The Edge of Madness Cafe (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 2)

by Mark Reynolds

  She said it all without even looking up, concentrating only on spitting it all out at once so that there would be no more questions, no more secrets, no more unmentioned details. All your cards are on the table; now we’ll see what’s what.

  Serena looked at her directly, no suspicion or fear or the lying smile used to humor the deranged. Her expression was both serious and sober. “You are coming to a crossroads, Ellen Monroe. A choice must be made. If even a little of what you say is true, you must never go back to Dr. Kohler again. He cannot grasp the possibilities of what you know. I understand the considerable authority he holds over you, but soon you will have to choose: the illusion of normalcy or true freedom.”

  Then Serena straightened up, leaning back a little as if struck with inspiration. “I want you to take some of my special blend with you.”

  Ellen blinked, wondering if she had blacked out momentarily. Tea? How was this back to being about tea? Wasn’t she listening?

  But Serena was already up and moving towards the counter. “Forget about anything this so-called “doctor” is prescribing to you, and take some of this tea. Drink it before bedtime. Don’t worry, it won’t keep you awake. It will help you sleep, help you dream; and that’s what you need right now, a nice restful sleep. Dreams help clear your mind.”

  “Mine don’t,” Ellen said darkly.

  “They will,” Serena replied, looking up at her from behind the counter, “if you pay attention. Your dreams are telling you something, Ellen.” Serena returned with a small paper bag and one large coffee. “It’s important that you listen to them. Your head knows a lot more about you than any psychiatrist could ever hope to. You just need to listen. I want you to take this.”

  “Serena, I appreciate this, but—”

  “I insist,” Serena said. “You can pay for the coffee if you like. I expect it’s why you really came in, and you might need it if you’re going to spend the night poring over Nicky’s little inventory project. But the tea is a gift, and you should never question when fate hands something to you.”

  Even through the paper, the tea smelled exotic, the aroma of stately pleasure domes. “Thank you. Can I ask what’s in it?”

  “It’s a special blend, oolong and herbs, mostly, with a little thyme to ward off nightmares, and a little chamomile to help you sleep, and a little of … other things.”

  * * *

  Ellen thanked her again while paying for her coffee, and apologized once more for the trouble. Serena dismissed both with that same regal wave, her gifts easily spared. Then Ellen left, dashing across the street to Dabble’s Books with a fresh cup of cinnamon-hazelnut in hand, cream and sugar already added because Serena knew that about the troubled young woman.

  Serena knew a great many things about Ellen Monroe, in fact, and was learning more by the moment. What troubled her however, were the things she did not know. “What are you hiding, Nicky?”

  Serena returned to the table, sitting opposite Ellen’s empty chair.

  Curiouser and curiouser, she thought, the situation less amusing than earlier. Something was going on around her, and she had no idea what. And that was more than a little bit alarming.

  With deliberate slowness, she reached across the small table, taking Ellen’s teacup and bringing it towards her. She turned it, looking carefully at the side Ellen drank from, careful not to touch it. Amber-green liquid rocked gently in the bone china, fragments of leaves dancing along the bottom. There was the aroma of lukewarm tea and the lightest trace of Ellen’s lips on the edge of the cup. Not lipstick, no, just the print of warm flesh against the smooth edge of ceramic like a fingerprint left behind, the tale of the traveler who had passed this way and was now gone.

  Serena raised the cup very deliberately, running her tongue along the lip print, tasting it. Then she tilted the cup back and drank in the flavor of Ellen’s forgotten tea, breathing in her aroma from the cooling liquid.

  Yes, Serena thought. There it is. There … it … isssssssss.

  No one entered Serena’s Coffee Shoppe for the rest of that evening, or bothered to wonder why the proprietor sat alone in the dark, a teacup halfway between the table and her lips, frozen in the moment like an insect trapped in amber.

  PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

  After more than seven weeks of treatment, Dr. Kohler had a revelation about Ellen Monroe.

