Later she’d dreamt of a red piano in the middle of a winter-white field. Of sitting down to it, sans clothing, her body bronzed and stark against the snow. Her fingers hovering over the keys, floating in a hesitant stasis because she could not remember how to play.
She might have dreamed more, but that was all that had survived the jump back to consciousness. Staring at the ceiling she wondered why she hadn’t dreamt of the hound and its blinding eyes or its threatening growl. And she wondered why she hadn’t dreamt of Dooley.
She showered and put on the clothes she’d worn on the plane, the only clothes she had with her. She put the room key on the dresser and left in the rental she’d picked up at O’Hare, waving at the desk clerk as she drove past the office. A few blocks away she ordered a late breakfast at the McDonalds drive-thru and ate it behind the wheel.
For three hours she drove west.
Just after one, with gray clouds rolling in the distant southern sky, Mary crossed over the Pecatonica on Route 20 and pulled to the shoulder on the far side of the bridge. Gravel ground and crackled beneath the tires as the rental stopped. Her foot pressed firmly on the brake, keeping her there, right there, the cold river waters behind and her childhood home ahead.
For a moment she closed her eyes and listened. She heard only water rippling at the bridge supports and licking at the rocky banks. It was dark behind her eyes. Dark and quiet.
And she controlled the dark. That was most important of all. made it come and go as she pleased. Eyes open and it was light. Closed, and it was dark. Open again, and the blackness was gone.
Her foot eased up and switched to the gas pedal, her hands steering the car back onto the highway. A quarter mile further on she entered Chaplin, Illinois.
She’d lived in this town, this now tired place that looked like it might just want to roll over like an aged dog and die, from the time she was born until she was nine. Then she’d moved with her mother and sister to the green corner house in Waukegan. There had been nothing to keep them in Chaplin after her father died. Her mother had had his remains cremated, so there was no nearby grave to bring flowers to on special days. Like his birthday, or Veterans Day...
Forget the stop sign, Mrs. Austin. Your husband was a veteran. A jury will eat that up.
Mary frowned at that twitch of memory. But the stop sign was important, because the garbage truck ran right through it like there was important trash to pick up.
So they moved to Waukegan, close to Lake Michigan. Into a house her mother’s brother was going to sell but agreed to let them rent. Moved away from Chaplin.
Forget the bad. Move on.
But Chaplin was her childhood, Mary had always felt, had always believed. Even now as she rolled slowly down Main Street— it actually had a Main Street —past the whitewashed windows and the occasional business still open, even now something of her was here.
She let her eyes search Main, and quickly they found familiarity. The barber shop where Old Jim used to cut...
...his head clean off, Mrs. Austin. We can’t fix that.
...her father’s hair was still open. It was even called ‘Old Jim’s’ still. But Old Jim wouldn’t be cutting hair anymore. He’d be Dead Jim by now. You could only get so old.
The Woolworth’s had been swept out of Chaplin, she saw, looking down the right side of the street. The letters high on the flat facade were gone, stripped away to leave only grimy, letter-shaped shadows on the ancient paint behind. In that bustling old store she and Julie had sucked on sodas at the lunch counter while their mother shopped. And during the summer they’d brought their nickels with them and bought rootbeer floats. Then one day the lunch counter was closed and its space filled with more shelves of socks and underwear. And the next month her father was dead.
Mary smiled sadly at the vacant storefront as she drove by.
At the traffic signal she watched an old woman drag an ancient grocery cart backward across the street, her world in its caged basket. When the light turned green she turned right and drove slowly down Chatham Avenue. She knew this street and wondered if anyone from her childhood still lived here. Visions of surprise reunions filled her thoughts. Of her parking, going up to a door and knocking, and being greeted with a huge hug as a long ago friend welcomed her home.
You can’t go home again. You can never go home again.
