She climbed into her car, trembling. Casper said, "Where are you taking me?"
Holly helped him to fasten his seat-belt. "You'll see. Someplace where you can be happy."
A Celebration with "Mickey Slim"
When Holly arrived home, she made herself a glass of lemon tea and took it into her study. There was mail on her desk but she didn't feel like opening it. Her mind was too crowded with thoughts of Casper Beale. She had driven him to East Portland Memorial Hospital and they had immediately taken him into intensive care. She had reported what she had done to the police, and a very bullish woman detective had come to the hospital to ask her some questions. Under the circumstances, though, she hadn't thought that they would take the matter any further. "You should have done it by the book, honey, you know that. But you're not going to be prosecuted for saving a child's life."
She thought about Daniel Joseph, too, and Sarah-Jane Heilshorn, and the way in which Doug and Katie had let her down. She wasn't a bitter person. She wouldn't have been able to tolerate her deafness if she were bitter. But she felt deeply resentful about Doug's betrayal. He had used her as a scapegoat because she was deaf, and there was nothing she could do about it except despise him for it. All that bullshit about "the sweetest girl in the Children's Welfare Department."
Her cell phone vibrated.
"Meet me 6 pm Hugos Bar? Mickey."
Well, why not? she thought. She could use a drink, and a shoulder to cry on. It was 5:45 already, so she went to find her coat. Marcella was in the kitchen, ironing Daisy's blouses, and she said, "You going out, Ms. Summers? What time you come back?"
"Not late. But I've had one of those days."
"You don't worry. I always look after your Daisy."
Hugo's Bar was on Southwest Alder, a narrow building of chocolate-brown brick wedged between Esparto fashion store and a glossy new marble-front bank. Mickey was waiting for her right in back, at a circular oak table, under a low-suspended Tiffany-style lamp. All around the dark green walls hung mahogany-framed engravings of sternwheelers and steamboats.
He stood up when she arrived. He looked even more gaunt than usual. He said, "What'll it be?"
"A large glass of pinot noir. Averylarge glass of pinot noir."
"Something wrong?"
"I've been suspended. I quit."
He said, "You quit? I don't believe what I'm hearing." She told him all about Sarah-Jane Heilshorn, and he listened and nodded. When she had finished, her eyes were filled with tears of frustration, and he laid his hand on top of hers. "I always said Doug Yeats was an asshole, didn't I? Didn't I always say that? I'll bet when he was a kid he took an apple for his teacher every day,andpolished it with his own nose perspiration."
"Oh God, make me feel sick."
"Well, don't you worry about Doug, because I've got some good news for you: We picked up two guys outside the Robert Herrera Hair Salon just after two o'clock this afternoon."
"Really?"
"Caught them in flagrante: They were trying to force Mrs. Gillian Rossabi into a four-by-four at the curbside. One of them was a well-known psychopath from Bend called Jimmy Novak and the other was a local waste of space called Frederick Drendel. Novak was carrying a.45, a pair of nylon handcuffs, and a switchblade knife."
"That'sterrific!You actually got them! At least something's turned out good."
"Well, not totally good, not yet. We also arrested John H. Rossabi, Mrs. Rossabi's less-than-devoted husband, but Merlin Krauss contrived to be out when we called, although it's only a matter of time. I'm pretty confident we'll find your wood-pulp guy too."
Holly raised her glass. "Congratulations. Here's to you."
"Are you kidding me? We wouldn't have even known that this hit was going down at all if it hadn't been for you. Mrs. Rossabi would have been turned into cardboard boxes and nobody would have been any the wiser."
"Actually, they're not made of cardboard. They're made of linerboard with a corrugated medium sandwiched in between, one hundred percent recycled pulp."
Mickey frowned at her. "You're getting more like an encyclopedia every day, I swear it. What's the capital of Venezuela?"
They were still laughing and joking when Holly caught sight of somebody sitting in the booth on the opposite side of the bar, somebody so intensely black that they looked more like a shadow than a person. She couldn't see his face, because the Tiffany lamp hung in the way. All she could make out was a shoulder and an arm-or was it a cape and a hood? Or was it nothing but the way the light was falling across the buttoned banquette?
Mickey suddenly realized that she wasn't watching his lips.
"What's the matter? Something wrong?"
"I don't know . Over in the corner there. Can yousee somebody sitting there?"
"In the booth, you mean? No."
"You mean there's nobody there at all?"
He took another look and shook his head. "No. Nobody. Why?"
"I get the feeling that I'm being followed."
Mickey tipped back his whiskey. "Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you're more than worth following? I'd follow you myself, if I had the time."
Three Quiet Days
The next three days were so quiet that she felt as if time had stopped. She went shopping and bought herself two new sweaters at Pioneer Place, one rust-red and one navy. The rust-red sweater was too large when she tried it on at home so she had to take it back, and they didn't have a smaller one.
