The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  Bad idea, maybe, because the dream had come again. Not Jonas this time. One of the old dreams. A perennial favourite of her subconscious. It wasn’t always the same, but there were common elements, thematic similarities you might say, slightly different director’s cuts of the same nightmare.

  There she was beneath a grey sky, standing on a long driveway leading up to a tall house, trees with rusty-black leaves surrounding her like a shroud. Sometimes she was in uniform, sometimes not. Sometimes there was an ambulance, a partner beside her. More often not. Always she knew she should not go inside, that there was something bad in there.

  But even as her heart pounded and her mind rebelled, the dream propelled her through the door and down the stairs, fear growing with every step. Sometimes she would wake at this point and that was bad enough. Other times, like tonight, she wouldn’t escape so easily.

  Down the stairs she went, through the doors of the walkout basement to the patio beyond. Slabs of adobe, stained with blood spray. A body lay on the tiles, limp and fragile, the thin frame of an adolescent boy. His face was a nightmare.

  The bullet had entered from beneath the jaw on the right side of his head and taken his head apart, ripping his skull in two and leaving his face splayed flat like a deflated balloon. His eyes were half-lidded in death, looking straight up into hers.

  Save me. Can’t you save me?

  Sometimes, in the very worst of the director’s cuts of these dreams, she would find herself trying.

  She would lurch around the patio, gathering bits of brain and skull into her bloody hands, driven by the notion that collecting them all would allow her to somehow reassemble the boy’s eggshell skull and thus return him to life. But always the sun was setting and it was getting dark… and she could never find all the pieces.

  Can’t you save me?

  Keller ran hands through her tangled hair. There would be no more sleep tonight; she could squirm and writhe, count sheep, try any kind of various insomnia apps installed on her phone, but all of them would still leave her staring up into the darkness till dawn’s light came creeping through the window.

  She rolled over and reached for the TV remote. CNN had programming all night long, if you were interested in what kind of whacked-out nonsense some politician was doing stateside, or in following the obsessive coverage of some disaster unfolding in a far corner of the world. She liked the BBC better. More global, less myopic. If all else failed, there was the Space channel. More Trek, or maybe Stargate. Better than narcotics, right? Right?

  Sure.

  She started when something moved beside the bed.

  Groot rose beside her, smacking his lips, curious whether Keller’s restlessness meant breakfast was afoot.

  She laughed. “You scared the shit out of me.” She was now doubly grateful Lang had offered to leave Groot for a sleepover. No better cure for nightmare heebie-jeebies than a dog by your side.

  Groot looked at her sideways.

  “Come on up, then.” She slapped at the sheets and Groot leapt up and settled beside her. She sidled up against the dog’s warmth. After a few minutes, Groot’s breathing slowed into the easy rhythm that signified sleep and she tried to match her own to it.

  When she woke again, sun was shining through the window and Groot was lying on his back, paws in the air, grinning as if he’d been patiently waiting for her to open her eyes.

  “Should we get up, you big idiot?”

  He leapt off the bed and ran down the hall.

  Keller rose, pulled on some clothes, and checked the back field before letting Groot out. She’d kept bear spray handy in the coffee table since finding a coyote on her back deck the previous summer, but all seemed clear and Groot charged into the grass, nosing around for mice.

  She began planning her morning. There might just be reason to feel good about the day ahead. Maybe she’d work around the acreage, clean out the stable. Sometime in the future, she’d always imagined boarding horses, getting a few dogs of her own.

  Then she remembered.

  “Shit.”

  Summerview wasn’t the end of rehab. “Just the end of the beginning,” her therapist had said. Today was her first appointment with the psychologist the Centre had referred her to, with further visits every week to look forward to for at least two months.

  “Well, that’s a buzz kill.”

  Groot was back with his favourite toy in his mouth, a fist-sized superball that Lang had left. He gave her a penetrating look that said, We are going to play now, right?

