Part 10 (1/2)

Her mother said nothing else, didn't move from where she sat at the foot of the bed, and Niki eventually drifted back into uneasy dreams, sleep so shallow that the sound of the thunder and the rain came right through. The next morning, her mother said nothing, never brought it up, that night, the things she'd said, and Niki knew better than to 86 ever mention it. But afterwards, on very stormy nights, she would lie awake, and sometimes she heard her mother moving around in the kitchen, restless utensil sounds, or the dry scuff of her slippers on the hallway floor outside Niki's door.

And years later, not long before she finally dropped out of high school, she heard a song by R.E.M. on the radio-”Fall on Me”-bought the alb.u.m even though she'd never particularly liked the band, and played that one track over and over again, thinking of her mother and that night and the storm. By that time, she'd read and seen enough to guess at her mother's nightmares, had understood enough of jellied gasoline and mortars and hauntings to glimpse the bright edges of that insomnia. Finally, twenty or thirty times through, having picked most of the lyrics from the tangled weave of voice and music, singer and song, she put the record away and never listened to it again.

If New Orleans taught Niki Ky nothing else, it taught her the respect due to ghosts, proper respect for pain so deep it transcended flesh and blood, and scarred time.

If her father had bad dreams, they'd never shown.

”Is that the way it was, Nicolan? Are you certain?” and Dr. Dalby watched her, watches her, is always watching her. Looking for the careless expression to expose a lie, the unguarded turn of a hand, flutter of eyelids, her teeth closing tightly on her lower lip. Every uncalculated act become her traitor, all unconscious Judases to give away the things she wants no one else to ever see.

”That's what I remember.”

”But you understand, those may not be the same thing, what you remember and what actually happened. We've talked about that-”

”I just said it's what I remember.”

”The night of the storm,” he says, not quite changing the subject. ”Did you ever tell Spyder about that night? What your mother said to you about the sky falling? The way that song affected you?”

87.

”Spyder hated R.E.M.”

A pause while he scribbles something in his notes, then the psychologist stares at her across the rims of his spectacles.

”Do you realize what you just said, Nicolan?”

”Spyder hated R.E.M.?”

”Yes. Her nightmares, her insomnia, the medication she took so she could sleep-”

”I'm not in the mood for word games today, Dr. Dalby.

Can we table that one for next week?” and then she stares at her feet, wondering what meaning he'll read into the invisible dashed line between her eyes and the tips of her shoes.

”I don't think of it as a game. There's meaning in every word we use, whether we choose to acknowledge that meaning, whether or not we intend it, whether or not we're even aware of it.”

”When I use a word,” Niki said, trying not to sound as angry as she was beginning to feel, ”it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.”

And Dr. Dalby sits silently a moment, chewing at the eraser tip of his pencil and staring at her, staring at Niki staring at her shoes, the purple paisley Docs that Daria brought her all the way from London.

”Yes, well, the question is,” he said at last, ”whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Niki looks up at him, glaring, wis.h.i.+ng her eyes could bleed fire, and ”They've a temper, some of them,” she says, and then stops herself, because she realizes these aren't her words, that they aren't even Dr. Dalby's words-Alice and Humpty Dumpty, something she read ages ago, lines from a little girl's nonsense book she thought she'd forgotten.

”There is always sense in a thing,” the psychologist says, ”whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.”

”Yeah,” Niki replies, looking back down at the toes of her purple boots. ”I've figured that much out.”

”That puts you well ahead of the curve, Nicolan.”

And she opens her eyes, pulling free of the dream as eas-88 ily as she slipped into it, slipping away from the pipe-smoke and old-book smells of Dr. Dalby's office, and the world stinks like Marvin's musty old Volkswagen again.

”Hey, you okay?” he asks, and she nods her head sleepily.

”I just dozed off. Are we almost there?”

”Yeah, we're almost there. Kaiser's just up ahead,” and so Niki shuts her eyes and decides she'll wait until they're all the way there to open them again.

Niki Ky met Danny Boudreaux their freshman year of high school, but they didn't start sleeping together until years later; one summer night after a rave, sweaty warehouse district chaos and both of them f.u.c.ked up on ecstasy and, finally, there were no inhibitions left to stand in the way. It wasn't an embarra.s.sment the next morning, but had seemed natural, something that should have happened, even though Danny had always gone mainly for boys. He worked drag at a couple of bars in the Quarter, was good enough that sometimes he talked about going to Vegas and making real money. A tall and pretty boy with only the barest trace of a Cajun accent, and he used a lot of foam rubber padding for his shows so no one would see the way his hip bones jutted beneath the sequins.

And then, late July and she met Danny for a beer at Coop's after work, early Sat.u.r.day morning and it was after work for both of them, the bar crammed full of punks and tourists. They went back to his place on the Ursulines because it was closer, raced sunrise together across the cobblestones, racing the stifling heat of morning, running drunk and sleepy, laughing like a couple of tardy vampires.

Before bed, they had cold cereal and cartoons. And Danny started talking.

The frail, pretty boy dropped the bomb he'd carried all his life, waiting for the right moment or the right ear, or simply the day he couldn't carry it any longer. More than drag, a lot more than that, and she sat still and listened, stared silently down at the Trix going soggy in her bowl

89.

while s...o...b.. Doo blared from Danny's little black-and-white television.

”I've been seeing a doctor,” he said. ”I started taking hormones a couple of months ago, Niki.”

And when he was done there was still nothing for her to say, nothing to make it real enough to answer, and finally he broke the silence for her and asked, ”Niki? Are you all right? I'm sorry-”

”No, I'm fine,” she said, not even looking at him, speaking to the safety of the TV instead, its senseless phosphor security, and she smiled and shrugged like it was no big s.h.i.+t, like he'd just asked if she wanted to go to a movie tonight or if she wanted another cup of coffee.

”I'm f.u.c.king wasted, Danny,” she said. ”We'll talk about it after I get some sleep, okay?”

”Yeah,” he replied and then offered another apology that she hadn't asked for before they crawled off to bed.

She lay awake beside him, staring out at the summer day blazing away behind the curtains, only one bright slice getting into the apartment. Concentrating on the clunking, rheumy noises coming from his old air conditioner, the uneven rhythm of his breath, until she was sure he was asleep, and Danny Boudreaux always slept like the dead.

She got dressed and wrote a note to leave beside the bed- Danny, I have to figure this out. I just don't know. Love, Niki-before she walked back across the Quarter to her own apartment, sweat-drenched and sun-dazed by the time she reached the other end of Decatur Street.

They've been waiting for almost two hours, and Marvin's throwing angry words at a male nurse with a clipboard and a shaved head; but it's too late already, too late to make the airport and the nine P.M. flight, so she really doesn't think it matters much whether or not they sit here the rest of the f.u.c.king night. Except that her hand has started bleeding again, and the pain is worse, and no one seems to care but Marvin. And the stark fluorescent lights s.h.i.+ning down on her from the ceiling are making her nervous, light so 90 empty, so bleak, that she can hardly imagine anything that could seem more unhealthy. Bleached and antiseptic light to forbid even the barest rind of a shadow, to gradually pick her apart, molecule by molecule.

”Do you even know how long she's been sitting there?”

”Yes sir,” the nurse says, frowning, looking at his clipboard instead of Marvin. ”You just told me.”