Chapter Forty-five "What do you know about auditory hallucinations?" Giselle asked. "Auditory hallucinations are nothing to be sneezed at." The doctor's earnest, dark-circled Iranian eyes crinkled at their corners like he was hoping she would think what he'd said was clever or amusing or cute. "Sneezed at?" Giselle gave him a suspicious look. "I've been learning to express myself in a more natural and relaxed way." "From who?" "A continuing education class put on by The Mayo Clinic." "You went to some dickweed seminar to learn how to talk more American? Is that where all that okey-dokey, buying-the-farm bullshit came from?" "I had hoped that my doctor-patient communication might be improved." "I liked you fine the way you were. What makes the Mayo Clinic think it knows how you should talk?" "It was my own idea. Lots of things don't sound quite right to me yet, either, but they say practice, practice, practice." "Practice on your other nutjobs, I've got some weird-ass shit going on." "I do not doubt it. You were asking about auditory hallucinations." "Yeah," she said, "I was. I had one." Dr. Javid's thick eyebrows moved slightly upwards. "Some," she said, "kind of a lot, maybe." He encouraged her with a half-smile but still didn't say anything. "I kept hearing this guy's voice on the phone—starting Friday in math class, then again after I got home and a few more times the whole next morning. The phone rang. I answered it. There was this voice, a man's voice. The only words he ever said were, 'I'm the Mayonnaise Man.'" "The what man?" the doctor asked, leaning forward. "Mayonnaise," she said almost inaudibly, feeling a blush of embarrassment. "Hey, I didn't get it either, okay? I still don't. What a stupid thing to call yourself, right? I agree. But the words weren't what mattered, it was the way he said them." "How did he say them?" Dr. Javid's forehead wrinkled as he looked down and wrote something in the folder balanced on his knee. "In all kinds of different ways, that's how. Just his inflections were a whole new language I'd never heard before. Every time he said the same stupid words there was a different feeling going on, a different emotion, emotions I felt somehow, like, in spite of the words. He talked the way animals must talk, the way kids talk before they can talk." Giselle stopped. Isaac had talked before he could talk. Ketchum was a dog. He could talk, too. He felt good. He said so. "I feel good," he said. "Did this voice speak to you only while you were on the phone?" "Yeah, but he was there when I called other people, too. I'd hear the phone pickup and there'd be this guy saying he was the fucking Mayonnaise Man." "The phone against your ear could have increased the intracranial pressure." "So you're telling me that everything else that happened was because of that little bulge in a blood vessel?" She waved vaguely toward the angiogram. "It isn't a little bulge, it's a big bulge. What all else happened?" "Pfssh." She blew into her hair. "More than I know. The guy showed up in person, on the sofa in my parlor. He was real. He was a regular guy, a cute guy, around my age, with the exact same voice as the guy's voice on the phone." "He just appeared out of thin air?" The doctor moved his hands like an amateur magician trying to get a dove to fly out of a hat. "No. Well, sort of. I kept thinking he was just a figment of my fucked-up imagination. The stuff on the phone was real, though. You can ask Andy Redkin." "I believe you, Giselle." "You do?" "Absolutely. I've never seen an aneurysm half the size of the one we found. The radiologist kept saying, 'Holy crap.'" "Yeah?" She felt flattered, like maybe they were going to get together and write her case up in The New England Journal of Medicine. "A man showing up on your sofa is no longer just an auditory hallucination." "Yeah, no shit. That's what I thought. I didn't know what the hell kind of hallucination he was. I asked him what the hell kind of hallucination he was." "What did he say?" "He didn't answer. He was pretty terse at first." "What happened immediately before he showed up?" "I told you. I saw that bleeding heart thing in my head and a lightning bolt broke my brain into a billion pieces and I passed out—that's when that little black spot must have happened." She pointed. "When I woke up, the guy was sitting on my sofa. The dogs didn't bark at him was the only odd thing." "The same person who had been saying that he was made out of mayonnaise?" "A guy with the same voice, yeah. Who else could it have been?" "When did Abraham Lincoln arrive?" The doctor looked puzzled. "They were the same guy. He only called himself Abraham Lincoln 'cause I acted like I wanted him to have a name. He said he could just as easily have been George Washington or Washington Irving or Irving Berlin but all everyone else ever called him was 'The Mayonnaise Man.' That was his real name." "Like Real Mayonnaise?" "Hey, I asked him that! Oh, I didn't have a headache anymore, either. That was the big thing. My head was emancipated from pain for the first time in twenty years." Giselle stopped. "Maybe Abraham Lincoln was the name I gave the stupid figment of my stupid imagination and I really did make the whole thing all up." Neither of them said anything else for awhile, then Dr. Javid asked, "The heart you saw, was it yours?" "I don't think so. Well, maybe, partly. It was more like Jesus's heart or Mary's heart at first—bleeding with divine love for all life everywhere like you see in the sappy sacred heart pictures poor people put on their walls—but later on it turned into my heart, too, like my wee little no-account heart was just as sacred as anyone's. It could bleed with love for all life everywhere, too—like anything with any kind of heart at all can bleed with love for all life everywhere. Abraham understood what I was talking about right away. He understood everything about me. 