Waking Lazarus (13 page)

Uh-ohs. That was what she called them: valuable items sold for a pittance by hapless schleps who didn’t know better. His mother could smell amateurs immediately, always using them to her advantage.

His mother’s greatest uh-oh had been a vase of some kind—what was it?—Rosewood. Roseville. A Roseville vase worth about $750. She knew the vase and its approximate value instantly, but she didn’t pay $750. Instead she got it for two bucks. Two bucks. She’d even haggled with the seller on the price; he wanted three, she offered two, and the guy took it.

When they got to the car and his mom explained how much the vase was worth, Jude asked why she had bargained on the price. If she knew it was worth $750, why couldn’t she pay three dollars for it? ‘‘Because,’’ she had answered, ‘‘that’s what garage-saling is all about. You dicker. If you don’t dicker, the seller is insulted.’’

Jude doubted most people would be insulted by such practices, but he didn’t argue.

Back in the present, he shook his head.

Funny he should remember that bit about his mom. Recently, long-dormant images of her had begun to flicker again—oddly enough, around the same time the headaches worsened. The memories were there, like echoes left on his pupils by a bright flashbulb. When he tried to look at them, they swam out of his vision; but if he didn’t concentrate on them, they popped into his mind, formed, and became solid again. His haunted past.

‘‘Okay, I’m ready.’’ Rachel stood at the living room’s doorway, dressed in pastel pink with a scarf around her throat. He hadn’t looked at her—really looked—for years, and he caught his breath. She was beautiful. Too beautiful for a paranoid janitor with past lives to hide. He lowered his gaze, staring instead at a dish on the coffee table. Maybe it was even a Roseville dish.

Rachel sat on the sofa and paused. ‘‘Soooo . . .’’ she said, coaxing him to talk.

He smiled. ‘‘Yeah, I know. I’m not really sure why I’m here. But something odd has been happening—’’

‘‘Odd?’’

He saw concern spreading across her face, and she was biting her lip. Of course she would be concerned. She knew he had always been a little . . . unbalanced. And to hear him talking about something odd was probably, well, alarming. He needed to be more specific.

‘‘I was at the Red Lodge Cafe a few days ago, and I felt . . . I don’t know, something about the waitress.’’

She stiffened. ‘‘You came to tell me you have the hots for some waitress?’’

He laughed, actually laughed, for the first time in what felt like eons. ‘‘No, no. Nothing like that. I mean, it was the same kind of thing as the guy getting hit by a car. Which you don’t know anything about, but—’’

‘‘I heard about it.’’

He stopped and narrowed his eyes. ‘‘You heard? Was someone . . .following me?’’

Rachel suppressed a laugh of her own. ‘‘Nicole—Bradley’s mom— said she saw you doing CPR.’’

‘‘Well, it wasn’t really CPR. It was . . . I don’t know. I tasted metal in my mouth, you know? And I knew I was supposed to talk to him, tell him something. Then, afterward, the same thing with the waitress.’’ He stopped, knowing he was sounding worse than ever.

‘‘You know,’’ he finally said, ‘‘maybe I will have that coffee after all. This is gonna take a while.’’

When he finished talking, his coffee was long gone and his tongue dry. He had started speaking, hesitant and nervous, but then had caught a wave and held onto it, riding it out as he told Rachel all about the events of the last two days. Most of the events, anyway. He left out the parts about Kristina and his previous life. Those stories weren’t ready to be told.
Keep it secret, keep it safe
.

Jude had been half afraid she would laugh, roll her eyes, or maybe just lean back into her couch and cross her arms. He had been up close and personal with his good friend paranoia for some time; Rachel might easily see all this as some outgrowth of his delusion and suggest he spend a time in a relaxing ‘‘facility’’ filled with ‘‘people who could help.’’ In reversed roles, he guessed that was essentially what he
L
AZARUS
would have done. He himself wasn’t fully convinced of it; the visions and blackouts constantly nagged at him, making him feel he was experiencing things that weren’t real. Or maybe even forgetting things that were.

But Rachel didn’t do any of that. She listened. She asked questions. She stopped him a couple of times and made him back up or fill in some blank spaces he’d left out.

When he finished, she sat in silence for a few minutes before speaking. ‘‘So what you’re saying is,’’ she began, ‘‘you’re hearing voices that tell you things about other people.’’

