The Astral

by V. J. Banis

  “You’re here,” Millie said. “I thought....”

  The doctor smiled and waved a hand to indicate the tubes connecting Catherine to the various life support systems. “How could she go anywhere?” she asked.

  For a moment more, Millie gaped. With a mystified expression, she shook her head. “Of course. How silly of me, how could you go anywhere?” She backed out of the room, her puzzled eyes studying Catherine’s face.

  Catherine looked at the doctor. “Why did you say that?” she asked.

  “Say what?”

  “That, what you said, about traveling?”

  The woman chuckled and slipped her penlight into the pocket of her tunic. “My dear, I’m afraid it will be a while before you do any real traveling. You rest now.” She got up and strolled toward the door.

  “Wait,” Catherine said, “I—I’m confused.”

  At the door, the doctor paused for just a second to look back and smile. Up until this moment she had been utterly professional and sweetly bland, a face you could almost but not quite remember, the sort of someone you might know only slightly from church or perhaps one of your child’s teachers. There was nothing bland or sweet about the smile she flashed across the room at Catherine, however. It was fierce, almost demonic. And challenging.

  “Of course you are. It will get better, I promise. You’ll be fine. It just takes time.”

  * * * *

  It felt strange to be back in Los Angeles. Jack McKenzie took the freeway ramp for Hollywood Boulevard, swerving out of the way of a brainless driver determined to get around him to exit first. That, at least, hadn’t changed: the Los Angeles traffic and the nutty drivers. No, that wasn’t true. The volume of traffic had doubled, at least, in the dozen or so years since he had been here.

  One thing that blessedly hadn’t changed was Musso and Frank’s. The restaurant sat where it had sat for ages, defending its faded elegance against the growing seediness of Hollywood Boulevard. He left his car in the parking lot in the rear, slipping the attendant a ten to insure that he kept an eye on it, and entered by the back door and the little corridor that went past the kitchen. To the right was the newer dining room with its lunch counter and brighter lights.

  He went to the left, however, to the older of the two rooms, with its monumental mahogany bar, the faded and vaguely pastoral murals, the high-backed wooden booths where generations of stars, politicians, moguls had sipped their cocktails and eaten the unchanged list of daily specials. The waiters might have been the same ones who had served him in the past. None of them were young and all of them were pros. To a man, and here and there a woman, they eschewed the trendy we-are-all-buddies-together style of service. If you wanted a waiter-as-friend, you could get that all over this town. Here, what you got was the business of good food and good drinks, properly, efficiently served.

  Peter Weitman was already in one of the booths, and already sipping a martini. A second one waited in its little bowl of ice for Jack. In the years since they had last met, Weitman had added some extra pounds to his never-trim build and traded much of his hair for them, but the eyes in the round face looked up at Jack with undiminished shrewdness.

  “I hope your tastes haven’t changed,” he said, indicating the waiting martini as Jack slipped into the booth across from him.

  “Not that much.” They shook hands quickly. By that time, a waiter had appeared to pour Jack’s drink into the chilled stemmed glass. Jack nodded his thanks and took a sip. “Ah. Nobody does it better, I swear.”

  Peter lifted his glass. “Welcome back to La-La Land.” He had a sip of his own drink. “How does it feel?”

  “A little funny. You forget the essence of the place. They never seem to capture that in movies or books. For all its tackiness, it does have a charm of its own.”

  “Admittedly a wacky charm,” Peter agreed. “You have to live here to get that.” He hesitated and looked down at his martini. “Did you hear about Catherine?” he asked without looking up.

  Jack skipped the pretense of asking which Catherine. They both knew there was only one Peter would mention.

  “I heard that she married Walter. That was years ago. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me they’re divorced.” He said it lightly, but he couldn’t help the little surge of hope that rose up inside him.

  “Her daughter was killed. Kidnapped.”

