The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (38 page)

One by one, then, she allowed each of them to return: her parents, her friends, her colleagues, her acquaintances. She saw them all, without their masks, at last. Felt their hopes and consolations, their compulsions and rationalizations. Knew their fears, as real as she recognized the wrinkles that shaped their expressions. Accepted them all. One by one. And then, when the sense memory of her retina found courage to recapture another face, he appeared before her, too. Stood in front of her bed as though he was in the room with her, and she had only to open her eyes to see him.

“David,”
she said, feeling the tremulous smile that shaped her lips.

Smiling back at her gently in reply, David simply pointed toward the calendar on the wall. Pointed with casual significance, as if about to share another part of the secret he kept. Only she knew there was no secret, anymore.
 
There had never been a secret.

She did not need to strain against her bonds to see, this time. Although he had once attempted to reach past the manipulations and abstractions roiling in her mind, David seemed to know that this time was different, too. That no exertion needed to be made. No effort required to reach her. So, with just one revelation left, he pointed his finger toward the answer that could end the story for her, without dramatics, without suffering, and without resistance.
 

And she looked where he pointed.

The day was today. That was the key. Incredibly, it was also the same profound and simple truth that he had first shared with her in conversation at the park. The one befitting precept that, being blind, she had been unable to grasp. The answer that she knew was real, but which her mind had since resisted. The truth that could set her free:
 

That she was alive,
right now.
 

That today was the day.
Today
, the only day.
 

The only day that mattered.

Even as his form gently dissolved back into silhouette, she felt David's presence as real as if she'd never left him that day. As real as sunshine was reflected as moonlight. His lips did not even need to move for her to hear, just as he was heard by others he had met, one by one, in the park. . .

It is the way of the ego to attempt possession of what it can never truly own. It is never happy, never at peace, and can never accept anything or anyone for what or who they are. It lives in this space and time as a controller, a warrior, a schemer, a killer, a blind despoiler of what it cannot understand. What does it know, instead? The price of everything and the value of nothing. Pain and fear. Regret and loss. Aggression and hate. Past and future. If you want to be free of its control, simply observe it, reveal it, and accept it. Do not resist, and you will live. Surrender your illusion of time, and you will open your heart to joy. Give up owning anything, and you will gain everything. Do it now.

When she finally opened her eyes again, her cheeks were wet. She saw that a nurse had appeared at her door, in David's place. Behind the dark-haired woman, in the hallway, stood Detective Trent. They both entered, then, and a moment later her boss, Greg Lomax, arrived. Greg looked on in astonishment as the nurse loosened her cuffs, and then examined her. He started to question the detective, but turned to Val instead.
 

“Are you okay, Valerie?” Greg wondered, seeing the tears that she made no attempt to disguise.
 

“I'm. . .alive,” Val told him.
 

Greg seemed relieved by her smile, she could tell. Seeing that it was the kind of smile which must have lit the space between them. A smile she'd saved for the future, like everything else, but which she now spent at last, only to find more in its place.

“I'm glad to hear that,” Greg admitted, although his expression projected curiosity as well.
 

He stood two steps away, looking down at her. She looked up into that familiar face, too, and saw the wrinkles there, the few whiskers that his electric shaver had missed. The red spot on his neck, his new teeth, his chapped lips.

“No, Greg,” she assured him. “You don't understand. It was an accident, what happened. If you believe in accidents. But I'm alive, now.” She smiled again, wanting to convey more of what she felt. “I'm really alive.”

“So . . . someone told you, then?” Trent inquired, not without surprise.

“Told me?” she said, turning to look at the detective.

“Yes. That David might be alive too.”

“
Leiter
wasn't shot or stabbed,” Trent explained to Greg, once the nurse had left the room, “he was struck on the head and then dumped in the desert, likely just unconscious. The man who did it is a drug addict named Morales. There's evidence at the site, but no body or sign of burial. So either David walked away on his own, as Morales insists, or someone else found him.” Trent traversed the hospital room to look out the window. He nodded toward the horizon. “It wasn't far from here, actually. The spot where it happened. Out that way it's mostly desert, and Mexico is beyond. That's where Morales was caught, trying to get
Leiter's
Jaguar out of the country.”

“Does this Morales admit to the kidnapping too?” Greg asked.

“Not yet, but he will soon.
 
No choice there.” Trent paused, glancing at Valerie, who returned to the bathroom to finish dressing. “I have to say, I do believe he was deeply affected by whatever David said, and only hit him when his back was turned, out of impulse or fear. Spooked by the publicity too, perhaps, but more likely David talked him out of it, from what I can tell.”

Greg nodded, thoughtfully. “So they didn't pay the ransom, after all.”

“The Melendez family? Didn't have to. The van was found at the park, abandoned. When the suspect's apartment in South Tucson was searched, they also found a watch and a camera inscribed "D.S..”
 
Plus some other stolen goods, including half a pound of marijuana and traces of meth. He has a dog, too.
 
Hadn't been fed in a while.”

“Picasso?” Val asked, from the bathroom.

“What? Who did you say?”

“His dog. Was it a Shepherd mix with blotches like patterns?”

“No,” Trent replied, “I think it was a pit bull.”

Greg shook his head in confusion.
 
“So what now?”
 

“We find David, if he's alive,” declared the detective.

“But he is alive,” Val informed them, reemerging from the bathroom.

The two men exchanged glances with each other.
 
“How do you know that?” Greg asked.
 