She sorted through her filing and shredded ten months' worth of credit-card bills and personal letters. She tidied the drawers in her bedroom, throwing away crumpled-up tubes of face cream and mascara brushes that looked like grumpy centipedes. She went out and bought three new imitation-leather photograph albums and emptied four shopping bags full of photographs onto the dining table so that she could shuffle them all into chronological order.
The trouble was, every photograph she picked up held her in a spell, and a whole afternoon went by before she had filled up even two and a half pages. Here was David, leaning against his new Porsche, grinning into the sunshine. Here was Holly, three weeks after his funeral, looking pale and cross. Here was Daisy, age eleven months, in nothing but a diaper, just about to topple sideways on the very first day when she started to walk.
And she thought to herself:What was this all for? Why did I live through all of those years of love and argument and agony and loss? To end up here, jobless, alone, unloved, in this apartment, putting all these photographs in order?
But she remembered then what George Greyeyes had told her about Raven.Raven is a scavenger, who takes away your luck. First your livelihood, then your home, then your loved ones, and then your happiness.
For the first time she acknowledged that she had been really cursed.
Casper's Warning
On Thursday evening she collected Daisy from school and took her to East Portland Memorial Hospital to visit Casper.
"Try not to be shocked, sweetheart: He looks very, very sick. But the doctors say that he's getting better."
Casper was out of intensive care, but he was still in a room of his own because he was so susceptible to infection. A small, bare room, with a view of the flat asphalt roof of the hospital kitchens, and the glaring sun going down over the Tualatin Mountains to the west.
Casper was propped up on three pillows, and he was being fed with a glucose drip. A dark fuzz was already growing on his head, and that made him look even more monkeylike than he had before. When she saw him, Daisy gripped Holly's hand and squeezed it tightly.
"Casper, this is my daughter, Daisy," said Holly, smiling. "How are you feeling today?"
Casper said, "Pretty tired, most of the time. I keep on falling asleep. Then I wake up and I don't know where I am."
"I talked to Dr. Arneson," Holly said. "He told me that you're doing real good. You've put on three and a half pounds since Monday."
Casper raised one of his bony hands and touched his cheek. "I keep wondering what it's going to
be like, not being sick anymore."
"It's going to be a whole new life, believe me. Look, Daisy's brought you a present."
Daisy reached into her shopping bag and took out a scale-model Ferrari in a box. Casper looked at it and smiled. Then he handed it back.
"Go on, open it," said Daisy. "It's yours."
Casper looked up at Holly, and Holly suddenly realized that he had never been given any toys before-or if he had, he hadn't been allowed to keep them. He struggled to open the cellophane and in the end Daisy did it for him. He lifted up the car and peered into the windows. "It even has a steering wheel and a gearshift."
Holly said, "The doors open too."
They drew up chairs beside his bed and watched him as he steered the Ferrari over his bony knees.
After a while Holly said, "There's something I have to tell you, Casper: When you're better, you won't be going back home to live with your mother."
Casper frowned at her. "Why? Why not?"
"Because it was your mother who made you sick."
"I know. I know she did. But she always looked after me."
"Actually, she didn't. She deliberately starved you and she gave you medicine to make you vomit so that everybody would think you had cancer. She nearly killed you."
"Where am I going to go, then?"
"I expect that the Children's Welfare Department will find you some people to look after you. Foster parents. I don't work for them anymore, but I know for sure that they'll fix you up with some real nice people."
"But can't I go home?"
"I'm sorry. You won't be able to. But I wanted you to know that if you needed anybody to talk to well, we'll always be here. Daisy and me."
Casper didn't say anything, but Holly could tell that he was upset. It happened so often when children were abused: No matter how badly they had been treated- even if they had been beaten or starved or sexually molested-they always wanted to go back to their parents. Children worked harder at keeping their family together than anybody did, and they always blamed themselves if the family fell apart.
"Casper your mother isn't well. She wouldn't have treated you like that, otherwise."
"She always took care of me."
Holly didn't know what to say. She stood up and kissed Casper on his white, dry-skinned forehead. "Don't worry things will work out. All you need to worry about is feeding yourself up. I want to see you eating cheeseburgers by the end of next week."
Casper's voice was suddenly different: throaty and almost threatening. "My momma she won't like it if you take me away."
"I know she won't, Casper. But it's all for the best."
"Something bad will happen to you if you take me away. Something really, really bad."
"Why don't you get some rest? We'll come see you again in a couple of days."
Casper kept on staring at her, as if he were trying to remember every detail of what she looked like. As if he never expected to see her again.
They walked along the corridor to the elevator. Daisy said, "He'screepy."
"He's very sick, that's all."
