Blood Spirits (2 page)

She clicked off the phone, dropped it into her bag, then leaned against the wall. Somewhere a clock ticked, and behind the nurse's station there was a continuous low murmur of voices. LaToya's breathing was tight with suppressed tears.

After a pause that stretched painfully, I said, “Want me to go? I'd be glad to stay, but not if you'd rather be left alone.”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I can't figure out why you came in the first place.”

The words were a cold shock, but her tone wasn't hostile. More . . . wary.

“I was afraid they wouldn't . . . that it might take a while, and I didn't . . . want him to be alone. There should be a familiar face. Even if it was only mine.” I was babbling, and shut up without saying what I was really thinking:
I didn't want him to die alone.

She said abruptly, “I cussed him out for leaving a peanut butter knife in the sink.” She wiped her eyes again. “Dammit! I don't want to remember that as the last thing he heard from me.”

“Actually, as it happens, he mentioned that,” I said. “While we were correcting finals. He wasn't mad. He was laughing about it. I hope that helps. I mean, that he wasn't mad.”

She slewed around. “What did he say?”

“We were trading jokes the way you do when work is really tedious. He asked if I lived with someone. I said no, and he said, ‘Then you don't make anyone mad when you forget to wash off your peanut butter knife.' And I told him . . .” I stopped.

“Go on,” LaToya said as she stared at me. “You told him what?”

That I hate living alone. That the guy I love is married to a second cousin who looks just like me, half the world away
. “How much I hate coming home to my own messes.”

She was still regarding me with that unreadable look. She switched her gaze to the observation window, beyond which there was nothing to be seen, then back to me. “Cami,” she said. “He thought all this time your name's Cami. You didn't give us ten words at the faculty meet-and-greet in September. He said you come and go. Don't talk to anyone.” She said all this with a puzzled frown while she stared at me at an odd angle, as if trying to bring me into focus.

“I got into town that very same day,” I explained.
After running away from California.
“After a seven-hundred-mile drive, with four hundred the day before. I was a last-second hire to replace someone who got a last-minute, tenure track gig at a big university.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“And I'm not good at parties.”
I'm not good at dealing with the fact that you can't run away, that the memories come right with you
.

“You read,” she said slowly.

“Read?” I repeated.

Her tone was odd, someone still trying to figure out a puzzle. “Ron says, you're always reading during office hours. Like you don't want him talkin'.”

“No, that's not it at all,” I said, though it was kind of true. But I didn't want to explain how painful I found the normal chatter around the office:
Are you dating? Where are you from?
And the worst one of all:
What did you do over the summer?

“So what
is
it?” she asked.

There we were, two total strangers, both far away from home, sitting in a hospital corridor in the middle of the night. Somehow it seemed natural, even right, to cut past the protective layer of meaningless small talk into intimacy.

But what could I say?
Last summer I went searching for my grandmother's family, and ended up masquerading as Ruli, a doppelganger cousin who I hadn't known existed, and falling in love with Alec, the guy she was supposed to marry. Oh yeah, and Alec's father was supposed to be crowned king on Alec and Ruli's wedding day.

I was unaware that the natural pause of question and answer had stretched into an extended silence until she said, “Looks to me like you've got some issues.”

Issues! “Yeah. You got that right—”

The door opened and a doctor appeared. “He's stabilized, but in critical condition. We've repaired . . .”

LaToya cut into the flow of medical jargon. “I want to see him.”

“For a minute.”

She got to her feet. I was not going to follow unless asked. She walked swiftly to the door, then skewered me with a look. “Go fix it,” she said.

“Fix it?”

“I've been listening to people for ten years.” LaToya flashed five fingers twice. “You helped me out, so I'm helping you out. I'm getting the sense that you left a peanut butter knife lying around somewhere. Go clean it up.”

“It's too late for that,” I said.

“Then you deal.” She tipped her head toward Ron and shut the door.

How do you deal with the fact that you've fallen in love with the right person at the wrong time, in the wrong place? No, Dobrenica was the right place, it just wasn't
my
place. But I wanted it to be my place. . . .

The familiar round of questions I couldn't answer closed in. I'd been trying to ignore them for three months without success. So how
do
you deal?

Start by going home.

By the time I got back to the office, it was a quarter to three in the morning. By the time the sun came up I'd finished the tests, and logged the grades.

By seven I had my stuff thrown into the back of my car and locked up my crummy studio apartment.

I stashed two thermoses of super-strong tea in the cup holders, jammed in the Beatles'
Revolver
CD to blast at top volume, and hit the road.

 

When my overheated, bug-splattered car rolled up my parents' quiet Santa Monica street, it was one a.m. Sunday morning.

I pulled into the driveway, killed the engine and sat back, flexing and wringing my hands. During the 1100-mile, five-state drive, I'd been battered by snow through the Rio Grande National Forest, then rain as I flashed past the spectacular geography of the Colorado River country, and finally hot desert wind, and here I was at last. The house was dark, the December air dry, and with nightfall, the fitful, hot gusts had died down.

Everything looked exactly the same, as if nothing had happened, as eerie a feeling as the preternaturally clear air of Southern California in December.

The front door was not locked. I saw a light in the kitchen at the same moment I smelled fresh coffee.

I leaned against the kitchen door. My head felt detached from my body, like a balloon on a string. Dad sat at the table with the innards of one of his clocks scattered before him, and tools neatly lined up. The coffee pot rested on an old clock manual, steam drifting upward in misty tendrils. Around the pot, half a dozen mugs clustered like chicks to a hen. The rhythmic lyricism of Irish folk music played softly on the radio.

