Part 35 (1/2)

She laid her head back down again. We kept on like this for hours, me reading and taking notes, Deborah staring at Elsie's picture in long silences broken only by her spa.r.s.e commentary: ”My sister look scared.” ... ”I don't like that look on her face.” ... ”She was chokin herself?” ... ”I guess after she realized she wasn't going to see my mother no more, she just gave up.” Occasionally she shook her head hard, like she was trying to snap herself out of something.

Eventually I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. It was the middle of the night and I still had a big pile of paper to sort through.

”You might think about getting yourself another copy of your mother's medical record and stapling it with all the pages in order to keep it all straight,” I said.

Deborah squinted at me, suddenly suspicious. She moved across the room to the other bed, where she lay on her stomach and started reading her sister's autopsy report. A few minutes later, she jumped up and grabbed her dictionary.

”They diagnosed my sister with idiocy?” she said, then started reading the definition out loud. ”'Idiocy: utterly senseless or foolish.'” She threw down the dictionary. ”That's what they say was wrong with my sister? She had foolish? She was an idiot? How can they do that?”

I told her that doctors used to use the word idiocy to refer to mental r.e.t.a.r.dation, and to the brain damage that accompanied hereditary syphilis. ”It was sort of a generic word to describe someone who was slow,” I said.

She sat down next to me and pointed to a different word in her sister's autopsy report. ”What does this word mean?” she asked, and I told her. Then her face fell, her jaw slack, and she whispered, ”I don't want you puttin that word in the book.”

”I won't,” I said, and then I made a mistake. I smiled. Not because I thought it was funny, but because I thought it was sweet that she was protective of her sister. She'd never told me something was off limits for the book, and this was a word I would never have included-to me, it didn't seem relevant. So I smiled.

Deborah glared at me. ”Don't you put that in the book!” she snapped.

”I won't,” I told her, and I meant it. But I was still smiling, now more from nervousness than anything else.

”You're lying,” Deborah yelled, flipping off my tape recorder and clenching her fists.

”I'm not, I swear, look, I'll say it on tape and you can sue me if I use it.” I clicked the recorder on, said into the mic that I wouldn't put that word in the book, then turned it off.

”You're lying!” she yelled again. She jumped off the bed and stood over me, pointing a finger in my face. ”If you're not lying, why did you smile?”

She started frantically stuffing papers into her canvas bags as I tried to explain myself and talk her down. Suddenly she threw the bag on the bed and rushed toward me. Her hand hit my chest hard as she slammed me against the wall, knocking me breathless, my head smacking the plaster.

”Who you working for?” she snapped. ”John Hopkin?”

”What? No!” I yelled, gasping for breath. ”You know I work for myself.”

”Who sent you? Who's paying you?” she yelled, her hand still holding me against the wall. ”Who paid for this room?”

”We've been through this!” I said. ”Remember? Credit cards? Student loans?”

Then, for the first time since we met, I lost my patience with Deborah. I jerked free of her grip and told her to get the f.u.c.k off me and chill the f.u.c.k out. She stood inches from me, staring wild-eyed again for what felt like minutes. Then, suddenly, she grinned and reached up to smooth my hair, saying, ”I never seen you mad before. I was starting to wonder if you was even human cause you never cuss in front of me.”

Then, perhaps as an explanation for what just happened, she finally told me about Cofield.

”He was a good pretender,” she said. ”I told him I would walk through fire alive before I would let him take my mother medical records. I don't want n.o.body else to have them. Everybody in the world got her cells, only thing we got of our mother is just them records and her Bible. That's why I get so upset about Cofield. He was trying to take one of the only things I really got from my mother.”

She pointed at my laptop on the bed and said, ”I don't want you typin every word of it into your computer either. You type what you need for the book, but not everything. I want people in our family to be the only ones who have all them records.”

After I promised I wouldn't copy all the records, Deborah said she was going to bed again, but for the next several hours, she knocked on my door every fifteen or twenty minutes. The first time she reeked of peaches and said, ”I just had to go to my car for my lotion so I thought I'd say hi.” Each time it was something else: ”I forgot my nail file in the car!” ... ”X-Files is on!” ... ”I'm suddenly thinking about pancakes!” Each time she knocked, I opened my door wide so she could see the room and the medical records looking just as they had when she left.

The last time she knocked, she stormed past me into the bathroom and leaned over the sink, her face close to the mirror. ”Am I broken out?” she yelled. I walked into the bathroom, where she stood pointing to a quarter-sized welt on her forehead. It looked like a hive.

She turned and pulled her s.h.i.+rt down so I could see her neck and back, which were covered in red welts.