'Love like you can't know on earth,' he said, 'Love that aches and waits and longs and bleeds.'" "Abraham was also the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam." "Yeah, but that all changed when Jesus came along, healed the sick, raised the dead, chased the shysters out of the temple and said, 'Before Abraham was, I AM.'" "It is quite a mystical concept." "Mystical, schmistical, all that biblical bullshit already crossed my mind. I asked him right away if we had a kid, would we have to name him 'Isaac?' What a ditzy thing to say. I barely knew the guy." She shook her head, cringed and bit her lower lip; then regained her composure and said, "Or it could just be that 'Land of Lincoln' is plastered all over every license plate I pass on the highway." "You said, 'everyone else' called him this mayonnaise person?" "His dad started it, yeah. Don't ask me why. I never got a straight answer." "You met his father?" "Way later, yeah, but just in this same long-ass dream I kept having. I knew my brain was whacked. I kept saying my brain was whacked." "What was his father's name?" "He never said. I don't think he was a big believer in names. He liked the way things sounded when you said them, what they meant didn't seem to matter." "In the same way that you responded to the sound of the man's voice on the phone rather than the words he said?" "Yeah, I guess so, sure, but I have no idea what that means." "And you interacted with the man who called himself Abraham Lincoln?" "Boy-Howdy, did I ever! Ate with him, slept with him, did all sorts of things, starting Saturday night 'til around midnight on Sunday—the same Sunday night you say isn't even here yet. This time that Sunday we were at a Waldenbooks in the Woodfield Mall. I was freezing my ass off in the parking lot, waiting for Abraham to bring Oprah out the back door, although naturally I didn't know what the hell I was waiting for at the time. He had me dress up like a slut. Oprah was at some kind of book signing. There was a big crowd. It had all been arranged ahead of time. She and Abraham had been talking on the phone all that morning but I didn't know who he was talking to. They both knew what was going on, that he was her son, blah, blah, blah—they bitched at each other like mothers and sons do—but Wolf Blitzer and everyone on the news thought we'd kidnapped her." "I didn't know Oprah had a son." "Yeah, well, she did. She was only fourteen or so. She doesn't talk about it much and gets huffy when other people talk about it, but it's in biographies about her. They say she got raped and the kid died, but that's bullshit. After Abraham was born his father took him to live in some kind of commune on a mountaintop in Tennessee. That was where I met him. I had to swim across this big lagoon. The houses are all made out of rocks from the river and the kids run around naked if they want to." "Do the adults wear clothes?" "Oh, sure, it's not any kind of weirdo place. The people are prim and proper and normal as pie, the kids just don't wear clothes unless it's cold. The time I was pregnant all I had on was a bra and panties, for some reason—probably so Abraham's dad could see how knocked-up I was. The next time it must have been fall. We could see our breath. I had on a Boise State sweatshirt, Ole Miss pants and a pair of pink Nike's. I'd been there other times, too, but none that I remember very clearly." "Did you believe that the man on your sofa was Abraham Lincoln?" "Not right off the bat, no, but I came to believe him. I cooked us a fancy dinner. We talked. I did dishes. He spent the night. We fell in love. I went to sleep with my head on his shoulder and dreamed that dream about Arabs chasing me." "The dream Jesus showed up in?" "A guy who looked like Jesus, yeah, but he had blond hair and blue eyes. That was the beginning of the same huge dream I kept having and having and having." "A pregnant woman who looked like Oprah was also in the dream?" "That must have been some kind of weird premonition." Giselle shrugged. "I didn't know Oprah was even Abraham's mother until the next day. They looked a little alike when I saw them together, but that first night I just liked the guy whether he had a mother or not. He told me we were going to have a baby the next day, too." "How did he know that?" "You got me. The Tennessee people know things other people don't know." "What else do you remember?" "We drove to Schamburg, picked up Oprah, sang Bob Dylan songs in the car and talked about going on her show." Giselle didn't feel stupid talking to Dr. Javid. That was as strange as anything else. "The two of them were going to tell everyone about how Abraham was her kid. His father was going to get in on it. She was going to fess up, to tell the truth, finally. Then the three of them were going to try to get other people to quit lying, to quit ripping each other off." Giselle's eyes narrowed. "Do you want to stop for a minute?" "No. I'm fine." She shook her hair. "We met up with Dow and Rocco, some of Abraham and his dad's Tennessee buddies, and Rocco and some kid whose name I can't remember smuggled Oprah into the Byron nuclear plant. Rocco worked there." "I thought he lived in Tennessee?" "Sometimes he did, yeah. I never got to the bottom of it all. Locking Oprah up in the nuke plant was just a publicity stunt to get everybody to watch the big reunion show the three of them were going to do. They were gonna get me in on it. We were gonna do all kinds of mushy stuff—make the world a better place. Then everything got totally fucked." She lifted her