Psychopath (14 page)

A tear started down her cheek.  She started rubbing her hands together.

"I know another way to make sure it’s all gone.  The yucky stuff."

"How?"

Jonah held out his hands to her.  "With these."  He saw her knees clamp shut.  "We trust one another.  Right?"

She nodded, but crossed her ankles.

"Close your eyes for me," he said.  He held his breath, waiting to see if she could do it, if she — unlike Anna Beckwith and the rest of them — was ready to be healed, able to be cured.  Because the ability to trust, which requires trust not so much in the kindness of others but in one’s own strength, was what Naomi really needed, more than she needed Zyprexa or Zoloft or Trazodone.  She needed to place herself in another person’s hands and see that she could emerge unharmed.  That was the antidote to everything her rapist had left inside her.

Jonah closed his eyes and prayed silently to the God he loved, the God who loved him, for some of the Lord’s strength to fill the part of him that was this beautiful little girl.  And when he opened his eyes, she showed that strength.  She closed her eyes and held them shut, crow’s-feet fanning out from the corners, her whole forehead visibly straining with the effort not to open them right back up again.

His skin turned everywhere to gooseflesh.  "You’re going to feel my hands on you," he said, his voice more melodious, more reassuring than ever.  "Promise me you won’t open your eyes," he said.

"Promise," she whispered.

Jonah stood and placed the palms of his hands gently on her head.  "I can tell if there’s bad stuff inside you," he said.  "If there is I can draw it out of you — and into me."  He moved his hands to her temples, then her cheeks, thrilling as he felt the wetness from her tears.

"It won’t hurt you?" she asked, pulling back slightly.

Her concern for him nearly took his breath away.  "I’m older than you are," he said, "and very strong.  I can hold a lot more inside me."  He spread his fingers over her ears, brought his hands to her neck, lightly pressed his thumbs into the soft flesh beside her windpipe.  "I’ll be fine. And you’ll be fine."

The crow’s-feet beside Naomi’s eyes lightened, then disappeared.  As Jonah’s thumbs massaged her jaw, the tension there melted away, too.  She sat still as his hands traveled down her shoulders, down her sides, and over her abdomen.  She didn’t move at all when he crouched in front of her, his hands on her thighs.  Only when his hands settled on her knees did she tense up again.  "We’re going to be all right," he whispered.  "All the bad stuff is going away.  I can feel it."

She relaxed enough for him to slip his hands between her knees, then for him to run his palms up the insides of her thighs.  Only when the crook of each hand was close enough to frame each side of her groin — without ever touching her there — did he pull his hands away.  He massaged her calves, then her ankles, took off her sneakers and worked at the soles of her feet.

Finally he stood again and laid his hands back on her head.  "Open your eyes," he said.

Naomi did as he asked.

He knelt in front of her and looked into her glistening, green-blue eyes a long time.  "It’s gone," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Her brow furrowed as she surveyed the internal landscape of her soul.  "I think it is."  She nodded.  "It is.  It’s gone."

He sat back in his chair and smiled at her.

"Where did it go?" she asked.

"First, into me," he said.  "Then to God."

"Do I need to pray to keep it away from us?"

"I think that’s a very good idea."

"Then I will," she said.  "Every night."

"I will, too," Jonah said.  "That way no matter where you are, no matter where I am, we’ll be together."

"Forever," she said.

Part Two

three weeks later

o n e

Almost Midnight, March 16, 2003

Route 45 North, Upstate Michigan

His brain burned white hot.  His knuckles had gone white.  The BMW’s stereo blared white noise.  He had started out from Canaan with every good intention, driving 480 miles to hike Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek Gorge, bathing in crystal clear water, breathing pristine mountain air, purifying himself.  But just three days back on the road and he was in agony again, his head pounding, his neck and jaw stiff, his heart and lungs straining.  He had swallowed five milligrams of Haldol, even dipped into the precious ruby fluid in his briefcase, but neither had stemmed the tide of evil rising inside him.

