Erased From Memory

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Erased From Memory Page 22

by Diana O'Hehir


  “Make safe your shore,” he says to her.

  She has just fallen seventeen feet into a creek. I saw her fall. She landed badly.

  She opens her eyes, which are a startling blue, and looks at my dad. Blood starts coming out of her ears.

  “My baby,” she says. “My indigo baby.”

  “Give us Lightland,” says my father.

  “Lightland.” She closes her eyes. “Homeland. Coming forth by day.”

  “Carla, perhaps we should be troubled,” he says. “I am here at Stanton’s Mill. You know about Stanton’s Mill. Where Susie has a house now. And these interesting babies are disappearing.”

  Daddy’s cell phone is a gift from our loving friend Susie, and Daddy is now at Susie’s new vacation house. My father, who has early-stage Alzheimer’s, likes using his phone, although he is insecure about its operation. It tends to quit on him, even more than other cell phones do on the rest of us.

  Susie is suddenly rich. That’s her definition of it. “Oh, I just knew that Squeegee was basically a good person. And now he has gone on into higher things and has left me his house.”

  Squeegee was Susie’s ex-husband, who drifted off many years ago to join a band. The house is a one-room cottage in Stanton’s Mill, which is the town behind Conestoga.

  And my dad is staying there for a few days with Susie. “The energy is very good here in Stanton’s Mill,” she says. “It will be healing for darling Edward.”

  Susie still has her organic-food store in Berkeley. She comes to Stanton’s Mill for weekends.

  “What’s this about babies disappearing?” I ask my dad now, loudly enough that Susie overhears and takes over the phone. “Oh, Carla, it is so upsetting. It’s the indigo babies, those wonderful, talented children. And they are vanishing, one by one. Cherie will be around to get you.” After which she severs the connection and I can’t get it back.

  She is also my part-time boss, because I also am part of the sheriff’s department in Del Oro County. I am a part-time deputy sheriff. I am quite certain you have never heard of such a thing as a part-time deputy sheriff, but I am not the only one in California. Cherie pointed this out to me when she persuaded me to take the job. “There are two others,” she said, “both women; now what does that tell you about the assignment of sexual roles in our society? But if that’s the only way I can get you, sugarbell, I welcome it.” Cherie has a heavy Southern accent; you must imagine anything she says slurred and softened and huskied up.

  She is a lawyer as well as a sheriff, and she was our lawyer briefly once. I liked her especially because she treated my dad with respect. Daddy’s Alzheimer’s is still not very bad.

  Then Cherie and I had a falling-out about the fact that she stole my boyfriend. This became history when their affair ended, but it’s only partly history. Partly it’s alive and is one of the things I think about when my batteries get low.

  “What’s this about babies?” I greet Cherie now. She wears a pale green pantsuit and is balancing deftly on spike-heeled slingback sandals, with six strings of crystal beads swinging across her small, upright bosom.

  I am at my Green Beach Manor desk with a stack of relatives’ complaints. My other job, my supposedly full-time one, is as assistant director of Green Beach Manor, the elegant senior residence where my dad usually lives, complaints are one of my specialties.

  And I have yet another job, a third one, actually my major occupation, a full-time assignment of worrying about my dad. He is getting older. He and his Alzheimer’s are at the brink, almost ready to lose it, wobbling, the full, dark curtain of forgetting spreading dust across his sweet life. I worry about him a lot.

  “Give that stack of crap you’re reading to somebody else and come along with me,” Cherie says. “Believe me, darlin’, this is serious.” She can’t pronounce the word darling, among other things. “I mean, it is not just babies, dear heart; I am not that intensely into babies. And this baby problem here is questionable. But the atmosphere is way peculiar. Come on. Get your mittens.”

  In spite of how she looks and sounds, Cherie is very bright.

  It’s an early California spring day. The waxy buds are popping out on the magnolia trees; the jonquils are exploding underfoot; the ocean fog has cleared off; and the air is full of pointillistic dots of light. I’m happy to surrender my pile of irritations and follow Cherie out to her sheriff’s vehicle, which is black with silver wheels.

  “So,” she says. “This is getting serious. You’ll see. It isn’t just the nonsense about those purple babies.”

  She is referring to the indigo children, who have hit Stanton’s Mill big time. An indigo baby analyst has arrived in town and has been interviewing babies to decide which ones qualify. Susie has heard a lot about this and is enchanted by the idea. “These wonderful, beautiful kids.” Some of them, she thinks, are from another life. Or another planet. “Extraordinarily gifted. More than most children. Of course you, Carla, were special . . . And so was Rob . . .” She gets herself back on track. “Some people claim that they have attention deficit, but that is just envy. They are going to reclaim our world. Make it safe for all of us. And I learned about it here. Berkeley has become so corporate, people never talk about these things. Oh, I am so grateful to dear Squeegee. Remembering me after all those years.”

  My personal opinion, from the rumors I’ve heard about Susie’s ex, is that he simply forgot to change his will. The big mystery is how he happened to have a will at all.

