Death and Resurrection Page 2

  Lynn looked like her mother. Most people noticed this—if they had seen a picture of Lily Young—but as Mrs. Young had died twenty years before, the resemblance was usually remembered only by Ewen.

  Lynn wasn’t with a patient; she was at her desk with a tall cup of Starbuck’s tilted against her lips. As she heard her brother open the door, she guiltily lowered the cup.

  “Just what every psychiatrist needs,” she said. “A good caffeine jag.”

  “If it works for you,” he answered. “Your message didn’t mention what you needed. Is it Jacob again?”

  Although twins, the two did not really look that much alike, except in feature and expression. Lynn Young-Thurmond looked as though a breeze could blow her over; it would take a Category 3 hurricane to bring Ewen Young down. Some clown in middle school had titled them “The Smiling Anime Twins,” and though they had changed, the nickname had stuck.

  She nodded and dabbed off a latte mustache with a tissue, careful not to smear her lipstick. “He’s biting himself again. He asked for you. Are you up for it? I mean—after last night?”

  Ewen had been swinging himself into one of Lynn’s armchairs, but stopped in place. “What do you know about last night? Do you mean the gallery?”

  “No. Uncle Jimmy called me this morning. Told me to be careful. Which was big of him, don’t you think? To tell me I ought to be careful because he’s got himself into something nasty? That man!”

  Once again Ewen was placed between Uncle Jimmy—his teacher—and the rest of his family. “Oh, I don’t know, sis. It takes two to make a fight, but only one to make a massacre.”

  “But you’re not hurt, right? I would have known if you were hurt. I’d have woken up.”

  “I’m not hurt. He scraped a strip off the side of my new Nikes, that’s all. Nothing more. But I’m here for Jacob, so let’s see Jacob.”

  Lynn and her brother entered the special room that contained nothing with which a person could hurt himself, unless by paper cut. Jacob Fischbein sat with his feet up on a cushioned chair, his elbows resting on his knees, hiding in his own darkness. Defending himself with his own darkness. He looked up at them warily.

  Jacob did not look like the sort of boy who would be biting himself. He looked very normal, healthy, even athletic. This last was true; Jacob was a wrestler at Redmond High, and it was on the mat where he’d stopped being able to hide his unhappiness from the public world.

  Jason began speaking in his usual way. “Hi, there Doc. Hi, Doc’s Brother. Spare me some change? Mind change? Change of venue?”

  Ewen said nothing, but looked around the room for a cushion. He found two, both in a floral pattern, and looking like fat Hawaiian shirts. He dropped them in the center of the room and sat down on one, legs crossed. The remaining pillow lay on the floor in front of him. Ewen did not smile at the boy. He was tired and he knew this was going to be work, but he gave him a comradely glance. He dropped his hands loosely into his lap and took one deep breath. “Okay. Let’s get down, Jacob.” He closed his eyes.

  He heard the rasping of the boy’s Levi’s. There was a small noise as Jacob’s baseball cap sailed across the room and hit a chair. The trick with the cap was a sign of respect, respect in Jacob-language. Ewen did start to smile. He reached out, not with his hand, but his mind. For the first moment of the touch, Ewen was a bit afraid—afraid of Jacob’s fears and of Jacob himself. Afraid of the effort involved in opening. Then he just did it. He opened.

  A small space of damp grass, surrounded by trees. Some of the trees were maple and some were evergreens. To the left was a low wall of stone, limestone, which he could slightly taste. Beyond that was the smell of water. This was a place Ewen had found a long time ago. He scarcely remembered when. He did not know what it meant or how it was that he could get there, but he was now the keeper of it. He felt the bounds, he marked them and fortified them, and now he allowed the mind of Jacob—a bad storm, a bruising wave, a maddened dog, a troubled child—to enter.

  Ewen let him in and closed the gate behind him. He defended the borders of this small place that was no place at all. That was Ewen’s whole job here. Keeping the borders.

