Erased From Memory (31 page)

“There’s a bucketful of those things upstairs in the museum in a glass case. Skinny and flexible. One of them without its arrowhead would be perfect for jabbing into somebody’s brain.”

I glance sidewise at Cherie. Her crisp bright hair and smooth pink suit identify her: elegant, innocent. Not like a sheriff or a murder expert. Or a ghoul. She catches my eye and winks.

 
 
Later that day, after tea, we are all in the meadow and heading down to look at the trains.

Cherie has organized the expedition. I’ve told her that my dad will probably be disappointed since the trains he really, truly loved were the ones near the museum. “He liked them because they had those graffiti that he thought were the ankh. You know, that symbol of life.”

“Yes, dear, I know.”

“He’s going to be disappointed. These won’t be as good. They don’t have that.”

Cherie squeezes my arm. “Just you wait, dear one. These trains are every bit as good.”

 
 
It is a bright coastal day, the fog cleared, the air a translucent mixture of blue and white in pointillist dots, the ocean crashing off to our left, the Manor garden at its best with its surreal mix of palm trees, moss, and succulents bright, dew-spangled. We walk in a ragged parade, Cherie with an arm looped around my neck, Susie and Mrs. La Salle volleying a discussion about Susie’s store. (Mrs. L. S. says books would be a good addition to Susie’s stock; organic health books are small in size and sell well.) My father alternates being first or last in our parade. He negotiates among us now, faster than anybody, like a puppy, waving a small bulbous object. “An Engleman’s prickly pear, I think. Carla, do you agree? Oh, I had to be careful in picking it. But I don’t think it’s ripe.”

“Darlin’,” Cherie says in a half-whisper in my ear, “what do you want to do now?”

“Now?” I ask, alarmed. No, Cherie doesn’t mean in the next ten minutes; she means, as I had feared, with the rest of my life. What business is it of yours, Miss Busybody; why are you asking? “I haven’t a frigging clue.”

“Because”—she puts out a hand to stop me from saying
no
before she’s finished—“because, darlin’, I am going to have to get rid of my two Klingons; I mean those two idiot deputies I inherited from Slimeball, and I am scouting around for replacements, and, well, I look at you and you are so smart and you did so well with all that weird mess at that museum, and . . . You get my drift.”

It takes me a minute to recover. “Cherie, if you’re propositioning me, I have no experience and no training and no skills, I was totally vague at the museum, and I don’t know spit about the law, I’m one hundred percent unsuited; I’ve got the wrong personality, for God’s sake . . .”

“And”—Cherie’s arm, looped around my neck, squeezes my windpipe and makes me choke—“you are still mad at me for that Rob thing, for which I don’t blame you, but believe me, that will pass, and . . . yes, darling Crocodile”—to my father—“I been noticing that flower, it is a gorgeous shade of yellow; how very percipient of you to choose it.”

One of the things that I have to appreciate about Cherie is that she doesn’t talk down to my dad.

“And,” she finishes by squeezing me again, “I am not asking for an answer now, jus’ run it up on your flagpole and see if anybody has an erection, or whatever. Think about it . . .

“Darling Croc, come and walk with me now.” She finishes our conversation by holding out a hand to him.

 
 
The terrain is all downhill toward the trains. I resist the thought that, like so many things in life, the route will be uphill coming back. This is the same railroad line that goes by the museum, but twenty miles farther north; these tracks are cuddled into a depression that skirts the edge of the ocean. They are weedy but not unused; there is a line of cars parked on a second track, a couple of red ones, some yellow cars, a brown boxcar that announces its affiliation with CANADA, LAND OF CONTRASTS.

We stop to admire. Railroads always remind me of old movies.

“Oh,” says my father, “a railroad, though not as nice as the museum one. I miss my museum. Do you think this line goes all the way in to Alexandria? That would be a good thing. I am glad to see a line which goes that far, although it isn’t as nice as the railroad near the museum, which was my favorite and which I want to get back to; it had . . .” He has started walking along the track. And in a minute he calls from down in the hollow, “Oh, yes. Oh, here at the end. Yes, oh, I am so glad. Yes, there is one.”

