John had intended to leave for Pennsylvania soon after he woke up, but he found that there were a couple of things he still needed to do before he could go. One of those was to see Dr. Barnes for a final check-up, and he hadn’t been able to get an appointment until five that evening. The other was more personal in nature. Pennsylvania—and Connie—would have to wait until tomorrow.
Finding out where Doug and Mary Ann Shaw lived was easy. Too easy, John thought. Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult or even impossible to find out the kind of information you could uncover on the internet in just a couple of minutes. In this case, it was just a matter of surfing over to WhitePages.com, typing in their last name, reading down the list, and selecting an address.
Fifteen minutes later, he was sitting in his idling car, drinking a cup of Starbucks coffee as Mary Ann left the house, got into her car and headed off to work.
* * *
Mary Ann Shaw was younger than John had thought she’d be. From the voice on the phone, he had pictured someone middle-aged, old even, and for some reason, overweight. Someone who had nothing better to do than pay uninvited visits to the homes of people she didn’t know. But she was none of those things. This woman was around John’s age, dark-featured, pretty in a solid, unremarkable kind of way. She wore jeans and a white tee-shirt and seemed to favor everyone who spoke to her with a genuine smile.
It also came as a shock to him that she was a teacher, or at least an assistant to one. What he was feeling wasn’t what he had expected to feel, or what he’d wanted to feel. Instead of the pent-up anger John had been preparing to release on this woman, he felt nothing but curious. Here, after all, was the only person in this whole crazy situation who seemed to be offering him something instead of asking for something. Whether that offer contained anything of worth was open to speculation, of course, but John found that he was growing more and more curious about what she might have to say.
Sitting in his car, John watched as she pushed a second-grader on a swing in the playground of the J. Murray Alfred Elementary School, which wasn’t far from John’s own school, Denton Academy, maybe two or three miles down the road.
All this time, they’d been this close.
Another child approached Shaw and tugged on her hand, said something John couldn’t hear from his spot under an elm tree a block away. She smiled and ruffled his hair, then pointed back at the school building and the child ran off.
John started his car and made his way slowly down the road. As he passed the playground, he glanced over at Shaw, who was pushing the kid on the swing again. She was laughing and smiling.
Not what he’d expected at all. This wasn’t his week for fulfilled expectations.
* * *
He pulled into the parking lot of a shopping complex and left his car, then walked over to a bar called the Wine Vault and took a seat outside. It was a nice day, and he ordered a beer and drank it while he thought.
When he was certain, he went inside and made a phone call.
* * *
There was a park not too far from John’s apartment, and at three o’clock he arrived and sat down on a bench underneath a big elm. Mary Ann Shaw pulled into the parking lot at around three-twenty and made her way over to him.
John watched her as she walked, a smooth, self-assured motion that John couldn’t help but find attractive. She was wearing what she’d had on at school, jeans and a tee-shirt, but over that she wore a light, lavender cardigan with the sleeves pushed up on her forearms. Her skin was olive-tinted and her hair jet black, but John couldn’t quite place her extraction. Somewhere on the Mediterranean, he thought. Spain or Greece, maybe. He knew from their phone exchange that her voice contained just the barest hint of an accent, the kind one might pick up from a parent, but not long-term immersion.
He didn’t stand or say hello as she approached, but she didn’t seem bothered, just sat down beside him and stared straight ahead. There was a long silence.
Finally, she said, “You were at my school today.”
That caught John off guard. “Yes,” he said.
She nodded. “I saw your car down the road. It was either you or a pervert watching the kids—we get those sometimes. I was hoping for you.”
Another silence.
“Do you want to hear what I have to say now?”
It wasn’t why he’d asked her to meet him here. Really, his only reason had been to intimidate her, to let her know that he was onto her, knew where she worked, where she lived. But there was a normalcy to Shaw, a solidity, that was making John doubt himself. This didn’t look like a woman who would spend her time looking for people to persecute. She didn’t sound like a crackpot or a psycho. She just seemed…like a nice person. All of the anger John had been storing up inside of his head and heart was suddenly gone. The only thing left was a numbing fatigue, defeat.
“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you have to say, please say it.”
* * *
“Some of this is going to be impossible for you to understand,” Shaw started. “Just let me finish. I don’t expect you to believe it now, but you will in time. You won’t have a choice. Things are starting to happen now.” Her confidence lent her an air of authority, and John felt himself wanting to believe whatever she was going to say. He had started to sweat lightly and realized that he was nervous.
Shaw took a breath and looked down at the ground, as if organizing her thoughts, then began.
“You are a very special person, John. You’re blessed with an ability to heal just by touching, a gift that can be traced back as far as Jesus Christ himself.”
John started to raise a hand and object, but Shaw continued. “Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a lecture on Christianity, but it is important that you understand that your ability has roots beyond just yourself. Where does this gift come from? I don’t have an answer for that. Some people would say from God, but I don’t claim to be any great authority on religion. Why you? Again, I don’t know. But I do know that once a generation, a child is born with the ability to heal. From time to time, there is born into this world a soul so white, so purely good, that its bearer can even take back death, though the sacrifice that soul makes when it performs such an act is…ultimate.”
