Turner sighed and began trudging back to the distant group of policemen in his own tracks. Nordstrom’s small avid figure still hovered over the gully edge, lenses twinkling in the relentless sunlight. Turner knew a moment’s perverse satisfaction that the man’s quarry had eluded him so utterly.
“It was dark last night, mister,” the old black man was crooning at Turner’s retreating back. “Real dark. Then we saw the light, and all our woes are over.”
Shaking his head, Turner rejoined those whose indifference he understood. An ambulance, siren muted for the dead, rolled across the scarred snowscape, adding its tire tracks to the melee.
Two attendants slid down the staked-out bank and loaded Jane Doe’s body onto a stretcher. She had died recently enough that her limbs were still pliant despite the cold. Her slight body sagged in the attendants’ grip for a few sickening seconds before the fiat stretcher claimed her, shaping her to its own stiffness. By so little time they had missed her.
At last the rough brown blanket was draped over her nakedness. Dead, Jane Doe seemed as fragile as Patty Hearst on her capture, and something shameful in the chase,
Turner reflected. Someone sighed relief behind him. Turner twisted to see the first cop on the scene, tension lines around his eyes finally relaxing.
Turner contemplated the depression Jane Dot’s body had made in the drift. Where she lay the snow had melted away to bare ground. Stones, dried leaves and broken sticks formed the dark silhouette of a figure. Its posture reminded Turner of a snow angel that had sunk too fast to earth. There was nothing pretty in it, only emptiness.
He started back to his car, then remembered Nordstrom. The guy was trotting like a fox terrier alongside the stretcher, lifting the blanket and pressing his bare hands to the body. Fingering it—throat, hands, even the feet.
Nordstrom looked up and caught whatever expression was grabbing hold of Turner’s face and twisting. His own was ecstatic.
“She’s still alive, Mr. Turner! By God, she’s still alive! I’ve got a faint peripheral pulse over her anklebone. She might be in hypothermia, but at the proper facilities—”
Faces fell in disbelief all around Nordstrom. The attendants almost dropped the stretcher. One folded back the blanket top to reveal Jane Doe’s bloodlessly calm, madonna-like face. Only the dead get complete privacy.
Turner swore out loud for the second time that morning, softly, to himself.
“Poor bitch,” he murmured. “Poor unlucky bitch.”
The Gleaning
January 14
“No contact possible to flesh…”
—T. S. Eliot , Whispers of Immortality
Chapter Twenty-four
* * *
Jane awoke.
A man was leaning over her, staring.
Jane stared back. She saw herself reflected, small as a figure in a snapshot, on the shiny lenses of his glasses.
“Hello. I’m Dr. Nordstrom. I’m here to take care of you.”
Jane blinked to wash her reflection away. When her eyes opened again, they saw straight through Dr. Nordstrom’s magnifying lenses into his eyes. They shone as hard and reflectively as his spectacles.
“Déjà vu.” Jane sampled the words. She’d never said them aloud before, but her French accent was impeccable.
The man withdrew a little, a very little. “What?”
“Déjà vu. ‘An inexplicable feeling of familiarity.’ But you aren’t familiar.”
“Then perhaps the situation is.” Dr. Nordstrom’s deep voice eased into her consciousness. “Think back.”
Jane did, remembering only cold and confusion and the slow, deep process of awakening. She knew suddenly that she had forgotten something. Because she had forgotten it, she couldn’t say what it was.
She turned her head on the pillow. Each appropriate word popped into her head as needed. Bed. IV. Hospital room. Oh, yes, hospital… No wonder it all seemed so familiar.
“I’m at the University of Minnesota Hospitals?”
“Something like that.” The deep voice came slower now, as if it talked to a child a long distance away. “You’ve been a very… ill young woman.”
“111. Is that what I feel?”
“Gravely ill,” the voice repeated, dwelling on the words in a way Jane didn’t like. This man dwelled on everything —with his eyes, his voice. His mind.
