My Soul to Keep

by Melanie Wells

  “Does he have asthma?”

  “Turned out to be panic attacks.”

  “A five-year-old? I’ve never heard of that.”

  She nodded. “They were triggering tracheal stenosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a spontaneous closing of the trachea. Tracheitis.”

  “More diseases to be afraid of.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think you need to worry too much. Odds are in your favor. You’re more likely to die of the flu. I bet you don’t get flu shots, do you?”

  “How did you know?”

  She laughed. “Um, your reflexive refusal to listen to anyone?”

  “What causes it?”

  “Your reflexive refusal to listen to anyone?”

  I made a face at her. “Trache-whatever.”

  “Some people get it from a virus. Or it can be a reaction to anesthesia or intubation.” She shrugged. “It’s rare for anxiety to trigger it, but it happens.”

  I sat there a minute. The gears began to grind in my mind. “So, does Nicholas still have the panic attacks?”

  “Sometimes. When he’s really afraid.”

  “And when did they start?”

  “Last fall. He changed schools in September. He’d been in a little private preschool until then—very structured. I moved him to Montessori. He got a little freaked out. He likes structure.”

  “So you think that was it?”

  “Well, nothing else was going on. Business as usual in the Chavez house. Mom’s too busy. No dad in sight. Nanny refuses to speak to him in anything other than Spanish. Bob has a fungus. Nicholas throws a fit wanting Sugar Babies for breakfast. The usual dramas.”

  “Tell me about the panic attacks.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What were they like? What were his symptoms?”

  “Rapid heart rate. Clammy skin. Respiratory distress. You know—that whole fear-escalation cycle.”

  “Which for Nicholas went how?”

  “It started with the sweating. He’d get gray and clammy, and his heart rate would go up. He called it drums in his tummy.”

  “And then what?”

  “Rapid breaths, increasing in frequency, decreasing in efficacy. Eventually, he’d either calm himself down or pass out. His trachea didn’t start closing until several months into it. But it was like an asthma attack. Almost exactly. I put him through the same tests Christine just went through. He blew up the balloon.”

  “What time of day did his panic attacks happen?”

  “Usually at night.”

  “Why?”

  “Nicholas is afraid of the dark.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He can’t go into a dark room. He can’t sleep in a dark room. He won’t even go into the hallway until I turn the light on for him. He’s always been like that.”

  “What, does he have a little night-light or something in his room?”

  “Superman. He has a Superman night-light. He says it keeps him safe.”

  “Keeps him safe? He uses those words?”

  “That’s what he says exactly. ‘It keeps me safe.’ ”

  I went to the kitchen, brought back the wine bottle, and filled Maria’s glass. “Maria, has anyone told you what the kidnapper said to Christine?”

  “I just heard that he knew Nicholas by name.”

  “She didn’t report it initially. I think she was afraid. Scared out of her mind. But she told me that when he grabbed her, he burned his hand.”

  She furrowed her brow. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know it doesn’t.”

  “What else did she say? You’re getting at something.”

  I hesitated. “He said he didn’t want her; he only wanted Nicholas.”

  “And?”

  I took a breath. “And … he said he was taking him to keep him safe.”

  “He used that phrase?”

  “Yes. ‘To keep him safe.’ That’s what she told me. Those exact words.”

  “It’s probably just a coincidence.”

  “I remember your telling me that he was having nightmares.”

  “About that creepy white guy with the slash in his back,” Maria said.

  “Peter Terry.”

  “The one you said was hunting souls.”

  “Right. That’s what he does,” I said, my anger rushing up me like a gust of hard wind. “He’s out to ruin us all.” I set my glass down. “Do you still have the coloring book? That Audubon coloring book? The one where Nicholas colored the birds with the slashes in their backs?”

  “I think it’s in his room.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  She got the book, and we pored over each page. I hadn’t seen it since last winter. I’d forgotten how graphic the images were.

  For the first half of the book, the coloring was normal for a kid his age. Scribbles in the margins. Wild, happy colors everywhere. Yellow swans, bright pink sparrows. Then a sudden change. The colors grew darker, angrier. Black parakeets, blood-red lovebirds. And then finally, a dove.

  Nicholas had left the dove white but had crossed out each of the wings and drawn an angry red slash in the bird’s back, wing to wing.

  “When did he do this one? Do you know?” I asked.

  She picked up the book and flipped through the pages until she found the remains of a page that had been torn out, its edge still bound into the backbone of the book.

  “This was December. He colored a picture and gave it to me for my birthday.” She gestured toward the bookcase, pointing out a framed hummingbird in green and blue and purple. “He looked it up in a book to get the colors right.”

  The following few pages were still bright, energetic. Three pages into it, Nicholas had colored a whooping crane black.

  “How often does he color?” I asked.

  “Two or three times a week, probably.”

  “Does he always color the pages in order and do one book at a time? Or are there several books, and he just picks one randomly?”

  “Nicholas is a very meticulous child.” She smiled. “He’s a lot like you that way.”

  I raised my glass. “My sympathies. Definitely in order and one book at a time, then. When’s your birthday?”

  “December twelfth.”

