The Affinities

  “Suze … is something wrong?”

  “I wanted to ask her, but she won’t wake up!”

  “I don’t understand. Are you at home?”

  “Yes!”

  “Your mom’s in her bedroom?”

  “No! She’s on the couch! I’m looking at her right now!”

  “What happens if you try to wake her up?”

  “Nothing!”

  Amanda overheard some of my end of the conversation—she sat up and gave me a concerned look. No one else was paying attention. Gordo sat by the window, his own phone in his hand, talking to one of his security people. Navarro’s snoring had settled into a growling rhythm, like someone trying to start a chainsaw.

  “Go to her now,” I told Suze. “See if she wakes up.”

  “Okay…”

  “Are you with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can she see you?”

  “Her eyes are closed.”

  “What if you touch her?”

  A pause. “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to get the blood on me.”

  I closed my eyes and said, “Suze, tell me about the blood. Is Mommy hurt?”

  “She cuts herself sometimes. Maybe she cut herself too much.”

  “Try to wake her up. Say, ‘Mommy, wake up!’ Real loud. Can you do that for me?”

  She didn’t just call it out, she screamed it. When she stopped, I said, “What happened?”

  “Nothing! Maybe her eyes came open a little bit but they closed up again.”

  “Okay,” I said, though okay was far from what I felt. “Okay, Suze, you need to call 911. Do you know how to do that?”

  “Yeah but…”

  “But what?”

  “Mommy said never call 911 if she’s passed out. Because people might come and take me away from her. She said just wait for her to wake up. But there’s more blood this time. Your number was in the phone so I called it instead.”

  “That’s good, Suze, that’s smart, but you’re right, this time’s different. Your mommy would want you to call 911. The 911 people know how to help, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

  “I’m afraid.” It sounded as if the tears were about to brim over.

  “Sure you are, but that’s part of being brave. Even the bravest people get scared. That’s when they ask for help, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So I’ll hang up, and then you call 911. Right away, okay? Don’t wait. They’ll stay on the phone with you until everything’s fixed up. After that I’ll call back and check on you. Okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “Don’t guess, Suze. Just do it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll hang up now, but I need you to promise to make that call. Do you promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say it for me.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good girl.”

  I ended the call and looked at the phone in my hand. The phone was shaking. Because my hand was shaking.

  Amanda came over and touched my shoulder, and I told her what Suze had said.

  She frowned and nodded. “God, that’s awful. It sounds like Rachel’s a cutter.”

  “A what?”

  “Self-injury. It’s a personality disorder. People cut themselves, burn themselves, things like that. Enough to hurt, but not enough to do real damage. So it probably wasn’t a suicide attempt. You said she had psychiatric drugs in her bathroom?”

  Her stash of pharmaceuticals, the kind prescribed for ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, even a couple of antipsychotics. Most of them had been prescribed to Rachel, though I had seen a different name on a couple of the labels—Carlos something-or-other, her barroom buddy.

  Amanda’s Tau telepathy was acute enough for her to guess what was going through my mind. “You didn’t take advantage of her, Adam. You didn’t know she was crazy until—”

  “Until after I took advantage of her.”

  “No. You didn’t do anything wrong. Rash, maybe, but not wrong. That’s the thing about outsiders. They’re unpredictable. Not always bad, but dangerous in all kinds of ways, to themselves and others.”

  I opened my phone again and tried Rachel’s number. I was gratified that the line was busy. I hoped it meant Suze was doing what I had told her to do.

  Amanda said, “Rachel’s damaged in ways you couldn’t have known about. I just don’t want you to be collateral damage.”

  “I’m thinking about Suze. Does she count as collateral damage?” I looked at the others in the room, my tribe, all of us leaning on each other in one way or another. Suze didn’t have a tribe. She barely had a mother.

  Amanda took a step back and said, “What I mean is—”

  I could guess what she was about to say. My welfare was more important to her than Rachel’s. She didn’t want me to get hurt. Outside Tau, people were unpredictable and relationships could go wrong in countless ways. Misunderstandings were inevitable. And so on.

