And of course Tommy was double most of all. When he'd first been introduced to her, he'd shaken her hand, said a quiet hello, asked if she were another doctor, and gone with Julieta to tend the animals. Quite reasonably, he was a little dubious about meeting yet another stranger wanting to probe and scrutinize him. A pretty regular kid. But there was a parallel Tommy, a hidden unease and pressure below the surface. There was the Tommy you could see, the one who stuck his head above the waves, and there was the rest of him moving in a different and darker medium.
Julieta went back to the barn and returned with another handful of grain. She put it into one of the pans and held it out to the horses, rattling it temptingly. "Come on, kids," she called. "Let's take our evening constitutional. C'mon, Breeze. Spence! Shake a leg!"
The horses sashayed toward her. As Julieta coaxed them into a walk around the fence line, the sun drifted below the shoulder of a rise to the west. Only a dwindling strip of orange lingered at the top of the mesa, and a mercury vapor light came on at the corner of the house, gilding the near wall of the barn with a silver tinge. Julieta strode in front of the ambling horses, Tommy among them with an arm thrown over one or another. As they headed along the far fence, he slipped onto the back of one of the mares and lay comfortably along her spine. The horse ignored him. After a few paces, he slid off the mare and up onto the gelding, where he sat with one leg down the horse's belly and the other crossed over its shoulder, hands relaxed on his thighs.
Cree was struck by the pleasure on Julieta's face, how lovely and rare. Despite his tension, Dr. Tsosie made a soft noise of satisfaction as he watched them.
And Tommy: Tommy looked almost happy. Maybe Mason Ambrose was wrong about this whole thing, Cree thought. Maybe the hospital doctors were right and the nagging buzz she felt was just Tommy Keeday, a relatively typical teenager with some normal-world issues that made him act out in an unusual way.
As if he'd read Cree's thoughts, Dr. Tsosie turned to her. The sunlight was almost gone now, and his face was lit with silver from the searing light on the house as he regarded her thoughtfully.
"Just wait," he told her.
9
You'd never know there was anything wrong with him, Lynn Pierce thought, watching Tommy. Good luck, Dr. Lucretia Black.
The boy was playing with the little marshmallows that floated on the top of his cup. He dipped his teaspoon and boated the white clots back and forth across the surface of steaming chocolate, then selected one and ate it. Some of it was an act; with the new psychologist there, he was working hard to play normal. Julieta sat at one end of the table, positively dripping martyred noblesse oblige, making quick insincere smiles whenever Tommy or Joseph looked her way and losing them just as fast when either male focused on anything else. The psychologist, who introduced herself as Cree, had alert hazel eyes and a neutral expression as she watched Tommy. Lynn wondered if she was perceptive enough to see just how bogus Queen Julieta was, how many secrets lurked below the surface here.
The five of them had settled in the infirmary's dayroom to drink hot chocolate and play cards, an exercise transparently thought up by Julieta to allow the psychologist to observe Tommy at close range. The wide, beam-ceilinged chamber was furnished with more institutional furniture than it no doubt had been when the queen was in her heyday here, but more than any other room in the building it retained reminders that this had once been a rich person's home: creamy stucco walls, huge fireplace with a step-shouldered mantel, brilliantly varnished old-board floors, built-in bookshelves, fancy light switches-something of a Santa Fe ambience. Right now the windows were hard black rectangles of night, and outside the temperature had dropped, but Lynn had lit a fire in the grate. It crackled behind its screen and made the place feel snug and pleasant despite Julieta's preening and that god-awful sense of latent menace in Tommy.
Joseph was shuffling the cards, not saying anything. He looked tired.
"So," Cree Black said, "your grandparents must be very proud of you. I haven't seen your work, but everyone tells me you're a talented artist."
Tommy looked embarrassed by the prompt and busied himself with stirring his chocolate. "I guess."
"Very talented," Julieta affirmed proudly, as if she were personally responsible for his abilities. "So much so that he won a complete private scholarship, just for visual artists, to come here. Tomorrow, you'll have to show Cree your work, Tommy."
Tommy looked into his cup and blew across the top.
"How did you start?" Cree asked. "Are there artists in your family?"
"Yeah. My dad was a potter and sculptor. In summer, he'd sell stuff to the tourists in Window Rock. He kind of got me going." Tommy didn't look up as he answered. Under the edge of the table, his right knee started to bob, and the taut, unconscious motion, so at odds with the false calm of his face and the controlled movements of his hands, frightened Lynn. Was that a sign of it? Kids bobbed their knees, but with Tommy you couldn't be sure. Was it an ordinary nervous knee, or the… the seizure, starting to kindle again?
"Okay," Joseph said at last. "Julieta, your turn to start."
They were playing rummy. Everyone took up the cards Joseph had dealt and looked them over. Cree's eyes moved to Tommy, who was scrupulously intent on his fan of cards, to Julieta to Joseph.
Julieta drew a card, slipped it into her hand, discarded.
"I was watching you with the horses," Cree went on. "Another talent, looks like. You must have spent a lot of time with them when you were growing up."
"Yeah. My dad liked them. He taught me to ride when I was a baby." The subject seemed to embarrass Tommy, and silence followed hard on his words.
"Well, my dad was no artist. He was a plumber," Cree said, as if she hadn't noticed the conversational stall. She took her card and considered it.
"He was from Brooklyn. I loved him to pieces, but I sure wasn't going to follow in his footsteps and set toilet bowls for a living. You're lucky you got the artistic influence. But Pop did have one thing in common with your father-he liked horses, too." She chuckled as if at some fond memory, discarded, and went on, "Probably in a different way, though. He liked to bet on the races. You have to understand, my father was the kind of Brooklyn guy you see in the movies who talks like this: 'So dis guy sez to me, he sez, "I got a sure t'ing for ya, put yaself a sawbuck on a win for Sugar Baby inna eight'."' Even I could hardly understand him half the time!"
Tommy flicked his gaze at her, a glimmer of appreciation there.
"You're up, Lynn," Joseph said, startling her.
She had a bad hand, of course, all low numbers and nothing to match. Like life, she thought savagely. She picked up and discarded.
"He died," Tommy said. "Killed himself." This time he raised his eyes to look challengingly at Cree. The words froze Julieta and Joseph.
"Who did?" the psychologist asked blandly.
"He drunk himself and my mother to death. Got into a car crash because he was so loaded he couldn't see cows on the road."
The psychologist didn't blink. "I'm sorry, Tommy," she said, with sincere but not excessive sympathy. "You must miss him terribly. I know I miss my pop every day."
Tommy looked to his cards again and shrugged his shoulders, doesn't matter or not really. He seemed puzzled and maybe put out by her response-clearly he'd been fishing for something more dramatic. He picked up a card, laid out three twos, discarded a six of spades. Meanwhile, Julieta was making heartbroken moon eyes and trying to hide the expression from Tommy. Joseph gave her a supportive, steadying gaze. It made Lynn sick. The craving for nicotine was beginning to gnaw at her in a way that couldn't be ignored, and she tried to remember which one she was on-number four? Or five? Whichever, she needed a cigarette.