Little Deadly Things (17 page)

“All we have to do is walk down the hall and get a license. Marta, I don’t know if this is the wedding chapel of your dreams, and there’s no wedding veil or ring bearer and all of that. But I want to marry you, Marta. Right here and right now. Will you be my wife?”

“Jim, I don’t understand.”

The onlookers craned their necks to hear.

“The judge agreed to perform a marriage ceremony after his next case if we get a wedding license. I know this is sudden, but we’ve talked about it. I want to marry you, Marta.” He placed his cheek against Marta’s swollen belly and looked up at her. “Let’s be a family.”

Marta Cruz burst into tears. The attorneys and their clients in the hallway looked at the bride-to-be. Marta looked down at the man kneeling at her feet. She pressed his face into her belly, as if to make the moment include their child.

“Oh, Jim. Yes. Yes, I will marry you.”

Every person in the hallway but one started to applaud.

“But there is a condition,” said Marta.

Movement stopped again.

“Stand up and look at me.”

Eva frowned briefly and watched Jim rise uncertainly to his feet.

“I will marry you, Jim Ecco, and I will be with you for better or for worse. But, the judge speaks for me as well. You have to learn to calm yourself. I won’t have our baby nursing on your temper. I know that anger will always be a part of you, but you must become its master, not its servant. If you will promise me that, then, yes, I will marry you, right here and right now.” Her eyes began to moisten, as did Jim’s.

Eva’s eyes were dry. They widened and narrowed. Something tugged at her, an inchoate sense of foreboding, of loss. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Back in control, she sighed impatiently. “Jeez, guys, this is a wedding, not a funeral. Hey, lovebirds—come on! We’ve got to get you to the clerk’s office.”

The onlookers cheered as the three friends ran up the hall. The line at the clerk’s window was long, but they had Eva. In less than a minute, they were at the front, and peering through security glass at a clerk.

“Huh. I didn’t know that wedding licenses were all that risky,” Eva muttered, touching the thick glass.

The clerk chuckled. “Nope. But fishing licenses? Now that’s another story.”

When the couple returned, Judge McClincy examined the license. He smiled and then retreated to his chambers. He removed a spray of daffodils from a vase on his desk and returned to the front of his bench to stand with the couple. He presented the flowers to Marta and asked, “Will this do for a bridal bouquet?”

She blushed and beamed.

He pointed to Eva. “Are you the maid of honor?”

“Best man. Jim, got a ring?”

“In fact I do.” He reached into his pocket and took out a small, cloth-covered box and handed it to Eva. She stared down at the ring. In a low voice Jim said, “Don’t lose it,” he smiled, “or make it disappear.”

Jim turned back to the judge. “Your Honor, we appreciate this. I’m not going to let Marta down—or you. But Marta and Eva have to get to their classes. Can you make this brief?”

Judge McClincy froze. He cocked his head and looked at Jim for a moment, and shrugged. “Okay, you’re the boss.” He turned to Marta. “You look beautiful, my dear. Do you, Marta Maria Cruz, take James Ecco to be your lawful husband?” She nodded, fighting to control tears, and barely spoke her affirmation.

“And you, James Bradley Ecco, do you take Marta Cruz to be your lawful wife?”

“I do.”

“Then by the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Mr. Ecco, you may kiss your bride.”

“That’s it?” Jim asked.

“You said, ‘Make it brief.’” Then, under his breath, “Gotcha.”

That evening Marta made a celebratory dinner—a simple student meal of pasta. Eva placed two red rose stems on the table. Jim produced a bottle of student-priced Chianti to toast the future but the plonk went largely untouched. Marta stuck with club soda—“the baby, you know.” Jim drank sparingly to a new future. Eva clinked a glass to the others in a toast to friendship, but set the alcohol back on the table, untouched.

The celebration marked a turning point for the three friends. It was the end of Jim’s legal troubles and the beginning of his path of self-control. For the first time since the death of Marta’s mother and the loss of her father’s attention, she concentrated on her own needs. She had made an unequivocal demand of Jim, to abandon his anger, and was rewarded by his efforts to mature.

Eva felt conflicted. When she shepherded Marta and Jim through the clerk’s office for a wedding license, she felt a kinship with them, a connection to others that was new to her. True, she had loved Gergana, but as a child loves a caregiver, not as a friend bound by voluntary allegiance. The antiquarian Coombs had offered friendship that transcended the difference in their ages. Eva accepted his benevolence, but not the mutual obligations of amity.

Her growing affinity for Marta and for Jim animated something within Eva. Platonic love, unselfish giving, unrewarded sacrifice—these could nurture her. The desiccated yearning for human connection began to bloom. She felt peace and saw that it was good.

But the Voices from the Table of Clamorous Voices counseled otherwise. They dripped poison in her ear, an insistent voice with Iago-like guidance.
Something’s wrong,
they warned,
here is danger.
Eight years earlier, Gergana’s murder had robbed Eva of a model of selfless love and the Table of Clamorous Voices was born. Scant weeks later, Jim Ecco said, “Let’s be friends.” He offered loyalty without expectation of romantic payment, faith without reservation. He stood at the head of the Table. He became a moderating voice.

Throughout their years together, Eva balanced the fear-driven impulses of the Table with the kindness of Jim’s friendship and Marta’s tolerant, if sometimes caustic, acceptance. But when Eva pulled them down a crowded hallway to the County Clerk’s office, she helped Jim move into Marta’s orbit. Eva did not understand the chemistry of human relations, that Jim could be shared by two people, much as an electron is shared by two atoms in the formation of a stable molecule. The Table of Clamorous Voices spoke, and it warned, “You have been eclipsed by another. A shadow has fallen upon you and you stand bereft of warmth and sunlight. You will perish without the light that has been taken from you. We can preserve you. You must preserve us.”

