V
"I feeeeel good!
(DA-da DA-da DA-da DA)
I knew that I would now
(DA-da DA-da DA-da DA)
I feel nice
(DA-da DA-da DA-da DA)
Sugar and spiiiice.
So good!
(DA DA)
So good!
(DA)
I got yououou
(DA DA DA … DAA!)
OW!"
Every three minutes or so, a forty-five from the thick stack plunked down
onto the turntable. Kevin reveled in the music of Aretha, The Temptations,
Gladys, Ike and Tina, and Otis. But nothing plucked him out of The Bad
Place like James.
Except
for this time.
He'd
tried the usual fancy footwork, the hip swivels, the long reach for the
high note, even a couple of spins. None of it lifted him. After a few minutes,
he hardly heard the music at all. Shrouded in anxiety, he made a pot of
coffee, set out a plate of hardening leftover-from-the-picnic brownies
and sat down in his study to wait for Rudy, pinching his nose with a sliding
gesture, from bridge to bulb and back again.
Ignatius,
the stray cat who had taken up residence at the rectory shortly after Kevin's
arrival, relaxed on his corner of desk. Already a full grown tom when he'd
moved in a dozen years ago, Iggy was now well advanced in years – possibly
as old as fifteen. He moved a little slower, sought the comfort of a warm
lap more and more often, and didn't attempt the spectacular leaps of yore.
Still, he remained alert and constant and inscrutable. With pale green
eyes opened very wide, he observed his housemate. He held Kevin in his
gaze for twenty minutes or more before jumping from the desk to a chair,
from the chair to the scarred, much scrubbed hardwood floor and sauntering
to the front door. There he sat down, staring at the door, waiting for
the doorbell to bong.
VI
Ten
minutes later, Rudy Otero ousted the cat from the faded velvet comfort
of the living room wingchair and settled himself in. In the past few years,
the elderly priest had forked his way past plump, but had not quite graduated
to corpulence. Father Otero preferred to think of himself as stout. A stout
individual. There was a certain dignity to that.
His
hair, once thick, coarse, and coal black, now drifted in long white wisps
about his head. The dark complected face, already quite wrinkled when Kevin
had been in seminary, had graduated into a labyrinth of lines. His deep
eyes though, they were still sharp, glittering darkly behind the heavy
folds of eyelid.
Although
there was an extensive collection of sterling in the rectory, practicality
won the day over presentation and Kevin poured out two cups of steaming,
fully caffeinated coffee from a white plastic insulated server. The remembered-at-the-last-minute
Jameson's stood on the kitchen counter alongside a splendid burgundy from
a small vineyard in Medoc. Father Otero didn't share Kevin's taste for
Irish whiskey. He was, however, deeply attached to red wine.
Ignatius
was not prepared to give up his late morning snooze spot simply because
it was already occupied. That particular sunray was too good to be wasted
and, really, he didn't mind sharing. The former tomcat sprang onto the
arm of the wingchair and blinked at the old priest for a moment or two
before slipping quietly onto the man's lap.
Rudy
rubbed the cat's head with the broad thumb of one hand while accepting
coffee with his free hand. He sipped from the cup, waiting for Kevin to
stop hovering and land.
"Would
you like to try one of these?" Kevin said, offering the plate of brownies.
"They were terrific last week. They might be a little chewy by now, but
if you dunk…"
"I
expect I will have more than one in a little while," Father Otero said,
passing an expert eye over the plate. He smiled, returning his full attention
to his former student. "Difficult as it may be to believe, I am more interested
in you than in chocolate. At least for the moment." He set his cup down
on a small three-legged table at his elbow. "Why not try to sit down and
tell me what is wrong?"
Obediently,
Kevin perched on the edge of the well-worn brocade sofa. Rudy and the cat
watched patiently as he took a few long breaths, trying again to slow his
mind, trying to catch the normal tempo of the physical world. "You said
you remembered the dreams," he said at last.
"Yes,
of course I do. You dreamed a beautiful woman visited your bed nearly every
night for - three years, was it?"
"That's
right. The same woman every night. We were…." He sighed. "We were intimate.
The dreams stopped coming immediately after I spoke to you about them."
Kevin shook his head, his lips tight with a wry smile. "If I had known
it would all end, I might have told you sooner or…"
"Or
not at all?"
"Yes,"
Kevin whispered. "Or not at all."
Rudy
gazed through the motes drifting through the splash of sunlight. Kevin
looked haggard. He looked frightened. It was most disturbing. That and
a stray thought that had surfaced on the drive over. "Well, you did tell
me," Rudy said briskly. "Impossible 'if's do not really matter in this
instance, do they? You told me you prayed about this predicament and, beyond
that, what more could you have done? Except talk to someone about it –
which you did eventually do. They were dreams, Kevin. You did not ask for
them, you could not control them – unless," he smiled, "you had found a
way to give up sleep altogether."
