Strangewood (13 page)

She dropped her head, suffering with her guilt, and her
blonde hair spilled down to drape over her face.

Time and again she told herself that this was her son, that
she belonged here at his side. Emily knew that was true, and she would have
done anything for Nathan. But a part of her just wanted to escape, only for a
little while. To be away from here.

"I’m sorry, honey," she whispered to Nathan as she
sat on the edge of his bed, ignoring the tubes.

It was silly, really. She knew that anyone would tell her
that. After all, nobody could spend all that time in a hospital room, no
contact, no activity or emotion but the fear of the future. But that didn't
make the guilt go away.

Emily rose and went to the small private bath off of
Nathan's room. She used the toilet, then washed her hands and splashed water on
her face. When she had finished, she leaned over the sink and stared hard at
her own visage in the mirror. Backward. The opposite of Emily, she had always
thought, alternately amused and repulsed by the idea. There were crow's feet
around her hazel eyes, but not too many. And though the dark circles were
particularly unattractive, she knew that they weren't usually this bad.

There, looking in the mirror, Emily began to come awake at
last. To rise from the numbing fog that had enshrouded her since Sunday night. She
was in the hospital, with her son, and he needed her more than he had since the
day he left her womb. That was all that mattered.

But in order to properly care for Nathan, to be there for
him and be ready to handle whatever might come up down the line, Emily knew
that she would have to continue to live. Continue to be Emily, the woman in the
mirror. Her late father had once told her, in a rare expedition into the
foreign land of philosophy, that people defined themselves, for better or
worse, by their own reflection in the eyes of others. Emily needed the moral
and intellectual support of the people in her life: her ex-husband; her mother
— if only it were possible to rouse her from her Alzheimer’s-induced fog;
Nathan's doctors; her co-workers; and Joe. She needed Joe, too.

Dragging her fingers through her unwashed hair, Emily went
back into Nathan's room. She sat on the edge of his bed, kissed his forehead,
and looked at her watch. Thomas had been gone nearly three hours. A long time,
she thought, and hoped he'd be back soon. She needed a break, damn it, and to
hell with the guilt that thought engendered.

Somehow, even without the shower, the change of clothes, and
the sleep she craved so powerfully, Emily felt reenergized. She reached for the
phone and, after several aborted attempts trying to figure out how to get an
outside line, called work.

Emily was the director of human resources at Sentinel
Software. Given her current circumstances, she realized that she was fortunate
to be in a job where she had two managers working for her who really knew what
they were doing. It had enabled her to work shortened hours, so she could pick
Nathan up at three o'clock every afternoon, and have a life with him. And now,
the competence of her subordinates enabled her to be with her son when he
needed her most.

"HR, this is Lorena."

"It's Emily," she said.

"Oh, God, Emmy, how is he?" Lorena asked
fretfully, and just from her voice on the phone, Emily could picture the
younger woman's concerned expression.

"No change," Emily admitted, sitting up a bit
straighter, a physical sign of her resolve to be strong for her son. "They
started with a CT scan on Sunday night, that's sort of a computer map of the
brain. Yesterday they did an MRI, which gives much more detail, but they still
haven't figured out what's wrong with him. I'm sure it's just a matter of time,
though. How are things on your end?"

"Are we firing Mark Caligiuri or not?" Lorena
asked.

"Yes. Show him his record if he wants. Wait until the
end of the day, though. I don't want him leaving with anything sensitive. He
can keep his rolodex, but not a single client file," Emily replied
thoughtfully. "Did we get an answer from that woman, Paula
whatshername?"

"Paulette," Lorena corrected. "Hobson. And
yes, she countered our offer. She's asked for an additional seven thousand,
commensurate bonus, and another week's vacation."

"Give her six," Emily said. "That's within
the executive committee's parameters for third quarter new hires. Anything
else?"

"Nope."

"I'm going to be here a while, Lorena," Emily told
her. "Well, shuttling between here and home. I'm going to pick up my cell
phone when I go home to shower, and then I'll be good to go."