"No," said Daisy, emphatically shaking her head. "He'screepy."
They crossed the hospital parking lot to Holly's car. As they did so, Holly saw Doug's green Pajero pull up outside the main entrance. Doug climbed out, although he didn't see Holly. He walked around and opened the passenger door. He helped out a woman in a brown suede coat.
Holly hesitated, holding her car keys in her hand. The woman turned around and she saw that it was Mrs. Beale.
Mrs. Beale hesitated, too, and looked around, as if she could sense that Holly wasn't far away. Just as Doug laid a hand on her shoulder to guide her inside, she caught sight of Holly and stared at her. As she did so, five or six black birds suddenly fluttered off the roof of the hospital and circled around, their feathers ruffled by the wind.
"Mommy?" asked Daisy.
"It's nothing," said Holly. "I thought I saw somebody I used to know, that's all."
In the Japanese Garden
Friday afternoon was sharp and sunny, so Holly drove up to the West Hills and went for a walk in the Japanese Garden, which had always been one of her favorite places to relax: five and a half intricate acres of pathways and bridges and stepping-stones that led between ponds and iris beds and formal gravel gardens. And Mount Hood, in the distant background, like Mount Fuji.
There was hardly anybody else around, and the fall sunshine glittered on the weeping willows. The chilly air was filled with the earthy smells of a gradually dying year. She walked through the five-tier stone lantern that led to the Strolling Pond Garden, and crossed the Moon Bridge over the upper pond. Farther down the garden, by the Zig Zag Bridge, she could see two Japanese men standing by the railings, talking, while a young Japanese girl of about fifteen was kneeling on one of the stepping-stones in the lower pond, wiggling her fingers in the dark green water to attract the koi carp.
Holly made her way down the mossy steps to the opposite side of the lower pond. Under the water the carp flickered like animated slices of orange peel. The girl looked up at her and smiled shyly. She wore a fleece-lined denim jacket and embroidered jeans and her hair was tied up in Pokémon-style bunches. Holly smiled back and gave her a little finger wave.
She sat down on a carved stone bench. She had needed an hour of reflection like this, a time to heal her hurt and her disappointment. She also felt that she had to make some decisions about herself. Was she really going to quit the Children's Welfare Department forever? How was she going to feel about all of those children out there who still needed her help? And what was she going to do about Mickey? Was she going to allow him to get closer? Did she trust him? Did she trust herself? She was always pleased when she saw him, and there was no question that she found him attractive, even though he wasn't handsome and even though she had witnessed how violent he could be.
She thought to herself:You're afraid, aren't you? Why don't you stop being afraid? Next time you meet Mickey, show him that you're interested. See where it goes from there.
A few curled leaves dropped from the trees onto the surface of the pond, circling around and around, and the carp came up to nibble at them. One of the Japanese men took off his white fedora and leaned forward on the railings, looking intently at the young girl.
"You don't think she'd give me any trouble?"
"Of course not. Her father brought her up to be obedient."
"Well, I could offer you a lot of money, depending on what she does. We have a new studio now, and a much more professional cameraman."
The man with the white fedora was about thirty-five, smartly dressed in a navy-blue blazer. The other man was about ten years older and dressed in a green weatherproof jacket. He took off his glasses and polished them on a crumpled shred of Kleenex.
"So how much are we talking about?"
"Two thousand. More, if the sales are good. She's pretty, and she's very young, and this time we hope to have more than thirty-five men."
The older man half-turned his back, so that Holly could no longer lip-read him, but she could still see the man with the white fedora. "It's our biggest seller now,bukkake. It outsells everything else we do by ten to one. I've even seen Americanbukkake."
Bukkake. Holly felt cold. Even here, in this tranquil Japanese garden, the world was poisoned. She hesitated for a moment, and then she stood up and walked around the edge of the pond until she came to the Zig Zag Bridge. The two men stopped talking, obviously waiting for her to pass. But she came right up to them, and smiled, and held up her cell phone.
"Pardon me, but I was wondering if either of you two gentlemen could help me. You see, my battery's dead and I have to call my daughter to tell her where to meet me."
"Ah," said the man with the white fedora. He reached into his blazer pocket and produced a tiny Sony cell phone with a shiny chrome cover. "Here, please, be my guest."
"That's so kind of you. I didn't knowwhatI was going to do."
"Please, no
problem."
Holly went across to the other side of the bridge and punched out Mickey's number. When he answered, she quickly texted him:
"NOTE THIS NO. HOLLY."
"??" he texted back.
"XPLN L8R."
Then she said loudly, "Okay, honey, I'll meet you at Janine's in fifteen minutes. That's great."
She handed the phone back. "Thanks again. Some people think I'm overprotective when it comes to my daughter but you know, you can't be too careful, can you, not these days?"
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