by S. L. LUCK
The Elder sat and set a large shell on the center of the blanket. Four containers were then positioned above the shell. The others huddled close, trying to block the wind as Nikonha drew pinches of tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar from the containers and put them into the center of the shell. A puff of mixed medicines swirled upward as the incensed wind worked to stop the ceremony, but Nikonha ordered the group to open their jackets and fill the spaces between them. They were to beat Flint together or not at all, and the others obediently opened their coats and leaned inward, forming a makeshift teepee.
The first match Nikonha struck went out the moment it ignited. Then the second. The third. The fourth. Each time a match was struck, wind tore into the top of their teepee and snuffed it out. Leaning further toward each other, shoulders touching, faces a breath away, they helped Nikonha thrust her prayer upward. She struck fire. The medicines began their slow burn, and Nikonha wasted no time retrieving the eagle feather from her bag to smudge herself, Dak, Wendy, Jesse, and Sarah. Up and down the feather circled the medicine’s smoke onto their faces, their bodies, while Nikonha beseeched the Spirits for their physical, and mental strength. They renewed themselves like this for some time, until finally the medicines had burned out and their ashes were returned to the earth.
When they retreated from their gathering, the wind had fallen quiet. Dak helped Nikonha to her feet and carried her bag inside, where Wendy prepared cedar tea and a snack of moose meat and strawberries. Before they sat, Dak showed Nikonha to the bedroom. His injured son was now awake and attuned to his phone.
“Little Elk,” Nikonha greeted Johnny, and proceeded to retrieve the contents of her bag.
As Johnny pulled himself up, pain lanced the stubs where his fingers used to be, and he sucked in air to keep himself from swearing in front of Nikonha. She deftly repeated the outdoor ceremony for Johnny’s benefit. With his good hand, Johnny welcomed the medicine his Elder was guiding toward him, and by the time the ceremony was complete, Johnny felt better than he had in days. “Miigwech Nikonha,” he said a little tearfully, and the curtain of wrinkles on the old woman’s face drew apart as she smiled up at him. In the corner, Dak sniffed.
“We will get through this, Little Elk,” Nikonha said to Johnny, patting his knee with an arthritic hand. She squinted at him. “Rabbit, Elk, boy, man, not so little anymore, and not so easy to knock down, am I right?”
Johnny held up his bandaged hand. “What’s two fingers when I got eight more to fight with?”
A chuff of laughter came from Dak. They saw Nikonha out of Johnny’s bedroom and into the kitchen, where their tea was already poured for them. The tea was sweet and tasted of the earth, and as they sipped from their mugs and picked at the berries and moose meat, Nikonha was apprised of the family’s encounters with Sylvia Baker, who they all suspected was hosting the spirit Flint. Though Dak did not relay the incident in the basement to the group, he suspected that Nikonha understood, as she held his eyes intently.
Once all had spoken, Nikonha spread her elbows on the table and leaned forward against her folded hands. Though she spoke quietly, the sound carried from her mouth was that of time itself, of the crashing of waves, of ancient winds over high mountains.
She said, “When I was a girl, they took my friends, my brothers, my sisters, my cousins. I’d go to play, and there would be another empty swing, another unattended net, until there was no one to play with anymore, and I was alone. I remember being scared that they were coming for me, but they never did. They never did.” She pointed to a crevasse of skin on her neck. “This is from when my best friend was taken from me. A piece of my whole. This”—she felt a divot on her arm— “was the presence of my baby brother.” She touched her chin, tapped her cheek, rubbed her ear, patted her nose, her forehead, an eye. “My big sister. My uncle. My neighbor. My niece. I bear their scars, but I am still intact. Pinch me,” she ordered Wendy, who knew not to refuse. Wendy gently pinched a flap of skin on Nikonha’s wrist. Nikonha said, “Still here, even with the pain, and that is how we defeat our other enemy, Flint.” An old fist formed in front of them, thin-skinned and scarred. It was the strongest fist any of them had ever seen. “In your head and your head and your head”—she pressed a warm finger to each of their foreheads— “know that we are together even if we are apart. Go inside there, let the Spirits in, and never be alone. We need an army of warriors to send Flint back to before he was born.” Five pairs of eyes viewed the Elder with awe. “We will call all the Elders,” Nikonha told them, confident in her plan. “And say goodbye to Flint.”
