My Soul to Keep (27 page)

I settled quickly into a good rhythm and had finished my first mile when a group of college kids started doing cannonballs into one of the lap lanes. The lifeguard blew his whistle and kicked them out. I waved a thanks and was poised to push off the wall when I realized I recognized the face. I knew that kid.

I peeled off my swim cap and dunked my hair in the water, then hiked myself out of the pool, wrapped up in my towel, and walked to the lifeguard stand.

“Gavin,” I said, craning my neck and squinting against the sun.

“Professor Foster!”

He hopped off his chair and was down the ladder in two big steps, standing in front of me, his bare chest tanned and smooth, with big Hawaiian flowers on the swim trunks skimming his knees. His hair—dyed a bright yellow blond but black at the roots—stuck out everywhere. An ankh gleamed on a leather rope around his neck.

“That was you in lane four? You have a pretty stroke.”

I blushed, embarrassed that he’d been watching me. “It may be pretty, but it’s slow. I’m just back in the pool the last week or so. I’ve been out of the water for a while.” I pulled my towel tighter around me. I felt awkward standing in front of a student in my bathing suit, hair dripping. “I didn’t know you were lifeguarding here.”

“Hey, good sun, bikinis …” He grinned and gestured around the pool. “And hardly any little kids to yell at. Easiest summer money there is.”

“You look great,” I said. “How are you? I haven’t seen you since … what, December before last?”

“Yeah, thanks for the C,” he said, laughing. “I bombed the final. Thought I’d flunked the class.”

“I get generous around the holidays. Don’t tell anyone,” I said. “Besides, you’d had a tough semester. I figured you could use the break.”

He nodded. “Yeah, tough semester.” He shifted his feet awkwardly and crossed his arms.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“No, that’s okay. I just don’t like to think about it. I don’t have too many fond memories of the loony bin.”

I smiled at him. “We call it an ‘inpatient psychiatric unit.’ ”

“You can say inpatient whatever. I say loony bin.”

“You’re doing okay, though, huh?”

“Doing great.”

“Are you still in touch with the DeStefanos? Did you know they’re in Guatemala now?”

“I’m housesitting for them.”

“You’re kidding! That’s great. I’m surprised they kept their house. I thought they were gone for good.”

“It’s just until it sells. It’s a slow market, I guess. Or something. I was there all semester.”

I pointed at the necklace. “I’d forgotten you wore an ankh. Was it a gift?”

“My mom gave it to me. The day before she died. For luck.”

“I didn’t know your mom was dead.”

“She died my freshman year of high school.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

There was an awkward silence, which I decided to plug with a little fair-play self-disclosure, just to even things up. “My mom died a few years ago too. Cancer. It was awful. I’m still not over it. It’s hard to watch someone deteriorate like that.”

I watched him consider whether to tell me more about himself. “My mom wasn’t sick. It was kind of sudden.”

“Was it an accident?”

“You could say that.”

I pursed my lips, unsure what to say next.

He saved me the trouble. “She overdosed.” He said it bluntly, without emotion.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I was batting a thousand bringing up awkward subjects.

He shrugged. “She had a lot of problems.”

“It was intentional, then?”

“I think that’s why she gave me the necklace. She knew she was taking off. She said it would keep me safe.”

I felt a surge of adrenaline shoot through my body. “What did she mean by that?”

“She was kind of a nut.” He smiled and glanced away. “Obviously.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Gavin. I didn’t know.”

He shrugged again. “No worries. It was a long time ago.”

I took a breath. “Well, it was good to see you. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon. I’m determined to spend as much time as possible in the pool this summer.” I slapped my thigh. “I turned thirty-five this year. Things are starting to slide south on me.”

He grinned. “You don’t look a day over thirty-four.”

“Thanks. You’re a real pal.”

We said our good-byes, and I walked back to my lane, hopped into the pool, and pushed off the wall, my mind spinning.

