Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

The image of Tommy came back to her: the impossible breathing, the independent movement of his anguished eyes, the horrible strength of his convulsions. Trying to restrain him, she'd felt an eerie fibrillation in his chest and shoulders as if individual strands of muscle were separately alive, steel wires trying to animate him against the resistance of the rest of his flesh. Then, later, awakening to the awful predatory fixity of his gaze and his sudden lunging, clawing attack. Beyond scaring her, it had felt like… what? A betrayal. Love rebuffed. The whole thing had been so wrenching she'd feared her mind, her whole world, would deform with the twisted force of it.

She'd never been a determined skeptic like Joseph; she'd been raised listening to Grandma Sandoval's tales of family ghosts, which as a child she'd believed as fact and as an adult had accepted as licensed but not utterly implausible. And you couldn't live out here without hearing rumors of mysterious and inexplicable events, wondering about the livestock mutilations, or sensing other presences in the rocks and shadows-it was one of the things she loved about this country. And yet, though she'd always been fairly open-minded about supernatural things, she would have described herself as a rationalist. Even two days ago, when she and Joseph had gone to meet Cree Black on Sandia Peak, she would have claimed a fairly secure belief in science and conventional medicine and the whole trend of rational, empirical Western thought since Aristotle.

But the events of the last few hours had busted all that up pretty good.

It was almost funny. Really, all she'd been doing for the last three weeks was continuing to live her mental habits, operating from her old paradigms. She was like that cartoon coyote, hurtling off a cliff and running in midair before he realizes he's suspended over a mile-deep canyon. As if the momentum of belief or habit or ignorance could defy the law of gravity!

"I don't believe in anything!" she called to Spence. His hide hitched at the sound of her voice, and he quickened his stride. She laughed bitterly at the realization and yelled to the empty land, "I don't know what to believe! I have no idea what's real!" She wanted to laugh and cry and scream. She wanted to hit something, strike something and punish the world for its fickleness. For its unfairness in visiting this catastrophe on her. On Tommy Keeday, of all people.

The thought of Tommy brought her thoughts back a little. This wasn't about Julieta McCarty, she reminded herself, this was about Tommy. A beautiful child, a talented artist, a boy with a lot of potential that would surely be destroyed if they couldn't cure him. A boy who knew nothing about the psychodrama he'd walked into at Oak Springs School, the role he played in the principal's secret fantasies and neuroses. Who was not to blame and who must never know of any of it.

Spence was laboring now, still willing but getting tired. She spoke to him softly and brought him down to a trot. The big horse huffed and snorted, glad for a chance to get his wind back. Already they were three miles beyond school property and well onto McCarty Energy's Hunters Point coalfield. The land immediately around her looked the same, but a mile to the west a series of low, flat-topped ridges appeared, the spoil mounds from mining operations of thirty years ago. Even now, the desert vegetation had not returned to those dry slopes. She hated the sight of them-why had she come this way? She nudged Spence a little more toward the northeast.

She marshaled her thoughts. The gallop had tired her as well as Spence, burnt off the worst of the crazy energy. Principal, she reminded herself. Administrator. Head honcha. It's executive decision time: Where do we go from here?

Was there really any point in allowing Cree Black to work with Tommy? She'd been all but useless last night.

On the other hand, Julieta couldn't really blame her, given that she'd just about gotten her skull fractured as she'd rushed to help him. And no, actually, she hadn't been useless. Quite the opposite. If her psychic radar or whatever it was hadn't prompted her to go out to the corral, Tommy might have died, suffocating as his lungs labored to rebreathe each other's air. So they already owed her a great deal.

And Julieta had to admit there was something about Cree, some inner determination that she'd noticed at their very first meeting. She was a woman of about her own age and height, with medium-length brown hair full of chestnut-red highlights. A pageant coach would have appraised her as pretty, but not glamorous enough to be competitive. What made her looks compelling was the keen alertness and candor in her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth. You got the feeling she was a person who cared. She was also someone who told it like it was, had no stake in misrepresenting anything. Whatever Cree Black's personal history, she had obviously faced some tough things, maybe something like the crisis of belief Julieta felt in herself now. Somehow she'd seen it through, had come to some faith or truth despite the maelstrom of uncertainties.

Which was kind of reassuring.

And right now, Cree Black's explanations seemed as apt as anything Julieta had heard from the doctors they'd consulted.

But there were other issues to consider. The symptoms were more extreme and lasted longer every time. The breathing problem demonstrated clearly that Tommy's physical survival, not just his mental well-being, was at risk, and that the school was not well prepared to assure his safety. From the standpoint of the school, the issue was clear: If Tommy died or got badly injured at Oak Springs, especially if any education or health authority heard she'd dealt with it as a supernatural issue, she could face criminal charges. Last night, citing both Tommy's needs and the school's, Joseph had been explicit that he couldn't let this go on: One more crisis and he'd insist on Tommy's being hospitalized again.

And he was right. Clearly, the safest and easiest route would be to remand him to the care of some public authority, or to his grandparents, and wash her hands of the problem. And try to forget him and the world of fantasies she'd constructed around him.

She felt her lips curl in a hard smile. Fat fucking chance.

The scary part of Joseph's dictum was that the next hospital visit would change Tommy's life. From there, the road took a crucial fork. Certainly, in long-term care, some anonymous clinic or institution, his acute needs would be better met. But no doctor was likely to believe-or risk a career by admitting-that some unknown entity was occupying his body and mind. And therefore he wouldn't get the real help he needed. The Indian Health Services would soon find they didn't have the resources for him, and they'd send him on to the state. A bunch of well-meaning, overworked doctors would drug him and talk at him, and if it didn't go away, they'd wedge him deeper and deeper into the system, until he was warehoused in some institution and forgotten. Or they might go for more drastic treatments; she'd read recently that electroshock therapy and lobotomy were coming back into fashion.

She shuddered and shook off the thought.

The other most likely option would be to send him home. That was the choice his grandparents had endorsed-the Navajo way, removing him from whatever bad influences had triggered his problem, wrapping him close against the bosom of family, performing some archaic healing Way for him. But, again, he would probably not get cured. And even with in-home support from the state or tribe, he'd be far away from appropriate medical help, from educational resources, from-

From Julieta McCarty.

A shiver of panic rattled her. The scariest aspect of those options was that they took him away. She couldn't even tell how much that thought was biasing what should be objective analysis of Tommy's needs.