24
In the dark of his mother’s musty living room, Troy wrestled with a need so great he trembled. A film of withdrawal sweat covered the entirety of his body, so he’d shucked his clothes and sat naked on the couch with the curtains drawn, waiting for the stage to pass.
He’d known it was coming. Months without fulfilling the desires of his Dark Friend, it was inevitable that he’d be punished. The small ache that crept up his leg and settled on his shoulders became a full-body cramp that gripped him until he had to run to the toilet, where things were squeezed out of every orifice he had. Then his skin boiled. Then it froze. Then it burned again. His nose ran. His eyes watered. His mouth twitched. Even after the productive meeting with Anabelle’s parents, his Dark Friend showed no appreciation for the gains Troy had made. There was no gratitude for their gratefulness, no leniency for their willingness to thrust their daughter’s welfare onto him as though Troy alone could save her, Troy alone could fix her. His relationship with the Cheevers would lead to rapture, but the prolonged process enraged his Dark Friend, and he felt its petulance with every spike of pain, every stab of anticipation.
How long had it been? Three months? Four? He reached for the memory, drew it from the place where he kept his secret things, and unwrapped it now. Late night. After the Runnymede Library had closed. A foggy Tuesday. One of the many nights Troy had stayed late at the office, so his presence in the shadows along Bloor could be rationalized. A departing storm had emptied the streets. There were few that had seen him and none that had caught him wedged between a concrete wall and a thicket of bushes in the messy lot of a home under construction.
His fortuitous dip down Ellis Park Road was a last-minute decision. He waited there a few minutes before he spotted a woman he had seen coming from the library a short time earlier. Heavy book bags hung from the crooks of her elbows, and her attention was attuned to her feet as she lowered her face away from the rain. She practically walked right into his arms, and it was only after he’d placed his hand over her mouth that the woman understood her reading days were over.
Remembering now the huffing of her breath against his fingers and the spill of blood from her ears, Troy wished for another easy elimination that would satisfy his Dark Friend until he could get to Annabelle without ruining his life. Garrett was crawling with law enforcement, and over-vigilant locals were already pouncing at anything that moved. There was no easy solution. He knew his delirium was dangerous; he knew his eagerness could make him sloppy, but he also knew that if he didn’t try, his system would shut down. Reason would abandon him. Tact would escape completely. If he didn’t satisfy his urge soon, it would consume what made him human and turn him into an animal. He shuddered.
The lights of a passing car swept through a slit in the curtains and fell on a collage of pictures on the living room wall. Pictures of his mother and her friends. Pictures of his mother and her dog. Pictures of his mother and him, when he was younger and obedient. The light passed but Troy stood and went to the wall, sliding his fingers over the frames, over the glass, over his mother’s face from memory. She would do for now, his Dark Friend suggested. Troy was indifferent. You have access, his Dark Friend purred inside him. And you don’t love her anyway.
“I don’t love anything except you,” Troy said to the empty room. His Dark Friend’s suggestion wasn’t something he hadn’t thought of before. It was always there; it was his fi
rst thought as though it had been born with him, but it didn’t give him pleasure because—young as he was when he’d first recognized the presence of another inside him—Troy was smart enough back then to know he needed his mother. But he didn’t need her now. Go on, his Dark Friend advised, and Troy took from the wall a picture of his mother. He squeezed the frame until the glass broke. Still he crushed, more, more, until glass sliced his fingers, his palms, and his own blood fell onto the floor. It stemmed his headache, and the pains he’d suffered for the last few days began to ebb away. Another sweep of passing lights drew across Troy’s naked and bloody body and his wide, grinning face then left him in darkness once more.
