Once Upon a Day: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  “But Jimmy asked him several times, is that right?”

  “Yes, and Father’s response was always that he would rather not talk about the past. This seemed fair to me.”

  Stephen was still thinking about New Mexico. Dorothea was so pale; he’d assumed she was from somewhere much colder and gloomier.

  “Do you know how your mother died?”

  “No. I’ve never asked because I knew it would hurt Father to talk about it.”

  Nancy sighed, but Stephen gave Dorothea an encouraging glance. This he understood perfectly.

  “Why do you think your father refused to let you leave your home?”

  “Obviously he didn’t refuse or Jimmy and I wouldn’t both be here in your hospital.”

  Stephen tried not to smile.

  “When you were children,” Nancy said, her tone not hiding her exasperation.

  “He wanted to protect us.” Dorothea took a breath. “I was sickly and mother had died. Grandma used to say it was natural that Father was afraid something would happen to us.”

  Nancy nodded, but she was still looking down at the chart. So far, she’d made very little eye contact with Dorothea, which annoyed the hell out of Stephen. Shrinks should have better bedside manners than regular docs, not worse.

  “Jimmy said your grandmother told him your mother’s family lived in Missouri. Did you know this was why he came here? To try to locate them?”

  “No,” Dorothea said slowly. “He didn’t share with me his reasons for going to Missouri.”

  “Has Jimmy ever intentionally hurt himself before?”

  “No.”

  “He has very vivid nightmares. Do you remember if he had these as a child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ever tell you the content of any of these nightmares?” It was then that Stephen saw Dorothea hesitate for the first time. He knew she was opposed to lying, but he also saw on her face a real reluctance to answer this question.

  When Nancy repeated it, he told Dorothea she didn’t have to say anything she didn’t want to say.

  “That’s helpful,” Nancy said to him, frowning.

  “It’s not a courtroom here,” he said. “Go easy on her. She’s a long way from home with a sick brother.”

  “You met this woman when you picked her up in the cab you’re driving. That’s what Jay said. Isn’t that your only connection?”

  Nancy’s voice was snotty, especially when she said the word “cab.” Maybe Dorothea noticed this, because she said, “He’s also my friend.”

  “Good to know,” Nancy said blandly. “Will you answer the question about your brother’s dreams or not? Of course I only ask because I think it will help him.”

  “All right,” Dorothea said. “Jimmy did have nightmares for a year or so when we were children. Our rooms were at the opposite ends of a long hall, and most of the time I wasn’t disturbed. Father was up with him nearly every night though. Jimmy told me this. He said Father would sit in his room until he was able to sleep again.

  “One night, when I was eight and Jimmy was ten, I did hear him screaming. It was a terrible sound, though perhaps no more terrible than the other nights I didn’t hear it. I can’t say. On that particular night though, I went down to his bedroom and I overheard him telling Father about the dream. I didn’t hear most of the details, but I heard enough to make me frightened myself. He said he was dreaming of our mother … as she looked when she was dead.”

  Stephen was surprised how unsurprised Nancy was. Maybe Jimmy was still dreaming the same thing, which was a pretty depressing thought.

  Dorothea’s eyes were dilated, possibly from the memory of fear. Not from the drug. If she hadn’t had that pill, she never would have made it through this. But what if making it through this would hurt her?

  The thought hit Stephen with a jolt. He was still listening to Nancy, who’d finally finished her questions and was now giving Dorothea the “history of the case,” as promised (which turned out to be just the facts, and very little Dorothea hadn’t already heard from Phillips last night). But Stephen was also considering whether he had made a glaringly stupid mistake.

  He had no idea what was causing Dorothea’s anxiety, and yet he’d medicated her anyway. What if this Charles O’Brien was some kind of abusive prick? (Her idealizing her father made this more likely, not less. Kids tend to idealize parents who don’t really love them, as he knew from doing pediatrics.) What if Dorothea’s only escape had been to find herself unable to breathe? What if all her singing wasn’t just to help her breathe more calmly and evenly, but also to calm down that father with her sweet voice? Not a bad strategy. Certainly a hell of a lot better than what her brother seemed to have come up with.

