Search Party (24 page)

Their father needed to sell a house and he had not sold one in a long time. He had the hours they were in school and that was all, because he wouldn't leave them alone even though Mandy was eight and had skipped a grade. She was in fourth grade. Cody was six, in first grade.

Child Protective Services caught up with them but it took the agency six months. It had them on the books already because of things neighbors had said about their mother.

The last house they stayed in, out in the country at the edge of a pine forest being cleared, was on the Street of Dreams. There was no street yet, but five houses were already furnished for the coming tours, each with its own grounds landscaped to match it. There was a castle with a moat and a black and white timbered house with a hedge cut into animal shapes. At night Cody was afraid of the dark because the streetlights weren't installed, but their father moved the three sleeping bags close together and gave him a flashlight of his own.

They were not in the beds but in the laundry room of the biggest house Mandy had ever seen. The front door had a huge brass knocker that would echo out over the pine stumps the day Child Protective Services arrived, and gold-edged ribbons sealing the six toilet seats. The table was set with platters instead of plates, and glasses as big as pitchers, and thick, tasseled napkins. The couches and chairs were huge and heavy on the deep carpet, and nothing creaked or rattled or made any sound at all, as if, before their father with his smile of promise turned the key, giants had lived as secretly as they were living in the house.

Who Is He That Will Harm You?

“I
HEARD
what you said to your girlfriend.”

“Why do you say that, ‘girlfriend'?” She looked up, stretched out on the couch with the Sunday paper, into his frown. “I mean, I don't say
girl
friends. A friend's a friend, right?”

“I heard what you said. You said what you'd put in an ad.”

“What?”

“What you'd
advertise
. You were on the phone.”

“I'm not following. So now—
what?
”

“You said, ‘Slim with big breasts and fat toes.'”

“Oh my God. We were talking about our bodies. Jeez.”

“I heard.”

She put the newspaper over her face. “It was Teresa from school. Saying what she would put in one of those ads in
The Stranger
.”

“What about you? Did you put an ad in?”

“Yeah, right. I totally did. I'm looking for a guy with a—”

Something happened. When she opened her eyes she was lying on her back with things on her. Papers. She was under a low roof. Half under. Table. Couch. Glass thing dangling. Lamp. She funneled through time, and found her name. She was Mary
Ann. Her head hurt. Down the room a blurred man stood with his legs apart.

Earthquake? She lay there in the prickling of details that weren't really thought. Her mind was joined to her body in a combination of exhaustion and alertness. She couldn't tell if there was silence or she was deaf. At length she heard her own voice produce the sound, if not the words, of a question. No answer. Her mind tried to sleep, but she kept her eyes open, thinking with a slowness like moving in a bath.

Dennis. She knew him. Dennis.

Her tongue was sore. Seizure. But pain . . . her head . . . huge . . . a word for it . . .

She was in medical school. There.

Dennis. Not helping her. She let her breath out. “You.”

“I what?”

“Hurt,” she said, drawing up her knees. She could move. She could produce words, she was seeing double but she had her speech centers. “You.” She raised a finger off the floorboard. Where was the other hand? On an arm twisted back along her head. “You. Get. Out.”

At that he took one broad step, grabbed the lamp and hurled it. The cord whipped after it and somewhere glass shattered. She rolled her eyes up, seeing the underside of his jaw and thinking—and at the same time noticing that she was thinking—strategically. She had her second realization, and with it a knowledge of what the word
realization
meant. He was panting. It might not be over.

There on a level with her were his feet. In socks, if he kicked. “Oh God,” she said. Her voice surprised her, a normal groan as if she were telling him how much reading she had to do.

“Oh God,” he responded, but he had backed away, he had sat down. That was good. Not on the couch, on the rocking chair, and he was rocking it, of all things, so hard it ground on the wood. If she shut one eye she could get two flushed, small, handsome faces condensed into one.

How long was she out? She was starting to give a history. She
had speech, she was speaking reasonably, and the person listening in the ER would be somebody she knew. A nurse would be best.

The phone rang, with a muted sound. “There's your call, there's Mom,” Dennis said in a mincing voice, or was that her imagination? Did she have her imagination?

Her finger kept softly touching the leg of the coffee table. I hit a table. Marble, from Goodwill. Iceberg. We call it the iceberg. So she had her mind. The brain works to repair itself, just like blood, which wants to clot. It doesn't want out into hair.

“Is there more to this?” the nurse would say, or maybe just, “OK, cut the crap. What happened?”

He did it.

She started over. Maybe he hit me with a lamp. I don't know. I don't remember. I don't remember getting up this morning. What day is it? What time is it?

What a comfort it would be, if a nurse were to say, “Three o'clock.” The day would be half over. They would have figured everything out.

Why was there no question of tears?

She turned her head and vomited, an act requiring no effort on her part. The phone was ringing again. So, Sunday. Her mother called on Sunday.

How was she going to get to the ER?

Now she saw in his face something she had not learned about in her years of learning everything rapidly and well. But she detached herself from the sight and went limp as he shoved the iceberg, toppling her books, and dropped to the floor half beside and half on top of her, tearing newspaper out from between them. I wonder if I'll beg, she thought. No, this was something else. He had started to cry. He sobbed, banging the floor with his fist. Would someone come? “Don't you know you can't talk like that? Big tits and fat toes? Don't you know that?” She could barely hear him. He weighed her down, her head pounded. I think maybe he killed me, she told the nurse.