He felt his face flush. He had read all the signs wrong. She
did
think he’d jumped headfirst into Mentalville. ‘‘No,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s not like I’m crazy or anything.’’ He saw the look on her face and stopped. ‘‘Okay, a little crazy. Paranoid. I’ll give you that. But I’m not totally nuts. They’re not voices or anything; they’re like . . .’’ He cringed. ‘‘They’re like revelations.’’

‘‘Calm down, Ron,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m not saying you’re any more crazy than usual. I just wanted to see how you felt about it.’’

‘‘What do you mean?’’

She shrugged. ‘‘I guess I feel like if you can admit that it
sounds
crazy, you probably aren’t. I mean, if you were really in serious trouble mentally, I think you’d be totally out of touch with reality.’’

Jude nodded. ‘‘Sounds good to me.’’ Still, he faltered a bit. He remembered, not so long ago, thinking people who became paranoid wouldn’t realize it was happening. Yet, he
knew
about his paranoia, felt it brewing within him all the time. What was to stop him from heading on down to that next exit labeled
delusional psychotic
?

‘‘I’ve been thinking about a few things,’’ she said. She stopped and bit at her lip for a few seconds. ‘‘You said you tasted copper.’’

‘‘Yeah.’’

‘‘Are you sure it was copper?’’

‘‘Well, I’m not saying it was actual copper or anything. Just the taste.’’

‘‘A lot of people say blood tastes like copper.’’

He studied her face for a moment. ‘‘I’m not sure that makes me feel any better,’’ he said.

‘‘Didn’t say it to make you feel better. I said it because I think you may be tasting blood.’’

‘‘Why blood? What does it mean?’’

‘‘I don’t know. What does copper mean? Blood just seems more sensible. Maybe you’re biting your tongue without knowing about it. Don’t take this wrong, but your talking about odd tastes, and odd images . . . sounds a bit like seizures.’’

‘‘Seizures?’’

‘‘Maybe. I’m not saying that’s the case at all. I just think, maybe, you should go to a doctor.’’ She paused, and Jude could tell she was considering her next words carefully. ‘‘I’ll . . . pray for you.’’

Praying. God. Yes, that had been part of it; he had waxed eloquent about God to the waitress, despite the fact that he and God weren’t exactly on speaking terms. In some strange way he could sense it was because the waitress herself was struggling with her belief in a god.

‘‘You believe in God,’’ he said, more a question than a statement.

He saw a new fire dance in her eyes. ‘‘Yes,’’ she said.

He nodded, sensing she wanted him to keep going. But he’d already spoken more in one day than he had in years; his nerves felt raw and frayed, overexposed. God was the last thing he wanted to talk about, because his mother was the last thing he wanted to think about.

Instead he turned his focus inside. Was he, as Kristina hinted, something more? Or was he simply something much less? Maybe he
was
having seizures, doing things he couldn’t remember. It seemed possible, even probable, considering how the memories of his past were all so neatly buried.

‘‘So what are you gonna do now?’’ Rachel asked.

‘‘Well, I took the day off. I’m going to . . . see my father.’’

She paused again before answering. ‘‘I didn’t know you still had a dad,’’ she said.

‘‘A lot of things you don’t know about me.’’ He huffed to himself, then added, ‘‘A lot of things
I
don’t know about me.’’

‘‘Where is he?’’

‘‘Billings.’’

She nodded. ‘‘How long?’’

‘‘Actually, I came to Montana when he moved to the retirement home. Until then he’d spent his whole life in a small town in Nebraska. Place called Bingham. That was right after . . .’’ He paused, catching the thought he wanted to say:
Right after God killed my
mother
. ‘‘Right after my mother died,’’ he finished instead.

‘‘So you moved to Montana to be close to your dad, but you’ve never gone to see him.’’

She stopped there, obviously wanting to let the thought sink in. Yes, he knew that. Yes, it was true. But so what? She didn’t know his dad, what had happened between them. He blinked a few times, realizing
he
couldn’t think of a lot of things that had happened between them. Most memories of his father were vague or absent. Over the past few days memories of his young childhood had been sparking in his mind here and there, like stars winking on at nightfall. But other than the kite thing, they were all memories of his mother.

‘‘Why now?’’ she pressed.