Every cell in his body screamed for those he had left behind:  Naomi McMorris, Mike Pansky, Tommy Magellan, fifteen other patients he had taken inside him at Canaan Memorial, hundreds before them.  He longed to touch their skin, to feel their pain, to see his reflection in their eyes.

He longed, too, for Michelle Jenkins.  She had invited him to dinner his last night in Canaan, and he had accepted.

"Where do you go from here?" she asked him at the restaurant.

"I’ll take a few weeks to relax before my next assignment," he said, "and then, who knows?  I can pretty much take my pick of states."

"Mysterious to the end," she said, with a smile.

With her silky black hair shining and her white teeth glistening, Jenkins looked as beautiful to Jonah as any woman he had ever been with.  He wanted her.  "I’m sorry we weren’t able to get to know one another better," he said.  "I know I keep people at a distance."  He paused for effect.  "Especially when I feel drawn to someone."  He watched her face as she received this confession, this ode to what might have been, and saw in her eyes that it had sparked that potent combination of nurturance and sexuality he could elicit from women.

"Why do you put up so many walls?" she asked softly.

"I don’t think I know the complete answer to that question," he said.  "Part of it has to do with moving again and again when I was a child.  Everything I built — friendships, adolescent romances, achievements on the football field — got torn down every year or two.  After a while I realized it didn’t make sense to put down roots at all."

"Your father’s job?"

Jonah nodded.  "Railroad.  He was an engineer.  We went wherever they were laying track.  By the time I was twelve, we’d lived in nine states, all over the country."

She tilted her head, stared into his eyes.  "You
had
to move with him as a boy.  You don’t have to
keep
moving as a man.  It just feels that way.  You could build something that lasts."

"Sometimes I think so," he said, glancing at Jenkins in a way to make her feel that he associated her with his potential for commitment.

She took a deep breath, reached to the center of the table, and linked pinkies with him.  "So I guess it’s no accident you waited until your last night in Canaan to spend time with me," she said.

No accident.  Nor was it an accident that Jonah felt free to make love with her that evening, free to be with her completely, because he was leaving her forever.  Naked together, he anticipated her every movement, unlocked desires tucked deep in her unconscious, touched her and tasted her in ways she could not bring herself to ask for.  He made her come again and again with the slightest pressure from his fingertip or tongue in precisely the right places at precisely the right times.  And when he did finally penetrate her it was at the very instant she desperately wanted him to, so that they truly began to move as one person, in the ultimate way men and women fantasize about but never quite achieve, because they are separate, autonomous beings.

Not so with Jonah.  He could shed his skin, slip inside a woman’s, and do everything to her that she would do to herself, if only she knew herself well enough to do it.  Because he had become her.

In the haze of her own pleasure, listening to his contrived groans, Jenkins probably failed to notice that he had not ejaculated.  He never did during sex.  He wanted women to release their warm, wet erotic energies into him, not the other way around.  His pleasure was in absorbing theirs.

Now, driving through the night, he had run dry again.  Bone dry.  And no one could know the depth of his suffering in that desiccation.  No one could fathom the horror of living without personal boundaries, without ego, an existence in which the lives of others — their suffering and hopes and fears and passions — became his own, only to be cleaved from him again and again and again.  His existence was an endless miscarriage, burying him under layer upon layer of grief — solitary grief, without the closure of a funeral, the solace of a headstone, the comfort of a shoulder to cry on.

Imagine loving so many, then losing every one.

Each of the past two nights he had dreamed the same dream.  He was lying on a bed of spring flowers in a lush valley, the sun warming his face, a gentle breeze sweeping over him.  He felt truly at peace, connected to all living things, finally healed and whole.  He closed his eyes, stretched his limbs, and breathed deeply of the new morning.

He was nearly asleep when he sensed a shadow falling over him.  He opened his eyes and saw a radiantly beautiful woman with golden hair, sparkling emerald eyes, and perfect, ivory skin kneeling beside him.  "Who are you?" he asked.

When she spoke, it was in the most gentle voice he had ever heard.  "Your heart is not your own."

It seemed to Jonah an elegant metaphor for love.  "I would gladly give it to you," he said.

"But it isn’t yours to give.  It hasn’t been for a very long time."

