Zero to the Bone Read online

  I parked the Metro in a free slot across the street from Rakaan’s office and walked down a winding flagstone path to a garden complex housing an herbal tea shop, an acupuncturist, a practitioner of holistic medicine, and a carved wooden signboard announcing the offices of Dr. James Rakaan, C.H.T. The heady scent of sandalwood greeted me when I stepped across the threshold into the reception area, a junglish room decorated in palm fronds and rattan furniture. The receptionist, a young woman with opaque gray eyes and a nebula of auburn curls framing her pale skin, serenely tilted her chin toward the ceiling and asked if I had an appointment when I said I wanted to talk to Dr. Rakaan.

  “Tell him that I’m worried about Christine,” I said.

  The receptionist advised me that Dr. Rakaan was with a patient at the moment but if I would please have a seat, in a few minutes she’d be able to take a message to him. While I waited, I glanced through a brochure touting a Caribbean cruise to the Panama Canal and spiritual enlightenment, in that order, cohosted by Dr. Rakaan and Thomas Van Voorhees, a renowned medium who claimed he could convey detailed messages from deceased family members in the spirit world. I had barely talked to my family members when they were alive, didn’t see what good it would do to chat with them dead, but I figured I was probably in the minority there. The door behind the receptionist’s desk eased open and a woman in dark sunglasses, white dress, and floppy hat emerged, looking like an aging movie star who didn’t want to be recognized. She succeeded. The receptionist slipped into the gap and a few minutes later Dr. Rakaan himself emerged.

  You might think that someone hailed as a revered figure in an exciting new science, even one so unexacting as past-life regression therapy, would be a nerdish gentleman of a certain age, balding at the top and dumpling at the middle, a man given to stay-pressed slacks and half-tucked shirts, his abstract but kind gaze obscured behind thick eyeglasses he likes to clean with the bottom end of his mismatched tie. Not Dr. Rakaan. Not even the photograph on his website prepared me for the striking image of the man himself striding into the reception area, long black hair as sleek as a flag waving to his shoulders, the stout bridge of his nose like the stem of a Y connecting the flying wedge of his massive brow, his glance as piercing as phaser fire set to stun. I didn’t doubt he treated a star-studded list of celebrity clients. He looked like a movie star himself.

  I asked if he’d seen Christine lately.

  “Are you talking about one of my patients…” He made a show of trying to pluck the name from memory. “Christine Myers?”

  “I’m talking about your girlfriend. That Christine.”

  Dr. Rakaan stepped aside, the tips of his fingers brushing toward the open door to his office, a gesture I took as an invitation to enter. His office looked like something Dr. Freud might have imagined if he took Prozac instead of cocaine and lived in Beverly Hills instead of Vienna. I avoided the rattan couch and selected a club chair set casually beside a weathered teak desk.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have a girlfriend named Christine,” he said. He settled into the swivel chair behind the desk and clasped his hands below his chin, his wide shoulders framed by a window overlooking the back garden.

  “I don’t care how you characterize your relationship. I just want to know if you’ve seen her in the past three days or know where she is right now.”

  His eyebrows puzzled together, narrowing his eyes to slits, an expression no doubt meant to convey his confusion but instead gave his face a cagey look. “And you are…?”

  I gave him my name.

  “You’re the photographer.” He nodded as though watching things fall into place. “She was very excited about that, the exhibition I mean, on the verge of euphoria, really. It gave her a tremendous boost of self-esteem, something she needs very much.”

  “Why would Christine say you’re her boyfriend if you’re not?”

  “Therapy can be an emotionally intimate experience, even more intimate than sex.” His face angled into the soft light from the garden window and a smug smile creased his lips, a smile he thought better to contain a moment later. He was not a man unaware of his own handsomeness. “It’s one of the hazards—of any kind of therapy actually, not just past-life regression. Even relatively well-adjusted patients form a strong bond with the therapist and sometimes that bond is misinterpreted by the patient to be a romantic one. When a patient is deeply troubled, with a past-life history of abuse…” He raised his hands and held them palms up, a gesture of disarming helplessness. “She can fantasize a romantic relationship when none in fact exists.”

  “Is that what happened to Christine?”

  “I can’t really tell you without violating the confidentiality between therapist and patient. But what’s this about Christine being missing?”

  “She didn’t show for the exhibition last night. I’ve asked around and nobody has seen her for three days, not since she was supposed to go on a date with some guy she thought was Johnny Depp’s producer.”

  “A date?” His voice cracked in the middle, as though torn between surprise and skepticism. “She mentioned nothing to me about it. But she missed her appointment two days ago, I can tell you that much. And her karma is so unpredictable this isn’t the first time I’ve worried about her.”

  “What’s wrong with her karma?”

  “She was murdered in her most recent past life and in the life before that as well.” He spoke as though these events had taken place just days or weeks ago and winced as though he regretted having to divulge a confidence. “Christine loves pain. That’s what her sessions are about. Her love of pain. So naturally I worry about the kind of company she attracts. But really, the most likely thing is that she and this producer hit it off and they’re somewhere in Vegas, Hawaii, or Mexico together. From what I understand that kind of behavior isn’t unusual with her.”