Good question. He hadn’t talked to his father in years. Hadn’t thought about him in almost as long. They were in separate galaxies, with a wide gulf between them. In his mind’s eye his mother’s face was a bright, golden-hued, soft focus picture. His father’s face, on the other hand, was a blank. There was a feeling of love there, somewhere. But also fear, fueled by a vaporous sense of . . . bad things. He didn’t know what or why, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

So why did he feel he needed to see his dad? His mother was dead, for one. She’d passed away several years ago. But there was more to it than that. He also wanted some answers, some gaps in his memory filled. He could now recall more details about his own deaths, and even mundane facts such as his favorite ice cream—mint chocolate chip—and that Kim Oakley lived on Walnut Street back in Bingham. But other chunks, bigger chunks, were still missing. He’d read once that David Bowie couldn’t remember one whole year of his life. Jude felt the same. True, he’d tried his best to forget much of it, but it was coming back in snippets. And with each flash of a memory, a growing part of him was hungry to find out more, remember new things.

Jude realized he hadn’t answered Rachel’s question. ‘‘I don’t know why I’m going now,’’ he said. ‘‘I just feel like I need to.’’

She nodded, waited for him to talk more. He looked down at her couch and watched the sunlight streaming in through the window, lighting the dust particles in the air. He put his hand in the midst of the sunbeam, splaying his fingers.

‘‘You ever notice about the air?’’ Jude asked. ‘‘How it has all these particles in it—the dust, you know—but you can’t see the dust unless it’s in the bright light?’’

She nodded. ‘‘Reminds me of a song I sang when I was a girl.’’

‘‘ ‘Dust in the Wind’?’’

‘‘ ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.’ ’’

17

SHARPENING

Frank crumpled the newspaper in disgust and pushed it off the table. He’d only been able to complete eight or nine words on today’s puzzle, his worst day of the week so far. Number twenty-nine across: capital of South Carolina. Who cares? He’d never been to South Carolina, and he never planned to go. Why did these crossword people feel South Carolina was so special?

Forget it,
he told himself as he turned to the
People
magazine on the table. The cover image was of a young actress who had risen to fame doing family-friendly films in her teens but was now raising some eyebrows by playing a prostitute in her latest role. Frank picked up his coffee and sipped it as he stared at the cover. Yeah, there was something comforting, something soothing, about
People
magazine. Especially after a skull-breaker of a puzzle.

He heard a clank outside the break room and paused, the coffee cup halfway to his lips for another drink. He listened, letting the cup sink back to the table. Cocked his head to the side to get a different angle. Nothing else. He shivered a bit, then shook his head and took another drink. Coffee time was a bit quiet without Ron around; guy hadn’t missed a day the last two years, and now he’d just decided to take some time off out of the blue. Good for him. Still, Frank hadn’t been alone in the break room for quite a while, and it was giving him both the heebies and the jeebies.

He turned his attention back to the cover of
People
, looking at the actress’s seductive gaze. How unfortunate she’d decided to sell herself out. She’d been such an adorable little girl, on screen since about age ten, and he’d always liked the innocence he’d seen in her eyes. She’d even kept that virtue through the bad years, the middle school and high school years when kids became uppity and decided they really weren’t kids anymore.

When they lost the magic.

Yeah, this actress had kept it longer than most, but it was painfully obvious she’d lost the magic now. He drained the last of his coffee, brushed a few grounds off his tongue, and decided he didn’t want to look at
People
after all. The photo of the actress was wrong, and it ruined the experience.

He thought, instead, of the actress’s eyes—of her eyes as a young girl. Sparkling, they were. And that, in turn, made him think of his True Work. After all, it was all about capturing the magic of childhood, wasn’t it? Of preserving that sparkle he so much liked to see in their eyes?

He looked at the clock on the wall and rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth, considering. Maybe he could take a little time off himself. Spend a little time in his basement. Matter of fact, he needed to sharpen some of his tools, didn’t he? They were dulling, he could tell that just last night when he’d been working with them. They needed honing, a little time on the grinder and the strap.

He licked his lips, excited by the thoughts forming in his head. He rose, a smile spreading across his face as he went to put away all the supplies and lock up.

Certainly it was too late to save the magic in the young actress’s eyes. But there were other kids, so many other kids still out there— kids with magical eyes that begged to see. He could show them, couldn’t he?