by Daniel Hecht
"I can," I said briskly.
I snatched his towel from the hook, took it to the hamper, and replaced it with a fresh one. Hans's eyes watched me from the glass, curious and doubtful.
I have been inwardly preparing myself for my meeting with Rev. Wallace and the Mission Council. This pending appearance causes me much uneasiness. I know them to be good men, and Deacon Skinner will support my petition, but I cannot be certain how the Council will respond. There are currents and countercurrents of belief and moral sentiment even among those six men, let alone the larger congregation; and by his very nature, Deacon Skinner fears, the wolf-man offers uncomfortable questions and may awaken divergent opinions. There is also the matter of how I came to know of him, for both Deacon Skinner and Dr. Mahoney observed that he seemed to recognize me, scenting me and fixing me with his eyes. I did not offer an explanation, and though their curiosity was plain, they did not press the point. But I worry that Rev. Wallace or the others might open that question.
This creates a quandary for me, in that I cannot explain the center of the issue or why the wolf-man's captivity distresses me so greatly. Having witnessed him with the kitten, I cannot help but think he must be, in part at least, a gentle creature. And if gentleness can reside in so fierce and strange a being, I think, cannot we make a similar claim for the worst of us? In appearance, at least, the wolf-man seems the very embodiment of our paradoxical natures; were we to know his mind, his ways, we might also draw some conclusions about those who claim full humanity.
And, too, there is simple curiosity: Does he speak? Does he reason, can he read and write? Does he have spiritual impulses and moral sentiments? Where did he come from? Who are his parents? How did such a creature come into being? How was he raised?
How does one live, being such an outcast, such a stranger, without the solace of any companionship except, fleetingly, a wild kitten from the docks? Surely, there could be no creature as alone as he is, cut off from every living thing. This last I will tell them, for I can admit to having seen his stark solitude in his cage at The Red Man.
For reasons I cannot explain, this seems the crux of the issue.
Perhaps it seems so because I myself have so long lived two lives, one concealed, one apparent, and therefore feel an outcast or stranger in my secret thoughts and beliefs, a state I would not wish on any being. Perhaps I think, too, of Margaret, who now lives as a fugitive and an outcast, alone and ever at risk. I mull many thoughts on this subject and wish I could discuss them frankly with Rev. Wallace and others, for I am convinced they bear upon the heart and soul of our faith. This is surely the center of it.
I do truly rue my foolishness and my daring and all my unconventional acts and thoughts. But my adventures and trials have changed me; birthing by degrees in me is a resolve I could never have anticipated. "I can," I answered Hans: though only partly true, such bold words! Increasingly, I rebel against the suppression of my hopes and observations, the silence imposed upon me by both my own cowardice and society. I am increasingly determined to act upon what I believe, no matter what convention it contravenes. No, belief is not the issue; it is only hope, again. But there it is, undeniable, a seed in my heart, and action is the nurture that will allow it to grow.
In our church we are always told that no mortal should stand between one's conscience and one's Maker, that each one's connection to God is personal and direct; yet in this we are hypocrites. We have no pope, but we allow the forceful personalities of our patriarchs, a fixed and uncritical interpretation of Scripture, and the rigid conventions of our brothers and sisters, to intrude between our questing, seeking consciences and the steady, sure guidance of Divinity. I have pressed my conscience hard, and it has offered an unequivocal and unvarying answer. I must honor it, and I will.
At times I consider if this is not an irrational resolve. Why concern myself? After all, I know nothing about the wolf-man; I hardly knew my own sister, can barely claim to know my husband. I experiment with the answers I will give to Rev. Wallace and the others, whose views I cannot fully anticipate but whose hearts I must win to gain their aid, and none seems quite right.
There is no perfect way to express it, for wisdom that can be spoken comes only from the mind, while the heart's wisdom is wordless; and the soul, wisest of all, only sings a song, a beguiling but distant melody we follow in the darkness. But I think it comes down to this: The stranger amongst us is no stranger but only ourselves reflected in the mirror of another; and what we fear and dislike most is either an imperfection in the glass or, more likely, a too-perfect reflection of those aspects of ourselves we would prefer not to see.