  “So sometime in the second or third week of December, his coloring changed. And then a week or so into that, he colors the dove. Do you remember a change in mood?”

  “That was when the nightmares started.”

  “The ones about Peter Terry.”

  “Right. He’d wake up screaming.”

  “I guess Superman wasn’t doing much good at that point.”

  “What are you getting at, Dylan?”

  “What triggered the decline? Did something happen in mid-December?”

  Maria’s eyes pooled suddenly.

  “It was my fault.” She wiped a tear away.

  “What?”

  “It was a Saturday, and I was running late, racing around getting ready for work. The nanny had just come, and she was cleaning up the breakfast dishes and starting some laundry. I thought he was with her. He always follows her around in the morning because she brings him a surprise every day. Nothing big. It could be a smiley-face Band-Aid or something. But he loves it. He can’t leave her alone until she gives it to him.”

  I watched as she struggled to retain composure. Her skin began to flush, and her upper lip trembled.

  “I wasn’t really tracking where he was,” she said. “I just wasn’t thinking about it. The nanny went to the laundry room to fold some towels. And I picked up my keys and left.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t know at first. The nanny called me in a panic a few minutes later. She couldn’t find him anywhere. She thought maybe I’d taken him with me without telling her.”

  “Where was he, Maria?”

  She began to cry, tears glistening wet in the soft light. She dropped
her head into her hands and began to sob, shoulders shaking, gasping air. The kind of crying you do maybe once or twice in your life.

  I’m pretty good with crying. I watch people cry all the time in my line of work. I sat down next to her until she’d cried it out, then handed her a Kleenex and waited.

  “The light goes off when the door closes.” She wiped her cheeks with her hands. “He was only in there a few minutes.” She took a rattled breath. “He couldn’t find the knob. That’s why he got so scared.”

  “What happened to him, Maria? Where was he?”

  “In my closet. I’d accidentally shut him in my closet.”

  17

  RAIN DRUMMED STEADILY FROM the night sky, thunder grumbling in the distance. Maria swiped a card to get through security and parked in the doctors’ lot at Children’s. She set the brake and was out of the car and halfway to the elevator before I’d finished admiring the covered parking space. The guard waved us through, and we walked through the double doors. I followed, almost at a trot, as Maria led us through the maze of hallways. Our wet shoes squeaked on the nonsensical painted stripes, echoing in near-empty corridors.

  On the seventh floor, Maria spoke briefly with the charge nurse, then pointed me down the hall to Christine’s room and said she’d be right there.

  Christine was sound asleep in her bed, sprawled sideways, clutching No-Nose. Liz sat in the Lysol chair in her jammies, flipping through a magazine. She had a stack of them on the table next to her.

  “It’s almost midnight,” she whispered. “What’s going on?”

  “We have a theory we want to run by you,” I said. “Fasten your seat belt. It’s pretty bizarre.”

  Liz frowned. “I can’t imagine anything you could say that would surprise me at this point.”

  Maria came in with three cups of coffee.

  “You went all the way downstairs in that amount of time?” I asked in a whisper.

  She shook her head and stirred her sugar in. “Nurses’ station. It’s one of the big perks of being a doctor.”

  “Is that one of those rights and privileges they talk about on the diploma?” I asked.

  “I always wondered what those were,” Liz said. “Other than unfettered access to narcotics.”

  Maria rolled her eyes. “Yeah, makes all those long hours of medical training completely worth the trouble. That and the spectacular pay you get working at a public hospital.”

  “How’s she been?” I hiked myself up onto the window ledge, throwing a towel over the air-conditioning vent to keep it from blowing snow up my shirt.

  “She seems fine. No more attacks. She’s dreaming some, squirming around. But she seems good. I think they’ll let us out of here tomorrow.” She looked around the room. “I will not miss this place.”

  Maria pulled up a chair. “I put in a page to Dr. Lindsay. He should have gotten the reports from the radiologist and pulmonologist today.”

  “Do you think it’s asthma?” Liz asked.

  “Gut feeling? No. But I want to make sure.”

  “What about you, Maria?” Liz asked. “Any news?”

  “Nothing.”

  Liz shook her head. “I don’t know how you’re getting through this.”

  “I’m on fifteen-minute segments,” Maria said. “ ‘One day at a time’ was too ambitious.”

  “What about you?” I asked Liz. “Any word from down south?”

  “I talked to Andy a little while ago. The satellite phone decided to work, finally.” She took a sip of coffee and sighed. “That stupid phone cost a fortune, but it’s a worthless piece of junk if the network’s down. There are some problems that all the money in the world will not solve.”

  “How does he sound?” I blew on my coffee, enjoying the smell of it.

  “Terrific. He says it’s beautiful there. The kids are having a ball. They saw parrots in the trees today. He said they’re wearing themselves out playing with all the little orphan children. Probably teaching them to shoplift or something.” She turned to Maria. “My boys are hoodlums.”

  “Sweet, though,” I said. “And so adorable they can get away with it.”

