by Ponzo, Gary
Until then, Bryant was hesitant to move forward without an agenda. He couldn’t afford to have another incident like Jeff’s on his watch. His form of therapy required months of asking questions and listening. Mostly listening. Staring at Megan’s grave, he summoned the will to probe further, like a surgeon digging deeper for the root of the patient’s disease.
“Were you very religious before the accident?” he asked.
Margo looked suspiciously at him, as if she might incriminate herself with her response.
Bryant softened his voice. “Margo, you need to trust me.”
Her face tightened, but it quickly turned thoughtful. They stood there in silence while the rain subsided. The only sounds came from passing cars and the water dripping off the saturated leaves around them.
Finally, Margo said, “No. I wasn’t very religious before the crash. We went to church on holidays and maybe once or twice during the year when my mom felt it’d been too long. But we weren’t real deep followers of Christ.”
Bryant smiled. He knew how hard it must’ve been for her to be so forthright. “It’s common for people who’ve been through the type of trauma you’ve experienced to find religion.”
“So you’ve already decided what’s wrong with me?”
“Maybe.”
“And?”
“And I think you have a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
“Which means what exactly?”
“Well, that your condition lends itself to kicking in the imaginative portion of the brain.”
“Meaning that these voices I’m hearing aren’t really aliens,” she said. A statement, not a question.
He waited a beat. Sometimes it wasn’t the exact words spoken, but how they were spoken. A quick response showed a definitive answer with no recourse. It worked for a baseball umpire who would never change his call under any circumstance, but a therapist needed to show some flexibility.
“I believe that’s a good possibility, yes,” Bryant said, carefully. “The brain seems to find ways to protect you. If you lose a limb, your brain puts you in shock mode to guard against feeling the full brunt of the accident. It makes sense that your mind would create a scenario to defend you against the guilt of being the only survivor.”
As darkness settled around them, the nearby streetlights fought to shine through the collection of trees which dotted the cemetery. Out of the shadows strolled a small, short-haired dog which tiptoed up to Margo and rubbed his back against her leg.
“Is that your dog?” he asked.
She looked down at the animal and smiled. “No.”
He remembered the stray cat at St. Andrews that had curled up to her in the pew and tried to put the two incidents together somehow, but couldn’t.
“Good doggie,” she murmured.
“You seem to get along well with animals.”
“They’re my only true friends.”
“Friends?” Bryant had so many questions, but they needed to line up properly, like guiding a row of airplanes to the landing strip. One false move could prove disastrous for someone in her mental condition.
“I’m curious about one thing,” he said. “If you don’t have an answer, I’ll understand.”
Her eyes remained steady on the dog leaning against her leg.
“Why did the alien want you to keep me here in Chandler?”
She looked up at him. “You want to know a scarier question?” The dog slipped away from her legs and scurried into the trees. “Why did the other alien want you to leave?”
“Why is that a scarier question?”
She shrugged. “I guess because that alien just scares me more.”
“Why?”
Margo pressed her foot back into the soggy impression she’d made earlier. When she pulled up on her shoe, it made a sucking noise. The silence lingered and it was more important to keep the dialog flowing rather than stopping to mine for gold.
“How often do you—”
“Something about the future,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“You asked me why the alien wanted me to keep you here. It has something to do with the future, but that’s all I know.”
“Okay,” he said, watching her fidget around in the dark.
She looked up at him with pleading eyes. “Am I crazy, Dr. Bryant?”
“These are all rational feelings for a survivor,” Bryant said. “I can help you get through this. It’s the one thing I know how to do very well.”
Margo lowered her head. “Then tell me whose voices I keep hearing when no one else is around?”
Bryant stuck his hands in his pocket and slowly paced. “Listen, when I was just opening my practice I had this eighty-year-old patient who was struck by lightning. She survived, but it knocked her out for a few minutes. A couple of nights after the incident, she called me at three o’clock in the morning to tell me that a marching band was playing music in her bedroom. She held the phone up for me to hear, but I couldn’t hear a thing. She begged me to come to her house and I did.”
“And?”
“And I stood next to her in her bedroom while she pressed her hands over her ears and screamed, ‘See what I mean?’”
“But there was no band?”
Bryant shook his head. “Auditory hallucinations. But to her they were as real as if the band was right next to us.”
“That can really happen?”
“Absolutely. Neuroscience is still in its infancy. There’s a lot we’ve yet to understand.”
“So I’m having auditory hallucinations?”
“I’m just saying it’s a possibility. When was the first time you heard the alien voices?”
“Right after the accident. I was lying there on the side of the mountain.”
“That makes sense. Did they happen to tell you where they came from?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Margo seemed to search her memory. “Is that important?”
Bryant smiled. “This isn’t a math test. There are no wrong answers. I can only say that everything you’re telling me fits the mold.”
His words seemed to have a calming effect on her. She moved her head in a tiny nod over and over as if processing the information. Her eyes roamed the graveyard until they landed on Megan’s tombstone. Bryant followed her stare.
