Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books)

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Her eyes swimmy with tears of frustration, Ellie punched the arm of the chair with her fist. “I don’t understand!”

  Dorothea said, “Would someone please bring me a glass of water?”

  Each time Ricky said to himself, this is frightful but I can stand it, the pain got worse.

  His pain had never been like this. He could visualize perfectly the hot wires — not white-hot yet, but a dull red — being drawn tight along his bones, scorching grooves in the calcium, pressing toward the marrow.

  The more you fear it, the worse it will be. That was what the doctors said about pain and fear.

  Deep pain, this was, as opposed to the sort of surface pain that made the lightest touch, the mere weight of a blanket or a sheet, unbearable. What happens when the wires reach the bone-centers and there is nowhere else for them to go, and they lodge there and begin to burn hotter, scarlet and then white-hot?

  They had left him alone on the small patio at his request. The wrong request. Should have asked the boy to shoot me. Never imagined it could be like this.

  Blanca saw how bad it was getting and she fled, while I was still telling myself it would soon be over, it was all right. But first she told me, my young friend in the cast, that help was coming. Frank. Did she lie? Would she? Why would she? He’s coming, he is coming, only it takes so long.

  Nothing else mattered. Not what had happened or might yet happen (Frank was coming).

  He will come. He must. She said so.

  Deep pain. Squinting up at the bright sun in its faultless blue setting, panting through his dry mouth, he thought, this can’t go on. Every change in position made it worse, and yet he couldn’t stop moving in the lounge chair, twisting in a slow, underwater motion from one position to another, trying to escape the pain. He tried to distance himself from it, to rise from his body like an astral spirit and observe with Olympian detachment his own struggles. He groped after chants and spells he had heard healers use in huts, in tents, under brush shelters. He made frantic promises to a god he hadn’t believed in since he’d been very young (and still didn’t believe in). He watched the hands of his wristwatch creep.

  Alex was too tired to run any more. His shirt stuck to his back. Jeff was the runner, not Alex. The soil gave under his sneakers, dragging him down. His scalp felt scorched by the sun.

  If anything terrible was happening back there because he had escaped, it wasn’t his fault. At least now somebody was going for help.

  If he could just find the road.

  He knew the others would tell the cops and everybody that he, Alex, had sided with the Cantus. Helped the Cantus, even. They’d take it out on him. So it was a good thing for Alex to be the one to go get help.

  Where was the damn road? He was getting thirsty. He was lost. Nobody had ever taught him to tell direction by the sun. He looked at it helplessly. It just hung up there and burned at him. How could you know which way it was going? Well, this was morning still, it must be rising; that meant over there was east.

  Great. This did not tell him where the road lay.

  He tried to remember the orientation of the house. All he could think of was looking down into the courtyard and seeing Roberto with the shotgun.

  That sound, God, he had almost been knocked off his feet just by the roar of that gun. Sure he’d be hit, he had kept running away from the blow that must come. When he’d realized that Roberto had missed, he’d wanted to laugh and laugh, but that would have slowed him down, so he hadn’t let the laughter out.

  He’d kept running, and there had been no more shots. Yeah! Missed me, man. You all missed me.

  But where was he now? He stopped and stared around.

  Down the arroyo, something glittered in the sunlight, winking and gleaming in the clear air.

  A mirage, he thought. I’m dying of thirst, I’m starting to see things. I got away, and now I’m going to die out here in the desert, it isn’t fair! He shut his eyes, his breath sobbing dryly in his throat, and tried to remember when he’d had his last drink of water. Oh God, I’m going to die after all!

  He turned and scrambled up the side of the arroyo, frantic for a sight of something man-made, a road, a house, a fence.

  Help me, somebody! I got away, I can’t get lost and die out here! I have to get help! I have to live so I can get help!

  Footprints. Someone had passed this way, going someplace.

  He followed, weeping as he trudged along.

  Ahead of him, a fold in the ground rose in a low ridge, and on it lay a building. Morning shadows reached out from the cinnamon walls. Quiet reigned. Peace.

