The Black Witch of Mexico

by Colin Falconer

  Chapter 4

  Boston, the previous spring.

  They were in an art gallery in Back Bay. The room was painted pure white with down-lights illuminating the sculptures and pieces of art on the walls. There were yellow flowers in a black onyx vase in the middle of the room. The ancient fireplace with its timber mantelpiece had also been painted white to blend with the walls.

  Elena stood by this same mantel, staring at a three-dimensional piece above it: six skulls, carmine, white and emerald green. She was frowning, a finger to her lips, one arm supported by the other.

  She had on a short, black dress for summer and wore her hair in a French braid. Adam could not care less about the art. He was staring at her.

  Exquisite woman, still life, dress painted on, wearing salmon coloured scarf. Not for sale. Not for anything.

  * * *

  Afterwards they wandered hand in hand into the Public Gardens, watched the swan boats on the lake, a father tossing a football to his son near the George Washington statue.

  “Do you ever think about having a family?” she asked.

  “Last thing I want right now is kids,” he said, and there it was, out of his mouth before he could stop himself. “Well, you know, someday.”

  It was like a cloud passing over the sun on a summer’s day. He saw the look on her face briefly, and then it was gone, replaced by her usual smile. “We all have to think about it sometime.”

  This was getting serious. This conversation was his cue to stop answering phone calls and text messages, to miss dates because he was so busy at work, to open the exit gate for her to walk through. He felt panicked. He wasn’t ready to let her go just yet.

  Later in bed she locked her legs around his hips, her eyes pinpoints, sweat beaded between her breasts. She had never made love to him so passionately before. She begged him to fuck her harder and then she rolled him on his back and rode him, held his face in her hands, fierce, intense.

  Afterwards he went to the refrigerator to get them water. He watched her lying naked among the wreck of their bed and smiled. He smelled her on his skin, sweat and perfume. He felt replete. He had everything he needed.

  He went up to the deck, the wind chill on his bare skin, stared at the lights on the John Hancock Building and the Prudential Tower.

  He felt like he was master of everything.

  He did not know she had just told him goodbye.

  Chapter 5

  Einstein’s theory of relativity; a quiet night on the graveyard shift, the time stretched on forever; if he had a cardiac patient in AF followed by multiple criticals from a road trauma, twelve hours could pass like twelve minutes.

  You shocked someone’s heart back to life or pushed a tube into the trachea and forced air into the lungs. You could save a life in a few seconds. He used to count up the saves at the end of the week but he didn’t even do that anymore. Days and nights blended together.

  Adam was back on the graveyard shift, ten through eight; he had taken care on an asthma emergency, started the workup of an elderly woman with abdominal pain, sutured a lacerated scalp. He went back to the nurse’s station to finish writing up his notes. One of the other physicians sat behind the desk, staring into a muddy cup of coffee. Frank was maybe ten or so years older, a nice enough guy, but he never went out for beers with him and Jay and the rest of the guys. Frank was a family man went straight home after every shift.

  “Everything okay?” Adam said.

  Frank didn’t look up. “Don’t get married,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “If you don’t get married then you won’t ever have to go through a divorce.”

  Adam looked around hoping there might be someone to bail him out. There were a lot of things he could manage in the ER--every life-threatening emergency he could imagine--but one of his colleagues bleeding his heart out wasn’t one of them.

  But it seemed everyone else was busy. He sat down.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you shout about.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Been happening for months. But the moving company came today, and when I get home after my shift all her things will be gone. I let her have most of the furniture. I said we’d go halves on the kids, that I knew a good surgeon.”

  It was a lame joke and instead of laughing he put a hand over his eyes and pretended he was tired. Please God, don’t cry, Adam thought. We’ll never be able to work with each other again.

  “You work so hard; you’re the top gun, the next big thing. Then one day you look around and you realize that everything you had in your future is all in your past. I thought I had everything worked out and then one day it hit me: I don’t know anything. What happens now?”

  “I don’t know, I never thought about it.”

  “Well, maybe you should.” He put his glasses back on. “While you’re still a top gun.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Bill suggested I take a sabbatical.”

  Bill was the chairman of the department, a hard man to please, and Adam suspected he was some kind of religious nut. Adam kept his head down and tried to avoid him as much as he could.

  “There’s a hospital down in the south of Mexico, charity thing, his church raises funds to help keep it going. They’re always looking for volunteers. It’s primitive but I don’t mind that. I need to get away for a while.”

  “I guess you have to do what you have to do.”

  Frank stood up. “You know, you work hard, you try and do your best, but ... what really gets me, I never even saw this coming.” He walked off, stopped and looked at him over the rim of his glasses. “Take my advice: don’t ever touch a gurney when a patient’s being defibrillated, and never get married.”

  * * *

  After his shift Adam changed out of his scrubs and jogged back to his apartment in Beacon Hill. He hoped Elena would still be there by the time he arrived, but she had already left for work.

