Obsession Falls

by Christina Dodd

  “Yes, I can undress.” Summer answered the now-old question by holding up her right hand, encased in a black oven mitt. “If you would get me started by removing that.”

  Kateri pulled it off. It was damp; Summer’s fingers were white and looked frozen. She hurried to the thermostat, turned it up, and heard with relief the old furnace wheeze to life. “Can you move them?”

  The woman stared down at her.

  “Your fingers. Can you move them?”

  Summer did, and winced.

  “They hurt?” Kateri lowered the seat on her walker, then eased herself down.

  “Yes. So badly.”

  “Good. They’re not frozen.” Kateri called Lacey, removed the pink, sequined coat, and dried the squirming spaniel.

  “Right. I knew that … Water?” Summer whispered.

  “Of course.” Kateri let Lacey escape her. She used the handles on her walker to support herself as she struggled to her feet. She went into her postage stamp–sized office, got a bottle out of her private stash, returned, and opened the lid.

  Summer took it, tried to put it to her mouth, but her hand trembled too much. She lowered the bottle in defeat.

  Lacey trotted to her side and nudged her, encouraged her.

  “What a nag,” Summer told her. “Okay, okay.” She lifted the bottle to her lips again, and this time she managed to drain half before taking a breath. “Better.” She sighed. “It’s weird. Water was falling from the skies, and I was dying for a drink.”

  Kateri liked this Summer person. She spoke to the dog as if Lacey were a person, with good humor and appreciation for the dog’s concern. As Kateri gathered blankets from the cupboards and cushions from the kids’ section, she chatted, trying to keep Summer’s attention on something besides her condition, trying to warm her from the inside with conversation. “I found Lacey in a garbage heap on the edge of town. I don’t usually go there, but I was out walking and headed in that direction. No reason…” Except that, like today, I felt some great need nipping at my heels. “The dog had been hit by a car, was half dead, but she managed to lift her head when I spoke to her. When I dribbled some water from my bottle into her mouth, she nudged me like she’s nudging you.”

  “She is so beautiful.” Still, Summer’s words were stiff, as if her face were frozen. “I would never have known she had been hurt.”

  Lacey had been hurt. She had been nearly dead, until Kateri had touched her, had felt Lacey’s blood on her hands, felt the sad ebb of a life that was ending too soon, and rebelled against the injustice. Kateri had refused to let Lacey die. Now Lacey lived, thrived.

  Summer moved her left hand away from her chest. She didn’t have an oven mitt on that hand; she had her fingers wrapped in a spotted white rag. Spotted with …

  Kateri shouldn’t have been shocked, but she was.

  Blood.

  “Shit!” Kateri grabbed her first aid kit and pushed her walker close. She sat down on the seat and took the poor, abused hand in hers. “Let me see,” she said.

  “Careful. Careful!” Summer winced, whimpered, cradled her wounded hand in her other hand, turned her face away.

  Kateri unwrapped the rag slowly, noting that it was a kitchen dishcloth, that the amount of blood increased as she got closer to the skin (duh!), and that, thank God, the blood flow seemed to be stopped. She finally wound the cloth down to the point that she could see it was stuck to the end of Summer’s little finger.

  And she knew.

  She got the scissors out of the first aid kit and began to cut away the extra material. “Who did this to you?” she asked fiercely.

  “I did it.” Summer leaned against the wall, no longer blue with cold. Now she was almost green with pain and horror. She pulled a small, sharp, blood-stained knife from her pants pocket, and dropped it beside her. “I was trapped. They were going to find me. I did it.”

  “My God. Oh, my God.” Kateri chanted the words like a prayer. “Listen. My experience here at the library allows me to kiss a boo-boo and make it better. I can put on a Disney princesses Band-Aid.” She dug in her bag for her phone. “I’ll call nine-one-one—”

  With her uninjured hand, Summer caught Kateri’s wrist. “No! No emergency personnel. No doctors, no forms, no names.”

  Kateri stared at the young woman. Summer was half dead, but still she managed to be both ferocious and insistent. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  “Not a lot. I’ve been cold from the moment it happened. Slowed the flow. No hospital. No.” Summer’s hand slipped away. “Promise.”