  The Jacob-storm entered, hit, and howled against the immaterial walls, but even the branches of the trees weren’t bent by it. The wave of Jacob’s misery struck against nothing and it vanished. The biting dog—the biting, the always-at-the-edges, fear-filled biting—found nothing to bite. Ewen held within his mind this small, open place where only the boy sat, sat gripping the grass in his fingers, sitting tight as a drum. Ewen himself did not enter with Jacob. This was Jacob’s refuge. In a sense, Ewen was the place and, in another sense, he wasn’t part of this event at all. Ewen’s place-making was a huge, simple concentration, just at the limit of what he was able to do, but Ewen sat on the pillow, unmoving, and he kept the boundaries.

  Lynn was shaking his shoulder, gently. He felt himself flinch.

  “How are you?”

  Ewen opened his eyes and squinted at the light. There was Jacob on the carpet in front of him, his head on the other Hawaiian pillow, sleeping like a baby. “I’m tired,” said Ewen. “I am really tired today.”

  The tiredness went away after five minutes pounding on the heavy bag at home. Ewen was now angry, as he had not had time to be the night before. Angry at the Hong Kong idiot with the bad sense of drama and the bad taste in sweatsuits. Angry at the sheepdogs behind him. And, yes, really angry with Uncle Jimmy. No way around that. Now that there was no one in the family present to defend him against, Ewen was thinking Uncle Jimmy was every kind of horse’s ass.

  He remembered the matches, one after another through his childhood, in which he had been given no choice but to compete. No choice but to win. The classes for which Sifu James Young had never showed up, and for which the responsibility had devolved upon Ewen—who had to show up because Sifu James Young might well not. Always working without pay, because he was family. Well, of course he never had had to pay for his training, either. He hadn’t had to keep going. Mom hadn’t been enthusiastic about the whole martial arts thing at all. His real talent, his art, had come from her. Dad would have backed him on dropping out, even though Jimmy was his brother. Especially because . . .

  Lynn never felt obliged to follow kung fu. She had been more the ballet type, the pony club type.

  Ewen had done it all to himself, to be honest about it. He was still doing it to himself. Who was he fooling? He did it because he was good and he knew it, and because . . . because it was grand.

  He worked out for forty-five minutes and then once again he was tired, but not in the same sense. He took a shower and went out to putter around in the garden.

  Ewen’s kung fu curse was Uncle Jimmy, but his garden curse was bamboo. He didn’t dislike bamboo in and of itself, but for what it had done during his four years living in the small suburban house. Ewen’s grandfather had liked bamboo very much, and had planted different types in both the back garden and front. It had flourished. God, how it had flourished, and so had a feud with Mr. and Mrs. Kelly on one side of the property, who had no love for bamboo at all.

  For years, Mr. Kelly had run down errant shoots of bamboo with his lawn mower and Mrs. Kelly had dug up the monstrosities coming up in her annual border. They had blamed the infestation on old Mr. Young, who held the opinion that the Kellys were fortunate to have such graceful volunteers for their very ordinary back yard.

  When resentment grew to fury and the county was called, Grandfather had a service come and dig out his lovely bamboo, and he felt he had done more than his duty toward neighborhood peace. The next year his bamboo came back from its severe pruning livelier and more invasive than ever, and the Kellys’ resentment grew as well.

  When Ewen inherited the house, he had no idea of the battle he was entering. Even though he was not responsible for planting the damned bamboo, the Kellys despised him for it. Despised him and all his doings and let him know it. The Kellys’ German shepherd had him marked for de
struction.

  Ewen had read up on bamboo, gone out to the edge of his property, and dug a ditch three feet wide and five feet deep. In doing this, he used nothing more complicated than a shovel. The ditch took him almost the entire first year of his residency; it strained his relationship with his roommate Karen, and did not improve the looks of the property—which, until it was refilled, had probably not endeared him to the rest of the neighborhood. When the ditch was done he went to Home Depot and bought rolls of long aluminum plating, and lowered them into the ditch, riveting them together as he went, so there was a metal wall five feet deep separating the Young property from that of family Kelly. It should have been enough.

  Bamboo, however, does not always send its runners in straight lines, and some had spread to the yard of Mrs. Blick, whose property was behind both the Young and Kelly yards. Mrs. Blick did not pay too much attention to her own back yard, so now the Kellys were also angry with Mrs. Blick and twice as furious with Ewen.

