of my father. ....... for being the father of my son."
Hatch didn't see how either thing could be a sin, but he waited, certain
that the physician would explain. He was beginning to feel like that
party-goer in the old Coleridge poem, waylaid by the distraught Ancient
Mariner who had a tale of terror that he was driven to impart to others
lest, by keeping it to himself, he lose what little sanity he still
retained.
gazing unblinking at the painting, Nyebern said, "When I was only seven,
my father suffered a psychotic breakdown. He shot and killed my mother
and my brother. He wounded my sister and me, left us for dead, then
killed himself."
"Jesus, I'm sorry," Hatch said, and he thought of his own father's
bottomless well of anger. "I'm very sorry, Doctor." But he still did
not understand the failure or sin for which Nyebern felt the need to
atone.
"Certain psychoses may sometimes have a genetic cause. When I saw signs
of sociopathic behavior in my son, even at an early age, I should have
known what was coming, should've prevented it somehow. But I couldn't
face the truth. Too painful. Then two years ago, when he was eighteen,
he stabbed his sister to death-" Hatch shuddered.
"-then his mother," Nyebern said.
Hatch started to put a hand on the doctor's arm, then pulled back when
he sensed that Nyebern's pain could never be eased and that his wound
was beyond healing by any medication as simple as consolation.
Although he was g of an intensely personal way, the physician was not
seeking sympathy or the link of friendship from Hatch.
Suddenly he seemed almost frighteningly self-contained He was about the
tragedy because the time had come to take it out of his personal
darkness to examine it again, and he would have spoken of it to anyone
who had been in that at that time instead of Hatch-or perhaps to the
empty air itself if no one at all had been present.
"And when they were dead," Nyebern said, "Jeremy took the same knife
into the garage, a butcher knife, placed it by the handle in the vise on
my workbench stood on a stool, and fell forward, impaling himself on the
blade. He bled to death." The physician's right hand was still at his
breast pocket but he no longer seemed like a man pledging the truth of
what he said. Instead, he reminded Hatch of a painting of Christ with
the Heart revealed, the slender hand of divine grace pointing to that
symbol of sack and promise of eternity.
At last Nyebern looked away from the Ascension and met Hatch's eyes.
"Some say evil is just the consequences of our actions, no more than a
result of our will. But I believe it's that-and much more. I believe
evil is a very real force, an energy quite apart from us, a presence in
the world.
Is that what you believe, Hatch?"
"Yes," Hatch said at once, and somewhat to his surprise.
Nyebern looked down at the prescription pad in his left hand. He took
his right hand away from his breast pocket, tore the top sheet off the
pad, and gave it to Hatch. "His name's Foster. Dr. Gabriel Foster.
I'm sure he'll be able to help you."
"Thanks," Hatch said numbly.
Nyebern opened the door of the examination room and gestured for Hatch
to precede him.
In the hallway, the physician said, "Hatch?"
Hatch stopped and looked back at him.
"Sorry," Nyebern said.
"For what?"
"For explaining why I donate the paintings."
Hatch nodded. "Well, I asked, didn't I?"
"But I could have been much briefer."
"Oh?"
"I could have just said-maybe I think the only way for me to get into
Heaven is to buy my way."
long time, watching a wasp that hovered over the red hood as if it
thought it had found an enormous rose.
The conversation in Nyebern's office had seemed strangely like a dream,
and Hatch felt as if he were still rising out of sleep. He sensed that
the tragedy of Jonas Nyebern's death-haunted life had a direct bearing
on his own current problems, but although he reached for the connection,
he could not grasp it.
The wasp swayed to the left, to the right, but faced steadily toward the
windshield as though it could see him in the car and was mysteriously
drawn to him. Repeatedly, it darted at the glass, bounced off, and
resumed its hovering. Tap, hover, tap, hover, tatap, hover.
It was a very determined wasp. He wondered if it was one of those
species that possessed a single stinger that broke off in the target,
resulting in the subsequent death of the wasp. Tap, hover, tap, hover,
tap-tatap. If it was one of those species, did it fully understand what
reward it would earn by its persistence? Tap, hover, tatap-tap.
After seeing the last patient of the day, a follow-up visit with an
engaging thirty-year-old woman on whom he had performed an aortal graft
last March, Jonas Nyebern entered his private office at the back of the
medical suite and closed the door. He went behind the desk, sat down,
and looked in his wallet for a slip of paper on which was written a
telephone number that he chose not to include on his Rolodex. He found
it, pulled the phone close, and punched in the seven numbers.