  But she didn’t finish the sentence.

  * * *

  At the time—when the window glass shattered, when the drapes billowed as if an invisible finger had tugged them, when Amanda looked startled and then fell down—we didn’t understand what was happening. Later, we reconstructed it this way:

  Gordo MacDonald had put his security detail on alert. Marcy Britnell, a Tau from Cleveland and formerly a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, was working the tree line at the western edge of the property, armed with a pistol and equipped with a pair of IR goggles, when she spotted a figure in the forest. The figure appeared to be carrying a long gun, and Marcy quietly called the news in to Gordo while keeping the stranger in view.

  Gordo didn’t want Marcy tackling the intruder by herself, so he told her to hold her position while he sent out a couple more of his people. And that’s what Marcy did, until she saw the figure raise his weapon and aim it toward the house. At which point she leveled her pistol and shouted to the gunman to lower his weapon and stand down.

  The gunman didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he began to swing it toward the sound of Marcy’s voice. Marcy wasn’t sure how visible she was in the moonlight, but she was taking no chances. She squeezed off a shot.

  The gunman twisted to the left, obviously hurt, and reflexively fired a round of his own.

  The rifle he carried was a Remington 783, and the bullet he fired went nowhere near Marcy Britnell. Instead it flew toward the house, clipped a pine bough, penetrated the glass of the sliding doors that adjoined the deck, pierced the coarse fabric of the curtains, passed within inches of the phone Gordo was holding to his ear, and struck Amanda just under her left shoulder and inches from the curve of her spine.

  I looked away from her at the sound of the bullet cracking the window. I saw the curtain billow and settle back as if a wind had lifted it, and I saw Gordo pause in mid-conversation, mouth open but motionless as he tried to sort out what was happening. When I turned back to Amanda she looked perplexed. Then she fell toward me, eyes open, and I caught her.

  * * *

  In those days we liked to talk about “Tau telepathy.” It wasn’t really telepathy, of course, but we understood each other so deeply, so intuitively, that it often felt that way. What we discovered that night on Pender Island was something even deeper than Tau telepathy. Call it Tau rage.

  Amanda tumbled into my arms, struggling to say something that emerged as a choked whisper, and time began to stagger forward in a series of static moments, snapshots taken in a glaring light. Probably everyone else in the room could say the same thing. But we worked in concert despite our confusion. I went to my knees, Amanda’s weight carrying me down. I helped her to lie on her right side. I could see the wound now, a flower of blood on the back of the wrinkled white blouse she was wearing. The wound was bleeding freely but not gushing. Her eyelids fluttered and the pupils of her eyes rolled upward.

  I said, “Amanda?”


  Hands pulled me away from her, and Gordo MacDonald knelt down in my place. “I’m qualified in emergency first aid,” he said, “and Marcy’s on her way in—Marcy did time in Afghanistan as a field nurse. Let us look after her.”

  Before I could answer he had taken a knife from his belt and cut away her blouse. Amanda gasped, a sound like water bubbling over rocks.

  The exterior door flew open almost immediately. It was Marcy, breathless, with a plastic case the size of an overnight bag in her hand. A med kit, which she had stashed in the trunk of one of the cars that had come over on the ferry. She looked frazzled and breathless, but she moved straight to where Gordo was tending Amanda. She inspected the wound, checked Amanda’s pulse, called her name and got a weak response. “Hang in there,” Marcy said. She turned to Gordo and added in a low voice, “We need professional help.”

  “The shooter?” Gordo asked.

  “Nelson’s bringing him in.”

  * * *

  Damian was on the phone to a Tau contact back in Vancouver. He put down the handset and began a brief, intense conversation with Gordo. I couldn’t hear what they said. All my attention was still focused on Amanda.