My father's fingers shifted in patient, minute movements as he tweaked the tiny gears. The yellow light overhead made a nimbus of his long, untamed, gray-frosted hair, and his chest-length, straggly beard. He made a last adjustment, then lifted his head and smiled. “Rapunzel,” he said, as though I'd only been gone a few hours instead of three and a half months.

I was too tired for surprise. “Any of those cups clean?” My voice sounded dry and strange—as if it came from somebody else's throat. My gaze went to the small dish of M&Ms next to the coffee pot, and absently I started picking out the blue ones, though I was too tired for the burst of chocolate to do much for me.

“All of'em, as it happens. I wash 'em in a bunch after I've used 'em up, then I start over again. How was the drive?”

I dropped into my old chair and poured coffee, since I was too tired to make tea. Elbow placement required some attention, for the table was covered with delicate clock innards. But at last I was looking at Dad from a comfortable angle.

I thought about the close calls, the traffic snarls, and the spectacular Southwest scenery, all stitched together by the black and yellow ribbon of the road. “Okay.” My throat hurt. I swallowed. “How's Gran? Mom already crashed?”

Dad squinted down into the clock, pausing as he made another tiny adjustment. “Your grandmother is fine. Asleep, of course. As for your mother . . . answering this question would entail broaching the forbidden
It
.”

It
covered everything that had happened to me last summer.

On my arrival home from Europe, I'd told them the whole story, but a couple of days later, when reality hit me along with the blazing heat of a Southern California September, I'd asked my parents not to talk about
It
anymore because it hurt too much.

But I couldn't forbid my grandmother, who was the reason I'd gone in the first place. She'd been in a deep depression that had gradually slipped her into a coma by the time I left for Europe. It was hearing me speak Dobreni on my return that brought her out of it. When she began asking entirely natural questions about the changes in her homeland, the memories hurt so much that I accepted the first job that would get me away from having to provide answers . . . and you see how well that worked.

I stiffened my spine and thought of LaToya's sad eyes and determined face as she stood outside the room containing the mangled body of her husband. “I'm here to deal with
It
,” I said to Dad.

“Good. In October Milo invited your grandmother and your mother to visit him. Gran wasn't up to traveling yet, but your mother went. She's been there ever since.”

“Mom's in
Dobrenica?
With Gran's
ex?
” I was so not ready for that.

“London.” Dad wiggled his brows.

“London, as in England?” I repeated, as though there were fifty Londons. Maybe there are. “I thought Milo was crowned King of Dobrenica back in September. Finally. After seventy years. I saw him in Dobrenica the day before I left.”

“Apparently some old duke who was about to leave England for Dobrenica had a stroke instead. Milo returned to England, and something or other has kept him there ever since.”

“Something or other? An earthquake? A revolution? Redecorating the palace with bees?”

Dad grinned at the Napoleon reference, then shot his forefinger at me, Mick Jagger style. “Dobreni politics. You know how much interest your mother has in politics.”

“That would be zip.”

“But apparently she's been a big help in other ways. Still able to deal with more
It?
” Dad asked, and on my nod continued. “Your grandmother decided a couple of weeks ago that she's through with physical therapy, and she's going to join them for the holidays.”

“Wait. Wait. Gran is not going back to Dobrenica, she's going to see Milo in London?”

“Yep.”

“The guy she dumped seventy years ago.”

“The very same. I offered to go along as wingman, since your Gran's never been on a plane.”

Obviously a whole lot had changed while I'd been grinding my way through interminable days teaching elementary French and German, and wasting night and day thinking (or dreaming) about how I didn't want to think (or dream) about Alec, nor the Wicked Count Tony (well, not
really
wicked, was he?) nor the castles and mountains of Dobrenica.

“I'm on a plane to Heathrow tomorrow. Which is why I'm up till all hours.” He gestured at the clock. “I want to have this finished before I go.”

“This isn't a sale clock?” I asked.

“For Milo,” Dad said. “Christmas gift from the family.”

Silence built, broken by the low mutter on the radio, and the tinkle of a tiny clockmaker's hammer on the worn sixties' Formica.

Dad poked a ruler through his beard to scratch his chin, then said, “Alec won't be in London. He's too busy in Dobrenica.”

Pop! went the balloon of exhaustion that had made my head feel like it was floating. Now it felt like a bowling ball on my shoulders.

Dad looked up, scraggly brows climbing toward his wild hair. “Was it the holiday that brought you back?”

I sipped coffee, trying to find words. Then I started talking. “There was a call on the language department phone, and when I picked up, it was the hospital. . . .”

Dad listened as he delicately wielded one tool then reached for another.

When I ran out of words, a gust of hot wind rustled the tree outside our big kitchen window, and the chair beneath my dad creaked. He said, “It's the first time you ever heard a ghost talk, right?”

I closed my eyes. “He was not a ghost,” I whispered. “I don't know what he was but . . . ghosts are dead. His heart had stopped, but . . .”

“I believe that is the definition of dead.” Dad wiggled his eyebrows. “Let me rephrase: Is it the first time someone has talked to you . . . without their body?”

“Yes.” I dropped my hands flat to the table. “Dad, there were two things I thought about on the long drive back. One, what happened with Ron scared me bad. I didn't want it to be true, because I don't want the responsibility of thinking that maybe I talked someone out of dying. But I believe that I did. That is so
very
scary. What if next time I screw it up, and someone . . .” I shook my head, and discovered I was actually shivering, in spite of the warm air.

Dad took my hands in his. “Second thing?”

“I kept thinking about how I grew up with pretty much just us.”

“Are you saying your childhood was unhappy?”

“No! I had a great childhood. You
know
that. But . . . maybe what seemed perfectly normal to me, really wasn't?”