The Narcissist's Daughter by Craig Holden Read Free Book Online Page B

said, and though I had no intention of turning into another one of his informants I could feel the pull of his vortex, the desire he seemed able to instill that made people want to please him, to be on his side, and the headiness of the power of having his ear.
    He said, “So I hear you’ve gotten to know the wife.”
    “I have, yes.”
    “Well?”
    I kept my expression as blank as I could.
    He said, “What do you think?” Again, I had no idea how to respond. It seemed like another snitch question, a followup to his having asked me to keep an eye on her, but he said, “Isn’t she something?”
    This puzzled me, too, that it should matter to him what I thought of her, or perhaps I wasn’t puzzled so much as just surprised, but then I thought it went back to that impulse I’d seen in him before, that she was a part of the package of his achievements he needed to have recognized by whoever had the capacity to appreciate them. But the fact is he was right—she was something. As it happened in the few weeks after I’d found her dead patient, Joyce made a point whenever I went up there of stopping to say hey or at least to throw me a broad smile. If I was eating dinner alone in the cafeteria when she came in for her nightly tea, she’d sit across from me to talk for a few minutes. She was nice to talk to and to look at, and I began timing my breaks to coincide with hers, which were on a fairly regular schedule as long as things on the unit were under control. She commented on it once, saying, “You must spend all your time up here. Every time I come down, here you are.”
    “I’m just lucky, I guess.” She smiled and looked away and I could tell that my saying it had pleased her.
    I was thinking of this, but all I said to Ted was, “She’s nice, a nice person.”
    “She’s certainly given you an A plus.”
    He studied me for another moment as if he were looking for something, then said, “Well, remember, keep me in the loop. It’s important. I can be a help to you, Syd.”
    Then he offered me his hook. I took it as I would a hand, and even a day later, as I lay in bed, I could feel how strange it had seemed to hold something so cold and dead but that moved as a functioning part of a human body.

    I rumbled out of the hospital one December morning in the 610, the Tubes cranked, white punks on dope, and passed another Datsun, a sleek black 280Z pulled over with its hood up. Two women stood beside it huddled into their long coats against the wind and the first traces of new snow it carried. I could see their faces. I looped around and pulled up behind them. The license plate read Path 2.
    Joyce said, “Well, aren’t you just what the doctor ordered.”
    “You all right?” I said.
    “The light came on. I pulled over but it started smoking.”
    “You didn’t turn it off?”
    “Well, then I did.”
    “Hey, that was good thinking. Was it smoke or steam?”
    “I don’t know. Steam?”
    “You probably didn’t burn it up completely.”
    “Did you just stop to be sarcastic, or are you going to actually help us?”
    “I suppose I could help.”
    “Not that I’m not very good at taking sarcasm. Loads of practice, you know. It’s just that we have to be somewhere.”
    “I can give you a lift. But let me take a look, first.”
    “You don’t have to, Syd, really. I can call triple A.”
    I got a rag and a blanket from my trunk. When I came back, she said, “I’m sorry. This is my daughter.”
    “Jessi,” the girl said. “Hi.” She wore little rectangular glasses that seemed to hold her tormented bangs out of her eyes.
    “Syd works in daddy’s lab,” Joyce told her, then said to me, “She rode in with Ted so I could take her over to the U for an interview. Just as a backup, you know. She wants to go to Case. Isn’t that right?” She reached up and pinched the girl’s bangs between her extended fingers and flipped them back away from her eyes.
    I wrapped the rag around the radiator cap and