Greenfields dotted with flowers . .. raindrops splashing from one autumn red leaf to another ... a dapple gray pony cantering along a twisting silver river.
She stopped rocking and turned to look down at him. Her apathetic eyes fixed on him.
"Elizabeth?"
She almost smiled, or so it seemed. "Elizabeth," she repeated.
A young black-haired girl picking flowers ...
Ian withdrew his hand slowly. She wasn't in pain, of that he was certain. She wasn't in anything. She was a blank slate, a feeble, childlike adult who would never get better, never be the self she was before, a vegetable in a woman's body, granted the rudiments of speech but no ability to understand or empathize or experience.
For a second, he couldn't breathe for the pain in his chest. The last bit of his hope died hard.
He'd been wrong. He'd thought that caring for Selena was like caring for Maeve. But it was much, much worse. At least Maeve knew her name and had a few good days. Even Elizabeth, brain-damaged beyond repair, had thoughts inside that beautiful head of hers. Selena had nothing. That's why his psychic powers didn't extend to her. Her mind was gone, empty. There was nothing to see, no images to pick up.
She wasn't his chance for professional salvation.
The fisherman had been right to bring her to Lethe House. It was where she belonged, among the other half-wits and crazies who never improved. At the realization, he felt a stinging sense of shame, then a burning loss. Shame because, as usual, he'd thought only of
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himself, his needs, and loss because the fantasy he'd created shattered in a million broken bits. He could never heal Selena, never re-create a vibrant human being from the pathetic shell-like woman sitting before him. He could be Selena's keeper, but she had no need for a physician. She was nothing to him; they were simply two people who shared a roof, coexisted in a place where lost, lonely people came together but never quite connected.
It was as good a definition of hell as he'd ever heard.
Selena. Elizabeth. SelenaElizabeth. The images of the two women blurred in his mind, merged until they were indistinguishable.
There was no future for his mysterious goddess, just a lifetime of perpetual care, years spent sitting in chairs and stroking dead animals and mumbling nonsense.
And through her, there was no future for Ian. Just the same dark, lonely present stretching out before him like a prison sentence in solitary confinement.
With a tired sigh, he rose and walked out of the room.
Outside, in the darkened hallway, Giles and Johann stood side by side. Giles looked up at Ian, a pathetic question in his watery eyes.
Ian closed the door shut behind him, trying to ignore the headache that had begun at the base of his skull. "She's not in any pain, Giles. She's ... in the past. Her childhood, I expect. I've never felt such happy, peaceful thoughts from a person before."
Giles's face crumpled. "Oh, thank God .. ."
For the first time, Ian experienced a certain joy in his curse. "I'm glad I could tell you that, Giles."
Giles swiped at his eyes and looked up. "Now let me tell you something, Ian. I know the trials you've had with Maeve, and believe me, they're nothing compared to the hell of brain damage. I'd trade my soul for one moment a year when Elizabeth knew who I was."
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Ian nodded. He knew that Giles expected more, but he couldn't find a voice, nor words to speak.
"Don't expect anything from your patient. Send her to Bloomingdale or Danvers. Forget about her, and don't get emotionally involved. This kind of thing . . ." Giles's voice vibrated with emotion. "It can break your heart."
Ian couldn't answer. Nodding, he turned and headed down the shadowy walk. He could hear Giles and Johann behind him, but he didn't care, didn't pay attention. He just wanted to get the hell out of this place.
The carriage hurtled through the countryside, down one jet black dirt road after another. Wind slashed at the sides of the coach, rain thumped on the roof. Light wobbled through the dark interior from a small lantern bolted to the wall.
Ian pulled his cloak tighter to his throat. He was cold, colder than he could ever remember being, but there was no warmth to be found in his cape.
He needed a decanter of whiskey. Maybe with its help, he could crawl into some dark, cold place and drink until he was blind and deaf and dumb, until nothing that happened on this earth could affect him.
"You got exactly what you expected, I imagine." Johann broke the silence at last, and Ian sensed that he'd been biding his time. "We all do, after all."
It took a great effort for Ian to lift his head. He tilted his chin just enough to slant a shuttered look at the man in the seat opposite him. "Cryptic and philosophical. I see you're back to your old self, Johann."
