Dance for the Dead

'I didn't say no.' She sat up again and ran her fingers through her hair to find imaginary tangles. 'I said we should have a serious talk sometime. I'll start any time you want to, but I'm not going to say yes right now.'

He sat up too. 'I can do that.'

She sighed. 'When was the last time you had sex, Carey?'

He pursed his lips and said reluctantly, 'The other night.'

'You mean the night before last night. The last time you came off a shift.'

'It was a colleague. It wasn't a routine procedure. She's a terrific diagnostician, a person of the highest - '

'I don't want to know.'

'What is this? You pry and then pretend you're not interested?'

'You'd make a lousy husband.'

'Jane, this thing with my colleague. It's not anything to get jealous about. It was a single, isolated event. Two patients died at the end of the shift after we did everything we could. I think we were just comforting each other. There's something buried deep in the cerebral cortex that gets triggered when you lose a life, some primitive forgotten instinct that says 'Fuck while you can, because one of these times that is going to be you.' It's the practical animal reaction that evolved to keep the species alive after prehistoric kill-offs. She's probably mystified that we did it. Next time we do a shift together we'll be perfectly professional.'

'I'm sure you will. You're a good doctor, and you'd know if she weren't. But I assure you, if you had her in the sack, she's not going to let herself get too mystified. She's probably waiting on your doorstep. If she isn't, it doesn't matter, because there will be another along shortly. There is, in fact, isn't there? Me. The world is full of women - an endless supply - and every last one of them has something about her: a little smile that makes you want to smile too, or breasts like two perfect grapefruits. Remember her? That's probably why she hung around your supermarket - so you could make the comparison.'

'That's not fair,' he said. 'You want me to start quoting you?'

'No,' Jane answered. 'It isn't fair. That's part of what I'm talking about. What we know about each other looks a little different if marriage rears its ugly head. And I'm not criticizing you.'

'You aren't?'

'No. I never thought for a second that there was anything wrong with anything you do. I still don't. But the only way it would make any sense to marry you is if I had some reason to believe you had become monogamous.'

'You actually think I can't do that?' Carey asked.

She smiled and lay down with her head on his shoulder. It was surprising how good it felt. In a moment she said, 'Want some breakfast?' and was up and heading for the kitchen. She slipped her bathrobe on as she walked down the hall. Then she heard the beep-beep-beep-beep, stopped, and walked back to the bedroom doorway. He was sitting on the bed staring sadly at the pager attached to the belt on the floor. 'Your alarm's going off,' she said. 'Somebody seems to be breaking into your pants.'

Carey picked up the beeper, slipped on his pants, walked to the telephone by the bed, and cradled the receiver under his chin as he dialed. 'It's the hospital,' he said, and buckled his belt. As she walked back down the hallway she heard him say. 'Dr. McKinnon.'

Jane went into the kitchen and packed him a little lunch while he talked on the telephone. She could hear him thumping around up there, probably not doing a very good job of making himself presentable. When she heard his feet on the stairs she came out and handed him the little brown bag.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I'll call you as soon as I'm off and get some sleep.'

'Thanks,' she answered, then added, 'If I'm not around, don't worry. I may have to go out of town.'

'See?' He grinned. 'Nothing's changed. You always say that.' He gave her a long, gentle kiss, picked up his black bag, and hurried out to his car.

Jane thought about what she had said. She had no plans to go anywhere. It was simply the old habit: never give anyone a reason to ask the police to look for you.

She considered going back to bed, but if she did she would be out of step with the sun and moon, and she hated that feeling more than being tired. She spent the day cleaning her clean house, cutting her lawn, and weeding her flower beds. She tried not to think about what Carey McKinnon was doing, or about being Mrs. Carey McKinnon, or about finding the right way of loving a particular person. What she needed to know wasn't something that could be figured out in advance. She had to wait until she was sure she wasn't taking an old friend and converting him into the consolation prize for failure. It was only after night had come that she went back up to bed and allowed herself to sleep.

9

Jane sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. The sun was beginning to come up, the light now diffused and gray beyond the window. She wasn't sure how long she had been hearing the birds, but they were flitting from limb to limb now, making chirrups. She used the hot coffee and the silence to work her way back through her dream, and she knew where every bit of it had come from.

She had been running at night through the woods, trying to make it to the river. She must have been a child, because her parents were with her. There was something big and dark and ferocious chasing them, but she wasn't able to catch a glimpse of it through the trees. Every time she tried to look over her shoulder it seemed to be closer, but she could only discern a shadow that blotted out some of the stars, or see branches shaking as it trampled through a thicket.

She walked to the middle of the living room and cleared her mind while she began the one hundred and twenty-eight movements of Tai Chi, one flowing into the next without interruption. She decided her muscles weren't as sore as they had been yesterday. Maybe Carey's liniment had worked after all - or something else had. Her body borrowed part of her consciousness as it had learned to do through long years to move through positions with names like 'Grasp Sparrow's Tail' and 'Cross Hands and Carry Tiger to Mountain,' and ended as it had begun, almost floating. Then she slipped on a sweat suit, hung her house key on a chain around her neck, went down the front steps, and began to run.

She started slowly and easily in the cold dawn air and gradually lengthened her strides as her body warmed and her muscles relaxed. She ran down to the river and along the open grassy strip toward the south. Deganawida was alive this morning with people just up and driving along Niagara Street toward their jobs, the men's hair wet from their showers and plastered to their heads, the children dressed in their second-heaviest coats already, their mothers hustling them down the sidewalk and making sure they were at least pointed in the direction of the school when they started off. She ran up as far as the Grand Island bridge and then turned back. The run home would give her just the right stretch of time to shower, change, and eat before the library opened.

Inside the library she walked to the desk and collected all of the past month's issues of the Los Angeles Times, then hid in the small room in the corner surrounded by the reference books that nobody ever used unless they wanted to settle a bet, and sat down to read. The first one that caught her eye was two days old.

INVESTIGATION OF COURTHOUSE DEATHS IS INCONCLUSIVE

van nuys - In the latest development in the strange saga of Timothy Phillips, kidnap victim and heir to a San Francisco fortune, an L.A. Police spokesman conceded today that the investigation has so far produced no charges against anyone. The bizarre events at the Van Nuys courthouse which caused the deaths of two persons and the arrests of five others last month are still under investigation, said Captain Daniel Brice. Details are still sketchy, but the police have put together this much of the puzzle: Just as the courts began session on the morning of the 15th, attorney Dennis Morgan, 38, of Washington, D.C. stopped his car in front of the courthouse to let off his eight- year-old client, Timothy Phillips, and Mona Turley, 29, the woman posing as Phillips's mother. The rented car then apparently slipped into reverse and slammed into an oncoming vehicle. Driver Harold Kern, 23, and passenger James Curtain, 26, both of Los Angeles, suffered minor injuries, but Morgan was (See Inconclusive, A 29)

Jane impatiently searched page 29 and found the rest of the article in the lower left corner.

pronounced dead at the scene.

Kern and Curtain ran into the courthouse, apparently seeking assistance for Morgan. Mona Turley, police theorize, may have believed the two men were pursuing her with hostile intent. A struggle ensued, in which numerous bystanders took sides. The confrontation erupted into a fight in a fifth-floor hallway, where bailiffs in a