forehead.
“Then tell me what the hell you are doing here or I’ll call them.”
“I will, I will, but please don’t.” He checked his hand. He was bleeding from the scalp. “Can I have a t- tissue?”
“No.” She tossed the phone down and raised the stick like an executioner’s sword. “Talk or I’ll bash your brains in.”
“You have a t-t-tattoo on your hip.”
Instantly her face shifted, and her hands flinched. But she said nothing.
“I saw it once real fast when you were at the pool. You were wearing a t-two-piece white bikini, and you were on the lounge chair reading a copy of
“How did you see it?”
“I c-c-can’t swim, so I don’t go up to the p-p-pool. Binoculars. I s-saw you through binoculars.”
“You mean you broke into my bedroom to see my tattoo?”
He nodded. “Ummm.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“It’s important. Very important. Can I p-please get up? My head’s bleeding.” The second time in a week, he thought.
He started to pull himself up, when she whacked him in the leg. “What do you mean, it’s important?”
Blood now trickled down the side of his head. He blotted it with his sleeve then reached into his pants pocket.
“Don’t you dare,” she said and raised the stick.
“No, don’t.” When she didn’t strike, he said, “I just want to show you something. Please.”
“How do I know you haven’t got a weapon?”
“Because I d-don’t.” He slipped his hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper and unfolded it, revealing the blue cartoon. “It’s Mr. Nisha,” he said.
Nicole glanced at it, and for a second her face seemed to have turned into a plaster mask. As the image began to sink in, little expressions flickered across it like eddies of electricity. “Where did you get that?”
“You remember,” he whispered.
She lowered the stick.
“Please, can I get up?”
She did not respond but took the drawing to the table beside her bed and turned on the lamp. While she studied the image, Brendan’s eye fell on a photograph tacked to the wall—Nicole and a bunch of other kids on a field trip. The eyes of the Asian girl at the end had been poked out.
While Nicole continued to study the drawing, Brendan noticed a video camera sitting on the desk. Beside it was a cassette. Without thought, he picked it up, but she snatched it out of his hands and threw it into the desk drawer.
Then Nicole turned the light toward herself and pulled down one corner of her panties. On her left flank was the same serene blue elephant with the big floppy ears, fat snaky trunk, and fingered human hands. And on its head some kind of crown. It was nearly identical.
“W-w-where … ?”
“Hampton Beach,” she said.
“B-but how did … ?”
“I wanted a tattoo, and when I saw an elephant sample, I knew that’s what I wanted. But all he had was stupid pink elephants or that freaky demon-beast shit for bikers. I made him draw it on paper until he had it right.”
“But why did you have it done?”
“Because I wanted a tattoo is why.”
“But where did you get the image from?”
“Why’s it so important to you?”
“Because I’ve been seeing this image for years in my brain. It’s like a ghost of something, but I couldn’t put it together. Until now. I th-think we’re connected somehow through that image.”
She did not respond.
“Does’M-M-Mr. Nisha’ mean anything to you?”
“Mr. who?”
“Nisha. M-Mr. Nisha. Or ‘dance with Mr. Nisha’?”
Before she could respond, the sound of a car pulling into the driveway cut the air. “Shit! My parents! You gotta get out of here.” He started for her closet, but she stopped him. “They saw my light on, so they’ll be in. The window.”
“We have to t-talk more.”
“What for? I’m going back to school, then camp.”
“But we have to.”
“Go!”
Brendan was overweight and unathletic, so the prospect of climbing down was not appealing.
She pushed him toward the window and opened the screen just enough for him to climb out onto the porch roof. She pointed to the corner. “The drainpipe,” she said, and shoved him through. “GO!”
He climbed out and steadied himself on the roof. He could hear the garage door close in the front of the house, leaving the night dark and still for his escape. From the roof, it was maybe a ten-foot drop to the ground, and little footholds attached to the corner column along the drainpipe made the descent easy. It was the path most taken.
As he eased his way down, he wondered about Nicole’s other midnight visitors and wished that for one moment he could feel what they had come for. Just one little burst of spring fires. He would die for that.
18
The ride to Connecticut took about three and a half hours. After breakfast, Rachel bundled Dylan in the car and drove him to day care, leaving Miss Jean her cell-phone number. Then she headed south on Route 95 to New Haven and the Yale University School of Medicine where she had a one o’clock appointment with Stanley Chu.
She listened to the radio to distract her mind. But she snapped it off after the news story about a controversial case of a mentally deficient man on death row in Texas. He could barely read and write and had flunked the seventh grade twice. He did menial work such as cutting grass. And last night, at thirty-three, after spending twelve years on death row for the rape and murder of a twenty-four-year-old woman, he had been executed.
She arrived at the medical school on time. A directory inside the main entrance led her to the Department of Neurology.
Dr. Stanley Chu, a slight man of about sixty with thinning hair and glasses, spoke with a faint accent. Rachel took a seat across from his desk. A folder containing Dylan’s medical records sat open before him. She had overnighted the package last week.
Dr. Chu seemed a little put off by her visit and got right to business. “I looked at your son’s medical history, the test results, and the scans. As you know, there’s some dysfunction of the left temporal lobe.” From a folder he pulled out some of the films and slipped them onto the display board. “Dylan’s brain is on the left, the one on the right is a child about the same age but with normal brain anatomy.” He used a ballpoint pen to point out the shadowy shapes. “As you can see, the gyri of Dylan’s brain—that is, the folds—are smaller and the sulci—the