  “You can laugh all you like”—Cherie is hanging one elbow out the window as we drive down the coast road “but this stuff is going to be serious. And, Carla, I need you.”

  “Okay, all right, you’ve got me.” The Manor has been unusually repetitive lately.

  “So, tell me,” I say, “what gives?”

  “Well, you know, this Anneliese Wertiger came into town and moved in with Susie’s next-door neighbor . . .”

  “Scope.” People in Stanton’s Mill tend to have odd nicknames. I know the town pretty well from having visited Susie there.

  “Right. And she set up shop right away. Put a sign up outside. Something about healings. Or constructivist consultations. Or something. Tell me, Carla darlin’, we got plenty a nuts in Berkeley but these ones seem more time-warped. Is it something in the water? The redwoods?”

  Stanton’s Mill offers an unusual combination of redwood trees, gully, and ocean. Most of the houses hug the sides of a redwood-shrouded gulch that winds around in back of Conestoga and cuts down to the sea. Conestoga people don’t go down into Stanton’s Mill much because there are no facilities there. The only store is a co-op, and you have to be a member before you can buy things in it.

  “So everybody lined up for a consultation,” I suggest.

  “Believe me. And the place was littered with indigo literature. All kinds of pamphlets with purple jackets. And would you believe it, special glasses for seeing that indigo whatzit—sort of haze—around you? Whatzit called, darlin’?”

  “Aura.”

  “Yes, darlin’ Carla. That’s why I need you. I can never remember facts like that.”

  One of Cherie’s ways of controlling a situation is to appear dumb. When she is not.

  “And the reason,” she says, “we are hightailing it over there now is, there is this little blossom named Tamina. Who is only fifteen, but thinks she is Joan of Arc. She called me and said she had something important to impart. That was the word she used. Impart. The child is too bright for ordinary events.

  “When the atmosphere here in Stanton’s Mill is disturbed, she tends to go to the edge of this big rock they have here and wobble around and make speeches. The rock is a collecting place where the Stanton’s Mill people get together to argue. And I’m afraid little Tamina will be there arguing back at them. Trying to impart.

  “It has to do with these damn purple babies,” Cherie adds.

  “So you can see why I need you. Hysteria accumulates fast in a place like this.”

&nb
sp; There’s a creek. The ocean throbs half a mile away.

  I know that this gulch is actually cold and damp, with serious septic tank problems, but as we pause above it, looking down, it flickers up an image of the ideal town.

  “You can’t believe how they fight with each other,” Cherie says reflectively, putting the official vehicle into third gear for the descent.

  “And,” Cherie says, “this disappearing baby stuff is all a bunch of the most absolute crap. As far as I can make out, it’s a total of three babies at most, and when I investigate each case, there turns out to be some story about the baby being off to see some auntie or grandma or something, but then the minute I turn my back and go back to Conestoga the rumor has started up again. Separated couples do that. They fight like mad.”

  She’s silent long enough for me to hear a distant agitated crowd. Something muffled and anxious, like a preview of the French Revolution.

  “Yeah,” Cherie says, “listen.” We descend, our wheels kicking aside roadway rocks and twigs, and the crowd murmur increases, gets to be a hunk of basic rhubarb-rhubarb movie noise: “Listen,” “Watch it,” “Something is going to happen.” We wheel into the co-op parking lot, but the crowd isn’t here. It’s somewhere over to our right.

  Cherie noses the car against the building and sets the brake. She and I scramble out and scuff to an unfenced drop, where we stare down. She says, “Oh, hell.”

  A voice behind us says, “Darlings, surely not.” It’s Susie, arriving on foot from her house, which is somewhere down the hill. She has my father in tow, looking puzzled; he doesn’t acknowledge my greeting.

  This parking lot overhangs the gully. To our right and also jutting over the gully is a big spur of rock with a flat tennis court-sized top; that’s where the crowd murmur is happening. That scene is slightly below us, clearly displayed and arranged as if on a stage: people milling back and forth; a figure apparently making speeches and doing gymnastics at the mesa edge; other shapes dodging around it. Wisps of protesting sound drift over: “No, no.” “Hey, right on.” “Listen, cool it.”

  “How in hell do we get over there?” Cherie asks, and I say, “Down some steps and over to the path and up some other steps; it’s complicated.” We start out.

  Cherie is an elegant, fit woman, but she’s over fifty and wears high-heeled slingbacks. I am twenty-seven and have Adidas on. I hold her hand for the way down and push her on the way up. She doesn’t weigh much.

  The steps up to the Rock, which is what the Stanton’s Millers call it, are homemade redwood; there’s a splintery, sagging rail. Cherie swears.

  My father never fails to amaze me. He is eighty-seven years old but in excellent physical condition, and for a long time he made his living as an archaeologist by climbing up things and hiding under things and scampering down them. And that’s what he does now. While Cherie and I are struggling with the redwood steps he passes us, lickety-split, and is triumphantly on the platform and diving into the middle of the crowd.

