“Where?”
“Home,” she said.
Another two weeks passed before she called Kat, first trying her DC number and finally reaching her on her cell.
“Hey, where are you?”
“On assignment,” Kat said. “What’s up?”
“Well,” she said. “It’s about Jack . . .”
There was a silence from the other end of the wire, then: “Oh?” Kat, always vigilant on her behalf and even more protective since the accident, had kept her voice neutral.
“The thing is—the thing is, he’s a pilot.”
She heard Kat’s sharp intake of breath. “A—a pilot?”
Maddie pictured her sister, hand at her throat, fingering the gold charm she always wore. A K. Not for Katherine, but for Katrina. Their mother’s. Like Maddie, it had survived the crash. “Yes.”
“Tell me one thing,” Kat finally said. “One thing that makes you trust him. One thing that will make me trust him.”
Maddie had closed her eyes and reviewed the whirl of the previous weeks, trying to choose a single thing that would convey to Kat what Jack was like. How he cared for his sister. His kindness. His patience with her. The thoughtful gifts he had found for her. Then she remembered the perfect instance. She went back to the night of the fried clams and frozen yogurt, the night she had led him to her bed. She remembered the maelstrom of emotions that had stirred in her chest. Desire, anxiety, a pulsing undercurrent of terror. It was the last that had caused her to turn from him and reach out to switch off the lamp before undressing. Only the doctors and nurses and Kat had seen the full extent of her damaged body. And, of course, the car salesman. She still could feel the shame when she recalled that one disastrous experience with Gil. His look of revulsion when he had seen her nude body. She couldn’t bear to see the same expression on Jack’s face. But he had stayed her hand and turned her toward him. When she dared to look, she only saw an expression she barely dared name. Not pity. Not revulsion. Only tenderness. And heat. She recalled the gentleness of his touch as he undressed her and revealed her shriveled skin, the livid scars. His words when he spoke. That is what she would tell Kat. The softness of his voice and the way that for the first time since the accident, his words had made her feel whole, undamaged. “You’re beautiful,” he’d said.
“The scars,” she’d said.
“Everyone has scars, Maddie,” he’d said. “They just hide them in different ways.”
Maddie forced her mind away from the recent past—she could have played the sweet and tender memories for hours—but the day’s work waited on the bench before her. She cast a glance at the origami on the window ledge, as if seeking proof that Jack really existed in more than her imagination, and then took a cookie from the tin and sat at her bench, ready to begin. Outside, the sirens sounded again, their keening cutting through the spring air.
KATHERINE
The room was too cold. They had left the air conditioner on high. Even at home in the sweltering weight of the capital’s summers, Kat had welcomed the heat and rarely bothered turning on the AC. She considered the distance from the bed to the unit and wasn’t at all sure that she would be able to manage it. She felt the shallow palpitations of her heart, the slippery, quick liquid of her pulse.
Two days ago, Dr. Verner had come for her in the middle of the night. She had not resisted. After the first time she had tried to run from him, he had threatened to have her restrained if she tried it again. She believed him. From now on, she had silently sworn, she would watch for her chance and not be foolish. In the examining room, her body had been poked, prodded, and scanned, vials of blood withdrawn. No longer concerned that Kat could hear, Verner dictated the results to his assistant, Helen Mercer, his voice as cold as the air that now chilled her room. Her liver and heart were still enlarged, but apparently the pace of her inexplicable aging had begun to slow. Behind the facade of his professionalism, the cool smile, she could sense his anger, as if somehow she were at fault and the flaw was not with his protocol—the diet, the weekly shots—but with a failing in her own body. There was no longer any mention of the promises he had made during her earlier trips to the clinic over the past months, assurances spoken with the passion and conviction of a man out to save the world, ones she had first come to investigate and then gradually come to accept. Until she had broken his rule and checked out the building that was off-limits.