"I won't call unless it's . . ."

"Call," Emily said quickly. "If you have
questions, if you need me, if you're not sure about something, call. If there
are papers I have to sign, messenger them over, or let me know and I'll pick
them up when I have a chance. I'm not going to stop being responsible in the
rest of my life, Lorena. But I need to be here."

"Of course you do," Lorena replied. "I just
meant that . . ."

"I know. Thank you. I'll be going home shortly. You can
reach me there for the next few hours, but I should be back here by two
o'clock. Three at the latest."

They said their good-byes and Emily hung up, grateful to
have someone as kind and competent as Lorena to rely on. She reminded herself
to actually tell the woman that the next time they spoke. Somehow, though, she
suspected that she would forget.

Behind her, the door clicked open.

"Sorry," Thomas said.

Emily pursed her lips, readying a stern reproach for his
tardiness. Then she saw his apologetic expression, and she faltered. There was
more to his appearance than merely apology, however. As he strode across the
room and dropped into the recliner, his eyes seemed to dart around
distractedly. He wouldn't meet her gaze, almost as if he were guilty of
something. But it wasn't exactly that. Emily knew it wasn't, because she'd seen
Thomas's guilty face before. He looked upset.

Haunted.

"I stopped at the park for a few minutes, just to think
for a bit," he said hurriedly. "Just lost track of the time, I
guess."

Still, he seemed unsettled. And Emily did not fail to notice
that she understood his reference to the park without Thomas having to
elaborate any more than that. There were dozens of parks in this area. But when
you'd known someone so intimately for so long, there were so many things that
no longer required explanation. She wondered if that were actually a good
thing, or if it served to weaken a relationship. There was a part of her that
yearned for that kind of simple explanation for the failure of her marriage to
Thomas: we just couldn't communicate. It would be so convenient to be able to
sum it up like that.

Like now.

"What is it, Thomas?" she asked, studying his
furrowed brow, the distinguished graying at his temples. He was two years
younger than she, but Emily knew that Thomas would only be more handsome as he
aged, and found a bit of envy in her heart at the thought. "What's
bothering you?"

In the surprised glance, followed by a frown, followed by a
sheepish and halfhearted grin and a shake of his head, Emily found that her
communication with Thomas was actually better than she would have thought. She
knew him. And because she knew him, she was worried.

"Thomas?"

He stood up again, unable to keep still, and walked over to
stare down at Nathan. Their son lay on the rough white bedclothes, as plain and
sterile as the rest of the room. Thomas touched the backs of his fingers to the
boy's forehead, as if checking for fever. Then he did the oddest thing: he
sniffed the air. At last, he turned his gaze to Emily, still distracted but a
bit more focused.

"Do you smell anything odd?" he asked.

"Only your behavior," she said firmly. "What's
got you spooked, Tommy?"

He wrinkled his nose at the nickname, but didn't correct
her, which was how Emily's suspicion that something was very wrong became an
absolute certainty.

"Really," he said, and gazed at her sincerely.

With a tiny shrug, Emily sighed, and sniffed the air in the
room. There was an odd smell, sweet and familiar. At first she couldn't quite
put a name to it, and then it hit her: peanut butter. Without flinching, her
voice steady, she looked at Thomas and lied to him.

"I don't smell anything," she said.

Whatever was bothering him, it was obviously something
bizarre. No matter what was going on in his head, she wasn't about to go along
with it. This way, she hoped that he would at least tell her what was haunting
him.

Instead, he muttered a curse under his breath, looked her
straight in the eye, and said, "I think maybe I need to see someone."

Emily wasn't the type of person who played the fool, not
even for the sake of a loved one. She knew precisely what Thomas meant and
wasn't about to dissemble.

"Maybe we all do, sometimes," she said. "We're
dealing with a lot, here, Thomas. It couldn't hurt to talk to someone."

"This isn't about Nathan," he said, but his words
sounded hollow, unsure. "This is just . . . I think I saw a flying manta
today. In the Hudson."

She stared at him, frowning.

