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Her eyes strayed to a group of photos on the wall and found the one of a beaming nun holding the hand of a shy Guatemalan kid who looked to be about ten. She frowned and reached down to scratch Helix behind his ears. He made a small sound of pleasure and his tail thumped the wooden floor.
‘Are you watching the news?’
‘What channel?’
‘All the channels, kiddo.’ Jeanne’s whiskey-ravaged voice dropped into a phlegmy rattle and Grace could hear her sucking on a lozenge. ‘They’re withholding your name for the time being, there’s that at least. Some wild man in a Hawaiian shirt’s pushing you out the squad car and screaming at you to duck.’
Grace felt drained. ‘Sid. My boss. I’ve told you about him.’
‘Oh, so that’s Sid. I always pictured somebody taller.’
Grace tried to smile.
‘Who was taking care of Katie?’
‘You mean while it happened? Lottie.’
Jeanne groaned. ‘God. Oil on the fire. You need to take a meeting? I could stay with Katie.’
‘I’m okay, Jeanne.’ An edge had crept into her voice.
Jeanne was silent, except for the sound of crunching. ‘I could come anyway.’
Grace shifted the phone and sank back, stretching out on the quilt. A pain jolted her midriff, and she massaged her side.
‘Grace?’
Tears welled and leaked down her face, wetting the quilt and pooling near her ears.
‘Honey?’
‘I’m here.’ Her voice was desolate, lost.
‘Talk to me, honey.’
Grace curled into a ball and rocked. ‘I can’t. I don’t.’ Her voice was low, fighting it.
‘Start anyplace. Start with what happened.’
Grace squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Can’t. Too soon.’
‘Then start with how it feels.’
Her belly was on fire, her head throbbed, her shoulder felt wrenched from the socket, and everything safe in the world was gone. She was in Guatemala again, and the world was on fire. It happened fast, when it came, with a force that never failed to derail her. It was close now and she was running hard ahead of it, trying to break free.
‘Oh, God. Pain. In my gut. Lost. Nobody here. Afraid. Like my body’s been torn apart. I’m free-falling, Jeanne.’
‘Honey, stay with me.’
Her lips were numb now and she felt a pounding behind her eyes; all the bad horses had been unleashed. A flicker of fire darted across her vision, the screen behind her eyes blinding, and she heard the crackling noise that always presaged a bad attack.
‘Stay there. Right there. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
‘Door’s locked.’ Her lips were turning numb.
‘I’ve got a key, remember? I’ll be right there.’
‘Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t leave me.’
‘I’m right here. Take a breath. Come on. Come on, sweetie. Come on back.’
Grace made herself open her eyes and she stared at the ceiling and forced her breathing to calm down. Her skin felt damp.
‘Where are you now? What’s happening?’
Grace shook her head and closed her eyes. Her feet were cold and she burrowed them under the pillows. ‘If I drove. I could.’
Jeanne crunched down hard on the lozenge and the noise made Grace wince.
‘Sure. There’s Vons on Rosecrans but why mess around pretending you need milk? Just hit the first liquor store you can find and get it over with. There’s one two blocks away.’
Grace exhaled. Her breath was shaky. ‘Too hard, Jeanne. This.’
‘Don’t give me that crap. You know drinking’s not the answer.’
Grace took another unsteady breath and the dark thing in her mind slid back to where it lived.
‘You heard me, right?’
‘Tell me again all the reasons.’
‘Katie.’
‘That’s one.’
‘That’s five or six million, all bunched up together, Grace. That little girl is your only responsibility. That’s all that matters. Doing right by her.’
‘My only responsibility?’ Grace licked her lip. The ceiling had stopped moving, and she took a deeper breath. ‘Easy for you to say. You have alimony and a house in Mission Hills with a pool, and AA when you want to go slumming.’
‘An empty house, Grace, an ex-husband who would have gnawed off his own foot to get away, two kids who hate me, neighbors who talk about me behind my back, and yes, AA, but not when I want to go slumming.’ Jeanne stopped. ‘You okay now? You better?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ She rolled on her side and took a deep shuddery breath, her eyes on the door, the door that led down the hall to Katie, that sweet bundle of laughter and darting energy, prickly feelings and blazing joy.
‘That’s it. I’m coming over.’ A click. Dial tone.
‘Thanks,’ Grace whispered.
In her mind, she still heard the whispery voice, the silky question:
Don’t you want to know what he’s going to do to you?
Going to do to you?
Going to do to you?
FOUR (#ulink_f3eda714-3785-5412-ae45-500972040650)
Monday
The CNN reporter had been following the taillights of a battered pickup truck for almost an hour as it headed into the Tohono O’odham Nation, a hundred miles of desert stretching from Arizona into Mexico. It was two in the morning, and stars spangled the night sky.
