“They’re not all men—I treat women too, as well as a few children. And one arthritic poodle.”
Ryan was convinced that if Indiana’s other male clients were anything like him, they paid simply to be near her, not because they had any faith in her healing methods. This was what had first brought him to Treatment Room 8, something he admitted to Indiana during their third session so there would be no misunderstandings, and also because his initial attraction had blossomed into friendship. Indiana had burst out laughing—she was well used to come-ons—and made a bet with him that after two or three weeks, when he felt the results, he would change his mind. Ryan accepted the bet, suggesting dinner at his favorite restaurant. “If you can cure me, I’ll pick up the tab, otherwise dinner is on you,” he said, hoping to spend time with her somewhere more conducive to conversation than these two cramped cubicles, watched over by the omniscient Shakti.
Ryan and Indiana had met in 2009, on one of the trails that wound through Samuel P. Taylor State Park among thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-high trees. Indiana had taken her bicycle on the ferry across San Francisco Bay, and once in Marin County cycled the twenty or so miles to the park as part of her training for a long bike ride to Los Angeles she planned to make a few weeks later. As a rule, Indiana thought sports were pointless, and she had no particular interest in keeping fit; but her daughter, Amanda, was determined to take part in a charity bike ride for AIDS, and Indiana was not about to let her go alone.
She had just stopped the bike to take a drink from her water bottle, one foot on the ground, when Ryan raced past with Attila on a leash. She didn’t see the dog until it was practically on top of her; the shock sent her flying, and she ended up tangled in the bike frame. Ryan apologized, helped her to her feet, and tried to straighten the buckled wheel while Indiana dusted herself off. She was more concerned about Attila than with her own bumps and bruises. She’d never before seen such a disfigured animal: the dog had scars everywhere, bald patches on its belly, and two metallic fangs worthy of Dracula in an otherwise toothless maw; one of its ears was missing, as though hacked off with scissors. She stroked the animal’s head gently and leaned down to kiss its snout, but Ryan quickly jerked her away.
“Don’t get your face too close! Attila’s a war dog.”
“What breed is he?”
“Purebred Belgian Malinois. They’re smarter and stronger than German shepherds, and they keep their backs straight, so they don’t suffer from hip problems.”
“What on earth happened to the poor thing?”
“He survived a land-mine explosion,” Ryan said, dipping his handkerchief in the cold water of the river, where a week earlier he’d watched salmon leaping against the current in their arduous swim upstream to spawn. Miller handed Indiana the wet handkerchief to dab the grazes on her legs. He was wearing track pants, a sweatshirt, and something that looked like a bulletproof jacket—it weighed forty-five pounds, he explained, making it perfect for training because when he took it off to race, he felt like he was flying. They sat among the thick, tangled roots of a tree and talked, watched over by Attila, who studied Ryan’s every move as though waiting for an order and from time to time nuzzled Indiana and discreetly sniffed her. The warm afternoon, heady with the scent of pine needles and dead leaves, was lit by shafts of sunlight that pierced the treetops like spears; the air quivered with birdsong, the hum of mosquitoes, the lapping of the creek, and the wind in the leaves; it was the perfect setting for a meeting in a romantic novel.
Ryan had been a Navy SEAL—a former member of SEAL Team Six, the unit that in May 2011 launched the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. In fact, one of Ryan’s former teammates would be the one to kill the Al-Qaeda leader. When he and Indiana met, however, Ryan could not have known this would happen two years later; no one could, except perhaps Celeste Roko, by studying the movement of the planets. Ryan was granted an honorable discharge in 2007 after he lost a leg in combat—an injury that didn’t stop him continuing to compete as a triathlete, as he told Indiana. Up to this point she had scarcely looked at Ryan, focused as she was on the dog, but now she noticed that he wore only one shoe; his other leg ended in a curved blade.
“It’s called a Flex-Foot Cheetah—they model it on the way big cats run in the wild,” he explained, showing her the prosthesis.
“How does it fit?”
He hiked up the leg of his pants, and she studied the contraption fastened to the stump.
“It’s carbon fiber,” Ryan explained. “It’s so light and perfect that officials tried to stop Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, from competing in the Olympics because they said his prostheses gave him an unfair advantage over other runners. This model is designed for running,” he went on, explaining with a certain pride that this was cutting-edge technology. “I’ve got other prosthetics for walking and cycling.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Sometimes. But there’s other stuff that hurts more.”
“Like what?”
“Things from my past. But that’s enough about me—tell me about you.”
“Sorry, but I haven’t got anything as interesting as a bionic leg,” Indiana confessed, “and I’ve only got one scar, which I’m not going to show you. As a kid, I fell on my butt on some barbed wire.”
Indiana and Ryan sat in the park, chatting about this and that under the watchful eye of Attila. She introduced herself—half joking, half serious—by telling him she was a Pisces, her ruling planet was Neptune, her lucky number 8, her element water, and her birthstones, silver-gray moonstone, which nurtures intuitive power, and aquamarine, which encourages visions, opens the mind, and promotes happiness. Indiana had no intention of seducing Ryan; for the past four years she had been in love with a man named Alan Keller and had chosen the path of fidelity. Had she wanted to seduce him, she would have talked about Shakti, goddess of beauty, sex, and fertility, since the mere mention of these attributes was enough to overcome the scruples of any man—Indiana was heterosexual—if her voluptuous body were not enough. Indiana never mentioned that Shakti was also the divine mother, the primordial life force, the sacred feminine—as these roles tended to put men off.
Usually Indiana didn’t tell men that she was a healer by profession; she had met her fair share of cynics who listened to her talk about cosmic energy with a condescending smirk while they stared at her breasts. But somehow she sensed she could trust this Navy SEAL, so she gave him a brief account of her methods, though when put into words they sounded less than convincing even to her ears. To Ryan it sounded more like voodoo than medicine, but he pretended to be interested—the information gave him a perfect excuse to see her again. He told her about the cramps he suffered at night, the spasms that could sometimes bring him to a standstill in the middle of a race. Indiana prescribed a course of therapeutic massage and a diet of banana and kiwifruit smoothies.
They were so caught up in the moment that the sun had already begun to set when Indiana realized that she was going to miss the ferry back to San Francisco. She jumped to her feet and said good-bye, but Ryan, explaining that his van was just outside the park, offered to give her a ride—after all, they lived in the same city. The van had a souped-up engine, oversize wheels, a roof rack, a bicycle rack, and a tasseled pink velvet cushion for Attila that neither Ryan nor his dog had chosen—Ryan’s girlfriend Jennifer Yang had given it to him in a fit of Chinese humor.
Three days later, unable to get Indiana out of his mind, Ryan turned up at the Holistic Clinic just to see the woman with the bicycle. She was the polar opposite of the usual subjects of his fantasies: he preferred slim