"That makes two of us, then."
"Meaning?"
"The brief flirtation with humanity has ended."
"Keep talking, Johann. You'll have me in a coma in no time."
Anger flashed in Johann's eyes. "You're the blindest,
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most selfish, self-obsessed person I've ever had the displeasure of knowing. You make me sick."
"Oh, stop. You're breaking my heart."
Johann leaned forward. "You fool. You have been birthmarked by the gods, destined for greatness, and yet you walk away from your potential like a spoiled child."
Ian sighed heavily. He looked at Johann's serious face, and felt suddenly old-too old for a thirty-five-year-old man.
"Selena is not Elizabeth," Johann said into the lengthening silence.
The words surprised Ian, and they hurt. Jesus, just hearing her name, soft and rounded and redolent with the mysteries of the goddess, hurt. He used bitterness to keep the ache at bay. "Selena is not Selena, either."
"It's too late, you know."
Ian wanted to ignore Johann's enigmatic statement, but he couldn't feign disinterest, not this time, not about Selena. And God help him, Johann was one of the few people who could actually understand Ian, who saw through the bitterness to the pain. Their lives were so similar; two affluent, educated men trapped in a hellhole of abnormality, thrust into the bowels of madness by physical conditions they couldn't control and a world they couldn't fit in to.
He looked up, met Johann's gaze. Tell me something that will save me. The thought came to him out of nowhere, humiliating him in its intensity. He forced his voice into a casual drawl. "Too late for what?"
"Dr. Wellsby's advice was very scholarly, probably even well thought out and accurate, but that's the problem with you doctors. You think that healing is a science. It's not, never was. Never will be. Healing is a spiritual art. It requires the heart and soul to save the body."
"Ah, medical advice. What a good choice, Johann."
"Wellsby is an idiot. If there's a chance to save
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Selena, it lies not in your books or your medicines or your knives; it resides in your soul and heart. You must get emotionally involved-as you already are. Your willingness to save her may be all that she needs."
Ian snorted derisively. He'd been down that road before, and there was nothing good at the end of it. "What should I do then, Johann, spend the rest of my life wiping the drool from her chin?"
"If that's all there is, then that's what you do. And you pray for more. Every day, every moment, you pray."
Ian closed his eyes, wishing he could forget the prayers he'd offered, the thousands of childhood nights he'd spent kneeling beside his bed, praying that his mother would get better. "And those prayers will be answered," he said bitterly. "Just as yours were."
"I forgot to pray," Johann said softly.
Hearing those words, quiet and honest and suffused with pain, Ian felt himself weaken. The thin, disguising veneer of bitterness fell away, left him with a painful nothingness inside. "I've tried that route before. It's a damn universe of pain. It sucks you in and strangles you, and . . ." He sighed. "You, of all people, should un
derstand. Sitting there, helpless, watching someone you care about sink deeper and deeper into oblivion." He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. "Christ, to do it again ..."
He tried not to think of Maeve, but he couldn't help himself. He remembered the night, so many years ago, when he'd tried to extricate himself from the horror of her madness. An eighteen-year-old boy with nowhere to turn and no one to lean on. He could still remember the night, taste it, feel the cold kiss of the snowflakes on his face and hair.
She'd tried to kill herself-again-and Ian had found her, naked and shivering and bleeding in the big copper washbasin in the kitchen, her pale arms drawn protec-
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lively across her chest. She hadn't wanted Ian to have had to clean up the blood....
She hadn't minded that he'd find her body, or that he'd know how little she valued their family, or that he'd be utterly alone without her. All she cared about was the mess, and so she lay curled tight in the tub, the only thing out of place in the gleaming kitchen except for the still-dripping butcher knife she'd used to slit her wrists.
Ian had snapped, unable suddenly to take it anymore. After he'd stopped the bleeding, he bundled her up and carried her into the carriage. They hadn't stopped until they reached the hospital. He'd deposited her in Dr. Wellsby's arms and walked away, his shirt and hands still smeared with his mother's blood.
Ian, don't leave me here. I'm sorry. Please . . .
It was a crystallizing moment in his life; he knew that now. The fact that he could leave her in that place, sobbing and alone, had defined the greatest weakness in his character.
