by John Saul
Which meant that Jed was alone even more than usual, for too often Frank found himself spending most of his waking hours driving back and forth over the 150 miles between Borrego and Santa Fe. And, if he was honest with himself, he knew that Jed’s problems—the problems Frank had been doing his best to ignore, or attribute to nothing more serious than typical adolescent angst—had increased in these last six months.
During the spring semester of school Jed’s grades, which had never before been a problem, suddenly took a nosedive. Before Frank had even become aware of the situation, it was too late. It had been a failing grade in geometry that had sent Jed to summer school.
He and his son had a terrible row about that. Only Frank’s threat to take Jed’s car away from him had finally convinced the boy that he had no choice.
In the end, Reba Tucker had suffered a stroke, putting a quick end to the summer school session, and now Jed was without his car anyway.
“Look,” he said at last, slumping in his chair and wondering why conversations like this always had to take place in the small hours of the morning rather than at a more reasonable time, “I know things have been tough for you lately. But they haven’t been easy for me either. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to do everything, and I guess I tend to let you take care of yourself too much. But up until recently, there’s never been a problem.”
Jed’s eyes clouded. “There’s always been a problem,” he said, his voice taking on a defiant note. “If there hadn’t been a problem, Mom would still be alive, wouldn’t she?”
Jed’s words hit Frank like a blow. He stared at Jed mutely, trying to decide whether what his son had said was only caused by his momentary anger or if this was something that had been eating at him for months, even years. And yet, as he studied the pain in his son’s eyes, he knew the words had been prompted by something the boy had been harboring for a very long time.
“Is that what all this is really about?” Frank asked quietly. “Your mother?”
Jed’s expression hardened. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice taking on an almost childish petulance. “Isn’t that why she’s gone? Because you treated her the same way you treat me?”
Fury welled up in Frank and he rose to his feet, towering over his son. “No, God damn it!” he roared. “What happened to your mother had nothing to do with me at all. I loved her, as much as I’ve ever loved anybody in my life, and she loved me too.” And yet even as he spoke the words, Frank knew deep within himself that it was that very love between them that had, in the end, been at least partially responsible for her death. For Alice, despite the love they had shared, had never been able to make a place for herself in Borrego. Part of her always longed to be back in Kokatí with the people she’d grown up with. She hadn’t talked about it often, but there had been times, particularly during the last months, when she’d curled in his arms late at night. “Nobody here likes me,” she’d whispered, her arms tightening around him. “I can tell by the way they look at me. They think I’m stupid, and they don’t think I hear the things they say about the Indians.”
“But they don’t mean to hurt you,” Frank had told her. “It’s because they don’t even think of you as being an Indian anymore that you even hear those things.”
But Alice hadn’t been convinced. In the last weeks she’d spent more and more time by herself, walking in the desert.
That last day, she’d been gone before dawn, and Frank had nearly taken the day off to go look for her. But in the end he’d decided to leave her alone.
And at half-past three that afternoon Jed had called him, sobbing and hysterical. The boy had come home from school as usual, and opened the garage door to put his bicycle away.
And found his mother’s body, hanging from the rafters, a thick rope tightly knotted around her neck.
Until this moment, though, he’d never known that Jed blamed him for what had happened to Alice. Now, keeping his voice as steady as he could, he tried to explain to his son what had really happened. Jed listened in silence, not interrupting until he was finished. Then, after several more minutes had passed, he nodded his head slowly.
“So Mom felt just like I do,” he said. “Like she didn’t fit in anywhere, like nobody really liked her.”
“But it wasn’t true,” Frank insisted. “Everyone in town loved your mother.”
Jed stared at him bleakly. “Did they?” he said. “I wonder. After all, she was an Indian, wasn’t she? And don’t give me any bullshit that everyone in town loves the Indians.”
“But your mother was different—” Frank began, then realized the words had been a mistake.
“Was she?” Jed demanded. “She was never part of anything, not really. She wasn’t part of this place, and up in Kokatí no one ever trusted her after she married you.”
“That’s not true,” Frank replied. “She never said anything—”
“She didn’t say anything to you,” Jed broke in, his voice filled with anguish. “But she told me.”
Frank wished he could shut out what he was certain was coming, but knew he had to hear it. “All right,” he said, his voice choking. “What did she tell you?”
Jed’s jaw tightened and his eyes reflected the pain deep within his soul. “That sometimes she wished she’d never had me,” he whispered. “She said that sometimes she thought it would be easier for me not to exist at all than to spend my whole life never fitting in anywhere, never feeling like I’m really part of anything.”
“But you are part of something,” Frank protested. “You’re my son.”
“I’m your half-breed son,” Jed said bitterly. “And that’s all I’ll ever be.”
“Now that is bullshit,” Frank replied. “If that’s the way your mother really felt, I’m sorry. Because she was wrong. You’re still you, and you can be anything you want to be. If you don’t like it here, you can leave. And after you graduate from high school, you will leave. At college you’ll find out that no one cares where you came from or what your background is. The only things that will count are your brains, and your talent. And you’ve got a lot of both.”
