I felt as if I’d been slapped. A spoon clattered to the tile floor and I realized I had dropped it.
When I stood after retrieving it, Mother touched my arm and said, “I didn’t mean to snap at you. Let’s talk later. You haven’t seemed yourself this evening. I can see something’s bothering you.”
Of course she could. She always could.
When we walked into the living room with the trays, Michelle and Kevin broke off an animated conversation. “We’re going sailing on the river this weekend,” Michelle said. “Kevin’s parents gave him a sailboat when he passed the bar exam.”
For a second Mother’s hand hesitated as she held the coffee pot over a cup. “We have the conference on Saturday,” she said, pouring the coffee, not looking up.
“Oh, we’re going sailing on Sunday.”
Michelle had forgotten something, but I hadn’t, and I didn’t miss the flash of hurt in Mother’s eyes.
“That sounds like fun,” she said. She passed a cup to Kevin. A pause. “It’s too bad you’ll have to miss the Picasso exhibit though.”
Michelle’s mouth rounded. “Oh. Oh no.” Her eyes flitted from Mother to Kevin. “We’ve got tickets,” she told him. “We’ve been planning—”
“You go with Kevin and enjoy yourself,” Mother said, smiling, her voice pleasantly insistent. “This weather’s perfect for boating.”
“Oh, Mother,” Michelle said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been looking forward to it so much—I mean, we all have.”
“Don’t make a fuss over it.” Mother was still smiling. “It’s not important.”
“Kevin,” Michelle said, “could we do it weekend after next instead?”
“Don’t be silly,” Mother said, firmly now. “I don’t want to hear another word about it. The two of you will go sailing and have a wonderful time, and Rachel and I will go to the National Gallery to see the Picasso exhibit. Kevin, can I wrap a slice of cake for you to take home?”
He fumbled for words, then smiled too broadly and thanked her too energetically. His eyes met mine for a second, and he looked like what he was, an outsider caught in an undercurrent that he felt but didn’t quite comprehend.
Michelle slumped back on the couch, eyes downcast.
Silent, furious, I demanded of Mother, Why won’t you let us make it right when we disappoint you? I couldn’t believe she deliberately made us feel guilty, I knew that as a psychologist she would scoff at that as the cheapest kind of emotional blackmail, yet her sacrifices and generosity could turn the smallest incident into a major betrayal in our minds. I saw it when it was happening to Michelle, but seldom saw it happening to me until it was too late and I already hated myself for being a thoughtless daughter.
***
I hoped she’d forget about our talk, so I could go to bed and wipe out this day. After helping Michelle load the dishwasher, I retreated to my room. This space, with deep coral walls and white woodwork, with paintings of outdoor scenes, and a wide bookcase crammed full, was completely mine, and when I was in it alone I felt free. I could stack books and magazines on the floor beside the bed. I could play the music I liked, as long as it wasn’t loud enough to disturb Mother across the hall.
I called the clinic to ask Tony about Maude—she’d stabilized and he would go ahead with surgery in the morning—then got ready for bed. I was turning down the covers and listening to a new Mary Chapin Carpenter album when Mother’s soft knock sounded on the door. I sighed and switched off the CD player. Mother never forgot anything.
She waited until I responded before she entered.
“Let’s sit down,” she said, crossing to the love seat that sat against a wall. She wore a long robe of a fleecy white material, which she smoothed over her knees. Her shining hair fell loose around her face.
I sat beside her, hands clenched in my lap.
“You’ve been so quiet all evening,” Mother said. Her fingertips brushed my wrist. “Is something wrong?”
Without warning my mind was flooded with the Coleman girl’s inconsolable cries, and I felt an answering wrench in my heart.
“Something happened at the clin—” I stopped, literally, in the middle of a word, but I couldn’t have said why I stopped.
“What, Rachel?” she coaxed. “What happened?”