Mac McGuire was traveling a road he’d taken half a dozen times, but a sudden rain the night before had cut gullies through it and left part of it a mire. He was relieved to have a guide.
On the seat next to him Pete Hildebrand snoozed, a burly arm around the camera. Mac felt a flash of irritation. One day, the car would hit a bump and that camera would fly out of his arms and smack the dashboard like an egg. In back, Aaron Spense stretched out, arms crossed, wearing his dad’s Marine boots, iPod earbuds in his ears. Next to him lay a mixer in a tangle of cables and snarl of mikes. Aaron was twenty-two, Pete not much older. It made Mac feel tired. He was thirty-eight, his last birthday.
Usually, CNN would have sent at least one producer, but Mac had insisted on keeping the size down, instinctively understanding that the fewer people pushing into their world, the greater likelihood he had of getting what he’d come for.
He thought through how it was going to go, what he was going to say, where the overhead boom mike needed to be positioned, and when exactly he wanted Pete to come in close for a tight shot. The mechanics kept his mind off the shoot itself, how important this one was.
Hekka Miasonkopna was a Yaqui Indian girl, three and a half years old, who was born with a damaged left ventricle. What had started as a piece about the nightmare of getting expensive cardiac care when poor had evolved into a series about the complexity of culture shaping worldview and the ferocity of a parent’s love.
Hekka’s parents knew she would die. They accepted it. So it became Mac’s fight, for her. She was now in end-stage and would die without a transplant, something they’d resisted considering. There was another thing they could try. Something so new it was still in experimental trials. So new nobody in the media except Mac and his producers and video team even knew of its existence.
His job was laying out the options and stepping back to record what happened next. Part of him came here wanting to nudge her parents into action, a move that was right at the edge of stepping over the line, and he knew it.
He and his colleagues joked about the special hell reserved for reporters. Someplace where they’d be forced to sit for eternity with the hapless fools they’d talked into doing something – a giddy kid he’d once coached early in his career into getting a tattoo on camera came to mind; that one still gnawed at his conscience – and the problem was that even with the most altruistic of pieces, like this one, there existed a small part inside himself that was looking at it coldly, evaluating it not just for its emotional wallop but for its ability to be a Mac piece, helping him – just like that old American Express ad – go everywhere he wanted to go.
Unlike local stations keyed to November sweeps, CNN tracked ratings all the time. TV viewing was higher in the fall, and Mac was working on two series simultaneously that would get big play: a graphic and disturbing one about child porn on the Internet that was close to being in the can, and this one with Hekka, culminating in her ground-breaking surgery and its aftermath.
Providing they went for it. Or not. Either way, it was a story. He hated himself for even thinking that. Mac sincerely wanted her to live. He’d grown attached to the little girl and her family. But part of him, almost equally as strongly, knew if they chose to let her die, it would tug at the audience just as much.
Horrible business, news. Someplace along the line, he’d sold part of himself and he couldn’t figure out how to get it back.
Clouds of dust rose and seeped into his vehicle, making it look as if Arturo’s truck was floating in a puff of magic. Mac’s eyes burned. In the lights, the Coyote Mountains rose like an apparition of shaggy cliffs and granite bluffs.
The pickup veered off road and Mac shifted into low, bumping across a dry riverbed. The Swiss Army knife on his key chain clinked like wind chimes.
The mother was in his pocket; he knew that. She’d try anything to save her kid. The grandfather, Don Jose, was the challenge. Maybe he wasn’t even there anymore and it would make things easy. Somehow Mac doubted it. This one hadn’t been easy from the first.
The land crumpled into arroyos of creosote bush and cactus. Bony cattle, picking their way among the scrub, flared in the lights and disappeared. Tin houses flashed and were gone.
The truck slowed and disappeared over a rise and Mac followed. The hollow was pitch black, except for a lightbulb hanging over a wooden porch that outlined the sloping roof of a house. Moths banged into the light and an oak stood like a sleeping giant, one branch hanging low over the house.
The truck cab opened and Arturo got out, with his long braids and dusty jeans, a younger version of his elderly father. Kids spilled out of the flatbed. Maria stood in the doorway, a baby on her hip, dark hair streaked prematurely with gray. Worry had etched fine lines on her face.
‘Showtime,’ Mac McGuire said softly as he pulled to a stop. Pete and Aaron yawned and scratched and rolled out of the vehicle, shivering in the cold. Aaron’s dyed hair tips looked like white dandelion tufts in the dark.
‘Inside.’ Maria pulled Mac over the doorsill and switched on a light.
Hekka’s bed sat in the middle of the front room. The kids from the truck crept silently into the room and slid into the corners. The room smelled acrid and old. Hekka’s breathing was labored, a bubbly sound that alarmed Mac. Her hair lay limply across the gray pillow. A vein in her neck pulsed. She’d always been smaller than normal, but now her fingers were clubbed and tipped in blue and her lips were ashy. He went to the bed and took her hand. It was icy.