A
FTER
a couple of years she never referred to it. People did not encourage that, as anyone back from an illness or a travel ordeal, her father said, or even from travel without an ordeal, will tell you. He was explaining not to Mary Ann but to her mother, to soothe her mother and give her some rest from talking.

People who had known Mary Ann when she was in medical school knew of the episode; that's what they called it, as she did herself. What else to call it? She had not been murdered.

W
HEN
they moved her out of the ICU she had her own window. Across the street stood a big tree where there was a bird the size of a goose or an owl, even bigger, too heavy for the limb it sat on. No, no, not a bird, merely leaves, the giant leaves of the tulip poplar: her mother brought one up to her room to prove it. There was no bird as big as the shape she was seeing. But a bulky green bird with a half-open beak sat there day after day, neck craned to peer into her room. The nurse she liked fixed her pillows and said to her mother, “Must've escaped from the zoo.”

“I'm sorry!” her mother said, almost in tears with the leaf in her hand.

“I don't care,” Mary Ann said. “Let it sit there.”

“Oh, it's worrying you,” her mother said. “It's making you uneasy.”

“No.”

H
ER
friends put all his things in two boxes to be picked up. They glanced through a scrapbook Teresa found wrapped in a lab coat at the back of a drawer. Drawings, dozens of clippings about random subjects, photos of Mary Ann cut up and pasted into collages. His name, Dennis Vose, written hundreds of times. Somebody came to collect the boxes. Her parents were in touch with his lawyer—he had a lawyer!—and through the lawyer he had turned over the key to her apartment. He could have given somebody else a copy, her mother said. “One of his henchmen?” her father said from the big hospital chair. They were both professors but her mother had taken an indefinite leave of absence from the English Department. Her pacing, her
bringing up things from books, her fury of analysis, always broken at its height by tears, did not bother Mary Ann as much as it bothered her father, who sat with his hand over his eyes beside Mary Ann's bed with its rails and gears.

F
ROM
the bathroom of the new apartment she could hear Teresa on the kitchen phone. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But . . . Yeah, but how do we convey to her . . .”

Teresa was staying with her until her mother could get there. She had passed her Activities of Daily Living—they wouldn't discharge you until you had mastered those—but she was going to have to have somebody for a while anyway. That was fine, but she was not going to leave Seattle and go to Portland to be with her parents. Nothing and nobody was going to make her leave her physical therapist, Nolan. On her last day in inpatient rehab, the PTs clapped while she was having the tantrum about Nolan. People with some aphasia, they told her—“some” was what everybody said she had, and it would resolve, most or all of it—would almost always find they could curse.

Nolan had to call her mother to explain that some patients developed a dependency on a particular therapist. He said that as an outpatient Mary Ann would ordinarily have somebody new but he would go on working with her himself as long as she wanted.

“You're a lucky girl,” the nurses had told her when she was first sitting up and listening to what was said to her. “Medical students get the royal treatment.” “Pretty ones. No kidding, they have a special saw they use on them.” “Don't listen to her. Seriously, you should have seen these guys taking care of you.”

Every resident who came in went over the whole thing with her. The nurses' account was shorter and had blood and mess in it. From when she arrived in the ER still pretty much herself and talking, downhill fast. Intracranial pressure. When that went high enough a team came in and sawed into the skull and lifted a section of it off, to be frozen and put back on later. In a case like hers, where the piece of bone turned out not to be sterile, they used plastic. A piece of plastic, said one resident, as expensive as
a car. A used car, Nolan said when she got to him. He made her half dozen procedures sound like a science project she herself had undertaken, well done but not all that complicated.

Bone or plastic, the piece was held in place with snowflakes.

Snowflakes. The snowflake, the surgeons explained in their careful, tiring way, was a little half-inch plate that fixed the piece back into the skull with screws. The plates got their name from the spokes sticking out from them, into which tiny screws were sunk. “Think of a dance floor in your skull,” Nolan said, “outlined with spangles.”

Teresa said Mary Ann would be playing tennis again soon, and they would be running their morning miles, but Nolan made no mention of that. Nolan never spoke of a possible improvement until it got close.
Milestone
was a not word he used. But Mary Ann was getting around, growing her hair, starting to read. Doorknobs and shoelaces gave her trouble, and forks, and stepping out of reach of the hug Teresa wanted to give her first thing in the morning when she wandered into the kitchen in her bathrobe.

“You know, your sweet little fat guy Nolan says we can go ahead and talk about anything that comes up,” Teresa said, pouring her coffee and Mary Ann's milk. Mary Ann no longer liked the taste of coffee.

“Why are you looking at me?”

“I'm just looking at you. You're looking at me too, babe.”

“Am I different?”

“Well, you've had a little work done. A little makeover.”

Mary Ann didn't laugh because a laugh had to be assembled from scratch. Once she had laughed at everything. They all said so. You could tell where Mary Ann was sitting in a lecture hall. “I don't mean looks,” she said to Teresa.