  Alex quickened his pace, then suddenly moaned to himself and dropped on all fours, trying to hide behind the yellow grasses.

  It was the painter’s house, the desperados’ last stand, the terror from which he had only just escaped. He had come back.

  Dorothea leaned back in the leather chair with her eyes closed. A mean ache chased up and down her side, and pain bit with every breath. Her body’s ills seemed to her a just penance for not being able to do better for Ricky.

  She couldn’t stop listening. Beyond the occasional desultory remarks and conversations in the room around her, she listened for the sound of Frank’s motorbike. But beneath this she knew she was listening in fear of hearing something else: screams, Ricky’s screams.

  You see, my child, I warned you , mourned the voice she knew.

  Her eyes flew open. The living room was quiet, offering nothing unusual to her sight. There were only the kids scattered and talking in low voices or sitting quietly — Jeff reading, Joyce watching Dorothea with a wide, luminous gaze. Ellie Stern, looking fretful and upset, sat at the chess-table, writing on a yellow pad.

  She did not see the ghost; she could tell by his voice that he was behind her chair, standing over her: I warned you, and I was right!

  No, she answered quietly in her mind, not turning. And I’m not your child.

  You always say that when we disagree , came the querulous reply. You always say that, and it changes nothing! What have you done, you hothead, you fool! The security I so carefully fashioned for you is shattered, your chance for a peaceful and prosperous life is forfeit. How could you do this?

  What? she thought. Across the room someone laughed. She closed out the sound, shutting herself inside her own head with the voice of the judge. What are you talking about? I don’t understand you.

  No, it is I who cannot understand you . (What was that sound, that dry, faint rasping? Like hands rubbing themselves together in distress, so familiar a sound. From when Ricky had sat vigil in her bedroom those early nights of the dreams? Appropriate, that a ghost from Ricky’s ancestry should echo that gesture.) What good can come of all this uproar? Do you think your heroics can change the world? You only bring danger on yourself, the unpredictable eye of public notice, the scars of injury .

  She hunched her shoulders, feeling the chill of his presence again. She wished he would stop talking and go away. Couldn’t he see that it was all over, her course was set? Couldn’t he see that apart from the nagging concern for Ricky and the unremitting pain of her side, she was settled, and liberated, and glad?

  Look, she replied reasonably, it’s not hard to understand. I couldn’t stand by and let one kid slaughter another just because I was scared.

  What was that scent — cloves? Smoke? Her side flamed. Must be delirious, she thought, arguing in my head with a ghost. Where the hell is Frank? Maybe I’m hurt worse than I think I am. She could hear the tv sound on very softly — some of the kids must be watching, good — at the same moment in which she smelled the wine on the ghost’s breath as it leaned closer above her in its vehemence.

  Prudence is not fear! Is it wise, is it brave, to end up here, like this? To bring me searching for you in such a place, stepping among the rows of the dead killed in riots looking for my own, my only child —

  Head bent over the yellow page, Ellie wrote on; the kids sat watching football with the sound turned low
, or they played cards, all unaware.

  Rows of the dead, Dorothea thought; what dead? She remembered Ricky’s comments about the White Terror, and abortive uprisings of the eighteen-thirties against the restored monarchy. Could the ghost mean the casualties of the savage suppression of those later rebellions? Was that where the judge’s idealistic son had ended up?

  Something light as the touch of a bird’s claw brushed over her hair. Her skin tightened and her breath caught tight in her throat, but within herself she was not frightened, only impatient and worried. What did he want with her, now that the matter was resolved?

  Why are you so afraid? she challenged.

  After a still moment the answer came, intense and rapid: You can only ask such a question because you have been sheltered in the haven I made for you, earned for you, the haven that you have thrown away, and by what right?

  She thought out her response slowly. A haven is only a haven, not the world, and no matter who makes it or earns it, it can’t be forever. If you don’t return to the world, once you’ve had the benefit of your haven, then the world will come to you. It has surely come to me, armed with anger and guns. Didn’t it come to you? If it didn’t, why not?

