Skull Session (10 page)

The parents looked at each other, and Brittany became very interested in the ribbon at her collar. The micro-momentaries—sudden activation of small muscle movements, like Marty's mustache twitching, the changeable weather of Janis's eyes and brows—told Mo he'd hit a topic of concern. Probably, therefore, of value.

"The fact is, we don't know," Marty admitted. "Essie is very reserved about that aspect of her life. We respect that. We don't pry."

Janis looked distressed. "Brittany, honey, can you do me a favor? Get me a drink of water? With ice, sweetie."

Brittany stood up and stumped out of the room, aware that she was being gotten rid of.

"Part of it was the church group, Mr. Ford," Janis said. She glanced at her husband, eyes brimming again. "They are so thoroughly . . . clean-cut. Such good,
traditional
values. Essie took it all to heart. At first I was glad. But I think the new pastor went too far—I mean, this emphasis on chastity and virginity and all that. They never mention sex without mentioning diseases or—"

"Janis, Mr. Ford doesn't want to hear it."

"Essie was a good girl," Janis said, crying openly now. "She really, deeply, wanted to be good and virtuous."

"She
was
good and virtuous. She
is,"
Marty Howrigan insisted.

Mo coughed. "To your knowledge, was Essie sexually active?"

The Howrigans were silent for a moment, looking at each other. Some gulf had opened between them. The look Marty Howrigan gave his wife seemed slightly fearful, as if he saw for the first time that whole areas of his daughter's life might be secret from him—and that his wife might not, in fact, always tell him everything.

"Not to my knowledge, no," Marty Howrigan said cautiously.

Janis wiped her lovely eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. "I don't think so. I mean, I don't know either. That's my point," she said, looking at her husband. "It's not whether she had boyfriends or not that bothers me, it's that she didn't feel she could ever,
ever
talk about it to us. Ever.

Don't you see, Marty?"

"This is an old discussion," Marty said. He threw himself back against the chair, started to speak again, then clapped his hands on his thighs and shut his mouth.

"Then let me ask you this," Mo put in, not willing to let the revelations stall, "what sort of mood was Essie in when she disappeared?

Was she different in any way? The day she left, the weeks preceding her disappearance?"

"I don't know," Janis said dully. "Maybe."

"Maybe how?"

"She was, I'd say, preoccupied," Marty said.

Janis nodded. "Just a little off. Not always paying attention. I just thought it was, you know, a developmental stage."

Brittany returned with a glass of water for her mother and sat again on the couch. Janis Howrigan took the glass absently. She had withdrawn, not looking at anything, lost in her thoughts. That tragic inwardness—another mannerism that always got to Mo, pierced him to his heart.

Mo asked the three of them some more questions, but it was clear the interview was effectively over. When he stood to go, Janis was staring at her glass of water, which she hadn't taken a drink from. She nodded vaguely but didn't speak to him or look at him when he said good-bye.

Driving around the reservoir for the third time that day, he fumed at himself. His heart felt wrecked in his chest, simply because a beautiful woman had not shown any special interest in him when he left. What had he expected? A lingering, meaningful gaze from a woman mourning her lost daughter? He was as vulnerable as a lovesick boy.

He'd liked the Howrigans, but he should have known that there was buried stuff there. Like every family. So the two parents had very different politics, especially when it came to issues of sexuality. Unless Essie turned up, they could wrangle over it for the rest of their lives—whose fault it was, whose philosophy was right, which of them had failed her as a parent. And how would Brittany deal with it when her turn came? She'd see the fork in the road soon enough, and have to choose.

Mo raged at himself and then found himself venting his anger on the Howrigans.
Brittany:
another one of those idiotic, pretentious names that were so in fashion, along with Chelsea, Tiffany, Heather, Courtney, et cetera. Cutesy, turn-of-the-century, pseudo-Anglo, yuppie. It wasn't until he'd driven another five miles that he realized the explosion about Essie's sex life, or the lack thereof, had deflected his thoughts. Something important had slipped through. Something about the names—another fashionable name. He thought back. One of the Teen Companion people: the teenager, Heather Mason. He'd have to check the files as soon as he got back to the barracks. If he remembered right, Heather Mason was the name of Richard Mason's sister—Richard Mason, the hit-and-run victim, the young man who had ended up at the end of a ninety-foot blood fan. On Route 138, not two miles from the Howrigans'.