“Yeah,” Jed growled. “Except that I’m not going to college.”
Frank stared at his son. “What the hell are you talking about? Of course you’re going to college. Your mother and I—”
“The hell with Mom,” Jed shouted, rising to his feet. “Can’t you understand that she’s dead? She killed herself, Dad. She didn’t love you, and she didn’t love me. So who the hell cares what she wanted? She didn’t even care enough to stick around and help me! So all I want is to get a job and earn some money so I can get the hell out of here. Okay?”
Before Frank could say anything, Jed wheeled and stormed out of the kitchen. Frank sat staring at the beer bottle for a few moments, then silently drained it, tossed it into the trash, turned out the lights and headed for his bedroom. He paused outside Jed’s door, his hand on the knob, then changed his mind.
Right now, in the hours before dawn, he suddenly felt as if he hadn’t the slightest idea who his son was, nor did he have any idea what to say to him.
As he lay in bed a few minutes later, trying to go to sleep, he felt more lonely than he had in all the years since Alice had died. Until tonight, he’d always felt that he at least had Jed.
Now he was no longer certain he even had a son.
Greg Moreland walked into the hospital at eight o’clock the next morning and smiled a greeting to the duty nurse, Gloria Hernandez. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Another quiet night?” His smile faded quickly as Gloria looked up at him, her expression haggard.
“I wish it had been,” she said. “But we got a body in about one o’clock this morning. Dr. Banning’s downstairs with it now.”
The last vestige of Moreland’s grin faded away. “A body? What happened?”
“It looks like a suicide,” Gloria told him. “It’s Heather Fredericks.”
Greg nodded perfunctorily, then went into
his office, slipped into a white smock, and went downstairs to the morgue beneath the hospital. He found Bob Banning in the single small autopsy room, nodded a greeting, then made himself look at Heather Fredericks.
Her body lay on the metal autopsy table, her abdomen slit open from the groin all the way up to her chest. Her organs, carefully removed from the thoracic cavity, lay where Banning had placed them, small samples of each cut away for testing by a lab in Santa Fe.
Greg turned away quickly, instinctively avoiding looking at Heather’s face. It was the one thing about being a doctor he hated—he’d never gotten used to seeing corpses, never developed that clinical detachment most doctors managed in the face of death.
For him, a corpse was still a person, and though he knew it was irrational, he sometimes felt that even after death, a person might still be able to experience pain.
He picked up the clipboard that held Bob Banning’s notes, and scanned them quickly From the first gross examination, death appeared to have been instantaneous, and caused by severe trauma.
Nearly every bone in Heather’s body seemed to have been broken in the fall: both arms and legs, her hips, her back and neck, as well as her collarbone. Her cranium was fractured as well, and there were severe lacerations on her back.
After he’d finished reading the notes, numbed by the shock of what had happened to his patient, he finally managed to speak to Banning. “Jesus Christ—how did all this happen?”
Banning shrugged, his eyes never leaving his work. “She fell over a thousand feet, and hit a rock in the river. She’s broken up like a bunch of matchsticks.”
“And it was definitely a suicide?”
Banning nodded. “As far as I can tell. I’ll have to wait for the lab analyses before I can make a final report, but apparently she just walked from her house up to the rim of the canyon—barefoot, and wearing nothing but a pair of pajamas—and jumped off. No sign of a struggle—her mother didn’t hear anything. She just went to bed, then got up a couple of hours later and went out and killed herself. Unless she was doing drugs—”
Greg Moreland’s brows knit into a deep frown, and he shook his head. “Not Heather,” he said. “I’d been treating her for that accident a week ago, and if she was on drugs, believe me, I’d have spotted it. I saw her yesterday, and she was just fine. Her wounds were healing, and the biggest problem she had was that her mother had grounded her. But you’d hardly think something like that would be enough to make a kid kill herself.”
Banning stretched his aching muscles, and yawned against the fatigue that clouded his mind. “I don’t know,” he said, almost echoing Gloria Hernandez’s words of a few minutes before. “I guess we’ve been pretty lucky around here. This kind of thing seems to happen every day now. Kids who seem fine just suddenly give up. It’s as though the world has become too complicated for them, and anything seems better than having to cope with one more day.” He moved to a sink, and began washing up. “By tomorrow we should know for sure. But if her blood comes up clean, I’m going to call it a suicide.”
Later, back in his office, Greg found himself still thinking about Banning’s words.
And he also thought about Heather Fredericks. He’d liked Heather, even though she had often been a bit manipulative, trying to get her own way about everything. But no one, he was sure, thought she was the kind who would commit suicide.
Perhaps, after all, they would find something indicating that it hadn’t been suicide at all.
Sighing heavily, he picked up the phone and rang the front desk.
“Gloria? When the lab reports on Heather Fredericks come in, make sure I get a copy, will you?”
“Of course, Doctor,” Gloria replied. “I’d have done it anyway. She was your patient, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was,” Greg agreed, then hung up.
