The Crystal Child (19 page)

“Then what will you do?” Julia asked.

For a moment, Achula looked non-plussed.  Then, sadly: “Go home to my mother.”

“Good idea,” Julia told her.

“And what will you do?”

Julia smiled sadly, realizing she had even less of an idea about her future.  “I don’t have the least idea. Maybe I’ll come work in your mother’s bakery.  How about that?”

Achula returned a wide-eyed smile.  She thought that was a grand idea. Taking up her pencil, she laboriously wrote her mother’s name and address on the flap of Bullfinch.  “You would be welcome.  Our village has no doctor.”

***

The DeLeon Institute.  I had no idea what to expect.  Not that I had any choice in the matter.  Where else could I turn?  But how long can I live in this moral slum?  San Lazaro is a playground for the pampered elite.  The place reeks of snake oil, expensive cosmetics, aesthetic surgery, and wishful thinking.  On the beach, tired old men buying the favors of the party girls who pass for nurses. At the pool, women obviously well into their sixties consorting with young body-builders.  The sad fantasies these people entertain in their mind’s eye are the only therapy they’re experiencing.  They might be behaving like randy teenagers, but their age is stamped all over them.  DeLeon’s guests are hooked on delusions of lubricous longevity.  They can pay for their high without having to hold up a bank or pass a bad check, but they’re junkies nonetheless.  What happens when they return home and look in the mirror?

Youth — the hardest narcotic of all, the addiction we find it impossible to break.

The interviews began two weeks before Julia was scheduled to be released.  She spent hours each day in various drab rooms waiting to talk with social workers and probation officers, counsellors and police officials.  An hour of waiting, ten minutes of questioning, the same questions over and over, her answers entered into different files for different departments.  What were her plans?  Where would she be staying?  Would somebody be on hand to meet her?  Did she have a job lined up?  How much money did she have to start her new life?  Once, Julia would have regarded such abrupt treatment as insulting.  Now it was a cleansing bath washing away her previous identity.

She gave answers that were reassuring and often patently false, but nobody seemed to notice.  As long as they fitted into the space provided.  The administrators rattled off the questions as if every word was memorized; some of them never looked up to see whom they were talking to.  Beyond warning her that she must keep her address on the sex-offenders’ register up to date, they could not have cared less about Julia Stein’s future.  Why should they?  Julia cared less than they did.  Bad as the last year had been inside, worse lay beyond these walls.  She had no future there, no desire to resume her career, no hope of finding forgiveness from those she had hurt.  Her mind was made up.  Her future was in her pocket; she could feel it in her hand.  A small, plastic container.  Shake it, and the tablets inside sounded like a baby’s rattle.  A generous supply of Oramorph.   Julia had been using the medication for months, a tablet every night to quiet her mind and let her sleep.  Patients who came to the infirmary were never given more than one tablet, which was more than enough to lay them out for the night.  They were required to swallow the tablet there and then under Julia’s supervision and then to open wide and have their mouths checked.  No hoarding pills.  One tablet: enough to do the job. Two tablets maximum.  More than three, on the way to fatal.

But nobody supervised Dr. Stein; nobody told her to open her mouth so they could look for a tablet hidden under the tongue or in the cheek.  Working in the infirmary at Stockton for a fraudulent medical director, she never had any difficulty laying hands on any medication she needed.  After the first few months, Stockton’s underpaid, part-time pharmacist asked her no questions; he even allowed her to oversee the pharmacy when he took unauthorized days off.   Over the course of the year, he had come to regard Julia as a fellow professional, someone who could be trusted to prescribe for herself.  As a collegial courtesy, he did not even expect her to sign her own medications out.

***

The day before her release she was summoned from the infirmary by a guard.  There was a phone call.  The voice on the other end of the line was Kevin Forrester.

“May I offer you a ride tomorrow?” he asked.  A controlled, business-like tone, but there was no way to miss the anxiety behind it..

“Thanks but I have that taken care of.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“With my sister in Dallas.”

“Are you leaving soon?”

“I don’t want to meet, Kevin.”

“It’s important to me, Julia.  Very important.”

“I’ve told you, I have no idea where he is.”

“Even so, I need to talk to you.  Can’t we meet just for a few hours before you leave the area?”

“I’m not going back to medicine.”

“There are questions …”

“I’m not interested in those questions.”

His voice was growing strained.  “I can help you get started again, Julia.  I can find you a place … a research position … “

“No, you can’t.  Don’t say you can.  That’s foolish.  Nobody will ever trust me again. Can’t you understand?  I don’t want to pick up the pieces.”

“You may not realize what’s at stake here.”

