Sleepwalk (13 page)

Frank knew the answer, or at least most of it. But aside from the loss of his mother, Jed had weathered more than his fair share of fights over the years—practically all of them having to do with his Kokatí heritage—and had finally built a shell around himself that told people not to mess with him, that warned them he would strike back if pushed too far. Frank supposed the shell Jed had built served a purpose, protecting the boy from things he didn’t want to deal with. But now he was almost grown, and in danger of wrecking his life. Frank had seen too many kids like Jed—bright but angry—just give up and drift into a job on the oil field or at the refinery, spending their evenings drinking too much in the bar at the café. And that wasn’t what he wanted for Jed. Jed was going to go to college, and get out of Borrego, and do more with his life than he had done with his own. Unless Jed gave in to his image, and decided going to school was no longer cool.

“Hope they’re not planning to take the class pictures today,” Frank said mildly, pushing the newspaper aside.

Instantly, Jed’s eyes began to smolder, as he understood what his father was really saying. “You don’t like the way I look?” he demanded.

“I didn’t say that,” Frank countered. “It’s just that on the first day of school—”

Jed cut him off. “What’s the big deal about the first day of school?” he pressed. “It’s just another day of sitting around listening to a bunch of dull teachers say dull things—”

“That’s enough!” The sharpness in Frank’s voice made Jed fall silent, and the boy slouched low in his
chair. “I know what you think about school, and I’m tired of hearing it.”

“I do okay,” Jed muttered. “And I don’t notice how not finishing school hurt you.”

Frank’s eyes fixed on Jed. “You think being a shift foreman at the refinery is a big deal? If I’d paid attention when I was your age, I could be managing the whole thing.”

“Sure,” Jed shot back, his voice dark. “And Mr. Moreland would still own the whole thing. Come on, Dad! I don’t care if you’d gotten every goddamn degree they can give you—you’d still be working for Max Moreland. Nothing ever changes—if you don’t start out rich, you don’t get rich. So why the hell should I keep going to school? What’s the big deal if I graduate or not? I’m going to wind up working in the refinery, just like you! In fact,” he added, shoving his chair back and standing up, “maybe I’ll do it today. Maybe instead of going to school, I’ll go down to the company office and get a job!”

So that’s what it’s all about, Frank thought. That’s what he hasn’t been talking about. He looked at Jed and knew the boy was waiting for him to explode, waiting for him to start yelling. Controlling himself, he leaned back and shrugged. “Well, if that’s what you want to do, there isn’t much I can do to stop you. You’re sixteen—there’s no law that says you have to go to school.” Jed’s eyes flickered with uncertainty. “I can save you a little time, though—there aren’t any jobs at the company. The only reason I’m still working is seniority. So you’d better start checking with some of the stores—maybe they can use some help.” He glanced up at the calendar on the wall. “Let’s see … I guess I can give you a week or ten days, so what do you say we start the rent
on the fifteenth? That should give you time to find a job.”

Jed blinked. “Rent?” he asked, his voice suddenly hollow. “What are you talking about?”

Frank shrugged again, his arms spreading in a helpless gesture. “What do you expect? If you’re going to school, I pay the bills. If you’re not, you pay your share.” He watched Jed carefully and could almost see the thoughts going through his son’s mind, see him calculating how much money he might earn bagging groceries at the market or clerking in the lumberyard. At last Jed finished his coffee, then stood up, his face a mask of belligerence.

“Maybe I’ll do it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll start looking around, and see what kind of job I can find.”

Frank nodded affably. “Sounds good to me.” He picked up the paper again and pretended to read, but he kept one eye on Jed, not missing the fact that when Jed went out the back door a few minutes later, he was carrying his book bag.

Stuart Beckwith, the high school principal, smiled thinly as Judith Sheffield came into his office. He remembered her well—the blond, blue-eyed girl who always sat in the front row of his social studies class and asked too many questions. And now here she was, back in Borrego, once more looking at him with those bright blue eyes, obviously just as inquisitive as ever. He pushed a stack of folders across the desk, then nervously ran his right hand over his nearly bald pate as if pushing back a lock of hair that had long since disappeared. “So,” he said as she took the chair opposite him and
began quickly thumbing through the folders, “how does it feel to be back home?”

