A Dream of Ice Page 7

  “Oh thank god, Dr. O’Hara, we were trying to—”

  Caitlin ignored her and looked around, gasping. No sign of him. She hurried past the desk and bashed open the door to the long, bright test kitchen. At the far end of the room Jacob was on his hands and knees on the floor. He looked like he was vomiting.

  The receptionist rushed up behind her. “He just wandered in here, he was talking but he wouldn’t respond to us—he kept saying something that sounded like ‘towers.’ ”

  Caitlin was already diving across the floor to him, her feet and then her knees skidding across spilled sauces and fragments of food. Large bowls were scattered everywhere. A small cluster of people surrounding him drew back as Caitlin reached him. His small back was arched and he heaved hard, but nothing came out but a horrible rasping. There was no vomit on the floor in front of him.

  “What is he trying to throw up?” Caitlin shouted, placing her hands on his back. “What did he eat?”

  “He didn’t eat anything,” someone said. “We were watching. He came in and he was spasming, walking and spasming. He looked like he was reaching for us but his arms were all over the place, like he wasn’t trying to knock things over but . . .”

  “We’ve sent for an ambulance,” the receptionist said.

  “Not now,” Caitlin said. “Everyone get out. Please.”

  The receptionist hesitated but then gestured for the staff and onlookers to leave them be. The door swung shut behind them and the room grew muffled, quiet, still, dead. There was only the mother and her son.

  And whatever the hell was preying on Jacob. Caitlin knew it was there, cold and possessing.

  “Jacob, it’s me, Mom,” Caitlin said, trying to modulate her voice. She leaned down to look at his face. His hearing aid was still in but he didn’t turn toward her. Then he screamed, and it was like nothing Caitlin had ever heard, not from him, not from the souls in Galderkhaan. Her boy made a sound like aluminum being ripped apart by a high wind.

  “Jacob, I’m here,” Caitlin started. She kept up a long murmur to him, hardly knowing what she was saying. It was the sound of her voice that mattered, the tone, not so much the words. Jacob still didn’t acknowledge her. He crawled forward, grasping at the tiles with his nails—but scratching the floor was better than scratching his forearms, as Maanik had done, Caitlin thought with a shudder. His back heaved again but still nothing. Caitlin tried to cup his chin in her hand and turn his face to her. She caught one glimpse of his eyes passing over her face. There was so little of the normal Jacob there that a fresh sob climbed along her throat.

  He kept turning, looking over her shoulder and then he forced himself up, to standing. He reached to the counter for support and another bowl overturned, something milky white flying across the surface.

  “Fire,” he said and signed. “Fire. Fire below me.”

  Christ, no!

  Caitlin continued speaking to him. “Jacob, I’m going to start counting now, I want you to count with me. One . . . two . . .”

  She kept going but he wasn’t listening. Her hands were on his shoulders, which were damp with the sweat rolling down his face and neck. She wasn’t restraining him but hoped that his body would register the weight and familiarity of her touch. She didn’t want to take that away to sign for him, and he wasn’t looking anyway. He was looking at a stove.

  Jacob started making sounds and Caitlin’s flesh chilled in anticipation—but it wasn’t Galderkhaani. It wasn’t English either. They were animal sounds, like he was a toddler again learning to use his voice, but with the pacing and pauses of English. Jacob pulled himself away from her toward the stove and Caitlin thought of Atash setting himself on fire in the library in Iran. Jacob reached for a knob on the stove, his mouth still working around the same odd nonlanguage. Caitlin grabbed him with one hand to stop him, and at the same time she reached out with the other hand and began knocking on the counter, re-creating his tapping on their shared wall at home. He showed no sign of hearing. His fingers were on the knob but they kept sliding off in an odd way, as if the knob were covered with oil, though Caitlin could see that it was dry.

  Suddenly, Jacob’s head jerked in an upward, backward swing that was not normal—still human, but not normal. His head turned so quickly that his shoulders and torso followed, and now he was looking at her. There was a chill in the air around him, something that had no apparent source, something that moved when he moved.

  “Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . .” Caitlin kept going, her voice rigidly calm over her fear. Her hands dropped to his elbows, placing pressure there but not squeezing desperately the way she wanted to.

  The curious sounds died away and Jacob was just looking at her. For one moment, Caitlin thought she saw his face shift away from his face. She shivered with terror. It was as if his face were momentarily displaced. Underneath were other eyes . . . dark eyes.

  “Jacob!” she screamed, and shook him.

  And then he spoke. Not animal sounds, not English, and not “towers.”

  “Tawazh,” he said with a voice that sounded like gravel.

