Surrender, New York

  “All right,” I said, taking her hand briefly. “Ambyr, my name’s Trajan, and let me introduce my colleague, Dr. Michael Li, who, I assure you, will be happy if you call him anything at all.”

  “Funny stuff, gweilo,” Mike mumbled, stepping up onto the patio. “Just call me Mike, Ambyr, everybody else does. I doubt anybody in this town even knows I’m a doctor.”

  “Okay, Mike,” Ambyr answered, smiling a little wider; and then she turned toward Lucas again. “And you, my smart-ass brother, can go inside and get the tray—which does not have any hot tea or ‘weird little cakes’ on it. Not in weather like this, because I’m not that dumb. Iced tea, lemonade, and fresh ginger cookies are what we’ve got. I hope that’s okay with you both?” Mike and I mumbled assent quickly. “I don’t keep any beer or alcohol in the house, because Dumb and Dumber would drink it all as soon as I bought it.”

  “Oh, right!” Lucas said, stomping toward the screen door. “And I suppose keeping the house alcohol-free wasn’t one of the rules for you being our guardian, Ambyr.” But the mere indication that she was moving the cane back to her right hand made Lucas quickly open the screen door, get inside, and pull the thing closed again. “Baaah!” he called. “Too slow on that one, sis!”

  “If I ever seem too slow to catch your gawky butt,” Ambyr laughed, once more revealing the same taste for good-natured banter that Lucas possessed, “you can bet I’m not really trying.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lucas scoffed. “Come on, Derek, help me carry this shit out to the table, or do I have to send you an engraved invitation?”

  As Derek complied with Lucas’ order, Ambyr moved closer to me, by small, deliberate steps. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and glanced quickly over to Mike, who shrugged even as he let a sly grin come into his face: he knew that I was growing increasingly uncomfortable because of a very pretty young woman being close. Finally, when Ambyr was just about half an arm’s reach from me, she held up her hands.

  “Do you mind, Dr. Jones?” She moved the hands closer to my face. “I’d kind of like to know what the face of the man who lives with a cheetah actually looks like.”

  “Oh,” I said, rather simply; and as I realized that she intended to get the feel of my features, I finally added: “I mean, of course. But I thought that was an old wives’ tale about blind people.”

  “Not this blind person.” Ambyr moved a little closer, and then, hearing a small animal grunt come from below her, asked, “Will Marcianna mind? Lucas says she’s tame, but I’m with you, on that subject—I think there’s a part of wild animals that can never really be tamed.”

  Which was yet another indication that Lucas was doing a lot of talking at home about what went on up at Shiloh; I really would have to read him the riot act.

  “She appears to be fine,” I said, glancing down at Marcianna, who in fact seemed somewhat agitated, rarely having seen any stranger—and certainly not any female, save my great-aunt—in such close proximity to me. “But maybe you want to meet her, before me. Put her at her ease.”

  There would be many moments in the days to come when I simply could not believe that Ambyr Kurtz was actually blind, so knowing were the glances that those dead violet eyes turned on me. This time, they seemed to say that she knew exactly what I was up to, just how uneasy I was with her physical scrutiny; and as she smiled coyly, she said, “Okay. If that’s what you think’s the best way to go.”

  “Oh, he does, Ambyr,” Mike threw in. “Believe me.”

  Ambyr smiled in a different way at this crack: still knowingly, but with affectionate familiarity. “Yeah, I can see why Lucas likes you so much, Mike,” she said, without turning to him. “You guys have exactly the same sense of humor.”

  “Well,” Mike said defensively, “I like to think mine’s a little more developed.”

  Ambyr only shook her head as she started to bend down to where she heard Marcianna panting. “You can think it,” she said, softly and simply. I turned to see Mike looking rather shocked, then leaned down to join our hostess.

  “If you’ll just put one hand under her muzzle, Ambyr, and let her get your scent, then she can start to get used to you.” Without my giving her any more direction, Ambyr located just the right spot to place her left hand. Then she began to murmur softly:

  “Well, hey, Marcianna…My name’s Ambyr, and I’ve been waiting a long while to meet somebody like you. Did you know that?” As Marcianna registered no complaint, Ambyr inclined her head up to me. “She seems okay—do you think I can go ahead and pet her head?”

