Black Swan Rising (33 page)

“Where’s
here,
Jay?” I shouted at the phone while waiting for the next message on the queue. It was Jay again.

“Hey, Garet, I realized after I hung up that if you hadn’t gotten my previous messages you might not know where I am . . . or what’s happened. Anyway, I’m at St. Vincent’s. It’s Beck—” His voice cracked on Becky’s name. “She tried to kill herself. Please get here as soon as you can.”

I ran to the hospital without bothering to change my clothes. Only when I was riding the elevator up (to the psych ward—that’s where the information desk told me Becky was) did I realize I smelled like the East River, a swampy miasma that seemed to capture my situation perfectly. I was slowly being drowned. Dee had got to my father, and then he’d got to my best friend. Who would be next? Would I lose everyone and everything if I continued to try to stop him?

I found Becky’s room, but when I first stepped in, I was sure I had gotten the number wrong. The person in the bed couldn’t be Becky. Sure, Becky was short, but this person barely swelled the tightly drawn sheets. And when had Becky ever lain that still? I’d shared a bed with her on lots of overnights
and spent the night fending off her thrashing limbs. This person lay flat on her back, her white, muffled arms lying on top of the sheets on either side of her like large cotton Q-tips. Even her hair, which usually bristled with electricity, lay limp and dead against the white hospital sheets.

But then I noticed the slumped form in the chair beside the bed and recognized Jay. The minute he saw me he sprang to his feet—Jay, who ambled through life,
sprang
to his feet and threw his arms around me.

“Garet, thank God. I thought something had happened to you too.”

“I’m okay. I lost my phone . . . and I couldn’t get home last night. . . . Damn, Jay! What happened? Is she going to be all right? Has she been unconscious since . . .” I looked down at Becky’s heavily swaddled wrists. The bandages went up to the crooks of her elbows.

“She was out when I found her,” he said. “The EMTs said she’d lost a lot of blood, but she came to for a little while after they gave her a transfusion.”

“You found her?” I looked hard at Jay. He’d fainted in biology class when we had to prick our fingers to test our blood types. I noticed dark stains on the knees of his jeans and a red smear on the cuff of his plaid flannel shirt. “Oh, Jay, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

He shook his head, his hair swaying lankly against his pale cheeks. He had dark rings under his eyes. “She came over last night to talk about the record contract. I thought she’d come to argue with me some more, but she was . . . contrite.”

“Contrite? Becky?”

“Yeah, I know. It was really weird. She brought a bottle of wine and told me she was sorry she’d been trying to pressure
me into signing the contract. She said it didn’t matter, that getting a big contract wasn’t worth it if it was going to screw up our friendship. That it was okay if we spent the rest of our lives warming up for bigger bands and playing small-town gigs. We drank the whole bottle and watched a movie on TV . . .
The Red Shoes
. . . which was funny, because it wasn’t in the newspaper listings or the cable guide. Becky was really excited because she said it was her favorite movie. She even insisted that we TiVo it for you. Becky opened up another bottle of wine that we found in your dad’s cupboard and we microwaved popcorn. It was nice . . . like those nights in high school when we used to stay up late watching old movies. It was foggy outside and Becky said that made it cozy—”

“Foggy? It wasn’t foggy where I was,” I said, remembering the clear sky above Governors Island.

Jay gave me a funny look. “I don’t know where
you
were last night, but it was foggy here in the Village. We couldn’t even see out the windows. Becky said it was a good thing we weren’t watching a horror movie . . . only, well I’d forgotten how creepy that movie is . . . you know that scene where the girl in the story puts on the red shoes and she dances herself to death? Well, Becky said sometimes she feels like she’s wearing those red shoes and she just wishes she could stop . . . stop touring, stop promoting the band, stop worrying over whether we were going to make it big or not. Just stop. And then when we got to the scene where Moira Shearer throws herself in front of the train, I noticed that Becky was crying. I should have realized something was wrong, but somehow it all just made me tired. I kind of felt like I’d been dancing my feet off like Moira Shearer. I fell asleep on the couch, and when I
woke up, Becky wasn’t there. I almost went back to sleep, but I heard a sound coming from the bathroom. A tapping noise. It got all confused in my head with the movie and I thought it was the ballerina from the story . . . dancing. It was so annoying I finally got up and went to see . . .”

