False Memory (22 page)

33

The Moment When Dusty Had Noticed the Napping Dog had been scissored from the earlier Moment When the Kitchen Phone Had Rung, and no matter how many times he replayed the scene in his mind, he could not tie together those severed threads of his day. One moment the dog stood, tail wagging, and the next moment the dog was waking from a short sleep. Missing minutes. Spent talking to whom? Doing what?

He was replaying the episode yet again, concentrating on the dark hole between when he’d picked up the phone and when he’d put it down, striving to bridge the memory gap, when beside him on the bed, Martie began to groan in her sleep.

“Easy. It’s okay. Easy now,” he whispered, lightly placing a hand on her shoulder, trying to gentle her out of the nightmare and into untroubled sleep again, much as he had done for Valet earlier.

She would not be gentled. As her groans became whimpers, she shuddered, kicking feebly at the entangling sheets, and as whimpers skirled into shrill cries, she thrashed, abruptly sat up, flung off the bedclothes, and shot to her feet, no longer squealing in terror, but choking, gagging thickly, on the queasy verge of regurgitation, vigorously scrubbing at her mouth with both hands, as though repulsed by something on the menu in a dream feast.

Up and moving almost as explosively as Martie, Dusty started around the bed, aware of Valet alert beyond her.

She swung toward him:
“Stay away from me!”

Such emotion rushed through her voice that Dusty halted, and the dog began to shake, the hair standing straight up along the length of his withers.

Still wiping at her mouth, Martie looked at her hands, as if she expected to see them gloved in fresh blood—and perhaps not her own. “Oh, God, oh, my God.”

Dusty moved toward her, and again she ordered him to stay away, no less fiercely than before. “You can’t trust me, you can’t get near me, don’t think you can.”

“It was only a nightmare.”

“
This
is the nightmare.”

“Martie—”

Convulsively, she bent forward, gagging on the memory of the dream, then letting out a miserable groan of disgust and anguish.

Despite her warning, Dusty went to her, and when he touched her, she recoiled violently, shoving him away. “Don’t
trust
me! Don’t, for Christ’s sake, don’t.”

Rather than step around him, she scrambled monkey-like across the disheveled bed, bounded off the other side, and hurried into the adjoining bathroom.

A short sharp bleat escaped the dog, a plucked-wire sound that twanged through Dusty and struck in him a fear that he had not known before.

Seeing her like this a second time was more terrifying than the first episode. Once could be an aberration. Twice was a pattern. In patterns could be seen the future.

He went after Martie and found her at the bathroom sink. The cold water gushed into the basin. The door of the medicine cabinet, which had been open, was swinging shut of its own accord.

“It must’ve been worse than usual this time,” he said.

“What?”

“The nightmare.”

“It wasn’t the same one, nothing as pleasant as the Leaf Man,” she said, but clearly she had no intention of elaborating.

She popped the cap off a bottle of an effective nonprescription sleeping aid that they rarely used. A slurry of blue caplets spilled into her cupped left hand.

At first, Dusty thought she was intending to overdose, which was ridiculous, because even a full bottle probably wouldn’t kill her—and, anyway, she must know that he would knock them out of her hand before she could swallow so many.

But then she let most of the pills rattle back into the bottle. Three were left on her palm.

“Two’s the maximum dosage,” he said.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the maximum dosage. I want to be out cold. I’ve got to sleep, got to rest, but I’m
not
going to go through another dream like that, not another one like that.”

Her black hair was damp with sweat and tangled like the crowning snakes of whatever Gorgon she had encountered in her dream. The pills were to vanquish monsters.

Water slopped into the drinking glass, and she chased the three caplets with a long swallow.

At her side, Dusty didn’t interfere. Three pills didn’t warrant paramedics and a stomach pump, and if she was a little groggy in the morning, she might be somewhat less anxious, as well.

He saw no point in suggesting that deeper slumber might not be as dreamless as she expected. Even if she slept in the scaly arms of nightmares, she would be more rested in the morning than if she didn’t sleep at all.

