“Why not?”
“I don’t like them. They do stuff to you.”
“What stuff?”
“Anything they want, and they don’t even ask if it’s okay. Them and motherly doctors and cute, redhead ‘designated examiners.’”
He braced himself. “So there’s more to this.”
“I don’t know.”
He rose. “Your clothes ought to be dry by now.”
She reached out to him. “No, no, okay! Okay!”
He stopped, standing over her. “You are the one who called this meeting we’re supposedly having, and I take it it’s to discuss your career. Your career! You expect me to work with you in trust and confidence when all you do is lie to me? This is absurd!”
She wilted, gathering the robe around her.
He settled in his chair again and waited, just waited, hoping a good, steady glare would do the job.
Finally she muttered, barely audible, “They were from the hospital.” Still he said nothing. She tried to look at him but couldn’t. “I was in the hospital and I got away.”
“What hospital?”
“Spokane County Medical Center.”
“And why were you there?”
She had to gather some courage to finally let it out. “I was in Behavioral Health. I guess I’m sort of crazy.”
“Oh, now you’recrazy.” He waved off any follow-up to that. “How crazy is ‘sort of crazy’?”
Now she met his eyes. “Not real crazy. Just a little crazy, and not all the time, just sometimes.”
“Enough to be in the hospital.”
“Uh-uh. No way. I’ve never hurt anybody. I have a job, I have an apartment, I have my very own driver’s license …”
“But you’ve been on the lam all this time?”
“Almost two months.”
“So what kind of crazy are you?” She looked puzzled. “Are you … paranoid, or split personality, or manic-depressive, or what?”
She looked away, but then, with a new resolve, she faced him and answered, “I’m delusional. I think I’m somebody else.”
He was silent, and not because he chose to be. Did she really say what he heard?
“But I’ve learned to live with it and I’m doing fine and I just want to be left alone. If they find me they’ll lock me up and drug me and I may as well die because my life will be over. There’s no moving forward in that place. All you do is sit and get moldy.” She was much different when she was honest. She was strong, able to face him. Good.
“And since you asked and I’m telling, I’ll just let you know that I’m badly in need of some friends right now. I don’t need pills and shrinks. I just need a chance—if you’re interested.”
A soul at the mercy of other wills. He could see it so clearly. It chilled him to realize he could feel it within himself. “Who?”
His one-word question puzzled her.
“Who do you think you are?”
She wagged her head. “That would be going back. I’m Eloise Kramer, and that’s all.”
It was self-serving, he knew, but he asked, “May I ask when you were born?”
She had to think a moment. “Umm, January fifteenth, 1991.”
Mandy’s birthday except for the year. He tried and failed to hide how that caught his attention. “January fifteenth?”
She nodded and reemphasized, “1991.”
“Where?”
She made a face as if she didn’t get the point of the question. “Spokane.”
“Are your parents still around?”
“No. They’ve both passed away.”
Something told him he was being silly. Maybe he was. “What were their names?”
“Arthur and Eloise. I was named after my mother.”
That hit him in the stomach, and he knew it showed. “Arthur and Eloise?” He would have touched her had it been appropriate, just to be sure she was there. He shook his head ever so slightly before he realized it and stopped.
She saw his reaction, and her eyes filled with … it looked like hope. “Did you know them? Arthur and Eloise … Kramer?”
“I …” He actually chuckled at himself. “No,” he said. “I’m sure I never met them.”
She sank back.
The robe she was wearing. It was his blue robe, the one she—the woman he saw upstairs, the vision, the hallucination, whatever she was—was wearing.
She was looking at him, getting concerned.
“Just thinking,” he said.
As he watched, a smile formed, widened, and filled her entire face with a glow he remembered. “Bet you’ve never done an interview like this one.”
He laughed, and what a relief. He put his hands over his face, rubbed his eyes. “Oh, no, I sure haven’t.”
She laughed, too—and she didhave Mandy’s teeth.
He talked in order to wrestle every thought and word back onto the rails of reality. “But since we’re being honest, you need to know I’m not in a good place right now—and I’m becoming more and more aware of it.”
The words still stuck in his mouth, difficult to force out. “I’ve just lost my wife …” Well, Dane? Are you going to tell her what an emotional wreck you are? That you can’t trust your feelings, or even your perceptions? That you have trouble looking at her and seeing only Eloise Kramer, born in Spokane in 1991?
He spoke the next safe thought he could find. “My wife and I were professional magicians; we were a team. We designed and wrote our own show. We could read each other, anticipate every move, every gag. We did shows in the States, in Europe, in Japan, Australia, New Zealand. We were together for forty years. Fortyyears. And for us, thatwas the magic. That was what it was all about.
“But now she’s gone. She’s really gone, and I’m having to deal with that.” Looking at the girl’s quiet attentiveness, he realized afresh that she was only nineteen. He could try to explain how it felt, but she still wouldn’t know, not really. “It’s been an unbearable surprise, like our life was an epic movie and right in the middle the film broke and I’m thinking ‘Now what?’ and … and I don’t know, and what really drives me crazy is, I’ll neverknow. I’ll never know how the story could have turned out.”
He jerked his head in the direction of the barn. “Our unfinished story’s out there in the barn: all our shows, all our inventions and memories, all the skill we put into it, all the years and dreams and concepts, they’re all out there, boxed up in crates under tarps, and I’m running on memories. What’s coming up, I don’t know. How the rest of my life is going to turn out, I don’t know.
“So anyway, whoever you are, or whoever you think you are, I’m not the mentor you’re looking for. You need a guide who isn’t lost. You need someone whose head isn’t … well, ‘scrambled’ isn’t a bad word.
“I have no doubt you’ll do well—uh, the hobo thing, if you ask me that’s like the Gypsy thing, you keep slipping into characters who aren’t you, I don’t know why unless it’s part of your being crazy—but you”—he sighted down his finger as he wiggled it at her—“you have it in your selfto be truly delightful and I really mean that. You just have to find out who you are, and once you do, you’ll be unstoppable. You don’t need me.”
He thought it was a pretty good speech, hopefully enough to establish truth so the mirage would go away. He was honest with her, and most important, honest with himself despite himself. It felt like dragging a sharp rake sideways through his guts, but it was honest.
Without a moment to contemplate she said, “You can’t stop now.”
Oh, right.He chuckled. Youth.How little she knew! “Young lady, things can look a lot different from this end of your life.”
This time she digested his words for a moment, her head tilted, her eyes narrowed.
“Once you’ve paid your dues, you’ll—”
“Excuse me?” Was she bristling at him? “ ‘Young lady’? ‘Paid my dues’? For your information, I’ve lost everyoneI’ve loved! I’ve got a whole life behind me that may not have happened. I don’t know who I am now, and— aww!” With a burst of anger she clapped her hands to the sides of her head—punishing herself? Giving herself a make-believe shock treatment? “You’ve got medoing it! No. No, no, no!” She shot to her feet, fumbling with the robe, pacing in her bare feet. “I’m notgoing there.” She pointed right in his face. “And you can’t make me! Nobody can, not anymore!”