Folly (19 page)

The downward spiral’s end came abruptly, from two more or less simultaneous directions.

Only many months later did it occur to her that she was an unlikely candidate for rape. Sheriff Escobar’s response to that tentatively offered observation, that some animals would rape anything that moved, only served to confirm how unappealing she was at the time: gaunt to the point of collapse, ill-washed, shiny-eyed with fever, racked with a cough, dressed in Alan’s baggy clothing, and wearing a backpack oozing the remains of a dozen broken eggs.

Late in the afternoon on the first Tuesday in February, as Rae stepped off the public road to slip through her gate, a big black pickup truck with oversized tires drove up behind her and braked in a rain of gravel. Two stocky young men hopped easily down from the cab, leaving both doors wide open, and strode confidently toward her, joking with each other and looming larger and larger, and only breaking into a run when she turned to flee in slow motion up the drive.

Cats with a mouse, lions with a rabbit. They seemed to be on her in two huge steps, the nightmare panting of their breath sweeping up behind her, their boisterous shouts terrifying in their merriment, and then the carnal rut of sweat and cigarettes filled her nostrils as they pounced, iron fingers yanking her off her feet, leaving a row of black circles in the skin of her shoulders and arm, the first of many. They stank of aggression and they laughed at Rae’s feeble efforts.

She fought them wildly, squirming and hitting out in desperate,
futile silence. The only sound to escape her was one brief cry when the dark-haired attacker broke her cast as he yanked away her knapsack. Their hands were all over her, wrenching and pinching and brutal; hitting them felt like slapping the sides of the redwood trees that stood quietly nearby. Only one of her blows connected with any force: The blond staggered back, clutching his nose, but struggle as she might, the brown-haired one’s arms held her fast. Then the blond was back, angry now, coarse laughter turned to foul curses. Hard fingers tore at her shirt, two arms locked around her from behind to keep her from flinging herself away, a hand, shockingly cold, thrust into the loose waistband of her jeans. She kicked out hard and the hand drew back, but only for a moment, to return with a brutal slap that snapped her head to the side. Half stunned, with the blond man’s jaw buried in her neck and his voice murmuring monotonous obscenities while the other one half-carried her toward the bend in the road, she felt the hand come back to insinuate itself between soft belly skin and fabric.

And then a shout, which Rae heard only later, in memory, or in a construct of imagination. All she knew at the time was that the hands in front stopped tearing at her clothes, and then she was flying through the air, arms spread wide, to land with a crash in the bushes.

Joseph Ayala, on his way home from work, dropped into the middle of Rae’s assault like an angel on a golden chariot, with a squeal of rubber and a furious blare of the horn of his beat-up Chevy pickup. Thirty seconds later and Rae and her pursuers would have been out of sight, but Joseph glanced up the dirt road as he passed, saw his recently bereaved neighbor struggling against two young men, and rolled down his window to shout, “I’m calling the cops, right now!” He held up a compact black shape to his ear to illustrate his threat. The two young men hesitated, then decided to cut their losses. The taller of the two threw her bodily off the road, and they ran back down the hill for their truck. Ayala hastily slapped his own vehicle into gear and retreated on up the road a bit, but Rae’s attackers did not pursue him, merely gunned the shiny black truck and accelerated away in the other direction toward the main road.

Rae, tearing herself out of the brambles, looked up to see a man laboring up the road toward her, a black leather wallet held incongruously in his hand. She snatched together her torn, bloody clothing, grabbed her dripping knapsack, and fled. Her appalled neighbor slowed
to a halt and watched her disappear. Then he ran back to his truck and drove fast for home and a real telephone, to phone 911 and gabble about the crime he had witnessed.

In the meantime, earlier that same day, Rae’s doctor had called Tamara to say that two appointments had been missed—was Rae all right? When she could not get Rae on the phone, Tamara, disgruntled and dutiful on the surface but queasy underneath with a lifetime of experience, picked up Petra from school and drove down to her mother’s house, letting herself in the gate a scant ten minutes after the sheriff and paramedics had done the same. Tamara pulled through the last grove of redwoods to find three official vehicles in her mother’s normally deserted forecourt, and a lot of people in uniforms.

In a panic, she rushed in, Petra on her heels. Both of them stopped, aghast, at the sight that met their eyes.

Sheriff Sam Escobar, six feet of broad muscle and tan uniform, was squatting down at one end of a sofa littered deep with scraps of paper, his hand held cautiously out as if to a panicked animal. Which was precisely what Rae Newborn was just then, a beaten, bloody, stinking, half-naked animal in pain, too terrified of assailants both real and imagined to do more than cower in the dark corner between the wall and the sofa, surrounded by a blizzard of her scribbled lists, hidden from the outer world by the bizarrely colorful bedsheets, whimpering in the back of her throat. The paramedics were looking at their watches, the deputy was fingering the lockstrap on his gun nervously, and Rae was hunched up into a ball, one eye on the man in the tan uniform as if judging when to bite his hand.

“Mother?” Tamara gasped. “Oh my God, Mother, not again!”

Rae gave a single sob, a sound of loss and relief, and tried to unfold her stiff limbs from their fetal curl. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but it was not to the sheriff, nor even to her daughter. “I’m sorry,” she told Petra, over and over. The child’s frightened face cut through it all—fever, terror, madness, pain: everything—and all Rae could think of was that her granddaughter should never have seen her like this. And so, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Situational psychosis” was a phrase whose source Rae could no longer remember, but one which she found infinitely reassuring, an acknowledgment that even the strongest mind could give way following a series
of blows, blows carefully calibrated and delivered by Fate. Even if she had not been the world’s most securely balanced woman before, even if she had gone through periods of grim depression and compulsive behavior and attempts at suicide, even if she had known panic attacks long before they had a name, it did not mean she was always and irrevocably crazy. It just meant that she had a weakness, no more of a moral flaw than her mother’s bad knee or her uncle’s trick back.