“What was she like?” Margo asked.
Bryant’s heart swelled at the question. “She had a great big heart. Her best friend was a little person. Lucy was her name.” He laughed at the image. “It’s hard to be a cool teenager when your best friend is only three and a half feet tall, but that didn’t stop Megan. Lucy was no angel either. A feisty kid. I swear if Lucy was regular height, Megan would’ve ignored her completely. But Megan rallied around the disadvantaged. She never wanted anyone taken for granted.”
“She sounds sweet,” Margo said. “I wish I could’ve known her.”
He nodded. “Yeah. She was a sweet, sweet kid.”
There was a comfortable silence while the two of them gazed at Megan’s grave together. Their eyes met and for a moment they were one. Just two people trying to cope with the loss of their families. Nowhere to turn.
Margo looked up and gave the sky an intent stare, as if she were calculating the direction of the wind. She looked concerned.
Bryant gently placed a hand on her shoulder. “They can’t hurt you, Margo. I won’t let that happen.”
She kept glancing up, splitting her attention between Bryant and the night sky. That’s when Bryant looked up and realized there was a slight break in the clouds. Through the sliver of an opening, the silhouette of a star twinkled down at them.
“I think some of them might be leaving,” Margo said almost to herself.
“The aliens?” Bryant asked.
“Yes.”
At first he considered the comment a breakthrough. But breakthroughs came after months or years of therapy and normally came with tears of joy and anguish. This was nothing more than a
parenthetical comment.
“Why?” was the only thing he could think to ask.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then her preoccupation with the sky subsided and she seemed to give a new thought some consideration. She looked at Bryant and beamed. “Does this mean I’m cured?”
Bryant couldn’t help but smile. The notion of Margo recovering from PTSD as a result of a ten-minute conversation was ludicrous. She was an open wound searching for a bandage.
His grin faded when he looked over Margo’s shoulder toward Warner Road. A black Ford Expedition rolled past the graveyard. It was going at an ominously slow pace. From behind the Expedition, a grey sedan honked its horn, then pulled around and sped past it, water spitting out from the front tires. The windows in the Expedition were too dark to make out a driver.
“Is that who I think it is?” Bryant asked.
Margo nodded. “He follows me everywhere.”
“Do you know why?”
“He doesn’t trust me.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “Something about the accident,” she said in a faraway voice.
He wanted to ask which accident, but quickly realized it could only be hers.
“Can you read his thoughts now?” he asked.
“He’s too far.”
The Expedition pulled over to the side of the road and parked along the street.
“It’s his way of telling me he’s here,” she said.
Bryant felt his pulse race hot. He’d despised public officials with a misguided sense of authority and a government agent following an innocent teenage girl sure smelled like one. Bryant started toward the car.
Margo grabbed his arm. “Please don’t,” she said, searching his eyes.
“I thought we had an agreement,” he said.
She loosened her grip and looked over at the idling Expedition; exhaust fumed from its tailpipe like a waiting dragon. “I don’t need to read your mind to know what you’re thinking.”
They both stared at the vehicle with their own thoughts, Bryant thinking he could use a couple of answers. He turned to Margo. “Where will you be tomorrow?”
“St. Andrews.”
“Good,” he said, “then I’ll see you there.”
Margo clutched his arm again. “Please don’t.” She shifted her stance, uncomfortable, as if she were trying to keep him from crossing the street. The unease on her face was palpable. Something told him she was hiding something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Bryant took her hand from his arm and gently let go. “I need to do this. For both of us.”
He walked over to Kate’s headstone, bent over and kissed it. He turned and kissed Megan’s headstone, then whispered, “Goodnight girls.”
Bryant walked past his parked car and headed for the street. He walked with a purpose, almost a strut to his step. Ever since the accident, he’d lost any sense of apprehension when it came to confrontations. He strode across the slick street and waited on the center strip for a car to pass. The Expedition was still sitting there idling. Bryant glanced over his shoulder and couldn’t see Margo.
After the car passed, Bryant headed straight for the Expedition. There was no hesitation to his gait. He stood inches in front of the driver’s side window and knocked. The smoky glass windows prevented him from seeing inside the vehicle, but he knew what to expect.
The window rolled down. Even under the dim city streetlights, Bryant could tell it was the same guy he saw at St. Andrews earlier that day. The man’s face looked like it was set in cement. His eyes were slits of intensity.
“Get in,” the man said.
Chapter 11
Bryant pulled open the passenger door to the Expedition and sat next to the FBI agent. It was chilly enough for Bryant to feel the heater blowing on his feet. The man twisted to face him and folded his arms across his chest.
“You want to know what’s going on, don’t you?” the man said.
“What’s your name?” Bryant asked.
The man hesitated. It was a simple question, but Bryant understood the consequences of the request. Giving up even something as simple as your name was a dispersal of power. A loss of previously undisclosed information. It gave him an identity.