  “Try her neck and chest, first,” I said. “Just so she’s sure you don’t intend any mischief. If that’s okay, then sure, move to her shoulders and her head. I’ve got a pretty good grip on her.”

  Repeating various soothing phrases softly, Ambyr completed this ritual, her sense of wonder undiminished. Marcianna bore it very well, which I was glad to see; because frankly, I really hadn’t been quite certain of how she would react. The pheromones of a young woman were still new to her; yet having seen her accept Gracie only forty-eight hours earlier, I believed I was on fairly safe ground with Ambyr. The combination of a new location and a new type of person did confuse Marcianna a little; but she had seen an awful lot of the bad in people, early in her life, and then the other side during the last five years at Shiloh, and she seemed to be able to tell that this was not a situation she needed to fear. Ambyr, for her part, displayed little variation in either her words or her expression—until, as she was stroking my companion’s head and left shoulder, Marcianna turned suddenly to allow her access to the rich, deep fur of her back and flank. Into this, Ambyr’s delicate hand disappeared almost completely—and she gasped, in a way that was utterly awed, very affectionate, and completely charming.

  “So amazing…” Ambyr said quietly. “I’ve never…” Then, daring perhaps more than she should, she put her cheek to Marcianna’s shoulder; but, realizing she hadn’t cleared it with me, she pulled back for a moment and asked, “Is that okay?”

  “Hey, you seem to be doing just fine,” I said. “Better than I did, when I first met her.”

  “Yes, but…” Ambyr waited to complete her statement until she had first satisfied her desire to feel Marcianna’s warm fur on her face, and then withdrew her head again to say, “But you first met her when she was in that horrible damned place, that ‘petting zoo’—which I hated, by the way. Lucas used to make our folks take us there, but it was obvious that it was just a moneymaking nightmare, that the guy and his people didn’t give a damn about the animals. I was really glad when Lucas said you were the one who got it shut down.”

  Her awareness of things that I had shared with her brother was now not only obvious but expansive; and it probably should have concerned me even more than it did, just then. But this one fact was so harmless, and I was so flattered and thankful to meet someone who actually appreciated why Mitch McCarron and I had put an end to the petting zoo, that I paid it no mind. “It wasn’t just me,” I said. “But I guess I was pretty much the one who pushed it hardest.” The words sounded dumb enough to me when I said them; but it wasn’t until I looked at Mike and saw him curl his finger, stick it inside his cheek, and yank hard, imitating a hooked fish, that I realized I was being a little obvious, myself. “Anyway,” I concluded, ignoring my partner, “we did get it shut down, and that’s the important thing.”

  “Yes, you did,” Ambyr said, stroking the top of Marcianna’s head once or twice, and then standing to turn to me again. “So—do I get to see what you look like now, or not?”

  “Oh,” I replied, once again uneasily—for I thought that maybe I’d dodged this part of the meeting. “Sure, of course. I guess.”

  The boyish silliness of my words made Mike put his hands on his knees and bend down to breathe in, deeply and quickly, in order to keep from laughing out loud; but he hadn’t counted on that extraordinary hearing of Ambyr Kurtz’s, and when her hands were about to touch my face, she said, “Careful, Dr. Li—Mike. I mi
ght ask to see what you look like, next…”

  At which Mike suddenly straightened up, looking almost as apprehensive as I felt. “Oh,” he mumbled. “I don’t look very interesting, really.”

  “Well, then—let’s see about Trajan, here…”

