Taji's Syndrome

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “You take care, Harold. I love you. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.” Before he said anything more, he hung up.

  There were sandwiches waiting, and the manager turned off his television so he could talk with Harold while the boy ate the two chicken sandwiches that the manager had made.

  “This is real kindly of you,” Harold said indistinctly through a full mouth.

  “You looked half starved and miserable as a drowned puppy,” said the manager, giving him a second glass of milk.

  “Not real common, your hospitality,” said Harold, this time with several questions implied in his tone of voice.

  The man shook his head. “I’m waiting for my two kids to get back from rehearsal for their high school Christmas program. I can worry on my own, or I can worry with company. Thing is, I hope that if my kids ever showed up looking the way you did that someone would give them. a sandwich or two.” He indicated the television. “There’s cable in the room sets, but no pay stations. I can get you a listing of what’s on, if you want it.”

  “Thanks,” said Harold, relaxing a bit.

  “Think nothing of it. My name’s Tucker, by the way. Norton Tucker,” He held out his hand.

  Harold took it. “I’m Harold Porter,” he said feeling very grown-up for a change.

  “Stick around, if you like, and meet my kids. They’re a little older than you are, but you don’t mind that, do you?” Tucker got up and took the nearly empty plate from Harold.

  “I better get to the room. My Dad’ll be back soon, and he wants me in the room.” Saying the words made him uneasy.

  “Whatever’s right,” said Tucker. “The kids’ll be around tomorrow, if you change your mind. Maybe if I say something to your Dad, he might—”

  Harold interrupted him. “No. Please. Don’t say anything. He . . . he doesn’t like me talking to strangers.”

  Tucker nodded. “All right.” He watched as Harold started toward the door. “You let me know if you need anything.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” He started toward the door, then turned back. “Don’t say anything about the phone call, will you? Dad doesn’t like me making calls.”

  If Tucker thought there was anything out of the ordinary in this request he did not reveal it. “You got it,” he said with a wave that was almost a salute.

  Harold made his way back to Unit 11, and took up his vigil.

  —Mason Ross—

  “We’re so sorry about Kevin,” said Joan Ellingham. “I wish there were something I could say—”

  Susan nodded and tried not to cry again. “Thank you,” she murmured as she reached out to take Harper’s arm.

  “Both of you,” their neighbor Barry McPhee said as he held out his hands to them. “Caroline and I are going to miss him so much.”

  Harper said a few words as he tightened his hold around Susan’s shoulder. He glanced at his other two children, so quiet in their dark mourning clothes, both of them grieving and awkward at their brother’s funeral.

  “Don’t worry about the rest of the . . . the holidays,” Harper’s department head told him as he took his hand. “I’ll put the grad students on your papers, so that you won’t have to bother with them. I’m really . . . you know.”

  “Thanks, Phil,” said Harper.

  “You, too, Susan,” Phillip Sanders said to her. “It’s a real shock, and what a time for it to happen.”

  Susan had to stop herself from getting angry with Phil, to keep from screaming at him that there was no time that was good for a teenager to die. That it was Christmas made it no worse than it would have been at any other time of year. She nodded, not trusting herself to do anything more.

  “I’ll call you later, Phil,” said Harper.

  The line seemed endless, and by the time everyone who attended the memorial service had left the chapel, Susan was afraid she would not be able to walk as far as the car. She reached out for her two remaining sons, touching them blindly and with ill-concealed desperation. “We’re going home.”

  “Okay, Mom,” said Mason, reaching out to take her hand. Despite his youth, he was curiously mature and responsible, as if he had been born thirty years old and was growing ancient before he reached high school.

  “You did a fine job, Susan,” said Harper, his face closed and remote, as if he were lost in study rather than grieving for the loss of his child.

  “How does anyone do a fine job with something like this?” she asked, but there was no heat in the words, only listlessness.

  “We do the best we can,” Harper said, starting down the steps of the chapel.

  Seattle was swathed in cold; snow had fallen the day before and now there was a frigid mist that hung over the harbor and lakes and hid most of the city. The chapel, which was only two blocks from the University of Washington campus, seemed suspended in clouds; the massive buildings of the university, most of them perched on the hill, were all but invisible.

  “I wish the doctors could tell us more,” said Grant, who at sixteen was clearly the best-looking of the Ross boys. He had spent most of the fall in California, at a ranch near Santa Rosa in a program for drug abuse. His uncle, Susan’s brother, had served as his guardian. Only Kevin’s death had brought him back to Seattle.

  “I wish they could, too, son,” said Harper as he led them toward their Trooper III. “Hurry up; it’s too cold to stay outside long.”

  “But what was it?” Grant asked, still bewildered and beginning to be angry. “Why don’t they know yet?”

  “Sometimes they . . . don’t have enough to go on,” said Harper in a distant way as he fumbled for his keys in his coat pocket. His heavy gloves made his fingers awkward.

  “Isn’t what they do like solving crimes?” Mason asked. “I mean, they’re similar, aren’t they?” It was a deliberate ploy; Harper Ross was a professor of criminology. As he got into the back seat, Mason added another thought to his inquiry. “Couldn’t you help them out, Dad? You’ve got the experience to help them.”