I hesitated. What would she make of my actions that afternoon, the sensation I’d had of being transported to another place, my inability to get the crying girl out of my mind, my panicky flight home to make sure Michelle was all right?
Part of me wanted to tell her. Maybe she could reach into her psychologist’s bag of explanations and pull out a neat, reassuring label for my experience, tell me how it all tied together. But for some reason I didn’t understand, I was reluctant—no, afraid—to tell her about it. I knew with absolute certainty it was something I could never discuss with Mother.
I shrugged, at the same time looking away, avoiding those dark eyes that always seemed to see and understand everything. I gave her part of the truth. “A dog, a patient of mine, was hit by a car. It really got to me.”
“Oh, sweetheart.”
She slipped an arm around my shoulders, and like a child seeking comfort I leaned into her gratefully, let myself be hugged by my mother.
“You know,” she said, “I worry sometimes that your work might be too stressful for you. You love animals so much, and you have to see all that illness and pain and death. It must take a toll.”
A prick of irritation made me sit straight, pulling away from her. “Most days all I do is give vaccines and examine perfectly healthy animals. But illness and death are part of the job. If I couldn’t handle it, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
She removed her arm from my shoulders. “Of course you can handle it.”
The image of little Kristin in her mother’s arms swam up before my eyes, and a deep sadness washed through me. My mind lurched away from the remembered scene, toward a patch of equally treacherous ground. Before I could check myself I blurted, “Mother, don’t we have any pictures of Daddy? Kevin started me wondering.”
I couldn’t look her in the face. Now I’d mentioned my dead father twice in one evening, and I couldn’t claim Kevin’s ignorance of the unspoken rules. My pulse tapped in my temples as I waited for her answer.
She sat perfectly still, staring down at her loosely folded hands in her lap.
Unable to bear the silence, I jumped to my feet and said, “I just wondered. I can’t remember ever seeing any pictures of him except the one in your room.”
“I—” She stopped, cleared her throat. “It’s still so hard to talk about him, even after all these years.”
She paused, pressed a hand to her mouth, and I saw the glimmer of tears before she squeezed her eyes shut. The hook of guilt caught at my heart. I sat beside her, slipped an arm through hers. “I don’t mean to bring up bad memories—”
She squeezed my hand. “It’s only natural you’d want to know about your father. And I feel like such a fraud sometimes, a psychologist who can’t talk about the painful things in her past.” She gave another self-deprecating laugh, this one choked with tears.
I said quietly, “I remember his death.”
I felt her tense. She looked at me, eyes wide. Her grip tightened on my hand. “You do?”
I reached back in time, but came up with little more than vague images and impressions. “I mean, I think I remember you telling us he’d had an accident and we wouldn’t see him again. I remember—I remember crying. You holding me. It was hard on us all, I guess.”
She drew in a sharp breath and looked away as tears came to her eyes again. “It was the worst time of my life.” She paused. “I didn’t think I’d survive it.”
A terrible pity filled me at the sight of my proud, strong mother brought to tears by an old grief. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, no, you have a right to wonder about your father.” She let go of my hand, sat straighter. “And we’ll talk about him sometime soon, I
promise. Right now I want you to get some rest. You’ve had a rough day.”
She’d reoriented her concern, turned it outward to me again, and I would get nowhere by pushing her with more questions. But she’d promised that soon we’d talk about my father, at long last.
“Would you like me to take you through some relaxation exercises?” she said, entirely herself again. “It’ll help you sleep.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“All right then.” She stood and walked to the door, where she hesitated for just a second, as if she wanted to say more. But all she said was, “Good night.” She closed the door as she always did, silently.
I removed my robe, turned out the lights, slipped between the sheets. Lying rigid in the dark, I closed my eyes and tried without success to shut down my mind.
The pictures. I was sure our baby pictures were around here somewhere, in an album we hadn’t opened in years. I remembered looking at them, although I wasn’t sure when. We must have pictures of our father holding us.