  He turned very slowly away from her. Again, he reached for the knob. Again, Caitlin stopped him as gently as possible. She did not want to shock him but she watched carefully, closely. He fought her and she held him more firmly. She didn’t wrest his hand back: if she were to know how to treat him, she had to know if he was in the same situation as Maanik and especially poor Atash, who had burned himself to death. The small fingers reached out, tried to turn on the flame.

  “No,” Caitlin said softly. “Jacob, you mustn’t touch that.”

  The fingers wriggled, tensed, then dropped limply. A moment later, so did Jacob. The cold around him exploded away, like a fever breaking. He was warm again, and Jacob was back. He became alert, suddenly, as if he’d been daydreaming.

  “Mom,” he said, and turned to her. “I could hear!”

  Caitlin checked his eyes, then wrapped her arms tightly around him and felt his arms circle her back and hold on. After a moment of deep relief, she looked up to see students and teachers peering through a glass panel by the door. Caitlin led Jacob out through the onlookers, took him away before the EMTs arrived. She already knew there was nothing they could do for him.

  In the cab home he didn’t say a word.

  Caitlin hesitated but asked, “Jacob, did you feel like something was—”

  He pulled the hearing aid from his ear and handed it to her. Then he closed his eyes and burrowed deep into her side, pulling her hand until her arm was tight around him. By the time they arrived home he was asleep. She hated waking him but he was too big for her to carry up the stairs. He trudged with heavy feet and heavier eyelids up the steps, leaned on the wall while she unlocked the door, then walked straight to his bed and climbed in without taking off his coat and shoes. Caitlin carefully slipped them off, pulled the blankets over him and sat quietly, gently stroking his head. She couldn’t help but wade through all of Maanik’s episodes. This event with Jacob was not the same, but it was too close; Caitlin was vigilant lest her own post-traumatic stress return.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon there, watching him sleep, seeing and sensing nothing abnormal. She called the school, learned that Jacob had left the building with a group going on a field trip but had never boarded the bus. The vice principal assured Caitlin that there would be an investigation and that—if she allowed Jacob to return—he would be watched constantly.

  “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 each other, 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.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “You better mean that.”

  “I do!” he said as she hooked her arm in his. “I also want you to know I feel underdressed.”

  “You’re not,” she said, finding a little laugh. “You look—Ben-ish.”

  He made a sour face. “Is that good or bad?”

  “Sartorially neutral,” she replied. “It’s the man in the clothes that matters.”

  He took her arm and held the door open with the other. They walked into the cool night, amid but apart from the throng.

  “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Cai, you really are beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I feel like we should be going to the opera. Well, you should, anyway.”

  “There was a time,” she
said, “when people dressed for dinner . . . every night.”

  “Only people of means,” Ben pointed out. “Servants like my ancestors, we ate around a butcher-block table in the kitchen.”

  Mention of ancestors threw a chill into Caitlin. Ben saw it, put his free hand on hers. “Cai?”

  “It’s okay,” she said, putting on a smile. “I’m discovering that there are shiny new trip wires in my life. Got to work around those.” She squeezed the fingers on top of hers. “Let’s eat.”

  She gave his arm a tug and headed to the corner, turned west—toward a halal food truck with ten people in line: single men and women, some with dogs; a female cop; and a group of teenagers.

  Ben stopped hard when he saw it. He was thrown back to their college days, grabbing street-corner hot dogs before their next lecture. This was classic Cai.

  “Zero romance,” he said, raising a hand in surrender. “Just us.”

  She grinned. “Just us.”

  He chuckled, so did she, and they settled into the line. The cop and a man from her building noticed her, looked partly away as the line moved forward a few paces.

  “We don’t have Washington Square Park to sit in,” Ben noted, “no guitars or drummers or hip-hoppers with boom boxes.”

  “We have my building’s courtyard and the playlist on my cell phone, if you want. All eighties, all the time. Besides, we may not have many alfresco nights left,” she went on.

  “Winter’s around the corner—frost on your rivets and ice in your nose,” Ben said.

  He twitched his mouth like his beloved fellow Brit Charlie Chaplin and Caitlin smiled, then hugged him. She held him closer, harder than she expected. He wrapped around her and they just stood in the hug, ignoring the world, the grid of skyscrapers, the impatient horns of taxis jerking across the intersection. Finally, the big guy behind them told them to move up, and they stepped forward with their arms still around each other. Ben gave Caitlin a peck on the top of her head and she disengaged.

  “So how are you?” he asked.

  “We’ll get to that,” she replied. “How are you?”