10

"I
'M NOT GETTING IT," Paul told Lia. "I don't get clear when we do this shit, the way you do. Like right now I'm
swarming.
I'm full of maggots." His abdomen seized in wrenching tics, explosions of air choked in his throat. A vaguely threatening tune was playing in his head, so loud he could hardly hear. He couldn't place the title, another growing irritation. When Lia had first planned the dive, a month before, it hadn't seemed such a bad idea, but now the danger had begun to seem all too real.

"Just see to your gear, I guess," Lia said. She wasn't unsympathetic: When she had the wild light in her eyes, that was philosophy, not advice. She wore a heavily insulated, hooded wetsuit, glistening black and neon blue with purple knee pads, that made her look like a female Master of the Universe. She checked her tanks, her regulators, her lights, her buoyancy compensator, hands flying. Obviously keyed up.

Lia had borrowed the equipment from another friend, a fellow member of CD A, Cave Divers Anonymous. The name of the organization was indicative, Paul thought, suggesting compulsion and addiction. He wished the diving gear, with its dials and tubes, rubbery straps, molded shapes, didn't resemble medical apparatus quite so much.

It was early Thursday afternoon. They had left the Subaru parked by the side of a dirt road, then packed the gear through the woods two hundred yards on a path that, presumably, only CD As knew about. The entrance to the cave was a low triangular cleft in a tumble of granite chunks at the base of a cliff Though Paul could hardly squeeze himself through, the passage opened inside to a room-size cave that Lia called The Foyer, where they stopped to dress and to perform the last equipment check before the dive. At the far end of The Foyer, another small hole opened, black and wet-looking.

"It's not
just
the element of risk." Lia cinched her tanks, made small adjustments. "There's curiosity too. And it's beautiful in there—it's strange and magical. You'll see."

Paul looked again at the map Lia had provided him, a Day-Glo yellow sheet of tough thin plastic with the winding labyrinth of the cave marked in black. It reminded him of something anatomical. They were about to slip inside the body of some giant creature.

"And the great thing is, it
registers,
¹⁹
Lia went on. "So often we're so cluttered with day-to-day preoccupations, we don't really
see
what's around us. It all gets filtered through the morass of daily crap, we miss a lot. The beauty of fear is that it cuts through, forces you to live in the moment. Watch how well you remember everything, later on."

"I'm feeling
more
cluttered. Damn it, Lia, I've got Tourette's."

"But you've said yourself when you're focused it goes away. I've noticed that after stress, you're calmer. Could it be that exposure to risk or tension desensitizes you to stressors? Who knows, Paul, maybe this is a way to reduce your symptoms."

It was possible. But Paul's resistance was also connected to Lia. Her intensity, the
hunger,
was as frightening as anything here.

When they were both suited up, forehead lamps in place, Lia led the way to the slot at the end, flippers slapping the rock. "I'm given to understand this is a rare structure for the East Coast, a remnant of volcanic action—chutes and tubes and pockets. This one is pretty small, only a mile or so of passages."

"Meaning we,might live."

She seemed unconscious of his sarcasm. "Yeah." She slid through the opening and disappeared, and Paul followed her, his tanks scraping on the granite edge.
You could get caught on something in such close quarters.
Things could go wrong.

Inside was a second chamber, smaller. Lia waited on a sloping shelf of rock, her forehead light illuminating a tapering funnel that ended abruptly in a sheet of utterly black, motionless water.

Paul stared at it, appalled. "On one condition, damn it. We—
you
— do not push the envelope. You do not extend your dive time. You do not explore anything that's not on the map."

