Stories: All-New Tales

“I know. But maybe she’s not.”

“True, maybe she’s not. But the alternative to her being crazy is that there really is a curse and you’re going to have to face a whole different bunch of crap. Either way, you’re in the hot seat.”

“Maybe but maybe not. You know she’s going to the hospital today to get the results of the DNA test.”

Eamon, took a deep breath and let it out in one hard hush. “Call me and let me know the results, will you?”

“I will.” I put out my right hand and we shook for a long time.

He smiled. “You’re a good guy, you really are. Sticking by Ava like that, no matter what? That’s stand-up stuff.”

“Eamon, before I go, tell me about these frozen animals you mentioned before.”

“No, you don’t need to hear about that now. Maybe it was just a thing she did to me. Forget I even told you.” He patted me on the shoulder again and walked out of the bar.

When I got back to Ava’s apartment, she wasn’t there, so I let myself in. On a table in the hallway, impossible to miss, was a sheaf of papers with a yellow note on top. In large black letters it said PLEASE READ. I picked up the papers and saw there was more written in smaller letters on the note.

“This is the DNA report. It says that neither you nor Eamon are the father of my child. I’m a coward and don’t have the nerve to be here when you learn that. I’m going to spend the afternoon with my sister and will be back later. Please be here then so we can at least talk about it. I’m so sorry that I lied to you about not being with other men. There have been others since you and I got together.

“Whether it makes any difference to you or not now, I wasn’t lying about Lamiya and the curse. I don’t know who the father is, although until today I was certain it was either you or Eamon. But Lamiya was real. The curse is real. My deepest love and affection for you is real. Please be here later. I don’t deserve that, but I can ask.”

Stunned, I tried to look at the other papers in the sheaf but everything was numbers and graphs and at the end a summary I couldn’t understand because my brain was flying south fast and had no more room in it.

Still in my coat, I walked into the living room with the papers in hand and sat down on the couch. The couch where we’d had so many good talks and sex and silent, contented times sitting together and reading or just being. I tried to look at the papers again but it was not possible, so I leaned forward to toss them on the coffee table in front of the couch.

A large-format book of photographs I had never seen before was there. The title of the book was Freeze Frame, and every picture inside it was a striking rendering of dead animals, fish, and reptiles…the whole animal kingdom, frozen. Every single picture was of dead frozen creatures—on their backs, their sides, on ice in markets, on empty snowy roads where they’d obviously been hit and killed by passing cars. The book was gorgeous, poignant, and macabre all at the same time. As I leafed through it, I kept thinking of Eamon’s question about whether I had encountered Ava’s frozen animals yet. Was this what he was talking about, this book? Or was there more?

I’d looked at perhaps ten of the photos before I came to the marked page. A green Post-it note was at the top, bent over onto the page by constant use. The photograph was unlike any of the others in the book. It was of a woman dressed in black holding an infant in her arms. It is snowing—the world around her is white. She and the child are the only color there. But the child, or what little we can see of it because the woman is holding it so that it looks like she is hiding it from the photographer, looks dead and so white in her arms that it could be frozen too, like all of the other subjects in the book.

But what is most arresting about the photograph is the look on the woman’s face. She is totally serene. If she is holding a dead child, she has risen beyond her grief into something holy or inhuman. She is at peace, or a kind of transcendent madness that has given her peace. The image was so powerful and beautiful—there is no other word for it—that I stared at it for what must have been a solid minute. Only after that hypnotic first impression had passed did I look at the bottom of the page where the credits for the pictures all were. The photographer’s name was not listed, but the location where it had been taken was Sabunçu, Baku, Azerbaijan.

THE THERAPIST

Jeffery Deaver

One

I MET HER BY CHANCE, in a Starbucks near the medical building where I have my office, and I knew at once she was in trouble.

Recognizing people in distress was, after all, my profession.

I was reading over my patient notes, which I transcribe immediately after the fifty-minute sessions (often, as now, fortified by my favorite latte). I have a pretty good memory, but in the field of counseling and therapy you must be “completely diligent and tireless,” the many-syllabled phrase a favorite of one of my favorite professors.

This particular venue is on the outskirts of Raleigh in a busy strip mall and, the time being ten thirty A.M. on a pleasant day in early May, there were many people inside for their caffeine fixes.

There was one empty table near me but no chair, and the trim brunette, in a conservative dark blue dress, approached and asked if she could take the extra one at my table. I glanced at her round face, Good Housekeeping pretty, not Vogue, and smiled. “Please.”

I wasn’t surprised when she said nothing, didn’t smile back. She just took the chair, spun it around, clattering, and sat. Not that it was a flirtation she was rejecting; my smile obviously hadn’t been more than a faint pleasantry. I was twice her age and resembled—surprise, surprise—a balding, desk-and library-bound therapist. Not her type at all.

No, her chill response came from the trouble she was in. Which in turn troubled me a great deal.

I am a licensed counselor, a profession in which ethics rules preclude me from drumming up business the way a graphic designer or personal trainer might do. So I said nothing more but returned to my notes, while she pulled a sheaf of papers out of a gym bag and began to review them, urgently sipping her drink but not enjoying the hot liquid. I was not surprised. With aching eyes, head down, I managed to see that it was a school lesson plan she was working on. I believed it was for seventh grade.

A teacher…I grew even more concerned. I’m particularly sensitive to emotional and psychological problems within people who have influence over youngsters. I myself don’t see children as patients—that’s a specialty I’ve never pursued. But no psychologist can practice without a rudimentary understanding of children’s psyches, where are sowed the seeds of later problems my colleagues and I treat in our adult practices. Children, especially around ten or eleven, are in particularly susceptible developmental stages and can be forever damaged by a woman like the teacher sitting next to me.