Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

  Golden Dream, indeed. She leaned back in her seat, thinking. In the scant hours since Madame Gupta had laid hands on her son, Hani had become more responsive and interactive than he had been in years. If this was real, something about the little woman was powerful medicine indeed. But something tickled at her instincts about this, and she trusted that little scratch. Sometimes life was a long and complicated path. Who had first mentioned the Sanctuary to her?

  Was it Maria Cortez? Maybe Olympia should thank her.

  Cortez was a blogger, working out of Dayline.com, CNS’s illegitimate tabloid child. Maria was a first-class talent in a second-tier job. If she remembered correctly, it was Maria’s blogging about the Golden Dream centers that had originally struck Olympia’s interest in their day-care services.

  Olympia took the elevator down to the basement, a symbolic descent into broadcasting purgatory.

  Basement: everybody out. Returns, blemished goods, plumbing supplies, and Dayline.com.

  There, in a warren of tiny, badly lit office cubicles that would have seemed spartan by Dilbert standards, she found Maria’s desk, but not Maria herself. Olympia supposed that the offices were so tiny because they wanted the bloggers to work out of their homes, as if the upper-floor employees couldn’t stand the sight of them, perhaps from a popular superstition that blogging would be the death of “real” journalism.

  So she called HR, obtained contact information, and punched the numbers. Initially reluctant to talk over the phone, Maria finally agreed to a face-to-face meeting.

  * * *

  It took her twenty minutes through angry traffic to drive to the address, an apartment building across from a One Star Ranch barbecue Olympia remembered as having beef ribs that would have choked Fred Flintstone.

  Maria lived in a beige two-story building with a Spanish-style roof, something that looked like it would have been more at home in Tucson, Arizona. She parked in one of the visitor spaces, hiked up the outside staircase, and knocked. When the door opened, she smiled at the slightly dumpy woman who answered it, her blue flower-print dress sashed with a black patent-leather belt. “Maria Cortez? I’m Olympia Dorsey, from CNS.”

  “I remember.” Cortez blinked her small, bright brown eyes, as if scanning a mental file folder.

  “You said you’d talk to me?”

  “I remember that, too,” Maria said, and made a decision, widening the doorway. “Come in.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I remember you,” Maria said, indicating a comfortable-looking chair covered in floral-patterned cloth. “You helped me on the Timons thing.” Xavier Timons was a local eccentric who had been arrested for putting change into expired Atlanta parking meters. That had been a great show.

  “I was hoping you remembered. And you said you owed me. I could really use it now.”

  Olympia was still standing.

  Maria waved her toward the chair again. “Have a seat. All right—what can I do for you?”

  Olympia sighed. “You’re on top of this whole Dead List thing, aren’t you?”

  Maria chuckled. “Is that what they’re calling it?”

  She nodded. “People like to name things.”

  “I just got finished being grilled by the FBI. Made me a little nervous about talking on the phone.”

  Olympia stared. “You’re kidding. What did they want to know? Can I record this?” She reached into her purse for her little digital recorder, but Maria raised a hand.

  “No. Absolutely not. I might be willing to go on the record—later. But I’ll write it myself.”

  Sigh. “I understand.”

  “They wanted to know how I was chosen, who I chose, who might have chosen the president … stuff like that.”

  Maria lit a cigarette, puffed at it without apparent pleasure, and looked at Olympia speculatively.

  “I don’t want to ask you about that, do I?” Olympia said.

  “Not if you’re as good a reporter as I remember.”

  “What I want to know is: what didn’t they ask that they should have?”

  Maria smiled. “No one asked if I got fan mail.”

  That caught her attention instantly. “Fan mail?”

  “And hate mail.”

  “From where?” Olympia asked.

  “All over,” she said with a deep draw on the cigarette, followed by a hiss of blue smoke. “Thirty-six pieces.”

  “Did anything stick in your mind?”

  Maria opened a file folder, extracted a sheaf of envelopes. She fanned through them. “This one,” she said. She pulled out a blue envelope, handed it to Olympia.

