Duma Key (5 page)

“Of course, but—”

“I'll help him,” Mrs. Fevereau said. She looked a little better, and she had ditched the cigarette. She reached for my right armpit, then hesitated. “Will that hurt you?”

It would, but far less than staying the way I was, so I told her no. As John went up the Goldsteins' walk, I got a grip on the Hummer's bumper. Together we managed to get me back on my feet.

“I don't suppose you've got anything to cover the dog with?”

“As a matter of fact, there's a rug remnant in the back.”

“Good. Great.”

She started around to the rear—it would be a long
trek, given the Hummer's size—then turned back. “Thank God it died before the little girl got back.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank God.”

ix

It wasn't far back to my cottage at the end of the lane, but getting there was a slow chug just the same. By the time I arrived, I had developed the ache in my hand that I thought of as Crutch Fist, and Gandalf's blood was stiffening on my shirt. There was a card tucked in between the screen and the jamb of the front door. I pulled it out. Below a smiling girl giving the Girl Scout salute was this message:

A FRIEND FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD
CAME TO SEE YOU
WITH NEWS OF DELICIOUS GIRL SCOUT COOKIES!
ALTHOUGH SHE DIDN'T FIND YOU IN TODAY,
Monica
WILL CALL AGAIN!
SEE YOU SOON!

Monica had dotted the
i
in her name with a smiley-face. I crumpled the card up and tossed it into the wastebasket as I limped to the shower. My shirt, jeans, and blood-spotted underwear I tossed into the trash. I never wanted to see them again.

x

My two-year-old Lexus was in the driveway, but I hadn't been behind the wheel of a vehicle since the
day of my accident. A kid from the nearby juco ran errands for me three days a week. Kathi Green was also willing to swing by the closest supermarket if I asked her, or take me to Blockbuster before one of our little torture sessions (afterward I was always too wiped out). If you had told me I'd be driving again that fall, I would have laughed. It wasn't my bad leg; the very idea of driving put me in a cold sweat.

But not long after my shower, that's what I was doing: sliding behind the wheel, keying the ignition, and looking over my right shoulder as I backed down the driveway. I had taken four of the little pink Oxycontin pills instead of the usual two, and was gambling they'd get me to and from the Stop & Shop near the intersection of East Hoyt and Eastshore Drive without freaking out or killing anyone.

I didn't tarry at the supermarket. It wasn't grocery shopping at all in the normal sense, just a quick bombing-run—one stop at the meat-case followed by a limping jaunt through the ten-items-or-less express lane, no coupons, nothing to declare. Still, by the time I got back to Aster Lane I was officially stoned. If a cop had stopped me, I never would have passed a field sobriety test.

None did. I passed the Goldsteins' house, where there were four cars in the driveway, at least half a dozen more parked at the curb, and lights streaming from every window. Monica's mom had called for backup on the chicken-soup hotline, and it looked like plenty of relatives had responded. Good for them. And good for Monica.

Less than a minute later I was turning in to my own driveway. In spite of the medication, my right leg throbbed from switching back and forth between the
gas and the brake, and I had a headache—a plain old-fashioned tension headache. My main problem, however, was hunger. It was what had driven me out in the first place. Only hunger was too mild a word for what I was feeling. I was ravenous, and the leftover lasagna in the fridge wouldn't do. There was meat in it, but not enough.

I lurched into the house on my crutch, head swimming from the Oxycontin, got a frypan from the drawer under the stove, and slung it onto one of the burners. I turned the dial to HIGH, barely hearing the
flump
of igniting gas. I was too busy tearing the plastic wrap from a package of ground sirloin. I threw it in the frypan and mashed it flat with the palm of my hand before scrabbling a spatula out of the drawer beside the stove.

Coming back into the house, shucking my clothes and climbing into the shower, I'd been able to mistake the flutters in my stomach for nausea—it seemed like a reasonable explanation. By the time I was rinsing away the soap, though, the flutters had settled into a steady low rumble like the idle of a powerful motor. The drugs had damped it down a little bit, but now it was back, worse than ever. If I'd ever been this hungry in my life, I couldn't remember when.

