Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  But then who was the man under the rug? Had Conor perhaps ventured in on Alan and Laura making love and this was the “man under the rug”? “Dead” perhaps in the exhausted aftermath of orgasm? Or “dead” perhaps as symbolism for “weak,” for Alan’s letting Laura emotionally abandon Conor? Was the cat there to protect Conor from the ghosts of memories of an infancy when she was all his? Or from the “dead man” who was his father?

  James looked at the boy. It had been much simpler to consider him autistic.

  Conor, intent on his painting, did not want interaction. Whatever psychological issues the boy was working out with the paints, it was for himself alone at that point, an internal process being made external, and he wasn’t ready to communicate it with James. James’s only role was to sit quietly and observe.

  As so often happened when there were quiet moments in the playroom, James’s mind wandered back to Adam. Adam playing. Adam painting. Adam chattering in his soft, lispy voice. Adam dead.

  My own ghost, James thought, as he watched Conor. I’m just as haunted as he is.

  It had been James’s fault that Adam had died. The tribunal was right about that. They all were, and the worst of it was that James knew that. If he had spent less time theorizing and more time observing Adam, if he had acted on what Adam said instead of simply watching and “interpreting,” Adam might well be alive today. If he hadn’t been negligent. The psychiatrist. The one who should have noticed the signs of brutal abuse and recognized them for the real symptoms they were, not some therapeutic displacement crap.

  But he had noticed. That’s what James had found so hard to tell the tribunal. He had seen the marks and noticed the weight loss. But abuse – torture, really, to give it its honest name – hadn’t crossed James’s mind when working with Adam. He was a five-year-old boy. Of course, he would be struggling with the Oedipal stage. Fantasies of fighting with his step-father for his mother’s love were part and parcel of the expected symbolism of Freudian psychiatry. And theirs was such a respectable family, well off and well educated. Intelligent, articulate and likable. The parents had been the ones themselves to bring in Adam for help. Who was James to question that things weren’t just as they had said, that Adam had inflicted those injuries on himself during his incomprehensible rages?

  James never found the words to defend himself, not then, not even now. Despite the perfect clarity everyone had in hindsight, at the time things really had looked uncertain and inconclusive. It hadn’t been blatantly obvious what the horrible conclusion was going to be. But, of course, the hard truth was that even when James had begun to suspect things weren’t as they seemed, it only made him question his own judgement. He never was brave enough to accuse the parents. Because what if he were wrong? What if it were all just part of Adam’s psychopathology? James’s psychiatric training had covered self-inflicted injury far more thoroughly than child abuse. He was so worried he would lose his credibility by causing a big fuss over nothing. He hadn’t meant to be blind or stupid. He was just an ordinary guy who’d got caught up in a truly horrific situation. His only real mistake had been trying to play safe.

  So deep in thought was James that he missed the accident when it happened. Conor had leaned far across the table to pick up a new sheet of paper when the stuffed cat slipped out of its niche under his arm and fell with a slurpy splat onto the painting Conor had been working on. There was so much finger-paint on the paper that it splashed up as the cat landed.

  A look of pure horror crossed Conor’s face. He screamed with terror.

  James jumped up quickly and lifted the toy out of the paint, but even that wasn’t fast enough. Conor was instantly hysterical. He began to shriek and flap his hands wildly, red paint splattering in all directions.

  “Here. Come here. We’ll wash Kitty off,” James said, trying to calm him. He placed a guiding hand on Conor’s back to encourage him in the direction of the sink.

  “Blood on the walls! Blood on the walls! No! No! No!” He flung himself about violently.

  Tossing the paint-soaked cat over into the sink, James moved to restrain the boy.

  “No! No! No!” Conor screamed. “Blood! Blood on the cat! The cat’s dead!”

  “No, it isn’t blood, Conor. It’s only paint.” He grabbed the boy and pulled him in tightly, wet paint and all. Conor struggled, powerful in his utter terror. Pushing against James, he slapped James’s face and kicked his shins. The two of them tumbled to the floor before James managed to secure the grip he was trying for. He lay half under the table, the boy clutched to him.

