Twisted Heart (5 page)

‘God, that makes it worse,’ I groaned.

She agreed. ‘The courts gave him a six-month sentence for stealing Dexedrine tablets from his local pharmacy – a first offence. Amos’s rehab community was his best option. They say he did real well there.’

‘Worse and worse.’

‘I know.’ Holly sat down at the kitchen table as if we had all the time in the world and Dad and Orlando weren’t hovering in the driveway ready to leave.

‘These halfway-house situations don’t usually work that well but you have to hand it to Anthony Amos and the guys who work with him.’

‘Tough love,’ I reminded her. ‘They set the kids big challenges, they don’t take no for an answer. All that wilderness therapy.’

Between us we pieced together what little we knew about New Dawn – facts we’d picked up second or third hand from the Internet and by word of mouth.

‘The juvies form a team and they hike up the mountain,’ Holly said.

‘What do they do up there? I mean, exactly.’

‘They explore. That’s why they call the kids Explorers. The leaders make them live like native people did before white men came and civilized the hell out of the place.’

‘They have to learn how to make a fire, find food, all that stuff?’

‘Yeah, and more. There’s a spiritual content too.’ Holly obviously knew way more about it than I did. ‘They have a motto: “From heart at war to heart at peace.”’

I said I liked the sound of this idea. ‘If only it was that easy,’ I sighed. I bet Holly didn’t have recurring nightmares and visions the way I did. I made a private bet my non-psychic buddy would outrun, outswim, outcycle any dark angel that came winging her way.

‘I hear you. And what do you bet it’s not all sweetness and light. Imagine living there month in, month out with only other juvies to talk to. Yeah, these kids are in rehab and they’re all supposed to show respect and find inner peace, but don’t you just bet some of them hate each others’ guts?’

Through the window I noticed Orlando tap his wristwatch and mouth for me to move my ass. ‘Hey, I have to go,’ I told Holly, scraping back my chair. But she has this way of holding back the most important thing until last – like yesterday’s fact about Conner being kicked before he sank. Now she did it again. ‘I saw who kicked him,’ she said, looking me in the eye.

I sat down again to give her my full attention. ‘Are you certain?’ There was too much spray, too many arms and legs. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘I told you – I was right behind Connor. The guy I’m talking about was ahead and to my right. I saw him get Connor in his sights. Then he rolled on to his back, aimed and lashed out with his foot, made contact, wham!’

‘You’re saying this was deliberate!’ I took a deep breath, tried to visualize the choppy waves, the chaos. ‘So who?’ I said again.

Holly was definite – no hesitation, no doubt in her mind. ‘Number 102,’ she said. ‘Tarzan with the long blond hair. One kick from him and Conner went down.’

P
eople say I’m the drama queen, that I go through life pulling in the bad stuff, but I’m nothing compared with Holly, believe me.

‘Honestly, that’s the way she sees it!’ I told Orlando and Dad as we drove into Denver. We were coming down from the mountains, seeing the flat plain of the city spread out below us. High-rise blocks lay half hidden by the morning mist. ‘She told me Conner’s death was a deliberate, cold-blooded homicide.’

‘That girl.’ Dad grunted in disbelief as he swung a right off the Interstate.

‘Yeah, I’m with you, Andrey,’ Orlando agreed. ‘Holly watches too many straight-to-video crime movies. There’s always a mystery.’

I sat in the car recalling the theories she and I had developed about the aftermath of Zoran’s Heavenly Bodies party. Was it mere alcohol that killed a million brain cells and stopped us from remembering what had happened at Black Eagle Lodge? No, Holly’s theory involved Rohypnol and date rape oblivion. For twenty-four hours after the event she would have sworn on her life that serious substance abuse was involved – until she showed up in the ER for a test to prove that it wasn’t.

‘So Conner’s death was an accident,’ I said quietly. Safe inside the car, swooping down on the city into Cherry Creek and stopping on Bannock Street to buy flowers for Mom, I was happy to believe it.

Then, after we’d parked the car and were making our way through the main hospital entrance, we had an unexpected brush with the reality of Conner Steben’s death.

There was a small crowd gathered outside, jostling to attract the attention of three people leaving the reception area – a grey-haired couple and a girl aged thirteen or fourteen.