I flipped the grotesquely large meat-patty and tried to count to thirty. I figured a thirty-count on high heat would be at least a nod in the direction of what people mean when they say “cooking meat.” If I'd thought to flip on the fan and vent the aroma, I might have made it. As it was, I didn't even get to twenty. At seventeen I snatched a paper plate, flipped the hamburger onto it, and wolfed the half-raw ground beef while I leaned against the cabinet. About halfway through I saw the
red juice seeping out of the red meat and got a momentary but brilliant picture of Gandalf looking up at me while blood and shit oozed from the wrecked remains of his hindquarters, matting the fur on his broken rear legs. My stomach didn't so much as quiver, just cried impatiently for more food. I was hungry.

Hungry.

xi

That night I dreamed I was in the bedroom I had shared for so many years with Pam. She was asleep beside me and couldn't hear the croaking voice coming from somewhere below in the darkened house:
“Newly wed, nearly dead, newly wed, nearly dead.”
It sounded like some mechanical device stuck in a groove. I shook my wife but she just turned over. Turned away from me. Dreams mostly tell the truth, don't they?

I got up and went downstairs, holding the banister to compensate for my bad leg. And there was something odd about how I was holding that familiar length of polished rail. As I approached the bottom of the staircase, I realized what it was. Fair or not, it's a rightie's world—guitars are made for righties, and school desks, and the control panels on American cars. The banister of the house I'd lived in with my family was no exception; it was on the right because, although my company had built the house from my plans, my wife and both our daughters were right-handers, and majority rules.

But still, my hand was trailing down the banister.

Of course,
I thought.
Because it's a dream. Just like this afternoon. You know?

Gandalf was no dream,
I thought back, and the voice of the stranger in my house—closer than ever—repeated
“Newly wed, nearly dead”
over and over. Whoever it was, the person was in the living room. I didn't want to go in there.

No, Gandalf was no dream,
I thought. Maybe it was my phantom right hand having these thoughts.
The dream was killing him.

Had he died on his own, then? Was that what the voice was trying to tell me? Because I didn't think Gandalf had died on his own. I thought he had needed help.

I went into my old living room. I wasn't conscious of moving my feet; I went in the way you move in dreams, as if it's really the world moving around you, streaming backward like some extravagant trick of projection. And there, sitting in Pam's old Boston rocker, was Reba the Anger-Management Doll, now grown to the size of an actual child. Her feet, clad in black Mary Janes, swung back and forth just above the floor at the end of horrible boneless pink legs. Her shallow eyes stared at me. Her lifeless strawberry curls bounced back and forth. Her mouth was smeared with blood, and in my dream I knew it wasn't human blood or dog's blood but the stuff that had oozed out of my mostly raw hamburger—the stuff I had licked off the paper plate when the meat was gone.

The bad frog chased us!
Reba cried.
It has TEEF!

xii

That word—
TEEF!
—was still ringing in my head when I sat up with a cold puddle of October
moonlight in my lap. I was trying to scream and producing only a series of silent gasps. My heart was thundering. I reached for the bedside lamp and mercifully avoided knocking it on the floor, although once it was on, I saw that I'd pushed the base halfway out over the drop. The clock-radio claimed it was 3:19 AM.

I swung my legs out of bed and reached for the phone.
If you really need me, call me,
Kamen had said.
Any time, day or night.
And if his number had been in the bedroom phone's memory, I probably would've. But as reality re-asserted itself—the cottage by Lake Phalen, not the house in Mendota Heights, no croaking voice downstairs—the urge passed.

Reba the Anger-Management Doll in the Boston rocker, and grown to the size of an actual child. Well, why not? I
had
been angry, although at Mrs. Fevereau rather than at poor Gandalf, and I had no idea what toothy frogs had to do with the price of beans in Boston. The real question, it seemed to me, was about Monica's dog. Had I killed Gandalf, or had he just expired?

Or maybe the question was why I'd been so hungry afterward. Maybe that was the question.

So hungry for meat.

“I took him in my arms,” I whispered.

Your arm, you mean, because now one is all
you've got. Your good left.