She met his gaze and clearly caught the look in his eyes. "Okay," she said softly.

They waited a moment. Lia was spiraling in on her fear, finding whatever it was that she so needed. Paul tried to do the same, trying to become transparent to the anxiety, to let the tics and urges boil through and pass out of him.

"I think," Lia said at last, "I think it has to do with
surrender.
There's a paradox here—when you surrender to it, to the moment, to the fear, to your mortality, that's when you have the greatest power." She looked at him again, and he could see she meant it, deeply. And he could see how much it mattered to her that he see it.

This has got to be love,
Paul thought. He pulled down his mask and respirator. He slid into the black water before Lia had moved, a way of saying he'd understood her.
This is love, and it will take you to the strangest
places, and you'll go willingly.

None of the diving he'd done before prepared him for this. Those few days had been in the sunlit, shallow waters off Key West, other divers all around, boats above. The water had been alive with fish, the play of sunlight, the metallic whine of distant propellers. This was just a yawning throat, disappearing into darkness, green-black rock walls at arm's length on all sides. The massive granite weight of the Green Mountains, the hiss of intake and the bubble of exhalation, the subliminal drum of his heartbeat. Above, Lia descended gracefully into the column of his bubbles, her light gyrating as she moved in eerie slow motion. A soft mist began to obscure the water around them, eons' worth of slowly accumulating superfine silt, swept from the walls by their movements. Cold, pressure, darkness.
Fear.

After a vertical drop of fifty feet, the chute widened and canted, gradually becoming nearly horizontal. The horizontal stretch was worse:
no up or down.
With neutral buoyancy, and without a surface above, without an external source of light, he couldn't always tell how to orient. It made his nerves shriek.
Which way was up?

Paul rode the crest of his panic, controlled his breathing, which had gotten quick and shallow. Bubbles
rose
—that was up. His exhaled air hit the ceiling and scuttled away over the rough surface like living drops of mercury, He paused to stabilize himself and let Lia reach him, and together they clumsily unfolded the map. Lia traced a route with one finger, then led the way through one of several openings.

This tube had a different structure, rounded and molded of yellowish igneous rock that sparkled in their lights. Humps and globs and folds of rock, like hardened wax, stretched away ahead.
A bile duct. A cholesterol
clogged artery, a small intestine.

The route Lia had traced led to a large chamber, marked on the map as an irregular oval, the biggest of the cave's spaces. As she'd explained earlier, the chamber had originally been above water and still trapped a bubble of air, which meant they could emerge there and rest for a time before heading back. The air would be breathable: Wherever there was water, there'd be oxygen.

Paul took the lead as they negotiated the final passage leading to the chamber. Obviously, this tube had once been above the water level too: Stalactite's and stalagmites hung from the ceiling and sprouted from the floor, jagged teeth. Some filaments of accumulated mineral were as thin as soda straws, tapering to needle points. Paul navigated with care, occasionally gripping the rock and using it to propel himself. The irregular tunnel was a shifting shadowland in his forehead light, distances became difficult to gauge. The panic he'd controlled earlier began to rise again.

Ahead, the tunnel began to widen, the beginning of the big room. Paul felt a moment of relief until he noticed that the light around him had changed. He turned to see Lia's forehead light panning wildly in the hanging forest of rock structures forty feet behind him. Something was wrong. Abruptly the light flashed through a swirl of bubbles, outlining a dark, struggling shape.

Paul catapulted himself off the base of a stalagmite and dove back through the maze of tapering rock, grappled and swam toward Lia. She was twisting and arching, reaching up behind her with her arms, repeating the same convulsive movement again and again. A hideous dance. Bubbles poured up from her tanks, scattering on the ceiling in a silvery tornado.

The pattern of it registered: Lia had caught some part of her apparatus on a spine of rock, her air tube had broken or dislodged, she couldn't

turn to free herself. Again and again, the reflexes of her body made her try to reach and turn. An animal in a trap. If she'd already inhaled water, death throes.

