Land of Echoes

5

Cree paced the carpet of her hotel room, waiting for the phone to be picked up in New Orleans. From her fifth-floor window, she looked down at the lights of the cars oozing along Central Avenue, the downtown artery better known to visitors as Route 66. Resonances of James Dean and Bob Dylan were few and far between now, but Cree had found them-not so much in the restored Historic 66 sections with their retro restaurants and clubs, but the dingy strip of older motels and greasy spoon diners. Somehow she felt more comfortable there; the restaurant where she'd grabbed a burger on the way back from the mountain was just the kind of place Pop used to like. Once a daughter of a working stiff, she thought, always.

Paul Fitzpatrick didn't pick up, but she got his answering machine. "Hi, it's me," she said, feeling awkward about the message she needed to leave. "I'm in Albuquerque. At the Hotel Blue-I don't know why it's named that. My talk went really well. I ran into my old mentor, Mason Ambrose." Pause. "Well, I didn't run into him, he showed up and kidnapped me. He sandbagged me completely. Brought a woman to meet me? A client? I kind of agreed to look into a problem at this school she runs over near the Navajo reservation." Kind of was inaccurate: She'd already canceled her flight back to Seattle and arranged to ride with Julieta McCarty to the school tomorrow. "She was desperate, and it looks like it could be a really important case. There's this kid who… Well, I shouldn't really talk about it. But I won't be showing up this week after all. I'm hoping we can reschedule my visit, maybe put it off… oh, three weeks? Can you get some time free then?" With all her hesitations, this was becoming a lengthy message, and it was all wrong anyway, no emotional weight. Hurrying, she tried again: "I'm really disappointed. I was really looking forward to seeing you sooner. I miss you. I hope you've had a fabulous day. Call me, okay?"

Bleep.

Relationships in the technological era! she cursed.

She put down the phone and got a can of Coors from the minibar. Back at the window, she popped it and took a cold swig. If only she'd taken an immediate dislike to Julieta McCarty. If only Mason hadn't piqued her curiosity despite her fury at him. If only it didn't involve a kid whose life really did seem to be on the line.

Down on Central, a police car sparked as it swerved through slower traffic, turned onto a side street, and finally disappeared into the maze of neighborhood streets. A moment later, an ambulance sped from the other direction and turned onto the same street. Some desperate human situation out there in the sprawling city. It was a lonesome view.

She put down the beer to dial Deirdre's number. Nine o'clock on a Thursday night-no, eight in Seattle-they wouldn't be in bed yet at her sister's house.

One of the twins answered. Hard to tell which on the basis of one word.

"Hi," Cree said tentatively.

"No, this is Zoe."

"I didn't mean 'Hy' as in Hyacinth, I meant 'Hi' as in 'hello.'" This was ritual vaudeville they went through whenever Cree got Zoe. When she got Hyacinth, the stock response was, "How did you know it was me?"

In the background, Cree heard the cacophony of some TV show. She could picture Deirdre and Don and the two girls, sitting in their snug Craftsman home, the lights warm on the nice fabrics Dee had done their living room in. A low-key Thursday night, some family time. Probably watching the Discovery Channel-it was something about crocodiles-and munching microwave popcorn. The image offered an unsettling contrast to the blank, black hotel room window and the naked urban sky.

"Are you still in New Mexico?" Zoe asked.

"Yeah. Actually, the reason I called was to tell you guys I won't be able to make your birthday party on Tuesday."

"Just a minute," Zoe ordered. "Can you guys turn it down?" Back to Cree: "What did you say?"

"I said I've got to stay on here for a few days, maybe longer. Kind of an emergency. I won't be able to get there for your birthday party."

"Oh, man. Mom's going to be p-… um, peeved." Zoe muffled the receiver, but Cree could still hear the scowl in her voice as she called out to her family, "Great! Aunt Cree isn't coming to the party!"

"I'm really sorry, Zoe. I've got some presents for you girls, though. I miss you like crazy. Hey, you should have seen where I went today-this tram ride that went up the mountain here? Like being in an airplane. Zoe, seriously, you'd have loved it."