V
THE OPEN DOOR
43
BERT CAME IN through the front entrance, a white-pillared portico with manicured succulents in boxes on either side. The place looked good in the morning sun, irrigated lawns so green and closely trimmed they looked like Astroturf, the buildings a crisp modern Spanish colonial nicely set off by trees and shrubs in bull's-eyes of redwood bark.
A fluttery, sick feeling in his stomach had tormented him for the whole drive to San Mateo. Like this was very important in some way he couldn't put his finger on. Maybe it had to do with the fact that this was his first visit to the Oaks in over two months, the longest break he had ever taken from his formerly ironclad ritual. It was not easy to see her, you never knew how it would go, and now on top of the usual anxiety he felt a little rusty.
He went into the spotless lobby to the reception desk, pressed the call button, and waited. The place looked perfect as always, floors glistening, vases of cut flowers on the waiting area tables. He wondered if she would like the birds he'd bought in Chinatown—three papier-mache things each about the size of his thumb, cleverly decked in real feathers with bead eyes and wire feet.
He hoped she would. The trick was to make her smile. He hoped today would be one of the days she'd smile.
In another moment he heard the chuff of a door seal and turned to see a white-uniformed staffer come into the lobby. She smiled tentatively as she came around the desk to check him in, remembering his face if not his name.
"Marchetti," he said. "Bert Marchetti—"
"Oh, of course." She made a compassionate half smile as she tapped in an exchange number and lifted a phone to her ear. She waited for a moment and then said gently, "Hi, Carol? Mr. Marchetti's here to see Megan."
A nurse led him through the door on the left side of the lobby. The core of the Oaks was a central block flanked by two long residential wings that gave it a U shape. The arms stretched back into more lawns and plantings cut with sidewalks that eventually meandered into the cluster of big California oaks that had given the place its name. Bert had never been into the right side, which was for the geriatrics.
Ten o'clock, breakfast and morning meds over, lunch not on the horizon yet, many of the residents loitered in the day rooms, some in wheelchairs, some ambulatory Most wore the all-purpose uniform of blue-gray sweat pants and shirts.
Bert turned with Nurse Sanchez into the main corridor and marched past the line of residential rooms. He avoided looking at the shapes of people inside, the humps in the beds or silhouettes at the windows. Hovering near his door, a young man with a dented forehead looked up with one goggle eye as if the sight of Bert appalled him.
"How is she today?" Bert asked.
Nurse Sanchez shook her head. "It's not a great day, Mr. Marchetti. She's been a little depressed."
"Why's she depressed, you think?"
"We don't think it's degenerative. We think there's a cyclical element. It may be hormonal."
Degenerative, that was the big worry—that the injuries weren't done damaging the brain, that small strokes were still occurring or that existing impairments were causing atrophy. Dr. Maris had warned him that brain function could continue to deteriorate over time. They'd seen some of it in the first two years, but she'd been relatively steady for the last three.
They didn't say any more as they en
tered the far hallway and continued to room forty-two. No one was inside. Bert poked his head in and saw the pretty things he'd brought other times, lined up on the shelf above her bed.
"She's in the alcove then, that's a good sign," Nurse Sanchez said. Trying to cheer him up. He must not have looked cheered up, because she continued quietly, "You know, the staff, the doctors—we all admire you."
"Oh yeah?" He honestly couldn't imagine what she meant.
"For doing this all these years. For caring. For sticking with her."
He almost tried to explain, to set her straight. But why disappoint her?
"Thanks," he said. "That means a lot to me."
The wheelchair was turned to the big glass doors and the view out into the lawns, her head just visible above the chairback. There were a couple of other patients floating in the bright room, too. Several orderlies stood apart, chatting together but watchful.