But all that day, and into the next, he kept thinking about Heather, and wondering what, if anything, the lab would find.
Chapter 5
The funeral for Heather Fredericks took place three days later, on the kind of perfect summer day when the New Mexican skies are deep blue and cloudless, and even the heat of the desert is made bearable by the dryness of the air. But as Judith Sheffield stood with Max and Rita Moreland in the cemetery next door to the old Methodist church she herself had attended as a child, it seemed to her the atmosphere was wrong. Though cloudy skies would have been a cliché, she still thought they would have been more appropriate.
Ted and Reenie Fredericks stood gazing blankly at the coffin that contained the remains of their only child, as if they hadn’t yet quite grasped what had happened. But as the minister uttered the final words of the service, and the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground, an anguished wail of grief suddenly welled up out of Reenie’s throat, and she hurled herself into her husband’s arms, burying her face in his chest. Judith, embarrassed to witness Reenie’s unbearable pain, averted her eyes, letting them run over the crowd.
She was surprised by how many of the mourners she recognized, many of them people she’d grown up with. Now, as she identified them ten years later, she found herself unaccountably bewildered that they were no longer the teenagers she remembered. Most of them had children, ranging in age from ten downward, and as she watched them she couldn’t help wondering what they were thinking. Were they, like her, wondering which of the other teenagers in the crowd might be considering following the course Heather had taken? Were they wondering if, in a few more years, or tomorrow, it might be their own child in that casket? Every face she studied wore an expression of shock—shock mixed with apprehension.
Heather’s friends seemed to have clustered together of their own accord, taking up a position close to the casket but separated from Heather’s parents by the casket itself.
Amazingly, Judith found she even recognized some of the dead girl’s classmates, though they had been only five or six years old the last time she’d seen them.
Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins were there—apparently still the inseparable friends they had been since they were little boys. But something about both of them had changed. Judith watched their faces—Randy’s narrow and vaguely hollowed, in contrast to Jeff’s tendency to chubbiness, which gave him a slightly baby-faced look—and realized, sadly, that their eyes, indeed their whole appearance, had lost any semblance of innocence. They stood together, their posture slouched as if to send a signal to whomever might be watching that even here, at the funeral of one of their friends, they were still cool, still somehow detached from it all. With them were two girls, one of whom Judith was certain was Gina Alvarez. Still as pretty as she had been as a child, Gina’s dark eyes seemed to sparkle with life, and her chestnut-colored hair framed a face that already had matured beyond the prettiness of a little girl and into the beauty of a young woman.
Next to Gina stood a boy Judith recognized at once. Indeed, she would have recognized Jed Arnold by his eyes alone—those incredibly bright, almost turquoise-blue eyes, made even more remarkable by the crisp planes of his face and the bronze skin he had inherited from his mother.
Those eyes were his father’s. Judith scanned the crowd, searching for Frank Arnold himself. A moment later she saw him, standing alone, staring at the coffin almost as if he weren’t entirely certain he should have been at the funeral at all. Was he remembering another funeral, when it had been his wife whose remains were being consigned to the ground?
She was about to look away when Frank abruptly glanced up, as if he’d felt her eyes on him. His expression seemed puzzled for a moment, but then his eyes met hers and he shifted his weight slightly, straightening up to his full height. He offered her a small nod of recognition, and Judith felt herself flush, all her childhood memories of him flooding back to her.
She turned away, falling in with Rita and Max Moreland as they made their way toward the Frederickses. As they came to the head of the receiving line, Judith extended her hand to Reenie Fredericks.
“I’m so sorry,” she sai
d. “You might not remember me, but—”
“Of course I remember you,” Reenie said, taking her hand firmly. “You used to be Judy Sheffield!”
“I still am,” Judith replied. “Except it’s Judith now. I never did really like ‘Judy.’ ”
“I know,” Reenie said, her faint smile fading as her eyes wandered to her daughter’s grave. “Heather hated nicknames too. She even wanted me to start making everyone call me Renée.” For a moment she seemed about to dissolve into tears once more, but then took her emotions under control. “Well, I’ll remember to call you Judith. I can certainly do that for Heather, can’t I?” Her voice trembled, but then the person behind Judith spoke, and Reenie turned away, once more forcing herself to smile, determined not to break down again.
Judith let herself drift away, moving through the crowd, stopping to talk briefly to some people, nodding to others. In a way, it was almost as if she’d never left Borrego at all. The same people were still there, doing the same things they’d been doing a decade ago.
No surprises.
An incredible feeling of familiarity.
And then she came face to face with Frank Arnold.
He was still standing by himself, but she hadn’t seen him approach until he put out a hand and turned her around. “I suppose everyone’s telling you you haven’t changed a bit, but I’m not going to,” he said.
Judith felt her heartbeat speed up slightly, and prayed it didn’t show. “You mean you didn’t recognize me?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t. She’d never thought of herself as a flirt, and didn’t intend to turn into one now. “That was a stupid thing to say,” she went on without pausing, “since you nodded to me earlier.”