Last Safe Place, The (25 page)

“Oh, I assumed … I thought it was Pedro’s birthday.”

“No, he throws a big party every year on his children’s birthdays. Anza turns eighteen today. Joaquin’s birthday is in the spring. And Angelina …” He turned and looked at the still child lying on the hospital bed. “Angel will be nine on Christmas Eve.”

Christmas Eve. That’s when Smokey had died.

Yesheb has sat motionless for more than two hours staring out the window of the jet at the ground below. It is a featureless expanse dappled with shades of brown and green, bisected by sewing-thread strands of rivers. None of man’s precious creations, art or architecture, is visible from this height—a perspective with profound significance, though he doubts that one in a thousand, one in a million of the globe-trotting lemmings racking up frequent flyer miles ever chances to glance out the window, much less understand the import of what he can see.

“Would you care for something to drink, sir?” A voice speaks at his elbow but he doesn’t turn, keeps his gaze fixed on a distant nothing out the window. “A cup of coffee? A glass of wine, perhaps? We have a lovely—”

“When do we land?”

“Half an hour, sir.”

“And everything will be set up when we get there?”

“Absolutely. The helicopter is waiting.”

Yesheb nods approval and dismissal.

They don’t get it down there. And they label those who do crazy.

All at once, a single, imprisoned memory makes a break for the fence, with searchlights circling, zeroing in.

The walls of the room are not padded, but of course, they wouldn’t be in a facility such as this. A single room here costs more than a whole suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Paris—but without the view. Yesheb will not be here long enough to miss it. The school will have called his grandfather. Yesheb will be set free as soon as they reach the old man—which could be a bit tricky sometimes. The hands-on director of the family’s oil fortunes, Yasser Al Tobbanoft is old school, spends most of his time at oil rigs in the desert and pipeline pumping stations. After Anwar Tobbanoft’s unfortunate and untimely end in the bathtub, their pathetic mother was certainly incapable of caring for Yesheb and his sisters so the old man assumed responsibility for them—fiscal and moral responsibility, certainly not emotional. He pays others to look after them, packs them off to boarding schools all over the world, sees them infrequently—at Ramadan or other holidays. Some years.

His absence suits Yesheb perfectly. He needs no one to “raise” him. He is directed by the voices. No other authority is necessary nor would be tolerated.

Which has gotten him into the situation he finds himself now. The voices were too loud, shouting in his head. They did that sometimes to torment him, to toughen him. But he was tired. He cried out, answered them, argued with them and they set off bombs of pain in his head in retaliation. Unfortunately, even with a private room, his schoolmates next door heard his voice. They came to check on him, found him writhing in the floor in his own excrement, foaming at the mouth. They called the headmaster and …

Yesheb’s grandfather’s absences are convenient until his presence is necessary. And it is necessary now. Yesheb can’t stay here. This is a place for crazy people and he is infinitely sane, confidently, proudly sane. It is the others, the rest of the herd, whose minds are clouded. But not by insanity, by stupidity.

Then the buzzing starts again in his head, the gnawing sound, like creatures inside are using chainsaws to get out. And he starts to scream again. He can’t help it. He screams and screams and …

Yesheb’s mind locates the escapee, trains machine guns on the memory and shoots it down. The frothing water of his soul slowly becomes smooth again. Glassy.

He stares undistracted now at the empty expanse below his private jet and understands what mere mortals cannot fathom. He can see the unformed fetus of mankind, deep in the forever dark of the immortal womb. Its eyes are blind. And it yearns to remain eternally sightless. It doesn’t want to know. It wants to curl up safe and snug in ignorance, fears the razor edges of truth and the pain of existence.

But inevitably, birth and life demand a choice. Open your eyes, recognize goodness and evil and choose your side. Or keep your eyes closed and see neither. The current state of the world is testimony to the cowardice of the many and the futile courage of the few. Everywhere on the globe, evil thrives in the soil of denial, pruned by cynicism, fertilized by disbelief, watered by inaction.

Yesheb smiles a rueful smile. In the great apocalyptic battle to come, his forces will prevail, of course. He and Zara will reign supreme. But he wonders how many of the others, the shuffling turtles on the other side, will even pick up weapons for the fight.