‘Hey,’ he said softly. ‘It’s Mac. The reporter.’ She moaned in her sleep and her eyelids fluttered. ‘Yeah, I know, that’s what everybody says when they hear it’s me.’ He gently slid his hand free and surveyed the room.
An old man close to eighty was sitting in a chair near the window. Mac nodded. Cords of sinew roped Don Jose’s arms and most of his teeth were gone. His few remaining teeth were yellowed tusks. He patted a pouch strapped to his belt, extracting a piece of guasima wood and a small knife. It was a half-carved figure three inches tall, the legs of a man, the head of a deer. Nicks outlined where the legs and feet would go. He set to work, ignoring Mac and the tangled cables at his feet as Pete and Aaron moved through the room setting up equipment.
The important thing right then was how quickly Pete and Aaron could get things ready, and Mac took the offered cup of water from Maria and stepped back as his crew adjusted the lights and checked audio levels. After a few moments, Aaron nodded to Mac, signaling they were set. Once they were inside this dusty wooden room, things always moved quickly, and Mac had learned the hard way he could never redo a moment if it wasn’t captured on video.
‘She’s dying,’ Arturo said abruptly, daring Mac to contradict him. Pete hoisted the camera and came in for a tight shot of the father’s wounded face.
‘I’m not a doctor,’ Mac started.
‘But still. You were one of those reporters in Afghanistan, you said. You saw death all the time. Even sewed some people up. Stopped that one guy from bleeding to death. You told me the story,’ he insisted. ‘You can hear it, same as me.’
‘I can hear it,’ Mac agreed.
In the corner, the blade snicked through the wood, popping shaved curls into the air.
‘She needs to go to the Center, Arturo,’ Mac said. ‘She can’t stay here anymore. That’s what the doctors say. They have a bed for her. They’ve told you it’s her best chance.’
‘But not for that!’ Arturo said. ‘Not for that heart-that-is-not-a-heart! She will die! Don Jose is certain.’
Maria buried her face in her infant daughter’s neck. Pete swung the camera onto her face and held. Maria shifted the baby in her arms.
‘You’ve changed your mind about the heart-in-a-box?’ The parents had enrolled Hekka in the experimental program four months before, only the second child out of a possible ten to be admitted, and time for her was running out.
‘It is a lie,’ Don Jose said from his chair. His voice was gravelly. The camera swung and steadied on his implacable face.
‘It’s brand-new,’ Mac countered. ‘But Dr. Bentley’s done it once before and that child is now strong.’
Mac thought of the piece he’d just finished editing that was part of the series. Eric Bettles was a five-year-old boy who’d been within days of dying a year ago when his lab-built heart had been implanted, a heart made from his own cells. He’d come back so dramatically that when they’d taped him last week, Eric was playing ball with his dad. During that year, his family had been sworn to secrecy until the series aired this week. It was a new procedure. Risky. How risky was the question. No one had an answer.
It was a crap shoot; a gamble. Eric Bettles looked strong, but no one could accurately predict what waited for him down the road. A developing heart in a fetus acquires tensile strength from the rhythmic beating of the mother’s own heart. In a lab-created heart, electronic pulses were used to simulate that movement; scientists still weren’t sure if Eric’s heart wouldn’t some day fray. If that happened, he’d die immediately. No turning back.
But Mac’s job wasn’t explaining the downside to Hekka’s parents. Doctors had done that and he’d caught it on tape.
‘It’s a heart built just for her,’ Mac reminded him. ‘I’m wondering why you’re rejecting the advice of doctors. They say it’s time to bring her into the Center and have that new heart put in.’
And then the series would air. And life forever would change across the world for transplant patients. Two lab-created hearts made out of tiny patients’ own cells and successfully implanted were enough for the Center to risk a firestorm of publicity and the attendant clamor of those wanting to enroll their kids in the experimental and risky program.
Enough to bump Mac up to whatever he wanted next. Maybe an anchor job. He wasn’t sure.
‘Except it’s a lie.’ The video whirred, the shot tight now on Don Jose. ‘I dreamed a black hole in Hekka’s chest. A heart not hers, evil found and lost. I dreamed her with wings, singing with a tuik kutanak, a good throat, and a strong heart in heaven, finally hers.’ He rolled the carving and knife between his yellowed palms and the outline of a foot emerged.
‘If she doesn’t come in, she will die. That’s what they say. It’s that simple.’ Mac’s voice was flat.
Don Jose carved in silence. Finally he said, ‘I carve the deer dancer. I carve this not for life. But for the usi mukila pahko.’
Mac searched his memory for Yaqui religious symbols and found it. When he’d first met the family and discovered the elder Don Jose was a devout Yaqui, he’d bought books through the University of Arizona to better understand the culture. Hell, use it. Why lie? Especially to himself. Usi mukila pahko. The funeral of a child.