Her voice rose.  “It was a freak cure, Kevin.  Inexplicable remission.  Impossible to replicate.  I couldn’t be of any help to you.”  He started to speak.  “I’m going to hang up now.  I beg you, leave me in peace.  I’m closing the door on this.”  He was starting to say something about tests as she placed the phone in its cradle.  “I don’t want to take any more calls,” she told the custodian who had been waiting for her to finish.

***

That night Julia was awakened with a start.  Somebody was clinging to her.  A dream, she thought.  She must be dreaming of Aaron.  But the dream took on solidity.  There really was someone beside her, embracing her.  She turned and reached out.  There was a body crowded on to her bunk.  Achula was trembling as she struggled to hold back her sorrow.  Julia could feel the tears that streamed down her face.  “Doctor, Doctor,” she whispered.  “What will happen to me when you are gone?”  Julia did her best to console the girl, but she had no answer for her question.

“Be brave,” Julia said, sensing how feeble her remark sounded.  “Behave yourself.  Don’t pick any fights.  You have only a few months more to serve.”

“You will come to visit me?”

“I can’t promise that.  I have to go away.”

“You will come to work in the
panadería
?”

Had she actually taken that remark seriously?  “I didn’t really mean that,” Julia told her, trying to laugh off the question.

Disappointed and embarrassed, Achula pulled away.  Julia drew her back, giving her permission to stay.  To her surprise, the girl responded with a hard kiss at the cheek, then the mouth. When the guard came by at two AM, she was still there.  The guard gave Julia a frown, gesturing her to wake Achula and send her to her own bunk.

Long after Achula had left her side, Julia lay awake, troubled by their encounter.  Eros at work again in one of his more comic modes, challenging another of her conventional values.  Sex with a beautiful boy, sex with a needy young woman … where were the boundaries?

***

The car John Briggs had ordered for Julia was late, leaving her to wait in the prison courtyard with several other women who had been released that day.  Julia kept her distance from them, but noticed how they exchanged whispered remarks as they looked in her direction.  She knew what they were saying.  She had served her sentence, but even in the eyes of those who had been prisoners with her, she was worse than a criminal.  She was a pervert.  Freedom was a vast emptiness that engulfed her; she was a speck of dust in outer space.  For the first time since her arrest she realized how alone she was.  This was the true measure of being “ruined” in the eyes of society.  To be this woman for whom nobody was waiting.  All she owned had been packed into in one small plastic suitcase: some nondescript clothes, an extra pair of shoes, an overnight kit, a few books.  Of course, she had a home with rooms full of furniture and private papers, remnants of her former and irrecoverable life.  But none of that was her property any longer.  She had no intention of claiming any of it.  She would let it drift out of her life.  That made it so much easier to inhabit the void.

A limousine pulled up at the curb.  John Briggs might have meant to boost her morale by ordering a car fit for a visiting dignitary, but the gesture made her feel all the more desolate.  Had she any choice in the matter, she would have sent it away.  Settling into the plush back seat, she felt a shabby discomfort accumulate around her.  Who was she to merit a car like this?  Did the driver, a neatly groomed Latino in a company uniform, know she was an ex-convict?  If so, he gave no indication. Turning to check politely with her about their destination, he read off her San Francisco address.  “Yes,” she answered, “that’s where I used to live.”

The car was deeply padded to keep out the sounds of the road.  There was orchestral music playing quietly through a small speaker behind her head, something by Ravel she thought.  Meant to be restful, it sounded funereal to her.  It was not until the limousine had delivered her to her front door and was pulling away that she realized she had no keys to the house.  She turned to call the driver back, but then heard a voice behind her.  A young woman she did not know was standing in the front door waving.   She was sharply dressed and well made-up, equipped with high spirits and a bright smile.  She introduced herself as one of John Briggs’ assistants.  Her first name was Martha; if she mentioned her last name, Julia failed to register it.  “I’ve been in charge of you,” she said as she ushered Julia into the house.  “I mean of your coming home.”

Martha was friendly, but all business. “I’ve had a house cleaner in,” she explained. “There was a gardener here last week, but I’m afraid the grass and shrubs have gone to ruin. The utilities have been back on for a week.  And I’ve stocked the refrigerator with basics.  I’m sorry to say there was a break-in last November.  The house was left in a terrible mess.  Your television and VCR were swiped, maybe some other things we couldn’t name for the police.  You may want to check.  We didn’t know what valuables were left in the house while you were away.  Was there a computer, or any jewelry? I did have the security system upgraded, though you may find that rather expensive.  John’s been paying that out of your house account.”

