Safe Passage (31 page)

    
In the gray morning light the dog was yellow, ugly. It was baring its teeth. At the very moment it started to come at him, Simon thought: Running is too easy. Standing still is not. Staying right where he was and not fighting back would be no easier than having his ear fixed, letting them put him to sleep. It went against every instinct he had. It was something he could offer.

    
He made himself freeze in place. He had to grit his teeth to keep himself from moving. In the end it was no harder than playing statues had once been, locking into position, becoming cold as stone. Let the dog have at him, slash him with its teeth, make him bleed. He could not offer his ear, but he could offer that.

    
Mag
was almost finished loading her bag with papers when Monster started to bark. She had a headache from the wine last night, and after running her papers on the last block, her temples were throbbing, making her awkward and slow. The odd sensation of complete freedom was still with her, as it had been from the moment she had sat across from Cynthia and decided what she would do. It was a cool, logical feeling. She was a stone, heavy but unfettered, falling through a dark cave. Her son was dead. Patrick would go blind. She was free.

    
At first, the dog's noise was simply an intrusion on her thoughts—a sharp, angry sound cutting into her headache. She was annoyed. The dog had been inside yesterday—because of her run-in with the owner on Sunday, she supposed—and she thought the exchange would keep the beast cooped up at least a couple more days.

    
Then it came into sight, almost beside her, barking its lungs out and running toward Simon—a dirty, yellow crazy thing.

    
She expected Simon to run away. Simon didn't budge. He remained perfectly still, in the strange motionless stance he had adopted several times since the bombing, with his fingers hanging limp and silent as a statue's, as if they had never been alive, never snapped. The dog almost touched her as it went by, growling and baring raw teeth at Simon's hands. Simon didn't move an inch.
Mag
was heavy, a rock inside, but molten. She watched Simon's stillness and felt the fury of the attacking dog. She dropped her paper bag and ran. She threw herself forward, and at the very moment the dog lunged toward Simon's hands, she tackled it.

    
She caught it around its hind legs. The dog didn't stop entirely, only slowed down. Simon stayed where he was, but Monster's teeth missed him.
Mag
hung on. The dog pulled her forward a little, then stopped and yelped. Beneath its short fur she felt hard muscles, tension, anger. Nothing moved; it seemed to be regrouping.

    
Then it turned swiftly and came at her face. She was holding too far back on its body to prevent it. Her face was pressed to its side just above its hindquarters. Her instinct was to let go, protect her eyes, but she held fast. She smelled dark hot dog breath and hate that had been meant for Simon. She saw its teeth. In the fraction of a second before the dog bit her, she propelled herself clumsily up and forward, pressing her belly against the dog's spine and grabbing its chest higher up. Her right arm went around its neck and her left hugged its rib cage. The dog's teeth missed her face because of the way she had moved. They caught dully at her leg, then let go.

    
She was straddling the dog now, her head tight against its
fur,
her legs sprawled out behind her. All her weight was on it, but the dog stayed on its feet.
It growled, low and intense.
She could feel the vibrations in her arms and chest.

    
Suddenly it tried to lunge forward, to rid itself of her. Its paws bit into the spongy ground while
her own
feet dragged free and useless. As long as it had a foothold and she did not, it was stronger than she. Its mouth was open, slavering, working to get loose. She hung on, being pulled forward; she would not have believed a dog could be so powerful. In a second it would be rid of her. She became aware of the pounding of her heart, the aching in her chest. She was about to let go when in the corner of her eye she saw Simon's legs, long sticks in gray
RipOffs
, and his mute, motionless fingers in exactly the same position they'd been before.

    
Burying her face in the dog's neck, she squeezed harder. The smell of damp fur engulfed her. It was the smell of every enemy she'd ever had—Susan
Durrell
with the spoon held aloft, ready to strike the toddler Percival; schoolteachers who had been unkind to him; circumstances that had left Alfred soulless and Simon earless; a terrorist bomber in Beirut. She found the ground with her knee, lifted, dug in. With all her strength she heaved herself over, onto her back. The dog's feet kicked wildly in the air. She held it to her, squeezing tighter with the arm around its chest and the hand at its throat. She still didn't have a foothold, but now the dog didn't, either. It thrashed, trying to roll her over and get its paws on the ground again. She didn't let go. Its muscles bore against her; she felt every movement of the dog's body in her own; they were one creature, blond and angry. Seconds passed.
Mag's
arms ached, but she held on. The kicking diminished. Simon was speaking to her. She didn't hear him clearly.

    
The dog made a sound—a high whining moan, terrible to hear. She squeezed harder, listening to the pitch go higher. Then the sound stopped and the kicking stopped, too. The dog was a weight against her, foul-smelling, wet. She didn't trust the silence. Finally she heard Simon.

    
"Mother! Listen to me!"

    
Her arms hurt, and her chest ached from the weight of the dog and the effort of squeezing so hard, but she held on. She lay on the ground with the dog in her arms, and above her Simon was tall, speaking to her, the sky behind him gray.

    
"You can let go now," he told her. Monster didn't move. Simon bent over her, his fingers moving again. He was taking the dog. "Let go now, Mother," he told her. "It's over. He's dead."

CHAPTER 13

    
Patrick dreamed he was smothering. At first he dreamed he was running behind Percival when he was still in middle school, helping him train. He held a stopwatch in his hand and checked it as they passed certain points. At the end, he'd tell Percival his times. He'd say he looked strong coming out of the trees but that he needed to lean forward when he charged the hill.

