Fire & Water (32 page)

I sipped the wine and moved toward the stairs.

“Jake, I brought penicillin!” I sang up the stairwell. In the kitchen, every dish had been washed. The counter sparkled, and the stale smell of the trash can had been replaced by the antiseptic odors of cleansers. Around the house, dead plant leaves were nipped, and the pile of ashes was gone from the fireplace. My blankets and pillows were put away, and the chenille throw was returned to the chocolate brown chaise. I brushed my fingers across the butter-soft suede, recalling the first night that Jake and I had made love there. On the hearth sat the earthen bowl of black stones, solid reminders of a gossamer memory.

I called up the stairs. “Did you hire a cleaning crew or what?”

Only James Taylor’s voice replied. “
I fix broken hearts Baby, I’m your handyman
.”

“Jake?” I called. The wood floors of the stairs gleamed and smelled of lemon; the upstairs hallway was free of the clutter that I’d ignored for weeks.

An uneasy itch began at the nape of my neck and crawled over my scalp. I stepped into our bedroom. It was immaculate. The bed that had been Jake’s lair for weeks was now a fluffy, white invitation. Candlelight flickered in the breeze from the open window. A foghorn moaned from the distant sea. I walked through the room to the master bath. My breath grew shallow and my heart began to race. “Jake?”

Candles glowed—the only light in the room. The glass of the mirror was clear of the steam that usually gathered during baths. I looked along the tile floor to the glistening white of the claw-foot tub.

“Jake?” My voice was a surprising whisper. I could see only the top of his head. He’d fallen asleep in the bath. Hadn’t I done the same a thousand times? But over his shoulder I could see no shimmering surface of water.

I inched toward him. Jake lay naked in the waterless tub. From his throat to the tops of his feet was a latticework of shallow incisions. Scarlet rivulets trickled in a perfect crosshatch pattern over his shaved body. The blood flowed across his torso, weaving another layer of pattern over the slices. His genitals were covered with trickles of blood, a woven pattern that covered him completely. Blood flowed from his wrists, gouged from the heel of each hand to the crooks of his elbows. He rested in a bloody lake the same hue of the wine in the glass downstairs. On his face, Jake wore an expression of beatific peace: no flicker of his eyelids, no twitch of his lips. From behind his hip peeked the shiny silver edge of a scalpel. I could smell the earthy richness of his blood.

The sound of my own gasp jerked me into motion from my split-second paralysis. I yanked towels from the rod and twisted them into tourniquets. His body was cool, but not cold. I pressed my hand against his carotid artery to find a pulse. “Jake! Jake!” I closed my eyes to concentrate. I felt again for a pulse. “Jake!” Had I felt it? It was faint, but yes, there had been a tiny throb beneath my fingers. I bolted to the bedroom and grabbed the phone. My blood-covered fingers found the nine, then the one. After one more press, I somehow managed to give the location and medical status of the patient in my bathroom.

Later I would absorb the beautiful horror he’d created—as intricate as any of his installations, as awe-inspiring as any of his sculptures. He’d transformed himself. He’d become the finely formed orchid in a porcelain vase, his own body one of his exquisite manipulations of nature.

He had become his own work of art.

As I watched the EMTs rush Jake toward the ambulance, I looked down for the first time at my blood-soaked clothes. “Take him to General. Ask for Dr. Gupta to be called.”

I drove behind the flashing red light of the ambulance reciting a silent prayer.
Please, please.
Please—let him die
.

Serenity

From the barstool that I had always considered Dr. Schwartz’s spot, I signaled for Mike to replenish my glass. I’d taken to occupying the stool nightly since Jake’s suicide attempt. Once he was medically stable, he had been transferred from San Francisco General to Serenity Glen, an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Napa County.

All I could tell Ryan was that Jake needed to go away for a while to rest. Mary K, Burt, and my pub family knew Jake was voluntarily hospitalized, though I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone about finding Jake in the bathtub afloat in a lake of his own blood. To escape the torture of my own memories, I worked longer and longer days and parked myself at the bar each night.