  “Jesus!” Jack slammed his drink down so hard that the stem on the glass broke. In an instant, a waiter was there. “It’s okay,” Jack said, snatching a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and using it to stem the little rivulet of blood.

  “I’ll bring a new glass,” the waiter murmured, whisking up the broken one and deftly wiping the table. One quick, practiced glance had told him the problem was not one of overindulgence. Else, no further drinking would happen on his stint at this table. Musso’s wasn’t that kind of establishment and there wasn’t a name, or a tip, big enough to bend that rule.

  They sat in silence until the waiter brought a new glass, already filled with a fresh drink. He set it down and gave Peter and the menus a meaningful glance. Peter shook his head and the waiter disappeared again.

  “God, she must be crazy with grief,” Jack said finally.

  “She was nearly killed herself.” He told him the whole story, so far as he knew it. Jack listened without interruption, sometimes looking down into the crystalline purity of his martini, sometimes up at the dingy murals over the booths, almost never directly at Peter.

  He was thinking, what a horrible thing it must have been for her. If only he could have been there to comfort her. He couldn’t, of course. She didn’t love him. He could have borne that, if she had only let him love her; but she was married to another man, had married him within weeks of the day he had left Los Angeles, so whatever love she felt for Walter must have been there all along—all the time that she was with him.

  Since he had arrived back in the city, he had been to nearly all the places they used to haunt. Yesterday he had lunch at The Apple Pan: a hickory burger with cheese, and apple pie à la mode. The day before, he had been to the pier at Santa Monica, where he had resisted the urge to ride the merry-go-round. A couple in love could do that and get nothing more than amused glances from passers-by. A single man could only engender suspicion.

  He had been to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, Angel’s Flight and The Bradbury Building, the Farmers’ Market, The Witch’s House that the tourists never discovered, and The Original Pantry in the seedy part of downtown, where he’d eaten a French Dip in honor of its invention there. A one-man tourist trail, and all of it empty of pleasure, all of it spoiled for him by the absence of the one with whom he had shared it in the past, with whom he could never share it again.

  Sitting across from him, as he talked, Peter watched all these emotions flit across his friend’s face. Should I have said anything, he wondered? Or kept my trap shut? He would have learned of it sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? For such a big city, Los Angeles could be a small town in that regard.

  He finished his story and waited for Jack to respond. The silence grew uncomfortably long. He was about to speak up himself when at last Jack looked directly at him for the first time in many minutes.

  “Let’s talk about that job you mentioned,” he said.

  * * * *

  It was nearly a month before she could go home. Brain damage, they explained, in terms too technical for her to grasp: stroke danger, seizures, black-outs. A whole litany of dire consequences, none of which mattered to her in the least. If she couldn’t die, couldn’t trade places with her daughter, what did it matter how she lived?

  She never saw the woman doctor again, the one who had spoken to her of traveling. No one seemed to know who she was. Even Nurse Millie was unhelpful.

  “There are so many doctors here,” she said when Catherine questioned her. “It’s hard to keep track of them all.” Millie was different now. She still took pains with her ministrations, but the easy intimacy t
hat had existed between them before had vanished. She was wary with Catherine. Sometimes it seemed as if she were uncomfortable in Catherine’s presence.

  “Who could blame her?” Catherine asked herself. “I am uncomfortable in my presence.”

  * * * *

  Walter brought her home, his air one of gentle solicitude. She had managed to give him at least some of the forgiveness she knew he sorely needed.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she assured him, this on the day before she left the hospital. “You are not to blame for their evil. How could you have known—how could any sane person expect that?”

  He was grateful, of course, but it seemed to her as if her forgiveness embarrassed him in some way. They both knew it was not over, that perhaps the guilt would never go away. Perhaps she could never altogether stop blaming him, but it was a start, at least.

  They had to try, if they were to save their marriage. If they were to save themselves. To linger in that hell of self-torture could only lead to insanity. She had felt since the moment she regained consciousness in that hospital bed that she was teetering at all times on the edge of that abyss. Sometimes she thought it might be easier to plunge into it.