  “Give me ten minutes in the shower and I’m all yours. You can be my pre-therapy therapy.”

  Twenty-Two

  Keller arrived early for her ten o’clock appointment. Registered Psychologist Ramona Philby, MSc, had a bright, windowed office with a southwest motif accentuated by tropical plants and a picturesque aerial photo of the Grand Canyon on one wall.

  The receptionist, a fiftyish lady with the soft voice of a librarian and perfectly coiffed greying hair, eyed the Red Bull clutched in Keller’s hand with some suspicion, handed her forms to fill out, and directed her to the deserted waiting area. The couch smelled vaguely of staleness and desperation, so Keller seated herself in a leather-clad easy chair beside the largest of the potted plants and drained the last of the Red Bull as she filled out forms.

  The first two documents were standard medical stuff. Name, address, medications, and previous conditions: History of heart disease? Kidney disease? Two dozen other questions that reminded her to be grateful as she ticked No boxes.

  The last few papers consisted of questionnaires with most of the queries beginning with How often.

  How often have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed, irritable, or hopeless over the last two weeks? How often have you been bothered by trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping too much over the last two weeks?

  Possible answers were graduated on a scale from Not at All to All the Time. It reminded Keller of her own rating scale for narcotics potency: Cool Smooth, Foggy Cotton, Can’t-Move Lassitude, Flirting with Unconsciousness.

  During most of her addiction, she’d stayed close to the low end of the scale at Cool Smooth. Maybe—maybe—Foggy Cotton on a bad day. Anything else was a mistake—what the Narcan was for. Cool Smooth made for a fairly functional Ash Keller. She’d stayed sober on the job, but hell of hells, there’d been times when she’d been Cool Smooth most of her time off. Cool Smooth shopping for groceries, Cool Smooth taking in movies, Cool Smooth having sex with Nolan.

  Her graduated answers to Philby’s questionnaires, however, ranged all over the map. She ticked off several All the Times. Then she had to self-rate anxiety and consumption of alcohol and illicit drugs. She considered writing Too Much and Too Little but didn’t think the black humour would be appreciated.

  She finished the forms and brought them back to the receptionist, shaking the empty Red Bull can. “Do you recycle?” Rubbing her face in it. Yes, I drank this stimulating substance. I’m naughty.

  The receptionist took the clipboard and gave her a smile that was a mere stretch of her lips. She definitely wouldn’t have appreciated Too Much and Too Little. But she accepted the empty Red Bull can, glancing at the clock.

  “Thank you and please have a seat. Just a few more minutes. She’s usually right on time.”

  Keller returned to the chair and brought her phone out, flipping through the news. There was an asteroid heading for Earth… except it wasn’t; it would pass within 200,000 miles and this was—in cosmic terms, apparently—a pretty close call.

  Just like at the farm.

  If she and Jonas had driven by ten minutes earlier or later they would have seen nothing. Jonas would still be alive. But their ambulance—their meteor—had not missed, had instead collided and wreaked destruction on everyone in its path.

  Don’t forget that those girls are free because of you. She could hear Lang saying it.

  More news. Chagas, a brand-new disease that Keller had never heard
of before, could be contracted from a “vampire bug” that enjoyed biting humans around the mouth. The parasites living in the bug caused enlarged hearts and liver damage. Excellent.

  In politics, violence had broken out at a rally for the Conservative Action Party in Toronto. Skinheads had shown up among a crowd of several hundred, shouting about Jews and immigrants. The fascists clashed first with counter-protesters, then with Toronto police. There was a picture of CAP leader Dennis Hunt shouting and pointing, and Keller frowned, pinching the photo to enlarge it. Some detail about the picture bothered her, though she couldn’t say quite what.

  “Ashleen Keller?”

  A tall, slight woman with sharp features and dark hair drawn tight into a bun stood over her, smiling. “I’m Ramona Philby.”

  Keller stood, sliding her phone into her pocket and shaking the woman’s hand. Her skin felt cool and dry, like tanned leather. “Ash is fine,” she said.