  It was not a revelation that would help her, but it was a revelation all the same.

  He grew up in a farm town at the furthest western edge of New York State, trapped between a failing city to the east and the forgotten corner of Pennsylvania to the west, its existence almost pointless. Confined by the lethargic pace of rural life, he grew anxious, angry. Not the restless angst of teenage rebellion, but a distinct sense that even at thirteen, life was already passing him by. From the distance of Cornell, post-grad work in Syracuse, a position in Chicago General before coming here to settle into private practice—big places with big ideas and big futures—his formative years, his entire childhood, existed only as a source of irritation, even embarrassment. He moved to a high-rise apartment in the city, suburbs too much like the country for his taste. He liked the smell of pavement and car exhaust, the noise of traffic and police sirens, the hustle and bustle, the attitude, people both purpose-driven and oblivious. It was reassuring to be where things were happening, the heart of the matter, the thick of it all. Nothing like where he grew up, that modern-day ghost town doomed to history, its useful life spent out long ago.

  Besides, small towns had ways of knowing things about you that were never meant to be known.

  The center of town where he grew up was an intersection, a junction of two roads with a corner gas station and a hardware and feed store. Farms spread over acres of planted hills and valleys with deteriorating roads binding neighbor to neighbor. People gathered after Sunday services—you were either a Methodist or a Lutheran—to talk about the rain or lack of it, the price of feed, how many gallons of milk they were averaging from their herd, or the slump in corn prices.

  Back then he was not Dr. Frederick Kohler, that still years away. Back then he was Freddy, youngest son of John and Lilly Kohler. He grew up with three older brothers that he hated, and a younger cousin who came to live with them so that his unmarried aunt could work. His cousin’s name was Catherine, but everyone called her Cassie.

  Cassie overdosed on heroin at nineteen.

  Back then, everyone thought drugs were a city issue, the scourge of the urban ghetto, a problem for the blacks, and maybe the Chicanos. No one thought you could get heroin where he grew up, God’s country, small-town U.S.A.

  Cassie’s death at nineteen was the death of innocence in yet another small town that long believed itself immune to the ills of the world at large.

  For Freddy, innocence died well before that day.

  Cassie was nineteen; younger than Ellen Monroe, but not much. Ellen had issues with substance abuse, even overdosed. And the similarities did not end there.

  He found himself inexplicably drawn to Ellen Monroe, unable to get her out of his head: her story, her delusions, her thoughts, her face. The picture album from her father began to fill in the holes. Mostly childhood photos. Not too many, and fewer and fewer as she grew up. Gabriel Monroe was not a man given to nostalgia. There was a single note in the box the photo album came in: Keep it. Most were unenlightening save to prove Ellen had a past she was repressing—as if there was any doubt. But there was one picture that caught his attention. Ellen was hanging by her hands from a tree branch, a summer day in the country for a little girl of six or seven. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and cheap tennis shoes, she was staring at the camera, her gaze wistful and untroubled, beautiful and somehow familiar. In her smile, a missing tooth, a spray of freckles across her nose.

  Cassie.

  Revelation hits like lightning, and everything he’d left behind came back in the blink of an eye. A patient he was treating for manic depression, delusional schizophrenia and amnesia was r
eminding him of a very specific afternoon one very specific summer when he was ten and a half years old, Cassie just turning seven. The two of them were playing cowboys and Indians with his three older brothers; politically incorrect, certainly, but it was a different time. You could still tell ethnic jokes about Polocks and Wops and Mexicans. Homosexuals were not even talked about. And African-Americans were still blacks, or, depending on the social gathering, nigger in a low whisper. His father routinely complained about the Japs taking jobs from honest Americans because they worked for a bowl of rice, and how could an American company compete with that; the goddamn bleeding heart liberals were to blame. It was a different time, forever ago.

  But as with most things from the past, it is a simpler matter to bury them than to forget them.