Now she was no longer an investigative reporter following leads and nosing around. Now she was no more than a specimen on which he could experiment. Until she was no longer of use. She would not allow herself to think of what would happen then. She pushed away fear, knowing it would serve no purpose and would only sap the strength she’d need for this battle.
She had only herself to rely on. She had told no one where she was going. Not Maddie. Not even Jessica. At the thought of her colleague, a food reporter for the Post, she recalled the day they had met for drinks at the Mayflower’s bar and how struck she had been by Jessica’s appearance. At first she had suspected serious surgery but saw none of the revealing signs. Jessica not only looked younger; she looked healthy. She glowed. It hadn’t taken more than a quick comment on how fabulous she looked for Jessica to launch into her story of this amazing doctor in Mexico who worked miracles. The more questions Kat asked, the more intrigued she became. According to Jessica, the doctor didn’t advertise, didn’t have a website, relied solely on word of mouth. Looking at her friend’s face, Kat had to admit it was a better advertisement than a full-page ad in any fashion magazine.
“He calls himself an immortalist,” Jessica had said.
“A what?”
“Immortalist. He truly believes we can extend life indefinitely.”
“Guess he hasn’t read The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Kat had said. But she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what Jessica had said—and how fabulous she had looked—and eventually decided to fly to Mexico and check it out for herself with the intent of writing an article about the doctor and his spa. The immortalist. Such a timely subject—any editor would leap at the chance to publish her story. It was only after her second trip, a follow-up to the initial one, that Kat decided to pony up for the exorbitant cost and take part in the doctor’s regimen, convincing herself it was all part of the research. If she hadn’t had drinks with Jessica that day in December, she would be home now, forestalling the inroads of aging by working on her abs at her gym and sleeping with her trainer.
She turned in the bed and moaned at the ache even this slight movement caused. She curled into herself, as much for comfort as to conserve her body’s heat, and after a bit, despite the chill and the pain and her fear, she drifted off.
A noise beyond the room woke her. She heard a female voice. At first, woozy, she thought it was Maddie, crying out as the dressings on her burns were changed. When she woke fully, she remembered where she was. She steeled herself against the weakness in her body. She suspected they were drugging her meals and tried to eat only the fruit and bread and items it would be difficult to conceal a sedative in. She sat up, waited a beat for her head to clear, and swung her feet to the floor. She heard the cry again. She pulled the blanket free from the mattress and, as if this thin mantle could protect her from the frigid air spewed out by the AC, shrouded it over her shoulders. Slowly she made her way across the floor, pulling the blanket tighter, and pressed her ear against the wall.
The voice was young, far too young to be Verner’s assistant or one of the two elderly Mayan women who came to clean her room and tend to her. The girl called out again. A single phrase repeated over and over and muffled by the thickness of the plaster, words that seemed to be a call of both prayer and pain. Kat strained to understand. It sounded like “a way of.”
She turned her mouth to the wall. “Hello? Hola?” Her voice was weak and to her ears sounded too frail to penetrate the cinder block walls. “Hola? Can you hear me?”
The rhythmic crooning from the other side did not cease. A way
of. A way of.
Kat managed to turn off the AC and staggered back to the bed. Once she had easily run a half marathon, whipped off sit-ups as easily as she turned the pages of a book. Now traversing a few feet left her drained. Even Verner didn’t know what had gone wrong or what had caused her to react so dramatically and horribly to the weekly shots he’d prescribed. As she collapsed on the mattress, she heard the echo of the girl’s voice. A way of. Well, at the moment she couldn’t see a “way of” or a way out. Not for her. Even Verner must now believe what was so clear in her body and, no doubt, on her face.
At first, horrified at the changes that had occurred in her body, she had been relieved there was no mirror, but after a while she had sought reflecting surfaces in the sparse room. The brass of the doorknob. The metallic cap of the bottle of lotion one of the Mayan women had left in the cabinet. Convex surfaces in which she might be able to study her reflection and see if there had been any change. But to no avail. Of course, she did not require any mirror to look at her hands, to see the raised and knotted veins, the papery skin that belonged on an old woman. A wave of nausea washed over her, then receded. She thought about the transfusions. Verner had sworn that they were completely safe, had explained the procedure and testing that were in place to ensure their purity. Was it possible that she had received plasma that hadn’t been checked?