arms and let them fall back to her sides. "How?" The doctor seemed truly interested. "Oh, God, I don't know. Some FBI guys killed Oprah, for one thing. That wasn't part of the plan at all. Cops had my house surrounded. Bill O'Reilly was there. They threw tear gas through my window and murdered my dog and shot me in the head and I keeled over and dreamed another part of the same dream again, only this time I was gigantically knocked-up." Giselle smiled. "Abraham's father and I were on the front porch of his house, talking about naming the kid after Hieronymus Bosh. Then I woke up. I still don't know how Isaac got his name and I have absolutely no idea how he knew he was going to marry Becky Thatcher." "Isaac married Rebecca in the Bible," Dr. Javid said. "Did he know he was going to marry her before he could talk?" "They don't say. Who was Becky Thatcher?" "Dow and Rocco's daughter who apparently wasn't even born yet, if you go by what Isaac says. It made as much sense as anything else." "She was Tom Sawyer's girlfriend, too, wasn't she?" "Yeah, yeah, it was a dream, okay? I get it." "Do you?" "No. I don't. And what I especially don't get is how that whole god damn twenty-four hour day could have gone on in less than an hour—or that whole nine months if you count talking to Abraham's dad when I was pregnant, or that whole two years if you count when Oprah came down and Isaac started talking, or that whole six years if you throw in what I remember of waking up in that Crockett House place." "How did you determine that the span of time was less than an hour?" "I put on this Van Morrison CD. Astral Weeks. It was playing when I conked out and was still playing when I woke up. The whole album's not even an hour long." "None of these things would be inconsistent with the location of the aneurysm, Giselle. I can cite you case study after case study of anomalies in the temporal lobe. No two are the same. The Prophet Muhammad may have suffered from a temporal lobe disturbance. There are time distortions in The Qur'an like you cannot imagine." "I can imagine most anything," Giselle said. "Apparently," she added and felt herself start to get weepy again. "Christ." "Can you imagine being taken by the angel Gabriel into the presence of God and traveling from Mecca to Jerusalem, taking journeys that lasted five-hundred years apiece through each of the seven heavens, meeting Adam and Noah and Jesus, and arriving back at Mecca again, all in the space of a single night?" "Sure," she said. "The main thing Muhammad ever said is 'God is great.' He wasn't just whistling Dixie, either. Me and Abraham talked ourselves silly about all kinds of religious crap and finally decided it's bigger than the both of us." "My fiancé and I had similar discussions and reached the same conclusion." "We were like a couple of frat boys on methamphetamine, coming up with all sorts of grand pronouncements we knew were stupid the minute we said them." "Like what, for example?" Dr. Javid asked. "Like, 'God is everything you don't know—the more you know the more you know you don't know and God gets greater all the time.' Pretty cool, huh? All any religion worth its salt ever brags about is the greatness of God compared to what worthless gobs of pus we are. Isn't that what Vishnu's dream was saying? Or Christ's immaculate conception and resurrection? Or Muhammad's thirty-five hundred year journey through all those dazzling heavens in one measly little night? Isn't it what that burning bush said to Moses on Mount Sinai or the utter incomprehensibility of Lao-Tzu's Tao and Buddha's Nirvana? With God all things are possible, without God nothing is—stupid Zen sounding stuff like that, meaningless crap—but what we always kept coming back to was the notion that God is love." "'He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love,'" the doctor quoted. "Yep," Giselle heard herself say, "And the other way around. We figured everything all out together. It was so fun. The big bang was God sneezing several billion years ago and all the snot he sneezed became diamonds and rubies and gas and oil and gold, but Jesus Christ was God's kid, his love child. You can spend your life looking for God's ten billion-year-old boogers or getting to know his only begotten son. Take your pick. God is love, money's snot. Shut the fuck up." "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," the doctor quoted again. "That was what we decided it all boils down to—God or money, take your pick, you can't have both." Giselle was tired. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Dr. Javid said. "Hey, Abraham Lincoln said that!" The doctor smiled, looked down at the folder and asked, "You mentioned people at the mall were dressed like chickens and that that came from a joke?" "The chicken joke, yeah. It's a Gary Larson cartoon. The chicken husband looks up from his bowl of chicken soup and asks the chicken wife, 'Anyone we know?' I used to tell my ex-husband the same joke, only it was about lampshades." "Dennis. He's the lawyer, right?" Dr. Javid looked up. "The Jewish lawyer, yeah. That was what made the joke funny. We'd be at a party at his parents' house or his Rabbi's house and I'd nudge him and nod over at a lampshade and whisper in his ear, 'Hey, Den, anyone we know?'" "And he wasn't offended by that?" "Nah, he was so madly in love with me it made his toenails curl...besides, it was funny. He was a sucker for anything funny. Gary Larson turned my lampshade joke into a joke about chickens eating chicken soup. Abraham had already seen the cartoon and didn't think it was all that funny the first time, but I kept telling him the joke that first night, anyway, just to piss him off—the more funny he didn't think it