  Freddy could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of going out with his older brothers to shoot B-B guns in the woods behind their home. As a rule, his older brothers never included him. He was four years behind his next oldest brother, Tommy, and those four years were insurmountable. They said he was a baby; that he couldn’t keep up; that he would cry; that he would tell mom. There was always a reason not to bring him along, not to let him play with them. The reasons were simply excuses; they didn’t want him around.

  But this time was different. Jake had asked him to come, and Jake was the oldest so the others would do as he said. Jake graduated in June and was going to join the army this fall when he turned eighteen. If Jake said it was okay, the other two would have to go along. Then they would tell Freddy things; secret things they stopped talking about when they knew he was listening. Freddy could hardly contain himself.

  Catastrophe was inevitable; their mother decided that Cassie was going along, too.

  Cassie was no good at playing cowboys and Indians! She was only seven. And she was a girl! She should be back at the house playing on the swing, or with her dolls, or … something, anything but tagging along on his first time playing cowboys and Indians with his older brothers, shooting B-B guns in the woods at beer cans and squirrels.

  Cassie would ruin everything.

  He made it a point to ignore her as he followed his brothers down the dirt road that ran alongside the fallow field of grass. Next year it would be alfalfa. The year after, corn. Now it was only drowsy grass thick with wildflowers and bees all hot and sticky on this late July day. He would have liked to carry one of the B-B guns, but when he asked, Jake said maybe later. That was all right; he could be patient. So long as he had a chance to shoot Jake’s B-B gun, he could wait all day.

  Cassie trailed a little behind, carrying on incessantly while skipping and sidestepping so that she could watch the dirt clouds scraped up by her sneakers. She was not taking the patrol very seriously; this was certainly no way to hunt renegade savages. “I wanna be a Indian, Freddy. I wanna be a Indian. I wanna be Thakaweha. Let me be Thakaweha, Freddy.”

  Cassie always liked Freddy; he was her favorite.

  Freddy assumed she meant the Indian guide, Sacagawea, but had confused the name. Missing front teeth further garbled her words. He had no idea how she had gotten the name into her head, and didn’t much care. He just wanted her to shut up and stop annoying his older brothers. The more she prattled on, the faster they seemed to walk. If Jake got really mad, he might not let him shoot the B-B gun, and Freddy really wanted to shoot Jake’s B-B gun.

  Nearly a mile from the house, the meadow dipped down and became woods. It was here, under a large maple with low branches—good for climbing and scouting out Indians—that his brothers declared they would make their fort. Jake, seventeen and the oldest, took a knee in front of Freddy and informed him that he would be in charge of the fort. It was his duty to guard all Indians that the brothers brought back. Jake told him this was very important, and that if he did it well, he would personally take Freddy out into the forest and let him shoot beer cans with his B-B gun. Jake’s air rifle had unlimited pump-action, unlike some of the newer ones with safety features to discharge excess pressure; Jake boasted that twelve pumps would put a B-B right through a beer can. God, Freddy wanted to see that!

  Of course, the first Indian to guard was the self-proclaimed Indian Princess, Thakaweha. Like Freddy, Jake had no idea who Cassie was prattling on about. As far as he was concerned, that was not his problem. And neither was Cassie; at least, not for long.

  The day was hot and windless, the air still and thick with the sweet smell of uncut hay and wildflowers and hard-baked earth, the drone of insects and the nattering of his cousin.

  Half an hour passed before Freddy first began to suspect something. Enthusiasm and the promise of firing Jake’s B-B gun held him for nearly fifteen minutes more. But enthusiasm doesn’t count for much when you’re ten years old, and bored. Clearly Jake’s only motivation for inviting him along to play cowboys and Indians—a game his brothers had declared on several occasions was for babies—was to ditch Cassie with Freddy. Their mother probably told Jake to look after Freddy and his cousin, and would not let his brothers leave the house without the other two. The pretense of playing cowboys and Indians was merely a clever way of getting out from under their mother’s eye, out to a place where the brothers could slip away and leave Freddy to watch over Cassie while they pursued squirrels and birds, and shot beer cans out in the woods. And as the day grew hotter, this kernel of an idea took root, sprouting greater and greater detail until finally it blossomed into one undeniable fact: he had been ditched! He wasn’t going to explore the woods with his brothers or play cowboys and Indians, and he was never going to fire Jake’s B-B gun or learn all the secrets that they whispered when he was around because they thought he was just as much a baby as Cassie. He would slow them down. He would get hurt or tired, and cry. He would tell on them. Just a little baby that they didn’t want around.

