The Horses of the Night (25 page)

I knelt to the floor, trembling. It was happening. Surely it was happening. There—her breath was quickening. Look—the red digits of the machines that measured her metabolism were flickering, the registers ascending, her pulse responding.

Surely she was stretching, about to whisper, about to roll upon her back and open her eyes.

I was on my feet again, and turning her over, a plastic bag swaying above me on a steel pole. I rolled her gently, tenderly, afraid that I might wound her somehow, aggravate a needle thrust into a vein. I kissed her.

I kissed her, willing all that I wanted, all that I needed to share with her, into my lips, into her. I held her, weeping, calling her name, over and over, the incantation, the one word I knew.

I wished, with all the power I had purchased with my soul, for Nona to return to me.

And nothing happened.

38

There was a sound I barely recognized as my own voice, calling her name. I swept her into my arms. One arm dangled. The metal pole that suspended the plastic bag of saline solution swayed and nearly fell.

She was slack in a way that disturbed me. She was thin, her bones apparent in the feel of her body in my arms. But she had no spark of even twilight awareness, no roll to settle inward against me, no sigh to show her relief to be in my arms.

Careful
, I cautioned myself.
Don't hurt her
.

She was beyond feeling. Her gauze-wrapped head lolled. One arm was bandaged, and her legs were swathed. She did not breathe so much as tug in air just a few slack inches and then, almost soundlessly, work it out again, like a person breathing the same exhausted breath over and over again.

I ceased abruptly. Someone was coming. I did not move, listening hard to footsteps in a far-off corridor. The steps pattered, receded, and at last left us alone together.

Lowering her to the floor, I slipped the IV from her arm, withdrew the catheter, carefully as the most skilled nurse, working to detach her from the courses and alternates of her bodily fluids. I cradled her recumbent weight, and I made hushing sounds, as though to encourage her to sleep. “Don't worry,” I whispered. “Don't worry, Nona.”

I would not surrender her. I would take her away. I would flee with her—I stopped myself, holding her there in my arms. Where would I take her?

Nowhere. I was outside the room, but I did not carry her any farther. Where would we hide?

I did not move again for a long time. Then I hurried toward a green
EXIT
sign.

I was determined: No one would take her from my arms. My feet echoed in the stairwell. There was a scent of old concrete dust. Light reflected dimly off the handrails. I was climbing upward, carrying Nona.

I leaned into the pushbar of a door. The door did not budge. I leaned into it again, hard, and the heavy barrier made a scraping rumble, and slowly gave way.

The smell of night surrounded me, the sea air, the tannic flavor of trees, the purr and mutter of faraway traffic I had never been alive to before this night.

I stretched her on the gravel of the roof, massaging her hands.

She did not stir.

She was waking up, I told myself. Keep talking to her. Keep massaging her arms. She's coming back. Look.

Her lips were parted, unmoving. Her eyes were closed, her breath so slow I could barely hear it, even when I held my own breath.

I swung a fist into the dark around me. “You lied!”

There was no response, but the silence was like that of a retreating wave, a falling back full of capability—and promise—to return.

A step pressed the surface beside me, a sound that was inaudible but which I felt in the lacquer of my own thoughts, like a sensation within my own flesh, a brain surgeon's probe calling forth this memory and that desire.

At first I felt joy. So, I thought, I was not alone. This was not insanity.

My joy did not last. “Lies,” I whispered.

This presence was a source of light. I could not look at her. Her gown made a sigh as it brushed the skin of air, the last remaining heat of sunlight radiating from the roof.

“That's all you offer, isn't it?” I heard myself say.

The light did not answer.

“Perhaps I lied to myself,” I said.

There was a long silence. Then a voice, like a whisper at the very edge of hearing. “There is a way for you to stir her,” the voice said. “But in your selfishness you will not discover how.”

Gravel scattered. “Tell me!”

There were no further words.

“Tell me how to wake her!”

