Blood Memory (16 page)

I’m standing at my picture window, gazing out at the lake. My meeting with Malik profoundly disturbed me, and I’m not sure why. His cryptic comments about my father stirred up a stew of fragmentary memories, but none has told me anything useful. I’m not even sure the images in my mind are real, and not things I’ve pieced together from old photographs and stories. A few things I’m sure of—salvaged from nights I sat in the loft of the barn my father used for his studio, watching him work into the small hours of the morning. The roar of the acetylene cutting torch, the hiss of steam as he dipped red-hot metal into the trough he used to cool it. The smell of acids he used for etching, the sound of the riveter as he linked various pieces of his sculpture into a whole that existed only in his mind. There were no sketches, no plans. Just raw metal and the vision in his head.

Now and then, he would remove his mask and look up into the loft at me. Sometimes he would smile. Other times he just stared, watching me with something like fear in his eyes. Even so young, I sensed that my father saw me as another of his creations, one too fragile to handle with confidence. He seemed afraid that, unlike the metal he shaped with such assurance, I might be damaged by a wrong word or move, and that the damage could never be undone.

I thought of the barn as my father’s studio, but in truth he slept there for the last few years of his life. It was only a couple of hundred yards down the hill from the slave quarters where I slept with my mother, but the separation was absolute. No one was allowed into the barn when he was working. No one, except me. When I asked my mother for an explanation of these sleeping arrangements, she said it was because of the war. She wouldn’t elaborate. My father told me that he had bad dreams at night, and that sometimes when he woke up, he didn’t know where he was. At those times, he said, it was like the war had never ended, like he’d never made it home. When that happened, it was better for me and my mother if we weren’t in the house with him. It was only later that I realized that, for our family, what my father believed during his flashbacks was true. The war
hadn’t
ended for him. He had never quite made it home.

“What are you thinking?” Sean asks from behind me.

I don’t turn. There aren’t many boats out, but I need to watch them. A sail moving slowly across the horizon gives me something to focus on when my internal moorings start to come loose. Like now. The frantic feeling that awakened in me upon leaving Malik’s office has not abated. “About my dad,” I say softly.

“What about him?”

“Just stuff. Fragments. That’s all I have, really.”

Sean lays his hand on my shoulder and squeezes lightly. I jump at his touch, but I manage not to pull away.

“I need a drink,” I murmur. “I really need it.”

He waits a bit before answering. “What about the baby?”

“It’s a drink or a Valium. At this point I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Would one drink be that bad?”

“It’s not just one drink. It’s the first step off a cliff.”

The grip tightens on my shoulder. “We need to get your mind off it. What can I do?”

“I don’t know.” The sail I was watching has vanished. The boat is tacking, fighting its way back toward shore. “Maybe we should make love.”

Sean’s other hand comes to rest on my other shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“No. I just need something to numb this thing inside me.”

“What is it? Is it the manic feeling?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this before. I felt good before I went in to see Malik. And I was fine while I was with him. But now…it’s like he flipped a switch in my head. All these feelings are flooding through me. Too many feelings.”

Sean turns me around and steps close enough that our chests touch. I look into his eyes, trying to lose myself in them. I’ve done it before, lost myself in those green spheres like a little girl swimming in an emerald sea. Drifting and rolling—

I jerk backward. Sean has kissed me, and the touch stunned me like an electric shock.

“Hey,” he says, worry in his face. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” I feel tears on my cheeks. “I don’t
know
. I have this feeling that everything’s connected, but I can’t see how.”

“What’s connected, babe?”

“Everything!
All
of it. The murders, me, Malik. Kaiser thinks so, too. He just doesn’t see any upside to telling me right now.”

“Come on, Cat. How could everything be connected?”

“How could it
not
? A month ago, these murders begin. Then I start having panic attacks at the crime scenes, something that’s never happened to me before. The only connection between the victims is a psychiatrist I happened to know ten years ago, a shrink who hit on me. Then you make another connection between the victims. Vietnam. Who went to Vietnam? My father, Nathan Malik, and two of the victims. Maybe more of them. And they were there in the
same year
. What are the odds of that, Sean?”