Verner had said that she was the only one whose body had deteriorated after receiving the infusions, and she wondered if that was true. Earlier, when it had become evident something had gone wrong, she had called Jessica and carefully questioned her about how she was doing. Her friend had nothing but praise for Verner. If there were others, wouldn’t there have been publicity about it? They were hardly results one could keep hidden, even in another country.
The girl continued to cry and call out. Who was she? How had Verner found her and brought her here? Kat assumed she was young, and she felt ill. Verner had explained how the plasma they received in their transfusions had been extracted from the blood of teenagers. Now she knew better.
Surely the girl in the next room had to be missed, had to have a family who would be looking for her. Kat thought about what she now knew Verner did here, where he really sourced the cells for his therapy, and she felt horribly impotent. In spite of her exhaustion, her old fighting spirit surfaced. The sound of the girl’s sobs triggered a memory so real that, for a moment, Kat could almost smell the saltiness of Maddie’s sweat, feel her sister’s slender hand clinging to hers in the dark.
“Just leave her alone,” Carl had said when Madison’s cries woke them one night during one of his rare visits to Maddie’s home during her long convalescence. “Christ, she’s a grown woman, not a child who needs to be coddled.”
But Kat had said, “I’ll be right back,” chancing his anger and casting the words over her shoulder even as she padded on bare feet down the hall to the room where her sister slept. “It’s all right,” she would soothe as she stroked Maddie’s hair, damp with sweat from her nightmare. “I’m here, honey. I’m here.” She had always been there for Maddie. In all the foolishness and havoc Kat had created in her own life, the trail of failed romances and lost opportunities, Maddie was the single, shining right thing she had done, the purely unselfish act she had performed. For the past fifteen years since their parents’ deaths, she had let nothing interfere with that charge, and during that time she had watched her sister grow from a traumatized nineteen-year-old into a wonderfully gifted woman whose sculptures hung in museums.
Until now. If her sister needed her now, Kat would not know. She wondered whether Maddie was trying to reach her. She remembered their recent conversations before she had flown back to Mexico and how happy Maddie had sounded. Even here, in this cold and alien room, the memory brought her comfort. She hoped that Motorcycle Man was good for her, was caring for her, was able to make her laugh. She hoped that with him, Maddie would at last learn to open her heart. To trust.
And that her trust would not be betrayed, as Kat’s had been when she had innocently given it to Verner.
MADISON
Maddie slid a CD of Appalachian folk songs into the player, grabbed two more oatmeal raisin cookies from the tin—breakfast—and settled herself at the worktable. In the distance, sirens screamed their alarm, swirling and fading, contrapuntal to the wild notes of a bluegrass harp, but Maddie was so quickly absorbed in her work they barely registered. Masks stared down at her from the studio walls. For an instant she imagined the tribal eyes were watching, witnessing her reluctance to count on happiness. Except, of course, there were no eyes, only empty sockets. A paradox, she thought. Eyes were the most important factor in revealing character, and yet her masks had none. They could see neither her happiness nor her fear at the idea of losing it.
Only here, in this studio, could she recapture some of the person she had been before the accident. Once she had been a girl up for adventures, not foolhardy but certainly open to calculated risks and eager to discover the world beyond her immediate geography. Now the spirit of that girl was given rein only in the studio. Only here did the cautious, tentative woman she had become feel safe taking risks.
She considered the work waiting on the bench: Lady Macbeth in steel, the third in a series commissioned by an international corporation to represent women in fact and fiction. Thus far she had completed Salome and Anne Boleyn.