was, the more I told it to him and the more I told it to him the funnier it got." "Witzelsucht," the doctor said under his breath as he wrote another note. "What's that supposed to mean?" "It's a German word having to do with the telling of jokes." "What's it got to do with my fucked-up brain?" "I'm not sure, probably nothing. I just write things down. That's my job." "Okay. Well. All I'm saying is the chicken joke must somehow have made its way into the whole fantasy I was having—if it even was a fantasy." "Can you think now of how other elements may have come into being? You mentioned the nuclear plant at Byron." "From all that terrorist bullshit, maybe, I have no idea. Or it could have come from watching too much Simpsons. Homer's always running around with plutonium in his pants. I said something to Abraham about it. He gave me a funny look. The whole thing could have come from anywhere. I watch Oprah on TV. I've been to the Woodfield Mall. I read books. Who knows where fantasies come from? But it was so real. I was happy, loved, known, inside and out...and my head didn't hurt." "You've never had a child?" "Not really, no," she said. "I don't think." "That's not something you would be likely to forget, is it?" "So you think it's just all that biological clock crap making stuff up out of the stupid aneurysm in my head?" "There's so much nobody will ever know, Giselle—hormones, instincts, genetic predilections—it's impossible to underestimate what the mind can imagine." "My poor, dead grandmother kept showing up in the same dream, too—at the mall, picking blackberries in Tennessee." Giselle felt a sudden antagonistic edge creep into her voice. "Terrorists, no kids, getting old, living alone, people you love god damn dying on you, plutonium everywhere..." "Giant aneurysm," the doctor added, as if Giselle had left it off the list. "Yeah, no shit. It's a wonder everyone's not crazy." "Crazy means different things to different people." "So Abraham and his dad and Oprah and Isaac and all the rest of it was just some kind of wish fulfillment? Like the ghost of Jacob Marley was a bit of undigested beef? The man of my dreams who loved me like nobody's loved me? He even sang that stupid song to me ten minutes after he showed up. Jesus. I totally fell for it—hook, line, sinker, bobber, boat. I would have done anything for him. I knew there was something weird going on, but I..." She stopped. "I didn't care." She felt her voice getting shrill. "I believed it. It was the truest thing I'd ever known, truer than true, impossibly true, perfect. If that's crazy, fine, I want to be crazy." "My fiancé said that same thing to me once a long, long time ago." "Dr. Noc?" "Yes." The doctor was quiet for a second, then, apropos of nothing Giselle could figure out, he went on to say, "Dostoyevsky once wrote that he didn't know whether his seizures lasted for seconds or hours or months, but he wouldn't exchange a single instant of the bliss he got from them for all the joys life can give. That's a quote from a paper Dr. Noc wrote. She was infatuated with Dostoyevsky. Tennyson said similar things. Here's another quote from one of her papers: 'Individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being—this is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.' She had something of a crush on Tennyson, too." "Sounds like you were jealous." "Of a couple dead nutjobs?" The doctor laughed. "Not at all, I admired her in all respects. I just mentioned them to show you what good company you're in." "Are you making fun of me?" Giselle frowned. "No." Dr. Javid shook his head and his eyes twinkled and he reached over and put his hand on the blanket covering her right shin and gave her leg a little squeeze. "I think you're a darling, sweet girl with a serious problem that needs looking after." Maybe Abraham had come partly from Dr. Javid, Giselle thought. He had the same sort of twinkle in his eyes. Yikes. She thought of talking to Dr. Javid like he was a regular guy, calling him, "Bo." No. Well, maybe. His hands were so hairy, though. He must have been hairy all over. Abraham's skin was smooth; nut brown, buttery, beautiful. Mame used to say a sort of Nursery Rhyme to her: "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?" Giselle's heart ached so badly it made her have to smile out loud. "What is it that's making you smile?" the doctor asked. "Oh, me, my brain, my grandmother, Abraham, you, Oprah, Homer Simpson, the thing you say I have in my head." "The aneurysm is quite real, Giselle." "So, if you get rid of it, though, what do you think that might do? Like, you know, to my imagination or whatever?" "It's not a question of if. The problem is very serious." "The problem I'm having right now is I'm not sure you know what the fuck you're talking about. I'm not entirely sure you're even real. I'm very serious. I got married and went to live in Tennessee and had a kid and he grew up enough to talk. All that was as real as anything I've ever known. I was there. I saw. I fucking participated. Oprah Winfrey was my son's grandmother. They argued with each other. Then I woke up in a nursing home called Crockett House, which even you say is a real long-term care facility and it was two-oh-oh-eight, six years from when you say it is now, and nobody there ever heard of you and Peter Jennings was dead." "Hey, can I ask you something?" The doctor looked carefully into her eyes as if what he was going to say was the most important thing he'd had to say all day. "Sure." "Why did Peter Jennings fall out of a tree?" "Because he was dead! Ha!" Giselle laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, however—a cough that didn't seem to want to stop. She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't