Black Dagger Brotherhood - Lover Eternal Part 2

Chapter Three.

Pavlov had a point, Mary thought while she drove downtown. Her panic reaction to the message from Dr. Delia Croce's office was a trained one, not something logical. "Further tests" could be a lot of things. Just because she a.s.sociated any kind of news from a physician with catastrophe didn't mean she could see into the future. She had no idea what, if anything, was wrong. After all, she'd been in remission for close to two years and she felt well enough. Sure, she got tired, but who didn't? Her job and volunteer work kept her busy.

First thing in the morning she'd call for the appointment. For now she was just going to work the beginning of Bill's shift at the suicide hotline.

As the anxiety backed off a little, she took a deep breath. The next twenty-four hours were going to be an endurance test, with her nerves turning her body into a trampoline and her mind into a whirlpool. The trick was waiting through the panic phases and then shoring up her strength when the fear lightened up.

She parked the Civic in an open lot on Tenth Street and walked quickly toward a worn-out six-story building. This was the dingy part of town, the residue of an effort back in the seventies to professionalize a nine-square-block area of what was then a "bad neighborhood." The optimism hadn't worked, and now boarded-up office s.p.a.ce mixed with low-rent housing.

She paused at the entrance and waved to the two cops pa.s.sing by in a patrol car.

The headquarters of the Suicide Prevention Hotline were on the second floor in the front, and she glanced up at the glowing windows. Her first contact with the nonprofit had been as a caller. Three years later, she manned a phone every Thursday, Friday, and Sat.u.r.day night. She also covered holidays and relieved people when they needed it.

No one knew she'd ever dialed in. No one knew she'd had leukemia. And if she had to go back to war with her blood, she was going to keep that to herself as well.

Having watched her mother die, she didn't want anyone standing over her bed weeping. She already knew the impotent rage that came when saving grace didn't heel on command. She had no interest in a replay of the theatrics while she was fighting for breath and swimming in a sea of failing organs.

Okay. Nerves were back.

Mary heard a shuffle over to the left and caught a flash of movement, as if someone had ducked out of sight behind the building.

Snapping to attention, she punched a code into a lock, went inside, and climbed the stairs. When she got to the second floor, she buzzed the intercom for entrance into the hotline's offices.

As she walked past the reception desk, she waved to the executive director, Rhonda Knute, who was on the phone. Then she nodded to Nan, Stuart, and Lola, who were on deck tonight, and settled into a vacant cubicle. After making sure she had plenty of intake forms, a couple of pens, and the hotline's intervention reference book, she took a bottle of water out of her purse.

Almost immediately one of her phone lines rang, and she checked the screen for caller ID. She knew the number. And the police had told her it was a pay phone. Downtown.

It was her caller.

The phone rang a second time and she picked up, following the hotline's script "Suicide Prevention Hotline, this is Mary. How may I help you?"

Silence. Not even breathing.

Dimly, she heard the hum of a car engine flare and then fade in the background. According to the police's audit of incoming calls, the person always phoned from the street and varied his location so he couldn't be traced.

"This is Mary. How may I help you?" She dropped her voice and broke protocol. "I know it's you, and I'm glad you're reaching out tonight again. But please, can't you tell me your name or what's wrong?"

She waited. The phone went dead.

"Another one of yours?" Rhonda asked, taking a sip from a mug of herbal tea.

Mary hung up. "How did you know?"

The woman nodded across her shoulder. "I heard a lot of rings out there, but no one got farther than the greeting. Then all of a sudden you were hunched over your phone."

"Yeah, well-"

"Listen, the cops got back to me today. There's nothing they can do short of a.s.signing details to every pay phone in town, and they're not willing to go that far at this point."

"I told you. I don't feel like I'm in danger."

"You don't know that you're not."

"Come on, Rhonda, this has been going on for nine months now, right? If they were going to jump me, they would have already.

And I really want to help-"

"That's another thing I'm concerned about. You clearly feel like protecting whoever the caller is. You're getting too personal."

"No, I'm not. They're calling here for a reason, and I know I can take care of them."

"Mary, stop. Listen to yourself." Rhonda pulled a chair over and lowered her voice as she sat down. "This is... hard for me to say.

But I think you need a break."

Mary recoiled. "From what?"

"You're here too much."

"I work the same number of days as everyone else."

"But you stay here for hours after your shift is through, and you cover for people all the time. You're too involved. I know you're subst.i.tuting for Bill right now, but when he comes I want you to leave. And I don't want you back here for a couple of weeks. You need some perspective. This is hard, draining work, and you have to have a proper distance from it.""Not now, Rhonda. Please, not now. I need to be here now more than ever."

Rhonda gently squeezed Mary's tense hand. "This isn't an appropriate place for you to work out your own issues, and you know that. You're one of the best volunteers I've got, and I want you to come back. But only after you've had some time to clear your head."

"I may not have that kind of time," Mary whispered under her breath.

"What?"

Mary shook herself and forced a smile. "Nothing. Of course, you're right. I'll leave as soon as Bill comes in."

Bill arrived about an hour later, and Mary was out of the building in two minutes. When she got home, she shut her door and leaned back against the wood panels, listening to all the silence. The horrible, crushing silence.

G.o.d, she wanted to go back to the hotline's offices. She needed to hear the soft voices of the other volunteers. And the phones ringing. And the drone of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling...

