Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) (35 page)

But you must, he said, but, but, I can do so much for you, my friends, my contacts, important people, I’ve told them all about you, I could have arranged a tremendous event for you, at least let me improvise, let me, let me.

No. Dorothea stayed with it, noting with surprise the racing of her heart. She wondered if she had made it clear to Ricky how valuable it was to her to have remembered how to be really, cleanly, knowingly angry and to act on it, a debt of sorts owed to Roberto. Saying no to George felt good: thrilling, because fear was being denied its absurd, obscure power. Not that she had a great deal of choice. If she were to hang up, that would be George’s excuse to drive out and continue the conversation here.

No, she said, again, watching Claire’s slender body doing its crepe-dance at the stove. No. You and your friends can come out with everyone else, or not at all. And if you do try to sneak out to the beforetime, I will raise such hell that your name will be black, stinking, volcanic mud in the art world forever after, my lad. Yes. I mean it. Over and over.

In the end, he hung up in a huff. Dorothea let out a sigh of relief.

“Way to go, Mom,” Claire said. She knew all about this. She was the one who had handled the invitations to the first viewing of the wall.

Dorothea arranged lacy-edged crepes on an ornate silver tray that Claire had brought down for the purpose and polished. “You’ve got to show me how to make these things before you take off again.”

Claire flashed her a quick, taut smile and rolled a new skin of batter swiftly around the pan. “Arthur called again yesterday, did I tell you?” The younger and sweetly prodigal son. “While you were out walking. He’s upset to have missed you again. He thinks you’re ducking him. You know how sensitive he is.”

“We’ve all survived Arthur’s sensitivity this long,” Dorothea replied testily. “I suppose we can get through this bout as well. It would be so much better if he’d just accept the fact that it’s all going to set itself right without him, that’s all.”

Arthur had to stay with the latest of the string of rock groups he had been managing. He worried, it seemed, from this or that hotel room between gigs, between tokes.

Bill, the older boy, handled things differently (always had). He’d sent a telegram from Tokyo, and there had been one exhaustive, efficient phone call in the middle of the night. He would come and see her when he got back. His mother’s assurances that she was well, that things were in hand, that Claire was here to help, had satisfied him. No doubt he thought that was a daughter’s proper place and duty, though Claire would mince him for saying so.

“Okay,” Claire said, switching off the gas, “that should be enough to hold you.”

She carried the tray inside and set it on the table in front of the couch. Dorothea followed, admiring her daughter’s style, proud to show her off a bit to Ricky.

“Teacups for only two?” Ricky said. “You’re not eating with us, Claire?”

The edge in his tone surprised Dorothea. Even more surprising was Claire’s sudden frowning confusion. She still looked about six when she knit her brows like that — only then she’d had bangs — and poked out her lower lip.

She said, “I can’t stay, really. My editor wants to talk some more about the article, maybe expansion into a series. She’s calling me soon, down at the Willis’s. I’ll see you both later.”

And she tossed off the apron, grabbed her suede jacket, and fled.

“Dope,” Dorothea said, trying to chew one of the crepes before it dissolved ethereally in her mouth. “These are delicious, and she’s too thin. Did you ever see her when she was in her teens? Plump as a partridge, and now look at her.”

“She’s afraid,” Ricky said.

“What?”

“She’s afraid. Of me, of the damned cancer.”

“Oh, Christ.” Dorothea set the coffee pot down and stared at the beautiful spread of food. “Are you sure?” But she knew. Of course Claire wouldn’t eat here or sleep here. She was scared of somehow picking up the cancer from plates and utensils Ricky had used. She was afraid of breathing air that had been tainted by his tainted lungs.

“It’s nothing new,” Ricky said. “I’ve seen it before.”

“I’m sorry, love,” she said.

“Don’t be so sorry that you let the crepes go cold. You’re right, they are delicious.”

Ricky heard Dorothea crying and took his morning juice to her room. She was sitting up in her bed and crying full-heartedly, noisily, and wetly into her hands.

Well, he thought, Frank had said this kind of thing was to be expected after what she’s been through. He wondered if there had been other outbursts. At least he could be moderately sure this wasn’t about himself.

He knocked on the door-frame. “May I come in?”

Blubbing and blotting away with the sheet-hem, she nodded.

He padded over in his pajamas and slippers and stood looking down at her. One way or another, he thought, we are managing to squeeze in nearly everything we might have had in a lifetime together, including this. My, doesn’t she look a mess, poor girl.

“What’s it about, do you know?” he said.

“I woke up drowning,” she said, blotting her eyes with two handfuls of bed sheet. “You’d think everybody died, instead of just poor Mars!”

“A glorious victory doesn’t cancel out a very well-earned, even celebratory stress reaction.” He sat down on the bed and hugged her against his side, taking care not to put pressure on her strapped ribs. There was no place within reach now to set the juice down. Ah, well. Funny thing too, how no juice he had tasted since could approach the wonderful cool sweetness of the glass that Blanca had brought him on that terrible night. “You’re making the sheets all wet.”