  Nancy was telling Dorothea that Jimmy might say some disturbing things. “He needs you to just listen,” she told Dorothea. “Can you do that?”

  Dorothea said yes. And Stephen was thinking, that’s all she can do is listen. No escape.

  Maybe it hit him harder because of his own experience with sedatives after the accident. If they were strong enough to put him to sleep, fine, but if they just calmed him down, it was much worse. He was calm enough to think about what happened, exactly what he didn’t want to do. He wanted oblivion, distraction, something, anything, other than facing what he’d been through. What in the hell was the point of facing something he could never understand or do anything to change?

  Dorothea and Nancy were standing now. Stephen stood too, and quickly turned to Dorothea. “I don’t think you should do this.”

  She blinked with confusion.

  “I can bring you back tomorrow. Even later today. But I think we should have lunch first. Wait a few hours.”

  Nancy shook her head. “I just had them bring Jimmy to another room. He’s very anxious to see his sister. I’m not going to put him through that again.”

  “Then let me go with you,” Stephen said. His voice was urgent, and he reached out for Dorothea’s arm.

  She looked in his eyes. He knew she didn’t understand, but he also knew she saw how important it was to him.

  “Bad idea,” Nancy began, but Dorothea interrupted.

  “I want Stephen to accompany me.”

  “What about what Jimmy wants?” Nancy snapped. “He asked to speak to you alone, and I’ve agreed. He’s not a danger to anyone but himself.”

  “Jimmy and I are very much the same,” Dorothea said softly, still looking at Stephen. “He will feel as I do about this.”

  “Fine,” Nancy said, grabbing her clipboard. “I have other patients to see. I’ll be back in an hour.” She looked at Stephen. “You know how to buzz for a nurse if you have any problems.”

  She led them to a standard hospital room: green walls, two beds, a curtain between them. But Jimmy was the only patient there, and he was sitting in a chair by the window.

  When he saw Dorothea, he ran to her, but she was already running to him. They met in the middle of the room. Stephen stood just inside the doorway, watching what struck him as the weirdest reunion he’d ever seen.

  At the same moment, they had both put their hands up, waist high, palms out. Then they reached out to each other, touching palms and aligning their fingers, while they stared into each other’s eyes. Neither of them said a word, at least not with their mouths, but their eyes seemed to be communicating. Their eyes never moved from the other’s face.

  For easily five minutes they stayed like this: two human statues connected at the hands. After a while, Stephen found his thoughts drifting to one of his patients, a mother of twins, who’d claimed her children had a secret language. Dorothea and Jimmy weren’t twins, though they did look strikingly similar, from their bright blue eyes to their unnatural paleness, their slight frames, their nearly equal height. Maybe they had developed a twin kind of closeness from living away from the normal world for so long. From living with no one but their family, Stephen now understood. Not in a religious cult or a commune or any community at all. Just two kids t
aken by a man to live an incredibly isolated life in the middle of nowhere.

  When Dorothea and Jimmy finally broke their spell, they sat down together on the bed. They sat very close, and she put her arms around him, but loosely, obviously trying to avoid the many places she couldn’t see where he’d cut himself. Jimmy was crying again like he had last night, sobbing really. Stephen would have felt uncomfortable witnessing this if Dorothea hadn’t looked at him every so often, showing in her eyes that she still felt that they were connected in some kind of pattern. “The charming coincidence,” as she called it, which Stephen knew wasn’t real, even if there was something he liked about the idea. Or perhaps it was just that she believed it, he thought, as he watched her holding her brother so carefully that her thin arms were twitching a little with the effort.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” Jimmy said, sniffing hard. He glanced at Stephen and lowered his voice. “Who is that? Another doctor?”

  “He’s a friend,” she told Jimmy. “He helped me find you.”

