chestnut-red highlights. A pageant coach would have appraised her as pretty, but not glamorous enough to be competitive. What made her looks compelling was the keen alertness and candor in her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth. You got the feeling she was a person who cared. She was also someone who told it like it was, had no stake in misrepresenting anything. Whatever Cree Black's personal history, she had obviously faced some tough things, maybe something like the crisis of belief Julieta felt in herself now. Somehow she'd seen it through, had come to some faith or truth despite the maelstrom of uncertainties.
Which was kind of reassuring.
And right now, Cree Black's explanations seemed as apt as anything Julieta had heard from the doctors they'd consulted.
But there were other issues to consider. The symptoms were more extreme and lasted longer every time. The breathing problem demonstrated clearly that Tommy's physical survival, not just his mental well-being, was at risk, and that the school was not well prepared to assure his safety. From the standpoint of the school, the issue was clear: If Tommy died or got badly injured at Oak Springs, especially if any education or health authority heard she'd dealt with it as a supernatural issue, she could face criminal charges. Last night, citing both Tommy's needs and the school's, Joseph had been explicit that he couldn't let this go on: One more crisis and he'd insist on Tommy's being hospitalized again.
And he was right. Clearly, the safest and easiest route would be to remand him to the care of some public authority, or to his grandparents, and wash her hands of the problem. And try to forget him and the world of fantasies she'd constructed around him.
She felt her lips curl in a hard smile. Fat fucking chance.
The scary part of Joseph's dictum was that the next hospital visit would change Tommy's life. From there, the road took a crucial fork. Certainly, in long-term care, some anonymous clinic or institution, his acute needs would be better met. But no doctor was likely to believe-or risk a career by admitting-that some unknown entity was occupying his body and mind. And therefore he wouldn't get the real help he needed. The Indian Health Services would soon find they didn't have the resources for him, and they'd send him on to the state. A bunch of well-meaning, overworked doctors would drug him and talk at him, and if it didn't go away, they'd wedge him deeper and deeper into the system, until he was warehoused in some institution and forgotten. Or they might go for more drastic treatments; she'd read recently that electroshock therapy and lobotomy were coming back into fashion.
She shuddered and shook off the thought.
The other most likely option would be to send him home. That was the choice his grandparents had endorsed-the Navajo way, removing him from whatever bad influences had triggered his problem, wrapping him close against the bosom of family, performing some archaic healing Way for him. But, again, he would probably not get cured. And even with in-home support from the state or tribe, he'd be far away from appropriate medical help, from educational resources, from-
From Julieta McCarty.
A shiver of panic rattled her. The scariest aspect of those options was that they took him away. She couldn't even tell how much that thought was biasing what should be objective analysis of Tommy's needs.
The third possibility was that she could again persuade his grandparents to keep him here. She'd met them twice, and they seemed to trust her judgment. Here at the school, he'd have decent, if not optimum, medical care; he'd have social contacts and educational options and all those lovely 'normalizing' things. Plus there was the possibility, one she found increasingly credible, that Cree Black could do something for him. The problem there would be Joseph. And the liability issues, of course.
What was the right thing? What did he really need? You couldn't decide that without deciding whether he was suffering from a neurological dysfunction, a psychological problem-or, as Dr. Ambrose and Cree Black insisted and his impossible symptoms seemed to prove, the literal invasion of his central nervous system by some foreign entity.
'It comes down to what we believe, doesn't it?' she asked Spence. Then she corrected herself: 'What I believe.' This time he whickered in agreement, and she stroked his shoulder, whispering gratefully, 'You're my man, Spence. My debonair gent.'
Sometimes you had to make decisions entirely on your own. It was hard, it was scary, it was lonely, but it was what you did if you had any guts. You did what you believed was right and necessary. No, she resolved, letting go of Tommy was out of the question. She'd fight to keep him at the school. She'd play whatever hand she had, legal or financial or personal, to retain a say in what happened to him.
'Screw safe!' she shouted. 'Huh, Spence? Screw easy!'
He picked up his trot as if he agreed. She felt a little better. An angry inner fire warmed her against the chill. When had she ever done anything easy?
The full disk of the sun had nudged above the horizon by the time she came within sight of McCarty Energy's current operations. She reined Spence to a stop and then sat there, looking north to a ruined ridge and the gigantic rearing boom of a dragline just visible a couple of miles away. Again she wondered why she'd come this way. She hated the sight of it. She'd been there often enough to fight with Garrett and Donny to visualize what lay beyond the screen of hills.
There was a wasteland of dug-up soil and rock heaped in man-made mountains, meandering dirt roads and ramps for the big machines, and gaping trenches blasted and scraped into the ground. There was the crusher and the huge mounds of coal waiting to be loaded onto trains. There were the walking draglines, whole movable buildings that supported the colossal girdered booms and buckets, one of which was the same dragline Garrett had led her through when he was in his phase of impressing her with the many large, expensive things he owned. With the boom from which sixty-six-year-old Garrett had fallen and died while showing off for his latest tramp girlfriend.
There were yellow dump trucks and front loaders the size of houses. There was the office and repair complex and a parking lot full of pickup trucks. And sometimes there was Donny's Lincoln Navigator or Porsche in the lot, and Donny, along with a gaggle of rapacious bean counters, going over the operation's records and being an officious pain in the ass and thinking up clever ways to make more money. And as a sideline, kind of a hobby, thinking up ways to make Julieta's life miserable.
Just like his father.
'One mistake,' she told Spence. 'That's all it takes. One. Then your whole life is spent living it down or trying to compensate.'
Spence swiveled one ear as if to hear her better but didn't answer. And of course it wasn't that simple. Which was the one mistake? Being suckered into that first teen modeling job? Sticking to the competitions despite growing misgivings? Going out for lunch that first time with a man old enough to be her father?
Or maybe the mistake was one of the avalanche of decisions that had come later and that had haunted her, every day, ever since.
It was hard to think of the creature inside Tommy as anything but a demon, a supernatural monster existing only to cause anguish- some horrible being from Navajo mythology, or a violent spirit of the ancient rocks, a distillation of sheer malevolence from old, angry gods. But maybe Cree Black was right about everything. Maybe she was right to look at Julieta, to put her on the couch along with Tommy. Maybe she was right in her theory that the psychological situations of people in proximity to the haunting created the conditions needed to support a ghost's manifestation. That what had invaded Tommy was a part of a once-human consciousness, taking someone else's flesh in an attempt to fulfill its deepest compulsions.
If that was true, there was only one person Julieta could imagine having the malice to do what it was doing. One person who'd have the fiendish insight and the motivation to destroy a child, this child, in an effort to strike at Julieta herself.
That's why she'd come here today, she realized. To remind herself.
She stood up on the stirrups and beamed hatred at the rearing boom where Garrett McCarty had gotten himself killed, as if she might see his vicious ghost and by sheer force of will send it screaming back to hell.
13
