False Memory

mysterious yet clear. Her white uniform was as bright and crisp as her professionalism, although red sneakers with green laces suggested — correctly, as it turned out — a playful streak.

“Hey, you’re just a little bit of a thing,” Skeet told her. He winked at Dusty. “If I want to kill myself, Jasmine, I don’t see you being able to stop me.”

As she removed the dinner tray from the bed and set it on the dresser, the nurse said, “Listen, my little chupaflor, if the only way to keep you from hurting yourself is to break every bone in your body, then put you in a cast from the neck down, I can handle that.”

“Holy shit,” Skeet exclaimed, “where’d you go to nursing school — Transylvania?”

“Tougher than that. I was taught by nuns, the Sisters of Mercy. And I’m warning you, chupaflor —no bad language on my shift.”

“Sorry,” Skeet said, genuinely chagrined, though still in a mood to tease. “What happens when I have to go pee-pee?”

Scratching Valet’s ears, Jasmine assured Skeet, “You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before, though I’m sure I’ve seen larger.”

Dusty smiled at Skeet. “From now on, it would be wise to say nothing but Yes, ma’am.”

“What is chupaflor?” Skeet asked. “You’re not trying to slip some bad language by me, are you?”

“Chupaflor means ‘hummingbird,’” Jasmine Hernandez explained as she stuck a digital thermometer in Skeet’s mouth.

In a thermometer-punctuated mumble, Skeet said, “You’re calling me hummingbird?”

“Chupaflor,” she confirmed. Skeet was no longer hooked to the electrocardiograph, so she lifted his bony wrist to time his pulse.

A new uneasiness slid into Dusty, as cold as a shiv between the ribs, though he couldn’t identify the cause. Not wholly new, in fact. It was the free-floating suspicion that earlier had motivated him to watch Skeet’s reflection in the night-mirrored window. Something was wrong here, but not necessarily with Skeet. His suspicion refocused on the place, the clinic.

“Hummingbirds are cute,” Skeet told Jasmine Hernandez.

“Keep the thermometer under your tongue,” she admonished.

Mumbling again, he pressed: “Do you think I’m cute?”

“You’re a nice-looking boy,” she said, as though she could see Skeet as he had once been — healthy, fresh- faced, and clear-eyed.

“Hummingbirds are charming. They’re free spirits.”

With her attention on her wristwatch, counting Skeet’s pulse, the nurse said, “Yes, exactly, the chupaflor is a cute, charming, free, insignificant little bird.”

Skeet glanced at his brother and rolled his eyes.

If something were wrong about this moment, this place, these people, Dusty was unable to pinpoint the falsity. The bastard son of Sherlock Holmes, born of Miss Jane Marple, would be hard-pressed to find good reason for the suspicion that sawed at Dusty’s nerves. His edginess probably arose from weariness and from his worry about Skeet; until he was rested, he couldn’t trust his intuition.

In response to his brother’s rolling eyes, Dusty said, “I warned you. Two words. Yes, ma’am. You can’t go wrong with Yes, ma’am.”

As Jasmine let go of Skeet’s wrist, the digital thermometer beeped, and she took it out of his mouth.

Moving to the bed, Dusty said, “Gotta split, kid. Promised Martie we’d go out to dinner, and I’m late.”

“Always keep your promises to Martie. She’s special.”

“Didn’t I marry her?”

“I hope she doesn’t hate me,” Skeet said.

“Hey, don’t be stupid.”

Unspent tears shimmered in Skeet’s eyes. “I love her, Dusty, you know? Martie’s always been so good to me.”

“She loves you, too, kid.”

“That’s a pretty small club — People Who Love Skeet. But People Who Love Martie — now, that’s bigger than the Rotary and the Kiwanis and the Optimist clubs all rolled into one.”

Dusty could think of no comforting reply, because Skeet’s observation was undeniably true.

The kid wasn’t speaking from self-pity, however. “Man, that’s a load I wouldn’t want to carry. You know? People love you, they have expectations, and then you have responsibilities. The more people who love you — well, it goes round and round, it never stops.”

“Love is hard, huh?”

Skeet nodded. “Love is hard. Go, go take Martie out for a nice dinner, a glass of wine, tell her how beautiful she is.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Dusty promised, picking up Valet’s leash and clipping it to the dog’s collar.

“You’ll find me right here,” Skeet said. “I’ll be the one in a body cast from the neck down.”

As Dusty led Valet out of the room, Jasmine approached the bed with a sphygmomanometer. “I need your blood pressure, chupaflor.”

Skeet said, “Yes, ma’am.”

That skewering sense of wrongness again. Ignore it. Weariness. Imagination. It could be cured with a glass of wine and the sight of Martie’s face.

All the way along the hall to the elevator, Valet’s claws ticked softly on the vinyl-tile flooring.

Nurses and nurses’ assistants smiled at the retriever. “Hi, puppy.” “What a handsome fella.” “You’re a cutie, aren’t you?”

Dusty and Valet shared the elevator with a male orderly who knew just the spot on the ears that, when gently rubbed, caused the dog’s eyes to take on a dreamy cast. “Had a golden myself. A sweet girl named Sassy. She got cancer, had to put her to sleep about a month ago.” His voice caught briefly on the word sleep. “Couldn’t get her to go for a Frisbee, but she’d chase tennis balls all day.”

“Him, too,” Dusty said. “He won’t drop the first ball when you throw a second, brings them both back, looking like the world’s worst case of mumps. You going to get a new puppy?”

“Not for a while,” said the orderly, which meant not until the loss of Sassy hurt a little less than it hurt now.

On the ground floor, in the recreation room adjacent to the lobby, a dozen patients, at tables in groups of four, were playing cards. Their conversation and easy laughter, the click of shuffling decks, and the mellow strains of an old Glenn Miller swing tune on the radio contributed to such a cozy mood that you might have thought this was a gathering of friends at a country club, a church hall, or a private home, instead of a physically shaky and psychologically desperate collection of middle-class and upper-middle-class crack smokers, snow blowers, crank freaks, cross-top poppers, acidheads, cactus eaters, and shit spikers with Swiss-cheese veins.

At a desk next to the front door, a guard was posted to ensure that upon the premature departure of a headstrong patient, family members and officers of the court would be phoned depending upon the notification requirements of each case.

During the current shift, the security station was manned by a fiftyish man dressed in khakis, a light-blue shirt, a red tie, and a navy-blue blazer. His name tag identified him as WALLY CLARK, and he was reading a romance novel. Pudgy, dimpled, well-scrubbed, smelling faintly of a spice-scented aftershave, with the kind blue eyes of a sincere pastor and a smile just sweet enough — but not too sweet — to replace the vermouth in a not- too-dry martini, Wally was every Hollywood casting director’s ideal choice for the star’s favorite uncle, mentor, dedicated teacher, beloved father, or guardian angel.

“I was here the last time your brother stayed with us,” Wally Clark said, leaning forward in his chair to pet Valet. “I didn’t expect he’d be back. Wish he wasn’t. He’s a good-hearted boy.”

“Thank you.”

“Used to come down here to play some backgammon with me. Don’t you worry, Mr. Rhodes. Your brother, deep inside, he’s got the right stuff. He’ll fly straight out of here this time, and stay straight.”