Fool's Journey (29 page)

They waited in
a private room near the intensive care unit. It had been hours since Deirdre,
hanging onto a thread of life, had been taken to surgery. Panda, one eye
blackened, slept fitfully in a chair.

Manny stood
staring at a jigsaw puzzle that had been completed except for one piece. It
seemed like everything was a symbol. Despite dread that washed through his
body, his mind circled the small clues, the piece of the puzzle that would
reveal the whole picture.

There were
traps in the universe, to be sure, and one had wrapped itself around Deirdre,
using various agents with their own particular motives. Freemont Willard,
Eunice Fisher—even perhaps the spirit of that long-dead poet, Diana Vibert,
stretched her wraith-like fingers into the mix. But that didn’t explain
everything. The incident that had started it all—the cutting of Deirdre’s hair
in the market—remained unexplained.

It didn’t fit
with Willard’s words and actions. He wanted to conquer. He wanted to humiliate.
How could it possibly have served his purpose to scare Deirdre first? And how
would a man of his age accomplish it anyway? He might have hired someone, but
surely that presented too much risk for exposure.

And this
aunt—she had only been able to find Deirdre through her mother, and that was
after the incident at the Market. A piece of the puzzle was missing—or maybe
there was more than one puzzle that he’d tried to assemble from the same
pieces.

The aroma of
coffee announced morning in the ward. When Panda awoke, she took the children
to the cafeteria to get breakfast. Manny sat down with his aunt and put his
head in his hands. She didn’t offer him false comfort, just rubbed his back
between the shoulder blades as she had when he was a child.

A doctor still
in his scrubs came into the room. “Mr. Ruiz?”

Manny stood up
and faced him.

“You’re the
boyfriend?”

He nodded.

“She’s out of
surgery, still alive, but just barely. The bullet grazed the abdominal aorta,
but it missed major organs. She lost a lot of blood, though, before we could
patch her up. We’ll know more in a few hours.”

“When can I see
her?”

He hesitated a
moment, then said, “You need to suit up, but I think you can take a peek at her
when she’s out of recovery. Just for a few seconds, though.”

“Do you like being dead?”

Emily Dickinson was making polite conversation
as she poured out chamomile tea from a china pot.

“I don’t think I am dead,” Deirdre replied.

Emily Dickinson pursed her lips and handed her
the cup. She looked exactly like the famous portrait in the anthology: dressed
entirely in white, sleek dark hair pulled back, prominent eyes, the ghost of a
smile.

In the distance there were other tables. Couples
and small groups gathered around teapots and martini shakers. Some walked in
pairs. This must be the Dead Poets’ Society, she thought, suppressing a giggle.
She drifted among them, recognizing a few faces. Ginsberg was reassuring Will
Shakespeare that the sonnet wasn’t really a dead form. Walt Whitman played
awkward table tennis with Robert Browning as a grinning skeleton in a top hat
kept score. When the ball went astray, an energetic spaniel chased after it.

Why isn’t anyone writing, she wondered? Emily
Dickinson reappeared at her side and whispered, “We don’t have anything left to
say.”

           
Manny stood by Deirdre’s bedside, an
island amid tubes and wires. Her eyelids were fluttering and her lips moved
slightly. Surely that must be a good sign. She was still terribly pale, though,
and her skin was the texture of faded flowers. How, he raged, could his sweet,
strong Deirdre be reduced to this frail mound?

           
He had failed her. He had come into
her life to protect her, and he had failed.

There was no excuse, no defense. He wished he could take one
of her hands in his, connect with what life she had left, but he had been
warned not to touch her or even step too near.

Then, what sounded like a sigh, as soft as a kitten mewing,
escaped her lips. She was trying to say something, he knew, and that gave him
hope.

“That’s all the time we can give you,” a nurse said from
behind him.

“She’s trying to say something. I’m right here, Deirdre,” he
said.

“Sometimes it seems that way,” she told him gently. “When
you want to hear something, sometimes you do.”

“No. Just listen a minute.”

The nurse nodded. Desperately he prayed he’d been right.
Talk to me, Deirdre. I’m right here.

In the background, the machines that surrounded her whirred
and hummed. A steady beep kept pace with her heart. Manny watched the gentle
rise and fall of her soft breathing. The nurse put a hand on his arm, but he
shook it away.

“You’ll have to go now, she whispered. “You can come back in
a few hours if…” Her unfinished words hung in the air.

If?

Rage and sorrow caught in his throat. If he left, if he even
blinked, he knew she would die. Ignoring the nurse, he dropped to his knees and
his heart cried out for angels to hear his prayer.

           
Rosa Ruiz watched Manny disappear
into the intensive care unit. He looked to her as if he had become hollow. Her
own heart was a mere husk as well, so empty a sigh could blow it away.

           
From the nurses’ station came the
buzz of conversation. They spoke as if she were invisible.

           
“Dr. Whitney’s breaking rules
again.”

           
“You mean letting the boyfriend go
back? He wouldn’t have if there were anyone else in the unit.”

           
“He’d better watch it. One of these
days some hard ass will complain.”

           
“I know, but he’s a pushover for
lovers. If he can, he tries to let them say goodbye.”

           
Goodbye? Manny wasn’t going
anywhere. Then she realized what they meant. Deirdre was going to die.

