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Disclaimer: All characters and events in this story are fictitious, and any similarity to a real person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintended by the author. "The Pretender" is a protected trademark of MTM Television and NBC and the characters of that series are used herein with no mean intent or desire for remuneration. It is, instead, a tribute to innovative television, that rare and welcome phenomenon.
The Third Highway Series Part 17:
Good Enough
Chapter 1
Witch1
Suquamish Island
Washington State
The image was a bit grainy, and in black and white, but Jarod recognized the scene immediately--it was Catherine Parker's memorial service, at the Centre, and he was a child again. A serious child, whose question to Sydney--"Why is everyone dressed in black?"--he also remembered vividly.
"Because someone has died," Sydney told him. "Here: come and see." And he propelled the boy Jarod had once been forward toward the other end of the room where, he noticed, no one else was. As he got closer, the lights became brighter, and he could see what all the adults were so intent on avoiding:
There was a large, cylindrical stainless steel tank--smooth sided and shiny--under a narrow, gleaming steel table on which lay a human shape, covered completely by a plain white sheet. At the foot of the table, a butcher's scale hung from a steel pole, and there was a smallish steel platform elevated on steel legs over the corpse's feet. Oddly, he saw the table in full color.
Jarod hung back, quite terrified.
"You've done simulated autopsies," Sydney reminded him. "Why should it be different just because you knew this person?"
But it was different--it felt horribly different--and young Jarod dug in his heels, trying to avoid going even one step closer the table.
At that moment Dr. Raines entered, a man in his late thirties, brisk and hurried but in black and white, like Sydney and himself. The lights grew even brighter, putting the body into high, greenish florescent light as Raines impatiently tugged the covering sheet off it. Jarod noted that the sheet immediately vanished into thin air. But he was too transfixed by the body to care.
It was Laura, naked, her skin the a waxy blue-gray. The thoracic-abdominal incision had already been made, so that there was a violent, gaping red wound that ran as a large 'Y', first from shoulder to shoulder--the two spokes cutting right across the upper mounds of her breasts--and the longer leg running straight through the center of her chest all the way to her pubis, neatly transecting her entire body. The upper organs had already been completely removed, so that her chest gaped open and empty, the glistening white vertebrae of her spine partly visible through the thin, internal fascia muscles of her back like a strand of large, ghastly pearls.
Jarod stood there open-mouthed. He was an adult now, he realized, no longer the hesitant boy he had been only moments before, and he saw himself in color--although Raines remained locked in time as a young man, in grainy black and white.
"Here's her heart," Raines said briskly, and held out the plump, dark grayish-red organ. "You've already cut it out, I see. Not very romantic, is it? No sentimentality THERE, huh?" Raines chuckled a bit. "Want to touch it, boy?"
Jarod drew back, feeling his bile rise and the room spin slightly.
"What's wrong, Jarod--not good enough for you?" Raines asked, cryptically. "Note that subject has rejected the heart. Again," he intoned in a clinical voice into a microphone that appeared out of nowhere to hang over Laura's body.
Raines plopped the heart unceremoniously on the smaller steel table at Laura's feet and sliced through it in one swift gesture with what looked like a small ceremonial sword that he had seemingly pulled out of the air for the job. "Just like cutting an apple--want to give it a shot, boy? You're the expert at this, aren't you, little man?" he taunted Jarod.
Jarod couldn't move. Literally--he was paralyzed, he realized. Frozen in place. "I'm stuck," he told Raines.
"Yes, that happens," Raines replied, not unkindly. "We sometimes get stuck on things. On people. Can't let go. Can't move on. Cripples us." He shrugged. "Irrational. But there it is."
Raines leaned over Laura--Jarod noticed with growing alarm that her body was growing pinker by the moment, the waxiness retreating as the cadaver flushed with what looked like life. Jarod turned to ask Sydney what was happening, but he was gone. In his place stood the young Miss Parker, in shades of black and white. "You aren't afraid, are you, Jarod?" she asked mockingly. "You were a pathologist, right? You've cut people up and played around with their guts. So what's the big deal if it's the witch, this time? Besides: you put her there."
He turned back to Raines, who was now thrusting another organ at him. "Hold out your hands, boy," he demanded. He didn't want to, but Jarod found himself doing just that. Raines flopped the large, pale-pink, funnel-shaped mass covered in a delicate network of veins in his hands. Jarod looked down at it in sheer terror.
"That's her uterus, boy--vagina attached," he told him jeeringly. "Never saw it from this end before, huh? Pretty kinky, don't you think? But you like it that way, right: the kinkier the better? Wonder where you learned THAT."
Jarod gasped and dropped it on the floor.
"Now look what you've done--you've torn this fallopian tube clean off!" Raines admonished him, leaning over and prodding the organ with the toe of his shoe. "What--no one ever told you be gentle with women, boy? Or do you just always have to have it rough?"
Sydney was back, suddenly at Jarod's side, and now he was the older, current version of himself, in full color. "Did you reject her because she could never have your children?" he asked in his best detached, psychologist tone.
Laura sat up--the incision wound gaping open even further as she did--and looked at him coldly.
"Offer him the heart, again," she told Raines. "Maybe if it's all cut up in little pieces he'll finally want the damned thing."
"We could stop HIS heart," Raines suggested gleefully. "I did that before. I think you'd enjoy watching, this time, my dear."
"That implies the bastard HAS a heart," Laura said to Raines.
They both laughed lightly, their heads together, looking at Jarod.
He heard his own scream, and then knew he was tied down, his wrists and ankles in thick, unyielding straps attached to the narrow hospital bed he was lying on.
"You awake?" a male voice Jarod didn't recognize questioned calmly. "No need to be afraid. We're taking good care of you. You're ill, Jarod. I'm a nurse. You're only in restraints for your own protection. You've been having violent nightmares."
Jarod was trying, by sheer strength, to escape, however, yanking at the straps and simply screaming as loud as he could for help. He saw the man hover over him, and the hypodermic needle as it entered the flesh of his forearm. "Sorry, Jarod," the man said. "But you need to rest."
