“Yes, more or less,” she said.
Okay. The light from the other end of the tunnel spun toward them, as if anticipating their arrival, but they turned into an open doorway halfway around the tunnel’s arc and stepped into Bern’s studio.
The woman paused on the landing and took in the large airy room that lay below the short flight of steps. Built piecemeal over a period of years, much of the work having been done by Bern himself, the studio was an assimilation of concrete, angled glass walls, and limestone boulders, with a high, sloping ceiling supported by steel beams. The glass wall on the far side of the room was slightly cantilevered over the lake, which was twenty feet below the floor of the studio.
He saw Becca’s eyes come to rest on Alice, who, knowing the routine, had moved her stool over to the sitting area near the glass wall, awaiting their arrival.
Becca said nothing as they crossed the room to the massive slab of mesquite that served as a coffee table. There were several armchairs and a sofa.
“This is Alice,” Bern said.
Alice smiled. Becca Haber nodded soberly.
Bern offered her a place on the sofa, but she chose one of the armchairs instead. She sat down with her sandaled feet close together on the concrete floor, holding the box on top of her thighs. She glanced at Alice.
“This is, uh, this is very personal,” she said softly to Bern.
He nodded. “I know, but it’s okay. She’s-she can’t understand you.”
Becca Haber kept her eyes on Bern. “She’s deaf?”
“No-”
“Oh. Chinese.”
“Chinese, yes, but her family’s been in the United States for more generations than mine. She can’t understand you because she has brain damage. A waterskiing accident about a year ago.”
“What do you mean, ‘she can’t understand’?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Brain injuries, they’re quirky things. There’s a cognitive disconnect of some sort.”
“‘Cognitive disconnect’?”
Bern had hoped she would just accept that and they could go on. But he could see what he always saw in people who were told about Alice’s condition: puzzlement and a ton of questions.
“Basically, she can’t recognize or understand the meaning of words,” he said. Over the past year, he’d developed a long and a short version of this explanation. She was going to get the short one.
“Even though she doesn’t understand the meaning of the words you’re speaking, she’s verbally fluent. I mean, she’ll hold a conversation with you. She’ll pause to let you have your turn at the appropriate time; then she’ll take her turn. She even punctuates her sentences correctly-for the most part. But it just doesn’t compute. It makes no sense whatsoever. The strangest part is, she thinks she understands the conversation. So I just go along with it.”
Becca glanced again at Alice, who was staring back at her with a birdlike curiosity, insensitive to the indelicacy of her frank gaze.
“Who, uh, who is she?”
“She’s the daughter of old friends. Actually, I’m her godfather.” He pulled around another chair and sat on the other side of the coffee table from her. “It calms her to watch me draw, and we’ve discovered that it has a kind of therapeutic effect on her. So Alice’s mother brings her by here a couple of times a week to watch me work. It frees her up for a few hours to do some shopping, run errands.”
“She doesn’t bother you?”
“Nope. We just talk, listen to music.”
“But she doesn’t make any sense?”
“Nope.”
Alice was still looking at Becca Haber with a penetrating concentration, waggling her foot, working her gum. It was as if the woman were a newly discovered object and Alice was trying to figure out her meaning and usefulness. It wasn’t exactly a calming thing for Becca Haber, who already seemed to be a little tightly wound.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Bern said.
Chapter 4
Glancing tentatively one more time at Alice, Haber leaned forward, carefully placed the box on the mesquite slab in front of her, and opened it, revealing the underside of a human skull cradled in a nest of shredded paper. Inserting her thumb into the foramen magnum on the underside of the skull, she lifted it out of the box. With her other hand, she took out the skull’s detached mandible, its horseshoe-shaped lower jaw.
With an odd expertise, she put the mandible just behind her suntanned bare knee, its two sides straddling her thigh like a beret, the teeth pointing away from her. Then she turned the skull upright, facing Bern, and held it on her thighs.
“It’s in good shape,” she offered, as if this were an audition. She looked down at the top of the skull.
He had already noticed that. It was in excellent shape. Rare. It looked as if it had been harvested from a hospital for academic purposes. Usually by the time he saw them, they had been through a lot of abuse, buried and etched by soil acids or worms, or left out in the open for months or years, teeth missing, gnawed by animals, bleached by the stresses of exposure. But this one was perfect in all respects, except for the separated mandible. It was pristine, all the teeth firmly in place.
Becca Haber had called early that morning and introduced herself. She said that she was from Atlanta and that she had just come into Austin. She told him she had a skull and that she hoped he would agree to reconstruct its face.
He’d asked her if she had been referred to him by someone at a law-enforcement agency. She’d said this was a personal situation. She had read an article about him in Atlanta a few years ago.
How did she happen to have the skull? he’d asked.
There had been a pause at the other end of the line.
“I’d rather explain that to you when I get there,” she’d said. Her voice had a southern lilt, but that hadn’t disguised the underlying hint of tension.
Now here she sat, holding a skull that looked eerily fresh. He didn’t reach for it, though he wanted to. Instead, he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.
“Why don’t you start by telling me how you happen to have this,” he suggested.
“Sure,” she said, nodding. “I understand.” She squared her shoulders. “I bought it from a street kid in Mexico City.”
But she didn’t go on. At first, Bern thought she was reconsidering what she was about to say, but as he looked at her face, he realized that she was looking at him without seeing him. Something seemed to be happening. He waited.
As a forensic artist, he was used to talking with clients who were upset. The people who were brought to him were victims of rape or attempted murder or kidnapping or mutilation, or had been witnesses to such things. Re- creating in one’s mind the faces of the people who have done such things is often an excruciating experience, and sometimes the mind rebels at being asked to recall the horrors it has recorded. Memory is a fragile and mercurial thing, and responds most reliably, he’d found, to tender treatment. He glanced away, giving her time to gain control of her emotions.
Becca Haber looked up.
“I’m positive…” she said, looking down at the skull in her lap, “almost positive, that this is my husband.”
The corners of her mouth pulled down involuntarily as she fought her emotions.
Out of his peripheral vision, Bern saw Alice’s foot suddenly stop waggling. He glanced at her. She had stopped kneading her gum and it rested like a little pink pellet exactly in the center of her slightly parted lips. She was staring at Becca with slack-jawed fascination, as if she were watching the woman metamorphose into something alien right there in the stream of sunshine.
