Cursed Be the Child (22 page)

“The
ababina
shook her head. ‘No, my dear little
shav,
there can be no
draba
against this evil spirit.’

“‘Then I am lost!’

“‘No, no,’ the
ababina
consoled him. ‘You can be aware of this evil spirit and thus always be on guard against it. Though you cannot rely on charms and spells, you can use your own mind and your own heart and your own soul to combat this wickedness, to resist both its attacks and its even more dangerous enticements. And now I will show you this evil.’

“And the ababina did.

“She held a mirror before the young man’s face.”

— | — | —

Twenty-Four

“I hate him. I hate his fucking guts.”

“But you don’t want to hate him?” Selena Lazone deliberately kept her tone neutral. But she was pleased to hear Kristin Heidmann vent her rage against Poppy. Anger directed against others was not anger that was directed against self, and it was self-anger and self-hate that had turned Kristin into a suicidal prostitute.

Kris had come a long way since the breakthrough, Selena reflected. In just under two weeks, you could see the change. The 14 year-old’s hair was now a single color, no longer a multicolored symbolic defiance. Kris spoke instead of snapped, replied to questions with words rather than a popping of gum or a bored, irritated sigh. Once or twice, Selena had caught the girl smiling instead of sneering.

“I guess I’m a shit for feeling like that. Hell, you shouldn’t hate your own grandfather.”

“Let’s not worry about ‘shouldn’t’ right now, Kris. Don’t worry about right and wrong. What do you feel?”

Kristin did not look at Selena. Her fingers were white-knuckled on the arms of the Danish modern chair. “Selena, I…I’m sorry he’s dead, you know, because if Poppy were here right now, I think I could kill him. Yeah, I know I could…”

Her voice trailed off.

“You’re that angry?” Selena said. She sat in her usual place, chair set so that with a slight turn of the head her clients could talk to themselves, to the wall or to their therapist, as they wished.

It was 9:25, halfway through Kristin Heidmann’s appointment. They’d changed Kristin’s time to Saturday mornings. Over half of Selena’s practice consisted of children and young adults; she reserved midweek evenings and Saturday mornings for the kids. They typically needed order and stability in their lives, had to feel like everybody else, and certainly did not need to miss school for an appointment with the shrink.

“Yeah, I’m mad,” Kristin said. She rocked forward, twisting to face Selena. “I’ve got a right to be, don’t I?”

“Why?” Selena challenged. “Didn’t you tell me Poppy told you that you were the one responsible?”

“Yeah, that’s what he kept telling me, but I wasn’t.”

“You were the one who led him on?”

“I didn’t! I was only a kid!”

“A rotten kid,” Selena said, her voice flatly condemning. “A no-good, wicked, born-evil kid. Six years old and hot to trot. You were a sexy, seductive, luring slut of a kid who turned a white-haired, pipe-smoking, mild-mannered, lemonade-drinking, sweet old Grampa into a dirty rotten child molester!”

“Bullshit!”

“Bullshit?” Selena’s eyes met Kristin’s and demanded a response.

“Yeah!” Kristin said. “Bullshit!”

Selena smiled. Quietly she said, “That is absolutely right, Kris. Bullshit.”

Kristin rubbed the knuckle of her thumb on her lower lip, perhaps to hide the twitch of a smile. She dipped her head and gazed at Selena through her eyelashes. “I see what you’re up to.”

“Tell me. Then we’ll both know.”

“You’re making me look at things, well, the way I ought to look at things.”

Out of the mouths of babes, Selena thought.

“Oh?” was Selena’s noncommittal response, the classic psychologist’s answer.

“It’s hard,” Kristin said.

“What’s that?”

“Seeing things the way they really are.”

Kristin abruptly rose and walked to the office window. With her back to Selena, she ran a finger along a slat of the Venetian blind. Then she too casually said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever see things the right way.”

“Hmm?” Selena sensed this was it. Once rapport with a client had been established, there was typically a center to each appointment, something the client wanted to say, needed to bring out, a specific psychic hurt or trauma to lay before the psychologist for healing.

It was just the way people bring their trouble and pain to a
cohalyi,
a Romany wise woman; they come in sick in their minds and souls and all they want is magic.

“So the other day,” Kristin was saying, “my dad tries to give me a surprise hug. He just reaches out and grabs me. It was kinda sweet, you know, because Dad, well, he’s not that way, never was a real huggy person. He was trying so hard! And as soon as he touched me, I couldn’t help it, I started screaming and just couldn’t stop. It was funny, even though it wasn’t. My poor dad jumped back and hit his elbow on the sideboard. And he said ‘Jesus Christ, are you crazy?’ and I was still screaming and I kept saying, ‘You scared me! I’m sorry! You scared me!’ but I think I was really crying because he’s a man and I just felt dirty like shit when he touched me.”

Kristin fell silent. Her shoulders moved, and Selena wondered if she were weeping. But when Kris turned there were no tears on her face. “Will I ever stop feeling dirty, Selena?”