Zoe didn't answer. Cree heard the noise of the receiver being handled and then Hyacinth was there. "Hi, Aunt Cree. Why can't you come?"

"Oh, there are some people who need my help here. It's an emergency."

"A ghost emergency?"

"Yeah," Cree said, wondering if that was quite the way to describe it.

"Well, I hope it turns out all right for them. Do you think it's significant?"

The two girls were identical twins, yet they were as different as the Fourth of July and Easter. As always, Hy had gone to the heart of the issue, instantly feeling concern for the client. Just going on eleven years old but so adult. "Significant": She'd heard Cree use the word before.

"Could be, yes. I should talk to your mom now, Hy. Sorry I can't make it Tuesday. Have a great party. I love you girls like a pile of elephants, okay? Big love, right? Tell Zoe for me."

When Deirdre came on, she wasn't peeved but concerned. Cree would have preferred peeved. Dee was two years younger than Cree and, Cree had always thought, much prettier and more grounded, in enviable control of her life. Her voice was smoothly modulated, the tone of a mother and middle-school teacher habituated to setting a good example.

"Everything all right?"

"Sure. Just a case coming up suddenly. You know."

"An important one, I take it."

"It involves a student at a school for Navajo kids. It's urgent or I wouldn't bag out on the party. I know you could have used my help."

"We could have used your company. We'll miss you." Dee hesitated. "But what about New Orleans? Weren't you going to go see Paul?"

"Yeah. Well. I'll probably go in a couple of weeks." Deirdre had kept the question casual, but Cree knew the concern was there and it pissed her off that everything she did scared people. That any change of plan might signal a problem in her relationship with Paul. Her relationship with the world of the living.

She injected some briskness into her tone: "Anyway, I'm here looking out over the infamous Route 66, and I've been having a great time. The food here is terrific-I could get addicted to the green chili. Everybody you meet is really nice. And the landscape is truly majestic. I don't mind the idea of spending more time here."

"Sounds great," Dee said, a little distantly.

They were quiet for a moment as Cree figured out what she'd wanted to ask. "Dee, I have a question for you. About kids. I feel like I'm kind of out of my league with them, the only ones I hang out with are yours? So I was thinking about this boy I'll be dealing with, what my underlying priority should be. I thought you'd be a good person to ask. As a mom."

"I can't claim to be any expert at that. But give me a try."

Cree thought about how to phrase it. "What's the main thing you do for your kids?"

"I don't understand."

" Well-what do they need most? What's the most important thing you do for them? Not to feed or clothe them, but emotionally. Developmentally. To, I don't know, prepare them for life."

"Oh, that. And here I thought you were asking me something weighty and complex!" Dee joked. She thought about it for a long moment, and Cree could hear the TV in the background again: The female crocodile will guard her nest fiercely, but once her eggs are hatched these baby crocs are on their own in a hostile world. "Well, when I have a moment to even think about this without noise and distraction and pressing needs, I guess I think of my main job as helping the girls know who they are."

"Explain."

"Maybe I emphasize that because I've got twins, and I don't ever want to treat them as interchangeable personalities? But any mother will agree. A child should know who she is. What she wants, what she doesn't want. What she believes in, what her values are."

"Mmmm," Cree agreed.

"She should know the difference between what comes from inside herself, what she gets from her family, and what she absorbs from popular culture. If a kid doesn't know that, she can't make good choices. Right now, for my girls, it's differentiating between personal values and peer pressure-like, oh, whether to try smoking or not, even if friends are. Soon it'll be how far to go with a boyfriend. Then it'll be what career she wants to devote her life to, or what man. Or what values to fight for. So I see my job as laying that foundation of self-knowledge. I'm always kind of asking them to look at who they are, to make decisions based on what they see in themselves." Dee cleared her throat. "That is, if I'm doing my job right. Which I manage, oh, about ten percent of the time."

"Uh-huh," Cree said skeptically. Dee was a terrific mother. In her mind she tried on the question for size: Who are you, Tommy Keeday?