Situational psychosis. Clinical depression. Nervous breakdown. Shell shock—all names for the neurological fault line that gives way under severe pressure, a shattering, devastating internal earthquake that leaves raw and gaping scars across the lives of everyone in the vicinity. This time when Rae was taken into the hospital, there was no overlooking the patient’s deeper problem. This second time in the ICU, the nurses were watchful, omnipresent, and meticulous about never leaving sharp objects near her bed. This time, once the antibiotics had done their work on her lungs, when the arm was reset with a plate on the bone and the cast replaced, when the fragment of Alan’s front tooth had been taken from her abscessed shoulder and most of the gravel from her hands and knees, she was transferred not to an open ward, but to a locked one. It was there, ironically enough, that some weeks later Rae managed to pull her wits together enough to make her third suicide attempt. Unlike the earlier two, this time she was by no means halfhearted. She wanted seriously to be dead, and she went about it with a determination every bit as grim and narrow-focused as her world had become. Only because of a fluke bed check was she caught before the blood loss became too great.

That was rock bottom. After that, she gave up. The soothing, mindless routine of the hospital took over; gradually, it began to do its work. Rae’s surroundings became a place of asylum, not just a madhouse. Swaddled tightly in the security of having absolutely no choices, seesawed by drugs, and seared by shock therapy, she found that in spite of herself, the scope of her vision began slowly to expand. The inescapably dreary hopelessness of the universe thinned a fraction, Rae’s field of awareness spread to include things outside her own uncomfortable skin, and then one day she suddenly became aware of the smell of popcorn being prepared in the staff room. She didn’t even care much for popcorn, but the odor drifted down the institutional halls like an angel choir. Then came Dr. Roberta Hunt, bearing the first glimmer at the end of the tunnel, lighting up the long road home.

Only, home was a place now shut up and silent, the furniture draped with sheets against the dust (the same sheets she’d stapled up to the windows, in fact). Or was home now this island, two broken stone towers at the base of a hill that was trying to bury them?

The question really only mattered if the six bullets remained in their neat pyramidal arrangement on the corner of her desk. The definition of home would hardly matter to a dead woman.

Most of the night Rae sat at her desk, picking up the bullets and playing with them, caressing the gun’s worn rosewood stock with her thumb, loading and unloading the chambers. Most of the night she listened to the low exhalation of the kerosene lamp and the shifting conversation of the two horned owls, torn between peaceful oblivion and the look it would bring onto Petra’s face. Toward morning, undecided still, Rae lay her head down on the journal.
How different the arrangement of bullets look from this perspective
, she thought. After a while her eyelids fluttered closed. Toward morning the lamp faded, and died.

It was light outside when a sound woke her. She tried to sit up, grunted at the protest of her cramped neck and spine, and peeled herself off the desk.

The sound came again. A woman’s voice, this time, and inexplicably calling Rae’s name. A dream, Rae knew. In the dream she stumbled to her feet and pushed her way out of the unzipped tent flap, where her eyes were met by the fairy-tale vision of a family of castaways deposited on her shore, a family of three coalesced out of the mist that swirled and glowed around their remarkable figures. What a peculiar dream. The father resembled Sheriff Escobar in his tan uniform (though taller and lighter of skin), the mother looked like a fairy without wings, and the boy was neither dark frizzy Petra nor blond curly Bella, but pale-skinned and red-haired like the mother.

The dream-family’s reaction was even more startlingly bizarre than their presence: The redheaded woman took one look at Rae, snatched up the child, and curled her body over his in a gesture of urgent protectiveness. What the man did was even more hallucinatory: He dropped into a crouch, drew out a gun, and lowered it at Rae.

Letter from Rae to
Her Granddaughter

April 12

Dear Petra
,

Before I left California, I ordered a couple of books on the history of the San Juans, since it occurred to me that I ought to know something about my new home. I suppose you’ve been doing some research too—let me know what you’ve discovered.

Now that I’ve had a chance to read them, I’ve been amazed to find that, for such a nice, peaceful landscape (even the water here is ridiculously calm compared with the Pacific—I’ve known lakes with bigger waves), there’s sure been a lot of wild goings-on here. During Prohibition (have you studied that yet in school?— the period when first the state and then the U.S. as a whole outlawed alcohol, making the Temperance Union happy and lots of criminals rich) the San Juans were a hotbed of rum-running, followed by marijuana in the Sixties and I’m sure other substances today. McConnell Island, west of here, was the home of an early racketeer. To the north, a man who called himself Brother XII fleeced a congregation of wealthy people on Valdes Island by setting up a sort of New Age church called the Aquarian Foundation—in, if you can believe it, the late 1920s.

Skull Island, Victim Island, and Massacre Bay (where a local deputy lives) commemorate Native American raids. Closer to Folly, and just around the time you were born, a drug smuggler set up shop on a little island in a deserted bay, only to find six months later that
it became packed with summer tourists. Who, naturally, noticed his enterprise. The island was confiscated and is now a wildlife refuge named, appropriately enough, Justice Island. We even had an international incident on nearby San Juan: The so-called Pig War started over an English pig that strayed into an American farmer’s potato patch and got shot. That was in 1859, when the U.S. and England were arguing over the boundaries and both claimed the island. We nearly went to war over a pig, if you can believe it
.

So, how do you like your grandmother’s nice, peaceable new neighborhood?

Love
,
Gran