Murphy’s Pub had become home again. Tully picked Ryan up from school. Dr. Schwartz helped her with her science fair project. Alice and Dad took care of her each afternoon, fed her supper, and tucked her into bed, often before I ever got there. Once I’d gotten drunk enough that my mind was too soggy to form cogent thoughts, I crawled into my childhood bed beside her.

I’d established a new routine.

Mike brought the bottle of Glenfiddich and a sour expression. “Two fingers, Mikey. On second thought, just leave the bottle, will you?” Lines of disapproval cut through Mike’s usually smiling face. It grew easier to ignore his expression after the third or fourth drink.

Tully sat beside me. Mike refilled his coffee cup and the two exchanged furtive looks.

“I saw that,” I said to their reflections in the mirror behind the bar, and I raised my glass in a mock toast.

Dad walked in from the storage room carrying a huge bag of peanuts. He took a quick assessment of the beverages in front of Tully and me. “There’s plenty of stew left,” he said to me. “You might want to eat a little something. Your stomach will be kinder to you in the morning.”

On days I didn’t have surgery, I’d drive to Napa to the ironically named Serenity Glen. At first, Jake was either morose and wept most of the time or he seemed lost in a fog—a stupor of sedatives. A hard shell grew around my heart, and rather than behaving like a visiting loved one, I was the consulting physician inquiring about his care, his medication, and the treatment plan. I’d sit with Jake for an hour—all I could tolerate—and then drive back to Murphy’s. This went on for weeks.

Our house was a sticky web of memories, and I went there only to gather the growing pile of bills and late notices. With the huge mortgage and the past-due bills, the fees for Serenity Glen, it became apparent that maintaining our Sea Cliff home—even with Burt’s secret nest egg—was no longer possible. I put it up for sale.

As weeks wore on, Ryan’s mood shifted. Usually happy and energetic, she became irritable and demanding. I was the recipient of her worst explosions of temper. She wanted to see Jake, to talk to him on the phone, and I was the obstacle. “He can’t be reached by phone,” I’d explain. Yet another of the half-truths I’d begun to tell. As she grew moodier and threw more tantrums, it got easier to justify leaving her with my family. She was happier with them.

“Have you talked to Jake?” Dad asked as he filled the first row of peanut bowls.

I tilted my glass, finding the tinkle of ice cubes satisfying. “I don’t really want to talk about Jake.” Despite my reunion with my family, something in me couldn’t tell them the gritty truth about Jake. Perhaps I felt that if I said it, actually formed words and shared them with someone else, it would make it all the more real. In an alcoholic haze, I could pretend otherwise.

Dad and Tully exchanged glances. “Did Ryan go up to bed, Kitten?”

“Alice is reading her a story,” Mike answered.

“
Where the Wild Things Are
,”
Tully explained. “You always loved that one, Katie.”

I took another warm gulp of scotch. “It’s all about a kid who feels he’s treated unfairly by his mother. Perfect.”

“Things are topsy-turvy,” Tully reassured me. “It’ll get better. You’ll see.”

“She’s just taking out her frustrations on you, that’s all,” Dad said. “Once Jake is back home and feeling right as rain again, she’ll be back to her sweet self.”

I tossed the rest of my drink to the back of my throat and lifted the bottle. “Hey, why shouldn’t Ryan hate me? I’m just the one earning a paycheck. Oh, and I’m selling the only home she’s ever known.”

Dad filled a beer pitcher with water and began watering his orchids. “So it’s final then, about the house?” I nodded. “What a shame. Such a beautiful place.”

“It’s too much house. It was a ridiculous, impulsive purchase,” I snapped.

Tully stirred sugar into his cup. “I know it’s hard with Jake now and all. Well, I’ve saved a few nickels. I could help you out a little, if you need it, Katie.”

“And I’ve always got some mad money,” Dad chimed in. “Maybe just to tide you over.”

I put up my hand. “I didn’t ask for your money.” A doctor’s salary should be plenty, but Jake’s debts were choking me. “We need to learn what it’s like to live on what I actually earn. The house is unrealistic. I’ll just have to live with Ryan hating me right now.”

