“Here and there,” she said, handing the cigarette back. “I was in Florida for a while, but there was nothing for me there.”
“But originally?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth. “I was orphaned and lived with a bunch of different families when I was young. New Mexico for a while, then Pennsylvania for a while, then I think a couple of foster families in New Jersey. When I fourteen I ran away and I’ve been moving around ever since. Never one place for very long.”
He’d stopped and was looking at her. “So are you living here now, or just passing through?”
What to say? “I’m not sure. But I never am.”
He started walking again and she fell back in beside him.
“What do you do?” he asked after a while. “I mean, for work?”
There was no good answer to this. Rose had never worked in her life, except at staying alive. “You know, this and that. Restaurants, bars. That kind of thing.”
He nodded, dropped the cigarette on the street, crushed it out. “Want to sit for a while?”
Rose hadn’t been completely aware of her surroundings for some time now, and when she looked around, she saw the same park where she’d sat earlier on. “Sure,” she said.
They sat down on the same bench, close, but not touching. Rose turned toward Mike and drew one of her legs up, tucked it beneath her, laid her arm atop the bench-back.
An enormously powerful feeling was building inside of her. She wanted to be close to this man, to touch him, to feel his strong arms around her, his breath in her hair. She wanted to smell him and put her hands on his body. She ached between her legs and suddenly, more than anything, wanted to have him inside of her. She shivered as a flush of heat went through her, a flush that found its center at her sex.
“Cold?” Mike asked.
“No,” Rose said, then, “well, maybe a bit.”
He looked down at his shirt and said, “I’d offer you my coat, but—”
“Then come here.”
Mike scooted over until he was touching Rose, put his arm around her.
“That’s nice.” Rose said. She leaned her head against his shoulder and smelled a mild cologne mixed with deodorant and something else that excited her. The smell of a man. Rose exhaled and felt her body relaxing.
She looked out at the park.
The soccer players were gone, but a few of the families remained, parked on their blankets beneath the lights.
Rose leaned back and tilted her head up toward Mike.
He was looking down at her, a slightly bemused expression on his face. “Are you about to kiss me?” he said.
She ran her fingers gently through his hair and brought him closer.
Chapter 8
A lot of bad had come out of the Kyra Metheny situation, but John’s new relationship with Iris Barnes was anything but. When he arrived at her office a little after lunch, Barnes’s secretary showed him right in and, after asking if he’d like coffee, hurried off to fix a cup.
As before, Barnes sat behind her desk, John in a comfortable chair across from her. Beyond that small nod to formality, though, talking to Barnes was as easy and pleasant as chatting with an old friend, only one who had something he badly needed: information.
“So, what did you find out?” John said. “About my dreams.”
Barnes nodded. “Yes, let’s talk about those.” She gestured at a couple of books stacked on her black desk and said, “I’ve done a little reading—no hardcore research, so there may very well be facts and theories I know nothing about—but what it all boils down to is that…no one has the slightest damned idea what dreams are. I guess I’d heard that before, that there was no one good theory that explained everything, but Jesus, there are thousands. It’s amazing. If you read Freud, he’ll tell you that dreams are a safe place for your subconscious and repressed desires to come out, that your dreams are actually trying to tell you something about what’s going on inside of you. But that’s just one theory. There’s also the idea that dreams—the things that happen in them, the people in them, everything—are representative of the dreamer. These people would say that, if you’re having a dream about a fight with your best friend, it’s got nothing to do with that friend, it’s just that something inside of you is in conflict. Both you and your friend represent components of you at war with one another. It’s interesting.”
John nodded slowly. “So what does it mean, then, when your dreams are all about killing?”
“I thought about that,” Barnes said, leaning back in her chair. “If you listen to the second camp, the ’components-of-yourself’ people, let’s call them, your dreams could stand for an unarticulated need, something you don’t even know you’re feeling, to kill—metaphorically speaking, of course—something within yourself, for the need to eliminate a part of you.”
“It’s hard to argue with that,” John said. “Who really likes everything about themselves? I mean, shit, I’d love to kill the slob part of myself, or the lazy part of myself, but that seems like a pretty insignificant reason for these dreams. And plus, their duration… I’ve been having these things in one way or another since I was just a kid. I wasn’t stupid when I was nine, not by a long shot, but I don’t think I was advanced enough to generate those kinds of thoughts about internal conflict. You know?”
Barnes was nodding now. “That’s what stopped me, too.” She leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk, drummed her fingers for a moment on the leather blotter. “You’re an only child,” Barnes said abruptly. “Correct?”
The tangent took John by surprise. “Yeah. My mother couldn’t have kids after me. Why?”
Barnes looked at him almost apologetically. “It’s going to sound a little crazy,” she said, “but the only thing I found that bore the slightest resemblance to your case was a chapter on twins I found in this book.” She tapped a thin tome with a finger. The spine read Dream Theory.
“It resembles my case how?”