  “What is it?”

  “About ten months later I got a letter from the parents of a girl named Maya Tanaka.”

  “Tanaka?” Olympia asked. “Should I have heard that name?”

  “Perhaps. I wrote about it a little, but she wasn’t in the news. She was a physics student at Columbia, but also something of a guru junkie. Apparently, she dropped out of college, and joined this group called the Salvation Sanctuary.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Not really. Her parents thought so. And they couldn’t deal with the fact that she’d dropped out of communication with them.”

  Olympia’s brow wrinkled.

  “Actually her parents put so much pressure on so many people that Maya finally came forward and answered the questions. Press conference. By the way, she showed up at her parents’ house on turkey day, just last year. She said that she was retreating from the material world, had found the answers she was looking for, and was rejecting the values she had been given. She said she had entered a four-year cleansing program, after which she would return to the world.”

  “How long ago did she enter that program?”

  Maria ticked something off on her pink-nailed fingers. “Just about four years ago. I think.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “She seemed smart, committed, and in control of herself. True believer, maybe. Sense of mischief, as if she knew a secret no one else knew, you know that attitude?”

  Olympia nodded. She surely did. “So you looked into it.”

  “Yeah, I did. There were a few other reports, people who had friends, children, even a spouse or two who had gone into this organization. They’ve got at least fifty branches in the United States, and maybe another twenty-five overseas. They run the Golden Dream centers—the ones we talked about back when. They’re quiet, don’t proselytize much, but seem to be similar to the Transcendental Meditation movement—they have a technique for stress or something, and it works.”

  “Any secrets?”

  Maria smiled. “I thought so. A few people hinted at something big that they were a part of, something that would be revealed in a few years. Remember the T.M. people who said they could levitate, and were supposedly training people to do just that? And that when they had a cadre of flying folks they would shock the world? Turns out they were just teaching ’em to do a kind of cross-legged hop.”

  Olympia laughed. She remembered.

  “Well, I figure that these people thought the Salvation Sanctuary had found the secret of enlightenment.”

  “What even is enlightenment?”

  “Hell if I know,” Maria laughed. “But they seemed happy. Healthy. Really healthy. I noticed a few things. Complexions cleared up, weight lost.”

  “Not exactly loaves and fishes.”

  “No, but they seemed to have something. Let’s just say that I looked into it a little more.” Her chuckle was mischievous. “In fact, I have to say thank you for reminding me about it. Why are you asking?”

  Olympia explained her situation, and Maria was all ears. “So you’re going up there?”

  “I think so. Why not? If you can think of a reason I shouldn’t, tell me now. What do you know about the place?”

  Maria smiled again. A secret smile. “Beautiful, and valuable. The property is built around an exhausted gold mine, up in the Georgia mountains. I hear the whole thing
is worth about twelve million dollars. Three-hour drive, I guess, from Atlanta. No, look, I looked into them, they’re nice people.”

  “What about this Madame Gupta?”

  “From what I’ve heard, nobody ever sees her.”

  Olympia snorted. “She put on a karate demo at the school here locally.”

  “Really?” Maria shook her head. “A public demo? That’s … unusual. I knew high-level members who’re not totally certain she exists. That’s bizarre.” She leaned forward. “What happened at this demo?”

  “She demo’d.” Olympia shrugged. Not easy to describe what had happened privately, and even if it had been easy, she had a powerful urge to keep it to herself. “Sparred with my guest and kinda wiped the floor with him.”

  “You go, girl.”

  “Invited me to the Sanctuary.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, actually, she invited Hannibal. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Tell me,” Maria asked. “What was she like?”

  Like the answer to my dreams. “It’s strange. She was like a three-hundred-pound man crammed into a hundred-pound body. Freak calm, like the eye of a storm. Terry, my guest, said she moves like something that isn’t human. She looked pretty much like a kung fu movie to me.”

  “Wires and all.”

