Blood Sisters

by Paula Guran

  They ate near the clinic. “You look a little frayed around the edges,” Doug said. “I heard about Jane Fennerman’s relapse—too bad.”

  “I’ve only been able to bring myself to visit her once since.”

  “Feeling guilty?”

  She hesitated, gnawing on a stale breadstick. The truth was, she hadn’t thought of Jane Fennerman in weeks. Finally she said, “I guess I must be.”

  Sitting back with his hands in his pockets, Doug chided her gently. “It’s got to be Jane’s fourth or fifth time into the nuthatch, and the others happened when she was in the care of other therapists. Who are you to imagine—to demand—that her cure lay in your hands? God may be a woman, Floria, but She is not you. I thought the whole point was some recognition of individual responsibility—you for yourself, the client for himself or herself.”

  “That’s what we’re always saying,” Floria agreed. She felt curiously divorced from this conversation. It had an old-fashioned flavor: Before Weyland. She smiled a little.

  The waiter ambled over. She ordered bluefish. The serving would be too big for her depressed appetite, but Doug wouldn’t be satisfied with his customary order of salad (he never was) and could be persuaded to help out.

  He worked his way around to Topic A. “When I called to set up this lunch, Hilda told me she’s got a crush on Weyland. How are you and he getting along?”

  “My God, Doug, now you’re going to tell me this whole thing was to fix me up with an eligible suitor!” She winced at her own rather strained laughter. “How soon are you planning to ask Weyland to work at Cayslin again?”

  “I don’t know, but probably sooner than I thought a couple of months ago. We hear that he’s been exploring an attachment to an anthropology department at a western school, some niche where I guess he feels he can have less responsibility, less visibility, and a chance to collect himself. Naturally, this news is making people at Cayslin suddenly eager to nail him down for us. Have you a recommendation?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Wait.”

  He gave her an inquiring look. “What for?”

  “Until he works more fully through certain stresses in the situation at Cayslin. Then I’ll be ready to commit myself about him.” The bluefish came. She pretended distraction: “Good God, that’s too much fish for me. Doug, come on and help me out here.”

  Hilda was crouched over Floria’s file drawer. She straightened up, looking grim. “Somebody’s been in the office!”

  What was this, had someone attacked her? The world took on a cockeyed, dangerous tilt. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, sure, I mean there are records that have been gone through. I can tell. I’ve started checking and so far it looks as if none of the files themselves are missing. But if any papers were taken out of them, that would be pretty hard to spot without reading through every folder in the place. Your files, Floria. I don’t think anybody else’s were touched.”

  Mere burglary; weak with relief, Floria sat down on one of the waiting-room chairs. But only her files?

  “Just my stuff, you’re sure?”

  Hilda nodded. “The clinic got hit, too. I called. They see some new-looking scratches on the lock of your file drawer over there. Listen, you want me to call the cops?”

  “First check as much as you can, see if anything obvious is missing.”

  There was no sign of upset in her office. She found a phone message on her table: Weyland had canceled his next appointment. She knew who had broken into her files.

  She buzzed Hilda’s desk. “Hilda, let’s leave the police out of it for the moment. Keep checking.” She stood in the middle of the office, looking at the chair replacing the one he had broken, looking at the window where he had so often watched.

  Relax, she told herself. There was nothing for him to find here or at the clinic.

  She signaled that she was ready for the first client of the afternoon.

  That evening she came back to the office after having dinner with friends. She was supposed to be helping set up a workshop for next month, and she’d been putting off even thinking about it, let alone doing any real work. She set herself to compiling a suggested bibliography for her section. The phone light blinked.

  It was Kenny, sounding muffled and teary. “I’m sorry,” he moaned. “The medicine just started to wear off. I’ve been trying to call you everyplace. God, I’m so scared—he was waiting in the alley.”

  “Who was?” she said, dry-mouthed. She knew.

