No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,56
we leaned on each other until laughs turned to giggles and finally into wheezing sighs. I kissed her hair again and said, “Better now?”, and she sat up to look at herself in the rear-view mirror.
“All except my makeup.” She touched under her eyes, tryin’ to wipe away mascara smears, then took a tissue from her purse and got herself tidied up again. As she folded it away, she said, “I love my dad, Gary. I wish he wasn’t in here, that this hadn’t happened to him, and I know it’s uncomfortable, but…be nice? Please?”
“He’s your father, doll. He’s always gonna have my respect.” We got outta the car and she took my hand, leading me into the institute. It smelled too clean and the halls echoed, but the doctors and nurses smiled hello, and called Annie by name as we went upstairs to an art studio. I hung at the door a minute, surprised to be watching half a dozen people painting and drawing. “This ain’t at all like what I thought it’d be.”
“It’s one of the newest institutes in the country. There were reform laws passed a few years ago.” Annie glanced at me to see if I knew what she was talking about, and I kinda shrugged. I remembered seeing somethin’ about it in the papers and hearing it on the radios, but it hadn’t affected me, so it hadn’t made much impression. “They used to be very bad,” Annie said. “A lot of them are still bad, but this one—a wealthy man’s wife was the first patient here. He had it built for her, so she could get the best care in the country. We were lucky to live so close, so Dad could come here instead of one of the other places. That’s him,” she said with a nod toward an older fella with hair blonder than Annie’s. He was sitting with his back to us, facing a window, but the painting he worked on didn’t have anything to do with the view. All I could tell was it was a woman with dark hair, but she seemed familiar somehow.
“Will he mind if we interrupt him?”
Annie shook her head. “He paints things from visions, not from the world, so the light never changes and the images never go away. It’s fine.” She tugged me forward, saying, “Hi, Dad,” when we were a few feet way.
Tim Macready turned to look at his daughter, a smile already in place. But then he looked past her at me, an’ the smile fell away into slack-jawed relief. He sank in on himself, hands going over his face, and dropped his forehead all the way toward his knees. The painting behind him was a green-eyed girl in her twenties, wearing her black hair so short it looked almost like my own military cut. I’d never seen a girl with hair like that, nor wearing the kinda outfit she had on: a white tank top short enough to expose her belly, jeans real low on her hips, and combat boots like my own. She had a kinda beaky nose, and a skinny scar on one cheek, and a buncha jewelry that didn’t match each other: something like gold earrings, but on the back curve of her ear, not the lobe, a silver choker necklace, an’ a chunky copper bracelet on her left wrist. Even weirder, she had a little purple bracer shield on one arm, and a glowin’ blue sword in the other hand.
I didn’t know what ta make of the painting, except looking at it was like a shot through the heart, just like seeing Annie for the first time. I stood there going hot and cold, and Tim Macready said into his hands, “It’s you. Thank God it’s you. You’ll take care of her now.”
CHAPTER TEN
Two months after I got to Korea, Annie wrote to say her dad was coming home. He’d quit painting that day, never even finishing the one he’d been working on, and the visions that had haunted him faded away. After a month, her letter said, the doctors had started being cautiously optimistic he’d recovered, and after two, they thought he was safe to go home. She’d explained to him about her being in school, and he was all right with it,
which is so strange, after so long, that it’s hard to explain, Gary. For the
past three years he’s been so adamant that I do nothing to risk myself, and