Vampires in the Lemon Grove (27 page)

Beverly learns that one prejudice that has been ordering her existence is that there
is
an order: that time exists, and that its movements are regular and ineluctable, migrating like any animal from sunup to sunset—red dawns molting their way into violet dusks, days flocking into weeks and months. Not:
April 14. April 14. April 14
, like raindrops plunking onto her head from a ceiling she can’t see. Her “flashbacks,” such as they are, do not conform to the timeline of Derek’s first story anymore. They feel closer to dreams—in one of them, the red wire rises out of his back like a viper to strike at her hands. Sometimes Zeiger stops the truck and kneels in dirt, digging with his fingers, and Mackey survives, and sometimes Zeiger fails to see the wire and the bomb explodes. Sometimes every character in the story has been dead for half a century, and a gleaming herd of water buffalo is grazing on the empty land, which looks like a science-fiction moonscape in this epoch, and a team of archaeologists finds the bomb, spading into the dust of the old New Baghdad.

The wire is always present, though—that’s the one constant. Curled loosely on top of the dirt, or almost completely buried. It’s a surprise that keeps giving itself away, exposed in the ruby light of her jarred skull.

Sometimes her worries worm southward, and she finds herself thinking about Jilly Mackey. This tenth-grader with her brother’s death day pinioned to her back like some large and trembling butterfly. She pictures the kid leaning over her homework in Lifa, Texas, pulling the red star taut under her shirt. What exactly were these “troubles” that Derek mentioned? Is the tattoo changing on her, too? What if something worse than a wire is lunging out of her canvas? Beverly has to fight down a crazy desire to telephone the Mackey women, offer her services. In another mood this would have struck Beverly as hilarious, the vision of herself boarding a plane to Texas with a duffel of massage oils.
My thumbs
to the rescue!
How would she conduct that conversation with Mrs. Mackey? “Hello, I’m a massage therapist in Wisconsin, you don’t know me from Adam but I’ve been mourning the death of your son? I’d like to help your daughter, Jilly, with her back pain?”

But that’s a lunatic wish, of course; Beverly’s concern for the Mackeys would fly through the telephone wires and mutate into something that stabbed at their ears. There’s no etiquette for a call like that. No set of techniques or magical oils.

“You know, I wanted to save him,” Ed confides to her. And Beverly thinks that she would have liked to save all of them—Arlo Mackey and Oscar Ilana and Derek Zeiger, Jilly Mackey and her mother, the Iraqi children of the
jammous
farmers getting poisoned by their swims in the polluted Diyala, her own mother and father.

“Me, too, Ed.”

“But a man like that is beyond help,” says Ed, patting Beverly’s shoulders as he has never done before in their decades together, and it’s a construction of such grammatical perfection that she knows he must have memorized it from the TV anchors.

Early Sunday morning, the phone startles Beverly awake.

This time, thank God, it’s not Ed Morales. It’s not Janet calling with the weather report from Sulko, Nevada, or the joyful percolations of her twin nieces, wearing their matching jammies under Gemini stars in the American desert. Nobody else calls her at home. No stranger has ever rung her at this hour.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Bev. Sorry to call so early.”

“Derek.”

Beverly sinks under her coverlet. The relief she feels is indescribable.

“Were you up? You sound wide-awake.”

“You scared me. The last time I saw you—”

“I know. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to explode on you like that. I honestly don’t know why that happened. It’s weird because I’ve been feeling so much better lately. And for that I wanted to say, you know:
thank you
. To be honest, I was never expecting much from you. My real doctor at the VA made me enroll in the program. Massage therapy, no offense, I was thinking: hookers. Happy endings, la-la beads.”

“I see.”

“But whatever you do back there
works
. I’ve been sleeping like a baby ever since. I sleep through the night.” The wall clock says 3:00 a.m.

“I sleep good,” he maintains, as if wanting to forestall an argument. “Tonight is an exception to the rule, I guess.” He laughs quietly, and Beverly feels like a spider clinging to one bouncing line—their connection seems that frail.

“Well, we’re both awake now.” She swallows. “Why are you calling me here, Derek?”

“I’m not cured, though.”

“Well, Derek, of course you’re not,” she says, fighting to get control of a lunging pressure in her chest. “Massage doesn’t ‘cure’ people, it’s a process …”

“Beverly …” His voice breaks into a whimper. “Something’s wrong—”

There are a few beats of silence. In the mysterious, unreal distances of her inner ear, Pfc. Arlo Mackey continues screaming and screaming inside the burning truck.

“I’m in pain, a lot of pain. I need to see you again. As soon as I can.”

“I’ll see you on Monday, Derek. Ten o’clock.”

“No, Beverly. Now.” And then there is shuffling on his end of the receiver, and an awful sound like half a laugh. “Please?”

Ed Morales has never fired anybody in his thirty-year tenure as the owner of Dedos Mágicos, and he always mentions this a little wistfully, as if it’s a macho experience he’s dreamed of having, the way some men want to summit Everest or bag a lion on safari. She doesn’t doubt that he will fire her if he finds them out.