  “Him. The tall one, the faggot—only he goes with women too, I’ve seen him. He grabbed me. He hurt me. I was lying there a long time. I couldn’t do anything. I felt so funny—like floating away. Some kids found me. Their mother called the cops. I was so cold, so scared—”

  “Kenny, where are you?”

  He told her which hospital. “Listen, I think he’s really crazy, you know? And I’m scared he might … you live alone … I don’t know—I didn’t mean to make trouble for you. I’m so scared.”

  God damn you, you meant exactly to make trouble for me, and now you’ve bloody well made it.

  She got him to ring for a nurse. By calling Kenny her patient and using “Dr.” in front of her own name without qualifying the title she got some information: two broken ribs, multiple contusions, a badly wrenched shoulder, and a deep cut on the scalp which Dr. Wells thought accounted for the blood loss the patient had sustained. Picked up early today, the patient wouldn’t say who had attacked him. You can check with Dr. Wells tomorrow, Dr.—?

  Can Weyland think I’ve somehow sicced Kenny on him? No, he surely knows me better than that.

  Kenny must have brought this on himself.

  She tried Weyland’s number and then the desk at his hotel. He had closed his account and gone, providing no forwarding information other than the address of a university in New Mexico.

  Then she remembered: this was the night Deb and Nick and the kids were arriving. Oh, God. Next phone call. The Americana was the hotel Deb had mentioned. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Redpath were registered in room whatnot. Ring, please.

  Deb’s voice came shakily on the line. “I’ve been trying to call you.” Like Kenny.

  “You sound upset,” Floria said, steadying herself for whatever calamity had descended: illness, accident, assault in the streets of the dark, degenerate city.

  Silence, then a raggedy sob. “Nick’s not here. I didn’t phone you earlier because I thought he still might come, but I don’t think he’s coming, Mom.” Bitter weeping.

  “Oh, Debbie. Debbie, listen, you just sit tight, I’ll be right down there.”

  The cab ride took only a few minutes. Debbie was still crying when Floria stepped into the room.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Deb wailed, shaking her head. “What did I do wrong? He went away a week ago, to do some research, he said, and I didn’t hear from him, and half the bank money is gone—just half, he left me half. I kept hoping … they say most runaways come back in a few days or call up, they get lonely … I haven’t told anybody—I thought since we were supposed to be here at this convention thing together, I’d better come, maybe he’d show up. But nobody’s seen him, and there are no messages, not a word, nothing.”

  “All right, all right, poor Deb,” Floria said, hugging her.

  “Oh God, I’m going to wake the kids with all this howling.” Deb pulled away, making a frantic gesture toward the door of the adjoining room. “It was so hard to get them to sleep—they were expecting Daddy to be here, I kept telling them he’d be here.” She rushed out into the hotel hallway. Floria followed, propping the door open with one of her shoes since she didn’t know whether Deb had a key with her or not. They stood out there together, ignoring passersby, huddling over Deb’s weeping.

  “What’s been going on between you and Nick?” Floria said. “Have you two been sleeping together lately?”

  Deb let out a squawk of agonized embarrassment, “Mo-ther!” and pulled away from her. Oh, hell, wrong approach.


  “Come on, I’ll help you pack. We’ll leave word you’re at my place. Let Nick come looking for you.”

  Floria firmly squashed down the miserable inner cry, How am I going to stand this?

  “Oh, no, I can’t move till morning now that I’ve got the kids settled down. Besides, there’s one night’s deposit on the rooms. Oh, Mom, what

  did I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything, hon,” Floria said, patting her shoulder and thinking in some part of her mind, Oh boy, that’s great, is that the best you can come up with in a crisis with all your training and experience? Your touted professional skills are not so hot lately, but this bad? Another part answered, Shut up, stupid, only an idiot does therapy on her own family. Deb’s come to her mother, not to a shrink, so go ahead and be Mommy. If only Mommy had less pressure on her right now—but that was always the way: everything at once or nothing at all.

