by Lisa Alber
“I’ll call him back later.” She leaned her head against the headrest, remembering a question Simon had asked her. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Not really, no. Do you suppose that’s why I’m having a hard time with the notion of being matchmaker?”
“Perhaps, but you’ll figure it out.”
“The other day I had an epiphany—about Nathan. I don’t know his whole story, yet I knew what he needed. The words he needed to say out loud. To heal. I had a glimmer of what you must experience all the time. Intuition, yes?”
“Which you’ve always had.”
“Yes, but I felt it this time. Not as an educated guess or a theory or an assumption. I knew what I knew.”
Liam clapped his hands once, hard. “Halle-bloody-lujah!”
“Very funny.”
“By the way,” Liam said, “Danny tells me Marcus is taking Edna Dooley out to dinner this weekend. Was that you?”
“Nah, that was them.” A wave of quiet contentment made Merrit smile. “But I helped out.”
She may not have all the answers about her life, but for the first time in eighteen months she was okay with that. She pulled out of the parking lot in front of Dr. Murphy’s office and turned south, away from the rainbow but also away from the storm cloud.
eighty-seven
Nathan wasn’t sure how long he’d been living in this room in the hospital. Years. No, he reminded himself. A week at most. A different room, a different hospital. Not even in England anymore.
He sat up in bed and wiped the dribble from his mouth. His thoughts were so ponderous he’d forgotten them already. The afternoon sun coated the room in a thick haze that he waded through to reach his jeans lying on the floor. The fabric disturbed every hair on his legs when he pulled them on.
On the bureau sat his goldfinches. A dozen of them in modeling dough. He’d told his therapist here—not Brenda, she was one of the head nurses—about his dreams. The ones that featured hands suffocating and reviving a goldfinch. He’d tried to tell the therapist what it meant to him, these dreams, these goldfinch replicas—the beginning of it all, at least for him. Twelve-year-old Zoe running to him one day, beaming with pride. See what I can do?
The sight of her suffocating the poor bird had repulsed him. When she healed it, she’d repulsed him even more. He no longer cared if the staff didn’t believe him. Here he was, once again. Yelling down the walls wouldn’t make what he had to say sound any less insane.
So, once again, he’d fake it. Tell everyone what they wanted to hear. He collapsed on his bed and curled up, too tired for the common room, after all. His eyes drifted shut, and then drifted open again sometime later. The goldfinches on the bureau fluttered. If he pointed that out, Brenda would up his meds, so he wouldn’t mention it.
A knock bolted him out of bed. Groggy and loose, he folded to the floor.
“Nathan,” Brenda said. Another knock. “I’m coming in now.”
Without a word, she helped Nathan to his feet. “You have a visitor.” She hesitated. “Sid Gibson.”
Nathan brushed his hands through his hair. “I’ll see him. He owes me something. He promised.”
He tucked in his shirt over his new tummy bloat and tried to straighten his shoulders, but they refused to hold their positions. One of his feet caught on the other. He stumbled forward. Brenda caught and held him. He shrugged her off and shuffled forward. When he’d settled himself at his table with the colorful dough, Brenda escorted Sid to the chair next to Nathan.
He scooted his chair closer to Sid’s, watching Sid’s lips form words that floated out of his mouth inside bubbles. He interrupted them to say, “You promised me Annie’s journal.”
“And you shall have it. Danny confiscated it for the case against Zoe. He promised me he would return it to you.”
Case against Zoe. If Sid wasn’t here about the journal then—“Why are you here?” he said.
“I would have come sooner, but I ran into difficulties. The lawyers straightened it out, I’m glad to say.”
Nathan noticed Sid’s teeth behind the word bubbles. Crooked teeth. Sharp little fangs. He blinked and they returned to normal.
“I owe you an apology,” Sid said. “I hid the sleán in your painting supplies to implicate you. I was jealous of your budding relationship with Annie.”
The word bubbles knocked against each other, popping before Nathan could decipher them.