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Mt. Ranier, Washington
Southeast escarpment, elevation: 5,892 feet
Jarod had been surprised by the number of cars in the parking lot at the Paradise visitor's center, and watched in amazement as a straggle of what he guessed might easily be eighty-five to a hundred people moved up the hiking trail that snaked through the alpine meadows above the low building. It had never occurred to him that Laura had actual friends. He saw Alex, standing at the head of the trail and directing people forward.
"I'd rather not be seen," he told Paul and Angela from the back seat. "You two go on ahead, I'll try to blend into the last bunch up the trail."
Angela looked silently at her husband. He knew she felt Jarod shouldn't even be out of bed yet, much less hiking up to the foot of a glacier for this memorial service. Paul only shook his head 'no' lightly: there was no point in arguing with Jarod. He was going to do whatever he wanted to do. And the man had been through enough: he needed closure as much as any one of them.
How Jarod was going to 'blend in', though, was another matter. His face was still nearly covered in bruises in various states of healing--mostly the green-and-purple phase--and wherever he wasn't bruised his skin was pale and clammy. There were neatly stitched cuts on his upper lip and over his left eye, and his hair was just beginning to cover the deeper scalp wound on the side of his head. His dark sunglasses--while hiding his blood-shot eyes--only made him look more ominous. He was dressed all in black, but he'd grown so thin his clothes hung off his frame shapelessly. The healing cuts across his entire back and buttocks couldn't be seen, but he walked slowly, like a man in pain, and seemed distracted and depressed. He looked, in short, too much like a corpse himself, to not cause shudders at a funeral.
But Paul had given up trying to reason with Jarod, so they went on without him, climbing upward on the narrow, chipped-rock trail between tufts of sedges and the thick clusters of tiny blooming plants: nodding violet-blue harebells and dwarf blueberry plants with hanging umbrellas of delicate pink and blue cup-shaped flowers. It was like an oriental carpet of vegetation, on a miniature scale, interspersed with outcrops of silvery blue granite, much of it covered in the intricate grayish-aqua-blue abstract patterns of lichens.
Some of the boulders protruded above the ground, many the size of refrigerators or Volkswagens, and, as he looked back down the trail, Paul could occasionally make out Jarod skulking between them.
The crowd gathered loosely around Alex, fanning out off the trail. The lower-most edge of the Cowlitz Glacier glistened dazzling white a few hundred feet above them, and over it Rainier itself loomed, filling the skyline. They'd crossed a slight bulge of foothill on the three quarter of a mile hike up from the visitor's center, and that building--and their cars--were now out of sight.
Alex waited patiently until they all seem to have arrived. The air was cool but the sunshine was bright, glinting off the granular surfaces of the granite boulders around them--and only a few whispers broke the silence.
"I . . . ummm, I guess you all are ready for this part," Alex said loudly. "It's sort of . . . unavoidable."
There was a slight murmur of assent. He had carried the urn up the trail--it was actually a polished cylinder of silver, perhaps a foot long and five or six inches across. He unscrewed its lid--those close by noticed that the cylinder's only decoration was a five pointed star inscribed inside a circle on the top of the lid--and then paused. "Well, I guess there's only one way to do this," he said slowly, and began to shake and toss the contents of the urn out onto the tundra before him. The ash was so fine it blew away instantly in the light breeze, and only a few heavier pieces of bone--themselves as finely ground as beach sand--fell visibly to the carpet of wildflowers beneath his feet. There was a puff of pale gray dust that hung in the air for a moment, and then that too was gone.
"'Ashes to ashes . . . '" someone in the crowd quoted in a whisper. Otherwise there was a long stretch of utter silence on the mountain.
"I think we all know that Laura wasn't exactly a very sentimental person," he began. "But she did leave a few words to be said today." He didn't mention that she'd also specified who she wanted to say them--Jarod--or that Alex had completely ignored that direction. He'd been second on her list, a fact that seemed completely indicative of their entire relationship. 'Second to Jarod in life--and in death', he thought, bitterly.
It didn't help that he'd gone to see Jarod while he was recovering at Laura's house and that he felt guilty about his reaction to that, as well. Jarod had been more or less conscious--although obviously heavily medicated--and had not only failed to recognize Alex, he'd attacked him, half-strangling him before Paul and the male nurse had pulled him free.
Alex knew he should have felt sympathy for Jarod--who had looked awful and had been through hell and back--but instead he'd felt even sorrier for himself. He missed Laura, blamed Jarod directly for her death, but had still been incredibly hurt that Jarod hadn't known who he was. Of course, it wasn't like Jarod had been himself, but it still riled Alex, feeling like one more item in a growing list of rejections.
After all, they'd slept together, all three of them, or whatever society wanted to call that. Only Laura had been sober, but it was hard to blame alcohol for all that had happened that night. But when he left in anger the next morning, Jarod had made no attempt to stop him or to call him afterwards. As idiotic as it sounded, he'd been expecting something from Jarod: some sort of recognition that they'd shared more than just Laura's body.
He'd sat by the telephone like a love-struck sixteen year old. He'd walked around in a daze thinking his whole life had changed--the entire world had been turned upside down--and no one but he seemed to notice.
He hated all of it. But was equally fascinated.
Laura had been right about that, too. He was in love with Jarod--or the idea of Jarod, whatever. And he hated himself because of it. He hated the pathetic, helpless way he'd felt seeing Jarod in pain, confused, in need. He'd wanted desperately to hold him but Paul never left them alone, and he hated himself for that unexpected impulse toward tenderness: it was outside all his experience of life that he could feel that sort of emotion about another man.
None of it made any sense to him. He wanted to hold Jarod as much as he wanted to hit him. It was, oddly enough, much the way he had often felt about Laura.
He tried desperately to push that thought aside.