But the only mental image I had of my father came from the photo on Mother’s dresser. Young, impossibly handsome, with blond hair brushing his ears in the style of the mid-seventies. Michelle, hardly more than a baby, sat on his lap. They were laughing. I couldn’t remember his laugh. I couldn’t remember his voice, what his body looked like in motion. I’d been five years old when he died. Surely memories of him were buried in my head, waiting to be coaxed forth.
Turning onto my side, I pressed my cheek into the pillow and again tried to empty my mind. I was too exhausted to think about these things anymore.
Taking deep breaths, letting them out slowly, I gradually relaxed into drowsiness.
I heard her crying. A high thin wail, a keening. My tiny sister stood alone in a vast open space, stood in the pouring rain and cried. A woman’s sad defeated face turned toward me then faded away before I could make out its features clearly. An angry man slashed the air with his hand.
I jerked upright, hauled myself out of the dream.
I stumbled from the bed and over to a window. I pushed it open, leaned my face to a cool breeze and waited for my thudding heart to slow. The night air vibrated with the songs of frogs down along the stream, a chorus that rose to a crescendo, dropped to a murmur, swelled again. It was mating season on Dead Run.
I’d thought I was rid of them, those phantoms in my dreams. Even in wakefulness they floated through my head like tendrils of fog, impossible to catch and give meaning.
They’d left me for years, left me in peace. I’d thought they were gone forever.
I slumped onto the bed, massaging my suddenly throbbing temples. What was I thinking about before I went to sleep? The pictures. My father. What brought on the dream?
Mother was right, I was stressed. My mind was jumping from one thing to another without logic.
I needed rest. But I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time before I was willing to lie down in the dark again.
Chapter Three
I walked into the clinic shortly before nine the next morning to find half a dozen staff members, including Dr. Campbell, clustered in front of the reception desk. Alison saw me, gestured with a flourish of her arm and exclaimed, “Dr. Goddard—our bat doctor!”
For a second I thought she’d said “our batty doctor.” Then I saw that the short man at the center of the group held a bird cage containing, yes, a bat. A tiny red one with a crinkled forehead, big shell-like ears, an upturned nose.
“You the doctor for wild animals?” the man asked. He raised the cage for me to see. “My cat brought it in last night.”
I sighed inwardly at this variation on a tale I heard too often. Somebody’s free-roaming cat was always dragging in something. I peered into the cage. The bat blinked.
“Okay, come with me and I’ll look it over,” I said.
“Can I watch?” Dr. Campbell asked.
“Well, sure, if you want to.” A half-formed thought: was he checking me out because of what happened yesterday?
I led the way through the waiting area and across the hall to an exam room. The man with the bat chattered, telling me he’d taken time off work and driven in from Herndon after the county animal shelter gave him my name. He was young, with a brown crewcut, and wore some kind of uniform, denim pants and a gray work shirt with the name Pete embroidered in blue on the pocket.
While Luke Campbell held the cage in place on the exam table, I opened the door just wide enough to snake in a hand. Alarmed by the touch of my fingers, the bat scrabbled around on the cage bottom, tearing the newspaper lining, and began to unfold its wings. I caught both its thumbs to stop that, and removed the animal from the cage. The little body was warm in my palm and vibrated with the frantic pulsing of its heart.
Acutely aware of Dr. Campbell watching me, I riffled through the rusty-red fur looking for blood or bite wounds. I found none. Next I gently extended the leathery membrane of each wing.
The man talked nonstop and with high good humor about his cat running in the back door with the flapping bat in its mouth, about the hour-long effort by both cat and man to recapture the bat after it got loose in the house, about the damage done while this was going on. He didn’t seem to notice that neither Dr. Campbell nor I was the least bit amused. My boss had developed a pronounced scowl.
“I think this little girl’s just shaken up from being caught,” I said. When I released the left wing it snapped back against the bat’s body with a small whap. “If you’ve had her since last night, she’s probably weak from hunger and dehydration by now.”
