28

I found Nona sitting beside Stuart. I could not suppress the thought: He was too thin to live much longer.

“Stuart was just asking for you,” she said. “He just told me his horses need more friends.”

She slipped me a sheet of lined foolscap from her notebook and I crafted the paper into a horse. I tore the corners into ears, and used a pen to describe a flowing mane. The horse had flared nostrils, and the eyes of one of the steeds of the Parthenon. Examined with a certain open-mindedness and imagination it was a fine horse, and it fit over Stuart’s fingers.

Stuart brought forth another horse from beneath his pillow, and the two horse puppets were an act of theater, a story, two figures of power introduced to each other. What happened next could be battle, or partnership. Stuart’s hands worked the puppets, one much more worn than the other, and I could see him debating the course of their relationship.

“The new one is stronger,” said Stuart. He had the pinched, deep-creased look of a middle-aged man who has lived hard.

“But the old one is crafty,” I said.

He didn’t understand the word.

“Crafty means ‘smart.’”

He gave me a mildly skeptical look: Smarts aren’t worth much.

“Strength isn’t everything.” There is an artificial heartiness some adults use around children, especially sick children. I tried to keep this fake tone out of my voice. The idea of strength troubled me under this circumstance, but I knew it was false to pretend that power, of one sort or another, did not constitute the major character of the world.

Stuart thought. Perhaps such considerations wearied him, but he kept the two horses before his eyes. “They are,” he said from his pillow, “both smart.”

“What do they think about?”

“They worry,” he said.

“What about?” I asked, although I could tell what he was about to say.

He closed his eyes, although the horses were still on his fingers. He opened his eyes again, and the horses seemed to gaze at each other.

Nona closed her door, locked it, and then kissed me. She slipped off her shoes, sitting behind her desk, skimming a brace of pink memos to one side. She kept my hand in hers, not wanting to let me go. She looked into my eyes, though, and her smile faded.

Her hand squeezed mine. “What is it?”

“Nothing you should worry about. You have enough on your mind.”

“Are we being a little coy today, Strater?”

She rarely used her office, on the ground floor of the medical center, and yet it bore marks of her character. There was a yellow sheet marked THINGS TO DO on the wall, but it was blank. Nona could always remember what she had to do, and get it done.

“I saw my mother this morning,” I said.

She gazed down at my hand, and then back up into my eyes. “How is she?”

I told her about my mother’s condition, and she listened with an air of compassion. When I had concluded my brief description of the visit she did not say anything for awhile.

Perhaps I seemed to be waiting for a prognosis, because she added, “Maybe there will never be a return, Strater. Maybe she will always be as she is now.”

“You want to prepare me for disappointment,” I said.

Nona’s face was rarely sad. She was too lively, too direct. But there was a touch of melancholy as she said, “There is so much that we can’t change.”

There was feeling in my voice as I said, “And the children here. Stuart, for example.”

She didn’t answer.

“They don’t have much hope either, right?”

“I think we have to have hope. As human beings—we have to have faith to keep on living. But there is such a thing as a false hope.”

She meant: Stuart did not have long to live.

She seemed to read my thoughts. “They don’t even know what’s wrong with Stuart.”

“Whatever it is, he’s dying,” I said, my voice husky.

“I help them in my way. There’s only so much I can do. Stuart was found in a dumpster as a newborn, abandoned. He’s lived with a string of foster families.”

“I used to believe the world was going to get better and better. We’d abolish things like sick children.”

Nona gave me a wide-eyed, knowing look and said, “You’ve been through something recently, Strater.”

I slipped easily into mock-cheerful denial. “Like what?”

“You’ve changed.”

I tried to laugh. “I’m in love.”

She smiled in response to that, but then she added, “You are keeping a secret. Don’t try to deny it.”

I had always intended to tell her. But I was not prepared to begin the story now.

She continued, “Are you in trouble, Stratton?”

The formal form of my first name made me look away. I could not lie to Nona, but what sort of truth could I tell her?

“Do you need my help?” she asked.

“Soon,” I said. “I will be able to tell you everything. But not now.”

A long silence. She whispered, making a joke of it to protect her feelings, “I know what it is—another woman.”

“I believe,” I began, “that there are Powers in the world that can pluck us as we might pluck an apple.” Having started, I wondered at my choice of words, at how I could possibly make her believe what I myself could barely accept.

“Do you mean,” she asked, “supernatural powers?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

She slipped behind me, and her fingers found the places in my neck and in my skull where the tension seemed to reside. “You had better tell me now. Whatever is bothering you, I want to know now. I won’t wait.”

Her fingers were wise. Calm pooled inside me. It had been a long time since I had felt anything like this.

But I couldn’t tell her. I had to keep my secret.

I stood and strode to the bulletin board, feeling caged in this office. Her eyes were aglow with the question: What is it?

And then I realized that Nona was the only person I knew, and perhaps would ever know, with whom I could share such a tale. I took a long breath. “It might not be safe to be with me right now.”

She waited.

My voice caught. “I’m a dangerous man.”