"I don't know if any of this applies to your kid out there," Dee went on. "But you need it all your life, right? How can you do anything if you don't know who you are?"

So very true, Cree was thinking after they'd said good-bye. Life was indeed an ongoing quest to discover who you were. Or maybe that was just the perspective of the metaphysically inclined, widowed sister, an inadvertent empath who was constantly exploring the nebulous interface between self and others and almost always discovering only uncertainties.

The night scene out the window was bothering Cree, but still she didn't draw the drapes. She looked down at her address book, the list of names and numbers. Why was it that the first thing she did when she took on a big investigation was this-this ritual of cutting off contact? Every significant case seemed to demand that she cancel something, put family and friends on hold, postpone things. Make excuses for why she wasn't a normal human being. Say good-bye as if she might not be coming back. Give hollow assurances she was being smart and taking care of herself. It was a rite of making ready. Like an ocean-voyaging ship, casting off the ropes as it got ready to leave shore, she had to sever her ties with the normal world. A way of isolating herself. Of becoming a woman alone.

On one level, that sounded scary, but in fact she liked the feeling. She couldn't deny that it gave her a sense of strength and self-sufficiency. It was like the feeling she used to savor on stormy days when she was a little girl: putting on her big yellow raincoat and rain hat, borrowing Mom's umbrella, and going out to sit in the pouring rain. That feeling of solitude and tidy self-containment. Everything sopping and wild around you, but you were dry and safe in your glistening yellow armor. Everything you really needed, right there.

She dialed Edgar's home number, and he picked up after two rings. She was glad to hear his voice.

"It's me".

"Hey, Cree. How'd it go?"

"The talk? Really well. The other presenters were great, too."

" But-?"

She'd said, what, a dozen words to him, and he already could tell she was off balance. Suddenly Cree missed him painfully, missed his lanky body and wry grin and the way it felt to be around a man who knew her so well. She wished she could tell him that, but it was best to keep away from the complex of feelings there. Since last spring, when she'd begun an unexpected and still largely undeveloped romance with Paul Fitzpatrick in New Orleans, Ed had pulled away considerably. It was his way of giving her room to explore it without pressure from him. But though she had accepted the necessity of distance, she hated it, and in the last few months she'd learned just how deep her ambivalences ran. Maybe it wasn't just Ed who felt more than friendship. If Ed were here tonight, they'd go out and explore Albuquerque and have a good time. They'd drink and dance-he was a knockout dancer-and confide and tell bad-taste jokes as they walked the night streets together. The thought confused her and she put it away.

"A case dropped into my lap," she explained. "No, it was thrown there very deliberately. By Mason Ambrose."

"Ambrose! That old bastard. No kidding."

"Yeah, and it's a doozy. There's a boy with… well, with something wrong with him. Mason calls it 'a ghost in a bottle' for us to study."

Ed paused, and she could imagine his long face frowning. "Like what-the kid's possessed?"

"Something like that, yeah. So I agreed to go look into it, starting tomorrow. I was thinking you and Joyce should get down here."

"Jesus, Cree-"

"I know."

"Do you really?" The condescension, she knew, was just the sound of Ed's protective reflexes kicking in. "Hey, Cree, let me spell something out for you. You're the most vulnerable person I've ever known. You almost died in New Orleans last spring. You're like a psychic petri dish, okay? An entity that can move right in on a normal person's nervous system is going to find you a pretty tempting little-"

"Not necessarily."

"Oh, come on! Even a nice ghost puts your sanity at risk. You get 'possessed' by our goddamned clients!"

Of course, he was right. But, as always, she felt an unreasoning flash of resentment at him for pointing it out.

"This isn't The Exorcist, Ed," she said witheringly.

"How do you know? You haven't been there yet. You have no idea what you're dealing with."

Cree would have retorted sharply, but a shiver took her, as if her body recognized the danger her mind refused to accept. She opened her mouth and shut it again and listened to the hiss of the telephone line for several moments.