He covered his face with his hands as if he could block out the memory of what he’d seen in the bathroom.

“The tapping came from the shower curtain blowing in the wind. Becky must have opened the window, because I’m pretty sure it was closed earlier. Maybe she thought about jumping, but not even Becky could fit out that tiny window. She’d found a razor blade in the medicine cabinet. She’d lined the floor with towels, so the blood wouldn’t get on the tile. You know how neat she can be.” Jay gulped air. I put my arm around him and patted his back until he was able to talk again. “I wrapped the towels around her wrists as tight as I could and called 911 right away. The EMT said that if they hadn’t gotten to her, she’d have been dead in another half hour. When I think that I almost turned over on the couch and went back to sleep—”

“But you didn’t, Jay! You got up and saved her.” I didn’t know how to explain to Jay what forces he’d been battling to stay awake. I was sure that the fog Becky had let in the apartment had both coaxed her into trying to take her own life and lulled Jay asleep. “And it’s not your fault she did this—”

“My fault . . .” The voice came from the bed. Jay and I looked down and saw that Becky’s eyes were open. They looked huge in her white face. “I’m so sorry . . .”

“It’s okay, Becky.” I sat down on the bed next to her and reached for her hand. Her fingers felt limp and cold. Looking
down at those huge eyes in that pale face reminded me of Melusine as she had melted into the rock. I squeezed Becky’s hand as if I could keep her from slipping away by holding on to her tightly. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”

Becky licked her dry, chapped lips. “But I did. I just thought it would be easier. . . . I felt tired of trying so hard. I mean, who am I kidding, trying to be a rock star? I should have gone to law school like my mother said . . . Oh,
shit
! Is my mother here? Does she know?”

“She’s on her way up from Fort Lauderdale,” Jay said. “I’m sorry, Beck. I had to call her.”

Tears slid down Becky’s face. I plucked a tissue from the box on the bedside table and dabbed at them. “This is going to kill her. What was I thinking?”

“You weren’t thinking, sweetie. You were”—the words
under a spell
occurred to me, but I bit them back—“under too much pressure. You’ll get some rest . . . and some help . . . and you’ll get better. I promise.”

Becky nodded, but her eyes were already drooping closed again. I sat by her, holding her hand, trying to think how I was going to make good on that promise.

I stayed with Becky through most of the morning, taking turns with Jay watching her. When Jay relieved me, I went to see my father. I had a bad moment when I walked into his room and found it empty, but then a nurse came in and told me that my father and his friend had gone to the sunroom. I hurried down the hall and found Roman sitting up in his wheelchair playing bridge with Zach and two Chinese ladies whom he introduced as Minnie and Sue. His color looked good and he was smiling.
After they finished their hand, I took Zach aside and told him about Becky.

“Poor thing,” Zach said, shaking his head. “I know she’s been under a lot of pressure.”

“Has she?” I asked, but then without waiting for an answer, went on, “I don’t know if we should tell Roman. I’m afraid it will remind him of when Santé killed himself.” As I said it, I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have told Zach. I’d always worried that he might be suicidal.

But although he looked saddened by the news, Zach seemed remarkably calm. “I see what you mean,” he said. “It
is
similar. Santé killed himself just before his biggest show, and Becky’s band is right on the edge of making it really big.” He smiled ruefully. “Sometimes I think it’s easier to be a failure.”

The remark startled me. All these years that Zach hadn’t painted, I’d thought he was lacking in inspiration. I’d never considered that he was protecting himself from heartache by not trying too hard.

“You’re not a failure, Zach,” I said, putting my hand on his arm. “You’re . . . family. I don’t know what I would have done these last few days without you.”

Zach’s eyes widened and gleamed. I was instantly afraid he might start weeping, but he squared his shoulders and pulled himself out of his characteristic slouch. “Don’t worry about Roman and Becky,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on both of them. You do whatever you have to do. I’ll hold down the fort here.”

Despite Zach’s assurances I hated to leave Becky, but at eleven a nurse delivered a message to me from Oberon.
Meet me at 2:00 on the steps in front of City Hall. Wear your welding clothes.

