Greg Iles - Blood Memory

Kaiser looks skeptical. “What could we really learn?”

“I don’t know. We might find our suspect suffers from a certain disease. We should give it a shot, right? Like Sean calling that bail bondsman back and figuring out that Ann paid Malik’s bail.”

“You’re right. I’ll tell the forensic team to do it.”

“Tell them quick. Baptiste has the only viable saliva for this, and cultures take time.”

“Done.” He goes to the door, then turns back to me and speaks in an apologetic voice. “Hey. Are you really pregnant?”

I nod silently.

“Sean’s?”

“Yes.”

He closes his eyes for a moment, then looks at me again. “Are you going to have it?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t blink. “Good for you.”

I never saw or heard a nurse come into my room. The Valium carried me away from the waking world like a gentle river of Grey Goose. Maybe my alcohol withdrawal has made me hypersensitive to drugs. Whatever the reason, I slid down the bright coral wall into my dream ocean without interference, and the myriad images of my subconscious surrounded me like children penned up in a house all day.

Time flows forward and backward in my dreams. Not at my whim, of course. If intruders are chasing me and about to grab me from behind with clawed fingers, I can’t reverse time and save myself. But events in my dreams don’t always unroll in a forward sequence. Sometimes I’m getting younger as my dream life progresses-or re gresses, I suppose-turning from nine to eight at a birthday party, for example. I’ve never gone back beyond eight, though. The age I was when my father died is like an obsidian wall, an immutable fact of physics laid down by Newton or Einstein or even God. The sign on that wall doesn’t read BEYOND THIS POINT LIE MONSTERS, like the legend on ancient maps. It reads BEYOND THIS POINT LIES NOTHING.

Nothing. Does such a thing exist? I’ve heard children ask this question: Isn’t even “nothing” something? Space is something, isn’t it? Time exists there. And gravity. Invisible things, perhaps, but they’re real enough to kill you. I existed before I was eight, even though I don’t remember it. I know that I existed then the way I know that doctors took out my tonsils while I was under anesthetic. Something happened, even if I wasn’t mentally present.

I have the scars to prove it.

My scars aren’t visible to the naked eye, but they’re there. If a child stops speaking for a year, there’s a reason. Something hurt me, even if it was only something I saw. What did I see? Eight years of lost images. Did they vanish down a well? Not all of them. I’ve always had fragments of that history. Images of animals, particularly, have stuck with me. A dog we had when I was very young. A red fox that Pearlie pointed out to me, running low and fast under the trees at Malmaison. Horses on the island, galloping across the sand as if they meant to swim the river to freedom.

And I remember my father. Those images I’ve hoarded, like gold smuggled out of a war-torn city. My father…Luke Ferry. Dancing to the sound of a car radio while he washed his beat-up white Volkswagen. Walking down the driveway of Malmaison with his head down and his hands stuck in his pockets, thinking hard about something. Screaming at my mother to stay out of the barn, even as he pulled me inside with one hand. Watching him from the loft of the barn while he sculpted with a cutting torch, bending the white-hot steel to his will. From where I sat, the fire from that torch looked brighter than the sun, and the roar of it filled my ears. The smell of hay closed around me in the loft, a smell no amount of cleaning could get out of that building. How many afternoons did I spend in that loft, watching him wrestle beauty out of a pile of bars on the floor?

More than he wanted me to.

Daddy didn’t always know I was there. Sometimes I crawled up the ladder on the back side of the barn and slipped into the loft that way. It reminded me of black-and-white movies I’d seen about a little Arab boy in the bazaar, spying on people and having glorious adventures. Most times Daddy heard me-his eardrums must have been like butterfly wings-but other times he didn’t. When he knew I was there, his head had a different tilt to it, as though he were making sure I could see what he was doing with the torch. I felt so privileged. He’d chosen me as his secret sharer, the only one allowed to see how the magician did his tricks. But some nights his head was hard down over his work, and I saw only the sweat running down his neck and back, soaking his white undershirt. On those nights he worked with a fervor I couldn’t begin to understand. He worked like a man who hated the linear chunks of metal and was trying to destroy their essence by making them something abstract-something without function, yet meaningful.

I am back there now.

The loft.

With the hay smell and the wasp nests and the mosquitoes that buzzed in during the day to lie in wait for me at night. I don’t slap them, because Daddy will hear me. I let them fasten to my skin and begin to fatten with blood, and then I slowly mash them into a paste of black and red.

When the cutting torch dies, the silence in the barn is absolute. In the silence, I hear the rain for the first time. I forgot it was raining. That’s why he didn’t hear me sneak in. The drops rattle against the tin roof like a barrage of hail, but the hypnotic roar of the torch was enough to drown them out.

Daddy is walking around on the floor, but I can’t see him. Craning my neck, I find him squatting on the floor beneath the loft. He’s beside one of the timbers that hold up the roof, working some kind of tool under a floorboard. After a moment, he looks around, then pulls the board up from the floor. Then another. And another. He pulls a bag from underneath the floor. It’s dark green, like the jeeps I’ve seen parked behind the National Guard armory when I go to the flea market there.

I’ve never seen the bag before.

He takes something out of the bag, but I can’t see what. A magazine maybe, or a big picture. Then he stands and walks to one of his worktables. His back is to me. He lays the object on the table and reaches down to his middle like he needs to undo his pants to pee. My face feels hot. He’s not peeing, because there’s no commode or even grass, just the table on the wooden floor.

His right shoulder is flexing the way it does when he’s working on metal. Like it will never stop. The rain keeps hitting the roof close over my head, and the sweat keeps running down his back. Then his head goes back like he’s staring at the ceiling, but somehow I know his eyes are closed.

I’m scared. I want to run, but my hands and feet are numb.

He turns sideways, and then I see what he’s doing, and my heart swells into my throat. I can’t breathe. His mouth is hanging slack, and the way it looks makes my stomach flip. When he groans and thrashes his head, something breaks the chains holding my limbs, and I’m suddenly running back to the ladder, running to save my life. My head slams into a board, and I lose my footing, and then I’m falling past the rungs of the ladder, throwing out my arms but catching only raindrops-

“Look, Cat,” says Grandpapa, pointing at some trees. “Look at that fawn over there.”

When I turn my head, I’m no longer falling out of the barn, but sitting in my grandfather’s orange pickup as it rumbles up the low hill toward the pond. I’m back on the island. Fear is still stuffing my heart into my throat, but the smells have changed. The hay is gone, replaced by motor oil, mildew, chewing-tobacco juice, and smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette. It hasn’t started to rain yet, but the sky is filled with leaden clouds as heavy as a pregnant cow’s belly.