  Ah. You bought off the world, right? You bought your peace and prosperity and security. At what cost, I wonder?

  You know nothing , cried the ghost. Nothing! How dare you speak to me of costs? A dead dog, a dead child? These are nothing, nothing! You fool! An entire farm family hung up, children, dogs, and all to their gate-posts like sacks of rags, does that mean anything to you? Bodies bobbing in the river from two towns up where half the men rose from their drink and talk at a tavern and fell upon the other half who were drinking and talking at a tavern across the square — talking politics of a different stripe — and slaughtered them, and threw their bodies off the town bridge. Neighbors accusing neighbors falsely in order to obtain their neighbors’ best fields, madwomen in an asylum raped and murdered as they wander out dazed and mumbling to greet their revolutionary liberators, what can you know, with no memories of these things? Battlefields of dead all across Europe, is that how you think of it, illustrated with colorful paintings of heroes and valiant cavalry charges and impudent cartoons showing bold working men standing up to the oppressions of a royal tyranny? But you have to have seen it happen right at hand, body by body, scream by scream, the dog-torn filthy corpse rolled carelessly into a ditch and left there for days as a warning —

  The voice raved and wept on, and Dorothea sat battered by the ravaged emotions of a phantom. I must be mad, she thought. He certainly is, and with reason. But doesn’t he see that it’s the shedding of blood, if only a small amount — the blood of Roberto, of Bobbie or Blanca or any of us, if things go wrong when we’re found — that I am trying to prevent here?

  His voice changed as he moved nearer and farther from her, and she realized that behind her chair he was pacing back and forth so that the floorboards creaked slightly. No one else noticed. He was here for her, not for them.

  To have survived at all , he hissed, and then to live carefully, managing and more than managing in the greedy, scrambling world of profit that succeeded our world of blood and fury — how dare you sneer at me for that? The costs were mine, and I took the gains, too. I was entitled to them, and I do not apologize! It is you who should apologize to me for your recklessness and your contempt!

  Oh, enough, stop it, she retorted, twisting in her chair to try to see him — Could she see him now? But it hurt too much to turn. What did you do, judge, sell rotten grain to the army, bad boots, short rations? What’s this tirade supposed to excuse — a radical turned exploiter and profiteer, traitor to his own, a smug scourge of the left in the name of the fat-bottomed powers that be? Is that why you hide your face from me? Who are you to me, with your whining excuses, why do you haunt me? I’m nothing to do with you, and I don’t want you!

  She heard again that rustling sound of dry skin on skin, and his agonized whisper came, You will never understand. I cannot tell you, nothing I say affects you. I don’t even know you. Who are you, who are these people, what is this place? The voice trembled with such anguished terror that she felt afraid herself. Why am I here? What has happened to me? Who are you?

  She managed at last to turn far enough in her chair, and she saw him hovering beside her, the translucent shape of his body, his hands clasped together and winding and wringing each other, eloquent of agitation.

  Like Ricky, his descendant.

  No. Not like Ricky, not at all — this was not his gesture. Electrified by memory, she stared at the writhing hands. Ricky rubs at the back of his neck. But she knew this gesture, she knew it in her muscles and the deep-grained memory of her nerves.

  She had to see the face. With a convulsive effort that made her gasp, she reached up and caught his wrists, her fingers closing on phantom flesh. She pulled.

  He stumbled forward with a startled grunt, and she saw his face (and, through it, a rippling distortion of the wall beyond), a pale face gaping with panic.

  A familiar face, but not what she had expected: not like some forebear of Ricky’s, nothing like Ricky. Whose face was this, broad at the brow and narrowing neatly to the jaw, thin lips curled at the corners and bracketed with folds, the nose aquiline and the eyes large and dark? Who was this, his white hair curled damply at the blue-veined hollows of his temples?

  He stared wildly back at her, his lips parted. “You are not my son! I do not know you — who are you?”