He left the living room and padded to the kitchen, where for the next twenty minutes he pulled shards of glass from his hands. His Dark Friend’s new admiration inoculated him from suffering, so even though several of the cuts were deep, the procedure was painless.
Troy wrapped his hands in kitchen towels and poured himself a bath. He preferred to visit the hospital as a clean man, a sane man, a man who’d simply tripped over a cat when he went to fetch a midnight snack and found himself with the broken pieces of a family treasure in his hands. The water turned red once he entered the bathtub and soon the things below the surface were indistinguishable in the dimness, but he lay there until the water ran cold, thinking.
By all means, his mother was not an easy choice—perhaps the worst he could make—but his Dark Friend’s insistence made his suffering over Anabelle tolerable, so he was determined to try. He dressed carefully, reminding himself that his godlike stature in Toronto’s legal community was no accident. He’d gotten to where he was with prudence and an expanse of logic that bordered insanity, and he would employ those skills to do what he had to do.
He drove to the hospital in the shadows of the night, leaving his window open to feel the sharpness of the air against his freshly bathed skin. His story required the appearance appropriate to a man near shock, so Troy let the wind mess his hair and blanch his skin. When he arrived, the towels he’d earlier wrapped around his hands were soaked through, and though there was only a heartbeat of irritation on his palms, he looked in the mirror to ensure the face he was about to present was the one expected. He frowned at himself, drew the corners of his lips down in a grimace of fake pain, and began to quiver, as though all his times at trial had been preparation for this moment.
The air outside was cold, and though the earlier wind had somewhat subsided, a new breeze fought vainly against his march to the emergency door. It pushed hard at him, until his body was slanted against its backward thrust, but he drove his body onward to the squares of light emanating from the building. Looking now at the patients and visitors clustered together trying to sneak a cigarette outside, Troy noticed that none of their pants were flapping and none of their gowns were waving beneath the bottom of their jackets. The Canadian, provincial, and municipal flags standing sentinel on a landscaped grassy rise at the front of the hospital hung, immobile, down the poles that held them, and not a single leaf or wrapper of gum carried past him as he walked.
The night was still but for the action around Troy. The thrum of resistance in the cool air was attuned only to him. His eyes swept up to the top floor of the hospital where he knew Anabelle Cheever lay, and he wondered if the presence he felt was hers.
You feel that? he asked his Dark Friend now. She doesn’t want us here, came its reply. Already resisting. Troy grinned slyly, for the first time appreciating the game they were about to play, then he staggered through the doors of the hospital.
He was attended to quickly, and before long he was rushed from the reception desk past a clot of indignant would-be patients who groaned dramatically while Troy and his nurse walked by as though his passage renewed their suffering. A woman clutched her stomach and shouted at the nurse that she had been waiting for hours while a man, slumping and slobbering over the trail of dried vomit on the front of his shirt, barked drunkenly to everyone in the waiting room that you had to be good-looking to get help. The mother of a red-faced baby beside the drunk leaned away toward the wall, and Troy was sorry he hadn’t had a seat far away from the man to relinquish to her. There was still a smidgeon of decency left in him.
He relayed his false story to the attending doctor, who efficiently removed three shards of glass Troy hadn’t seen, and expediently sewed thirteen stitches—six on his right, seven on his left—in varying parts of his hands. The doctor would have been suspicious if Troy explained he didn’t require freezing, so he accepted the needle and pretended it felt better while the doctor worked on him.
A short time later, with his hands bandaged and decently numb, Troy thanked the doctor and retraced his way through the same waiting area. Only the mother and her baby were gone. In her place, a gargantuan man with tattoos covering most of his face seemed to be the keeper of the room’s peace, for each time the drunk tried to speak, the tattooed man jabbed the other’s foot with the heel of a crutch.
