The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  “Maddie? Honey? It’s okay.”

  She looked up, disbelief and confusion clouding her face. “Jack?”

  He crossed and knelt at the foot of the chair. Winks hopped off her lap.

  “Jack?” She ran her fingers over his cheek, his chin, his chest, as if testing reality. He used his sleeve to wipe her face, her tears and snot, then wrapped her in his arms. She allowed herself this, the presence of him, the comfort of him, the reality of him, several long moments of him. And then she pushed him away. “No.” She began crying again and struck her fists against his chest.

  “Stop. Maddie, stop.” He grasped her wrists and held them until he felt the fight go out of her. “Tell me. What’s wrong? I’m here. Just tell me.”

  “You didn’t call! Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you let me know you were all right? You should have called.”

  He tried to pull her close, but she held herself rigid and apart. “I thought you were dead.”

  He let go of her and sank down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry I didn’t call, Maddie. Really. I am. I had a lot on my plate, diverting to Hyannis, taking care of the passengers, arranging for a ride home for them and for me to get back to the airport. Filing a report. Then when I got back, things were chaos at the field.”

  “You should have called,” she repeated, her voice hollow.

  He started to speak and then stopped, suddenly understanding. “Oh God, Maddie. I’m sorry. You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

  She looked away.

  “But you have to know I came as soon as I could get free,” he said. “And I did. I came right here. You know that, right?”

  What she knew was that whatever this was, whatever they had, she couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t go through this again. Couldn’t live with the constant threat that he would die, too.

  KATHERINE

  A high buzzing echo that presaged a drugged sleep filled Kat’s head. She swallowed and forced herself to go on. It had only been a minute or two since she had taken the pill. She must still have seven or eight more before she passed out. Too late, she realized she should have made herself sick, vomited up the pill. She tried to remember how far the compound gate was from the building where she was being held. Overhead the fluorescent tubes in the corridor flickered. She looked left then right but was disoriented. At one end of the hallway there were two doors. At the other end there were three. She turned left, toward the three, praying she had chosen correctly. With a hand against the wall, she steadied herself and made her way to the first door, tried the knob, half expecting it to be locked. It swung open soundlessly on oiled hinges, revealing a small space with a single overhead window, a room identical to the one she was being held in. It was empty. No need to lock a vacant room.

  Kat backed away and slipped into the corridor again. She reached for the second of the three doors. Her limbs felt thicker, as if she were moving underwater. She fought the encroaching darkness. She could tell she wouldn’t have much time before the medicine kicked in. Her strength was ebbing rapidly. The second door was heavier than the first. She pushed against its weight with the entire force of her body, moaning with the effort. One final push and it gave way, and she stumbled into the semidarkness of a room lit only by the ambient light from the corridor and was enveloped by a veil of steamy, tropical air. She turned to leave but the door swung shut, cutting off all light. She reached out and felt the concrete wall, swept her hand along the rough surface, feeling for a switch, fighting a growing sense of panic and disorientation. There: she had it. Instantly the room was flooded with light. Overhead spotlights glared down intensely, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes while her pupils adjusted. The first thing she saw was the steel table with metal stirrups that stood in the center of the room. Lining the far wall was a bank of closed cabinets, several of which she could see were secured with padlocks. This was not the room where Verner had examined her.

  Every instinct screamed to get out, but she remained rooted in place. Another wave of dizziness, stronger than the earlier one, overtook her. It was an effort to move. She lurched forward, stumbled toward the table, recoiled at the cold touch of the steel. Broad canvas tie-down straps were attached to the side. Identical strips hung from the stirrups. A supply cart stood to the left. She saw bottles and jars, sterile dressings, surgical gloves and instruments: a speculum with gleaming, curved blades, stretched forceps, a hypodermic that looked nearly a foot long, scissors, scalpels, curettes with honed edges. A stool was at one end of the table, and at the other were canisters of gas, tubes.