  “I promise. But we’ve got to have … somebody…” Kateri eased herself from the seat onto her knees. She knocked the ice off the man’s bomber jacket that Summer wore, unzipped it, then slowly, so slowly, peeled it down one arm, then down the other and over the poor, wounded hand.

  Summer cried, and at the same time said, “Thank you. I’m so cold it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just … it’s so horrifying I can hardly stand to—”

  Someone knocked on the library door.

  Kateri couldn’t believe it. “Who the hell…?”

  “Kateri! Kateri! It’s Mrs. Branyon. I need that new book. That one … with the guy … and the girl … and they do the wild thing and kill each other?” Eagerness quivered in Mrs. Branyon’s voice.

  Kateri and Summer looked at each other in horror.

  “She’s like a hundred years old,” Kateri whispered.

  Mrs. Branyon banged on the door again.

  Kateri shouted toward the door, “The library doesn’t open for two hours!”

  Of course, Mrs. Branyon, the most hateful old woman in the world, went into one of her harangues. “Kateri Kwinault, I pay for your salary, and you better let me in and give me that book, or I’ll report you to the mayor!”

  Kateri couldn’t believe the gall. In a rage, she shouted, “No! Go home! The library opens at ten.”

  Outside, a moment of startled silence was followed by a huff of astonishment and indignation. “I will tell … I will tell the mayor and the city council,” Mrs. Branyon said.

  “You do that! And I’ll tell them you came out in the middle of an ice storm to get a pornographic book filled with bondage and hot sex.” Kateri’s voice got louder and louder. “What do you think about that? What will your daughter think about that?”

  “Insolent Indian. You’re probably drunk and imagined the whole thing,” Mrs. Branyon roared back.

  They listened to the grumbling noise as Mrs. Branyon wandered away.

  “Bitch,” Summer whispered.

  Kateri found herself laughing. “She is. She sticks with the classics. The traditional drunken-Indian insults. They never grow old.”

  “Where am I?” Summer asked.

  “Virtue Falls. In Washington State. On the Pacific Coast.”

  “Oh.” Summer nodded. “I’m going to lay down now.” That was all the warning Kateri got; Summer slid sideways on the wall to the floor.

  Shit. Summer was looking worse and worse. Kateri threw three blankets over her, figuring she needed the heat more than she needed to be jerked around to get her out of the damp clothes. “Now … listen. No hospitals, no medical assistance, but Rainbow is the waitress here in town and she’s a genuine earth mother. I’m calling her. She’ll know what to do.”

  Summer nodded, swallowed, shook in a sudden bout of shivering.

  Lacey whimpered and crawled close.

  Kateri shoved a pillow under Summer’s head, and called Rainbow.

  Rainbow answered, sounding as cranky as Kateri had been to be awakened. “The café is closed. I’m supposed to be sleeping in. So this better be good.”

  “You know about losing the tip of a finger, right?” As Kateri talked, she scooted down by Summer’s feet, unlaced her soaked black leather shoes, and eased them and her socks off.

  On Rainbow’s end, the pause was long and profoundly confused. “Yeah … a few of the cooks I’ve worked with have cut off a fingertip, and I did a pretty good jo
b chopping my thumb when I was about twenty. Why? You cut off your finger?”

  “I got a lady here. She needs help.”

  Rainbow said, “This lady lost her fingertip? You called me because some cook cut off her fingertip? I don’t think so. Kateri, what’s going on?”

  Kateri held the phone away from her mouth and spoke to Summer. “Can you move your toes?”

  No response.

  “Summer! Can you move your toes?”

  The toes wiggled reluctantly.

  Kateri dried them, covered them with a towel. “It’s not just her fingertip. It’s…” She scooted away from Summer and lowered her voice. “Listen. You know I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t an emergency. I’m afraid she’s going to … Can you come to the library?”

  “What crazy shit are you into now?” But Kateri heard Rainbow throw off the covers. “Goddamn it, Kateri, it’s cold in here. It’s cold outside. Have you looked out the window? Have you seen the ice? You want me to come out in that?” As Rainbow got dressed, she was huffing like a steam engine. “My God, you went out in this, didn’t you? Have you no sense?”

  “Not much.”