The Lady Macbeth mask was rough-edged and so flat it was nearly one-dimensional. It was strong, but Maddie was dissatisfied. She felt she had missed the mark on this one. Whenever she was invited to museums and universities to lecture about masks and mask making, she spoke about history and mythology, about methods and materials and about how when creating a mask, she searched for a story, a place that would serve as a point of entry for the work. But there was much she did not reveal. She did not tell her audiences how, in the best of her work, the mask itself revealed its truths.
For a week she had been listening to the strong and complicated spirit of Lady Macbeth. She had reflected on ambition and regret and had thought about disintegration and the deliberate denial of Macbeth’s essential self. Still, the truth of the mask eluded her.
The CD ended. Time passed. She stared at the mask and waited. Gradually, the steel edges blurred, softened. Tell me your secrets, she thought. The metal seemed to shimmer and move.
“Tell me your secrets,” she whispered.
They say it was regret. The thought rose up from the steel. But it was memory that drove me mad.
A thrill ran through Maddie. Now she could see the completed mask; a rift sliced through the center, dividing it into spheres of shadow and light. She pulled her goggles down over her face, switched on the acetylene torch, adjusted the flame, and began.
At noon she took a break. She set the torch on the bench and switched off the tank valves. Lady Macbeth, riven and enigmatic, stared up at her, and she felt a rush of satisfaction at its force.
In the kitchen, she ladled leftover tomato and lentil soup into a bowl and set it in the microwave. While it heated, she loaded the dishwasher with the dishes from the previous night’s meal. As she worked, thoughts of Jack settled in. After dinner last night, when he’d been playing his trumpet, he’d closed his eyes, giving himself over to the music, and his face had become transfixed in a way that gave her a glimpse of what he would look like when he grew older, and the vision had comforted her. She recalled the touch of him, the taste of him. She pictured his grin, the crinkle of fine lines that despite his age already fanned out from his eyes. Pilot lines, he called them. From squinting into the sun. He loved flying as much as he loved jazz. He had wanted to share that passion with her, too. Again and again he’d asked her to let him take her flying. Coaxing, urging, confronting her fears with facts and statistics. Aviation, he said, was safer than driving a car.
As he’d been from the first, he was patient. Gentle. When she had been unable to fight back her fears, the terror always there since her parents’ deaths, and hadn’
t allowed him to coax her into going up, he had told her all the things he wanted her to see, the things he wanted to share with her. He told her how different everything was from the air. The cranberry bogs and golf courses, shoals along the outer beaches, and sharply eroding sand cliffs on the Atlantic shore where cottages teetered on the brink. “I’ve seen all that,” she had said. “When I used to go up with my father.”
Still, he’d persisted. “But I want to share it with you, to show you what I love about it all—the land, its colors and contours, and how they look so different from a thousand feet. All mounds and curves. So maternal in its swells,” he’d said. “I think that’s why we call her Mother Earth.”
She’d thought it was one of the most erotic things he’d said to her. But she did not concede. “I just can’t,” she’d said.
He had kept pushing. “It’s not the flying that’s important, Maddie. It’s about the fear. Fear is like cancer: it feeds on itself, grows and spreads. I know you’re afraid. I understand that. But you can’t let fear keep you from experiencing beautiful things.”
“Stop,” she had said. “Just stop. I’m not who you think I am. So let it go.”
“No, Maddie, you’re not who you think you are.”
The rest of the evening had been strained, each of them carefully polite to the other. She knew she had disappointed him and she knew she would keep doing it, because she couldn’t be who he wanted her to be.
She finished the soup and rinsed the bowl. She checked the clock on the microwave and wondered when he would be back. In the early days she had not allowed herself to believe the relationship was anything more than a fling, telling herself they both understood that it was temporary. Short-lived by definition. And then he would move on. Find a woman who kept a clean house and would give him a family. Someone his own age. Someone who wasn’t covered in scar tissue. She had worked to keep a part of herself sealed off. She still hadn’t been open to having him move in, although he stayed over several days each week.
The Orchid Sister Page 4