“Their fur. That’s great, Damien. Keep going.”
She had never expected to outlive her husband. She did her part, but he was the glue that held them all together. And now, if it turns out she can no longer do her work, what’s left? Friday bar crawl with Lucky and his wife? Marta’s book club? Her ears ring faintly at a pitch not on any scale. That and the tepid headache have become her constant companions.
“I don’t understand why you won’t let me use spell-check.”
“You need to learn to spell.”
“But that’s why there’s spell-check.”
“What if the spell-check is wrong?”
“Wronger than me?”
“Or what if there’s a power failure and you can’t get online?” She hesitates—what do they call those bombs? EMPs. Electromagnetic pulse weapons, Sentro remembers. They were all the rage for a while.
Damien rolls his eyes, and as he makes the correction on the borrowed shelter laptop, Sentro reaches into her pocket, takes out a small pill bottle with a childproof cap. It was Jenny who suggested the tutoring, Jeremy who found her the venue. For a while she was coming here four times a week. But the impermanence wore on her. Homeless kids are at the mercy of their peripatetic parents; she’d just be getting started, and they’d vanish. Rarely to return.
“Jagwire.”
“Close enough.” She fumbles to open her bottle as Damien soldiers on.
“Jagwire. Their fur. The ocelot—the ocelot can live in trees, and the ocelot will fight”—he stumbles over the word—“fer-o-shus . . .”
Sentro shakes out a pair of capsules to wash down with Diet Pepsi, then sees the boy watching her, looking wary. “It’s just aspirin,” she says. “For a headache.” She smiles her smile. “Keep going.”
“My sister went to jail for pills.”
“These are legal.”
“They make her act scary weird.”
Sentro holds Damien’s gaze. “Don’t worry.” His mother works two jobs, trying to save enough to make first and last month’s rent to move to subsidized housing. Sentro has offered to help them, but the All Saints volunteer rules prevent it.
“—and fight ferocious sometimes,” he resumes.
“Ferociously.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“She sorta stabbed my mom with scissors.” The little boy won’t look at her. There’s something else.
“What.”
“What if I’m not here when you come back?”
Sentro wants to say the right thing. “I’ll find you,” she tells him, knowing it might be impossible. But she’d try. “Ferociously.”
“Ocelots, us,” Damien says.
“That’s right.”
“’Kay.” The little boy lowers his head, makes the correction, and: “—ferociously, sometimes to the death . . . for its home and family.”
He looks up at her. This last part he knows by heart.
“But mostly ocelots live alone. They are an endangered species.”
CHAPTER TWO
I’m an old cowhand . . .
Several CT scans of a human head glow, spectral, on a wall monitor.
. . . from the Rio Grande . . .
Normal bone structure. Healthy tissue. No tumors. No apparent trauma.
“Did you play contact sports when you were younger, Mrs. Troon?”
“Sentro. Ms.”
“Oh.” The doctor looks down at his chart with what she presumes to be a practiced, professional doubt that he could ever be mistaken. “I’m sorry. It says here—”
“Sentro’s my maiden name; I never legally changed it. When the kids were younger, I used my husband’s name for family and medical matters because—”
“I get it.” He makes a notation.
Having given up trying to convince herself that the noise in her head will fade, here she is: battery of tests, awkward questions, anxious and undone. She’s determined not to tell anyone, yet. A diagnosis is what she wants. And a remedy.
A confirmation is what she’s afraid she’ll get instead.
MRI of a human brain. The ragged coastlines of gyri and sulci. Her head has felt heavy for days. Overcast. Migraines, mood swings, discomfiting distractions—she can’t shake loose the clouds. The riot of color assigned to scanned images is merely for reference, but part of her wants to believe that they’ve actually mapped the tangled, uninvited memory scraps that have started chasing her through fitful nights: thunderclouds piled like soft serve, tumbleweeds the size of longhorns, a wafer-thin air freshener in the shape of a rose, faded by sun, dangling from the rearview of a station wagon doing ninety on a Texas two-lane, ruler straight from horizon to horizon. A brown Sherman Cigarettello, smoke twisting up from the glow, wedged in the pink lipstick smear of her mother’s mouth, singing:
Yippee-ai-oh-kai-yay.
“Field hockey? Rugby?”
Legs dangling, feet bare, sitting uneasily on the end of the examining bench she feels a cold shiver of loss trouble through her. “No.”
He’s a specialist she found online, deliberately out of network. Patchwork hair not necessarily all his own, troubled skin, lab coat, skinny legs crossed, hipster socks showing, the doctor makes a few more marks with a stylus on the wireless tablet crooked in his arm, then glances up at her, pushing rimless glasses back up his nose.
“Ping-Pong,” Sentro offers. “In high school.”
“Your film shows evidence of multiple concussions. Serial TBI.” He’s fishing.
“Traumatic brain injury?” She just stares at him. The fluorescent ceiling has a faint low-frequency hum that harmonizes with her tinnitus and reminds her of something new; an image flickers, indistinct. Cairo? Apple-shaped man in a mustard-colored suit. Comic book eye patch, leather, tooled with a starburst.
Then gone in, literally, a flash.
Her hearing has, until the high scree crept into it, always been freakishly good.
. . . I’m a cowboy who never saw a cow,
never roped a steer ’cause I don’t know how,
and I sure ain’t fixin’ to startin’ now—
“At some point in your life, Aubrey,” the doctor is explaining, “you received a blow to the head, and then again, and then again—more than once is what I’m saying, likely over an extended period of time, months, years. And now you’re paying the price for it.” His eyes keep straying to the small bandage under her ear, but he seems to have no idea how close he’s stumbled toward the truth.
“Wouldn’t I remember something like that?” She wonders if he can tell she’s dissembling.
“You would. Until you forgot.” There’s a hesitation before he asks, as kindly as he can, “Abusive relationship?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did your late husband get physical with you?”
“What?” The utter absurdity of this misunderstanding is a relief. “No. Nothing like that. Not my husband or anyone. Ever.” She conjures a picture of Dennis, with the easy, restful eyes, running a hand lightly through her hair. His gentle touch a glory.
“Okay. Well. What you have we call persistent postconcussion syndrome,” the doctor tells her, “and it would explain your headaches, the aural distortions, mood swings, memory problems, and so forth. Unfortunately it can present long after the original trauma.”