The Enchanted (6 page)

And then one day I was eighteen and they said, “Okay, time to leave.”

It turned out I had been a ward of the state. Once I turned eighteen, no one was paying for my keep. They gave me a folder with my papers and showed me to the front door. I stepped under that carved mantel and walked outside down a long lane lined with trees. It was windy and cold that day. A gardener pointed the way to the city.

The wind came down and stole the papers from my hands, and I opened my palms and let them go.

I stopped at the first home I saw, a little ranch with a clothesline in the back and a window with a fluttering white curtain.

I
t takes a week for the lady to locate the retired Dr. Hammond of Sawmill Falls. She feels the clock ticking and York smiling as time passes with no progress. Every day that passes with no results, he has told her with his notched smile, is like a dime in the bank for his death.

His execution date is circled in red on her calendar. She picked up the case in May; already it is closing in on June.

Dr. Hammond of Sawmill Falls has retired to a nameless bedroom community on the outskirts of the city where she lives. The homes all look alike, perched in orderly formations on the hillsides, their dying yards spackled with forgotten shrubs.

He is not happy to see her. Fortunately, she doesn't care.

She had worried the doctor was dead, but no, he is older than Aunt Beth and tottering. He totters into the dark living room with an impatient air. He totters to his liquor cabinet. He totters to get a clean glass, which is really spotted. He totters around his house, which is like a dollhouse for saints. He has a nativity scene on the mantel. The objects people put out for viewing in their homes fascinate her.

She has come to believe that the homes of sad or hateful people smell different. When people have sadness or hate inside them, it comes out in a miasma. Dr. Hammond's house smells like a form of slow poison has been hanging in the air for years. She has a sudden conviction that if she lifted all the furniture in his house, she would find layers of squished black bugs underneath.

Right away he says he knows nothing. He remembers nothing. He could guest-star on
Hogan's Heroes
as the bumbling know-nothing Sergeant Schultz.

“I don't know that woman,” he says again.

She wonders if getting affidavits from Auntie Beth about her damaged sister and her little son will be enough to convince the judges to spare York's life, especially when they know he wants to die. No. For a case like this, she needs the brass ring—something so irreversibly altering that it cannot be denied for post-conviction relief.

“Nope, never heard of her,” he says, and lifts his drink with a shaky hand.

You liar, she thinks. She wants to kick him in his skinny shanks. She wants to tear the nativity scene off the polished mantel and throw it in his lame fake fireplace. Instead, she turns on her empathy high beam. You are a water bug on the surface of life, Dr. Hammond, she thinks, and I am the fish coming to feed.

“It must have been hard to be the town doctor,” she says in a soft voice.

“Come again?”

“So many people coming to you with so many problems.” She makes her eyes soft. “I bet a lot of them were, you know, woods folk. Not too bright. And you were a
doctor
.”

His eyes are uncertain. “I don't remember the lady you talked about.”

“Of course not. I think I was wrong about her, wrong name, sorry, no big deal. I obviously got the wrong person.” She is stepping back in her tracks oh so carefully. “I know what it's like to be the only qualified person in a place. The only one who understands.”

She thinks, What a lie. You barely graduated from high school and slogged through community college having no idea of what you would become, just knowing you had to find it. You fell into this work because you know what it is like to live like Shirley, to live like York, to live like all the others and not like this man.

And yet in the moment, it is always true. It is true because her own childhood taught her how to pretend to be like the others just to survive, all the while protecting her pure, untouched core.

He has met her eyes with his blood-mapped own. “It was hard,” he agrees. “I had degrees, you know. I was a
doctor.
”

She smiles and relaxes into her chair. She is going on a journey to the past. She will go with him and see what is there.

It takes hours, but Dr. Hammond finally gives her the information she needs without even knowing it. He tells her that when he retired—you would think Rome had to be notified—he sent his few remaining patients to a doctor in a nearby town. And along with them went all of Dr. Hammond's medical records.

T
he lady waits her turn at the old metal detector, which the guards joke is there to give her cancer. To judge by the creaking high-pitched hum of the ancient machine, she is not sure they are joking. The windows inside the prison lobby are glossed white with foulness, the fake leather seats ripped and slashed. The fat trusty is there to fix the ailing Coke machine. He gives her a distrustful look, glancing at the lanyard on her chest.

She sees the priest come in, take off his loafers. She smiles at his bare feet. It is a wonder they let him get away with that.

The priest stands in line behind her, painfully aware of her presence. There are three electric inches between them. He glances down to her folding shoulder blades, the smallness of her back, the curve under her skirt. The trusty smirks.

The visiting sergeant signals the lady forward, through the hum of the machine. She carries nothing metal: no jewelry, no watch, no phone, no pens or hair clips. Her hands are empty except for a single piece of paper.

The priest unloads pockets full of random items: paper clips, loose keys, cards with magnetic strips, an old falling-apart wallet. His cheeks grow flushed as he fills the plastic tray, and then he is signaled through. She smiles as he fills his pockets.

They walk down a very steep, long corridor that leads down into the bowels of Cellblock A, where another guard awaits to usher them through the series of locking doors that will take them deeper and deeper into the prison, down below to the final stairwells leading into our dungeon.

The lady is silent as they pass through the thunderbolts of the locks. She holds the lanyard on her chest like a security talisman. The guards look at the priest with contempt. The lady, they eye carefully. The warden has warned them about her; she is not there to do them any good.

The priest walks next to her. He is aware only of her scent—soap and fresh air.

They are almost down to the dungeon when the lady seems to sense him and turns to look up at him. She is down below, and he is here, and what is she to do with this warm body among the almost dead. She cannot stop them all from dying, and so she knows that the noises of their breathing and snoring and pleas behind the bars are
all pathetic offerings against the reality of time running out. She cannot begin to care who breathes and who dies down here, because if she did, it would crush her.