"There's no . . ."

". . . such thing, I know," he agreed, and that
was all.

It was obvious to Emily that Thomas was holding something
back. There was more to all of this. But the key issue was out in the open. He'd
started to hallucinate.

"It's probably all stress related, Thomas," she
assured him. "Everybody freaks out. Creative people are likely to freak
out in creative ways. Or in ways related to their work or art, or
whatever."

She stood up and went to him, reached out for his hands, and
held them in hers. Emily gazed into her ex-husband's brown eyes with sincerity,
but nothing more. There was a line drawn between them, and she didn't want him
to misinterpret the gesture as crossing that line.

"See someone, Thomas, and right away," she said. "Nathan
needs you in one piece. He needs your strength. And so do I."

Briefly, they embraced. Then Emily reached for her purse.

"Give me a couple of hours," she said. "I'll
go as fast as I can. Do you need anything?"

"Only my head examined," Thomas said, a
self-deprecating smile on his face. "And our son back."

On the drive back to her house in Tarrytown, Emily received
a ticket for driving forty-seven miles per hour in a thirty zone. The cop
didn't care that her son was in the hospital. The law was the law, according to
him.

As much as she had resolved to remain a part of the world,
to keep pace with her work and the people in her life, Emily felt horribly
detached from it all. The speeding ticket was merely one in a long stream of
occurrences that proved to her the world didn't care. The world sped on and on,
with little or no interest in what had happened to Nathan, nor any interest in
how it had affected Emily. The world didn't need her.

But Emily needed the world, very badly, to keep her
grounded. Already, the surreal quality of it all, the terrible mystery of
Nathan's illness — if it could even be labeled an illness — had
managed to sweep her away into some kind of strange twilight borderland, a
limbo from which she could watch the lives of other people continue on without
interruption.

As she drove south on Broadway, Emily felt as though her
Honda Accord were a bubble carrying her along through the real world. It was a
horrible feeling, and she felt bile rise in her throat. She passed through
Philipse Manor and the turnoff that would take her to the park that Thomas
loved so much. In Sleepy Hollow, she passed several churches, the high school,
and the little restaurant, Horsefeathers, where she had met Joe for the first
time.

That was real life. A memory that didn't have anything to do
with Nathan or Thomas. Emily latched onto it with a desperation she had never
felt before. Somehow, it began to settle her down. She slowed the Honda to a
stop at a traffic signal, where she blinked several times, took a deep breath,
and let it out. Emily tested her grip on the wheel, felt the solidity of it
beneath her palms and fingers, and nodded to herself.

I'm freaking out,
she thought, and immediately, her
mind flashed to one of the cartoons Nathan enjoyed so much.
Freakazoid
,
she thought it was called. An image formed in her mind of her son's face, the
sandy blond hair a tussle and the cheeks dimpled with a wide grin.

Emily took another breath, sat up straight, and set her jaw
defiantly. She paid little attention to the tears that began to stream down her
cheeks. The tears were real. She had every reason in the world to cry. Weeping,
she drove several blocks to the center of Tarrytown, where Main Street led
west, down to the train station and the Hudson beyond. There, she took a left,
going east, up the hill toward Marymount College and home.

A few minutes later, Emily turned into the driveway of the
home she shared with Nathan. For several moments after she turned off the
ignition, listening to the engine tick and cool, she couldn't even look up. The
house would be dead to her now, empty as a ghost town. She dreaded going inside
and promised herself that she wouldn't go into Nathan's room.

Then she looked up and saw the bicycle propped on its
kickstand near the garage. A twelve speed lightweight racing bike the color of
grape soda. It was Joe's.

They had been dating little more than a month. Measured in
weeks, even, it seemed such a brief time. Emily would never have predicted the
rush of relief and gratitude that filled her at the sight of that bicycle. She
knew that her emotions were running wild. No doubt. But as much as she needed
Thomas to be in her life right now, particularly at the hospital, with Nathan,
Emily realized in that moment that Joe was what she needed to anchor her to the
rest of the world.