Following the third ring, an answering machine picked up as it had on
his previous calls yesterday and earlier that morning: "This is Morton
Redlow. I'm not in the office right now. After the beep, please leave
a message and a number where you can be reached, and I will get back to
you as soon as possible."
Jonas waited for the signal, then spoke softly. "Mr. Redlow, this is
Dr. Nyebern. I know I've left other messages, but I was under the
impression that I would receive a report from you last Friday.
Certainly by the weekend at the latest. Please call me as soon as
possible. Thank you." He hung up.
He wondered if he had reason to worry.
He wondered if he had any reason not to worry.
6
Regina sat at her desk in Sister Mary Margaret's French class, weary of
the smell of chalk dust and annoyed by the hardness of the plastic seat
under her butt, knowing how to say, Hello, I am an American. Can you
direct me to the nearest church where I might attend Sunday Mass?
Tres boring.
She was still a fifth-grade student at St. Thomas's Elementary School,
because continued attendance was a strict condition of her adoption.
(Trial adoption. Nothing final yet. Could blow up. The Harrisons
could decide they preferred raising parakeets to children, give her
back, get a bird. Please, God, make sure they repare that in Your
divine wisdom You designed birds so they poop a lot. Make sure they
know what a mess it'll be keeping the cage clean.) When she graduated
from St. Thomas's Elementary, she would move on to St. Thomas's High
School, because St. Thomas's had its fingers in everything. In
addition to the children's care home and the two schools, it had a
daycare center and a thrift shop. The par
ish was like a conglomerate,
and Father Jiminez was sort of a big executive like Donald Trump, except
Father Jiminez didn't run around with bimbos or own gambling casos.
The bingo parlor hardly counted.
(Dear God, that stuff about birds pooping a lot-that was in no way meant
as a criticism. I'm sure You had Your reasons for making birds poop a
lot, all over everythug, and like the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it's
just one of those things we ordinary humans can't ever quite understand.
No offense meant.) Anyway, she didn't mind going to St. Thomas's
School, because both the nuns and the lay teachers pushed you hard, and
you ended up learning a lot, and she loved to learn.
By the last class on that Tuesday afternoon, however, she was full up
with g, and if Sister Mary Margaret called on her to say anything in
French, she would probably confine the word for church with the word for
sewer, which she had done once before, much to the delight of the other
kids and to her own motion.(DearGod,please remember that I made myself
say the Rosary as for that boner, just to prove I didn't mean anything
by it, it was only a mistake. When the bell rang, she was the first out
of her seat and the first out of the classroom door, even though most of
the kids at St. Thomas's School did not come from St.
Thomas's Home and were not disabled in any way.
All the way to her locker and all the way from her locker to the front
exit, she wondered if Mr. Harrison would really be waiting for her, as
he had promised. She imagined herself standing on the sidewalk with
kids swarming around her, unable to spot his car, the crowd gradually
diminishing until she stood alone, and still no sign of his car, and her
waiting as the sun set and the moon rose and her wristwatch ticked
toward midnight, and in the morning when the kids returned for another
day of school, she'd just go back inside with them and not tell anyone
the Harrisons didn't want her any more.
He was there. In the red car. In a line of cars driven by other kids'
parents. He leaned across the seat to open the door for her as she
approached.
When she got in with her book bag and closed the door, he said, "Hard
day?"
"Yeah," she said, suddenly shy when shyness had never been one of her
major problems. She was having trouble getting the hang of this family
thing. She was afraid maybe she'd never get it.
He said, "Those nuns."
"Yeah," she agreed.
"They're tough."
"Tough."
"Tough as nails, those nuns."
"Nails," she said, nodding agreement, wondering if she would ever be
able to speak more than one-word sentences again.
As he pulled away from the curb, he said, "I'll bet you could put any
nun in the ring with any heavyweight champion in the whole history of
boxing-I don't care if it was even Muhammad Ali-and she'd knock him out
in the first round."
Regina couldn't help grinning at him.
"Sure," he said. "Only Superman could survive a fight with a real hard
case nun. Batman? Fooie! Even your average nun could mop up the floor
with Batman-or make soup out of the whole gang of Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles."