  “They think it had something to do with toxic wastes,” Susan said, so tired that she might as well have been up for three days without sleep.

  “And you, Dad?” Mason prompted.

  “It’s possible,” said Harper as he waited for the engine to warm up before putting the four-wheel-drive Trooper III in gear. “It fits with what we do know about it.”

  “It could be . . . anything,” said Susan. “He died. That’s the one thing we’re all sure of.” She put her hand to her eyes so that she would not have to explain her tears.

  “But if it’s something we can learn about,” Mason began, and saw that Grant was staring at him in unconcealed anger.

  “It won’t change anything,” Grant said.

  “It might mean that someone else won’t die,” Mason responded, meeting his brother’s hostile stare. “That wouldn’t bring Kevin back, but it could make a difference.”

  “Mason, for God’s sake,” said his mother.

  “He’s right,” Harper agreed unexpectedly.

  “Not you, too.” Susan smeared her tears over her face, her mascara leaving wide, dark tracks.

  “I don’t think I could sit by and watch this happen to another family,” said Harper as he concentrated on holding the car on the road. “It would be too much, if there was something I could do to prevent it.”

  “There’s nothing anyone could have done,” said Susan. “If there were, they would have. They ran out of ideas, you heard them say so.”

  “Susan,” Harper warned sympathetically. “Think. Letting others die won’t change Kevin’s death, it will only make it worse; it would put other families through the same thing we’re going through. Do you want that, Susan? Wouldn’t you do something about it if you could?”

  “Are you trying to convince y
ourself?” Susan asked softly. “Or do you want to make a gesture?”

  “It’s not a gesture, it’s . . . the only contribution I can think of to give.” Harper dared not take his eyes off the road to look at her, but the impulse was there in the angle of his head and the way he held the steering wheel.

  “Yeah,” said Mason, leaning forward in his seat. “I’d help, if I could. I don’t know what I could do, but if there was anything . . . I owe it to Kevin, in a way:” He fingered his dark tie. “If there are more cases of this stuff . . .”

  “Shut up,” Grant told him sharply. “Just shut up.”

  They drove in silence, each one alone in pain.

  “I told Phil we wouldn’t be there New Year’s,” Harper said to Susan as they neared the freeway entrance.

  “He didn’t think we would be, did he?” she asked, sufficiently shocked to respond with less lethargy than she had shown so far that day.

  “No, but I wanted him to know. He means well, and it saves making a phone call later.” He signaled to change lanes, maneuvering around a stalled van.

  “All right.” She put her hand to her eyes once more.

  On the freeway the traffic moved at less than twenty miles an hour, progress toward the Bellevue exit slowed by the mist and the cold. The Rosses were quiet as the Trooper III moved along; only when they had reached the Medina exit did Susan speak again, her voice still thick with tears. “If you decide to do anything, to get involved —if there’s anything to get involved with—then you do it on your own conscience. I’ve had all I can take. You do it on your own time, Harper.”

  He nodded slowly as he moved into the right-hand lane. “All right. If you want it that way, I’ll do as you ask.”

  “Dad’s being noble again,” Grant said. “Always looking for something to help out.”

  “Stop it!” Mason yelled.

  “Not another word, young man!” Susan, commanded, turning in her seat to glare at Grant. “You get that chip off your shoulder and the smirk off your face and then maybe you can question what your father does where I can hear you, but not before.” She was crying, but no longer in the helpless. depressed way she had since Kevin died. “I don’t want to hear anything more out of either of you, is that understood?”

  “Yes, Morn,” said Mason, neither sullen nor chastened.

  “Shit.”

  “And none of that,” Harper warned as they neared the Bellevue turn-off. “It’s bad enough that we lost Kevin; I won’t stand by and watch the family self-destruct.” Since Harper was generally a soft-spoken man whose quiet, professorial manner gave away his occupation before he mentioned it, any outburst was regarded as important and significant, a thing to be respected. “Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Dad,” said Mason in the same accepting tone he had used with his mother.

  This time Grant remained silent, though his face was flushed and his eyes sizzled.

  They had almost reached Lake Washington when traffic came to a complete stop.

  “What do you suppose it is?” Susan asked.

  “Probably an accident, the weather the way it is.” Harper sighed and studied the dials. “I wish I knew these methane engines better than I do. In the old Buick I would have known in a second, the way it sounded, if I ought to turn it off or not. But this thing . . .”

  “You were the one who wanted to get it,” Susan reminded him.

  “I’m glad we did,” he insisted, keeping his voice level and steady. “It was the only sensible thing to do; you agreed. Waiting in line for gas is—”

  “Senseless,” she finished for him. “I know, and wasteful and profligate. Methane engines are the wave of the future. As long as matter decays we have no lack of methane. Et cetera, et cetera,” she recited, sounding like one of the more righteous of the advertisements for the new methane engines.

  “It’s true. I’m simply not used to it yet,” Harper said in his most reasonable tone. “In weather like this . . .”