  He was out on his feet but he tidied the kitchen or he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. How many times had he told her about leaving her breakfast dishes in the sink? Rinse them and put them away. “It only takes a minute,” he said.

  He plumped the cushions on the sofa, put a CD back in its case, then took a shower, dumping his sweaty t-shirt in the hamper. He made the bed and climbed in. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Frank. The poor bastard had two kids still in school. He didn’t see them much as it was.

  It bothered him, not just what he said about marriage, but about the future becoming the past. But he guessed he didn’t have to worry about that now, the future was still a long way off. Marriage and kids, it was all still to do.

  He drifted off to sleep, listening to the muted roar of traffic on the Turnpike. He could smell Elena’s perfume on the pillow: Jean Paul Gaultier.

  He loved his life.

  Chapter 6

  The next weekend he and Elena drove down to Cape Cod. He had managed to arrange a precious weekend away from the ER. Late Friday evening they headed out of the city, an hour later they were on the Pilgrim’s Highway just outside Plymouth. He had one hand on the wheel and the other on her thigh. He had been on nights all week and he couldn’t wait to get her into bed.

  His hand moved along her thigh. She was staring out of the window, her sunglasses on, watching the sun set over the trees. “I’m not wearing underwear,” she said.

  He checked for himself. No, she wasn’t wearing underwear and she was waxed smooth. He put the X5 on cruise control. He had an intricate mind map of her body and it guided his fingers unerringly to where he wanted to go without his eyes ever leaving the road. She gasped and put her knuckles in her mouth.

  She was wet.

  “Slow down.”

  “I’m doing the speed limit,”

  “Not the car.”

  He slowed down, as she asked him to, and she did not come until Ellesville Harbor. “Y
ou’re amazing,” she whispered, nuzzling his cheek in that dreamy way of hers. He thought it meant she was his forever, but of course it didn’t.

  “Amazing” didn’t mean what he thought it meant. Nothing meant what he thought.

  * * *

  “Do you ever think about being with someone else?”

  It made him uncomfortable, these questions. He supposed it was natural for her to think about it, they had been together over two years. But he didn’t like these conversations.

  “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Never?”

  “No, I like being with you.”

  “But if we broke up?”

  “Why would we break up?”

  How could they be talking about this now? He could still taste her on his fingers.

  “If we did.”

  “No, I can’t imagine it,” he said.

  “Oh, you’d be okay. Handsome doctor, you’d have girls all over you. I’ve seen all the nurses checking you out.”

  “But I don’t check them out. That’s the difference.”

  “Not yet,” she said and smiled, like it was just a matter of time.

  “What about you?”

  “I think you can make yourself love anyone if you want to.”

  “Crap.”

  “Perhaps not that nurse on the front desk--the one with the double chin and the moustache. But if a girl were attractive enough you’d go for her. You might find it easier than you think.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “We all make compromises. Not everyone has a lightning bolt before they get married. Sometimes you just have to be good friends.”

  “Are we just good friends?”

  “I didn’t mean us. This is different. But if it didn’t work out with us, well, you know what I mean.”

  No, he did not know what she meant. “Don’t you think we have something special happening?”

  “Sure. But you know, if something happened, I just wondered what you’d do,” and she pushed her Ray-Bans back on her nose and went back to looking out of the window.

  He was sure there was a subtext--there always seemed to be with women--but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He didn’t know what made him so angry about what she’d just said. He supposed he believed it himself, in a way. It should have been his cue for the fight he was planning, to start the long process of winding this thing down. But for some reason he was stalling on that, he didn’t want it to wind down, not just yet. And he sure didn’t want her to be in love with anyone else.

  His knuckles turned white around the wheel. He turned on the radio. He tried to calm down.

  But already he sensed this weekend was not going to work out quite as he had planned.

  Chapter 7

  There were parents with pushers, children with balloons and ice cream, families everywhere. Elena stopped to watch a father with his little girl on the carousel, holding her on top of one of the ponies. She started screaming so he took her off again and put her on his shoulders instead.

  “That could be us one day,” she said, and the very thought made him go cold. He was too young to think about children; okay, thirty-two, but you were as young as you feel, they said, and he still felt like he was just out of med school. Look, he practically was. He’d spent all these years studying or working twelve hours a day as a resident. He didn’t want to think about kids yet.

  He felt a guilty pang; she wanted kids now, he didn’t. He was stalling her and she knew it. He supposed it was selfish, but he wasn’t ready to let go of her.

  They got hot dogs, and then she wanted to go on the bounce house, but the guy told her she had to be under eight-years-old. She tried flirting with him but he wouldn’t give in. Adam bought her a slide pendant on a byzantine chain to stop her pouting, and a Vermont rock candle for her apartment.