Dad shook his head and watered his flowers.

“I’m not the bad guy, you know,” I grumbled.

“Kitten, everybody needs a little help now and then. Nobody is here to judge.”

“Aren’t you?”

I grabbed my glass and the bottle and moved to a table at the back of the bar.

* * *

The next thing I knew, morning light sliced through the window of my childhood room. Ryan and Alice’s voices rang from the kitchen. “
And the green grass grew all around all around
,” they sang.

The smell of pancakes turned my stomach and my mouth felt like a nest of cobwebs. I pulled the covers up over my pounding head.

“
And the green grass grew all around
.”

I made my way to the kitchen. Ryan stood on a step stool beside the stove. When I tried to hug her, she snapped at me. “We’re cooking. You’re going to make me get burned.” I folded myself into a chair at the table.

“Want a Mickey Mouse pancake?” Alice asked, her tone clipped and formal as she assessed my hung-over demeanor.

Shaking my head felt like moving a boulder.

“Feeling well this morning, Katie?”

“Tip top.” I rested my forehead on the heels of my hands, hoping to stop the imminent explosion. “I’ve got to get some things done at our house tonight. How about we stay there tonight, Noodle? Besides, it’s pretty crowded with the two of us in that small bed.”

“I want to get some stuff from Daddy’s studio. I have an idea for a project that I want to make for him. He’ll be surprised when he comes home from his trip and he sees it.”

I didn’t correct Ryan’s assumption that Jake was traveling. “Sure,” I muttered. “Be sure and take care of Daddy.”

Alice’s eyebrows climbed high on her forehead. “I think I’ll leave the breakfast dishes for you, Katie.” She wiped her hands on a towel and folded it just a little more precisely than necessary. She kissed the top of Ryan’s head. “You have a good day at school, Sweetheart.” Ryan threw her arms around Alice’s waist and squeezed. “Bye, Nana.” Alice descended the stairs without saying anything more to me.

“Let me dry that hair, Ryan. You can’t go to school with a wet head. I don’t want you getting sick.”

Ryan tilted her head and put her hands on her hips. “It’s a myth that you get sick from having wet hair. You told me, Mommy. It’s only viruses, diseases, and bacteria that get you sick.”

“Drat,” I said, poking her ribs with my finger. “Foiled by my own words. Let me towel it off.”

“I already did that,” she said. Her face was crumpled in a scowl. “Stop telling me what to do!”

“It would help me a lot if you’d be less grumpy with me.”

Ryan replied by flouncing off into our bedroom.

I followed her. Ryan’s bedside lamp glowed, and with the curtains drawn, the light from the lamp still shone. She’d insisted that I bring the lamp from her bedroom at home. Jake had created it for her from shells they’d collected. Unlit, it appeared as a simple lamp—a long cylinder decorated with shells. But when illuminated, it cast a panorama of shadows onto the walls and ceiling, the dark and light creating a scene of woodland animals—deer, birds, butterflies and squirrels—clustered together in a forest full of trees and blossoms. I’d tried for years to see the pattern when the lamp was off, but could see only the shells.

Ryan plopped onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling. “Daddy’s not working on a job, is he?”

I lay down beside her and looked up at the shadowy menagerie. “No, not exactly.”

“Is he still as sick as he was?”

“They’re just figuring out what medicine can help him the most.”

“He takes a lot of medicines.”

“Sometimes it takes a while for doctors to figure out what kind works the best. Every person’s body is different.”

“Daddy said that the shot he gives himself makes him feel better.”

“Daddy doesn’t take shots,” I said. “Just pills.”

“I don’t know how he sticks himself like that. I hate getting shots.”

I sat up like with a jerk. “You saw Daddy give himself a shot? When?”

A cloud crossed over Ryan’s face. “I didn’t
see
him give a shot. I found a bag with his shotters in it when I was looking for paints. A long time ago. Before I started kindergarten. He told me not to touch it because his medicine could make me sick.”