John waved her off and leaned back tiredly. Anger flashed in Shaw’s eyes, and when she resumed, her voice was tight with impatience.
“The flip side of the coin is that, in nature, one extreme demands a diametric opposite. You are a healer, a life-giver, but you are only one side of the equation. On the other there is a—”
“A what?” John said and shook his head. “A life taker?”
“Yes,” she said. “A person driven to take life in order to survive. Like you, this person doesn’t understand what they’re doing or why they’re doing it; they just feel compelled to kill, to murder, to feed off the act of taking life. And as with you, this is a compulsion that has gradually grown in strength over the years. It may have started off small, with stray animals, but as she grew older…it wouldn’t take long before the urge to take a human life would be too much to resist.”
Shaw sat impassively, apparently waiting for John to laugh or walk off.
But John had been thinking. “If what you say is true, and I’m the exact opposite this…this life-taker, if I’m a healer, wouldn’t that mean that I would need to heal in order to remain alive? Wouldn’t I be compelled, to use your own word, to heal whenever opportunity presents itself?”
Surprised by John’s earnest-sounding question, Shaw answered in kind. “It’s a different kind of situation, but you’re right. Think about this for a second. When you saw that girl lying in the street in front of your school, what was your thought-process? Did you panic, like the rest of them must have been doing? Did you run to the toilet to throw up, or just let someone else deal with it—pass the buck, so to speak? Most people would have. It certainly would have crossed my mind to shuck and run.”
She paused, and John rewound to that after
noon, put himself on the street, saw the kids, blank-faced, shocked, remembered thinking about that painting by Picasso, the one with the death-mask, and then, seeing Kyra…
And what after that?
A remembered calm washed over him, a sense of peace.
He saw himself kneeling down next to the girl and reaching out, then pausing, hand in midair—
Careful, Johnny.
A whisper from the past. Then taking Kyra’s hand, that same calm like a cool, silky breeze.
“Do you remember?” Shaw said softly, snapping John from the memory.
John nodded, his mouth dry, each shallow breath clicking in his throat.
“What do you remember?”
“Peace,” he said, “calm. I remember knowing that everything was going to be just fine. My mind was telling me that she was going to die, that she probably couldn’t even feel me holding her hand, but still, I knew…I knew that she was going to be okay.”
“Did you ever, for one second, think about leaving her there?”
John shook his head and looked up at her, feeling suddenly cold.
“That’s because leaving her was never an option. No more than it would be an option for your opposite to stop taking lives. When that poor girl was struck by that car, you saw that a life was in danger of guttering out, so you re-lit the wick. It’s what you are, whether you want it or not.”
Despite an overwhelming desire to refute what Shaw had told him, John found himself recognizing himself in her words. He searched desperately for a loophole, some kind of caveat in the story she’d laid out. He could find only one, and voiced it. “But this is the first time anything like this has ever happened,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like I did that day, and I’ve certainly never healed anyone before. If I have this need to heal in order to survive, then how can you explain that?”
Shaw laughed, a light, musical sound. She wasn’t laughing at him, John knew, and her laughter didn’t cause in him the sort of defensive anger it might have just moments ago. Instead, he just felt tired.
As John watched, Shaw leaned over her knees and plucked a dandelion from the grass, raised it to her nose, smelled it. “John,” she said after a moment, “do you get sick a lot? I mean, more than you think is normal?”
“Yes,” John said. “Never anything too bad, but sometimes I feel like I’m sick—run down—for months at a time.”
“Is it especially bad during the school year?”
“I guess, but that’s true for all teachers. Kids are basically just incubators for every type of virus in the world. It’s impossible not to bring that crap home once in a while.”
“Maybe a little worse for you?”
He thought about it. How many days of school had he missed this last year? Twelve? Fifteen? He routinely went over the maximum number of absences allowed for a teacher, but he was so good at his job otherwise that the administration never gave him grief about it.
“Sure, I miss a little school,” John said. “But I don’t think it’s—” John stopped, realizing what she was getting at. “Oh Jesus, you can’t be serious.”
She shrugged, hands to the sky. “I didn’t say anything. But doesn’t it make sense? If you went to school tomorrow and checked student attendance records for the past several years, I bet you’d find that there have been far fewer absences at Denton than at any other school in the area.”
“This is nuts,” John whispered. “I told you, I never felt anything like I did that day with Kyra. I never felt like anything…significant was about to happen, nothing big.”
“Not at the same level, maybe,” she responded. “But then, curing a cold and healing a girl on the doorstep of death are slightly different animals, wouldn’t you agree?”
John put a hand over his face. “Insane,” he whispered.
“Fine, maybe, but tell me this: do you feel content at school, at peace with yourself, like you’re doing what you’re meant to do?”
“Sure, but I’ve always loved teaching. It’s all I really thought about doing, ever since I was a kid.”
“Did you ever wonder why? Ever wonder why you wanted so singularly to surround yourself with young people each and every day?”