inhale; all she could do was exhale, all she could do was cough. She felt her eyes get wider and wider as she pushed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand into the base of each of her clavicles but no air would go into her lungs. She gasped, at last, but that just made her cough harder, exhale all the more. She was going to pass out. Again. Motherfuck. "God, help me," she said as her whole life came crashing into her consciousness, the parts of her life that mattered, anyway. "Reciprocity is all," Abraham had said. But he wasn't Abraham, he wasn't anyone, he was nobody, he was nothing, he was her, he was a figment of her own whacked imagination, she'd fallen madly in love with her own fucked up self. They'd all been her imagination—Dow, Rocco, the people at Woodfield, the little girl who'd lost her balloon, the guy in the guard station who'd tried to look up her skirt at the nuke plant, everyone. Even Oprah and Woo and the rest of the people she already sort of knew were figments of her own whacked imagination. How that could be was way too much for Giselle to understand—what the fuck was truth supposed to be, anyway? What was reality? She didn't know. She didn't think anyone else did, either, certainly not some sad-eyed Iranian shrink who had to go to seminars to learn how to talk right—all he knew was that she had an aneurysm she needed to think about getting rid of. Her cough had subsided some by then. "The jokes were your jokes, Giselle. You've told me some of them. You told me the chicken joke a long time ago. You've asked me why the monkey fell out of a tree. You tell your jokes to other people. You tell them in your dreams. You crack yourself up. That's healthy, normal, okay, nothing out of the ordinary—but everything else you think may have happened, Abraham Lincoln, Tennessee, Oprah, having a son, all that was an elaborate fantasy brought on by the biggest aneurysm I've ever seen." "Hey, talking to you might be a fantasy for all I know." "Talking to me is not a fantasy, Giselle." His voice was impatient. "That's what Abraham said. Talking to him was as real as this, more real. That's the problem. If I get this stupid bulge fixed, what's that gonna do to the rest of my brain? I could end up a vegetable with no memory of anything." "If you don't get it fixed it you'll die. You're going to have to trust me." "Abraham said that, too. 'Trust me,' he said. "Give it a chance,' he said." She felt a hitch in her throat, a lump, a gob of mucous that made her start to cough again. This time she couldn't stop. She coughed and coughed. Her head felt like it was going to split open and still she couldn't stop coughing. She saw the doctor stand up. A frantic look came into his eyes. He tossed the folder he'd been writing in over onto the table below the light box and took off out of the room in a big hurry. He was almost running. She'd never seen Dr. Javid run before. He ran like a girl. Abraham didn't run like a girl. He ran like a gazelle...leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills...rise up my love, my fair one, and come away...

Chapter Forty-six It's dark, quiet, cool. Giselle's hair is partly in her mouth and partly stuck to her cheek with dried sweat and drool like she might be Homer Simpson waking up from a long winter's nap. She's still scrunched down into the big green beanbag pillow beside Oprah's maroon chair but Abraham's arm is no longer around her shoulders and all that's left of the fire in the fireplace is a few faint embers. There's a light on in the kitchen. That rings a bell. Something had been wrong with Isaac's foot. He was getting too big for his britches. Giselle hadn't been able to help; she'd wanted to but she couldn't move. She'd been trying to explain Dennis's theories about Hitler and The Holocaust. Abraham got snippy and took Isaac in to see Diane. She'd know what to do. He'd left one of the kitchen doors open. Now it's closed. She rolls over onto her hands and knees, pulls herself to her feet by the arm of Oprah's chair, pushes her hair away from her face, tiptoes across the hooked rug onto the bare floor and nudges the right side of the door open a crack. The scrumptious smells of all the different things Diane had been cooking still fill the room, along with a whiff of the toasty-brown, buttery crust and the bubbling apples and cinnamon and sugar from Ray's pie. When was the last time she had something to eat—well, not counting that drug-laced green tea the old coot made her drink? The shrimp and ribs from Woo's that time Ron Harley showed up? How long ago had that been? A million years? Her mind might still be on the fritz from that darn aneurysm. The oven and the burners on the stove are off. The dishes are washed. The pots and pans have been put away. There's a door made out of linoleum-covered planks propped open with a worn stick in the middle of the floor like the entrance to a storm cellar. Except for a rat staring at someone or something under the table, everyone else is gone—down through the cellar door and on their way to that big potluck dinner Diane had been talking about, no doubt. They must have decided she needed a nap. Isaac must have stayed behind to show her the way. Aw. What a sweetie. She can't see him, but who else could it be? All she can see clearly is the rat sitting on its haunches under one of the chairs with its paws poised by the sides of its snout. It's not a cute little white rat that might be someone's pet, but a big, full-grown brown rat with quivering whiskers, a long slithery rat tail and crooked yellow rat teeth. "Tell Isaac if he wants me he can come get me himself," a little girl's voice says. "I can't believe he sent a rat." Hm. Apparently it's not Isaac under the table. The voice is petulant; a raspy, whispery, high-pitched, melodic whine, the way a little girl rodent would talk if little girl rodents could talk. "Isaac didn't send me, your mom and your dad did." The rat wrinkles its nose. "Only 'cause Isaac told 'em to. They do whatever he says." "Everybody sent me, okay? They all got in a big circle and held hands and begged me to come get you, 'Please, please,' they said. 