The Black Witch of Mexico

by Colin Falconer

  But it was stupid, thinking like this. Some snake oil salesman in southern Mexico had nothing to do with Elena’s accident or her boyfriend getting cancer. These things happened every day. He was a doctor, he saw good luck and bad and this was just plain bad luck.

  But what was that she whispered to him today in the coffee shop: I often wonder if I did the right thing.

  She couldn’t have children so that wasn’t going to come between them; and soon there would be no Oliver either. She would be on her own and she would be looking for comfort, looking for someone who didn’t care about the scars.

  He shut the file and slammed the lid on the laptop.

  This was nothing to do with that. This was just the fall of the dice.

  This had nothing to do with the Crow.

  Chapter 54

  He met Charlie Evans in the coffee shop. Like all specialists he was a busy man when he wasn’t on the golf course. He looked at his watch as soon as they sat down, listened to Adam’s brief explanation of the problem and then got right to the point. “Your friend could get a second opinion if she wants, but in every case where the cancer has metastasised the outlook is always dire.”

  Adam knew it was what he would say, but he had promised Elena he would talk to him. “So no hope?”

  “Two of my patients went to Lourdes, Adam. Things went just the same as if they hadn’t, I’m sorry to say. As a practising Catholic I would have been delighted if they’d come back with a miracle cure. I’ve had three cases in my whole career of spontaneous remission. We don’t know why it happens but it does happen. We think the body’s natural immune system goes into overdrive, but we don’t know what triggers that, and if we did we’d have a cure for cancer.”

  “Right.”

  Charlie seemed to hesitate. There was something else.

  “There was a patient I had recently, his prognosis wasn’t as dire as your friend’s, but it was still very serious. He’s been in remission now for five years.”

  “What happened?”

  “He went to some - what do they call them? - retreat in New Mexico. It was all about diet and meditation, that sort of thing. Very New Age.” Adam thought about the curanderos, about the witches, about the herbal cures. The healers were here before western medicine, Doctor Prescott. “I can’t remember the name of the place--you’ll have to look it up on the internet. Two other patients went there and tried it but they have since passed, so make what you will of that.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “I’d better be getting back,” he said and left.

  Adam did some searching on the internet that night and found the name of the retreat. He thought about calling Elena to give her the information but he emailed her instead, sent her the link and tried to put it out of his mind.

  Chapter 55

  Bill studied the file in front of him then looked at him over the rim of his glasses. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. Everything’s fine.”

  “If everything’s fine and you’re fine why did you almost administer five milligrams of morphine sulphate to one of our patients last night despite the fact that she was wearing a medic alert bracelet that would have told you she had a moderate to severe allergy to morphine and codeine? If you hadn’t had an experienced ER nurse right there you could have put your patient into anaphylactic shock. The patient may have died.”

  Adam knew which nurse he was talking about. Jackie had been looking for payback after he reported her callous treatment of a homeless man who had been brought into the ER three months ago.

  “I would have double checked before I administered the morphine.”

  “You shouldn’t have even drawn the dose. You check first.”

  Adam nodded. He didn’t know what else to say.

  “I thought six months in Mexico would get you back on track. What is wrong with you? You used to be my top physician.”

  “I still am.”

  He slid the file across the desk. “Not if you start killing patients, you’re not.”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Bill said. He shook his head. “This is not like you, Adam. You had yourself checked out?”

  “Everything’s fine. I’ll sort it. I promise.”

  Bill looked like he wasn’t quite convinced but he let it go. “Your last warning,” he said as Adam walked out of the door.

  * * *

  He was headed down Tremont, headed back to Beacon Hill.

  He thought about what Jamie had said to him when they were driving back from the Sonora Market: Must there always be a logical explanation?

  “Must everything fit in your neat little box? Life is there to confound us. Some things you cannot analyse, you cannot dissect. They belong to the part of us that is hidden, the part that cures ourselves when you give us a sugar pill. Why does a sugar pill work? You say it’s the power of the mind, as if that’s a rational explanation, when you don’t even know what that power is, or what the mind is. All you know is how to trick it and play games with it. But you don’t understand it.”

  He had just crossed Berkeley, barely five minutes from home when he saw flashing red and blue lights in the mirror and heard the siren.

  “Fuck.”

  He pulled over. The cop got out of his patrol car, leaned in his window. Adam already had his licence and his papers in his hand. “You got a death wish?” the cop said.

  “What did I do?”

  “You just ran a red light.”

  “Sorry.”

  The cop took his licence, then took a closer look at his face. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, you work in the ER at Saint Mary’s.”

  “Didn’t know I was famous.”

  He had out his citation pad, but he put it away again. “I guess you got a lot on your mind some days.”

  “Maybe.”

