"Do you know who the chindi is?" Ellen whispered. "What it wants?"
"No."
Ellen looked at her curiously. "Do you know how to heal him?"
"Not exactly, no."
The look of puzzlement increased. "Do you know why he asks for you?"
More noises came from inside the hogan: sounds of exertion, a clatter. Cree felt the prickle come up her throat again. "I'm not sure. Sorry."
Ellen's eyes searched Cree's face as if she might be missing some hidden message, or looking for clues Cree was joking. Cree could imagine what she saw: some bilagaana from the big city, way off her familiar turf, frowsy from lack of sleep, with a scabbed, bruised forehead and scraped-up hands. Not much to inspire confidence.
But a surprising thing happened. Ellen's searching expression gave way to one her face wore much more naturally: a grin, fleeting but radiant.
"Well, you sure tell it like it is, idn't it? Something to be said for that, I guess." Ellen chuckled, sobered quickly, and turned back toward the hogan door.
Cree followed her, marveling at the incredible resilience of this woman's good nature. After what she must have been through in the last thirty-six hours! In the shadow of psychic siege that surrounded this place, it was a bright spark of hopefulness.
It took a moment for Cree's eyes to adapt to the relative darkness inside. The first thing she saw was the single window, a dust-hazed rectangle that cast a Vermeer light on the interior of the eight-sided room. Then she saw Tommy, on hands and knees on the dirt floor. He was struggling through an obstacle course of an overturned table and chairs and a scattering of tin cups and plastic plates.
A middle-aged Navajo man stood motionless on one side of the room, wearing the look of befuddled alertness of someone trying to cross a highway in heavy traffic. It was Ellen's brother, Raymond, a big man dressed in combat pants and a T-shirt that revealed banded workingman's muscles in his arms. His black hair was coiled in a simple bun that lay at the base of his neck.
Tommy's skin was pale and waxy. The face that twisted to look up at Cree was emaciated yet puffy, a sick look exacerbated by the dirt smeared across it. His shirt hung in rags from his shoulders. Scratches bled on his arms. When Cree came in, he looked up with uneven eyes and she saw it react to her presence. A hump writhed through his torso, torquing him, and abruptly he heaved himself up onto two legs like a wounded bear.
For an instant as he rose, Cree had a visual impression of a shape that trailed behind, a phantom being that overlapped Tommy's physical body only incompletely. One whole, vague arm sprang from near the center of his back, the lower part of a leg from his inner thigh. She understood it instantly: It isn't oriented right in him.
Tommy swayed on his feet and she lost the image. She stood ten feet away, watching him, not sure how to greet him, trying to find the starting place.
Distantly, she heard Ellen call out, "Ray! Raymond!"
The big man stirred and after a pause glanced over as if startled to see her. "Yeah."
Their voices surprised Cree, too. She realized that she'd been standing there for a time, just inside the half-open door. Hanging in mesmerized indecision as time stretched. And yet now everything was happening too fast. Tommy was walking toward the door. Before he got as far as Cree, Ray had moved in from the side of the room and half blocked him. Tommy twitched violently in alarm but not at Ray. He was looking at Cree as he asked, "What are you doing here?" Ellen answered quickly, "It's Dr. Black!" but Cree wasn't sure it was Tommy who had spoken. His brows had dropped and he gazed from beneath them with that baleful, predatory look. This close, she felt the particular lights of the intertwined beings in him. Narrative, she reminded herself vaguely, find its narrative. Within the confusion she sensed a strong spark of impulsiveness and behind it a relentless confidence and bottomless determination. Driven. Yet there was fear and remorse and anger and impatience, too. She wanted to surprise the entity but now she couldn't remember the word the girl had used for brother, and without thinking she called out "Garrett?" Everything was a maelstrom of confusing impressions, and it took her a little while to figure out why: She was down on the dirt floor with Tommy on top of her, pounding at her. His waxy face tossed from side to side above her, screaming. Ellen and Ray seemed to move with lazy, floating motions as they bent to reach for him. Cree fought off his hands. It lasted only a moment and then his efforts became random and he rolled off her and began convulsing on the floor. She twisted away from his humping body and got to her hands and knees, feeling a huge pain throughout her, as if her bones had all exploded and her organs ruptured and her heart split. But that was his pain. And still that sense of powerful determination burned, the force of will, the imperious and resistless will, backed by a tangle of feelings from sorrow to tenderness to self-hatred to yearning. As it went on, it veered into a nightmare place of hatred and killing urge. It engulfed her. She vaguely remembered her decision to surrender, but now every instinct of self-preservation screamed in protest against the invasion. Reflexively, she pushed away the foreign being and groped for a life rope, a single certainty, that would pull her free. She found it in the image of Hy and Zoe, wrapping her thoughts around them and clinging to the love between them.
It gave her the strength to get up and lurch a few steps away. Tommy was lying on his back now, Ellen and Ray holding his shoulders with all their weight but unable to restrain his arm from pushing up and snapping back. Slow push, snap! back. The chest rolled with its uneven sideways panting and from a long distance Cree heard herself saying, "Watch his breathing! We have to watch his breathing!" Ellen's lip was split again and a line of fresh blood divided her square chin.
Something moved in Cree's peripheral vision and for an instant she didn't recognize it as it hurtled toward her face. Reflexively she shied from it before she saw it was her own hand and arm. It came up and joined her left hand to sweep the hair out of her face and tuck it back behind her ears.
Afterward she held the hand in front of her and wriggled its fingers. They did as they were told. She made a peace sign and a thumbs-up and a fist. It really was her hand and arm, she was in charge. But that half second of unfamiliarity terrified her more than anything she had ever seen or imagined.
43
Julieta was at her wit's end. Joseph wasn't answering his phone. She had called twice and listened to his usual answering machine message that said that if he didn't pick up he was probably at the hospital and that if this was a patient emergency, please call Dr. Irving's office. When she called the hospital, they told her he wasn't on the schedule for today, Dr. Bannock was filling in for him, would she like to have Dr. Bannock paged? She dialed Joseph's cell number only to be forwarded to its answering service, where she got the same message recited by the robotic voice of a stranger.
She had to give up on Joseph for now. She took a last tour of the school to make sure the facility was in order, talked to several key faculty and students, and by the time she was done it was almost eleven, time for the MacPhersons to arrive. Her secretary had taken several calls and left message slips that demanded attention: Donny McCarty, Dr. Corcoran at Ketteridge Hospital, the New Mexico Child Protective Services. But Julieta put them aside. She couldn't do anything about any of it. She had no idea how to respond, and in any case for the next five hours she couldn't let any of it affect her. The major donor ritual had to be done.