  “No-wire fu, but I kept expecting Larry Fishburne to offer me the red pill.” She paused. “The most important thing is that Madame Gupta thinks Hani’s special. Called him an ‘indigo boy.’ And she thinks she can help him.”

  Maria blinked. “Indigo boy? Help him? That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd about it?”

  “Well, I did an article about it a while back. ‘Indigo child’ is a term that bounces around the neurodiversity community,” Maria said. “They basically theorize that autism, ADD, and so forth are positive things. Intermediate phases of an evolutionary response to a changing world.”

  “That Hani is like Wolverine or something?”

  “Kind of. Which makes her comment strange. The NDs take the position that the world needs to adapt to the children, not have the children adapt to the world. So … what is it that she’s helping the kids with?”

  “Dealing with the fact that the rest of us are slow?” Olympia asked.

  “Pretty much. But the point is that they don’t think the kids are broken, or need to be ‘fixed.’”

  “That sounds pretty good to me.”

  “Could be. I’ll tell you one thing though.” Maria tapped her chest. “Instinct. I think that Madame Gupta went there to see Hannibal. I think she’s telling the truth. For some reason, she thinks Hannibal is a very special little boy.”

  * * *

  After Olympia Dorsey left, Maria slipped a picture out of her desk, a 5×7 glossy shot of Maya Tanaka. She signed on to Facebook, and went to Maya’s page. Up until two days ago, Maya had posted several times a day, glowing about the wonderful experience she was about to have.

  Well, she must have had that “wonderful” thing by now. But there hadn’t been a post since. That might mean nothing at all, but at one time Tanaka had been compulsive about social media. Reporter instinct told Maria that it meant something.

  But exactly what, she couldn’t say.

  CHAPTER 16

  The vine-covered pool house was community property, one of the perks of the Foothill Village Homeowner’s Association. Olympia had been in the village three years, and the only time she’d ever been in the pool house was during the Christmas parties.

  It wasn’t that she wasn’t social. It was sensitivity about Hani. She knew on some level that this was her problem, her issue. That it wasn’t reasonable to wonder about the meaning behind every neighbor’s glance, every word, seeking glassy eyes above a synthetic plastic smile. There but for the grace of God goes my child. The politely oblique damnation of the whew, we dodged a bullet attitude.

  And of course, the other side of it. At times it gutted her to watch other people’s children, observing them play and laugh and just be kids, damn it, and feeling herself on the verge of tears. Hani tried to get into a party mood, but inevitably either over- or underreacted, laughing raucously or withdrawing sullenly, flashing between emotional poles without finding balance, aware of the mismatch between his emotions and the external world that triggered them.

  Always. Right on the edge.

  Pity for the wounded child. Sorrow for the wounded widow. She just …

  But Christmas was a little different, somehow. For some reason, the yuletide brought out a different feeling from her neighbors, as if focusing on their children’s joy brought them all together in a different and wonderful way.

  No snow on the ground, but a holiday spirit alive in their hearts. She had been working with the decorations and coordinating the gift exchange for weeks. Her neighbors began trickling in, pointing at the tinsel and punch bowl, cooing with pleasure, slapping backs, pulling cans of pop or beer out of the ice-filled tub, tinkling the corner piano, chuckling at the tinseled plastic tree and spontaneously breaking into snatches of song.

  She and her retired neighbor Cathy Robbins served frosted Christmas tree cookies, urged Cathy’s husband to play harmonica or piano, and danced with the old guys who normally just sat around the pool smoking cigars and complaining about Liberals. She kept one eye on the door, hoping against hope.

  Nicki and two girls from her drama club danced and giggled in a corner and played with the inexhaustible Pax, who for all her polka-dotted Great Dane mass was remarkably delicate with children and furniture, almost as if aware of the damage her rambunctious nature might cause. She was downright tender with Hannibal, and when he tried to ride her, she indulged the whim with a level of tolerance dogs usually reserved for puppies.