"But
that's just it." Kevin was running his thumb and forefinger up and down
the sides of his nose again. "I'm not so sure I was dreaming after all."
Rudy's
hands went still. The cat swiveled his head, nosing the priest's plump
fingers in an attempt to getting them moving again. Iggy had an itch under
his chin. Why should he go to all the trouble of tending to it when a willing
volunteer was so close at hand? After a moment, the fingers resumed their
rhythm and the cat closed his eyes, purring noisily.
"I
believe you will need to explain that to me," Rudy said.
"I've
seen her, Rudy. Cara, the woman from the dreams. I've seen her three times.
The first time was on Saturday at the church picnic."
"Surely
not, Kevin. How could you remember clearly what a dream woman looked like
after all this time? For myself, I cannot even remember a dream clearly
the next morning. And what has it been? Fifteen years now?"
"Nearly
seventeen since the last dream," Kevin said. "More than twenty since the
first."
"Well
there, you see…"
"I
didn't recognize her at the picnic. She was too far away and…" Kevin huffed
his self-exasperation. "…and her hair was the wrong color. The room was
always dark when she came to me. I'd always thought her hair was black.
I mean, it always looked black and… Then again, maybe it really was black
twenty years ago. It doesn't matter anyway, except that I didn't recognize
her. She seemed familiar, but that was all. But when I saw her again on
Sunday, I knew. She came to church, Rudy. She came for Communion. Up so
close, there was no mistaking her. Then on Thursday night, I went to dinner
at Alvie and Eric Theriault's. Do you know them? No probably not. Why would
you know them? Anyway, she was there, Rudy. She called herself Eve. Eve
Townsend, I think. But she was Cara. When we were left alone together for
a few moments, she…"Kevin looked up helplessly at his mentor. "She spoke
as if she knew me too and… she touched me."
Rudy
sat forward in his chair, cradling the cat and shifting his eyes slightly
as though he was trying to focus them inward, where his thought were –
his most unwelcome thoughts. "I assume you mean she touched you inappropriately."
Kevin's
laugh was harsh. "You could say that."
"And
she spoke to you as if she knew you? You are very sure of that?"
"Oh
yes. And today she left me a message. It's still on the answering machine."
"May
I hear it?"
"The
machine's in the study, just through there." He pointed to a heavy double
door at the far end of the living room. "I'd rather not hear it again,
if you don't mind. All you need to do is push the 'play' button on the
machine."
Two
ideas had occurred to Father Otero, one bad, the other wildly impossible.
He pinioned them in a corner of his mind as he surrendered his chair to
Ignatius and walked heavily into the study, closing the door behind him.
He found the answering machine on a dark mahogany credenza behind the large
desk. He pressed the play button.
"You
left so early last night," the woman's voice said. "We hardly got a chance
to talk at all. I've missed you so much, my love." The message ran on to
the end and the machine clicked itself off.
So.
It was bad. But not necessarily impossible.
VII
When
he returned to the living room, Father Otero found Kevin uncorking a bottle
of cabernet. On the coffee table fronting the sofa were two wineglasses.
"They
tell me that this should breathe for a half hour or so," Kevin said, pouring
into both glasses. "They also tell me that breathing in the glass is better
than leaving it in the bottle."
"They?"
"The
guy at the wine shop."
"Ah.
Well, they are correct."
Kevin's
lips twisted into a wry smile. "Frankly, at the moment I don't care what
they say. I don't think I can wait half an hour."
"Nor
I."
The
younger priest tasted the wine while the older priest downed half his glass
and refilled it before reclaiming his chair. "This wine," he said, "will
be quite splendid in a very little while."
"I
guess," Kevin said, wishing it were Jameson's neat instead.
Rudy
held his glass up to the light, examining the color. "You are right, of
course."
"I
am?"
"Certainly.
This woman seems to know you, Kevin. She calls you love names. She attempts
intimacy. Under other circumstances, I would suppose her merely to be mentally
unstable. I would recommend she seek council – not from you, naturally
– and perhaps medical care."
"But?"
Rudy
set his wine down on the little table, next to the cup of cold coffee.
"But these are not ordinary circumstances, are they? You recognize her.
You say you are certain, even after two decades." He shrugged. "So it stands
to reason. It is very simple really. You never dreamed this woman came
to your bed. Obviously, she did come to your bed."