  Conor continued to scream and struggle. James pulled the two of them into a sitting position and held on.

  A minute passed.

  Two minutes.

  Three.

  Conor was drawing in air in big, shuddery gasps, his voice gone hoarse from screaming. At long last he collapsed against James, his face pressed into the fabric of James’s suit.

  James looked down at the boy, at his milky skin, blotched and tear-stained. He waited for complete silence.

  “Shall we wash Kitty off?” James asked when Conor was finally still.

  Conor looked up and his eyes went dark again with terror. He pulled back from James, but as James was still holding him, he could go only so far. A long moment passed between them as Conor studied James’s face. Then tentatively he reached up and touched red paint, dried on James’s cheek. “Not dead?” he asked.

  “No. I’m not dead. It isn’t blood, Conor. It’s only paint.”

  “The cat is dead.”

  “No. The cat isn’t dead either. The cat only fell in the paint.”

  “The cat’s dead.”

  James rose slowly to his feet, helping the boy to his. “Come here. Let’s wash your kitty off, shall we? See? It’s not blood. Just red paint. Here, I’ll turn on the tap and put Kitty under. See? There it goes.”

  Tears still wet on his cheeks, Conor had begun to watch James sponge soap over the stuffed animal’s fur to get the paint out.

  “Where are his cats?” Conor asked softly.

  “Kitty’s right here.”

  “His cats,” Conor said and reached a tentative finger out to touch the cuff of James’s shirt. “Where are the man’s cats?”

  “My cats?”

  Conor nodded slightly.

  “It’s safe in here,” James said, “so you think I must have cats here protecting me?”

  Conor looked up. “Yeah.”

  Before James could respond, Conor took off, circling the periphery of the room. The tangle of strings trailing behind him, paint on his skin and his clothes and in his hair, he began to push toys aside, peer into the dolls’ house, rummage through the farm animals in an increasingly obsessive search for cats. Of which there didn’t seem to be any in the playroom, an oversight James had been unaware of until now. Dogs, ducks and aurochs, yes, but the playroom appeared to be a cat-free zone.

  In a box on the shelf was a set of cardboard-cutout farm animals that James had found at a jumble sale. They were thirty years old and he’d bought them purely for sentimental reasons, because he’d had the same set himself as a young boy. Modern children, however, had not been so entranced by such plain toys and the box had sat largely undisturbed on the playroom shelf.

  Now Conor pulled off the lid and ruffled through the figures. There he found it. Among the assortment of animals was a grey-striped tabby cat in a standing position, ears erect, tail up in a friendly greeting. Around its neck some long-ago child had tied a piece of string for a leash.

  “Look!” Conor cried in amazement. His small face brightened and he made direct eye contact with James. “Look! Look! A mechanical cat!”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Torgon’s killing that baby with the cleft palate continued to haunt me,” Laura said. “Even though I’d gone on to write other stories about her life in the Forest, that first one sat with me in a dark, secret way, bubbling back up to consciousness at odd moments, leaving me to mull it over.
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  “In the course of all this thinking, I started to understand the role ignorance plays in our actions. Torgon wasn’t evil for killing that child. She had been doing the best she could, because she simply didn’t know what else to do.

  “This insight fired me up, because I realized this was true not only for Torgon’s world, but here, in our world too. There were many places like Torgon’s village, where lack of skills or equipment meant needless lives were lost, where people were forced to accept horrible solutions because they had no alternatives. This felt like a golden key to me, the thing I had been looking for to connect Torgon’s world and my own.

  “I suddenly came alive. My life at last had purpose. In direct response to Torgon’s behaviour with the cleft-palate baby, I decided I would become a doctor.”

  Laura smiled at James in a soft, almost ironic way.