  Philby nodded as if expecting nothing less and ushered her into the next room. Presented with two easy chairs opposite the more formal one clearly meant for Philby herself, Keller took the chair slightly farther from the psychologist. She detected a slight widening of the woman’s smile in response and tamped down the urge to roll her eyes. The people who’d treated Keller in Summerview had been consummate professionals, and she likely owed them her life. There was no reason to think Philby was anything different, but she’d had enough of therapists and was tired of imagining what they might make of anything she did or said.

  Calm down. She’s on your side till proven otherwise.

  She had been suppressing degrees of hostility throughout her care. Some of it was embarrassment for getting herself into this, some of it was a natural reticence to disclose private inner thoughts, and another part—perhaps the largest—was what her grandma would’ve called her own darned cussedness. But knowing all that didn’t make her hostility go away.

  Philby plucked a file off her desk and placed it on a table beside her. “Thank you for coming in. Can I get you a glass of water? Maybe a tea?”

  Right there was a sliver of hypocrisy. Thank you for coming in. “Coming in” had not been optional. Not if Keller wanted to work as a paramedic again.

  “Water would be great. Thanks for seeing me.”

  Philby retrieved a bottle of Evian from a mini-fridge behind her desk and handed it to Keller. She took a long gulp, only then realizing her throat was dry.

  “My colleagues from Summerview forwarded me your file and I had a look through it,” Philby said as she settled into her chair, “and much as I don’t want to drag you through another telling of your story, it often helps a new therapist to hear everything from start to finish.”

  “You mean that night?”

  Philby nodded. “That night, yes. It sounds to me like the night of your assault was a catalyst of sorts. But of course I’d also like to hear about your accident and how you began self-medicating and—”

  “Addiction. Maybe I’ll give you the Coles version? Stuff I think I know? I don’t mind if you have different conclusions.”

  “I probably won’t have conclusions just yet,” Philby said. “I may ask you to look at things from a different perspective. It doesn’t have to all get told or solved today, but if there’s anything you’re particularly struggling with, that’s something we need to make sure we get into before you leave this morning.”

  “Right, okay.” It would be tiring going through her story again, but there would also be some relief in vomiting up to a stranger every bad thing she’d ever seen or thought or done. In Summerview, it had brought feelings of peace and catharsis, as though talking leached the poison of guilt and shame out of your system.

  The early recap was easiest. Paramedic for ten years, give or take. Lots of good calls, lots of bad calls, and three or four that were plainly horrific, as vivid as yesterday in Keller’s mind.

  The man who beat his pregnant wife so badly he fractured her skull and put her into a coma. Before the cops arrived, he tried to explain himself to Keller, saying that he’d done it “because she’s just so cold and the baby needs to feel emotion, so I made sure she was feeling this.”

  The six-year-old who was sexually assaulted by her father and nearly ripped apart in the process. Blood all over the bedroom, posters from the movie Frozen covering the walls, and pale death in the mother’s eyes as Keller and Lang worked to save her child. The rabid fury in the police officer who’d handcuffed the man, Keller wondering all the while if he would let that fury slip loose—and if she didn’t just wish he would.

  The suicide boy and the woman in the bathtub…

  There were worsts and then there were worsts in EMS. Going to one of these calls was like getting caught by a landmine, though you couldn’t know till years later which of the emergency workers caught shrapnel, whose psychological blood was splattered on the wall, who might eventually die of their injuries.

  Keller related her analogy of a boxer taking hit after hit, watching to see if Philby was paying attention. She saw the therapist’s gaze flick up from her notepad as Keller went on.

  “You never know how many shots it’ll take. You just know that sooner or later it’ll be too much, and that every time you take a hit, it does something to you. There’re no free passes.”

  Philby tapped her pen against her chin. “You’re very self-aware. I mean about the machinery of post-traumatic stress. You’re right. It’s predictable that it happens. Unpredictable how quickly or how badly people are affected.”