Judith shrugged, the nervousness she had been feeling earlier that morning dissolving. Ten years ago, when she’d been a teenager, she’d always thought of Beckwith as mean, but now she could see that what had once seemed like petty spitefulness was actually nothing more than weakness. She knew the type perfectly from Los Angeles—the sort of administrator whose prime rule was “don’t rock the boat.”

She, of course, had always been a boat-rocker, and had no intention of changing. Still, she didn’t want to alienate Beckwith on her very first day on the job. “It’s interesting,” she said carefully. “Actually, the town hasn’t changed much. In fact,” she added without thinking, “it doesn’t even look like it’s been painted since I left.” She immediately regretted her words, as a defensive tightening pinched Beckwith’s sallow face. “I didn’t mean—” she began apologetically, but to her surprise, he cut her off.

“Of course you meant it,” he said. Judith felt herself reddening slightly, and an uncomfortable silence filled the room until, as if he’d come to a decision, Beckwith leaned forward and rested his forearms on the top of the desk. “I’m afraid I seem to be getting off on the wrong foot, don’t I? But I have to confess that I’m still at a bit of a loss. Losing Reba Tucker was very upsetting, and …” He paused then, his lips pursing into what struck Judith as a phony smile. “And I have to confess,” he went on, “that having one of my own students return as one of my teachers is making me feel just a little old.”

Judith didn’t know whether she was expected to laugh, but decided not to. “I was very sorry to hear about Mrs. Tucker,” she said, choosing to ignore
Beckwith’s feeble joke. “She always seemed so—well, strong, I guess.”

Beckwith’s head bobbed and his expression took on a too mournful cast. “We all thought she was,” he said. “And it seemed to come on her quite suddenly. She was teaching summer school, and everything seemed to be fine at first. And then she began to have strange moods, and finally, well …” His voice trailed off and he made a helpless gesture, as if there were really nothing else to say.

Judith tensed. Rita Moreland had distinctly said that Mrs. Tucker had suffered a stroke, and Greg, Reba’s doctor, had concurred. But Beckwith’s implication was something else entirely. “You mean she had some sort of breakdown?”

Beckwith hesitated, then sighed. “I suppose that’s what one would have to call it, yes,” he said. “Of course, young Greg Moreland says it was a stroke, but it seems to me it was a lot more than that. In the weeks before the … episode, she seemed to get listless.” He clucked almost like a ruffled hen. “Not like Reba. Not like herself at all.” Pointedly, he glanced at his watch, then pushed another folder toward Judith. “At any rate, these are her lesson plans. She used the same ones every year, and I’m sure she’d have no problem with your using them too.”

Judith made no move to pick up the folder. “That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but as it happens, I’ve got my own lesson plans. As I’m sure you know, I’ve been teaching in L.A. for the last couple of years, and I think it might be easier for me to do what I know haw to do than try to turn myself into Mrs. Tucker.”

Beckwith leaned back, his hands folded over his stomach. His lips tightened in a show of disapproval that
made Judith suddenly feel as if she had been undergoing some kind of oral exam she’d just flunked. Gathering the folders that contained the records of her homeroom students into a neat stack, she stood up. “If I’m going to go through these before classes begin, I’d better be going,” she said.

Beckwith seemed about to let her go without comment, but as if changing his mind, he stood as she turned toward the door and smiled at her, then came around his desk to shake her hand. “Let me welcome you back to Borrego,” he said. “I have to confess, I had terrible misgivings about your coming here. I was afraid you might want to come in and start changing everything, modernizing everything, that sort of thing. But we don’t have the money to do much, and you know we’re just a little backwater high school in the middle of nowhere. If you can deal with that, then I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.”

Judith hesitated only a moment before taking Beckwith’s extended hand. Yet as she left his office she wondered if she had, after all, made the right decision in returning to Borrego and taking this job. The interview had been odd, and Beckwith, once her least favorite teacher, had not become any more appealing now that he was principal of Borrego High. But what troubled her most, what would not leave her mind as she hurried through the building to find her classroom, was his strange description of what had happened to Reba Tucker.

