Twenty-three years in San Q.
Time off for good behavior could cut it in half. A belated appeal might shave off more. Meaning McCloskey’s release could be imminent- if it hadn’t already taken place.
No doubt Dutchy would know the precise release date- he’d be the type to follow that kind of thing closely. I wondered how he and the child’s mother had explained it all to Melissa.
Dutchy. Interesting fellow. Throwback to another age.
From juror to retainer. I was curious about the evolution but had little hope of satisfying my curiosity. The way things were going, I’d be lucky to get an accurate history on my patient.
I thought of Dutchy’s secretiveness and devotion. Gina Dickinson had the ability to inspire strong loyalties. Was it the helplessness, the same princess-in-distress frailty that had brought Eileen Wagner out on a house call?
What did growing up with a mother like that do to a child?
Men with sacks…
Same dream I’d heard from so many other children, almost an archetype. Children I’d cured.
But I sensed this child would be different. No easy heroism here.
I had a deli dinner at Nate ’n Al, on Beverly Drive: corned beef on rye accompanied by the tape-loop blather of Hollywood types shmoozing about pending deals, drove home, and phoned a San Labrador exchange that had stuck in my head.
This time an answering machine with Jacob Dutchy’s voice informed me no one was available and invited me, halfheartedly, to leave a message.
I repeated my urgent desire to speak with the lady of the house at 10 Sussex Knoll.
4
No callback that evening, nor the following day, and as 5:00 P.M. approached I resigned myself to pumping Dutchy for information again- awkward position be damned.
But he didn’t show up. Instead, Melissa was accompanied by a Mexican man in his sixties- broad and low-slung, hard and muscular despite his age, with a thin gray mustache, beak nose, and hands as rough and brown as cedar bark. He wore khaki work clothes and rubber-soled shoes and held a sweat-stained beige canvas hat in front of his groin.
“This is Sabino,” said Melissa. “He takes care of our plants.”
I said hello and introduced myself. The gardener smiled uncomfortably and muttered, “Hernandez, Sabino.”
“Today we took the truck,” said Melissa, “and looked down on everyone.”
I said, “Where’s Jacob?”
She shrugged. “Doing stuff.”
At the mention of Dutchy’s name, Hernandez stood up straighter.
I thanked him and told him Melissa would be free in forty-five minutes. Then I noticed he wasn’t wearing a watch.
“Take a seat, if you’d like,” I said, “or you can leave and come back at five forty-five.”
“Okeh.” He remained standing.
I pointed to a chair.
He said, “Ohh,” and sat down, still holding his hat.
I took Melissa into the consult room.
Healer’s challenge: Put aside my annoyance at the way the adults were fancy-dancing around me and concentrate on the child.
Plenty to concentrate on, today.
She began talking the moment she sat down, looking away from me and reciting her terrors nonstop, in a singsong oral-report voice that told me she’d studied hard for therapy. Closing her eyes as she went on, and climbing in power and pitch until she was nearly shouting, then stopping and shivering with dread, as if she’d suddenly visualized something overwhelming.
But before I could say anything, she was off again. Fluctuating between blurt and whisper, like a radio with a broken volume control.
“Monsters… big bad things.”
“What kinds of big bad things, Melissa?”
“I don’t know… just bad.”
She went silent again, bit down on her lower lip, began rocking.
I put my hand on her shoulder.
She opened her eyes and said, “I know they’re imaginary but they still scare me.”
“Imaginary things can be very scary.”
Saying it in a soothing voice, but she’d reeled me into her world and I was flashing mental pictures of my own: gibbering hordes of fanged and hooded shadow-things that lurked in the nightgloom. Trapdoors unlatched by the death of light. Trees turned to witches; shrubs to hunched, slimy corruptions; the moon, a looming, voracious fire.
The power of empathy. And more. Memories of other nights, so long ago; a boy in a bed, listening to the winds whip across the Missouri flatlands… I broke away from that and focused on what she was saying:
“… that’s why I hate to sleep. Going to sleep brings the dreams.”
“What kinds of dreams?”
She shivered again and shook her head. “I make myself stay awake but then I can’t stop it anymore and I sleep and the dreams come.”
I took her fingers in mine and stilled them with touch and therapeutic murmurings.
She turned silent.
I said, “Do you have bad dreams every night?”
“Yes. And more. Mother said one time there were seven.”
“Seven bad dreams in one night?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember them?”
She liberated her hand, closed her eyes, and retreated to a detached tone. A seven-year-old clinician, presenting at Case Conference. The case of a certain nameless little girl who woke up cold and sweating from her sleeping place at the foot of her mother’s bed.
Lying there, frozen, staring up at the ceiling, trying to convince herself it was just a ceiling, that the things crawling up there weren’t-
Freezing again, as she said
Her eyes opened. She threw a panicky glance at the separate exit.
A convict weighing the risks of jailbreak.
Too much, too soon.
Leaning in close, I told her she’d done well; we could spend the rest of the session drawing again, or playing a