  Then … a cry of “Merry Christmas!” and Mark waddled in, his muscular bulk padded beneath a red suit, sunburnt face concealed behind a white beard. “Ho, ho, ho!” he called, aggressively radiating holiday cheer.

  Hannibal shrieked in pleasure and ran to Santa, hugging him around the knees as Nicki rolled her eyes. But she was smiling. Hani rarely initiated physical contact with anyone.

  Mark and three other men (one in a wheelchair, wheeling with one hand and carrying a white sack over his shoulder with the other) joined the party, and all seemed in fine moods. They handed out wrapped candies and Dollar Store yo-yos and miniature plastic ukuleles, laughing and letting themselves be chased around the room by a swarm of urchins.

  The one in the wheelchair introduced himself to Nicki as Ernie Sevugian, thin with red hair and a full face and not the slightest apparent sensitivity about his disability. Terry astonished her, sitting down at the piano and pounding out an entirely plausible rendition of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” singing in a hillbilly voice so at odds with his appearance that the entire room dissolved into gales of mirth.

  When he and a falsetto-spouting Mark began “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” Olympia had to sit before she collapsed with laughter. After he was finished, Terry took a bow and sauntered over.

  “I didn’t even know you could play,” she said.

  “Neither did I,” he replied. He was being mischievous, but then his expression was genuinely puzzled. “Haven’t played since I was fifteen. Don’t know what got into me. Life is a mystery, isn’t it?” His smile was so close. “You must be an inspiration.”

  “’Erry!” Hannibal said, and dragged Terry back toward the center of the floor.

  “What’s this?”

  “He wants to dance with you,” she said, hoping that he wouldn’t rebuff her son. Terry didn’t disappoint her, lifting Hani to his shoulders and dancing a creditable jig while Sevugian tinkled out “Frosty the Snowman,” singing and somehow managing to layer adult insinuation into the lyrics.

  Olympia laughed and laughed until she realized she was crying. She wiped her face with embarrassment, then realized Nicki wasn’t watching her. No one was, they were all howling and clapping as well. She felt as if she had stepp
ed through a wall of ice into a world of warmth and connection, and at that moment if someone had asked her if she had ever been happier in her life, she might well have honestly said no.

  Her family was happy, and safe, and warm.

  Dear God. Such a small and precious thing. But her hunger for it was like a fire that had singed and numbed the very nerves that carried the pain.

  Terry lifted Hannibal down to his sister, who guided him into a side room. Olympia handed him a cup of punch. “Really well done,” she said. “Thank you. You delivered. Big-time.” He bowed, without spilling his punch. Sipped.

  “Spiked,” he said. “Spiked Hawaiian Punch.” He slipped into a damned fine Most Interesting Man in the World impression. “‘I don’t always drink Hawaiian Punch, but when I do…’”

  She laughed. It was a relief that the kids had their own party in a side room. She could be an adult, for once. “Who are your friends?”

  “Oh.…” He pointed out his four companions, who were whooping and having fun, except for the one who had introduced himself as “Ronnell.” The wiry blond Ronnell lurked around the side, smiling meaninglessly and observing. She didn’t like him much, but smiled back. ’Twas the season.

  But there was something her mother had said once upon a time. That if you wanted to understand someone, look at their friends. Add up all their qualities, divide by the number of people, and your friend will be right in the middle of the pack.

  If that was true … what did that say of Terry?

  He named them: Lee, Pat, Ernie, and of course Mark. “Just thought I’d get them in on the fun,” he said.

  Mark was a force of nature, that craggy face concealing a secret sadness behind a wall of synthetic mirth. Lee was a goofball, looked as if he should have been in a cornfield chewing straw in a Norman Rockwell painting. He was the joker in the deck. Sevugian was interesting—prickly, but with a deep vein of strength. The way he’d improvised on the piano, vocally and instrumentally, suggested high intelligence and mocking self-awareness.

  Ronnell was another matter. He reminded her of a very polite, soft-spoken piranha. Something in the back of his eyes was not merely cold, but dead.