But my memory was taking him in my
arms,
plural. Channeling my anger

(
it was RED
)

away from that foolish woman with her cigarette and cell phone and somehow back into
myself,
in some kind of crazy closed loop . . . taking him in my
arms . . . surely a hallucination, but yes, that was my memory.

Taking him in my
arms
.

Cradling his neck with my left elbow so I could strangle him with my right hand.

Strangle him and put him out of his misery.

I slept shirtless, so it was easy to look at my stump. I only had to turn my head. I could wiggle it, but not much more. I did that a couple of times, and then I looked up at the ceiling. My heartbeat was slowing a little.

“The dog died of his injuries,” I said. “And shock. An autopsy would confirm that.”

Except no one did autopsies on dogs that died after being crushed to bones and jelly by Hummers driven by careless, distracted women.

I looked at the ceiling and I wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night, but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries.

That's what Wireman says.

Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil's there, too—everyone says so—but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be, you know.

Imagine that baby girl again, the one who fell from the carriage. She struck the right side of her head, but it was the left side of her brain that suffered the worst insult—contracoup, remember? The left side is where Broca's area is—not that anyone knew that in the 1920s. Broca's area processes language. Smack it hard enough and you lose your language, sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever. But—although they are closely related—saying is not seeing.

The little girl still sees.

She sees her five sisters. Their dresses. How their hair is crazy-combed by the wind when they come in from outside. She sees her father's mustache, now threaded with gray. She sees Nan Melda—not just the housekeeper but the closest thing to a mother this little girl knows. She sees the scarf Nanny wraps around her head when she cleans; she sees the knot in the front, at the very top of Nan Melda's high brown forehead; she sees Nan Melda's silver bracelets, and how they flash starpoints in the sunshine that falls through the windows.

Details, details, the truth is in the details.

And does seeing cry out to saying, even in a damaged mind? A wounded brain? Oh, it must, it must.

She thinks
My head hurts.

She thinks
Something bad happened, and I don't know who I am. Or where I am. Or what all these bright surrounding images are.

She thinks
Libbit? Is my name Libbit? I used to know. I could talk in the used-to-know, but now my words are like fish in the water. I want the man with the hair on his lip.

She thinks
That's my Daddy, but when I try to say his name I call “Ird! Ird!” instead, because one flies past my window. I see every feather. I see its eye like glass. I see its leg, how it bends like broke, and that word is
crookit
. My head hurts.

Girls come in. Maria and Hannah come in. She
doesn't like them the way she likes the twins. The twins are little, like her.

She thinks
I called Maria and Hannah the Big Meanies in the used-to-know
and realizes she knows again. It's another thing that's come back. The name for another detail. She will forget again, but the next time she remembers, she will remember longer. She's almost sure of it.

She thinks
When I try to say Hannah I say “Ird! Ird!” When I try to say Maria I say “Wee! Wee!” And they laugh, those meanies. I cry. I want my Daddy and can't remember how to say him; that word is gone again. Words like birds, they fly and fly and fly away. My sisters talk. Talk, talk, talk. My throat is dry. I try to say thirsty. I say “First! First!” But they only laugh, those meanies. I'm under the bandage, smelling the iodine, smelly the sweaty, listening to them laugh. I scream at them, scream loud, and they run away. Nan Melda comes, her head all red because her hair is wrapped in the snarf. Her roundies flash flash flash in the sun and you call those roundies
bracelets
. I say “First, first!” and Nan Melda doesn't know. So then I say “Ass! Ass!” and Nan makes me go potty even though I don't need to go potty. I'm on the potty and see and point. “Ass! Ass!” Daddy comes in. “What's this shouting about?” with all white bubbles on his face except for one smoothie. That's where he slid the thing that makes the hair go away. He sees how I point. He understands. “Why she is thirsty.” Fills up the glass. The room is full of sunny. Dust floats in the sunny and his hand goes through the sunny with the glass and you call that pretty. I drink every drink. I cry more afterwards, but from better. He kiss me kiss me kiss me, hug me hug me hug me, and I try to say him—“Daddy!”—and still can't. Then I think around sideways to his name, and John is there, so I think that in my mind and while I think John I “Daddy!” out my mouth and he hug me hug me some more.