“Ron,” the man said tersely. Then he seemed to arrive at a conclusion. He reached into his coat pocket and came out with a gold shield. “Special Agent Ron Turkle.”
“All right, Ron,” Bryant said, not giving the man the satisfaction of acting intimidated. “Why don’t you tell me what I need to know.”
The FBI agent sat motionless while Bryant took in the interior of the vehicle. A GPS device sat in the middle of the dashboard. It was dark green, but for an orange dot blinking on the top portion of the screen. A few hundred yards ahead of the Expedition a car started. Bryant didn’t put the two things together until he noticed the blinking orange light on the GPS begin to move at the very same moment a small car pulled out onto Warner Road and drove away. It was too dark to tell, but it looked something like a Honda Civic.
“That’s her car you’re tracking isn’t it?” Bryant said.
Agent Turkle didn’t pay any attention to the GPS, or the car. He simply stared at Bryant with a serious expression, as if he were deciding exactly how much to say.
“She’s just a teenage girl for crying out loud,” Bryant said. “What are you so afraid of?”
Turkle didn’t seem in any rush to engage Bryant. He looked out his window to peek at the overcast sky.
“The meteorologists already have a name for this anomaly,” Turkle said. “They’ve labeled it some kind of stagnant air flow something or other.” He turned back to Bryant and added, “Is that what you figured it was?”
Bryant was beginning to wonder why this guy seemed so casual. He was using soft tones and innocuous conversation as if trying to keep Bryant curious enough to stay.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Bryant said.
“You already know the answer to the first question, but it’s the second question you want to ask that’s got you all geeked up with intrigue.”
Bryant wasn’t getting anywhere with this line of dialogue so he decided a different approach. “Aw, Agent Turkle,” Bryant moaned, a disgusted look on his face. “Don’t tell me you’re into young girls. Is that how you get your kicks?”
A slow, wicked smile crept across Turkle’s face. Bryant wasn’t sure if he’d just poked a sleeping lion.
“You know what I think?” Turkle said. “I think you’re innocent. I think you made those reservations to Jackson Hole just because you needed to get away. Not because you were running away like some of the guys in my office think.”
“Running away from what?”
“And I think you keep that bottle of Ativan in the top drawer of your desk just in case you get the nerve to commit suicide and not for emergency anxiety attacks like some of the other guys think.”
The heater seemed to blow hotter on Bryant’s legs. The FBI had better things to do than to search a civilian’s office unless there was good reason. Bryant’s life was getting more complicated by the minute.
Turkle glared at him. “Don’t antagonize me, Dr. Bryant. I don’t like shrinks to begin with, so don’t make matters worse.” He pulled a laptop computer from under his seat and rested it on his knees.
“I’m sitting here trying to help you,” Turkle added, plucking the keyboard with his index finger. “Maybe I should let you go on with your slow spiral into a deep depression, but it occurs to me that I could speed up the process for you.”
Bryant didn’t like the change in his voice. More businesslike. The computer screen glowed in the agent’s hands as he seemed to find what he was looking for.
Turkle turned the computer to face Bryant, then handed it to him. “You already know about the plane crash, right?”
Before Bryant could respond, an image appeared on the screen. An aerial view of a foggy, snowcapped mountain range. Turkle reached around the scree
n and pushed one of the “F” keys at the top of the keyboard. The picture slowly zoomed in to become different shades of white, the fog peeling away like layers of a veil. As the image zoomed closer, a dark spec came into view. At first Bryant thought it was a rock jutting out from the snow, but soon discovered something quite different. As the image became clearer and closer, Bryant could see that the spec was a smattering of debris. Metallic-gray particles interrupted the pristine pallor of the landscape. They seemed foreign, like slivers of a screw in a bowl of white rice.
Bryant’s stomach clenched as his eyes finally focused on the image. There was no indication that the foreign material in the photo had ever been part of a commercial aircraft. If Bryant hadn’t already suspected what he was seeing, he would never have come up with the right answer.
“The computer malfunctioned at the same time they were flying through an early-season snowstorm,” Turkle said. “The pilot was flying without instruments and flew into the side of Mt. McKinley at over four hundred miles an hour.”
The screen kept zooming in until Bryant could see the aircraft’s fuselage split open. Pieces of the seats were mingled in with luggage and body parts. As a medical doctor, Bryant had seen plenty of trauma during his residency, but this was violent. The charred debris really stood out against the snowy backdrop.
“The gas tanks were full at impact. We found parts of the fuselage over a hundred yards away from the site,” Turkle said.
The interior of the car had warmed up considerably. The heater seemed to be blowing fire onto Bryant’s legs.
“Margo?” Bryant uttered. “She was on this flight?”
“They couldn’t make a positive identification on her entire family, even with dental records,” Turkle said. “They found Margo sitting next to the crash site without a scratch on her.”
Bryant narrowed his eyes.
“And I’m not talking figuratively here,” Turkle continued. “She literally did not have a scratch. No broken bones, no internal bleeding. No swelling, nothing. Like she just happened to pass by the site on her way to school.”