Retribution (10 page)

"What is it?"

"Don't know." The tech rose out of his chair, blocking two of the monitor screens slightly.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" She stood. "What's happening?"

"She's out right… I mean, she was practically totally under." The tech touched dials. Mary shouldered him aside a little to look at the monitors.

She had been at enough of Charlie's tests to realize that the dye had been administered— she'd been asleep for thirty minutes without realizing it— but could see nothing else untoward about the displays. "What is it? Is she in danger?"

"No, no… just… look at the brain activity here." He tapped a finger on his screen. "Those aren't sleep waves… but she's out… look." And he indicated the video which displayed Charlie's form inside the narrow tube.

Mary looked at her daughter, eyes closed, body still. "What is it?"

"I don't know. Strange, huh?" The tech pulled his pigtail around to the front and tugged on it absently for a moment. "Sorta like a poltergeist, I guess." He grinned, showing a broken tooth, and make eerie noises.

"That's not funny. She can't be hurt in there, can she? I want it shut down immediately."

"The machine's fine." The tech cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I didn't mean to upset you. Can you have a seat? I'm almost done here."

Mary held her ground, alternating her study between the video picture of Charlie and the monitor showing the MRI scan. "It's not a reaction to the dye?"

"No, ma'am. She's fine. Except she is showing brain activity on some level I've never seen before." He clucked. "Let the docs figure that one out."

"But her heart rate…"

"Everything else seems to be fine. Might be some kind of reaction to the Valium." He shrugged. "Weird."

Mary shifted her weight. She stayed on her feet for ten more long minutes till the noisy throbbing of the MRI shut down, and Charlie's quiet form came sliding out of the enclosure. By then the activity seemed to have stopped, and the second tech had brought her bed around, and the two techs transferred Charlie back onto it. Mary quickly tucked the gown and sheets around her into some slight form of modesty. Charlie's eyelids fluttered slightly.

"Mom."

"Right here."

"I'm… groggy."

"It's all over. We're going back to observation now." Mary patted her daughter with a confidence she did not have.

"I want to… go… home."

"As soon as they let us know." She lengthened her stride to keep up with the bed as the orderly took over outside the Radiology department and began to push Charlie back down the corridor.

Charlie nodded and took a deep breath.

The doctor was waiting for them in the room and looked up from his clipboard wearily, a young, thin Asian doctor, his hair sticking up in the back from a recent attempt to get a few hours of sleep, a wrinkled and threadbare white lab coat over his hospital scrubs.

"She can go. Well read the test results when we can and have them sent to…" He paged through forms on the clipboard. "Dr. Katsume and Dr. Clarkson."

"You're releasing her?"

"Soon as the Valium wears off, which shouldn't be too long, a minimum dose was ordered for her. All the rest of her vitals seem fine."

"And that's it?"

He looked at her through tired black eyes. "That's all we can do for now. She seems stable. If the MRI shows something, your own doctors will handle it. I'll have a wheelchair brought up." He paused at the room's doorway. "Is there someone here who can help you?"

"My husband should be in the building somewhere."

He nodded. "Saunders? I'll have him paged." The doctor disappeared out the door before Mary could say yea or nay.

She sighed.

Charlie stirred on the hospital bed, kicking aside the tangled sheet. She grasped the railing and tried to sit up.

"Charlie, wait a minute."

She gave a wobbly shake of her head. "I want to go home."

Faintly, Mary could hear Quentin being paged to patient discharge. She moved to her daughter as Charlie stubbornly clung to the railing on one side of the bed and tried to lower it on the other. "Let me help."

Charlie gave a little laugh. "I don't think I… have… much choice."

The phone rang sharply. Mary jumped, caught her breath, and then answered it.

"Everything all right?"

"Everything is fine, they're releasing her."

"It'll take me a minute to bring the car around, then."

"We'll wait for you in the lobby, dear."

He made a noise, one she was familiar with, not a grunt or a sigh, but a noise in between, that he often used when making a decision of some type. Then he said, "Be there as soon as I can."

"We don't even have a wheelchair yet, so don't hurry."

"All right." The phone line went dead.

Mary replaced the receiver, and stepped to Charlie. Already her daughter looked more alert as she reached for her garment bag of clothes. The IV had been removed and Charlie clumsily began to peel off the connectors to the heart monitor. Silently, Mary stood there, and helped her daughter when she could, almost as if afraid to touch her.

* * *

Charlie felt frail. More than her mother's action made her feel that way. The Valium seemed to have numbed even basic motor skills.

It took more time than she thought getting dressed. She seemed to have reached some kind of mental block as to what to do with each item, how to put it on and fasten it, what she really wanted to do with it, and the sheer effort of the concentration it took her to deal with dressing made her afraid. She did not look at her mother once while she did so, knowing that her mother might read her confusion from her face. An attendant came with the wheelchair and waited for Charlie to step into it.

Mary pushed a wing of ash-blonde hair from her face and said, "We should wait in the lobby for your father."

"All right. Are you going to sign me out?"

"I think that's one of the things he's taking care of." Mary hesitated a moment, then moved to Charlie's right side, and put her arm out, so that Charlie could lean slightly on her.

And Charlie did so, something she hadn't done in years, and her mother looked up at her, gave a short smile, and the glistening in her eyes dissolved to a tear that rolled down her face slowly. "I haven't… I haven't had to help you like this for six or seven years."

"And you won't again, either." Charlie gave her a brusque hug. "I'm fine, Mom." She took a deep breath. She could not always remember what it had been like those first few years after the operation, the weakness, the physical therapy, the recovery to the point where she could get along quite well, even without a service dog. The weakness, the trembling, the disorientation, the inability to hold her right hand steady enough to paint…

The loss of desire to paint anything at all.