  Keller rubbed at her forehead. “That’s great I’m self-aware.”

  “It’s always helpful.”

  “I was being ironic.”

  “I realize that.” Philby blinked at her, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “It hasn’t always felt helpful,” Keller said. “It kind of feels like watching a car crash and being able to predict who’ll get hurt. It doesn’t stop the crash.”

  “I understand. Let’s go with that analogy. The car has crashed. We know there’s been trauma. We work with strategies to heal.” She picked up another sheet from Keller’s file. “You got into Summerview quickly.”

  “A doc I know heard I was in trouble, he knew somebody there.” To her everlasting shame. “He told me I wasn’t taking someone else’s space, that his friend would take an extra case.”

  Philby did an odd frown-and-nod, and Keller wondered if what she’d just verbalized was an impossibility. She hoped not. If she’d jumped queue, it meant someone at the back of the line might have died because of her. More blood on her hands.

  Philby didn’t pursue it. “You scored a thirteen on the Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale. That’s not too bad.”

  “I’ll study harder next time.”

  Philby frowned. “Lower is better.”

  “I know.”

  “Means you were coming off a mild to moderate dependency.”

  “I tried to keep myself light,” Keller said. “Functional.”

  Wasn’t always easy.

  “That could be worrisome. ‘Functional’ implies something working well. It could mean you think you had things under control. People who think they can control it often go back.”

  This did not surprise Keller. Over the preceding weeks she had learned that almost everything could seem worrisome to a therapist.

  “I poisoned a man with my own fentanyl. You think I feel like I’m in control?”

  Philby considered the question, then looked down at her file folder again. “You’re drinking?”

  “I drink wine sometimes.”

  Night was sometimes, right?

  “Alone?”

  “No, never alone.”

  Not since Groot arrived.

  “What would you think about cutting that out, or working to cut it down?”

  “I’ll consider it. I didn’t get in trouble drinking.”

  “One thing can lead to another, as I’m sure you know. A weak moment is easier to come by after a couple of dri
nks.”

  “I’ve heard about AA,” Keller said. “I don’t think I can do it. I don’t believe in higher powers, for one thing.”

  “Let’s leave that aside, then, this time. I’ll just ask you to think about it.”

  Keller glanced out the window. It was a beautiful day and she suddenly wished she were out in it. She could do that. Stand up and leave, walk out into the sunshine, leave everything behind, EMS included.

  But that was just it. She wouldn’t be leaving everything behind, would she? Not the nightmares, that was for sure. Sooner or later she’d wake up from one longing for a hit so she could dive into the kind of sleep that had no dreams.

  Just a taste of one of those ugly blue-green pills. Just a lick…

  “So… those strategies to heal?” Keller said. “Healing sounds pretty good. Want to know about the fentanyl?”

  “In your chart”—Philby glanced at the file—“you called it ‘self-medicating.’”

  Keller smiled and shrugged. “Addicts will call it anything they can before they’ll call it addiction, right?”

  “Often true.” Philby’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, then, tell me how you got addicted.”

  “Same way everyone does.” Keller met Philby’s gaze squarely for the first time since she’d sat down. “I was in pain.”

  Twenty-Three

  Three years prior, November.

  Sunshine Village Ski Resort.

  Shift work could be a wondrous and beautiful thing at times. It meant missing some Christmas mornings and the occasional weekend party, but it also meant skiing on Wednesdays when the hills were deserted.

  A week’s worth of steady snowfall had loaded the mountains with deep powder. Keller got off night shift, felt the warm Chinook breeze, and stopped at home just long enough to throw her ski gear into the back of her car.

  By ten o’clock she was on the express chair shooting up Lookout Mountain. She had three good runs under her belt, taking it easy, sticking to Angel Traverse and any of the blue runs branching off it. The hill was mostly deserted, except for an intermediate ski-school class on the eastern slope of the run.