  He stood and apologized that he had another appointment scheduled and couldn’t spare more time. I allowed myself to be goaded into standing but instead of moving politely toward the door, I thought about the jealousy in his voice when he spoke and said, “I don’t doubt she’s your patient, but you’re having sex with her, aren’t you?”

  Dr. Rakaan pushed past me and opened the door.

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s young, blonde, beautiful, and like you said, liable to have romantic feelings toward her therapist. You may as well sit a man down to a gourmet meal and ask him not to eat. Of course you’re having sex with her.”

  “I’m not sleeping with Christine,” he said.

  “I’m sure Christine is nothing special to you. I’m sure she’s not the only patient you’re having sex with. And I didn’t say you were sleeping with Christine. I said you were having sex with her.”

  His fingertips darted to his temples as though his head was about to explode and he said, “You have incredibly filthy karma, I can’t believe I didn’t see it when you first walked in. Is it possible that you’re…?” His face slackened in stunned awe, then he shook his head, revolted. “I’m sometimes hit with moments of clairvoyance. In some cases, I don’t have to take someone through past-life regression to discover who they once were. I already know. Do you have any idea who you were in your past life?”

  “I hope you’re not going to tell me I was Napoleon.”

  “You were Lizzie Borden,” he said. “Now, please, get out of my office.”

  4

  I SHOULD HAVE laughed when Dr. Rakaan claimed I was the reincarnation of Lizzie Borden, the young Massachusetts woman accused of hacking her father and stepmother to death with an axe in the late nineteenth century. Nothing like being called a reincarnated axe murderer to make you feel good about yourself. Particularly if the call might be accurate. While I coasted down the hill toward Sunset Boulevard my cell phone chirped, flashing a familiar-looking number that took me several seconds to place. I’d grown up with that number. I hadn’t received a call from my parents’ house since my mom died. Pop and I hadn’t talked for six years, and it would have bee
n just the same to me if we didn’t talk for another sixty. I couldn’t imagine why he’d be calling now, and because I couldn’t imagine a single compelling reason, I took the call.

  “Hi,” Cassie said. “I’m kinda stuck. Can you come pick me up?”

  “Sure,” I said, shocked to hear her voice coming from that number.

  “I’m at Gramps’s house.”

  “Gramps?”

  “You know, your pop. I’m at his place. In Canyon Country.”

  “Since when do you call him Gramps?”

  “He’s my grandfather, isn’t he?”

  “Your mother hated him.”

  “He’s not so bad.” Her voice sounded almost cheerful. Her voice never sounded cheerful. “He came out to visit me. In Phoenix. And we’ve been talking on the phone. So I thought I should go see him.”

  “Pop drove to Phoenix to see you?”

  “A couple of times.”

  A car turned into traffic in front of me as I neared the bottom of the hill. I hit the horn, hard, but resisted the temptation to flip off the driver when he glanced in the rearview mirror. That didn’t, however, stop him from flipping me off.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “Because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  “Is the Rott with you?”

  “He’s right next to me.” She turned her face from the phone and pitched her voice singsong high to tell the dog she was talking to me. “That’s why I need you to come get me. People aren’t so fast to pick up somebody hitchhiking with a big dog.”

  “You hitchhiked to Canyon Country last night?”

  A distance of thirty miles.

  “Of course not. Somebody I know, he gave me a ride.”

  “At midnight.”

  “He could only go at night, because he had to work the next day.”

  “Without saying a word to me.”

  “I was gonna tell you but you were gone. I left a note.”

  Helpless and innocent are not two words I would use to describe my niece. Her stepfather was currently serving a ten-year sentence in Oregon for bank robbery. Her mother had been a con artist at the time of her death and worse things before that. The kid knew how to look out for herself.

  “So are you gonna come get me or not?”

  “I’m not going inside that house,” I said. “I’ll honk outside, three times.”

  For once in my life I obeyed the speed limit as I drove the Golden State Freeway north toward Canyon Country, in no hurry to get where I was going. My feelings toward my pop had mellowed considerably over the years. Used to be I wanted to kill him. Then for a long time I would have settled for a painful, crippling injury. Whenever he hit my mom I went back to wanting to kill him. After her death, when I watched him collapse from something like grief at her funeral, I stopped wishing him violent physical harm. Since then I merely wished never to see him again.

  He hadn’t been the worst father, despite the beatings he dispensed to one family member or the other with near sacramental regularity. He despised physical weakness and considered it his duty to demonstrate by example how to defend ourselves from everyone except himself. Had he not decided to instruct us during moments of capricious rage, tindered by alcohol and sparked by unpredictable reactions to words or gestures that struck him as disrespectful, beating the hell out of us one moment and declaring how good it was for us the next, I could have accepted—eventually—the slaps, punches, and kicks as educational.

  I don’t want to disparage his accomplishments. He taught me many things, more things of true value in life than anyone else. His beatings taught me discipline, how to walk quietly and be silent, how to tune into the moods of your opponent and hit him before he hits you or to run before he strikes. Above all, he taught me how to watch. I’m a photographer because of him, because of my fear of him. I learned early how dangerous it could be to talk, how the wrong word could summon the beast in him with savage speed. I learned to sit silently and watch, my eye like a camera engaged in distant action. These skills have served my career well. And if nothing else, I owe to him my ability to throw a killer left hook and to take a punch without crumpling in pain or intimidation.