The thought came: Soon you will forget all about her.

I said, carefully, deliberately, “We have no contract.”

A force wrenched me to my feet, and slammed me against an air-conditioning duct. A weight pressed my ribs. The breath was crushed from my lungs. All the air was flattened out of me, and I went numb. I struggled, my arms twitching. I could not make a sound, or think any thought except: air.

I was suffocating.

The invisible grip let me drop, sprawling to the sharp stones. I tasted my own blood, and wiped the water that flowed from my nose on my sleeve.

The whisper again, a sound I could barely make out. “You think of us as evil,” she said. “So that is how we appear to you.”

“How can I win her back?” I asked.

There was no response. Her presence was like the flickering fragment that precedes a migraine, like the shard of light associated with a blow to the face.

They won't give you Nona, I said to myself.

What can they give you?

Sometimes the cheers of a crowd are so complete that they deafen, a solid wall of noise. Sometimes a leader steps before his adoring subjects and, when he speaks, is silenced by the love his supporters feel for him.

I was this prize, this man who stood before the senate of the dark and found myself buffeted by their acclaim. I was no longer a man who had lost his humanity. I was one of their creatures, and while I had no hope, what hope did any man possess?

For a moment I thought I could escape, forgetting that what I breathed was the same air that sustained Nona, except that she was still alive, however vanquished, while I already felt the socket in me, the stump that had been my soul.

I gathered Nona into my arms. The gravel was unclean. So was I.

Perhaps I had struck a bargain with nothing more than my own insanity. I lectured myself in a wry, peevish inner voice: Your own mental illness, your own circus of hallucinations, would make nothing happen in the world of plasma and blood gases.

Whatever I had bargained with, I could not turn back.

“Let them attack me again,” I said. “The people who did this.”

Again—silence.

“That's what I want. Let them try again.”

There was a silence, and the light around me was dimming.

“I can have that, can't I? If I can't have Nona, then I can have revenge.”

There was no answer.

39

It was a bad question to have to ask myself: How did I get here?

I did not recognize this room. There was firelight, and I was not alone. That peculiar fear had me, that sensation of not knowing the walls, the floor, the furniture.

There were two people with me. I was very near to guessing who they were.

I was on a sofa. There was a soft footfall. Rick adjusted the blanket that covered me, a heavy afghan. It was the sort of action our mother must have made when we were children, a lift of the blanket, and a careful folding over and adjusting of the counterpane. A bed, even a temporary one such as this sofa, is a magical place, a place of refuge, of dream, of procreation and healing.

“Everything will be all right,” said Rick. It was that ancient optimism, perhaps the first lie one family member ever told another.

But it was a comforting sound, the low murmur of Rick's reassurance. We were in a comfortably messy study, large volumes on bookshelves beside computer software and stacks of journals.

“He looks okay,” said Rick. He sounded eager to convince himself.

A familiar voice said, “He's physically quite sound. When I got to the hospital I saw him as he is now. Physically quite well, his blood pressure normal, his pulse rate a steady fifty-six per minute.”

Rick accepted a bourbon, and both men settled into chairs, but it was with a false ease.

Barry could have been fishing for an explanation. Rick said, with a trace of pride, “Stratton's always kept himself in good shape.”

“That's one way of putting it.”

“We heal fast, too.”

“We” meant: our family, and, in light of my mother's condition, Rick might not have been quite truthful, but I was touched by his words.

“I suppose I understand,” Barry said. “He visited Nona, and was overcome. I don't blame him.”

“I didn't feel right about leaving him tonight. I kept calling, and after awhile I was so nervous I dropped by his house.”

“Did he seem to have left in a hurry?”

“Stratton's always been the organized member of the family. I've always admired that.”

There was a long, silent reverie on the part of both men, Barry's silence more complete, Rick's quiet of the restless sort, legs crossed and uncrossed, liquor sipped, and then gulped. “That's great bourbon.”