He drew back, looking offended. “Well, I don’t know what to feed a bat. You tell me what to give him, I’ll see he gets fed.”
“You won’t have to worry about it. We’ll take care of it.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I’m gonna keep it. Just tell me what to feed it.”
I glanced at Dr. Campbell, who seemed about to speak but decided against it.
“You want to keep a bat as a pet?” I asked the man.
“Well, yeah, why not? Don’t worry about my cat getting it. I’ll keep it in a cage all the time.”
If I wasn’t careful, I was going to say something truly memorable. “Mister—” I didn’t know his last name. “Pete,” I began again. “You can’t keep a bat as a pet. It’s illegal, for one thing, because you’re not a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. And you couldn’t take care of it properly.”
He was getting impatient. “Yeah, I can.”
He put out a hand for the bat but I held it out of reach. Red-faced, he dropped his arm.
Time for the heavy weaponry. “Bats carry rabies. You’d never know when it might bite you. And after you’re bitten, you’d have to undergo a long series of very painful injections, which still might not prevent onset of the disease. If you developed rabies, you’d die. There’s no cure.”
His face had gone from red to white.
“By the way,” I added, “is your cat up to date on its rabies vaccine?”
His head bobbed. “Oh, yeah, I get him his shots on time.”
“Good. But you’d better examine him for bites, and watch him for any signs of illness.” I opened the door with my free hand. “We’ll take care of the bat. And, you know, you really should keep your cat indoors, for its own safety.”
He started to protest that, but shut his mouth again. He grabbed the cage Dr. Campbell held out and left with a backward glance at the bat, a look that mixed longing and fear.
“Good grief,” I muttered when he was gone.
Dr. Campbell, to my relief, burst out laughing.
“Did I overdo it?” I said, starting to laugh myself. “Somebody’s bound to tell him I lied about the rabies shots. If he knew it’s only two injections now, he’d probably be willing to risk it.”
“You got rid of the jerk, that’s the main thing. You were a hell of a lot nicer to him than I would’ve been.” He stroked the bat’s head with his index finger. The animal’
s eyes were squeezed shut against the glaring overhead light.
Alison’s high clear voice came over the intercom. “Dr. Campbell, your first appointment is here. Dr. Goddard, your first appointment just drove into the parking lot.”
He opened the door to leave, casually throwing his words back over his shoulder as he went. “Let’s find some time to sit down together later. I want to talk over something with you.”
The little breeze my sigh created made the bat flex her big ears and open her dark eyes. “You know what he wants to talk about, don’t you?” I said. She closed her eyes again.
I turned the bat over to a technician with instructions to feed her meal worms and water, then find a rehabber who could take her back to Herndon and release her that night.
So the day began, with an animal saved and a seed of worry planted.
That morning, for the first time I could remember, I’d dreaded coming to work. All through a restless night I was plagued by dreams, some old and familiar, others new and brought on by my encounter with the Coleman child. Morning sunshine couldn’t dispel the dark images. I was afraid they’d stay with me and I’d be fighting all day to keep my mind anchored in the here-and-now. I was sure everybody I worked with was still wondering what had come over me, clinging to a little girl, scaring her with my tight grip and hysterical cries.
But as I worked through the hours, the dreams faded to the back of my mind, I settled into routine and camaraderie, and I felt a little foolish for expecting my co-workers to dwell on my behavior.
Only Lucas Campbell gave any sign of remembering that I’d come unhinged in the middle of the reception area the day before.
In and out of exam rooms, passing through the corridors, returning charts to the front desk, I ran into him everywhere, and he caught my eye each time. His look was speculative, and I didn’t want to consider what it meant.
The hospital room reeked of disinfectant when I went in to see Maude in mid-afternoon. Carl, on his knees cleaning one of the lower dog cages, smiled up at me and said, “The little hound dog’s surgery went off real well, I heard.”
The Heat of the Moon: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 3