  Rainbow took a long breath. “All right. Tell me. How bad is it, this woman’s finger?”

  “Amputated down to the joint below the nail. She managed to pull some skin over the top of it. It … it doesn’t look good.”

  “Call the EMTs.”

  “I can’t. I promised.”

  “She’s off the grid, huh?” Rainbow understood that right away. Respected it, too. “Okay. I’ve got some painkiller. I’ll bring it.”

  Thank God for Rainbow. “Just come.” Kateri smelled cigarette smoke. Heard Lacey bark. “This is way beyond my experience. She’s got hypothermia and she looks like…” She glanced at Summer.

  Summer, who lay still and quiet, her face pale and her brown eyes wide as she looked into the next world.

  “She’s dead!” Kateri cast the phone aside.

  The old cowboy who knelt beside Summer turned his head and looked into Kateri’s eyes. She’s not dead. Not if you help her. He stood and walked away, giving Kateri room.

  Lacey crawled close to Summer’s side and rubbed her head against Summer’s unmoving arm.

  Kateri ignored the frantic squawking from the phone. She scooted back to Summer and put her fingers on the pulse on her neck.

  It beat faintly. But it still beat.

  “Come on. Come on!” Kateri embraced Summer, a whole-body embrace, willing her own life into the still form. “You didn’t come this far to quit now. Come on! Live!” She put her ear close to Summer’s mouth.

  Summer wasn’t breathing.

  The cowboy said, Help her. You can save her. That’s why she came to you.

  Once again, the faint scent of tobacco smoke touched Kateri’s senses, compelling her to believe in him. To believe in herself.

  So she put her mouth to Summer’s and breathed her breath into her lungs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Taylor wandered through green fields touched by mist, where time did not exist and life was weighed in tastes of golden joy and seen in blossoms of yellow despair. She would stay. She wanted to stay. Please … life had been so difficult. She would stay. She needed to stay.

  Then … someone touched her arm.

  “You son of a bitch.” She lunged at her attacker. “Leave me alone!”

  A woman’s hearty voice: “Kateri, tell me why I do stuff like this for you.”

  “Because I can’t do it for myself.” A woman’s soft voice.

  “Yeah, yeah. Hypothermia is a bitch, and so’s she.” Another touch, this time on Taylor’s foot.

  Taylor kicked her attacker as hard as she could. “Are you going to kill me? I dare you to try.”

  Someone coughed, gasped. Hearty Voice again: “Okay. We’re not going to play nice.” She sat on Taylor’s hips and unbuttoned her shirt.

  Taylor’s rage faded, and she tore at the shirt. “Get it off. Get it off!”

  The weight disappeared, and Hearty Voice said, “What’s she doing now?”

  “I looked it up,” Soft Voice said. “Wanting to rip your clothes is one of the weirder signs of hypothermia.”

  Taylor got her shirt half off. Tore at the waistband of her pants.

  “What about trying to kill me?” Hearty Voice asked. “Is that a sign of hypothermia?”

  “Half the people in Virtue Falls want to kill you.” Soft Voice laughed.

  Taylor paused to listen. Familiar voice … She strained to hear it.

  Soft Voice spoke again. “Yes, Rainbow, rage is a symptom of hypothermia. You’re a big girl. She’s half dead and she cut off her own finger. So dry her off. She’s shivering.”

  They rubbed Taylor with what felt like a wire scrub brush.

  She fought, but she didn’t have the strength. So she cursed.

  Someone licked her face.

  She struck out.

  The dog yelped.

  She tried to open her eyes, to say, Nice dog. And, Sorry. She managed to open her eyes and whisper … something.

  A pretty blond cocker spaniel crept forward and placed its head on the pillow next to Taylor’s. Taylor lifted her hand, inch by painful inch, and stroked the soft head. Somehow, that made her feel calmer. She closed her eyes and let them wrap her in blankets …

  Taylor couldn’t speak. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember where she was or why she was here. Her skin hurt.

  Hearty Voice said, “It’s her pulse and breathing that scare me. She needs to be in the hospital. Can you imagine the scandal if she dies in the library?”

  Again the soft voice. “She won’t.”

  This time Taylor knew that voice. “Kateri,” she whispered. Kateri, the angel who had appeared out of the blue, frozen world.

