Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“How? With an ankle bracelet?” Caitlin asked irritably.

“Nothing of the kind,” the vice principal replied. “He isn’t a prisoner.”

Caitlin calmed, knew she had just been venting.

“We’ll watch him and use your son’s cell phone GPS, if you agree, Dr. O’Hara” the official went on. “I’ll monitor him myself until we understand what happened here.”

Caitlin agreed. She heard it all through a thick mental gauze.

A few hours later she called Ben, intending to cancel their evening. At the sound of his voice, she ended up pouring out the entire story of Jacob’s… whatever it was; his disappearance. Her voice was shaking by the end of it. He listened, sympathized, and didn’t put her through the third degree about symptoms, for which she expressed her gratitude. He refused to accept a rain check, however.

“Are you insane?” Caitlin said. “I can’t leave Jacob. Ben, he said a Galderkhaani word!”

“Maybe he heard you say it.”

“He didn’t.”

“Or maybe he was saying just what the receptionist thought he said: ‘towers.’ You heard what you wanted to hear.”

Caitlin didn’t believe that. But she had to admit she was hardly an impartial observer.

“Anita,” he said. “See if she’d be willing to watch Jacob. That serves two purposes, no?”

Dr. Anita Carter was Caitlin’s coworker, the psychiatrist who filled in for her when there were emergencies—of which there had been quite a few, of late. So many that Anita had joked she wasn’t making any plans until she knew that Caitlin was “back.” Ben was right but Anita could actually fill three roles here: standby babysitter, analyst, and role model. African-American and originally from Atlanta, her no-nonsense approach to problem solving was: acknowledge the problem, solve it, file it, and go to dinner. She knew how to handle emergencies and she might just be the impartial observer that Jacob—and Caitlin—needed.

Caitlin put Ben on hold and called Anita. She laughingly agreed to be there, seven o’clock.

“Another new patient?” Anita asked.

“Yeah,” Caitlin told her. “Me.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need a little air,” she said. “But I can’t go too far—”

“Jacob?”

“Jacob. He’s been having nightmares. I don’t want to hover—”

“I understand,” Anita said.

Caitlin decided not to tell her the details about what had happened. If Jacob’s symptoms recurred, Anita would call her and handle them her own way. Caitlin could use that right now. Smothering Jacob with attention, even passive attention, wouldn’t give either of them a chance to breathe. But there was a larger issue. For her, right now, all roads seemed to lead to Galderkhaan. She had to get some input on that, some understanding. Some solutions . And as long as she was just an elevator ride away…

Caitlin told Ben that he should meet her downstairs at seven; she’d pick the place. In the meantime, she decided to see if Nancy O’Hara’s classic anger management technique worked just as well for her daughter as it did for her: she cleaned her apartment. At the same time she scrubbed her mind, her mood, her loss of perspective.

You are here, in New York, with your son, in the present , she said as if it were a mantra.

Galderkhaan was a project but Barbara was right. All of the manifestations had individual solutions. They could be treated separately. She had to take precautions but she also had to live her life.

By the time Caitlin was folding a load of laundry with a second one rolling in the dryer in the basement, the miasma of frustration and temper had evened out enough for her to sing Motown songs to Arfa. The feline usually sniffed Caitlin’s mouth as she crooned, as if he were confused, trying to figure out what the hell was happening and whether he should seek cover under the bed.

Not this time. Arfa crouched behind the laundry basket as though waiting for a mouse. Maybe there was one, not a wandering soul, a ghost. Funny how she would have welcomed that right now, a real-world problem with a quick, sane solution.

As Caitlin folded the second load, she came around to accepting her new realities with her customary courage instead of fear. She would take the approach that Jacob’s sociologist father Andrew Thwaite had advised when they were helping survivors of the tsunami that had caused unthinkable destruction in Thailand: “ If you can’t run from the beast, embrace it. ”

Caitlin did her hair and dressed as if she were going to a World Health Organization fund-raiser: a warm, double-lapel zip-trim crop jacket, velvet cropped ankle pants, T-strap pumps. She put on makeup—not a lot, but more than the little she usually wore.

Anita was impressed.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think faculty and trustees were part of your dinner plans.”

“Nope,” she said. “Just Ben. I needed to feel…” She sought a better word than “human,” settled on, “normal.”

Anita’s expression was warm and understanding and she gave Caitlin a hug as she grabbed her purse and headed out.

She arrived in the lobby before Ben did, impressing the doorman and refusing to look at her cell phone while she waited. She stood near the door, watching life and traffic, ivory clouds against a darkening sky, people moving north and south and plugging into their own intangible, invisible worlds of thought and wireless conversation.

I shouldn’t be here , she thought with a welling of guilt. She glanced back toward the elevators, felt the pull. She started back, fished in her purse for her cell phone… then stopped herself.

No. You’re right downstairs. Jacob will be fine. You need this, need to get out, grab distance, perspective.

A cab pulled up and Ben charged from it like Pheidippides announcing that the Persians had been defeated at Marathon. Either he was running from his day or—

His expression as he came through the door settled the question. He stopped inside, stunned to immobility. Ben’s mouth was the first thing to move, forming the widest grin she’d ever seen. He was very happy to see her.

“Crap,” he said.

“Just the word I was hoping you’d say,” she told him.

“No—no, Cai, you look amazing! That’s what that meant. Not ‘crap.’”

She smiled, smelling her own lipstick… and smiled a little wider. She walked toward him, hugged him. They continued to hold one another, moving aside only to get out of the way of other tenants.

“You’re going to get through this,” Ben said in her ear. “You and Jake.”

“I want to believe,” she said.

“Then do. We understand the nature of the problem, if not the specifics. The solutions are out there.”

“Ben, my son was—possessed. That’s the only word that applies.”

“No, it’s a convenient label that conjures up all kinds of negatives,” he said. “What happened is something ancient, something Galderkhaani, and that’s our new business: understanding that world and its processes. We’ve done pretty well so far, I’d say.”

“You would,” she said. “You’ve been studying it… I’ve been living it.”

Ben drew back slightly. “That’s not fair. I’ve been there every step. I’ve seen how ‘possession’ affected Maanik, how it affected you. That wasn’t easy. I wasn’t just an observer.”

“No, you weren’t,” she agreed. “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted, and I’m going to tell you now what I’ve said before: we are in this way too deep to be objective. We have to regain some of that.”

“I know.”

He stepped back a little farther and offered his arm. She had been sobbing, just a little. She dried her eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.