He reached into his pocket and retrieved a folded piece of paper. Somehow he had to get through this ceremony. "Before I read this, though, I'd just like to thank you all for coming. Laura asked that we do this in the spring, when the tundra was in bloom"--everyone looked down at the carpet of alpine plants surrounding them--"and it turned out that's when she died, anyway. She was very specific about the place. I mean, she left a topographical map with this spot marked, noting that the view from here includes no trace of human intervention in nature besides the trail"--this comment caused the crowd to look around them, verifying that was indeed true--"and also that there were enough rocks for us to stand on and not hurt the plant life"--at this, there was a flurry of whispers and shifting of position as everyone made sure they were standing on granite, not wildflowers--"which is exactly the sort of attention to detail I'd expect of Laura. Anyway, this is what she wrote:"
Alex reached into his pocket again, and this time retrieved and put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. He held the piece of paper he carried closer to his eyes; he cleared his throat.
"'I hope you waited for a nice day to do this thing, because the view is pretty spectacular--'' there was another bout of heads turning to look out at the snow-capped Cascades, arching with undulating stateliness into the mysterious blue distance. "'--which is more or less the whole point. I guess you all know I've never been big on this sort of thing, and I've never really gotten the big deal about mortal remains and the disposing of same--but, then again, there's a lot of stuff I've never understood, much of it obviously important to some of you. So I apologize for that--'" at this Alex stopped and blinked. He began again, this time half choked with tears: "'I apologize for that because I hurt a lot of you with my bluntness. It never meant . . . I didn't care.'" And Alex had to completely stop and turn away for a moment. There was a ripple of whispers, blown noses and head shaking in the crowd, Jarod noticed. He was past being able to cry, at this point, and merely stood there. He was having a great deal of trouble, still, connecting these words to the fact that Laura was actually dead.
Alex had pulled himself together and continued in a stronger voice: "'So there you go,' she wrote.' I hope all of you will take a long look around at the wonders Mother Nature has so kindly provided and then get over it. Life is for living. Period. And as much as I wish I was there, obviously--if someone is reading this--I'm not. So good-bye, I will miss you all, too, yada yada."
Alex paused and looked out at the faces before him, clearly bemused. "She actually wrote, 'yada, yada'," he told them. "Only Laura . . . " He shook his head and then continued reading: " 'And please try not to trample the wildflowers as you leave.'"
Alex stood there for a moment rather blankly and then turned the piece of paper over in his hand, looking for anything further.
"That's it", he said at last. "Well, just like Laura to have it short and sweet, I suppose," he mused. He cleared his throat again, recognizing the double entendre. "Ah--does anyone else want to say anything? Jenn--I know you said you wanted to."
But Jenn was crying, completely overwhelmed, hugged by the bass player from her band--Jarod never could remember the young man's name--and shook her head, 'no' with an audible sob.
There was movement at the other side of the crowd, and Jarod was surprised to see Laura's great-aunt Margrit moving calmly forward to stand beside Alex. It wasn't so much that she was there that shocked him, but that he hadn't noticed her before. She was nearly as tall as Laura had been, and had a stately, patrician bearing as she turned to address those gathered.
"Some of you--most of you--know what Laura was, what all the Greggor women are"--there was a murmur at this: evidently coming right out and saying they were all witches wasn't a very popular sentiment, at the moment, although Jarod wasn't quite sure why. He filed away this odd squeamishness as another example of the bizarre twists of human nature and realized he'd never be able to ask Laura to explain it to him.
"Nevertheless," Margrit continued, "as Laura would say: 'There it is. Get over it!'" And Jarod saw small smiles break out on the faces around him. He realized he was smiling, as well. "She also didn't really believe in religion, but she was a very spiritual person and understood the concept of divinity, even if she never admitted to invoking it. Which I do, for her, now." And Margrit slowly raised her arms upward. The crowd became absolutely silent. A cloud passed over the sun and--as mountain climates will--the temperature instantly dropped at least ten degrees.
A raven passed over them, swooping low off the mountain, gliding on silent wings above their heads.
"I invoke Thee in the name of Thy sister, who we no longer can see with these eyes," Margrit said in a slightly melodramatic tone. Jarod felt first a gentle puff of breeze, then a steadily building cold, raw, wind rushing down off the glaciated slopes of the mountain, cutting right through his clothes. "Holy mother: our Laura is now even more Your Laura. As it was, so it shall be, forever!"
The wind was practicality howling through them by the time the last word was spoken. People had huddled up against each other, leaving Jarod feeling even more intensely alone as he lurked behind them.
"Enough!" Margrit said. She dropped her arms to her sides and the wind stopped instantly. The cloud passed and the sunshine sparkled again on the pale bluish lichens encrusting the steely-gray granite rocks and the delicate, nodding flowers and fresh green sedges surrounding them.
No one moved or said a word. Margrit looked out over their faces--holding Jarod's eyes for a long moment--a bit smugly, he thought. She had the slightest of smiles on her lips.
"Well," she added, "I have only one more thing to say: wherever Laura is, one thing is certain. They better damned well have an open bar, or they'll definitely hear from HER!"
The ripple of laughter, it seemed to Jarod, was even more of a release, coming after what it did. He saw the smiles on faces still blinking back tears, the shell-shocked expressions of people trying to deal with an emotional overload.
In the silence, Alex cleared his throat. "As you know, Laura also asked that we have a wake tonight in the ballroom at the Westin. Black tie optional, live band. I hope to see you all there."
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He was standing partly hidden by a boulder when he saw Alex and Jenn approaching--Jenn still being comforted by her boyfriend.
"Did you think I wouldn't see you here?" Alex asked coldly, and Jarod flinched from the anger in the man's voice.
"You are, like, such a total and absolute asshole!" Jenn interjected. "Aunt Laura loved you, and you left her to die with a bunch of whacked out strangers. I cannot believe I ever slept with you!" she finished bitterly, and then turned and walked quickly away, the boyfriend following.
Alex raised his eyebrows at her comment. "You're just all things, to all men--and women--aren't you, Jarod? Did you fuck all of Laura's friends, or just the close ones?" he asked sarcastically. "You do realize you have no right to be here. She's dead because of you. I warned her this would happen--that you'd manage to get her killed someday, but you'd come out of it just fine."
"I don't know," Jarod answered, "about the 'just fine' part."
"Yeah, I'm sure you're just all torn up, aren't you?" Alex said bitterly. "Because you loved Laura so much--didn't you? Didn't you, you cold-hearted son of a bitch? Didn't you?!"