           
She put her head in her hands,
feeling more helpless than ever before. Why had she and Manny been sent into
Deirdre’s life if it were only to come to this? Had Deirdre lived so deeply, so
desperately, in the past that there was no room for a future? Some ghosts
couldn’t be outrun, but Deirdre had done her best.

Rosa shook her head. All that was left for her to do was
pray. She fumbled in her bag for her old wooden rosary, the beads worn smooth
from decades of petitions. She prayed in the old Latin she remembered from her
girlhood.
Ave Maria, gratia plena
. Behind
the ancient words her heart cried out: Holy Mother, keep our hearts from
breaking.

XXXVIII.

           
Panda returned and shooed the
children toward a pile of communal toys. A flutter of ragged worries swirled
about her like imps in cinders.

“Any change?”

           
Mrs. Ruiz shook her head. “Manny’s
in with her now.”

           
“I should never have left her,”
Panda said, dropping heavily onto a chair. “I knew she was in trouble and I
left her anyway. And then – how stupid can I be? – I brought that hideous doll
back.”

           
“Don’t worry, Panda. That’s not what
hurt her.”

           
“I need to beat myself up, Mrs.
Ruiz. Please don’t get in my way. Self-flagellation is my only way of dealing
with this.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz patted her hand. “You
can’t help with thoughts like that, Panda. Don’t let the sadness win.”

           
A few minutes later, a young man
walked into the waiting room, carrying a bunch of red carnations. Dressed in
jeans and a rumpled flannel shirt, he slid into a chair and let his backpack
drop to the floor.

           
“Are you friends of Professor
Kildeer?” he asked.

           
“You’re one of her students?” Mrs.
Ruiz asked.

           
He nodded. “I’m Adam. I’m taking her
Advanced Poetry.”

           
“How did you know to come here?”

           
“It was kind of weird. I was away
for the weekend and didn’t get back until this morning. I ran into Professor
Seymour on campus and she told me about Deirdre, so I got the flowers and came
right over.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz searched his face. There
were no lies there. “Professor Seymour?” she repeated.

           
“Yeah,” Adam said. “I don’t know
what she was doing there on a Sunday. I took a class from her a couple of terms
ago, but I didn’t think she even knew my name.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz leaned back against the
sofa, turning the boy’s words over in her head. It couldn’t be, shouldn’t be.
Manny had seen Bess Seymour’s body taken away to the morgue. The dead might
call to the dead, but to urge the living to the living made her wonder if there
was a thread of hope.

           
“It’s nice of you to come,” Panda
said. “I’m Panda.”

           
“Hi. I feel really bad. The other
students in my class weren’t nice to her, even though she tried hard.”

           
Panda shrugged. “That’s kind of the
way with teachers and students sometimes. Never the twain shall meet.”

“It’s not just
that.” He looked at them through the strands of his disheveled hair. “A while
ago, someone I used to be friends with did something really mean to her. I felt
bad about it, but I couldn’t rat him out.”

Mrs. Ruiz
leaned forward. “What did he do?”

Adam grimaced.
“It was a really stupid game. We were doing this thing on campus at night. We’d
break into the professors’ offices – it was really easy – and we’d take one
thing. Just something little. One of Professor Tracy’s pipes. Professor
Willard’s stapler. It was just to see if we could do it.”

A chill settled
on the room. “And Deirdre . . .Professor Kildeer?”

“She was one of
the last ones and some people were bored by then. This guy Todd said we should
do something more risky, something more personal. Last weekend some of us were
down at the Market and we saw her there.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz caught Panda’s eye and the
quick mental communication between them was acknowledged in a blink. Nothing
had been what they thought it was. There had been no single thread of evil in
Deirdre’s recent days, only a scattering of angry stitches.

           
Deirdre had said it once, that the
occurrences felt like the layers of meaning in a poem she couldn't comprehend.
Some part of her had known the symbols had been different.

           
“So that’s what happened,” Panda
went on. “The hair – your friend cut it.”

           
Adam’s voice broke. “I’ve hardly
slept since then. I didn’t want to go to class the next day. I didn’t want to
see what he’d done, but I went anyway. She twisted her hair up so it didn’t
show, but I knew anyway. Todd looked so smug, so pleased with himself. Look, I
really like her, I mean I . . .”

           
“It’s okay, Adam,” Mrs. Ruiz said.
“You didn’t mean for it to happen. Sometimes things go crazy.”

           
"He told me what he did later,
with the wreath we saw her try on. It was sick and mean."

           
"Shhhh." She put a hand on
his head and blessed him silently.

           
Deirdre poured out tea from a silver pot
into pale china cups. Across from her sat an ancient Chinese who nodded and
smiled. On his red silk robe dragons danced and breathed fire. Their tails
sprayed gold dust in puffy trails as they leapt and circled mountains.

“Some are filled with life,” he
whispered. “Others are empty with death. Some hold fast to life, and thereby
perish, for life is an abstraction."

           
He made sense, although
she could not have explained why. She tried to picture life and read the
difference between what had been and what was. Something tugged at the edge of
her mind, persistent and worrisome.

           
"Do not heed
the old echoes," the Chinese said. "They are no more real than spring
or winter. They are only . . ."

           
“Katie!
Look at me!”

           
Deirdre
tore herself from the smiling face and spinning dragons and found herself
staring into her mother’s eyes. She was young and smiling and full of radiance.

           
“Mama!
You’re all right!” Deirdre reached for her mother, stretching her hands
forward.