  That seemed to satisfy her brother. He rambled on then for what felt like fifteen minutes or more, and Stephen took a seat on the other bed. Most of it he couldn’t decipher because it was too personal, about their childhood, about their house, about their father. He wasn’t sure that Dorothea was understanding it all either, especially since she barely spoke. But then he remembered that Nancy had told Dorothea to just listen. She was doing exactly what the doctor told her to do, trying hard, for her brother’s sake.

  She didn’t speak until Jimmy mumbled, “I hate this place.”

  “It’s awful,” Dorothea said, and she actually shuddered. Stephen wondered what she saw here that he didn’t. “Don’t worry though. We’re going to get you out of here.” She looked at Stephen. “Maybe today?”

  He nodded, even as he realized what this meant. If Jimmy got out this afternoon, the two of them would probably go back to New Mexico tonight. The whole thing would be a strange incident in his life, nothing more.

  “I can’t leave,” Jimmy said, and his eyes filled with tears again.

  “Yes, you can,” Dorothea said. “Stephen will convince them to let you go.”

  “I’ll try,” Stephen said, but Jimmy shook his head violently.

  “No! If I leave here, it will happen again.”

  “What will happen?” Dorothea said.

  “It hurts.” Jimmy dropped his head. “It hurts so much I can’t stand it. I can’t fucking stand it!”

  Stephen saw Dorothea flinch at the word “fucking.” He wondered if she’d ever heard it before.

  Jimmy started talking about his dream, and Stephen realized his hunch was right. The first thing Jimmy said was that he was still having the same dream about their mother.

  “Can I tell you what I see in the dream?” he said, looking closely at his sister. “I don’t want to make you nervous.”

  Jimmy’s voice was polite now, more like Dorothea’s again. Stephen imagined how he would have been if he hadn’t come to the city. Or if he hadn’t had the breakdown. Maybe both. Really, Stephen had no idea what was wrong with him. He could have stitched him up, but he couldn’t have done a damn thing about whatever caused him to cut himself.

  Dorothea said yes, of course he could tell her about his dream. She wanted to hear whatever he wanted to say.

  “She’s lying on the floor.” Jimmy stood up and started pacing. “She’s lying on the floor, and she’s … covered in blood. Oh God, Thea, it’s so fucking horrible. I can’t even tell it’s Mom except I know it is. I can see her hair.”

  Stephen glanced at Dorothea. She still looked fine.

  “She has on her bathing suit. It’s strange, but in the dream I always think something must have happened to her in the pool.” Jimmy walked over to the window and turned back. “You heard Grandma say we used to have a pool at our house in California.”

  The effort it was taking for Dorothea to keep silent was evident to Stephen then. He could see her biting her lip.

  “But Mom wasn’t hurt in the damned pool,” Jimmy said, looking away. “I don’t know where it happened, but it wasn’t outside.”

  “Are you still talking about in the dream?” Dorothea said. Her voice was so small and frightened; her pupils were twice the size they’d been in Nancy’s office. Stephen wanted to curse Nancy for telling her to just listen. What was the medical foundation for this advice? Maybe it would be good for Jimmy, but how could it possibly be good for Dorothea?

  “It’s not just a dream,” Jimmy said. “I never understood this before, but one of the doctors here told me a dream that keeps repeating has to be real. I really saw her like that. I saw our mother lying in a pool of her own blood, cut to death.”

  Stephen was trying to imagine why a doctor would tell Jimmy that. He was pretty sure he’d heard the opposite: that dreams were almost never literal memories. He thought about explaining this, but Jimmy was still talking.

  “I was the only one there.” The tears had started again. “I don’t know who did it to Mom, maybe I did. Fuck, maybe that’s why I only feel better now when I cut myself.”

  “You were six years old,” Dorothea whispered. “An innocent child.”

  “I wasn’t innocent. I’d already killed our dog.”

  Jesus. Stephen seriously doubted that Jimmy had killed his dog or anything else for that matter, but he could almost feel his guilt: palpable, painful, a force in the room. It struck Stephen that this guilt was what made Jimmy seem so young, though he was close to twenty-five. He’d seen little kids who thought they were responsible for everything that happened. Of course some adults thought this too, but most had discovered that the number of things they could really affect in the world was so small, it was laughable. If only they could believe that what they did mattered, for good or bad.