John just shook his head tiredly. No, he had never wondered, but seeing it now, placed so unavoidably out in front of him, it was all too easy to trace every major choice he’d made over the course of his life to this one seminal fact. Of course, the thought entered his mind that his still-exhausted brain—hell, his injured brain—might be searching for sense, creating sense, in a place where none existed.
When you got right down to brass tacks, John was exhausted. More than that, he was fed up with not understanding his place, where he fit, and all the recent drama had brought the fear and confusion he’d been feeling since he was a child to a roiling boil. It was entirely possible that Shaw’s comfortable demeanor and calmness was causing him to hear her words with more credence than he might listen to words from another, more agitated mind. The most convincing lunatics were always the ones who could put their crazy ideas out there as if they were the most rational things in the world.
But he didn’t think that’s all it was. He didn’t think so at all. “How do you know all of this?” John asked.
Shaw blew out forcefully and thought for a moment. “When I was eight years-old, my cat was run over in the street outside my house. We lived in Pennsylvania, out in the country. By the time we found him—his name was Charlie—he was almost dead. Stupid asshole who hit him never even stopped. I don’t know what people think sometimes.”
John had felt chilled before, but now an icy fear twisted in his guts. A brief but powerful wave of bright static washed over his vision. “Oh, God,” he whispered.
Shaw continued. “There was a little boy who lived across the street. I used to play with him sometimes. He was over at our house when we found Charlie. He was my age, and I was crying my eyes out, but the little boy, he didn’t cry at all, even though Charlie was bloody and had a broken back. He just knelt down in the grass next to my cat and—”
“Your mom said, ‘Careful, Johnny.’” John looked at her for confirmation, though he didn’t really need any.
Shaw nodded. “And then you put your hands on Charlie and he got better. That cat lived another ten years, and only died the year after I left for college.”
“Oh, man,” John muttered, covering his face with his hands. His brain was raw, like someone had put a cigar out in it. “Oh, man.”
“After that,” she said, looking off into the park, “I couldn’t get it out of my mind. My mom, either. When we moved away, she used to look in the papers to see if there was any mention of you. She did that for years. Before long, I started doing it, too. It was just always, you know, in the back of my mind, what you did to my cat. When I was a little older, I went to the library and did some reading on the subject of healing. Most of the stuff was religious, faith healers and such. But some of it made sense. I even wrote a paper on it when I was in college.” She laughed humorlessly. “Sounds obsessive, I know, but seeing something like that, it changes you, gets inside you. What I found was a pattern, a pattern that I couldn’t argue with, and that you fit perfectly. More than anything, it’s that pattern I needed to tell you about. It’s why I moved here two years ago, to be closer to you. So I could help you understand when something like this happened.”
Although he’d sensed where she was headed, the admission that Mary Ann had moved here to be close to him stopped John cold. “Crazy,” he said, shaking his head. “You have to see that. You have to see that…I’m not some fucking prophet, Mary Ann. I’m a man. Just a man.”
She nodded and put her hand on his. “I know that. And I know what this must sound like. It’s…stalkerish. I get it, and I’d be creeped out, too. But try to understand. This gift you have, this ability to heal, it’s evidence of something greater than we are, John. I’m not making a case for God, or for anything else. I’m just making a case for somethi
ng. Do you understand? I’m a Catholic. I go to church every Sunday, and I say prayers before bed. I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ. But I’ve never seen them. What I have seen is you. So what was I supposed to do? Go back into the world, forget you existed, never think about you again?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t do that. No,” she said, reconsidering her words. “I didn’t want to do that. Even following you the way I have, my life is full. I have a man who loves me. I have a job I can’t wait to go to each day.” She shook her head and locked eyes with John. “So yes, I know how it sounds, but please, please try to understand. This is something I had to do.”
John looked up at the sky. It was edging towards four. In another hour or so, he’d start to feel groggy, slow, and then an hour after that his vision would start to double and that other reality would start to filter in. Soon after, he’d be incapable of driving, a total menace on the roads. Thankfully, home wasn’t far. “You mentioned a pattern,” he said.
“Once every so often—there’s no set period that I can see, and trust me, I’ve looked—there are a spate of what seem to be legitimate healings, not the ones you see reported in the tabloids, but the ones that make the big papers. And I’m not just talking about the New York Times and Boston Globe. When I was doing research, I found references from a hundred and fifty years ago in places like the Dublin Evening Standard and the South Africa Cape Times. Those are places people don’t want to admit the legitimacy of miracles without some irrefutable proof, so it’s hard to dismiss them out of hand.”
She paused for a moment to think, then continued. “At the same time, there’s a rise in the incidence of seemingly patterned killings. Mostly, the people who are murdered are alone: transients, traveling salesmen, etcetera. You can actually chart the movements of the killer, your opposite, if you can find a starting spot.”
“People get murdered all the time,” John said. “I could pick up copies of newspapers from ten cities right now and come up with some kind of goddamned pattern. ‘Look, stabbings in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. Must be a pattern.’ It’s impossible.”