And at the end of the chain of cars, slightly separated by grass and a hand car, is a white refrigerator container with some blue scribbles on its side. There isn’t as much graffiti as on the museum cars, not as complex nor as intertwined. But there are indeed several very clear ankhs.

“Thank God they didn’t take it away since this morning,” Cherie murmurs in my ear. “I was so afraid they would. That’s the kind of thing that always happens.”

By which she advertises, at least to me, that she was out here earlier today using blue spray paint.

“You see, darling Croc,” she calls down to him, “this railroad near your Manor is just as good as the museum one.”

My father doesn’t answer. He is too busy casing out the car and making approving noises.

 
 
Cherie reminds me, again
sotto voce
in my ear, that I should think seriously about her proposition and that, in addition, things are pretty good for me now; I have my choice of two very attractive boyfriends. “Or men friends. I just hate that term
boyfriend
.”

“If you mean Scott for one of them, he’s not eligible.”

“Darlin’, one of my very best men friends was in jail. That gives a lady a sense of security. And as for Rob. Well. He is real sorry he was . . . well, he’s sorry he flirted with me. It was just for a while. After all.”

 
 
I’m silent because I’m watching my father scope the refrigerator car. He has taken Mrs. La Salle’s hand and is giving a lecture on the ankh. “This is a very clear example,” he says. “In some ways it is a better ankh than the one on the museum cars. As you know, it is a symbol of the life-giving powers of air and water; it exists in”—he sweeps his arm in a semicircle to indicate something copious and diffuse—“everything, the grass, foliage, earth, ocean, atmosphere around us—in all of it . . . Daughter,” he calls up after a minute, “what am I trying to say?”

“It’s life on earth, Daddy,” I shout down.

And he picks up, after a minute, “Yes, of course it is. Yes, life on earth.

“
Life
, as I said. Life in this world. What could be better?”

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“She’s not going to die,” I say.

My friend Cherie, the Del Oro County sheriff, says, “Sugar, I wouldn’t count on that.”

“No, she’s not going to.” I hear myself getting passionate about it.

I especially don’t want this pale, clean-profiled young woman to die because she looks, in spite of her fall, unmarked and brave, like the priestess in my dad’s
Egyptian Book of the Dead
who is marching solemnly off to the next world. You want to follow her and bring her back. And also because it seems that she’s a friend of my father’s. He is sitting beside her holding her hand.

“Make safe your shore,” he says to her.

She has just fallen seventeen feet into a creek. I saw her fall. She landed badly.

She opens her eyes, which are a startling blue, and looks at my dad. Blood starts coming out of her ears.

“My baby,” she says. “My indigo baby.”

“Give us Lightland,” says my father.

“Lightland.” She closes her eyes. “Homeland. Coming forth by day.”

 
I am here because of a phone call from my dad. This was a couple of hours ago and he was using his new cell phone.

“Carla, perhaps we should be troubled,” he says. “I am here at Stanton’s Mill. You know about Stanton’s Mill. Where Susie has a house now. And these interesting babies are disappearing.”

Daddy’s cell phone is a gift from our loving friend Susie, and Daddy is now at Susie’s new vacation house. My father, who has early-stage Alzheimer’s, likes using his phone, although he is insecure about its operation. It tends to quit on him, even more than other cell phones do on the rest of us.

Susie is suddenly rich. That’s her definition of it. “Oh, I just knew that Squeegee was basically a good person. And now he has gone on into higher things and has left me his house.”

Squeegee was Susie’s ex-husband, who drifted off many years ago to join a band. The house is a one-room cottage in Stanton’s Mill, which is the town behind Conestoga.

And my dad is staying there for a few days with Susie. “The energy is very good here in Stanton’s Mill,” she says. “It will be healing for darling Edward.”

Susie still has her organic-food store in Berkeley. She comes to Stanton’s Mill for weekends.

“What’s this about babies disappearing?” I ask my dad now, loudly enough that Susie overhears and takes over the phone. “Oh, Carla, it is so upsetting. It’s the indigo babies, those wonderful, talented children. And they are vanishing, one by one. Cherie will be around to get you.” After which she severs the connection and I can’t get it back.