Yesheb’s ears begin to pop. The plane has begun its descent.

“My little Angelina is beautiful, is she not?”

Theo jumped. He hadn’t heard Pedro come up beside him as he stood at the foot of the hospital bed. The tumor he’d dubbed “Cornelius” had got shook real good by that jeep ride and it was payback time. His temples throbbed relentlessly. He held onto the railing around the bed because if he let go, the dizziness would turn him upside down and drop him face first on the floor.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to startle you.”

“Hearing’s about gone, worn out. Just like the rest of me.” He taps his chest. “Got a lifetime warranty and it’s about up.” Theo turned back to consider the angel lying so still before him. “What happened to this chile?”

He saw Pedro flinch. Theo always had been blunt, cut to the chase. Lately, it’d gotten worse, though. When your train was about to pull out of the station, you didn’t have time for pussyfooting conversations.

“Brain damage.”

“So she not gone wake up for the party.”

Again the flinch.

“No.”

“She ever gone wake up?”

“… probably not. She has remained a little baby, never grew up, talked, walked or …” There was a heartbeat pause, then Pedro rushed ahead, “Oh, God could perform a miracle. We pray for that every day. We have hope, but ...”

“But probably not,” Theo finished for him.

Both men were quiet. The sheet that covered the child’s thin chest rose and fell in rhythm with the whoosh and hiss of the machine sitting on the table beside the bed. There wasn’t a wrinkle in the sheets anywhere. The lace nightgown was as perfect as the outfit on a doll. A clean, white bandage on her throat covered up the opening there for the tube that stretched across the bed to the ventilator.

The old man could hear the hum of conversation around him and music of some kind—a mariachi beat, nothing he cared about. He was beginning to discover that being deaf wasn’t an altogether bad thing.

“Because she ees my child, too, just like the others,” Pedro said. Theo heard that, turned and looked questioningly at him. “You want to know why she ees right here in the living room, in the middle of everything.”

“If I’d wanted to know, I’d have asked.”

Pedro smiled a little. At least Theo thought he did. With that broom on his upper lip it was hard to tell. “Yes, I suppose you would have.”

“You think she knows she’s here, knows what’s going on around her?” Pedro’s eyes were suddenly moist, but he didn’t blink, looked steadily into eyes that age had yellowed. “I pray every day that when I meet her one day in heaven, she will say she knew, she was aware every minute, she heard every word.”

G
ABRIELLA SAT DOWN
on a couch covered with a beautiful Indian blanket—and fell so deep into the cushion it would take a forklift to get her back out. Obviously, the blanket hid a broken spring.

“Should have warned you,” Steve said as he eased down next to her. “This old couch is stuck here in the corner for a reason.”

Gabriella had elected to sit there for the same reason. Damaged goods had a way of finding each other.

“So finish what you were telling me about the guy with the string tie,” she said. For the past couple of hours, all through the taco buffet dinner, Steve had been giving her a running commentary on the various characters in the room—the old Indian with the rheumy eyes, the fat, bald man with a strawberry birthmark on his head. Every one of them had a story.

The string-tie man was middle-aged, with boots a little too polished and the creases in his hat a smidge too perfect. Drugstore cowboy.

“He’s pretty tight-lipped but I’ve got him down to an investment broker on the commodities exchange, a bookie or CIA. The safe money’s on bookie.”

There was the tall, clean-shaven, pressed-shirt-tucked-in man who’d moved to St. Elmo with his three wives, escaping a crackdown on multiple marriages by the Mormon Church in Utah. The youngest wife had promptly taken up with the man who drove the gasoline delivery truck that serviced the filling station. The other two couldn’t get along—not with each other—with
him.
They finally threw him out and lived together now with the seven children in the house he’d moved the herd into. He lived in a trailer set back from the creek down the road.

Ty ran in and out of the room now and then as the newest member of the Mormon herd. Or tribe, since it included a couple of native American kids and several young Hispanics.