How true.  How absolutely right.  Jonah felt he had finally found a kindred spirit, one who understood his special place in the world, his special burden.

"I carry many souls inside me," he said.

The woman began unbuttoning his shirt, laying the cloth aside, kissing his chest.

He tilted back his head and closed his eyes, waiting for her to move to the button at his waist, to the zipper below, to take
him
inside
her
.

"You’re so tired," she whispered, running the tip of her tongue down his abdomen.  "You need to let go."

"Yes," he breathed. He arched his back with pleasure, lifting himself toward her.  And with that he felt the first searing flash of pain over his sternum.  He tried to sit up, but could barely raise his head.  He glimpsed the blade of a scalpel, wet with blood.  His blood.  He was desperate to flee, but his hands and feet were frozen.  Then he felt her beginning to feast, her razor-sharp teeth ripping through his skin, through muscle, scraping so furiously at the sternal bone below that it began to splinter.  The pain was unspeakable, a hellish torture that woke him from sleep, screaming, shaking with terror, his sheets soaked with sweat.

He could find no refuge from his isolation.  Not by day.  Not by night.  And his next hospital assignment was a full week away.

The road was a blur.  He was nearly blind with hunger for another human being.  He took the next exit, heading onto Route 17, toward the Ottawa National Forest.  If he could make it there, he might outlast his cravings.  He had enough food and water to camp out a week.  He could hike Mount Arvon, climb closer to God, further from temptation.

But God had another test waiting for him.  A mile off the exit a man wearing a backpack turned around and held his thumb out for a ride.  In the middle of the night.  In the middle of nowhere.  A man in precisely the wrong place, at precisely the wrong time.  Jonah looked away, gritted his teeth, and drove past him.  Then, half against his will, as if drawn there by the part of him that was nine-year-old, wheelchair-bound Benjamin Herlihey, his gaze drifted up and to the right, into the rearview mirror.  He saw the man at the side of the road shake his head and throw down his fist in frustration.  And he saw something more.  The man was wearing a patch over one eye.

A simple thing, that patch.  There could be a dozen explanations.  A workplace accident.  A birth defect.  A lazy eye from multiple sclerosis.  A retinal hemorrhage from diabetes.  A beating.  For anyone other than Jonah it would have remained nothing more than a curiosity.  Something seen and then forgotten one or two miles down the road.  But for Jonah that curiosity landed inside him like a grappling hook, sinking through his flesh, into his soul.  It slowed him down, reeled him in, then pulled him to the curb and held him there.

Jonah watched as the man started toward him.  He looked slim and strong.  He had a spring in his step, even under the weight of his pack.  He walked up to the passenger window.  Jonah turned to him, saw he was about thirty, handsome in a rugged way, with a few days’ growth of beard and shoulder-length, reddish hair under a gray and black striped ski cap.  He lowered the window.

"Any chance you’re headed toward Trout Creek?" the man asked nervously.

"Close enough," Jonah said, rubbing his stiff jaw.  He forced a smile.  "Throw your pack in the back seat."

The man slipped out of his pack, put it in back and climbed in beside Jonah.  He extended his hand.  "Doug Holt."

"Jonah Wrens."  He shook Holt’s icy hand.

"I didn’t think I’d catch a ride all night.  Nobody stops anymore."

"I used to hitch a fair amount," Jonah said, unable to take his eyes off Holt’s patch.  "I had to, to visit the girl I was dating during med school.  I didn’t have the money for a bus."  He shook his head, as if remembering the lean years.

"I can get you pretty much the whole way to Trout Creek."

"You don’t know how huge that is," Holt said. "God knows how long I would have..."  He paused, suddenly aware he was being studied.  He touched his eye patch.  "BB gun.  A buddy of mine.  I was five."

Was this Ally Bartlett again, ready to reveal all to Jonah?  Was Doug Holt another angel, in the nick of time?  "Did you manage to stay friends?" he asked.

"To this day.  Only thing is, Troy moved halfway around the world.  He’s teaching English over in Japan.  Plus he’s married, three kids.  I talk to him a couple times a year."