“Elder Joe? Remember him? Killed by a turf cutter?” Sid smiled. “I know it’s difficult. The drugs they force into you—it’s fiendish. Not a bother if you’re not catching my meaning.”
His words were coming too fast. Nathan thought maybe, just maybe, there was a fact related to Zoe within all those word bubbles. “Zoe?”
“You landed a rum deal with her as a daughter, didn’t you?”
“Rum deal.”
“Listen, my friend, I’m after ridding you of Zoe. Hopefully for a long time. In that respect, you can relax. Prison for her, eventually. It will happen.”
“For what she did,” Nathan said.
“Exactly.”
Sid understood Nathan. He was the one person on the planet who did. Maybe Nathan could reveal the truth to him. Maybe Sid would believe him. The one person on the planet. That would be something. Then he wouldn’t talk about the past again. Ever.
He bent toward Sid and lowered his voice. A quick glance around the ward told him that no one spied on him, but just in case, he mumbled his words. Sid leaned forward.
“Zoe practiced on me.” He pulled up his shirt and lowered his jeans to show Sid his scar, but quickly, before anyone saw. Sid whistled low. “The healing. No one believes her, but she can do it. She practiced on me. Over and over.”
Sid looked impressed, maybe even entranced. “You let her torture you?”
Torture. Nathan retreated from the word. He floated above himself, hearing his flickering, unsure voice, sounding like he didn’t believe himself.
How it had all begun with the poor goldfinch, and how Susannah refused to believe it even when Nathan corroborated Zoe’s claims that she could heal. Susannah had looked at him strangely then, the first time he’d seen wariness aimed at him. Perhaps he’d been losing his marbles already. Perhaps he and Zoe shared a delusion. He’d heard all the theories. He didn’t give a shite about the theories. He knew what he knew: he was to blame for Susannah’s death.
He retreated from Zoe after that. He let Susannah and Zoe battle it out, mother and daughter. Susannah wanted to send Zoe to a private clinic for treatment. Zoe’s fights with Susannah. Her neediness with Nathan. Nathan’s love for his wife over his daughter that caused him to side with Susannah despite what he’d seen. The goldfinch. The strife—and Nathan’s avoidance of the strife—escalated until the day he found Susannah at the bottom of the stairs.
Nathan paused to catch his breath. Those were the most word bubbles he’d uttered in weeks. Sid urged him to continue. “You have quite a story there, mate.”
Nathan remembered the bizarre light in Zoe’s eye, a determination when reviving her mother failed, her teariness. “I’m going to practice even more,” she’d said. “No more goldfinches. I’ll learn how to heal properly so I can save people.”
She’d leaned into Nathan, her head under his arm, her arms around his waist. “Now it’s us, and we’ll be perfect, you’ll see.” Her hot hands stuck to him through his shirt. His heart squeezed itself off from her with such disgust that she couldn’t help but notice. She’d pulled back with her eyebrows drawn together in reproach.
That was the moment his life changed, when doom lowered itself over him. And he’d known then, hadn’t he? He’d known his guilt, and his memory began to slip after that. When Sid said “torture,” maybe he was correct. Penance and guilt and Zoe always there. Nathan let her cut him. He let her.
He hadn’t cut himself. He knew that much. He’d swear by that.
Yet it w
asn’t torture—not according to Zoe. She practiced on him, improving her healing skills until the moment his mind snapped and he turned her knife back onto her. Sometime later, he came to in a psych ward, safe from her, and now here he was, safe again. Better yet, there would be no Zoe waiting for him or searching for him when he got out.
Nathan’s words floated away from him. A vague emptiness surrounded him, comfortable as a cocoon. A foreign feeling of relaxation overcame him. Relief. Gratitude.
“I have a gift for you.” Nathan beckoned a nurse and asked her to fetch his personal belongings out of storage. The nurse returned and hovered next to them as Nathan fingered his scant belongings. Wallet. Keys. Mobile. And the last item, which he placed on Sid’s palm.
“Fishing wire?” Sid said.
Nathan waited for the nurse to leave before he spoke. “I remember now. The last of it. Everything.”