  Her mother was at the house when they got there. “I won’t be in the way,” Sandra Dodd promised, wary, because up till now, when she had visited at the hospital, her daughter had been distant and uncommunicative. “I’ll just finish getting dinner ready and then I’ll go home. Unless,” she added, and could not keep a hopeful note from her voice, “you want me to stay.”

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Catherine assured her, making the effort to smile gratefully. “I can manage.”

  “Maybe she should stay for a night or two,” Walter said. “I’ll have to go to work. I’ve been away from the restaurant so much, and you know what happens when the cat’s away. People are getting sloppy.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Catherine said, and, more emphatically when they both looked uncertain, “Really.”

  She glanced around at the living room that should have been familiar, and looked utterly foreign to her. She focused on a vase filled with yellow roses that sat atop the piano. “Thank you for the flowers, Mom,” she said, to soften the stubbornness that she knew left mother and husband uneasy.

  “Oh, they’re not....” Sandra hesitated. Part of her wanted to let the mistake stand, but she found that she couldn’t. “They aren’t from me.” Catherine raised a questioning eyebrow. “They’re from Jack. Jack McKenzie.” She didn’t add that they had been coming every week for nearly a month.

  “McKenzie?” Walter said. “I didn’t even know he was back in town, did you?” The look he gave Catherine was accusing.

  “I’ve rather been out of circulation.” She took the note from the roses and read it.

  “What the hell does he want?”

  She handed him the note. It was simple to the point of austerity: “My sincere sympathy. Jack McKenzie.”

  Jack McKenzie. As if he needed to add his last name. As if she might have forgotten who he was. She suddenly remembered hearing his voice in that dying moment. That was why she had kept the memory of that incident so resolutely locked away inside her mind, why she had mentioned it to no one. To remember that eerie moment was to remember Jack, and she didn’t want to think of Jack; wouldn’t think of him. That, surely, was the feather that would tip her over the edge into the bottomless pit if anything would.

  Walter took the card, read it for a long moment as though the message it contained was a lengthy one. “Have you seen him?” he asked finally.

  She sighed. “I haven’t spoken to Jack since he left thirteen years ago.”

  He was on the verge of saying something further, and thought better of it. Instead, he crumpled up the card and threw it violently into the wastebasket by the desk.

  “Did I hear a baaing sound?” Sandra asked. “I do believe there’s a lamb stew calling for my attention.”

  She left the room to give them tactful space for anything that needed saying. There was, she thought, quite a bit of that, none of which she needed to hear.

  Whatever that might have been, however, remained unsaid in a silence that eddied around husband and wife. Catherine went to the bay window and stared out at the back garden. The flowers were wilted, the grass brown from lack of water, the leaves of the maple tree hung down dispiritedly. She supposed it was a measure of her healing that she could even notice such things, though she hadn’t yet reached the point of caring much.

  “I’d better get to the restaurant,” Walter said to her back. “If you have any...if you need anything, call me on my cell.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said again. Relenting, if only slightly, she came to give him a perfunctory kiss.

  When he had gone, when she heard the car door slam, heard the Buick pull out of the driveway and move off down the street; when she was sure he wasn’t coming back but was truly on his way to the restaurant he owned in Santa Monica, she went to the wastebasket and retrieved the card, smoothing it out. She too studied it for a long while, as if seeking some coded message invisible to the undiscerning eye.

  They had been rivals, Walter and Jack, if unequal ones. It had always been Jack who had ruled in her heart, though she liked Walter well enough, and felt kindly toward him for his unrequited love.

  “You’re sweet. I do like you, honestly,” was the best she could give him then, and that, of course, was not enough for a man in love. Even as she said it, she was aware of its inadequacy.