Jarod stood there and stared at him. He didn't have the vaguest idea what to say.
Alex advanced on him another step--Jarod could feel the man's rage lapping at him, like a palpable force of nature. "I see you again, I'll fucking kill you," Alex whispered.
Jarod braced himself--he knew what was coming. He'd been hit enough recently to be neither surprised or particularly frightened, but when Alex's fist connected with his jaw he was shocked by the strength in that blow. Alex fully intended to hurt him as much as possible and, if Jarod hadn't been ready for the punch, would no doubt have been knocked right down.
As it was he tasted blood as the cut on his lip was opened again and saw a blinding flash of red--of his own rage--along with yet more pain. He opened his eyes and exerted himself to stand perfectly still. If Alex wanted to take another shot at him, he welcomed it.
Instead, Alex looked sick and horrified. Instinctively, he reached out--Jarod watched his hand moving toward his face--but then caught himself, steadying himself and pulling his hand back. "Laura loved you," he said quietly, nearly in a whisper. He looked mystified and utterly confused. "Why wasn't that good enough for you? And why couldn't I just let it be? Why do I feel this way?" He looked stricken. "God, Jarod, I'm so sorry. I don't want to hurt you. I want to . . . " But he couldn't finish the sentence. He looked overcome by emotion and simply stood there for a long, silent moment, staring into Jarod's eyes, thinking that he'd never in this lifetime see him again and feeling endlessly lost.
And then he turned and walked slowly away.
It was then Jarod noticed that Margrit hovered a few feet away--she'd been listening and obviously waiting for Alex to leave.
"Do you blame me, too?" Jarod asked her, simply, sadly.
"No, no I don't. What happened to Laura is her own fault as much as anyone else's. She knew how dangerous you are." Margrit was peering at Jarod intently. "Why--you don't think she's dead!" she said, in evident shock.
"What?" he asked. "Forgive me, but cremation is pretty final."
Margrit shrugged lightly. "Details!" she said. "What do your instincts tell you?"
Jarod only shook his head. "I don't understand what you mean. I watched her die. I saw what happened. I was THERE."
"No, you weren't," Margrit insisted. "Not when they incinerated whomever ended up in that urn, you weren't. Jarod--you may not realize it, but you think Laura is still alive You FEEL it."
"But you'd know, wouldn't you?" he asked in surprise. "I mean--that witch thing. Laura could tell that about people--if they are alive or dead--can't you?"
Margrit frowned. "Laura rejected me. Rejected her own heritage. Wasn't good enough for her, I guess. I doubt she'd let me know much at all about her. Besides, until just now, sensing what you feel inside, the thought hadn't even occurred to me. You, Jarod: you're the one who would KNOW."
He swallowed hard and looked off into the distance uncomfortably. "I've been having these dreams . . . " he began.
"Well!" Margrit said, as if that settled everything. "There you are!"
"Are you saying you think she's alive?" Jarod asked her.
"You don't need me to tell you that!" she snapped impatiently. "You already know!"
But all Jarod 'knew' was that he was confused and exhausted. It had taken him the last two weeks at Laura's house, being cared for by her friends Paul and Angela and the male nurse they'd hired, to recover from his own injuries enough to be walking around on his own, and he still wasn't able to sleep for more than a few short hours before being awakened by the nightmares.
He stood there alone after Margrit left. After a while, he realized he was the only person left on the mountain. He went back over to where Alex had scattered the ashes and tried to find some trace of them on the tundra, but the carpet of plants seem undisturbed below his feet, and the sun ducked behind a cloud again, bringing with it a sudden chill, dizziness and nausea.
He had nothing to say, he realized. He didn't feel Laura's presence there, and he had wept too much for more tears.
He turned and started back down the path toward the visitor's center.
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"I don't think he should even be walking around, Paul!" Angela replied hotly. "Why you can't simply tell him that--"
"Ang, we've been through this hundred times," her husband told her patiently. "I can't tell Jarod what to do--he's not a kid or something. Besides, the doctor said he should be moving around, that the concussion won't heal any faster if he's still in bed at this point--"
"The doctor!" Angela snorted. "As if he knows anything about how long it takes to heal a broken heart! You've heard Jarod screaming, Paul, like a stuck pig--you've seen that the man can hardly sleep more than a little kitten does before he's wide awake and hollering. And you heard damned well what that doctor said had been done to him--he was tortured: beaten and . . . well, you know, HURT, that way."
Paul sighed. Jarod had refused to tell anyone anything at all about what had happened to him. All they knew for sure was what could be inferred from his injuries, and assumed from the evidence of Laura's death. Meanwhile, Jarod had attacked both the male nurse, Alex and Paul himself when half-awake, clearly thinking they were his tormentor. He'd been delusional and violent on and off and Paul hadn't thought he should come to this funeral of Laura's either, actually, but had felt helpless to prevent it.
"We can't keep him tied to a bed, Ang, or so doped up he doesn't know where he is. Jarod needs to do like Laura said in that thing Alex read: 'get over it'. I don't think that's going to happen overnight."
They watched him, together, as he appeared at the trail head and then started across the parking lot toward their car. Paul was a bit shocked, really, by the changes in Jarod. The man had always moved with a sort of cocky, self-assured confidence, but he seemed often, now, to be uncertain where he was. He still had occasional black-outs, sometimes even falling right over, and was pale and often too nauseous to eat. He'd lost both weight and muscle tone and looked, as Angela put it, 'as peeked as a veal calf blinking in the sun.'
Jarod walked up to the car and climbed slowly into the back seat.
"You feeling poorly again, Jarod?" Angela asked. "You look like you just saw a ghost!" And he did--he was glassy eyed and trembling slightly.
But Jarod smiled and even managed a little laugh. Paul raised his eyebrows and looked at Angela--they hadn't heard him laugh since Paul had rescued him on the Olympic peninsular the day Laura had died.
"Maybe I did," Jarod mused. "I wonder where I can get something to eat," he asked unexpectedly.
Angela smiled broadly. In spite of how bad he looked, maybe he'd finally turned the corner. Maybe the funeral--as odd as it had been--had done him good.