Bert's stomach tightened as he came around the chair and saw her slumped there in her blue sweats, hands twisted against her chest. Her eyes panned past his and settled somewhere else. Nurse Sanchez squeezed Bert's arm and headed back down the corridor.
"Hey, Megan. Hey, it's Bert. Look, I brought you a present." He fumbled the little birds out of their bag and offered them to her. They looked ludicrous, there on his palm, still with their price tags on. Megan's eyes scouted them but then went away and remained indifferent.
"You want to go for a walk outside, Baby Kid?" Bert asked.
She turned her head toward the bright glass, and he took that as indication that she would. This indirect responsiveness to verbal communication, along with her ability to laugh, cry, and sometimes vocalize in response to stimuli, had convinced Dr. Maris that she retained some level of cognitive function.
Bert put the birds onto her lap blanket, then got behind her and rolled the chair to the doors. One of the orderlies keyed it open so Bert could push the chair through. Megan winced at the sunlight and put an arm over her face and moaned. But she didn't get cranked up. Relieved, Bert rolled her along the winding pavement and out into the grounds.
Everybody agreed that she had been a pretty girl. Hard to tell with her hunched back and slack face, but her skin was smooth and the people at the Oaks kept her hair clean and well brushed, a straight sheath of glossy ebony that hid the scars where her skull had been broken.
Whoever had beaten this girl had meant to kill her, but some fierce spark had kept her alive. The doctors had told him that, the first day—that she was a fighter. It was one of the things that had earned his devotion right away.
Bert had gotten the call five years ago from an old contact in the San Jose PD. Twenty-some years after Megan's abduction, and the guy still remembered Bert's quest. A critically injured woman found behind a Dumpster, about the right age, half-Asian and half-Caucasian. Naked, no ID, unconscious, couldn't speak, didn't match any missing persons description on the databases. Bert was at the office when he took the call and the room had shuddered like there was an earth tremor.
He went to see her at the hospital in San Jose before calling Fran. The young woman was swaddled in bandages and puffy from surgery, he couldn't tell if there was any resemblance and anyway she had been only six, who knew how she'd grown up. He'd stood over the drug-drowsing woman and beamed his thoughts into her bandaged skull like he was a human X-ray. So many questions: Is that you, Baby Kid? Where have you been? What happened to you back then? Who did this to you? Standing there, he'd picked up her slack hand and just as he did her fingers suddenly clasped his. It was just some reflexive movement, but it was magical to him, signaling she felt the same deep, instinctive recognition he did. At that instant he felt something slip or purge out of him, so intense it was like some kind of orgasm, one he'd been building toward for two decades. Or maybe it was like a knife being pulled from its sheath. He'd stood there for another half an hour before he had let go the hand and gone to a phone.
"Fran," he'd choked out, "Frannie, there's a girl here at the hospital. You better get over here."
Bert rolled the chair slowly out the winding path, smoking a cigarette and talking to her. You had to have faith that on some level they were in there and were hearing you.
"Sorry I haven't been coming down so much," he said. "I just been so busy. I told you last time, right, I'm punching my ticket pretty soon, there's a lot of work to get finished up. That's all."
Megan's head turned as she looked around at the lawns and plantings and the green-brown hills in the distance.
"Nurse Sanchez says you been a little off. What's up with that? Tell you the truth, I been a little off myself, I know what that's like. What're we gonna do about it, you and me, huh?"
By the time he finished his cigarette and flicked the butt under a shrub, they were nearing the back of the grounds, where the sidewalks converged in a big circle around one of the oaks. Along the curve were benches where sometimes there'd be other residents and their visitors or orderlies, but today they were alone. He was relieved. He rolled her around to the far side and took a seat on the bench next to her. She wasn't smiling. In fact she looked uneasy. The birds had fallen to the side of the chair, but when he put one into her hand, her fingers moved on the feathers and then the other hand joined the first. All the doctors said that sometimes tactile or kinetic was the only way to get through to them—movements and sensations talking to the deeper, older parts of the brain.