"Cree," Ed said into the silence. His voice had changed, and now he just sounded concerned. Dear Ed: He'd never shown much stomach for fighting with her. "Listen to me. Let me say one thing. Take a step back, okay? Third person. I'm just a guy in Seattle whose… friend, Cree, does risky things. Okay. But ever since he's known her, she's been very absorbed in her husband's death, right? Her husband, who appeared to her exactly once for about thirty seconds ten years ago, practically lives in her. I mean, possession, obsession, where's the line?"

Cree shut her eyes, not wanting to hear this.

He went on, still more quietly: "In any case, we know you're vulnerable. You're temperamentally predisposed to this kind of thing. Okay, suppose it's not a monster out of Damian III or whatever, fine, maybe it's just a lost personality who's so afraid to die it lives parasitically on any nervous system it can cling to. So what? You let it into you, you're still possessed. And who do Joyce and I and your family go to for help? There's no Cree Black to help us out." He paused and then finished deliberately: "Cree. If there is one parapsychological phenomenon you personally should absolutely stay away from, it's possession."

'He was right, and there was no logical rebuttal because this wasn't a logical thing. There wasn't really anything she could say. "Ed," she said fondly.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just Ed."

She listened to his breathing. After a moment she heard a rustling at the other end, Edgar moving papers around on his desk, then the faint pecking that she knew was him pulling up the calendar on his digital assistant.

"Sunday," he said resignedly. "Couldn't possibly get there before Sunday night."

When the phone rang at ten, she knew who it was before she snatched it off the hook. Her heart was suddenly pounding. "Hello, you."

Paul chuckled. "Sorry I missed your call. I was up on the roof. Hurricane Isidore's arriving, first big blow of the year. I had to get the furniture down or it'd end up in Baton Rouge. Luckily it's more rain than wind." His voice was warm with just a faint luster of sunny Southern vowels, and the sound of it transported her back there, to his rooftop deck where they'd drunk wine and talked and kissed. The big umbrella and teak table and chairs, the nighttime views of the French Quarter, narrow streets lined by lovely decrepit buildings and secret courtyards. The lush vegetation of New Orleans and the humid air with its sleepy, sexual charge.

"How are you?" she asked.

"Well, I was pretty good until I got your message. I had big plans for when you got here."

"Think you can rearrange things so you can take some time in another few weeks?"

"I'll try." His tone suggested he was put out, as he had every right to be. For a clinical psychologist with a highly successful private practice, it was not easy to carve time away.

"The situation here is a crisis, or I'd never-"

"Somebody else's crisis. Isn't that the key to surviving the psychotherapy business, Cree? Getting some distance on it? I get people in crisis every week. You learn to put up a little wall that keeps your own life intact, or else-"

"I'm not good with walls."

He made a frustrated sound. "Okay, a levee then. A dike. Just high enough to keep floodwaters out, right? Look, I don't want to argue about the right metaphor. I miss you. I want to see you. I've been checking the days off my calendar!"

She accepted his chastening, letting a silence give them some distance from their dissonance. "What kind of big plans?" she asked at last.

"Frankly, very sexy plans that involved superb wine, candlelight, and good music on the stereo. As well as tickets to a couple of jazz concerts." There was still some reproach in his voice. "Jogging together up at the lake in the morning. Dinner at Antoine's. Then some more of the wine and candlelight thing."

She thought of his bed in the tall room with its lazy ceiling fan; the fascinating scent of his pillows, his smell overlaid on clean linen. He had a wonderful body and a sweet physicality, and the urgency was there for both of them. But it hadn't been easy, either the first time she'd returned or her second visit in midsummer. She'd felt so inexperienced, so confused by her memories of Mike's body and the lovemaking they'd shared so long ago-a sense of betrayal that she had to fight off. And Paul had been a man in disarray after his shocking experience in Lafayette Cemetery; she suspected part of him feared her, as the agent of his shattering transformation-maybe something of what she felt around Mason Ambrose.

And still it had been sweet. Enough to make her ache, thinking about him now.

"That sounds splendid," she said shyly. "I had the same general plan."

