Cast a Pale Shadow(2)

"Yes, ma'am," Trissa agreed, defeated. She dropped her books on the table and slammed out the door before the tears she strained to withold could escape her.

"Where are you going?" her mother called after her.

Detecting a glimmer of hope in her slightly softened tone, Trissa turned back and faced her through the screen door. "To the store. I need new gym shorts."

"Get me two packs of Salems, will you? Here, come get some money."

"Yes, ma'am." Trissa spent her gym short money on a lock for her closet door.

She had thought that when her father's strike-forced layoff ended, things would improve. They did, in a way. For a while. He came home earlier, a little less drunk, and a little more amorous. But at least his eyes seemed to have cleared to the respective roles of his wife and his daughter. And the only time he ever touched Trissa was to slap her across the mouth for talking back or breaking curfew.

"What time did your mother tell you to get home?"

"By dark."

"And what time did you get in?"

"10:30. All the other kids get to-- " she started, knowing it was useless but hoping to imply she had friends enough to know the other kids' habits. With school out for spring break, the only contact Trissa had with other kids were those she saw parked along Calvary Drive while she sat huddled in silence in the woods across the railroad tracks, in the descending blanket of a warm spring night.

"Don't give me that crap. You don't need to do what all the other kids do. Maybe their parents don't give a damn."

"Oh, and you do?" she asked with all the venom in her rebellious teenage heart. The slap that time knocked her off her chair.

It didn't matter. She didn't let it hurt her.





Cole



He had his seasons reversed. Instead of packing and heading south as April turned to May, Cole knew he should be unpacking and studying street maps and deciding on routes so that, by the end of the summer, he would have covered all of Grand Rapids. He should be looking forward to a season of smiling brats and whining mothers and money in his pocket.

Instead he counted his spare change and wondered if he needed to once again hock his camera equipment to get enough money to get out of town. He should never have stayed on so long, but Daisy got sick, and the vet bills kept him insolvent, and Florida seemed too far away to even dream about.

On the first fine days of a false spring in March, Cole curried the recovered Daisy and aired out his costumes and picked a neighborhood at random. How could he know it was populated by the foulest tempered hellions ever born? Or that Daisy would grow so quickly impatient at being kicked in the side and tugged at the mane? He should have been more conscious of the pony's mood. He should have realized she was not back to her docile sweetness after being so sick.

Poor Daisy. He would miss her, but he doubted she would waste a moment missing him. She probably much preferred the green pastures she grazed now to trudging the streets with Cole, posing for his camera with bogus baby Billy the Kids and Calamity Janes on her back.

Daisy probably had not even known she had sealed her fate, and Cole's too, when she bit a chunk out of one little bugger's shin, setting its mother to howling and threatening to sue. It wouldn't have bothered Daisy how Cole had had to nearly give her away to see she was cared for, or how he had given a moment's consideration to inquiring what the dog food factory would have paid for her. He was that irritated with this turn of events.

But it was just as well. Cole had stayed too long in Grand Rapids. The gray of the winter skies had gotten under his skin and set his mood to match. If he sold off his pony trailer, Daisy's saddle and harness, and one trunkful of his costumes, he thought he might get enough money to get away. Maybe he'd wind up in Ocean City or Myrtle Beach in time for the tourists. He'd figure it out on the way. He'd hold on to his cameras until worse came to worse.

Once he got settled again, he could even sell his car. Cole was a vagabond by choice, and he knew his feet and his thumb would serve him as well as four wheels he could not afford to keep in gas and tires. But he was a photographer by blood, and no amount of squaring his fingers and clicking his throat could substitute for his Canon and a roll of film.

There was plenty of trunk space in the wheezing Buick, once blue but now mostly rust. Even packed with all of the belongings Cole could salvage after his scramble for funds, there was room enough to sleep back there, which he might someday soon be forced to do.

Or to transport a rug-wrapped body to a burial with the fishes. He immediately regretted the thought. The image gave him a prickling chill. He let his imagination get the best of him. He slammed the trunk lid hard three times to get it to latch, then rolled his shirtsleeves down to cover his goose bumps. It was time to go to someplace warm, away from this chronic winter turning him morose and unsettled.

He should call his father first, or rather leave word with his father's custodians where he could be reached. Necessity might push him into a decision on where that might be.

On second thought, he might as well visit. At least it would give him a direction to head when he drove out of town.

Four hours later, Cole turned up the circular drive around the St. Vincent's statue, a pigeon perched on its alabaster head, surrounded by tulips just beginning to nudge their green shoots out of the ground. It was not visiting hours, so parking was plentiful, but just to be perverse Cole pulled into the spot marked "Reserved for Chaplain."

The reception hall had its familiar smell of floor wax, old carnations, and urine. He always marveled at the shine on the black and white tile. Cole smiled at the armed guard at the door who acknowledged him by removing his finger from its search up his nose to stick it under his armpit, never changing the scowl wrinkling his face.

"Cole Brewer. I'm here to see my father, Duncan Brewer," he said in a hushed voice to the receptionist.

Without looking up, she answered in a nasal drone, "Visiting hours are one to three and seven to eight-thirty. Visitors must have a pass from the attending doctor."

"That's just it. I received a call from him and was told to come right away," Cole lied. "He said he'd leave a pass at the desk."

Heaving a huge sigh, the broomstick of a woman eyed him over her glasses. "What's his name?"

"Duncan Brewer."

"The doctor's name," she whined.

"Oh, sorry," Cole flashed her one of his usually irresistible smiles to no effect. "Doctor Lorenzo Fitapaldi."

"I shoulda guessed." With a show of elaborate irritation, she checked a file folder then pulled a pad from under her blotter. "I'm writing you a temporary pass. It is good for today only. You are to turn it in to me when you leave. But first Doctor Fitapaldi has left a standing order you should see him before visiting your father."

"Thank you. But I have very little time."

Her pen stopped scratching and she cocked an eyebrow up at him. "Well, then, there will be no pass.

Cole looked down at the floor and saw streaks of grime trapped in the thick wax. "I'll see him."

Five minutes later, he sat across from Fitapaldi, screening out most of the doctor's words with daydreams of the Carolina shore.

"Naturally, we do not need your consent, but I feel you should be informed. This new drug is experimental and the treatment plan will be carefully monitored. Your father's participation could lead to a way to return patients to functional life."

"Return?" The word brought Cole to attention and he felt all the blood drain from his face.

"Oh, not your father's return, of course. The terms of his conviction preclude that. But we have hopes the use of this drug in early stages could prevent--"

"Yes, well--" Cole rose abruptly from his chair. It was not good to remain seated too long in a psychiatrist's office, whether on a couch or a straight-backed wooden chair. It made Cole feel like a germ on a slide. "I'm sure, if he were aware, my father would welcome this chance to repay a part of his debt to society." Cole crossed to the window and frowned down on the terraced lawn below him, his hands clenched behind him to keep them from shaking.

"Exactly so. Mr. Brewer, I note from the charts that you have curtailed your visitation considerably in the past year."

He glanced at the dark, balding Fitapaldi whose eyebrows would soon boast more hairs than his head. "I've been away. Is there a problem with that? I believe I've kept the hospital aware of my whereabouts." As much as Cole, himself, was aware of them, in any case.

The psychiatrist leaned forward on his desk with his elbows and scrutinized him through a triangle made of his fingers. "No," Fitapaldi answered eventually, without much conviction. "Your visits have no long range effect on your father."

"The result is not mutual, I assure you."

"Then why come at all?"

"It is not always a conscious decision," Cole said, with more honesty than he had intended.