Gavin had been a student of mine a couple of years ago. The two of us had wound up in an odd tangle with the dark side after Gavin found himself in Peter Terry’s target zone. He’d almost lost his battle. I’d arranged for him to stay with the DeStefanos—to keep him safe, come to think of it. But he’d tried to hang himself in Tony’s bathroom and done a little time at one of the local psychiatric hospitals.

The DeStefanos are good people, though. They’d apparently stuck with him, and today he looked whole and healthy.

I finished my swim and said good-bye again to Gavin, who promised to keep in touch, then I showered, changed, and walked across campus to Bridwell Library.

The reference librarian pulled some books from the shelves and
then helped me haul a stack of them to the study area, where I settled into my favorite spot. The sun had already started moving across the table as I cracked open the first book.

I had two missions today. The snake, of course. I had to find out about the snake. I pulled Christine’s papers from my bag, unfolded the pages, and smoothed them onto the table.

My second mission was to find out how the ankh fit in. Not that I was certain it did. It’s just that it tended to show up when Peter Terry came around.

On his last visit, ankhs had appeared in the graffiti-like art of a murdered co-ed and in the weird mythology of her nutty psychic mother, Brigid, who had given the girl an ankh on a chain to wear around her neck for protection. I’d also discovered it stamped on the back of a necklace I’d received the day I first met Peter Terry.

And now Gavin was wearing one. An ankh his mother had given him. To keep him safe.

If I remembered correctly, Joe Riley had also worn an ankh on a thin chain underneath his hospital gown that day in the radiology lab. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. But since he’d become the incredible disappearing man, it had taken on an eerie significance.

I’d spent some time studying ankhs last winter. They turned out to be an ancient symbol of protection, of life, and of immortality, and the mark of an apocryphal being named Anael—possibly an angel—whose name I’d never heard before. I’d turned up a little dirt on him, but not much. Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer are the only celestial beings actually named in the Bible. The rest of the angel lore comes from questionable sources, at best. I’d waded through hundreds of years of speculation and pieced together some odd bits of information—just enough to make me wonder if Peter Terry could be Anael in disguise.

The protection thing confused me. Were ankhs good or bad, angelic or demonic? The whole mess was just a jumble of guesses stuck together like a big wad of gum.

As the beam of sunlight made its way across the table, I searched every reference I could find that listed ankhs and snakes in the same
volume. Those wacky Egyptians, not surprisingly, were crazy about both. Many of the pharaohs—who believed, of course, that they themselves were gods—had incorporated the symbol in their names. Steve Martin’s fave,
Tutankh
amen, for instance. Interestingly, the pharaohs often wore crowns with snakes on them—to keep them safe, it turns out. Apparently a snake is an asset when it’s on your side.

I struck out on finding anything resembling the snake with the circle in its mouth. I checked every reference on the table, but by the end of it my stomach was growling and I had the distinct feeling I was running around the wrong tree. I closed up the books, tucked Christine’s art into my purse, and left. I needed food—and some time to practice my greetings before my big meeting with David. He’d be getting no more “Hey, yous” out of me.

I grabbed a sandwich at my favorite sub place across the street from campus. The picnic tables outside were empty, so I sat at one, ate my sandwich and chips, and drank my Dr Pepper, reveling in the heat of a Dallas summer afternoon. Why must buildings in Texas be so cold in the summertime?

While I was at it, I caught up on phone calls and checked in with Liz and Christine. Good news on that front—the fever was gone, and they were discharging her that afternoon. I left a few more groveling messages for Harold, then dug around in my bag for the card with Molly Larken’s number on it. I’d forgotten until now that she’d never returned my call.

I hate it when people subject you to endless rounds of phone tag without coughing up the reason for the call. It reinforces my already-concrete resistance to calling them back. I liked Molly too much to do that to either one of us. I left her the full message—the brief but sordid tale of John Mulvaney’s continuing demise—and suggested she call me back if she wanted to. I figured, she’s an adult. She knows how to use those little numbers on her phone.