  He nodded. “Well take more care next time, doc. You don’t want to finish up in your own trauma room.”

  “Thanks, officer.”

  “You may not remember it, but you took good care of a buddy of mine last year. Now take it easy.” He got back in his car. Adam sat there a while, watched the cop pull back into the traffic.

  The worst of it, the really scary thing? He hadn’t even seen the red light.

  Chapter 56

  A long day. Three patients brought in from an auto wreck; a family of four, only the youngest child survived. The boy was four years old and would probably lose his leg. How did anyone make sense of things like that? But you couldn’t dwell, there were more patients, more traumas on their way. He did his job and moved on.

  Trying to see a benign and unseen hand at times like that…well, that was for guys like Bernard.

  He went to the lounge to get coffee. He was just reaching for the pot when his pager went off. He hurried back to the nurse’s station. Fiona told him there was someone who had asked for him personally, she was waiting in the triage area.

  It was Elena. She was a mess.

  She sat slumped over with a mess of confetti at her feet where she had torn the paper tissue in her hand into tiny pieces.

  “How long has she been here?” hesaid.

  “Ten minutes,” the nurse said. “She hasn’t moved.”

  “can you have someone cover for me for a few minutes?”

  She looked disapproving, probably thought it was some romantic entanglement. If Bill heard about this there would be hell to pay.

  The radio squawked to life; EMS2 was headed in with two patients from a three-car collision on the Turnpike. “Better be quick,” she said.

  He took Elena by the arm and looked for somewhere they could be private, but all the trauma and consulting rooms were busy. Eventually he took her into the chapel.

  She stood in front of the altar, her shoulders heaving. She still had her cane; she looked so broken.

  He pulled up a chair and eased her
into it.

  “El, what is it?”

  She took a deep breath, it sounded as if she was choking. She was sobbing so hard she couldn’t get a word out. He coached her to take slow and steady breaths. Finally she had calmed enough that she could talk.

  “It’s...Julie.”

  “Has something happened to her?”

  “She’s...she’s...dead.”

  “Dead?”

  He eventually got the story from her. She had gotten a call at work from her father , Julie had been found unconscious in her kitchen by her husband that morning. She had been complaining of headaches for a couple of days, but she thought it was just a migraine.

  Her husband called the ambulance but she died on the way to the hospital. “They said it was an aneurism, a blood vessel burst in her brain.”

  “Why did you come here?” he said. “Why aren’t with your family?”

  She looked up at him; her eyes were red-rimmed and desperate. “You’re all I have left,” she said.

  Of course: her mother was dead, and she had never been close to her father. Julie had been her confidante in everything.

  “Where’s Oliver?”

  “He’s in the hospital; he’s still in chemotherapy. I can’t worry him with this now--he has enough to think about. He has to get well.”

  Her shoulders heaved again. Adam looked up at Jesus hanging on his cross. It made him think about that other, inverted cross in southern Mexico, and about the deal he had made with the devil.

  He called a taxi, led her outside and waited with her until it arrived. He helped her in and gave the driver the address of her father’s house in Jamaica Plain. After she left he called one of her girlfriends on his cell, told her what had happened, asked her to find someone who could perhaps go and stay with her, maybe organize a roster between herself and her other friends.

  Then he stood there in the rain until Bill come out and asked him what the hell was going on.

  “We got patients ramped up in there.”

  “It was a personal emergency, Bill.”

  “There’s been a few too many of those lately, Adam.”

  Adam nodded and headed back inside.

  “For Christ’s sake, go and towel off first. You’re wet.”

  “Sure.”

  “You need more time off?”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “Make sure you are.”

  Adam said: “I think I’ve just killed someone,” but he was already through the doors and Bill did not hear him.

  * * *

  He walked home through the park. There was a drizzle of rain, it was like the whole world was dripping. He slumped down onto a bench and felt the cold damp seeping into his clothes. He didn’t care.

  So this was what the thousand-yard stare looked like from the inside.

  Something made him turn around and he looked up and saw a crow sitting on the branch of a beech tree, staring down at him through one nasty yellow eye. He found a coke can in the trash and threw it. It flapped its wings and soared away, wheeling over the grass.

  This was crazy. He could not be responsible for what happened to Elena. People had car accidents all the time, that wasn’t magical, it was tragic but it was everyday.

  Just like people got cancer and got aneurisms. Sometimes it did happen all at once: one of the interns lost his father, his uncle and a cousin in the space of two months. That wasn’t black magic--it was just bad luck.

  And yet.

  When Oliver died whom would Elena turn to? She didn’t have her sister there anymore, no one to confide in and no one to turn her against him.

  Hadn’t he asked the Crow to help him get her back? Isn’t that what was happening, against all the odds?

