Free The Horses of the Night by Michael Cadnum Page A

funds. Today is really horrible. I have to meet with the budgeting committee over chicken salad. I need to explain why hypnotherapy is as important as chemotherapy. Doctors forget that their patients have psyches. Sometimes I think half the surgeons on the staff would be just as happy if they treated horses and dogs instead of people.”
    â€œThey forget,” I said, “that people have souls.”
    Perhaps Nona hesitated with her hairbrush for an instant. “Exactly.” Then she turned to look at me. “You are all right, aren’t you?” she asked hopefully.
    Leaping from bed, I hurried into my clothes. “I’ll make some coffee—”
    She saw me tucking in my shirttail and gestured that she had no time, a flutter of her hand much like a wave of farewell. “I have a coffee machine in my office that I never use. Morning is so important. The children need special reassurance in the morning, when they first wake up.”
    â€œDinner tonight?”
    â€œSomeday we’ll be able to do everything we want to do,” she said.
    â€œThey teach you how to say no in medical school. Just go ahead and say it. It’s a word of one syllable.”
    She kissed me, her lips lingering on mine, and on the special place in my forehead, that point where wisdom and peace were supposed to originate. “I know how you feel,” she breathed. “There will be time for us, Strater. Someday.”
    â€œThis is only the fifth time that we have even spent the night together. The fifth time in over a year.”
    She made a soft groan that I knew was a sincere expression of her feelings. She put her forehead against mine, and we stood as though in a small, confined space, a place of our own making. “I want to change the way we live. There’s just so much to do—”
    My feelings made it hard to speak. “I admire your work, Nona. It’s part of why I love you.”
    The word love definitely made her pause. “Someday we’ll have day after day together. Someday when I get real support, instead of the piecemeal dollar here and there. Someday, when my projects are funded—”
    I kept the disappointment out of my voice. “Someday when there are no more sick children.”
    â€œThey don’t even take me seriously, some of them. Some of the men, some of the dinosaurs with fat wallets. They can’t even hear what I’m saying. They look at me and think: Just another hyperactive female. Just another pushy, plaintive woman. Just another lightweight. Besides,” she laughed. “You’d get tired of me. Take my word for it—if you saw me every night you would become bored.”
    Day was coming. We could see without difficulty. We walked down the stairs together, Nona holding my hand, my arm trying to slow her down, hold her back.
    I found myself wishing, whimsically, that I could visit a seer, a prophet who could tell me succinctly whether or not I would win Nona.
    â€œYou have to believe in the future,” Nona was saying, as she reached the front door. She was bantering, refusing to take me seriously, and at the same time she realized how serious I was. “You’re good at believing, aren’t you?”
    And I believe in you, I wanted to say. “Call me,” I said, and then she was gone.
    With her absence, the frustrations of my life all returned to me. There was simply the raw truth: My family had been wealthy, and now it was not. Nona knew a little, now, but no one beside my brother and I really understood the nature of our finances. Our cash reserves had suffered years of my father’s benevolent mismanagement, money given away to promote everything from better acoustics in opera houses to computers in schools. What my father did not sow, Zeus-like, grand and loving, my mother finished off, but that was a story I did not like to even consider.
    I kept up the illusion of brisk wealth, but it was only a