  What can I do, she asked herself? She couldn’t help being in love with Jack anymore than Walter could help being in love with her. Not just love, either: her feeling for Jack had been a burning, an overwhelming passion that never left her for a moment.

  Maybe, she sometimes thought even then, more passion than love. Waking or sleeping, he was always there. She had only to close her eyes and see him drawn in flames upon her lids: the dense dark curls of his hair, his blue gray eyes that seemed to see into her heart, his lips, too full, perhaps, for a man, but sensually thrilling to her. Especially when he kissed her, when he kissed her lips, when he kissed her there, the delirious prelude to that moment when he lowered his lean, hard body onto hers and she gave herself up to him so utterly.

  I mustn’t think of this, she told herself severely. I mustn’t remember. From the kitchen she heard the rattle of cups and silverware as her mother set the table. She started to throw the card away again, but her hand refused to do her bidding. Instead, she dropped it into the pocket of her denim skirt.

  She ran her fingers through the shapeless fringe of reddish blonde hair just beginning to grow back in over her scars. He wouldn’t find her so desirable if he saw her now, she thought grimly. And, probably, that was just as well.

  She followed the aroma of lamb stew into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Summer became autumn. The house stifled her. Everywhere she looked she found memories of Becky. She tried to watch television, and instead of Oprah, she found herself watching Becky’s one time favorite show, Daffy Danny’s Alley. It was a passion that Becky had shared with a great many pre-teens and one that (thankfully so far as Catherine was concerned) she had quickly outgrown. Catherine had come into the den one day to discover Becky watching cartoons instead.

  “No Daffy Danny?” she had asked.

  Becky’s answer was brief and to the point: “He’s smarmy.”

  An opinion Catherine shared. Danny was Danny O’Dell, host and hand-puppeteer, an altogether too fey young man—or, probably not really so young, but who worked hard at that illusion—who wore too-short trousers and a too-tight checked jacket and a tam with a red pom-pom and who mugged a little too outrageously for the benefit of the squealing girls in the studio audience.

  In the past she had gritted her teeth while Becky sat enrapt, from “Kids, what time is it? It’s Daffy Danny time,” through every “daffy laffy,” to the last “daffy bye-bye,” delivered with a big kiss thrown at the televis
ion screen.

  Now, of course, she would have kissed Danny O’Dell herself if it could have brought her daughter back to her.

  She clicked off the television with an angry gesture.

  * * * *

  She went back to work finally at Dean and Summers, Publishers, half days to start, both glad to have her time occupied, and sorry to have to face the well-meant expressions of sympathy, the worried glances that she pretended not to see when she went past people. As if the jungle drums had alerted them, everyone seemed to know when she was coming, were waiting for her appearance in the drama of their lives.

  Alden Summers had passed away years back, but the firm still carried his name on the masthead. She went first thing to Fermin Dean’s office. Fermin’s secretary waved her in with a friendly but guarded smile.

  “Catherine,” Fermin greeted her with evident delight. He was tall and gaunt, silver haired, one of those people who seem to be in motion even when sitting still. He bounded up from his chair and came round his desk to clasp her hands. “It’s good to have you back. Though when you see the load on your desk, you’ll know just how much I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ll be glad for the work. I can use the occupation,” she said.

  “Don’t overdo it. And, I mean this, Catherine, make your own hours, please, come and go as you want.”

  Even with his warning, she was not quite prepared for the workload waiting for her despite everyone’s obvious efforts to keep things moving along. As chief editor for their art books divisions, one of Dean and Summer’s major divisions, her input was nearly indispensable. Books that ought to have been in production by now had been held up for months and newer projects waited for her green light. A mountain of correspondence, most of it submissions for book proposals, filled up one half of her desk and overflowed onto a chair.

  She threw herself into her work. It was the best antidote she had found yet for the pain. Not, of course, that the pain ever quite went away, it merely curled itself up into a little knot in a far corner of her mind, where it ever waited to come back out into the light.