  “Look, Deb, suppose I stay the night here with you.”

  Deb shook the pale, damp-streaked hair out of her eyes with a determined, grown-up gesture. “No, thanks, Mom. I’m so tired I’m just going to fall out now. You’ll be getting a bellyful of all this when we move in on you tomorrow anyway. I can manage tonight, and besides—”

  And besides, just in case Nick showed up, Deb didn’t want Floria around complicating things; of course. Or in case the tooth fairy dropped by.

  Floria restrained an impulse to insist on staying; an impulse, she recognized, that came from her own need not to be alone tonight. That was not something to load on Deb’s already burdened shoulders.

  “Okay,” Floria said. “But look, Deb, I’ll expect you to call me up first thing in the morning, whatever happens.” And if I’m still alive, I’ll answer the phone.

  All the way home in the cab she knew with growing certainty that Weyland would be waiting for her there. He can’t just walk away, she thought; he has to finish things with me. So let’s get it over.

  In the tiled hallway she hesitated, keys in hand. What about calling the cops to go inside with her? Absurd. You don’t set the cops on a unicorn.

  She unlocked and opened the door to the apartment and called inside, “Weyland! Where are you?”

  Nothing. Of course not—the door was still open, and he would want to be sure she was by herself. She stepped inside, shut the door, and snapped on a lamp as she walked into the living room.

  He was sitting quietly on a radiator cover by the street window, his hands on his thighs. His appearance here in a new setting, her setting, this faintly lit room in her home place, was startlingly intimate. She was sharply aware of the whisper of movement—his clothing, his shoe soles against the carpet underfoot—as he shifted his posture.

  “What would you have done if I’d brought somebody with me?” she said unsteadily. “Changed yourself into a bat and flown away?”

  “Two things I must have from you,” he said. “One is the bill of health that we spoke of when we began, though not, after all, for Cayslin College. I’ve made other plans. The story of my disappearance has of course filtered out along the academic grapevine so that even two thousand miles from here people will want evidence of my mental soundness. Your evidence. I would type it myself and forge your signature, but I want your authentic tone and language. Please prepare a letter to the desired effect, addressed to these people.”

  He drew something white from an inside pocket and held it out. She advanced and took the envelope from his extended hand. It was from the western anthropology department that Doug had mentioned at lunch.

  “Why not Cayslin?” she said. “They want you there.”

  “Have you forgotten your own suggestion that I find another job? That was a good idea after all. Your reference will serve me best out there—with a copy for my personnel file at Cayslin, naturally.”

  She put her purse down on the seat of a chair and crossed her arms. She felt reckless—the effect of stress and weariness, she thought, but it was an exciting feeling.

  “The receptionist at the office does this sort of thing for me,” she said.

  He pointed. “I’ve been in your study. You have a typewriter there, you have stationery with your letterhead, you have carbon paper.”

  “What was the second thing you wanted?”

  “Your notes on my case.”

  “Also at the—”

  “You know that I’ve already searched both your work places, and the very circumspect jottings in your file on me are not what I mean. Others must exist: more detailed.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “How could you resist?” He mocked her. “You have encountered nothing like me in your entire professional life, and never shall again. Perhaps you hope to produce an article someday, even a book—a memoir of something impossible that happened to you one summer. You’re an ambitious woman, Dr. Landauer.”

  Floria squeezed her crossed arms tighter against herself to quell her shivering. “This is all just supposition,” she said.

  He took folded papers from his pocket: some of her thrown-aside notes on him, salvaged from the wastebasket. “I found these. I think there must be more. Whatever there is, give it to me, please.”

  “And if I refuse, what will you do? Beat me up the way you beat up Kenny?”