Jane’s thoughts jerked into another gear. “Clothes. I don’t have clothes. The light took my clothes—”
“We’ll get you other clothes. Later.”
“Who is we?”
“The people who are here to take care of you. The nurses and doctors. Myself. You’ve been ill before. You know what that means.”
“I don’t like it.” Jane tried to sit up, but found her limbs too weak to support her.
Dr. Nordstrom pushed her back, his hand pressing on her chest. It stayed there, cold through the thin fabric of her hospital gown. He seemed to be measuring her heartbeat.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he urged, his voice reassuring but his eyes still the same, still opaque.
Jane sat up again, this time against the force of his restraining hand, “Kevin,” she said, articulating another word that had spurted into her mind. An image, and an emotion, followed obediently, as if leashed.
“He’s… away.” Dr. Nordstrom’s expression hadn’t changed, but somehow he had. “Lie back. Lie back and you’ll get better sooner and can have anything you want.”
“No one can have anything they want.”
Dr. Nordstrom smiled. It reminded Jane that Kevin’s smile was much nicer. “Some of us can, dear.”
Lying down again, she studied the ceiling. It was covered in tiles with rows of dark dots punched through. Acoustic, her mind coached. So sound wouldn’t carry. Another memory spun into place. Dr. Swanson’s lab in the basement of Whittington Hall. Rooms with locked doors with windows in them. Acoustic tile everywhere—ceiling and walls. Kevin hadn’t liked that place at all. Kevin hadn’t liked Jane being there,
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“No.” Dr. Nordstrom’s voice softened with certainty. Another emotion underlay it, one Jane had never perceived or experienced before. She cocked her head. His smile returned. “You’ll need to stay here awhile. You and I are going to work together. We’re going to… explore… what will make you well. We’ll look into your memory, into those powers of yours—”
“I want to leave,” Jane insisted.
“You can’t.” He sounded quite final now. “Your physical condition is too tenuous. You’re a very sick young woman. Somehow you lost weight again. Why, you’re nothing but skin and bones. They very nearly took you away for dead.”
His hands shaped her form outside the sheet, clasping her wrists, knees, elbows, hips in turn. He touched her a bit like Kevin had touched her later, when he no longer had medical reason to touch her body. He had never touched her like this in the hospital.
Jane considered, her reactions hamstrung between responding to a familiar stimulus, and the unwelcome source. She decided to think it over. So much was confused. She felt cold to her bones. What she was experiencing in this hospital room was only a shadow overlaid on what she really knew deep in her brain: snow and cold and dark of night. And the ship.
The ship formed in her mind, a huge, hovering bat of darkness with one lurid eye calling to her. The ship. But that must have been days and days ago, maybe… a week… since the ship.
Something more—so much more—had happened since. Hadn’t it? She couldn’t recall anything beyond being returned naked to her Mother Earth, to Kevin, but knew no panic. Maybe this Dr. Nordstrom would help her remember, as Kevin had.
Jane matched his perpetual stare with her own. Dr. Nordstrom was here to help her, but she would only tell Kevin about the ship that she didn’t… quite… remember.
* * *
“Where are you taking me?” Kevin wanted to know.
The cop finally gruffed out, “Visitors.”
Kevin felt like a pariah as he was hustled through the halls. The uniformed men and women with holstered hips walking these workaday halls ignored him as they passed.
He was looking forward to seeing someone who would recognize him, accept him—probably Kandy and his lawyer, The cop had said “‘visitors,” plural,
A long Plexiglas panel divided the room into “Home” and “Visitors,” into “us” and “them.” Kevin was ushered to a cubicle with a phone. Two people sat on the other side of the Plex, and they weren’t Kandy and some lawyer. Kevin almost wished the cops would drag him away screaming, à la the movie cliché. Instead, he faced a new kind of confinement.
“Hi, Mom,” he found himself mouthing like a football hero on TV. “Dad.”