But memory was a mistress, his thoughts said, ever slick and untrustworthy. He shook them off. “Susannah’s death wasn’t an accident,” he said. “She tripped over this wire stretched between the balusters. I don’t think Zoe meant to kill her—”
“You said she tried to heal your wife.”
“She did, she did. That’s what Zoe said.” Nathan’s word bubbles dissipated again, doubt creeping in. Or maybe that was her strategy. To be seen by Nathan as the good daughter, trying to heal her mother.
Sid’s hand landed on his arm. His skin against Nathan’s prickled and rubbed, but Nathan forced himself to concentrate on the word bubbles.
“She wanted you all to herself,” Sid said. “Then, and now.”
Nathan pressed his hands over his face. Convulsive shudders took over his body. His teeth chattered. One of the nurses stooped and placed an arm around him, but Nathan shook his head for her to leave.
When he looked up sometime later, one minute, five minutes, Sid still sat beside him, waiting with his teeth covered, thankfully. He pressed the fishing wire between his hands in a prayerful gesture. “I’ll cherish it. Thank you, my friend.”
The fog cleared out of Nathan’s head for a moment. “Annie,” he said.
“Yes, Annie.” Sid tucked the bundle of fishing wire into his pocket. “You could say she sacrificed herself for you. If not for her death, you wouldn’t at last be safe from your dear daughter.”
“You believe me—about Zoe?”
With a slow nod, Sid said, “I find that I do.”
Nathan sagged back on his chair. All he’d ever needed was one person—not Zoe—to believe him. Tears streamed down his face, and Sid didn’t bat an eye. He watched Nathan in that way of his, like his teeth were about to transform into fangs again.
Nathan waved to Sid, stumbled to his feet, and left the room. He didn’t care if he ever saw the man again. In his room, he nestled under the bedcovers and fell into a dreamless sleep.
eighty-eight
Danny brushed his finger over the thin scab on Ellen’s neck. Two inches long, the cut would heal into a pink line as smooth as the rest of her skin. Ellen used to pick at scabs, rubbing them until they broke open or worrying them around the edges until they snapped off and exposed new skin not ready for its unveiling yet. She didn’t care about the scars they left. The dimples on her knees from dozens of falls over a lifetime, the shiny skin on her hand where she’d splashed hot oil on herself, the two divots on her arm from a dog bite. Unlike those, the scar on her neck would eventually fade into nothing. She wouldn’t notice it if she woke up.
But she wouldn’t wake up. At last Danny understood this beyond theory and medical statistics. He’d felt the truth of it the moment Zoe sliced Ellen’s skin. Ellen was destined for a slow and excruciating deterioration—placed on ventilators and poked, prodded, and manhandled every time an infection took residence in her body.
Danny picked up Ellen’s hand and rubbed his thumb over the thickened burn scar. He summoned Cecil, the straight talker. He’d have to be blunt. It would be like revealing that magic didn’t exist, and the children still believed in magic.
“I don’t believe your mom will be resurrected,” he said to Mandy and Petey.
The children were subdued for a change. Mandy had brought a book to read to Ellen. The Wind in the Willows. She lowered the book. She, along with Petey, turned wide eyes toward Danny.
“I’m not an expert on these things, but I do know that if your mother resurrects, it’s not like how you imagine, not like waking up. According to the Bible, even Jesus didn’t walk on Earth as a man after he resurrected.”
The children glanced at each other. They had a way of communicating without words that exasperated Danny at times.
“You’re saying that Mum won’t come back to us,” Mandy said. “Never again.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” He rushed forward with more words. “But we can help her resurrect up to Heaven. Like Jesus.”
Cecil would have disapproved of that bit of sophistry, but how to talk to his kids in a way they would understand? Ellen had raised them in a devout fashion. If he’d learned anything from the case of Zoe Tate the healer, Liam the healed, and Nathan the survivor of the healing, it was that belief trumped all. Belief became its own truth.