“I’m no mathematician, but it’s not impossible. Coincidences like that happen all the time.”

His attempt to minimize the significance of these facts infuriates me. “My father was murdered, Sean. And I don’t know why.” I reach backward and touch the picture window. The cool hardness of the glass reassures me somehow. “I don’t remember anything about that night before seeing his body in the garden, but I found blood in my old bedroom. And I’m having nightmares. Recurring dreams and hallucinations. I’ve always had them, but now they’re getting worse. The fucking rain…it won’t stop. And what does Nathan Malik specialize in? Recovered memories.”

Sean is looking at me strangely. “What rain are you talking about? And you found blood where?”

I forgot he knows nothing about my visit to Natchez. “In the bedroom I grew up in. Old blood. I think it dates from the night my father died.”

“Cat…what the hell are you talking about? That was twenty years ago.”

“Twenty-three. I only found the blood by accident. When I went home the other day—Jesus, that was yesterday—a little girl spilled some luminol in my room. I think they’ve been lying to me all this time. My mother, our maid, my grandfather. For a while I was afraid my father had killed himself, but I don’t think that anymore. I think—”

Sean grips my shoulders tight enough to make me stop speaking. “You’ve got to calm down. I want to hear this, but you’re starting to fly. Can’t you feel it? You’re going too fast. You told me to tell you when you sound like your thoughts are racing. Well, I’m telling you.”

He’s right. My thoughts
are
racing, and I don’t want them to slow down. I’ve experienced amazing epiphanies during manic episodes. From that dizzying neurochemical height, the seemingly random details that confuse normal people form themselves into coherent patterns. I’m almost certain that if my brain kicks up to the next plateau, the connections among myself, Malik, his patients, and the dead men will leap into stark relief.

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Sean. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re thinking riding the high is worth the low that’ll follow the crash.”

He knows me well. Thank God there’s enough of my baseline identity left for me to hear him. In my present circumstances, the next crash could kill me.

“Tell me about Natchez,” he says. “What happened there?”

“I think I may have seen my father murdered, Sean.”

“Why do you think that?”

“The night he was killed, I stopped speaking.”

“That sounds normal enough.”

“For a year?”

His cheek twitches as though from the effort of trying to look calm. “Okay, maybe not so normal.”

“And after talking to Malik today, I’m thinking maybe I was so traumatized by what I saw that night that I became dissociated. That the truth about his death is locked inside my head somewhere, but I can’t reach it.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to talk to Malik again.”

Sean blinks in disbelief. “Jesus, Cat. The guy’s going to be in jail soon.”

“I don’t care. I think he knows something about me.”

“What could he know about you?”

“The reason my father died.”

“You told me your dad was killed by a prowler. And your nightmares are consistent with that. Faceless men breaking in and hunting you through your house?”

“What if they’re also consistent with something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe his death had something to do with Vietnam. Our maid thinks one of my dad’s friends came looking for drugs, and they argued. But what if it was about something else dating back to the war?”

“Like what? The Vietnam War ended thirty years ago.”

“Yes, but it hadn’t even been over for ten years when my dad was killed. And I really don’t know what he did there.”

Sean clearly wants to help me, but he has no idea what to do. We’ve been in similar situations before.

“Listen,” I tell him, not at all sure I should confess this. “I didn’t tell Kaiser this, but I have the feeling I’ve met Malik before.”

Sean looks confused. “You
have
met him before. At University Medical Center.”

“No, somewhere else. Or some other way.”

“Shit. What way?”

“That’s what I want to ask Malik.”

“You’re freaking me out, Cat. The guy did act like he knew things about you. Is Kaiser right? Could you have had more contact with Malik than you think, but blocked it out somehow?”

I turn up my palms in frustration.

“Cat?”

“I want to go to bed. Right now.”