  These days Ewen would wait for the Kellys to be out, on the rare occasions they took their dog with them, and he would vault the five-foot fence in between the back yards and yank out any sprouts of bamboo he saw, hoping to eliminate the problem before they noticed it.

  This afternoon Ewen was in his front yard, weeding around his little water garden. The shubunkins followed him from side to side, poppling the surface of the water with their hungry little mouths and hoping. Ewen didn’t notice them. He wanted to call the police about the attack in the parking lot. The Chinese school vendetta seemed to him a custom more fitting for an alien planet than for the Puget Sound. Maybe those guys the night before had been space aliens. He also hoped Uncle Jimmy, like Grandfather, hadn’t degenerated to feuding. Uncle was, with all his faults, a good person, and had been Ewen’s teacher since Ewen was five years old. But Uncle Jimmy was also undoubtedly getting crotchety, and being at odds with the rest of the Young family did not improve his attitude.

  Ewen believed the family trouble had started because Granddad hadn’t approved of his oldest son becoming a martial arts teacher. His father had told him as much. Not that his grandfather hadn’t approved of the discipline itself—he hadn’t faulted Ewen for taking lessons, and was even proud of the boy when he had won his little boyhood awards—it was just that it wasn’t the proper way to make a living. It had no future, unless one was intensely practical and with good business sense, which ruled out Uncle Jimmy. Better he should have been a lawyer or a dentist. Ewen, unlike Granddad, knew that being too impractical to run a profitable martial arts studio—his kwoon—meant Uncle Jimmy would have been hopeless as a lawyer. Or a dentist. In Ewen’s own semi-practical mind, he was grateful for Uncle’s outlaw status; in comparison, it made a grandson foolish enough to be an artist seem like a paragon.

  And his outlaw uncle was going to “handle” the situation . . . How? A duel to the death on a Seattle rooftop? Hiring a hit man?

  Oh God! Ewen sat back on his heels. He whispered, “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the dharma. I take—”

  Rinngg!

  “—a phone call. I take a phone call.”

  Ewen sprang to his feet, running for the door, because he knew it was his sister, Lynn, and he knew there was more trouble.

  Lynn’s voice was brimming with maternal fear. Her son Teddy had been threatened by a strange man during recess. “He called to Teddy over the schoolyard fence and he said . . . he said he should buy white clothes, because his family was going to go into mourning.”

  “He said Teddy’s family was going into mourning?”

  “Yes, Ewen. Teddy’s sure that’s what the man said! I called Uncle but there was no answer. I had to leave a message!”

  Ewen’s stomach turned over. He dialed Uncle Jimmy himself. No answer except the voicemail. He got into his Prius and drove to Lynn’s.

  He reached his sister’s house, parked, and darted under the three-color, Tibetan-style gate lintel and to the house. He frequently referred to his sister’s family as his “Sino-Tibetan relations,” a reference to Theodore Thurmond’s strong Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, though Theo was a six-foot tall balding blond of German ancestry.

  Theo was out on the porch, face strained, his long blond hair escaping its ponytail and hanging around his face. “We can’t get hold of your uncle,” he said. “The police are on their way.”

  Ewen swept by him and banged open the screen door. Lynn sat on the living room couch hugging six-year-old Teddy, who was two-thirds the size of his mother. They both looked lost. “I’m so sorry,” said Ewen, kneeling down by the couch and trying to fit them both into one large hug.

  “As though it’s your fault,” said Lynn reprovingly, with a little snort. She frequently acted as though she were much older and more experienced than her twin brother. Ewen had always felt this was a result of her medical training.

  Ewen began to pace, from the television at one end of the room to the altar at the other. “I should have called the police at once. Not just Uncle Jimmy. I should have known better.”

  “Who would have thought?”

  Teddy lifted his head from his mother’s embrace. “Is this like in the movies? Where one Chinese guy tries to kill another because of kung fu?”

  Lynn patted her son and said absently “No, dear. They have things like the Pride Fighting Championships for that now.”

  Hearing that simple statement, Ewen stopped in his tracks. Perhaps Lynn really was older and wiser than he was. “You’re right. The idea makes no sense. Uncle Jimmy doesn’t even have much of a school! That can’t be what it’s about.”