I spent the rest of the hour planning my strategy, writing out as many witty greetings as I could think of. It was a slim list, but anything was better than “Hey, you.” At precisely ten minutes to two, I bused my
table, washed my hands, glossed my lips, brushed my hair, and marched myself right over to the Meadows Museum of Art, squaring my shoulders for a meeting I was certain would determine my romantic destiny. My mission, which I had chosen to accept, was to get my boyfriend back.

It was Operation Get That Guy. I was locked and loaded.

A
S
I
WALKED ACROSS
the green, shaded lawn through the center of campus, past the museum’s huge, outdoor, kinetic, wavelike sculpture, up the steps past Claes Oldenburg’s weeping Geometric Mouse and the crouching lumps of bronze that flanked the doors to the museum, I could feel my brain emptying itself of intelligence. One by one, all my cogent thoughts leaked out onto the St. Augustine grass, replaced by dull, cottony space bound by thick, wiry tension. By the time David walked up and hugged me—looking delicious and wearing that blasted Italian cologne—I’d forgotten my entire script. Every single word.

“Hey, you,” he said, grinning wickedly.

I shot him a quick wave.

“Hi … there.”

He stepped back and held up his hands in mock consternation. “ ‘Hi there’? I thought you were going to work something up.”

I moaned. “I choked again. It’s so humiliating. Wait a minute.” I held up a finger and fished in my bag for the notes I’d made during lunch, then unfolded the paper and cleared my throat. “Okay. Here’s what I came up with. I’ve got, ‘Hey, sweet man.’ ‘Hey, handsome.’ ‘Hey, good-looking’—obviously without the ‘whatcha got cooking’ part. ‘Hey, former sugar pie’ …”

“ ‘Former’? How did that happen? Once a sugar pie, always a sugar pie. I thought that was the rule. I mean, absent the commission of some crime against humanity.”

“Unfortunately, you forfeited your sugar-pie status when you resigned from being
my
sugar pie.”

“Gyp!”

“I’d like to remind you that this was your choice, Mr. Shykovsky. You’re, of course, still a sugar pie, generically speaking, but you’ll not get a ‘sugar pie’ out of me until you reapply. Of course, that involves a committee interview, references …”

He pursed his lips, holding back a grin. “Fair enough. What else have you got?”

“That’s pretty much it. Variations of
hey, hi
, and
hello
. The allpurpose, generic ‘How’s it going?’ It’s a sad list, really. Representing an embarrassing lack of creativity.”

“Yet an admirable attempt to manage the nickname thing. Let’s call it a victory. Did you get the tickets?”

I waved them at him. “Two tickets to the Caravaggio exhibit.” I checked the museum poster beside the information desk. “It’s up on the second floor, I think.”

“Who’s Caravaggio?” David asked.

“Some Italian. Let’s walk.”

We handed over our tickets and climbed the stairs toward the buttery daylight filtering in from above. We passed a sculpture of three naked women.

“Someone should put clothes on them,” David said.

“The fraternities usually do. At least once a year they all end up wearing nightgowns or bras or something.”

We paused to study a painting here and there, walking awkwardly side by side. It was as if neither of us knew what to say or what to do with our arms. Normally, of course, we’d have been holding hands, laughing at the naked paintings, cracking jokes, people-watching.

I pointed at the gallery across the hall. “That’s the permanent collection over there. Spanish art. It’s, like, a specialty. We’ll do those next. Just to expand your small-town mind.”

He winced. “Will it hurt?”

“Hopefully.”

“I thought all the big bananas were Italian.”

“They are—except the ones who are Dutch, French, English, Spanish …”

“Funny. You’re very funny. If SMU is into Spanish, why are they renting space to the Italian guy?”

“Maybe he’s got an uncle in the mob or something. His uncle Vito got him a showing.”