Oh, he might tell Johann he would help Selena, might even try to, but it would be a halfhearted attempt, an easily forgotten vow. In the end, mental illness terrified him, ripped out what little goodness lurked in his dark soul. It didn't matter that three months-and two suicide attempts-later, he'd returned for Maeve, rescued her. There was no redemption from the selfish cowardice of his true nature. But there was honesty. There was truth.
"I can't do it, Johann." He sighed and bowed his head, sickened by his own character, repulsed by his own weakness.
"She needs you to care about her."
"There is no her, Johann."
"The amnesia-"
"Didn't you learn anything from Wellsby? It's not amnesia, Johann. It's brain damage. She's not going to get her memory back. She'll never be normal. That's
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why I can't read her thoughts. There's nothing there to read. No past, no present, no future."
Johann stared at him for a long time, so long that Ian started to become uncomfortable. Finally Johann reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small glass vial.
Ian frowned. "What have you got there?" "Cachou lozenges." Slowly he opened the vial and poured out the tiny white pills. Then he threw the empty bottle to the ground and cracked his heel down on top of it.
"What are you doing?"
"Making a point." Johann bent down and retrieved a small, nickel-sized piece of glass. Light caught the jagged edges and set them afire in sparkling prisms of blue and red and yellow.
Johann's voice fell to a seductive whisper, so soft that Ian involuntarily leaned forward to catch the words. "Why do you demand such wretched commonness from those you would care about?"
Ian slammed back in his seat and crossed his arms. He was disgusted with himself for having leaned forward at all. "Jesus, Johann, don't be so dramatic. I simply don't find mental illness or brain damage appealing. It's hardly grounds for execution." "You saw the bottle, yes?" "I'm not blind."
"It was pretty and fulfilled perfectly the function it was designed for." "Yes. So?"
"Now, see the bit of glass." Johann extended his hand, until the sharp edges of the glass were almost magical in their colored illumination. Slowly he turned the piece, letting light play across the surface in a shifting fan of yellow and purple and red and gold. "It's broken." "Yes." "But it has its own beauty now, its own value; if only
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one looks past expectations, past 'normality,' there is an almost magical effervescence here. Something seen that wasn't anticipated. A gift." Johann met Ian's frowning gaze, gave him a slow, soft smile.
Ian stared at the jagged bit of glass so long, it blurred like a teardrop in the half-light. He couldn't blame Johann-the younger man couldn't know that Ian had thought the same thing a thousand times in his life. He'd tried to see the beauty in Maeve, tried so damn hard. As a young boy, he tried every day to expect nothing of his mother, to simply love her as his father had. But every time she didn't recognize him, every time she slapped him or walked past him without a word, it hurt.
Johann's theory didn't work; not for Ian, anyway. He looked at life head-on, without blinders or rose-colored glasses. Maeve would always be sick and undepend-able. Selena would always be brain-damaged. He'd wasted enough time already on hopeless dreams-most of his life, it seemed-and he was tired of it, exhausted by the disappointments.
"You won't try again, will you? Won't even hope that Selena can be cured."
"Oh, I'll hope, Johann." Ian couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice, and he didn't really try. It comforted him, gave him an emotion that didn't hurt so badly. "What I won't do is care."
"Will you help her when we get home?"
"When you get home. I'm not returning to Lethe House right now."
"But-"
Ian raised a hand for silence. "Don't bother, Johann. And for God's sake, don't break any more bottles to prove your point. I'm heading for all the train stations and postal offices between here and New York. I'm going to post notices about a nameless, faceless woman in my care and beg for information about her. Maybe that
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damned lobsterman will read a notice and come forward."
"You're hoping someone will come and claim her" You're damn right I am. Let her break someone else's heart."
Chapter Ten
The quiet gurgle of running water.
The rhythmic thunk-splash of wet cloth on a washboard.
Women talking in low, muted voices, too softly for any single word to be heard.
They were talking about something important, something just out of reach. Selena felt terribly alone, disconnected from the sights and sounds and movements around her. A stranger in the darkness, waiting, watching.
Random images floated through her mind, taunted her with wisps of remembrance.