A man that was hungry couldn't be suffering too much, she knew, and a hungry man could be fed: a simple, basic chore that she knew she could manage.
The rest, she hoped, would take care of itself.
Good Enough
Chapter 1
Witch1
Suquamish Island
Washington State
The image was a bit grainy, and in black and white, but Jarod recognized the scene immediately--it was Catherine Parker's memorial service, at the Centre, and he was a child again. A serious child, whose question to Sydney--"Why is everyone dressed in black?"--he also remembered vividly.
"Because someone has died," Sydney told him. "Here: come and see." And he propelled the boy Jarod had once been forward toward the other end of the room where, he noticed, no one else was. As he got closer, the lights became brighter, and he could see what all the adults were so intent on avoiding:
There was a large, cylindrical stainless steel tank--smooth sided and shiny--under a narrow, gleaming steel table on which lay a human shape, covered completely by a plain white sheet. At the foot of the table, a butcher's scale hung from a steel pole, and there was a smallish steel platform elevated on steel legs over the corpse's feet. Oddly, he saw the table in full color.
Jarod hung back, quite terrified.
"You've done simulated autopsies," Sydney reminded him. "Why should it be different just because you knew this person?"
But it was different--it felt horribly different--and young Jarod dug in his heels, trying to avoid going even one step closer the table.
At that moment Dr. Raines entered, a man in his late thirties, brisk and hurried but in black and white, like Sydney and himself. The lights grew even brighter, putting the body into high, greenish florescent light as Raines impatiently tugged the covering sheet off it. Jarod noted that the sheet immediately vanished into thin air. But he was too transfixed by the body to care.
It was Laura, naked, her skin the a waxy blue-gray. The thoracic-abdominal incision had already been made, so that there was a violent, gaping red wound that ran as a large 'Y', first from shoulder to shoulder--the two spokes cutting right across the upper mounds of her breasts--and the longer leg running straight through the center of her chest all the way to her pubis, neatly transecting her entire body. The upper organs had already been completely removed, so that her chest gaped open and empty, the glistening white vertebrae of her spine partly visible through the thin, internal fascia muscles of her back like a strand of large, ghastly pearls.
Jarod stood there open-mouthed. He was an adult now, he realized, no longer the hesitant boy he had been only moments before, and he saw himself in color--although Raines remained locked in time as a young man, in grainy black and white.
"Here's her heart," Raines said briskly, and held out the plump, dark grayish-red organ. "You've already cut it out, I see. Not very romantic, is it? No sentimentality THERE, huh?" Raines chuckled a bit. "Want to touch it, boy?"
Jarod drew back, feeling his bile rise and the room spin slightly.
"What's wrong, Jarod--not good enough for you?" Raines asked, cryptically. "Note that subject has rejected the heart. Again," he intoned in a clinical voice into a microphone that appeared out of nowhere to hang over Laura's body.
Raines plopped the heart unceremoniously on the smaller steel table at Laura's feet and sliced through it in one swift gesture with what looked like a small ceremonial sword that he had seemingly pulled out of the air for the job. "Just like cutting an apple--want to give it a shot, boy? You're the expert at this, aren't you, little man?" he taunted Jarod.
Jarod couldn't move. Literally--he was paralyzed, he realized. Frozen in place. "I'm stuck," he told Raines.
"Yes, that happens," Raines replied, not unkindly. "We sometimes get stuck on things. On people. Can't let go. Can't move on. Cripples us." He shrugged. "Irrational. But there it is."
Raines leaned over Laura--Jarod noticed with growing alarm that her body was growing pinker by the moment, the waxiness retreating as the cadaver flushed with what looked like life. Jarod turned to ask Sydney what was happening, but he was gone. In his place stood the young Miss Parker, in shades of black and white. "You aren't afraid, are you, Jarod?" she asked mockingly. "You were a pathologist, right? You've cut people up and played around with their guts. So what's the big deal if it's the witch, this time? Besides: you put her there."
He turned back to Raines, who was now thrusting another organ at him. "Hold out your hands, boy," he demanded. He didn't want to, but Jarod found himself doing just that. Raines flopped the large, pale-pink, funnel-shaped mass covered in a delicate network of veins in his hands. Jarod looked down at it in sheer terror.
"That's her uterus, boy--vagina attached," he told him jeeringly. "Never saw it from this end before, huh? Pretty kinky, don't you think? But you like it that way, right: the kinkier the better? Wonder where you learned THAT."
Jarod gasped and dropped it on the floor.
"Now look what you've done--you've torn this fallopian tube clean off!" Raines admonished him, leaning over and prodding the organ with the toe of his shoe. "What--no one ever told you be gentle with women, boy? Or do you just always have to have it rough?"
Sydney was back, suddenly at Jarod's side, and now he was the older, current version of himself, in full color. "Did you reject her because she could never have your children?" he asked in his best detached, psychologist tone.
Laura sat up--the incision wound gaping open even further as she did--and looked at him coldly.
"Offer him the heart, again," she told Raines. "Maybe if it's all cut up in little pieces he'll finally want the damned thing."
"We could stop HIS heart," Raines suggested gleefully. "I did that before. I think you'd enjoy watching, this time, my dear."
"That implies the bastard HAS a heart," Laura said to Raines.
They both laughed lightly, their heads together, looking at Jarod.
He heard his own scream, and then knew he was tied down, his wrists and ankles in thick, unyielding straps attached to the narrow hospital bed he was lying on.
"You awake?" a male voice Jarod didn't recognize questioned calmly. "No need to be afraid. We're taking good care of you. You're ill, Jarod. I'm a nurse. You're only in restraints for your own protection. You've been having violent nightmares."
Jarod was trying, by sheer strength, to escape, however, yanking at the straps and simply screaming as loud as he could for help. He saw the man hover over him, and the hypodermic needle as it entered the flesh of his forearm. "Sorry, Jarod," the man said. "But you need to rest."
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Mt. Ranier, Washington
Southeast escarpment, elevation: 5,892 feet
Jarod had been surprised by the number of cars in the parking lot at the Paradise visitor's center, and watched in amazement as a straggle of what he guessed might easily be eighty-five to a hundred people moved up the hiking trail that snaked through the alpine meadows above the low building. It had never occurred to him that Laura had actual friends. He saw Alex, standing at the head of the trail and directing people forward.