  The wind started to pick up and soon there were whitecaps on the lake. A front was headed in; dark clouds billowing up the horizon. One of the three guys playing jazz on the lawn lost his straw boater, and then a gust blew over a rack of silkscreen t-shirts. The Old Tyme Kettle Korn lost its chalkboard.

  He said they should go. Some of the stalls were already packing away early. He wanted to get back to their rented cottage before the storm hit.

  Then she saw the fortune teller next to one of the craft tents. A sign outside claimed she was “clairvoyant to the stars.” There was a board with the names of her supposed past clients; Ted Kennedy’s name was there, and so was Ben Affleck’s.

  A woman sat in the tent behind a card table, an unremarkable person in a shapeless frock. As far as he could make out, her only props were a deck of tarot cards. At least she could dress for the part, he thought, give the people their money’s worth; a gypsy scarf, black out a couple of teeth. She was the least likely fortune teller he had ever seen.

  “Can we go in?” she said.

  “I don’t want to go to a fortune teller. I know what my future’s going to be, it’s whatever I make it.”

  “Did all your patients decide they wanted to be in the ER?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’ve never been to a clairvoyant.”

  “She’s not a clairvoyant, she’s a pensioned-offhippie with a deck of playing cards. Come on, it’s a waste of money.”

  “What’s wrong, are you scared?”

  “Come on, El, we’re having fun, let’s not ruin it.”

  “You’re frightened she’ll say something you can’t explain and you’ll have to spend the next two days explaining to me why it’s all nonsense, right?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  She tugged at his hand. “Okay, if you don’t want to go, I’ll go on my own.”

  He let go of her hand. “Okay, go ahead. I’ll go check out the homemade knitted teapot caddies. It’ll be more fun.”

  She shrugged and headed for the tent. He almost gave in, then changed his mind. She wanted to get ripped off for twenty bucks, she could go right ahead.

  But in the back of his mind, he worried about what the fortune teller would say.

  Chapter 8

  “What did she say? Are we going to live happily ever after?”

  “She said I was a complicated soul.”

  “Got that right,” he grinned, but she didn’t smile back.

  “She said that we were both on long journeys.”

  “Right. Are you going to meet a tall, handsome stranger?”

  Her expression was wistful. “I think she’s the real deal, Adam. I really do.”

  “Come on, El. It’s just a fair ground game, like the shooting gallery.”

  “I know you think that, but you’re not right about everything even though you are a doctor.”

  Her sulky tone irritated him. He didn’t think he was right about everything either but fortune tellers, necromancy? He didn’t like people getting into her head like this, coming between them. This woman sounded like her sister, but with a cheap set of playing cards.

  “No one can tell the future. We make our own destiny, we decide.”

  Just because people made their own destiny didn’t mean that crazy women like that couldn’t affect it. If you believed something enough you could make it happen.

  She could think herself into love and she could think herself out of it; and it didn’t have anything to do with a set of stupid cards.

  * * *

  The storm hit while they were driving back. A curtain of rain swept towards them, hit like someone had thrown a handful of gravel at the windscreen. Elena screamed. He turned the windscreen wipers on full but the rain hit the windshield faster than the wipers could push it away. Adam’s knuckles turned white on the wheel. The windscreen fogged over and he wiped at it furiously with the back of his hand but he couldn’t clear it.

  “You’re going too fast,” Elena said.

  “It’s all right, I’ve got it.”

  “Slow down!”

  “It’s all right!”

  He felt the
rear wheels lose traction and they slid to the right. He overcorrected and the car started to spin. They veered across the road and into a ditch and the fender hit the mud bank. Then silence.

  He flipped off his seatbelt, turned to Elena; she had her hands across her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  She took her hands away; she was white. “I told you, you were going too fast.”

  “If I was going too fast we wouldn’t be alive right now.”

  “I told you to slow down!”

  “I did slow down!”

  He tried to reverse but the wheels spun in the mud. The front right wheel wasn’t even touching the ground. They would need a tow truck.

  “She said this would happen.”

  “Who?”

  “That fortune teller. She said I’d be in a car accident.”

  “Everyone has a car accident some time.” He turned off the engine.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’re stuck. I’ll have to go and get help.”

  “No! I don’t want you to leave me here.”

  “You can’t go anywhere in this. Look at it.” To emphasise his point there was a heart-banging clap of thunder directly overhead. The car shook.

  “The road back to the cottage is just up there. I don’t want to sit here all night.”

  “You’ll get soaked!”

  “If you didn’t want me to get wet then you should slow the fuck down!”

  She got out, held a magazine over her head to try to keep off the rain but it did no good. Most of the pages blew away in the wind in the first hundred yards. He locked the car and ran up the road after her.

  By the time they reached the cottage they were both soaked through and Elena’s makeshift umbrella was just a few sheets of soggy paper. He fumbled with the keys and they stumbled inside and stood there, dripping water onto the floorboards, shivering. The fire had gone out in the hearth.