“Twenty years old,” said Barry.

Rick accepted more. Barry commented with enthusiasm on the oaky flavor of the bourbon, and I knew that Rick was being polite, as well as simply solicitous of more liquor when he had finished this second drink. Rick had never cared for overelaborate discussion of food or wine, but Barry prided himself on his knowledge of liquor and tennis-racquet technology.

“I suppose he can hear us,” said Rick.

“He might, but I doubt it. He's in a sort of torpor.”

“His eyes were open when I came in.”

“Maybe he's awake, then. Ask him.”

“Strater. Can you hear me? Wiggle something.”

I listened to the snapping of the fire in the fireplace, intent on the silence between their words.

They both waited for me to make some movement of arm or leg, but I did not care to stir.

Barry thought for awhile. Then he continued, “I took a risk bringing him here. Medically, maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do. But I thought of how much Stratton would hate this kind of publicity, and I also reflected that he needed something more than what our hospital can offer in the area of psychiatry. Now that Nona is—” He worked towards a better word, and failed. “Now that she's gone.”

They were both silent. Then Barry continued, “I came close to letting the neurologists do a serious workup on him. But I looked into his eyes and made one of those snap decisions …”

Perhaps Barry wanted to be congratulated, or at least reassured, that he had made the right move. Rick understood this a moment too late, but he was warm in his expression of gratitude, his praise for Barry's good judgment, and went on to admire the library, and the stonework of the fireplace.

“The look in his eyes bothers me, too,” said Rick. “It has for some time.”

I could sense the shake of Barry's head. “Medically he is a remarkable specimen. He doesn't even look the way he used to. Have you noticed? He looks stronger and even younger somehow.”

“He was always a good-looking man,” Rick said, with a touch of fraternal protectiveness. For a moment Rick did not speak, or could not. He cleared his throat, and said, “I'm so glad he's in your good hands, Barry. You've done a very good thing.”

“Listen, when my brother died a few years back I was so broken up I couldn't eat or sleep. The thing is, though, that after awhile we forget. We simply forget, and go on living.”

“He's taking it hard.”

“Nona Lyle was a tremendous human being.”

After pouring himself some more bourbon, the scent of the liquor reaching me, Barry said, “Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing. What it is to be a physician. The money is satisfying, and the sense of being somebody. But you realize how little even a skilled doctor can do.”

Rick made his question sound motivated by civilized concern, but I could tell how deeply troubled he was. “It's a crime to keep her alive like that.”

“She's self-sustaining. Breathes for herself. She's very much alive. But …”

“I don't call that life.”

Barry did not speak.

Rick was done with his drink, too, and I could hear the glass slip across the surface of a table. Rick was no longer making conversation.

“I have to ask,” said Barry. “As a doctor, and a friend—what is Stratton up to?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he want to take Nona's life?” He had stepped to the fireplace. His shadow bulked across the ceiling.

“By dropping her off the roof?” Rick said, sounding dazed.

Neither of them had to mention DeVere's name.

Rick spoke softly. “We can't do anything without Stratton's consent.”

“How is your mother doing?” asked Barry, no doubt about to embark on the possibility that mental instability had a genetic root.

I sat up.

There was a silence. Then the two men greeted me, encouraged me, said that I had been found unconscious at the hospital, and brought here to the warm fire, both men adopting a simplified form of speech, the way one addresses a sickly child. Or perhaps it only sounded that way to me. I knew, now, how undernourished our psyches are, how little we know of the truth.

I was vibrant, clear-headed. Even my vision was sharper. I was aware that Rick's eyes were on me, glittering with firelight. Barry was easy to counter-lob, a player I could outmaneuver. But Rick would anticipate me.

“You had an accident,” said Barry. He stated this hypothesis as a certainty, something he had ascertained beyond a doubt.

“Really?” I said, my voice the tone of mild and courteous interest, a man learning of the minor misfortune of someone he did not know. “An accident?”