He decided to speak to Mandy and Petey in the language of their belief. “We can help her, and it will be better for her.” He pointed to the machinery that kept Ellen dosed with fluids and nutrients. “We turn off the machines. When her soul is ready, her body will”—he paused, still unsure—“her body will die.”
“She’ll die,” Mandy said. “She’ll go to Heaven. That’s what you mean.”
“Ah, sweet things,” Danny said. “Come here.”
The children climbed on his lap. They were too big to fit comfortably, but somehow they made it happen with limbs jumbled together and arms around his neck.
“I’m going to be blunt now, okay?” he said.
They nodded.
“Life sometimes serves us shite.” They nodded again like this was self-evident. “And sometimes because of that we have to make tough choices. We mere humans have to decide on the greater kindness. That’s the question at the bottom of it all. What’s the kindest thing for your mom? Stay like this or—or pass on? I’ve made up my mind which is kinder, but I’m going to leave the room now and you can talk privately.”
They stared at him with identical open-mouthed awe. Yes, he thought, I’m including you in an adult decision process. Please let me not be traumatizing you.
“You can stay,” Mandy said.
She grabbed Petey and led him into a whispered conversation in the corner of the room. They darted glances at Danny and cupped their hands around their mouths.
The hum of Ellen’s life-support equipment comforted him, Danny realized. When had that happened?
Mandy held Petey’s hand as they returned to him. “Dad?” Petey said.
“Ay?”
“You can let her go now.”
He hesitated, biting his lip. Mandy nudged her with his elbow. “Say it,” she hissed.
“Say what?” Danny said.
“It’s like this,” Mandy said. “We’ve been waiting for you to get your head out your bum.”
A startled laugh burst from Danny. Father Dooley had said the same thing. He tried to look stern, but it didn’t work.
“We always knew what Mum wanted,” Mandy said. “She said you knew, too, but you were so sad.”
“She talked to you about this?”
In identical moves, they rolled their eyes at him like he’d gone mad. Of course, you eejit.
“Dead people,” Petey said matter-of-factly. “We talked about it a lot. Mum said going to Heaven is a nice thing and that your work helped the dead people move on.”
Danny stood. He paced back and forth. It was either that or laugh again until he crumpled. Ellen had filled their heads with the most lovely nonsense, but here they stood, full of acceptance. No conflicts for them.
“What about resurrecting on Easter?” he said.
> “That was a game.” Petey grinned at their sleight of hand. “We knew you were listening to us talk in bed. We were trying to trick you for earwigging.”
Mandy climbed onto Ellen’s bed and tucked the covers around her shoulders. “Mum always said you shouldn’t listen in on people. What a lot of nonsense, and you let us go on and on.”
“Of course Mum wouldn’t come back on Easter like Jesus!” Petey hollered.
“You gave us the best Easter ever, though,” Mandy said.
“You played me.” Danny collapsed back onto the chair and Petey climbed on top of him again. “I’m an utter eejit, all right. All this time I thought you were waiting for Mum to ascend.”
“Daddy? You know you can talk to us,” Mandy said. “All you had to do was ask and we would have come clean.”
Danny smiled at the phrase come clean. “I am duly chastised, and I think ice cream cones might be in order on our way home.”
Their identical smiles just about tore out his heart. Jesus, how he loved his urchins.
Petey shifted off of Danny and climbed onto the bed so he lay on one side of Ellen and Mandy on the other. Mandy resumed reading her book aloud while Petey drifted off to sleep. Danny picked up the silver hand mirror and tilted it toward a thin stream of light shining through the window. The reflecting surface caught the light and directed it toward the wall. Danny shifted it until the light illuminated Ellen’s face like a light from her Heaven.
the end
© James Titus
About the Author
Lisa Alber is a Rosebud Award nominee for best first novel for Kilmoon, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and Walden Fellowship.
Before devoting herself to the fiction life, Lisa worked in Ecuador, Brazil, and New York City. Her various career choices included international finance, journalism, book publishing, and technical writing, with a minor stint as cocktail waitress.
Lisa lives in the Pacific Northwest with a tiny dog and a chubby cat. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. You can find Lisa at www.lisaalber.com.