  “It’s about his gambling, of course,” said Lynn with a shrug. “Uncle Jimmy must have been having another losing streak.”

  “Oh.” The idea hit Ewen like a brick and he simply stood still for a while. “And that’s what the guy meant about me being a message?” he finally said. “About some people betting on the wrong things?” He hit his head with the back of his hands. “Yeah, I bet you’re right, Lynn. And it would have been no good to break the old man’s back—then he could never pay. But a nephew. Or a niece . . . ”

  “Or a grandnephew.” Lynn silently mouthed the words over Teddy’s head.

  Ewen shook his head vehemently, then said aloud, “I don’t think the guy meant anyone was going to hurt Teddy. If he has wanted to harm him, then—” Ewen broke off and lowered himself into the antique chair opposite the couch, the one Theo could not use because it put his knees to his chin. “Hey, why aren’t the police here yet?”

  “They are coming. This isn’t exactly an emergency by their definition.”

  Teddy, whose attention span was shorter, even for potential violence, wandered over to his newest Star Wars picture book.

  “This gambling thing. Uncle gambles a lot, doesn’t he? I never heard about it, exactly, but . . . ”

  Lynn gave him a long-suffering look. “Ewen! Uncle Jimmy gambles endlessly, and on anything, from mahjong, to the ponies, to when a fly on the window buzzes away! Why do you think he’s always in debt? Why he can’t afford a decent studio for teaching, or some equipment made after World War Two?”

  “It’s because he doesn’t charge much,” said Ewen reflexively. “And he’s not a business—” He stopped himself. He was done defending his uncle. “How come I never heard about how much he gambles? I’m the one closest to him out of all of us.”

  “That’s why, stupid. Dad doesn’t want to break your faith in your dear Uncle Jimmy, who gave you so much of his time and attention. And . . . well, he was good to you. And you were so good at it. So Dad told you the reason Jimmy was stiffed in the will and you got the house was because Granddad didn’t approve of his career. As if! He didn’t want to give a house to a man who would immediately lose it in a poker game.”

  Ewen’s mind was racing and going nowhere. He was out of his chair and pacing again, and then heading for the door. “I’ll be back,” he said. His sister bounced to her feet and followed, taking him by the arm. “Ewe
n, the police will want to talk to you.”

  Gently, he freed himself. “Yeah, when they get around to showing up. Meanwhile, I’m going to find Uncle.”

  Theo was still watching on the porch. Ewen sprang past him and down the porch steps without touching them. Behind him he heard Lynn’s voice, louder this time. “Ewen, stop and take a breath. A deep breath.”

  “I’ll take several,” he said, but he kept running.

  Uncle Jimmy’s neighbor, Madge, told him she didn’t know for sure where Jimmy was but probably he was out at The Garage. The neighbors still called the place “The Garage,” which was what it had been before he had rebuilt it into his kwoon. It still looked more like a garage than a school.

  Ewen took out his cell phone and tried his uncle at his work number, getting only the answering machine. He got back into his car and drove the short block to the studio. The single, rolling garage door was locked down, but the small doorway to its side was cracked open. There was light within. Good. Uncle was there after all. Just ignoring the phone.

  Ewen wanted to discuss some things with his uncle. He was perhaps becoming too angry—angry with his whole family for keeping him in the dark, for treating him with kid gloves because he was a “sensitive artist.” But he was especially angry at Uncle Jimmy, for making all this deception possible, for maybe endangering little Teddy. He wanted to burst the door open and shout for his uncle, but his long years of training had taught him discretion in the practice hall. He quietly opened the door and walked in.

  There was the mirror on the wall, the wing chung-style dummy, the heavy bag, the speed bag, the row of striking pads for the adult students and the tiny set for the children who made up so much of Jimmy Young’s clientele. There was the red training mat on the floor for throwing and falling, and there on the mat there was Uncle Jimmy.

  Ewen’s uncle seemed to have just accomplished a break fall: one arm flung out, one leg bent up. It took a moment for Ewen to make sense of what he was seeing, and as he did, his nose registered the smell of something burnt. “Uncle,” he cried out, and ran to the splayed form on the mat, where red had blended with red.