  Knowing a thing does little to change it; sometimes knowing only makes the agony worse.

  “Freddy, leth do thomething,” Cassie whined, missing teeth ruining her S’s; it would have been funny if he didn’t hate her so much just then. “When are we gonna play cowboyth and Indianth, huh? Jake thaid I could be Thakaweha.”

  “We are playing cowboys and Indians, you dodo,” Freddy said, swinging back and forth from a low branch on the tree. It wasn’t as much fun as it sounded; not like shooting a B-B gun. “I’m the cowboy. You’re the Indian. And you’re my prisoner, so be quiet.”

  He couldn’t very well tell her that all the other cowboys had ditched them. And anyway, it was her fault.

  “I don’t wanna be a prithoner, Freddy. Jake thaid I could be Thakaweha. Just like on TV. I’m thuppothed to be an Indian printheth.”

  He felt like an idiot. He wanted to cry, but knew he was too big for that. And he wanted to punch his older brothers, each of them; really hard. But he was too little for that. Jake might not bother, but Kevin and Tommy would definitely beat the grease out of him, even if it meant his father would smack them both within an inch of their lives and mom would ground them. He was trapped in the middle and did the only thing a ten-and-a-half-year-old could do in that situation. He blamed someone else.

  Funny how we never really outgrow our childhood.

  “Leave me alone,” he said sullenly. “As soon as Jake gets back, we’ll play. We have to wait for him.”

  This wasn’t the answer Cassie was looking for. “Why?”

  “Cuz!”

  While giving no answer seemed better than telling her the truth, it only held Cassie for about a minute. Sitting on the ground, staring at the soles of her sneakers for lack of anything else to look at, she said, “Freddy, thith ith boring. Leth do thomething.”

  “We gotta wait for Jake,” he grumbled, and plopped down on the ground and stared at the tree.

  “Then help me make an Indian cothtume,” she offered.

  Freddy felt the sun cleave through the gaps in the leaves, felt it bake down upon his skin, already prickling with sweat and dirt, feverish from sun and undirected anger. His brain felt swolle
n, ready to explode, filled with hate for Jake and his brothers, for Cassie, for himself. All he could hear was Cassie’s complaints and the drone of insects whirring in the summer haze, moving slowly through the languid heat of the summer field to mix with the buzz of accusations in his skull: dodo, dummy, dodo-head, baby, stupid, idiot. He didn’t want to make costumes; he wanted to shoot Jake’s B-B gun, to be a grown-up. He didn’t want to play silly, baby games with Cassie!

  “Indians didn’t wear costumes, dummy,” he said, losing patience. “They didn’t wear anything. You wanna look like an Indian; take off your clothes and you’ll look like a real Indian. Stupid.”

  “Really?”

  Why wouldn’t she just shut up! “Course; what’d you think?”

  She considered this very deliberately. “On TV, they’re not naked.” It was not a challenge, simply uncertainty. “They had clothes with fringeth and featherth.”

  “That’s TV,” he said, no longer even sure where this idea was coming from. He was sure he had read it somewhere, but couldn’t remember when. “They can’t show stuff like that on TV, though. The Indians didn’t wear costumes, just war paint and feathers in their hair.”

  All throughout childhood, Cassie trusted Freddy. Not his older brothers. Sometimes not even his parents or her mom. But she always trusted him.

  “’Kay,” was all she said.