‘Mr Steben, have you carried out a positive identification of your son’s body? Have they given you an exact cause of death? Mrs Steben, can you tell us how you’re feeling? Do you attach any blame to the organizers of yesterday’s event?’

‘Jeez!’ Orlando steered me around the knot of reporters.

I took another quick look. The parents seemed totally traumatized – as if the soft tissue on their faces had been dragged down by some terrible g-force – and the expression in their red-rimmed eyes was dazed, exhausted. The girl, though, looked angry. Her teeth were clenched, her jaw set. She caught my eye and I saw straight away there was hurt beneath the anger and she was probably holding her jaw tight to stop herself from falling apart.

‘Where will you hold the funeral, Mr Steben? Will you take Conner home to Oregon to bury him?’

What sleazeball editor ordered these guys to doorstep the grieving family? What level of heartlessness does it take to push a camera into their faces? I was glad when two muscle-bound security officers showed up to shove the journalists to one side.

Dad strode on ahead of me and Orlando, leading us into the elevator and showing us the way to Mom’s ward on the sixth storey. ‘She got good sleep,’ he told us. ‘But still tired. Doctor goes on looking for reasons.’

He slowed down as he reached the door into a private room – Mom’s medical insurance is the best – and he pushed the purple orchids we’d bought into my arms. ‘Go ahead,’ he told me and Orlando. ‘Talk to Mom. I’ll find doctor, nurse, someone to ask.’

So we went into a small white room with white slatted blinds to keep out the sun.

My mom smiled at us from her crisp white bed. Her dark hair was loose around her shoulders. Her face looked thinner and more shadowed than before her illness. ‘Flowers!’ she murmured as if they were the last thing she was expecting.

The clear wrapping crackled as I lay them on a table by the window. ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ I asked. I hovered. I didn’t go right up to her.

‘Come here,’ she said. And she hugged me. We didn’t speak for the longest time. Then she reached out to Orlando and squeezed his hand. ‘Sit,’ she told us. ‘Not on the chairs – on the bed where I can hold your hands.’

I hesitated. ‘What about the nurses?’

Mom raised her eyebrows in a so-what way – a look I was totally familiar with, though seeing her confined to bed was the weirdest thing. ‘Sit,’ she repeated. She waited a while then said, ‘So they made a diagnosis.’

I took a deep breath. ‘But Dad said … he thought …’

‘The doctors were just in here. They finally know what we’re dealing with.’

Major headaches, blurred vision, extreme fatigue. There’d been a quick consultation with our family doctor then immediate admission into the neurology unit for tests. The news couldn’t possibly be good.

‘There’s no tumour,’ she began.

I allowed myself a sigh of relief. ‘But?’

‘They say I’ve had a series of small brain haemorrhages,’ she told us, perfectly calm. ‘Intra cerebral – that means bleeding inside the brain tissue.’

I shook my head, found nothing to say that would help. This shouldn’t be happening.

‘Don’t look so tragic,’ Mom said gently. ‘They call it ICH for short. The pressure from the bleeding is what gives me the headaches. All they need to do is get in there and relieve the pressure.’

‘Surgery?’ I whispered.

‘Today,’ she confirmed. ‘Like, right away.’

‘But how … what causes it?’

‘Too many glasses of Merlot,’ she joked. ‘Well, they say alcohol is a major risk factor.’

‘But you don’t … I mean … not that much.’

‘Plus menopause, plus high blood pressure,’ Mom added. ‘A lethal cocktail, apparently.’

‘But the surgery will fix it?’ I was so scared I couldn’t look her in the eye. This was my mom, the strong one, the one who always made the right decision, who was never ever sick.

‘You bet.’ She held my hand, squeezed it tight.

The room was too white, the orchids too purple, the sun too strong beyond the blinds. I fought back tears, thinking, I’m not the one who matters here. Be strong, be like her.

‘So, Orlando, you take care of my baby,’ Mom told him. ‘Promise?’

He nodded and then he had to leave the room to hide his own tears, making the excuse that he would go find Dad.

‘And, Tania, you take care of Daddy,’ Mom told me in the silence as the door swung closed. ‘I’m talking about these next few days. I’m not talking for ever because I plan to sail through this and get back to doing what I’ve always done. But help him through this difficult part, OK?’

‘I will.’

‘I’m glad you came home,’ she said with a sigh, after a long silence.

‘Me too.’