It was a plea for survival—and a declaration of war.

___________________________________________

EXTINCTION BURST

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
APRIL, 2030

N
o one doubted Jim Ecco’s sincerity when he promised to control his anger. That was Marta’s condition for marriage and Judge McClincy’s condition for probation. No one was surprised when he announced he’d seek professional help rather than take mood blocks. It was his selection of a dog trainer for a therapist that raised eyebrows.

Prosecutor Sean Doyle took exception. But Jim presented Dr. Elizabeth Luminaria. Her doctorate in behavioral psychology met the letter of the law, no matter that her dissertation dealt with animal behavior. That she was a behaviorist at Haven Memorial Animal Shelter was irrelevant. She fit the law’s requirements. The court had to accept the arrangement.

“I’m not a traditional talk therapist,” she told Jim at his first meeting, one that Marta attended on Dr. Luminaria’s instruction. “Exploring your family history can be helpful, but any discussion of the past will bring you right back to your starting place, the present. You can’t change what went before. You can’t change most of what is around you. You can’t even change what’s inside of you. But you can learn to change your responses to what’s inside you and what’s around you.”

“Oh, great,” complained Jim. “I sort of had the feeling that I can’t change the past, and now you’ve confirmed it for me. Brilliant. Are you going to teach me to change the future?”

Dr. Luminaria’s peered at Jim, as she peered at the entire world around her. She had a perpetual squint, as if trying to see inside the objects of her gaze. Her actions were energetic and precise, without wasted motion. She moved with sharp gestures that reached exactly to whatever object she wished to grasp and no further. She spoke each word fully, never dropping a letter, and yet her speech was neither clipped nor autocratic. Her office had little enough room for a desk and chairs let alone the buckets of hard rubber toys, bundles of leashes, collars, halters, and a small sofa coated with a thick layer of dog hair, which discouraged human occupants. Three walls were hidden behind paper books and photographs of Dr. Luminaria with her various pupils, both two- and four-legged.

“I understand that you are good with dogs,” said Luminaria, as if she did not hear Jim’s complaint.

“That’s maybe the only thing I’m good at.”

“You’re going to be a father, aren’t you?” she asked with a sly smile and a squint.

“Yeah.”

“Well, then you must be good at two things, minimum.”

Jim did a double-take. “What?” he said, not quite believing he’d heard her correctly. Marta suppressed a grin.

“Got your attention now, have I?” Luminaria asked in a sweet voice. Jim nodded, uncertainty showing on his face.

“Good. The court and your wife are both concerned about your behavior, not your inventory of talents. We’re going to use the same techniques with you that you use with dogs.”

The fifty-ish Luminaria was a doctrinaire behaviorist, a four-square adherent of the theories of B. F. Skinner. She held that the mind is a black box, its contents unknowable. Instead, she looked at stimuli in the environment as inputs to the black box. Behavior was the output. Her therapeutic goal and her training goals were identical: to develop a ways identify the stimuli to which a subject responds—the inputs—and to change the reaction to those stimuli, the outputs. Her detractors called her Dr. Black Box, a term she took as a compliment.

“Behaviorism is the perfect metaphor for you to understand your actions, Jim. A stranger on the street, a loud noise, some annoying habit of Marta’s, these are all inputs from the environment. You have no control over the inputs, but you can learn to react differently to the oddly-behaving stranger, to the loud noise, and to your wife’s eccentricities.

“So, what, I just ignore the way I was raised?”

“No, your inputs also include your family history. “You can’t change the past but you can change the way you react today,” she repeated. “Eventually, you’ll be a believer. You’ll trust yourself as much as you trusted your dog.”

They started by comparing canine and human behavior. “Nobody knows what a dog is thinking, or even another person. You know how to observe a dog’s behavior, to see how its actions spring from something in the environment. You’re successful when you work to recondition the dog’s response. You can do the same for yourself.”

“Yeah, right,” Jim said. “Everyone says I have this gift for ‘reading’ people, and look where it’s gotten me.”

“You whine more than a wet puppy. Stop it. You have a wonderful gift. You just use it when it suits you. Worse, you react before you finish observing. Would you serve a cake with uncooked batter?”

“I do just fine with dogs. It’s with people that I get into trouble.”

“Of course it’s easier for you with dogs! Your early experiences with dogs shaped your comfort with them. But you said your father could be violent and that your mom provoked him. That’s the model for human behavior that you formed as a young child. Your model for canine behavior is Ringer. You’re not afraid of an aggressive dog because you’ve never been struck by a dog. So you can respond properly to the dog. But if you believe that a person might be aggressive, then you get into trouble because it evokes the memory of your father’s violence.”

Jim’s head snapped up. He flushed and stood and tried to pace in the cramped office and was about to kick a bucket full of dog toys when Dr. Luminaria spoke with quiet authority.

“Please sit down,” she commanded. “You’re angry, and right now, that’s good. I want you to close your eyes for a moment and take in three deep breaths. You too, Marta. Let them out slowly. No, slowly. That’s it, deep breathing, not panting.” As Jim relaxed, Dr. Luminaria told him to pinch gently on the helix of his left ear. “That fleshy outer ridge is connected to acupressure points that help lower blood pressure. Once you practice this, you can breathe and touch your ear to create instant relaxation.”