A wicker laundry basket, a metal pie tin, a small, perfectly round wooden box.
She had no words to label the items, no memories to match them. Simply a vague realization of things ...
"Sshh, hush, little one. Sshh . .."
Selena heard these words more distinctly. They were spoken in a quiet, lilting voice that was familiar. She realized suddenly that she was asleep, that she had been dreaming. The memory of what that word meant and the experience it implied slipped into her mind.
"Sshhh, little one. I am never so far away as you think."
A hand caressed her cheek, and even though there 115
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was a lingering remnant of pain in her jaw, it felt good, that touch, so good.
She came awake slowly, and the strange dream drifted out of reach, forgotten almost immediately. The room was steeped in darkness, with only a sliver of moonlight through the glass windowpane to relieve the shadows. Night stained her coverlet a deep, charcoal gray.
"Sshhh, little man. Don't cry now."
Selena turned toward the voice, and noticed for the first time the woman sitting beside her bed, drawn close, her rail-thin shoulders draped in a lace shawl so delicate, it looked to be made of cobwebs. Reddish blond hair lay twisted and piled on her head. She was moving slightly, rocking back and forth, though the chair wasn't moving. Something satiny-a timepiece ... no ... lantern ... no.
Selena couldn't name the thin strip of silvery white that twined through the woman's thin fingers.
Maeve. The name came almos
t effortlessly this time, and her ability to recall it filled Selena with joy. She tried to remember what to say now, the proper greeting of woman to woman. "Maeve," she whispered, "hello ... there."
Maeve didn't glance at her, seemed not to notice she'd spoken at all, and Selena wondered if she'd said the wrong thing again. "Maeve?"
"I heard your weeping," Maeve said finally. "You mustn't worry. He'll be back. Your father always comes back."
Anxiety rustled the hairs at the back of Selena's neck. She frowned and pushed up to her elbows. "Maeve?"
Once again, there was no sign of recognition, no glance or touch or sound that indicated a response. Her face was downcast, but even so, Selena could see Maeve's moist hazel eyes. A glistening droplet clung to her pale lashes and stubbornly refused to fall.
Selena glanced down, saw the patch of moistness on
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Maeve's gown, a seeping darker patch on the white lawn of her nightdress. The place where tears fell.
Maeve reached out, stroked Selena's cheek again. Her touch was soft and comforting, her skin papery and dry. Slowly, in a trembling voice, she started to sing quietly, "Hush little baby, don't say a word. Mama . .." Her voice cracked. Tears filled her eyes and slipped down her hollow cheeks, dropped on her hands. She drew her hand back, let it fall in her lap. "Mama .. . can't do anything, can she? No ..."
Selena heard an incredible pain in her friend's voice, a sadness that seemed to parch the woman's spirit. Last night Maeve had been laughing and happy; tonight, somehow, she'd fallen into darkness.
Selena knew how that felt, to fall inside yourself and be trapped. "You will .. ." She searched for the words. Find a way "Out."
Maeve brought a pale finger to her lips. "Sshh, little boy." She shook her head. The single tear streaked down to her lap, melted into the wet patch of lawn.
Selena did the only thing she could think of, the thing that she would want someone to do for her. She shifted sideways in the bed and flipped the coverlet back in invitation. ". .. Maeve ... sleep."
Maeve looked up. For a split second, the confusion in her gaze dissipated, and Selena saw the raw need that lay beneath.
"Sleep." Maeve sighed and shook her head.
Selena patted the mattress beside her, wishing desperately that she could find the words to ease Maeve's pain. But she couldn't find them, if such words even existed. Instead, she said the only word that came to her, made the only offer she could think of. "Sleep."
Maeve pushed to her feet. The wooden stool crashed to the floor beside her, but she seemed not to notice. The vague, glassy look returned to her eyes. She stared through Selena as if she were invisible.
"Your father should be home now." She leaned for-
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ward and pressed a warm, moist kiss to Selena's forehead. "Sleep well, my child."
"Good . .. night, Maeve."
Maeve stiffened and drew back. "No good ones," she whispered, tears springing to her eyes once more. Wrapping the silver strand more tightly through her fingers, she walked away and closed the door behind her.