As she lowered the glass from her lips, Martie caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her reflection strummed a shiver from her, which the cold water had been unable to induce.

As winter freezes the blueness out of a pond, so fear had frozen much of the color out of Martie. Face as pale as ice. Lips less pink than they were mallow-purple, with dry peels of zinc-gray skin that had been rubbed loose by her scrubbing hands.

“Oh, God, look what I am,” she said, “look what I
am.
”

Dusty knew that she was not referring to her damp and tangled hair or to her blanched features, but to something hateful that she imagined she saw in the depths of her blue eyes.

Splashing out the last of its contents, the glass arced back in her hand, but Dusty seized it before she could throw it at the mirror, tore it from her clutching fingers as water spattered on the tile floor.

At his touch, she erupted away from him with such alarm that she crashed into the bathroom wall hard enough to rattle the shower door in its frame.

“Don’t get near me! For God’s sake, don’t you realize what I could do, all the things I could
do?
”

Half-nauseated by worry, he said, “Martie, I’m not afraid of you.”

“How far is it from a kiss to a bite?” she asked, her voice hoarse and ragged with dread.

“What?”

“Not far from a kiss to a bite, your tongue in my mouth.”

“Martie, please—”

“A kiss to a bite. So easy to tear off your lips. How do you know I couldn’t? How do you know I wouldn’t?”

If she hadn’t already reached a full-blown panic attack, she was running downhill toward one, and Dusty didn’t know how to stop her, or even how to slow her.

“Look at my hands,” she demanded. “These fingernails. Acrylic nails. Why do you think I couldn’t blind you with them? You think I couldn’t gouge out your eyes?”

“Martie. This isn’t—”

“There’s something in me I never saw before, something that scares the shit out of me, and it could do something terrible, it really could, it could make me blind you. For your own good, you better see it, too, and you better be afraid of it.”

Tidal emotion swept through Dusty, terrible pity and fierce love, crosscurrents and rips.

He reached for Martie, and she squeezed past him, out of the bathroom. She slammed the door between them.

When he followed her into the bedroom, he found her at his open closet. She was riffling through his shirts, rattling the hangers on the metal pole, searching for something.

The tie rack. Most of the rack pegs were empty. He owned only four neckties.

She pulled a plain black tie and a red-and-blue striped number from the closet and held them out to Dusty. “Tie me.”

“What? No. Good God, Martie.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I. No.”

“Ankles together, wrists together,” she said urgently.

“No.”

Valet was sitting up in his bed, twitchy eyebrows punctuating a series of worried expressions as his attention bounced from Martie to Dusty to Martie.

She said, “So if I go psycho, total blood nuts, during the night—”

Dusty tried to be firm but calm, hoping that his example would settle her. “Please, stop it.”

“—total blood nuts, then I’ll have to get loose before I can screw up anybody. And when I’m trying to get loose, that’ll wake you if you’ve fallen asleep.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

His feigned calm didn’t infect her, and in fact words gushed out of her in an ever more feverish stream: “All right, okay, maybe you’re not afraid, even if you should be, maybe you’re not,
but I am.
I
am
afraid of me, Dusty, afraid of what the hell I might do to you or to somebody else when I’m having a fit, some crazy seizure, afraid of what I might do to
myself.
I don’t know what’s happening here, to me, it’s weirder than
The Exorcist
even if I’m not levitating and my head isn’t spinning around. If I managed to get my hands on a knife at the wrong time, or your pistol, when I’m in this crazy mood, then I’d use it on myself, I know I would. I feel this sick desire in here”—she rapped her stomach with a fist—“this evil, this worm of a thing curled inside me, whispering to me about knives and guns and hammers.”

Dusty shook his head.

Martie sat on the bed and began cinching her ankles together with one of the neckties, but after a moment she stopped, frustrated. “Damn it, I don’t know knots the way you do. You’ve got to help me with this.”

“One of those pills usually does the job. You took three. You don’t need to be tied.”

“I’m not going to trust pills, not pills alone, no way. Either you help me with this, or I’ll puke up the pills, stick a finger down my throat and puke ’em right now.”