"I'd rather not be seen," he told Paul and Angela from the back seat. "You two go on ahead, I'll try to blend into the last bunch up the trail."
Angela looked silently at her husband. He knew she felt Jarod shouldn't even be out of bed yet, much less hiking up to the foot of a glacier for this memorial service. Paul only shook his head 'no' lightly: there was no point in arguing with Jarod. He was going to do whatever he wanted to do. And the man had been through enough: he needed closure as much as any one of them.
How Jarod was going to 'blend in', though, was another matter. His face was still nearly covered in bruises in various states of healing--mostly the green-and-purple phase--and wherever he wasn't bruised his skin was pale and clammy. There were neatly stitched cuts on his upper lip and over his left eye, and his hair was just beginning to cover the deeper scalp wound on the side of his head. His dark sunglasses--while hiding his blood-shot eyes--only made him look more ominous. He was dressed all in black, but he'd grown so thin his clothes hung off his frame shapelessly. The healing cuts across his entire back and buttocks couldn't be seen, but he walked slowly, like a man in pain, and seemed distracted and depressed. He looked, in short, too much like a corpse himself, to not cause shudders at a funeral.
But Paul had given up trying to reason with Jarod, so they went on without him, climbing upward on the narrow, chipped-rock trail between tufts of sedges and the thick clusters of tiny blooming plants: nodding violet-blue harebells and dwarf blueberry plants with hanging umbrellas of delicate pink and blue cup-shaped flowers. It was like an oriental carpet of vegetation, on a miniature scale, interspersed with outcrops of silvery blue granite, much of it covered in the intricate grayish-aqua-blue abstract patterns of lichens.
Some of the boulders protruded above the ground, many the size of refrigerators or Volkswagens, and, as he looked back down the trail, Paul could occasionally make out Jarod skulking between them.
The crowd gathered loosely around Alex, fanning out off the trail. The lower-most edge of the Cowlitz Glacier glistened dazzling white a few hundred feet above them, and over it Rainier itself loomed, filling the skyline. They'd crossed a slight bulge of foothill on the three quarter of a mile hike up from the visitor's center, and that building--and their cars--were now out of sight.
Alex waited patiently until they all seem to have arrived. The air was cool but the sunshine was bright, glinting off the granular surfaces of the granite boulders around them--and only a few whispers broke the silence.
"I . . . ummm, I guess you all are ready for this part," Alex said loudly. "It's sort of . . . unavoidable."
There was a slight murmur of assent. He had carried the urn up the trail--it was actually a polished cylinder of silver, perhaps a foot long and five or six inches across. He unscrewed its lid--those close by noticed that the cylinder's only decoration was a five pointed star inscribed inside a circle on the top of the lid--and then paused. "Well, I guess there's only one way to do this," he said slowly, and began to shake and toss the contents of the urn out onto the tundra before him. The ash was so fine it blew away instantly in the light breeze, and only a few heavier pieces of bone--themselves as finely ground as beach sand--fell visibly to the carpet of wildflowers beneath his feet. There was a puff of pale gray dust that hung in the air for a moment, and then that too was gone.
"'Ashes to ashes . . . '" someone in the crowd quoted in a whisper. Otherwise there was a long stretch of utter silence on the mountain.
"I think we all know that Laura wasn't exactly a very sentimental person," he began. "But she did leave a few words to be said today." He didn't mention that she'd also specified who she wanted to say them--Jarod--or that Alex had completely ignored that direction. He'd been second on her list, a fact that seemed completely indicative of their entire relationship. 'Second to Jarod in life--and in death', he thought, bitterly.
It didn't help that he'd gone to see Jarod while he was recovering at Laura's house and that he felt guilty about his reaction to that, as well. Jarod had been more or less conscious--although obviously heavily medicated--and had not only failed to recognize Alex, he'd attacked him, half-strangling him before Paul and the male nurse had pulled him free.
Alex knew he should have felt sympathy for Jarod--who had looked awful and had been through hell and back--but instead he'd felt even sorrier for himself. He missed Laura, blamed Jarod directly for her death, but had still been incredibly hurt that Jarod hadn't known who he was. Of course, it wasn't like Jarod had been himself, but it still riled Alex, feeling like one more item in a growing list of rejections.
After all, they'd slept together, all three of them, or whatever society wanted to call that. Only Laura had been sober, but it was hard to blame alcohol for all that had happened that night. But when he left in anger the next morning, Jarod had made no attempt to stop him or to call him afterwards. As idiotic as it sounded, he'd been expecting something from Jarod: some sort of recognition that they'd shared more than just Laura's body.
He'd sat by the telephone like a love-struck sixteen year old. He'd walked around in a daze thinking his whole life had changed--the entire world had been turned upside down--and no one but he seemed to notice.
He hated all of it. But was equally fascinated.
Laura had been right about that, too. He was in love with Jarod--or the idea of Jarod, whatever. And he hated himself because of it. He hated the pathetic, helpless way he'd felt seeing Jarod in pain, confused, in need. He'd wanted desperately to hold him but Paul never left them alone, and he hated himself for that unexpected impulse toward tenderness: it was outside all his experience of life that he could feel that sort of emotion about another man.
None of it made any sense to him. He wanted to hold Jarod as much as he wanted to hit him. It was, oddly enough, much the way he had often felt about Laura.
He tried desperately to push that thought aside.
He reached into his pocket and retrieved a folded piece of paper. Somehow he had to get through this ceremony. "Before I read this, though, I'd just like to thank you all for coming. Laura asked that we do this in the spring, when the tundra was in bloom"--everyone looked down at the carpet of alpine plants surrounding them--"and it turned out that's when she died, anyway. She was very specific about the place. I mean, she left a topographical map with this spot marked, noting that the view from here includes no trace of human intervention in nature besides the trail"--this comment caused the crowd to look around them, verifying that was indeed true--"and also that there were enough rocks for us to stand on and not hurt the plant life"--at this, there was a flurry of whispers and shifting of position as everyone made sure they were standing on granite, not wildflowers--"which is exactly the sort of attention to detail I'd expect of Laura. Anyway, this is what she wrote:"
Alex reached into his pocket again, and this time retrieved and put on a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. He held the piece of paper he carried closer to his eyes; he cleared his throat.