Because with no distractions, her mind flushed up terrible images: Hospital beds. Needles. Bags of drugs hanging next to her. In an awful mental snapshot, she saw her head bald and her skin gray and her eyes sunken until she didn't look like herself, until she wasn't herself.

And she remembered what it felt like to cease being a person. After the doctors started treating her with chemo, she'd quickly sunk into the fragile undercla.s.s of the sick, the dying, becoming nothing more than a pitiful, scary reminder of other people's mortality, a poster child for the terminal nature of life.

Mary darted across the living room, shot through the kitchen, and threw open the slider. As she burst out into the night, fear had her gasping for breath, but the shock of frosty air slowed her lungs down.

You don't know that anything's wrong. You don't know what it is...

She repeated the mantra, trying to pitch a net on the thrashing panic as she headed for the pool.

The Lucite in-ground was no more than a big hot tub, and its water, thickened and slowed by the cold, looked like black oil in the moonlight. She sat down, took off her shoes and socks, and dangled her feet in the icy depths. She kept them submerged even when they numbed, wishing she had the gumption to jump in and swim down to the grate at the bottom. If she held on to the thing for long enough, she might be able to anesthetize herself completely.

She thought of her mother. And how Cissy Luce had died in her own bed in the house the two of them had always called home.

Everything about that bedroom was still so clear: The way the light had come through the lace curtains and landed on things in a snowflake pattern. Those pale yellow walls and the off-white wall-to-wall rug. That comforter her mother had loved, the one with the little pink roses on a cream background. The smell of nutmeg and ginger from a dish of potpourri. The crucifix above the curving headboard and the big Madonna icon on the floor in the corner.

The memories burned, so Mary forced herself to see the room as it had been after everything was over, the illness, the dying, the cleaning up, the selling of the house. She saw it right before she'd moved out. Neat. Tidy. Her mother's Catholic crutches packed away, the faint shadow left by the cross on the wall covered by a framed Andrew Wyeth print.

The tears wouldn't stay put. They came slowly, relentlessly, falling into the water. She watched them hit the surface and disappear.

When she looked up, she was not alone.

Mary leaped to her feet and stumbled back, but stopped herself, wiping her eyes. It was just a boy. A teenage boy. Dark-haired, pale-skinned. So thin he was emaciated, so beautiful he didn't look human.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, not particularly afraid. It was hard to be scared of anything that angelic. "Who are you?'

He just shook his head.

"Are you lost?" He sure looked it. And it was too cold for him to be out just in the jeans and T-shirt he was wearing. "What's your name?"

He lifted a hand to his throat and moved it back and forth while shaking his head. As if he were a foreigner and frustrated by the language barrier.

"Do you speak English?'

He nodded and then his hands started flying around. American Sign Language. He was using ASL.

Mary reached back to her old life, when she'd trained her autistic patients to use their hands to communicate.

Do you read lips or can you hear? she signed back at him.

He froze, as if her understanding him had been the last thing he'd expected.

I can hear very well. I just can't talk.

Mary stared at him for a long moment. "You are the caller."

He hesitated. Then nodded his head. I never meant to scare you. And I don't call to annoy you. I just... like to know you're there. But there's nothing weird to it, honest. I swear.

His eyes met hers steadily.

"I believe you." Except what did she do now? The hotline prohibited contact with callers.

Yeah, well, she wasn't about to kick the poor kid off her property.

"You want something to eat?"

He shook his head. Maybe I could just sit with you awhile? I'll stay on the other side of the pool.

As if he were used to people telling him to get away from them.

"No," she said. He nodded once and turned away. "I mean, sit down here. Next to me."

He came at her slowly, as if expecting her to change her mind. When all she did was sit down and put her feet back in the pool, he took off a pair of ratty sneakers, rolled up his baggy pants, and picked a spot about three feet from her.

G.o.d, he was so small.

He slipped his feet in the water and smiled.

It's cold, he signed.

"You want a sweater?"

He shook his head and moved his feet in circles."What's your name?"

John Matthew.

Mary smiled, thinking they had something in common. "Two New Testament prophets."

The nuns gave it to me.

"Nuns?"

There was a long pause, as if he were debating what to tell her.

"You were in an orphanage?" she prompted gently. She recalled that there was still one in town, run by Our Lady of Mercy.

I was born in a bathroom stall in a bus station. The janitor who found me took me to Our Lady. The nuns thought up the name.

She kept her wince to herself. "Ah, where do you live now? Were you adopted?'

He shook his head.

"Foster parents?" Please, G.o.d, let there be foster parents. Nice foster parents. Who kept him warm and fed. Good people who told him he mattered even if his parents had deserted him.

When he didn't reply, she eyed his old clothes, and the older expression on his face. He didn't look as if he'd known a lot of nice.

Finally, his hands moved. My place is on Tenth Street.

Which meant he was either a poacher living in a condemned building or a tenant in a rat-infested hovel. How he managed to be so clean was a miracle.

"You live around the hotline's offices, don't you? Which was how you knew I was on this evening even though it wasn't my shift."

He nodded. My apartment is across the street. I watch you come and go, but not in a sneaky way. I guess I think of you as a friend. When I called the first time... you know, it was on a whim or something. You answered... and I liked the way your voice sounded.

He had beautiful hands, she thought. Like a girl's. Graceful. Delicate.

"And you followed me home tonight?"