Maybe that was true in one sense. Maybe there would be no reunions like the one she fantasized. But she was here. Home. Driving down Chatham Avenue toward Augusta Street. And at Augusta Street, in the hometown she had come back to, she would turn left. And at number 1675 she would stop. It would be a small house on the right side of the street, and there might still be a sign on a post in the front yard, and on that sign it might still say Roger Cleary, M.D. It might still say that.
Please let it say that.
But when she turned onto Augusta she could see quite clearly that, a dozen houses down from the corner, the steel post that rose from the yard of 1675 had rusted to an ugly reddish brown, and the square frame atop it that had held the frosted plastic sign that was lit when it got dark was now empty. The fluorescent tubes that must have been inside were gone, too, just a few ends of stout wire poking upward from the hollow post like the roots of a misdirected plant.
Mary drove to the spot and pulled up to the curb. Ahead, in a yard ringed by cheap and wasting chain link, two little girls rode up and down the incline of their driveway, two to a very big tricycle, one pedaling furiously and the other standing on the step between the back wheels. Across the street a man stood on the porch of a house, which had run down so badly that sheets of blue tarp hung from the weather-beaten eaves in flapping tatters. The man was staring at her and scratching the side of his enormous, tee-shirt covered belly. He was looking at her like she didn’t belong. Like an oddity.
She had come home, but home was different.
Suddenly frightened by the fear that this all had been in vain, Mary turned her head and looked past the skeletal sign and to the house at number 1675 Augusta Street. Almost immediately she began to smile. In the window, on a placard no bigger than a license plate, the words Roger Cleary, M.D. had been carefully printed in crisp black letters. And there was another sign, this one dangling from the doorknob on a thin chain. OPEN. She breathed deep, and the air tasted clean and fresh and safe. It says, OPEN.
Mary put the car in park and made sure to lock it all around before she went to the door and let herself in.
The smell hit her like a happy, nostalgic wave. The old medicinal scent that, when she was very little, had filled her with the terrible fear that she was at the place where the man was going to stick a...
A what? A WHAT?!
...needle in her arm, but was now bringing a calm confidence to her. Everything was going to be all right. Dr. Cleary would be able to help her.
Mary whiffed the strong scent again and tapped the bell on the old counter where Nurse Angela usually sat. She peeked over; there wasn’t even a chair back there now.
“Coming,” someone said from the back of the office/house. “I’m coming.”
Mary recognized the harried old voice instantly, and the face and form when it poked through the spilt of curtains that hung in place of a door for the hall to the back. He was older, obviously. Twenty-two years had been tacked onto the fifty or so he’d already racked up when she last knew him. His gray hair had gone white and thin, and was long now. It spread from the spotted skin pulled tight over his skull in wispy strands. And he wore glasses now. Small, very clear ones that he removed with one gaunt hand when he came into the waiting room.
“Can I help you?” he asked, polite and smiling.
“Dr. Cleary,” Mary said. She took a step closer. “I was a... My mother used to bring me to you when we lived in Chaplin.”
His old eyes narrowed as he studied her face.
“My name...”
DON’T DO IT! LEAVE! NOW!
With all her inner strength she ignored the terri
ble, growling voice, and focused on Dr. Cleary’s kind, caring face.
“My name is Mary Austin.”
His eyes opened slowly, fully, and his lips parted noticeably.
A few quick gasps pierced Mary’s forced poise. Desperation invaded her gaze, making it wet at the source. “Do you remember me, Dr. Cleary?”
He nodded, speechless. He remembered. He certainly did.
“Dr. Cleary, the...the headaches are back,” Mary said, the words spilling from her as her knees started to go. She collapsed forward, her head swimming, the last thing clear in her mind the old wiry hands reaching out for her.
Twenty Six
Mary woke to the caustic smell of ammonia fuming in her nostrils. She coughed and put a hand to her face. Her eyes squelched tightly at the scent, then blinked open to see Dr. Cleary leaning over her, his hand pulling back from her, a small glass vial in it.
“Are you with us again?” Dr. Cleary asked spryly. Mary tried to sit up, but a gentle hand on her shoulder guided her back down. “No, no. You just lay there for a minute and get your wits back.”
