Hideaway (24 page)

Food had a natural tranquilizing effect. Each bite of egg yolk soothed his nerves.

“Okay,” Lindsey said, going at her breakfast somewhat less heartily than Hatch did, “let’s suppose there was brain damage of some sort, after all. But minor. So minor it never showed up on any of the tests. Not bad enough to cause paralysis or speech problems or anything like that. In fact, by an incredible stroke of luck, a one in a billion chance, this brain damage had a freak effect that was actually beneficial. It could’ve made a few new connections in the cerebral tissues, and left you psychic.”

“Bull.”

“Why?”

“I’m not psychic.”

“Then what do you call it?”

“Even if I was psychic, I wouldn’t say it was beneficial.”

Because the breakfast rush had passed, the restaurant was not too busy. The nearest tables to theirs were vacant. They could discuss the morning’s events without fear of being overheard, but Hatch kept glancing around self-consciously anyway.

Immediately following his reanimation, the media had swarmed to Orange County General Hospital, and in the days after Hatch’s release, reporters had virtually camped on his doorstep at home. After all, he had been dead longer than any man alive, which made him eligible for considerably more than the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol had said would eventually be every person’s fate in celebrity-obsessed America. He’d done nothing to earn his fame. He didn’t want it. He hadn’t fought his way out of death; Lindsey, Nyebern, and the resuscitation team had dragged him back. He was a private person, content with just the quiet respect of the better antique dealers who knew his shop and traded with him sometimes. In fact, if the only respect he had was Lindsey’s, if he was famous only in her eyes and only for being a good husband, that would be enough for him. By steadfastly refusing to talk to the press, he had finally convinced them to leave him alone and chase after whatever newly born two-headed goat—or its equivalent—was available to fill newspaper space or a minute of the airwaves between deodorant commercials.

Now, if he revealed that he had come back from the dead with some strange power to connect with the mind of a psycho killer, swarms of newspeople would descend on him again. He could not tolerate even the prospect of it. He would find it easier to endure a plague of killer bees or a hive of Hare Krishna solicitors with collection cups and eyes glazed by spiritual transcendence.

“If it’s not some psychic ability,” Lindsey persisted, “then what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It could pass, never happen again. It could be a fluke.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Well ... I want to believe it.”

“We have to deal with this.”

“Why?”

“We have to try to understand it.”

“Why
^?
”

“Don’t ‘why’ me like a five-year-old child.”

“Why
^?
”

“Be serious, Hatch. A woman’s dead. She may not be the first. She may not be the last.”

He put his fork on his half-empty plate, and swallowed some orange juice to wash down the homefries. “Okay, all right, it’s like a psychic vision, yeah, just the way they show it in the movies. But it’s more than that. Creepier.”

He closed his eyes, trying to think of an analogy. When he had it, he opened his eyes and looked around the restaurant again to be sure no new diners had entered and sat near them.

He looked regretfully at his plate. His eggs were getting cold. He sighed.

“You know,” he said, “how they say identical twins, separated at birth and raised a thousand miles apart by utterly different adopted families, will still grow up to live similar lives?”

“Sure, I’ve heard of that. So?”

“Even raised apart, with totally different backgrounds, they’ll choose similar careers, achieve the same income levels, marry women who resemble each other, even give their kids the same names. It’s uncanny. And even if they don’t know they’re twins, even if each of them was told he was an only child when he was adopted, they’ll sense each other out there, across the miles, even if they don’t know who or what they’re sensing. They have a bond that no one can explain, not even geneticists.”

“So how does this apply to you?”

He hesitated, then picked up his fork. He wanted to eat instead of talk. Eating was safe. But she wouldn’t let him get away with that. His eggs were congealing. His tranquilizers. He put the fork down again.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I see through this guy’s eyes when I’m sleeping, and now sometimes I can even feel him out there when I’m awake, and it’s like the psychic crap in movies, yeah. But I also feel this ... this bond with him that I really can’t explain or describe to you, no matter how much you prod me about it.”

“You’re not saying you think he’s your twin or something?”

“No, not at all. I think he’s a lot younger than me, maybe only twenty or twenty-one. And no blood relation. But it’s that kind of bond, that mystical twin crap, as if this guy and I share something, have some fundamental quality in common.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did.” He paused. He decided to be entirely truthful. “Or maybe I don’t.”

 
 
Later, after the waitress had cleared away their empty dishes and brought them strong black coffee, Hatch said, “There’s no way I’m going to go to the cops and offer to help them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“There is a duty here—”

“I don’t know anything that could help them anyway.”

She blew on her hot coffee. “You know he was driving a Pontiac.”

“I don’t even think it was his.”

“Whose then?”

“Stolen, maybe.”

“That was something else you sensed?”

“Yeah. But I don’t know what he looks like, his name, where he lives, anything useful.”

“What if something like that comes to you? What if you see something that could help the cops?”

“Then I’ll call it in anonymously.”

“They’ll take the information more seriously if you give it to them in person.”

He felt violated by the intrusion of this psychotic stranger into his life. That violation made him angry, and he feared his anger more than he feared the stranger, or the supernatural aspect of the situation, or the prospect of brain damage. He dreaded being driven by some extremity to discover that his father’s hot temper was within him, too, waiting to be tapped.

“It’s a homicide case,” he said. “They take every tip seriously in a murder investigation, even if it’s anonymous. I’m not going to let them make headlines out of me again.”

 
 
From the restaurant they went across town to Harrison’s Antiques, where Lindsey had an art studio on part of the top floor in addition to the one at home. When she painted, a regular change of environment contributed to fresher work.