"They mean well," she said, which was three words, at least, but sounded
goofy. She might be better off not talking at all; she just didn't have
any experience at this father-kid stuff.
"Nuns?" he said. "Well, of course, they mean well. If they didn't mean
well, they wouldn't be nuns. They'd be maybe Mafia hitmen,
international terrorists, United States Con" He did not speed home like
a busy man with lots to do, but like somebody out for a leisurely drive.
She had not been in a car with him enough to know if that was how he
always drove, but she suspected maybe he was loafing along a little
slower than he usually did, so they could have more time together, just
the two of them. That was sweet. It made her throat a little tight and
her eyes watery. Oh, terrific. A pile of cow flop could've carried on
a better conversation than she was managing, so now she was going to
burst into tears, which would really cement the relationship. Surely
every adoptive parent desperately hoped to receive a mute, emotionally
unstable girl with physical problems right?
It was all the rage, don't you know. Well, if she did cry, her
treacherous sinuses would kick in, and the old snot-faucet would start
gushing, which would surely make her even more appeming. He'd give up
the idea of a leisurely drive, and head for home at such tremendous
speed that he'd have to stand on the brakes a mile from the house to
avoid shooting straight through the back of the garage. (Please, God,
help me here. You'll notice I thought "cow flop" not "cow shit," so I
deserve a little meig.) They chatted about this and that. Actually,
for a while he chatted and she pretty much just grunted like she was a
subhuman out on a pass from the zoo. But eventually she realized, to
her surprise, that she was talking in complete sentences, had been doing
so for a couple of miles, and was at ease with him.
He asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she just about
bent his ear clear off explaining that some people actually made a
living writing the kinds of books she liked to read and that she had
been composing her own stories for a year or two. Lame stuff, she
admitted, but she would get better at it. She was very bright for ten,
older than her years, but she couldn't expect actually to have a career
going until she was eighteen, maybe sixteen if she was lucky. When had
Mr. Christopher Pike started publishing? Seventeen? Eighteen? Maybe
he'd been as old as twenty, but certainly no older, so that's what she
would shoot for-being the next Mr. Christopher Pike by the time she was
twenty. She had an entire notebook full of story ideas. Quite a few of
those ideas were good even when you crossed out the embarrassingly
childish ones like the story about the intelligent pig from space that
she had been so hot about for a while but now saw was hopelessly dumb.
She was still talking about writing books when they pulled into the
driveway of the house in Laguna Niguel, and he actually seemed
interested.
She figured she might get the hang of this family thing yet.
Vassago dreamed of fire. The click of the cigarette-lighter cover being
flipped open in the dark. The dry rasp of the striker wheel scraping
against the flint. A spark. A young girls white summer dress flowering
into flames.
The Haunted House ablaze. Screams as the calculatedly spooky darkness
dissolved under licking tongues of orange light. Tod Ledderbeck was
dead in the cavern of the Millipede, and now the house of plastic
skeletons and rubber ghouls was abruptly tilled with real tenor and
pungent death.
He had dreamed of that fire previously, countless times since the night
of Tod's twelfth birthday. It always provided the most beautiful of all
the chimeras and phantasms that passed behind his eyes in sleep.
But on th
is occasion, strange faces and images appeared in the flames.
The red car again. A solemnly beautiful, auburn-haired child with large
gray eyes that seemed too old for her face. A small hand, cruelly bent,
with fingers missing. A name, which had come to him once before, echoed
through the leaping flames and melting shadows in the Haunted House.
Regina... ..... . Regina.
The visit to Dr. Nyebern's office had depressed Hatch, both because the
tests had revealed nothing that shed any light on his strange
experiences and because of the glimpse he had gotten into the
physician's own troubled life. But Regina was a medicine for melancholy
if ever there had been one. She had all the enthusiasm of a child her
age; life had not beaten her down one inch.
On the way from the car to the front door of the house, she moved more
swiftly and easily than when she had entered Salvatore Gujilio's office,
but the leg brace did give her a measured and solemn gate. A bright
yellow and blue butterfly accompanied her every step, fluttering gaily a
few inches from her head, as if it knew that her spirit was very like
itself, beautiful and buoyant.
She said solemnly, "Thank you for picking me up, Mr. Harrison."
"You're welcome, I'm sure," he said with equal gravity.
They would have to do something about this "Mr. Harrison" business
before the day was out. He sensed that her formality was partly a fear