  A noise echoed from beyond the door. A sound escaped her lips, a single gasp of fear. Exposed and vulnerable, she edged toward the wall. Even as she crept toward the switch, her eyes took in more details. An IV pole. A stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff hanging from the frame. And—this her eyes found last—by the foot of the metal table, a suction cannula, the vacuum no larger than a bucket, to which was attached a hose. The transparent tubing was darkened from repetitive use.

  She had stumbled into the room where Verner harvested the fetal tissue.

  Backing away in horror, Kat felt the blackness closing in.

  MADISON

  Maddie had fallen asleep on the couch and woke thick-tongued and dry-mouthed, as if she had been drinking. Remembering the Ambien, she groaned. She had taken the tablet after midnight. A week had passed since she had broken things off with Jack, and she was desperate to escape the emptiness of loss. She stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. A bleak inertia gripped her. The phone rang, but she did not move. The machine would pick up. Sooner or later she would have to get on with routine. Work. Something.

  The phone rang again. It had been several days since he had called, leaving messages that she’d instantly deleted. Cold turkey was best. Move on. A swift, sharp break was better than a lingering one. There was no sense in delaying it when an ending was inevitable, as she had seen from the beginning it was fated to be. She counted the rings, waiting for voice mail to pick up. After a moment she heard a female voice. Not Jack, then. She closed her eyes against the disappointment that took her. Time would heal that, make her stronger. The caller continued to leave a message. Probably Lonnie, she thought. And then: Kat.

  About time, she thought. Usually they talked at least once a week, but when she’d called Kat after she broke off with Jack, there had been no answer, and, oddly, her sister had not responded to the messages she’d left on her voice mail. Maddie wondered where her sister was off to now and why she hadn’t mentioned a trip.

  She stumbled from the couch, her legs unsteady. She tried to remember whether she had taken one or two of the white tablets. She felt a pulsing in her temples. Bending forward, protectively, like an aged person afraid of falling, she went into the kitchen and played back the message.

  “Hi, Maddie.”

  Not Kat. Her disappointment was sharp. She had wanted it to be her sister. Needed it to be. Wherever Kat was—probably on assignment—Maddie hoped she would be back soon. And again, she tried to remember if during their last conversation Kat had said anything about going away.

  “Maddie, it’s Meredith. Where are you?”

  Not now, not Meredith of all people. The woman was one of the group of artists whom the Gallery on Main represented. She painted oversize canvases with expansive scenes of meadows and rustic fences with a single focus in the center of each. Maddie remembered one of a partridge. Meredith had explained that she had come upon the bird frozen stiff in a snowdrift and had taken it home to paint, propping its neck straight with toothpicks as it thawed so she could complete the painting. Maddie reached out to erase the message.

  “I was hoping to get you before you left the house,” Meredith continued before Maddie could punch delete. “I was wondering if you would like to have lunch after the lecture? Someplace close. The East Coast Grill?”

  What lecture? Maddie tried to concentrate. The pulsing in her temples swelled, slid behind her eyes. What the hell was Meredit
h talking about? Then she remembered. She had promised to give a slide presentation to Meredith’s art history class. She glanced at the clock. Nine thirty. She crossed to the kitchen desk, shuffled through a stack of old mail, located her appointment book, checked the date. There it was, written in her own careful script: M’s class. 10:30. Slides and talk. She looked back at the clock. That gave her a half hour to shower, dress, and gather materials and a half hour to get to the college. Or cancel. Plead illness. The thought was enormously tempting. But she’d made the commitment, and it was too late to back out. Plus, Meredith was the sort of person who banked away things like that. Maddie could hear her voice ten years on. “Remember that time you promised to lecture to my art history class and you blew me off at the last minute?”