Paul dove for the side of the tunnel, dodging Lia's flailing limbs, then came around behind her. In the flurry of bubbles it was hard to see what had caught, but he brought his shoulder against the pillar of rock and heaved. On the second try, it broke with a sharp
clack!
and he was able to twist it free of her regulator housing and air tube. Lia came around again, felt her freedom to turn, found Paul's arms with her clutching hands.

He yanked her mouthpiece out and gave her his extra regulator, then reached up to cut off her air flow. The cacophony of hissing and bubbling air abruptly stopped. Lia calmed slightly, taking air, then got her own spare reg into operation.

After an agonizing few minutes they broke the surface in the big chamber. Paul paddled, treading water and turning to cast his beam around him. They were in a high-vaulted room, perhaps a hundred feet long. Against one wall, a massive formation resembling a cluster of organ pipes rose to the ceiling, its base melting into a shelf that extended into the water like a small beach. Paul pushed Lia ahead of him, then boosted her onto the shelf. They both collapsed, flinging off the masks, breathing the air of the cave.

No thoughts, no talk. Just air, some space overhead.

After a time Paul sat up and looked at Lia. What was she feeling?

Relief, remorse, shame, gratitude? Was she at some level savoring this?

She was clearly focused inward, inspecting whatever had been revealed. Or maybe just in shock. She'd pulled off her hood, and her wet hair lay tangled around her. He wished she weren't so beautiful:

He wanted to stay angry with her. He'd be damned if he'd let her off easy this time.

"You know what I was thinking the whole time?" she said at last.

Her voice was hoarse. "I mean, not that I was actually 'thinking,' but there was one sort of idea that came to me."

"Has it ever occurred to you there might be other ways to get at these great ideas? I don't want to listen to any of the revelations this earned you. Whatever they are, they're not worth it."

She ignored him. "The thought was, /
want to have a baby with Paul.

I've got to get unstuck so lean live and make a baby with Paul.
I know it's nuts.

But there it is."

Paul didn't answer. Some big, nameless feeling was rushing to fill the aftermath. A good feeling, strong. He scowled at it.

She didn't push her luck, just looked around the room with him.

Their lights set fire to the rocks, a rainbow of pastels, luminous. Still gently disturbed by their swimming, the water reflected and fragmented the ceiling colors, scattered the beams of their lights. An enormous, lustrous opal.

"There's a word for the way it looks," Lia said.
"Chatoyant.
It's in the dictionary. It means 'of changeable luster.' Isn't that a beautiful word?"

He didn't answer, didn't look at her. He kept seeing her caught and convulsing like a gaffed fish.

"Thank you for helping me," she said. "For saving me. I never saw anyone move so fast. I don't know how you broke that stalactite."

"How much air did you lose, Lia?"

"There's enough to make it out again."

Lia worked on her gear, small hands deft and certain. Paul looked away again. They'd lived. With any luck they'd make it out alive too. He couldn't stay mad at her forever. She was right about too many things. The Big Nameless filled him, almost euphoric. He felt completely empty of tics, centered, simplified. He almost wanted to fake a twitch or two, just to spite her. God damn her for being crazy, and for being right. Terror therapy for Tourette's—the latest cure. After his unthinking effort to save her, he felt oddly sensual, aware of the blood circulating in his veins and the well-used feeling in his muscles. He could feel Lia's body heat next to him, the electrical energy of her. The hall they were in was astonishing, the throne room of some underworld king. He'd never seen anything so beautiful.

It slipped out of him before he could stop it: "So maybe fear is a barrier," he said. "Beyond which is
wonder."

She looked at him. "If I'd said that now, you'd get mad."

Paul lay back again, staring at the ceiling.
Surrender, just surrender.
It was hopeless. He knew from experience that after her near escape she'd be charged with sexual energy. And he felt it too. Maybe there was truth to the theory that an organism's procreative urge was strongest during mortal threat, an ancient instinct to assure survival. Paul didn't go looking for it the way she did, but he wasn't immune to it either.