What had he meant? Had what happened to Mrs. Tucker been something other than a stroke?

*  *  *

The house sat at the top of a small rise on the floor of Mordida Canyon, nestled almost invisibly into a grove of cottonwoods. Even during the hottest part of the day, it was always cool here, and as the woman emerged from the building, she felt a slight chill. The sun had moved far enough across the sky so that even without the trees, the house would still be lying in shadows, and it occurred to her—not for the first time—that it was an odd place for a rehabilitation center. How was anyone supposed to get well when they never got any sunlight? Still, the spot was beautiful, and the pay was good, and God knew, the work was simple enough.

She balanced the tray on one raised knee and quickly pushed the door to the little cabin open. There were no lights on, and she groped for the switch, wondering, not for the first time, how people could stand to sit all day in the dark.

Not that this newest patient could do much about it, she reminded herself.

The lights came on, and the woman looked over at the bed.

There she was, sitting by the window, staring out at the canyon just as Reba Tucker had been doing an hour ago, the last time she’d looked in on her.

“Here’s lunch,” the attendant said, summoning up a cheeriness she knew sounded false, but not really worrying about it, since she wasn’t at all certain the woman even heard her.

Stroke victim, was what Dr. Moreland called her.

Just plain old senile, the woman thought.

Still, she had a job to do. She set the tray on the rolling table, then pushed the table around so it swung over the chair in which the woman sat. Finally she eased the patient around so she was no longer staring
blankly out the window, and shoved an extra pillow behind her back.

Lifting the cover off the single dish on the luncheon tray, the attendant plunged a spoon into the soft grayish mush, then brought it close to the patient’s lips.

“Come on, Mrs. Tucker,” she crooned. “We have to eat, don’t we? We don’t want to starve to death.”

The spoon touched Reba Tucker’s lips, and, as always, they parted just enough for the attendant to slide the pablum into her mouth.

The woman waited a moment, until she felt Mrs. Tucker’s tongue wrap itself around the spoon, removing the food from it so that it could slip down her throat. Then she scooped up a second serving …

Slowly, concentrating the small part of her mind that still functioned on the task at hand, Reba Tucker managed to swallow the gruel.

Sometimes, as she did now, she wished she could bring herself to speak. Indeed, when she was alone, she sometimes practiced it, moving her tongue slowly, struggling to form the sounds that had once been so natural to her.

She knew the attendant didn’t think she could talk, didn’t even think she could hear.

And that was fine with Reba.

Let them all think she couldn’t hear, and couldn’t talk.

She still didn’t know who they were, or even where she was.

All she remembered was waking up and finding herself here.

Except she didn’t know where “here” was or what had happened to her.

Panic had set in, and she’d screamed and screamed,
but mercifully, she didn’t know how long the screaming had lasted, for she no longer had any more sense of time than of place.

There was darkness, and there was light.

And there were the nightmares.

Perhaps, she thought in that tiny corner of her mind that still seemed to work now and then, she should stop eating and let herself starve to death.

She wasn’t sure, because sometimes, in those fleeting moments when she could think at all, she thought she must already have died and gone to Hell.

But there wasn’t any point to dying again, and besides, if she wasn’t dead already, she knew they wouldn’t let her die.

If they let her die, they couldn’t give her the nightmares anymore.

For Reba Tucker, that was what life had become.

Waiting for the nightmares.

“Will you please hurry?” Gina Alvarez pleaded, though she knew her words would fall on deaf ears. As far as Jed Arnold was concerned, it was definitely not cool to hurry on the way to a class. The whole idea, in fact, was to look as though you didn’t care whether you got there or not. Now she looked up at Jed’s face to see his incredible blue eyes twinkling happily at her. She knew he was testing her, knew he was waiting to see if she’d wait for him or hurry off by herself so she wouldn’t be late to class. She wrestled with herself, part of her wanting to leave him standing there lounging against his locker, idly passing time with his friends. She didn’t even like his friends—they seemed to her like a bunch of jerks who didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives.