands, her lips. The icy infusion settled softly in her bones, where the last of it was warmed away as rapidly as evaporating moisture in the bright desert sun.

He was gone, spent, enfolded, and she was whole at last.

She came slowly to herself, sunk in the old leather chair in her own living room, with Ellie Stern standing over her and anxiously repeating her name while the kids of the class looked on in tense silence.

Oh, damn these people, couldn’t they let her alone, at this strange, fading moment of mystery and calm? How often do you get to literally come to yourself? How often do you give and receive the gift of peace?

Outside came the roar of a motor — Frank, at last, with (if they were lucky) Johnny Sanchez of the Taos police.

And with that, she snapped back fully into the present, calm and alert to the needs of the moment. She cleared her throat and took a breath (
aaghh,
damn it!). “Roberto, Bobbie, come here,” she said. “Blanca, you too. I want you all next to me when the police come in here.”

Because no one was going to shoot at them, not if they were sitting quietly with her, like harmless guests in her studio.

l2

Dorothea insisted that Claire come inside. Claire was driving her around because of Dorothea’s codeine prescription for the cracked ribs, but she was sleeping at a B and B in town. She said she didn’t want to intrude on their privacy.

Stepping inside now seemed to add an edge of nervousness to Claire’s normally forthright manner. She paused on the threshold, looking around uneasily, and then headed for the kitchen.

“I’ll put this stuff away, and then I’ll make some crepes for lunch; how’s that?” she said, over her shoulder.

“Thanks, Hon, that would be lovely.” Dorothea could not get over how much like little-girl-Claire this grown Claire looked, soft-faced and solemn-eyed. In her letters she was so much older and more severe. Have I been quarreling all these years through the mails and over the phone with a mere front? No, no, don’t over-simplify. She is my youngest, Claire, but she’s also this adult stranger with her own life. Damn, I’m glad she came.

Ricky never used the little patio adjoining his bedroom anymore. Instead, as usual with him now, he lay stretched out on the couch in the big front room, her old Afghan blanket pulled loosely over his body, pillows tucked behind his head and shoulders. The radio was on softly, the dial turned to the classical station.

Claire gave him a hearty, “Hi, Ricky!” and hurried on into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags.

Dorothea noticed how much leaner Ricky had grown. His dark shirt hung on him as if on a wire hanger; his belt was buckled through a fresh-punched hole and held in the slack folds of his trousers. His neck was a knobbed, fragile stem, too delicate to hold up the bony sculpture of his head. Face and hands looked outsized, vital, preternaturally rich with character, hooked to that sketch of a body.

“How was it?” he said. He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch with deliberation and effort. She took one of the big leather chairs, facing him. She had been down to Albuquerque to speak yet again with Mrs. Garcia, the probation officer in charge of the Cantu case.

Dorothea talked easily of the trip down. As she talked she began to see how one might frame Ricky sitting there: his dark clothes, the furry gray corduroy of the couch, the pale skin of hands and face, the bright Afghan lapping a pink and vermillion corner over his rail of a thigh. She could feel her hand jump with the impulse to paint him just as he was, quietly dying in the mellow afternoon light.

How would you show the pain that his medication controlled? How would you show the distance he had traveled lately, all unwilling? Sometimes now his eyes would take on a remote and shuttered look that it hurt her heart to see.

For the moment, however, he was attentive and interested. “Sounds as if she still hasn’t made up her mind, then.”

Mrs. Garcia’s job was to speak with all the parties involved and then advise the Children’s Court attorney whether to bind any or all of the young Cantus over for trial as adults. Alternatively, she could recommend a hearing in the judge’s chambers that would result in some form of probation. Dorothea had been arguing all along for that.

“She admitted today that I baffle her completely.”

“Because you’re the only one to have been physically injured, but you aren’t howling for blood,” Ricky said, nodding. “She must find you utterly inexplicable.”

“This time she went so far as to suggest that I may be suffering from something they call ‘hostage syndrome,’ where you start identifying with your captors. She’s no fool, Ricky. The first time we talked, she asked me about my kids, whether any of them had ever been in trouble with the law. Today, she suggested pointblank that I see in Roberto something of my own younger son in his more wayward, draft-dodging days.”

“Poor woman,” Ricky observed calmly. “She hasn’t a chance in hell of working out the truth, has she?”

“Not unless I tell her. I have a feeling that she’s not much on mystic revelations and such, so I’m not going to.”

The radio whispered a banal, familiar theme. She got up. “I’m going to put something on the phonograph. One more hearing of the ‘Bolero’ and I’ll turn into a pillar of salt. Any requests?”

He murmured, “You’ve got some late Hayden quartets there, I believe.”

In the kitchen the phone rang and Claire answered. She uncomplainingly fielded the calls — not so many of them now, thank goodness — from news and media people, friends, sympathizers, critics, nuts of the extreme right and left, members of civil rights and ethnic or minority rights groups, law students, prophets, politicians.

Ricky cocked his head in the direction of the kitchen. “Mrs. Garcia’s secretary calling, no doubt,” he observed with amusement, “to make an appointment for your next discussion.”

Dorothea groaned. “I hope not. She also quizzed me about whether I’d been in communication with the Cantu kids or their mother. Undue influence on a sentimental old mommy could explain me, I suppose. I assured her I’ve been avoiding any such contact for exactly that reason.”

“Well, what do you think of Roberto’s chances?”

“The best I can persuade myself to think on any given day,” Dorothea said grimly. “I’m doing all I can for him, but he hasn’t made it easy. And some of the other kids’ parents are out for blood, believe me — among other things, it looks as if Mary’s school is going to be shut down even if they don’t get sued to blazes. I must admit, I find it hard to figure out how you put a dollar value on what we all went through.”

“For some of them, I imagine the experience was valuable,” Ricky said, “although I wouldn’t say such a thing aloud to anyone but you.”

“I know. I can’t very well tell Joni Reed’s mother that I’m not very impressed that the kid has been having nightmares ever since. Joni missed the worst of it thanks to her own quick-wittedness, which should be worth something to her self-esteem.”

Ricky said, “Do you think another statement from me might be of help?”

Dorothea shook her head. She yawned. The codeine did that to her sometimes. “You’ve done more than your share, love. And the Cantu kids have a few other things going for them. The results of the Pinto Street investigation are helping tremendously.”

A complex case was being built against the fraudulent developers who had tried to steal Pinto Street and against the police who had answered the riot-call. It had recently come to light that one of the developers, a Mr. Bickford, had a friend in the police department who had been acting for the developers in various ways, most of them having to do with the distortion or suppression of information. The whole thing stank higher and higher and promised a sizable battle in court down the line.

“I do have my doubts sometimes,” she admitted. “I can’t deny that Roberto has the makings of a real thug. But he could become any number of other things, couldn’t he? I don’t want to try to write his romance for him. It may turn out a good deal grubbier and smaller in scope than I hope for him, but whatever it is, it’ll be his.”

“I believe you’ve come to like Roberto,” Ricky said.

“Oh, I don’t know. Youth is attractive, kids themselves are. Their easy bafflement. Their amateurish defenses and tremendous vulnerabilities. I’ve had kids of my own. I’m not proof against any of it.”

“I have none,” Ricky said, thoughtfully drawing the fringes of the afghan through his fingers. “And I’m not either.”

“And another thing. I remembered something the other morning, something I normally don’t think much about. Do you know what I did when I left Jack? The last thing I did? I went out into the garage — I’d been slipping out there to make prints whenever I could find time — and I tried to heave my old printing press over. I couldn’t take it with me — I had no place of my own at that point — so I tried to destroy the thing. I couldn’t budge it, of course; it weighed more than I did. But damn, I tried!” She stopped, thinking back to that dank work-space with the fluorescent bulbs she had installed herself to have light to work by.

“I confess, the connection escapes me,” Ricky said.

“I was angry. I was furious. Angry with myself for having put it off so long, afraid I was starting too late, you see? That I would never catch up and make a serious career as an artist. And afraid to leave, too. I was just boiling with rage and fear, Ricky. I’ve never felt that way since, not even when Nathan left — not until that evening when Roberto and I ended up shouting at each other and he smashed my lamp. He reminded me of what that kind of anger feels like when it breaks free; and what those feelings are like to live with, bottled up inside. I think he’s been living with feelings like that for a long time. I guess I understand him a little better, remembering that, than I’d like to. So I can’t just write him off, can I?”

“You can,” Ricky said, “if you want to.”

Dorothea leaned back. “Then I guess I don’t want to.”

The phone rang again and Claire called, “Mom? Did you want to speak to George?”

Ugh. No. But it had to be done. Ricky gave Dorothea the victory sign as she headed for the kitchen.

While she talked to George on the phone, she leaned against the wall, watching her daughter making a stack of thin French crepes for tea. This soothed her, and she needed soothing, for she had to calmly, steadily, and repeatedly tell George that no, he would not be allowed to come out early, ahead of the scheduled mob, and show his personal big-wigs the wall. No. No. No.