'Tell her we can't do anything without her. Tell her we love her and miss her and want her and need her.'" "Go back and tell 'em I fell out of a tree," the little girl's voice says. "Hey, come or don't come, be coy all you want." "Why would they send you?" She sounds offended. "It's the Year of the Rat. They've got me doing everything." Giselle gently pushes one of the swinging doors open, frowns, cocks her head and says, to no one in particular, "I thought it was the Year of the Horse." "Where've you been?" The little girl is still out of sight but her voice switches smoothly from whispery rodent to childlike English. The question stops Giselle in her tracks. She feels like that centipede Allen Watts talked about: "The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad, in fun, said: 'Pray, which leg goes after which?' That worked his mind to such a pitch He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run." Where has she been? Dr. Javid told her it was 2002 but Diane and that Felicity person at that creepy Crockett House place said it was 2008! Who's she supposed to believe? What's she supposed to believe? Where had the whole last six years gone? And why had Diane acted like she didn't know who the heck she even was? "How did it get to be the Year of the Rat?" Giselle asks the rat. "What the hell year is the Year of the Rat, anyway?" "Oh-eight and oh-nine," the rat says. "Oh, great, that's fine, that's just what I needed to hear." Giselle has a sinking feeling having to do with Charlie Gibson and the condition of her hair, but ignores it, points and asks, "I suppose that's supposed to be Becky Thatcher under there?" "Yep," the little girl's voice says. There's a commotion. One of the chairs moves as if by magic and pretty soon the most darling child Giselle has ever seen is on her hands and knees, looking up at her with such sparkly dark Asian-looking eyes and such a mop of thick, curly black hair she has to be Dow and Rocco's daughter. Wow. More than just her memory's on the fritz. Dr. Javid he didn't know the half of it. The little girl's got on a long, modest, homespun, yellow-and-white-speckled, puffy-sleeved pinafore, a matching yellow bonnet, a pair of black, round-toed, patent-leather shoes and white ankle socks like she might really be Becky Thatcher. "You talk some sense into her," the rat says. "I have to report my findings." He scrabbles across the floor and disappears down the entrance to the cellar. "I've only been waiting for you." Becky stands up. "I'm not going down into that throng without at least one sane person on my side." "Sane, ha! I'm barely on my own side. I'm just along for the ride." "No you're not. Without you none of this would even matter." "Really?" "Weewee." Becky blinks solemnly. "Hey, do you know why Eskimos wash their clothes in Tide?" "'Cause it's too cold out tide," the little girl answers quickly. "Who told you that?" "Abraham. He's always telling your jokes." "Does he say they're my jokes?" "Oh, yeah. He starts laughing before he gets halfway to the punch line, too—like, you know, if there ever even is a punch line. He's been missing you." "He has?" Giselle's face gets hot. Her heart beats faster. "Yep," Becky says. Her shiny black curls bob up and down beside her pretty pink cheeks as she sings a little song, complete with hand motions and dance steps and facial expressions, like she might be on-stage at a Little Miss Beauty Pageant: "Somebody loves you and wants you to know, Longs to be with you where ever you go? Somebody loves you each hour of the day, When you're around dear or when you're away?" "Last I heard, you weren't even born yet." Giselle changes the subject. "Who did you hear that from?" Becky frowns. "Isaac. He was stoked about how you and him were gonna get married." "We are." "He called you a little hottie." "He would." "How old are you supposed to be?" "Fwree." "Isaac was two when he told us about you. How old is he supposed to be?" "Way older than me." She stretches her arms out. "Five, I think, or six." "Where have I been?" "Everyone seems to know you just come and go." She shrugs her clavicles. "Tell me about it." "People bring you up all the time, though." "That's comforting." "What else did he say about me before I was born?" Becky squints and cocks her head so far to one side her black curls almost touch her shoulder. "That you were the love of his life." "I am." "He just started talking one day—out of the blue. He said he knew things nobody knew." "That's him, this is me." Becky indicates the entrance to the storm cellar with her thumb and points a finger at the front of her dress. "He can do all kinds of things nobody can do, but so what? Does that mean we have to do everything his way?" "Anything in particular?" "Like me and Isaac's wedding that smarty-pants rat's so antsy about." She points across the room. "Now is a good time, sure, okay, it's, like, all astrological or whatever." She makes a face. "I'm not arguing with any of that, but this dress?" "Aren't you both a little young to be getting married?" "Nah, it's all set. That's what we're on our way to go to but I wanted you to see this froufrou dress grandma Oprah got Isaac to say he wants me to wear first." "Why does she want you to wear that froufrou dress?" Giselle laughs. "She wants me to