False Memory

was trying to express my concern. I couldn’t talk about him falling off a roof, not directly. Never, my God, when you talk about it, that’s when it happens. And here we are, talking about it! Now he’s going to fall off a roof, and it’ll be my fault.”
    “Mom, that’s irrational. It won’t happen.”
    “It’s already happened,” Sabrina said. “And now it’ll happen again. Firemen and fires. Painters and roofs.”
    Holding the phone between herself and Dusty, so that her mother could hear both of them, Martie said, “How many house-painters have you known, people who work for you, others in the trade who haven’t?”
    “Fifty? Sixty? I don’t know. At least that.”
    “And how many have fallen off roofs?”
    “Aside from me and Skeet?”
    “Aside from you and Skeet.”
    “One that I know of. He broke a leg.”
    Putting the phone to her ear again, Martie said, “You hear that, Mom? One. Broke his leg.”
    “One that he knows of” Sabrina said. “One, and now he’s next.”
    “He already fell off a roof. Chances of any one painter falling off a roof twice in his lifetime must be millions to one.”
    “His first fall didn’t count,” Sabrina said. “He was trying to save his brother. It wasn’t an accident. The accident is still waiting to happen.”
    “Mom, I love you tons, but you’re a little nuts.”
    “I know, dear. All those years of worrying. And you’re going to end up a little nuts, too.”
    “We’ll be busy the next couple days, Mom. Don’t pass a kidney stone if I fail to return one of your calls right away, okay? We’re not going to fall off any roofs.”
    “Let me talk to Dusty.”
    Martie passed the phone to him.
    He looked wary, but he accepted it. “Hi, Sabrina. Yeah. Well, you know. Uh-huh. Sure. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I promise I won’t. That’s true, isn’t it? Huh? Oh, no, I never did take it seriously. Don’t beat up on yourself. Well, I love you too, Sabrina. Huh? Sure. Mom. I love you, too, Mom.”
    He passed the phone back to Martie, and she pressed end.
    They were both silent, and then Martie said, “Who would have thought—a mother-and-child reunion in the midst of all this crap.”
    Funny, how hope raises its lovely head when least expected, a flower in a wasteland.
    Dusty said, “You lied to her, babe.”
    She knew he wasn’t referring to her reconstruction of the time frame of Skeet’s leap and hospitalization, nor to her leaving out the news about Susan and the rest of the mess they were in.
    Nodding, she said, “Yeah, I told her we weren’t going to fall off any roofs—and, hell, every one of us falls off a roof sooner or later.”
    “Unless we’re going to be the first to live forever.”
    “If we are, then we’d better get a whole lot more serious about our retirement fund.”
    Martie was terrified of losing him. Like her mother, she could not bring herself to put the fear into words, lest what she dreaded would come to pass.
    New Mexico was the state where the high plains met the Rockies, the roof of the American Southwest, and Santa Fe was a city built at a high altitude, nearly one and a half miles above sea level: a long way to fall.

     
     
    On the answering-machine microcassette labeled SUSAN, only one of the five messages was important, but listening to it, the doctor felt his heartbeat accelerate once more.
    Another wild card.
    When he had reviewed the two messages from Martie’s mother that followed Susan’s bombshell, he erased the tape.
    Once it was erased, he took the cassette out of the machine, dropped it on the floor, and stomped it underfoot until the plastic casing was well crushed.
    From the ruins, he extracted the narrow magnetic tape and the two tiny hubs around which it was spooled. They didn’t even fill the palm of his hand: so much danger compressed into such a small object.
    Downstairs, in the living room, Ahriman opened the damper in the fireplace flue. He placed the tape and two plastic hubs atop one of the ceramic logs.
    From his suit coat, he withdrew a slim Cartier cigarette lighter of elegant design and superb craftsmanship.
    He had carried a lighter since he was eleven years old, first one that he had stolen from his father and then, later, this better model. The doctor didn’t smoke, but there was always the possibility that he would want to set something on fire.
    When he was thirteen, already in his first year of college, he had torched his mother. If he hadn’t been carrying a lighter in his pocket when the need of one arose, his life might have changed much