  Cherie and I are closer to the crowd scene now, but the noise remains muffled. Muffled noise is not a good sign. It means that someone, or several someones, think sudden outbursts might upset the situation. So there is quiet, which is sporadic and punctuated by upheavals: “Stand back,” and “Hey, Tammy, we get it,” and “For God’s sake.”

  I’m pushing Cherie as fast as I can but it’s still too slow; the scene is delivered to me in slices between the stair treads, which are at eye level. What I see are feet, skirts, blue jean bottoms. Maybe up ahead are little Tamina’s feet—those rainbow-striped flip-flops. And that’s the edge, where she’s flip-flopping. Maybe she’s doing a minuet step. Graceful, sort of. Other feet are in the way. I move more sharply, pushing Cherie.

  We’re still on the steps when the noise escalates to become screeches: “Tammy, for Christ’s sake!” “Jesus, girl, watch it!” And then, high, delirious, in piercing ultrasound, “Stop it, stop, stop!” What kind of a voice is that? Male or female? I shove Cherie to one side and stumble up, scraping my knees, launching myself desperately along the remaining six steps.

  And so I and my narrative are at the point where Tamina falls seventeen feet into the creek bed. From my place on the steps, at eye level with the platform, I watch her flip-flopped feet go over.

  There’s a tangle of arms and legs in my view, someone tries to run; someone else scrambles on hands and knees; voices squawk. I reach the top step and dive underneath some shapes and over some others and get to the edge of the drop-off.

  There are too many people jostling.

  But they’re jostling quietly. Some stand with their toes right at the edge. All of these edge huggers are being careful. Everybody is looking down. The yelling has stopped; for a moment it’s pin-drop still. I come closer and feel dizzy. If you stand too close to a precipice, you fantasize about letting go.

  The view is down to the creek, which trickles gently, exposing uneven terrain. Half in the water and half out, a small figure spreads, arms outflung. Blond hair is splashed out and partly floating. The figure wears pants and a T-shirt. One of its feet is entangled with a flip-flop; the other foot pokes awkwardly up, ankle turned and sole exposed.

  And my father, arriving behind me, is the one who sits beside her and says Egyptian poetry at her.

  She says Egyptian poetry back. Even though there is blood coming out of her ears. Words like sun-disc and purity. She looks up at my father, with her strange blue eyes glazed. Her chest heaves and a stone pendant shaped like a tree slides back and forth there.

  Cherie calls for an ambulance and a first-aid crew. She tells them to hurry.

  Then she kneels beside the girl and calls her honey lamb and sweetie pie and asks her if she was pushed. Which Tamina does not answer.

  Tamina is mostly in the creek, which means that Cherie is mostly there, too, with the trousers of her green silk suit and her slingback sandals becoming sodden. And my father is sitting with his butt in the stream, holding the girl’s hand.

  After a while Cherie gets up and goes to the creek bank. She tells me that this situation is out of hand. “I am the sheriff here,” she says, and she fills up the time until the ambulance crew arrives by becoming Sheriff Inflexible Ghent and getting all the viewers off the viewing point above and down to the creek bank, where she makes them sit while she yells orders. “All right, shape up; I got the power to arrest you, y’know. Now, I want everybody to try an’ remember. Just a moment of silence while you think, and then I’ll begin with the person farthest to my left . . .”

  She gets out a notepad and a pencil. What was Tamina saying before she fell?

  There’s a clamor. “Like, she had something important . . .” “No, no, something of import, that was what she said.” “Something that would turn out to be important.” “Didn’t she say vital? Hey, dude, I think vital was in there.”

  “What happened?” Cherie asks. “Why did she fall?”

  A woman in a flowered muu-muu says, “She was pushed.” No, she doesn’t know who pushed her; she didn’t see; she just knows. This gets noted, plus the informant’s name. And the names of those who agree with the lady’s remark. Plus the name of the man who yells that she is crazy. Plus somebody who says Cherie should follow standard procedure.

  Plus a cluster of other ideas. “No way that girl would jump.” “Mano; she was enticed.” “Enticed? I know when somebody’s high on pot . . .”

  Cherie say in my ear,” A good start, right?”

  I shrug. All this is blatantly counter to standard rules about questioning and is probably dangerous. But right now it’s producing something. Maybe the wrong something.

  “You are not,” Cherie intones with commanding venom, “to all talk at once.”

  I’m still thinking about this as the emergency crew arrives, a sure-footed bunch, three guys and a woman, jack-rabbiting down with a canvas litter, backpacks, and canisters. Cherie clears everyone off by threatening jail. She tells the crowd she has all their names. “An
d I got a real good memory.”

  “Cool it, darlin’,” I warn her. That Southern charm is easy to pick up.

  My dear friend Susie has joined us and has stayed unusually quiet. Now she emits a little sob, like a hiccup, and gestures at Tamina, being fitted with a plastic collar. “This lovely child. And so bright. She and Ed will do wonderful things.”

  I’m wondering if Tamina’s future includes doing anything at all. She has achieved that paler shade of white, the one the manuals say goes with serious shock. A dead white, they call it.

 

 

 


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