  She needed coffee. She dropped in a pod, got out a mug. If she skipped the shower she could buy herself a few minutes. She carried the coffee into the studio and found the cartridges for the slide projector. She had been promising herself to switch everything to the computer—PowerPoint presentations were what people expected these days—but she had yet to get around to it. She stared at the cartridges, trying to remember what she had promised to speak about. A lecture on the Sacred Power of Masks? Or the Use of Masks in Ritual? Maybe it was the Meaning and Function of Masks. There wasn’t time to sort through them or to call Meredith. She grabbed the closest one. She would just wing it. As she turned to leave, she caught sight of the row of origami objects on the shelf and felt the swift thrust of unexpected pain. Swan. Rose. Crane. Turtle. Sword. She knew she should get rid of them but so far had been unable to bring herself to destroy them. So beautifully and carefully crafted. So intricate. She would throw them away eventually. Just not yet.

  Upstairs, she couldn’t avoid seeing the empty chair at the foot of the bed. Nothing of Jack’s remained there. Even his absence was a presence. She turned and sorted through her clothes, clumsy from a combination of the Ambien hangover and haste. Although her rib cage constricted with just the thought of it, she supposed she should wear a bra, much as she hated the idea. One of the perks of working at home was the freedom to dress completely for comfort. She rummaged through a drawer, pulled one out. She reached into the closet to retrieve her favorite blouse, a long-sleeved top in a soft shade of lavender that Kat had given her. When she saw the shirt Jack had left behind, she felt a jolt. But that was how it would be for a while, she guessed. When she saw a Harley on the road, caught sight of the back of a tall slim guy, heard the name Jack. Eventually, she knew, she would grow numb to these things, but right now she wanted to crawl back into bed and stay there for weeks. Months.

  Life goes on. Another thing she’d learned.

  She pulled out the lavender blouse and a pair of dark gray slacks and shut the closet door. She brushed her hair and applied concealer foundation to the scarred side of her face. False advertising, she thought wryly. The makeup did not live up to its name.

  She arrived at the college eight minutes late.

  “We were so worried.” Meredith’s words were thick with fake concern and suggested that the only acceptable excuse would be if Maddie had shown up in a full-body cast. Passive-aggressive. Lonnie once had said that if Meredith were a dog, she would piss on your foot while licking your hand. “How can someone who looks like a Botticelli painting be such a bitch?” Lonnie had asked.

  Maddie wished she had canceled after all.

  It took them several minutes to set up the projector. Maddie still moved with awkward gestures. She could have used another cup of coffee to snap fully awake. Once Meredith leaned in and whispered, “Are you all right? You look hungover.” Several students seated nearby overheard. A girl with copper earrings smirked.

  Meredith introduced her to the class. Faces stared up. Maddie looked out at expressions ranging from interested to slightly bored to curious: whether about the subject of her talk or Maddie herself she couldn’t tell. She wondered how much Meredith had told the class about her. She bent her head so the curtain of hair fell forward, partially concealing the map of scars. “To a large extent,” she began, “the original significance of the mask has been forgotten in the civilized world.” Her voice sounded hollow, as if it belonged to someone else. She signaled for Meredith to pull down the shade and lower the lights, then pressed the remote. The carousel clicked forward; the first slide slipped into place. An Etruscan mask of hammered bronze flashed onto the screen. She swallowed back a sound. The cartridge she had grabbed held the slides of death masks. She heard herself identify the one on the screen by material, date, and origin. “This is a death mask,” she said. “These masks hold the mystery between two phases of existence.” She pressed the remote, forwarding the carousel. “Some of the finest of the genre can be found in the Aleutians.” Click. The carousel turned again. “The African masks were of particular importance in their funeral rites.” Her tone grew stronger as she settled into the familiar material. She advanced the slides and identified death masks from Egypt and Cambodia and Siam. This was a talk she could give in her sleep.

  Another slide slipped from its slot in the carousel and dropped into the projector. Chips of turquoise rimmed in gold illuminated the mask. A half dozen teeth remained affixed to the gaping mouth. “This is an unusual example,” she said, “in that the turquoise mosaic is laid over the actual skull of a human.”

  “What country is it from?” a boy asked.

  “Mexico,” she answered. Immediately she remembered the trip she had taken with Kat. Mexico, the enchanted land. Then, suddenly, inexplicably chilled, she trembled.