In the car, with the sun-spangled ocean visible between some of the buildings to their right, Lindsey pressed the point that she had nagged him about over breakfast, because she knew that Hatch’s only serious character flaw was a tendency to be too easygoing. Jimmy’s death was the only bad thing in his life that he had never been able to rationalize, minimalize, and put out of mind. And even with that, he had tried to suppress it rather than face up to his grief, which is why his grief had a chance to grow. Given time, and not much of it, he’d begin to downplay the importance of what had just happened to him.

She said, “You’ve still got to see Nyebern.”

“I suppose so.”

“Definitely.”

“If there’s brain damage, if that’s where this psychic stuff comes from, you said yourself it was benevolent brain damage.”

“But maybe it’s degenerative, maybe it’ll get worse.”

“I really don’t think so,” he said. “I feel fine otherwise.”

“You’re no doctor.”

“All right,” he said. He braked for the traffic light at the crossing to the public beach in the heart of town. “I’ll call him. But we have to see Gujilio later this afternoon.”

“You can still squeeze in Nyebern if he has time for you.”

Hatch’s father had been a tyrant, quick-tempered, sharp-tongued, with a penchant for subduing his wife and disciplining his son by the application of regular doses of verbal abuse in the form of nasty mockery, cutting sarcasm, or just plain threats. Anything at all could set Hatch’s father off, or nothing at all, because secretly he cherished irritation and actively sought new sources of it. He was a man who believed he was not destined to be happy—and he insured that his destiny was fulfilled by making himself and everyone around him miserable.

Perhaps afraid that the potential for a murderously bad temper was within him, too, or only because he’d had enough tumult in his life, Hatch had consciously striven to make himself as mellow as his father was high-strung, as sweetly tolerant as his father was narrow-minded, as great-hearted as his father was unforgiving, as determined to roll with all of life’s punches as his father was determined to punch back at even imaginary blows. As a result, he was the nicest man Lindsey had ever known, the nicest by light-years or by whatever measure niceness was calculated: bunches, bucketsful, gobs. Sometimes, however, Hatch turned away from an unpleasantness that had to be dealt with, rather than risk getting in touch with any negative emotion that was remotely reminiscent of his old man’s paranoia and anger.

The light changed from red to green, but three young women in bikinis were in the crosswalk, laden with beach gear and heading for the ocean. Hatch didn’t just wait for them. He watched them with a smile of appreciation for the way they filled out their suits.

“I take it back,” Lindsey said.

“What?”

“I was just thinking what a nice guy you are, too nice, but obviously you’re a piece of lecherous scum.”

“Nice scum, though.”

“I’ll
call Nyebern as soon as we get to the shop,” Lindsey said.

He drove up the hill through the main part of town, past the old Laguna Hotel. “Okay. But I’m sure as hell not going to tell him I’m suddenly psychic. He’s a good man, but he won’t be able to sit on that kind of news. The next thing I know, my face’ll be all over the cover of the
National Enquirer.
Besides, I’m not psychic, not exactly. I don’t know what the hell I am—aside from lecherous scum.”

“So what’ll you tell him?”

“Just enough about the dreams so he’ll realize how troubling they are and how strange, so he’ll order whatever tests I ought to have. Good enough?”

“I guess it’ll have to be.”

In the tomb-deep blackness of his hideaway, curled naked upon the stained and lumpy mattress, fast asleep, Vassago saw sunlight, sand, the sea, and three bikinied girls beyond the windshield of a red car.

He was dreaming and knew he dreamed, which was a peculiar sensation. He rolled with it.

He saw, as well, the dark-haired and dark-eyed woman about whom he had dreamed yesterday, when she had been behind the wheel of that same car. She had appeared in other dreams, once in a wheelchair, when she had been laughing and weeping at the same time.

He found her more interesting than the scantily clad beach bunnies because she was unusually vital. Radiant. Through the unknown man driving the car, Vassago somehow knew that the woman had once considered embracing death, had hesitated on the edge of either active or passive self-destruction, and had rejected an early grave—

...
water, he sensed a watery vault, cold and suffocating, narrowly escaped ...

—whereafter she had been more full of life, energetic, and vivid than ever before. She had cheated death. Denied the devil. Vassago hated her for that, because it was in the service of death that he had found meaning to his own existence.

He tried to reach out and touch her through the body of the man driving the car. Failed. It was only a dream. Dreams could not be controlled. If he could have touched her, he would have made her regret that she had turned away from the comparatively painless death by drowning that could have been hers.

When she moved in with the Harrisons, Regina almost thought she had died and gone to Heaven, except she had her own bathroom, and she didn’t believe anyone had his own bathroom up in Heaven because in Heaven no one needed a bathroom. They were not all permanently constipated in Heaven or anything like that, and they certainly didn’t just do their business out in public, for God’s sake (sorry, God), because no one in his right mind would want to go to Heaven if it was the kind of place where you had to watch where you stepped. It was just that in Heaven all the concerns of earthly existence passed away. You didn’t even have a body in Heaven; you were probably just a sphere of mental energy, sort of like a balloon full of golden glowing gas, drifting around among the angels, singing the praises of God—which was pretty weird when you thought about it, all those glowing and singing balloons, but the most you’d ever have to do in the way of waste elimination was maybe vent a little gas now and then, which wouldn’t even smell bad, probably like the sweet incense in church, or perfume.

That first day in the Harrisons’ house, late Monday afternoon, the twenty-ninth of April, she would remember forever, because they were so nice. They didn’t even mention the real reason why they gave her a choice between a bedroom on the second floor and a den on the first floor that could be converted into a bedroom.

“One thing in its favor,” Mr. Harrison said about the den, “is the view. Better than the view from the upstairs room.”

He led Regina to the big windows that looked out on a rose garden ringed by a border of huge ferns. The view was pretty.

Mrs. Harrison said, “And you’d have all these bookshelves, which you might want to fill up gradually with your own collection, since you’re a book lover.”