Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Read Free Book Online Page A

both lived in crackbrained families; they both lived without benefit of mothers; they both navigated, daily, around highly unpredictable dads. They both could see the billboard thoughts and they could hear those thoughts turning, click click, inside the skulls of every person, child and adult, in Promised Land. There’s a kid on a treasure hunt for trouble, people murmured. People read the signs. Old man’s a lunatic, they whispered. Allowances have to be made.
    So they had that much in common, Cobb Slaughter and Leela-May Moore. In another sense, they had nothing in common at all because on the derangement scale their fathers were at opposite ends.
    The next day, after the night of her face at the window, Cobb Slaughter found in his desk a perfect single gardenia and a sand dollar taped to white card. On the card, block capitals in ballpoint ink announced:
THIS IS A LUCKY SAND DOLLAR. IT’S A FREAK. I FOUND IT AT FOLLY BEACH. IT’S GOT SEVEN PETALS ON THE STARFLOWER AND SEVEN SLITS INSTEAD OF FIVE. SEVEN IS GOD’S PERFECTNUMBER. IF YOU PUT IT UNDER YOUR PILLOW, IT WILL PROTECT YOU SEVEN DAYS OF THE WEEK.
    The card was unsigned.
    He knew it meant: I’m a freak, you’re a freak. So what?
    He knew it also meant: Your protection needs are so great, only magic and God can help.
    He was ridiculously comforted. He was ashamed. He was furious. He loved her and hated her.
    He still had the sand dollar. He kept it with him at all times, wrapped in a silk handkerchief and protected inside a vintage tin that had once held loose-leaf tobacco. The tin had been in his desk drawer in the brief stint in Paris and with him in Afghanistan and then in Baghdad and now in Boston. He kept it in the inner pocket of his vest when he felt the need of totemic power.
    He studied Leela closely through the one-way glass. He had not seen her for fifteen years but he could have picked her out of a line-up in an instant. He noted that her mane of coppery hair was shorter, though still unruly. She tossed it in the same provocative way, daring all comers. Every boy in Promised Land had wanted her. Many were lured; more than a few were chosen. He felt abiding hostility toward every last one of them. When she made out with boys in cars, or on the veranda of the abandoned Hamilton house, he had hidden and watched.
    Even when Leela was still religious, she was wild.
    Now, all these years and miles from Promised Land, she was examining the interview room, plotting escape routes perhaps, or calculating the ratio of walls to floor, who knew? Slaughter could see her squinting, lining up points with her thumb, assessing dimensions. There was not much to see: four walls, nowindows, a table, two chairs, a microphone, tape recorder, bare floor, everything a pale institutional green. Once the door was closed, the room appeared seamless. There was neither handle nor lock on her side. Inevitably, of course, she looked at—she looked through—the black plate of glass. All the detainees did that, as though staring would make it a window.
    Slaughter savored this moment. The interview room, which was the phrase his team used in logs and documentation, gave him pleasure. He liked being outside and looking in. Whoever was in the interview room deserved to be there. They had given good cause. They needed to be shown—no, more than that, they needed to experience bodily the fact that carelessness in matters of national safety had consequences, and the consequences were costly. It angered Slaughter that certain kinds of people were so casual, so unaware. His duty was to make them aware and he took it seriously.
    He liked the fact that whoever was in the room knew he was being watched, understood that she was being studied like a germ on a microscope slide, but as to who was watching or why… there the room’s occupant was either uncertain or had no clue. Very quickly, however, that occupant—any occupant—dredged up likely and unlikely reasons by battalions. So the