  Weyland said calmly, “I told you he should stop following me. This is serious now. There are pursuers who intend me ill—my former captors, of whom I told you. Who do you think I keep watch for? No records concerning me must fall into their hands. Don’t bother protesting to me your devotion to confidentiality. There is a man named Alan Reese who would take what he wants and be damned to your professional ethics. So I must destroy all evidence you have about me before I leave the city.”

  Floria turned away and sat down by the coffee table, trying to think beyond her fear. She breathed deeply against the fright trembling in her chest.

  “I see,” he said dryly, “that you won’t give me the notes; you don’t trust me to take them and go. You see some danger.”

  “All right, a bargain,” she said. “I’ll give you whatever I have on your case if in return you promise to go straight out to your new job and keep away from Kenny and my offices and anybody connected with me—”

  He was smiling slightly as he rose from the seat and stepped soft-footed toward her over the rug.

  “Bargains, promises, negotiations—all foolish, Dr. Landauer. I want what I came for.”

  She looked up at him. “But then how can I trust you at all? As soon as I give you what you want—”

  “What is it that makes you afraid—that you can’t render me harmless to you? What a curious concern you show suddenly for your own life and the lives of those around you! You are the one who led me to take chances in our work together—to explore the frightful risks of self-revelation. Didn’t you see in the air between us the brilliant shimmer of those hazards? I thought your business was not smoothing the world over but adventuring into it, discovering its true nature, and closing valiantly with everything jagged, cruel, and deadly.”

  In the midst of her terror the inner choreographer awoke and stretched. Floria rose to face the vampire.

  “All right, Weyland, no bargains. I’ll give you freely what you want.” Of course she couldn’t make herself safe from him—or make Kenny or Lucille or Deb or Doug safe—any more than she could protect Jane Fennerman from the common dangers of life. Like Weyland, some dangers were too strong to bind or banish. “My notes are in the workroom—come on, I’ll show you. As for the letter you need, I’ll type it right now and you can take it away with you.”

  She sat at the typewriter arranging paper, carbon sheets, and white-out, and feeling the force of his presence. Only a few feet away, just at the margin of the light from the gooseneck lamp by which she worked, he leaned against the edge of the long table that was twin to the table in her office. Open in his large hands was the notebook she had given him from the table drawer. When he moved his head over the notebook’s page
s, his glasses glinted.

  She typed the heading and the date. How surprising, she thought, to find that she had regained her nerve here, and now. When you dance as the inner choreographer directs, you act without thinking, not in command of events but in harmony with them. You yield control, accepting the chance that a mistake might be part of the design. The inner choreographer is always right but often dangerous: giving up control means accepting the possibility of death. What I feared I have pursued right here to this moment in this room.

  A sheet of paper fell out of the notebook. Weyland stooped and caught it up, glanced at it. “You had training in art?” Must be a sketch.

  “I thought once I might be an artist,” she said.

  “What you chose to do instead is better,” he said. “This making of pictures, plays, all art, is pathetic. The world teems with creation, most of it unnoticed by your kind just as most of the deaths are unnoticed. What can be the point of adding yet another tiny gesture? Even you, these notes—for what, a moment’s celebrity?”

  “You tried it yourself,” Floria said. “The book you edited, Notes on a Vanished People.’” She typed: “… temporary dislocation resulting from a severe personal shock …”

  “That was professional necessity, not creation,” he said in the tone of a lecturer irritated by a question from the audience. With disdain he tossed the drawing on the table. “Remember, I don’t share your impulse toward artistic gesture—your absurd frills—”

  She looked up sharply. “The ballet, Weyland. Don’t lie.” She typed: “… exhibits a powerful drive toward inner balance and wholeness in a difficult life situation. The steadying influence of an extraordinary basic integrity …”

  He set the notebook aside. “My feeling for ballet is clearly some sort of aberration. Do you sigh to hear a cow calling in a pasture?”

  “There are those who have wept to hear whales singing in the ocean.”

  He was silent, his eyes averted.

  “This is finished,” she said. “Do you want to read it?”