The emptiness.

The frailty.

Midnight coming.

She did not want to go back.

Never.

She took a deep breath as she settled into the wheelchair. "Let's see if Daddy is waiting for us yet."

When Midnight comes, it is unrelenting. Total. A complete blackout of all five senses, like death. But it is not death, because once its curtain, its cloak, has fallen over her, it brings back the senses one by one.

Sharp.

Acute.

Painful.

But they are not her senses, they do not belong to her, they belong to this creature of darkness that possesses her. They ride piggyback on her own, thrust into her, latched on with grappling hooks, piercing her with agony.

She sometimes thought of Midnight as that Hell-raiser creature from the Clive Barker books and movies: needles everywhere, raw nerves and bringing horrifying visions with it.

Visions.

Nightmares.

Owning her soul completely until she could somehow, some way, put them down on canvas… exposing them to the light of day.

Many of the nightmares seemed not nearly so awful or frightening once she translated them into paint. Some were even quite beautiful.

"A colorist," they said of her. "Symbolic. Somewhere beyond Picasso and between Chagall and Dali. None of any of them, and similar to all."

Valor, at first her agent, and then someone who had tried to take total control of her life, had often whispered in her ear, "That's because you transform it. You take the rawness of what you see, and you purify it. You reflect it, and the essence of you, your innocence, your goodness… heals it."

She did not believe that.

Valdor wanted her to start painting again. He lived expensively and gambled even more expensively, and he had grown more and more desperate as the years went by.

She only knew that between what Midnight brought her and her hands put on the canvas, the visions changed.

Except for the two.

The first two paintings of a trilogy she would never finish.

Because when that tumor had been cut from her brain, Midnight had been excised with it.

And she could not paint any more. She had not even tried for the first six months. That had been taken up with learning how to crawl, how to walk, how to stand and gain balance, and eat and dress herself again. She made progress so rapidly that she hardly noticed the toil, and then came a point when the weakness still remained, and she knew she would never be the same again.

Quentin had gotten her the dog then. He helped her stand and steady herself, pulled her when she was too tired to walk on her own. Carried things for her. Warmed her. And when he'd gotten too old to help her any more, Monte had been retired to the same foster family who had raised him from puppyhood to training, and Valdor replaced him. A crutch… only he leaned on her far more heavily than she leaned on him.

She had not consciously done it then, and she realized now that Federico Valdor had insinuated himself into that position purposely. Urging her to depend on him, taking up the brushes again. Always insisting that he had her best interests at heart.

She had not been able to do so.

Eventually their bickering turned to quarreling, and quarreling to vicious, controlling fights and hatred.

And Quentin had gotten her Jagger when Valdor left, though he never really left. He stayed on the fringe of her life like a lingering remnant of the weakness which plagued her.

A reminder that something had struck which could never be completely cured, but would always have traces, remains, which must be endured.

Valdor had never considered her foray into commercial art as successful. Her weavings, her collages, her textile creations adorned banks, lined entire corridors of office buildings, and continued to earn her a substantial living, so that the fortune she had earned before was never touched. She would probably never have to worry about money the rest of her life if she lived modestly, yet her career was something he scorned. "Wallpaper," he scoffed, "was not art." And, of course, he did not have a percentage of her commercial career. And though the paintings she had done previously continued to go up in value, there was no doubt that their worth would be greater if she returned to her career, bolstering it with growth and new examples of her talent.

She did not know or care. She bought the Laguna bungalow she and her mother had lived in most of her young life, moved away from the modest mansion in which Quentin and her mother lived, and she was happy. Her hands grew calluses from the weavings and the loom, her back sometimes ached from bending over the potter's wheel and worktable, her jeans were often flecked with minute pieces of paper lint from making her own papers and masks.

And if she thought of Midnight at all, it was only in memory.

If it was inspiration, she would live without it.

If it was hell, she knew that someday it would return.

The attendant was wheeling her out of the elevator, when her beeper went off. She brushed the appliance, then looked at them. "I'm sorry. We're shorthanded tonight."

"I'll take her from here," Mary said softly.

The young woman hesitated, her burnished brunette hair swinging about her face. Then she sucked on a lip. "I could get into trouble… hospital rules…."

"They need you upstairs, and we'll be fine. We'll leave the wheelchair by the information desk."

The attendant had already backed up a step, retreating to the elevator. "All right." She smiled at Charlie. "You feel better now."

Mary Saunders guided the chair into a quiet corner of the lobby. "I'll go find Quentin." She brushed her lips across Charlie's forehead, her mouth dry, trembling, and Charlie felt the concern and worry her mother restrained.

"I'll be fine."

Her mother hurried off with a faint click of her low heels.

The lighting was subdued in the hospital lobby. Charlie absently checked for her watch, but her mother had not returned it to her, so she looked around the several alcoves of furniture and magazines, anywhere, for a clock. She finally spotted one on the wall in the glass-enclosed gift shop which was shuttered for the night. A plain-faced dial of a clock, its somber black hands rested at ten after three. Yet, even at this hour, one of the other lobby niches held a family, leaning close to one another as if for strength, murmuring quietly, their faces showing the strain of their vigil.

One brown-haired child had succumbed to sleep, his face bunched up against his mother's elbow in a rubbery, uncomfortable position, but his snuggled contentment apparent. Only he seemed at peace. The man and woman and brother all fidgeted and watched the elevator banks against the far wall with furrowed brows. That was the elevator, Charlie knew, which the doctor came down in after surgery.