Mary looked at the doctor for a moment, then around the room. It wasn’t the examining room she remembered. “Where am I?”
Dr. Cleary’s mouth curved into a big smile. “A question. You’re thinking; that’s a good sign.”
“Where...”
“My office, Mary,” Dr. Cleary explained. “Those examining room tables are far too high for me to lift someone to. Maybe when you were a youngin, but...” His head shook pleasantly. “...you’re not a youngin anymore.”
“I don’t remember...”
“I don’t think you would. You passed out almost onto my feet, and I got you in here and onto my couch.” He tossed the capped vial a few times in his palm. “This always did the trick.”
Mary started up again.
“You should—”
“I feel better,” she said quickly, and continued until she was sitting on the couch, turning so her legs were over the edge, feet on the floor again. On good solid ground. “I really am sorry.”
Dr. Cleary nodded and stepped close. Mary instinctively tipped her head back a bit as his hand came to her cheek, his thumb pulling her lower eyelid down. He examined one eye, then the other, using his penlight to check the pupils’ reactivity. “It doesn’t look like you did any damage on the way down...”
...way down...
“...sweety.”
Mary nodded and brushed her hair back with both hands. She suddenly felt very stupid for doing this, for coming thousands of miles to an old worn out town to see a frail country doctor. It wasn’t right that she was here. The urge to flee rose like a sailor’s wind within, pushing her. She should just go.
rrrrrriiiiiight
The pleased purr came from inside, low and sweet. Happy at her doubt. At her...concurrence?
Mary knew right then that she would not leave. That coming had been the right thing to do. That being here meant she was safe.
She thought she heard an angry little laugh, but decided that it was just the good doctor, who was coughing against the back of his hand.
“Pardon me,” Dr. Cleary said. He backed to a chair that faced the couch and eased himself unsteadily into it, his hands grabbing at the arms for balance.
“Are you all right?”
Dr. Cleary chuckle/coughed at her. “I’m the doctor, young lady.”
She smiled at him. A false smile barely hiding worry.
He saw this and waved off her concern. “I’m old, Mary. This is how old people are, all hacking and aches. Now, forget about me and tell me about you.”
Mary hesitated and glanced out the office door to the waiting room’s empty counter. “Nurse Angela isn’t with you anymore?”
Cleary shook his head. “No, no. She left me ten, eleven years ago. Moved down to Florida to live with her granddaughter. I get a Christmas card from her every year. Ugliest damn things you’ve ever seen, with palm trees on ‘em and Santa in cutoffs.”
“Really,” Mary said, nodding, avoiding the doctor’s gaze, which had become pointed and fixed on her.
“You said the headaches have come back,” Cleary said. “That’s what you said just before you passed out.”
Mary did look at him now. A rancid taste rose in her throat. Her eyes floated hollow in her head. “Yes.”
“Bad?”
She nodded, her eyes bobbing against the motion as if disconnected from who she was.
It had been a long time. Longer than it took for the specific maladies of most patients to be forgotten. Sure, he could look the old gashes and breaks and fevers up in a yellowed file if need be. But here that wasn’t necessary. He remembered Mary Austin quite well, and her headaches. And when they had started. And why.
He would have liked to have forgotten the latter.
“They’re just like the ones I got after my father died, with—”
“After your father died?” Cleary asked, leaning forward.
“Yeah,” Mary confirmed, puzzled at first but understanding coming as she grasped how much the man across from her had changed. How could she expect a man this old, a man who’d had thousands of patients, to recall every detail of their lives? “Remember? He died when a garbage truck ran the stop sign at Crowley and Trask?”
Cleary edged farther forward in his seat, his head cocking quizzically. “Mary, how much do you remember about your father’s death?”
“Some,” Mary answered. “I mean, I remember that it happened. And when. It’s all kind of foggy. I just get snippets of it.”
“But you remember the garbage truck running the stop sign?” Cleary said.