look like a big dork, that's why." "Why do you want me to see it?" "So you'll say wear something else. She's just his grandma, you're his mom." "What do you want to wear?" "Not this cornball dress. I want to wing it. Come as I am." "You should've seen the god-awful purple dress my mother made the undertaker put on my poor aunt at her funeral. It was hideous." "So you'll talk to Oprah?" "I don't have to talk to Oprah, just don't wear the thing. Is she still around?" "Sure. She's been coming and going on and off for as long as I can remember but everyone's here now. She wouldn't miss me and Isaac getting married for anything in the world. She was gonna bring Barack Obama and his wife and kids down again but they don't get around much anymore." "Who's Barack Obama?" "The new president. Oprah's all gaga over the guy but grandpa says he's just another puppet who's gonna keep doing whatever rich guys want him to do." "Oh, man. Obama was one of the names I heard Charlie Gibson talking about on that fritzy TV they had me looking at. Him and Hillary Clinton and a bunch of other guys were having debates about who was gonna make the best president." "What fritzy TV?" Giselle feels like that darn centipede again. "It's too complicated." She shakes her hair—possibly to see if it's still there. "He talked about a war in Iraq, too." "Who did?" "Charlie Gibson. I hadn't ever even heard about a war in Iraq except for that one a long time ago when they set all the oil wells on fire. Dr. Javid never heard about any other war in Iraq, either." "Who's he?" "Dr. Javid?" Giselle waves her hands like that poor centipede again. "That's even more complicated than the fritzy TV. Just tell me. Is there a war in Iraq or not?" "Yes. It's been going on since before Isaac was born. Obama's gonna get us out of it, though. That's why Oprah got him elected. Plus, he's a black guy. She's super happy about that. They let Hillary be Secretary of State 'cause she's a girl." "Oprah got a black president elected?" "According to her she did, yeah—half black and half a bunch of other stuff—but Isaac's grandpa says it was the guys who own Oprah that got him elected. George Soros and David Geffen and Michael Bloomberg, guys like that." "They never did seem to agree about much," Giselle says. "No. They still don't. It's funny. They argue about everything." "Why does she still even come here?" "She dotes on Isaac, that's why. She can't get enough of him. He used to talk to her little dogs and tell her what they said. She loved that. It was her favorite thing ever." Becky's eyes get extra wide and she laughs the sweetest little peal of laughter. "What's so funny?" "Oh, sometimes her little dogs said things Oprah wouldn't want to hear, so Isaac would tell her they said nice things, things they didn't say and her little dogs would get mad at him for not telling her what they really said—Solomon was the worst but Sophie was the one who said, 'I didn't say she has a big heart, I said she has a big butt!' They cracked us up. The nicer the things Isaac told her they said, the worse the things were that they actually said—that used to drive them completely crazy. 'Hey, tell her yourself,' Isaac would say with one of his little know-it-all smiles. Then Sophie and Solomon died. It was sad. Isaac felt bad, like maybe he had something to do with it, like maybe he should've told her the truth." "When did that happen?" Giselle frowns. "Oh, I don't know, a year or so ago." "I didn't hear about it." "There's a lot you haven't heard about." "What about my little dogs?" "Oh, they're fine. They'll be at the wedding," Becky says. "Does he talk to them, too?" "We all do. They never say anything bad about you." "Is that a lie?" "I'm not Isaac. I don't lie. And he only lies to be nice. Ketchum used to give me piggyback rides. Oprah got some new Cocker Spaniels, but they died, too. She never brought the Golden Retrievers 'cause she was scared Ketchum might get 'em pregnant. She doesn't bring any of her dogs down anymore at all." "She seems to like Abraham okay, too," Giselle says. "Yeah." Becky nods. "Him and Isaac are the only real family she has. That's why she brought the Obamas down, so we could all get to know each other. Barack and Abraham are about as old as each other. She acts like they're like both her kids." "How did that go?" "Abraham and Barack mostly just played basketball. His wife hung out in the kitchen with Diane and some of the other mothers. Me and Isaac took the kids down to the river, showed them the caves we go to. Your little dogs followed us everywhere we went. Now the Obama kids want a dog, too. Oprah and Isaac's grandpa spent the whole time arguing about stupid stuff in the living room like they always do." "Are they gonna have anything to eat at this wedding?" "Oh, yeah. Lots." Becky makes her arms into a mountain of food. "Well, how about we just go there, then. I'm starving." The rectangle of linoleum-covered planks in the floor leads to a stairwell that's lit by dim, reddish light. The stairs are steep. There are walls on either side, but no railings, like stone stairs leading to a dungeon. Becky leads the way. "Close the door behind you," she says.