  It reminded him of a joke Jay had told him. A man was driving through a parking lot, there wasn’t a space anywhere and he asked God to find him one. Miraculously he turns around the next corner and there is someone just pulling out of the only space left, right there in front of him.

  “Don’t worry, God,” he says, ‘it’s all right, I’ve found one.”

  He thought about the way she clung to him before he put her in the cab that afternoon. Wasn’t that what he had dreamed about, to feel her arms around his neck again?

  Yes, but not like this.

  He put his head in his hands. He had to stop thinking like this.

  Chapter 57

  Lynne looked him up and down and shook her head. “You look like shit,” she said.

  “Thanks. Can I come in?”

  He followed her into the kitchen. Gaucho got up from the floor and started barking. Adam tried to pet him but he backed off. “What’s got into you?” Lynne said and shooed him out the back door.

  The boys were sitting on the floor, Legos spread across the tiles. She sent them into the playroom and put on some fresh coffee. “Who died?” shesaid, and then she saw the look on face. “Shit, sorry. This is more than just girl trouble?”

  She cleared a space on the table among the toys, the dirty breakfast dishes, the laundry she was still halfway through folding. Still, he found the chaos strangely comforting. She was like the mother he never had. If he went to Mom’s he was served Blue Mountain from bone china teacups; here it was Nescafe from a mug with a picture of Elmo on the side.

  “So what’s happened?”

  He told her about Oliver, about Elena’s sister. She said she was sorry to hear about it, but looked puzzled.

  “I didn’t think you liked Julie,” she said. “And this Oliver guy. Isn’t he the one she cheated on you with? I don’t get it.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, but didn’t know where to start and while he was trying to work it out, the kettleboiled.

  He stared at the crayoned kids pictures blue-tacked to the refrigerator while she made the coffee. He was a coffee snob and he never drank instant but it was part of their ritual for her to put one in front of him.

  She brought the cups over and sat down. “Well, spit it out,” she said.

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “I already do. Come on; get it off your chest. It’s me. If you can’t tell your big sister what’s bothering you, who can you tell?”

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Saying this aloud was going to sound stupid. “When I was in Mexico I did something that was really...”

  “Really what?”

  “Really not like me.” He tapped on the table with his fingertips. “I went to see a witch. See, I knew you’d think this was a joke.”

  “You did what?”

  “I was curious, that was all.”

  “A witch? Did she have, like, warts and a black pointy hat?

  “It was a man. He’s like a healer who’s gone to the dark side. Like one of those nurses that like to kill people. He was the most profoundly evil man I’ve ever met.”

  “Why, what did he do?”

  “Just his presence. He had this blackness about him.”

  “Okay. So what happened?”

  “He said he could do anything I wanted. Anything.”

  It only took her a moment to catch up. “You didn’t?”

  He shrugged.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It was just...it’s different down there. There’s all these strange things happening and you start to wonder what it’s all about and so one day I went along.”

  “You were always the rational one in the family.”

  “I like to think I still am.”

  “We’ll get back to that. Look, I’m in shock and awe, but what has this got to do with anything?”

  “Well it’s happened, hasn’t it? Do you see? Her boyfriend’s dying, she can’t have children - and that was the issue that came between us - and now my biggest enemy in her family has just dropped dead.”

  “You don’t believe this...medicine man had anything to do with it?”

  “It’s playing on my mind.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Ada
m!’

  He stared out of the window at the yard. The leaves were starting to turn. Soon it would be fall; almost a year since he first went to Santa Marta.

  “I’m thinking of going back.”

  “To Mexico? To do what?”

  “Well, what would you do?”

  “I’d get a therapist. You’ve been working too hard, little bro.”

  “All the more reason to take some time off then.”

  “You’ll lose your job! They just gave you a six month sabbatical.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care? That’s maybe because you’ve had it too easy for too long!’

  “You think seven years of medical school and twelve hours a day as an intern is too easy?”

  “Then all the more reason not to throw it all away!’

  He put his head in his hands.

  “What are you going to do, ask this crazy guy for another spell?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Reality check, bro! This is crazy thinking. You’re scaring me.”

  “You mean you don’t believe that what someone thinks can affect someone else’s health?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re in a prayer group. What’s that all about then?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “You can’t kill someone with your mind.”

  “But you think you can make people better with a prayer, isn’t that the same thing?”

  “We’re asking God to intervene, we’re not saying we can heal someone ourselves.”

  “Well he says the same thing. He says it’s not him that does this, it’s the devil.”

  “The Devil? What is this, the Middle Ages? Listen to yourself. I thought you were an atheist.”

  “I feel like I’ve called down a curse on her head.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. The guys in the white coats will be coming for you, you keep talking like this.”