“To make love, you mean?”

“No. To sleep.”

Sean closes his eyes, then opens them and gives me a long-suffering smile. “Okay. Let’s get you tucked in.”

After managing a smile of gratitude, I walk past him and down the stairs to my bedroom. I want to fall into bed, but my hygiene ritual is one of the things that holds me together. I manage to finish most of it, but my skin lotion will have to wait until tomorrow. As I climb under the covers, Sean comes in and sits on the edge of the bed in the least threatening position possible.

“Feel better?” he asks.

“No. What are we going to do?”

“About what we were just talking about?”

I shake my head. “About us.”

He gives me what he must think is a brave smile. “I don’t know, Cat. Now that Kaiser knows about us…there’s no telling what kind of stories will spread.”

“Can you leave them, Sean? Just tell me the truth. Can you leave your wife and children to be with me?”

He takes a deep breath and slowly blows it out. “I can. I can give up everything to be with you.”

I see in his eyes that it’s true. “But do you
want
to? Is it the best thing?”

“Best for who? For me? Yes. For the kids? I can’t say that. It might be the worst thing that ever happens to them. It might ruin their lives.”

I close my eyes. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life. But I don’t want to lose mine, either. “You’ve got three days to decide. After that, you’re either all the way in my life, or all the way out.”

Sean has witnessed terrible things in his life, but those quiet words seem to have put him into shock.

“I’m pregnant, Sean. I can’t wait anymore. I have to live a real life.”

He nods slowly. He gets it. “Can you sleep?”

“I’d sleep better if you were here.”

“I can stay.”

“How long?”

“It’s still afternoon. Five or six hours, maybe. Unless the killer hits again. Then I’ll have to go.”

“If that happens, I want you to go. But I don’t think it will.”

Sean pats me on the shoulder, which I hate. “Go to sleep. I’ll be out there watching TV.”

“Wake me up if you have to leave. I don’t want to wake up alone.”

“I will.”

He kisses my hair above the ear, which I like. As he leaves the bedroom, I prop one pillow so that it blocks the light from the window, then turn to the wall and let my eyes lose their focus. Malik’s words are ricocheting through my head like bats in a cave. How did he get to me like this? What does he know about me that I don’t? And how does he know it?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve had the feeling that the world makes sense, but according to a logic indecipherable to me. That the region of my mind that can decode life’s symbols is inaccessible due to the chemical imbalances in my brain. Only in sleep do I travel to that place, and even then the faces I see are obscured, the words garbled as though spoken through water. As a teenager, I experimented with techniques that supposedly allow people to guide their dreams, but I had no luck. To this day, my subconscious remains off-limits to my conscious mind, like two hostile nations along a fiercely guarded border. When I do dream, terror and confusion are the primary emotions I experience. I’m a stranger in a strange land, trying to read signs printed in a foreign language, praying only to find my way back to the safety of the waking world. Nothing I’ve seen seems related to my father’s death, though, at least not to the story I was always told. As sleep draws its curtain over my fevered mind, I ask myself again if the adults in my life long ago decided to protect me from a reality they deemed too devastating for me to endure.

Nathan Malik seems to think so.

Where wakefulness becomes sleep, I never know, because my dreams are as vivid as anything I experience while awake. This time I’m back on the island, in the ancient pickup truck, riding through the pasture with my grandfather at the wheel. He points out cows grazing by a fence, others standing with dumb satisfaction in a waterhole. The acrid scent of tobacco burns my nostrils. The truck’s round hood is rusted orange and dented from a hundred impacts. The engine groans as Grandpapa forces the truck up the long slope toward the crest of the hill.

There’s a pond on the other side of the hill. I’ve played in it many times, but today I’m afraid. Something terrible is waiting over there. Something I can’t bear to see. I know it’s there, but my grandfather doesn’t. I can’t warn him. My mouth is glued shut. I can only sit on the torn vinyl seat, eyes shut tight, praying God will spare us from the horror that awaits….