  The first touch of those thin-wristed, elegant hands was not coy or flirtatious, but rather directly probing: softly, but with the genuine purpose of discovering what my features resembled. Their intent, however, could not halt my reaction. It had been a very, very long time since I’d come into contact with a human female (excluding my great-aunt) in so close, even intimate, a way. And it wasn’t simply the contact. As I say, the light blue dress she was wearing—standard summer issue from any Walmart or Target store—covered very little of her upper body, coming up in a simple sweep from a mid-thigh-length skirt to conceal her chest and then turning into two negligible, crossing spaghetti straps that were the sole covering of her back and shoulders: and from all her exposed areas of skin came the mixed aromas of light perspiration and a gently scented soap. The cumulative effect of touch and scent meant that for the first time since the radiation treatment six months before, which I had thought might have killed off my ability to experience such things forever, I felt a stirring: not blatantly sexual, it was rather a simple suggestion that the physical side of my life might not, in fact, have been shut down forever. As her fingers moved from my forehead and eyes slowly down to my nose, delicately seeking out each detail, then circled both ears on their way to and along the jawline, I found that I could not look for long into that violet gaze, blind though it might be: pure self-consciousness and insecurity wouldn’t allow it. There was no way in which I could turn, however, without catching sight of Mike, who I knew must be reveling in the situation once again; and so, as Ambyr’s fingers reached along my cheeks to my mouth, I simply closed my eyes—

  But when her fingertips found my mouth, I cannot deny, a sudden shudder went down my spine. It was thrilling, yes; but it was also, in some way that is difficult to describe, a little frightening, and as I felt it my eyes suddenly popped back open and my head snapped instinctively back, a movement that made Ambyr chuckle.

  “Don’t worry, Trajan,” she said. “I’m done. And Lucas was right—you’ve got a nice face.”

  “When the hell did I ever say that, sis?” Lucas said, coming out of the house through the screen door. Derek followed behind, doing the work, predictably, of carrying a heavy tray that bore a pitcher each of iced tea and lemonade. “Alls I said was, he ain’t ugly enough to turn you to stone.”

  “Stop it,” Ambyr scolded gently. “That’s not what you said, Lucas—don’t worry so much about acting like a human being, every now and then.”

  “O-kay,” Lucas replied airily. “But you might regret saying that, someday. Where do you want the stuff?”

  “Bring it this way, Derek,” Ambyr answered, knowing full well which one of the boys was pulling the laboring oar, and finding the edge of the patio easily with her cane. Then she stepped down onto the lawn and pointed with the slender white stick. “Let’s put it on the table, but let’s make sure the table’s in the shade, first. The chairs, too.” She glanced back toward me as she led Derek away, a peculiar move: she couldn’t actually see my reaction, after all. Was it for my benefit, then? Nothing else seemed possible. “I hear you get uncomfortable very fast, with your leg and all, Trajan,” she said, smiling. “So we’ll get you one of the big chairs, and keep it out from the table, in case you want to get up and pace around…”

  That was it. Before Lucas could follow the other members of his unusual little family, I horse-collared him by his T-shirt and yanked him back to where Mike and I were standing. “All right, you,” I murmured, trying to regain my full composure. “Is there anything about life up the hollow that you haven’t told your sister-mother and your friend-brother, you little worm? I warned you about security, Lucas, damn it.”

  “Hey, I didn’t let on about the case, don’t worry,” Lucas answered, fully in control, as he shook free of my grip. “But I had to give them some kind of information, or they would have gotten suspicious. So I told them details that don’t matter.” Straightening out his shirt, he added, “Jesus H. Christ, what the fuck has got into you, Doc?”

  “Something that’s long overdue, kid,” Mike answered with a smile. “So don’t give him too hard a time about it.”

  Glancing from Mike back to me, Lucas finally declared: “Fuck you, Mike. No way. L.T.’s got a thing for my sister?”

  Mike tilted his head judiciously. “Well—let’s just say that the last time I saw him act like such a sap in front of a good-looking woman, he ended up going out with her for three years.” He paused for an instant, almost not sure how mischievous to be; but then he just blurted it out: “And she ended up in a mental hospital.”

  “The last part of which had nothing to do with me, Michael,” I seethed quietly. “As well you know. And I am not being a sap.”

  But neither of them, of course, was going to listen to a thing I said.

  “So—the doc’s got a thing for Ambyr…” Lucas mused; and it occurred to me again that he was neither as surprised nor as outraged as I would have expected him to be, given how protective of her good name he’d always been. “Well, Doc,” he decided at length, “she ain’t got no boyfriend—and she is blind, which at least gives you a shot.”

  He tried to bound away, with that crack, but I snagged him again with my cane hand, making him groan for the fate of his T-shirt. “Really, Lucas?” I said, trying to affect a severity that I did not feel. “Blind jokes about your sister—from you?”