The boy seemed perfectly fine, but the swelling in his face hadn’t gone down as quickly as Steve would have liked. He said if Ty’s eyes and lips were still puffy four hours after he finished the IV, he’d give the boy another one.

Steve pointed to a couple of indeterminant age standing near the head of the hospital bed. He had a full-bore Jeremiah Johnson—or John the Baptist—beard and long hair that fell in his face. She looked normal enough—except for the full sleeves of tattoos on both arms and both legs and growing like morning glory vines out the collar of her shirt.

“Albert and Sadie live in the house on the other side of the dry goods store. For five years, they had a line painted down the middle of the floor of their living room and on election day Al couldn’t cross that line. Their house is the polling place in St. Elmo and in Colorado a paroled convict can’t vote until his parole is up.”

He answered her next question before she had a chance to ask it.

“Some kind of drug charges, I think. Using, not selling.”

She spotted Theo and Pedro in conversation at the foot of Angelina’s bed and allowed her eyes to caress the child’s perfect features again.

“That little girl … she’s not just asleep, is she?”

“Angelina’s in a PVS, permanent vegetative state. She was like that when I bought Heartbreak Hotel five years ago.”

“How does Pedro …?” It hadn’t escaped her notice that the cooks for the event were Anza and another woman old enough to be the girl’s grandmother. “It looks like he’s single—”

She was surprised and a more than a little dismayed by how much she was hoping he was, that his wife wasn’t just visiting her sister in Omaha. She’d even searched the photographs on the wall, looking for a woman at Pedro’s side, but found nothing but pictures of the children.

“His wife left him. Pedro doesn’t talk about it much, but apparently she wanted to put Angelina in a nursing home, a permanent care facility, and he wanted to keep her at home so …”

“How does he do it, take care of her all by himself?”

“He has Anza.” He gestured to the room. “And all of St. Elmo. I bet Pedro’s telling Theo right now about the alarm system.”

Steve pointed to the machine that rested on a cart by the hospital bed.

“Angelina can breathe without that ventilator for short periods of time, but not for long. If the machine failed—came unplugged or the electricity went out—Angelina could be in trouble quick so Pedro rigged up an alarm. When it goes off ...” He looked at her and grinned. “… the result gives a whole new meaning to close-knit community.”

* * * *

Yesheb buckles the seatbelt but he has to wrestle the harness. He motions for the helicopter pilot to lift off anyway—he’ll figure it out in the air. He can see the flashes of distant lightning. It’s storming in the mountains on the western horizon.

* * * *

There was a sudden crack, followed instantly by a boom of thunder. The sky had turned ugly after Gabriella got to St. Elmo. She’d have to stay here until the storm passed and the rainwater drained off the trail. Even so, she wasn’t looking forward to wet rocks in the dark.

Thunder rumbled again.

A storm. And a full moon.

* * * *

Yesheb hops out of the helicopter while it is still a foot off the ground, leans over and races through the hurricane wind of the blades toward the lone car that sits at the far end of the church parking lot where the chopper has been directed to land. The engine in the car is running.

He has kept in constant contact with Bernie throughout the trip, who is in contact with someone yearning to collect half a million dollars in cash for a chance encounter. As of Yesheb’s last conversation with the smarmy little agent, the informant remained certain Gabriella was attending a party in a tiny collection of houses high in the mountains that stood as behemoth shadows against the night sky above the valley floor. The information stopped there—no address to feed into a GPS that would display the route
with a red arrow using information sucked down from some whirling silver ball of technology in the sky. But Yesheb doesn’t need a computer voice to talk him through the journey. Google Earth shows the town to be so small it would be impossible to miss a gathering there of more than two people.

Yesheb isn’t worried about finding her. He is a top-of-the-food-chain predator. Once he gets near enough, he’ll be able to smell her. He turns out of the parking lot and down the street. The tires squeal when he shoves his foot down on the accelerator, then night folds like the wings of a bat around the car and he disappears.

* * * *

When Gabriella jumped at a sudden boom of thunder, Theo looked at her with compassion. The old man had eased down on the couch beside her after Steve left about half an hour ago and Gabriella wondered if he had remained there because he was comfortable or because he couldn’t get up.