The priest seems to understand—he does without speaking. His eyes are on her as if he is trying to pull something out of his chest. As if he is administering not to the dead but to someone who might care.

“I
'm not signing that,” York says, looking at the medical release in her hand.

The lady gets close to him in the cage. Not close enough so he can reach but within an inch of his possible grip. “I know you say you want to die,” she says, and her voice is calm and hard. “I respect your choice.”

“Then you don't need that paper,” he says with a flick of his dark eyes.

She looks again at the medical release. She meets his eyes. Both are struck again by how similar they look—like dark woods creatures slinking out of fern and clover. They could be brother and sister for how alike they look.

“You know what I am trying to do,” she says. “I'm trying to save you from execution. And unlike most of my clients, you don't want to be saved. But I want it.”

“Why? Because you
love
me?” His voice is snide. “Because you
care
?”

“No.” She feels her voice turn into a calm river.

“Why, then?”

“It's my job.”

For the first time, she sees a light in his dark eyes. She can see what a strangely charismatic man he was, despite his oddly formed little body. She can see how easy it was for him to do those terrible things. To real women like her.

He bursts out laughing, those strangely notched teeth thrown back. “So it's not about me,” he says. “You're different. I heard that before, but it's true.”

She leans over. “I'm going to build you a castle,” she says.

“Yeah?” He sounds amused.

The amusement dies when she comes close enough to the cage that he could grab her, but she acts as if she knows he will not, and she is right. He can see the determination in her eyes. “We don't have much time.”

He returns her chilly gaze. “I still want to die.”

“I know.”

T
he bouncing ball, as she hopes, takes her back out to the blue country. She packs an overnight bag so she can take her time and then find a motel room. Maybe she can even find a cabin along those emerald lakes. The idea fills her with a delicious, unexpected anticipation.

The town is called Squiggle Creek. It isn't much farther past Sawmill Falls, down roads that whip and twist, and the sense of déjà vu grows as she travels, until she becomes convinced she may never find her way home, and she would not argue with it, being lost in these blue woods.

The last doctor has died, but he left his records in the hands of his daughter, who runs a café and bakery in the building where her father practiced. Luckily, the daughter has stored all her father's medical records in the dusty attic. “I keep telling myself to get rid of these things,” she says as the lady follows her broad rump up the creaking pull-down attic stairs.

An hour later, with dust on her shirt, the lady carries a thin folder with two names crookedly typed on the outside. In the other hand, she has a white paper bag with a thick turkey sandwich she has bought from the daughter in the coffee shop, who looked at the lady's small frame with pity before adding an extra swipe of cooked salad dressing from what looked like a handmade crock.

The lady stops at the aptly named Squiggle Creek on her way out of town. She crosses a little footbridge and carefully slides down the bank to where the stream narrows into a deep pool. She sits at the edge on a boulder and eats her sandwich. After the first startled bite, she realizes it is made out of chunks of real turkey from some leftover bird, along with a tangy cranberry relish and that fresh old-fashioned cooked dressing, all on two thick doorstops of homemade white bread. The sandwich is satisfying in a way most food isn't to her. She eats the whole thing and watches the baby fish come up to the edge of the bank, nibbling at the pebbles. The fresh tumbling water makes her think of drinking and thirst and the hunger she has always felt—if she could swim in this creek, and wade away to forever, she might be whole.

A man comes down the bank. He is tall and thin, with graying sideburns, and dressed in old jeans and a pair of battered cork boots. He carries a fishing pole in one hand, his other fingers laced into the plastic-ring top of a six-pack.

He gives her a simple, affectionate woods smile. “Afternoon,” he says.

“Afternoon. Where does this creek go?” she asks.

“Where they all do, I guess.”

She smiles. “Where's that?”

“The lakes.”

She rises and dusts the crumbs from her slacks. Her bottom feels cold from the boulder. “Do the people round here ever call them anything but the lakes?”

He looks amused. “No, ma'am. Just the lakes.”

“And why is that?” she asks. She says this in a playful voice but suddenly the answer seems very important to her, and this tall woodsman with his gentle smile seems safe to give it.

“Well—I suppose some things don't need names, do they, ma'am?”

She smiles and it is like a sudden lifting of her spirits, a real sunshine smile. “No,” she says, still grinning hugely at him, and he is grinning back. “Some things don't need names.”

I
t is dusk by the time she gets back to the lakes, and she has a headache from peering over the steering wheel as
she turns the dark forested corners. She is convinced she will not find a place to stay and will be forced to drive in the dark through the woods. Then she sees a neon Vacancy sign on the side of the road. It is an old-fashioned road motel, with small cabins along the lake's edge.

She parks in the little asphalt lot. She is almost shaking as she gets out of her car. A flood of emotions has come over her. She walks down to the water's edge. The emerald lake spreads in front of her, the caps of water lit with gold tints from the fading sun. Powerful smells come across the waters on a cool breeze: fir and cedar, water and fish, deep growing things and all the weight of the surrounding forests. It is as if the blue forests want to say
breathe
to her, and she wants to say back,
yes.

She gets the room key from an old woman who doesn't even come up to her chin. The woman has a Greek accent, and on the tiny chipped counter next to the register, she has an array of homemade goodies wrapped loosely in waxed paper. “You take a treat?” she asks, handing the lady a palm-sized pastry along with her key. The whole scene begins to feel surreal, and the lady worries briefly that she is having another déjà vu episode. She knows she is not. She is experiencing something for the first time in her life—a sense of place. This is a good place, her body tells her.

The lakeside cabin is old but clean, with a warm sense that someone actually has been there, wiping the counters and shaking out the homemade quilt.