  GRACIELA

  The woman in the next room had finally stopped crying. Earlier, Graciela had heard a commotion outside in the corridor. There had been voices—the stern one of the doctor and then the woman who was always with him, the woman who had come up to her one day in the village and promised her money, seeing what even Graciela’s own madre had not seen. With relief, Graciela had listened to the woman’s solution for her problem. Beneath the voices in the corridor, running like an underground river, flowed the eerie moaning that made her skin prickle. Since then, she had heard a woman crying and calling out. This made her think of her madre. She wondered again if Inez was weeping for her.

  She tried to move, but her body was disobedient from the shot that had been given to her. From the start she had intended to be brave. But there was much to be afraid of in this place. When fear fingered its way in, she reminded herself of her abuela’s name for her: Mi pequeña valiente. My little brave one. She heard the sea echo inside her ears and swallowed against the thickness of her throat. Overhead, the light hanging from the ceiling blurred and sharpened, blurred and sharpened. She shut her eyes and allowed the dark to swallow her.

  Soon the hour of dawn will come. In the night, the high priests have prepared her, painting her skin with blue dye, perfuming her hair, forcing the ceremonial gourd of balché to her lips, holding it there until all the bitter wine is swallowed. She is naked. In the heap of jade beads and pottery, in the offerings of zapotes and tapel piled at her head, she sees the string tied to the red shell. Since she was five, her mother had laced it around her waist, replacing it with a bigger one each year on her birthday. It was to come off forever when she turned twelve, but the Nacom in the crocodile mask had removed it weeks ago, the first day the Ah Kin began fasting.

  Since birth she has been prepared for this. When she was a toddler, just walking, her madre had dangled a tiny pitch bead from a string tied to her hair until her eyes, focused on the bead, had become permanently crossed. And when she was younger still, her forehead had been flattened between two blocks so that the top of her scalp was squeezed into a pointy hump. Later a tooth was drilled to hold a jade pellet, and pendants were hung from her ears. All that work and pain. All to make her most desirable to the gods.

  Somewhere from a distance, she hears the screech of a macaw, then, closer, the cough of a jaguar. In spite of the intoxicating balché, fear envelops her.

  Graciela
was awakened by the sound of her own voice crying out. Her heart pulsed in her chest like that of a captured animal. She fought to lift her head, to look down at her body. A moment passed before she trusted the truth of her own eyes. There was no blue paint on her skin. She was not naked but wore the shift they had given her when they took away her clothes, a worn cotton garment that did not tie shut.

  She had been dreaming. That was all. She was not a child painted blue. That girl had been only a dream. A dream spirit from long ago. Again she heard her abuela’s voice, speaking old wisdom. Such spirits will not harm us. But if we allow them, they will warn us. Tia Clara had echoed this during the times they had talked together about the gift that Graciela shared with the old seer.

  Was the girl-child spirit trying to warn her? Or had it been a vision brought on by the medicine? She dropped her head back on the pillow, fought the darkness, but soon slipped off again.

  Dawn is near. She who has been chosen hears the Ah kin begin to chant, praying to the Chacs. At one side of the altar, a priest waves a broom through the air, spreading the sweet clouds of the burning copal. Another claps wooden sticks together, and the noise of this thunder rises above the sounds of shell trumpets and bone flutes. The beat of the turtle drum swells; her own heart climbs to meet it.

  The hands of the high priests stroke her body, lift her up. Fear flickers and her head swims from the wine, given to her so she will not fight as she is carried to the cenote. Soon she will fly. Not up, but down. Down into the darkness of the cenote. Soon she will join those who have gone before her, deep in the earth where the silent waters flow.

  Again, Graciela woke crying out. Her abuela was right. The child spirit was trying to warn her. She wanted to leave this place. She would tell this to the norteamericano when he came. She had changed her mind. She wanted to go home, back to her family. She would keep the infant that grew inside her belly. She didn’t want the money the woman had promised. She called out to her madre, to her abuela. Take me home.