Chapter Forty-seven There's a humid, faintly flowery scent in the stairwell, mixed with a hint of incense, maybe, sandalwood incense? Giselle never did know her smells very well. At the bottom of the stairs, they come to a low, narrow, dungeon-like passageway. She has to stoop some to keep her hair from brushing the ceiling. The light gets brighter, whiter—or maybe it's just her eyes getting used to the relative gloom. The floor is blue and white Italian tile but the light makes it look green for some reason; she never understood the laws of optics very well, either. When they get to the door of an old-fashioned vault, Becky twirls the combination lock, pulls down on a chrome-plated handle like she's chinning herself until the steel door opens into a sort of anteroom with a pretty good-sized, dimly-lit swimming pool taking up most of the floor space. The pool is made of the same tile as the tile in the passageway but the wide walkways around its sides are covered with some kind of soft, rose-colored, slip-proof stuff. Becky pushes the heavy door shut with a sturdy, muffled click. Steam rises from the water. Web-like shadows ripple across the domed, rose-colored ceiling that seems to be made of the same soft, slip-proof stuff that covered the floor, although why a ceiling would have to be slip-proof, Giselle does not know. There are pistachio-green padded lawn chairs and a matching chaise lounge at either side of the water. Wet footprints lead away from the far end of the pool to another steel door in the opposite wall. There are two other, similar doors, in the other walls, all with little piles of clothes beside them like the pile of clothes near the door they just came in. A few old-fashioned coat racks stand guard around the door at the far end of the pool. They're all empty except for the one with two big cotton towels and a short cotton robe and a long cotton robe still hanging from it. Becky's eyes light up. She claps her hands and squeals a little squeal of triumphant glee. "What are we getting all giddy about?" Giselle frowns. "It's food and raiment day!" "Food and what day?" "Raiment. Having food and raiment let us be therewith content," Becky says, plopping herself down on the soft, pink cement floor. "You lost me, kid. What's that supposed to mean?" "It means I don't have to wear this dork dress." She slips off her shoes and socks, gets up again, pulls the pinafore over the top of her head, takes off her underwear, tosses everything into the pile of clothes that's already there and dives stark-naked into the pool as if it's a ballet she's been in before. Taking off one's clothes and diving into the pool looks like the thing to do so Giselle does it, too. The water's cool, refreshing, cleansing, like the water in that lagoon was when she dreamed she was pregnant and had to swim across it to meet Abraham's dad for the first time—the same lagoon she dreamed the black woman who looked like Oprah was swimming across when she got bit in two by a big blue fish the night Abraham showed up on her sofa. Now she must be dreaming that she and their son's bride-to-be are swimming across more water. She makes a mental note to ask Dr. Javid what the heck all that water might mean. Birth? Nah. He wasn't much of a Freudian. He'd probably go with some kind of bathing ritual, like the baths John the Baptist used to make people take before they could know anything worth knowing, but, on the other hand, the soft pink floor and domed ceiling did look a little womblike. Ah, forget about it, he'd just tell her the water meant whatever she thought it meant. Shrinks are idiots. That's why he was only her neurologist. Becky slithers like a shiny brown otter up the side of the pool and over toward the towel racks with Giselle right behind her. Their wet footprints are all sloshed with fresh drips and dribbles. The rest of the footprints are mostly dry. Whoever left them must have been the ones that took all the other robes and towels. The towels are light lavender, like lilacs, and the robes are daffodil-yellow, like Easter, like spring, all fresh and clean and sweet-smelling as if they've been hung on clotheslines in warm sun and cool air. The two of them dry themselves, slip into the thick robes and drape the damp towels over their shoulders. Becky pushes an almost invisible doorbell. The door moves slowly at first but all of a sudden it's all the way open and Abraham's standing there, right in front of them, wearing a sweet-smelling yellow robe, too. His face is radiant, beautiful, lovely, and his eyes are so full of such shy affection for her that something in her woebegone brain triggers neural pathways she didn't even know she had. Her knees forget how to support her legs. Her arms feel like they've fallen off. And her heart, holy Christ, her poor heart's so all aflutter she's gonna swoon, she's gonna faint dead away if he doesn't hurry up and do something. "God, help me," she says as they fall into each other's arms. Whether she says it out loud or not, she doesn't know, nor can she tell who's holding up who; it feels like him but he might think it's her. Just before she closes her eyes, Giselle sees the top of Becky's wet mop of curly black hair scurry around them and over toward the rest of the people in yellow robes, Oprah, Abraham's dad, Dow, Rocco and Isaac. They're all sitting on pillows in a semicircle around a big, round table raised two feet off the floor. The table turns like a Lazy Susan. It's jam-packed with serving dishes filled with more different kinds of food than Giselle's ever seen in one place before—it's gotta be that pot luck dinner everyone was talking about. The pillows are red and green and yellow and purple and fuchsia silk. There are matching silk banners on the walls and a bright white enamel upright piano over in one corner—with ribbons tied around it, and stick-on bows here and there, like a big birthday present. Beyond the people in yellow robes there are maybe a hundred or so other people milling around in an auditorium like she might be backstage at an old vaudeville theater. "I've missed you," Giselle hears Abraham say through her hair. "I must have needed a little nap," she says and feels his hands pushing into the small of her back as her eyes fall shut. "Some nap," she hears him say.