Near + Far (9 page)

Extracting the hospital newsletter from the mail one morning, she looked through the list of classes and discussion groups:
Social Networking for Seniors
;
Health Insurance Basics
;
Applying for Disability Benefits
;
Journaling for Beginners
;
Intensive Journaling
;
Extreme Journaling
;
Alcoholics Anonymous
;
Sexoholics Anonymous
;
Netheads Anonymous
;
Strength Training and You
;
Ornithology for Your Window Feeder
;
How to Live Without Salt
;
You and Your Colon
;
Learning to Trust Doctors
;
Making a Living Will
;
Vegan Cooking
.

Practical Shamanism
.

She'd smelled sage and lavender wafting from his room. New habits: an odd gesture with his hands before and after eating, a phrase said under his breath. A scuttle of unintelligible words, like a tinny echo of a prayer in foreign movie. Sitting by himself staring at plants in the garden.

What could it be other than
Practical Shamanism
?

She stuffed the brochure in the recycling bin, as though it might tip him off that she'd been snooping. Give him something new to reproach her with.

She didn't want to ask him directly. She wasn't sure what to make of the concept of shamanism, or even where it fit into the world of the New Agey.

What else could she do but search on the Internet, making mental notes, bookmarking as she hopped from page to page?

A range of beliefs. Tarot and divinatory dreams. The healing properties of tourmaline and snowflake obsidian. The ability to enter other dimensions.
Healers and renders of the soul
, one website read. Animal or spirit guides.

She pushed her chair back and stretched. Wondered which of her characters would be her spirit guide. She loved them all. Maybe Mrs. Mountebank and the Whistling Gypsy a trifle more. Only a trifle. And they weren't animals.

What was Lewis' spirit guide? A snake, a wasp? Something more terrifying? She could not imagine it benign.

But Lewis seemed happier, less snappy. Perhaps she could relax. Never entirely, though. She'd been ambushed too often.

From The Annals of Everkind:

Lily the Turtle-headed Woman:

Something's coming, sure as shooting stars.

Mr. Wiggly:

Baa!

LtThW:

No, I mean it. A chancy sort of thing, and lunatic as the moon's frown.

Lewis flipping through TV channels. The trees rattled their fingers on the dark window, swished their leaves against the glass as though asking to come in.

"They're called Dhami," he said.

"Who?"

"The shamans in the school of teaching I'm studying." He smirked. "Now you'll tell me how nice it is I'm doing something outside the house."

"I didn't know you were interested in shamanism," she said. She could see, given the list of other groups, why he might have chosen it.

His tone altered, slipped out of its usual snakeskin coated form. Became more sincere. "They teach what might happen after death. How you can prepare."

The honesty stunned her. The first moment like this they'd had, since he'd become a nuisance. A nuisance but also something she loved fiercely, had missed like a lost forearm ever since he'd withdrawn from her.

She groped for words like someone trying not to scare an exotic, unimaginable bird, phoenix or quetzalcoatl. If the shamanism class had taught him this, she was all for it.

"What are you learning?"

But the moment had passed, sudden as a cloud's shadow slipping away.

He folded his arms. "I'm going in Sunday mornings as well, for a drumming workshop at the coffeehouse."

Did she need to stay and wait, in case he needed her? She could take her pad and wait in the car. He shook his head in answer.

"Some nurses from the hospital are attending too. They know what to do." He sneered. "It'll get me out of the house, I knew you'd approve. You can make more of your little books."

That stung enough that she retreated to her workshop. She took her buzzer. It would alert her if he fell prey to a fit.

She curled in the chair. How had she come up with Everkind? Stories she wrote as a child, crude wish-fulfillment, a kingdom of magical ponies battling a villain called Brutescruel. She'd drawn them whenever she could.

Eventually she added more characters, made more and more sophisticated stories. She listened to concepts, dramatic tension, denouement, foreshadowing, in a creative writing class, and found them familiar, like learning a language you knew as a child.
Find your voice
, one teacher kept saying, but she had already found hers.

