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Another Friday and Monday in Min Henry’s soothing office, a Sunday and a Wednesday correcting papers and grunting replies while her mother rambled on in her ear, practice three afternoons and the begi
“Tell me again about the sound you hear in your dream,” she said in this, their sixth session. “Was it the car behind you hitting the cat?”
“In my imagination, maybe-I didn’t actually hear anything. I couldn’t have, since I know I didn’t hit it, and the car windows were up and the tape player going.”
“Then what is the sound?”
“That is weird, isn’t it? In the dream, it’s the sound that panics me more than anything.”
“You described it as a clunk?”
“Sort of a hollow thud. A little like… Jeez. Is it like…? No, not really. I was thinking it reminded me of the sound of a basketball bouncing, but that’s not it. Other than a sort of hollowness. Brief, final-God, Min, I don’t know. Why does it matter, anyway?”
“Okay, Lauren, take a couple of deep breaths. The tissues are on the table next to you.”
I’m crying, Lauren realized with a shock. Why am I crying? What the fuck is going on, a stupid frightened cat causing some damned psychosis or something. “Why is this so awful?” she pleaded. “I mean, I could understand if I’d watched a person get run down, that would be enough to haunt you, but cats get killed all the time. And it wasn’t even me that hit him!”
One of the things she had always liked about Min Henry was that the doctor actually answered her patients’ questions instead of turning the questions back around. Now she said, “Lauren, you are assuming this scene with the cat has triggered off some traumatic episode or emotion that you’ve hidden from yourself. That may be so, or it may simply represent some state of mind you’re having trouble acknowledging. In either case, the key may lie with that anomalous sound. You say it doesn’t belong with your memory of the actual cat incident; if that’s the case, then it must have snuck in from elsewhere.”
“But where? I told you that my mother had no idea of a trauma with a cat.”
“Could it have been something other than a cat?”
The simple question reverberated softly through Lauren’s mind, stirring up an odd and unidentifiable series of feelings, excitement and confusion and a peculiar stillness, as if she were a rabbit hiding from a circling hawk. She blinked, and found that the therapist was watching her closely.
“We’re ru
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it, for next time.”
“How about trying hypnosis?” Lauren blurted out. “This not knowing-it’s making me crazy.”
“Lauren, I’d rather see if your memory can loose this on its own. We can try hypnosis, but let’s give the mind a while longer to work it out.”
“How much longer?”
“Give it a month, two at the most. Your doctor gave you the prescription for sleeping pills, didn’t he?”
He had, although they left Lauren feeling as groggy as sleeplessness did. Two months?
But in the end it didn’t take anywhere near that long.
The week passed. Wednesday a conversation with her mother, Friday a session with Min, two more practices, four broken nights, and all the while Lauren’s mind fretted over the question.
Could it have been something other than a cat?
Oh, yes. But what?
Saturday dawned, four endless weeks after the cat had fallen from the sky and into Lauren’s mind. There was a game this morning, and Lauren dragged herself reluctantly from bed, made herself a pot of forbidden coffee, and drove to school. The girls were excited, the new uniforms looked good, the other team was strong enough to challenge but with definite exploitable weaknesses, and the bleachers were full of enthusiastic supporters. Lauren’s own problems, for once, retreated.
It happened in the last quarter, the blow that hammered the wedge all the way home and split her memory clean up the middle.
The score was 47-45, the home team hanging on to its slim lead through the quarter, when the visitors called a time-out and sent in three new players, girls who separately were a threat, but together bonded into something formidable. A tipped-in rebound tied the score, a gorgeous shot from what seemed like center court put Lauren’s girls three points behind. They made up two, the others matched it, then got two more, and with ninety seconds left on the clock, the struggle was in earnest. As the visitors brought the ball down, Marisol’s hand darted out to slap it away; Juana was there as if by magic, and the two girls flew down the court with a stampede on their heels. The crowd stood and roared as Juana leaped up to drop the ball through the hoop. Then the other team had possession, sprinting down toward the basket with the determination of aristocrats threatened by the lower classes. They slammed into the home players, tried for a shot, missed, and as Marisol struggled to position herself for a rebound, the opposition’s six-two forward rose past her, spiked the ball in, and came down again with her elbow centered squarely over the top of Marisol’s skull.
The crack must have been more imagined than actual, since the noise level in the auditorium was so high only a gunshot would have risen above it, but the impact was nearly as great. Marisol’s knees turned to water and she staggered back into the girls behind her, collapsing slowly until she was sprawled flat on her back, her short hair spiky with sweat, eyes wide, mouth in an astonished “O.” Three hundred throats went abruptly still as the girl lay briefly stu
The tall forward was nursing her elbow with stifled curses and the other coach was racing across the court to see if either girl was badly hurt, but Lauren stood rooted in place. Thud; bewilderment; spiky hair; a determined struggle to rise. The faint lapping of waves against wood reached Lauren’s ears. Marisol sat up, the opposing forward stopped hugging herself to reach down and pull Marisol to her feet, the crowd applauded its relief, and players from both sides gathered around the two girls.
Nobody was expecting one of the coaches to collapse. No one even noticed Lauren at first, standing rigid on the sidelines, both hands clapped over her mouth, her face as bleached as the team’s new shorts. She stared at Marisol, who was rubbing her head and shrugging off the concern of her teammates, and then Lauren’s knees gave way and she dropped to the court, completely limp. It was Lauren for whom the paramedics came.
In the hospital emergency room, with the curtains drawn and a call in to Min Henry, Lauren saw it again and again, a twenty-six-year-old movie playing itself out in her mind’s eye.
The bench beneath her had been the unpadded seat of an old wooden skiff, her tiny shoes dangling free of the boards; the gray expanse of concrete was really the cold surface of a wooded river in winter. The young man in the water had been, she could only assume, Arty. She had adored him-that she remembered-not just his fragrant cigars, and he had gone into the river with a huge and bewildering splash, to surface, spluttering, head bolt upright and eyes popping at the shock of cold, a look of astonishment on his face. He had shaken his head like a dog, making his dark hair go spiky; his naked hand, surprisingly delicate without the glove, had reached up, in supplication or to ward off the next blow of the upraised oar. His eyes had been frantic, locked into a determined search for support, for haven from the icy water. He had been about to lunge for the boat when the oar hit him a second time, with a weird, hollow thunk.