Feeling a strange kinship with the kind beast, Troy inclined his chin; an infinitesimal gesture, but the beast paid no notice, and Troy departed the hospital, ready to see his mother. Even with his previous parting words and parking lot abandonment, the costume of injury would endear him to her again because no mother, not even his own, wanted to see her child suffer. He would feign pain and let her dote on him until her defenses were down and his strike would come unnoticed.
As he stepped off the sidewalk into the parking lot, an old minivan sped past Troy and screeched into a stall. A moment later, William Cheever scuttled out of his car carrying four bags of fast food, each from a different restaurant. He spotted Troy almost immediately, greeting him with unmistakable joy. “Troy!” he called, hurrying toward him with his bags. “Troy! I was going to call you! You’ll never guess what happened! She’s awake! Oh, she’s awake and talking and wants food. Can you believe it?” He shook his bags in the air, and two French fries flew out.
The unexpected news sent a rush of heat though Troy and he stifled a shudder as he looked at William Cheever. “A miracle.” Troy smiled at the man. “Thank God for that. How is she feeling?”
William’s shoulders popped upward. “She’s not walking yet, but the doctors say that will come, if they can figure out the … you know.” He let the statement hang. William’s eyes fell on Troy’s bandaged hands. “I’m sorry, Troy. I’m so worked up these days, with Anabelle and everything, I’m not thinking straight. What’s it now? Two o’clock in the morning and of course you shouldn’t be here in the parking lot talking to me. What happened? Are you okay?”
“Cat tripped me on my way to the kitchen,” Troy told him. “They’re not so far off when they say midnight snacks’ll kill you.” His little huff of laughter made William lower his bags and give him a sympathetic whistle.
“Broke my toe when my own damn cat did that to me last year. He became an outside cat after that.” William chuckled then looked down at his bags. “You get your snack after all that trouble?” Troy said he did not, hoping William would extend an invitation, which he promptly did. “If it’s too late for you,” William said, “say so, but if you’re still hungry, why don’t you come see Anabelle with me? She’s the only one on the floor, and they’ve been pretty lax with the visiting hours since she woke up. We’ve told her all about you. I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”
“I don’t want to impose …”
“Nonsense!” William said, guiding him along with a bag-ladened hand. “She got Susan to get her a coffee, so she’ll be up for a while yet. Says she doesn’t want to sleep, and right now that’s fine with me. As long as she’s here, you know?” There was a catch at the back of his throat.
They took the main entrance, and Troy was grateful to avoid the emergency waiting area. Here there was only a scattering of people: a middle-aged man rolling his intravenous pole toward the vending machines, two nurses talking quietly over cups of tea on a bench near the water wall, and an old woman consoling anot
her woman weeping on her shoulder. Through all this, the smile had never left William’s face. He had his daughter back, and not even this depressing sweep of hospital life would change his gratitude.
In the elevator, William watched the ascension of lights on the control panel with unrestrained enthusiasm. Almost immediately, the bigger man in his heavy jacket, against which leaned bags of hot food, started sweating. Troy offered to ease the burden in William’s arms, but William politely refused, nodding toward Troy’s hands. “You got your hands full already,” he said. “But I’m sure they stitched you up nice and you’ll be good as new before you know it. They’re good people around here, you know. Makes me feel sort of bad about the lawsuit.” His eyes sidled away from Troy as spots of color touched his cheeks. “They did do everything they could, given the circumstances, and between you and me, I don’t think a bigger hospital would have done anything different. They might have bigger and better facilities in Toronto, but with the amount of people they tend to, Anabelle wouldn’t have been a priority like she was here. The way she was—you know, with the electrification and everything—I wonder if she would have been too much trouble for them, taking a whole floor in a city that size. If I’m being honest, I think they would have let my girl die rather than take up all their resources.”
His voice trembled, and Troy sensed that if he pressed the lawsuit right now, William would crumble. Not only would it make Troy seem insensitive, but it would engender suspicion that he definitely could not afford. He wouldn’t give up because as of this moment the lawsuit was his only way to Anabelle. Biding his time was his only option. As long as he wasn’t dismissed, there was still hope.