  She was alert enough to murmur something about the pain. Marcy took a syringe from her kit and with practiced efficiency gave her a shot of morphine. Almost immediately, Amanda’s eyes drifted to half-mast. “She’ll be okay, Adam,” Marcy told me over her shoulder. “I mean that.”

  “She needs a hospital.”

  “Setting it up right now,” Damian said from across the room.

  There were a couple of local physicians on Pender and a small regional hospital not far away on Salt Spring Island, but we needed a better and faster option. Late as it was, it took Damian only three calls to find a Tau who ran a helicopter-commute service out of Tsawwassen. A Sikorsky S76 was in the air twenty minutes later, by which time Damian had located a Tau physician near Ladner with access to a fully equipped clinic. The doctor agreed to assess and treat Amanda without reporting a gunshot wound, as long as she didn’t require complex surgery—which Marcy had said she would not.

  As that was being arranged one of Gordo’s security guys, the one called Nelson, came up the stairs to the rain-sodden deck with the wounded shooter clinging to him. Damian stopped him at the door: “Not in here—we can’t have his blood all over everything.” The shooter slid down to the hardwood planks.

  When we talked about it later, that was what we called him: the shooter. Because we had heard the word on TV and in the movies. But that wasn’t how I thought of him at the time. Not when Amanda was still losing blood. I thought of him instead as the son of a bitch who had tried to destroy everything that made my life worth living.

  Marcy and Gordo headed for the deck, and I followed them. The shooter was a skinny dude with one of those long faces you sometimes see on very tall people, as if his features had been stretched vertically. His hair was wet and dangled over his forehead in two black wings. His eyes were anxious but unfocused. Marcy’s bullet had taken him mid-body, below the ribs and to the left. Blood had clotted on his cotton shirt and discolored his jeans from the waist to the left knee. Marcy looked at him and said in a small voice, “Oh, Christ. Gordo—”

  “I know,” Gordo said.

  The man was dying, and there was nothing Marcy or anyone else could do to save him. That was what I surmised from their silences.

  It made me glad.

  Hatred is a purifying emotion. Before that night I would have said I hated a few people. But dislike and disdain aren’t hatred. They’re pallid, hollow emotions. Real hatred is a bulldozer. It wants to demolish and destroy. It brooks no opposition.

  I looked down at this piece of shit in the form of a human being, and he looked back at me through a haze of pain. Furious or frightened tears leaked from his eyes. I knelt down and put my face close to his face. His pig eyes narrowed. His breath stank of cloves and halitosis, mingled with the coppery smell of all the blood he was spilling. I ordered him to tell me his name.

  Gordo, behind me, tried to get my attention. “Adam—”

  The shooter wasn’t saying anything, though I had his complete attention. So I put my hands on his throat. I felt the stubble where he had shaved that morning. I felt his Adam’s apple frantically bobbing against my fingers. His lips struggled to form words. I let him take a breath.

  “Fuck you,” he whispered.

  Gordo pulled me away before I could do any damage. “Adam, we know who he is. We’ve got his wallet. His driver’s license. His credit card. His phone.” He looked at the dying man and I realized that the same hatred I felt was running through Gordo, Damian, Marcy, everyone else in the house. It was one big river. Maybe what they felt was a little less white-hot than what I felt, but it was real, visceral hatred.

  “This time tomorrow,” Gordo said, “we’ll know everything about him. Where he lives, who his friends are, who he’s working for. We already know he’s an amateur. Carrying his personal shit on him like that.”

  The shooter moved his mouth again, seemed to be trying to say something that wouldn’t come out.

  Marcy fetched her medical kit. After a brief, hushed conference with Gordo and Damian, she produced a syringe and filled it from a small brown bottle.

  “Hold him steady,” she said. “I don’t want him knocking this out of my hand.”

  Gordo leaned across the shooter, pinning his legs and his left arm. I tugged his right arm straight out as Gordo used a pocket knife to slice his shirt sleeve from cuff to shoulder. When Marcy jabbed the needle into the shooter’s bicep, he arched his back in a feeble spasm of resistance. I asked Marcy what she was giving him.