  “Wow.” Hearty Voice. “You must have impressed her. She knows you.”

  Kateri said, “Yes, and we’ll keep her alive.”

  “We? You’re assuming I am going to help you.”

  “No, I meant Lacey and I.”

  The dog barked.

  A moment of surprise, a loud laugh, and Hearty Voice said, “That’s putting me in my place.”

  “Someone has to.” The creak of wheels as Kateri moved her walker across the threadbare carpet. “I’m going to call Dr. Watchman.”

  Taylor shouted, “No doctors! You promised!”

  “She’s mumbling something.” The woman with the hearty voice leaned close. “Nope, can’t tell what she wants. Kateri, why are you going to call that old horse doctor?”

  “Dr. Watchman knows what she’s doing—she’s always treating the Families when they go out and get drunk, cut, stabbed, shot, beat up.” Kateri sounded farther away.

  Hearty Voice said, “But Dr. Watchman’s not supposed to treat humans. She’s a veterinarian, for shit’s sake.”

  “People are very much like horses,” Kateri replied in a prosaic tone.

  “A lot of them are very much like horses’ asses,” Hearty Voice said.

  Kateri chuckled softly. “True … More important to the case at hand—Dr. Watchman doesn’t report stuff to the authorities.”

  Taylor relaxed.

  “Dr. Watchman doesn’t report stuff to the authorities because she’s Native American and her patients are Native American.”

  “And I’m Native American, so she won’t tell on me,” Kateri said.

  “Half Native American,” the hearty-voiced woman said.

  “And I’m god-kissed.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rainbow scoffed, but beneath that, Taylor heard caution.

  God-kissed. What did that mean? Taylor tried to ask, but again, no one paid any heed. Why wouldn’t they listen?

  Danger. They were in danger. Michael Gracie was after them. They were going to die, and it was Taylor’s fault.

  She fought again. She needed to run. They needed to run.

  Hearty Voice restrained Taylor by wrapping the blankets tighter.

  Lace
y whined and rubbed her head against Taylor’s face.

  “The doctor’s on her way.” Kateri was close again. “Summer can’t stay out here in the main room. The children will arrive soon. I’ve made her a bed in my office. If we use blankets as a stretcher, can you drag her in there?”

  As Taylor bumped along the floor on the makeshift stretcher, pain racked her joints. She screamed. And screamed.

  The dog barked. And barked.

  Kateri and Rainbow tried to hush them both.

  They got Taylor into the office and shut the door.

  “Wait until she’s had some painkillers,” Rainbow said. “Then we’ll make her more comfortable.”

  Taylor drifted off, then woke in a panic when someone put a needle in her arm.

  Michael Gracie. He was going to kill her.

  Taylor fought until the sedative took effect.

  When she came out of it, it was dark. She was cold. She was in pain. She fought again.

  The third time she woke, daylight shone from the high windows in the cement-block cell. Three women slept sprawled in chairs around her.

  Who were they? Where was she?

  Who was she?

  Taylor silently cried until the dog snuggled with her. She slept.

  On day three, she knew who she was. She knew where she was. She knew who these women were. And she wanted to cut off her finger again. It made sense, because if she got rid of her finger, she wouldn’t be trapped here anymore, and Michael Gracie wouldn’t get her. He was going to get her.

  Taylor heard Rainbow say, “She’s really crazy,” in a voice of awe.

  “No, she’s not,” Kateri said. “She’s had hypothermia, and she’s got an infection. She’ll come out of it.”

  Another needle. More sleep.

  Taylor woke and met Rainbow. Rainbow was tall, raw, with broad shoulders and big hands. She had recently shaved her head, and her salt-and-pepper hair was a quarter-inch long from ear to ear. She had a long, uneven, jagged scar behind her left ear where no hair grew. Taylor vaguely thought that if she had any sense, she would be afraid of Rainbow.

  Taylor met Dr. Watchman, a Native American who wore her black hair in a long braid that dangled down her back. She smelled of peppermint, and handled Taylor as if she were a horse, efficiently, briskly, and without allowing any struggle. Somehow, Taylor expected her to sing Indian medicine chants. But she never chanted. She never said a word.