“Painkiller,” she said curtly.
“What, to make him feel better?”
“Enough for that,” she said. “Enough for that and more.”
The shooter thrashed and struggled when he heard her. But not for long.
Chapter 11
Maybe understandably—or maybe not—a couple of days passed before it occurred to me to call Rachel Ragland.
She didn’t answer her phone, and I left an apologetic message and asked her to get in touch. Another day passed. Nothing. I drove to Rachel’s building, parked, and buzzed her apartment from the lobby. Silence. So I called the local hospitals and found her at Vancouver General. She was in “for observation,” and unless I was family, visiting hours were two to six, at Rachel’s discretion.
By my watch that left a window of three hours, and the hospital was only twenty minutes away. It hadn’t rained since the weekend. The weather had slipped into an autumn lull, all soft blue skies and crisp breezes, and it was an easy drive. But I felt as if some transparent part of me had become opaque: I looked at the world through a lens of clouded glass.
It turned out that Rachel was in a ward in the hospital’s psychiatric wing. A locked ward, though that wasn’t as bad as it sounded; all it meant was that patients and visitors needed authorization to pass through the glass-and-mesh doors next to the nurses’ station. I waited twenty minutes for someone to find Rachel, give her my name, and find out if she was willing to see me. At last a nurse (a young guy in powder-blue scrubs) waved me in. I followed him to Rachel’s bed.
She was dressed in slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. There were slippers on her feet, and she was sitting up, an ancient paperback novel in her hand. She gave me a long, searching look. She was clean and reasonably alert but I could tell by a certain slackness around her eyes that she was back on her meds. Before I could speak she said, “They think I’m suicidal. That’s why I’m stuck here. But I was only cutting.” She held out her left arm to show me her bandages, a swatch of cotton and tape that ran from wrist to elbow. “You know about that? People who cut themselves sometimes?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said.
“Well, I’m one of them.”
“I’m surprised. I never saw—”
“What—scars? This was the first time I did my arm. I used to just cut my legs. Up high, so I could wear shorts and not show anything. But not a bathing suit. Which was okay because I don’t swim. And I was pretty healed up when you saw me without my clothes on. I’d been good. On the mend. But you could have found scars if you’d looked for them.” She put a bookmark in her paperback novel and set it aside. “So why are you here?”
“Suze called me,” I said. “That night.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard all about it. You told her to phone 911.”
“Yeah.”
“Even though she wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“She said so, but—”
“Because I trained her that way. You know why? Fucking social workers, that’s why! There were a couple of incidents back before I got my prescriptions and now I’m on their watch list or whatever. I’m on, like, bad mother probation.”
An orderly passing by with a box of gauze in his hand slowed and cocked his head. Rachel moderated her voice until he was out of sight. “They’re like the NSA in here, always watching. This is where they put people who can’t be trusted.”
“You were unconscious when Suze called. She couldn’t wake you up.”
“I’d been cutting, yeah, and maybe a little too deep, and I was ashamed of myself, so I took a double dose of meds and washed ’em down with orange juice and vodka. Because I really, really wanted to sleep. And hey, it worked. Out like a light, right there on the sofa. Still bleeding a little. I leaked before I clotted. So I guess Suze got scared, which I’m really really sorry about. A miscalculation on my part. But would you take away my kid for that?”
“No…”
“No, but you did. That’s exactly what you did when you told Suze to call 911. Now they’re putting her in temporary foster care. Pending an assessment. They won’t even let me talk to her. They say we can schedule a visit, but not until the doctors decide I’m up to it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears that were perhaps equal parts loss and anger. “They took away my baby!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I would absolutely fucking love it if this were totally your fault. That would make me feel a little better. But, taking Suze’s call? Being worried about me? I can’t really blame you for that.”
“Thank you, Rachel.”
“What I do blame you for is—” She hesitated and bit her lip as if debating how to proceed.
“Go ahead. Say it.”
“I don’t know exactly how to say it, but … I’m here, and Suze is in foster care, and I can’t help thinking, none of this would have happened if I was a Tau. If I was a Tau, you wouldn`t have called 911, would you? You would have called some other Tau. Or a bunch of other Taus. Some nice little Tau couple would be looking after Suze, and after I got attention from a Tau clinic, and with a whole tranche to make sure I kept on my meds, I’d have her back right away quick. What do you think, Adam? Is that about right?”
I didn’t have to answer. It was absolutely true.
I stayed a few minutes more. A nurse came by with three pills and a paper cup, and Rachel dutifully swallowed the pills and chased them with a gulp of water. She opened her mouth to show the nurse she’d swallowed the meds. I think Rachel wanted me to see this small humiliation. The fate to which I had delivered her.
As I turned to leave she said, “Are you okay? No offense, Adam, but you look like shit.”
“I haven’t slept much.”
“Yeah, well.” Her gaze went a little quavery. “Welcome to the club. Oh, I remembered something. Something I meant to tell you. About the guys who came to visit me? The ones you drew a picture of at the beach?”
It seemed like a long time ago. “What about them?”
“The guy who did most of the talking—you asked about his face, and that’s what I was trying to remember. But he had another, uh, distinguishing feature. Not his face. His hand. There was a mark on it.”
“A mark?”
“A tattoo. A little one. Actually not his hand but just above the wrist? I saw it when his shirt cuff rode up.”
“What did it look like?”
The medication was beginning to kick in. She smiled dreamily. “A window.”
“I’m sorry—a window?”
“A box. A rectangle. A tall box. With a line across it. Like an old-fashioned window, the kind where you lift the lower pane. Know what I mean? Like a letter H, but with three cross lines, top bottom and middle. Does that mean anything?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
We rolled up our Vancouver operation in November of that year. Which was good, because by then I was desperately homesick. I missed Lisa and Loretta. I missed their big, warm house in Toronto. I wanted to be there when they put up the Christmas tree—usually a huge spruce, decked out with Victorian ball ornaments and spun-glass angels and silver menorahs and any other ecumenical or secular decoration any tranche member felt like attaching to it. I wanted to be home for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Dognzhi, Pancha Ganapati, Shabe Yaldā, Saturnalia, and what-have-you. That was what I wanted.