  “Hey,” he answered, flailing his arms. “I can make ’em, you can’t. Now let me go, damn it, this is my last clean T-shirt!”

  “I don’t doubt that,” I finally said, releasing him to take off across the lawn. Marcianna strained to join him, wanting to play; but I held her back, stepping off the patio. Mike moved with me, his smile becoming a shit-eating grin. “Come on, Mike,” I preempted. “I’m almost twice her age.”

  “So what?” Mike said. “She’s twenty, not fourteen. You’ve been waiting a long time for something like this, L.T.; I say go for it.”

  “Of course you say go for it, Li,” I answered, still tightly controlling my volume and speaking toward the house. “You’ve never met a good-looking woman that you didn’t say that about.”

  “Only because, generally speaking, it’s true,” Mike chuckled, as we started to walk toward the big, heavy picnic table, which Derek was maneuvering into the shade as if it weighed very little.

  The first part of that late afternoon passed pleasantly enough, Ambyr presiding with extraordinary competence and, when it came to lifting the fat pitchers of lemonade and iced tea, surprising strength and ease. But when the refreshments had all been consumed, Derek and Lucas became increasingly restless, starting something out on the grass that looked to develop into another round of MMA fighting. Ambyr had heard this coming, however, and suggested that, if they couldn’t control themselves while the adults talked, they should at least turn their energies toward something that might not get them both injured. There was on old basketball on the ground, and an equally old hoop hanging from the side of the garage above a bare patch of dirt, and she swung her light white can to indicate it.

  “Now you’re speaking my language,” Mike announced, clearly sensing that I wanted time to draw Ambyr out minus the presence of the two boys. “Come on, you pair of losers—think you’re up to taking on one old criminologist?”

  Derek and Lucas responded in a shot, dashing over, seizing the basketball, and showing quickly that they were both adept at using it. “Trash, trash, trash, Mike,” Lucas said. “You can talk it, all right—let’s see how you walk it. We’ll even spot you some points.”

  Mike grinned, though part of him clearly took the kid’s words to heart. “Yeah,” he said, “We’ll see, Mr. Mouth.”

  I took a couple of steps after him, enough to be able to
say, without being overheard, “Good idea. I’m going to take Marcianna on a walk someplace with Ambyr. See what she’s got for us.”

  Knowing he was safe, he leered at me. “Oh, I think we know what she’s got—at least for you,” he chuckled. “The question is, can she help on this case?”

  “Fuck off, Li,” I said, trying not to sound too self-conscious. “I just want to calm Marcianna down and—”

  “Yeah,” Mike said, moving off again with another laugh. “And. You are so dead, L.T. So. Fucking. Dead…”

  With that Mike moved to the little basketball court, and I walked back to the table.

  “You sure you don’t want to join them?” Ambyr asked. “They can get a little out of hand, two-on-one, and I used to be a pretty good JV player before I got sick. I can still dribble and shoot, too, just by feel and sound. Together we ought to make one decent player.”

  There was nothing like mocking or teasing in her tone; far from it, had I not known better I would have taken it for flirtation. “No, not me,” I said. “Not anymore. Once upon a time, but these days…” I tried to shake off the sad thought. “Anyway, Ambyr, I need to take Marcianna somewhere fairly discreet, give her a chance to poke around, or she’s liable to go crazy trying to join the game. Do you have a spot?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she answered, quickly getting to her feet and pointing off to her right, toward the earthen embankment at the rear of the yard, where a small path led up through some trees. “One of Morgan Central’s practice fields is up there. Nobody will see us.”

  “Ideal,” I said. “Shall we go, then?”

  Ambyr nodded happily, and then, as I let Marcianna have a little more lead, locked her left arm with somewhat startling suddenness around my right. Thus did we begin the climb to the most remote of the school’s playing fields, which seemed to grow in number every year, in direct proportion to the collapse of the students’ basic competency levels.

  It was on this hidden field, onto which I had a great deal of trouble not loosing Marcianna, that I would learn Ambyr Kurtz’s full, terrible story. And by the time it was all over, I very much feared that Mike had been right: in a variety of ways, I was indeed a dead man.