“Laundry tomorrow anyhow,” she said, her face muffled in his shoulder. He loved the feel of her sleepy, loose weight against him, all trusting and helpless. At least at moments like this he could feel himself in some sort of authority, a sensation increasingly hard to come by for him these days.

“I think,” he said, “you miss your ghost.”

At this, she began to laugh as well as cry and ended up gulping down hiccups.

“Careful,” he said, “or you’ll have orange juice in your hair.”

“Poor ghost,” she said, relaxing against him as the weeping fit passed. “So terrified, and trying to terrify me too, for my own good. The funny thing is, it wasn’t about the details of history at all — all that good stuff you dug up for me in the books I brought you. It was about the effect of those terrible, bloody times on a weak soul. He was frantic to justify his own cowardice, which was all over and done-with centuries ago. It was sad.”

“You think you’ve truly made peace with him, then?”

“Well, to start with I stopped trying to fob him off on you,” she said ruefully. “Once I recognized him as mine, everything changed. He was
then,
and this — all of us, those scared, angry boys — this was
now,
and I — my modern self — I could choose to do things differently. So I did, because he’d taught me what I needed to learn. That’s what I take from all this. I hope it’s enough to let the judge dry up and blow away now, like any ghost who’s made an effective delivery of his message.”

“Well, it’s the damnedest ghost story I’ve ever come across; very twisted, Dorothea, and shockingly unconventional.”

“But satisfying,” she said. Then, with a grin she added, “So how about it — the two of us could come back as Peruvian archaeologists or Chinese astronauts next time and go exploring together. What do you think?”

“Reincarnation!” He snorted.

“He was me, Ricky, as I was in a former life,” she said earnestly. “I’m sure of it. What have you got against the idea, anyway?”

“It’s such a tearoom gypsy notion,” he said irritably, pulling away from her and propping himself against the headboard of her bed. “All beads and incense and Madame Arcati shenanigans; or else a lot of pseudo-eastern mystical solemnity! And either way it’s belittling, don’t you see? So damned — convenient. Death’s a lark, not to worry, back again sucking your bottle before you can say Jack Robinson!”

She smiled. “My own feeling has always been, ‘What, you mean I have to come back again? I’ve just managed this time by the skin of my teeth, next time might be worse!’ But when I recognized him — God, Ricky, it was the creepiest moment of my life, I swear. I thought, it’s me, and oh you poor creature. Even though he didn’t look exactly like me — it was that difference that threw me at first — I didn’t have a doubt in the world.”

“How, not exactly like? Blue-jawed? Hairy-eared?”

Dorothea burrowed past him to dig a tissue out from under her pillow. “Move, come on.” She blew her nose. “The main difference was that his eyebrows were spiky and tangled, like a cartoon wizard’s.”

“A lot of old codgers have wizard-eyebrows,” Ricky said. “A barber can singe them or wax them flat for you, to make you look younger. Your ghost needed a better barber.”

“Don’t get all sniffy just because you didn’t figure it out first. Who in the world could have guessed? Our cultures don’t even recognize the phenomenon as real! What tickles me about the whole affair is the way it shows that people are too narrow in their thinking about reincarnation — trying to confine it to bloodlines and physical inheritance. When you think of it, there’s no good reason why a non-physical transfer like the reincarnation of a soul should have the least connection with your particular family tree.”

Ricky rubbed at the nape of his neck. “So we have to keep coming back and doing the same things over until we get it right, like having to endlessly repeat a grade in school? I think I’d prefer Hell, thanks.”

“Not repeat, exactly,” she said slowly. “Just — come at a similar problem from different angles until you see your way through it because you’ve grown a little older and wiser. Maybe that’s how you come to know that you have grown; and that it’s time to move on.”

“Here’s to that thought, then,” he said, lifting his juice glass to her. “I think we could all use that kind of opportunity, one way or another.” And then, because she looked so small and warm and red-nosed with weeping and because he missed her horribly across the foot-and-a-half of space between them, he put the glass down and held out his hand. “In the meantime, would you mind very much if I just lie down here and hold you for a little?”

That afternoon Dorothea did her own driving. Brillo and her knapsack of tools and supplies rode in the back of the truck. She regretted giving up the slow, thoughtful stroll to the wall, the rewards of the gradual approach, but Ricky was weaker than he had been. And there was no more reason to avoid laying a tell-tale wheel track along the arroyo.

She parked without looking at the wall, hoping that this time she wouldn’t want to throw up or scream when she did see it. Ricky climbed carefully down. He was slightly wobbly under the stronger dose of hospice mix they had him on now. They left the truck doors open so it wouldn’t turn into an oven.

It was no good, she couldn’t get used to it. She turned quickly away from the wall, her eyes wet. She had been mad to agree to show the thing. It had not been obliterated — that was beyond even a half hour of Roberto at his most violent — but it was not what it had been, what she had set out to make, and what she had made. It had been changed by the destructive hand of a stranger.

“Come here, sit down,” Ricky said. He spread the old gray blanket in the shade of the juniper. Dorothea sat, her back to the wall.

Brillo lay on his back grunting with pleasure while Ricky scratched the dog’s stomach. “When are you going to get another dog?” Ricky said. “Brillo’s lonely.”