the wing. But that was the extent of the relationship. We were hospital friends.
I opened the cabinet door under the sink and took a large, fluffy towel from the stack of large, fluffy towels, none of them older than a year. Mom had joined a towel club—a bunch of ladies who agreed to buy each other towels on their birthdays. For some reason Mom found this easier than just going out and buying herself ten new ones. I dried off and started opening drawers, looking for a comb.
“Del, it’s Dr. Aaron.”
“Really?” I unlocked the door, opened it a crack. A lick of cool air
against my shoulder. My mother stood there, covering the receiver with a hand. I shrugged and took it from her.
“Dr. Aaron?” My voice echoed in the small space. I leaned back, closed the door.
“Del, I’m sorry to bother you. But I’ve been looking at some of my old notes, and something occurred to me. Do you have time to talk today?”
I looked at my wrist, but I’d taken off my watch. It must have been about 9:30, though. “I don’t know. My brother’s coming by in a little bit, and I’m going into the city for a couple days.” I’d already told Dr. Aaron about ICOP, but I didn’t want to say it aloud. It seemed impossible to talk quietly in this echoing room. I picked up my watch from the sink top. It was 9:40.
“I think we need to talk before you go,” she said. There was an edge to her voice. “It should take only a few minutes.”
Was this about the sleeping pills? Maybe she’d reconsidered. Or maybe she’d decided what I really needed was to check into rehab. No, it sounded like something else.
“Okay, listen, let me get dressed and . . .” In the drawer was a gray earring box. I picked it up, ran my thumb over the velvet top. “How about the Borders by Randhurst Mall? They have a cafe. You live in town, right?” It was only two minutes’ drive for me. We agreed to meet at the bookstore in twenty minutes. Lew would probably be late anyway.
I put down the phone and looked at the little box. I used to sneak in here to show it to my friends. With great drama I’d lock the door and swear them to secrecy.
The box had a stiff spring hinge. I used both hands to open it. My mother’s spare eyeball.
I dried my fingers against the towel, then lifted the eye from its concave pad. It was lighter than I remembered. I held it up to the light, and my mother’s eye stared down at me. Maybe it didn’t fit right, or it was the wrong color, or she just wanted to have a spare around, but she got a new eye when I was in sixth grade, and kept the old one here in the bathroom. Lew and I called it the Eye of Agamoto, after Dr. Strange’s all-seeing amulet. It was my friend Jeff who said, “Is that the one she keeps in the back of her head?”
I leaned over the sink, wiped the fog from the mirror. I held the plastic up to my forehead, a big unblinking third eye, and looked at myself looking at myself. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for my mother. Even after the possession, I was no angel. Even now. But during those months when I was running wild in the house and starting fires, or those long days when I was tied to the bed and she was tied to me . . . I don’t know how she did it. The demon that had possessed me was called the Hellion. It was a Dennis the Menace, a Spanky, a Katzenjammer Kid. It possessed boys who were at least four and never older than nine—towheaded kids with impish smiles and fly-away hair—and turned them into scampering brats with Woody Woodpecker laughs. The Hellion was the eternal prankster. He booby-trapped doorways with paint buckets, threw baseballs through windows, slipped snakes into beds. Whipped out his homemade slingshot and knocked those glasses right off your head.
I grimaced. Pressed the eye back into its little bed. Closed the box with a snap.
“I want to go back to the car accident,” Dr. Aaron said. We sat at a table by the window, only a table away from the traditional yellow chair. Even Borders kept a yellow chair, as if the Fat Boy might burst in and start demanding lattes. There were maybe twenty people in the cafe, and at least half of them seemed to be seventy or older. We’d both ordered bottled water. Not usually my thing, but I’d had enough coffee this morning and I was feeling jittery.
“At any time during the crash,” she said, “did you go unconscious?
Maybe you struck your head?”
“Are we back to that theory?” I said. “I bonk my head, start hearing voices, wackiness ensues.”
“Please, bear with me for a minute.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I didn’t hit my head—nothing like
what happened in the pool. I mean, when I first hit the rail everything went black for a second—but just a second. I remember right after the air bag hit me, the car filled with this stuff like gray smoke. I found out later that it was the cornstarch they packed the air bag in to keep it from molding or something. Then I went through the rail and bounced against the air bag a few times, but afterward my forehead wasn’t bleeding or anything. I didn’t even get a black eye.”
“When you say everything went black, you mean you blacked out?”
“No, I didn’t go unconscious—I just couldn’t see anything. I don’t think I was knocked all the way under—it happened too fast. I just . . . saw black.”
“Like ‘a black well’ opening up?”
Heat rolled up my chest, made my ears roar.
“Del, after we talked yesterday, I looked up my old notes from our sessions. When you first visited me, we spent a lot of time talking about your near drowning. You talked about a ‘black well,’ a deep hole that you saw at the bottom of the pool. You could feel it sucking you in.”
“I did?”
“Do you remember that?”
“Not really.” The shiver had passed. I pressed my palms into my knees. “Some.”
“And this time?”
“Some.” I looked up, smiled, but couldn’t hold it. “There was something like that. Like a well. When I hit the guardrail I kind of lurched forward, and for a second there I saw it, this blackness, and I felt like I could . . . like it was sucking me in. But I held on. I stayed awake, and then I was getting whipped around inside the car. A second later I was at the bottom of the ravine.” I shook my head. “You think that means something?”
“Del, both times after you saw this well, the noises came back. Some people when they have near-death experiences, they see a tunnel, and perhaps—”
“The tunnel, the light, and Grandma and Jesus at the end of it with their arms open to greet me. I’ve read about this. That’s just oxygen starvation.”
“That’s one theory—oxygen starvation and endorphin release. But say that the Jungians are right, and there are outside archetypes or memes that the brain is receptive to. One way to think of this black well is that it’s a gateway—a gateway that opens when you’re most vulnerable.”
“So I’m near death, and the demon jumps back in.”
“Maybe.” She pursed her lips; it was killing her to agree with demon. Dr. Aaron liked things agnostic. But she nodded. “Maybe. It explains a lot. Each time the well opened, it came after you. It’s like an opportunistic infection. But the good news is that you’ve fought it off before. And if the current exercises aren’t working, that just means we’ve got to try new ones.”
“It’s a really good theory,” I said flatly.
She blinked. “But you don’t think so.”
“I wish you were right, Doc. A couple of months ago I would have bought it.”
“A couple of months ago—when you were hospitalized?”