Grant Wood could have painted this portrait of sober parental shock. His mother looked cast in wax—the careful details of her Elk River-modish outfit seemed picked out in wire armature. His father looked as Kevin had never seen him, worried white.
Kevin picked up the phone and sank onto the molded plastic chair. “Who told you?” Pen strokes scarred the tabletop in front of him, inarticulate doodles from the terminally self-conscious.
“Is it safe to speak?” his mother wondered.
“Good question, but what can it hurt?”
She nodded sorrowfully, but his dad took the receiver to answer.
“That… Kandinsky fellow told us. We asked at the university and someone said he was a friend—”
“He is.”
“Kevin, what the hell’s going on?” His father was recovering enough to assume the mantle of parental outrage as if he’d personally loomed it. “They said that you were booked on a murder charge!”
“I am, I guess. They haven’t bothered telling me.”
“Good God, why didn’t you call, son?”
“They don’t let you do long-distance in jail, Dad. Besides, I didn’t want to upset you and Mom—”
His mother, listening in cheek to cheek with his father, swallowed a sob, masking it with her gloved hand.
She wore those fuzzy wool gloves with black leather palms that always reminded Kevin of an ape. He could see why she kept her gloves on; it was cold in the visitors’ room. Besides, someone like Kevin’s mom only took off her gloves in places where she was staying for a while. She wasn’t ready to accept this mean, compartmentalized room as more than a place of passage for herself—and Kevin.
“Look,” Kevin said. “It’s absurd, the charges. But they’ve got me locked up over a long holiday weekend—”
“Holiday?”
Kevin smiled wearily at his dad. “I guess they don’t close down much in Elk River on Martin Luther King’s birthday yet. But the mail doesn’t come, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Hard to keep track of a new holiday.” Arthur Blake frowned vaguely.
“How was Christmas at the store?” Kevin asked.
His dad shrugged, and Kevin suddenly knew where he’d gotten the gesture. “So-so. Folks are still pretty tight, even at Christmas.”
“Thanks for the presents,” his mother put in. “Those special candies—”
“Truffles.”
“—whatever, were real good. I’m on a diet now, though.” Her smile was as modest as ever. Clare Blake had always done what was expected of her, at the proper time and in the proper season. January was for diets. And Christmas, Christmas was for… guilt trips. “You look so much nicer without the beard,” she couldn’t resist putting in now.
“Sorry I didn’t get up for the holidays, Mom. I had this critical case—”
“All your cases seem to be critical. You should have gone into hardware,” his dad joked—or perhaps didn’t joke. “Nothing’s critical there except maybe plumbing supplies.”
“I’m not in hardware, Dad; I’m in software. Human head stuff. Psychiatric treatment doesn’t follow a schedule. I had this case—”
“Is that… she… the one you went off with?” His mother’s faded blue eyes held the grave, tell-the-truth-now look Kevin hadn’t seen for years.
“I didn’t 4go off with her. It’s too complicated to explain—”
“Ail your cases are that way,” his father put in.
Kevin found reflex forming the words, “You don’t understand.” They didn’t, but he didn’t say it. Again.
“My cases are demanding,” he said instead. “This one especially.”
“Who was that man who called?” his mother wanted to know. “I… didn’t like the way he put things, like he needed to know that he knew something we didn’t. I didn’t like him”
Kevin grinned at her. “Very perceptive, Mom. You’d make a good shrink.”
“Women’s intuition,” she returned, pleased.
“There’s something to that… maybe. But the guy who called was just trying to scare me by putting a scare in you. It must have worked, if you two drove down here from Elk River.”
“Finding out you were in jail put a worse scare in us,” his father said. “Kevin, how can you sit here—you have never been in jail a day in your life—and take it like it’s nothing? We’ll find a lawyer; we’ll get you out.”
“Not until Wednesday. By then it’ll be too late maybe. It’s Jane they really want. My patient.”
“We met her.” His mother put her ear back to the receiver after dropping this bombshell, the ape-gloves folded primly on the clasp of her go-to-church real leather purse.
