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.
The MacPhersons had come all the way from Boston. They were an elderly couple, white haired, tanned, trim, dressed in expensive, ruggedly casual clothes, radiating the robust serenity of the very wealthy enjoying shopping for the appropriate philanthropy. They arrived at eleven in a tremendous Land Rover that they'd rented God knew where; Julieta and the student body president, a senior girl named Rosa Benally, met them with open arms. They went to her office for coffee, where she made them welcome and they chatted for a time. At noon, they went about the sacred fund-raising rite: They joined the students for lunch. They filed through the cafeteria line with the kids, sat at one of the tables with three students and a couple of faculty members. Bright and clean and new, the big room echoed with conversation, the clatter of dishes, the scooting of chairs. The kids were great about the strangers in their midst: curious but too courteous to stare, generally well behaved but as noisy and energetic as ever. Julieta spent the meal introducing students and staff members who passed with their trays and adding occasional comments as Rosa talked about the mural that took up one wall of the long room.
'Way over on the left,' Rosa told them, 'those are the early Athabaskan-speaking emigrants, ancestors of today's Navajo and Apache tribes, exploring this region for the first time.'
The MacPhersons beamed as Rosa took them through the other panels: the Spanish period, the American colonial period, the Long Walk, the treaty signing, and the handsome Tribal Council chambers in Window Rock, signifying the tribe's growing self-reliance. Sketched but not painted yet, the last panel featured Navajo youths looking toward high-tech professional futures represented by Navajo men and women in lab coats working with microscopes and computers; traditional symbols suggested continuing awareness of cultural heritage.
Julieta explained, 'We began it during our second year. The content was chosen by the whole student body, and the drawing was done by our art majors. The painting is being done for art credits by any students who volunteer.'
'Very impressive,' Mr. MacPherson exclaimed.
'Wait till you see the classrooms!' Rosa told him enthusiastically.
One sharp kid, Julieta thought. With Rosa in charge, the MacPhersons were toast. She smiled at the thought, but abruptly she recalled how much Tommy had been looking forward to working on the mural. And that he'd never gotten the chance.
With that, all the worries swarmed over her. She excused herself and went to the hallway outside the girls' bathroom, where she tried Joseph's numbers one more time. Answering machines and forwarding services again.
Joseph, where are you? What's going on? Maybe he was up at the Keedays' with Tommy? But he hadn't said he planned to go today. And why wouldn't he answer his cell phone? Maybe the place was out of service range. She didn't know.
She wanted to run out, dash to her truck, leave the school, go find him. But she didn't know where to look! At home? The hospital? The Keedays'?