“I’m not that interested in playing it safe. I see children die.”

It was a decision as deep as the moment in which a person picks up a weapon to defend his life, or decides to leap from a burning building.

Telling her, letting the events slip through my fingers like a line, I did not begin to imagine what impression the story would make on her.

It took a long time. I told her all over again of Blake’s suicide, of DeVere’s apparent suicide. With a trembling voice, I told her of my father.

“You’ve been through all of that,” she said at last, “and didn’t think to tell me even a hint of it?”

There was no glib response to that. “Do you believe any of it?”

“What you say disturbs me, Stratton.”

“What do you think?” I added, with a rasp in my voice, “Give me your diagnosis, Dr. Lyle.”

“I believe that something wants your soul.”

“Something real?”

“Does it matter?”

“You know it does.”

She watched me, actually saw me, the way few people look at another human being. “It’s real for you, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” I let the admission, the confession of ignorance, linger in the room.

“I think you want me to tell you that it’s all impossible.”

“If that’s what you think, please do.”

“I don’t think there are such places as Heaven and Hell, Strater. I don’t believe in things like that.”

“Psychosis.”

She was thoughtful as she rose from her desk and plucked a thumbtack from its place on the bulletin board.

“That’s the word you’re trying to avoid using, isn’t it?” I said, pain in my voice.

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “But we might have to consider the possibility.”

“You’re being too nice about this,” I said, with a flash of impatience. “Go ahead and say it—I’m ready to move into the hospital with my mother.”

“I would say so, if that’s what I thought. Your father taught you to be noble and generous. Mine taught me to be honest.”

“If it’s not psychosis, then I’m in even worse trouble.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“Because that means that what has happened to me is actual. Real.”

She gave the tack a toss, and it nestled in the wrinkle of her palm. She seemed to be weighing it.

“Besides,” I continued, “a man who dares riptides as a form of recreation can hardly be called normal.”

“I never said you were ‘normal,’ Strater. Every potential hero has to be a little bit in love with death. Only a little—but it makes the big risks possible.”

“I never quite saw myself as heroic.”

“I always saw you that way.” She replaced the tack, down by the frame of the bulletin board, and pushed it in carefully.

“But you see why it might be dangerous to be around me. I don’t know what I’m going to see next. Besides, DeVere’s people will be after me. You might not even be safe in your apartment. I’ll ask Fern to arrange some security for you.”

“You rely on me, don’t you, Strater? As a source of common sense. You think that I’m going to be able to answer your questions. You almost hope I have some sort of medication that will put these images to sleep.”

I answered truthfully. “I wouldn’t mind.”

For the first time that afternoon, and perhaps for the first time since I had known her, she seemed defeated by something. Listening to me had spent something in her, and I sensed that I was about to discover something about Nona I had never known before.

“My father was a physician,” she said. “Not one of these doctors who spend their afternoons playing tennis with their investment counselors. One of the real kind, the kind with a black bag and a practice of people who can’t pay their bills. He had a general practice in Oakland, years before it was stylish to want to save the inner cities, and then after it was no longer stylish.”

She gave me a glance, and I told her with my eyes: Please go on. She rarely spoke of her family.

“He died of overwork. That’s hardly a medical description. But on a death certificate there is a step-by-step breakdown. There is the primary cause, and the secondary cause, and the contributing cause to that. A cerebral hemorrhage killed him, and that’s all that they bothered typing in. But they could have accurately given fatigue, and the weight of too many sick people, as the contributing causes.

“He died when I was in college. It broke my mother’s spirit. It forced her back into her past. In a way, she reacted like your mother, only much less violently. She moved back into her old neighborhood, and lived quietly and peacefully in a world of soap operas and bridge games where she was born and raised, in Minneapolis. I think seeing me reminded her of what she couldn’t bear to remember. My father was that special. When she died it was as though she made up her mind not to breathe anymore.

“I would be proud to accomplish one-third of the good he was able to work in his lifetime. And one thing he bequeathed to me, one precept, that I swear to live out each day: Be true. Be honest. Don’t lie, especially not to yourself. If you don’t know, admit it. Be ignorant and brave.”

I had never heard her describe her parents in quite this way. There had been, naturally, the occasional anecdote. I had thought that I was getting to know Nona. But now I saw that she was a person I was only beginning to know, and that I could spend years with her, as in a new, unfamiliar country, and still find her amazing.

“I never mentioned why I decided to study psychiatry,” she said. Without waiting for me to respond, she continued, “I had problems of my own. They are all far behind me, thank God. I got the help of someone very capable.”

“I think your father would be proud of you,” I said.

My words touched her. She ran her hand through my hair. She kissed me, her lips the flavor of cinnamon, sunlight. Then she kept her hand there, on my head, as though in an effort to bless me, to give me peace. “Something is after you, Stratton. After your soul. I don’t know what it is. But I’m going to fight with you against it.”

“It might be a mistake.”

“Whatever it is, Stratton—it makes me afraid. And it has convinced me: I’m moving in with you. Today.”