‘And look at you – my grown-up girl.’ Mom leaned her head back against the pillow but she didn’t let go of my hand. ‘How many languages do you speak now – fluent French, Italian … ?’

‘A little bit of both. Not as much as you.’

‘You know what they say about travel? It broadens the mind. I’m a true believer.’ She took a rest but she wasn’t through talking yet. ‘And you and Orlando?’ she asked.

I smiled back. ‘You know what they say about absence?’

‘It’s true too. That’s how come Daddy and I do so well after all this time – I fly home from a trip and each time I remember the reasons I love him all over again. Likewise, he works out of state, comes home and, magic – his heart has grown fonder!’

‘My God, you’re a pair of old romantics!’ Like the mourning doves who find a mate for life.

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I’m with you.’ That’s where I get it from – being romantic is in my DNA.

We were chatting in the white room, warding off the big, scary reason she was here. ‘And, Tania, you still want to go back to Paris to study film?’ she asked, sounding exhausted.

‘Maybe.’ I wouldn’t commit until today was over. Right now it felt as if my future was a blank screen waiting for keys to be pressed.

Mom’s eyelids flickered shut and she sighed.

‘How bad is the headache?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer but her eyes opened again. ‘I want you to know how very proud I am,’ she murmured. ‘From the day you were born, always proud of my girl.’

‘Even when I’m trouble?’ I kidded. Angsty teen agonizing over which jeans to wear, refusing to clear up my room, fighting her authority. And, as it turned out recently – a psychic medium messing with dark angels. My simple question was loaded with all this significance.

‘Especially then. Always.’

So now my tears fell. Mom couldn’t be this sick. She couldn’t be.

‘And your intuition, your psychic power – call it what you like – I want you to know that you should go ahead and trust it one hundred per cent.’

‘So I’m not crazy?’ All those times she’d heard me wake up from nightmares of the forest blazing, of the house burning, of hearing the child cry. The nights when she’d come into my room and soothed away my fears.

‘Be strong,’ she insisted, hours away from life-saving surgery, thinking only of me. ‘Follow your star. Believe in yourself the way I believe in you.’

That same evening, after Mom’s surgery, Dad began to feed the dove. He threw down sunflower seeds, sat under the trees and waited. ‘Here, pretty bird. Fly down, eat.’

Coooo-woo-oo-oo-oo!
She whistled down to the ground, scattering the seeds with her fluttering, black-spotted wings. Then pecked with her short dark beak.

We called her Zenaida because it sounds exotic. They shoot gazillions a year like vermin, but, hey, ours was unique.

‘Where’s your mate?’ Dad asked her.

Mom had survived the procedure to drain blood from her brain. It was only afterwards, while she was still sedated, that the surgeon gave us the bald statistic – a mortality rate of over forty per cent.

‘Your wife is one tough lady,’ she’d told Dad. ‘But even she will need to sleep through the next twenty-four hours, so we have sedated her and you have time to go home, relax. We’ll call you if we need to.’

So when Dad spoke to Zenaida it came from the heart. ‘I’m sorry you lost mate,’ he said in his deep, un-American voice. ‘But stick around here, mend broken heart.’

‘Mourning dove,’ I called from the porch swing. I had the bird book on my lap. Orlando was with his laptop inside the house, researching costume design for the first Paris production of
The Firebird
in 1910. He had to submit an assignment before the end of the week. ‘Predators include falcons and hawks.’

And black eagles.

I shiver as the dark angel in eagle form sweeps across the rain clouds gathering over Carlsbad. There will be other times, other places. We’re talking about his thirst for revenge, his twisted heart, and I never for a moment doubt that he’ll be back
.

Zenaida saw the Randles’ white cat crouched on the porch roof next door. She took off with a whistle of wings.

The next day, Monday, Dad drove into Denver alone. According to the latest report, Mom was doing well but she was still sedated until the swelling in her brain reduced. ‘Visit tomorrow is better,’ Dad advised. ‘Today, you and Orlando take hike, make bike ride – have fun.’

Easy to say but more difficult to do when all my energy for the past twenty-four hours had gone into living and reliving every agonizing moment of Mom’s surgery.

‘It’s a good idea.’ Orlando showed up at the house as Dad left. My heart eased the moment I saw his black truck come up the hill. He was my cavalry, my knight in shining armour. ‘Your mom told me to take care of you. What do you want to do – cycle or hike?’