They stared out at the remainder of the groomed lawns, past a few more oaks, into the manzanita scrub. A quarter mile uphill a subdivision began, rooftops peeking from foliage.
As soon as her condition stabilized, he'd had her moved to a private hospital with a good reputation for neurosurgery, and then, eventually, on to the Oaks. If she'd been just an unidentified adult ward of the state, the accommodations would have been very different, and he wanted to be sure she had the best. Ordinarily the added cost would have been impossible, but at first Fran and her husband had chipped in, and anyway he had started up with Nearing and Koslowski a few months before, still hadn't made up his mind about how to spend the extra money. "Younger women": a private joke he'd thought up to deflect Nearing when he asked what Bert did with his share.
Bert had tried to convince himself it was Art Wei, Fran's husband, who insisted on testing, but he knew better. Finding the girl had put Fran and Bert in frequent contact again and she wasn't comfortable with it. Plus she'd had doubts about her from that first day, and the expense didn't help, Fran had always had a stingy streak. Without telling Bert until it was a done deal, she had gone ahead with DNA profiles of her blood and Megan's. She didn't even call Bert herself with the results, just let the administrator here at the Oaks do it.
No match. This young woman was not the daughter of Fran Marchetti Wei.
At first Bert refused to believe it. He followed up with another DNA test based on hair follicles from a hairbrush of Megan's he'd saved, asking Hank Chambers to personally oversee it at the Berkeley DNA lab. Definitive results: The girl who was registered at the Oaks as Megan Marchetti wasn't Megan Marchetti. But the staff had been calling her that the whole time, and anyway, what was the alternative? The name had stayed with her. By then Bert had been coming to see her twice a week for five months, and had found something steadying about the ritual. Plus he'd managed to make her smile a few times, she'd vocalized in a happy way, giving Bert one of the best feelings he could remember. By the time they did the testing, it had become habit—visiting her, bringing her things, paying the bills at the Oaks. And maybe they were feeding him a Pollyanna line, but the staff invariably said how good his attention was for her. They said that you never knew what normalizing contact could do, that the embrace of familial love had incredible healing powers. Dr. Maris cited actual cases of recovery that had happened even when the strictly clinical prognosis was grim. Like there was a ray from your heart that could fix anything.
Fran dropped the girl cold once she found out. Bert had argued with her, asking why it really m
attered, when they'd thought she was Megan it was easy to make room for her in their hearts, what did it matter whose DNA she had? What, you decided stuff like this on the basis of some fucking molecules it took a whole laboratory and computers even to figure out?
But he could see her point. With so many damaged, lost people in the world, there was no reason anybody should invest so deeply in some random Girl X. Who was probably a prostitute anyway: When the tests confirmed she wasn't Megan, the San Jose cops concluded she was an illegal alien brought over by some bride service or sex importer, somebody living so far under the radar that her disappearance didn't beget a call from anybody.
One of the things that made him resist the finding initially was how he made her smile the first time. When the actual Megan had been a little kid, Bert had found she liked dancing with him. He'd put on one of his records and pick her up, holding her on his hip with his right arm, other arm out and hands clasped in a wildly lopsided frame. He'd rock her to the music and they'd swing through the house and if she was in a bad mood, tantrums, sulking, anything, he could always pull her out of it.
The first time this girl had started to go into one of her anxiety things, the side-to-side struggling against her seat belt, hands scrabbling at the arm rests, the high moaning, he'd been scared to death. They'd been out here by the big oak, alone, he didn't know what you were supposed to do. But the doctors had said tactile and kinetic, tactile and kinetic. And it occurred to him maybe she'd remember. So he'd started swinging her chair, weaving it side to side and back and forth, trying to find that same swing rhythm, humming the music. It was like magic. After a while she'd cranked her head around to see what he was doing, and she was smiling, sort of a Mona Lisa smile, like she was listening to something in the far distance. To him, it proved absolutely who she was. Some part of her remembered the times they'd danced, and the movement brought back that good feeling.