  “Yeah, they’re going to be lady-killers, both of them,” Liz said. “We’re foregoing a college fund for those two. We’re socking away cash for a criminal-defense fund instead.” We all laughed, bottling up the sound to keep from waking Christine. I watched as Maria wiped tears from her eyes. Tears of laughter, not grief or anger. I was grateful to see her eyes soften, her smile linger. The next fifteen minutes were looking pretty good.

  “They keep dragging orphans up to Andy one at a time and asking if they can bring them home, like they’re puppies at the SPCA,” Liz said. “Like if they just find the right one …”

  “Would you do that?” Maria asked. “Adopt a kid like that?”

  “Maybe. I would like a little notice first. Andy’s liable to just show up with a few. He’s got a huge heart. He was one of those kids who always brought home lost kittens and birds with broken wings.”

  “Do they know about Christine?” Maria asked.

  “The boys? He didn’t want to scare them.”

  “How’s Andy taking it?”

  “He’s worried. He wanted to turn right back around and come home.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said he was doing more good there than he could possibly do here. I don’t need the boys yanking the pages out of Christine’s chart and climbing her IV pole.” She tapped me on the arm. “You know how they are. Besides, he’s there for the orphans. It’s an important trip. They’re building a clinic. And the Angel Wing plane is flying around picking up supplies and bottled water and bringing in doctors. He needs to be there.”

  “Is he personally building the clinic?”

  “He thinks he is. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing. But he loves to swing a hammer.” She took a sip of coffee. “Makes him feel like a man.”

  “Enrique was over last week with his power drill putting some shelves up in my closet,” Maria said. “So sexy.”

  I nodded. “I love a man with power tools. David used to prune my sycamore tree with a chain saw.”

  “And you broke up with him? You’re an idiot,” Liz said.

  “He broke up with me,” I corrected. “And I think my idiot status is well established.”

  Maria’s phone rang loudly. She snatched it up before it could wake Christine, spoke briefly, then hung up and turned back to us. “That was Dr. Lindsay.”

  “At this hour?” Liz said. “Where can I get that kind of pull?”

  “I delivered his twins. He owes me.” Maria winked. “Besides, he’s a night owl.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He saw the test results. No asthma.”

  “What could it be then, Maria?” Liz asked. “Seizures maybe? Something neurological?”

  Christine stirred and turned. No-Nose fell softly to the floor. Liz tucked him back in with Christine and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders.

  We lowered our voices and told her about Nicholas’s panic attacks.

  “What are you saying?” Liz hugged her knees. I covered more of the register with the towel. “That Christine is having panic attacks? Is that what’s behind this … what’s it called?”

  “Tracheal stenosis.”

  “Liz,” I said, “I think it might be more complicated than that.”

  “Is this the seat-belt part?” she said.

  Maria looked at me quizzically. “Seat belt?”

  “I told her she’d need to buckle up for this ride.” I hopped down and sat on the edge of the bed. “Think about what’s happened so far. Nicholas starts having nightmares about a pale, creepy guy with a slash in his back.”

  “Peter Terry?” Liz said. “When was this?”

  “Last fall,” Maria said. “I wish I understood who he is, Dylan.”

  “Look, if I knew, I’d run for God.”

  “He’s sort of a specter, I guess,”
Liz said. “The anti-Earl. That’s the best way to explain it.”

  “I got him a Superman night-light,” Maria said.

  “Didn’t he have Superman pajamas too?” I said. “I think he was wearing them the first time I came over to your house.”

  Maria nodded. “Those were for ‘double protection’ nights. I had him convinced they had superpowers.”

  “Why would he need double-protection pajamas?” Liz asked. “What was he afraid of?”

  “Nicholas is afraid of the dark,” Maria said.

  “Aren’t all kids afraid of the dark?” Liz asked. “My kids think their night-lights protect them from monsters. Or the boogie man.”

  “I thought it was bogy man,” Maria said. “I hate colloquial phrases. My English …”

  “It’s either, really. But Andy taught them boogie. As in ‘Boogie Fever.’ He’s still living in the seventies.”

  I laughed. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I wish I were. He’s crazy about ABBA. And you know the green shag carpet and lava lamps in our game room? That’s Andy—and it’s not a cool retro thing. His favorite movie is Smokey and the Bandit.”

  “That’s hysterical,” I said. “I think of Andy as being so … cultured. Isn’t he on the symphony board or something?”

  “It’s an act. Really, his childhood fantasy was to be Danny Bonaduce.”

  “Who’s that?” Maria asked.

  “The Partridge Family,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, Liz, I wanted to be Laurie.”

  “Right, but Laurie was cool. That’s my point. Any normal boy would want to be Keith.”

  “Who’s Keith?” Maria asked.

  “David Cassidy,” I said.

  Maria threw up her hands. “I’m lost.”

  “Evel Knievel was his second choice. Remember him?”

  “I’m happy to say I have no idea who that is,” I said. “If it wasn’t on reruns after school and before my parents got home, I didn’t see it. My mom didn’t believe in TV.”

  “Well, you didn’t miss much. He was always vaulting over eighteen-wheelers on his motorcycle in this horrible white Elvis suit.” She took a sip of coffee. “It feels so good to laugh.” She shook her head and sighed heavily. “I need to get some sleep.”

  “Did they give you anything?” Maria asked.