  Pop was never one to garden much, preferring to spend his free hours tinkering with his pickup truck, but as I looked at the one-story tract house where I’d been raised, the height of the weeds growing from the lawn startled me. Our lawn had always sprouted equal amounts of dandelions and crab grass, but thistle, foxtail, and ragweed now grew a few inches shy of being declared a fire hazard. I circled the block and parked across the street from the house, tapped the horn three times, noticed the paint looked more weathered than ever and the asphalt-shingle roof needed patching. Pop was letting the place run down, not that it mattered to me. While I waited, I searched for Sean’s number on my cell phone and called it. His voice mail picked up. I left a message detailing my conversation with Dr. Rakaan and disconnected. If he wanted to call me, he’d call me. I pocketed the cell as Cassie stepped out the front door, without the Rott. She shrugged and turned her palms up, making the gesture theatrically big so I couldn’t fail to notice it, then curled her hand toward her shoulder, motioning me to come to her.

  I stuck my head out the window, shouted, “What?”

  “Baby! He won’t come!”

  “Grab his collar and pull him!”

  “I can’t! He’s too big!” She drew out the words when she shouted, emphasizing her relative helplessness against the size of the dog.

  I vaulted out the driver’s door and strode across the street, my patience finally down to the bone, and even though I didn’t like to yell at my niece, preferring instead to discipline her with a minimum of anger—not that she listened—this time I planned to tell her exactly how I felt about getting ditched in the middle of the night and then dragged out to a house I considered hell on earth, but the second my Doc Martens brushed the weeds beside the front walk the sweat burst from my skin in a dozen places and my throat constricted as though wrapped by a snake.

  “What’s wrong?” Cassie asked, no doubt afraid that her attempts at manipulation had irrevocably pissed me off.

  I couldn’t allow myself to lose my temper with her, not there, where I’d suffered so much from Pop’s anger that I had a panic attack just approaching the door. I asked her where the dog was.

  “Under the bed in the back bedroom.” She took a step toward the door to encourage me to follow. “He won’t come out for me.”

  I shouted for the Rott, heard his bark in response but not the thumping gallop of his paws racing to greet me. Cassie pulled at my arm, her voice rising an octave in fear or frustration, I couldn’t tell which. “I told you, he won’t come, he’s stuck under the bed. You have to come inside and get him.” I allowed her to lead me up the steps and across the threshold into a house that had been both a sanctuary and a place of terror for me. The smell wrapped me as my eyes adjusted to the dark, the stale odors of old man, smoke, and fried food as heavy as cloth. I glanced at the rust-colored couch and brown recliner in the living room, both positioned at angles favorable to watching the television set in the corner, the heavy oak coffee table still chipped in evidence of the things Pop had broken against it, a smooth path worn in the beige carpet leading toward the kitchen, where Pop himself sat framed in the doorway, hunched over a mug at the table, staring at me like an animal from its den. I nodded once, slowly. He nodded back and raised his right forefinger from the top of the mug.

  The Rott barked again, his paws scratching against the bedroom door. Cassie scuttled down the hall. “Listen,” she said, a false cheer running through her voice. “It sounds like he’s come out now.” She opened the door before I could get to it, the Rott bulling through the gap as it widened, bumping Cassie aside to get to me. I dropped to my knees and we collided, chest to shoulder. I turned with the blow, landing on my back, the Rott thrilled to find me pinned to the floor, squirming to escape his fat, wet tongue. I rolled onto my stomach, his
tongue flicking at my ears from behind, the high-pitched squeals of my niece’s laughter resonating in the narrow hallway. I’d never heard her laugh before. I struggled to my knees and glanced into the room where the dog supposedly had been hiding. The bed frame stood about six inches above the carpet, barely high enough to give clearance to a cat.

  “The dog is bigger than the bed,” I said. “No way he could fit under there. And even if he did get stuck, how was he going to open the door? If you’re going to lie, at least try to make it believable.”

  When I saw her cheeks crimson above a pleased smile I realized she had lured me inside the house for some other reason. I’d shared the room with Cassie’s mom, Sharon, until she ran away from home at age sixteen. The sight of my childhood room didn’t make me sentimental. Except the bed and dresser, everything of mine had long since been thrown out or given to Goodwill. Maybe Cassie was searching for some kind of context. She’d been placed in foster care after her mother’s arrest for bank robbery. Before that, the years they’d been together had been troubled. Maybe my presence helped her visualize how her mother lived as a girl.

  I told the Rott to sit and then stood behind him, stroking his head down to his haunches, physical contact that bound us and prepared him to obey. Cassie held his head in her hands at the same time, the Rott in dog heaven between us. Then I commanded him to heel.

  “That’s a fine dog you got there,” Pop called. He stood at the threshold between the kitchen and living room, backlit by sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. “Why don’t you sit down a bit, have a cup of coffee with your old man.”