  Recognition, a soundless explosion, took her breath and her voice. Fascinated and horrified, she leaned closer to see him better — her former self, her dead self turned tortured revenant.

  He recoiled, trying to twist away from her. “Who are you?” he cried. “Are you a spirit? A demon? For the love of God, tell me who you are!”

  This is me, she thought into the huge, ringing darkness that seemed to enclose them alone together. This is who I was. This is my ghost, the ghost of myself in that other, long ago life of peril and upheaval and a desperate scramble for security.

  You are me.

  My life that was.

  My frightened soul, my cast-off shell, the fearful dreamer of my nightmares.

  “Let me go, let me go!” he panted, craning his face away from her. She saw the tears of his distress, and without warning pity overwhelmed her. She tried to offer comfort.

  “I’m you,” she said. “I’m the student of your cowardice. I’m your second chance.”

  He was sinking toward her now, weeping and struggling, but without strength. As weak as a ghost, a mere breath of a long-finished life.

  Someone was calling her, a distraction that she ignored.

  “Thank you,” she said, and lightly kissed his cheek.

  With a fading wail, he fell downward, into her, like an arctic breeze drawn into her tissues through the contact of their hands, her lips. The icy infusion settled softly in her bones, where the last of it was warmed away as rapidly as evaporating moisture in the bright desert sun.

  He was gone, spent, enfolded, and she was whole at last.

  She came slowly to herself, sunk in the old leather chair in her own living room, with Ellie Stern standing over her and anxiously repeating her name while the kids of the class looked on in tense silence.

  Oh, damn these people, couldn’t they let her alone, at this strange, fading moment of mystery and calm? How often do you get to literally come to yourself? How often do you give and receive the gift of peace?

  Outside came the roar of a motor — Frank, at last, with (if they were lucky) Johnny Sanchez of the Taos police.

  And with that, she snapped back fully into the present, calm and alert to the needs of the moment. She cleared her throat and took a breath ( aaghh, damn it!). “Roberto, Bobbie, come here,” she said. “Blanca, you too. I want you all next to me when the police come in here.”

  Because no one was going to shoot at them, not if they were sitting quietly with her, like harmless gues
ts in her studio.

  l2

  Dorothea insisted that Claire come inside. Claire was driving her around because of Dorothea’s codeine prescription for the cracked ribs, but she was sleeping at a B and B in town. She said she didn’t want to intrude on their privacy.

  Stepping inside now seemed to add an edge of nervousness to Claire’s normally forthright manner. She paused on the threshold, looking around uneasily, and then headed for the kitchen.

  “I’ll put this stuff away, and then I’ll make some crepes for lunch; how’s that?” she said, over her shoulder.

  “Thanks, Hon, that would be lovely.” Dorothea could not get over how much like little-girl-Claire this grown Claire looked, soft-faced and solemn-eyed. In her letters she was so much older and more severe. Have I been quarreling all these years through the mails and over the phone with a mere front? No, no, don’t over-simplify. She is my youngest, Claire, but she’s also this adult stranger with her own life. Damn, I’m glad she came.

  Ricky never used the little patio adjoining his bedroom anymore. Instead, as usual with him now, he lay stretched out on the couch in the big front room, her old Afghan blanket pulled loosely over his body, pillows tucked behind his head and shoulders. The radio was on softly, the dial turned to the classical station.

  Claire gave him a hearty, “Hi, Ricky!” and hurried on into the kitchen with her arms full of grocery bags.

  Dorothea noticed how much leaner Ricky had grown. His dark shirt hung on him as if on a wire hanger; his belt was buckled through a fresh-punched hole and held in the slack folds of his trousers. His neck was a knobbed, fragile stem, too delicate to hold up the bony sculpture of his head. Face and hands looked outsized, vital, preternaturally rich with character, hooked to that sketch of a body.

  “How was it?” he said. He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the couch with deliberation and effort. She took one of the big leather chairs, facing him. She had been down to Albuquerque to speak yet again with Mrs. Garcia, the probation officer in charge of the Cantu case.