“Basically word-for-word. Well, minus the murder angle, of course. We’ve all heard the stories about twins separated at birth who still somehow shop at the same stores, eat the same brands of cereal, marry women with the same first names. This guy just talks about the dream component. He has documented cases where twins separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles have been able to describe the furniture and objects in their sibling’s homes.”
“Because they saw the other house in their dreams,” John said quietly.
Barnes nodded, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay,” John said, pushing forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Let’s take this one and run with it for a sec. If we take—” he looked down at the spine of the book Barnes had indicated “—Martin Harris’s theory and project it onto my situation, what we’re basically saying is that, A, I have a twin I know nothing about, and B, said twin is a serial murderer.” He paused for a moment, then added, “And a precocious one at that, to be scaring the shit out of me since we were kids.” He looked at Barnes.
She smiled. “Hey, I said it sounded like your case. That’s all, smart guy.”
John grinned ruefully. “I know you’re trying to help,” he said. “I’m just tired of trying to figure out—”
“How it all ties together,” Barnes finished for him.
“I’m wondering how I can get back to my life. Back to teaching, going out at night, not worrying about whether I’m going to turn into a vegetable at the stroke of seven PM.”
“So you don’t think the whole thing with Kyra Metheny is related?” Barnes sat back and appraised him, head slightly tilted.
John blew air out. “That’s complicated.”
“Why?”
“If all of this other stuff—the dreams, etcetera—had started after the thing with Kyra, whatever that really was, sure, I’d say it’s all probably related, but that’s not the way it is. It’s not like this is all the result of what happened that day, some kind of psychological repe
rcussion, trauma, whatever. The dreams were around twenty-five years before I even met Kyra.”
Barnes thought for a second, apparently weighing whether or not to say what she wanted to. “There’s something you’re not saying. Why don’t you just say it and get it out there.”
John laughed because she was right. “What if I don’t want to?”
She shrugged again. “Your choice. But I’m not going to say it for you, and we can’t go any further with this until it’s been said. Looks like we’re stuck.” She pursed her lips and looked around casually, glanced down at her wrist, tapped a watch that wasn’t there, hummed a few bars. John watched, thinking, why not?
“Fine,” he said, feigning annoyance, and Barnes grinned. “All of this can’t be related because that would mean…it would signal some kind of…”
“Look at you,” she said softly, “afraid to even say it. Tisk tisk.”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just don’t know how to put it.”
“Then just say it. Don’t worry about how it sounds. No one here but us birds.”
John closed his eyes. “If all of these things were interrelated, it would mean that the dreams and my trouble sleeping were somehow…anticipatory of the thing with Kyra, some kind of build-up to what happened that day. But I don’t even know what happened that day.”
“What do you think happened?” Barnes asked, her voice low but insistent.
“I don’t know. Not what people have been saying, anyway.”
“You didn’t heal her?”
John made a harsh, ugly sound that he barely recognized as a laugh. “Heal her? Christ, listen to how ridiculous that sounds! As if that’s even possible.”
“You don’t believe in that sort of thing? In miracles?”
“No.”
“You say that as if you have some stake in it. You’re not religious?”
“This isn’t about religion.”
“What’s it about?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Obviously, you do. You said ‘this’ isn’t about religion, which implies that there is a ‘this’ and that it’s about something besides religion. Semantics, John.”
John put his hands to his head and squeezed, said, “Oh God, my brain’s going to explode. You should have been a shrink.”
Barnes chuckled, then said, “Just think about it, okay. There are places you’re not letting yourself go, for whatever reason. Why not? When you come up with some answers, we can talk about them and compare notes.”
“Man, and here I thought we were just going to talk about my dreams.”
“Jeez, John, what do you think we’ve been doing?”
* * *
John glanced in his rearview mirror again.
Ever since leaving Barnes’s office fifteen minutes ago, he’d felt as though he were being watched, the hairs standing up on his arms and on the back of his neck. As he made the turn into the complex, however, he’d looked around and seen no one suspicious-looking.
But the feeling of paranoia still hadn’t subsided completely, and he couldn’t stop searching the sea of cars and pedestrians for…for what? Nothing back there but cars, and none that looked particularly threatening. Of course, what would make a car look threatening? Fangs on the grill? A bloodstain on the windshield?
Still, he felt it.
* * *
Back in his apartment, John sorted through his mail. The flow of pleas and threats was already tapering off somewhat; today there were only seven or eight, a drop in the bucket when compared to the hundred or so he’d received every day for the first week. He opened them all and scanned through. A child dying in Indiana, a wife sick in Arkansas, another wife who’d lost an arm in a factory accident, her husband wanting John to help her “re-grow it.” John grunted at that one and re-read it just to make sure he’d read it correctly the first time.
And a brown envelope with a Charlotte postmark.
John tore it open and pulled out the single sheet of paper inside.
It read: I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW, CALL ME.