He sighed. "So it's a crisis. And it's a case that promises to be instructive?"

"Yes."

"You want to tell me about it?"

"I can't. I don't know enough yet, and if I did it'd be confidential. I'll tell you when I can, I promise."

"Just tell me which way we're going here, Cree. Forward or backward?"

"Forward," she said immediately. "Of course, Paul!" But who really knew where it would go? It was so new. Untested, uncertain. They were not at the stage where either could say with absolute conviction, with the sweet release that came of confession, "I love you." And while distance could obstruct the path of love, raising doubts that were unwarranted, it could also nurture false hopes and illusions that more sustained contact might set straight.

"Forward!" he cried. A cavalry charge.

She laughed with him, and her doubts receded a bit. They talked about other things. Paul said he'd work on his calendar and let her know when to make reservations. She told him about the conference, about Albuquerque. After a while the sense of intimacy grew, and the plastic phone became more and more a frustrating impediment. Phones required talk, and talk required thought, and there were times when rationality was simply not the right process. Reason was based on inquiry, and inquiry was based on doubt, and doubt was not good for building something between a man and a woman. Your body was often so much wiser.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"Long-distance relationships," Cree said. "Miserable, huh?"

"All relationships are long-distance," he told her.

She was still awake when the front desk called to tell her that a package had arrived for her. When they sent it up, she found it was an overstuffed manila envelope from Mason, with a terse note scrawled on the front: Some materials you might find useful.

She opened it to find a two-inch stack of photocopied articles about possession. The top page featured a medieval woodcut of some saint exorcising a naked victim who lay on the ground with a snake or worm coiling endlessly out of his mouth.

She read through the first few pages, a historical survey of possession compiled by somebody or other. Typically, symptoms came in cycles, periods of normalcy giving way to "fits" in which the victim fell down, went into convulsions, made contorted movements, screamed and shrieked, "displayed a frightening and horrible countenance" that often included an alarmingly extended tongue. Other classical symptoms: vomiting up strange objects such as toads, stones, broken glass, pins, worms. Breathing problems such as choking, coughing, wheezing. Foaming at the mouth, foul body smell, speaking in tongues, speaking in an altered voice. Blasphemy, hypersexuality.

She turned hurriedly past that section to the summary of purported causes. Historically, the victim was thought to be inhabited by a demon or "unclean spirit," a Satanic entity conjured or inflicted by someone nearby, usually an old woman or man who was thought to be a witch. Such accusations often resulted in the torture and execution of the accused, usually by burning or crushing. In later centuries, medical explanations came into favor, with the torture reserved for the victim: physical "purging" treatments such as whipping, immersion in ice water, lifelong incarceration in madhouses, exotic drug therapies. Toward the end of this list were the modern interpretations: epilepsy, hysteria, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder. Though the recent perspective was more enlightened, contemporary cures didn't strike Cree as all that improved: electroshock therapy, lobotomy, mind-altering pharmaceuticals.

Feeling shaky, she put the stack on the desk. The woodcut bothered her: its dark, blocky rendering, the agonized victim, the serpent demon's nasty face. She knew she should read more tonight, but she didn't feel up for it. Instead, she put the whole pile back in its envelope as if that would contain the superstition and terror, keep it from getting loose in the room.

Thanks loads, Mason, she thought.

Her beer had gone flat and metallic-tasting from sitting so long in its can, but she finished it, welcoming the soothing effect of the alcohol. The numbing effect, whatever.

She dialed Joyce's number, got her answering machine, left a message asking her to coordinate with Ed and fly down as soon as she could. Then she turned out the lights and got into bed. Sleep didn't come for a long time. The fat envelope waiting on the desk bothered her. She thought about Paul and about the odd oscillations between doubt and warmth they'd just been through. Then she wondered about what Ed had said, about just where the line between preoccupation and obsession was, and, further up the spectrum, the line between obsession and possession. There wasn't any easy answer.

Later, closer to the void, she wondered where Joyce was. Where Tommy Keeday was. Where Cree Black was.