The way he said it was so… sorrowful, somehow, and with the glow of firelight on his face he looked so resigned and handsome that Lynn almost reached out a hand to console him.
"Joseph is the rummy king," Julieta told Cree. "He murders us every time." She threw back her shoulders, stretching her elbows wide and arching her perfect breasts forward as she pulled her hair away from her face with both hands.
Lynn noticed the way Joseph's eyes lingered briefly on her body, a steady soft heat like coals. The sight made her stomach hurt.
— And too self preoccupied to show him the respect he deserves, to honor their past together by reciprocating his feelings, Lynn finished, hating her. The way any woman with anything like a human heart in her body would.
She begged off the next hand, claiming she had work to do. The others played another round in the dayroom while she went back to the office and began filling out a pharmaceutical requisition form. She heard their voices faintly through the half-closed door. Were they more talkative now that she was gone, more cheerful? The nicotine craving had intensified and was screaming in her veins now. Outside, the wind had picked up a little, whispering around the building.
Her face seemed to burn, scalded by her own acid thoughts and searing feelings. After a while she realized she couldn't concentrate on her paperwork. She fled to the bathroom, where the ventilator fan made a welcome white noise, a camouflage as well as a safe haven from the faint sounds from the dayroom. She locked the door and stood facing the brightly lit, merciless mirror above the sink.
Envious, she said to the face in the mirror. Jealous. All sick inside. Nasty. Hateful, spiteful creature. You're full of everything little and nasty. You're ugly and you have a crazy speck in your eye. You're festering with jealousy and resentment and you're all twisted up and repressed. Hateful, hateful, bad, bad.
She wanted to smack the cheeks of the awful, fleck-eyed face, slap at all the nasties there, so obvious.
At the same time, she felt like going out to the dayroom and telling the psychologist, Don't let her fool you! She claims to work so damn hard for the kids and for the school, and yet every other time you look for her she's out riding her horse at the foot of the mesa, ever so gay and devil-may-care, big hair blowing free on the wind. You'll fall for it just as I did when I first met her, but soon you'll come to look back on that feeling with disgust. She pretends she loves Navajos all to pieces, yet she won't acknowledge Joseph's love and give hers in return, even with everything that happened all those years ago. Because at bottom she's a spoiled rich white princess who thinks she's too good even for such a fine man. She treats him like he's a servant, has him come here for pro bono care with her students after his long workdays, even has him help shovel the horse manure like some stable hand! She acts so upright and forthcoming, and everyone believes her, but trust me, she's got dirty secrets in her past and it makesfor very strange relationships with some of the kids. Especially Tommy. And that's not right.
That thought brought her back a little. She looked at the blotched, scalded-looking face in the mirror and recoiled. She turned on the tap and began to splash cold water against her burning cheeks. She loosened the elastic at the back of her head, straightened her braid, tucked in loose strands of hair. She fumbled in her pockets for her cigarettes, lit up, and stood gratefully taking the fix and blowing smoke up into the exhaust fan. When she was done, she flushed the butt down the toilet.
The face in the mirror looked much better. This wasn't a personal issue, it was an issue of professional responsibility. That was the only way to see it. The well-being of the children was her only real concern, and if she observed misbehavior on the school administration's part, she had a duty to respond. This thing with Tommy was only one example.
The problem was that so far there was nothing overt, nothing provable that she could put before someone with the authority to do anything. And Julieta was so good at charming people into seeing things her way, it probably wouldn't matter anyway.
But. Fortunately, there were a few people who saw Julieta for what she was. There were others who would be very glad to know about the situation with Tommy, who would probably know what to make of it, what to do about it, even if there was nothing that could be done through formal channels.
She waited another couple of minutes to make sure the smoke was fully exhausted, checked the mirror one last time, then turned toward the door.
That's what it's about, she told herself. The children. Professional responsibility.
10
Cree burst gasping out of a chaotic dream into the darkness of the ward room. Something was screaming in her mind.
It took her a moment to remember where she was. She had chosen a bed against the wall farthest from the inner door, near the window that looked out toward the mesa. A pair of night-lights plugged into wall sockets shed enough light to see the other five beds, green-white rectangles in the gloom. The windows were black, the silence so absolute it hissed in her ears.
In the dream, the night-dark rocks of Lost Goats Mesa had twisted and swarmed and metamorphosed into faces, grotesque brows and cheeks and gaping mouths of beings crying from the depths of the earth. There were crowds of them pushing at the cliffs, and there were air creatures, too, sharp electric things in the sky, flying with cruel stabbing motions. The landscape was alive: things pressing against its inner surfaces, straining against each other, contending with each other.
Dream, she told herself. Just a dream. Get a grip. She sat up and took deep, steady breaths to dispel the feeling.
But it didn't go away. Abruptly, she knew with certainty there was something happening nearby, telegraphing itself directly to her central nervous system.
The part of her mind that didn't recoil in fear registered that the night-lights were throbbing gently, erratically. The flicker phenomenon, she and Edgar called it: the tendency for light sources to become unsteady when paranormal phenomena manifested.
A noise came from the window. A muffled stamp or thump, then a.. what? A breath, a deep exhalation. The horses? She listened and heard nothing.
She got quietly out of bed. In her stockinged feet, wearing the sweat pants and T-shirt she'd used as pajamas, she crept to the door of the room. She looked into the hallway and entry area and listened. The dim corridor, lit by several softly pulsing night-lights, stretched away to the bend that led to the dayroom, the nurse's bedroom, and the ward room where Tommy slept.
Ringing silence, charged with a sense of invisible motion.
She walked stealthily down the hall, through the entry, and into the hall on the other side, thinking to check on Lynn Pierce. The silver-haired nurse with the astonishing fleck in her eye had played hostess to the four of them after they'd come in from the horses, starting a fire in the dayroom hearth, making hot chocolate in the kitchen. They had played cards until Tommy's bedtime. It was like no other card game Cree had ever played: five people trying to chat and act relaxed when all felt a rising dread of anticipation. With the night pressed around the building, she had been acutely aware of how isolated they were, not just physically but socially. For the five of them there was no other recourse, no aid or comfort from the larger world of humankind. They were on an island.
She had pushed Tommy pretty hard, confronting him as candidly as she dared, and by and large was not unhappy with his response. He'd been defiant, embarrassed, shy, reluctant. But every patient of every age resisted probing, quite justifiably. She got a sense of an intelligent, complex person, decent and very much wanting to please, but confused by typical adolescent identity issues and troubled by ambivalent feelings toward his dead parents.