 
Cherie appears twenty minutes later. Cherie Ghent is our new sheriff in Del Oro County. She is a tiny fashion-model type, with curly blond hair, elegant clothes, and turquoise eyes. She doesn’t look like a sheriff.

She is also my part-time boss, because I also am part of the sheriff’s department in Del Oro County. I am a part-time deputy sheriff. I am quite certain you have never heard of such a thing as a part-time deputy sheriff, but I am not the only one in California. Cherie pointed this out to me when she persuaded me to take the job. “There are two others,” she said, “both women; now what does that tell you about the assignment of sexual roles in our society? But if that’s the only way I can get you, sugarbell, I welcome it.” Cherie has a heavy Southern accent; you must imagine anything she says slurred and softened and huskied up.

She is a lawyer as well as a sheriff, and she was our lawyer briefly once. I liked her especially because she treated my dad with respect. Daddy’s Alzheimer’s is still not very bad.

Then Cherie and I had a falling-out about the fact that she stole my boyfriend. This became history when their affair ended, but it’s only partly history. Partly it’s alive and is one of the things I think about when my batteries get low.

“What’s this about babies?” I greet Cherie now. She wears a pale green pantsuit and is balancing deftly on spike-heeled slingback sandals, with six strings of crystal beads swinging across her small, upright bosom.

I am at my Green Beach Manor desk with a stack of relatives’ complaints. My other job, my supposedly full-time one, is as assistant director of Green Beach Manor, the elegant senior residence where my dad usually lives, complaints are one of my specialties.

And I have yet another job, a third one, actually my major occupation, a full-time assignment of worrying about my dad. He is getting older. He and his Alzheimer’s are at the brink, almost ready to lose it, wobbling, the full, dark curtain of forgetting spreading dust across his sweet life. I worry about him a lot.

“Give that stack of crap you’re reading to somebody else and come along with me,” Cherie says. “Believe me, darlin’, this is serious.” She can’t pronounce the word
darling
, among other things. “I mean, it is not just babies, dear heart; I am not that intensely into babies. And this baby problem here is questionable. But the atmosphere is way peculiar. Come on. Get your mittens.”

In spite of how she looks and sounds, Cherie is very bright.

It’s an early California spring day. The waxy buds are popping out on the magnolia trees; the jonquils are exploding underfoot; the ocean fog has cleared off; and the air is full of pointillistic dots of light. I’m happy to surrender my pile of irritations and follow Cherie out to her sheriff’s vehicle, which is black with silver wheels.

“So,” she says. “This is getting serious. You’ll see. It isn’t just the nonsense about those purple babies.”

She is referring to the indigo children, who have hit Stanton’s Mill big time. An indigo baby analyst has arrived in town and has been interviewing babies to decide which ones qualify. Susie has heard a lot about this and is enchanted by the idea. “These wonderful, beautiful kids.” Some of them, she thinks, are from another life. Or another planet. “Extraordinarily gifted. More than most children. Of course you, Carla, were special . . . And so was Rob . . .” She gets herself back on track. “Some people claim that they have attention deficit, but that is just envy. They are going to reclaim our world. Make it safe for all of us. And I learned about it
here
. Berkeley has become so corporate, people never talk about these things. Oh, I am so grateful to dear Squeegee. Remembering me after all those years.”

My personal opinion, from the rumors I’ve heard about Susie’s ex, is that he simply forgot to change his will. The big mystery is how he happened to have a will at all.

“You can laugh all you like”—Cherie is hanging one elbow out the window as we drive down the coast road “but this stuff is going to be serious. And, Carla, I need you.”

“Okay, all right, you’ve got me.” The Manor has been unusually repetitive lately.

“So, tell me,” I say, “what gives?”

“Well, you know, this Anneliese Wertiger came into town and moved in with Susie’s next-door neighbor . . .”

“Scope.” People in Stanton’s Mill tend to have odd nicknames. I know the town pretty well from having visited Susie there.

“Right. And she set up shop right away. Put a sign up outside. Something about healings. Or constructivist consultations. Or something. Tell me, Carla darlin’, we got plenty a nuts in Berkeley but these ones seem more time-warped. Is it something in the water? The redwoods?”