False Memory

so detailed and intense that it seemed as if it were happening right here, right now. She was convinced that she was flashing forward to a terrible incident that would happen, receiving a glimpse of an inevitable moment in the future, toward which she was plunging as surely as if she’d thrown herself off a cliff. When she thrust the key into the ignition, her mind filled with an image of an eye pierced by the wicked point of the key, gouged by the serrated edge, which sank into the brain behind the eye. Even as she jammed the key into the car ignition, she twisted it, and simultaneously the key in her vivid premonition also twisted in the eye.

Without any conscious awareness of having opened the door, Martie found herself out of the car, leaning against the side of it, bringing up her lunch onto the rainwashed street.

She stood there for a long while, head bent.

Her raincoat hood had slipped back. Soon her hair was soaked.

When she was sure that she was fully purged, she reached into the car, plucked tissues from a box of Kleenex, and wiped her lips.

She always kept a small bottle of water in the car. Now she used it to rinse out her mouth.

Though still a little queasy, she got into the Saturn and pulled the door shut.

The engine was idling. She wouldn’t have to touch the key again until she was parked in her garage in Corona Del Mar.

Wet, cold, miserable, frightened, confused, she wanted more than anything to be safe at home, to be dry and warm and among familiar things.

She was shaking too much to drive. She waited almost fifteen minutes before she finally released the hand brake and put the car in gear.

Although she desperately wanted to go home, she was afraid of what might happen when she got there. No. She was being dishonest with herself. She wasn’t afraid of what would happen. She was afraid of what she might do.

The eye that she had seen in her premonition — if, indeed, that’s what it had been — was not merely any eye. It had been a distinctive shade of gray-blue, lustrous and beautiful. Just like Dusty’s eyes.

18

At New Life Clinic, the positive psychological influences provided by animals were thought to be useful in certain cases, and Valet was welcome. Dusty parked near the portico, and by the time they got into the building, they were only slightly damp, which was a disappointment to the dog. Valet was a retriever, after all, with webbed feet, a love of water, and enough aquatic talent to qualify him for the Olympic synchronized-swimming team.

In his second-floor quarters, Skeet was fast asleep atop the covers, fully clothed, shoes off.

The bleak winter afternoon pressed its fading face to the window, and shadows gathered in the room. The only other light issued from a small battery-powered reading lamp clipped to the book that Tom Wong, the male nurse, was reading.

After scratching Valet behind the ears, Tom took advantage of their visit to go on a break.

Dusty quietly unpacked both suitcases, stowed the contents in dresser drawers, and took up the vigil in the armchair. Valet settled at his feet.

Two hours of daylight remained, but the shadows in the corners spun expanding webs until Dusty switched on the pharmacy lamp beside the chair.

Although Skeet was curled in the fetal position, he looked not like a child, but like a desiccated corpse, so gaunt and thin that his clothes appeared to be draped over a fleshless skeleton.

* * *

Going home, Martie drove with extreme care not only because of the bad weather but also because of her condition. The prospect of a sudden-onset anxiety attack at sixty miles an hour was daunting. Fortunately, no freeways connected the Balboa Peninsula with Corona Del Mar; the entire trip was on surface streets, and she remained behind the slowest-moving vehicles.

On Pacific Coast Highway, before she was even halfway home, traffic came to a complete stop. Forty or fifty cars ahead, the revolving red and blue emergency beacons of ambulances and police cars marked the site of an accident.

Caught in the jam-up, she used her cell phone to call Dr. Closterman, her internist, hoping to get an appointment the next day, in the morning if possible. “It’s something of an emergency. I mean, I’m not in pain or anything, but I’d rather see him about this as soon as possible.”

“What’re your symptoms?” the receptionist asked.

Martie hesitated. “This is pretty personal. I’d rather talk about it only with Dr. Closterman.”

“He’s gone for the day, but we could squeeze you in the schedule about eight-thirty in the morning.”

“Thank you. I’ll be there,” Martie said, and she terminated the call.

A thin shroud of gray fog billowed in from the harbor, and needles of rain stitched it around the body of the dying day.

From the direction of the accident, an ambulance approached along the oncoming lanes, which contained little traffic.

Neither the siren nor the emergency beacons were in operation. Evidently the patient was beyond all medical help, not actually a patient anymore, but a package bound for a mortuary.

Solemnly, Martie watched the vehicle pass in the rain, and then turned her gaze to the side mirror, where the taillights dwindled in the mist. She had no way of knowing for sure that the ambulance was indeed now a morgue wagon; nevertheless, she was convinced that it held a corpse. She felt Death passing by.

* * *

As he watched over Skeet while waiting for Tom Wong to return, the last thing Dusty wanted to think about was the past, yet his mind drifted back to the childhood he’d shared with Skeet, to Skeet’s imperial father — and, worse, to the man who had followed that bastard as head of the household. Husband number four. Dr. Derek Lampton, neo-Freudian psychologist, psychiatrist, lecturer, and author.

Their mother, Claudette, had a fondness for intellectuals — especially for those who were also megalomaniacs.

Skeet’s father, the false Holden, had lasted until Skeet was nine years old and Dusty was fourteen. The two of them celebrated his departure by staying up all night, watching scary movies, eating bales of potato chips and buckets of Baskin-Robbins chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream, which had been verboten under the strict low-fat, no-salt, no-sugar, no-additives, no-fun Nazi diet enforced for all kids — though not adults — during his dictatorship. In the morning, half nauseated from their gluttony, grainy-eyed with exhaustion, but giddy with their newfound freedom, they managed to stay awake a few extra hours in order to search the neighborhood until they accumulated two pounds of dog droppings, which they hermetically boxed and posted to the deposed despot’s new digs.

Although the package was sent anonymously, with a false return address, they figured that the professor might deduce the identities of the senders, because after enough double martinis, he sometimes bemoaned his son’s learning disability by claiming that a reeking pile of manure had greater potential for academic accomplishment than did Skeet: You are about as erudite as excrement, boy, no more scholarly than a stool sample, as cultured as crap, less comprehending than cow chips, as perceptive as poop. By sending him the box of dog waste, they were challenging him to put his lofty educational theories to work and transform the dog droppings into a better student than Skeet.

Days after the counterfeit Caulfield’s butt was kicked out into the rye field, Dr. Lampton took up residence. Because all the adults were excruciatingly civilized and eager to facilitate one another’s quests for personal fulfillment, Claudette announced to her children that a quick and uncontested divorce would be followed immediately by a new marriage.

Dusty and Skeet ceased all celebration. Within twenty-four hours, they knew that soon the day would come when they would be nostalgic for the golden age during which they had been marked by the ruling thumb of the humbug Holden, because Dr. Derek Lampton would no doubt brand them with his traditional ID number: 666.

Now Skeet brought Dusty back from the past: “You look like you just ate a worm. What’re you thinking