The
cabernet in Kevin's glass had somehow disappeared. He fingered the stem
lightly, resisting the urge to crush the glass in his hands. Resisting
the urge to do damage, to deflect his thoughts with a few moments of physical
pain. So many years he had thought himself a particular kind of man, a
man of God, a man of honor, a man who had found his path early in life
and had never strayed, had rarely stumbled. And now – what? Now there was
a possibility that he didn't know himself at all. "I see that I must have,
but I don't understand how I could have deluded myself, Rudy," he said.
"I don't understand how anyone could – not to that extent. Cara was real,
but, at the same time, she wasn't real at all. None of it was real. Do
you see?"
There
was pity in the old priest's dark eyes. He had a great affection for his
former student and it was difficult to see him in such a state. "My notion
that this woman actually knows you," he said with deliberate calm, "that
you most likely were intimate with her, does not preclude the possibility
that she is emotionally disturbed. If we think she was capable of slipping
into your room every night for three years, why should we not consider
that you may not been deluded at all? Why should we not consider that she
was may have been able to prey upon you by somehow altering your consciousness?"
Kevin
puzzled his way through all those negatives before saying, "You think she
drugged me?"
"My
dear Kevin, I think, in this life, anything is possible. I think the mind
is extremely intricate in its workings. You may have been drugged by this
woman." Rudy paused, picking up his glass and sipping at its contents.
"Ah, this is beginning to bloom very nicely." He returned his eyes to Kevin's.
"Or you may truly be in deep denial about events that never should have
taken place."
"Or
I've been lying about the dreams. Or I've lost my mind and I never saw
Eve and none of this ever happened at all."
The
old man shrugged. "Anything is possible." The weathered face broke into
a wide smile, exposing teeth of extraordinary brilliance. "Although, the
tape does provide us with evidence that Eve does exist. And, if you are
a liar, you are a talented one indeed. Imagine the forethought of a young
man who invents a lie about a dream that he never had – just in case his
secret lover should appear two decades later and set the parish tongues
wagging. I suppose you might be crazy, but let us eliminate the first possibility
before we begin to consider the rest."
"I
bow to your greater wisdom and experience, Father." Kevin couldn't help
himself, he grinned.
Kevin's
struggle to keep his mind from haphazardly spinning at 78 rpms came to
an abrupt end and, with a jolt, he found himself back at 33 1/3. He rolled
his neck slowly, enjoying the several pops it made, relishing the air now
that it moved effortlessly in and out of his lungs. He was back in sync
and it was a fine thing. A reasonable voice had offered him a possible
way out, an easy way past the pain. But it was not the free ride that had
becalmed him. It was the voice that had offered it.
True,
before now, it had never occurred to Kevin to throw drugs into the middle
of this nightmare. The idea was pretty far-fetched, but so was the idea
that a woman had sneaked into the seminary dormitory every night and never
been caught, never even been seen. The whole thing was ridiculous. Serious,
but ridiculous nonetheless. He'd been either deluded or a dupe. He wasn't
sure which option made him the bigger fool.
"Chain chain chain…
Chain chain chai-ain…
Chain chain chai-ee-ain…
Chain of …"
He laughed softly, hearing Aretha clearly in his head.
"You
are all right?" Rudy asked, his slight frown making his eyes nearly disappear
behind his heavy eyelids.
"More
all right than I've been for several days. For which I thank you – and
God, of course."
"Of
course."
Kevin
paused, changing directions, tempering his good spirits. "There's more,"
he said after a moment. "It fits into the anything's possible aspect of
all this."
"What
is it, son?"
"The
reason I'm so sure that Eve is Cara… aside from everything she's said and
done…. Rudy, she looks the same. I mean exactly the same. If we assume
I really know this woman, then I've known her for twenty years – and she
hasn't aged a day."
For
a brief moment, Rudy's jaw muscles tightened, his black eyes glittered
brightly. He sipped again at his wine and when he looked up, his face had
returned to its usual benign maze of lines and folds. "There are procedures
now. They are commonplace these days. Many women have them."
"I
suppose that's what it must be," Kevin said with more certainty than he
felt. The woman he had seen at Communion and at the dinner party had not
merely been unlined, did not just seem young. The word that came to his
mind was fresh. Somehow, Cara was still young and fresh.
"One
of us should have a talk with this Cara, do you not think so? To find out
what she wants, what she is doing here. As much as I would like to do it
myself, I think it should be you, Kevin. It may be uncomfortable for you
to be alone with this woman, but she will, not be so honest with me, I
think. There would be less reason for her to lie to you."
"Yes,
you're right, of course. I don't know how to get in touch with her though.
I suppose I could telephone Alvie. She must know…"
Rudy
leaned sharply forward in his chair. "No, I would not suggest you do that.
This is better kept as private as possible. You must be patient and wait
for her to contact you again. I think she will not wait very long."