Reason wasn’t going to sway her. She was as high on fear as Skeet on his drug cocktail, and hardly more rational than the kid had been on the Sorensons’ roof.

Sitting in an ineffective tangle of ties, sweating, shaking, she began to cry. “Please, baby, please. Please help me. I’ve got to sleep, I’m so tired, I need some rest, or I’m going to go bugshit. I need some
peace,
and I’m not going to have any peace if you don’t help me. Help me. Please.”

Tears moved him as fury couldn’t.

When he went to her, she lay back on the bed and covered her face with her hands, as though ashamed of the helplessness to which fear had reduced her.

Dusty trembled as he bound her ankles together.

“Tighter,” she said through her mask of hands.

Although he obliged, he didn’t draw the knots as tight as she would have preferred. The thought of hurting her, even inadvertently, was more than he could bear.

She held her clasped hands toward him.

Using the black necktie, Dusty hitched wrist to wrist tightly enough to secure her until morning, but he was careful not to cut off her circulation.

As he bound her, she lay with her eyes shut, head turned to one side and away from him, perhaps because she was mortified by the disabling intensity of her fear, perhaps because she was embarrassed by her disheveled appearance. Perhaps. But Dusty suspected that she was trying to hide her face largely because she equated tears with weakness.

The daughter of Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse—who had been a genuine war hero, as well as a hero of another kind more than once in the years following the war—was determined to live up to the legacy of honor and courage she had inherited. Of course, life as a young wife and a video-game designer in a balmy California coastal town didn’t provide her with frequent opportunities for heroics. This was a good thing, not a reason to move to a perpetual cauldron of violence like the Balkans or Rwanda, or the set of the
Jerry Springer Show.
But living in peace and plenty, she could honor her father’s memory only through the small heroics of daily life: by doing her job well and paying her way in the world, by commitment to her marriage in good times and in bad, by giving all possible support to her friends, by having true compassion for life’s walking wounded, like Skeet, while living with honesty and truth-fulness and enough self-respect to avoid becoming one of them. These small heroics, never acknowledged with awards and stirring marches, are the fuel and the lubrication that keep the machine of civilization humming, and in a world rife with temptations to be self-indulgent, self-centered, and self-satisfied, there are surprisingly more small heroes than might be expected. When you stood in the shadow of great heroics, however, as Martie did, then merely living a decent life—lifting others by your example and by your acts of kindness—might make you feel inadequate; and maybe tears, even in moments of extreme tribulation, might seem to be a betrayal of your father’s legacy.

All this Dusty understood, but he could say none of it to Martie now, or perhaps ever, because to speak of it would be to say that he recognized her deepest vulnerabilities, which would imply a pity that robbed her of some measure of dignity, as pity always does. She knew what he knew, and she knew that he knew it; but love grows deeper and stronger when we have both the wisdom to say what must be said
and
the wisdom to know what never needs to be put into words.

So Dusty knotted the black tie with formal, solemn silence.

When Martie was securely tied, she turned onto her side, closed eyes still damming a lake of tears, and as she turned, Valet padded to the bed, craned his neck, and licked her face.

The sob that she had been repressing broke from her now, but it was only half a sob, because it was also half a laugh, and then another followed that was more laugh than sob. “My furry-faced baby boy. You knew your poor mama needed a kiss, didn’t you, sweet thing?”

“Or is it the lingering aroma of my truly fine lasagna on your breath?” Dusty wondered, hoping to provide a little oxygen to make this welcome, bright moment burn a little longer.

“Lasagna or pure doggy love,” Martie said, “doesn’t matter to me. I know my baby boy loves me.”

“So does your big boy,” Dusty said.

At last she turned her head to look at him. “That’s what kept me sane today. I need what we’ve got.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and held her bound hands.

After a while her eyes fell shut under a weight of weariness and patent medicine.

Dusty glanced at the nightstand clock, which reminded him about the issue of missing time. “Dr. Yen Lo.”

Without opening her eyes, Martie said thickly, “Who?”

“Dr. Yen Lo. You’ve never heard of him?”

“No.”