Still, where else are they supposed to go? Beverly is a professional. She is not going to confuse everything even further at this late hour by beginning to see patients in her home.

Beverly has keys to the building. She drives beneath a full, icy moon, following the chowdery line of the Esau River. All the highways are empty. When she pulls into her staff slot, the sergeant’s blue jalopy is already there.

“Thank you,” he mumbles as they climb out of their cars. His eyes are red hollows. “Don’t be scared, promise? I don’t know what went wrong the other day.”

Beverly, who has some idea, says nothing.

“Are you afraid of me, Beverly?”

“Afraid! Why would I be? Are you angry at me?”

Kind
nos
are exchanged.

There is a fat moon behind him, one white ear eavesdropping brazenly in the midwestern sky.

Beverly fumbles with the car lock, gets them both inside the building. Something is moving under his shirt, on his back, she can see it, a dark shape. In the onlyness of moonlight, his snowy boots look almost silver. Nothing stirs in the long hallway; when they pass the crescent of the reception desk, she half expects Ed to leap up in a fountain of expletives. Their shoes mewl on the tiles, sucked along by slush. They speak at the same time—

“Lie down?”

“I’ll go lie down—”

“Thank you for meeting me, Beverly,” he says again, sounding so much like a boy about to cry. “Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s
wrong
.” He groans. “Ah, Bev! Something feels twisted around …”

He pulls off his shirt, lies down. Beverly sucks in her breath—his back is in terrible shape. The skin over his spine looks raw and abraded; deep blue and yellowish bruises darken the sky of Fedaliyah. And a long, bright welt, much thicker and nastier than the thin scar she erased, stretches diagonally from his hip bone to his shoulder.

“Jesus, Derek! Did someone do this to you? Did you do this to yourself?”

“No.”

“Did you have some kind of accident?”

“I don’t know,” he says flatly. “I don’t remember. It looked this way when I woke up two days ago. It’s gotten worse.”

Beverly touches his shoulder and they both wince. Maybe the welt did erupt from inside the tattoo. Maybe Derek vandalized the tattoo himself, and he’s too ashamed or too frightened to tell her. She’s surprised to discover how little the explanation matters to her. In the end, every possibility she can imagine arises from the same place—a spark drifting out of his past and catching, turning into this somatic conflagration. No matter how it happened, she is terrified for him.

She dips a Q-tip into a bottle of peroxide, stirs.

This time she abandons any pretension of getting the true story out of him. She doesn’t try to grab hold of April 14 and reset it like a broken bone. She doesn’t mention IEDs or Mackey. Her concerns about whether or not it would be better for the sergeant to forget the wire, wipe his slate clean, are gone; she thinks those debates must belong to a room without this boy hurting in it. All
she wants to do right now is reduce his pain. If she can help him with that, she thinks, it will be miracle enough.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’re going to fix you up. Hold still for me, Derek.”

She begins at the base of his spine, rolling up, avoiding the most irritated areas. He whimpers only once. Through his neck, she can feel the strain of his gritted teeth.

“That fucking
kills
, Beverly—what are you doing?”

“Shh—you focus on relaxing. This is helping.”

She defaults to what she knows. Eventually, as in the first sessions, she can feel something shifting under her hands. Her voice needles in and out of Zeiger’s ears as she tells him where to move and bend and breathe. It’s dark in the room, and she’s barely looking at his back, letting his fascia and muscles guide her fingers. Gradually, and then with the speed of windblown sands, the story of the tattoo begins to change.

A little after five a.m., Beverly stops the massage to button her sweater up to her neck. It’s the same baggy cerulean skin that she always puts on, her old-lady costume. Tonight her sleeves bunch at her elbows, so that she feels like a strange molting bird—eating keeps slipping her mind. The moon is out; their two cars, viewed through the clinic window, have acquired a sort of doomed mastodon glamour, shaggy with snow. A green light blinks ceaselessly above her, some after-hours alarm she’s never here to see. She checks to make sure the windows are closed—the room feels ice-cold. Beverly moves to get Zeiger’s shirt, towels. She’s washed and dressed the damaged skin; the tattoo is almost completely hidden under gauze. Now she doesn’t have to look at the red star. Beverly cotton-daubs more peroxide onto his neck, which feels wonderfully relaxed. Zeiger begins to talk. With his eyes
still shut, he tours her through the landscape on his back; it’s a version of April 14 that is completely different from any that’s come before. She listens to this and she doesn’t breathe a word. She has no desire to lift the gauze, check the tattoo against this new account.

When he’s finished, Beverly asks him in a shaky voice, “Nobody died that day, Derek?”

“Nobody.”

He sits up. Perched on the table’s edge, with the blanket floating in a loose bunting around his shoulders, the sergeant flexes and relaxes his long bare toes.

“Nobody died, Bev. That’s why I got the tattoo—it was a miracle day. Amazing fucking grace, you know? Fifty pounds of explosives detonate, and we all make it back to the FOB alive.”

Beverly smooths a wrinkle in a square of gauze, tracing the path of what was, the last time she looked, the Diyala River.