Kevin sat to attention. “Jane?” He whispered automatically despite the phone—half from shock, half from caution. “Where? No—don’t say.”
“She’s an awfully odd girl, Kevin. Are you really… serious… about her?”
He just shook his head. Explaining Jane and himself to anyone—even, or especially, his parents—seemed futile. “Can you… hint… where you saw her?”
His mother leaned into the Plexiglas, breathing confessionally into the receiver. “Your condominium. We went there looking for you.”
“When?”
“Oh—” Her eyes sought her husband’s. “Thursday.”
“Thursday. And this is Saturday, right?”
His father nodded. “We closed the store Wednesday night and drove down early Thursday. Now I guess we can tell customers it was for the holiday weekend.”
“Did my place… look all right?” The feds must have tossed it, too, Kevin guessed.
“Fine. Perfect. Your decorating is a little barren for my taste—,” his mother added scrupulously.
“Was… anyone else there?” Government men.
“Just her.” His mother’s face tightened. “She was right at home.”
“She wants to know does this Jane person live there,” his father put in man-to-man.
“No, Mom. Jane doesn’t live with me. She was only at my place once.”
“Oh. Well, she made herself right to home yesterday morning. Ate some food from the refrigerator. An empty bottle of beer was on the coffee table.” Distaste flavored her tone. In Clare Blake’s book, nice girls didn’t drink beer and certainly not from the bottle. “Maybe you had it,” she added hopefully. Real men, on the other hand, did drink beer. From the bottle. Only.
Kevin smiled, warmed despite himself by the soft, familiar slings and arrows exchanged between the generations, between country parents and city sons. They felt far less lethal than the projectiles the cold, cruel world of strangers had hurled his way recently.
“I’m glad Jane found some chow,” Kevin said. “You don’t know how I’ve worried about her—”
“What about you? What about us?” Arthur Blake grabbed the receiver solo, swinging into full parental mode again. “It’s always been your work. Your work first and foremost.”
“I’m sorry. I never would have brought you into this.”
“That’s just it, Kevin!” His mother was hissing into the mouthpiece, agitated. “You leave us out of everything— your life here, your work. You never tell us anything.”
“I can’t tell you what’s really behi
nd this, either.”
“Why?” his father demanded.
“Because it’s worse than even you think.”
Their faces fell in tandem, a side effect of thirty-eight years of textbook marriage.
“Go back to Elk River,” Kevin urged his parents in the same quieting tone he found effective with patients. “There’s nothing you can do—nothing they’ll let you do, except get hurt. Just… don’t believe everything you hear about me,” he added. Having their only son in jail was no picnic for his parents. He had to warn them that it could get worse.
The cop had opened the door behind him.
“We’ll… talk to that Kandinsky fellow again,” his father suggested. “If he’s getting a lawyer—”
The cop had Kevin by the arm, pulling him up from the table. Kevin had already accepted the way of the world in jail, but his mother didn’t have to.
She rose with him and pressed against the clear plastic. Kevin touched fingers with her through the barrier, half convinced he could sniff the faint aroma of a recent home permanent. Next he would be smelling gingerbread cookies and seeing the old kitchen linoleum in his dreams— regressing to the peaceful past that had never been as tranquil as it seemed in retrospect.
You of all people, Blake, should know better, he told himself as the cop closed the door, framing his parents’ worried faces behind a sheet of smeared glass.
He’d botched it again, as he always did, with his parents, in the name of sparing them, sparing himself.
A white-attired trusty wheeled a cart of supper trays down the hall as Kevin was hustled past. No gingerbread men lurked in the tray’s shallow food wells. He looked.
So Jane had still been free as recently as Thursday night—free and raiding his refrigerator. Triumph did a loop-de-loop in Kevin’s arterial system. Jane was free! That was what he was fighting for, keeping quiet for, getting dumped on for. That made everything worth it.
Kevin laughed suddenly to himself. Aloud.
The cop glanced suspiciously in his direction.
Kevin laughed even louder.
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