 

Val pointed toward what hung on the wall. “Because he was standing right over there, as real as you are, pointing at that calendar with the mountain and the. . .”
 
She squinted at the photo in unexpected puzzlement.

“What is it?” said Trent.

“Nothing.
 
It's just. . .I mean. . .”

“What?”

“Something is different.” Val moved closer to study the image for a moment before she realized what the difference was. “It's the picture.
 
I'm certain that there were no ice floes beneath the mountain like those. So it must have been a different mountain.”

“What does that matter?”

She lifted one hand toward the image, then touched the shiny surface of the calendar with one finger. “A different mountain,” she repeated, in fascination.
 

She turned up a page of the calendar to reveal a field of yellow wildflowers in a green meadow, which indicated the next month. Then she let the page drop, and reached up to the holder that secured the pages.
 
Finally, she unhooked the previous month just passed, to let it drop down over the new and current month.
 

She stared in wonder at the result.
 

It was the mountain she'd seen in her waking vision. The mountain toward which David had pointed: A tall, rocky Alaskan peak girdled by clouds, fringed by snow. No dark headland or reflecting glacier at all.
 
It was exactly as she'd seen it, she was more than certain.
 

Not only a revelation, then, but a premonition.

“David's here now,” she announced with conviction.

“Huh?” Greg smiled nervously.

“What?”
said Trent.

“He's here,” Val concluded, her tone calm and assured, “in Kino Hospital.
 
In another room, just like this one.”

~ * ~

Nurse
Hagner
demurred, but when Trent insisted, she scanned the patient roster with an impatient and dubious circumspection. “There's no David
Leiter
listed,” the stolid woman concluded with brusque dismissal, and then lifted her clipboard to fan her weary face with the evidence.
 

“Okay, then. . .thanks anyway,” Greg said. He nodding meekly, and finally sighed as though consoled. Trent just stood there, eyebrows furrowed, blinking at the floor. Thinking. A moment later a file folder was produced, and all parties were urged to sign the release form, as a matter formality and procedure. But when the pen was thrust at Val, she refused to take it.

“What's wrong?” Greg asked, and patted her shoulder gently, “don't you want to get out of here, Valerie?”

“Not yet.” Val looked at Nurse
Hagner
with an effortless, candid defiance.
 
“I‘ve been sleepwalking most of my life, ma'am,” she said, evenly, “but I'm awake now.”

Nurse
Hagner
chuckled in disconcertion, but despite herself could not hold Val's steady gaze for long. “What on earth does that--”

Val took Greg's hand gently, and then turned, leaving Trent behind. With Greg in tow, she began to walk down the hallway, methodically pushing open doors as she went. Checking each room.

“Hey!” Nurse
Hagner
called after them. “What do you think you're doing?”

Val didn't answer. Nor did Greg resist, although he hesitated when
Hagner
started to follow. But then the phone rang at the nurse's station, and a buzzer sounded. Conflicted,
Hagner
picked up the phone, put her hand over it for a moment, and then called for an orderly to intercept them, instead.
 

~ * ~

The orderly who blocked the tenth door they came to was a big young man, resembling a college linebacker. When Val looked up into his face, though, she saw no sleepwalker looking back. Despite his age, this young man had learned kindness, had seen pain, but had not disassociated himself in defense from it. As such, he worked in the right place and at the right time. So when she gave him a description of David, his intuitive empathy produced a different effect than if he had been deadened by robotic duty.

“We do have a John Doe, admitted just the other day,” the young man said.
 
“Not sure that he fits your description, though."

He led them down a stairwell to the basement, where at last they came to another door. Not a door to a regular patient room, this one, but to a storage room. Val did not hesitate when the orderly pushed open the door, although she did when she glimpsed the form of a man on the bed in the corner. The room itself was dimly lit by an exposed ceiling bulb, and possessed no windows. Along one wall were metal racks containing banded paper napkins, toilet rolls, heaps of soiled towels, linens, bed pans, tubes of paper cups wrapped in plastic, and dozens of sealed brown boxes. Three empty bunk beds lined the opposite side of the room, but the only one that was occupied stood on rollers, and had several cables protruding from behind it into a mobile monitoring device which stood next to an I.V. stand, also on wheels.
  

On the wall, though, was a calendar.

At seeing it, Val pulled Greg into the room behind her, and let go of his hand. They both stared, now, at the clean shaven man hooked to a monitor.
 
The man's head was thickly bandaged, but his eyes were partly open. His body lay straight and limp, as though positioned there. The metal sides of his mobile bed were lifted to prevent accident. If there was such a thing.
 

“He's. . .” she began.

“In a coma,” the orderly confirmed. “Ever since he was brought in by the trucker who found him.”

“Is it David?” Greg wanted to know, touching her shoulder.

Val did not answer. Instead, she went to the man's side, and looked down into his face, illuminated by the stark light above them. She saw that his eyes, barely open, did seem clouded, just like a man's who had been looking into the sun too long. Perhaps even a man who had once given up on life, and then sat quietly in his back yard to gaze up into the brilliant, blinding radiance of a fiery orb that dwarfed the earth and everything on it, including himself. She imagined this man, with nothing left to lose, gazing up fiercely for some kind of answer to what he'd imagined to be oppressive and cruel, or--worse--eternal and heedless.
 
Then, only when he'd surrendered to the pain, had the answer come, in the silence, in the darkness, in the redemption of freedom from illusion.