There was no phone number, but it only took John a second to understand.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and walked into the kitchen, dug though the odds-and-ends drawer, pulled forth the card he’d found stuck beneath his knocker yesterday. He grabbed the phone and dialed the number, waited impatiently as it rang.
Nobody answered, but a machine picked up after seven or eight rings. John almost hit the TALK button on his phone to hang up, but instead he listened as a woman’s voice, recognizably the same voice he’d yelled at, said, “You’ve reached Doug and Mary Ann Shaw. No one’s in to take the call right now, but leave a message and one of us’ll call you back.” There was a long beep and John hung up before it ended.
He was still frustrated and angry, but at least he had a name now. That created a certain type of equity, didn’t it?
Mary Ann Shaw.
* * *
That evening, after a dinner of fish sticks and rice, John poured a glass of wine and called Connie. As the phone rang, he opened the sliding door and walked out onto his porch. The air smelled clean, and a soft breeze played rustling music in the treetops. The phone rang half a dozen times and then Connie picked up and said hello. The sound of her voice froze him and it took a moment to recover.
“It’s me,” he said. “John.”
“I wasn’t sure you would call,” Connie said, her voice low, as if trying not to wake someone in the room with her. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” John said. “Things have been a little hectic or I’d have called sooner.” A question that hadn’t occurred to him earlier now popped into his head and he said, “Where are you?”
There was a prolonged pause. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Why would I know?”
“I thought your parents might have told you,” she said. “I’ve been staying with your mom and dad the last two weeks.”
What the hell?
“Alright,” he said slowly. “We’re going to have to take a step back for a second. Why exactly have you been staying with my parents? They never said anything about this. They never even told me they’d talked to you.”
“I begged your mom not to tell you, but I thought she would anyway. I know how close you two are. I told her that I would tell you, but that it had to be the right time. Don’t be mad at her, John. She never felt right about it, but I told her I’d be in touch with you soon, and that it would all come out then. I got here just a day or two after your parents left for Charlotte, when you were in the hospital. We needed a place and they were nice enough to say yes.”
John sat down on a plastic chair and stared out over the lush green thicket of trees between him and the highway. “So, why? The last I heard, you lived in north Jersey. You were working in New York, I think.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said. “Almost ten years now. I got married a couple of years after college and moved to Ohio. And then, when I got divorced, I moved back to Boston. That’s where I’ve been ever since. Well, until now.”
“What’s this all about?” John said.
Connie was silent, as if bracing herself. “I have a daughter,” she said. “Her name is Katie, and she’s eight. She…she’s sick, John. Very sick. We’ve been through every treatment option in the past two years. It’s been hard on her. A couple of months ago I ran out of money and couldn’t pay the mortgage on our house anymore. The bank finally kicked us out last month and we’ve been moving around since then. Until we got here.”
“I’m sorry,” John said. “What’s wrong with your daughter?”
“You got my letter, obviously,” Connie said. “Well, it’s our family thing. Cancer. Not ovarian, though. Katie’s cancer is in her bones.”
John didn’t know what to say that could possibly mean anything. “What’s the treatment?”
There was the soft sound of a restrained sob on the other end of the line, then Connie
said, “At this point, nothing. If the radiation and chemo were going to kill it, they would have by now. Her doctors all agree on that. And it makes her so sick, John. If she is going to—to die,” John could hear her forcing herself to say the word, “then I don’t want her last days or weeks to be spent that way.”
“And so it’s down to me,” John murmured.
John half-expected Connie to equivocate, to plead innocent to the charge he had just leveled, but instead she simply said, “Yes.”
John closed his eyes. A significant portion of him wanted to hang up, to click the phone off and disconnect it from the wall, maybe throw it in the trash for good measure. This wasn’t his fight, after all. Even if he did have some power, some ability to heal with a touch, what right did this woman, this woman he hadn’t seen in a decade, have to ask him to sacrifice himself for her—not even for her, for her child? Wasn’t his life difficult enough? Hadn’t he paid his dues already?
For thirty-odd years, his life had been a rushed frenzy in the service of nothing. He moved from place to place, making few friends and fewer lovers, staying only as long as his paranoia would allow him to. In the beginning it had been hard, but he’d learned to live with his problems, he had learned rules. And yes, he knew this existence wasn’t a fully realized one, knew that there was a world he was missing, but that could not be helped. Giving in to his desires for love and stability could only harm others, could only hurt those around him, as he had hurt Connie all those years ago.
So yes, there was that part of him. The rest of him, however, knew that part was bullshit. On the other end of the phone line was the woman he had loved—the woman he still loved and always would, if he was being honest with himself—and she was asking him for help. He could say no to her. The simple act of saying the word was nothing; he had become so adept at turning his emotions off that he frequently scared himself with his dispassionate refusals of comradeship and affection. The only people he allowed himself to love fully were his mother and father, and he couldn’t even bring himself to visit them for fear of placing them in some kind of danger he didn’t even understand. Look what he had done to Suzie, a beautiful and caring woman who had only wanted to know him better.