Martha was young and brisk, clearly trying to do a thorough job for her boss.  She was wearing a business-chic suit, tasteful pearl earrings, and high heels.  Overdressed for greeting an ex-con, Julia thought.  Checking off items in a notebook as she clipped along, Martha might have been a real-estate agent showing the property.  Julia was struck by the young woman’s tact. Not one false note in her performance.  She wondered what Martha knew about her case.  She must know why Julia had been sent to prison.  Weren’t there rules about being in disgrace?  Perhaps she, Julia, should try to look more beaten-down and contrite, though Martha — efficient, professionally polite Martha — did not seem to expect that.  She was acting as if Julia had returned from a long vacation. Was this a foretaste of things to come, Julia wondered.  Would she be dealing with Marthas for the rest of her life, people who knew of her shameful past but never betrayed the least awareness?  Rather like nurses who dealt with foul-smelling patients but never showed their disgust.  Maybe that was worse than outright disapproval.

The two women spent the next hour going over various details about debts and bank accounts and loose legal ends.  Martha had laid out several stacks of mail and other papers on the dining room table in order of importance.  Financial, legal, personal.  Julia tried to concentrate, but most of what Martha said flowed past her without leaving any clear recollection.  She felt like a stranger moving into somebody else’s home.  Finally, Martha asked if Julia had any plans for dinner, hinting, though not enthusiastically, that she would be willing to take Julia to a restaurant.  If she did, it would be as part of the service she was being paid for.

“I think I’d like to be on my own,” Julia answered, letting her weariness show.

“Of course.  Here’s my card if you need anything.”

It occurred to Julia as she walked Martha to the door that this young woman, a low-level para-legal, now ranked higher in the world than she did.  Martha had a job, probably a husband or boy friend.  Even if she was an absolute beginner in life, there was one thing she could claim.  She was innocent in the eyes of the law; she had no police record. Did she realize how much of an advantage that was?  Beside her, Julia felt as worthless as the clothes she wore.  At the door Martha reached out to give a firm handshake, then remembered to add, “Oh, yes. There’s a car in the garage. An old Taurus.  Yours?”

“My son’s,” Julia answered.

“It was registered in your husband’s name.”

“Was it?  Yes, I guess it was.”

“I gather it was left here for you.  Unfortunately, the thieves took it for a joy ride.  It was found in Vallejo in pretty bad shape.  The suspension is shot, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t totalled.  If it had been, we could have gotten a fast cash settlement.  I’ve renewed the registration until next July and I had the battery charged, but the interior is very grotty. You probably won’t want to drive a car like that.” She meant
she
, Martha, would not want to drive a car like that, a choice penniless Julia might not have. Martha’s car, a sporty little Lexus, was parked at the curb.

“The tape deck was stolen,” Martha went on.

“What?” Julia asked.  The words meant nothing to her.

“The tape deck in the Taurus.  It was stolen.  Do you want me to get that replaced?  The insurance will cover it.”

“Tape deck?  No.  I won’t need that.”

“Very well, then,” Martha said, wrapping up quickly now. “I think that covers everything.  So glad we had the chance to meet. Best of luck.”  She did a good job of sounding sincere; perhaps that was her specialty — greeting jail birds back from the slammer. Then she was gone.  Several minutes passed before Julia realized she had failed to thank her.

Walking back through the house, Julia felt more abandoned than ever.  The faded familiarity of all she saw around her in the home that was once hers made her painfully aware of how greatly her life had changed.  Of course she would not continue to live here.  But John Briggs had been right when he advised her to hold on to the house.  If she had not returned here, where would she have gone?  She had twenty dollars in her purse, no check book, no credit card.

Casually, she checked the refrigerator.  Yes, Martha had filled it with enough food to hold out for a few days.  There were two deluxe-brand, frozen dinners in the freezer, which otherwise looked as pathetically bare as a small Arctic waste.  She had no interest in eating.  She walked to the sink and washed her hands, then remembered she had done that before while talking to Martha.  She strolled aimlessly through one room and then another.  It was all she could think of doing, as if she were making sure everything was in order.  But how could anything ever be in order again for her?  The very fact that the house had been unlived-in for so long and had been burglarized made her feel ill at ease.  Something nagged at her as she moved past chairs, tables, pictures she had not seen for a year.  It was the quiet.  She was not used to such silence.  No clanging doors, no shouting guards.  The quiet of normal life.  Here, if she listened closely, she could pick up the drone of an airplane, the growl of a power mower down the street.  Otherwise, she stood enveloped by a privileged domestic silence she did not seem to deserve. She slumped into a chair in the living room and waited for the loneliness of the house to swallow her whole.  But the house did not know her, did not want her.  It wanted Dr. Julia Stein, not this social misfit who was disturbing its still air.  Well, she would not be living here long, not long at all.