The stories had possessed her. They emerged beneath her pen, flowed like a fountain. Even when she'd graduated and gone to work as a graphic designer, she'd still drawn them. An art director who liked to mentor had sent one off to a publishing company.

The rest was history. The Everkind graphic novels, her "little books," might not be wildly popular, but they did provide enough to pay the rent and for the medicines that ate up four fifths of her income. He knew as well as she did that she could be living much better. His illness was responsible for the shabby but clean house that they lived in, the ten-year-old car she drove.

Downstairs, Lewis moved about, restless, turning to a nature show on the TV, then talk radio, the kitchen mini-TV sending out the ping of a bat, a crowd's roar. Battling soundtracks. The inevitable precursor to a fit.

She was downstairs before the device in her pocket buzzed.

He lay on the floor, shuddering for breath. She thumbed the hypo-spray, pressed it into his forearm. He moved from side to side, helpless, staring up. She looked away, didn't meet his eyes. Her fingers rested on his inner arm, letting his pulse race against her fingers, agonized, slowing at an imperceptible rate.

Her hand drooped like a sad little animal.

She wanted him to live.

She wanted, more than anything else in the world, for him to die.

Pain and hate and despair twisted his face.

Twisted her heart.

A childhood memory:

They'd insisted on going by themselves through the fun house, twelve-year-old Amber, seven-year-old Lewis.

Amber knew it a terrible mistake the moment the cart jolted forward into darkness. Bones and red cloth and LED-lit eyes swooped at her. Lewis screamed. She flinched into him and put her arm around him.

"Close your eyes," she said. "Nothing can hurt you if your eyes are closed." She did the same.

There were noises, of course, shrieks and cackles. Twice string brushed over her face. Lewis clutched her; she held onto his reassuring presence. The cart shuddered and tilted, ascended an incline. Doors swung open. Sunlight flooded around them, almost blinding them.

The second floor balcony track led along a ledge before returning to the funhouse. Amber could see her father and mother in the crowd below. They waved up, smiling.

Lewis screamed, trying to climb out onto the balcony. She held onto him, terrified he'd be caught in the machinery. She was the only thing protecting him. Anger flashed through her. Why had her parents left her with this terrible responsibility?

"Close your eyes. Close your eyes," she repeated.

They returned to darkness and clamor.

Afterwards they emerged, shaken and hand in hand, to eat hot dogs and throw up without preamble. Their displeased parents took them home.

In later years, they were uneasy allies. Sometimes they stole toys or candy from each other's rooms. Other times generosity moved them. Lewis made Amber an elaborate Christmas crèche in his art class that was still a treasured decoration in her study. She spent a month making him a dollhouse/space station in which his Star Trek figurines and her Barbies played.

Coming into the kitchen, she saw him with saltshaker raised over the pot bubbling on the flat stove surface.

"Don't put that in," she said. And exasperated, "For Pete's sake, you know I have to watch that for my blood pressure."

He shrugged. "Guess I forgot. I don't have to watch that sort of thing."

He picked up his socks and jacket after himself, as though he had more energy. The lines around his eyes plumped out. He was nicer.

He still smelled of sage and lavender, and now other things, musk and sweet-amber and something with an odd metallic edge. Still muttered almost beyond her hearing, a phrase that sounded like calling for an errant dog.

Did she trust Lewis? No. And disliked herself for not being able to go that far. When had she gone so cynical, so cold?

She kept waiting. Had a character ever taken such an agonizingly long time to come to her before? She wondered what a shaman would suggest. How to invoke it.

What had she ever known of this unseen world that Lewis dabbled in? Once, when she was eight or nine, she'd been upstairs, standing near the head of the staircase, when she'd heard a woman's voice shout, "Help me, someone help me." It had been so real, so close that she'd called out to her parents.