  “My family was in shock,” she said. “I had this reputation for being dreamy to a point of absence and suddenly I picked this hugely ambitious goal. Just as incredible to them was the fact that medicine was the kind of out-of-reach, professional job people like us didn’t aspire to. ‘We aren’t rich,’ Dad said with horrified emphasis, when I told him. ‘That’d take years, Laura. We would still be paying for your education when Tiffany is ready for college.’ Marilyn saw a completely different range of problems. Like, for instance, how was I ever going to get a decent husband if I spent my time competing with them? If I liked medicine so much, why not become a nurse? That was easier and cheaper, and I’d stand a better chance of marrying a doctor.

  “I wasn’t deterred. The decision gave validity to everything in my head. I felt suddenly as if I’d been ordained, as if I was like Torgon herself – chosen unexpectedly to follow a sacred path – and for the first time in years, I was genuinely happy. So I refused to be cowed. I worked out budgets, shopped around for scholarships and filled in reams of applications. I was accepted at my second choice, a university in Boston, almost two thousand miles from home.”

  “I can remember my last night at home before leaving for college. Marilyn came downstairs to my room.

  “‘This is going to be a big change for you,’ she said quietly and sat down on my bed.

  “I was clearing out my bedroom and putting everything in boxes, because they wanted to make a rec room out of it. So I was up on a chair, taking down all the magazine pictures that had been tacked on my walls.

  “‘I hope you’ll be happy,’ Marilyn said.

  “‘Yeah,’ I replied.

  “‘I hope you’ll get what you want out of life.’

  “‘Yeah, I’m sure I will,’ I said with that certainty you only have in adolescence.

  “I climbed down and began stacking the pictures carefully on the top of my desk. Mostly they were the ones of Brigitte Bardot that I’d collected over the years. I remember pausing as I came to the one from And God Created Woman. Of all of them, that one was still the most evocative of Torgon and every time I looked at it, it made me feel good.

  “‘I’m sorry,’ Marilyn said.

  “I glanced at her. ‘For what?’

  “‘I’m sorry we couldn’t make you happier.’

  “Surprised, I said, ‘I’m happy enough, Marilyn.’

  “She let her shoulders drop.

  “‘I am happy,’ I said again. ‘Maybe it’s a different kind of happiness than what you had in mind for me, but I still am happy. Isn’t that what matters in the end?’

  “From the expression on her face, I could tell she didn’t agree. I felt bad then. I regretted that I couldn’t have been the cheerleader, the prom queen, the debutante that she’d wanted. I wouldn’t have wanted any of those things for myself, but I felt flawed for wanting something different. Moreover, I felt guilty for having got it.

  “‘Perhaps you’ll like it better where you’re going,’ she said, her voice still soft. ‘Perhaps you’ve made a good choice.’

  “‘I think I have.’

  “‘Maybe you can come back here when you want to get married and settle down.’

  “I shrugged slightly. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  “‘You do want to get married, don’t you, Laura?’

  “I looked at her. She was glancing sideways at the stack of pictures on my desk but I was too naïve to read deeper meaning into the question. I took it at face value, pondered it and then said, ‘I don’t know.’

  “‘You do like boys, don’t you, Laura?’

  “‘Yes, some of them.’

  “‘Do you like women?’

  “‘Yes, some of them.’

  “She ducked her head a moment, then looked back. ‘Do you prefer women? Is that why you haven’t ever tried to get any boyfriends?’

  “Comprehension dawned and my jaw dropped. ‘Geez, Marilyn. Is that the only explanation you can think of for my not wanting to do things your way?’

  “‘Well, it’s just if that’s the way things are, your father and I deserve to know.’

  “‘That’s not the way things are. But what would be the big deal if it were?’

  “She shrugged slightly. ‘Well, it wasn’t so much that you haven’t had any dates. It was that you don’t seem to want any dates. Boys don’t just happen to you. You have to make an effort with yourself. And you never have.’

  “‘I’ve had other things to do,’ I said.

  A pause.

  “‘I just need time,’ I said.