"'I hope you waited for a nice day to do this thing, because the view is pretty spectacular--'' there was another bout of heads turning to look out at the snow-capped Cascades, arching with undulating stateliness into the mysterious blue distance. "'--which is more or less the whole point. I guess you all know I've never been big on this sort of thing, and I've never really gotten the big deal about mortal remains and the disposing of same--but, then again, there's a lot of stuff I've never understood, much of it obviously important to some of you. So I apologize for that--'" at this Alex stopped and blinked. He began again, this time half choked with tears: "'I apologize for that because I hurt a lot of you with my bluntness. It never meant . . . I didn't care.'" And Alex had to completely stop and turn away for a moment. There was a ripple of whispers, blown noses and head shaking in the crowd, Jarod noticed. He was past being able to cry, at this point, and merely stood there. He was having a great deal of trouble, still, connecting these words to the fact that Laura was actually dead.
Alex had pulled himself together and continued in a stronger voice: "'So there you go,' she wrote.' I hope all of you will take a long look around at the wonders Mother Nature has so kindly provided and then get over it. Life is for living. Period. And as much as I wish I was there, obviously--if someone is reading this--I'm not. So good-bye, I will miss you all, too, yada yada."
Alex paused and looked out at the faces before him, clearly bemused. "She actually wrote, 'yada, yada'," he told them. "Only Laura . . . " He shook his head and then continued reading: " 'And please try not to trample the wildflowers as you leave.'"
Alex stood there for a moment rather blankly and then turned the piece of paper over in his hand, looking for anything further.
"That's it", he said at last. "Well, just like Laura to have it short and sweet, I suppose," he mused. He cleared his throat again, recognizing the double entendre. "Ah--does anyone else want to say anything? Jenn--I know you said you wanted to."
But Jenn was crying, completely overwhelmed, hugged by the bass player from her band--Jarod never could remember the young man's name--and shook her head, 'no' with an audible sob.
There was movement at the other side of the crowd, and Jarod was surprised to see Laura's great-aunt Margrit moving calmly forward to stand beside Alex. It wasn't so much that she was there that shocked him, but that he hadn't noticed her before. She was nearly as tall as Laura had been, and had a stately, patrician bearing as she turned to address those gathered.
"Some of you--most of you--know what Laura was, what all the Greggor women are"--there was a murmur at this: evidently coming right out and saying they were all witches wasn't a very popular sentiment, at the moment, although Jarod wasn't quite sure why. He filed away this odd squeamishness as another example of the bizarre twists of human nature and realized he'd never be able to ask Laura to explain it to him.
"Nevertheless," Margrit continued, "as Laura would say: 'There it is. Get over it!'" And Jarod saw small smiles break out on the faces around him. He realized he was smiling, as well. "She also didn't really believe in religion, but she was a very spiritual person and understood the concept of divinity, even if she never admitted to invoking it. Which I do, for her, now." And Margrit slowly raised her arms upward. The crowd became absolutely silent. A cloud passed over the sun and--as mountain climates will--the temperature instantly dropped at least ten degrees.
A raven passed over them, swooping low off the mountain, gliding on silent wings above their heads.
"I invoke Thee in the name of Thy sister, who we no longer can see with these eyes," Margrit said in a slightly melodramatic tone. Jarod felt first a gentle puff of breeze, then a steadily building cold, raw, wind rushing down off the glaciated slopes of the mountain, cutting right through his clothes. "Holy mother: our Laura is now even more Your Laura. As it was, so it shall be, forever!"
The wind was practicality howling through them by the time the last word was spoken. People had huddled up against each other, leaving Jarod feeling even more intensely alone as he lurked behind them.
"Enough!" Margrit said. She dropped her arms to her sides and the wind stopped instantly. The cloud passed and the sunshine sparkled again on the pale bluish lichens encrusting the steely-gray granite rocks and the delicate, nodding flowers and fresh green sedges surrounding them.
No one moved or said a word. Margrit looked out over their faces--holding Jarod's eyes for a long moment--a bit smugly, he thought. She had the slightest of smiles on her lips.
"Well," she added, "I have only one more thing to say: wherever Laura is, one thing is certain. They better damned well have an open bar, or they'll definitely hear from HER!"
The ripple of laughter, it seemed to Jarod, was even more of a release, coming after what it did. He saw the smiles on faces still blinking back tears, the shell-shocked expressions of people trying to deal with an emotional overload.
In the silence, Alex cleared his throat. "As you know, Laura also asked that we have a wake tonight in the ballroom at the Westin. Black tie optional, live band. I hope to see you all there."
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He was standing partly hidden by a boulder when he saw Alex and Jenn approaching--Jenn still being comforted by her boyfriend.
"Did you think I wouldn't see you here?" Alex asked coldly, and Jarod flinched from the anger in the man's voice.
"You are, like, such a total and absolute asshole!" Jenn interjected. "Aunt Laura loved you, and you left her to die with a bunch of whacked out strangers. I cannot believe I ever slept with you!" she finished bitterly, and then turned and walked quickly away, the boyfriend following.
Alex raised his eyebrows at her comment. "You're just all things, to all men--and women--aren't you, Jarod? Did you fuck all of Laura's friends, or just the close ones?" he asked sarcastically. "You do realize you have no right to be here. She's dead because of you. I warned her this would happen--that you'd manage to get her killed someday, but you'd come out of it just fine."
"I don't know," Jarod answered, "about the 'just fine' part."
"Yeah, I'm sure you're just all torn up, aren't you?" Alex said bitterly. "Because you loved Laura so much--didn't you? Didn't you, you cold-hearted son of a bitch? Didn't you?!"
Jarod stood there and stared at him. He didn't have the vaguest idea what to say.
Alex advanced on him another step--Jarod could feel the man's rage lapping at him, like a palpable force of nature. "I see you again, I'll fucking kill you," Alex whispered.