    
It was hard to tell if Percival was listening. He was running with the long, easy stride he'd had when he was younger. It was pleasant to watch. Patrick understood that terrible things would happen as Percival got older, but in the dream it seemed possible to avoid them before they occurred. He was trying to explain this as they ran—that the future held no danger, because all the time in front of them was free.

    
Percival did not want to hear. He ran faster, to get away from the sound of Patrick's voice. Time passed, and Percival grew. His legs stopped looking like pipe cleaners and muscles formed in his chest. Patrick had to work hard to keep him in sight. He stopped being able to see the future in front of them, though he was running as hard as he could. Percival was getting away. Patrick was having trouble catching his breath. His head began to hurt. Still, he did not slow down. Slowing down or stopping did not seem to be options. You never stopped in a race. Percival was out of sight but Patrick kept running. His head pounded, and he was smothering as he ran.

    
He was still smothering as he came into consciousness—slowly, with no power to speed the process up. When he finally opened his eyes, he realized he was lying on his side, with something fuzzy against his face. The fuzzy thing was Lucifer. He reached up to swipe the cat away. Lucifer jumped down onto the floor. Patrick's head was pounding. On the night table the clock said 8:06. He never slept so late. He sat up in bed, still with that sense of everything happening in slow motion. Finally he stood, feeling for his slippers with his feet. He knew what his lethargy signified, and the odd sensation of moving as if under water, unable to function at a normal pace. He knew what the headache meant.
Mag
was gone, and that was just as well. He did not want her to see this. He got his feet into the slippers and went into the bathroom for his pills before he became completely blind.

    
His heart was as audible as a metronome. He'd thought he'd gotten hold of himself the other day, but it was no better than ever. To go blind just as you woke up gave no time to prepare. The light was almost gone now, a steady gray—and he felt suspended, caught. Trapped inside
himself
. His dream came back to him. Percival running.
Graceful,
fast
.
And the explosion.
He was a little dizzy. Traveling at great speed in one of those amusement park rides that goes so fast gravity holds you against the wall, keeps you from falling just yet—aware that eventually you'll slow, and either the floor will rise or you'll tumble down.

    
He clutched the sink with his hand to stop the spinning sensation. Opened the medicine cabinet.
A bottle against his hand.
Valium? He was pretty sure it was. He squinted, but he had no vision at all, so he emptied some of the pills into his palm, feeling them—the right size, right shape. Heart drumming. Cup in hand now, spigot on.
Valium, two aspirin.
Down the hatch.
Now think about the Keys until the mechanical calm came—think about hot sunshine, the water (ironically, when he thought of the ocean, what came to him was its turquoise blueness, the visual component), fish flapping under his touch, scales rough, cold against his hand.
A deep breath.
He could clean a fish by touch only. He would not need to see.

A new timbre to the headache now,
reorchestrating
itself toward the back of his head. What did he care about fish? A note for the logbook: Even if he could get rid of the headache, which ground away at his reason, he was not sure he could control his panic over this unbearable sense of being trapped.

    
He turned around, stubbed his toe on the toilet, but not hard enough to distract his attention from his head. Next would he roar and beat his chest to try to get outside of himself? There had been an amputee who'd begged in front of the movie theater where he went to Saturday matinees as a child. The man stood with his stumps on a cloth mat and held his cup up to the waist level of adults coming out of the theater, the chest level of children. Patrick had no money to give him, but in any case his pity was mingled with disgust. In such circumstances, he himself would surely have fashioned a pair of wooden legs, maybe to walk around on and certainly to raise him up to face people eye to eye, let him maintain a semblance of dignity. Why didn't the amputee do that? What was his excuse?

   
 
Heart rate still up, but he could breathe more freely; the smothering sensation was gone. Even blind, even with the headache, he was going begging. At worst, there were practical possibilities: a cane, a Seeing Eye dog, Braille, whatever would get him out of himself.
Never the possibility of being trapped.

    
And when the Valium worked, he would analyze the events of these past three days—try to figure out why he'd been blind three days in a row—and particularly now, just after waking, after a troubled sleep.

    
Wary because of the stubbed toe, he nudged his shoulder against the bathroom wall and walked out, making his way across the bedroom to the doorway and into the hall. He was getting better at negotiating the stairs. He supposed it was useful to know how to traverse the house in the dark whatever happened, a good skill to have in case of a major storm or another energy crisis. He felt for the tread with his toe.

    
He was counting: seven steps to the landing, one step to the edge of the landing, seven more to the bottom. Someone was standing a few feet from him, at the entrance to the family room:
Izzy
. He didn't know how he knew someone was there, or why he knew it was
Izzy
.

    
"It's happened again, hasn't it?"
Izzy
said.

    
"Yes."

    
"I thought it would. It's getting worse."
Izzy's
pronouncements had the clarity of incisions. "Come sit down. I have a theory."

    
"It must be some theory, to get you out of bed before noon."
Izzy
hated getting up. He'd fallen off his bike because he was half-asleep the morning he'd broken his ankle delivering papers in high school. He wouldn't admit it, had insisted the bike had jumped a curb, but everyone knew the troubles he had, getting up.

    
Patrick hugged the wall going toward the family room.
Izzy
had the grace not to help him.

    
Someone else was there.

    
"Who's that?"

    
"It's me," Gideon said.

    
"What, did you go out to run?"

    
"No."

    
Of course Patrick knew Gideon hadn't been running. He could barely walk. Everyone had been careful not to mention it: Gideon, of all people, limping around because he was so upset about his brother.