  “Painkiller,” she said curtly.

  “What, to make him feel better?”

  “Enough for that,” she said. “Enough for that and more.”

  The shooter thrashed and struggled when he heard her. But not for long.

  CHAPTER 11

  Maybe understandably—or maybe not—a couple of days passed before it occurred to me to call Rachel Ragland.

  She didn’t answer her phone, and I left an apologetic message and asked her to get in touch. Another day passed. Nothing. I drove to Rachel’s building, parked, and buzzed her apartment from the lobby. Silence. So I called the local hospitals and found her at Vancouver General. She was in “for observation,” and unless I was family, visiting hours were two to six, at Rachel’s discretion.

  By my watch that left a window of three hours, and the hospital was only twenty minutes away. It hadn’t rained since the weekend. The weather had slipped into an autumn lull, all soft blue skies and crisp breezes, and it was an easy drive. But I felt as if some transparent part of me had become opaque: I looked at the world through a lens of clouded glass.

  It turned out that Rachel was in a ward in the hospital’s psychiatric wing. A locked ward, though that wasn’t as bad as it sounded; all it meant was that patients and visitors needed authorization to pass through the glass-and-mesh doors next to the nurses’ station. I waited twenty minutes for someone to find Rachel, give her my name, and find out if she was willing to see me. At last a nurse (a young guy in powder-blue scrubs) waved me in. I followed him to Rachel’s bed.

  She was dressed in slacks and a plaid flannel shirt. There were slippers on her feet, and she was sitting up, an ancient paperback novel in her hand. She gave me a long, searching look. She was clean and reasonably alert but I could tell by a certain slackness around her eyes that she was back on her meds. Before I could speak she said, “They think I’m suicidal. That’s why I’m stuck here. But I was only cutting.” She held out her left arm to show me her bandages, a swatch of cotton and tape that ran from wrist to elbow. “You know about that? People who cut themselves sometimes?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said.

  “Well, I’m one of them.”

  “I’m surprised. I never saw—”

  “What—scars? This was the first time I did my arm. I used to just
cut my legs. Up high, so I could wear shorts and not show anything. But not a bathing suit. Which was okay because I don’t swim. And I was pretty healed up when you saw me without my clothes on. I’d been good. On the mend. But you could have found scars if you’d looked for them.” She put a bookmark in her paperback novel and set it aside. “So why are you here?”

  “Suze called me,” I said. “That night.”

  “Yeah, I know. I heard all about it. You told her to phone 911.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even though she wasn’t supposed to do that.”

  “She said so, but—”

  “Because I trained her that way. You know why? Fucking social workers, that’s why! There were a couple of incidents back before I got my prescriptions and now I’m on their watch list or whatever. I’m on, like, bad mother probation.”

  An orderly passing by with a box of gauze in his hand slowed and cocked his head. Rachel moderated her voice until he was out of sight. “They’re like the NSA in here, always watching. This is where they put people who can’t be trusted.”

  “You were unconscious when Suze called. She couldn’t wake you up.”

  “I’d been cutting, yeah, and maybe a little too deep, and I was ashamed of myself, so I took a double dose of meds and washed ’em down with orange juice and vodka. Because I really, really wanted to sleep. And hey, it worked. Out like a light, right there on the sofa. Still bleeding a little. I leaked before I clotted. So I guess Suze got scared, which I’m really really sorry about. A miscalculation on my part. But would you take away my kid for that?”

  “No…”

  “No, but you did. That’s exactly what you did when you told Suze to call 911. Now they’re putting her in temporary foster care. Pending an assessment. They won’t even let me talk to her. They say we can schedule a visit, but not until the doctors decide I’m up to it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears that were perhaps equal parts loss and anger. “They took away my baby!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I would absolutely fucking love it if this were totally your fault. That would make me feel a little better. But, taking Suze’s call? Being worried about me? I can’t really blame you for that.”