My welding clothes? Then I remembered that the only elemental I’d yet to meet was fire. Will had said that Oberon was saving the
fiercer guides
for last. I couldn’t begin to imagine what would be more dangerous than jumping off the Empire State Building or traveling through the city’s water system in purely molecular form, but I did know that I’d be better prepared for whatever was in store for me if I got some sleep.

What finally prompted me to get out was spotting Joe Kiernan. I was coming back from the cafeteria when I saw him heading into Becky’s room. I stopped in the hallway and waved Jay down when he came out immediately afterward.

“What’s
he
doing here?” I asked. “Does he think what happened to Becky had something to do with the robbery?”

Jay stared at me. “How could he?” Then he shrugged. “He came by earlier too. He said he just wanted to see, as a friend, how Becky was doing.”

I didn’t trust Detective Kiernan to do anything casually, but I couldn’t imagine how he’d know that Becky’s suicide attempt was connected to John Dee—and I wasn’t about to try to explain it to him. “I think you’d better keep an eye on him,” I told Jay. “I have to go home for a while.”

Jay nodded. “I think you’d better get some rest. You’re beginning to sound paranoid.”

I went home and took a long hot shower (in the third-floor bathroom; I didn’t think I’d be using my dad’s bathroom for a while). I put on sweatpants and an old T-shirt and then, for no good reason, Will’s shirt over that. When I lay down, though, I heard Jay’s voice describing what had happened last night.

Becky and I had watched
The Red Shoes
at a Film Forum
festival when we were sixteen. She’d loved it so much that she’d dragged me back to see it a second time—and gone back by herself a third. I’d liked the movie too, but I’d thought at the time it was strange how obsessed with it she became. It
was
peculiar that it had come on last night when it wasn’t even on the TV schedule.
Becky was really excited.
. . .
She even insisted that we TiVo it for you.

I got out of bed and padded barefoot downstairs to the second floor. When I opened the door to my dad’s apartment, I was assailed by the coppery tang of blood. I almost shut the door and fled up the stairs, but I went to the couch instead and sat down facing the TV. There were two open bottles, two empty glasses, and a large bowl on the coffee table. I picked up one bottle of wine and read the label: Woop Woop, an Australian Shiraz that the liquor store on Hudson sold and Becky loved to buy because it was cheap and she loved saying the name. That would have been the bottle she brought. I picked up the other bottle, the one Jay said they’d found in my dad’s cupboard. The bottle was so covered in dust that I had to wipe off the label to read it.
Le Vin du Temps Perdu.
The wine of lost time. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a bottle my father had bought, but how had Dee managed to sneak it into the house? Had the shadowmen left it the night of the burglary? I lifted the bottle and noticed a little was still left. I poured a few inches of deep red liquid into one of the empty glasses and held it up to my nose. A heady aroma of chocolate and cinnamon wafted up from the glass. Before I could remind myself why it was not a good idea, I took a sip.

The wine was so dry that it seemed to evaporate as soon as it hit my tongue and turn into a mist that filled my mouth . . . a mist that tasted of chocolate and lavender and some unnamable spice. I took another sip and tried to roll the flavor on my
tongue before it evaporated. I closed my eyes and I was standing in a vineyard in southern France. I could feel the sun on my skin and smell lavender in the air . . .

I snapped my eyes open and pushed the wineglass away.
Le Vin du Temps Perdu,
indeed! Talk about the dangers of drink! And Becky had drunk a whole bottle of this . . . while watching a movie that shouldn’t have been on.

I looked around for the remote and then dug in the couch cushions until I found it. I switched on the TV and pressed the button for the DVR menu. The most recent recording was
Bringing Up Baby
with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but it was the only recording made last night so I selected it and hit
PLAY
. I fast-forwarded through a commercial for a Turner Classic Movies DVD collection until I saw Robert Osborne, TCM’s movie critic, standing in front of his brick fireplace in his clubby den full of oil paintings and overstuffed red chairs. Becky and Jay would have watched the intro—Jay loved Robert Osborne and could do a pitch-perfect imitation of his glib movie intros. I hit
PLAY
.