“That’s about all I remember,” Mary said apologetically, embarrassed that such a watershed event in her life was escaping her. Had escaped her already. “And it was after that that the headaches started. The bad ones. You gave me some pills that my mother mashed up in applesauce because I had trouble...”
...swallow...
“...swallowing pills.” Snippets, she thought. Like clips of old movies flicking on and off, a word here, an image there. I had trouble swallowing pills. So what? I remember that. So what? It means just that.
rrrrriiiiight
The purr left a chill drooling down the back of her throat.
Cleary settled back in his chair. She didn’t remember. She really didn’t remember. Was that a curse, or a blessing?
“I didn’t know who else to come to.”
Cleary nodded slowly. “Are there flashes of light?”
“Yes. Just like back then.” Well, not just like back then. Then the light hadn’t been as bright, as threatening, and it certainly hadn’t come in the form of two glaring animal eyes inside her head. But they were still lights. That’s all he’d asked. He didn’t need to know more.
yourenotgoingcrazyMARYyourenotItellyou
“And the sounds?”
“Them too.” Again, not the same. Something like grinding gears it had been then. Now... What? Are you going to tell him you’re hearing voices? One really mean voice, one like an animal might have if an animal (hound?) could speak. And another quieter, quickspeaker that could be me just talking to myself in my head...
rememberme?
...but I’m not even sure of that. I mean, is this me talking now? Me talking to me?
“Are you losing any time, Mary?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you coming up with missing time?” Cleary said again. “Like you’re one place, and then suddenly you find yourself someplace else, and you have no idea how you got there?”
Mary started to shake her head, because that had most certainly never happened to her. She was having headaches. Bad ones with bright lights (eyes) and sounds (voices). And sometimes, like now, the voices (a voice) came without the bright throb behind her eyes, spitting small and rapid thoughts at her. That was all. It was enough, but it was not ‘losing time’. So she went full into the gesture of denial and...
...it stopped
cold dead as the memory of the lesson plans sprang out of nowhere. Her eyes flared as the moment came back, her mother’s phone call the Sunday before last, and looking to the lesson plans on her lap, only they were no longer on her lap. They were on the coffee table. And the time. (Losing time?) It had been light outside, then dark when the phone rang. Losing time? Was that losing time? Was that losing time?
Is that losing time? Oh my God is that losing time? Am I losing time?
And then, more frighteningly, Mary began to ask herself, to contemplate, What happens during time that is lost?
you’renotlosingtimeMARYnotattallwhatasillynotionthatyouwouldlosetimeMARYwhywhatasillythingMARYandabadthingandasillythingandaverybadthingandyouknowwhattodowithbadthingsyouforgetthemandmoveonyouforgetthemyouforgetthemyou FORGET THEM
“I...”
theydontletCRAZYpeopleteachMARYrememberthattheydontletCRAZYpeopleteach
“I sometimes doze off.”
Damn you, Jean Louise. I told you to take her to Chicago. I told you she needed a different kind of doctor. The old doctor’s head wanted to shake with disgust. Twenty years. Good Lord, it’d been twenty years. He was terrified by thoughts of what twenty years inattention might have done. Being a doctor, Cleary knew what happened if you let an open wound sit without proper care. Without being dressed. My good Lord... It festered. And things grew in a festering wound. Tiny, dangerous things grew.
“Are you sure that’s all it is?” Cleary pressed her gently. “Just dozing off?”
ofcoursethatsallitisMARYofcourse
“Of course,” Mary told him, but there was no conviction in her words.
Cleary scratched at the pocket of his white coat, the one over his heart. “Mary, I want to ask you something.” There was great care in his words. As much care as he would have used wielding a scalpel in years gone by. A cut was a cut, he knew, by blade or otherwise. It exposed what lay underneath. “The headaches, they started up again just recently?”
She nodded.
“Did something happen around that time?” Cleary watched her struggle with the question for a moment. “Anything traumatic?”
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