“Yes,” Selena said without hesitation.

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

It was a promise Selena Lazone could not keep.

She spotted it—a space! She turned off Ellis Avenue into the “C” lot by the Court Theater. Parking at the University of Chicago was often impossible, so you took what you could get. Anything under ten miles away from where you wanted to be was a perfect parking spot.

Selena was outlandishly pleased at her good fortune, parking without hours of driving up, down and around. This was one of life’s little victories that keep us all going.

With the temperature in the low 60s, the day was beautifully sunny. The soft breeze carried not even a thin promise of forthcoming chilly weather, but autumn had arrived, the leaves turning early and the campus exploding with color.

It was an invigorating walk to the bookstore. In jeans and a flapping long sleeve, frayed collar shirt, one of David’s castoffs that he wasn’t quite ready to cast off, she felt very young, girlish almost, as though she’d shed her “mature adult responsibility” guise with her tailored suit.

Yet Selena felt something else, too—disquieting, out-of-place feeling. This time it hit her as she zigzagged around a hand-holding couple, giving them a quick glance. Both of them had book-laden knapsacks. Yuppies? Not hardly. The young man wore unfashionable wire rim glasses; with his shock of unruly hair, he looked like a 1930s socialist labor organizer. The woman was strikingly plain. Her thin lips were pursed as if that was their natural expression. She had the look of a film critic who hadn’t seen a worthwhile movie since Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast.

What was the young couple discussing on such a fine day?

University of Chicago students belonged here. They had been bred for the U of C, growing up in homes where Miros and Chagalls hung on walls, where bookcases held signed copies of Dos Passos, Sinclair and Wilder, where the radio was incapable of playing rock and roll or country and western but broadcast only Studs Terkel’s retrospective on the music and politics of Paul Robeson.

As an undergraduate, Selena had often thought herself a fraud, an impostor. It was still the feeling she could never quite shake whenever she was at the U of C.

Self-hate? she asked herself, knowing she was thinking like this because of the morning’s session with Kristin Heidmann. But yes, it was indeed self-hate. She despised what she had been—an illiterate nomad and outcast skulking on the edge of civilized society.

But she had not let herself remain a slave to unthinking genes or tradition. She’d had a vision of what she could be, and she worked to turn her vision into reality.

And she had.

And that was that.

“Enough bullshit,” she quietly scolded herself.

An hour and a half later, she stepped out of the bookstore. She had purchased three psychology texts, including a new translation of an early Binzwanger, and a reprint of a collection of short stories by John Updike. Now she felt all right. Buying books was always reassuring, reminding her that she was free to acquire any knowledge she sought.

Chances are David would be in now. She’d call and lure him away from the Blues in Black and White project that seemed to be his 24-plus hours a day obsession. She’d have him meet her at The Woodlawn Tap for a drink or two, and then maybe they’d go somewhere and catch a bite, and then this evening, maybe hear some jazz, and then, late, a little drunk and laughing easily, they could go back home and fuck like crazy. When they’d totally had it, totally, didn’t dare give it another go because their butts would just plain fall off, then they could peer out the living room window and see the moon drifting high and cool and eternal over Lake Michigan, and they would sigh and she would nuzzle his ear and whisper about needs and desires, and maybe, just maybe, he would say for the first time ever, “I love you.”

Her thoughts were romantic and erotic and silly and nice, so Selena giggled to herself. Then she stopped giggling and stopped walking and stared with eyes she could actually feel straining in their sockets.

Not more than three yards in front of her, it perched immobile on the lowest limb of an elm tree. Its huge yellow eyes were wise and cruel, horrible and hypnotic.

Selena stared, and the great horned owl stared back.

Mulesko chiriklo.

The owl should not have been out in the daylight hours; it was a nocturnal hunter. The owl should not have been in a crowded urban center; it belonged far to the north, deep in the woods, in the quiet, in the dark.

But the owl was here because it was not a bird but an omen.

It was
mulesko chiriklo,
Selena Lazone thought, the bird of death, and it was a warning sign of death to come, a portent to be seen and understood by the Romany cohalyi, the Gypsy sorceress, Selena Lazone.

The
mulesko chiriklo
rose from the limb on its silent pinions and like a feathered nightmare shot straight at her face.

Then at the very last possible instant, when Selena knew she did not have the control to protect her eyes with even a reflexive blink, the owl shot straight up. It zoomed into the sky and disappeared.

But not before she heard, or thought she heard, the owl make a sound that was not quite sharp enough to be a screech but that had the perfect cutting edge to be a warning.

Her plastic bag of books fell, and her knees slammed into the concrete sidewalk. It hurt, but it was a normal hurt, what anyone would feel, and she savored it, kneeling on the walk, laughing and crying, nose running, tears blinding. She ignored the gathering passers-by, even as she hysterically laughed at the crazy show she was putting on for them.

Selena tried to fill her mind with the pulsing pain in her knees. And she tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about the warning of the
mulesko chiriklo.