  “It’s okay, Dad. There’s that special light on the thermometer, remember?” He pointed to the various dials, relieved to have something to talk about that was not connected with Kevin’s death.

  “Which one?” Harper asked, appearing more confused than he was.

  “There. If it turns yellow, then you have to . . . you have to engage the supplemental coolant. I think that’s how it goes. And if it turns red, then pull off the road and idle for two minutes, engage the supplemental coolant and then turn the engine off.” He said the last with pride, amazed at himself for remembering what the mechanic had told them when they bought the car the year before.

  “No yellow, no red.” Harper leaned back in the driver’s seat and adjusted the angle of the lower back. “So long as we’re going to sit for a while, we might as well—”

  He was interrupted by whooping sirens as two ambulances and a highway-rescue firetruck sped by on the shoulder of the road.

  “Fuck a duck!” marveled Grant, watching the emergency vehicles fade into the mists.

  “Oh, stop it,” Susan said, more irritated than angry now.

  “Must be pretty bad to bring all that sh . . . stuff out,” said Grant. “Wonder where the cops are?”

  “They’re probably the ones who radioed for the ambulances and the firetruck,” said Harper, lapsing into the same manner he adopted when lecturing in class. “It’s the most sensible explanation, in any case.”

  “Someone with a CB might have done it,” suggested Mason.

  “Yes, that’s true, but then the cops would have come along with the others.” He had both a CB and police monitor in his car, and for a moment toyed with the idea of turning them on and listening in. Then he realized that more disasters could be more than anyone of them was prepared to handle that day. He studied the instrument panel and let himself get lost in the information they offered.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to sit here?” Susan asked when almost five minutes had gone by.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could turn on the radios and find out what’s happened,” she said sharply.

  “I don’t want to heat up the engine or put too much strain on the battery. We could be here quite a while and if we are, we’ll have to use the supplemental interior heater; that thing eats up battery power like a hog eating hops.” Harper hoped that his excuses were sufficient for Susan; he had no intention of turning on the radios.

  She sighed. “All right. Why not? We might as well be stranded here as anywhere.”

  In the back, Grant started to fiddle with the zipper on his jacket, his face blank, his eyes drifting into the hypnotic stare that had been part of him for the last four years. He began to hum, first very softly and aimlessly, then slowly getting louder, until he was forcefully grunting out the same four notes in endless repetition.

  “I wish you’d stop,” said Mason, not expecting to get a response.

  “Leave him alone, Mason,” said Harper. “It’s been a hard day for all of us.” He paused. “I wish I could call Linda. I don’t want her to think that we’re not coming.”

  “Use the CB,” said Susan, unconcerned.

  “She probably knows about the accident. Restaurant people usually do,” said Mason, doing his best to be neutral.

  “If this lasts too much longer, I will call,” said Harper, staring out into the mist. “It’s terrible.”

  “They say it isn’t going to clear up for a couple more days. Then we’ll have rain,” said Mason, repeating what they had all heard on the news that morning.

  “I guess the McPhees are stuck in this, too,” Harper said, in order to say something.

  “They were going to the Ellinghams for a drink,” Susan corrected him. “But who knows? it might go on long enough for them to sit here the way we’re doing.”

  “T
hey’ll have it on the news. The cops will keep the traffic diverted,” said Harper with more faith than certainty.

  The air in the car was getting cooler, but no one wanted to mention it yet. Only Grant, locked away in his relentless mind, accommodated it to the extent that he stopped unzipping his jacket and instead ran his thumbnail down the interlocking bits of metal.

  One of the ambulances hurried back the way it had come, all lights on and the siren on screech. A few of the other cars honked their horns at it, whether in derision or support was a matter of conjecture.

  “When we get home, I’m going to call Jarvis and tell him I’d like to help if they’ll let me, if there’s anything I can do.” Harper’s voice was distant, the words coming slowly. “I don’t want to worry you or upset you, Susan, but I have to do it.”

  “You do what you have to do,” said Susan in a constricted tone of voice. “I don’t want to know about it.”

  Harper sighed, and let himself be distracted by the sudden return of the second ambulance, this time with a police escort. “I can’t believe that Christmas was day before yesterday.”

  “Some Christmases aren’t real Christmasy,” said Mason, hoping he would not cry. He had wept for a week before Kevin died, so wasted and pale, with machines and tubes turning him into something as alien as a being from another planet. He had wept the night it had finally ended. Now he did not want to cry anymore.

  “Next year we’ll do something better,” said Harper, pain and determination in his words. “Let’s go to Hawaii, or to Florida, somewhere it’s warm and Christmas looks like a midsummer fair.”

  “That’s next year,” said Susan, but with less criticism than before.

  “We’ll do something that won’t remind us. That will be a start. Lots of people have holidays that have bad things associated with them,” Harper said with deliberate simplicity. “That doesn’t mean that the holidays were bad, or have to stay bad, but that something bad happened on one.” He hesitated. “Remember that Phil’s brother was killed in that plane crash the day before Thanksgiving five years ago. Phil still has Thanksgiving and . . .”