  “Then sadness permeated the air again. Marilyn hung her head. ‘Well, maybe going back East will be the right move for you. Maybe you’ll find more of your own kind back there.’”

  “Maybe I did find more of my own kind, because university was a magic time for me,” Laura said. “And the magic could be summed up in one word: freedom. For the first time in my life I felt able to be who I really was without anyone hawking over me. If I wanted to study, I could study. If I wanted to write, I could write. If I wanted to plaster pictures of Brigitte Bardot all over my bulletin board, I could do that. No one minded.

  “No one minded if I was a bit different either. I listened to folk music and protest songs instead of rock, and dressed in baggy shirts and jeans instead of fashion. I wasn’t the dorm hippy, but I was the edgy, creative one and everyone was good with that.

  “In fact, the social set-up at college really worked for me. I wasn’t somebody to have friends. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want them or didn’t like them; just that socializing took time that I preferred to spend in other ways – writing, or even studying, because I was enjoying the academic side of college too. But it was nice having people around generally, nice being able to stop out in the sitting area of the dorm and have a cup of coffee and talk to someone. Then, when the coffee was finished, I could get up and leave without anyone thinking I was rude. I liked people having their own lives, so that they weren’t so wrapped up in mine.”

  “So you did a lot of writing during this time?” James asked. “Was this different writing? Were you still writing about Torgon.”

  “Just Torgon. That’s what I’m trying to say,” Laura replied. “There was this enormous freedom. For the first time I could be with Torgon whenever I wanted. However much I wanted. No one censored my time. No one made me feel guilty for it. It’s difficult to explain what the sensation was like. Writing made Torgon very present for me. I could hear everything in my head, almost like dictation. I was always experiencing her world at the same time as mine, laid down over my everyday life. This wasn’t a conflict for me, this layering of two realms. It felt good. I remember being really happy.”

  Undoing the tie, Torgon let her trousers fall from her waist, then slipped the benna shirt over her head to leave only her undergarments. There were so many crawling, biting things that she was reluctant to remove all her clothes, but the white showed too plainly here midst all the green-on-green. She removed the undergarments too.

  She knelt to spread the paste of water herbs over her body to mask her smell. Laying the trap carefully, she sank down prone in
the tall grass and waited.

  Time passed. The sun grew hot across her back, making sweat that brought flies. The strong smell of water herbs would deter the biting flies, but the lesser flies were not bothered and swarmed noisily above her.

  A hare appeared but did not go near the trap. It sunned itself, lolling in the grass not twenty feet from where Torgon lay. It rose and idly washed its flanks. Torgon waited.

  Whoosh! The trap went at last and she sprang like a great cat to snatch the hare from the rope before it went too tight. The creature kicked and squirmed, its jaw working wildly to produce an eerie, almost canine growl of terror.

  “I have you, little one. Don’t fight,” she whispered and smiled at the creature. Then she bagged it, dressed quickly and loped off through the forest and back to the compound.

  Taking the hunting bag into her inner cell before opening it, Torgon knew she had to work fast now or the creature would die of fright.

  Everything was ready except the death oil. She hadn’t dared remove the death oil from its wooden casket for fear the Seer might happen by and see it out. Removing the candle holders from the top of the ornate wooden box, Torgon lifted the lid. All the holy oils were kept in there and the mingled scent was so overpowering that Torgon always had to step back for a moment or two to let fresh air in. The Seer would know she’d been into the chest just by the smell of her room.

  Which one would be best? She’d long pondered this question. Finally she chose the one in the blue bottle. It was more inclined to upset the stomach than the other death oils, but it wasn’t as toxic. And it was easier to dilute.

  She tipped a drop or two into a vial of spring water. Would this be strong enough? Too strong? Her hands were shaking. Pausing, she took in deep, measured breaths to slow her rapid heart. The Power would tell her. If she could relax enough to let the Power come, it would give her again those eerie visions of organs still quick with the life force that had haunted her thoughts for all these months.