Jarod braced himself--he knew what was coming. He'd been hit enough recently to be neither surprised or particularly frightened, but when Alex's fist connected with his jaw he was shocked by the strength in that blow. Alex fully intended to hurt him as much as possible and, if Jarod hadn't been ready for the punch, would no doubt have been knocked right down.
As it was he tasted blood as the cut on his lip was opened again and saw a blinding flash of red--of his own rage--along with yet more pain. He opened his eyes and exerted himself to stand perfectly still. If Alex wanted to take another shot at him, he welcomed it.
Instead, Alex looked sick and horrified. Instinctively, he reached out--Jarod watched his hand moving toward his face--but then caught himself, steadying himself and pulling his hand back. "Laura loved you," he said quietly, nearly in a whisper. He looked mystified and utterly confused. "Why wasn't that good enough for you? And why couldn't I just let it be? Why do I feel this way?" He looked stricken. "God, Jarod, I'm so sorry. I don't want to hurt you. I want to . . . " But he couldn't finish the sentence. He looked overcome by emotion and simply stood there for a long, silent moment, staring into Jarod's eyes, thinking that he'd never in this lifetime see him again and feeling endlessly lost.
And then he turned and walked slowly away.
It was then Jarod noticed that Margrit hovered a few feet away--she'd been listening and obviously waiting for Alex to leave.
"Do you blame me, too?" Jarod asked her, simply, sadly.
"No, no I don't. What happened to Laura is her own fault as much as anyone else's. She knew how dangerous you are." Margrit was peering at Jarod intently. "Why--you don't think she's dead!" she said, in evident shock.
"What?" he asked. "Forgive me, but cremation is pretty final."
Margrit shrugged lightly. "Details!" she said. "What do your instincts tell you?"
Jarod only shook his head. "I don't understand what you mean. I watched her die. I saw what happened. I was THERE."
"No, you weren't," Margrit insisted. "Not when they incinerated whomever ended up in that urn, you weren't. Jarod--you may not realize it, but you think Laura is still alive You FEEL it."
"But you'd know, wouldn't you?" he asked in surprise. "I mean--that witch thing. Laura could tell that about people--if they are alive or dead--can't you?"
Margrit frowned. "Laura rejected me. Rejected her own heritage. Wasn't good enough for her, I guess. I doubt she'd let me know much at all about her. Besides, until just now, sensing what you feel inside, the thought hadn't even occurred to me. You, Jarod: you're the one who would KNOW."
He swallowed hard and looked off into the distance uncomfortably. "I've been having these dreams . . . " he began.
"Well!" Margrit said, as if that settled everything. "There you are!"
"Are you saying you think she's alive?" Jarod asked her.
"You don't need me to tell you that!" she snapped impatiently. "You already know!"
But all Jarod 'knew' was that he was confused and exhausted. It had taken him the last two weeks at Laura's house, being cared for by her friends Paul and Angela and the male nurse they'd hired, to recover from his own injuries enough to be walking around on his own, and he still wasn't able to sleep for more than a few short hours before being awakened by the nightmares.
He stood there alone after Margrit left. After a while, he realized he was the only person left on the mountain. He went back over to where Alex had scattered the ashes and tried to find some trace of them on the tundra, but the carpet of plants seem undisturbed below his feet, and the sun ducked behind a cloud again, bringing with it a sudden chill, dizziness and nausea.
He had nothing to say, he realized. He didn't feel Laura's presence there, and he had wept too much for more tears.
He turned and started back down the path toward the visitor's center.
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"I don't think he should even be walking around, Paul!" Angela replied hotly. "Why you can't simply tell him that--"
"Ang, we've been through this hundred times," her husband told her patiently. "I can't tell Jarod what to do--he's not a kid or something. Besides, the doctor said he should be moving around, that the concussion won't heal any faster if he's still in bed at this point--"
"The doctor!" Angela snorted. "As if he knows anything about how long it takes to heal a broken heart! You've heard Jarod screaming, Paul, like a stuck pig--you've seen that the man can hardly sleep more than a little kitten does before he's wide awake and hollering. And you heard damned well what that doctor said had been done to him--he was tortured: beaten and . . . well, you know, HURT, that way."
Paul sighed. Jarod had refused to tell anyone anything at all about what had happened to him. All they knew for sure was what could be inferred from his injuries, and assumed from the evidence of Laura's death. Meanwhile, Jarod had attacked both the male nurse, Alex and Paul himself when half-awake, clearly thinking they were his tormentor. He'd been delusional and violent on and off and Paul hadn't thought he should come to this funeral of Laura's either, actually, but had felt helpless to prevent it.
"We can't keep him tied to a bed, Ang, or so doped up he doesn't know where he is. Jarod needs to do like Laura said in that thing Alex read: 'get over it'. I don't think that's going to happen overnight."
They watched him, together, as he appeared at the trail head and then started across the parking lot toward their car. Paul was a bit shocked, really, by the changes in Jarod. The man had always moved with a sort of cocky, self-assured confidence, but he seemed often, now, to be uncertain where he was. He still had occasional black-outs, sometimes even falling right over, and was pale and often too nauseous to eat. He'd lost both weight and muscle tone and looked, as Angela put it, 'as peeked as a veal calf blinking in the sun.'
Jarod walked up to the car and climbed slowly into the back seat.
"You feeling poorly again, Jarod?" Angela asked. "You look like you just saw a ghost!" And he did--he was glassy eyed and trembling slightly.
But Jarod smiled and even managed a little laugh. Paul raised his eyebrows and looked at Angela--they hadn't heard him laugh since Paul had rescued him on the Olympic peninsular the day Laura had died.
"Maybe I did," Jarod mused. "I wonder where I can get something to eat," he asked unexpectedly.
Angela smiled broadly. In spite of how bad he looked, maybe he'd finally turned the corner. Maybe the funeral--as odd as it had been--had done him good.
A man that was hungry couldn't be suffering too much, she knew, and a hungry man could be fed: a simple, basic chore that she knew she could manage.
The rest, she hoped, would take care of itself.