  “You didn’t kill our dog,” Dorothea said.

  “Ask Father,” Jimmy said, and he laughed, but it was a painful, hysterical laugh. “I asked him once and you know what he told me? He told me he loved me. Like that makes a difference. He loves me so much, he built this fucking castle of lies around me.”

  She stood up and went to her brother. “You’re a good person.” She took his hand between hers. “I will never believe otherwise.”

  “Because you don’t remember,” Jimmy said. “You only want to believe that.”

  When Dorothea turned around, Stephen checked her eyes. The pupils were still enormous. But her voice was surprisingly confident. “Then I will remember,” she said. She looked at Stephen. “It can be done, can it not?”

  Shit, he had no idea. He was pretty sure the answer was no, but he heard himself saying yes. And when both Jimmy and Dorothea seemed to perk up, he blurted out something he was almost positive was crap. He told Dorothea that she could remember anything she wanted to.

  Later, after Nancy had come back for Jimmy—and noticed how much calmer her patient seemed, willing to make eye contact for the first time, a really encouraging improvement—and Dorothea had agreed to return tomorrow, to help her brother again, Dorothea turned to Stephen on the way to the parking lot. First she thanked him, as always, and then she said, “So, how is this remembering accomplished?”

  PART TWO

  Naked Heart

  six

  LUCY DOBBINS HAD a beautiful house in one of the most desirable areas of Malibu. She had Al, who was more devoted to her now than when they’d married twelve years ago. She had her health and she still had her good looks, or so people always told her. They marveled that she was so thin without working out, that her hair was still fiery red, not a strand of gray in sight. She marveled that anyone would care about such things when there were so many more important things in the world.

  By more important things, Lucy meant the tragedies and losses that, for the past nineteen years, she’d defined to be the real truth of life. Her own life, yes, but everyone else’s also, whether they knew it yet or not. She’d volunteered at the domestic counseling center for mo
re than a decade, and she’d learned that there were even worse things than what had happened to her. She’d met women whose children had died, for instance. Their ability to go on was something that always amazed her. At least there was still hope in her case, no matter how much that hope had faded with each disappointment.

  Whenever the sadness threatened to overtake her, Al would convince her to use Charles’s money to book another trip. Bermuda, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome. Lima, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Montreal. They had been all over the world, and everywhere they went, Lucy peered into the faces of children. It wasn’t completely foolish. The last few detectives had all agreed that the United States was very unlikely at this point.

  Did your ex-husband ever talk about wanting to visit any foreign countries? Does he have any relatives overseas? Old friends? Colleagues?

  Unfortunately, her answers were no help. Charles had traveled when he had to for a project, but he’d never mentioned any place he actually wanted to go. He had no relatives overseas or anywhere else, other than his mother, Margaret Keenan, who’d lived with them in California until she too had disappeared. Charles didn’t have any friends overseas because he didn’t have any friends at all. In the last two years they were together, he’d cut himself off from everyone. His colleagues had no idea what had happened to him, Lucy was sure of this, because his colleagues had been her colleagues. They’d both been in the business—he was a writer and director, she was an actress—when he disappeared.

  “Disappeared” was the word Lucy had used from the first phone call to the police to the last time she’d hired a new detective, though she knew it wasn’t exactly right. If someone disappears they might have been murdered or kidnapped or killed in a car accident. They don’t tell you that they are leaving, the way Charles did. They certainly don’t tell you that you’ll never see them again.

  What kind of person would say such a thing anyway?

  Vindictive, immature and retributive. Someone with a black-and-white sense of morality and a grossly inflated view of himself.

  This was the description from a psychologist one of the detectives had consulted to create a personality profile of Charles, to help them determine where he might have gone. Lucy never understood how her answers had generated these traits for her ex-husband, nor could she say how accurate they were anymore. None of it led them to Charles, of course. The profile was as useless as all the psychics she’d seen and all the ads she’d placed in newspapers from Maine to Seattle, from Florida to Arizona, and every place in between.